Listen to Episode

Read Episode Transcript

Look at free markets like this is so awkward. I can't wait. He's literally brought popcorn. Didn't. You brought popcorn? He's like, I wanna see round three. I have nothing to say today. I'm just gonna sit here and watch. I brought popcorn. I got my chili roasted pistachio nuts. I'm gonna sit back and enjoy the jakal sacks. Let your winners ride. Hey, man, David. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy. We. Are we really gonna do this as the top story? I mean, this is the third time we've tried to do this story. Do we give the background sacks or no? We wouldn't have had to do it over and over again if you didn't act so hysterical. Here we go. First one you killed. No, you killed it. No, the first one you first. Yeah, because it wasn't even on the docket and it wasn't. It wasn't even newsworthy. OK. And the second one I killed because you came across like a stark raving lunatic. I spiked at the second time because I was so infuriated by your cavalier attitude towards it. What do you worry about my attitude for? Why don't you just focus on making your own good points? Here's the thing. I was so correct. I was so correct. The two of you let him go. Let him go. You guys got pops here, this idiot. Try to blame his own hysteria on me. You said that January 6 was overblown and of course, no, I said it was a disgrace. I said it was an embarrassment. It was an embarrassment to the country. I said it was wrong. But you want to inflate it. You're you're engaging in in classic Washington threat inflation and and there's two problems with that. One is you're going to take your eye off the ball of the real issues facing the country. Like. Inflation, the economy and economic anxiety, like COVID, like crime, like schools. I mean, these are the issues that Americans care about, not, you know, a riot that happened over a year ago. And if you and the Democrats keep talking about this and focus on it on MSNBC, to the exclusion of the issues that really matter, I'll see you in November because you're going to get slaughtered in this midterm election is going to be a landslide. But the other problem with it is with this threat, inflation is that it justifies. The expansion of surveillance powers and prosecutorial powers by the Justice Department, by the you know by by the by the Justice Department, other branches of our government who want to basically go after, you know this the so-called domestic terrorism. That will lead to an infringement on civil liberties, just like the expansion of those agencies did after 911. And so I think we should all be, like, concerned about it. Now. Look, are these oath keepers a bunch of idiots? Yeah, there were eleven oath keepers at that rally. They broke into the cabin. Wait a minute, you're saying prosecuted? Wait, wait, wait a minute. You were saying an old fat guy with an eye patch? And that says both. Keeper Lifetime member is not credible to you. Exactly. I mean, look, this is these guys are they're they're not unlike the Antifa, right? You know, people in Portland who are trying to burn down buildings or or chase a boudins parents who are domestic terrorists. I mean, yeah, this is a small number of knuckleheads who broke into the capital. They should be prosecuted. They're they're guilty of of saying this leader is saying intemperate things, but was this gonna be a coup to take over the capital? I don't. I don't think so. OK, let me do you want to focus on that to the exclusion of the real issues facing the country? Like I said, this landslide in November, this red wave is going to be even bigger. Just to your point about my focus every week here on the number one tech podcasts in the world and on the #6 Tech podcast in the world this week in Startups, I focus on all of those issues. But let's read, because we can chew gum and walk at the same time. Let's read what happened on Thursday. The FBI arrested eleven members of the Oath Keepers on sedition charges, and the House committee subpoenaed Facebook, Google, Reddit, and Twitter after insufficient responses to the January 6 riots or insurrection. Whichever term you prefer, the leader of the Oath Keepers, which is an organization that claims over 30,000 members, primarily in the military and police. OK, well hold on a second. If this was their big moment to stage a coup and take over the government, why we're only 11 of the 30,000 there. The eleven were indicted, David. There were. How many were there? Well, we don't know yet. But last week you said last week you said there was no coordinated attack and now we have proof that there was. That's not what I said that you. Look you you can't veto the segment from last week and then try to claim that I said sorry, let me just find it. Can I get through these story or you keep interrupting? My God. OK. Quote from the. You're complaining about interruption. OK, that's another interruption. Finish it without before interruption. Or would you like to just keep monologuing? What are you reading? Why don't you just give us, remember every week the audience could just go get the actual story. That's what I'm trying to do, but you keep interrupting. So here we go. While certain EARTHKEEPER members and affiliates inside Washington DC breached the Capitol grounds and buildings, others remained stationed just outside the city in QRF teams. These are quick response teams that had weapons and they transported firearms into Washington DC and and these in support operations were aimed at using force to stop the law. Full transfer of presidential power, according to our Department of Justice. Which is, uh, majority Republican, obviously. Law enforcement excuse? No. Supplicant. Yes, it is me. A portion of the Oath Keepers communication occurred on signal. Signal? Are you gonna keep interrupting me and my God, can I just read two sentences? Dave, get a taste. Your own medicine, pal. OK, fine. Signal is an encrypted chat app that's not supposed to have any back doors. But obviously there are some plant. Here are some of roads is comments. We aren't getting through this without a civil war. Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body and spirit. It will be a bloody and desperate fight. We're going to have to fight. This cannot be. Avoided if we wanna make the January 6 stuff relevant, first of all, let me just say I see that it primarily as a media story. What happened, happened. Obviously it was a disgrace and embarrassment of black eye for the country. I'm not supporting or defending anyone. I tend to think these oath keepers. It was not like a super organized, concerted effort to take over the government. It it's somewhere it it's basically a bunch of loudmouths who, you know, engaged in a riot. Maybe there was more planning and preparation. Fine. The court case will bear it out. And if they can prove that it was what you said, it was great. Let them go to jail. I have no desire to defend them. But I also think then the grand scheme of things, this whole thing's been blown completely out of proportion. And if you watch MSNBC, it's all January 6, all the time. And, you know, if Democrats are going to focus on this issue for the next 10 months and, you know who Roger Stone was photographed on a sidewalk with, which was the big story the other day, this red wave in November is going to be an even bigger wave. I'm just telling you right now because it's not what the average voter in the country cares about. I think you're right about that. I think you're right about. I'll agree with that. I think, you know, MSNBC is focused on this and Fox is focused on fake voter fraud. And we've been pretty clear here that none of us agree with either of the extremes of media coverage. I do think this is an issue worth wait resolving quick voter fraud. Are you talking about the the guy who who's obsessed right now with voter fraud is Biden. He just gave a speech, a very intemperate speech saying that if you don't support his new Voting Rights Act that you're on the side of Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis. There was some political calculus there. He had to do that because he was also trying to basically bolster the ability to get this, you know filibuster thing passed in the Senate. So he he basically had to play a relatively weak hand and and you know again. And what happened again legislatively is that his own party said no enough. In this case it was Kristen Sinema who basically said no, none of this is possible. Mansion won't support him ending the filibuster. So this thing was DOA. We we said it was DOA when when the build back better bill collapsed. We said they were gonna try and pivot to voting rights to change the subject even though it was DOA. But there is something that Biden could do or could have done that I think would be a bipartisan reform, which is to reform the electoral count act. I mean what happened in November if you're concerned about. Trump and, you know, this version of the potential to subvert the election and the way he tried to influence Pence to stop the counting of the electors. If you're concerned about all of that, there is a fix for that, which is the electoral count Act of 1887. It's completely antiquated, obviously. It's been around for over 100 years. There is bipartisan support for fixing that. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has come out for months. That is to the audience, well, it's just a it's just a it's a law that that governs how these electors in the Electoral College get counted. Up and certified so that, you know, the election gets certified. So David Brooks had that piece that that Jamal shared in the New York Times, which is the problem we have right now is not in the actual voting. It's in the if you're worried about what happened in this past November, it's in the certification, not the voting. And, you know, what Brooks was writing about is there's a lot of social science saying that, you know, a lot of these rules that Democrats and Republicans are really focused on around the convenience of the election don't really influence the number of people who vote. People who vote want people who want to vote, vote. People who don't, don't. You know, we're getting hung up on the wrong thing, which is, you know, these voter ID laws, what really matters is the certification of the Electoral College. And you could fight, Biden could find, I think there's a number of Republicans who would support a clarification of that law and updating of it so that what potentially could have happened in, you know, in January if Pence had gone along with this plan to basically reject the accounting of the electors. I mean, everyone understood that. That was just ceremonial, right? That was. What do you think of that plan? What did you think of Trump's plan? I think that Trump had a right to air his grievances in court, but once the court threw out his claims and rejected them, and once the Supreme Court denied certiorari, it was over. It was over. The stream court has the final word in our democracy about legal matters. And so no, pence never had the authority or the ability under the Electoral Count Act to reject the county of electors. That whole process is ceremonial, but but the mere fact this isn't even even an issue. Suggest that we should fix it. We should go back and fix the electoral count Act of 1887. So, and look, you could Biden could have gotten 60 votes for that, you know? I think that was very doable. Get he can get votes for that. He can also get votes to stop the insider trading of members of Congress. He could get that done too. So why? Why isn't he focused? Why isn't he focused on things where he can actually get a bipartisan majority? Has one big legislative success as President has been the infrastructure bill where he got a bunch of Republican support, which is a pretty big win? Yeah, those are the types of issues he should be focused on. And instead he's giving these, you know, speeches saying that anyone who disagrees with the progressive agenda. Voting rights is basically George Wallace or Bull Connor. Did you guys hear his speech the other day on CNBC about COVID? I mean, he was so incoherent. It was. Kind of scary. It feels like he's in cognitive. The cognitive decline is, you know, I voted for the guy. Anything to get Trump out of office. I thought that was an existential risk. But, man, he is cognitively declining quickly. I mean, I think the craziest thing about COVID was this Rachel Wolensky interview. I mean, like, why does it take two years into a pandemic to tell us what we kind of anecdotally knew? But if we had known up front or sooner, we would have completely. Rachel Wilensky does an interview. She's the head of the CDC, and she said, well, it turns out that 75% of all the deaths because of COVID were people that suffered from at least 4 comorbidities. At least 4, not 3, not 2, not one. Yeah. It wasn't all it was. I think it was a subset defined by it might have been like vaccinated deaths or something like that. It was it was one study. But yes, that was basically the conclusion absolutely is significant comorbidities among people who died. And so if we, if we had known that, don't you think, I mean, freedberg you, you tell me. But wouldn't we have just changed our response to just mask and just kind of like start living our normal lives and people with four comorbidities or people at a certain age or immunocompromised should have stayed home and we would be in a very different. Situation. So, you know, I mean, I understand, Jason, that Biden didn't. The last few speeches have been a little tight, you know, I mean, I think, look the the Quinnipiac Poll poll then Nick, you can post. I mean, look, his ratings are just plummeting, plummeting. I mean it's down to Trump levels right every week. And so he is definitely searching for a handful of wins. I don't think he's strategically found the right ones. He could have done something on certifying the Electoral College. He could certainly do something right now on insider trading laws for members of Congress. But instead we're focusing on all these random things. But anyway, sorry, he can't get the answer to anything past Pelosi but but but but yeah, I think it is something that would get a huge bipartisan majority. Look, she's going to lose anyway, so he might as well just throw under the bus. You're right. This is about his political salvation over hers. By the way, you guys saw this? I mentioned this in the group chat. Someone floated the trial balloon of dumping Kamala Harris and replacing her with Liz Cheney. This is how bad things have gotten for the Democrats. They were trying to they floated a trial balloon of of Biden Cheney in 24 crossover ticket. I we talked about this on the for a couple of years in private and poker. I thought, I think a crossover ticket is what the country needs to kind of get back to center. And I know it's a crazy concept and it's a 1% chance, but I kind of like the crossover, but things have gotten so bad for the Democrats now that. And I, I sort of said sacks floated this or pre floated it. We had a little debate on the Twitter but I don't if you remember two or three episodes ago SAC said hey listen there's going to be a new appreciation for Clinton and not 10 days later the Wall Street Journal and a bunch of people are floating Hillary coming back to run. So I think Bill Clinton, I didn't mention Hillary I know that but I think you either you are in your star chamber and doing a pre float on all end so then the backups and the can then you know pump Hillary. Does that or it's just people are listening to you and you're that influential. What I'm what I'm proposing is that Biden engage in Clintonian, by which I mean Bill Clintonian triangulation, which is he does not have the votes in Congress to enact a progressive agenda. He should be looking for bipartisan wins. He did with the infrastructure bill. He could do with this insider trading thing. He could do it on the electoral count Act. These are things that would be, you know, progress China policy and importantly momentum, momentum going into 2020. 24 and maybe good for Americans like, I mean, his China policy, the fact that he came out with a statement on the Uighurs. I thought it was very strong. You know, one of the stronger things he did, but it's not coming up in the polls. And I think that whole Republicans interesting. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about what's happening to the week. OK, you you bring it up because you really care. And I think that's nice that you care. The rest of us don't care. I'm just telling you very hard. I'm telling you, I'm telling you a very hard, ugly truth. OK? Of all the things that I care about, yes, it is below my line. OK. Of all the things that I care about it is below my line. Disappointing. I think people if you if you explain to them what's happening to the workers in China they care. But it's not top of mind for them. That's not care. Mine right now is to go to the grocery store and and the shelves are empty. Sure that I care about yeah I I I care about the fact that our economy could turn on a dime if China invades Taiwan. I care about that. I care about climate change. You know I care about a bunch of I care about America's crippling and you know decrepit in healthcare infrastructure. But if you're asking me that, do I care about a segment of a class of people in another country? Not until we can take care of ourselves will I prioritize them over us. And I think a lot of people believe that. And I'm sorry if that's a hard truth to hear, but every time I I say that I care about the Uighurs, I'm really just lying if I don't really care. And so I'd rather not lie to you and tell you the truth. It's not a priority for me. And my response to that is I think it's a sad state of affairs when human rights as a concept globally. You know, falls beneath, you know. Tactical and strategic issues that we have to have, we need. That's another luxury belief. That's another luxury belief. I don't believe believing in the the human declaration of human Rights that Eleanor Roosevelt lecturer billions. I don't think it's a luxury belief to believe that all humans should have a basic set of human rights. I think it's a luxury belief. And the reason I think it's a luxury belief is we don't do enough domestically to actually express that view in real, tangible ways. So until we actually clean up our own house, the idea that we step outside of our borders with, you know. With with us, sort of like morally, virtue signaling about somebody else's human rights track record is deplorable. Look at the number of black and brown men that are far from deplorable. Look at the number of black and brown men that are incarcerated for for absolutely ridiculous crimes. I don't know if you saw this past week, but there is a person that was released from jail because he couldn't even be protected in jail because in some of these cells they run these fight clubs inside of Rikers Island that are basically tacitly endorsed by the corrections officers that don't do anything. And the difference so. Hold on, Jason. So if you wanna talk about the human rights of people, I think we have a responsibility to take care of our own backyard first. First. And then we can go and basically morally tell other people how they should be running their own countries. The difference is chemaf saying what you just said in China or Saudi Arabia would put you in jail and get you 100 lashes and you would be tortured for a decade. We here in the United States are far from perfect. We still have the death penalty, which is against the United Declaration of Human Rights, which we signed, which Eleanor Roosevelt created in the UN. And we propagated as Americans around the world. We started that chamath. And we can have these discussions about being better in this country. And the whataboutism that you're proposing is? So am disproportional to the equivalent of the Holocaust going on. We're talking about a million weekers in concentration camps right now to talk about what we have here that we need to fix and compare it to that or to Saudi Arabia whipping bloggers and throwing gay people off roofs for being gay. These these two things are not morally comparable. They are very far and we need to have open discussions and talk about human rights all the time, because if we do not talk about it all the time, then your position. Which is I don't have time for that. I want to solve my problems, then gives the green light to dictators everywhere that nobody's watching. We need to have vigilance and that and that's what I find. And I I think we need to hold on a second. Your position. That's not what I said and that's not true. You said you can't get up for it. Yeah. So tell me how problem are you? Are you saying that the, the situation with the Uighurs is the same as the Holocaust? People who are Jewish are making that comparison? You never know. I'm asking you. I think it is. There are upwards of 1,000,000 people. In a concentration camp right now, this is getting to numbers that are actually comparable. It is actually a valid comparison saying there are million people in a concentration camp. That is the numbers that human rights organizations are saying between 300,000 and a million people are incarcerated right now being tortured, raped and in doing 4 sterilization, reeducation, and when they're released are being tracked in ghettos. And so are you seeing people are bringing this up? Hold on, are you saying the comparison, you're saying the entire world is basically? Decided that that doesn't matter. You just said you can't get up for, I'm talking about you specifically. Who is getting up or who is getting up for it. I am very up on it. I talk about it all the time every week. What about the US government? What are they doing about it? The Biden just said we are going to do a ban and we are going to sanction companies that do business in that region. So Apple and and Tesla, I think there will be increased pressure on all companies that are engaging in China over its goods that are sourced from those areas, right? Correct. Yes. It's not doing business. It's it's it's if your supply chain comes from that area and you say first, it's a first. Like, we won't we won't buy Nazi goods, but we're we'll sell our iPhones into Nazi Germany. Well, if you want to have a discussion about this, you know, it's how do we disengage from China? We've had this discussion here. How what amount of time will it take to disengage from countries that have brutal dictatorships that are committing human rights? Atrocity again, might look at, look I I think I'm spending a lot of time and money actually trying to fortify. America's supply chain. You guys know about some of the things that I'm doing. I'm not doing that from a moral perspective. I'm doing that from a practical capitalist perspective. I think the jobs are better served for Americans, and I think that we should have the ability to build our own businesses just like China has the right to do for themselves. Without the risk of these things being undercut by policies that we don't understand, which is effectively what you do when you outsource your supply chain to countries where you're not 100% aligned with them and they're dictatorships. So I again, I'm not, I I'm not even sure that that it that China is a dictatorship the way that you want to call it that. Again, I think that country that's in the name. Look, you have to understand, Jason, there are a set of checks and balances here on China that you know at the end of the day. I don't think that I have the moral absolutism to Judge China. And I would say that when NATO is silent, the United Nations is silent, all of Western Europe is silent. And America is effectively silent. That this issue may be small data points being extrapolated in a way to create a narrative that may be not be true. And if it is true, Jason, there is a responsibility for those body politics to do something because that is the early warning signal that the rest of the world uses to say, OK, hold on, let me write, reprioritize my list of things. So I guess what I'm saying is. I am not going to be an armchair journalist on this topic, nor am I going to be the armchair human rights advocate for the world, because I just don't know. I can focus on the things that I know about, build the things that I know about, and if something really does get red light status. Then other parties will do something. And again, I just want to be clear. NATO is silent. United Nations is silent. America is silent. A press release doesn't change the actual technical posture on these topics. OK, if that. If your position is that human rights matters to you, if government, large government organizations or politicians give you the green light to care about it, that's fine. I care about it intrinsically, every day. Great. I'm fine with you doing that. I thought there was a segue there. Talk about the Ray Dalio thing. That freeberg cares about that. I mean, this is. I mean this debate that you're having. Between kind of realism and idealism and foreign policy is sort of what Dalio tackles, right? For your look. I mean, it sounds to me like there's. Let's just say a red herring. There always needs to be, as chamath points out, a narrative on framing our enemy when you know you're running out of land. I mean, you guys saw this. Was it a journal article or New York Times article that came out today that U.S. intelligence revealed that Putin had actually put some actors into the eastern Ukraine to set up for a reason, to have a response and therefore an excuse to invade the Ukraine. So he was trying to create a bit of a. Fireworks show to give him an excuse. We always need a narrative that we can sell to our. You know our, our, our citizens and so you know there's there's not going to be a lot of you know patting on the back of China right now as we've talked about there is this you know overarching multi 100 year economic cycle you know call it geopolitical cycle that the United States and China are about to clash on. And in order for them to clash effectively we need to get the narrative right which is to paint them as the bad guy and to make things evil. And look I mean you you may take your ethical framework and say that they are bad and you may be able to take other parts of your ethical framework and looking at. Objectively call some countries that you consider good that as well, depending on what story you want to tell yourself and what story you want to be told. And I think that's what's going on and we'll continue to go on for a long period of time. And this, this weaker thing, as, as Chamat pointed out, how do you measure on an absolute basis human rights? I don't think that there is a way to do so. Whether it's one person getting tortured publicly in a street or 100,000 people being suppressed economically and not being able to to get jobs, it's hard to say what is appropriate, what is not, what is. Evil, what is not, at the end of the day, we we create narratives and that narrative allows the bigger picture to kind of play itself out. And I think that's what's going on largely. And I don't think we're going to hear a lot of good news about China for the next decade from any politician in the United States or anyone that wants to defend our political and economic interests globally, which are certainly being challenged by China right now. So I don't know. That's my diatribe about the Dalio. Look, Dalio obviously does a great job of kind of simplifying and eloquently stating what's going on, but I think this is one of many, many manifestations of it. You need only read what the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Guardian, the New York Times. You know, this is not up for question. Why do you think you're so wound up about this and you're not wound up about what's going on in Somalia? Oh no. Or you're not wound up about what's going on in Saudi Arabia, or you're not or you're not wound up about. Hold on. Hold on. Going on in eastern Ukraine, hold on a second. There are human rights violations all over the world. I comment on, on them, and I have commented on them for decades since I worked at Amnesty International. Amnesty International, which is where I started my career. I've been passionate about this since the age of 18 or 19. When I worked at Amnesty International, you said that you cannot grade these things, right? You just said, like, it's hard to compare these things. And this is a problem like, you can actually do that. There are human rights violations like freedom of speech, which, you know, is a great aspiration. But we would say torture, murder, systematic rape and sterilization are more intense and horrific than just freedom of speech. So if you look at Hong Kong when they shut down Apple News, that's one level of human rights right people have lost their ability. But again, you're telling story. Hundreds of this is that stories. These are facts. Apple News was shut down. You were telling a fact about a particular, a particular set of experiences that are particularly harming a set of people. Let me give you another fact in the United States, where we have a population of, let's be generous and say, 400 million people 2.3 million or 40 million, 340 million Americans. 2.3 million of whom are incarcerated absolutely. In China, with a population of 1.4 billion 1.7 million Chinese are incarcerated. Absolutely something we have to deal. Where is human rights being violated on an absolute basis? It's a very difficult conversation to use facts and figures because at the end of the day, there's a lot of data that can be pointed the other way. And so it all comes down to narratives. And that narrative always has an objective, which is what are you trying to get people to believe and what are you trying to get them to get behind and get to do? Yes. And what are you trying to justify? Yes. And the action, they don't have a drug problem over there because they killed all the drug dealers now put them up against the wall and shot him. So, you know, they just send their fentanyl here. That's fair. That's fair enough. But I'm just saying, like, look and and and it's it's a very good point, which is you can actually take the data and you can slice it and tell different stories around it. But at the end of the day, it's very hard to say there's good and there's evil that we have to go and attack. And and that is what is going. Never said attack. I never said attack. I didn't say invade China over this. And I didn't say invade Saudi Arabia, I think. You should talk increase the temperature, raise the temperature, right? I did not say that either. If you wanna know what I think should happen, political pressure on them, right? I think. When people are involved in torture, murder, rape. And sterilizing people that there should be economic and disengagement that occurs as a first step. And that that is why when people in our circles in venture capital take money from somebody who murdered a journalist, Mohammed bin Salim, and be asked from Saudi Arabia, we should disengage from a country like that. I believe that that is what we should do. And I believe people like us, I believe people like us who are capital allocators and craters and who are influencers, should be talking about human rights all the time. And we should be familiar with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and we should read what's in it. And we should aspire to hit those notes in our country and everywhere else. And this me tourism, I'm sorry, this, you know, equivalency problem that you guys keep bringing up. That is a trap. That is an intellectual trap because there is no equivalency. From putting a detaining 1,000,000 people, putting hundreds of thousands of them and torturing them, to what's happening in the United States where we wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and where we can have conversations about it. If you tried to have the conversation we are, and I disagree with you, we would all be tortured in Saudi Arabia. We would all be tortured and detained inside of China. I just think that there's a very dangerous thing that you're doing, which is you are ranking and which is essentially assigning some sort of, let's just call it economic value to those things that you just just described, torture, rape, forced sterilization. But I think then you're ignoring how do you actually economically rank systemic racism in the United States? What happens in our inner school system, inner city school system, what happens to black and brown men? What happens to the families of those people? What happens to how the lobbies basically break down the healthcare system? All I'm saying is, Jason, if you take your argument to the extreme, you start to get into all these areas of Gray where it's impossible to assign economic realities to those things so that you can actually rank and rate. That's why I do think that. Yeah, because, you know, we're talking about your numerically ranked these. No, no, no, I I never use a numerical. Just saying one is proportionally different. Sure. I'm not putting economic, I never use my purpose. Really bad things happen 10 times and these kind of bad things happened 10110 thousand times. Which one's worse? I think if you asked anybody who is in a weaker prison being sterilized towards not harassing you if they would rather be, yes. I mean, you could you could do this test. Jason, I'm asking you a question. If 10 people, 10 Uighurs were raped or forced. Paralyzed, yes. Versus 10 million black men falsely incarcerated. Which one is worse? Yeah. This is not the way to do the calculus. You could do it on an individual basis. You can look at individual inside of a prison being tortured and an individual living in the United States, every single person who is inside of that torture chamber, being raped, being sterilized would say, I would absolutely love to come to America. That's why everybody wants to come to this country and live in a free democracy where they can speak freely, they can practice whatever religion they want and not be tortured and what you're doing. By adding up all the tiny pain and suffering that we have here in America and then, you know, trying to conflate that with these horrific acts, you have to look at exactly how horrific these are on an individual basis, just like we did with George Floyd. We see George Floyd happen. That is something that is absolutely worth being outraged about at a higher level, right. You have to stop for a second and say, Oh my God, this has to be resolved. We can do these two things at the same time. We can refine our education system. No, George Floyd. George Floyd. Stopping the wiggers being sterilized. I think George Floyd plus my point, because there's been innumerable number of black men that have been murdered with nary a thing that's ever happened in the United States but had happened in an exact moment where the sum of all of these other things that happened before had just compounded to a point where the whole thing spilled over and enough people decided to basically say the sum total of this damage. Yeah, now is the equivalent of a very meaningful human rights violation. You can work on both of these things at the same time. My point and and this and this. You're basically giving a pass by kind of conflating these two things. In my mind, you can work on both of these issues. You could want to stop abhorrent, torture and murder and rape while wanting to make our justice system better, while wanting to make our education system better. You don't have to pick one. Trim off. I think you do, actually. No, you do not. We could absolutely create nothing I can do about the Uighurs in China. 0 queries you could not capital allocate to regions or to companies that are engaging. I don't. I don't have any xannies, OK. Startups as you do see one, you could do that and you could also speak up because they can't get out of China. What are you talking about? Do you take money don't exist? Audi Arabia? No. And did you make a moral decision about that? No? OK. If you did get offered a billion dollars, would you take it from them? And by the way, to be honest, there's a bunch of my companies that have been supported by folks who have taken money from them, and I know that's a problem when I look. Well what's the bigger problem is that that the solution that these guys are that they're designing for mental health or diabetes or you know housing or whatever it is this startup does when they take money from SoftBank to remember all of a sudden they should be cancelled and not be able to do that. I didn't say cancel just take the money from somebody different. Nobody said cancelled. Where? I don't know. Code 2 pick another firm. Goldman I don't know who it doesn't take Saudi money. Should the should the United States create a program or whenever you get a you ever get a term sheet from SoftBank or anybody with money from didn't say that if you should just be able to go and redeem it. Or some somebody else's money. I never said that either. I think each individual, a capital allocator like yourself and CEO's should make what they believe is a morally right decision. While they voted and they don't care about this issue, they're voting with their dollars. Everything that people should care about human rights and they should care about who they make money for. I know I'm a lone voice. I know I'm a lone voice, but I believe you should care about her. You're not saying, Jason. I'm just saying something very subtle. I'm not saying that what you believe is wrong. In fact, I think it's beautiful and wholeheartedly right. What I'm saying is. And everybody else tries to nod their head and agree with you. In the moment, they're just morally virtue signaling in a luxury belief that they themselves don't exhibit, they don't make any changes towards. And it's largely because they don't believe that this is an issue. And I'm just putting it on the table as it just is true based on everybody's behavior. Maybe other than you, I, Carinthia, but everybody else is voting. I would like to change everybody's behavior and I think you can offer your opinion and maybe you will change some people's minds. I'm sure there are some people listening here, and I know there are some founders who would not take money from SoftBank. And would not take money from Saudi Arabia. And I know there are some capital allocators who will not take money from dictatorships. I think that you're you're also forgetting that there's there has been as as as it seems again from very very far away looking in. A lot of things that they have been able to do that is really constructive. You know, they've actually created some pretty decent ties to Israel. They've actually started to create a path to normalize normalized relations in the Middle East. You know, they've organized against what could be the real threat there, which is. You know, a a nuclear empowered Iran. So just to put things in perspective, Jason, it's kind of like you have to look at the totality of the situation again in the United States today. If you just looked at that one simple thing you can cherrypick all kinds of reasons why many other companies shouldn't expect, shouldn't accept American capital because you know, we don't really exactly have our **** together. Proportion of these issues is the issue I think, which which month is saying is the world, the world is complicated. I mean we had so under the the previous President they said there could never be. Like a piece in the lease or a deal between Israel and Arab powers. And there was the Doha Agreement where you had three Arab states signing peace treaties with Israel and Saudi Arabia allowing flights between Saudi Arabia and Israel for the first time. And that's all because of MBS. And there was an article in the Wall Street Journal talking about how King Salman actually was holding MBS back on this because, you know, he's part of the previous generation who was backing the Palestinians and NBSP. Wants to move forward and actually get a deal done with Israel. And if the Palestinians won't make it, then he's willing to move forward without them. And this is not me saying, this is Wall Street Journal. Yeah, we need to dig up that piece. So all I'm saying, look, what happened with that journalist was absolutely wrong. But clearly, like, Foreign Relations is very complicated, especially in the Middle East. And it's not clear that, like, net net, Saudi Arabia probably just did the one wrong thing, which is that every country engages in extra judicial killings. They just got caught. Right, because I don't think it's fair to say that. So torture. They also killed a journalist. I think that Americans have done that, OK? We've done that as well as journalists. Absolutely. I don't think you actually have any idea of the extent of what we have done during the course of these wars in all of these countries. I don't think you know. Well, I don't think I know. Yeah. So by saying, and I think that nobody knows if we chopped up a journalist who criticized do you know who is in Al grab Al, Abu Ghraib. Do you really know? Do you know of all the other of the worst one of the worst things we ever did and one of the things we need to aspire to do better? Around the Middle East for 20 years now in Afghanistan, we we supported warlords in Afghanistan who we were allies with, who were ****** young boys. I mean this was like a giant series of articles in the New York Times, Oliver North Iran Contra. I mean we've been doing this since the 80s. Even more recently in Libya, we we basically got rid of Gaddafi and plunged that whole country into civil war and it's never recovered from it. So look, I I actually, Jason I'm somewhere in between. I actually agree with your idealism. I'm my mind still blown that you actually work for Amnesty International. But I just think that the world is more complicated than that and sometimes we have to make choices and and the the the thing that concerns me is that that idealism that you're citing has become a prelude in a pretext for war in the over the last 20 years. And we can, to be clear, I'm not advocating we keep going around the globe getting into these conflicts. Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. You know, what good is that done us. Yeah. You know, I'm anti war, you know, I'm anti war. You know, I'm not advocating for invading places. I'm advocating. That we speak up when we see Saudi Arabia take a Blogger, Rafi Badawi. Everybody did. I mean, that was universally condemned, but but the question is at the end of the day, caned for writing blog posts. What's alternative in Saudi Arabia? Who? Who's our alternative there? We don't get to pick and choose who the leaders of these countries are. Doesn't mean that doesn't. I'm talking specifically about entrepreneurs, capital allocators. That doesn't mean we need to engage in business and building their chip stack. If you want the sternly worded press release you just got it from Biden to, hopefully it it's it peaked it, it satisfies, it quenches your thirst. Because the only other solution is talking about. Actually, if you want to know what I want, I want to see the three of you speak up for human rights. That's what I would like to say. I think that human rights in the United States is way more important to me than human rights anywhere else in the globe. And I think that we have an abysmal track record of taking care of colored men and women in this country. And I don't disagree. And so I have zero patience and tolerance for white men blathering on about **** that happens outside your own backyard. Fix your own inside backyard because you guys hold on, hold on. Because you guys are the ones that are get to diminish me for being white. No, I understand, but I'm saying that you are. Uniquely definition of power in a way that the rest of us are not and so when you guys clean up the inside, then we can go and fix the outside. Yeah, I believe we can do both. I I believe we can do the same thing at the same time. We could speak about human rights here. We could speak about it in Saudi Arabia, we could speak about in China, and we could talk about the same thing. We could talk about all the human right issues, from freedom of speech to murder. I do. I do constantly look at my Twitter. If you care so much about journalists, why haven't you spoken up in favor of stone and Assange the way that Glenn Greenwald has of Julian Assange, Assange and Snowden? Read Glenn Greenwald's reporting on this, these topics that we need to get to the bottom of both of those in. In either case, we don't know the full information. You've acted with complete certainty on Twitter saying that these guys are traitors and should be locked up in US prisons. Oh no, no. I think we don't know. I don't think we know who they're working for. Why haven't you spent the time to learn? No. Well, I mean, it is a black box. In that case, we don't know in both of those cases what the back story is. I do think I do have a nuanced position on what's going on, you know, about what's going on with the Tigers because you read a New York Times article. It's it's it's. So why don't you read the New York Times article about Snowden? And we have had people who have. We have, we have people who have defected and been on 60 minutes who were in those prisons. You believe what you want to believe. No. You you literally can believe somebody who escaped from the prison. You can believe them. Yes. With when it comes to Julian Assange, I I I don't know what to believe exactly, because he released all those data dumps and he didn't do it properly, like a journalist where he vetted the information. With Snowden, I'm more inclined to think that he was a good actor. And I think it's a very nuanced position. So if you want to try to paint me as, like, not knowing everything about every human rights violation in the world, every nuance position of a leaker, that's correct. I don't know everything about everybody, but I do. Keep that position. I don't know anything about any of these things, which is why I chose to focus on the things that I can control. And I want to believe that I want to improve my own backyard, which I think is absolutely great and I think you can add an end there, which is you should be talking about human rights in Hong Kong, should be talking about in Saudi Arabia, and should be talking about OK, and not my problem, is the problem. Problem? I believe that's part of the problem right now. You said it. You you said it perfectly chamath people don't care about human rights anymore. There's a large group of people, I agree with you, who do not care about human rights the way they did. I think they care about the local version of human rights. Fine. Yeah, and I think you need to care about all of them and talk about all of them at the same time. International adventurism around human rights I don't support in the least. And I do feel that a lot of this stuff is like the tip of the spear of people who then get morally absolute and say we have to fix this and the only solution is to invade. These countries, and instead I would just rather them, if they really care about it, let them stand up and do what they need to do. I think we need to fix our own backyard. I mean, look, not to kind of bolster to mop's point, but there is a blind eye turned to that which we don't want to believe or that narrative which we don't want to sell. And then we point towards the narrative that we do. And we see this all the time where the focal point of where should we be addressing human rights issues is where we have economic and geopolitical interests. No one seems to be solving the problem. Sibilia no one's getting on stage talking about the issues that people are facing in countries outside of where we have deep rooted trade partnerships and serious economic interest. And so, you know, like we can tell ourselves all day long that we need to be kind of be absolutists and absolutely take care of the world because we're the the the beacon for human rights. But the challenge is we end up being forced to choose where we want to spend our time and our resources and our resources go to where those resources flow back to us. And that's often where we have a geopolitical. Economic interest now, Jason, just say, I'll say one more thing like this because it's important, Jay, cause you, you called us all out. I am. An absolute human rightist, in the sense that I believe every human on earth should have a right to do whatever they want within their own sphere of influence, provided their sphere of influence does not intersect with the sphere of influence of others. End of story. And I don't see that happening anywhere on Earth. And this ends up being a trade off. You always end up trading off your sphere of influence for that of the greater good or someone else, because power allocates and power aggregates to specific places, often to government, sometimes to organize societal decisions that we say we're going to trade off. For individual rights and freedoms for that of the greater collective. And it is that judgment and it is that Gray area where all of these issues that we individually choose to address and spend our time on arise. And so I have, you know, just to point out like a very absolute point of view on this. But to me, the challenge is how do you make a discernment? How do you make a determination that imprisonment of brown and black people in the United States versus the treatment of people by militia in Somalia? Versus the treatment of the wiggers in China, versus, you know, and and you go on and on and on. It's a very difficult moral judgment. Or you could just say they're all wrong, they are all wrong, they are all wrong. But I don't care about the other two. We're going to talk well, see, but you work on all of them. You work on none of them. And I would rather see innovation enable more people to have access to more free speech, to have more resources, to have more of an ability to climb and have the freedom to do the things they want to do with their life. I think that innovation and technology. And bring all of these old school ways of thinking and behaving out of the medieval ages and the dark ages. And so that's where I choose to spend my time. You know, how can we unleash people's freedom? We got to make things more available. We got to make things more accessible. I would just want to make two points and then maybe we can move on. On this topic, point #1 is. When you're an immigrant. Part of what you're doing is you're actually voting against the place that you leave to embrace the place that you come to. And Jason, you know, of all the four of us on this pod, you're the only natural born American, right? You you started here, you've lived your entire life here. And that's an incredible. Blessing that you were given and the three of us weren't. And, you know, in my case I had to go through it. And even more circuitous path, I didn't even come to the United States first. I had to go through Canada. But implicitly, you know, when I look at the places that I left and specifically, you know, when I look about, when I look at Sri Lanka, who, you know has a very checkered human rights record, in fact, terrible in some ways and the way that they ended the war against the Tamils atrocious. I have to make a decision, right? I have to make a decision about is this something that I'm going to wade into or not? And what I've realized through my own life's journey is these are not my battles, and in many ways, I abdicated my responsibility to vote on that issue when I left. And instead, I stay here and I focus on the things that I can control here. And I think that I do have a responsibility to fix the issues of the country that adopted me. And so that's where some of my framework comes from. Separately, I do want to give all three of us a shout out because I do think that there is an enormous human rights issue that I do think we did bring up and in the last few weeks has become a real groundswell. And it started on the, you know, year end recap pod, where we talked about what's happened to our kids. And I just want to call out that in the last few weeks, the amount of press attention. That this issue has gotten, which I do think is a human rights level issue. Which is a cognitive impairment of our children has really come front and center and I think that it's really, really incredible all the way to like even nature now publishing these you know and and maybe the timing is just coincidental, but these big longitudinal studies. That really show that, you know, we have. Driven a level of retardation in our children, we have held them back. From a level of learning and development that we now have thrown our arms up in the air, we don't know what the real long term impact is. That I think is a human rights level issue. And domestically in the United States, I think we're in a position to fix it if we decide to take care of it. So, you know, again, I don't mean to offend you when I say that in my prioritization list, it's below the line, but there are different human rights issues that I care about. And I think to just to be clear, I don't. You know, when you said I called everybody out here, I'm trying to have a productive discussion freeberg. I'm not trying to put in a spot. I don't get offended. I'm not. I'm trying to have a productive discourse. I'm gonna send it anyway. I'm OK. But I wanna make it clear that I'm not trying to call out besties here. I'm trying to have a productive dialogue about humor from Prince Alwaleed. He's like one of the largest investors in the world, you know, I wouldn't, you know, like he's, yeah, he's a, he's a Saudi investor and the money of Saudi Arabia, you wouldn't if the money comes from a dictatorship. From an authoritarian country, I would 100%. He was locked up. He was locked up at the Ritz and he was forced to give a bunch of his money. And so it wasn't clearly lived out of the country anyway. I mean, like again, if his money, if you're asking me, let's put inside of a specific person, I'll just tell you my, my philosophy citizen or a former citizen of that country born there. Jakal. Yeah, I agree. Let me just tell you, I clearly I would never take money from an authoritarian regime. Would you take money from a Chinese billionaire? No, I would not take it from a Chinese. So I would not take it from a Chinese if I if I'm not an authoritarian regime. They, they, the Chinese, are not an authoritarian regime. No, we're talking about a Chinese billionaire. If the Chinese billionaire was outspoken about humor, I would tell you it's a great thought question and I'm just ripping here. It's a great thought experiment if a Chinese billionaire had left China. And what would you take? Has violated your human rights at the poker table many times. That's true. That's true. He has he has turned number 27 going all in. But I have two pair and I'm like, I guess he's got a set and he's just absolutely tortures me. Yeah, so but no, I would not. I would if if the person was a reformer. Yes, I would consider it. I would consider it, Jason. But Jason, I guess what you're saying is like you and this is your decision to make. My decision, yes, it's it's important for you that you understand what people's personal belief systems are. When you take money from them, no, human rights is important to me. Well, there's something like their personal belief system, like, you know, you you wouldn't care less if they were an illicit drug user, right, for somebody else. So, for example, I'll give you an example. So I did take money from a Chinese billionaire when I when I first started social, but I'm not going to say who it is, but there was a a morality clause and there were certain things that were incredibly important to this person and they were very easy for me to reflect because they were nothing that I cared about. But, you know, they explicitly didn't want certain kinds of investments in their scabbling cannabis sex ****. For me, yeah, this was gambling alcohol. Can anyone? My point is. You're fine signing up to those moral judgments. From an investor, am I? But not necessarily, you know, silence on. I'm asking you the question. You would be fine signing up for those moral obligation for moral delineation of what you can and can't do, even if it's not against what you believe. But you have a different issue when it comes to silence on these other topics. Yeah, I would here's, here's how I'll answer the question. I if I'm taking other people's money to invest it and they don't want to invest in the adult, I don't have a problem with. Cannabis as an example. I don't have a problem with wagering and gambling. But if I'm building a fund to invest in businesses, those are that. That's not an important issue for me and I don't know, that's a great venture investment, and I can also invest outside of it my own money. So it's a more nuanced issue there. Like I I have invested in wagering apps that I'm thinking about creating a syndicate specifically for gambling and wagering. And yes, there are LP's who I currently have in my previous fund, the active fund, that do not, I do not invest in wagering because of that. So yes. And it's because they just want clarity in some cases on not getting sued for investing in a, in a, in a wagering companies where we don't have a federal mandate yet. So you know I think comparing it's these are great thought experiments. Find training of everything. For me, I was fine signing up for no alcohol because my father was an alcoholic and so it was. It was more like and. There was a certain investor who? At one point tried to be an LP very well known person who was convicted of. Domestic abuse. And I didn't take that money because I was, I had been the victim of domestic abuse as my asthma has my mom. Yeah. And so that was a moral issue for me. The point I'm trying to make to Jason is that it's very nuanced. Everybody can be on a bunch of different sides of this thing, and I tend to think the most consistent, reliable thing is that these are very local beliefs. That when they touch you, you have a point of view on them. And I and I think that you know. It's much more practical, and maybe this is just being too practical. To see a world where people want to fix their own backyard 1st and the and I think a lot of why you may be disappointed that a lot of people don't have a stronger view on things like China is people are a little exhausted. With having moral views about things that are so far away when things in their own backyard are so broken. Yeah. And and I can understand that exhaustion. And to be clear, I just feel like human rights is such an obvious and easy one to get behind for all humans and that really perspective. And that's what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was about was we were hoping that all countries in the United Nations or Eleanor Roosevelt was that we could all just agree that torture was immoral and when the United States. Water board. But the United States can't even agree on whether the death penalty is immoral. So, I mean, and you know what? That's something that, you know, is our great failing. We're riddled with hypocrisy. The Declaration of Human Rights here is is an ideal. It's a goal. It's something to strive towards. And each country has places where they succeed and fail, and you can actually measure it. And we do measure it, actually. We do measure which countries have the worst record on human rights violations and which ones have the best. Couple scores are crazy. No, no, they're not. You can literally talk. Look at how many women are raped in prison in one country versus an understanding. But my point is, when you put a score to that or count it, you're not counting a bunch of other things that are really bad as well. The scoring system could be refined. Sure, I will give you that. And I think this is the debate we had today, which was an unexpected debate, and I didn't think we would go this deeper. I think is such an important debate for us to have as humans and as a civilization because we are getting in the weeds on so many other issues, whether it's inflation. Or, you know, innovation or politics that human rights I feel is something we should all be able to agree on, that all people should be able to definitively jakal everyone says yes, the definition and the prioritization is where all the noises yeah, that's that's everything. And how do we deal with no one on Earth that's going to say I don't believe in human rights? Agree with the ideals. Everyone agrees. Everyone agrees with the ideals. The question is how you implement them. Implementation prioritization, definitely. Like for for maybe in the West we do. I think it's, I think it's a legitimate position for you to say that you're not gonna take money from dictators, but to then say that any family office from any individual who was born in that country, you're not going to take their money either. I would have to think about. I didn't say that. I said I would have to think and say they're willing to risk their lives by denouncing their own government. They sent you like. I don't know. They have to do it publicly. I mean, if I talk to this hypothetical Chinese or Saudi person and they said I don't agree with this, I'm working against, I'm a reformer. I I guess I would have to consider it because no, no, but you would want to make money for the reformer. But Jason, what if they said I don't have a point of view that I would go with people who would you morally disqualify them? You would disqualify them on moral grounds if the way to make allies jakal, which is important. You're not letting me. Look, look, hold on. I need to answer. If you could both gonna ask me this question and accuse me of, you know, this, I would have to make a nuanced decision on an individual basis. I would not make a blanket decision. That's my position on this hypothetical situation where somebody is a Saudi citizen, has a family office. I would have to make a very nuanced decision. Like you did chamath where you didn't take the domestic abusers and you did take the person that was an American. But I took the Chinese. Yeah, but it's the same thing. Human rights violation, it's it's a horrible thing that occurred and you had to make a nuanced decision and you know, that's what I'm hoping to promote here is that we have a dialogue about human rights again because when I was growing up in the 80s, this was something that the world was getting consensus on and the West had consensus on. And I think the West is very weak now. And the fact that the NBA that you know, Apple, whatever companies, I don't want to call out individuals because it's not productive, especially if it gets re aggregated. And, you know, I happen to know some of them. It's it's something that the West has to contend with of what is our strategy here with human rights violators? Do we engage them? Do we admonish them or or somewhere in between? Do we disengage, engage or, you know, make our feelings hurt and try to shape their behavior to bend towards human rights? And it's a very complicated, nuanced discussion. I'm glad we had it here today, the time period you're talking about, where we supposedly had consensus on this during the said, the 1980s, during the Cold War, I was talking about in America. Yeah. OK, well, we we talked about it a lot in America is my point. Yeah, well, I think, actually, I think Ronald Reagan did a really good job with this. He did announced the evil empire, but said that we should be a shining city on a hill, and we did. We actually avoided a bunch of unnecessary foreign wars 100%. So look, I think the best way for us to lead on this issue is just to be an example. And we're not doing a very good job of that. I mean, 100% of your ideals are great, but the world doesn't neatly line up with those ideals and presents us with choices that don't fit those ideals. I mean, during the Cold War, we had a choice. To support either communist regimes or, in a lot of cases, authoritarian regimes. And we chose the lesser of two evils. I think today we have choices between we want to support Islamic fundamentalist regimes, or we want to support authoritarian regimes, or resisting it. I mean, those are the types of tough choices the world actually presents to us, and I think that's what makes it hard to. To sort of to. My enemy is my friend. It's a complicated chess board, and you're better at chess than me, sack. So I will give you that. And I think it's great that we have the discussion. I really do appreciate that you guys were willing to talk about this for so long. It's an important discussion because if we don't stand for human rights and basic human rights, what do we stand for? You know, and and I agree that domestic is implied. Stand for. I stand for me. Yeah, we know that. We know that. Tell us about the sweater. Tell us about the sweater. No candle. Concerned about the rise of authoritarianism, which actually this was my one of my big trends in the prediction episodes. I am concerned that democracy is the most negative trend. But then I think you should be concerned about this. Like rising tide we have here of censorship and the surveillance state about it. Yes, I'm in agreement. And our federal law enforcement agencies demanding more and more powers and lockdowns. Ingredients are blowing this whole, like January 6th thing out of proportion. You should be concerned about their attempts to exploit and use that to demand more powers to surveil and prosecute Americans. I do not believe in surveillance, but I and and I think you should understand that the hysteria created around that event is going to be used, is going to be exploited to demand these powers. Politicians are explaining this on all sides of the aisle. I agree with you, the right and the left. The right is diminishing it, the left is exacerbating it. The truth in the middle is it. I think we are in agreement, sacks. The overwhelming majority of people who went to the Capitol that day were ******** who just wanted to protest, and they cared about Trump, and they went there for the party of it all. And then there was a small cohort who intended harm and who are deranged and who could potentially be dangerous in the way chamath framed it. Lone wolves, or small packs of wolves like the Oklahoma City bombers who murdered a large number of people. And so we have to be very careful in in prosecuting one Group One way and one the other way. And that's exactly what the Department of Justice. Has done. In that case, 700 people got pled deals or very minor sentences, and then these folks are going to have the book thrown at them, and rightfully so, because they could have murdered pence or they could have murdered Pelosi just like that woman got murdered. I'm sorry the woman strategically got stopped and shot and died like that could have been a much different day if dozens of people had died and those cops had not shown restraint. We could be sitting here having a much different discussion about the Oath Keepers if the oathkeeper sat down with the Oklahoma City bombers succeeded in doing. This would be a much different discussion, right? They didn't, which is why it is a different discussion. Well, thank God for our police and and for how brave they were in not unloading their pistols when any reasonable person who was being beaten by that crowd and crushed would have taken their gun out and started firing. They didn't. Thank God those police did not start fire. Look, I think the one thing we can agree on is we don't want something like that to happen again. And there's two things, two simple things that would prevent. One is reform with the the Electoral count act like we talked about. That's what Biden should be going for, not making these speeches. About Bull Connor and George Wallace, he could actually get that done. And the other thing is, if the Capitol police had just been a little bit more prepared and had barricades and screens better security, that also couldn't. It couldn't happen again. That's all we have to do to solve that problem. January 3rd. Thing we have to do is arrest these oath keepers and put them in jail for what they did. Well, they've been indicted. You tell me if they're going to convict him of something. Yeah, well, and rightfully so. It seems that way. Hopefully they get their day in court. Maybe we can transition. I want to talk about the other side of the coin on inflation, because I think that we have. Hammered the point. For a long time now that, you know, the government was really sort of like off pieced by printing incompetent trillions and trillions of dollars and and injecting it into the economy. And what it's really created has been this massive bout of inflation, which then could cause an ultimate recession because the Fed has to react. All of those things I think are well documented. I just wanted to put on the record the a little element of the counterfactual, which I think is really important. And this is an article in the Wall Street Journal. And Nick, you can post this if you can please, but I'm just going to read this. I'm just going to look down. The 1st 2 rounds of stimulus payments lifted 11.7 million people in America out of poverty. According to the Census Bureau, Americans built up $2.7 trillion in extra savings, and some expect that combined with rising wages to provide to provide them with lasting stability. Despite the return to more normal spending patterns and rising inflation. So I just want to make sure that all of us have heard that. Because that's an incredible thing to be able to say that 11.7 million Americans in poverty are no longer in poverty because of the stimulus, which I think when you look at the right way of framing what some of these progressives want to do, I think a lot of the good intentions comes from things like this. And I just think it's important to acknowledge that that did happen. And that's something that we should really be proud of, and especially if those folks can. Actually stay in the lower middle and then move up to the middle class. That's an incredible outcome. And, you know, we we all supported that, I think, genuinely. And I think that that's good. We knew it was scary and we needed to put something into the economy to keep it from crashing. And it's very hard to know what the right amount was. Right chamath. Like, how do you know what the right amount of stimulus is in a pandemic that happens every hundred years? And thank God, it feels like Omicron is, you know, leading us out of this. OK yeah. There's some great examples, by the way, in this article, if you guys, if people want to take the time to read it, of some examples of people that have really done. An incredible job in. In like completely changing their financial picture, which I think I mean a lot of a lot of people went into freelance. A lot of these young people realized, I don't know if you saw this headline a million less people started college this year and enrolled. And I think what's happening is so many people who were going into college realize, I don't know if I should go into debt. I figured out a way to make money at home and more financially literate. I'm going to make a better decision about college and not go 100K into debt. Well, to be very special people, very resilient and being better, making better judgments about their own lives because they've been forced to, to be specific, I think you mean. Boys. Because the other thing that's happening is in colleges now it's becoming very tilted, female versus male, especially around colleges. In some colleges it's, you know, 2/3 female, one male, 65. We were actually creating this weird longitudinal pattern here where an entire gender is going to be very miseducated relative to another one. And in fact it's it'll be the exact opposite of what it was like in probably the 50s or 60s where you have these large swaths of men that are educated women who typically stayed home or were. Undereducated, relative to their ability here, now it's the exact opposite, where slings, you know, women are getting undergrads and graduate degrees and boys are learning how to play video games and smoke pot in cells. Very strange time. I mean, that's what happens when you David. What is that like, it being an insult? You were a pioneer in being an insult. We made it through the show, so it was so civil. Let's get the Friedberg ratio up. Let's talk about an exciting scientific paper and the implications of it to science. Boy, tell us about this new study from Harvard that revealed Epstein Barr virus could be associated with Ms. I'll do a zoom out, then zoom in. So bear with me for a moment. So you know there are over 80 what are called autoimmune diseases. These are diseases where your body, your immune system, attacks your own tissue and causes. Real problems, one in 20 people worldwide suffer from some sort of autoimmune condition. So this disease, lupus, which affects, you know, your whole system, rheumatoid arthritis or your joints get inflamed, Sjogren syndrome, where your eyes and your mouth get get messed up, and. And multiple sclerosis, which we'll talk about here in a second. But these are all diseases that have a similar ideology, which is that your immune system attacks some tissue in your body if it it dysfunctions and it attacks it. And there's always been this big question about kind of what causes autoimmune? Conditions and what causes immune system disregulation like this. And there's all sorts of different theories and studies and papers, many of which have been, you know, well, well documented genetic risk factors, environmental factors, age. And in particular, as you get older, the thymus, which is supposed to create these helper cells that go out and keep cells in your immune system from attacking your own body, your thymus kind of starts to fade away. And or, sorry, your Thomas starts to fade away. Start, Start Stop working. And so, you know, one theory that's been talked about a lot is molecular mimicry, which means that there's some protein from a virus or that enters your body or cancer. And that protein looks a lot like some other protein in your body. And so your immune system starts attacking that protein and as a result, your immune system gets turned on to that protein and it actually attacks a similar looking protein somewhere else in your body. And that's a, you know, a very kind of broad statement about, you know, some potential cause of autoimmune conditions. And you can find protein mimicry theories coming from the gut where you know microbes in the gut are triggering this and then also viruses, so particular, you know, cytomegalovirus and Epstein Barr virus, which we're going to talk about here today. So multiple sclerosis is this disease, one of the autoimmune diseases where your immune system attacks and destroys myelin, which is, you know, found on. Your nerve cells and in your brain and it can actually cause, you know when when this happens and your immune system starts to attack your brain, you end up with these lesions and and really debilitating effects over time. One in 300 people in the US have been diagnosed with Ms. It is a brutal disease. It it lasts your whole life and the treatment today, the primary treatment is this drug that destroys B cells in your body and your B cells make antibodies. And so by destroying the B cells it gets rid of the cells that are making the antibodies that are attacking your own brain. And and this is a really effective treatment. It's been able to reduce the effects of Ms significantly, but we still don't know what causes it and what triggers Ms and there's always been this theory going back to the the the mimicry question. That one of these viruses that everyone seems to get, as they, you know, age, is causing it. And so Epstein Barr virus has always been thought to be one of those viruses. It's one of the herpes viruses. Everyone knows it as mono. So, you know, you get mono and you get swollen neck. A lot of people do. Most people that get this virus don't end up having any symptoms that are, even though they have it. And here's a crazy statistic. 95% of people have Epstein Barr virus, and it's known that Epstein Barr virus does actually cause some kinds of cancers. Anyone lymphoma and so on. So here's the paper that was published yesterday. And again, if you know that Epstein Barr virus, you know, is is doing some other stuff in your body that's negative, shouldn't this be a reason to look at it for Ms? But how do you get the data to do it, given that 95% of people already have Epstein Barr virus? So here's what happened. These guys at Harvard went to the military, the US military, and the US military basically had 10 million members of the military take 62 million blood samples. Over a period of time from 1993 to 2013, and when they take these blood samples, they, you know, they run their typical checkup on these people, on the military members, but they save some of the blood sample in a freezer and so they've got 62 million blood samples sitting in freezers. The US military does. And so these researchers were able to access those blood samples and they then found 5% of the people that don't have Epstein Barr virus because remember 95% of people have it. So they found the 5% that don't and they went through and they found that during this period of time that they have all this blood data for, they were able to identify 800 people. That started out Epstein Barr virus negative and then got Ms. 100% of the people that got Ms were infected with Epstein Barr virus during this period of time. And for the group of people that that didn't get Ms, only about half of them got Epstein Barr virus infection during this period of time. And then they looked at this for about 20 other viruses and basically showed absolutely no correlation or difference in risk between all the other viruses if you got Ms or didn't get Ms and so it basically creates a 95% probability that you're 32 times more likely to get. And that's from Epstein Barr virus than from anything else. It is from a racially diverse pool, an age diverse pool, ethnically diverse pool. So a lot of other, you know, confounding factors like race or ethnicity or genetics, a lot of other factors, like all the other viruses that might be causing Ms, have been excluded. And it shows that maybe Epstein Barr virus is the primary cause of MF that triggers certain people's immune systems to go nuts and attack the brain. And it's interesting because, you know, Epstein Barr virus has a bunch of proteins in it that look like other human proteins. So it makes sense why this might happen. Ms Costs 40 Grand a year. There's $30 billion a year spent in the US on Ms Care. So if we can go in and get Epstein Barr virus eliminated from the human body, it would be an incredibly incredible cost saving and a therapeutic benefit to people with MS you should talk about the reason why we don't have a herpes vaccine, though. So HSV 123, now 4. None of these things have reasonable vaccines, and it's for a very specific reason, which is that the herpes virus itself is incredibly, incredibly difficult to isolate and find until it activates. And it hides itself and it nests itself inside these nerve cells. So you may want to just talk about how complicated it is to produce it. I mean, the DNA disappears into these nerve cells and so it's hard to get, you know, immune. System to go and clear them out permanently. Yeah, the Epstein Barr virus hides out of B cells in your body, and so it's floating around in your body forever. And as your B cells replicate, the virus replicates with them. And then when your immune system starts to get weak, the virus pops out and starts attacking and inflaming your body again. So #1 Epstein Barr virus has never been a great target, the therapeutic target, because there's not much money to be made because it's like, who the hell cares about mono? Once you get mono, you get over it, you're fine. But if Epstein Barr virus is in fact causing this problem with. With Ms, there's a reason to go after a lot of money to go after it. And there are several new technologies and therapeutic strategies that are possible, one of which is, you know, transient out over our group text, a company that's doing T cell therapies, we can actually program a T cell and the T cell goes into the body and finds these, these B cells so that with Epstein Barr virus and wipes them out. There's a steroid, a diuretic steroid that's been shown that that's used to treat high blood pressure, that's been shown to stop Epstein Barr virus from leading cells. There's an antiviral drug. Made by tequila called Maribavir, which has been shown to have high efficacy eliminating Epstein Barr virus. So there are now therapeutic strategies that are being actively explored that could unlock the potential of minimizing or eliminating Epstein Barr virus for a broader population than we ever thought should be taking these therapies. Because the implications may be that if you can stop Epstein Barr virus from replicating or eliminated from your body, you can stop all these follow on diseases that occur over time in your life that are super debilitating and costly. Yeah, Lupus is another one tied to tied to herpes simplex 4. I think the the the real problem is going to be that 2/3 of the adult population under the age of 55 have. Herpes simplex 4. So you know, you're literally talking about inoculating the entire world. And when we start to think about that grand of a scale? There's a cost issue, there's a manufacturability issue, and then there's an ROI issue that that, unfortunately. Will be adjudicated and it that to me is what really you know, stands out and that and that and that is that just the healthcare economics of it? Obviously the science of it is still really complicated. Aren't we doing an M RNA vaccine for Epstein Barr? And how would that play into this? Absolutely. So there's a lot of techniques. This is you know T cell therapeutics, MRA, a chemotherapy type drug, a steroid drug, an antiviral drug. So every modality for therapeutics has some candidate or candidates for Epstein Barr virus. And so you know there may be a bunch of ways that you start to identify risk factors and that you give someone one particular therapy that might be really affordable like this antiviral maybe super affordable, you know if we could make it for five. That's a pill. You could, you know, get it out to a lot of people prophylactically that are high risk. You know, if there is a, a group that actually is active with Ms, a good treatment may be to try and give them the cell therapy and see if that helps. And so that's the clinical trials that will start now because if you can give people AT cell therapy and eliminate B and and stop all future need for Ms treatment, that'll save 40 grand a year. It'll start to make sense to run clinical studies to see if that stuff's possible and it's worth doing. So it opens up a whole new kind of. Area of interest. Now, by the way, this isn't novel. People have been talking about this for a long time, but this paper has such incredible data and such strong signal. That it's really gonna it's really going to catalyze investment. We didn't have the big data based on this study we would not have gotten here for once on this show I will say thank God for the US government and all of the the the data that they've you know all of these blood samples that they can freezers. I want to get your read on the the human transplant thing that we saw this week where a genetically modified pig heart was an implanted into 57. Jason you wanted 57 year old man. You want to read that out? Yeah. David Banner, a 57 year old man requested special emergency authorization for the experimental surgery from the FDA FDA? Was dying and unable to receive a human heart transplant. The surgery was performed on January 7. In Baltimore, and yeah, this happened as the US is facing a major organ shortage. I mean, we have, we have hundreds of thousands, I mean, of people on organ donor registries or needing a transplant, you know, my father. Was on a kidney transplant registry for eight years until he passed away. Uh, these things are just brutalizing for the individuals and the family around it. And so, like, you know, all of a sudden if you can see a path where you can genetically modify other sources of organs and implant them without organ rejection into the human body, that cycle, that is. That's mine. It's mine. But here's what's really important. It's not just about the availability of these things, but it's about turning off one of the biggest the the the. Big risk factor of organ transplant is rejection, meaning you're putting all this foreign matter into your body. It's foreign proteins. And so when your immune system sees all those foreign proteins, your body goes haywire and tries to kill it. It's like this, there's all, it's like imagine getting a billion viruses at once, and so there's all these new proteins and so one of the interesting things you can do. You know, if you can grow these these organs and and alter the genetics of the cells that are being used to grow the organs is you can get those cells to match your own or to basically downregulate all of the proteins that might be triggering immune rejection in your body. So theoretically you could grow jacala's heart with tissue and cells that match your DNA potentially and match your protein structure perfectly and such as had had a heart, you could do it with him too, right? There you go. Good transition. But no, I mean that, but and by the way there there may also be a path here where we grow these these organs with your DNA without even using the animal body, the entire the entire key of the rest of the animal to do so. So there's a lot of really interesting breakthroughs that are possible but but it's really great to see a highlighted, you know, non, you know kind of transplanted organ from another body into the human body because it's just, again it opens up what people have been talking about for decades. Which is the possibility of this now that we have gene editing and potentially have the ability to grow? Biological matter in bioreactors. It's it's going to be, it's going to be dramatic. Take out. What do you think about the democratic person in the SEC saying that they wanted to basically make the accredited investor laws even stricter? That's incredibly infuriating. That was your big prediction? Yeah. I mean we really have to get these laws. I mean, I think this is like a Theranos or we work. Overreaction, which is like, Oh my God, there are some bad private companies. If you take the number of bad private companies and then look at what is happening in the country with people wagering on sports and wagering on crypto, slash investing, depending on, you know how you look at it. We need to have one rule for the road, which is people take a test, they get accredited. And then they can do what they want with their money. The equivalent of what I'm suggesting. People can only invest a fraction of the money they have on their last two years tax returns. Let's pick a number, 5% of their two year average on their tax returns, 10% whatever you want to pick and they have to take a test with the would be the equivalent of people having to take a 3 hour course in a, you know, I don't know, 50 question test to go to Vegas and play blackjack and they could only put on the blackjack table. 10% of their total average yearly income for their household in the past year. Do you think about how crazy that would be to tell an American you got to take a blackjack course and pass a blackjack test and understand the odds of poker or whatever to play that game? And you can only put if you made $50,000 on ours years, you can only bet 5000 in Vegas had any one time. That's the Max chip you can buy in a year. Those are the two things I'm advocating for in private company investing. And that's really if we want to have people move from, you know, poor to middle class, from middle class to affluent in this country, there has to be equity participation. And equity participation has to start early. Look at what happened with all these young people betting on crypto, betting on stocks or stonks and, you know, doing puts and calls and all kinds of crazy things. You know, in public markets we would really rather see those people or at least in addition be able to invest on LinkedIn if they were. A recruiter in year two, or they were an Uber driver, be able to buy Uber shares, or if they were an Airbnb host, be able to buy Airbnb shares as a private company will change the entire complexion of upward mobility in the United States and and we really have to keep. Educating people, not limiting their upside. That's my personal belief person who asked you the question stopped paying attention like 5 minutes ago. Ohh because we were talking about science and hearts. No Jamath asked you a simple question like 15 minutes ago and like you just mean that was a 92nd monologue OHS for Henry Belcaster. By the way I got inside information on sax. What's that you know how Sax started like doing a little bit of artistic direction you know he's got that Scorsese in him having done the award-winning film. Thank you for smoking and he he got. Every bell cast around his team. You know the tick tock, guys. Tik T.O.K guys are taking some suggestions. Lightly suggesting Sax has been directing, not directing tax superfan saying, hey, you might want to make a tik T.O.K out of this monologue idea here's, here's what happened is some there. There is a quote of a segment that somebody liked. They retweeted it got a whole bunch of likes and so I sent the tick tock guy said this might make a good talk. Yeah, nobody else doing that, but OK, OK, we'll go for it. I'm not editing, but I'm slightly suggesting check out it again. People do think that you have Tucker Carlson's writers writing for you because you say it and people don't know. To be clear, I that is a joke. You do not have Tucker Carlson's current writers writing for you. There may be some. I do admit I have a special writing team for Rose. You do just for Rose. But do you, do you do you keep them on retainer? Like if you have a roast? Like you can just ask them to punch up some stuff for you? Or. I've only done it twice. I did it for you, for your roast J Cal and I did it for Phil Hellmuth. Destroyed. Fell. Oh my God. You remember my, this is hysterical. Oh my God, this is the cheapest roast ever. They rented like a junior suite that they got for free at some. It wasn't. Yeah, they got it for free. They got it for free. They had like 30 people in a room and they're like, oh, you got to come out for Phil's roast. It was like 30 people in a junior suite had like a B level hotel. And there was so bad. And Saxon, I came in and we had absolutely no allegiance to the audience. I lost so much money that everybody. You guys were out of control. It was brutal. Here's the helmet roast I got. I got the material right here. No. Oh no. Oh my God. Can you be sure? These aren't our jokes? This is what a Comedy Central writer wrote. So we have. Well, we do not endorse these. Well, OK. So if you said that how it work. So they basically put together some material and then I shape it and there's like some back and forth. That's all. The workshop. You work it, we workshop it. Yeah. Go ahead. It begins. We're here tonight to roast the poker player known as the Greatest. Unfortunately, Phil Ivey wasn't available, so we settled for Phil Hellmuth. Hello? In the poker world, Phil is known as a poker brat. The rest of the world just calls him *******. Hello? Phil has mastered the GTO strategy of playing poker. For most players, GTO stands for game theory. Optimal, but it infills case, it stands for grading toxic and obnoxious. Despite all this, Phil fancies himself a quote UN quote poker ambassador. Not to throw a damper on things, but calling Phil an ambassador for poker is like calling Bill Cosby an ambassador for Quaaludes. Ohh no, you cut that one. Ohh, that's not that's too good. Let's face it, Phil is nuts. He's the only poker player sponsored by Lithium. Sold them in silence at the poker table so you can hear the voices in his head. So good. When Phil was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame, they retired his straightjacket. Now she's doing what? I think mentally ill everybody he's he's deranged now Phil is doing what all people in crisis do right self help books. Call positivity. Which is ironic, because the only thing Phil has ever tested positive for is narcissistic personality disorder. So good. This inspirational tone is a whopping 84 pages. Oprah has taken inspirational ***** bigger than this. How bad is Joe's book on Amazon? It says people who enjoyed this book also enjoyed pounding ***** **** with a meat tenderizer. Oh my God. Oh, you're you're a bunch of guys for good. All right, everybody, hope you enjoyed saxes excerpt from the Phil Helmuth Narcissist Roast. And we'll catch you next week on the podcast episode 64. Bye. Bye. Let your winners ride Rain Man. David said that. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Besties? That is my dog thinking it was your driveway. Ohh man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge **** because they're all just useless. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release stuff out there. Let your feet. We need to get merchants. Please.