DOGE unveils a roadmap, Unlocking GDP Growth, WW3 escalation, Fat cell memory

1. 0:00 – 1:54

   Bestie intros!

   1. JCJason Calacanis0:00

      Chamath, do you hear that Friedberg got busted looking at porn on his computer?

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:03

      (laughs)

   3. DSDavid Sacks0:04

      (laughs) No, I did not. You got busted looking at porn?

   4. JCJason Calacanis0:07

      You want to know what it was?

   5. DSDavid Sacks0:08

      Yeah.

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:09

      (laughs)

   7. JCJason Calacanis0:09

      It was Elon and Vivek's Wall Street Journal op-ed.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:13

      It was. (laughs) I lost it.

   9. DSDavid Sacks0:14

      Oh, man.

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:15

       I lost it. It was too good.

   11. DSDavid Sacks0:16

       (laughs)

   12. JCJason Calacanis0:17

       I think he was pleasuring himself to that op-ed.

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:18

       He was playing the skin flute. (laughs)

   14. DSDavid Sacks0:21

       He was playing yogurt everywhere. What happened that is?

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:24

       He had to go for a quick game of pocket pool as you were... Oh my God. (laughs) It was, it was too exciting.

   16. DSDavid Sacks0:29

       You were beating the bishop.

   17. JCJason Calacanis0:30

       Allison came in and she was like wondering what was going on.

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:33

       She grabbed my computer, she looked at it-

   19. JCJason Calacanis0:35

       (laughs)

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:35

       ... and it was an essay.

   21. NANarrator0:37

       Going all in. Let your winner ride. Rain Man, David Sacks. I'm going all in. And I said. We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

   22. DSDavid Sacks0:49

       Love you, bestie.

   23. NANarrator0:50

       Queen of quinoa. I'm going all in.

   24. DSDavid Sacks0:53

       All right, before we get to DOGE, we got a little house keeping, a little housey-housekeeping. You know, we're getting into the holiday spirit here, it's episode 205, we're in year four, and we're having a Christmas party. It's going to be great. The All-In Holiday Spectacular is happening in San Francisco on Saturday, December 7th. I think the VIPs sold out, there's still some tickets left. Go to allin.com/events. And, uh, if you can't make it to San Francisco, I think you can buy, uh, a ticket for $50 on, uh, on the, uh, Zoom. I think we're going to have it on Zoom. Is that right? Am I... Do I have my facts straight there, Friedberg?

   25. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:33

       Yeah. There's going to be a live stream.

   26. DSDavid Sacks1:35

       Mm-hmm.

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:36

       Thanks to Zoom for setting this up for us. It's kind of interesting they're doing this thing where you could, you kind of, you know, get access to live events. So they're helping us-

   28. DSDavid Sacks1:45

       Mm-hmm.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:45

       ... get this set up if you want to watch the, the stream live on Zoom.

   30. DSDavid Sacks1:50

       Anything's possible. It could be spicy.
2. 1:54 – 24:28

   Breaking down the DOGE roadmap

   1. DSDavid Sacks1:54

      listen, bestie Elon and bestie Vivek wrote an op-ed, a barn burner in the Wall Street Journal about DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. And they laid it out, they want to cut overbearing and unnecessary regulation, obviously. They want to cut unnecessary administrative roles, save taxpayers money. They want to run it by founders, not politicians. Helping the Trump transition team find a way to hire "a lean team of small government crusaders." Team's going to work closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. Here's the plan: first, take aim at 500 billion in annual fe- federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress, then fix the government's procurement process by conducting massive audits during temporary payment suspensions. This is an interesting playbook that Elon has done before. So basically, suspend all the payments and, hey, let everybody audit those payments. Drive change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than passing new laws. And two SCOTUS rulings are going to play a major role here. West Virginia versus EPA. That's when SCOTUS ruled that federal agencies can't impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress authorizes them to do so. And Luper Bright versus Raimondo, that's from 2024, and that overturned the Chevron doctrine. We talked about that on a previous episode. So according to DOGE, when combined, "These cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law." DOGE will use software and legal experts to create a list of regulations that Trump can immediately pause. They're going to make some sort of a leaderboard, Elon said, and Vivek said he would do, he suspended his existing podcast. I didn't know he had a podcast, but he's doing a DOGEcast, a DOGE podcast. And so, Friedberg, this has been, you know, a, a major issue for you. Y- you've been talking about on this podcast that the unsustainable, existential issue for our country is all of the debt we have. What are the chances that this is going to occur? Because obviously we all know the machine is going to fight to preserve the machine. Chances that we are sitting here in four years and we've seen meaningful cuts in spending and a meaningful reduction in size of the government.

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya4:25

      Look, it, it... DOGE has probably 18 months to do what they can do before the midterms, and there's going to be an inevitable amount of recoil and backlash that's going to arise from the actions that they're going to try and take, and President Trump's going to try and take, uh, under the, uh, recommendations provided by DOGE. Um, so they need to move fast and aggressively, and that's only going to cause the recoil to be harder and, and faster. There's going to be a ton of litigation. Obviously, everything's going to go to court. It's going to be, um, incredibly politicized. What is frustrating and challenging to me is that there is nothing that they said that doesn't seem obvious and right. I don't know how you can politicize the points that they're making. Put aside their party, put aside who they are individually, put aside how we got here. At the end of the day, this federal government needs to be run more efficiently, more effectively. It is unfair and it is a tax on every one of us to have money thrown away. To have wasted capital, to have bureaucracy that gets in the way of people being able to do their jobs. It is a tax on all of us and our kids and our future. It needs to be fixed. If it doesn't get fixed, as I've said countless times before, we are in an arithmetic debt death spiral. There is no way out of it. So by resolving both the inefficiency, reducing the bureaucracy, stopping the wasteful spending, having accountability in the org- in the government, we can actually get the United States another 50 years, 100 years, whatever long we want. But we were literally in a death spiral leading up to this moment. And I have no idea how we ended up on this timeline. I was over the moon and shocked when I read...... all of the progress over the last couple of weeks in putting this thing together, I did not know that this is where we would end up. I couldn't be more happy with what I think is gonna happen with Doge and its effect on, if not actually making the changes, shining a light on the issues that need to be addressed. And I will say, it is unfair to Americans for this to be politicized. The Democrats shouldn't make this a Republican issue. This is not about Republicans doing damage. This is about doing the right thing for the government and for the country. And the Democrats had an opportunity to own this issue, and instead they've chosen to oppose it, which makes no sense. It is frustrating and challenging to me as an American to think that this is even a political point. This should be a what's right for America point. It's almost like we're going to war, war with ourselves, with our bureaucracy, with the morass that's been built up over the last couple of decades. And I'm thrilled that this is happening, and frankly, put the p- put the people aside, maybe it's the fact that you need people that are as outspoken, as challenging, as difficult as these two particular individuals that are gonna run this group. But that might be what it takes for it to happen in the small 18-month window that they have. So-

   3. DSDavid Sacks7:08

      We had a, um-

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya7:08

      ... I don't know, that's my rant on it.

   5. DSDavid Sacks7:10

      Yep, great rant. And, uh, we had a Milton Friedman clip go viral, and he spoke exactly about his positions on what he would eliminate, departments like Agriculture, Commerce, Education. Let's just play that clip, and then there was obviously the Millei interview by Lex Fridman earlier this week.

   6. DFDavid Friedberg7:26

      Keep them or abolish them? Department of Agriculture?

   7. MFMilton Friedman7:30

      Abolish, gone, I mean.

   8. DFDavid Friedberg7:31

      Department of Commerce?

   9. MFMilton Friedman7:33

      Abolish.

   10. DFDavid Friedberg7:34

       Gone. Department of Defense?

   11. MFMilton Friedman7:36

       Keep.

   12. DFDavid Friedberg7:36

       Keep it? Department of Education?

   13. MFMilton Friedman7:39

       Abolish.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg7:39

       Gone. Energy?

   15. MFMilton Friedman7:41

       Abolish.

   16. DFDavid Friedberg7:42

       Health and Human Services?

   17. MFMilton Friedman7:43

       There is room for some public health activities to prevent, uh, uh, uh, contagion.

   18. DFDavid Friedberg7:49

       We'll eliminate half of the Department of Health and Human Services?

   19. MFMilton Friedman7:50

       Yeah, something like that.

   20. DFDavid Friedberg7:51

       Okay, one half, there we go. Housing and Urban Development?

   21. MFMilton Friedman7:54

       Out.

   22. DFDavid Friedberg7:54

       Done. That's gone. Department of the Interior.

   23. MFMilton Friedman7:57

       The problem there is, you first have to sell off all the land that the government owns. But that's what you should do. You should get rid of-

   24. DFDavid Friedberg8:03

       But it could be done pretty quickly.

   25. MFMilton Friedman8:04

       It could be done. You should-

   26. DFDavid Friedberg8:05

       The whole series of ownership.

   27. MFMilton Friedman8:05

       You should do that.

   28. DFDavid Friedberg8:06

       Department of Justice?

   29. MFMilton Friedman8:07

       Oh, yes.

   30. DFDavid Friedberg8:08

       Keep that one.
3. 24:28 – 48:11

   Milei's impact, DOGE's tight timeline, impact on GDP growth, "default sustainable," how to communicate DOGE

   1. DSDavid Sacks24:28

      And Milei in Argentina has basically, uh, basically, I don't know, a year or an 18-month head start on us and has been doing this. He did a great podcast with Lex Fridman. They translated it, actually. They dubbed it, which is kind of interesting technology. And in this discussion, they talked about reducing the ministries, agencies from 20 to eight. They fired 50,000 government workers, 15% of the total workforce. There were 341,000 when he started. They implemented daily deregulation process to remove inefficient policies, so they just do that day in and day out. They ended discretionary payments to provinces and cities to restore market-driven utility prices, no more subsidies, yada, yada, yada, right down the line. Sachs, your thoughts on how many months it will take to do this. And there's this, this discussion, and I don't know if that's from inside the Trump administration, of, "Hey, we gotta get this done in 18 months. We gotta get this done in 18 months." What can you tell us about the, the sense of urgency about getting this done quickly and, and why that's occurring?

   2. Well, I think Elon and, and Vivek have announced that Doge will be sunsetting or disbanding at the 250th anniversary of America, which would be July 4th of 2026. So they've only given themselves about, what's that, 18 months?

   3. Yep.

   4. Which kinda makes sense, right? I mean-

   5. CPChamath Palihapitiya25:55

      And that's, that's leading into the midterms, right?

   6. DSDavid Sacks25:57

      Right, exactly. You tend to have the most momentum coming off an election like this one where you have the trifecta. So I think that makes a lot of sense that they're gonna be able to have the greatest impact, let's say, in the first year after the new president and Congress gets sworn in.

   7. How do you get Democrats in on this, Sachs? How do you push them to join the party, to, to join the movement, to be more efficient, to be more transparent? Is there a possibility for us to get some coordination here with the other side or no?

   8. I mean, you might be able to get some support of particular Democrats on particular things. I don't wanna say that it's not possible. Difficult, but not, not impossible. But look, I think what Milei has done in Argentina is remarkable. I mean, that was a country that was a total basket case. Inflation was out of control. Uh, it's already, because of the cuts he's made, they now have a more normal inflation rate and they've gone from basically being uninvestable to investable as a country. Now, the United States is not the basket case that Argentina is, but we are on an unsustainable fiscal trajectory. Doge is also not gonna have the power that Milei has. It's not gonna have the degrees of freedom to act, but we also don't have as big a problem. What we need to do is just bend our fiscal curve from being unsustainable to being sustainable. And if we can do that, it'll have a huge impact on the economy. Specifically, what we saw in the last election, the thing that probably hurt the Democrats the most was inflation. Voters clearly do not like inflation. They do not like the diminishment of their purchasing power. But how do you stop inflation? You have to raise interest rates, and that's not good either because that raises the cost of a mortgage, that raises the cost of a car payment. It's bad for investment, right? Because if interest rates are higher, then that means the discount rate on stocks and real estate, on every investment class basically, is higher, and the hurdle rate for investments higher. So high interest rates are also bad for the economy. So how do you get out of that box where you either have high inflation or high interest rates? The only way is to bend the fiscal curve to that more sustainable path. And if you can-

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya28:10

      Yes.

   10. DSDavid Sacks28:10

       ... and if you can do that, the bond markets will actually give you credit for it in advance because they know-

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya28:17

       Hallelujah.

   12. DSDavid Sacks28:17

       ... uh, it, because they know that they're not gonna be flooded-

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya28:19

       Mm-hmm.

   14. DSDavid Sacks28:20

       ... with the need to keep funding all of this US government debt. So we either get to kind of, you know, startups have this saying about being either default alive or default dead. We either get to default sustainable or default unsustainable. Right now, we're unsustainable. The bond markets know it. Inflation remains persistently high, around 3%. The Fed has not been able to cut interest rates the way that they expected to. Remember, the markets were expecting seven cuts this year. We got basically three. We got a 50 and a 25. So it's just hasn't been the cuts that people were expecting, and that's because inflation hasn't come down as much as people thought. So if Doge, working with the rest of the government, OMB, the Treasury, Congress, executive orders, can now convince the markets that the US financial picture is more sustainable, we'll get credit for that. Interest rates will come down, and that'll lead to a boom in the economy. So it's all win-win if they can pull this off.

   15. Friedberg, any final thoughts here before we move on from Doge wishing Elon and Vivek as much success as possible? We've really, I mean, everybody should be rooting for this. You wanna give us your final thoughts?

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya29:31

       I feel like America is Neo from The Matrix-

   17. DSDavid Sacks29:36

       Hmm.

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya29:36

       ... where there was, like, a thousand bullets being shot at America and we, like, literally had to dodge every single one of them in order to get to this, this point.

   19. DSDavid Sacks29:45

       Mm.

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya29:46

       I, again, I am so shocked and surprised in a positive way that we ended up on this particular timeline. Look, everything had to go the way it went for this to have happened. (laughs) Biden decided to run for reelection. Biden stayed in too long. They didn't run a primary. They put Kamala in. Kamala-

   21. DSDavid Sacks30:03

       Elon got off the fence, switched parties.

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya30:05

       Elon, Elon-

   23. DSDavid Sacks30:06

       Yeah.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya30:06

       ... decided to throw 100 million bucks at the problem. Elon bought Twitter. China had a real estate bubble. I mean, you can go down the list of things that had to go right for us to get to this very moment where a small group of people have recognized the fiscal death spiral that the United States federal government has been in and have the authority and the capacity and the skills to be able to go and execute against a solution.I have no idea how this could have been architected. Maybe Sachs knew all along and I convinced him two years ago that this was how things had to go, and he's been designing it like Emperor Palpatine.

   25. DSDavid Sacks30:44

       Maybe it's you talking about Ray Dalio-

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya30:45

       Yeah.

   27. DSDavid Sacks30:45

       ... and the end of the empire for three years on this podcast.

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya30:48

       And honestly, as, as, as we-

   29. DSDavid Sacks30:48

       Maybe you did it, Freberg. We give you credit.

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya30:50

       As we remember, when, when we talked with Dalio about this, he's like-
4. 48:11 – 1:00:43

   WW3 risk: Biden's recent escalation

   1. DFDavid Friedberg48:11

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya48:11

      Sachs, you put World War III on the docket. Would you like to tee it up for us? Yeah.

   3. DSDavid Sacks48:16

      Sure. Well, there's, uh, several events that have happened in reasonably close succession. The- the first thing to understand is what's happening on the ground in Ukraine. The Ukrainians have been losing territory at an accelerating pace. There's an excellent graphic in the New York Times that I'll put on the screen that shows this. It's not a stalemate. Remember I said on this podcast six months or a year ago that it was no longer a stalemate, it was a war of attrition in which the Ukrainians were now losing.And every single month now, the Russians are taking more and more territory. Again, the curve is accelerating. We'd all invest in a business who had a growth curve that looked like this. So, not good news for the Ukrainians. In response to that, I think that's finally the condition on the ground that's created the next set of actions, which is the Biden administration finally approved the use of long-range missiles, ATACMS missiles, Storm Shadows, to hit territory deep inside of Russia. The Russians believe, and I don't know whether this is true or not, but what they say is that those weapons cannot be operated without Americans or British operators being there to, you know, they're too complicated for the Ukrainians just to use on their own. So they, the Russians, view this as not just a direct attack on their homeland, on their, their motherland, but also a direct involvement by the NATO allies, United States and Britain, in the war. And that is a big escalation. You know, a lot of people say that the Russians have all these red lines we keep crossing and, and they don't do anything. That's not true. If you actually listen to what the Russians have said, there's only been two red lines. The first red line was they said they would not accept NATO expanding to Ukraine, and they proved their seriousness on that issue by invading Ukraine in February of 2022. The second red line is they said that they would not accept American long-range missiles being used to target inside of Russia, and that line has now been crossed. So, this leads us to the next set of events, which is Russia just used what may be, some people are saying it's an ICBM, but it probably is more likely to be not an intercontinental but an intermediate range ballistic missile that hit a Ukrainian city. And it's, obviously, it didn't carry a nuclear payload, but it's the type of, of ballistic missile that is used to carry nuclear weapons. There are a couple of features of this that I think are really important. Number one, it's a hypersonic missile. It hit the target at something like Mach 10. What that means is that it just can't be intercepted. It's too fast. Uh, the, the West, and the United States in particular does not, as far as we know, have a technology to intercept a hypersonic missile like that. The second is that it had what's called a MIRV warhead or, or payload. MIRV is multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles. Basically, what it means is the warhead splits up.

   4. DFDavid Friedberg51:13

      Right.

   5. DSDavid Sacks51:13

      When it gets close to the ground, it splits into six separate warheads. And the reason for this, as I understand it, is diabolical. Again, it's just, if you're launching a nuclear weapon, it just makes it that much harder to now intercept it because now you've got six warheads hitting you instead of just one. So, I mean, as I understand, a missile like this has never been used before and what the Russians are doing, obviously, is sending us a signal. And what that message is, is that they're saying, "We have the means to hit any European city or any European asset with a hypersonic missile that you can't stop, that may or may not have a nuclear warhead attached to it." And it's just a way of them expressing their seriousness and displeasure and, and, and reacting to and escalating in response to the fact that we are now allowing Western missiles to be hitting targets deep inside of Russia. So, the bottom line is this war is escalating. It's escalating nowhere good and at some point soon-

   6. DFDavid Friedberg52:15

      Yeah. It's really...

   7. DSDavid Sacks52:16

      ... we're gonna have to get off of this escalatory ladder-

   8. DFDavid Friedberg52:19

      Totally. Totally.

   9. DSDavid Sacks52:20

      ... or we're gonna end up in a really disastrous place. And just the last final point is it's absolutely remarkable that Biden decided to take us to this place with what, just six weeks left in his term?

   10. DFDavid Friedberg52:32

       Completely.

   11. DSDavid Sacks52:33

       I mean, as a lame duck president, what is his mandate for doing that, for taking this extraordinary risk on behalf of the country? The voters just voted for Trump, who made it really clear he wanted to end the war, and Biden and his team have unilaterally now escalated this war. They did it without consulting with Trump's team. At least that's what was publicly reported is there was no briefing set up for Trump's transition team. So, you have here Biden and his team taking a unilateral action to expand and escalate this war, even when he's a lame duck president, and the question you have to ask is why? What is the point of this?

   12. DFDavid Friedberg53:07

       Well, I think it's just completely deranged because it's not just that... For- forget Biden and Trump for a second. If you take a step back, what was voted in was to end this war and for the United States to get our hands out of it. So, you couldn't have a clearer message to the sitting president in the White House, which is, "This is not what Americans want." And so, to basically ignore the will of the voters and to essentially go and push another country into the brink, I think, is so incredibly responsible. And you know, other times we've said in the past, "Take Donald Trump seriously, but not literally." Russia, you should take seriously and literally because they actually write it down for you and tell you. And so when they said, "Every act of aggression from now on is going to be viewed by us on a look-through basis to the actual country that is enabling this to happen," you couldn't be more clear. But Americans couldn't have been more clear, which is, "We don't want this war anymore." And I just think it's really deranged what the Biden White House is doing. It's incredibly dangerous. And by the way, not to mention, it's incredibly costly as well. I mean, we've had, like, some last-minute efforts to sort of tamp down on these last-minute budget approvals and whatnot, but we're talking about tens and hundreds of billions of dollars that we're giving on top of the risk of, of nuclear escalation. I just think it's absolutely crazy. It's absolutely crazy. Putin is not a dummy. He has heard and seen Trump's campaign rhetoric and-

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya54:44

       ... Sachs, I don't know if this is, this has been publicly reported that he had a call with, with Trump after the, uh, the election victory. Does Putin not see that in a couple of weeks, a couple of months, there will be new leadership in the White House and there's gonna be a path to a resolution here? Like, does that not give us all a little bit of reprieve that this is not gonna escalate because everyone's waiting for January 20th?

   14. DSDavid Sacks55:10

       Oh, I mean, for sure. I mean, thank goodness I would say-

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya55:13

       Right.

   16. DSDavid Sacks55:13

       ... that we have a new president coming in who does not own this war. I mean, the problem with Biden is that he completely owns this war and he does not wanna admit defeat. And so what you've seen is that over the last couple of years, every weapons system that Biden said he wouldn't give to Ukraine because it could literally cause World War III, these are Biden's words, he said it could be Armageddon if we gave Ukraine F-16s, it could be Armageddon if we gave them Abrams tanks, it would be Armageddon if we gave them HIMARS and ATACMS and could lead to World War III if we let them hit targets inside of Russia. These are Biden's words and he has basically given in on every single one of those points because he's so committed to this policy, right? He's, he's in the quagmire, he can only double down. He doesn't know how to extricate himself. And now, we don't know exactly what Kamala Harris would have done but I think probably she would have inherited Joe Biden's policy and likely continued it. And I think we have a wonderful opportunity here with Trump taking office. He doesn't own this policy, he can look at it with fresh eyes, and most importantly, he campaigned on ending the war so he has the mandate of the American people to stop it. All I can say is thank goodness and we just need to get through the next two months. We just need to get to January 20th without there being some new horrible escalation in this war.

   17. DFDavid Friedberg56:31

       He's bi- (laughs) Joe Biden does martingaling. That's his strategy for the Ukraine-Russia war (laughs) . Just keep doubling down and doubling down and doubling down.

   18. DSDavid Sacks56:39

       Doubling down. Oh yeah, do you wanna explain what that is?

   19. DFDavid Friedberg56:41

       Oh yeah, sorry. Martingaling is a strategy in gambling where, let's just say, you know, you start betting a dollar and you lose, your next bet is $2. If you lose, your next bet is $4. If you lose, your next bet is $8. And eventually you'll win once, is the theory. But there's many times where martingaling does not work.

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya56:59

       But you only, but you only, but you only win a dollar. (laughs) So you could be betting, you know, 80, uh, you know, 40 bucks, a hund- 80 bucks, $160, $320 and then you finally win and you win a dollar.

   21. DSDavid Sacks57:10

       Right. Or, or you go broke. That's a great analogy 'cause you can also go broke, right?

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya57:15

       You can go broke.

   23. DFDavid Friedberg57:15

       Well, this is why they have caps at the roulette table. One time I would do this as a joke.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya57:20

       That's why all casinos have a max. Yeah, exactly.

   25. DFDavid Friedberg57:22

       Yeah, so I would do this as a joke with my wife or when I was at the World Series of Poker. I'd be like, "I'll go to pay for dinner," or lunch or whatever, and I put a hundred dollars on black, lose, put 200 on black, win, go pay for lunch. And I did it one time at the WSOP and I went 100, 200, 400, 800, 1,600. I ran out of cash, I got 3,200 from my friend. I put it down, the floor man came over and said, "That's your last bet."

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya57:47

       Oh no, my buddy and I-

   27. DFDavid Friedberg57:48

       And so they will-

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya57:48

       My buddy and I would go play-

   29. DFDavid Friedberg57:49

       ... they will stop you if you, if you do this, yeah.

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya57:51

       In our college years, early 20s, we would go to drink for free at the casino. You just sit at the blackjack table and just keep getting a dollar and black.
5. 1:00:43 – 1:10:06

   Science Corner: Fat cells can remember being fat!

   1. DFDavid Friedberg1:00:43

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:00:44

      You guys wanna do science corner? I got one for you.

   3. DFDavid Friedberg1:00:46

      Yeah.

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:00:47

      Let her rip.

   5. DSDavid Sacks1:00:47

      Yeah, let's hear it.

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:00:48

      All right.

   7. DSDavid Sacks1:00:49

      Your superfans are desperate for a science corner. Give them what, Freebird? Give them something.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:00:53

      All right, I will give you guys-

   9. DSDavid Sacks1:00:55

      Throw in something.

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:00:56

       ... here, here's a depressing paper that was published in the journal, Nature, just this week. Research team out of Switzerland, going over to the Swiss where they are conducting extraordinary research in the epigenetics of fat cells in obesity.

   11. DSDavid Sacks1:01:13

       Oh, so we're gonna fat shame me on the, uh, science corner? Go ahead. Great. Let's go for it.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:01:17

       No, we're actually gonna understand perhaps why it is difficult for people that have been overweight-

   13. DSDavid Sacks1:01:23

       Yes.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:01:24

       ... to keep the weight off. So-

   15. DSDavid Sacks1:01:26

       I did read this, and I, I think it's fascinating. Yeah, explain it.

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:01:28

       It is, it is really incredible. So remember, we've talked about this many times in the past, but every cell has your whole, all your DNA, all your genes. And certain genes are turned on or off in different cells, and those genes being on or off differentiates those cells and causes them to act differently. That's the difference between an eye cell and a skin cell and a heart cell is they have different genes that are up-regulated, down-regulated, turned on, and turned off. And even when you have different kinds of cells, you have certain genes that are over-expressed or under-expressed, they're over-regulated or up-regulated or down-regulated. So that means that those genes are turning, pumping out certain proteins that do certain things in that particular cell. So what these folks did is they wanted to understand what is the epigenome, meaning what are the genes that are turned on or off or up-regulated or down-regulated in fat tissue, in fat cells? And does the epigenome change when an individual loses weight? So once they're obese and they lose weight, do the fat cells actually change their epigenome, or day, do they have an epigenetic memory? Meaning that those cells, even though the person has lost weight, those cells still continue to act as if that person were obese. So I'll tell you, in, in humans, they basically took five individuals that were obese and lost more than 25% BMI, and they looked at the epigenome, they looked at the markers of what genes are up-regulated and down-regulated before and after they lost the weight. After they lost the weight, there were a set of markers that were still up-regulated that are associated with poor metabolism and increased fibrosis and increased cellular death. So these are inflammatory genes. These are genes that are associated with the cells being inefficient at utilizing glucose to create energy. And so these cells continued to act like slow, dying cells, even after the person lost weight. And they did the same thing in mice, and they found similar results, that they caused these mice to gain weight, looked at the epigenome of the fat cells, and then looked at the epigenome after they lost the weight. And again, the mouse g- epigenome continued to act as if the mouse was obese. And what this means is that the metabolism remained reduced, fibrosis remained elevated, and likelihood of cell death remained elevated. So now, they applied glucose in this Petri dish to those cells, and they saw that the glucose had a harder time being fully, being appropriately utilized from a healthy fat cell that hadn't been obese. So it actually permanently alters and creates an epigenetic memory in the fat cells after obesity. And this could explain pretty significantly why when people that have been obese lose the weight, they are more likely to gain the weight back and have a hard time-

   17. DSDavid Sacks1:04:16

       The yo-yo effect-

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:04:17

       ... keeping the weight off. Yeah.

   19. DSDavid Sacks1:04:18

       ... you're referring to, yes. And that, that makes total sense, because anybody who's added weight, Chamath, if you add but, you know, you eat one extra Oreo a week, that's 3,500 (laughs) calories. You do that over 20 years, all of a sudden you wake up one day, you're 20-

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:04:33

       Totally.

   21. DSDavid Sacks1:04:33

       ... 30 pounds overweight, like I was three or four years ago. And this is where I think Ozempic and Wegovy and Mounjaro and all these things are so great, 'cause it does seem like it breaks you through that, no, Freebird?

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:04:43

       Well, the problem, but we, we do see in all those results that when you go off of the GLP-1 agonist drugs, you gain the weight back very quickly. This is very-

   23. DSDavid Sacks1:04:51

       Some amount of the weight.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:04:52

       This is-

   25. DSDavid Sacks1:04:53

       Yeah. It's, it's not the total amount. Yeah.

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:04:54

       Uh, no, uh, like, it's a pretty significant bounce-back effect.

   27. DSDavid Sacks1:04:56

       Yeah.

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:04:56

       So, and, and, and this is pretty well-documented. And so I think that it speaks to the why. Now, the, it, it also introduces an opportunity.

   29. DSDavid Sacks1:05:04

       Hmm.

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:05:05

       There are molecules that can turn certain genes on or off, can now be identified and utilized to change that epigenetic memory. So now there's this-

Episode duration: 1:10:06