E46: False Ivermectin narratives, regulatory grift, wartime mentality in solving issues & more | LIVE from TPB Symposium!

**David Sacks** (0:00)
J. Cal looks like he's going to a night at the Roxbury.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:02)
Absolutely.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:11)
I mean, you look horrible.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:13)
Thank you.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:14)
Absolutely fucking horrible.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:15)
Okay, appreciate it. Is that your MCI.
Thanks for coming. This is the Production Board Symposium 2021 Tell us just a little bit about why we're here, David, and what this is and what it represents for the Production Board.

**Eric Friedberg** (0:49)
The Production Board Symposium, second ever. Thank you all for being here. We're excited. We have an amazing group of scientists, engineers, folks from academia, from business, from the investing community, some of our investors. So we're excited to share thoughts and ideas over the next couple of days and thought we would chase half of you away by hosting the All-In Pod tonight.
So here we go.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:17)
Great. Okay. So first up in the news, Rolling Stone amplifies Ivermectin story. You were following this, Chamath. What do you think?
This Ivermectin controversy and...

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:29)
You want to give a little summary of what the issue is before we talk about the hypocrisy of it?

**Jason Calacanis** (1:35)
Well, on September 1st, Oklahoma News Station K4 ran a story and published an article on Ivermectin overdoses backing up rural hospitals. The article was titled Patients Overdosing on Ivermectin Backing up Rural Oklahoma Hospitals and Ambulances. First line of the article, quote, a rural Oklahoma doctor said patients who are taking the home dewormer medication, Ivermectin, to fight COVID-19 are causing emergency rooms and ambulances to back up. On September 3rd, Rolling Stone amplified the story in its own article.
The only problem was they treated, they tweeted it with a picture that featured people lined up in the cold. It turns out the picture was people waiting for vaccine shots back in January, not gunshot victims waiting to get into the hospital.

**David Sacks** (2:30)
Yeah, the story is totally false. You understand that, right?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:32)
Well, I didn't want to say fake news, but I know it was beyond it was beyond fake news. This was basically a doctored up, conjured article by some person trying to incite a moral mania at Rolling Stone. Look, you tell me if the science of this is wrong. The whole premise is ridiculous. So Ivermectin basically, as far as we know, because we don't know that much, acts on a handful of specific characteristics. One we know to be glutamate, which we don't really express in the same way as like fucking worms.
And so yes, technically it can be used as a dewormer, but there are four or five other ways in which it acts, which we don't know anything about, because we haven't taken the time to do a broad based double blind study. So I think the fairest thing to say about Ivermectin is we don't know what it is. And so neither the people that propose to use it as a solution for COVID, nor the people that rail against it aren't really starting from the basis of fact. But then what happens is you have these folks who basically are so turned off by the idea that people aren't getting vaccines, they're going to use this other thing. They basically doctor it up an article that wouldn't be so bad because nobody reads Rolling Stone.
Right.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:42)
It's kind of a it's like it's kind of it's an ancient brand that was going for medical news.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:47)
But then the problem is you get a handful of these folks who think they're really, really smart who amplify it. Rachel Maddow amplifies it. Jimmy Kimmel does it on a comedy skit. And then all of a sudden there's this enormous outrage.
But the problem is you can't put the genie back in the bottle when it turns out to be a completely fabricated lie.
And then all the people that are purporting to basically push this lie who now have been outed have no consequences because they're on the left screaming at the right. And what happened when it was the other way around, we basically started to put people in boxes. We basically kicked them off these platforms. And again, so you have this compounding building double standard. That to me is the whole the worst part about it.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:26)
David, when we look at the Ivermectin story, we also saw Joe Rogan got COVID. That was a big ha ha moment for a lot of people.
And he took Ivermectin as part of his treatment. And then people started amplifying that he was taking a worm drug for horses, dewormer, dewormer.