look at free bird he's like this is so awkward I can't wait he's got he literally brought popcorn didn't he was watching the shower you brought popcorn he's like I want to see round three I have nothing to say today I'm just gonna sit here and watch I brought popcorn I got my uh chili roasted pistachio nuts I'm gonna sit back and enjoy the J Cal sacks [Music]
Rain Man David's house we open source and source of fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] are we really going to do this as the top story I mean this is the third time we've tried to do this story do we give the background sax or no we wouldn't have had to do it over and over again if you didn't act so hysterical there we go first one you killed no you
killed it no the first one yeah because it wasn't even on the docket and it wasn't it wasn't even newsworthy okay and the second one I killed because you came across like a stark raving lunatic I spiked it the second time because I was so infuriated by your Cavalier attitude towards it what do you worry about my attitude for why don't you just
focus on making your own good points here's the thing I was so correct I was so correct the two of you let him go let him go you guys hear this idiot try to blame his own hysteria on me you said that January 6 was overblown and of course no I said it was a disgrace I said it was an embarrassment it was an embarrassment to the country I said it
was wrong but you want to inflate it you're you're engaging in in classic Washington threat inflation nope yeah and um and there's two problems with that one is you're going to take your eye off the ball of the real issues facing the country like inflation the economy and economic anxiety like covid like crime like schools I mean these are the issues that
Americans care about not you know a riot that happened over a year ago and if you and the Democrats keep talking about this and focus on it on MSNBC to the exclusion of the issues that really matter uh I'll see you in November because you're going to get slaughtered in this midterm election it's going to be a landslide but the other problem
with it is with this threat inflation is that it justifies the expansion of surveillance powers and prosecutorial Powers by the justice department by the you know by the by the just Department other branches of our government who want to basically go after you know this the so-called domestic terrorism that will lead to an infringement on civil liberties just like the expansion
of those agencies did after 9 11. and so I think we should all be like concerned about it now look are these Oath Keepers a bunch of idiots yeah there were 11 Oath Keepers of that rally you're saying an old fat guy with an eye patch that says both keeper lifetime member is not credible to you exactly I mean look this is these guys are they're they're
not unlike the antifa right you know uh people in Portland who are trying to burn down buildings or or chase a boudin's parents who are domestic terrorists I mean yeah this is a small number of Knuckleheads who broke into the capital they should be prosecuted they're they're guilty of of saying this leader is saying in temperate things but
was this going to be a coup to take over the capital I don't I don't think so okay if you want to focus on that to the exclusion of the real issues facing the country like I said this Landslide November this Red Wave is going to be even bigger just to your point about my focus uh every week here on the number one Tech podcast in the world and on the
number six Tech podcast in the world this week in startups I focus on all of those issues but let's read uh because we can chew gum and walk at the same time let's read what happened on Thursday the FBI arrested 11 members of The Oath Keepers on sedition charges and the house committee subpoenaed Facebook Google Reddit and Twitter after insufficient responses to the January 6
riots or Insurrection whichever term you prefer the leader uh of The Oath Keepers which is an organization that claims over 30 000 members primarily in the military and police okay well hold on a second if this was their big moment to Stage a coup and take over the government why we're only 11 of the 30 000 there the 11 were indicted David uh
there were how many were there well we don't know yet but uh last week you said uh last week you said there was no coordinated attack and now we have proof that's not what I said look you can't veto the segment from last week and then try to claim that I said sir well let me just can I get through this story or are you gonna keep interrupting my God okay
you're complaining about Interruption okay that's another interesting finish it without before interruption or would you like to just keep monologuing what are you reading why don't you just give us a little remember every week that's what I'm trying to do but you keep interrupting so here we go while certain earthkeeper members and
Affiliates inside Washington DC breached the capital grounds and buildings others remain stationed just outside the city in qrf teams these are quick response teams that had weapons and they transported Firearms into Washington DC ins and these in-support operations were aimed at using Force to stop the law full transfer of Presidential Power
according to our department of justice which is a majority Republican obviously law enforcement excuse no Republican yes it is my God can I just read two sentences Dave gotta take zero medicine pal okay fine signal is an encrypted chat app that's not supposed to have any back doors but obviously there are some plant here are some of Rhodes's comments we
aren't getting through this without a civil war too late for that prepare your mind-body and spirit it will be bloody and desperate fight we're going to have to fight this cannot be avoided if we want to make the January 6th stuff relevant first of all let me just say I see that primarily as a media story what happened happened obviously it was a
disgrace and embarrassment a black eye for the country I'm not supporting or defending anyone I think tend to think these Oath Keepers it was not like a super organized concerted effort to take over the government it it's somewhere it's basically a bunch of loud mouths who you know engaged in a riot maybe there was more planning and preparation
fine the court case will bear it out and if they can prove that it was what you said it was great let them go to jail I have no desire to defend them but I also think that in the grand scheme of things this whole thing's been blown completely out proportion if you watch MSNBC it's all January 6 all the time and you know if Democrats are going to focus on this issue for the next 10
months and you know who Roger Stone was photographed on a sidewalk with which was the big story the other day this red wave in November is going to be an even bigger wave I'm just telling you right now because it's not what the average voter in the country cares about I think you're right about that I think you wrote about it I'll agree with that I
think you know MSNBC is focused on this and fox is focused on fake voter fraud and we've been pretty clear here that none of us agree with either of the extremes of media coverage I do think this is an issue worth wait where's the fake voter fraud are you talking about the guy who who's obsessed right now with voter fraud is Biden he
just gave a speech a very intemperate speech saying that if you don't support his new Voting Rights Acts that you're on the side of Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis there were some political calculus there he had to do that because he was also trying to basically bolster the ability to get this you know filibuster thing passed in the Senate so he he
basically had to play a relatively weak hand and and you know again on what happened again legislatively is that his own party said no enough in this case it was Christian Cinema who basically said no no Mansion won't support him ending the filibuster so this thing was DOA we we said it was DOA when the bill back better Bill collapsed we said they were
going to try and pivot to voting rights to change the subject even though it was DOA but there is something that Biden could do or could have done uh that I think would be a bipartisan reform which is to reform the Electoral count act I mean what happened in November if you're concerned about Trump and you know this version of the potential to subvert the
election and the way he tried to influence Pence to stop the county of the electors if you're concerned about all of that there is a fix for that which is the electoral count Act of 1887. it's completely Antiquated obviously it's been around for over 100 years there is bipartisan support for fixing that the Wall Street Journal
editorial page has come out from what that is to the audience well it's just a it's just a it's a law that that governs how these electors in the Electoral College get counted up and certified so that you know the election gets certified so David Brooks had that piece that jamas shared in the New York Times which is the problem we have right now
is not in the actual voting it's in the if you're worried about what happened in this past November it's in the certification not the voting and you know what Brooks was writing about is there's a lot of social science saying that you know a lot of these rules that Democrats and Republicans are really focused on around the convenience
of the election don't really influence the number of people who vote people who vote want people who want to vote vote people who don't don't you know we're getting hung up on the wrong thing which is you know these voter ID laws what really matters is the certification of the Electoral College and you could Biden could find I think there's a number of Republicans who
would support a clarification of that law and updating a bit so that what potentially could have happened in you know in January if Pence had gone along with this plan to basically reject the accounting of the electors I mean everyone understood what they think that's just ceremonial right what do you think of that plan what did you think of
Trump's plan I think that Trump had a right to air his grievances in court but once the court threw out his claims and rejected them and once the Supreme Court denied sociality it was over it was over the Supreme Court has the final word in our democracy about legal matters and so no Pence never had the Authority or the ability under the Electoral count act to
reject the county of the electors that whole process is ceremonial but but the mere fact this isn't even even an issue suggests that we should fix it we should go back and fix the Electoral count Act of 1887. so and look you could Biden could have gotten 60 votes for that you know I think that was very you can get he can get votes for that he can also get votes
to um stop uh the insider trading of members of uh Congress he could get that done too so why isn't he focused why isn't he focused on things where he can actually get a bipartisan majority he has one big legislative success as president has been the infrastructure Bill where he got a bunch of Republican support which is a pretty big win yeah
those are the types of issues he should be focused on and instead he's giving these you know speeches uh saying that anyone who disagrees with the progressive agenda on voting rights is basically did you guys George Wallace or Bull Connor did you guys hear his speech the other day on CNBC about covid I mean he was so incoherent it was kind of scary it feels like he's in
cognitive the cognitive decline is you know I voted for the guy anything to get Trump out of office I thought that was an existential risk but man he is cognitively declining quickly I mean I think the craziest thing about covert was this Rachel wolensky interview I mean like why does it take two years into a pandemic to tell us what we kind
of anecdotally knew but if we had known up front or sooner we would have completely Rachel wolenski does an interview she's the head of the CDC and she said well it turns out that 75 percent of all the deaths uh because of covid were people that suffered from at least four full morbidities at least four not something yeah it wasn't all it was I think it was
a subset defined by it might have been like vaccinated deaths or something like that it was it was one study but yes that was basically the conclusion absolutely is significant comorbidities among people who died and so if we if we had known that don't you think I mean Friedberg you you tell me but wouldn't we have just changed our response to
just mask and just kind of like start living our normal lives and people with four comorbidities or people at a certain age immunocompromise should have stayed home and we would be in a very different situation so you know I mean I understand Jason that Biden didn't the last few speeches have been a little tight you know I mean I think look the
the quinnipac call poll then Nick you can post I mean look his ratings are just plummeting plummeting I mean it's down to Trump levels right every week and so he is definitely searching for a handful of wins I don't think he's strategically found found the right ones he could have done something on certifying the Electoral cartilage he
could certainly do something right now on insider trading laws for uh members of Congress but instead we're focusing on all these random things but anyway sorry he can't get the entire trading thing past Pelosi but but but but yeah I think it is something that would get a huge bipartisan majority look she's going to lose anyway so he might as well just
throw under the bus you're right this is about his political salvation over hers by the way you guys saw this I mentioned this in the group chat someone floated the trial balloon of dumping Kamala Harris and replacing her with Liz Cheney this is how bad things have gotten for the Democrats they floated a trial balloon of of Biden Cheney in 24. crossover ticket I we
talked about this on the uh uh for a couple years in private in poker I thought I think a crossover ticket is what the country needs to kind of get back to Center and I know it's a crazy concept and it's a one percent chance but I I kind of like the crossover but things have gotten so bad for the Democrats now that but I I sort of said Saks floated this
um or pre-floated it we had a little debate on the Twitter but I don't know if you remember two or three episodes ago Sax said Hey listen there's gonna be a new appreciation for Clinton and not 10 days later the Wall Street Journal and a bunch of people are floating Hillary coming back to run um Bill Clinton I didn't mention Hillary I know that but I think either you are
in your Star Chamber and doing a pre-float on all in so then the backups and the can then you know pump Hillary as that or it just people are listening to you and you're that influential what I'm what I'm proposing is a Biden engage in clintonian by which I mean Bill clintonian uh triangulation which is he does not have the votes in Congress to
enact a progressive agenda he should be looking for bipartisan wins he did with the infrastructure Bill he could do with this entire trading thing he could do it on the Electoral count act these are things that would be you know progress yeah China policy and importantly momentum momentum going into 20 2024 and maybe good for Americans like I mean his
China policy the fact that he came out with a statement on the uyghurs I thought was very strong you know it's one of the stronger things he did but it's not coming up in the polls and I think the whole Republicans interested nobody cares about what's happening to the weakers okay you you bring it up because you really care and I think
the rest of us don't care Gary hard you're saying you virtually don't care I'm telling you a very hard Ugly Truth okay of all the things that I care about yes it is below my line okay of all the things that I care about it is below my line disappointing well we I think people if you if you explain to them what's happening to the uyghurs
in China they care but it's not top of mind for them that's not what's carrying mine right now is they go to the grocery store and the shelves are empty sure that I care about yeah I I care about the fact that our economy could turn on a dime if China invades Taiwan I care about that I care about climate change you know I care about a bunch of I care
about America's crippling and you know decrepit in healthcare infrastructure but if you're asking me that do I care about a segment of a class of people in another country not until we can take care of ourselves will I prioritize them over us and I think a lot of people believe that and I'm sorry if that's a hard truth to hear but every time I I say that I care
about the uyghurs I'm really just lying if I don't really care and so I'd rather not lie to you and tell you the truth it's not a priority for me and my response to that is I think it's a sad State of Affairs when human rights as a concept globally you know Falls beneath you know tactical and strategic issues that we have to have we need that's another
luxury believe that's another luxury belief I don't believe believing in the the human Declaration of Human Rights that Eleanor patience I don't think it's a luxury belief to believe that all humans should have a basic set of Human Rights I think it's a luxury belief and the reason I think it's a luxury belief is we don't do enough domestically to
actually Express that view in real tangible ways so until we actually clean up our own house the idea that we step outside of our borders with you know with with us sort of like morally virtue signaling about somebody else's human rights track record is deplorable look at the number of black and brown men that are far from deplorable look at the
number of black and brown men that are incarcerated for for absolutely ridiculous crimes I don't know if you saw this past week but there was a person that was released from jail because he couldn't even be protected in jail because in some of these cells they run these fight clubs inside of Rikers Island that are basically tacitly
endorsed by the Corrections Officers that don't do anything and the difference so hold on Jason so if you want to talk about the human rights of people I think we have a responsibility to take care of our own backyard first first and then we can go and basically morally tell other people how they should be running their own countries the difference is shamof
saying what you just said in China or Saudi Arabia would put you in jail and get you a hundred lashes and you would be tortured for a decade we here in the United States are far from perfect we still have the death penalty which is against the United Declaration of Human Rights which we signed which Eleanor Roosevelt created in the U.N and we
propagated As Americans around the world we started that chimoff and we can have these discussions about being better in this country and the what about ISM that you're proposing is so um disproportional to the equivalent of the Holocaust going on we're talking about a million uyghurs and concentration camps right now to talk about what we have here that we need to
fix and compare it to that or to Saudi Arabia whipping bloggers and throwing gay people off roofs for being gay these two things are not morally comparable they are very far and we need to have open discussions and talk about human rights all the time because if we do not talk about it all the time then your position which is I don't have time for
that I want to solve my problems then gives the green light to dictators everywhere that nobody's watching these things have vigilance and that that's what I find and I think hold on a second that position that's not what I said and that's not true you said you can't get up for it yeah so tell me a problem are you are you saying that the the
situation with the uyghurs uh is the same as the Holocaust people who are Jewish are making that comparison you never know I'm asking you I think it is there are upwards of a million people in a concentration camp right now this is getting to numbers that are actually comparable it is actually a valid comparison you're saying there are a
million people in a concentration camp that is the numbers that human rights organizations are saying between 300 000 and a million people are incarcerated right now being tortured raped and in doing for sterilization re-education and when they're released are being tracked in ghettos and so are you doing this up hold on you're saying the entire world has
basically decided that that doesn't matter you just said you can't get up for it I'm talking about you specifically but who is getting up well who is getting up for it I am very up on it I talk about it all the time every week what about the US government what are they doing about it the Biden just said we are going to do a ban and we are going to uh
sanction companies that do business in that region so apple and and uh Tesla I think there will be increased pressure on all companies that are engaging in China it's Goods that are sourced from those areas right correct yes it's it's if your supply chain comes from that area like we won't we won't buy Nazi Goods but we'll sell our iPhones into Nazi
well if you want to have a discussion about this you know it's how do we disengage from China we've had this discussion here how can what amount of time will it take to disengage from countries that have brutal dictatorships that are committing human rights attracts again might look look I I think I'm spending a lot of time and money actually trying to fortify
America's supply chain you guys know about some of the things that I'm doing absolutely I'm not doing that from a moral perspective I'm doing that from a practical capitalist perspective I think the jobs are better served for Americans and I think that we should have the ability to build our own businesses just like China has the right to do for
themselves without the risk of these things being undercut by policies that we don't understand which is effectively what you do when you Outsource your supply chain to countries where you're not 100 aligned with them yeah and they're dictatorships so again I'm not I I I'm not even sure that that China is a dictatorship the way that you want to call it that again
I think a country that's in the name look you have to understand Jason there are a set of checks and balances here on China that you know at the end of the day I don't think that I have the moral absolutism to judge China and I would say that when NATO is silent the United Nations is silent all of Western Europe is silent and America is effectively
silent that this issue may be small data points being extrapolated in a way to create a narrative that maybe not be true and if it is true Jason there is a responsibility for those body politics to do something because that is the early warning signal that the rest of the world uses to say okay hold on let me re-prioritize my list of things so I
guess what I'm saying is I am not going to be an armchair journalist on this topic nor am I going to be the armchair human rights advocate for the world because I just don't know I can focus on the things that I know about build the things that I know about and if something really does get red light status then other parties will do something and
again I just want to be clear NATO is silent United Nations is silent America is silent a press release doesn't change the actual technical posture on these topics okay if that if your position is that human rights matters to you if Government large government organizations or politicians uh give you the green light to care about it that's fine I care about it intrinsically every
day great I'm fine with you doing that I thought there was a segue there to talk about the ray dalio thing that Freeburg cares about I mean this is I mean this debate that you're having between kind of realism and idealism and foreign policy is sort of what dalio tackles right Freiburg look I mean it sounds to me like there's um let's just say a red herring there
always needs to be as chamat points out a narrative on framing our enemy when you know you're running out of land I mean you guys saw this uh was it a journal article or New York Times article that came out today that U.S intelligence revealed that Putin had actually uh put some actors into the eastern Ukraine uh to set up for a reason to
have a response and therefore an excuse to invade the Ukraine so he was trying to create a bit of a fireworks show to give him an excuse we always need a narrative that we can sell to uh our uh you know our our citizens and so you know there's not going to be a lot of you know padding on the back of China right now as we've talked about there is
this you know overarching multi-hundred year economic cycle you know call it geopolitical cycle that the United States and China are about to Clash on and in order for them to clash effectively we need to get the narrative right which is to paint them as the bad guy and to make things evil and look I mean you you may take your ethical
framework and say that they are bad and you may be able to take other parts of your ethical framework and looking objectively call some countries that you consider good bad as well depending on what story you want to tell yourself and what story you want to be told and I think that's what's going on and we'll continue to go on for a long period of
time and this this uyghur thing as chamat pointed out how do you measure on an absolute basis human rights I don't think that there's a way to do so whether it's one person getting tortured publicly in a street or a hundred thousand people being suppressed economically and not being able to to get jobs it's hard to say what is appropriate what what is not what is
evil what is not at the end of the day we create narratives and that narrative allows the bigger picture to kind of play itself out and I think that's what's going on largely and I don't think we're going to hear a lot of good news about China for the next decade from any politician in the United States or anyone that wants to defend our political and economic
interests globally which are certainly being challenged by China right now so I don't know that's my diatribe about the dalio look at dalio obviously does a great job of kind of simplifying and eloquently stating what's going on but I think this is one of many many manifestations of it you need only read what the UN Amnesty International Human
Rights Watch The Guardian the New York Times you know this is not tough for questions why do you think you're so wound up about this and you're not wound up about what's going on in Somalia Oh no you're not wound up about what's going on in Saudi Arabia or you're not or you're not wound up about hold on hold on what's going on in eastern
Ukraine hold on a second there are human rights violations all over the world I comment on them and I have commented on them for decades since I worked at amnesty National Amnesty International which is I where I started my career I've been passionate about this since the age of 18 or 19. when I worked at Amnesty International you said that you
cannot grade these things right you just said like it's hard to compare these things and this is a problem like you can actually do that there are human rights violations like freedom of speech which you know is a great aspiration but we would say torture murder systematic rape and sterilization are more intense and horrific than just freedom of speech
so if you look at Hong Kong when they shut down Apple news that's one level of Human Rights right people have lost their ability again you're telling stories hundreds of these are not stories these are facts Apple news was shut down you were telling a fact about a particular a particular set of experiences that are particularly harming a set of people let
me give you another fact in the United States where we have a population of let's be generous and say 400 million people 2.3 million under 40 million 340 million Americans 2.3 million of whom are incarcerated absolutely in China with a population of 1.4 billion 1.7 million Chinese are incarcerated absolutely something we have to do where is human rights being
violated on an absolute basis it's a very difficult conversation to use facts and figures because at the end of the day there's a lot of data that can be pointed the other way and so it all comes down to narratives and that narrative always has an objective which is what are you trying to get people to believe and what are you trying to get
them to get behind and get to do yes and what are you trying to justify yes they don't have a drug problem over there because they killed all the drug dealers Mal put them up against the wall and shot them so you know they just send their fentanyl here that's fair enough but I'm just saying like look and and it's it's a very good point which is you
can actually take the data and you can slice it and tell different stories around it but at the end of the day it's very hard to say there's good and there's evil that we have to go and attack and and that is what is going to never set attack I never said attack I didn't say invade China over this and I didn't say invade Saudi Arabia I think we should talk increase the temperature
raise the temperature no I did not say that either if you want to know what I think should happen your political pressure on them right I think when people are involved in torture murder rape and sterilizing people that there should be economic and disengagement that occurs as a first step and that that is why when people in our circles in Venture Capital take
money from somebody who murdered a journalist Muhammad bin Salim uh and be asked from Saudi Arabia we should disengage from a country like that I believe that that is what we should do and I believe okay it's like us I believe people like us who are capital allocators and are creators and who are influencers should be talking about
human rights all the time and we should be familiar with the universal Declaration of Human Rights and we should read what's in it and we should aspire to hit those notes in our country and everywhere else and this me too ISM I'm sorry this you know equivalency problem that you guys keep bringing up that is a trap that is an intellectual
trap because there is no equivalency from putting um detaining a million people putting hundreds of thousands of them and torturing them to what's happening in the United States where we wrote The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and where we can have conversations about it if you tried to have the conversation we are going to disagree with you we would all be
tortured in Saudi Arabia we would all be tortured and detained inside of China I just think that there's a very dangerous thing that you're doing which is you are ranking and which is essentially assigning some sort of let's just call it economic value to those things that you just just described torture rape Force sterilization but I think then you're ignoring how do
you actually economically rank systemic racism in the United States what happens in our inner school system inner city school system what happens to black and brown men what happens to the families of those people what happens to how the lobbies basically break down the Health Care System all I'm saying is Jason if you take your argument to the extreme
you start to get into all these areas of gray where it's impossible to assign economic realities to those things so that you can actually Rank and rate that's why I do economic yeah because we're talking about these things no no I never use a numerator I'm just saying one is proportionally different sure I'm not putting economic I never determine if
those really bad things happen 10 times and these kind of bad things happen ten ten thousand times which one's worse I think if you asked anybody who is in a uyghur prison being sterilized towards you know I'm asking you if they would rather be yes I mean you could actually do this test Jason I'm asking you a question if 10 people 10 uyghurs were
raped or forced sterilized yes versus 10 million black men falsely incarcerated which one is worse yeah this is not the way to do the calculus you could do it on an individual basis you can look at it individual inside of a prison being tortured and an individual living in the United States every single person who is inside of that torture chamber being
raped being sterilized would say I would absolutely love to come to America that's why everybody wants to come to this country and live in a free democracy where they could speak freely they can practice whatever religion they want and not be tortured and what you're doing by adding up all the tiny pain and suffering that we have here in America
and then you know trying to conflate that with these horrific acts you have to look at exactly how horrific these are on an individual basis just like we did with George Floyd we see George Floyd happen that is something that is absolutely worth being outraged about at a higher level right you have to stop for a second and say oh my God this has
to be resolved we can do these two things at the same time we can refine our education system now George Floyd the uyghurs being sterilized I think George Floyd's my point because there there's been innumerable number of black men that have been murdered with nearly a thing that's ever happened in the United States but it happened in an
exact moment where the sum of all of these other things that happened before had just compounded to a point where the whole thing spilled over and enough people decided to basically say the sum total of this damage yeah now is the equivalent of a very meaningful human rights violence you can work on both these things at the same time is my
point and this and this you're basically giving a pass by by kind of conflating these two things in my mind you can work on both these issues you could want to stop abhorrent torture and murder and rape while wanting to make our justice system better while wanting to make our education system better you don't have to pick one trim off I think you do actually no you do not we
could absolutely create nothing I can do about the uyghurs in China zero absolutely there is you could not Capital allocate to Regions or to companies that are engaging I don't I don't have any Xing Chinese okay and if you do see one you could do that and you could also I can't because they can't get out of China what are you talking
about do you taste in Saudi Arabia no okay did you make a moral decision about that no okay if you did get offered a billion dollars would you take it from them and by the way to be honest there's a bunch of my companies that have been supported by folks who have taken money from them and I know that's a problem when I look what well what's a bigger
problem is it that the solution that these guys are that they're designing for mental health or diabetes or you know housing or whatever it is the startup does when they take money from SoftBank or whoever all of a sudden they should be canceled and not be able to do that I didn't say cancel just take the money from somebody different nobody
said canceled where I don't know CO2 pick another firm Goldman I don't know who it doesn't take Saudi so should the should the United States create a program where whenever you get us you ever get a term sheet from SoftBank or anybody with money from didn't say that pif you should just be able to go and redeem it for some somebody else's money I never said that
either I think each individual a capital allocator like yourself and a CEO should make what they believe is a morally right decision well they voted and they don't care about this issue they're voting with their dogs after getting that people should care about human rights and they should care about who they make money for I know I'm a
lone voice I know I'm a lone voice but I believe you should care about it I'm not saying Jason I'm just saying something very subtle I'm not saying that what you believe is wrong in fact I think it's beautiful and wholeheartedly right what I'm saying is when everybody else tries to nod their head and agree with you in the moment they're just morally virtue
signaling in a luxury belief that they themselves don't exhibit they don't make any changes towards and it's largely because they don't believe that this is an issue and I'm just putting it on the table as it just is true based on everybody's Behavior maybe other than you I agree with you but everybody else is voting I would like to change
everybody's behavior and I think you can offer your opinion and maybe you will change some people's minds I'm sure there are some people listening here and I know there are some Founders who would not take money from SoftBank and would not take money from Saudi Arabia and I know there are some capital allocators who will not take money from dictatorships I think that you're you're
also forgetting that there's there has been as as it seems again from very very far away looking in a lot of things that they have been able to do that is really constructive you know they've actually created some pretty decent ties to Israel um they've actually started to create a path to normal normalized relations in the Middle East
you know they've organized against what could be the real threat there which is you know a a nuclear empowered Iran so just to put things in perspective Jason it's kind of like you have to look at the totality of the situation again in the United States today if you've just looked at that one simple thing you can cherry pick all kinds of reasons why
many other companies shouldn't expect shouldn't accept American Capital because you know we don't really exactly have our [ __ ] together either proportion of these issues is I think I think what shamath is saying is the world the world is complicated I mean we had so under the the previous president they said there could never be uh like a peace in
the Middle East or a deal between Israel and Arab powers and there was the Doha agreement where you had three Arab states signing pastries with Israel and Saudi Arabia allowing flights between Saudi Arabia and Israel for the first time and that's all because of MBS and there was an article on the Wall Street Journal talking about how King Solomon
actually was holding MBS back on this because you know he's from part of the previous generation who was backing the Palestinians and MBS just wants to move forward and actually get a deal done with Israel and if the Palestinians won't make it then he's willing to move forward without them and this is not me saying this is a Wall Street Journal
yeah we need to dig up that piece so all I'm saying look what happened with that journalist was absolutely wrong but clearly like Foreign Relations is very complicated especially in the Middle East and it's not clear that like net net Saudi Arabia probably just did the one wrong thing which is that every country engages in extrajudicial killings they just got caught right
because I don't think it's fair to say but also torture they also killed a journalist I think that Americans have done that okay we've done that as well absolutely I don't think you actually have any idea the extent of what we have done during the course of these wars in all of these countries I don't think you know well I don't think I know yeah so by
saying criticize Abu grape do you really know do you know of all the other the worst one of the worst things we ever did and one of the things we need to Aspire to do better around the Middle East for 20 years now in Afghanistan we supported Warlords in Afghanistan and we were allies with who were raping young boys I mean this was
like a giant uh series of articles in the New York Times Iran Contra I mean we've been doing this since the 80s even more recently in Libya we we basically got rid of a Gaddafi and plunged that whole country into Civil War and it's never recovered from it so look I I actually Jason I I'm somewhere in between I actually agree with your idealism my mind's still blown
that you actually work for AMC International but I just think that the world is more complicated than that and sometimes we have to make choices and and the the thing that concerns me is that that idealism that you're citing has become a Prelude and a pretext for war in the over the last 20 years and we can and to be clear I'm not advocating
Globe getting into these conflicts Libya Syria Iraq you know what good has that done us yeah you know I'm anti-war you know I'm anti-war you know I'm not advocating for invading places I'm advocating that we speak up when we see Saudi Arabia take a blogger uh Rafi everybody did I mean that was universally condemned but but the question is who is it being caned for
writing blog posts what's an alternative in Saudi Arabia live there we don't get to pick and choose who the leaders of these countries are does it mean that doesn't I'm talking specifically about entrepreneurs Capital allocators that doesn't mean we need to engage in business and building their chip stack if you want the sternly worded press
release you just got it from Biden to hopefully it it's it peaked it it satisfies it quenches your thirst because the only other solution us talking about actually if you want to know what I want I want to see the three of you speak up for human rights that's what I would like to say I think that human rights in the United States is way more important to me than human rights
anywhere else in the globe and I think that we have an abysmal track record of taking care of colored men and women in this country and I don't disagree and so I have zero patience and tolerance for white men blathering on about [ __ ] that happens outside your own backyard fix your own inside backyard humor rights here as well because you
guys are the ones you do not get to diminish me for being white no I understand but I'm saying that you are uniquely in tradition of power in a way that the rest of us are not and so when you guys clean up the inside then we can go and fix the outside yeah I believe we can do both I I believe we can do the same thing at the same time we could speak about human
rights here we could speak about it in Saudi Arabia we could speak about in China and we could talk about the same thing we could talk about all the human right issues from freedom of speech to murder I do I do constantly if you care so much about journalists why haven't you spoken up in favor of son and Assange the way that Glenn Greenwald has
of Julian Assange Assange and Snowden read Glenn greenwald's reporting on these topics I think that we need to get to the those I in either case we don't know you've acted with complete certainty on Twitter saying that these guys are Traders and should be locked up in U.S prisons oh no no I I think we don't know hi we know who they're working for why
haven't you spent the time to learn no well I mean it is a black box in that case we don't know in both of those cases what the backstory is I do think I do have a new conversation on what's going on you know about what's going on with the uyghurs because you read a New York science article the New York Times article about Snowden
we have had people have we have we have people who have defected and been on 60 Minutes who were in those prisons you believe what you want to believe no you you literally can believe somebody who escaped from the prison you can believe them yes with when it comes to Julian Assange I I I don't know what to believe exactly because he released all those
data dumps and he didn't do it properly like a journalist where he vetted the information which snowed in I'm more inclined to think that he was a good actor and I think it's a very nuanced position so if you want to try to paint me as like not knowing everything about every uh human rights violation in the world every nuanced position of a leaker
that's correct I don't know everything about everybody but I'm going to take that position I don't know anything about any of these things which is why I choose to focus on the things that I can control and I want to believe that I want to improve my own backyard which I think is absolutely great and I think you can add an end there which is you
should be talking about human rights and Hong Kong should be talking about inside okay and not my problem is the problem not my problem I believe that's part of the problem right now you said it you you said it perfectly Jamal people don't care about human rights anymore there's a larger people I agree with you who do not care about human rights the way I
did I think they care about the local version of Human Rights fine yeah and I think you need to care about all of them and talk about all of them at the same time the international adventurism around human rights I don't support in the least and I do feel that a lot of this stuff is like the tip of the Spear of people who then get morally absolute
and say we have to fix this and the only solution is to invade these countries and instead I would just rather them if they really care about it let them stand up and do what they need to do I think we need to fix our own backyard I mean look not to kind of bolster tomat's point but there is a blind eye turned to that which we don't want to believe or
that narrative which we don't want to sell and then we point towards the narrative that we do and we see this all the time where the focal point of where should we be addressing human rights issues is where we have economic and geopolitical interests no one seems to be solving the problem in Somalia no one's getting on stage talking about the
issues that people are facing in countries outside of where we have deep rooted trade Partnerships and serious economic interest and so you know like we can tell ourselves all day day long that we need to be kind of the absolutists and absolutely take care of the world because we're the the beacon for human rights but the challenge is we
end up being forced to choose where we want to spend our time and our resources and our resources go to where those resources flow back to us and that's often where we have a geopolitical and economic interest now Jason I'll say one more thing like just because it's important jaycal because you called us all out I I am an absolute human rightist in the sense
that I believe every human on earth should have a right to do whatever they want within their own sphere of influence provided their sphere of influence does not intersect with the sphere of influence of others end of story and I don't see that happening anywhere on Earth and this ends up being a trade-off you always end up trading
off your sphere of influence for that of the greater good or someone else because power allocates and power Aggregates to specific places often to government sometimes to organize societal decisions that we say we're going to trade off our individual rights and freedoms for that of the greater Collective and it is that judgment and it is that gray area where
all of these issues that we individually choose to address and spend our time on arise and so I have um you know just to point out like a very absolute point of view on this but to me the challenge is how do you make a discernment how do you make a determination that imprisonment of brown and black people in the United States versus the treatment of people by
um uh militia in Somalia versus the treatment of the wiggers in China versus you know and and you go on and on and on it's a very difficult moral judgment or you could just say they're all wrong they are all wrong they are all wrong we're going to talk well see but you work on all of them you work on none of them and I would rather see Innovation
enable more people to have access to more free speech to have more resources to have more of an ability to climb and have the freedom to do the things they want to do with their life I think that Innovation and Technology can bring all of these old school ways of thinking and behaving out of the Medieval ages and the Dark Ages and so that's where I
choose to spend my time you know how can we unleash people's freedom we got to make things more available we got to make things more accessible I just want to make two points and then maybe we can move on on this topic Point number one is when you're an immigrant part of what you're doing is you're actually voting against the place that
you leave to embrace the place that you come to and Jason you know of all the four of us on this pod You're the Only Natural Born American right you you started here you've lived your entire life here and that's an incredible blessing that you were given and the three of us weren't and you know in my case I had to go through an even more circuitous path I didn't even come to
the United States first had to go through Canada but implicitly you know when I look at the places that I left and specifically you know when I look about when I look at Sri Lanka who you know has a very checkered human rights record in fact terrible in some ways and the way that they ended the war against the tamil's atrocious
I have to make a decision right I have to make a decision about is this something that I'm going to wade into or not and what I've realized through my own life's journey is these are not my battles and in many ways I abdicated my responsibility to vote on that issue when I left and instead I stay here and I focus on the things that I can control here and I
think that I do have a responsibility to fix the issues of the country that adopted me and so that's where some of my framework comes from separately I do want to give all three of us a shout out because I do think that there is an enormous human rights issue that I do think we did bring up and in the last few weeks has become a real Groundswell
and it started on the you know year in recap pod where we talked about what's happened to our kids and I just want to call out that in the last few weeks the amount of press attention that this issue has gotten which I do think is a human rights level issue which is a cognitive impairment of our children has really come front and center and uh I think that it's really
really incredible all the way to like even nature now publishing these you know and maybe the timing is just coincidental but these big longitudinal studies that really show that you know we have uh driven a level of retardation in our children we have held them back from a level of Learning and Development that we now have thrown our arms up in
the air we don't know what the real long-term impact is that I think is a human rights level issue and domestically in the United States I think we're in a position to fix it if we decide to take care of it so you know again I don't mean to offend you when I say that in my prioritization list it's below the line but there are different
human rights issues that I care about and I think to just to be clear you know when you said I called everybody out here I'm trying to have a productive discussion freeberg I'm not trying to put it in a spot I don't get offended I'm not I'm trying to have a predominative discourse okay but I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to call out besties here
I'm trying to have a productive dialogue from Prince alawid he's like one of the largest investors in the world you know I wouldn't yeah yeah he's a Saturday of Saudi Arabia you wouldn't if the money comes from a dictatorship from an authoritarian country I would 100 he was locked up he was locked up at the Ritz and he was forced to give a
bunch of his money so it doesn't mostly lived out of the country anyway I mean person oh I always tell you my my face is a citizen or a former citizen of that Country Born there Jacob yeah I agree let me just tell you I clearly I would never take money from an authoritarian regime would you take money from a Chinese billionaire no I would not take
it from a Chinese no I would not take it from a Chinese if I if I no not an authoritarian regime they they the Chinese are not an authoritarian we're talking about a Chinese billionaire if the Chinese billionaire was outspoken about human I would tell you it's a great thought question and I'm just ripping here it's a great thought experiment if a chinese billionaire had
left China he just absolutely tortures me yeah so but no I would not I would if the person was a reformer yes I would consider it I would consider it Jason but Jason I guess what you're saying is like you and this is your decision to make my decision yes it's it's important for you that you understand what people's personal belief systems are
when you take money from them no human rights is important to me well there's some saying my their personal belief system like you know you utilize care less if they were an illicit drug user right for somebody else so for example I'll give you an example so I did take money from a Chinese billionaire when I when I first started so remember but I'm
not going to say who it is no no need but there was a a morality clause and there were certain things that were incredibly important to this person and they were very easy for me to reflect because they were nothing that I cared about but you know they explicitly didn't want certain kinds of investments in whether it's gambling cannabis sex porn for me
yeah the list was gambling alcohol can anyway my point is you're fine signing up to those moral judgments from an investor but not necessarily you know silence on I'm asking you the question you would be fine signing up for those moral oblique for moral delineation of what you can and can't do even if it's not against what you believe but you have a
different issue when it comes to silence on these other topics yeah I would here's here's how I'll answer the question I if I'm taking other people's money to invest it and they don't want to invest in the adult I don't have a problem with a cannabis as an example I don't have a problem with wagering and gambling but if I'm building a fund to invest in
businesses those are that's not an important issue for me and I don't know that's a great Venture investment and I can also invest outside of it my own money so it's a more nuanced issue there like I I have invested in wagering apps that I'm thinking about creating a Syndicate specifically for gambling and wagering and yes there are LPS who I
currently have in my previous fund the active fund that do not I do not invest in wagering because of that so yes and it's because they just want Clarity in some cases on not getting sued for investing in a in a in a wagering companies where we don't have a federal mandate yet so you know I think comparing it's these are great thoughts everything for me I was fine signing up
for no alcohol because my father was an alcoholic and so it was it was weird and there was a certain investor who at one point tried to be an LP very well-known person who uh was convicted of domestic abuse and I didn't take that money because I was I had been the victim of domestic abuse as my as my mom yeah and so that was a moral issue for
me the point I'm trying to make to Jason is that it's very nuanced everybody can be on a bunch of different sides of this thing and I tend to think the most consistent reliable thing is that these are very local beliefs that when they touch you you have a point of view on them and I and I think that you know it's much more practical and maybe this
is just being too practical to see a world where people want to fix their own backyard first and the and I think a lot of why you may be disappointed that a lot of people don't have a strong review on things like China as people are a little exhausted with having moral views about things that are so far away when things in their own backyard are so broken yeah
and and I can understand that exhaustion and to be clear I just I just like human rights is such an obvious and easy one to get behind for all humans and that really perspective and that's what the universal Declaration of Human Rights was about was we were hoping that all countries in the United Nations or Eleanor Roosevelt was that we could all
just agree that torture was immoral and when the United States waterboarded the United States whether the death penalty is immoral so right and you know what that's something that you know is our great family we're riddled with hypocrisy the Declaration of Human Rights here is is an ideal it's a goal it's something to strive towards and each country has places where they
succeed and foul and you can actually measure it and we do measure it actually we do measure which countries have the worst record on human rights violations and which ones have the best viable scores are crazy no no they're not you can literally talk look at how many women are raped in prison in one country versus they understand but my
point is when you put a score to that or count it you're not counting a bunch of other things that are really bad as well the scoring system could be refined sure I will give you that and I think this is the debate we had today which was an unexpected debate and I didn't think we would go this deeper I think is such an important debate for us to have as
humans and as a civilization because we are getting in the Weeds on so many other issues whether it's inflation or you know uh Innovation or politics that human rights I feel is something we should all be able to agree on that all people should be so the definition of Jake how everyone says yes the definition and the prioritization is where all the noise is
yeah that's that's everything and how do we deal with violence no one on earth that's going to say I don't believe in human rights everyone agrees with the ideals the question is how you implement them implementation prioritization definition exactly like for example in the west we do I think it's I think it's a legitimate position for you to say that
you're not going to take money from dictators but to then say that any family office from any individual who was born in that country you're not going to take their money either I would have to think about it I didn't say that unless they're willing to risk their lives by denouncing their own government I don't know they have to do it publicly I mean
if I talk to this hypothetical Chinese or Saudi person and they said I don't agree with this I'm working against I'm a reformer I I guess I would have to consider it because I wanted to make money for the reformer but Jason what if they said I don't have a point of view that I would go with people who would you morally disqualify them
you disqualify them on moral grounds that's not the way to make allies Jacob which is important you're not letting me know look look hold on I need to answer it if you're both going to ask me this question and accuse me of you know this I would have to make a nuanced decision on an individual basis I would not make a blanket decision that's my position on
this hypothetical situation where somebody is a Saudi citizen has a family office I would have to make a very nuanced decision like you ditch him off where you didn't take the domestic abusers and you did take the personal that was an American but I took the Chinese okay yeah but it's the same thing it's a human rights violation it's it's a horrible thing that occurred and
you had to make a nuanced decision and you know that's what I'm hoping to promote here is that we have a dialogue about human rights again because when I was growing up in the 80s this was something that the world was getting consensus on and the West had consensus on and I think the West is very weak now and the fact that the NBA that you know
Apple whatever companies I don't want to call out individuals because it's not productive especially if it's aggregated and you know I happen to know some of them it's it's something that the West has to contend with of what is our strategy here with human rights violators do we engage them do we admonish them or somewhere in between do we disengage
engage or you know make our feelings heard and try to shape their behavior to bend towards human rights and it's a very complicated nuanced discussion I'm glad we had it here today the time period you're talking about where we supposedly had consensus on this during the you said the 1980s during the Cold War I was talking about in America yeah
okay well we talked about it a lot in America is my point yeah well I think actually I think Ronald Reagan did an earlier job with this he denounced the incredible evil empire but said that we should be a shining city on a hill and we did we actually avoided a bunch of unnecessary Foreign Wars 100 so look I think the best way for us
to lead on this issue is just to be an example we're not doing a very good job of that I mean 100 of your ideals are great but the world doesn't neatly line up with those ideals and presents us with choices that don't fit those ideals I mean during the Cold War we had a choice to support either communist regimes or in a lot of cases authoritarian regimes and we chose the
lesser of two evils I think today we have choices between do we want to support Islamic fundamentalists regimes or we want to support authoritarian regimes we're resisting it I mean those are the types of tough choices the world actually presents to us and I think that's what makes it hard to [Music] it's a complicated chessboard and you're
better at chess than mesack so I will give you that and I think it's great that we had discussion I really do appreciate that you guys were willing to talk about this for so long it's an important discussion because if we don't stand for human rights and basic human rights what do we stand for you know and I agree that domestic is important I
stand for I Stand For Me Yeah we know that we know that tell us about the sweater tell us about the sweater no candles and Jacob if you're concerned about the rise of authoritarianism which actually this was my one of my big trends in the prediction episodes I am concerned democracy which is the most negative Trend but then I think you should be
concerned about this like Rising tide we have here of censorship and the surveillance yes I'm in agreement and our federal law enforcement agencies demanding more and more power lockdowns and lockdowns this whole like January 16th out of proportion you should be concerned about their attempts to exploit and use that to demand more Powers I do not believe in surveillance would I
uh and I think you should understand that the hysteria created around that event is going to be used it's going to be exploited possible to demand these Powers politicians are explaining this on all sides of the aisle I agree with you the right and the left the right is diminishing it the left is exacerbating it the truth in the middle is I think we
are in agreement sex the overwhelming majority of people who went to the Capitol that day were were [ __ ] who just wanted to protest and they cared about Trump and they went there for the party of it all and then there was a small cohort who intended harm and who are deranged and who could potentially be dangerous in the way shmoth framed it
lone wolves or small packs of wolves like the Oklahoma City bombers who murdered a large number of people um and so we have to be very careful in Prosecuting one group one way and one the other way and that's exactly what the Department of Justice has done in that case 700 people got pled deals or very minor sentences and then these
folks are going to have the book thrown at them and rightfully so because they could have murdered Pence or they could have murdered Pelosi just like that woman got murdered I'm sorry the woman tragically got stopped and shot and died like that could have been a much different day if dozens of people had died and those cops had not shown restraint we could be sitting here
having a much different discussion about The Oath Keepers if the Oath Keepers had done with the Oklahoma City bombers succeeded in doing this would be a much different discussion right they didn't which is why it is a different discussion and well thank God for our police and and for How brave they were in not unloading their pistols when uh
any reasonable person who was being beaten by that crowd and crushed would have taken their gun out and started firing they didn't thank God those police did not say look I think the one thing we can agree on is we don't want something like that to happen again and there's two things two simple things that would prevent it one is reform of the the Electoral count act like we
talked about that's what Biden should be going for not making these speeches about Bull Connor and George Wallace he could actually get that done and the other thing is if the Capitol Police had just been a little bit more prepared and had barricades and screens of better security that also couldn't it couldn't happen again that's all we have to do to
solve that problem is there anything we have to do is arrest these Oath Keepers and put them in jail for what they did well it's no they've been indicted you tell me if they're going to go to jail don't convict him or something yeah well and rightfully so it seems hopefully they get their day in court maybe we can transition I want to talk
about the other side of the coin on inflation because I think that we have hammered the point for a long time now that you know the government was really slow sort of like off-pisteed by printing incompetent trillions and trillions of dollars and and injecting it into the economy and what it's really created has been uh this massive bout of inflation which
then could cause an ultimate recession because the FED has to react all of those things I think are well documented I just wanted to put on the record the a little element of the counter factual which I think is really important and this is an article in the Wall Street Journal and Nick you can post this if you can please but I'm just
going to read this so I'm just going to look down the first two rounds of stimulus payments lifted 11.7 million people in America out of poverty according to the Census Bureau Americans build up 2.7 trillion dollars in extra savings and some expect that combined with Rising wages to Bravo to provide them with lasting stability despite the return to more normal
spending patterns and Rising inflation so I just want to make sure that all of us have heard that because that's an incredible thing to be able to say that 11.7 million Americans in poverty are no longer in poverty because of the stimulus which I think when you look at the right way of framing what some of these progressives want to do I think a
lot of the Good Intentions comes from things like this and I just think it's important to acknowledge that that did happen and that's something that we should really be proud of and especially if those folks can actually stay in the lower middle and then move up to the middle class that's an incredible outcome and you know we we all supported that I think
genuinely and I think that that's good we knew it was scary we needed to put something into the economy to keep it from crashing and it's very hard to know what what the right amount was right tremoth like how do you know what the right amount of stimulus is in a pandemic that happens every 100 years uh and thank god it feels like Omicron is
you know leading us out of this okay yeah there's some great examples by the way in this article if you guys if people want to take the time to read it of some examples of people that have really done an incredible job in um in like completely changing their financial picture which I think well I mean a lot of comp a lot of people went into freelance a lot of these young
people realized I don't know if you saw this headline a million less people uh started college this year and enrolled and I think what's happening is so many people who were going into college realized I don't know if I should go into debt I figured out a way to make money at home I'm more financially literate I'm going to make a better
decision about college and not go 100K into debt well to be very expensive people very resilient and being better making better judgments about their own lives because they've been forced to to be specific I think you mean boys because the other thing that's happening is in colleges now it's becoming very tilted uh female versus male especially
colleges in some colleges it's you know two-thirds female one big male so 65 we were actually creating this weird longitudinal pattern here where uh an entire gender is going to be very miseducated relative to another one and in fact it'll be the exact opposite of what it was like in probably the 50s or 60s where you had these large swaths of
men that are educated women who typically stayed home or were undereducated relative to their ability here now it's the exact opposite whereas you know women are getting undergrads and graduate degrees and boys are learning how to play video games and smoke pot in cells a very strange time I mean that's what happens when you David's what is that like yeah being an
incel tell us you were a Pioneer in being an incel we made it through the show so it was so civil let's get the Friedberg ratio up let's talk about an exciting scientific paper and the implications of it it's a science boy tell us about this new study from Harvard that revealed Epstein-Barr virus could be associated with Ms I'll do a
zoom out then a zoom in yes so bear with me for a moment so you know there were over 80 what are called autoimmune diseases these are diseases where your body your immune system attacks your own tissue and causes real problems one in 20 people worldwide suffer from some sort of autoimmune condition so Crohn's disease lupus which affects you know your whole system rheumatoid
arthritis or your joints get inflamed Sjogren's syndrome where your eyes and your mouth get get messed up and and multiple sclerosis which we'll talk about here in a second but these are all diseases that have a similar ideology which is that your immune system attacks some tissue in your body it dysfunctions and it attacks it and there's always
been this big question about kind of what causes autoimmune conditions and what causes immune system dysregulation like this and there's all sorts of different theories and studies and papers many of which have been you know well well documented genetic risk factors environmental factors age and in particular as you get older the thymus which is supposed to create these helper
cells that go out and keep cells in your immune system from attacking your own body your thymus kind of starts to fade away or sorry your thousand starts Fade Away start stop working and so um you know one Theory that's been talked about a lot is molecular mimicry which means that there's some protein from a virus or that enters your body or
cancer and that protein looks a lot like some other protein in your body and so your immune system starts attacking that protein and as a result your immune system gets turned on to that protein and it actually attacks a similar looking protein somewhere else in your body and that's a you know a very kind of broad statement about you know some
potential cause of autoimmune conditions and you can find protein mimicry theories coming from the gut uh where you know microbes in the gut are triggering this and then also viruses so in particular you know cytomegalovirus and Epstein-Barr virus which we're going to talk about here today so multiple sclerosis is this disease one of the
autoimmune diseases where your immune system attacks and destroys myelin which is you know found on um your nerve cells and in your brain and it can actually cause you know when this happens and your immune system starts to attack your brain you end up with these lesions and really debilitating effects over time one in 300 people in the US have been diagnosed with MS
it is a brutal disease it it lasts your whole life and the treatment today the primary treatment is this drug that destroys B cells in your body and your B cells make antibodies and so by destroying the B cells it gets rid of the cells that are making the antibodies that are attacking your own brain and uh and this is a really effective treatment
it's been able to reduce the effects of Ms significantly but we still don't know what causes it and what triggers Ms and there's always been this Theory going back to the the mimicry question that one of these viruses that everyone seems to get as they you know age is causing it um and so Epstein-Barr virus has always been thought to be one of those viruses
it's one of the herpes viruses uh everyone knows it as mono so you know you get mono and you get swollen neck a lot of people do most people that get this virus don't end up having any symptoms they don't even know they have it and here's a crazy statistic 95 percent of people have Epstein-Barr virus and it's known that Epstein-Barr virus does actually cause some kinds of
cancers and when lymphoma and so on so here's the paper that was published yesterday and again if you know that Epstein-Barr virus you know is is doing some other stuff in your body that's negative shouldn't this be a reason to look at it for Ms but how do you get the data to do it given that 95 of people already have Epstein-Barr virus so
here's what happened these guys at Harvard went to the military the U.S military the U.S military basically had 10 million members of the military take 62 million blood samples over a period of time from 1993 to 2013. and when they take these blood samples they you know they run their typical checkup on these people on the military members but they
save some of the blood sample in a freezer and so they've got 62 million blood samples sitting in freezers the US military does and so these researchers were able to access those blood samples and they then found five percent of the they found the five percent that don't and they went through and they found that during this period of time that
they have all this Blood data for they were able to identify 800 people that started out Epstein-Barr virus negative and then got MS a hundred percent of the people that got Ms were infected with Epstein-Barr virus during this period of time and for the group of people that um that didn't get Ms only about half of them uh got Epstein-Barr virus infection during
this period of time and then they looked at this for about 20 other viruses and basically showed absolutely no correlation or difference in Risk between all the other viruses if you got Ms or didn't get Ms and so it basically creates a 95 probability that you're 32 times more likely to get um Ms from Epstein-Barr virus than from anything
else it is from a racially diverse pool an age-diverse pool ethnically diverse pool so a lot of other you know confounding factors like race or ethnicity or genetics a lot of other factors like all the other viruses that might be causing Ms have been excluded and it shows that maybe Epstein-Barr virus is the primary cause of Ms that
triggers certain people's immune systems to go nuts and attack the brain and it's interesting because you know Epstein-Barr virus has a bunch of proteins in it that look like other human proteins so it makes sense why this might happen Ms costs 40 Grand a year there's 30 billion dollars a year spent in the U.S on Ms care so if we can go in and get it I've seen Barr virus
eliminated from the human body it would be an incredibly Incredible cost saving and a therapeutic benefit to people with Ms you should talk about the reason why we don't have a herpes vaccine though so HSV one two three now four none of these things have reasonable vaccines and it's for a very specific reason which is that the herpes virus
itself is incredibly incredibly difficult to isolate and find until it activates and it hides itself and it nests itself inside these nerve cells so you may want to just talk about how complicated it is to produce it I mean the DNA disappears into these nerve cells and so it's hard to get you know immune system to go and clear them out permanently
uh the Epstein-Barr virus hides out of B cells in your body and so it's floating around in your body forever and as your B cells replicate the virus replicates with them and then when your immune system starts to get weak the virus pops out and starts attacking and inflaming your body again so number one Epstein-Barr virus has never been a
great Target therapeutic Target because there's not much money to be made because it's like who the hell cares about Mono once you get mono you get over it you're fine but if Epstein-Barr virus is in fact causing this problem with with Ms there's a reason to go after a lot of money to go after it and there are several new technologies and therapeutic strategies that are possible
one of which is you know Shabbat sent out uh over our group text a company that's doing T-cell therapies we can actually program a T-cell and the T cell goes into the body and finds these uh these B cells with Epstein-Barr virus and wipes them out there's a steroid a diuretic steroid that's been shown that's used to treat high blood pressure
that's been shown to stop Epstein-Barr virus from leaving cells there's an antiviral drug made by takita called meribavir which has been shown to have high efficacy and eliminating Epstein-Barr virus so there are now therapeutic strategies that are being actively explored that could unlock the potential of minimizing or eliminating
Epstein-Barr virus for a broader population than we ever thought should be taking these therapies because the implications may be that if you can stop Epstein-Barr virus from replicating or eliminated from your body you can stop all these follow-on diseases that occur over time in your life that are super debilitating lastly yeah lupus is another one
tied to herpes simplex 4. I think the the the real problem is going to be that two-thirds of the adult population under the age of 55 have herpes simplex 4. so you know you're literally talking about inoculating the entire world and when we start to think about that grand of a scale there's a cost issue there's a manufacturability issue and then there's
an Roi issue that that unfortunately will be adjudicated and it that to me is what really you know stands out and that and that and that is that just the healthcare economics of it obviously the science of it is still really complicated aren't we doing an mRNA vaccine for Epstein-Barr and how would that play into this absolutely so there's a lot of
techniques this is you know T-cell Therapeutics mRNA a chemotherapy type drug a steroid drug an antiviral drug so um every um modality for Therapeutics uh has some candidate or candidates for Epstein-Barr virus um and so you know there may be a bunch of ways that you start to identify risk factors and that you give someone one particular therapy that might be really
affordable like this antiviral may be super affordable you know if we could make it for five cents a pill you could you know get it out to a lot of people prophylactically that are at high risk you know if there's a a group that actually is active with Ms a good treatment maybe to try and give them the T cell therapy and see if that helps and
so that's the clinical trials that will start now because if you can give people a T cell therapy and eliminate EBV and and stop all future need for MS treatment that'll save 40 Grand a year it'll start to make sense to run clinical studies to see if that stuff's possible and is worth doing uh so it opens up a whole new kind of area of Interest now by the way this
isn't novel people have been talking about this for a long time but this paper has such incredible data and such strong signal that it's really gonna it's really gonna catalyze investment we didn't have the big data based on this study we would not have gotten here for once on the show I will say thank God for the US government and all of the the the data
that they've you know all of these blood samples I want to get your read on the the human transplant thing that we saw this week where a genetically modified pig heart was an implanted into 57 Jason you want a 57 year old man you want to read that out oh yeah David Banner a 57 year old man requested special emergency authorization for the experimental
surgery from the FDA FDA who was dying and unable to receive a human heart transplant the surgery was performed on January 7th uh in Baltimore and um you know this happened as the U.S is facing a major organ shortage I mean we have we have hundreds of thousands I mean of people on organ donor Registries uh or needing a transplant you know my father
was on a kidney transplant registry for eight years until he passed away uh these things are just brutalizing for the individuals and the family around it and so like you know all of a sudden if you can see a path where you can genetically modify uh other sources of organs and implant them without organ rejection into the human body that's
like that is that's mind it's mind-blowing here's what's really important it's not just about the availability of these things but it's about turning off one of the biggest the the big risk factor of organ transplant is um rejection meaning you're putting all this foreign matter into your body it's foreign proteins and so when your
immune system sees all those foreign proteins your body goes Haywire in price to kill it it's like this there's all it's like imagine getting a billion viruses at once and so there's all these new proteins and so one of the interesting things you can do you know if you can grow these uh these organs uh and and alter the genetics of the cells that are being used to grow
the organs is you can get those cells to match your own or uh to basically down regulate all of the proteins that might be triggering immune rejection in your body so theoretically you could grow jaycal's heart with tissue and cells that match your DNA potentially and match your protein structure perfectly and it's such a had a heart you could do
it with him too right there you go good transition but no I mean but and by the way there there may also be a path here where we grow these uh these organs uh with your DNA without even using the animal body uh the entire the entire key of the rest of the animal to do so so there's a lot of really interesting uh breakthroughs
that are possible but but it's really great to see a highlighted um you know non you know kind of transplanted organ from another body into the human body because it's just again it opens up what people have been talking about for decades which is the possibility of this now that we have Gene editing and potentially having the ability to grow
biological matter in bioreactors it's it's going to be it's going to be tremendous Jacob what do you think about the Democratic person in the SEC saying that they wanted to basically make the uh accredited investor laws even stricter that's incredibly infuriating uh yeah that was your big prediction yeah I mean we really have to get these laws I mean I think this is like a
theranos um or wework overreaction which is like oh my god there are some bad private companies if you take the number of bad private companies uh and then look at what is happening in the country with people wagering on Sports and wagering on crypto uh Slash investing depending on where you know how you look at it we need to have one rule for the road which
is people take a test they get accredited and then they can do what they want with their money the equivalent of what I'm suggesting people can only invest a fraction of the money they have on their last two years tax returns let's pick a number five percent of their two-year average on their tax returns ten percent whatever you want to
pick and they have to take a test with the would be the equivalent of people having to take a three-hour course in a you know I don't know 50 question test to go to Vegas and play Blackjack and they could only put on the blackjack table ten percent of their total average yearly income for their household in the past year you think about how crazy that
would be to tell an American you got to take a blackjack course and pass a blackjack test and understand the odds of poker or whatever to play that game and you can only put if you made fifty thousand dollars on average less years you can only bet five thousand in Vegas at any one time that's the max chips you can buy in a year those are the two
things I'm advocating for in private company investing and that's really if we want to have people move from you know poor to middle class from middle class to affluent in this country there has to be Equity participation and Equity participation has to start early look at what happened with all these young people betting on crypto betting
on stocks or stonks and uh you know doing puts and calls and all kinds of crazy things you know in public markets we would really rather see those people or at least in addition be able to invest on LinkedIn if they were a recruiter in year two or they were an Uber driver be able to buy Uber shares or if they were an Airbnb host be able
to buy Airbnb shares as a private company will change the entire uh complexion of upward mobility in the United States and and we really have to keep educating people not limiting their upside that's my personal belief person who asked you the question stop paying attention like five minutes ago oh because we were talking about like 15 minutes ago and like you just
that was a 90-second monologue for Henry what's that you know hashtags started like doing a little bit of artistic Direction you know he's got that Scorsese in him having done the award-winning film Thank You for Smoking and he he got Henry bellcaster on his team you know the tick tock guys Tick Tock guys after making some suggestions
lightly suggesting sax has been directing not directing talk superfans saying hey you might want to make a tick tock out of this monologue here's what happened there there's a quote of a segment that somebody liked they retweeted they got a whole bunch of likes and so I sent the tick tock I said this might make a good talk right yeah nobody else doing that but okay okay
we'll go for it I'm not editing but I'm I'm lightly suggesting again people do think that you have Tucker Carlson's writers writing for you because you say it and people don't know to be clear I that is a joke you do not have Tucker Carlson's current writer's writing for you there may be some I do admit I have a special writing team for
Rose you do I'm just for us do you keep them on retainer like if you have a roast like you can just ask them to punch up some stuff for you or yeah I've only done it twice I did it for you for your roast J Cal and I did it for Phil Hellmuth destroyed Phil oh my god do you remember this is hysterical oh my God this is the cheapest roast ever they
rented like a junior suite that they got for free at something yeah they got it for free they got it for free they had like 30 people in a room and they're like oh you got to come out for Phil's roast it was like 30 people in a junior suite at like a B level Hotel and they were so bad and sax and I came in and we had absolutely no allegiance to the audience
I lost so much money everybody you guys were out of control it was brutal uh here's the helmuth roast I got I got the material right oh no oh no oh my God could you be sure these aren't our jokes this is what a Comedy Central writer wrote so we had well we do not endorse these no what well okay so if you remember what I said that how I work
so they basically put together some material and then I shape it there's like some back and forth the workshop you worked yeah we Workshop it yeah go ahead it begins we're here tonight to roast the poker player known as the greatest unfortunately Phil Ivey wasn't available so we settled for Phil helmuth hey Phil is known as the poker brat the rest
of the world just calls him [ __ ] Phil has mastered the GTO strategy of playing poker for most players GTO stands for Game Theory optimal but in Phil's case it stands for grading toxic and obnoxious despite all this uh Phil fancies himself a quote-unquote poker Ambassador not to throw a damper on things but calling Phil an ambassador for poker is like
calling Bill Cosby an ambassador for Quaaludes oh no you can cut that one oh that's not that's too good let's face it Phil is nuts he's the only poker player sponsored by lithium and silence the poker table so you can hear the voices in his head and Phil was induction to the poker Hall of Fame they retired his straight jacket Phil is doing what all people on crisis
do write self-help books it's called positivity which is ironic because the only thing Phil has ever tested positive for is narcissistic personality disorder that's so good this inspirational Tome is a whopping 84 Pages Oprah has taken inspirational shits bigger than this on Amazon it says people who enjoyed this book also enjoyed pounding their
dick with a meat tenderizer oh my god oh you're you're a bunch of guys are good all right everybody hope you enjoyed Sax's excerpt from the Phil Hellmuth narcissist roast and we'll catch you next week [Music] and they've just gone crazy [Music] besties [Music] it's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow we need to get Mercies [Music]