E150: Israel/Gaza escalating or not? EU censorship regime, Penn donors revolt, GLP-1 hype cycle

00:00:00.000 | Well, you're talking about three very different actors there.

00:00:02.320 | Wait, David, David, behind you is your security cameras are on. Do you want to turn those off?

00:00:06.240 | Yeah, I don't know. Hold on a second.

00:00:09.440 | You sit there and watch those all day? Security apparatus.

00:00:13.920 | What is this guy, the Batman?

00:00:16.560 | He sits in that couch all day and watches.

00:00:20.160 | Did you see that behind him? It was so dystopian. Oh my gosh.

00:00:26.320 | You must have caught some crazy shit on those security cameras. What do you do with that

00:00:29.760 | footage?

00:00:34.560 | Okay, everybody, welcome to episode 150 of the all in podcast. Yes, we've made it to 150 episodes

00:00:56.960 | somehow, talking about technology, business, and of course, politics. And this week, we will

00:01:04.400 | continue our discussion, tragically about the situation Israel and the war with Hamas,

00:01:11.280 | and a lot of the downstream effects of what's going on here and try to make sense of the world

00:01:17.760 | as we do. We gave a disclaimer last week, we're not experts. And I suspect many of you are not

00:01:23.680 | experts on this, but we're going to try to talk about the heart topic here and do it in good faith.

00:01:30.400 | And then we will move on to topics that don't have to do with the war in Gaza. That could by the time

00:01:38.000 | you read this again, another disclaimer, by the time you listen to this podcast, a ground invasion

00:01:44.240 | may or may not have started. We take these on Thursdays, and you listen to generally speaking

00:01:49.200 | on Saturdays and Sundays. With me again this week, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sachs, and of course,

00:01:56.080 | David Friedberg. And gentlemen, I'm just going around the horn here quick before I tee up the

00:02:02.080 | first topic. How's everybody feeling about the events in the 10 days since 10.7 and the terrorist

00:02:10.880 | attack that occurred in Israel? I skipped last week. I was too emotional to do the show, just

00:02:17.200 | so folks know. It was difficult to see what I saw on the internet and the reporting. I think I was

00:02:30.480 | really moved. Because I thought a lot about the like, how lucky we are. And I thought about my

00:02:41.200 | children and seeing what I saw and being a parent. It's really different. I remember 9/11,

00:02:51.600 | it was really shocking. I was really upset from 9/11 as well. But when I saw the events last week,

00:02:57.760 | it immediately projected onto my kids and the care I try and take for my kids and thinking about

00:03:07.200 | the experience of other people in this situation. I was also, I'll be honest, really moved

00:03:13.680 | and saddened because of the bombing of children in Gaza. And I was really saddened

00:03:21.600 | that there were innocent children suffering there as well. And the whole thing just felt so horrific

00:03:30.080 | to me. I don't think about the justification or the morality of one side over another. I was just

00:03:36.720 | more moved. Because I felt really sad about the experience of a lot of families and a lot of

00:03:42.080 | children caught in the middle, caught in this in this environment. So I was I was pretty hurt last

00:03:47.680 | week, I was in a really bad state, and I couldn't do the show. I think, you know, time has allowed

00:03:55.120 | me to kind of become a bit rational about things and try and understand where things are headed.

00:03:58.720 | And it's a really complicated, confusing situation. And it's really sad. I worry a lot

00:04:04.080 | about where things are headed, not just in the Middle East, but also domestically,

00:04:08.320 | coming out of this conflict. So that's where I'm at.

00:04:12.720 | Yeah. And thank you for sharing. I wasn't sure if you would share your absence last week. And

00:04:19.200 | I think it's fair. I too have been thinking about my own children. And it's at 9/11. And it's,

00:04:25.280 | it's very dark. And so it's hard to talk about. But we're making progress here, I think. And today

00:04:33.920 | we'll talk about a lot of the issues, Chamath or Saxe, any opening thoughts before we get started,

00:04:40.960 | delving into what's actually happening. And then more importantly, I think, where this is heading,

00:04:48.320 | and what the possible outcome or resolution could be if there is a resolution here.

00:04:53.600 | I think things are getting better, actually, I think, okay, from where,

00:04:59.360 | if you had to graph your expectations of how bad things could get, I think what most people would

00:05:06.240 | probably say is somewhere last week, there was a scepter of some potential World War Three-like

00:05:13.440 | contagion. And I think in general, it hasn't stopped some of the bloodshed, but the extent

00:05:22.640 | to which we expected this thing to escalate, it actually hasn't happened. And so if you take a

00:05:29.120 | step back, and you kind of calmly and coldly look at the facts, I think that there are a lot of

00:05:36.480 | people on all sides trying to maintain their composure in a moment where there's a lot of

00:05:45.680 | brush fires. So I actually think that this has been

00:05:51.760 | much, much better than it could have been. And so I'm generally optimistic that we're

00:05:59.440 | going to find our way out of this. So, Saxe, any thoughts?

00:06:03.040 | Well, to be honest, I can't be as optimistic as Chamath. It's true that World War Three

00:06:08.480 | hasn't started yet. But I think the situation is incredibly volatile still. Just the last

00:06:13.600 | couple of days, the headline story was an explosion or bombing of this hospital in Gaza.

00:06:21.200 | Blame immediately fell on Israel. The claim in the New York Times was that

00:06:26.640 | they had dropped a bomb on it from a plane. Social media was aflame with that. I think in the last

00:06:33.520 | day or so, the perspective seems to be changing. There's video now showing that it wasn't the

00:06:40.160 | hospital, but rather the parking lot next to the hospital that took the brunt of the damage.

00:06:46.160 | I think that it's far from clear that Israel did it. A lot of people are blaming Islamic Jihad.

00:06:53.920 | In any event, it's very unclear. So I'm going to continue to do what I've done,

00:06:57.760 | which is suspend judgment until there can be some sort of proper investigation of what happened,

00:07:02.400 | and we find out exactly who's really responsible. But it does seem that over the last day or so,

00:07:08.640 | there's been now a backing off of the idea that Israel was definitely responsible for this.

00:07:13.440 | Nonetheless, you saw immediately in the wake of that story coming out that there were protests

00:07:21.680 | and riots all over the Middle East. The Arab Street was absolutely ignited. And I think that

00:07:30.960 | the Arab Street's not going to be convinced that Israel wasn't responsible for this. I just think

00:07:35.600 | that they're convinced. And I think partisans on both sides are convinced about who did it,

00:07:41.600 | and they're going to be immune to whatever evidence comes out. So I think that's kind

00:07:45.520 | of the situation we're at right now. I would consider the riots that we just saw in regards

00:07:52.720 | to the hospital and the eruption on social media to be a prelude or dress rehearsal of what we can

00:07:59.440 | expect to happen almost every day if Israel proceeds with the ground invasion of Gaza. Now,

00:08:06.080 | they haven't done that yet. And that's why the situation seems tenuous, but stable. But we're

00:08:12.560 | still waiting to find out if Israel's going to go into Gaza. And if they do, I think all bets are

00:08:17.760 | off in terms of where this is going. This was my biggest concern last week. I think the thing I was

00:08:23.920 | most anxious about was that the imagery that would come out of Gaza with the action from Israel

00:08:34.720 | would be the fodder for escalation worldwide, that there's this perception already with half a

00:08:44.960 | billion people, maybe 2 billion people, maybe more, that there's an oppressor and there's an oppressed

00:08:51.840 | and the oppressed is suffering under the oppressor, and that there would be the creation of fodder to

00:08:58.240 | support that narrative. And I think that the hospital bombing, the kind of point I made to

00:09:03.120 | someone who reached out to me two days ago or yesterday about it, was I don't know if it matters

00:09:09.440 | that we get the corrections from all these people that may have said something that turns out to not

00:09:13.920 | be true. Because it was almost like that media became confirmation bias for people that already

00:09:19.760 | felt that this is what was going on. And this is simply evidence of what is going on. And it

00:09:25.520 | justifies the next step. It justifies the beliefs, it justifies the morality. And I don't think that

00:09:36.000 | if it wasn't this, it's something it's going to be something else, there is a tinderbox ready to be

00:09:40.560 | lit. And that tinderbox is just looking for a match. And whether it's this match or the next

00:09:45.920 | match, there's going to be a match. And the tinderbox will be lit. I think that a large number

00:09:51.360 | of people feel like they're on the right side, if everyone thinks they're on the right side of

00:09:55.760 | something, everyone feels like they have the right moral stance that there is a regime on the other

00:10:00.800 | side that has the wrong moral stance, I am good, you are evil. And therefore, anything I see,

00:10:06.480 | is my confirmation bias for my belief. And it'll it gives me permission to take the next step.

00:10:14.960 | And in that framework, it will only escalate. And we are only going to a dark place. And I think

00:10:22.000 | like the real question for me to Chamath's optimism is, what are the muting factors? What

00:10:27.200 | are the factors where one side feels like they're getting something that forces them to say, I'm not

00:10:34.000 | going to take the next step, I'm not going to justify the next step. And it's a it's a really

00:10:38.320 | hard question to answer at this stage. Let's, let's take that other side and just explore it

00:10:43.280 | for a second. So the question that I've been asking myself is, because I agree with you,

00:10:49.840 | it doesn't matter who was responsible for this bombing, because it's already been defined.

00:10:54.880 | And yeah, but in a moral sense, it does just, you know, in a moral sense, it does. But I'm saying

00:10:59.360 | practically in the theatre of war and the theatres near the war, it doesn't matter, because it's

00:11:03.920 | about how is it framed. And to your point, people have already made up their minds. The pro Israel

00:11:12.480 | side have made up their mind and the pro Palestinian side has made up their mind. But the

00:11:19.600 | question that I asked myself is, okay, is that how much of an incremental escalation is it from

00:11:26.160 | what their status quo is? You know, one of the interesting things I learned from the Jared

00:11:33.680 | Kushner interview with Lex Friedman, it's like, a lot of this tension, you can trace back to

00:11:42.080 | the Al Aqsa mosque, and all of the misinformation around that, right, he spends a section of that

00:11:48.560 | podcast talking about how that's been framed and reframe the myths and disinformation to basically

00:11:54.400 | get people fervently up in arms. And it turns out that it isn't under the supervision of the

00:12:00.960 | Israelis. And in fact, you know, you can go get a visa to visit Al Aqsa mosque, and it's under the

00:12:06.400 | custodianship of the King of Jordan, as an example. So that is the fact. But those facts aren't

00:12:13.280 | necessarily shared on the ground. And that is where a lot of this original tension comes from.

00:12:19.600 | So then I asked myself, Okay, well, if that's been lingering for decades,

00:12:23.520 | how much more incrementally bad does it get for this specific thing? And I think you see it in

00:12:30.960 | people's actions, which is, they try to use it to escalate. And my honest measurement of that

00:12:37.520 | escalation is that outside of the actual theatre of war, most of these escalations died down pretty

00:12:44.880 | quickly. Now, if all of these embassies were overrun, and all of a sudden, you saw a Beirut

00:12:51.920 | like situation, right, the US embassy in Beirut in the early 80s, I would agree with you that this

00:12:56.560 | is getting really bad really quickly. But that's not what we saw. And I think what that speaks to

00:13:02.480 | more is how much hatred is actually in the heart of people versus not. And so I think that this

00:13:09.840 | was a moment for people to channel their anxiety and some of their aggression and some of their

00:13:17.040 | hatred towards America or Israel. But what it didn't was escalate. You didn't see these embassies

00:13:23.600 | get burned to the ground, you didn't see people getting dragged out. And so I'm not trying to

00:13:27.360 | justify that behaviour. I'm just trying to look at it in an absolute sense and answer the question,

00:13:32.880 | is it escalating? Or is it not escalating? And my assessment right now is that it is not escalating.

00:13:42.800 | I saw on Sunday, something that I thought I would never see, which is Iran put out a press release

00:13:48.400 | through the United Nations to Israel. You haven't seen that that's de escalatory. That's not an

00:13:54.240 | escalatory action from a country whose mission statement includes the destruction and demise of

00:13:59.040 | a country. So I think when push comes to shove, there are a lot of people in positions of power

00:14:06.560 | who understand the stakes here and are trying their best on both sides. And I hate this word,

00:14:14.800 | so I can't even believe I'm about to use it to find some proportionality and try to de escalate.

00:14:19.280 | That's how I measure and judge what I see. Over the last week, a lot of people use labels to

00:14:27.760 | characterize the actions, the tonality, the behaviour of the other side, because every

00:14:35.200 | everyone believes that they're on the right side. And the point of view that there is hate and anger

00:14:42.480 | on the other side comes from a place not out of the blue hate and anger doesn't just emerge

00:14:47.280 | from nothing. It typically comes from a place of deep hurt. I think the biggest question for me is

00:14:54.000 | how do you resolve the deep hurt that is being felt and has been felt by either side over a

00:15:02.000 | very long period of time? It's the hardest thing to answer because what do you give millions of

00:15:08.320 | people that have lived feeling hurt for so long, feeling challenged for so long, that makes them

00:15:14.960 | feel resolved in that sense. And I get that you're speaking about the Palestinian people.

00:15:19.200 | I'm speaking about the Israeli people too. Okay, and I'm speaking about the fact that like,

00:15:25.200 | these actions don't, they don't come out of the blue. They don't come out of a place of

00:15:30.960 | like greed. Let's go to an example in our own lives. Let's just say that we have a friend or

00:15:36.960 | you know, we had a girlfriend at some point, where there is a deep betrayal. Okay, and then there's

00:15:43.680 | just an unrelenting anger. To your point before you can talk about the hurt, you have to deescalate

00:15:53.120 | the anger. So there has to be an active process of deescalation before you can actually resolve

00:15:58.960 | this stuff. I thought Israel was quite clear last week, we are going into Gaza on Sunday.

00:16:04.560 | But then they didn't. That seemed deescalatory. Again, I'll just say it again. Iran puts out a

00:16:11.680 | press release to Israel through the UN. That seemed deescalatory. There was a moment where

00:16:18.800 | Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and Biden were supposed to meet, they ended up not meeting in

00:16:26.080 | Amman. But that seemed deescalatory. Biden, Tony Blinken, Tony refused to leave the IDF until he

00:16:34.160 | got some assurances about humanitarian aid into Gaza. That seems deescalatory. Biden spending time

00:16:40.320 | and then reiterating those assurances from Netanyahu. Again, all of this stuff seems like

00:16:45.200 | both sides are in the middle of all of this chaos, not trying to light the tinderbox. And it doesn't

00:16:52.400 | mean that they're on a path to resolution. But I just think that they understand the stakes.

00:16:57.760 | Saks, when we look at the hospital situation specifically, and the fog of war, you had the

00:17:04.960 | New York Times getting attacked for maybe taking Hamas's word for it, then flipping and then now

00:17:14.080 | there is conspiracy theory, the United States is, you know, carrying water for Israel and

00:17:20.160 | then the fog of war, oh, my goodness, we maybe the hospital wasn't even hit it was in the

00:17:27.440 | it was in the parking lot. And so it didn't even get hit. So when we look at all of that,

00:17:31.920 | and then Shamad says, Hey, wait, things haven't escalated. I actually, I happen to be here in

00:17:36.480 | Dubai right now on a business trip. And I'll explain some of the feedback I've gotten from

00:17:43.040 | people who are Palestinian, ethnically, or Jordanian and of Palestinian descent, I should

00:17:50.960 | say, and we'll get into that in a second. The ground war hasn't happened. And this seems to be

00:17:56.560 | one of the as Chamath is pointing out, it's fascinating that it hasn't because it was

00:18:01.360 | supposed to have happened already. Do you have any thoughts on why it hasn't happened?

00:18:05.360 | One of the conspiracy theories and I hate to go down these roads because in the fog of war,

00:18:10.560 | I think people try to fill a vacuum. And then of course, as you were pointing out,

00:18:13.920 | Chamath and Freiburg, people then use it as evidence for their side, the people here in

00:18:18.720 | Dubai, a number of people have pointed out this ground war is not going to happen, that it's

00:18:24.800 | saber rattling, but Israel is going to black back down and get the hostages back. And this has been

00:18:31.040 | told to me by many people. I know, I don't know if that's wishful thinking, or some kind of

00:18:35.280 | conspiracy theory. But But what do you take from the ground war not happening? And then if you want

00:18:39.680 | to go back and touch on the fog of war issue here with things flipping back and forth, and what is

00:18:46.160 | actual reality, and just broadly speaking, escalating or de escalating?

00:18:50.400 | Look, I think that there's a few possible reasons why Israel hasn't gone in yet. Number one is they

00:18:56.000 | may perceive it to be a very difficult military operation. They're almost certainly walking into

00:19:00.240 | a trap, there's going to be ambushes everywhere, snipers, IEDs. Hamas has an elaborate tunnel

00:19:06.960 | network, they can disappear down that tunnel network when the fighting gets too hot, they can

00:19:10.880 | booby trap the access points. They've got anti-tank weapons, they can take out armored vehicles.

00:19:17.760 | It's going to be a very difficult fight for the Israelis. And so they may be taking a pause here

00:19:23.680 | just to assess that situation, and maybe get organized for it, or maybe think better of it.

00:19:29.360 | So they may be either stopping to organize or getting cold feet. I think second, they have to

00:19:35.440 | think through the consequences of going in there. Hezbollah has basically threatened to open up a

00:19:41.280 | northern front and invade Israel if Israel goes into Gaza. You also saw, as we saw with the reaction

00:19:49.200 | to the hospital bombing, that they have to be concerned about the Arab street erupting.

00:19:54.480 | And again, if they go into Gaza, this could ignite the whole Arab world. It seems to me

00:20:00.160 | that if you're Israel, you don't want to become the focal point for all of this anger in the Arab

00:20:06.720 | or larger Muslim world. There are important differences in that world. There's differences

00:20:11.840 | between Sunnis and Shiite. There's differences between Arabs and Persians and Turks. And the

00:20:19.120 | last thing you want is to paper over all those differences by having everybody's

00:20:23.600 | anger targeted at you. So I think there's very big consequences that could follow. Geopolitically,

00:20:30.400 | I think, again, the war would almost certainly not just be a single front war against Gaza,

00:20:35.200 | it could turn into a multi-front war. So that's, I think, the second reason. I think the third

00:20:39.120 | reason is you have to believe that there's furious diplomacy going on behind the scenes.

00:20:43.280 | And I think this is what Chamath is referring to. What we don't know, obviously, are the content of

00:20:49.440 | those conversations. We don't know what the Biden administration has told the Netanyahu government.

00:20:55.280 | We don't know if they've said to them, "Listen, we are not going to get involved in this."

00:21:01.280 | Publicly, they've said that we stand with Israel, but you just have to wonder

00:21:04.720 | what they're privately telling the Israelis. All of that being said, I think that Israel has

00:21:10.960 | declared that it's at war with Hamas. There are these stories that are coming out daily of these

00:21:17.040 | atrocities that were perpetrated by Hamas. I saw once by paramedics who discovered the bodies

00:21:21.920 | and described the way they were tortured. The population of Israel demands retribution.

00:21:28.080 | And so Netanyahu is under intense domestic political pressure to deliver on that.

00:21:33.600 | So I think that Chamath is right that things haven't escalated yet, but I wouldn't say they've

00:21:39.440 | de-escalated. Blinken did demand and Biden did announce those relieving of some of the humanitarian

00:21:45.920 | issues in Gaza. But to my knowledge, they have not been implemented yet.

00:21:49.360 | They turned the water back on, I believe.

00:21:51.040 | Okay, so I think this thing is still a powder keg and it could erupt.

00:21:55.040 | And again, it all comes back to this key question of does Israel go into Gaza or not? If they don't,

00:22:01.840 | then I think that creates room for some sort of international diplomatic effort to get the

00:22:08.000 | hostages back and maybe de-escalate the situation. And I guess we'll find out over the next week or

00:22:13.600 | so. And that you didn't even mention that there could be some deep diplomacy here going on in

00:22:18.480 | terms of releasing the hostages and maybe somehow they believe if they go in too early,

00:22:24.880 | the chances of getting those hostages out alive could be seriously diminished. Yeah.

00:22:28.880 | You know, it's strange to me that I just don't hear that much about the hostages. It seems like

00:22:33.520 | the Israeli population, just in terms of what they're publicly saying,

00:22:37.600 | seems to have almost written off the hostages. There was some video of the

00:22:41.600 | families of hostages being upset that they don't feel like the government response is adequately

00:22:46.240 | taking the interests of their families into account, that they just seem hell bent on

00:22:52.720 | this invasion of Gaza. But, you know, we don't know what's happening behind the scenes. And

00:22:57.600 | again, that would be the way to de-escalate this is you get an international effort

00:23:02.480 | to release the hostages in exchange for maybe it can't be stated, but a quid pro quo where

00:23:09.360 | Israel does not go into Gaza on the ground, and maybe the bombing stops.

00:23:13.280 | Yeah. Okay. So, maybe we can pivot discussion here to...

00:23:18.320 | I will say, just let me make one other point here. Delving into the internal politics of another

00:23:22.640 | country is not something that we typically like to do or that Americans are particularly good at.

00:23:27.840 | But when a situation like this happens, that could drag us into a war. We do have to kind

00:23:34.000 | of understand the internal dynamics of these countries. Israel is a country that for the

00:23:38.640 | last several years has been very internally divided. There's been something like five

00:23:43.120 | elections in the last four years. Netanyahu got reelected in December of 2022 by creating a new

00:23:53.200 | coalition with far-right elements of the Israeli political system. And Chamath, you mentioned the

00:24:00.400 | Al-Aqsa Mosque, and I know Jared's take on this was that he thought that this was blown out of

00:24:07.200 | proportion. But I'll give you a different perspective on this. I've just been researching

00:24:10.960 | this. If you read Al Jazeera, what they point to is the emergence of a far-right figure named

00:24:19.600 | Itamar Ben-Gavir, who has become a member of Netanyahu's government as a result of this

00:24:26.240 | coalition that was forged in December. And Ben-Gavir has been... Previously, he was a fringe,

00:24:34.320 | sort of anti-Palestinian, far-right provocateur. When he was 19 years old, he basically had

00:24:40.880 | somehow stolen or taken the hood ornament from Yitzhak Rabin, the then prime minister's car,

00:24:46.000 | and was waving it around saying that, "If we can get to your car, we can get to you."

00:24:50.480 | Three weeks later, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a far-right religious extremist in Israel

00:24:58.400 | because they felt that he had committed treason by signing the Oslo Accords. Now, Ben-Gavir wasn't

00:25:03.120 | implicated himself, but it gives you a sense of kind of where he's coming from. And Ben-Gavir

00:25:08.800 | has led, over the past year, several incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque area. And the reason he

00:25:16.720 | said he's done this is to show that the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the Haram al-Sharif,

00:25:24.000 | which is the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina, he says that that is under the

00:25:29.520 | sovereignty of Israel, that that belongs to Israel. There is also a faction of the Israeli far-right

00:25:35.280 | that wants to build the third temple on the Temple Mount. You have to understand that that cannot

00:25:40.000 | happen while the Al-Aqsa Mosque is still there. So, you have these, I don't mind saying, crazies.

00:25:47.440 | I mean, to destroy or even to imply that you would ever destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque is such an

00:25:55.520 | explosive issue. It would turn the entire Muslim world against Israel, and basically, I think it

00:25:59.600 | would be the end of Israel. But you have these figures who've now been incorporated into Netanyahu's

00:26:05.840 | cabinet. And they are, I think, far to the right of Netanyahu, but they are preferring Netanyahu.

00:26:12.160 | They seem to be baying for some sort of religious war. So, you know, the domestic policies of another

00:26:17.600 | country is not something that we're totally familiar with, but you have to understand that

00:26:20.480 | Israel does have these elements. And man, I hope that the Biden administration is telling Netanyahu

00:26:29.680 | that, yeah, we stand with Israel, but not if you're going to follow the advice of these far

00:26:35.760 | right religious extremists. Jared: This is, I think, a very important point to pause on here

00:26:41.200 | and maybe unpack, which is, as I said, I'm here in Dubai and had this trip planned. And I'm actually

00:26:49.600 | – Rod: Tell us what you're hearing. What are you hearing? What do people say?

00:26:53.200 | Jared: Yes, fascinating. And this is going to get a little touchy. And so, I just want to be clear,

00:27:00.160 | I'm going to tell people what the conversations are here. It's not necessarily me endorsing any of

00:27:06.000 | these positions. And again, I'm no expert, of course. And on Saturday night, I went to a bat

00:27:10.880 | mitzvah, my friends, daughters had their bat mitzvah. And on Tuesday night, I had dinner –

00:27:16.480 | Rod: Sorry, where? In Israel?

00:27:17.760 | Jared: No, in the Bay Area. And then I flew here, and this juxtaposition where I had dinner last

00:27:23.920 | night with five Jordanians who are of Palestinian descent. And they universally are appalled by

00:27:33.760 | Hamas and what happened, right? So, just say that right out front. And then they are perplexed

00:27:42.160 | why there is no discussion in the West in America of the conditions that could have led to this and

00:27:49.440 | the treatment of the Palestinian people who they believe are living in apartheid. And that word is

00:27:55.120 | used over and over again. And that they have, you know, now a generation of people who have no hope,

00:28:01.040 | and a generation of people who have nothing to lose, and that they have nothing to live for.

00:28:06.000 | And this is the piece of the discussion that has gotten a lot of people in the West, I think,

00:28:11.200 | in trouble talking about it. We had a conference producer who was tweeting, hey, listen, you know,

00:28:17.600 | very early on, like on 10/7, Israel has to abide by, you know, international law, etc. And this

00:28:26.240 | came up over and over again, from Muslims here in Dubai, that the West is not, in the free world,

00:28:34.560 | is not holding Israel accountable to human rights standards, basic standard tenets of war.

00:28:40.480 | And I was coming into the trip a little bit more positive. And now, there's such a deep hurt

00:28:46.000 | on both sides of this that I got to see, you know, from both of these events and people suffering,

00:28:52.640 | that my normally positive outlook has been a little bit shaken, if I'm being honest,

00:28:59.440 | this feels very intractable to me. And, yeah, to even go near the topic of

00:29:08.000 | what has Israel contributed to this situation, and the treatment of the Palestinian people.

00:29:13.440 | That's what the people in the region want to hear us talk about or just hear the world talk about

00:29:19.840 | any reaction to some of the protests that happened in Europe and the people that took to the streets,

00:29:25.360 | what was their perspective on that? I think their perspective is a very small percentage

00:29:29.760 | of Americans care about the Palestinian people. And, you know, if you look at the surveys that

00:29:35.760 | have gone on, and I have some of the survey data that's been done, and I'm not sure Americans

00:29:41.760 | views on this are the most important views for us to be focused on, but a very small percentage

00:29:48.400 | of people are aligned with the Palestinian people, as opposed to the state of Israel.

00:29:54.480 | So well, I mean, the biggest challenge and finding a path

00:29:57.440 | towards, I don't want to just be so generic and say the word peace.

00:30:04.320 | No, I think that's the word. Yeah.

00:30:05.520 | But towards some form of understanding and settlement with each other is that

00:30:09.520 | there's a framing right now that you have to pick a side. You're not allowed to be pro Israel,

00:30:16.320 | and also be sympathetic and empathetic to the plight of the children in Gaza. You're not allowed

00:30:23.200 | to say, I'm looking out for the Palestinians, but I believe Israel should have a state. You're not

00:30:30.080 | allowed to point out the fact that there are multiple Muslim majority countries, and there's

00:30:36.720 | only one Jewish state, while also saying that what the Israelis have done may also not be right.

00:30:44.800 | You're not allowed to take a nuanced point of view, and you're not allowed to address

00:30:49.920 | the variance in behavior over time with each of these different sides, and how there is a massive,

00:30:57.440 | complicated mess here, that it has to be pick your side, you're pro Israeli, we need to wipe out

00:31:03.680 | x, y, or z, or you're anti Israeli, and as a result, you're anti Semite.

00:31:08.800 | And the fact that we conflate all of these things together and force people to jump on a side is

00:31:14.800 | what is also escalating that we can't actually have conversations around these topics that it

00:31:18.960 | all ends up being pick a side. And then let's figure out how many people and what resources

00:31:24.480 | are on one side and what people and what resources are on the other. And I think that this notion

00:31:29.280 | that we have almost a cancel culture behavior, that's now leached into this discourse,

00:31:35.360 | that if you try and talk about the plight of Palestinians, you cannot also be pro Israel

00:31:42.240 | is what's keeping us from making progress in finding a path to resolution. And I think that's

00:31:48.400 | the biggest issue right now. And we leverage the you're not a loyalist. You're not moral.

00:31:54.800 | You're not a good person. You're evil. If you don't stand on our side, and both sides are act

00:32:04.480 | that way. And it's that's the hardest thing to change. It's I think the only way to find a path

00:32:11.440 | is to change that first. And I think starting with empathy is the only way but man, that's

00:32:16.960 | impossible right now. Fucking impossible. Yeah, it's hard. Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm just I'm just

00:32:21.680 | super like, wow, I'm super emotional about this, because I just don't like that, like,

00:32:24.960 | you know, so there are, broadly speaking, two factions that we're seeing out in the streets,

00:32:32.480 | either denouncing Israel or supporting the Palestinians. I think there is a group of

00:32:37.680 | people who genuinely hate Jews or hate Israel and do not believe in Israel's right to exist,

00:32:44.000 | and are preaching things like decolonization, which is a recipe for for genocide. Then there

00:32:50.000 | are people and probably a larger group who I think are concerned with the plight of the Palestinian

00:32:55.680 | people who recognize the conditions they have is deplorable, and that the tactics that Israel uses

00:33:02.400 | to enforce its security, whether it's the occupation of the West Bank or the blockade of

00:33:08.480 | Gaza, are unsustainable and create unfair conditions for the Palestinians. So in other words,

00:33:15.280 | they're not saying that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, they are principally concerned

00:33:19.760 | with helping the Palestinians and achieving a Palestinian state. It seems to me of paramount

00:33:25.120 | importance that Israel separate these two groups by understanding the concern and I would apply

00:33:33.920 | this to American leadership as well, by understanding the concerns of the latter,

00:33:38.800 | and hopefully getting us on a path to resolving them.

00:33:43.040 | Totally.

00:33:43.520 | So as to isolate the haters.

00:33:46.080 | Totally.

00:33:46.960 | Because otherwise, this whole thing is headed towards a gigantic disaster where,

00:33:51.440 | and I think it's a disaster for Israel, most of all, is that Israel could be destroyed.

00:33:56.560 | But I think the whole world is being asked to pick a side too. And that's where this escalates into

00:34:00.880 | a much bigger, broader conflict. It's that...

00:34:03.600 | Yeah, and in the position...

00:34:04.560 | Every country, and even within the US, we're being asked to pick a side and now we're seeing

00:34:07.840 | civil unrest in the US.

00:34:09.280 | The frustration as well amongst people who are Muslim or who are Palestinian descent or Jordanian,

00:34:17.280 | or just in the region generally, is that Hamas set this process back decades. And there's like a

00:34:23.280 | great frustration that maybe some progress was being made, and that we could come to some normalcy

00:34:28.240 | in a two state solution, and that Hamas did this exactly because so much progress has been made

00:34:36.720 | recently.

00:34:37.280 | I think that is the best theory about why this happened now is that there was a process of

00:34:41.520 | normalization happening between Israel and a number of these Arab states. And we talked about

00:34:46.720 | it last week, that Jared Kushner set this in motion. There were three or four deals that

00:34:50.960 | were signed between Israel and the Gulf Arab states, bringing about normal relations and

00:34:56.720 | Saudi Arabia was on the table as being the next one. There was a effort underway to negotiate

00:35:03.520 | a normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that is now completely on ice.

00:35:10.480 | And at risk of the other agreements maybe being ripped up, because if Israel goes in and has a

00:35:17.600 | massive ground invasion, and there's more suffering and death, that that will maybe

00:35:22.320 | blow all those accords up.

00:35:23.760 | I think that what Hamas may have been concerned about to the extent you want to impute strategic

00:35:28.480 | logic to their decisions, even those decisions are atrocities, but if they have a strategic

00:35:34.160 | purpose in mind, it's to derail that process of normalization. Because if the entire Arab

00:35:40.080 | world basically normalized relations with Israel before the Palestinian question is resolved,

00:35:44.640 | it takes a major carrot off the table in their negotiations or whatever they want to achieve.

00:35:52.000 | So I think that to thwart that process was a big part of the goal here. But I do think that

00:35:59.120 | what this has shown is that getting to a larger Middle East peace without resolving the

00:36:05.920 | Palestinian question is likely to be a failed strategy. I just don't know.

00:36:10.480 | It's impossible.

00:36:11.360 | It's impossible. And so

00:36:12.560 | It's impossible.

00:36:13.200 | Again, this does not justify anything Hamas did. But I think that what these events have now

00:36:19.520 | created is a dynamic where the Palestinian question is now front and center and everything

00:36:27.280 | else is basically paused until this gets resolved. Now, I just want to say something about the two

00:36:32.800 | state process. Again, I was doing some research. There really hasn't been any work on the two state

00:36:39.360 | solution for roughly a decade. Obama was the last president who tried. He explicitly said

00:36:45.840 | that Israel should try to make peace based on the 1967 lines, but with land swaps to accommodate for

00:36:51.600 | the changes that have happened on the map since then. Netanyahu was very irate at that formulation,

00:36:56.560 | by the way. He never had a good relationship with Obama because of that. And then John Kerry,

00:37:01.920 | who is Secretary of State under Obama, made a major effort to try and bring about a two state

00:37:06.800 | solution. And frankly, it went nowhere. And a big part of the reason why is that Netanyahu said

00:37:14.240 | that, "Listen, the only situation that's acceptable to Israel from a security standpoint

00:37:20.720 | is that we must control all security west of the Jordan River." So in other words,

00:37:24.880 | we must control security in the West Bank. And his argument was that, "Look,

00:37:29.600 | adjacent land is very important. If you create a Palestinian state there where they have total

00:37:34.320 | sovereignty over their own security, they could be digging tunnels under the wall." He basically

00:37:39.440 | said it could turn into 20 Gazas. And he's got his point of view. And when people challenged him

00:37:44.560 | on this, he said, "Listen, you don't live here. We live here. We understand the security situation."

00:37:49.360 | That's what he said to John Kerry. So the whole process fell apart. And since then, the idea has

00:37:55.200 | been for Israel to move forward, again, on this larger normalization project with the rest of the

00:38:00.400 | Middle East, putting the Palestinian question to one side. The idea has basically been, "Listen,

00:38:06.000 | if you won't make peace with us," and this goes back to Arafat at Camp David,

00:38:09.680 | turning down the deal that was on the table that Clinton brokered with Ehud Barak,

00:38:15.680 | "If you won't make a deal with us, we'll just go around you. You're too rejectionist. You're

00:38:19.760 | too difficult. You're too hard to make a deal with. So we're just gonna put that to one side."

00:38:24.320 | And that really has been the process for the last decade, I would say. Since John Kerry's

00:38:31.680 | initiative fell apart, the process has been starting with Kushner under Trump, and then,

00:38:37.600 | I think, Biden tried to extend it by brokering the Saudi Arabia deal. The idea was, "Let's put

00:38:42.960 | the Palestinian question to one side. We'll work on these other deals." I think now that that

00:38:48.080 | process has fallen apart. So the two-state solution, that process died back in 2014.

00:38:54.160 | This idea of going around has basically fallen apart now. And so I think this is why people

00:38:59.120 | are pretty pessimistic about where things go from here is, what is the process? And meanwhile,

00:39:04.720 | you have this hard shift inside Israeli domestic politics to the right. You've got these religious

00:39:10.320 | factions who believe that the entirety of the West Bank, what they call Judea and Samaria,

00:39:16.160 | is their God-given right. And if you go back to the Netanyahu's government forming in December

00:39:22.240 | of 2022, their first plank was to say that Judea and Samaria belong to us, we have sovereignty

00:39:29.200 | over them, we're not giving them up. So what room is there for compromise? And since then,

00:39:33.360 | they've been expanding the settlements in the West Bank.

00:39:35.840 | Let me ask you a question, just to shift the question for a second. The thing that

00:39:40.080 | surprised me the most over this past week were the extent of the protests, some violent,

00:39:51.440 | in the United States and in Western Europe. And I'm curious to hear from you guys,

00:39:56.160 | was that overwhelmingly about pro-Palestine and making sure that there wasn't a human rights

00:40:02.560 | atrocity in Gaza? Or was that a emergence of like, a simmering anti-Semitism that we hadn't seen?

00:40:12.240 | Well, both. That's kind of my point is there's type one and type two. Type one is the true

00:40:16.960 | hatred, it's the denial of the Israeli right to exist. However, there's a type two, which is

00:40:23.040 | legitimate concern over the condition of the Palestinians and the desire to resolve that by

00:40:28.240 | creating a Palestinian state. And until you separate those two things, you're not gonna

00:40:31.920 | make progress. Your type two can breed a type one is the real scary reality.

00:40:38.000 | The simmering anti-Semitism.

00:40:39.680 | That you can have a legitimate concern about the people of Palestine, because you always are going

00:40:46.320 | to be concerned about the oppressed, being oppressed by the oppressor. And that then

00:40:52.480 | translates into an anti-Semitism, because you say that it's the Jewish people that are perpetrating

00:40:58.240 | this upon those people, therefore, the Jewish people need to go. And I've heard friends of

00:41:04.480 | mine in the last week, who have said awful things like all Muslims need to go. Well known,

00:41:10.880 | well respected public people have said this to me in private, I can see where the hatred can come

00:41:17.040 | from a place of hurt. I can see that when people feel sympathetic towards the Palestinian plight,

00:41:22.240 | they can then turn into anti-Semitism. And so I do think that there are two distinct groups today.

00:41:29.120 | But my concern is that just like what happened in the past, that that can then breed into

00:41:34.880 | a more generalized, more fiery, and more scary situation, where it really is anti something

00:41:43.360 | genocidal on both sides, by the way, I think what we're describing here is a classic vicious cycle,

00:41:49.120 | where you start with there's conditions of occupation that breeds resistance, that breeds

00:41:56.240 | extremism. Extremism breeds fear on the part of Israelis because they get attacked. And then that

00:42:03.760 | breeds harsher security conditions, the next level of occupation or blockade, and then the cycle

00:42:09.600 | continues. Yeah. And so the question is how you break that cycle, because the Israelis right now,

00:42:15.840 | and I'm sure Netanyahu would make this point, if we open things up, if we gave you a Palestinian

00:42:20.160 | state, what's to stop 30,000 Hamas fighters, if we opened up the walls around Gaza, what's to stop

00:42:28.000 | 30,000 Hamas fighters from massacring us in our homes? And if you do a ground invasion,

00:42:33.680 | are you inspiring more radicalization? Of course, of course, because for every,

00:42:39.600 | and so for every person you kill, they've got brothers, they've got sisters, they've got

00:42:44.160 | parents, they've got kids, they've got aunts and uncles, and they become the next generation

00:42:48.400 | of extremists. How does the cycle break, I think is the frustrating part here. And just

00:42:56.800 | looking at the reaction in the US, we saw a lot of discussion over

00:43:02.960 | young students writing arguments that Israel had brought this on themselves and were solely

00:43:10.320 | responsible for the Hamas attack. And this has led to massive outrage amongst donors to Ivy League

00:43:19.200 | schools like Penn and Harvard. And obviously, those have very large endowments. And this is now

00:43:27.360 | leading to many of them pulling out of commitments they've made. The Wexner Foundation,

00:43:35.440 | founded by Victoria Secrets billionaire said it's breaking off ties with Harvard.

00:43:40.640 | Idan Ufer quit the executive board of Harvard's Kennedy School. Citadel's Ken Griffin,

00:43:47.280 | who's donated more than a half a billion dollars to Harvard placed a call week last week to the

00:43:51.520 | head of Harvard and asked the university to come out in support of Israel. And then more than a

00:43:56.720 | dozen anonymous donors told the New York Times they felt they had a right and an obligation to

00:44:01.440 | weigh in here. And before this all happened at Penn donors had started pulling out because of a

00:44:07.360 | Palestinian rights festival that happened two weeks before the events of 10 seven.

00:44:13.920 | From September 22 to 24. The U Pen hosted the Palestine rights literature festival,

00:44:19.280 | the festival was billed as a gathering to explore the richness and diversity of Palestinian culture.

00:44:24.480 | But according to multiple sources, it mostly focused on Jews, Israel and Zionism.

00:44:28.160 | One speaker called for ethnic cleansing of Jews. Another said violence was a necessity. Any

00:44:34.160 | thoughts Chamath we were talking last week about these work madrasas. And then I guess this is the

00:44:38.720 | second order and third order effects coming into play. If you said it more generically,

00:44:43.600 | this would be a perfect opportunity for these leading universities to actually provide nuance

00:44:49.120 | and teach people the history of both sides and to show the perspective of both sides.

00:44:58.800 | That would take leadership. Yeah, I would take courageous leadership on the part of the people

00:45:02.960 | who run the university.

00:45:03.920 | Let's just be honest. I think these elite universities are essentially asset management

00:45:09.920 | businesses that have an education, the fake leaf of education wrapped around them. So they're more

00:45:16.800 | like BlackRock than they are like a school. And so they behave like any for profit asset manager

00:45:23.280 | would, which is that I think that as they didn't try to intervene in one way or the other over the

00:45:29.360 | last 15 or 20 years in actually making sure that they were graduating the best kids. So instead,

00:45:37.120 | what happened is they get hijacked by professors and people who wanted one very specific strain of

00:45:44.160 | thinking. And I don't think it matters which strain it is. But it betrays what the point of

00:45:49.440 | the leading university is supposed to be. And then as a result, the people that graduate from these

00:45:53.520 | places are close minded. And what that does is that that screws America. Because you have all

00:45:59.920 | of these other places graduating kids with a different mindset who then go and build the

00:46:04.400 | things that matter. And America just keeps falling back. And we're just slower and we're

00:46:11.440 | not intellectually capable of thinking in a way that allows us to see more than just what's right

00:46:16.400 | in front of us. So I don't know what you want me to say. It's just like, I'm just it's a follow up

00:46:22.160 | to what we talked about last week. And so I thought it was pertinent. sacks, looking at

00:46:28.960 | the free speech issue, there was some pushback online. Again, not my position. I'm just putting

00:46:34.800 | it out here for you to comment on sacks, which is blacklisting young college students who had

00:46:41.920 | an opinion about Palestine is wrong, and you're trying to cancel people, which response to holding

00:46:48.800 | people accountable or canceling the students for their positions on the Israeli Palestinian

00:46:54.560 | conflict?

00:46:55.920 | Well, what's happening now is that these campuses that took outrageous positions on this whole

00:47:03.280 | issue are now trying to wrap themselves in the cloak of academic freedom as if that's a value

00:47:07.840 | they've been respecting. Free speech is not a value they've been respecting free speech is a

00:47:11.840 | value they've been imposing. And this was revealed by a survey that was just done the fire survey

00:47:19.520 | that surveyed students on 248 campuses on a range of free speech issues. So it asked them about how

00:47:28.080 | comfortable do you feel expressing your views on controversial topics? What is the tolerance

00:47:34.560 | on campus for liberal speakers or conservative speakers? How acceptable is it to engage in

00:47:40.000 | disruptive conduct against the speaker on campus such as shouting them down to prevent them from

00:47:45.440 | speaking? What sort of administrative support do different views get on campus? And how open

00:47:50.800 | is the campus to hearing about different issues? And what they found was that the most elite

00:47:57.040 | schools ranked the worst, the only elite private school to score above average on free speech was

00:48:04.400 | University of Chicago, which got a score of about 65 out of 100, which made them ranked number 13.

00:48:11.200 | Overall, the rest of the top schools, the Ivies were abysmal. Brown ranked number 69, Duke ranked

00:48:19.440 | 124, Princeton ranked 187, Stanford ranked 207. This is again, out of a total number of 248.

00:48:29.040 | And Penn, which is where the donors are up in arm, ranked second to last, number 247. They scored

00:48:38.160 | 11 points on the survey. And then Harvard finished 248 out of 248 schools ranked,

00:48:44.080 | also known as dead last. And get this, the rating in the survey was 0.0. They scored a Blutarski.

00:48:52.880 | 0.0. Remember Blutarski in Animal House? He scored 0.0. Harvard scored 0.0.

00:49:01.920 | 0.0. Yes. So, so look, I think it would be, it would be one thing if these schools said to the

00:49:11.280 | alumni, we agree with you that some of these speakers were over the top, but this is what

00:49:16.640 | academic freedom is all about. But they have no standing to say anything like that because they

00:49:22.080 | have been suppressing views on campus, allowing speakers to be shouted down. They have been

00:49:28.400 | stifling the presentation of alternative views. So this is clearly these types of speakers,

00:49:34.240 | these types of views that I think absolutely crossed the line from, again, what we talked

00:49:38.240 | about, which is type two support for legitimate support for a Palestinian state into hatred of

00:49:44.880 | Israel and Jews and denying the right to exist. It absolutely crossed over. In many of these cases,

00:49:50.480 | there's an outrageous talk given by, I think, a Cornell professor who was outright praising

00:49:57.280 | this massacre. Oh, God, that was disturbing. So look, it is simply not the case. He was excited

00:50:02.080 | about it. Yes, he was excited about it. Thrilled by it. So look, I think that these alumni have a

00:50:08.960 | point in saying that you, these elite campuses, have been clearly putting your thumb on the scale

00:50:15.600 | in favor of certain views. You've been suppressing certain views. So this must be a view that you

00:50:22.320 | either share or endorse or permit, given that the rest of your speech regime is so

00:50:27.840 | restrictive and oppressive. So even though I would in a different circumstance support academic

00:50:33.440 | freedom, I don't think these colleges have a leg to stand on. All right, we're going to talk about

00:50:38.720 | some other topics today, because that's what we do on the all in podcast. And so tangentially related

00:50:44.560 | to the speech issues in the EU officials held a meeting to discuss enforcement of the DSA,

00:50:51.760 | or Digital Services Act. For some background here, the EU's Digital Services Act updated the

00:50:56.640 | EU's electronic commerce directive of 2000, which was inspired by section 230 here in the US common

00:51:04.080 | carrier laws, where the common carriers be those AOL, Yahoo, Google, Facebook are not responsible

00:51:10.880 | for what individuals post on their platforms. And so that protection has been critically important,

00:51:17.520 | not making social media sites or WordPress into editors or having them have to censor

00:51:23.440 | content on their platform. So the DSA officially went into effect in August of this year,

00:51:29.200 | the main goal was to quote unquote, foster safer online environments, the DSA aims to

00:51:35.440 | do that via tighter rules around disinformation, illegal content, and transparent advertising,

00:51:42.560 | those last two, not controversial, that first one, disinformation is obviously the one that's going

00:51:47.840 | to be pretty challenging. The DSA has been called a new constitution of the internet in an effort to

00:51:53.680 | shape the future of the online world. Some things the DSA covers enforces VLOPS, a new term very

00:52:03.280 | large online platforms disclose how their algorithms work. They must give users the right

00:52:08.000 | to opt out of recommendation systems and profiling, they must share key data with researchers and

00:52:12.800 | authorities, they must cooperate with crisis response requirements, and they must perform

00:52:17.440 | external and internal audits, they want to force transparency on how content moderation decisions

00:52:23.440 | are made. That seems logical. They want to force transparency on the ways advertising is targeted,

00:52:28.800 | that also seems reasonable. And then they want ways to flag illegal content, obviously obligations

00:52:36.480 | around protecting minors. I don't think anybody will debate those, but it forces them to cooperate

00:52:42.320 | with specialized trusted flaggers to identify and remove this illegal content. I don't know who those

00:52:47.840 | people would be. Freeberg, you had some thoughts.

00:52:50.560 | My thoughts are that the era of the open internet as a decentralized technology platform for the

00:52:58.960 | benefit of individuals and not to be overseen and run by governments is over. The Digital Services

00:53:07.200 | Act, I think, is one of the most overreaching threats to any sort of open, transparent,

00:53:16.480 | democratic opportunity on the internet. The idea of the open internet, the idea of creating a

00:53:24.320 | network of computers that could share information and make services available to individuals around

00:53:30.480 | the world, freely, uncensored, and an easy to access way was the reason that the internet has

00:53:39.680 | transformed society, improved productivity, and provided extraordinary benefits. The Digital

00:53:47.120 | Services Act is an example of a government seeing that a decentralized technology, the internet

00:53:54.560 | itself is meant to be a decentralized technology. There's no central servers, they are all part of a

00:54:00.000 | network of computers that anyone on the network can access anything else on the network. Blockchain,

00:54:05.280 | obviously, is the more modern kind of exciting, you know, decentralized technology concept that

00:54:11.360 | is meant to avoid the scrutiny, the oversight and the control by central governments or central

00:54:17.680 | authorities of any sort. And the language in the Digital Services Act, I think, got squeezed through

00:54:24.400 | in a way that most of the people that I'm guessing passed this Digital Services Act,

00:54:28.160 | don't fully comprehend the implications of some of the decisions that they're making.

00:54:32.560 | It can be easily framed as this is good for people. You cannot sell illegal content online,

00:54:38.640 | you cannot sell illegal goods and services. We're trying to safeguard young people. But

00:54:43.840 | the protection of minors means that you can no longer do personalized web experiences for anyone

00:54:50.240 | under 18, which means you need to know the age of everyone. And now your web experience, if you're a

00:54:54.960 | kid is not going to be personalized. The overreach gets even worse when they say we can now go in

00:55:00.960 | and run evaluations of the algorithms and allow open access to your data to third party researchers

00:55:09.840 | to get into your systems and look at how you guys are running the services that you're offering on

00:55:13.680 | the internet. So not only are you no longer allowed to have an open internet where people

00:55:17.440 | can provide whatever services they want to provide. But if you're on the internet, you now

00:55:21.840 | have to make your service and the inside part of your service available for scrutiny by governments.

00:55:27.200 | And so you have and researchers who are these researchers sounds like a Stasi type the way

00:55:31.680 | it's written, it gives this commission as the primary regulator effectively a lot of leeway

00:55:38.240 | in deciding who what, where and how they can go into companies go into individual servers,

00:55:44.480 | individual computers, I could run an individual company on my computer at home. And it gives this

00:55:50.000 | government the legal right in the EU to go into my computer and pull information out of my computer

00:55:56.000 | and scrutinize it and make decisions about what I'm doing, and whether or not I'm compliant

00:56:00.640 | with whatever the commission's enforcement standards are of that day. I mean, this is

00:56:04.640 | about as 1984 as you can get. And it's a real serious threat. I don't think people are recognizing

00:56:10.240 | the second and third order effects of what this is going to do over time, to internet services to the

00:56:14.960 | quality of experience we get on the internet. And to the role that government is now going to play

00:56:20.320 | in policing, scrutinizing, and providing restricted access to content and services for each individual

00:56:25.840 | that wants to use the internet. But it's important to say if you're a European, it'll just make

00:56:29.600 | Europe even more of a place you go to vacation and never to live. Yeah. Right. I mean, it's not

00:56:35.040 | this. We're not talking about America, right? We're talking about Europe. This is all the changes

00:56:38.800 | that are going to happen inside of Google, which is going to affect more than just the EU users,

00:56:43.200 | because of the requests and the demands of the EU. And so you know, the the services that you are

00:56:48.720 | going to get around the world are going to be affected by the CEO compliance regime. And it's

00:56:52.480 | going to be dynamic. It's a commission, basically a bunch of individuals that get to decide who what,

00:56:57.440 | where and how. That's gonna, that's going to create a really scary, scary situation, where a

00:57:04.880 | bunch of people who are going to have their own motivations, their own political leanings, their

00:57:10.800 | own objectives, they're going to be able to leverage their particular role in applying

00:57:19.600 | We saw Canada do something similar. And Facebook's reaction was, and Facebook's reaction was,

00:57:25.600 | we're not going to syndicate links. So I don't know, I would go back to another argument you

00:57:30.160 | make a lot, which is which I agree with, which is the free market will act rationally here. And if

00:57:35.360 | Google deprecates a bunch of features and or completely pulls out of Europe,

00:57:40.080 | that'll be the death knell for these kinds of decisions, because then other governments and

00:57:45.440 | other people will see the cost of trying to get this kind of control. I think the bigger issue

00:57:50.400 | in a moment like this is Europe has such a checkered past on these things, which is that they

00:57:57.360 | somehow try to find this moral high ground. And there is just this overreach. And this quasi

00:58:06.400 | central planning that just never works. And so if this is another example of it,

00:58:11.920 | I would encourage all for profit companies to make the practical decision.

00:58:15.360 | Can you imagine Google's decision making here, they've got 1000s of employees in Europe,

00:58:20.880 | they make billions of dollars in revenue in the market, it's such a difficult situation to be in,

00:58:24.960 | not if what you're saying is true, not if what you're saying is this is the threat of the

00:58:28.800 | internet. I think it'll be very easy for Larry and Sergey to say cut it move on.

00:58:33.040 | No, I Europe is too big a market for Google or any other major tech company to exit. There's just no

00:58:38.480 | way what they're going to do is comply. There won't be a market. Well, hold on a second. What

00:58:42.320 | this new DSA rule does is apply penalties to social networks for not censoring what they call

00:58:48.800 | legal speech, which is whatever speech they say it is. So freebirds, right, there's gonna be some

00:58:53.680 | sort of committee and Brussels that basically sends out takedown requests now to all these

00:58:57.920 | social networks. Yes, the DSA Commission. Yeah, it's pretty safe mission. So yeah,

00:59:01.680 | Europe, again, is just too big an area not to serve. And then what could happen is that because

00:59:07.920 | it's easier for companies just to have one approach where they can, there is a risk that

00:59:12.640 | these same policies get applied in the US. That is what happened with privacy. Remember, Europe went

00:59:17.840 | first with GDPR. And then regulations came to America. Now, the First Amendment may stand in

00:59:23.680 | the way here. But there is some risk that tech companies of their own accord decide that it's

00:59:30.080 | cheaper and easier to comply with the European regime everywhere than trying to parse their

00:59:34.960 | service in different markets. I'm just saying that's a risk. But look, let me frame it in a

00:59:38.400 | different way in an economic argument. Okay, so Europe is about 25 cents of every dollar of

00:59:45.200 | revenue that Google generates. Okay. So if you think about that, that's call it 60 odd billion

00:59:51.520 | dollars a year, plus or minus, okay. So the question is, at what point is the cost of trying

00:59:58.320 | to get 60 billion so great that you say it's not worth the 60 billion. And my point is that there,

01:00:06.000 | there is an economic, rational argument here for it, if it costs, for example,

01:00:12.320 | 10 or $20 billion to implement this stuff, that's probably the efficient frontier where when you

01:00:18.960 | factor in multiple compression, and you factor in behavior change in Europe, which may actually

01:00:23.920 | degrade the 60 billion to 50 or 40, where you just throw your hands up and say, it's just not

01:00:28.960 | economically worth it. You've seen these actors make this trade off in Canada, it's not totally

01:00:33.520 | unreasonable that they run a model to figure out the cost. Maybe they just take the perspective

01:00:38.480 | that whenever this DSA Commission sends us a takedown request, we're just going to do it

01:00:42.400 | instantly. Why wouldn't that just become the norm? In fact, I'm pretty sure that's what they'll do.

01:00:46.880 | The management and most of these companies really at all of them except for Elon,

01:00:51.520 | they don't really care. They have the same biases. Yeah, they're, they don't care about

01:00:56.640 | they're not founders, they don't care about that free speech. Moreover, they have a lot of the

01:01:01.040 | same political biases that these are not supporting. All I'm saying is I think that economic

01:01:05.920 | rational actors will do the right thing. I think the most likely outcome is that tech companies

01:01:11.360 | will be craven and they'll fold those do whatever these EU commissioners want,

01:01:14.880 | which then could be an opportunity for, you know, distributed blockchain. You know,

01:01:20.560 | sort of like that. Yeah, it's hard to scale them, but the devil's in the details.

01:01:26.560 | Yeah. Or and you guys feel this every day, like Jason, you know, you're right now in the UAE.

01:01:31.200 | You can communicate in certain ways through WhatsApp, you can't communicate in other ways

01:01:35.760 | through iMessage. There are just rules of usability on products. And they exist all

01:01:40.400 | around the world. If you go to India, there's certain apps that are blocked and certain apps

01:01:44.640 | that are not. And so maybe that's just what happens where there is just a gradient of user

01:01:48.960 | experiences around the world for people and we all deal with it. Yeah. And we don't know exactly

01:01:53.520 | how heavy handed they're going to be here. This is by definition, heavy handed. I don't agree with

01:01:58.720 | it. But hold on. We don't know what this is the problem with how they've done this. This is all

01:02:05.360 | being done in a star chamber. We don't have any insight into what kind of content they want to

01:02:09.680 | take down. If it's obviously abusive content, fine. But if it's, you know, COVID information,

01:02:16.000 | or misinformation, obviously, there's going to be a problem that we saw here in the United States.

01:02:21.440 | Just so people know, I can't respond to that. Yeah. And once I get away too much credit,

01:02:26.320 | Jay cow, I'm not giving them any credit. I do not want to see this happen. I'm not giving them any

01:02:30.960 | credit. I'm just saying we'll see how heavy handed they'll be. You're assuming they're going to be

01:02:35.120 | super heavy handed. We'll see. And we'll see what their what their own citizens respond.

01:02:39.440 | I think the fact that a roomful of commissioners in the you can send takedown requests to social

01:02:44.720 | media companies is by definition, have the handed. Let me back up what the Twitter file showed. Okay,

01:02:51.120 | is that we had 80 FBI agents being the conduit for takedown requests to Twitter and presumably

01:02:56.960 | other social networks. Well, no, no, but that was all on the deal on the deal. Exactly. Yes,

01:03:01.120 | that was not. And yes, moreover, when they did that in their takedown requests, they would always

01:03:06.800 | point to well, this tweet violates your terms of service. Okay, what the EU is doing is different.

01:03:13.920 | They're actually defining the terms of service. They're saying that your terms of service need

01:03:17.920 | to do x, y, and z. They're doing it explicitly. This is not on the deal. They're not doing it.

01:03:22.880 | They're not saying what policy needs to be what we say it is. And when we tell you to take

01:03:28.000 | something down, you're going to do it. They haven't defined what that is. That's I think

01:03:32.240 | the issue is, where is the actual definition of what's going to happen here. And that's why it's

01:03:36.320 | hard for us to have a discussion about this is because we don't know what they're talking about

01:03:39.760 | with this content. That's just a problem. Whatever they say in the future is disinformation needs to

01:03:45.120 | be taken down. That's the framework. The fine is going to be up to 6% of global revenue for

01:03:51.600 | companies that do not comply. So the EU has also figured out that speeding tickets don't work. And

01:03:58.240 | they're looking to give pretty heavy penalties. So we'll see. This is a moving target here. We

01:04:06.640 | don't have complete information. But yeah, it's not a moving target. We do have complete information.

01:04:12.080 | This is a censorship regime, Jason, we just don't know what their term for illegal or problematic

01:04:17.920 | content this year. I don't want I don't want to be pitted as your adversary here. I am not in

01:04:24.000 | favor of this. So we're clear. But and I don't think there should be a star chamber where people

01:04:28.880 | get to pick what goes up and what goes down there. I think the private companies can do a good enough

01:04:33.200 | job there. And there should be freedom of speech. And yeah, you're gonna see some things you don't

01:04:36.880 | like, grow up, turn change the time. If you don't like it, basically, as they say, sets a horizontal

01:04:42.800 | rule, covering all services and all types of illegal content. And disinformation, illegal

01:04:50.400 | content could be fine, right? freeberg, like, illegal content, putting up doxing, somebody,

01:04:55.200 | child pornography, illegal content, I think we would all be okay with it's the disinformation

01:04:59.360 | part, right? I'm not trying to be okay or not. Okay. I'm just saying that, like, you're basically

01:05:02.960 | saying that whatever the rules are that they come up with that may be different than somewhere else

01:05:06.880 | on the internet, they get to then regulate other businesses on the internet. I think the internet

01:05:12.160 | should be open. Well, and there are a lot I don't want to have a commission approve what I write in

01:05:16.800 | my blog post. I don't want the commission telling me that what I put on Twitter, or put on my

01:05:21.520 | website is up to them to decide whether or not it's okay to put up because they think it's illegal,

01:05:26.960 | because it has what they deem to be misinformation. Right? There are already laws that exist.

01:05:32.880 | So disinformation, illegal content, two different things, but those laws provide some authority to

01:05:37.920 | a commissioner. I mean, that's the problem, right? It's it's right. Look, the problem is in the

01:05:42.160 | vagueness of this, the law says that social media companies have to take down illegal content, but

01:05:47.520 | it doesn't say what illegal content is, it delegates the power to define it to this group of

01:05:52.800 | Eurocrats led by theory Bretton, and they're meeting this week to hammer it out. So yeah,

01:05:58.880 | look, in practice, it's gonna be whatever they say it is. That is explicit censorship.

01:06:04.160 | Okay, let's move on to our final topic. Second largest hype cycle of 2023, perhaps GLP ones.

01:06:12.400 | Chamath you brought this up in our group chat. So maybe you could tee it up.

01:06:17.200 | Well, I was just interested in understanding

01:06:19.600 | everything that's been happening around GLP is mostly because it just seems like people

01:06:27.920 | think it's a panacea. We have a lot of our friends, Jason, you were the one that said this.

01:06:33.040 | In our poker group, like four of the 12 or 13 regulars are on it. Is that right?

01:06:39.760 | I think it was four of like, yeah, four of 12 people were on it. Yeah, it was a third. Yeah.

01:06:44.960 | And then and then I got this really interesting chart, Nick, you may want to put this up. It

01:06:49.920 | basically showed how the GLP one market was tracking very similar to the AI market in terms

01:07:01.040 | of a hype, which is if you separated companies as a basket of people who were positively affected

01:07:08.640 | by GLP ones like Lily and Nova Nordisk. And you had a basket of companies that were disrupted by

01:07:15.440 | GLP ones, those would be like, Dexcom or Davida or folks like that. It eerily mimics the same hype

01:07:24.160 | cycle around AI, which is there's those businesses that seem to be feeding the hype train around AI

01:07:29.440 | and then all of these companies that theoretically will be disrupted. And it just brought up to me

01:07:34.400 | that there's this incredible market movement here where I think people think that these GLP ones are

01:07:42.080 | a solution to everything. And I thought it was just an important thing to discuss because

01:07:45.600 | scientifically, the mechanism of action is still a little questionable and murky. On top of that,

01:07:51.280 | I think we don't know physiologically what the real long term ramifications of taking these things

01:07:55.440 | are. There's still a lot of mixed evidence around the total amount of weight loss you can lose the

01:08:01.520 | percentage of muscle versus fat that you lose. And so yeah, I just thought it was important for us to

01:08:06.160 | talk about it and see what this would be a

01:08:09.600 | basket spread trade. Here are the companies that win here are the companies that loses and look at

01:08:13.840 | that gap between the two and it's exactly mimics people who would benefit from AI and people will

01:08:19.360 | lose from AI. Yeah, the GLP one hype. The summary is the GLP one hype cycle is as overextended as

01:08:28.320 | the AI hype cycle. So we should probably separate the wheat from the chaff and start by understanding

01:08:34.160 | what GLP ones are. Because I'm sure there's a lot of people in our listening community who are on

01:08:39.040 | this stuff, they should really probably understand that's where you think we should go next. We should

01:08:44.720 | then throw it to the sultan of science himself, David freeberg explained to us what we prepare

01:08:52.080 | our Uranus jokes, GLP ones. These drugs have been around for a while, they're small peptides,

01:09:00.080 | little proteins that bind to this GLP receptor in your gut, that causes insulin to be released from

01:09:07.920 | your pancreas and triggers a couple of other hormones that reduce your hunger and appetite.

01:09:15.120 | So basically gets you to eat less and your brain and your brain and it's effectively a way to make

01:09:21.120 | you feel not hungry. And you're not you're you can then run a calorie deficit. And when you run a

01:09:25.760 | calorie deficit, your body starts starving and starts burning other parts of your body besides

01:09:32.480 | the glucose that can get out of the stomach where you would otherwise have food and ends up in your

01:09:37.440 | blood. And it starts generating energy from your stored body fat and your stored and your muscle

01:09:43.280 | mass. So these have been around for a while. Novo Nordisk is the developer of two of the

01:09:49.680 | main drugs. And here's a chart of Novo Nordisk stock price, you can see that in the last

01:09:56.640 | five years, their stock has five x, they've basically gone from, you know, call it a

01:10:03.040 | $60 billion company to a $350 billion company in five years, largely on the back of the promise

01:10:10.080 | of this drug. So these drugs have been around for a while. And there's actually one that's

01:10:13.280 | been on the market for a long time, but it only causes 5% body mass loss. So 5% weight loss. So

01:10:18.400 | people are like, Oh, it's not that great, it didn't really get widely adopted. Then this new class,

01:10:22.080 | they add a little side chain, add another little molecule to the peptide. And as a result, it

01:10:26.960 | didn't get degraded as fast. And it was far more bioactive in the body and caused a much

01:10:31.440 | greater benefit. And so suddenly, people on these drugs started to see massive weight loss,

01:10:35.120 | massive improvement, diabetes, and metabolic health all moves together. So as you burn body

01:10:39.440 | fat, as you have less glucose in your blood, your your metabolic condition improves. The problem is

01:10:44.880 | when you're starving normally, if you were to just stop eating, you would typically see that your

01:10:50.160 | body starts burning first of all the glucose and then it burns off the glycogen in your muscles,

01:10:54.640 | which is the next energy store. Once that's gone, your body starts burning fat. And as it's burning

01:11:00.000 | more fat, it also says, Hey, I need to get these other molecules, which I'm not getting just from

01:11:04.640 | the fat, I need muscle, and your body actually starts burning muscle. And that's how your brain

01:11:09.360 | gets energy that it needs when you're starving is actually primarily from the degradation of

01:11:13.840 | muscle tissue. So normally, if you're just starving yourself, you'll see a ratio of weight loss,

01:11:21.200 | where it's about 20% coming from lean muscle mass. In some of the studies that have been done on

01:11:26.800 | these GLP one agonists, we're seeing up to 40% of the weight loss coming from lean muscle mass

01:11:33.120 | being burnt off. So Jason, I don't know if you've done a DEXA scan, because I think you've you've

01:11:38.480 | said publicly that you've tried it, right? I mean, yeah, you should check you should check

01:11:41.600 | out what your lean muscle mass is versus your fat composition and your body. I don't know if you

01:11:46.880 | have it from before. But I have him. And this has been one of the concerns, obviously, if you're not

01:11:52.320 | working out, and you're not, you know, doing what you need to to eat protein and build muscle,

01:11:56.480 | you're going to be burning through a lot of that muscle mass. And so that's problem number one,

01:12:00.960 | that's arisen that people are concerned about. The other one that's that's really, I don't know

01:12:05.280 | if it's concerning or not. But when people go off these drugs, they gain the weight back in a very

01:12:11.760 | quick way. And there's two reasons for this one is, if you haven't actually changed your behavior,

01:12:15.600 | you haven't changed your exercise patterns. And you suddenly have the appetite suppressing drug

01:12:20.880 | taken out of your system, you start eating more food again. And when you've been in a state of

01:12:25.840 | starvation, your meta, your metabolism, your baseline metabolism goes down. So instead of

01:12:31.920 | burning on average 2000 calories a day, your body's only burning at 1200 calories a day.

01:12:36.160 | So suddenly, if you go back to eating 2000 calories a day, because you're not you're,

01:12:40.000 | you know, you no longer have the appetite suppressor, you're gonna have a cow,

01:12:43.280 | you're gonna reinflate. And so so your metabolism goes down, the appetite suppressant goes away,

01:12:48.480 | and you gain all the weight back if you haven't changed your behavior otherwise. And so I don't

01:12:53.120 | know if you guys saw this clip I sent out of Arnold Schwarzenegger talking with Howard Stern.

01:12:56.960 | But he was talking about how like, I can't do a Howard accent, J. Cal, you could probably do it

01:13:00.960 | really well. But you know, one thing you what do you think of the Ozempic? But you know,

01:13:06.320 | how the Ozempic is, you know, Americans used to be very interested in working hard. And I don't

01:13:12.160 | know why that's so bad. But you get up at 5am and you work hard, and you do it and you make yourself

01:13:17.040 | strong. Right? That's what it's about. You don't need to do a little baby girl Ozempic in your

01:13:21.600 | sight. Oh, look, I'm gonna eat less food. Thank you. Wait, did you listen to the clip? Is that

01:13:27.840 | is that what he said? That's exactly what he said. That's exactly what he said. You don't exactly

01:13:33.360 | really man. I don't make it this way. What do you mean? Hard work. And that's why I say in my book,

01:13:42.560 | you know, work, work your ass off. And because it's there's no shortcut. What built this country?

01:13:49.760 | Too much. Is it people that were whipping out? This is how I want to be comfortable. No,

01:13:57.760 | this will balls, you women and men that went out there at five in the morning and got up and they

01:14:03.120 | struggled and they fought and they worked their butts off. That's what made this country great.

01:14:09.120 | He said that in response to I think Howard Stern's questions about Ozempic. Yeah, like,

01:14:15.200 | but don't take a shot. Like, like, we're basically creating a new multi billion dollar

01:14:20.480 | pharmaceutical drug system that people are going to have to stay on in order to stay healthy.

01:14:25.760 | Do we know what the long term effects of taking some of gluotide are and can be and will be?

01:14:30.720 | Do we know these drugs have been around for quite a long time? So you know, the

01:14:35.280 | there are various side effects, but in terms of like, are we debilitating our health over the long

01:14:41.200 | run? You know, it seems to be a reasonably safe drug. And it seems to be a drug that that folks

01:14:47.360 | are kind of recognizing as being well worth the cost and whatever the risks may be.

01:14:52.720 | Well, what are the implications that if you lose 40%? Well, it's about 16% of your weight loss,

01:14:59.200 | you typically lose, right? I mean, yeah, they'll say up to 20%. If you lose weight, you'll usually

01:15:04.320 | see up to 20% of lean muscle mass of the of the weight you lost coming from lean muscle mass loss.

01:15:10.960 | And, you know, 80% or 85%, as you say, come off coming from from body fat loss. But with the

01:15:16.240 | ozempic drugs, they're seeing as high as 40% coming from lean muscle mass, which is obviously

01:15:20.400 | concerning. I just made an adjustment. I everybody knows I lost like 40 pounds or so or talk to me for

01:15:25.280 | more than five minutes, you know, I have because I'll tell you and the first 20 was just fasting

01:15:30.960 | and doing keto. And then when this drug came out, I tried it, I tried to send pick and then I did

01:15:34.640 | what Govi and I'm going to give you but I didn't gain it back. I gained back about four or five

01:15:40.080 | pounds. And I also increased protein in the morning. And I do a lot of walking. Okay, so

01:15:44.960 | so let me give you this math and tell me if it maps to what you have felt or not. So if 250 pounds,

01:15:50.000 | let's just say you lose 16% of your body weight, that's 40 pounds. Okay, so you get to 190. I was

01:15:57.040 | right to 210. And of that, you lose 16 pounds of muscle. Is that what you saw? Or did you see

01:16:04.080 | something less than that? No much less muscle because I use weights and I do a lot of walking

01:16:09.280 | and I eat a ton of protein, right? So you're doing the exercise, you're doing the exercise,

01:16:13.120 | I'm not doing hardcore exercise. It's a no, I do exercise, you have to do exercise. And the

01:16:17.920 | challenge J kal is that the vast majority of people that go on the drugs, by the way, I'm

01:16:21.680 | not saying the drugs shouldn't be adopted. I think that there's extraordinary benefit health benefit

01:16:26.000 | to the majority of people that are on these drugs. But the downside is that if you're not exercising,

01:16:31.680 | you are going to lose muscle mass. And then obviously, there is the fact that you're now

01:16:35.040 | hooked on this thing, if you're not going to figure out ways to change behavior,

01:16:38.480 | I cycled off of that two or three times and had very minor weight gain back three, four or five

01:16:44.480 | pounds, but I deliberately changed my relationship with food portion size. And I work out now. And

01:16:50.240 | what I found was as I lost weight, my interest and the joy I got out of working out dramatically

01:16:56.400 | increased. So running, walking, skiing, everything got easier, and I just got more into it. So I like

01:17:03.680 | working out again, now that I'm 40, hot pound 42 pounds off my peak weight. So I think it's an

01:17:11.040 | amazing wonder drive. I'm having a great experience on this, like a take on this,

01:17:14.640 | like you think that these things are overhyped right now. And we're just in the middle of a

01:17:17.200 | hype cycle, or what's your key takeaway? My key takeaway is that for many people,

01:17:20.720 | from a health perspective, I think that it could be a really great solution.

01:17:27.120 | I think that these triple agonists that are coming out are going to be probably even more

01:17:32.480 | effective than these double agonists that we have right now. Yeah. I don't understand the triple

01:17:39.040 | when Jaro's the triple agonist. Yeah. People who don't jarrow told me it is

01:17:44.560 | unbelievable how not hungry you are. Yeah, it's super fast to super fast. I just want to see,

01:17:51.840 | you know, like, for example, when you know, when you get older in your 60s and 70s,

01:17:57.440 | one of the biggest risks you take on and in your 80s is actually like, you know, musculoskeletal

01:18:02.480 | and falls and things like that. And one of the best preventative measures for that is muscle

01:18:06.080 | mass. And so you get into this weird catch 22 of your place one issue with another. So longitudinally,

01:18:11.760 | if you use it for a long time, I'm concerned about that. I do think that these GLP ones,

01:18:16.160 | if when we look back on it will probably be like statins. And in as much as when statins first came

01:18:22.640 | on the market, it was a wonder drug, right. And, you know, we were all teetering towards,

01:18:29.680 | you know, heart disease and heart attacks and all of this stuff. And then once people got on

01:18:33.520 | these statins, I think there was a very meaningful impact to the percentage of people that that

01:18:36.960 | suffered heart disease and cardiac issues, but heart disease still continues to grow.

01:18:41.360 | And you would say to yourself, well, how is this possible? Because statins are effectively free,

01:18:45.600 | they're generic, they're widely available. And today, right now, because of the lack of supply,

01:18:51.840 | the emergency FDA order around the semi glutoids allows you to make generics right now,

01:18:58.000 | right. So the cost of those are not really 1000 bucks a month, but can be as cheap as a few 100.

01:19:02.800 | So you're getting this widespread adoption and usage. I think the open question for me is,

01:19:08.320 | if human history is a guide, we're going to replace this issue with a different kind of issue.

01:19:14.400 | Because unfortunately, you know, maybe people take it and then they physiologically adapt,

01:19:20.880 | and then they just continue to eat the same or more, because they think, wow, this is a get out

01:19:24.560 | of jail free card for me. And maybe they overpower that satiety that that's sent that glp one is

01:19:30.640 | supposed to give you I don't know. I find it from a sort of public societal health perspective,

01:19:37.200 | really interesting. From an economic market perspective. I think that these things are

01:19:43.440 | priced to perfection. It's kind of like Nvidia, which is like, right? If people are assuming

01:19:49.200 | everything people are assuming everything is going to work. It's a tough point in the cycle

01:19:53.280 | to be a buyer, I think as an economic actor. But as you're making a trade, that seems like a hard

01:19:58.800 | trade to make. And just to give even some more color to it. Novo Nordisk announced that it was

01:20:05.520 | halting. So Zimba kidney disease trial early. Well, Nick show that because it was so conclusive.

01:20:10.560 | Yeah, I mean, if you look at that, it's marked a $3.6 billion sell off in shares of dialysis

01:20:17.440 | providers. I mean, remember, over 40% of Americans are clinically obese. It's a

01:20:22.000 | sorry, almost 60%. Now it's an extraordinary health epidemic in the United States. And you know,

01:20:26.560 | if this drug can have this sort of an effect, it can reduce costs across the healthcare system. So

01:20:31.120 | you know, there is still a I mean, Chumash point out that is the right number.

01:20:34.640 | This affects cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease,

01:20:43.280 | there's an average 16% weight loss reduction actually get people from obesity to

01:20:48.880 | on obesity, or are they still are they still obese?

01:20:51.600 | The obesity trial seem to remember you have to get FDA approval for a particular

01:20:56.640 | so this is this is what Jason was mentioning. So this is this is a basket that Morgan Stanley

01:21:01.600 | created, which was essentially starting at the beginning of the year when the hype was really

01:21:07.600 | starting to get out of control. Morgan Stanley created a basket of the GLP one winners and a

01:21:12.720 | basket of the G GLP one potentially disrupted healthcare stocks. So you could trade them off

01:21:17.520 | against each other. And this just shows how it's performed, which is just a blockbuster trade in

01:21:22.400 | the last 10 months. So if you if you went long the GLP one winners and short these potential

01:21:28.320 | potentially disrupted, it's I mean, I've never seen a spread trade pay off like this in such a

01:21:32.720 | short time at 80% a year, unless unbelievable nature of would you take the other side of this

01:21:39.120 | trade right now? Or like, how do you I would, I would I would take the reason. And the reason is

01:21:43.520 | because of two, two, two practical factors. One is that when when a when a market gets this

01:21:50.640 | exaggerated, what you're pricing in is essentially like a panacea solution that and those tend to not

01:21:56.640 | really be realistic. And again, I would point to statins as a good example of that. And so there's

01:22:01.280 | a part of it, which is just like, these trades are so overextended, that you can probably pretty be

01:22:07.280 | pretty safe on the other side. And then the second part is that I don't think we really understand

01:22:11.680 | yet. The other half of the coin, which is, you know, for every one of us that's generally positively

01:22:19.280 | inclined around GLP ones, who isn't getting enough attention right now, are the doctors who've

01:22:25.120 | spending a lot of time researching, researching this stuff, who may actually have a perspective

01:22:30.080 | on the other side, you know, probably the most prominent one like Bob Lustig. So you have to

01:22:36.000 | give that a little bit of time for it to play out, because nobody wants to hear the bear case on GLP

01:22:41.120 | ones as a drug that people take. So I would just say that it's it's probably again, when you see it,

01:22:48.080 | an economic trade like this, it's it's, it's probably okay to be on the other side of it.

01:22:53.280 | And then just from a public health perspective, you know, take a wait and see. But for a lot of

01:22:59.040 | people who are clinically obese, it doesn't seem like the math is such that if you're at a BMI of

01:23:04.800 | 30, reducing your weight 16% I think gets you to like a 26 it doesn't get you under I think it's

01:23:10.480 | meaningful. I think it's meaningful. No, no, I'm not saying it's not meaningful. I'm saying it

01:23:13.360 | does it. You're still obese. Yeah, I think the the key thing and I don't want to give medical advice,

01:23:19.680 | but I think you need to do this holistically. So you got to keep your diet and you got to keep

01:23:23.760 | working out in mind when you do it. And that should be fairly obvious. And those are always

01:23:27.360 | good things to do is to make sure you take it your whole life and not work out or how do you

01:23:31.920 | view? No, I'm five pounds from my lowest weight as an adult and my the weight I used to be when

01:23:36.000 | I ran marathons. And so my plan is to come off of it. Like by the end of this year, and then

01:23:41.600 | and I had taken like six months off twice doing this. So I did it like a little intentional

01:23:47.840 | his friends in spurts friends. Yeah, just to get where I wanted to be. And this last five,

01:23:53.280 | last five pounds. What is your Do you have a sense of if your behavior changes?

01:24:00.960 | When you're on and you're off? Like, do you? Yeah, I do feel more hungry. But then I remember how

01:24:09.840 | bad I felt when I was overweight. And I just weigh myself every day. And if I see myself

01:24:16.240 | get above a certain number, I consider that like a red alert. And I just, you know, either start

01:24:21.280 | fasting, working out or just eating super healthy. So it's just the discipline of weighing myself

01:24:26.080 | every day that I've gotten into. And just understanding, hey, you know, if I make two or

01:24:31.280 | three bad decisions, you're not going to make two or three bad decisions when you're on these drugs,

01:24:35.440 | in my experience, because you feel so bloated and so painful when you overeat, that you don't want

01:24:39.840 | to do it. It's really it's really like it hurts. You feel distended. And you know, there are

01:24:44.320 | reports and it did happen to me twice over two or three years of doing this, that if you take it and

01:24:49.440 | you eat too much, you you could get sick and actually vomit. So it some people just don't

01:24:54.640 | have the stomach for it. I think a lot of people just tap out it makes their stomachs feel too

01:24:58.320 | distended or gnarly. And that and that's why the dosage actually really matters. They have

01:25:03.840 | dosages that are like a very wide range, maybe 10 x. And so the dosage getting that right working

01:25:10.240 | with your doctor is key. But yeah, I'm just I'm excited to get off it because I want to really

01:25:14.880 | start sincerely weightlifting. So I'm getting a personal trainer to do like weightlifting twice a

01:25:19.040 | week and get really into that next. Because you can't do hardcore intense working out with us

01:25:25.040 | because you're, you know, just lower calorie. But I think it's a miracle drug. And I'm excited about

01:25:31.520 | the one question I have for you on the spread trade. Before we end, Chamath, does the nature

01:25:35.520 | of making those indexes and giving people the ability to put the trade on exacerbate the trade

01:25:41.040 | because then I saw everybody was tweeting about this, you know, over the last week, does the

01:25:45.120 | nature of an index being made impact the the the box, you know, Morgan Stanley is particularly good

01:25:53.120 | at these basket creations, and they tend to make it for their biggest hedge fund clients and their

01:25:57.760 | richest families. So it tends to be pretty isolated. They, they they give an edge to a

01:26:03.200 | few folks that so these things are not broadly published. And so I doubt it in the end,

01:26:09.760 | but so they come up with this idea, how many in how many names are in each index,

01:26:13.600 | it all just depends like and they're very smart about, you know, being able to create these on

01:26:18.080 | the fly based on what themes they're seeing. And then, like I said, they share them with their

01:26:22.880 | best hedge fund clients and their and their and their biggest families. They don't they don't

01:26:26.240 | trade, you know, they don't share them with us. I got it, Jason, when I told you like,

01:26:30.240 | at the end of all of that at the end of that graph, everybody put the trade on and got the win.

01:26:34.640 | But so they didn't actually share it with me in January. I wish they did.

01:26:41.200 | All right, listen, we got to wrap up great show boys. And we're praying for peace and

01:26:46.240 | the return of the hostages for the Sultan of science, the dictator and the rain man. Yeah,

01:26:51.840 | David Sachs, I am the world's greatest moderator. See you at episode 151. Enjoy the 150

01:26:57.200 | fan meetups this weekend. Anybody who's going to love your voice.

01:27:01.360 | Let your winners ride.

01:27:04.480 | Rain Man David Sachs.

01:27:07.360 | We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

01:27:14.160 | Besties are gone.

01:27:25.040 | That's my dog taking a notice your driveway.

01:27:28.480 | We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just

01:27:37.040 | like this like sexual tension that they just need to release.

01:27:42.640 | That'd be your beef.

01:27:47.040 | We need to get Merck is our

01:27:48.480 | I'm going all in.

01:27:56.480 | I'm going all in.

01:27:59.680 | [positive music]

E150: Israel/Gaza escalating or not? EU censorship regime, Penn donors revolt, GLP-1 hype cycle

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