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E93: Twitter whistleblower, cloud security vulnerabilities, student debt forgiveness & more

0:00 Bestie intros! 1:25 Twitter's former head of security makes allegations against the company 22:08 Foreign countries placing government agents in US tech companies, cloud security vulnerabilities 33:54 Student loan forgiveness 1:03:25 Red wave or red ripple? 1:07:57 Science corner: Gut microbiome, fecal transplants Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/twitter-whistleblower-sec-spam https://www.npr.org/2022/08/23/1119071586/twitter-whistleblower-complaint-elon-musk-security-bots-fake-users https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/23/tech/twitter-whistleblower-peiter-zatko-security/index.html https://time.com/6207996/twitter-whistleblower-allegations/ https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1562179576800763904 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1562179705322684416 https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-forced-twitter-put-agent-payroll-whistleblower-says-2022-08-23 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1562105413977493504 https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-08-24-musk-gets-a-potential-boost-with-twitter-whistle-blowers-claims-2 https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/23/tech/twitter-whistleblower-peiter-zatko-security/index.html https://www.zuckermanlaw.com/sp_faq/largest-sec-whistleblower-awards https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2021/06/30/the-need-for-legislative-reform-on-secrecy-orders https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-democrats-shifting-coalition https://fortune.com/2022/08/24/biden-changing-income-driven-repayment-plan-student-debt-borrowers https://twitter.com/LHSummers/status/1562040653432999936 https://www.socialcapital.com/ideas/2021-annual-letter https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/house/2022-primaries/red-wave-looks-more-ripple https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(22)00919-9.pdf https://grow.google #allin #tech #news

Jason CalacanishostChamath PalihapitiyahostDavid Friedberghost
Aug 26, 20221h 23mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 1:25

    Bestie intros!

    1. JC

      I want to play the theme music for this episode. Okay, hold on one second. Here we go.

    2. NA

      When you get in trouble. And you don't know right from wrong. Give a little whistle. (whistle) Give a little whistle. (whistle)

    3. CP

      If you let the Indian government plant spies in your office, give a little whistle. (whistle)

    4. NA

      (laughs)

    5. CP

      (Whistle) If you have too many bots, you can come up with your own metric, MDA use. (whistle) MDA use. (whistle)

    6. NA

      (laughs) .

    7. CP

      When you want to incent your staff to not look at the bots, give them bonuses based on DAUs. Based on DAUs. (whistle)

    8. NA

      (laughs)

    9. CP

      Always let your bonus be your guide. (whistle) When you're on the board, and you see metrics that you don't like. Turn a blind eye.

    10. NA

      (laughs)

    11. CP

      Turn a blind eye. (whistle)

    12. NA

      (laughs)

    13. JC

      (laughs)

    14. CP

      Sorry, sorry. (laughs) I just got subpoenaed (beep) .

    15. NA

      (laughs)

    16. CP

      Shit, everybody's getting subpoenaed again. (beep)

    17. DF

      This is J-Cal at his best.

    18. NA

      (laughs)

    19. DF

      We got to stop. This is... We're getting ourselves into too much trouble.

    20. NA

      Don't let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sack. I'm going all in. And I said, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you 69th. Queen of Quinoa. I'm going all

  2. 1:25 – 22:08

    Twitter's former head of security makes allegations against the company

    1. NA

      in.

    2. DF

      This is gonna be the story of 2022, for sure. (laughs) Right before, I guess, the big case between Elon and Twitter is about to happen, I guess in October at some point, a Twitter whistleblower has come forward and dropped a nuke into the middle of what was basically the story of the year in business, I think. The former head of security hired by Jack himself, an incredibly well-respected, uh, Peter Mudge, Zatko, uh, he's referred to as Mudge, one of the most respected people in, uh, the security industry. Uh, again, recruited by Jack in 2020 after a team of hackers, you may remember, took over all these verified accounts, Obama, Biden and- and- and Elon's account as well. And he was, um, head of security until January of this year, eight months ago, and he claims, through explosive documents, a huge document dump, that, uh, Twitter execs ignored, these Twitter executives ignored multiple security vulnerabilities. Now, why is this important? Well, obviously if Obama, Biden and other heads of state have their Twitter handles, they could say something that could cause an international incident, and that's actually happened, uh, with hacks before. He also says they were not following even the most basic security protocols, like safeguarding staff access to core software. Of course, all this comes after there were Saudi infiltrators, spies essentially, inside of Twitter. I mean, the- the list of things here that he is alleging is truly colossal. He- he dumped these documents to the Department of Justice, the SEC, Congress and, uh, The Washington Post. He alleges that the vulnerabilities make Twitter extremely vulnerable to foreign spies, hacking and disinformation campaigns. And perhaps most importantly to the acquisition, the complaint also adds that Twitter's policy towards fake accounts incentivize "Deliberate ignorance by undercounting spam accounts and giving bonuses to execs for increasing users, but not finding bots." Sacks, your thoughts, I mean, on this? We- we talked about your subpoena or whatever that was. Uh, I don't think that's-

    3. JC

      No, it's not a subpoena.

    4. DF

      It's a subpoena.

    5. JC

      I'm being depositioned. It's, uh-

    6. DF

      Oh, you're having a deposition?

    7. JC

      Yeah, they want to- they want to depo- depo me too, which is kind of amazing. But let's- let's save that 'cause-

    8. DF

      Yeah, sure.

    9. JC

      ... I think this is more- more newsworthy.

    10. DF

      (laughs)

    11. JC

      So you recall on a previous show, we talked about this idea that if Twitter sues Elon to go after the kill fee or to go after damages, the question will very rapidly become about whether Twitter has a bot problem. And will discovery reveal documents that show that Twitter executives knew or should have known there was a problem? And so I said, you know, the question will very rapidly become, what did Twitter executives know and when did they know it? Now, I couldn't have predicted that this whistleblower would come forward, but what he's basically saying is, not only is there a bot problem, there is a cover up of the bot problem, and he's accusing the company of positively Nixonian tactics here. So just to build on what you said, J-Cal, he said that, "Twitter executives don't have the resources to fully understand the true number of bots in the platform, and their executives are disincentivized to count them properly, because doing so would negatively affect their bonuses." So I didn't know that their bonuses were in any way tied to, uh, to this bot issue. So he's basically, he's making the Upton Sinclair argument that it's hard to get a man to understand a problem when his salary depends on not understanding it. So that's part of what he's saying. He's also saying that he's- he's accusing Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal directly. Let's just say these are allegations, right? These are not proven yet. Uh, but here's what he's saying. Basically, he's saying that Parag and his lieutenants repeatedly discourage him from providing a full accounting of Twitter security problems to the company's board of directors. They basically prevented him from producing a written report. He also says that the company's executives ordered him to knowingly present cherry-picked and misrepresented data to create the false perception of progress on urgent cybersecurity issues.

    12. DF

      Wow.

    13. JC

      He also alleges that they went behind his back to have a third-party consulting firm, uh, their report scrubbed to hide the true extent of the company's problems. And as a result of this, he's basically saying that Twitter executives committed securities law violations by making material misrepresentations and omissions in SEC filings.And this is what got Elon to, to sort of c- commemorate Zatko's revelations with one of his trademark memes, which was the meme of Jiminy Cricket singing Give a Little Whistle from the film Pinocchio-

    14. DF

      (laughs) Which I think becomes a cold open here. (laughs)

    15. JC

      ... uh, which, (laughs) exactly. (whistles) Which just became our cold open.

    16. DF

      (laughs)

    17. JC

      So yeah, look, these are very serious allegations. They're not proven yet. He's working with the same group who worked with Frances Haugen. And I certainly question some of the things she was saying, so I'm not gonna automatically accept on faith everything he's saying. But I think by the same token, because he's working with groups that back Frances Haugen, who was very much not on the free speech side of this debate, I also think you can't just accuse this guy of being an Elon stooge. This guy, uh, is a respected cybersecurity authority. He's one of these, like, white hat hackers. He's somebody who was an early hacker-

    18. DF

      He's literally m- ... If you were to ask before all of this, before he worked at Twitter, like, "Who would you want as your chief security officer? You know, give me a short list," he'd be on it for any company.

    19. JC

      Right.

    20. DF

      One of the most respected people who points out vulnerabilities. And Chamath, uh, or Friberg, I have a question about corporate governance and what seems to be a dysfunctional relationship here. You have Jack hires somebody to solve the security problems. Then when presenting to the board, he's not allowed to tell the truth, and they, the board has given incentives to the management team. He's a top five, top seven member of the management team. So what's going on here with this dysfunction where he's hired to tell the truth, to fix the problems, the board is, is turning a blind eye to it, and maybe the management team is not giving the board the data they need to make better decisions? Who, who, w- how do you game theory this? Yeah.

    21. DS

      I'm not sure that it's, you can come to all those conclusions.

    22. DF

      Yeah, I'm not coming to the conclusion. I'm just, my mind is wandering of how this-

    23. DS

      I read the, I read-

    24. DF

      ... dysfunction comes up. Yeah.

    25. DS

      I read parts of, of his whistleblower. I can't claim to have read it all. It actually isn't super supportive of Elon's case. Uh, the most problematic thing that he points out is the following, and this is a quote from his complaint. He said Twitter, quote, "Already doing a decent job excluding spam bots and other worthless accounts from its calculation of mdao." At best, he's alleging that Twitter omitted details, not that it lied directly. So if you kind of take that, I think what he's really pointing his sights on are, as you said, disclosures that have nothing to do with the spam issue, but have a lot to do with security. And that is something that typically in a, in a public company board filters up through the audit committee typically, that gets a readout, right, once a quarter from the rep- from the right people who talk about, "Here's our cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities." And then there is a readout from that committee chair to the board, and then those are noted, um, in your quarterly, uh, i- in your quarterly reports that the secretary writes down. So I think part of why this guy may not have had the audience is, it was also written that he was a pretty terrible manager, and there were hundreds of people in his organization who were just kind of running here and there. And so, you know, you guys have all been in the situation where we hire somebody who is an exceptional performer, and then we miscast that person by putting them in a point of leadership and, and being a team manager versus, um, you know, a, a single kind of, like, um, product or engineering expert. And it seems like there was a part of that at play as well, which decayed the ability for management to actually have enough faith and trust in this guy to put him in front of the board. So, and that's all that's just come out in the last few days. So I don't know. My, my reading of the whistleblower claim is really that this is the kind of thing that companies like Facebook and Google and others have had issues with the FTC in the past. They typically settle those claims. They pay a fine, snap. But those things take three to five years to play out. So I suspect that this body of content more leads to that outcome than is a smoking gun that really helps Elon. In fact, this, the f- the fact that he's actually affirmatively stating that their calculation of mdao is actually pretty decent actually hurts the claim that Elon is making.

    26. JC

      I don't, I don't know if I agree with that actually.

    27. DF

      Okay, go ahead, Zach.

    28. JC

      Uh, so I, I agree with, with Chamath that the claims he's making are far broader than the bot issue, um, and far broader than the issues that Elon's raised. So I agree with you about that, Chamath. However, I don't agree that what he's saying isn't specifically helpful to Elon's case. So what he said is, so this is from a CNN Business article. He said, um, "Zatko's disclosure argues that by reporting bots only as a percentage of mdao, rather than as a percentage of total number of accounts on the platform, Twitter obscures-"

    29. DF

      Ah.

    30. JC

      "... the true scale of fake and spam accounts on the service."

  3. 22:08 – 33:54

    Foreign countries placing government agents in US tech companies, cloud security vulnerabilities

    1. DF

      The final point on this I would like to get everybody's, um, uh, commentary on, if it is true that they essentially, um, were forced, Twitter was forced by the Indian Government to put a government agent on the payroll (laughs) . I think agent means spy. How explosive is that, and then how many other countries-

    2. DS

      That, that to me-

    3. DF

      Yeah.

    4. DS

      That, to me, is the most important thing that is not getting nearly enough coverage. It's like you had a government come to a company that's based in America, and it's no- it's not the United States Government that did it, and basically said, "We need you to place an agent of our intelligence services inside of your company," and it seems like they were like, "Okay, where do you want them to sit?"

    5. DF

      Now, Sacks, if that's true, would ... I wonder if they would be required to tell the CIA and our government that their arm's being twisted. Like, this seems unprecedented to me.

    6. JC

      I don't know. That's-

    7. DF

      And if they didn't-

    8. DS

      Well, I mean, I think the bigger-

    9. DF

      I mean, if true, again, this is all alleged, so, but if true, Sacks, what-

    10. DS

      I, I think the bigger ... but no, Jason, you should also ask the next one, which is if they did it to Twitter, which is kind of small, what about the big honeypots of users?

    11. DF

      Apple, Google.

    12. DS

      Apple, Google, Facebook.

    13. DF

      Wow.

    14. DS

      TikTok, Snap. And what about coun- countries outside of just India? What about-

    15. DF

      Yeah. Saudi Arabia.

    16. DS

      ... uh, the United States? No, I mean, what about the (laughs) United States?

    17. DF

      Uh, well, yeah, we have access to this stuff, you know, through the courts.

    18. JC

      There's supposed to be a process. There's supposed to be-

    19. DF

      Warrants. Yeah, we have warrants.

    20. JC

      The process is you go to court and you get a warrant. Not that it's a high bar, but, uh, a prosecutor has to go show probable cause and get a search warrant, present it to the company, and then they turn over the data. This, you're, you're right, it's explosive in the sense that what they're saying is that these government agents, this is what Zatko says according to Time Magazine, "The purported agents had direct, unsupervised access to internal information." So-

    21. DF

      Which I think means DMs, when the accounts are created, who owned which account, the IP addresses. That's what I'm guessing they had access to, which is ... you, you do not wanna trust anything-

    22. DS

      I'm guessing, and I'm guessing what it-

    23. DF

      Don't put anything in your DMs, folks.

    24. DS

      I'm guessing what it doesn't mean is the Twitter menu in the cafeteria.

    25. DF

      Yeah, no.

    26. JC

      (laughs)

    27. DF

      Yeah, not that, I mean, not that anybody's been to that cafeteria in three years anyway. (laughs) I mean, there's literally $47 olive steaks-

    28. JC

      I think they had, they had direct unsupervised access to the salad bar.

    29. DF

      (laughs)

    30. DS

      (laughs)

  4. 33:54 – 1:03:25

    Student loan forgiveness

    1. DF

      The other big news story that people are talking about this week, and we talked about, I guess, last year, was student loan debt relief. Interestingly, uh, about 85 days before the midterms, Joe Biden has decided to unilaterally r- give 10 to 20K of debt relief to people who have, uh, student loans. You have to have under a 125K in yearly income as an individual, 250 as a household. And the student loan pause program, which happened during COVID, has been extended to the end of this year, I'm not sure why. Turns out there's about-

    2. DS

      No, that... They, they explained why.

    3. DF

      Yeah.

    4. DS

      Apparently, it takes four months for them to turn on their COBOL-written software that runs these loan servicing apps.

    5. DF

      Fucking Christ almighty.

    6. DS

      No, I'm serious, it, it-

    7. DF

      So push the change, takes four months. (laughs)

    8. DS

      It's gonna take, it's gonna take four months to restart the software that, that calculates your loan balance and is able to print a bill.

    9. DF

      We're so incompetent. Okay, anyway, you have to apply for this, um, and as we know, student loan is, student loan debt is 1.75 trillion. Uh, this is gonna cost us another 300 billion. Can't imagine what's gonna happen with this 10, 20K, uh, people buying NFTs and stocks and housing, and we're gonna hit the, uh, I guess we're gonna heat-

    10. DS

      Bloomberg, Bloomberg had a report that said-

    11. DF

      ... market over.

    12. DS

      ... that, look, we, we, we passed the Inflation Reduction Act, we talked about it last week, but one of the key pillars of that is that there's a 300 billion of expected revenues coming in, and we essentially turned around and just gave that back, um, to a very, very small segment of the American population. Um, Bloomberg's analysis was that it's gonna create somewhere between 0.1 and 0.3% extra inflation on top of all of that. Um, and so, you know, you really have to ask yourself, like, what, what was the White House trying to accomplish? I think, number one, they made a campaign promise. And so, you know, I think Biden needed to make sure that he fulfilled that. But nobody was really happy, right? The progressives wanted something extreme. Everybody else said, you know, "This is not really the right thing to do because it doesn't really solve the sym- the, the, the root cause of what we're dealing with." You know, if... It would have been much better if you had said, "Hey, listen, um, you know, we're gonna make this stuff expungable on bankruptcy." That would have been really useful. Um, what happens if you actually try to... I don't know, you were from the inner city and you worked your ass off, you became a doctor, you have 300,000 in debt, but now you're a, you know, a resident and you make 126,000?

    13. DF

      Yeah.

    14. DS

      Well, now you're, you know, you're kind of SOL here. So there's a lot of folks...... that they probably-

    15. DF

      Poorly executed.

    16. DS

      ... wanted, wanted to help that they didn't help. Then there's all the blue-collar folks who are like, "W- why, why this giveaway only to these folks?" Then there are the people that paid off their loans thinking, "Why did I pay my loans off?" Then there's the incentives that it creates for colleges which is, "Well, I'm just gonna keep jacking up tuition because if they did it once, they may do it again." So all of these things, I think, are sort of a little bit of, you know, uh, it, it's a little bit of a head-scratcher. And then the last thing, which we can talk about at the end is, I don't think this is what gets people out to vote and I don't think it's what people care about ultimately at the polls, which, if there was a political calculation to make, that's important. And specifically, when you look at what happened last night in a bunch of these districts, every progressive candidate got absolutely shellacked. They lost across the board. And so the progressive talking points around this stuff, fundamentally when push comes to shove, doesn't work for Democratic voters. And then second is, there was a really hotly contested seat which was a Democrat versus a, a Republican. Uh, I think it's Pat Ryan versus this guy Mark Molinaro, the Republican. He was leading the entire way and then this guy won 51-49, and this is a very centrist, down-the-middle Dem. So all the signs are like, this may not have been the smartest thing to do, but I don't think Joe Biden had a choice because he made the promise and he had to live up to it.

    17. DF

      Freeburg, is this a fair thing to do, a smart thing to do, a cynical thing to do to buy votes? Where, where do you fall down on this issue?

    18. JC

      This is absolutely moronic. I think that the fact that eight million households are eligible for this relief and $10,000 to $20,000 is relief, uh, is provided to a, a minority of Americans is, uh, exactly what Chamath said, which is kind of distorted politics at its worst. There, uh, this is a $300 billion bill to the US taxpayer, and the ultimate beneficiary of that bill, while we all might want to say it's the people that are getting debt relief that have taken out these student loans, that money was transferred to somewhere. And you know where it was transferred to? University endowments and the profit, uh, and the, and the pr- pockets of for-profit, uh, educational institutions. If there were a free market for education in the United States and the government was not involved in the process of funding and supporting the educational infrastructure in this country, individual citizens would have the right and the obligation to make decisions about whether or not the money that they're spending on tuition actually has a positive ROI for them. By spending $10,000 or $100,000, am I gonna make more than that much money back when I graduate? And unfortunately, we've lulled our citizenry, we've lulled our country into complacency where that decision and that calculus is no longer required because Uncle Sam is there to give you all the money you want to go to college. And the hungry, money-hungry institutions that are there to educate you are taking that money, putting it in their endowments or in the pockets of their shareholders. And at the end of the day, it turns out that that decision may not have been the best decision. And we're no longer holding ourselves individually to take responsibility for the decisions that we've made, and we're creating misincentives because of the government programs that have been created by telling people, "You need to get a higher education. The government is gonna pay for it for you, and it doesn't matter if it does or doesn't work. Because at the end of the day, if it doesn't work, we're just gonna pay it back for you anyway."

    19. DF

      We'll bail you out. Sachs?

    20. JC

      And there, and there, and there's a middle class in the United States of America that is gonna end up paying the tax bill primarily because that's where most tax dollars come from for the minority of people that made a bad decision. And it's not necessarily their fault. They made that decision because the infrastructure and the system was set up to tell them-

    21. DF

      They were duped, yeah.

    22. JC

      ... "Go to college, get a good degree, you'll end up-

    23. DF

      It always works out.

    24. JC

      ... ... having a good life. You'll make more money." And the, and the reality is that they aren't and that they don't. The ROI for many of these degrees has been negative. You make less money than you would have if you were actually in the workforce earning an on-the-ground experience and progressing your career. You do not need a degree in philosophy or history or German studies to be able to go and be effective in the technology workforce or in the services workforce. And I think that we're seeing that play out. The biggest challenge now is if we're gonna provide this loan relief and not reform the educational infrastructure and the, and the requirements for whether or not an educational system is eligible for support from the federal loan program, we are not actually solving the fundamental problem. We are keeping this gravy train running, and we're not actually getting to the root cause of where this money is flowing. And this is exactly what happens, I will rehash my point that I've made 100 times, at the end of empires. Everyone sees that the money train is leaving the station, and everyone jumps and grabs what they can. And that's exactly what's going on. We think that we're a rich nation, but we're becoming complacent, and this is unfortunate and it's a really sad sign. I think we need to fix this educational infrastructure. We need to make eligibility requirements for whether or not loans are actually gonna have a positive ROI for students. And then individuals ultimately need to be educated on that and made held accountable to whether or not they're making the right decisions for themselves.

    25. DF

      Sachs, should each American pay a thousand dollars to let these eight million people off the hook? 'Cause that's what this is gonna cost.

    26. JC

      No, of course not. I mean, I agree with everything-

    27. DF

      All right, there you go. If people say, "I don't like you," I just gave you the softball of all softballs. Go. (laughs)

    28. JC

      No, I mean, look, I think this is an issue where all four of us are on the same page. I agree with everything that Chamath said and what Freeburg said. I mean, this bill is unfair, or it rewards relatively well-off college grads over working-class people. It's gonna add 300 billion to the deficit. I mean, Joe Manchin should feel like a sucker right now because they just spent the 300 billion of supposed savings that he just agreed to. I, just to add, it's, it's unconstitutional. I mean, the, the Constitution expressly says, "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law." So I don't understand how Biden can even do this.... by an executive order. I expect this will be challenged and taken to the Supreme Court, and I think there's a very good chance it'll end up like Biden's other executive orders that were ruled unconstitutional. Remember, there was the vaccine mandate that he tried to do, and there was the eviction moratorium that he tried to do, and they were both ruled unconstitutional. I think there's a good chance that this will also be ruled unconstitutional. E- and like, like you guys mentioned, it's inflationary. I mean, these are basically stimmy checks, which we don't need right now, and it's gonna make tuition go up because the more government subsidizes something, the more th- those providers have an incentive to raise the cost. So, this is just a jump-the-shark moment, I think, for policy-making. The question is, why are they doing it? And I think it really speaks to the nature of the Democratic Party today, which is the Democratic Party has shifted from being a blue-collar, sort of more economically populist party, economically left party, to being a professional class, that is college-educated, culturally left, more woke party. And this is the ultimate example of that, where the Democratic Party is basically passing this payoff and giveaway to their sort of woke college graduates at the expense of their blue-collar, uh, the blue-collar part of their coalition. And, you know, a Democratic political scientist that I like to read, uh, Roy Tuxera, just today, he had a blog post called The Democrats' Shifting Coalition, where he pointed out that if you look at polling, if you look at the generic ballot among White college graduates, they favor Democrats by 12 points, whereas the White working class, which is to say non-college voters, they favor Republicans by 25 points. So, one of the biggest gaps in the electorate is college versus non-college. That is the fundamental gap. It's bigger than even, you know, than any other gap, than racial gaps or anything like that. This is really the key gap in the electorate, and this is a payoff to the... basically to the foot- the new foot soldiers of the Democratic Party. If you think about it, the old stereotype of a foot soldier of the Democratic Party would be a union representative. They were the ones getting out the vote. That person's been replaced with sort of a woke college graduate who joins the Democratic Socialists of America, and they go out, and they're the ones pounding the pavement and, and doing the ballot harvesting. So, there's been a real change in what this party is about, and I think that's the explanation for why they're passing this-

    29. CP

      The MFAs-

    30. JC

      ... really horrible piece of legislation.

  5. 1:03:25 – 1:07:57

    Red wave or red ripple?

    1. DS

      Sax, fi- final question for you. Uh, I posted this thing in the group chat, but what do you guys think about this r- you know, uh, Republican tidal wave becoming a Republican ripple? That's what, um, uh-

    2. JC

      Yeah.

    3. DS

      ... that's, that's, that's... it was a- it was an odd set of outcomes, don't you think, for-

    4. JC

      Yeah. No question. I mean, Biden... Look, Biden has h- had a good run over the last few weeks. Um, there's no question about-

    5. DF

      I'm sorry, my, my audio cut out. One more time, Sax. Can you say-

    6. DS

      Oh, I'll say it again.

    7. DF

      ... it's like I didn't hear that.

    8. DS

      I'll say it, I'll say it again.

    9. DF

      Sax, what did you say?

    10. DS

      The Cook Political Report says that the red wave looks-

    11. DF

      Got it.

    12. DS

      ... more like a red ripple.

    13. DF

      Got it. Okay.

    14. JC

      No, I think it's, I think it's right. Well, look, I, I think a couple of things happened. So first, Biden has got some wins legislatively. I don't think it's good policy. I don't think this executive order is good policy. I don't think the 750 billion of, uh, climate that pretends to be an Inflation Reduction Act, I don't think that's good policy. But nonetheless, he has delivered some goodies for his, his base, for his donors, and that has basically ameliorated the story in the press that Democrats are in disarray, so you're not hearing that. In addition, I think Biden's got two things going for him, Dobbs and jobs. I mean, Dobbs, there's no question, Dobbs has helped the Democrats quite a bit. It certainly has motivated their base. And then the jobs report has been strong. Look, I think overall, the economic data is mixed. Real wages are not keeping up with inflation, but jobs have so far been strong. So yeah, there's no question that Democrats are in a materially better position than they were in June when it looked like a tsunami. That being said, the election is still 10 weeks away, and I think we'll have to see what happens. And I think the economy is still in a pretty fragile state, so 10 weeks is still a long time. But yes, you're right, that-

    15. DS

      Well, where are most of... yeah.

    16. JC

      ... from where, from where things are looking right now-

    17. DS

      Sax, where are most of his?

    18. JC

      ... things are a lot better for Biden. And by the way, I do think the Republicans have some issues with candidate quality. And so there's a couple of races that, you know, should have been more slam dunks than, that are not. But, so yeah, there's no question-

    19. DF

      What was the first word you used there? You said Dobbs and jobs. What was the first word?

    20. JC

      Dobbs and jobs.

    21. DS

      Dobbs, jobs, abortion. Ah, got it.

    22. JC

      The Dobbs case, yeah.

    23. DF

      Got it. Got it. Okay, okay. That... I, I just didn't hear it perfectly. Weren't a, a lot of these wins for Biden, uh, bipartisan?

    24. JC

      Well, no, the Inflation Reduction Act was passed on straight party lines. This, this, uh, college loan forgiveness is something they can't even get through the Senate, it's being done as a l- as a executive order. The, the things that were-

    25. DF

      The gun stuff, you know.

    26. JC

      ... bipartisan... Hold on. The things that were bipartisan, there was that CHIPS Act where they got some votes.

    27. DF

      Yeah.

    28. DS

      That's great.

    29. JC

      And, um...

    30. DF

      Guns, guns

  6. 1:07:57 – 1:14:27

    Science corner: Gut microbiome, fecal transplants

    1. DS

    2. JC

      So there was, there was a paper published in, um-

    3. DS

      Cell.

    4. JC

      ... uh, the journal Cell. The paper was done by a research team out of Herzliya. So I'll, I'll take a step back. Y- ... The human body is made up of roughly 10 trillion cells, um, and there are also somewhere between 10 and 40 trillion bacterial cells that live in your body, primarily in your small intestine, in your, in what people call the gut biome. And so this is a population of microbes, bacteria, that are basically chemical factories. (metal clanks) They eat stuff up and they spit out chemicals, and those chemicals end up in our body. And it turns out that the gut biome, the bacteria in our gut, can actually regulate our health in a very significant way, and this was the basis of our company Munique. You guys can bleep that out if you want, which is now called SupraGut. And J-Cal, I know you've tried the product, which was-

    5. DF

      SupraGut is awesome. Thank you. You sent me ... I bought Munique. That helped me with my weight loss, and then I just got SupraGut bars-

    6. JC

      Yeah.

    7. DF

      ... which were delicious.

    8. JC

      And so the, the, the principle of that business is that there is a known product, uh, uh, a molecule, amylose, that you can feed the gut biome. It doesn't get absorbed by the human body. It sits in the gut biome and the bacteria in your gut, certain types of bacteria, will eat it. Their population will grow. Another population of bad bacteria will shrink, and the good bacteria release chemicals called short-chain fatty acids that go into your blood and reduce your blood sugar and have a profound effect on, uh, on your metabolism. And there are also known gut bacteria that can regulate your sleep, your mood, your anxiety, your energy levels, and, um, uh, your glycemic control, the control of blood sugar. So it's, it's an incredibly important-

    9. DS

      Are you telling me ... Are you telling me that Cialis is, uh, a natural compound, is a bacteria?

    10. JC

      (laughs)

    11. CP

      (laughs)

    12. DS

      Are you tell-

    13. DF

      Wait a minute. Are you saying we have to cancel our Cialis prescriptions? (laughs)

    14. JC

      (laughs)

    15. CP

      Oh, no. Good god.

    16. JC

      Yeah. So guys, there's, there's, there's a known, um ... There's a known principle that's really deeply studied now in urology, uh, I- in neuroscience, um, uh, called the gut-brain axis, that you can actually profoundly affect, um, disease and the condition of the brain, um, and, uh, and neural conditions by changing the gut biome. And so this is a ... This is something that's just being studied. The reason it's a- it's all coming to light in the last few years is 'cause of the cost of DNA sequencing. We ... It used to be very, very expensive to sequence the DNA from your gut biome, which you do by looking at your poop and then, you know, looking at all the DNA that's in the poop, and that tells you what your gut bio- what bacteria are in your gut. That used to cost a thousand bucks. Now it costs five bucks. And so in the last couple of years, there is this absolute explosion in research into the gut microbiome, and more importantly, how the gut microbiome affects human health. So this particular paper looked at the effect that eating, um, artificial sweeteners had on the gut biome and on human health. And so what these researchers did is they, um, they took 120 people. They gave them nothing or gave them sugar or gave them saccharin or sucralose or aspartame or stevia, the four most popular artificial sweeteners, and then they looked at how their gut biome changed, and importantly, they looked at how their glycemic control or ability to control blood gl- glucose changed. Blood glucose, as you guys may recall, you know, you always have glucose in your blood. The more ... If you have over, you know, a level of 100, uh, you know, you c- and, and it persists, you can actually have really bad health effects, and it causes high A1C over time, which is diabetes. Um, and so high, um-

    17. DF

      And it stores more fat when you're spiking, and so you get fatter.

    18. JC

      Yeah. When, when, when you have high blood glucose, it's actually damaging to organs, it's damaging to cells, and over time, it can cause very significant deleterious effects to the human body. That's what the, the disease of diabetes is and does, is it's about high blood glu- bl- high blood sugar, blood glucose. So what these guys did is they gave people s- uh, saccharin, sucralose, aspartame, and stevia, and then measured their blood glucose and their ability to convert, um, uh, sugar in the blood and absorb it and use it, and that's called glycemic control. The way you guys ... You guys have probably done this at the doctor. You take a g- glycemic control test. You drink a bunch of sugar water, and they measure your blood sugar every couple minutes, and then they show the curve on how effectively your body can metabolize that glucose. And if it cannot metabolize that glucose well, you have bad glycemic control, and ultimately that is diabetes. And what they found was that if you eat saccharin and sucralose, which we always assumed were better than sugar, they actually adversely affect your ability to control, um, uh, blood glucose. Saccharin and sucralose in particular drive up your blood glucose and makes it harder for your body to metabolize glucose out of your blood. Aspartame and stevia were relatively benign.

    19. DF

      Oh, really? 'Cause that's what's in Coke Zero. That's what I drink.

    20. JC

      There you go.

    21. DF

      Aspartame.

    22. JC

      And so, so, so that was kind of the realization, and then they went deep and they actually analyzed the microbiome, and they showed that there were profound differences in how these, um, compounds affected the microbiome. It turns out that sucralose, for example, is more likely not being absorbed by your intestines, so it's sitting in the intestinal walls and the bad bacteria are eating it, and the, the, the good bacteria that are supposed to be making short-chain fatty acids and all these chemicals that regulate blood sugar, um, have a lower population. And so we actually see a, a profoundly negative effect.... from eating certain compounds. And so-

    23. DF

      Have you shipped your poop to test these? Like, you have to-

    24. JC

      Me personally?

    25. DF

      Yeah, I'm just saying-

    26. JC

      We just did a clinical trial at Supergut, by the way, and we found, uh, and, and we published it, so it's, it's public.

    27. DF

      But wait, h- h- this, the audience doesn't even know this stuff exists, in, in all likelihood. The, you basically take a poop, and you put it in a vial and you send it, and they analyze your poop. I don't mean to be graphic here-

    28. JC

      Yeah.

    29. DF

      ... but have you done this before?

    30. JC

      No, so-

Episode duration: 1:23:53

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