In conversation with Sheryl Sandberg, plus open-source AI gene editing explained

00:00:00.000 | David Sachs had a last minute board meeting, so he will not be joining us.

00:00:04.000 | I'll be David Sachs.

00:00:04.960 | Please do your best impression.

00:00:06.960 | Can you imagine?

00:00:08.000 | Hi, Jason.

00:00:08.800 | Hello, sister. How are you?

00:00:11.120 | Jason, do you know what I'm about to do? I'm so excited. I'm so excited.

00:00:15.360 | Tell me.

00:00:15.760 | Do you remember Fake Chamath?

00:00:18.000 | Of course, yes. Do we have to log it?

00:00:19.760 | Do you know who that is? Of course, right?

00:00:21.280 | Oh, you're going to reveal who Fake Chamath is?

00:00:23.600 | I'm revealing.

00:00:24.480 | Oh, wow. It's a big reveal.

00:00:26.480 | Nine years later. I want that handle.

00:00:29.360 | I would like to get that handle and give it to someone to be.

00:00:32.400 | I can hand it to you, whoever you want.

00:00:34.480 | Well, trust me, there's a lot of people who would love to have the Fake Chamath handle.

00:00:37.600 | Well, how do I get it? Can I ask Linda at Twitter for it?

00:00:41.840 | Yeah.

00:00:42.340 | We might know somebody at Twitter who can reset the password.

00:00:44.720 | Maybe you can help me. I am so credible as the person who deserves that password.

00:00:49.200 | Of all the people who've suffered spending time with Chamath, you're at the top of that list.

00:00:54.880 | Anybody has the right to mock Chamath.

00:00:58.400 | I mean, you've had to watch his growth over 20 years. You've had to suffer.

00:01:04.960 | I raised him. I raised Chamath and he raised me right back.

00:01:08.560 | All right. Welcome back to the program, everybody.

00:01:28.000 | One of the guests we've always dreamed about having on the show is considered one of the

00:01:31.040 | great business operators of all time in Silicon Valley. For the past 20 years,

00:01:34.400 | Sheryl Sandberg was a key, some might say the key, piece in building the two largest

00:01:40.080 | advertising and technology companies in the world, Google and Facebook.

00:01:43.760 | Paradoxically, they don't go by those names anymore, Alphabet and Meta.

00:01:48.720 | When she joined Google in 2001, it had $20 million in revenue. They were private.

00:01:52.720 | And when she left in 2008, they had $22 billion in revenue.

00:01:56.960 | When she joined Facebook in 2008, it was at $270 million in revenue.

00:02:01.520 | When she left, it was at $117 billion. Market caps of those two companies

00:02:06.160 | have grown $100 billion and $950 billion during her tenures.

00:02:10.240 | And today, both are worth over $3 trillion combined and are the number four and number

00:02:15.280 | seven market cap companies in the world. However, to our crew, she will always be

00:02:20.320 | Bestie Dave Goldberg's dream girl, as he once described it to me.

00:02:24.960 | He told me he pursued her relentlessly until she finally gave in,

00:02:28.640 | dated and then married him and started a beautiful family together.

00:02:32.880 | Dave Goldberg passed away nine years ago this week in 2015. In an alternate universe,

00:02:39.600 | on a different timeline, Goldie would have been one of the four people on this panel,

00:02:42.640 | because he was the most wise, funny, supermench of the entire 10-person core poker group,

00:02:49.360 | the original poker group. In fact, he was twice the man of any of us,

00:02:53.840 | which, given the low benchmark we've set, isn't that difficult. We can get at least three shows

00:02:59.840 | worth of wisdom from our current guest. But that's not why she's joining us today.

00:03:03.920 | She made a documentary, and we're here to talk about that. And we'll have some time for business

00:03:08.000 | talk at the end, which is going to be a very hard pivot, given the nature of the doc.

00:03:12.320 | The doc she co-produced is called Screams Before Silence. I watched it on the flight back from New

00:03:17.600 | York. I had to take three breaks, and it took a lot of tissues, if I'm being honest. It is one of

00:03:23.520 | the most difficult hours of viewing I've ever had in my life. It is focused on the sexual violence

00:03:30.480 | committed by Hamas during and after the October 7th attacks, and which, tragically, in all

00:03:36.640 | likelihood, continues today with the hostages who are still somewhere in Gaza. The documentary also

00:03:42.800 | takes on claims in our polluted, journalistic, conspiracy-filled media landscape that claim

00:03:48.400 | none of this happens. She traveled to Israel to conduct interviews for it,

00:03:52.240 | and outside of comforting the victims, she spends less than 90 seconds speaking in it herself. The

00:03:56.560 | stories, of course, speak for themselves. Now, this isn't a disclaimer, but some context about

00:04:01.760 | this podcast, for those of you who are here for the first time, might be helpful. We realize we're

00:04:06.640 | wading into a conflict that is thousands of years old, and it's shrouded in pain and suffering,

00:04:11.280 | with a foundation on the most deeply held religious beliefs humanity has ever formed.

00:04:16.080 | When we do podcasts like this and have guests, we'll be championed by one side and derided by

00:04:20.960 | the other. But as you know, we don't shy away from the hard discussions on this podcast.

00:04:25.120 | We go all in on them. Equal time will always be given, and we welcome all sides on these

00:04:29.680 | difficult discussions. It goes without saying that we're not here to be your expert or final

00:04:34.480 | authority. We're here to have a first principle discussion and to personally learn alongside each

00:04:38.160 | other in good faith. In good faith, this is a really important concept, because it's hard to

00:04:44.400 | have these discussions in good faith today. So, with that, I'll welcome to the all-in podcast,

00:04:49.040 | our bestie, Sheryl Sandberg. Well, saying two things you just said,

00:04:53.440 | that Dave would have been on this podcast, I've thought that, actually. And calling me a bestie,

00:04:58.320 | because I've been friends with all of you for so long, means a lot to me.

00:05:01.680 | Yeah. Jason, you dedicated your book to Dave. That

00:05:05.120 | meant everything to me. David Freeberg and I have been traveling around together to conferences,

00:05:09.280 | sitting in the backseat of cars. And Shma, it's a really special moment to be here with you.

00:05:15.040 | We lost Dave nine years ago, yesterday. We were at our dear friend, Phil Joich's 50th birthday

00:05:21.840 | party. It happened suddenly. I was in shock. Everyone was in shock. Shma sprung into action,

00:05:28.240 | took care of every logistical thing you could have possibly needed. But then he did something,

00:05:33.200 | you did something, Shma, even more important, which is you showed up for my children,

00:05:36.560 | not just for the days and weeks, but for the months and years afterwards.

00:05:40.880 | And one of the many things you did is you taught them to play poker. Because what you said is,

00:05:45.200 | if Dave were alive, he would have taught them to play poker. And last night, on the ninth

00:05:48.720 | anniversary of his loss, my kids were in that room playing poker. And that is very much to

00:05:54.320 | your credit, Shma. And I will always, always be grateful for that and grateful, Jason, to David,

00:06:00.800 | and all of us for Dave. So the world lost something really big when we lost Dave.

00:06:08.800 | And I think a lot of people know a lot of the things we lost. I lost an amazing husband and

00:06:13.120 | father to my children. You all lost a best friend. The world lost a lot of wisdom. But

00:06:18.960 | there's actually one thing that the world also lost that we've never shared. And I'm prepared

00:06:24.640 | to reveal right now, right here, right now. Because last night, Rob Goldberg, Dave's brother,

00:06:30.240 | and I decided, we decided it was time to share. People may have known there was a fake Chamath

00:06:38.640 | Twitter handle. I built Facebook, rocked the angel world, and now I'm the warriors. My motto,

00:06:42.960 | don't be a D-bag. That's my job. And people have questioned who this was. I mean, some people think

00:06:48.560 | it was Jason Calcanez. Some people think it was Friedberg's choice. All right. I got to say,

00:06:53.120 | some people think it was Chamath himself. But you know what? The number one choice. Yeah.

00:06:57.520 | The number one choice. Yeah. Dave was fake Chamath. Now, he didn't write all the tweets

00:07:02.880 | himself. I know all of you helped him, but he wrote a bunch of them. And he used to

00:07:06.000 | literally lie in bed next to me, write something, and just big bellow. Remember Dave's big laugh?

00:07:12.800 | He would laugh out loud. And there are so many things the world lost. But can you guys imagine

00:07:17.680 | the field day Dave, a.k.a. fake Chamath, would be having with this podcast? Field day. Field day.

00:07:25.360 | All he'd have to do is just take excerpts from the show.

00:07:31.200 | I mean, it's one of the great things about the great challenge. I remember

00:07:35.360 | workshopping some tweets here with Dave, with Goldie. And the big laugh we would have and

00:07:43.200 | David Lee from the Warriors was involved in this. I mean, we just had like, a whole group who lived

00:07:48.000 | to write these tweets. And sometimes Chamath's tweets were so insane and deranged that we

00:07:56.480 | couldn't top them. Like this one from fake Chamath. This is a great one. Pinterest is a

00:08:06.240 | new hot company in the valley. I don't understand why a site for girls with cats is worth 300

00:08:11.600 | million. Now that's something that would be a benign tweet. Here's a great one from October

00:08:19.760 | 29 2011. A lot of demand for me to appear in commercials like others, but I am holding out

00:08:25.040 | for Cartier. Mercedes is beneath me. I mean, this predated Laura Piana. Freebird, you got this next

00:08:33.200 | one. Give us this next one. There is a Laura Piana one. Yeah, reason number 756 to go to Vegas. No

00:08:39.760 | sales tax on Laura Piana. This is in 2012. By the way, very precious. If you dress like me, I won't

00:08:45.600 | initially think you are a D-bag. There's no way Dave know what Laura Piana was. There's no way

00:08:51.120 | Dave wrote this. Someone else wrote this one for sure. Absolutely. Who was ahead of the time on

00:08:54.880 | Laura Piana at that time? Very good. I mean, it's just incredible. People think the Laura Piana

00:08:59.680 | thing is like recent history. It was 12 years ago. I mean, this is when... I mean, Cheryl,

00:09:04.480 | before we get started here. Wait, Cheryl should read that last one. That's really good. All right,

00:09:08.880 | Cheryl, you get the last one. My newest investment is so good. Jet time. You can random video chat

00:09:15.360 | with other people who are also on their private jet. G55 to Hawker. Yeah, Dave loved this group

00:09:22.000 | of friends and he loved being fake Chamath. Yeah, loved it. Anyway, the secret's out.

00:09:27.520 | My guess is that Twitter handle's about to get popular again. It's going to get pretty popular

00:09:33.760 | and I will just say, as much as Dave loved being fake Chamath, it's like half the amount Chamath

00:09:40.960 | loves being at Chamath. So let's just keep that in mind here, folks. Oh my God, I haven't cried

00:09:48.560 | and laughed so hard in five minutes as I did just now. I mean, actually, in some ways, Cheryl,

00:09:54.960 | you're our fifth bestie as well. You're always welcome to come on the pod. And I just also,

00:10:00.720 | for a little bit of housekeeping here, when guests come on this podcast, we don't pre-vet questions.

00:10:04.960 | No questions are off limits and nobody gets to strike or do anything nonsensical with the product.

00:10:11.360 | Everybody comes here. We're not journalists. We're not. We're not journalists. We're not

00:10:14.800 | traditional journalists. We're friends talking, trying to understand stuff. And just to be clear,

00:10:19.440 | I know a lot of commentary comes back. Well, why didn't you say this or ask this? And, you know,

00:10:23.520 | I think we're just when we have guests on, we just want to talk with them like we would

00:10:26.880 | in a living room and have a conversation. So right, which means no gotcha journalism.

00:10:31.920 | Although I'll ask a tough question once in a while that may get me in a little bit of trouble. But

00:10:37.040 | David Freeberg, you set this all up. And I know you and Cheryl have been talking about these

00:10:42.400 | important issues. And of course, we're going to have all sides on so you don't have to email me

00:10:47.920 | and say, what about this side? What about that side? All sides are welcome to come on the pod.

00:10:51.840 | But Freeberg, why don't you kick us off here? We're going to talk about this important film

00:10:55.520 | and a lot of the debates going on about this horrific attack on October 7th and then what's

00:11:01.920 | going on in Gaza today. But then we also make that hard pivot to business and get some of Cheryl's

00:11:08.240 | insights on what's happening in the world today of business. So Freeberg, why don't you kick us

00:11:11.760 | off? Well, I just want to zoom out because I think Cheryl, we had, I believe it a couple of

00:11:18.240 | conversations after October 7. Amongst other folks, I've heard that there's been a lot of

00:11:28.080 | disappointment that institutions, organizations, ideologies that have been supported by folks

00:11:35.440 | like yourself, or maybe you can speak, I don't want to put words in your mouth,

00:11:37.920 | suddenly emerged to be something quite different when threads of anti-Semitism started to emerge.

00:11:46.320 | And folks began to deny certain things based on their ideology about the oppressor oppressed

00:11:57.200 | concept being applied to Israel and Palestine. And, and maybe you can tell us a little bit about

00:12:04.800 | the surprise and journey that you've been through since October 7th with respect to some of the

00:12:10.000 | groups that you've supported that suddenly seemed quite different than what maybe we all thought

00:12:13.280 | they were prior. Look, it's a great question because I mean, I'm sorry. And that's the

00:12:20.240 | conversation Cheryl and I have been having that led to saying, hey, why don't you come on the

00:12:23.760 | show this week and let's talk about this and other topics, particularly given the timing

00:12:27.840 | with the release of the film. It's a great question. I mean, if you had told me on October 6th,

00:12:34.720 | the following is going to happen. Terrorists are going to parachute into Israel. They are

00:12:40.640 | going to kill 1200 people. They are going to sexually brutalize, brutalize and rape multiple

00:12:47.600 | women and men. I would have said, you're crazy. Then if you would have told me that people were

00:12:54.640 | going to deny the reports were going to start coming out, people were going to say, I'm a

00:12:58.320 | first responder. I saw naked bodies. I saw women bloodied, legs spread, but then people were going

00:13:04.720 | to deny that this happened. I would have said you were crazy. And then if you had told me that what

00:13:09.280 | we would be doing on college campuses is not protesting sexual violence as a tool of war

00:13:16.000 | by the hands of Hamas, Hamas, misogynistic, homophobic terrorists who are right now

00:13:23.200 | holding not just Israelis, but Americans hostage. Yet we would be protesting and college kids would

00:13:28.800 | be screaming, we are Hamas. I would have said you were crazy. And that's hit me hard. And for me,

00:13:35.440 | as a woman, as a very outspoken feminist, it's all hard. But the part that has hit me the hardest

00:13:40.560 | is the denial of the sexual violence. That has just been horrible. And so the reports were coming

00:13:47.840 | out in November, I wrote an op-ed. And what my op-ed said was, no matter what you believe should

00:13:52.560 | happen in the Middle East, I believe in a two state solution. No matter what flag you're flying,

00:13:56.960 | march you're going to, you can all be united on one thing, which is sexual violence should never

00:14:02.640 | be used as a tool of war. Then I did a video that went pretty viral, but people are denying it and

00:14:09.840 | they're attacking articles and attacking reports. And so I went to Israel and I sat down myself

00:14:16.480 | with a video crew. This was generously financed by this great philanthropist, Joey Lowe and his wife.

00:14:24.240 | And I sat down there and I asked people, what did you see with your own eyes?

00:14:30.240 | We sat down with a released hostage who told her story. And this is because people are actually

00:14:38.400 | denying or ignoring this. And that is a horrible place for us to be and truly shocking, truly

00:14:47.760 | shocking. Let's double click into that word denial. So it's a very heightened moment. Everybody is

00:14:55.360 | taking sides. Everybody's trying to interpret what they think is the right point of view,

00:15:00.240 | whether it's in that moment or historically in the arc of how

00:15:04.880 | Israel and Palestine have been in conflict. Where does that aspect of denial come from? Have you

00:15:11.440 | have you spent time trying to unpack like, how do you start to get to a place where you say clearly

00:15:17.360 | people were killed, but then when it goes into war crimes and sexual violence, we're actually

00:15:24.400 | going to stop it there because it basically pulls our cause back. So we can't agree that that

00:15:30.400 | actually happened. How how does that happen? Why is that happening? I mean, you're framing exactly

00:15:35.600 | right. That's exactly what happened. So I mean, you all talk about this a lot, but there's huge

00:15:40.160 | polarization. What does that mean? Polarization means I have a view that is so firmly entrenched

00:15:45.520 | that I see the word is black and white. Everything has to fit into my view and my narrative.

00:15:49.680 | And when it doesn't fit, I don't know what to do. So I reject it. And that's I think what's

00:15:53.840 | happening, that there is there are people out there who believe that October 7th was resistance.

00:15:58.960 | I want to be clear. I'm not that person. I do not believe that. I'm horrified by what's happening

00:16:03.920 | in Gaza. Every life lost is too much. I want two states living peacefully beside each other.

00:16:09.680 | I really want that. But let's say you think October 7th was resistance.

00:16:15.280 | Then all of a sudden you're like, wait a second. Mass rape.

00:16:22.640 | Genital mutilation of men and women, women and men. Women tied to trees, naked, bloodied,

00:16:30.160 | leg spread. That doesn't fit your narrative. So what can you do? You can now think maybe the world

00:16:34.720 | isn't so black and white. Maybe I have to rethink my narrative. Or you can say this didn't happen.

00:16:40.400 | And I think it is a travesty and a tragedy that anyone could say that. And I want to be clear,

00:16:46.880 | Jason, you started this by saying you always have positions. You always give people room for two

00:16:52.160 | sides. And that's fantastic. I think there are not just two sides, multiple sides to the Middle

00:16:57.120 | East story, multiple sides to the history, multiple sides to what's been going on. There

00:17:01.680 | are not two sides on this. This is sexual violence. There is one side, one side, and we are against it.

00:17:08.160 | And that's relatively new in the world. To take you back, quick history lesson, which you all

00:17:12.480 | know, but I'd love for all your viewers to know. For a long time, the history of mankind, women's

00:17:18.560 | bodies were part of war. You got the village, you got the gold, you got the women. And it was only

00:17:23.760 | 30 years ago after the mass rapes of the DRC, Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia, that people said,

00:17:29.680 | no, rape is not a tool of war. We will prosecute it as a war crime and a crime against humanity.

00:17:37.120 | And the feminist groups were the ones who made that happen. The civil rights groups,

00:17:40.640 | the human rights groups, they've held since then in this moment, if our politics drive us to give

00:17:46.560 | that up, think about what we give up. Because as we're doing this podcast right now, there are

00:17:52.000 | hostages in Gaza that we know are being sexually assaulted. There are women in Ukraine, Sudan,

00:17:58.640 | Ethiopia, around the world who are being sexually assaulted right now, right now.

00:18:03.760 | And we can't let that go. This is the one place we need to be united.

00:18:10.080 | Why are the feminist groups finding themselves aligning more with Hamas than they are with this

00:18:17.840 | core, what seems to be and should be a core ideology? So look, we can't paint them all with

00:18:23.520 | one brush. There are feminist groups that have spoken out on this, that have said, you know,

00:18:28.080 | now did it, the new NARAL did it. They said, we are against the sexual violence. CARE did it.

00:18:35.440 | There are groups that have done it, no matter what else they're working on.

00:18:38.880 | A bunch of them have said to me privately, I know you're right. Of course, sexual violence

00:18:43.360 | isn't okay. And of course this happened, but I can't speak out because all my employees are

00:18:47.360 | going to get upset. I can't speak out because the young people and that makes me really sad.

00:18:52.000 | But explain that. What does that mean? You know, people will be upset to know that,

00:18:56.080 | that both things happen. You've got to be able to hold two thoughts at the same time.

00:19:02.560 | Again, not my thought, but if you believe October 7th is resistant, you can still believe sexual

00:19:07.440 | violence happened. The fact that a group of feminists, none I'm particularly close to,

00:19:13.520 | have actually signed letters saying this didn't happen is crazy. Absolutely crazy. I mean, look,

00:19:20.880 | I'm going to read this. The UN special representative on sexual violence, Pramila

00:19:24.560 | Patten, traveled to Israel and here is what she wrote. She said, I witnessed in Israel were scenes

00:19:30.000 | of unspeakable violence perpetrated with shocking brutality, catalog of the most extreme and inhumane

00:19:35.920 | forms of killing, torture, and other horrors, including sexual violence. That's the UN.

00:19:41.200 | They're not exactly a pro-Israel group. Cheryl, let me ask, because I think it's important to

00:19:47.360 | note some people will counter and say, look at this article from Grayzone. Grayzone said Western

00:19:53.120 | media concocts evidence that the UN report on October 7th sex crimes failed to deliver for March

00:19:58.720 | 7th. They said Western media promoted a UN report as proof Hamas sexually assaulted Israelis,

00:20:04.240 | yet the report's authors admitted they couldn't locate a single victim, suggested Israeli officials

00:20:09.200 | staged a rape scene and denounced inaccurate forensic interpretations. I just want to give

00:20:13.040 | you an opportunity to respond to Grayzone's article, because I think a lot of folks have

00:20:17.760 | pointed to that article and the articles that that organization has put out as being representative

00:20:24.240 | of an alternative view that the sexual violence maybe didn't happen as evidenced in your film.

00:20:29.360 | Maybe you can address it, give you a chance to do that. Yeah, well, the key thing you said there is

00:20:33.920 | where are the, they're asking where are the victims? Well, let me tell you where the victims

00:20:37.440 | are. They're dead. They're dead. That is why we call this film, sorry, Screams Before Silence.

00:20:45.120 | I have a story in this film, this woman, Tali. I went with her to the trailer where she hid. She

00:20:51.920 | was at the Nova Film Festival. She's a nurse. She hid in a trailer. I walked in with her to that

00:20:57.040 | trailer the first time she'd been in there and you could see her body like shake and she, we didn't,

00:21:01.680 | this didn't make the final cut of the film, but she picked up a black sweater and I think she

00:21:05.440 | might have been wearing that sweater. I was afraid to ask her, but she was like shaking.

00:21:08.640 | She hid in that trailer for, I don't know, five, six, seven hours and she heard,

00:21:12.800 | sometimes she would hear like a little scream, like, ah, someone's pointing a gun at you and

00:21:17.040 | a shot. But sometimes she would heard scream over and over and over, stop, stop.

00:21:22.080 | And then for like a long period, like 15 minutes and then a shot.

00:21:28.640 | And then when she got out of that trailer, there were naked bodies where she heard those screams.

00:21:34.960 | The victims are dead. Most of them are dead. There is exactly one person who is an escaped,

00:21:42.800 | released hostage. Her name is Amit Sasana. She gave a video interview. You all saw it.

00:21:47.040 | We have the only video interview in this documentary. And she tells her story very

00:21:51.360 | clearly. She was held hostage for months. She was chained to a bed. And as she said it,

00:21:58.080 | her captor forced him to do a, commit a sexual act on her. This woman is so brave. And she told

00:22:05.120 | me she's speaking out because there are still hostages there, but she is the only living

00:22:09.920 | witness to speak out. We think there are a few more who are in deep trauma, but there were 1200

00:22:16.240 | people killed and at least dozens of them were sexually brutalized, assaulted. And that is why

00:22:23.760 | they're not speaking out just as a followup. What is the social and political motivation of a group

00:22:28.480 | like gray zone and other appointed deniers? What are they trying to accomplish by denying?

00:22:34.240 | They're trying to accomplish their narrative that October 7th was justified resistance

00:22:38.960 | because even they understand that it is not tainted because the sexual violence taints it in a way,

00:22:46.640 | right? As opposed to just being soldiers, killing soldiers, the sexual violence aspect of it, ain't

00:22:52.480 | the valor of the resistance. Is that a fair way to summarize it?

00:22:55.840 | Yes. Even they don't believe, and it's interesting, Hamas has been proudly talking

00:23:02.400 | about who they killed, but even they deny the sexual violence. That wouldn't happen. It's

00:23:05.840 | against our religion. The sexual violence doesn't fit the narrative, but I want to be clear. The

00:23:12.080 | sexual violence was multiple locations, systematic, meets the definition of a war crime, a crime

00:23:19.120 | against humanity and was part of the plan. If there was no sexual violence,

00:23:23.760 | would it be fair to call it a resistance? I would not call it a resistance.

00:23:27.600 | One of the things that happened after the Holocaust was there was still a small cohort

00:23:34.960 | of people that denied that it ever happened. And I think that there was to use the word

00:23:40.160 | systematic again, a systematic effort to document, right? There's pictures, there's museums,

00:23:48.480 | there's memorials. You can think what you want of World War II or Jews in general,

00:23:54.240 | but you can't deny that that happened. And the documentation of it is pretty unambiguous or

00:24:00.720 | completely unambiguous. When you spent time there, is there an effort to start doing this? And here's

00:24:06.800 | where I'm getting to, which is kind of a morbid question, but there was a moment in this documentary

00:24:10.800 | where this woman who was the doctor in the morgue, I guess, is talking about all of these bodies.

00:24:18.160 | And unfortunately, where my mind went to, but I think it's the kind of the right thought is I hope

00:24:24.480 | that there was rape kits done, even if it's posthumously, because that's the trail of

00:24:32.320 | evidence that allows one to know squarely inside of a box. This is the totality of what happened

00:24:39.600 | as a learning lesson for everybody, including not just the people that disagree, but the people that

00:24:44.800 | agree. And then to reinforce some of these basic rights that we thought we've all signed up for.

00:24:49.120 | I mean, it is such an important question. There were not rape kits done. 1200 people killed in

00:24:56.320 | one day. I don't anyone was people, their bodies were burned, people were trying to identify them.

00:25:00.880 | I've actually looked into this a bunch. And in a lot of sexual violence in war situations,

00:25:05.200 | there are no rape kits. So that's actually sometimes they're used, but often, in chaos,

00:25:09.440 | there is none. There are very few pictures, there are some and I saw them in this documentary. And

00:25:15.600 | they are sorry, they are naked women with nails in their groin, like, I'm sorry, I saw these pictures.

00:25:27.520 | But what's interesting about it is the people who are the first responders are taught not to take

00:25:32.720 | pictures, particularly, particularly of gruesome things. They don't have the victims, the victim's,

00:25:38.800 | you know, rights. But the man I interviewed, he said, 24 hours in, he thought to himself,

00:25:46.080 | no one's going to believe this, I got to take pictures. And against the training he had,

00:25:49.600 | he took the pictures and he showed me on his phone, he was like, I took this. And another

00:25:54.560 | guy from Zaka, they're a first responder group that goes in. This is an unheard of situation.

00:26:01.520 | I mean, I said to him, you've been processing, sorry, maybe that's not the right word, you've been,

00:26:06.000 | I guess, processing dead bodies all over the world. How many times in your experience are

00:26:11.280 | they naked? And he just looked at me and said, never, they're never naked. And what meets the

00:26:17.840 | legal criteria for proving crimes against humanity are witnesses, eyewitnesses. And what's important

00:26:24.480 | about the documentary that we did, but also important about the efforts Israel is doing,

00:26:29.840 | Israel is doing that documentation, not Israel, the country, a woman in Israel named Kochav Levi,

00:26:35.360 | who's fantastic. She is from a private university with private funding, doing that documentation,

00:26:42.240 | which at this point are mostly considered of interviews. But there are hundreds of them.

00:26:48.080 | And look, I hope people watch in the documentary, I go into a field with this guy, Rami, I'm sure

00:26:53.840 | you guys remember this. He because he's huge, right? He Yeah, huge. He stands like this tall

00:26:59.600 | over me, private citizen, this guy is the biggest hero I've ever met my life, sirens go off, he gets

00:27:05.200 | into his car, takes his gun, and drives to where incredible bravery, rescued hundreds of people

00:27:13.280 | himself, himself. But he got to a field and I stood in those trees. And he said, these trees,

00:27:21.520 | he thinks about 30 women were there and raped or sexually brutalized when he saw them. They were

00:27:26.880 | naked, tied to trees, legs, red, bloodied, like bloodied in the regions, you would be bloody if

00:27:32.640 | you were raped. And he what he said in the film is I got there, I covered their bodies, so no one

00:27:38.480 | else would see. He didn't take pictures, I wish he had. But well, I guess I don't know, do I wish

00:27:44.480 | he had? I don't know. But you understand why? But he said, I saw this with my own eyes. And what

00:27:50.080 | you saw in the film is this huge man who's so brave fought terrorists themselves crying because

00:27:56.240 | he didn't get there early enough to save those women. But the good news is, while the victims

00:28:00.800 | were killed, the good news is the first responders are alive and their testimony, which is eyewitness

00:28:07.120 | testimony meets the criteria of any international or global court. Absolutely crimes can be proven

00:28:15.120 | by by by eyewitnesses, for sure. Sure. What is the response? What is the response in Israel?

00:28:21.360 | How do you how do you judge what Netanyahu is doing, both in reaction to the events,

00:28:28.480 | but then in reaction to these specific aspects of the events? What are they doing?

00:28:33.920 | That's different? Or what would you wish they were doing differently? Or

00:28:38.480 | can you just give us a sense of how people are processing this aspect?

00:28:44.320 | I mean, look, we need peace. We need two sides and two leaders that are committed to

00:28:51.520 | peace, like long term peace. And there's a lot going wrong, you know, but on this aspect,

00:28:57.840 | you violate someone said it in the film, you violate a woman, you violate a country.

00:29:03.040 | There's a reason sexual violence is used as a war crime. There's a reason it was used in the

00:29:08.800 | DRC and Bosnia. And it's being used in Ukraine today because and I can see it in your reaction.

00:29:13.680 | I mean, it's to humiliate people, right? It's to humiliate a country, right? You humiliate look at

00:29:19.840 | look at the three of you like, y'all don't cry a lot. Like, this is traumatic, because you all have

00:29:26.320 | mothers and daughters, like you can feel what happens to a country. And that's why this was

00:29:33.120 | done. This was not an accident. This was on purpose. And unfortunately, it works.

00:29:40.720 | sexual violence. I think I think, like, for us to have a path towards peace,

00:29:47.040 | there has to be a degree. Despite the pain, being felt a degree of empathy for the other side's

00:29:55.840 | desires, the other side's pain, the other side's feeling that they were enacting a resistance

00:30:03.680 | against an oppression. How does one side embrace that aspect having gone through this? How do we

00:30:10.160 | get to a point that a people can say, I have empathy for the resistance after feeling this

00:30:18.160 | sort of pain. And this is the age old story of war. I for an eye never ends, it always goes on.

00:30:24.240 | What's the right path here to hear the other side to hear the kids on campuses to hear the

00:30:30.880 | people in Palestine to hear the world saying, we feel free Palestine. After going through this,

00:30:40.240 | I can tell you what I believe. I believe we need peace. I believe we need two states. I believe

00:30:45.920 | those states need to be run by peaceful leaders who want prosperity for the other side.

00:30:50.560 | Look, I believe we should be able to look at anyone anywhere in the world, but

00:30:55.200 | certainly the Palestinian people living in Gaza and say any death is too much. One death is too

00:31:02.080 | much. No innocent lives should be killed. No women, no children, no innocent lives should be killed.

00:31:07.200 | But I think also as part of that path to peace, there needs to be forgiveness,

00:31:11.920 | but there needs to be a clear, clear articulation of what is not acceptable ever. And the sexual

00:31:21.440 | violence is not acceptable ever. If you were netting, if you were netting Yahoo, what would

00:31:26.800 | you do differently? I'm sorry for cutting you off. No, no. I mean, I don't have an answer to peace in

00:31:32.160 | the Middle East. I don't. I mean, I wish I did, but I do have a very strong view that we are not

00:31:38.320 | going to get to peace when we are apologizing or denying crimes against humanity and crime,

00:31:43.520 | mass rape of women. Well, that is not the path to peace. The path to peace is not saying this

00:31:48.720 | didn't happen. The path to peace is saying this happened. No matter what side of the fence you're

00:31:53.760 | on, no matter what side of the world you're on, if you're the far right, the far left, anywhere

00:31:57.440 | in the world, we're not going to let this happen again, and we're going to get to peace to make

00:32:00.800 | sure. Denial is not going to get us there. Why has the other side captivated so much of the youth

00:32:06.880 | in the United States? You're very close to Harvard. Maybe tell us what's gone on at Harvard over the

00:32:11.360 | last few years. How did we end up in this place where so much of the youth is so sympathetic

00:32:17.040 | to the Palestinian cause and not as moved as you are by the trauma experienced on the other side?

00:32:24.080 | I mean, y'all are, I would throw that question right back to you. I know you've talked about,

00:32:28.960 | you know, narratives and oppressor and oppressed, and again, polarization is where

00:32:34.800 | you can only have one view, and you cannot tolerate anything that doesn't fit one view,

00:32:40.880 | and I don't know of anything that's that clear and that simple. I mean, I'll throw that right

00:32:45.440 | back to you. You all have been articulate on this, and I think have a lot to say.

00:32:48.720 | Well, I mean, you said it earlier, Cheryl, this tolerance for ambiguity, this ability,

00:32:54.640 | the cognitive dissonance to be able to hold in your head that the people of Gaza are suffering.

00:33:00.080 | Perhaps, I guess the other side would say, you know, they would start down this whataboutism.

00:33:04.800 | It's not my position, but what about what Netanyahu is doing? What about aid to people

00:33:10.000 | suffering Gaza? You've addressed that. You don't believe anybody should suffer,

00:33:13.520 | but I just want to talk a little bit about this conspiracy theory that it didn't happen.

00:33:18.560 | Also, in the documentary, The Savagery, you chose not to show the graphic

00:33:28.240 | photos that you saw and that you're clearly traumatized by, and a lot of us New Yorkers

00:33:36.320 | had a similar experience with 9/11 and watching that up close. It is what terrorists do.

00:33:41.200 | Terrorists do these things to cause massive trauma, to make it impossible to deescalate.

00:33:45.840 | That is the sadism, that is the pure evil of this brand of terrorism, is to make it impossible for

00:33:53.600 | the good people of the world to unwind or deescalate. I think part of the process

00:34:00.640 | is accepting what happened and coming to some truth. The truth can be there are people dying

00:34:07.440 | unnecessarily in Gaza. There are people starving in Gaza. There are children who are not getting

00:34:12.000 | food and water. All of those can be true. This horrific sexual sadism and violence that occurred

00:34:18.480 | is also true. That was awesome. I couldn't have said that better. That was exactly right, Jason.

00:34:27.440 | That is exactly the point and the path. Sorry, please continue.

00:34:32.000 | I'm trying to make sense of this. I come to it with humility. This podcast hits certain notes

00:34:39.760 | with people and, "Oh, how can people in Silicon Valley or whatever discuss these topics?" Listen,

00:34:44.320 | we're all discussing them. We're all trying to make sense of a very confusing world.

00:34:48.480 | But you made two choices in the documentary. One was to leave yourself out of it largely.

00:34:53.360 | Your role in the documentary is to hug people and to cry alongside them and to witness this stuff.

00:34:59.360 | You talked for, I think, 90 seconds in the whole documentary. I think this was an important

00:35:03.360 | decision you made. Then you made a decision which I'm not sure if I agree with, which is to not show

00:35:09.040 | the photos. I am of the belief that people should see what happened on 9/11 as a New Yorker who

00:35:15.360 | witnessed it and my brothers in the fire department. I had PTSD from it. I think people have to see

00:35:20.560 | these things. You chose not to out of respect for the family. You should put a note at the end.

00:35:25.920 | Explain this choice because I know you must have struggled with it. There are photos that you've

00:35:30.480 | seen of women with their breasts cut off. I don't want to say these things. I know it's very

00:35:35.840 | traumatic. But I believe people have to understand what's in these photos that you saw. Nails in

00:35:41.360 | women's private parts. Breasts that have been cut off. This is undeniable. If you want to deny the

00:35:47.040 | rapes happened or whatever, you cannot deny the photos that you saw. You chose not to put them in.

00:35:52.800 | I understand that decision. Respect for the family. Take us into that decision.

00:35:57.520 | Maybe you need to. The woman who chose to do the interview with you, she's so brave.

00:36:06.880 | She said, "I had to do this because I wanted to combat the denialism." I don't know who the gray

00:36:11.440 | zone is. I don't know why people are giving it a ton of attention. The first line of the Wikipedia

00:36:18.480 | page is it's a fringe website. I'll just leave it at that. I don't know if it is or if it isn't,

00:36:21.440 | but that's the first line of the Wikipedia page. Is there not a case to be made for making a second

00:36:27.680 | version of the documentary that shows exactly these things so people can stop denying it?

00:36:33.040 | Because then you would have to come to the place that the people who are one-sided created fake

00:36:40.640 | images. Is that what we're getting to in this conspiracy-filled world that the dozens of people

00:36:48.800 | you interviewed are part of a grand conspiracy and the photos are doctored?

00:36:52.960 | Just talk about that decision. You must have had an important meeting about that.

00:36:57.840 | Look, we didn't really have a choice. I agree with you. I think the world seeing this

00:37:05.440 | would probably be necessary at some point. I do think the deniers will deny. They'll say, "Oh,

00:37:11.120 | you can doctor any photo, so you're going to have to believe the person who took them anyway." We

00:37:16.880 | didn't have that choice. These photos are held by people who have taken a vow as part of their work

00:37:24.080 | as first responders of processing and getting bodies ready for burial that they won't show them.

00:37:29.760 | We've made this freely available on YouTube, so anyone can watch it. No firewalls. Anyone can

00:37:37.120 | watch this thing if you're over 18. It wouldn't meet YouTube standards, so that would be taken

00:37:42.800 | down. We can't show them right now for those two reasons, but I think over time, the world may have

00:37:48.960 | to see some of them, but I also want to go back to what Chamath said because there are photos.

00:37:53.600 | There are clear photos and there are clear witnesses, but Rami's story, he took no photos,

00:37:59.040 | and he will tell you why he took no photos. He covered those bodies so no one would see.

00:38:04.320 | Yeah. It's traumatic.

00:38:05.040 | And so, it's traumatic, and that's why Israel is documenting this, or not Israel,

00:38:10.640 | actually. I shouldn't say it. Someone in Israel is documenting this, but again, no matter what

00:38:16.160 | else you believe, I love the way you said it, Jason. You can absolutely believe, I absolutely

00:38:21.680 | believe that every single person, particularly the private citizens, not the terrorists,

00:38:27.520 | in Gaza should live in peace and harmony. They should, of course, get aid, but they

00:38:31.760 | shouldn't need aid because they should have a thriving economy and a state that's their own.

00:38:38.320 | That doesn't mean sexual violence didn't happen because it is clear it did,

00:38:42.400 | and the denial is crazy. I was in France. I took some of the witnesses to different

00:38:48.080 | parliaments, including in the French parliament, and Maurice Levy hosted this beautiful lunch for

00:38:54.640 | us, and there were all the people who work in civil society, and this woman stood up at this

00:38:59.040 | lunch, and she stood up and she said, "I'm French. I'm not Jewish. I run a non-profit that works on

00:39:05.920 | sexual violence and conflict. I've done this work for 30 years. No one's ever questioned my work

00:39:13.040 | ever until now," and she said, "I think it's anti-Semitism." You look at that New York Times

00:39:19.600 | article, and I know there's different views of the New York Times. I'm not defending the paper,

00:39:23.600 | but that article written by Jeff Gettleman and others, he has covered sexual violence

00:39:29.280 | for decades. He won a Pulitzer for his coverage of this in Somalia, a Pulitzer.

00:39:35.280 | I did a search. No one's ever questioned it before. Something is going on here,

00:39:40.240 | and it is a combination of narratives and polarization and anti-Semitism,

00:39:44.640 | which is getting us to a place where we lose. Yeah, sorry.

00:39:49.120 | Let's explore that for a second. So, when you see the videos, what you see

00:39:52.560 | are young people, but you see a lot of young women, and many of the leaders of these

00:40:02.640 | movements on campuses now, the spokespeople are women. The leadership seems mostly to be women.

00:40:09.680 | Do you have a reaction to that? Do you have a thought on that when you see

00:40:13.920 | these folks and that they should be closer to this realization maybe than a man could theoretically

00:40:22.960 | overlook it or try to block it out, but it's actually the leadership of these organizations

00:40:28.800 | tend to be mostly women-led, and they're basically like, "Let's keep going, and it's about this

00:40:32.960 | resistance." How do you react to that when you see that? It really depends what I see. When I

00:40:38.000 | see someone peacefully protesting and saying, "Free Palestine," that's good. I want free Palestine.

00:40:46.000 | When I see people protesting and saying, "We need peace on all sides. We need a ceasefire.

00:40:52.640 | Of course we need. We need a permanent ceasefire. I'm for that." Ready? When I see people saying,

00:40:58.480 | "The rapes didn't happen. That's unacceptable." You saw a student at Columbia. I saw it on video.

00:41:04.400 | I'm sure you did too, screaming at a Jewish kid, "Go back to Poland," or,

00:41:09.760 | "October 7th is going to happen to you over and over." That's not okay. It really depends what

00:41:16.000 | they're saying, but again, I'm hoping people watch this documentary so they can see it for

00:41:20.560 | their own eyes. I'm hoping people wake up and realize that they are capable of holding two

00:41:26.080 | thoughts at the same time. They just are. What's going to happen at Harvard? What's

00:41:29.840 | going to happen at the Ivy Leagues? I don't know what's going to happen at any of these schools,

00:41:33.760 | but I'll tell you, I'm a parent of college-age kids. I've got a kid who was in college for a

00:41:40.480 | year. I've got a kid going off this year in the fall. Colleges have a responsibility to keep our

00:41:45.680 | kids safe, full stop, and protect them from hate, full stop. They have the ability to do this.

00:41:54.240 | They have the ability to do this. It's up to them. Do you think Columbia has done a good job?

00:41:59.120 | Well, if you were president of Harvard, what would you have done differently, Cheryl?

00:42:01.760 | I'm not close enough. It's all merging together in my mind. I don't know exactly which protests

00:42:06.800 | that happen at which schools, but here's what I would do. Yeah. I would have very clear rules,

00:42:12.240 | which by the way, all the schools have. It's a question of enforcing them. Right. The schools

00:42:16.240 | that are letting this happen are not enforcing their own rules. Schools are actually, I think,

00:42:20.720 | look, free and open dialogue is important. College is the place you should go to talk

00:42:25.440 | about the issues from all sides, to have thoughtful conversations, to have deep conversations,

00:42:30.800 | even maybe to have angry conversations, but not violent.

00:42:35.360 | I went to Berkeley. It wasn't lunch without a protest. I mean, that's like the daily thing

00:42:39.360 | you do there. You go grab a sandwich, and you go protest, and you go back to class.

00:42:42.960 | Great. And I bet you had thoughtful conversations because that's what's made you you. Look at your

00:42:49.600 | views, David, you're able to articulate multiply complex views. And I bet some of that was from

00:42:54.160 | Berkeley, where you probably sat with your fellow students, and talk to them, right?

00:42:58.400 | That's not what's happening. I think things are very different. Yeah, I think things are

00:43:03.280 | very different. These colleges have rules. Some of the colleges there, most colleges have a rule

00:43:08.800 | that you can't protest in the president's office. There are colleges where the faculty and

00:43:13.360 | administration when people are protesting in the president's office, they're serving them food.

00:43:18.080 | There are colleges that say you're not allowed to protest here, go outside.

00:43:21.360 | But if you feel if you feel deep down in your heart that it's a matter of life or death,

00:43:25.360 | don't you feel justified that having an encampment, setting up a tent,

00:43:29.440 | living there showing that that degree of conviction is necessary, because you're saving

00:43:34.880 | lives versus, hey, I think something is a good idea. Let me go protest for an hour during lunch,

00:43:39.120 | and then I'll leave. It's never going to move the needle. The question I'm asking as a young

00:43:43.120 | person is how do I move the needle? And there's not a lot of ways that people feel empowered to

00:43:47.120 | move the needle. So it seems rational to me to some degree that they want to go into these

00:43:52.480 | encampments and they want to do something strong and show their conviction. But again,

00:43:57.840 | I think that there's a question on how much truth is anyone willing to see how much are folks willing

00:44:02.800 | to embrace the other side? How much are they willing to listen? I see very little listening,

00:44:06.720 | very little dialogue going on. Because then you put up a list of demands that are unmeetable.

00:44:11.680 | And, you know, you deny anyone to have a conversation and you deny listening to the

00:44:16.400 | other side. And you take this hardened view that doesn't allow for progress. And I think it's the

00:44:22.000 | hardened views on all sides that's limiting progress entirely. Unfortunately, the youth

00:44:26.400 | have been subsumed by this. And it's really frustrating to see because I worry about what

00:44:31.600 | that is. I think it's not necessarily the use meaning. I think you're seeing it in some very

00:44:37.760 | specific places that cater to a very specific kind of youth. You see them at Columbia, Harvard,

00:44:44.080 | there are these specific Berkeley UCLA that are bastions of privileged kids. For the most part,

00:44:50.000 | these are extremely elite institutions that typically allow in kids that have been coached

00:44:57.280 | their entire lives to get into those schools. And I think that they're coming there with a lack of

00:45:02.240 | fulfillment. And it reminds me at some level of how people reacted to Occupy Wall Street.

00:45:10.480 | Meaning there were a whole bunch of young people there that probably didn't even know what the

00:45:15.920 | whole Occupy Wall Street movement was about. Well, they showed up-

00:45:19.280 | They said themselves, Chamath, it was a platform for whatever your grievance was. That was their

00:45:23.200 | stated mission. Yeah. And I think what they found a decade and a half ago or so was community in

00:45:29.280 | this weird way. Yes. Right? The physical interaction of other people where you had this intimacy around

00:45:34.320 | a thing. I'm not condoning Occupy Wall Street, just like I'm not condoning what's happening on

00:45:37.920 | campuses. But I think psychologically, what kids are looking for is that level of attachment.

00:45:42.960 | And to your point, David, something that they can feel strongly about. And I think they end up

00:45:49.040 | getting to the age of 18 and 19, not having felt strongly about anything, because they were working

00:45:53.600 | on playing nine sports and 14 instruments and all this other bullshit to go to these schools.

00:45:59.120 | And then they get there and they feel a little empty. And sometimes negative things can fill the

00:46:04.240 | void. What I was going to say is I think the answer lies in what we're saying. David, you

00:46:09.600 | started out by saying, how are we going to get to progress? Well, screaming at each other is not

00:46:12.880 | going to get to progress. I don't have an answer for peace in the Middle East, but universities

00:46:17.840 | play roles in getting there. Thoughtful, hard conversations. Let's look at the real history.

00:46:24.400 | Let's look at who the leadership could be. Let's look at what kind of leaders we need on both sides.

00:46:29.280 | Let's look at what the international community could be doing. Those answers could come out of

00:46:34.240 | universities. Some of those college students, if they weren't reading five things they don't

00:46:38.720 | understand, could help us get there. And I think these protests are getting in the way

00:46:43.040 | of the thoughtful dialogue. And I honestly think part of what happens with cancel culture,

00:46:49.680 | I don't want to listen to another view on all sides. Really? Why don't you say,

00:46:55.200 | I want to listen. My friend Adam Grant wrote a great book called Think Again. I wish everyone

00:47:01.440 | in the whole world would read that damn book. Think Again. Think Again means you like might

00:47:05.520 | not be right about everything. Think Again means you need to like listen to the other side. We're

00:47:11.840 | never going to get there without that kind of thoughtful dialogue.

00:47:14.320 | Well, yeah, and that's exactly where I wanted to go with it, Cheryl, which is if you steal man,

00:47:19.120 | if you look at their perspective, and you look at the beauty of feminism and femininity,

00:47:25.920 | and you wrote a book, Lean In, and you are an expert on this,

00:47:29.840 | having compassion for people who are suffering is absolutely beautiful. It is the best of humanity,

00:47:37.280 | and I think it's the best of femininity and women, is that they have this incredible gift of empathy

00:47:43.600 | that as men, maybe we are so far behind. And so it does not surprise me that women leave these

00:47:49.120 | organizations when they see suffering. And if you see children suffering, women are in a unique

00:47:54.000 | position in their life experience to understand the value of children, of family, and of suffering.

00:47:59.840 | And, you know, I can understand an impressionable young person seeing the videos coming out of Gaza

00:48:06.560 | of a baby dying in a bombing and collateral damage, and being devastated and saying, you know what,

00:48:10.960 | I have to fight for these poor children. It is completely noble in their mind. In fact,

00:48:17.440 | it might be noble, I mean, to fight for peace. And so, you know, I can understand their positions,

00:48:26.000 | and I don't actually disagree with them. But then you start looking at the reality

00:48:31.200 | of getting the hostages back. And if this was an American situation, and we actually have a

00:48:38.480 | corollary 9/11, we didn't go to Afghanistan to get hostages, we went there to get retribution.

00:48:45.920 | So if America went there to eliminate this threat, and we also took out another country,

00:48:55.600 | just for good measure, that wasn't even involved in it, you know, it's such a complex issue. And

00:49:00.800 | we're in the fog of war, I think everybody pausing for a second here, and just remember

00:49:04.960 | how confusing it was after 9/11, how confusing it was. And we had to figure out, wait a second,

00:49:10.560 | these were Saudis. These were this radical group, the splinter group, like, it takes a while to

00:49:15.680 | figure out what's going on here. And I do think on these campuses, they should allow them to protest,

00:49:22.000 | but there's outside agitators. That seems to me to be completely unacceptable to have 40,

00:49:26.000 | 50, six-year-old lifetime agitators on these campuses allow these kids to protest, but to

00:49:34.160 | chase Jewish kids around the campus and then surround them and threaten them in 2024. I mean,

00:49:41.120 | I can't understand what's happening and how could an administration, Cheryl, allow students to

00:49:49.360 | threaten other students and not immediately snap a snap decision. It's a decision. You just said it.

00:49:56.000 | It's a decision. It is a decision. Absolutely expelled. If a Jewish set of Jewish students

00:50:01.760 | surrounded a Palestinian student, an Islamic student, a Muslim, and chanted at them about

00:50:09.120 | what happened October 7th and made them feel threatened, expel them as well.

00:50:12.640 | There's just some basic, basic rules of the game they're not enforcing. It's absolutely infuriating,

00:50:18.240 | but I just want to make sure I stay on that other side. And you did, you know, I think very

00:50:22.400 | eloquently say you also agree with the suffering in Palestine needs to end. I know we're out of

00:50:29.360 | time. Can I say one thing? I really want to say this. You can say anything, Cheryl, as much as

00:50:32.640 | you like. You have time. I really want to thank you all for this because two things happened in

00:50:36.960 | the last hour with you. One is that you were really passionate against the sexual assault and

00:50:44.720 | really clear. And as much as we need women to believe this, we need male and male leaders.

00:50:50.160 | And so, your voices, like I could feel the passion on this and I'm really grateful because that gives

00:50:56.720 | me hope. Like I am, it's such a dark moment. It's such a dark moment for democracy. It's

00:51:01.360 | such a dark moment for Jews. It's such a dark moment for women, but this really gave me hope.

00:51:06.400 | And the second is your tears for Dave. Thanks. It's been nine years. A lot of we've moved on.

00:51:16.080 | You have friends. I have a wonderful life that I'm so grateful for, but the world still lost

00:51:24.560 | a really, really, really special person. And I can see how much that means. I knew this, but--

00:51:31.520 | There are very few things as you grow older that you realize in life that matters and--

00:51:36.560 | Thank you.

00:51:38.400 | Friends are-- that's it. It's just friends.

00:51:41.520 | You know, at the end of the day, Chamath, we have--

00:51:43.440 | You have family and your friends. That's all you have.

00:51:45.280 | I think about Dave frequently. And I just think at the end of your life, what you have

00:51:54.560 | is but a collection of memories. And the memories we have with Dave, the laughter, the joy, the--

00:52:01.760 | Fake Chamath.

00:52:02.480 | Fake Chamath, yeah. His wit, his insights. You know, we would be sitting at that poker table,

00:52:08.640 | and it was like we're all like 15, 16-year-olds, and we got this big brother who's 20.

00:52:14.240 | And, you know, we'd be bickering and laughing, whatever. He'd come in and say, "Hey, guys,

00:52:19.040 | how about this and this?" So, Chamath and I would be jawing each other. He'd say,

00:52:23.280 | "Hey, guys, let's calm it down a little bit and let's have a good time," whatever.

00:52:27.040 | Thank you guys so much. I have to go to my board meeting.

00:52:29.440 | This was as deeply meaningful as it could have been. Seriously, thank you.

00:52:36.560 | We didn't get to talk about anything business.

00:52:38.560 | Come to the summit, come to the summit.

00:52:40.720 | I beg you to come back to the-- either come to the summit and be long or short in video.

00:52:43.840 | We just need to know.

00:52:44.560 | It's a hard pivot into business.

00:52:47.280 | It's true. It's a hard pivot.

00:52:48.080 | Let's not even try.

00:52:48.720 | Also, what's your view on crypto?

00:52:52.800 | If you were to change any paragraph of the Lean In book.

00:52:55.600 | We'll save all this for the sun.

00:52:57.760 | A really big hug. Thank you, guys.

00:52:59.520 | And thank you for watching.

00:53:00.720 | Wow. I need to take a deep breath here, Chamath Freeberg. This was super emotional for me.

00:53:09.120 | I didn't know if I could do it. I'll be honest. I have so many emotions, Chamath,

00:53:13.840 | about Dave. I have so many feelings about this situation.

00:53:16.960 | I watched the documentary. I thought the most important thing is there are these,

00:53:22.800 | you said it, Jason, in the fog of war, there are things that happen that are just wholly

00:53:28.080 | unacceptable. I remember when I was getting older and I was curious, why did my family

00:53:36.720 | not go back to Sri Lanka? And what do the Tamils, which is a small minority, Hindu minority in

00:53:44.720 | the majority Buddhist population, why did they feel so out of sorts? And we were part of the

00:53:49.600 | Buddhist majority. And when you insert yourself into that struggle and understand where they're

00:53:55.440 | coming from, it's jarring because you have to really re-underwrite, okay, what are we fighting

00:54:02.320 | for? What are they fighting for? And the most important thing that I got to is what is allowed?

00:54:06.720 | Because then you would see things. And the unfortunate part of Sri Lanka's history was

00:54:13.840 | in the final parts of the war that ended it, there were some incredible atrocities that were committed.

00:54:19.840 | And the United Nations and international court system tried to find justice for the Tamil

00:54:27.840 | minority population in what happened in those final hours of that war. I don't think that they

00:54:33.440 | did for the most part. But it's just to show you that these things leave deep wounds that, frankly,

00:54:42.320 | can be reopened in a moment. So it's very important that I think these things are,

00:54:48.800 | and I hate to say it so unemotionally, but documented. >> Absolutely. Absolutely.

00:54:53.840 | >> For those that don't even understand the Holocaust, if you go to the Holocaust Museum,

00:54:58.560 | if you're lucky enough to do it in Israel, I would encourage you to do it, but even in Washington,

00:55:02.240 | you know the totality of what happened. There's certain places that document these important

00:55:08.960 | moments in history. And if this is one of those moments to the Israeli people,

00:55:13.200 | I just encourage them, please make sure that you minimize the miss and disinformation.

00:55:19.200 | As complicated as that may be to do, it is incredibly important so that you can create--

00:55:24.960 | >> And doing so does not dissolve empathy for the other side's cause or for the other side's

00:55:33.520 | motivations or objectives. Having empathy for the circumstances that happened here is the equivalent

00:55:38.880 | of having empathy for the plight of the Palestinian people and what they're dealing with today

00:55:43.920 | following October 7th. And I think that we need to recognize that both things can be true.

00:55:49.040 | We can have empathy for both sides. >> Yeah. And by the way, humans have

00:55:54.080 | a way of making decisions which I think is pretty predictable, which is once you have a point of

00:56:00.320 | view, there are things that you believe are facts, and then there's all this other stuff

00:56:05.920 | that you have degrees in which you believe that are essentially conjecture. The most important

00:56:12.320 | thing in really important debates is to move something from that gray zone into the box of

00:56:17.680 | facts. >> So to speak.

00:56:19.280 | >> And that is the only way that causes people to re-underwrite their principle views. It doesn't

00:56:25.040 | matter what topic we're talking about. So the more that we're able to document and actually

00:56:30.720 | make these things unambiguous, I think it actually has a really important role to play in how these

00:56:36.000 | young people view what it is that they're a part of. I'm totally pro-protesting. I'm totally in

00:56:42.800 | support of standing up for the things that you believe in. I'm not in support of overlooking

00:56:48.720 | atrocities. >> I mean, it's well said,

00:56:51.920 | Chamath. And the response, I can tell you, to this episode and the response I got for just tweeting,

00:57:00.080 | "Hey, this is an important documentary to watch," is the whataboutism, the other side,

00:57:06.160 | and documenting what's happening in Gaza. And we have this search for truth right now,

00:57:10.720 | which is very difficult because institutions have a lot of self-inflicted wounds. We live in an age

00:57:19.200 | of conspiracy theory, and there are reports of crisis actors in Gaza creating fake deaths and

00:57:30.640 | fake videos. So now you have one side saying, "Oh, the people of Palestine or Hamas, the numbers

00:57:38.560 | aren't correct of the number of people died. The suffering's not correct. These images aren't

00:57:42.000 | correct." The fog of war is going to be thick for a while here, folks, and it's going to take us a

00:57:46.080 | while. And Chamath's exactly right. You got to document this. You got to get to some ground

00:57:49.120 | truth. You got to get to some common facts so we can all objectively look at those common facts.

00:57:55.120 | And, you know, listen, it's a shame David Sachs couldn't make it today, but he's really missed

00:57:59.520 | here because, you know, we have that same thing with the war in Ukraine. It's very hard for

00:58:05.760 | us in this current media landscape where we're quoting from news sources and anonymous Twitter

00:58:13.200 | accounts, fake videos. It's going to get worse with AI. It's going to be harder and harder to

00:58:18.320 | find the truth. And this is where your own personal morality, ethics, and I'm not sure who

00:58:23.120 | brought this up during our talk because I'm emotionally spent, I got to be honest. It's a

00:58:27.920 | little hard for me to collect myself here. But, man, you know, you have to have some basic moral

00:58:34.880 | principles here. Children, women, rape, sexual assault, we all can agree on this. You said this

00:58:44.160 | in the week after October 7th, Freeberg, you had a very powerful moment on the show, that you don't

00:58:50.400 | want to have to decide between October 7th being horrific and children dying in Gaza being horrific.

00:58:59.440 | And you don't want to have to be painted with one side or the other. You want to

00:59:03.520 | believe as a moral person, that all suffering needs to end. And we collectively as a species,

00:59:11.040 | in 2024 on this planet, can work together to just agree that certain things should never happen.

00:59:20.080 | And to try to resolve these horrible conflicts. I'm so spent right now. And it was just very

00:59:26.240 | difficult for me to watch that documentary. I don't know where we go from here, gentlemen.

00:59:29.680 | I'm fine ending the show here. We're taking a 10 minute break and then maybe doing one

00:59:33.600 | or two new stories. Take a break. We'll come back. Let's take 5-10 minutes.

00:59:37.360 | All right, everybody. Welcome back to the program. Yep, it's not easy to do a pivot here.

00:59:52.160 | But we collected ourselves, took a deep breath. And you've all been asking for a science corner.

00:59:57.840 | And so, there's a really important story that Freeberg has been educating us about on the

01:00:03.920 | group chat. There's a startup that just open sourced an AI gene editor. Yes, you heard that

01:00:07.680 | right. Open source gene editor, powered by AI. It's called ProFluent Bio, am I correct? ProFluent?

01:00:15.040 | Yeah, Berkeley based startup ProFluent Bio. Great. Have we talked about CRISPR and gene

01:00:19.440 | editing before on the show or no? I think we have mentioned it. It would

01:00:22.400 | be good as a primer for you to just explain from first principles, what is CRISPR? Why

01:00:26.880 | it's important, and then get into this. So, there's debate around who discovered

01:00:31.520 | CRISPR-Cas systems first and found their application. But generally-

01:00:34.800 | Whose side are you on? The Jennifer Duden aside or the MIT?

01:00:39.520 | I'm an open source guy, which is why I'm excited about this topic today. Because I don't give a

01:00:43.840 | shit. I think things that are in nature are in nature. And I don't think you should be

01:00:46.960 | able to patent stuff that you discover in nature. So, let's step back for a second,

01:00:51.600 | Freeberg. Explain what CRISPR is to somebody who's heard the term but doesn't actually know

01:00:55.360 | in your unique ability to explain science. Yeah. So, CRISPR-Cas, C-A-S, Cas proteins,

01:01:04.240 | C-A-S proteins, are proteins that can go in to a cell. And they have what's called a guide RNA,

01:01:13.440 | little piece of RNA attached to them, that allows that protein to find its way to a specific point

01:01:20.720 | in DNA in that cell, in the nucleus of that cell. And when that protein hits that specific location,

01:01:26.800 | it cuts it like scissors. And so, the protein finds the part of the DNA it's looking to cut,

01:01:31.600 | attaches itself, cuts the DNA, and a cut is made. And so, this capability was discovered actually

01:01:38.400 | in bacteria. And it was an evolved system that bacteria developed to actually protect themselves

01:01:45.360 | from viruses. So, the CRISPR-Cas complex emerged through evolution, where bacteria started to

01:01:52.880 | figure out that they could cut up viral DNA. So, they made these proteins, these proteins would

01:01:57.760 | attach to viral DNA and destroy the viruses that came into the bacteria cells. So, scientists,

01:02:05.120 | arguably from Harvard, from Berkeley, and from other places around the world, in the early 2010s,

01:02:11.040 | started to do research and identified ways that we could leverage these proteins that we were

01:02:15.760 | discovering in nature to do targeted DNA editing in human cells and plant cells and other cells.

01:02:22.720 | So, rather than them just being used as a defense mechanism by bacteria, that we could harness these

01:02:28.160 | proteins and make them useful to go in and do specific gene editing. Now, why would we want to

01:02:33.200 | do gene editing? Gene editing, if done precisely enough and efficiently enough, would allow us to

01:02:41.440 | go in and fix genetic diseases in humans, for example. It would allow us to take T cells and

01:02:47.600 | reprogram them to go and attack cancer cells back in the human body. It would allow us, in the case

01:02:53.600 | of agriculture, which I'm very close to and what I work on every day, to figure out ways to make

01:02:58.560 | specific changes to the genes of a plant to make that plant grow in higher yield or change itself

01:03:04.880 | to be disease resistant or drought resistant or other features that might be helpful to agriculture

01:03:09.920 | and to humanity. So, gene editing became this amazing toolkit that emerged around 2012, 2013,

01:03:16.240 | and just blew up on the market. And the main original foundational patents, which are now

01:03:21.920 | mostly held after a lot of litigation by the Broad Institute, which is, you know, there's this kind

01:03:27.280 | of joint patent arrangement with the Broad and MIT and Harvard, are being used in medical

01:03:33.520 | applications, are being used in agriculture applications, they're being used in all these

01:03:36.640 | different tools, but they're patented, there's royalties, there's fees, all this stuff. And in

01:03:41.360 | the years that followed, many other cast proteins started to get discovered, all these different

01:03:46.080 | types of proteins were discovered. And the reason you want to use different proteins is you want to

01:03:50.240 | improve the efficiency. So how frequently or how good are these proteins at editing the cell

01:03:55.280 | and eliminate off target effects, meaning the protein isn't making cuts or making changes to

01:04:01.040 | other parts of the DNA that you don't want it to. So there's been this search underway for the last

01:04:05.520 | decade for new cast proteins and developing new cast proteins, and dozens have been discovered,

01:04:10.640 | people are trying to patent them, people are trying to make them do special things,

01:04:15.040 | they can only change one letter, all these different tools are emerging. So we went from

01:04:20.000 | having absolutely no ability to do gene editing just over a decade ago, to suddenly having all

01:04:25.040 | of these different tools that could do gene editing really efficiently, really cheaply,

01:04:30.160 | really affordably, really scalably, and more precisely. So this company ProFluent, they

01:04:35.280 | actually used an AI model, what they call a protein language model, to create and train

01:04:41.440 | an entirely new library of cast proteins that do not exist in nature today. So they basically took

01:04:49.360 | 26 terabases as 26 trillion letters of assembled genomes and metagenomes, this is from other from

01:04:57.760 | various species and start to simulate new cast proteins that could be useful to replace the ones

01:05:04.480 | that are on the market today or improvements on what's in the market today. And they found one

01:05:09.280 | that they called open CRISPR one, and they made it publicly available under an open source license.

01:05:15.680 | So any startup, any research lab, any individual, any scientist can use this particular

01:05:21.360 | cast protein to go in and make edits without having to deal with patents and IP and claims on

01:05:29.200 | who owns what that they found in nature. And this particular protein that they identified

01:05:35.600 | is 400 mutations away from anything that they've seen in nature. So basically,

01:05:42.080 | the AI model started to learn what sequence of DNA generated what structure of protein

01:05:49.120 | that was really good at being a gene editor. And they started to discover and iterate on building

01:05:54.080 | new ones. And the AI started to predict, hey, this would be a good gene editor, this would be a good

01:05:58.560 | gene editor. And they came up with dozens of new gene editing molecules that don't exist in nature

01:06:03.360 | today. They identified one that they then sequenced, they created it, they put it in a lab,

01:06:08.880 | they tested it, and it turned out to be much better than cast nine. So they wanted to mark

01:06:14.880 | so they use an AI model to find a new guide RNA, to find a new cast protein. So the guide RNA is

01:06:24.320 | just RNA. That's like a that's like the key. Think about a CRISPR cast system has two components. One

01:06:31.120 | is the cast protein. That's the giant protein that goes in and cuts DNA. And attached to it is what's

01:06:38.160 | called a guide RNA guide RNA is the specific letters. And those specific letters are like a

01:06:43.280 | key and a lock, they go attached to a particular part of the DNA. And then that giant protein cuts

01:06:47.520 | in that exact spot. And so what they what everyone's been working on is new proteins. And

01:06:51.760 | they've been trying to find new cast proteins that aren't going to go do off target cutting,

01:06:55.840 | they aren't going to make mistakes that are going to be perfect at making the exact cut you want to

01:07:00.080 | make. So everyone's always trying to improve the efficiency and reduce the off target effects of

01:07:04.320 | these systems. And so what they did is they tried to create a new protein that doesn't exist by

01:07:09.360 | learning from all of these other cast proteins that exist in nature today, and identifying the

01:07:14.240 | three dimensional structure of them, and allow the model to predict a cast protein that might

01:07:18.320 | actually be better than anything that's found. So it works around every single existing patent.

01:07:23.200 | Well, that's going to be tested in the courts later, I'm sure, but they open sourced it. So

01:07:27.840 | they they're not claiming any IP on it. They're not making any claims on it with the patent office.

01:07:32.000 | And they're saying, Look, it's free and available. I'm on the same page as you if this is this,

01:07:35.920 | this was occurring billions of years ago. And it just took us billions of years to actually

01:07:41.600 | observe it occurring naturally in nature. It's absolutely ridiculous that a patent would be

01:07:45.200 | granted on that. Now the implementation of that in a commercial use case, that's fine.

01:07:50.080 | Be able to know this is happening, I guess, in the psychedelic space with psilocybin, MDMA.

01:07:57.760 | That's such a leap.

01:07:58.960 | No, no, I'm just saying, there are drug companies now that are really realizing the efficacy at

01:08:03.520 | Johns Hopkins, Stanford, where they're doing these, and then they're trying to figure out

01:08:06.800 | how do we take something that's occurring naturally, psilocybin in mushrooms, referred

01:08:11.680 | to colloquially as magic mushrooms. And then how do we get our how do we bear hug this so that we

01:08:15.840 | can patent it? How can we own the implementation of it, as you're saying? And so they're fascinating

01:08:21.840 | to me taking nature and trying to patent nature.

01:08:24.880 | Right. There's a simple truth to all this, which is every single life sciences lab on Earth is

01:08:31.360 | using this technology today. It has absolutely revolutionized life sciences. It has changed

01:08:37.280 | everything. It has reset the trajectory of human health, of agriculture, and of industrial

01:08:42.720 | biotechnology. Those are the three major markets where gene editing is useful. It is changing

01:08:47.840 | everything. And so it is already a ubiquitous tool. We basically created software engineering

01:08:53.760 | for DNA for life capability. And so this system that these guys just published on, I think,

01:08:58.880 | is a really wonderful manifestation of how AI is allowing us to open source and create improved

01:09:05.600 | tools. And it's, it's really important for humanity. And so it's just great to see happen.

01:09:12.880 | Yeah. Okay. Two questions for my baby brother with the with the science brain. Number one,

01:09:17.440 | the LLMs here, how, maybe you speak to the efficacy of LLMs when applied to this vertical,

01:09:25.840 | because it's a constrained data set, I believe. So it feels to me analogous to

01:09:30.800 | code, whereas like, human language, images, videos, you know, building an LLM around them,

01:09:36.800 | you have like, pretty large corpus. It seems to me code is constrained a video games constrained.

01:09:42.640 | And of course, maybe maybe gene editing is constrained. I'll let you answer that. And

01:09:46.400 | the LLM component here. And then maybe you could speak to what this will do to the startup community,

01:09:52.480 | being able to leverage this open source tool have have startup started to pop up around this yet?

01:09:58.480 | Is there a.org.com kind of equivalent here we have wordpress.org open source version of WordPress,

01:10:04.880 | wordpress.com, the hosted paid version? And are we gonna see a bunch of.com versions of this and

01:10:10.080 | different startups? Take it whichever way you like the two questions. I'm not super familiar.

01:10:15.680 | I've met the profluent guys a couple times. I'm not super familiar with what their business models

01:10:20.320 | going to be. But I hate that startups are worried or feel encumbered by the patent landscape

01:10:34.560 | associated with CRISPR cast systems, and that they can't build novel products and move humanity

01:10:41.120 | forward. Okay, so it's a blocker for humanity. I'm hopeful that we do see more of

01:10:45.600 | these open source like tools become available and ubiquitous. It's almost the equivalent of having

01:10:51.120 | Linux, where everyone can now, you know, as an operating system, or HTML being, you know,

01:10:57.760 | standard code. I don't know if you remember, to use before HTML five, a lot of people were using

01:11:04.480 | macro media flash. Oh, there was a huge blocker. Yeah, it was a huge blocker. So you had to pay

01:11:10.320 | the license fee to to create flash content. And then you had to I don't know if they sold consumer

01:11:15.120 | plugins. Well, yeah, they were rug pulled, right? They could change their mind. And they were trying

01:11:19.440 | to make money on both sides. And so in order to show Microsoft did active to try to be a blocker

01:11:24.480 | and own the open source. So in order to put it Yeah, in order to put multimedia on the internet,

01:11:28.720 | you have used to have to pay license fees. And then HTML five basically created multimedia

01:11:34.800 | capabilities native to the HTML, which is open source. And so everyone could do it. And I think

01:11:39.600 | that it's really important that we see that happening with gene editing. I think all the

01:11:42.800 | applications of gene editing should be patentable and protectable. But the core tools are so powerful

01:11:47.920 | and important, that I think it's very difficult and hard to see how we are accelerating humanity's

01:11:54.720 | progress by keeping these things at bay. And I'm it's really great to see open source tools like

01:12:00.160 | this hit the market. Okay. And I think it's really important. And I think it's really amazing.

01:12:04.800 | Yeah, tell me about the LLM side here, the large language model being built around this data,

01:12:10.960 | how, what's the efficacy of that going to be like, and is my analogy of a constrained data set,

01:12:17.600 | meaning it will be able to perform at a higher level, like we see with code,

01:12:21.440 | and then copilots for code? Well, they created their, their own LLM, they call it a protein

01:12:28.880 | language model. So they took all of this genome data that is generally very publicly available,

01:12:34.480 | there's a lot of this stuff published in open genome databases, you can download it,

01:12:39.040 | ingest it and use it for whatever purposes you want as a life sciences researcher. So they took

01:12:44.480 | 26 trillion base pairs of data and basically use that to train their model. And then using that

01:12:52.880 | trained model, they then started to run inference on it, to say, come up with cast systems that are

01:12:58.000 | novel, that could theoretically have efficacy greater than what we see in nature with the

01:13:03.440 | natural cast systems. And then the model started to output all of these novel proteins, then they

01:13:07.520 | started to test them. And they found that this one worked really, really well after testing in

01:13:12.640 | the lab. So actually, here's a great image. So here you can see, basically in training the model,

01:13:18.160 | so it's a little bit technically complicated what they did in the steps to generate this system.

01:13:23.040 | But ultimately, the system yielded something that they could then create, put in a lab environment,

01:13:28.240 | and in the lab environment, test how well it worked. And what they showed was that it actually

01:13:32.000 | worked better than cast nine, which is the primary gene editing protein is today. So, you know,

01:13:37.760 | pretty powerful set of steps and all unlocked by, again, freely available data and building their

01:13:44.320 | own model and now ultimately open sourcing the best output of it. Okay, well, amazing job. If

01:13:52.000 | you missed any of those graphics, you're listening to the podcast, go to YouTube and search for all

01:13:57.280 | the podcasts if you want to see those graphics. All right, gentlemen, this has been another

01:14:01.120 | amazing episode of the all in podcast for your Sultan of Science, David Freeberg, the chairman

01:14:07.360 | dictator, and David Sachs, who couldn't make it today. I am the world's greatest moderator.

01:14:13.760 | Rest in power, Dave Goldie. We love you. We miss you. And we'll see you all next time

01:14:19.680 | on the all in podcast. Love you boys.

01:14:31.200 | And it said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy

01:14:34.800 | with it. I love you. I squeened a quinoa.

01:14:38.800 | Besties are gone.

01:14:52.800 | We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless.

01:14:58.560 | It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

01:15:02.720 | What you're about to be. We need to get Merck.

01:15:10.000 | We are.

01:15:17.680 | ♪ I'm going all in ♪

01:15:20.600 | you

01:15:21.100 | you

In conversation with Sheryl Sandberg, plus open-source AI gene editing explained

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