E149: Hamas terror attacks in Israel: fallout, reaction, next steps

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome to Episode 149 of The All-In Podcast. With me again, David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya. David Friedberg couldn't make it this week. We're going to carry on without him.
And it's a difficult week. So just a quick opening statement from me about this episode. Like all of you, we're devastated by the terrorist attacks that occurred in Israel on Saturday. And I just want to start the discussion here with two important housekeeping notes. First, this is obviously a very dynamic situation.
And we're dealing with the fog of war, quite literally. So we're going to do our best to make sense of what's happening. But things will change between when we tape this episode on Thursday and you choose to listen to it in all likelihood at some point over the weekend.
Second, there are going to be some folks out there who claim, quite correctly, that we are not the experts on this topic, and thus we shouldn't chime in with our opinions. On the other side, the All-In community has told me explicitly they want to hear us discuss what happened and they want a sense of normalcy. As one loyal listener explained to me last night at a dinner, the fact that the four of you can debate hard topics, listen to each other, and in the end have a deeper understanding of the world gives me hope every week. That's why I listen. So, we'll do what we do here every week. We'll have the hard discussion. We'll listen to each other deeply, hopefully. And we'll try to understand the world and each other just a little bit more.
And that's worth it, at least to me and apparently many of you. So, with those two quick disclaimers, gentlemen, anything you want to say up front before I recap where we are five days into this senseless brutality?

**David Sacks** (1:34)
I think that was a pretty good intro, Jason. I mean, you're right. We're taping on Thursday, late morning Pacific time. By the time this drops, it'll be Friday.
And so a lot could have happened. Also, it's true that the Middle East in general and this topic in particular is hugely complicated. We will be accused of not being experts, but at the same time, the audience seems to appreciate our opinions as consumers of information who are trying to make sense of the world.
So that's all we can really do.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:04)
Right. And conversations, I think, are how we make progress.
Any thoughts before we get started here? And I'll recap what's occurred. Chamath, any opening thoughts before we get into the details here?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:16)
On behalf of somebody who worked in Israel, have a lot of friends there, spent a lot of time there, it's really just a terrible, devastating situation. I've really tried to stay off of social media just because it's allowed me to kind of think a little bit more logically. It's fast and furious right now, I think, on X.
And it's just a lot of people trying to make sure that their version of the truth is amplified over every other version of the truth, which I think is the point in the cycle where you just have to almost unplug from the matrix a little bit and find a few places that seem to be just telling things in an even-handed way, which I also find on X, and then just kind of reconstruct what happened, why it happened, what do we do from here? I don't know. I have a lot of thoughts on a lot of the peripheral issues, but the core issue is just, I'm just stunned that this happened. I don't even know how this is possible that this happened.

**David Sacks** (3:24)
Like Chamath, I'm not trying to get too weighed in too deeply into the tweets, but...

**Jason Calacanis** (3:30)
I did notice you, by the way, have stopped tweeting. You've done a couple of retweets, but you paused this week a lot of your tweeting.

**David Sacks** (3:39)
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's an important time to listen and learn and process what's going on.
This is not a great time to be having hot takes. I have posted a few things. First of all, Jason, you've made the analogy to 9-11 being in New York right now. I think that is the comparison that's been made, is that this is Israel's 9-11. I think that's a justifiable comparison in two respects.
One is this was a terrorist attack. It was an atrocity. This was a massacre of civilians. Even if you're somebody who believes in the Palestinian cause, you should be able to recognize that these were war crimes. The videos are coming out. The stories are coming out. In particular, the rounding up and slaughter of 260 attendees at a music festival was really beyond the pale. They're clearing some of these farming villages and so forth, and finding the bodies, the families, basically killed. Anyway, we don't need to repeat all of the details here, but this was, I think, an attack on civilians that is reminiscent of 9-11 and has affected the Israeli people in a similar way.