E63: Insurrection indictments, human rights in the US and abroad, groundbreaking MS study and more

Chamath Palihapitiya said leaving Sri Lanka ultimately changed where he feels responsible for human-rights problems. He described emigration through Canada to the U.S. as a choice to focus on the country that adopted him, while calling Sri Lanka’s war-ending human-rights record atrocious.

Jason Calacanis argued that venture investors should use capital itself as leverage against serious human-rights abuses. He said he would not take money from an authoritarian regime and urged founders and investors to consider disengagement from regimes or backers tied to torture, murder, rape or forced sterilization.

Despite fighting over January 6, the panel converged on three practical responses: prosecute organized offenders, tighten Capitol security and clarify electoral certification. Sacks argued the Electoral Count Act of 1887 offered a bipartisan fix; Jason agreed a smaller dangerous cohort warranted much harsher treatment than ordinary protesters.

The panel highlighted a major benefit of pandemic stimulus that their inflation criticism often omitted: the first two rounds lifted 11.7 million Americans out of poverty. They cited Census Bureau figures and $2.7 trillion in accumulated savings, while still arguing that excessive stimulus contributed to later inflation risk.

A Harvard military-cohort study gave the episode’s strongest scientific finding: Epstein-Barr infection preceded every MS case in a key previously uninfected subgroup. Using 62 million stored blood samples from 10 million service members, researchers identified about 800 people who began EBV-negative and later developed MS; the study estimated a 32-fold higher risk after infection.

The genetically modified pig-heart transplant was treated as more than an organ-supply breakthrough: gene editing could also attack transplant rejection. David Bennett, 57, received the experimental heart on January 7, and the panel argued future organs might be engineered to suppress immune-triggering proteins or better match a recipient’s biology.

Jason proposed replacing wealth-based accredited-investor barriers with a knowledge test plus an investment cap tied to income. His example would let ordinary people invest perhaps 5–10% of recent average income in private companies, giving workers, drivers and hosts earlier equity exposure to firms like LinkedIn, Uber or Airbnb.

David Sacks admitted he has hired professional comedy writers for roast material, but only twice. He said writers supplied material for Jason Calacanis and Phil Hellmuth roasts, after which he shaped and workshopped it—an unusually candid account of how those performances were built.