What did your doctor give you to make you lose all this weight?

What is your celebrity doctor giving you?

Tell the truth.

Did you get that new shot?

People on Twitter are like,

your Twitter account’s sounding a lot more like J-Cow.

And I’m like, I think we’re on the same diet.

I think that’s what’s going on here.

In three, two…

Love you, Wesley.

Hey, everybody.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome to another episode of The All In Pod.

With us today, of course, the queen of quinoa.

And from his castle in Italy, the cackling dictator,

Chamath Palihapitiya, nice gardenias.

And back from his big, big battle, his brawl,

unblocked and undefeated, the rain man himself, David Sacks.

And judging by the comments, I’d say dominant.

Oh, you read the comments?

Just another sign of your obsession with how you’re perceived.

I never read comments.

Rule number one, don’t read the comments.

We’re not doing it again.

It shows because you’re not listening to the comments.

So it makes sense.

Okay, go ahead.

And you got your whole troll army?

How many people have you hired on your social media team

to troll me from anonymous accounts on Twitter now to prove your points?

Now you’re paranoid too.

I’m not going to.

Don’t be paranoid.

Don’t be paranoid.

Anyway, look, we’ve patched things up.

It’s patched up.

Don’t break the peace.

We have detente.

All right.

So Freeberg is busy writing tweet storms now about the drought in California,

which seems to be just going to be a really bad year, basically.

So Freeberg, walk us through it.

How bad is California’s drought going to be this year?

So the drought is already very bad.

I put out a lot of tweets at two in the morning last night.

I think I drank way too much caffeine yesterday.

I’m in the mountains.

And like the only way I can avoid having headaches is like drinking caffeine all day.

And it was a mistake.

It kept me up all night.

You’re sure it’s not there.

Maybe you’re so excited about this

that you just can’t sleep.

Nick, you can beat this out.

Nick, you got to edit this shit out.

No, no.

Keep that.

Keep that.

So, you know, the big tweet storm I put out at two in the morning last night kind of highlighted

that there was a paper published in 2018-2019 that showed how, you know, North America,

particularly the western half of North America is in this, you know, mega drought that we haven’t

seen in, you know, 500 plus years.

And since that paper was published, you know, in 2019, conditions have only worsened.

We talked about this a few pods ago.

But like the snowpack level in California reached 0% throughout the entire state by

June 1st.

That has never happened before.

Temperatures in British Columbia, as you guys know, reached over 120 degrees for several

days in a row last week, which has never been seen in history in British Columbia.

You know, there was a paper published today that estimates that over a billion

animals and life forms were wiped out in the coastal region of British Columbia because

of this heat wave.

And the temperatures in California are obviously excessive as well, not as bad as they were

last year.

But what matters most is that the moisture conditions in our forest land is lower than

we’ve ever seen at this time of year in history.

And so this all sets us up and the other kind of big consequence, the high temperatures

is causing an increased demand for air conditioners.

That’s the big variable in power demand on all grids.

And the low snowpack means that we’re not getting hydroelectric power.

Hydroelectric power is down by 70% in the state of California over where we were in

2019.

Because there’s no snow that’s melting causing the rivers to flow.

And about 11 to 15% of our state’s electricity comes from hydroelectric power.

So we’re going to have more power demand, we have less power available.

We have extremely dry forests.

And so this is setting us up for a number of possible disasters this year.

And so rather than just trying to sound the alarm bells, what I’m pointing out is that

there may be some things that we should be thinking about doing to try and get ahead

of some of the consequences of these, these big risks, like, you know, having enough masks

for people to breathe outside, so we don’t have to shut down schools and shut down outdoor

work and all the things that might happen.

Having community centers that have power available, the state is scrambling to find excess power

on the grid right now.

But, you know, it just highlights that there’s a moment here that is almost like where we

were going into COVID.

It may not happen, but the probability is high enough that something bad may happen

that we should probably start to get prepared for it.

You know, we should probably be talking about the things we’re doing to get prepared for

it.

And we’re talking about, we should be talking about the things we’re going to do to make

sure that communities are safe and people are safe and businesses can keep operating.

Because if the state of California has 150 AQI, which is the air quality index, workers

can’t work outside.

And all the outdoor work, which employs 3 million Californians has to shut down.

And you know, you kind of start to add these things up.

It’s like, what are we going to do as this happens, not if this happens, and we should

kind of be planning for it.

And I don’t see much happening in terms of planning and preparation and talking about

the opportunity.

History rhymes, because if you remember, and this is all going into a recall election in

the fall, this was a different but kind of equivalent setup where you guys remember,

we were having all these blackouts and brownouts when Gray Davis was recalled.

And then Schwarzenegger just swooped up out of nowhere.

And, you know, people thought, oh, there’s no chance.

And people were just frustrated because the quality of life took a measurable step backwards

in the intervening six or nine months before the recall election.

And so it’ll be really interesting to see how Gavin Newsom manages all of this, because

if he can’t get the state’s act together, and you have all of these issues at hand,

and a credible candidate emerges, you could have some really interesting political fireworks

in September.

A big part of this, correct me if I’m wrong, Friedberg, is that we live in essentially

like a lot of desert area here in California, and we just haven’t invested in the desalinization

plants.

We have one that’s come on since 2005.

And I think there’s another one in SoCal that was mothballed, and they during the last drought

wanted to open it up again.

But we now have one in Carlsbad, the Clawed Bud, Lewis Carlsbad desalinization plant that

is now I think that cost us a billion bucks.

But Israel, correct me if I’m wrong, is now they charge three times as much for water

than we do.

So people take water seriously, and they actually monitor their water usage.

And they have desalinization, and they have more water than they need per capita.

Well, desal doesn’t really solve a number of these problems that I’m highlighting, you

know, the probability of the forest land on the west coast, not just in California, but

all up and down the west coast catching on fire is very high.

No number of desal plants is going to put out those fires.

When that happens, the air quality is going to get really bad.

You know, like we saw last year, I don’t know, you guys remember, I escaped to Lake

Michigan last summer, when the smoke hit.

Yeah, we remember the threads.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it was, it was insane.

You know, it doesn’t desal plants don’t solve the air quality problem where people can’t

work outside, your kids can’t go to school, etc, etc.

Desal plants don’t solve the problem of hydroelectric plants, which require snowpack to melt to

get rivers to run to turn those turbines to generate electricity for the state.

Nuclear would solve that, though.

Nuclear would solve that, certainly.

And so, you know, the point is, we’re kind of reaching this apex of, are we going to

do climate change adaptation?

Are we going to have, you know, kind of long term systemic solutions that we’re going to

start to put in place for these risks that we face?

And more importantly, from an acute perspective in the near term, what are the actions we

should be taking to protect communities and get ahead of this problem?

So it’s not a scramble after the crisis, which is what we typically do with these sorts of

we’re not investing in infrastructure, if we put in some nuclear power plants, if we

did more de sal, and we did more forest management, or put more fire breaks into, you know, all

this, I’m talking about a simple solutions, like, have those three things would be massive,

wouldn’t they?

Well, those are long term solutions.

I’m talking about like for this summer, this summer, is it we need we need we need community

know, but we need to prepare for what is going to happen this summer.

So when communities get run out, what are we going to do, you know, do we have community

centers set up where people can get water and power?

Do we have masks available so that outdoor workers can keep working in the state?

You know, all of these things that we could be doing to get in front of the inevitable

consequences of these risks, I think are things that we should be actively

if you’re in California, you should order your air purifiers.

Now, we ordered six more of the Conway ones that we used last year that were amazing.

Get and do it.

We have the N95 masks, we ordered them already.

And we’re going to put in a power generator, which I know not everybody is able to do.

But you can buy a portable one for as little as three or 400 bucks, I think now.

So portable generator in case you lose power, stock up on everything else,

we need those solutions.

Like I think there’s going to be a big kind of power generator push, right?

Like distributed power has always been something that’s the whole point of solar,

you get the solar on your roof, you get your own power.

But how are you going to keep your AC running when it’s 120 degrees outside if you have no

power?

You know, that’s kind of a very scary circumstance of heat waves.

And it’s something that we should have a real plan around.

And if I were the governor, or if I were kind of California leadership,

or leadership up and down the West Coast, you know, the Western governors,

I’d probably be running a daily press conference starting now, saying,

let’s just get in front of this problem and talk about what are the risks we’re seeing,

what are the problems we’re seeing, and what we’re doing about it,

just so people feel reassured.

Because, you know, scrambling after a crisis doesn’t make anyone feel better.

You know, showing that we’re prepared, and we’re taking action to get in front of this crisis,

which is not 100% certain, but it’s a greater than 0% probability,

is something that could helpfully kind of reassure and start to put the pieces in place

for the near term.

By the way, just just for those that don’t really appreciate how interconnected everything is the

basics, the science basics on drought, as I learned about them, were really, really incredible.

So you think, okay, well, how is all this stuff connected, it turns out that, you know,

as we have warmer and warmer temperatures, I didn’t know this,

Friedberg, you probably do this, but it accelerates soil evaporation.

And then there’s this really terrible feedback loop that starts, which is you have drier soil,

which means you have less vegetation.

And then as a result, you have less what’s called evapotranspiration,

which means there’s less regional precipitation.

And then this whole thing just starts to spin and spin and spin,

you have warmer temperatures that results in less snowpack, the snowpack, the snowpack melts

earlier. And we have a situation now in the United States, which is just incredible.

I saw a graph, which is one of soil moisture.

And it shows basically the western half of the United States is in the first percentile

of soil moisture, looking back over many, many decades.

So well, then all of that vegetation dries up, and then it becomes fodder for more fires.

No, Jason, we’re even worse than this, we’re in a position where,

you know, we are threatening our own food supply.

And just just to just to put a finer point on this, it’s not just the western half of

the United States, that’s now suffering from this, it’s Brazil, it’s the Mediterranean

and southern Europe, and it’s large parts of Africa, you add up all those number of people,

there are many countries there that are actually self sufficient, which will then no longer be

we’ll have to import food, that food quality is, you know, questionable at best in some cases.

So we’re in a really tough position here.

And so it’s, isn’t this all solvable with technology?

I mean, if we just tax people a little more for the water usage, if we really invested

in the desal plants, if we really invested in nuclear, we could actually flip this whole thing

the same way it’s spiraling in the wrong direction, it could spiral in the right direction.

Two things on the water side, I’ve been looking at water investing for a while,

there’s a there’s a real problem, which is, you know, when I when I looked at this,

my team found some incredibly interesting opportunities, largely,

it evolves around owning water rights, right, and then basically selling them back to the state.

And when states get in difficult situations, the problem is,

I think it’s politically intolerable for, let’s just say somebody like me,

to own those kinds of water.

To be a water baron.

Yeah, I think it’s I think it’s no bueno. The idea then that I had was like, well,

maybe what we should be doing is buying these things and sticking them in a foundation so

that we can guarantee water for people in certain states. Maybe that flies, I’m not so sure.

That’s the government’s job.

That’s the government’s job. And but then they’re not doing their job.

But they’re incompetent.

They’re unfortunately not, not as skilled as you’d want them to be on this stuff.

Saks, how would you spin this out of this death spiral and into abundance? Is there a way?

Well, I mean, the first thing to realize here is that this is not a black swan event. I mean,

this is entirely foreseeable. Drought conditions have existed in California for a long time.

In fact,

200 years. Yeah.

Well, and even maybe going back millions of years. I mean, geologists have found evidence that,

you know, millions of years ago, you would have millions of acres of California burning every

year. And so drought conditions have existed for a long time. Has climate change amplified

that and made it worse? Yes. But this is entirely foreseeable. We know we’re dealing

with these conditions. And in fact, back on his first day in office in 2019,

Newsom held his very first press conference about this issue on emergency preparedness for fires.

But the problem is, there has been no follow through. And so, you know, to go back to Chamath’s

point about the political ramifications here, you could have a Gray Davis-like situation with

the recall where all of a sudden Newsom goes from being the favorite to potentially losing

because of fire season. But by the way, I mean, the whole reason why the recall election is

happening in September now instead of October, November is because Newsom is precisely worried

about the Gray Davis scenario. And this recall is supposed to happen in the October, November

timeframe. They’ve moved it up to September because Newsom thinks there’s a higher chance of fading

the worst of fire season by doing the election sooner. The problem for him is that fire season

now starts in August. And so, we could be in the middle of fire season when this recall election

happens. And this thing could boomerang on him. But back to the point about, you know,

Newsom held this press conference back in January of 2019. And the problem is,

there hasn’t been any real follow through on forest management. So, you know, Newsom was

recently caught in a lie saying that, you know, they had basically treated 90,000 acres,

this is what this article I put in the chat said, in reality, that only really treated about 11,000

acres, even 90,000 would be inadequate, right? They’re not doing enough. And the way, you know,

I talked to a very prominent person who knows California politics well and knows all the

players. And what he said is, look, the fundamental problem is that Gavin is not operational,

right? He’s fantastic at fundraising. He says all the right things at press conferences.

Right here, right here.

But not everything is about running for re-election. And the problem is, he has not

managed to this outcome. And so, now we’re in the situation where, to Freedberg’s point,

we’re going to be scrambling after the fact. Now, what is Newsom’s excuse going to be? It’s

going to be, you know, climate change. It’s going to be global warming. It’s kind of the all-purpose

dog ate my homework excuse for anything that goes wrong is that he can just blame it on climate

change. But the reality is, we knew about climate change. Climate change is something we’re going

to have to live with. Even if we stop it in its tracks from this point forward, we’re not going

to be able to reverse the effects it’s already had. And so, we need leaders who will step up and

get much more aggressive about preventing this problem. I think, and by the way, my tweet,

I didn’t mention climate change at all. I got, you know, I don’t think that that’s even the point.

The point is, we are facing acute conditions on the, in the western half of the United States

right now, that lead to a number of significant and severe consequences. Those acute conditions,

you know, you could blame them on climate change or say that they’re part of climate change,

it doesn’t change the reality. They are here today, and we have to deal with them. And I think

yeah, we have a we have a couple of things that are that are going to happen here in short order

that I think can make this thing accelerated a little. So there’s a an organization, a department

in the United States government that’s not very well known called the US Bureau of Reclamation,

USBR. And they are the ones that will make formal assessments of water levels. And there’s a really

important assessment that’s going to happen in Lake Mead at the end of this year. And the reason

why it’s critical is that if the US Bureau of Reclamation measures Lake Mead under a certain

threshold, they can declare a tier one shortage. And what that means, just practically speaking,

cutting through all the, you know, jargon is that initially, the state of Arizona will be denied

around 600,000 acre feet of water next year. What does that mean? That’s about 15% of the demand for

that state. And so you’re going to start, you know, to deal with these sort of like rolling,

I don’t know what we’re even going to call these water out scenarios where it’s not just about

watering your lawn, that’s not going to be possible, it’s going to be a whole bunch of other

things. Now, there is a solution. And this is where California can come to the rescue for most of the

Western United States if they really want to, or at least for the rest of California, which is

there is an enormous untapped groundwater aquifer in Southern California, which is the size of Lake

Mead. It’s an incredibly unique thing. It’s actually owned by a public company.

And the whole goal was, okay, well, let’s just build a pipeline, right from the aquifer to

deliver drinking water to folks that, you know, are lacking water. And this has been a multi year,

you know, bordering on multi decades slog because of California politicians,

because water has become highly politicized, no one wants to pay the full cost for a commodity

that they frankly view as a right, but then they don’t want to step in to do the work

to actually make it reasonable and viable. So this whole thing is just again, as David,

as you said, the dog ate my homework. And now we’re really playing with some very complicated

things that are really out of the control and intellectual capacity of the frankly state

governments, which is the interconnectedness of weather, temperature, water or soil or food

supply. It’s a I think what’s so frustrating, this is this is so easily solvable. And we are not

doing the blocking and tackling the free throws the basic things. If you look at just monitoring

our water usage, I invested in two companies, one of them didn’t work out. But both of them were to

monitor water usage. And what we learned was at a campus like Stanford, they have like four water

meters, like they’re not going down to the building level, in some cases, there’ll be like

four buildings on one water meter. And you can very easily at each sink at each, you know,

showerhead, you can put a device that costs 25 bucks installed, it just wraps around the the

water, the the pipe, and it could tell you how it’s flowing. And we lose 20 30% of our water to

leaks. Nobody is monitoring their usage, because there is no cost to it to match point. And then

you look at these crazy, insane, almond and other agriculture in the middle of California.

They are using flood irrigation, which I’m sure Friedberg can give us an education at versus what

you know, the drip irrigation that they use and other reclaiming methods in Israel and other

places. So we look at water as like, to Tramont’s point, some crazy, God given right that we can

just splash it everywhere, we can take 20 minute showers. And then we allow how crazy is this,

we allow the bottling of water in California, we allow these companies to bottle water and then

sell it. And we don’t even monitor our usage. We have well, we are so entitled, it is gross,

nuisance biggest donors. Who’s that family that grows all the almonds or whatever?

Whoever they are, the Resnick’s,

the Resnick’s single biggest, them and the teachers union signals.

Oh, Linda Resnick and those palm people with the palm stuff.

It’s total political corruption, right? I mean, they get

Chinatown. It’s literally the movie Chinatown.

Yeah. Well, I think so to this point about why aren’t politicians solving the problems? I mean,

to make a meta point, there’s a great tweet from Thomas soul or the person who manages

the Thomas soul account, where he said, no one will really understand politics until they

understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They’re trying to solve

their own problems, which are getting elected and reelected. That’s number one, number two.

Stay in office. That is their only goal.

Whatever is number three is far behind. And that’s basically the situation we have is,

I think Newsom actually is a little bit like Trump, not in his personal style, but in that

he thinks he can talk his way out of problems. And he’s not going to focus on solving a problem

when he can just spin his way out of it. By the way, I just think you guys should know

the you know, because a lot of people talk about residential water use, that is also kind of an

acute and local problem, where depending on your water supply, how much water you have available

to your community. But in terms of aggregate water use, the vast majority of water in California is

used in agriculture. It’s about 10x what is used for residential applications. So California

agriculture, by the way, it’s not a bad thing. It’s a huge part of our economy, that water has

generally been fully available in aquifers, people bought that land with rights, they paid a premium

for those rights to those aquifers. This is a very complicated problem in California. And that,

you know, supports a large part of the California economy. So you know, you can’t just kind of blow

them away. But 90% of water use in California is associated with ag. And it’s not just a generally

we need to save water problem. It’s very specific to a region and a community and their particular

water source on whether and how much you need to save versus do you have abundant supplies and so

on. And so it’s a little bit more complicated, but yeah, but we should be focused on abundance,

Freeberg. If you look at the new nuclear power plants that you know, Bill Gates has invested in,

and then you look at desalinization, which is an energy issue, we can desalinize for roughly two

or three times the cost that we’re getting more water for now. So just put a nuclear power plant

next to a desalinization plant, and you’re done. Great. That’s a 20 year project. And you got

why? Why is it a 20 year project? China does it in two, you got to be more bold in this country.

It is completely ridiculous that we accept that everything has to take 20 years. We need this now.

Where’s the leadership that says, fuck it, let’s do it immediately. Let’s set a goal of two years

to build 10 of these. And let’s spend the fucking money.

I’m not sure it solves our acute problems. It solves long term problems associated with climate

change and energy. We can’t do both. Let’s do both. Sure, we should do everything. But right now,

you know, the conditions indicate that there are some specific things that we can and should be

doing to kind of support the state in terms of what’s going to happen in the next year or two.

And yes, we should also be funding long term projects that create water security and energy

security for everyone in the United States. But Saks, to your point, and by the way, if you guys

ever want to read an interesting book about how the grid operates, there’s a book called The Grid.

And it talks about how the electrical power grid system was built in the United States and how

inefficient it is and all the problems. There are a lot of structural problems that need to be solved,

not just, you know, dropping in cheap power. Saks, who is the good operational candidate

that you’ve seen that’s running for governor of California in this recall? Is there someone that

stands out in your mind? Because I don’t seem to hear anyone talking about, hey, there’s a good

alternative to Gavin Newsom at this point. Yeah, I mean, we don’t a clear alternative has not

emerged yet. You know, I guess the and part of the problem is that because there was no

Republican primary, you haven’t sort of consolidated the opposition to a leading

candidate. There are a couple of, I guess, interesting candidates on the Republican side,

I need to spend more time getting to, you know, know them. I mean, I’ve never met them or talked

to them. But the two who are, I think, mentioned quite a bit are this guy, Faulkner, who’s the

mayor of San Diego, who is sort of a socially liberal Republican. And then there’s a state

assemblyman named Kevin Kiley, who I think says a lot of interesting things. And he just announced

he’s running. There’s another guy as well, John Cox, but he got trounced by Newsom in the last

election, I think it’s time to let somebody else take a shot against him. And then of course,

you’ve got Caitlyn Jenner, but I think people are still trying to figure out if her campaign

is real or how real it is. So yeah, look, we the opposition has not consolidated against Newsom,

the way it did with Schwarzenegger, you know, back in 2001,

I’m voting, I’m voting Republican, just to create a counterbalance. I don’t care who it is. And I’m

not a Republican, I’m an independent, but I’m voting across the board, I’m just going to go

to Republican for every position in California. And I’m going to just run my finger down the

Republican line and check every single one. How does it feel to be a radical Trump supporter?

Listen, I’m not for Trump, but Chamath, talk to us about nuclear and what we can do to get to

reverse what these hippie, dippy, well intentioned, no nukes concert, set us back 50 years. And let’s

be honest, a lot of the climate change problems we have today, we would not have if we had invested

in nuclear. Yeah, I sent her around. Well, I sent her on an image, Nick, maybe you can stick it in

the show notes or something so that people can see but if you if you look at if you graph the

construction of nuclear reactors from the 1960s 1960s to today, essentially what and you color

code them by country, what essentially you see is a transition from the able from the frankly,

from countries that basically were just right at the leading the pack, and it was really the United

States, building, building, building, and then two things really happened. There was Three Mile

Island, and then there was Chernobyl. And there was an incredible overreaction to not really

understanding either the cause and or the remediation to two events. Now, could you

imagine if there were two airlines that crashed, and we stopped flying? How, basically, we would

have, you know, retarded the progress of the world. And now you impose it on something like nuclear

energy, which is consistently proven to provide an enormous, the abundant, cheap, and clean form

of sustainable energy. And it actually solves a bunch of the problems we talked about before. So

for example, if you look at the power consumption for desalination, it’s off the charts, quite

honestly, okay, that’s why people say that it can’t be done credibly. If you look at even just

like the amount of energy that’s required to clean water and to, you know, sanitize water and make it

drinkable. The the standards that are defined by the government are incredibly stringent, but the

implication of it operationally is an enormous amount of power that goes into it. But Jason,

you are right, which is that if we have small forms of sustainable, abundant energy that can

be basically hyper localized and located where we can do these jobs, the jobs to be done,

it’s transformational. Now, why doesn’t it happen? It doesn’t happen because the same folks who

really want to sound the alarm bells on climate change, which is the progressive left, are not

really willing, they’re intellectually lazy when it comes to nuclear, they don’t do the work.

They make a brand sort of broad based prognostication about how we need to do something

about climate, then they will point to solar and wind without really understanding the contamination

of the earth that we do in order to mine the rare earths and the actual metal and mineral inputs

that are required for solar. It’s yes, nuts. But it sounds better, right? It sounds better.

It sounds better. Oh, we’re using air and the sun and water.

And it’s like, if I could show you what tailings are, and like the dirty after effects of mining

copper and nickel out of the ground, which is what we need for batteries, and how countries

like Indonesia are literally dumping it into the ocean, dumping it faster that they can get their

hands on it so that they can sell copper and nickel and cobalt to us so that we can make

batteries, you would actually say to yourself, if you knew all these facts, you’d actually say to

yourself, you know what, maybe nuclear isn’t so bad. And maybe I overreacted to do you want to

understand this, you just have to look at the laziest group of individuals in society, the

French, they want to take the laziest route and do the least amount of work and have the most amount

of leisure. Sorry to our French listeners. 70% of the energy in France is from nuclear nuclear

figured this out. They said, How do we take more time off and not work and have unlimited

electric 70% nuclear? They’re smart. Well, the French are actually smart, because after

Fukushima, because after Fukushima, what happened is if you had, you know, sort of like woke

politicians, Germany, a bunch of Germany, they completely unwound their entire nuclear agenda,

shut it down, which, which was insanity, insanity. And so now here they are, they’re writing laws

faster than they can make them up. They’re basically pivoting entire industries to try to

now adopt batteries and storage without any real understanding about the downstream implications

to the earth that they are going to create the net consequences. If they had just stayed the

course on nuclear, they would be in a much better place. And to Francis credit, they were like,

what the fuck are you people overreacting about? Again, just think about this, guys,

the pragmatism is delightful stopped flying. After two airline crashes, where would the world be?

Where would the world be? I mean, be pragmatists here? What do we want to deal with high energy

prices, and brownouts and all kinds of problems and rolling blackouts? Or do we want to put this

issue behind us? If we just go on a Manhattan project, literally to make new nuclear, we would

be this issue would be behind us. And we could focus on something else like education. It’s so

dumb. The very scary thing about nuclear is despite all of the progress, it will get bogged

down in litigation and bureaucracy. These are the last two things that should be in front of science

and physics, especially when it comes to energy independence. I just think it’s

it’s crazy. Anyway, out any way we can get people to what’s the best way to convince the American

public to embrace nuclear and force our politicians to do it. Open your mind and think for yourself.

Right, please. Well,

Mark Andreessen had a good term. He said we’re living in a V talker see as in the word veto.

I think it was an interesting interview with Antonio Garcia Martinez on his blog. Anyway,

yeah, they were talking about the inability of the US to build anything anymore,

especially when you compare us to some place like China. And whether you want to call it

nimbyism or vetocracy, there are just too many people and groups who have the right to say no

to anything and block anything important from happening. But we got to we got to stop letting

our politicians off the hook by making excuses, you know, just because there’s climate change

doesn’t mean that the politicians can’t do anything about it.

I mean, welcome to the downstream consequences of a successful democracy. Right? Like a democracy

over time doesn’t reduce the number of laws it has. Every year politicians need to do their job

and they create new laws. As new laws accumulate, like the things get clogged up, right? Like,

when have you seen a law that gets passed by a local government, a state government or federal

government that makes it easier to do something? I get that. But where where does it say in the

Constitution of the United States that being part of a democracy also means shutting your brain off

and becoming a dumb cynic? Yeah, that’s that’s not part of what being part of a democracy is.

I by the way, I want to I want to talk about that for one second. There was this thing

that I sent you guys in the chat. And Nick, hopefully you post post that in the show notes

as well. But there was a study that was done about cynicism. And it went back and it did like

a qualitative assessment of more than 200,000 people, and their attitudes and their measured

IQ, their measured literacy, their measured numeracy, and their measured earnings. And

here’s what they found. cynicism is associated with lower IQ, lower literacy, lower numeracy

and lower earnings. The idea of cynical individuals being more competent, appears to be

a widespread, yet largely illusory lie. So I think, I think this makes sense. I mean, I was shocked by

that study, because I actually generally think cynical people must be smarter, because they’re

thinking more rationally. And maybe I’m being emotional. It turns out they’re fucking stupid.

Well, here’s the thing. There’s cynicism. And then there’s people who are cantankerous and

not content. And I think people sometimes conflate those two things. If you look at the constant,

constant, pervasive cynicism is not a feature of democracy. It means that you just stop thinking

for yourself as a protective mechanism, right? But but the people we know, who have changed the

world and who they seem to be, they’re not cynical. They’re not cynical. They’re actually

delusional and optimistic, or as they wouldn’t have started a company to make electric cars,

you know, or, you know, whatever piece of software or climate.com, or synthetic biology,

you have to be a radical optimist. I mean, we’re literally trying to attack our incredible

capitalists who are actually solving these problems, while our politicians can’t get

their shit together and make diesel plants and nuclear plants. The private market seems

like the only solution sacks. Well, there’s an old saying that pessimists get to be right,

and optimists get to be rich. And, yeah. If you think about it, you know, pessimists don’t create

companies, right? They’re, they’re no rocks, they become journalists. They become shit posters on

Twitter. They become critics. Yeah. Anton Ego, right? Sax, what do you think about this idea

that, you know, if we get into the throes of it, for water, the folks that own water rights,

I think that this is going to be like an eminent domain issue where the government is at some

point just going to say, sorry, need it back. It’s mine. Yeah, during an emergency, for sure.

For sure. But I mean, I hate to, I hate to use the words, I agree with Jay cow, but

but you know, look, there’s not a shortage of water in the world, right? I mean, the world

is mostly water. So it is a function of building desalination plants, if that’s what we need.

There has to be a solution for that problem. And Freeberg’s right that maybe it does take

a decade or two to put in place all that infrastructure. But then why didn’t we start

10 years ago? You see, we should be starting a program where we convince the American public

that abundance would lead to them having more freedom, and our country being stronger,

electrical abundance with nuclear water abundance with desalinization, and agricultural abundance

with those previous two, because if you had unlimited nuclear energy, and you had a limited

clean water, the price of agriculture will go down, and we’d have more free food for everybody

or lower cost food.

I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you a theory I have on this. And it’s basically an anti science theory,

which is that, you know, culturally, we’ve kind of developed this anti innovation,

anti science mentality, broadly speaking, across kind of modern culture in the United States.

If you remember coming out of World War Two, and I think it has its roots in the Cold War.

You know, out of when World War Two ended, you know, we were all in it together,

you know, this country, everyone bought the same stuff. We all had Rice Krispies every day,

we all kind of, you know, we’re excited about our homes that look like everyone else’s home

on the block. And technology was empowering all of this, right? There was a space race on

there were plastics that were suddenly allowing us to make all sorts of amazing things.

There were chemicals that were creating new drugs for humans, and new applications for

agriculture that was making an abundance of food, and increasing lifespans and so on.

But then what happened in the late 60s and 70s, is we realized we got ahead of ourselves.

And, you know, there was cancer from DDT, there was, you know, Three Mile Island, there was

a number of pollutants that got into the environment that permanently damaged the

environment from chemical companies. And we started to wake up and say, like, wait a second,

all of this technology that we thought was so great, and was giving us this extraordinary

abundance, it turns out is really risky and can cause massive unknown consequences.

And if you watch, I think I talked about this on our podcast once, but one of my favorite videos

to watch, there’s a video on YouTube from the Disney Channel History Institute. And they show

the history of Tomorrowland at Disneyland. When Tomorrowland opened in 1955, every ride was all

about adventuring into space and like traveling into the human body. And they even had a ride

from Monsanto where you would go into the micro world and look at plastics and stuff. And it was

all about this amazing abundance in technology. And the guy, the narrator on the video says,

beginning in the late 60s, early 70s, we changed all the rides. And the rides all became about the

fear of technology. It was all about aliens attacking Earth. It was all about Captain EO

was like, you know, the world became robotic and got taken over by unnatural things.

Even Star Tours was about a robot that went awry. And the robot doesn’t know what it’s doing. So,

it drove us off course and we had to survive the robot. And so, everything became, you know,

subconscious or subliminally a little bit, this negative technology sentiment. And I think that

that still persists, you know, there is an asymmetry people take for granted the abundance

over time, because you get used to it. But you feel the acute pain of the loss when technology

goes awry. And then that becomes the social conscience. And I think we’re still grappling

with that. And I don’t know how you reverse it. Because you know what, are we not experiencing

this right now, everybody with COVID, where there’s one group of people who are like, Oh, my

God, the science we were able to deploy in COVID and get through this so quickly is so promising

that the world’s going to be better. net net after the pandemic, even with all the suffering,

you could make an argument that that suffering is going to lead to more prosperity. And there’s

another group of people who are like the delta variant, let’s get our masks back on. And people

want to take the cynical route as an individual, I don’t want harm done to me or my kids or my

environment. That’s, that’s the I think the general kind of conscience, right? And I don’t

care about the abundance, because I’ve basically taken it for granted. And so now I find myself as

an individual saying, you know what, we shouldn’t do nuclear because look at what happened in

Fukushima, forgetting the fact that you’ve been living off of free electricity, practically for

decades, or whatever the you know, the case might be water and free water and all these things. And

I think that the abundance that technology delivers to humans, because humans are only

programmed to recognize change, they’re not programmed to recognize absolutes. There’s a

lot of good socio psychological and evolutionary. Give us an example of that. Give us an example.

Like if you know, if you go to the store every day, and you’re used to just getting a $1 can

of Coke, you don’t say oh my god, I feel it’s an amazing world I live in, I get a $1 can of Coke,

you never praise that $1 can of Coke. Now, if you went to the store, and the can of Coke went up to

$2, you’d be like, what the heck, why does Coke cost so much? And so, you know,

we habituate to the great things in our life, the price of Coke dropped to 50 cents,

you’re like, okay, that feels good. And then you get used to the price of Coke being 50 cents. And

a few weeks later, if it goes up, you’re upset, but you’re not as happy on the other way. So

human emotion is kind of asymmetrically, you know, defined by these negative consequences.

And I think over time, you accumulate these negative consequences as your core psyche,

and you have an aversion to doing, you know, innovative things as a whole, not all people,

but as a whole, that’s how we operate. And it’s why technology kind of gets lambasted over over

time. This is the most frustrating thing to me, Chamath is that we have so many amazing

things happening in technology. And nobody will 10x or 100x on them from the government perspective

of the public. I had a company called zero mass on my podcast, which I think is now called source

and you’re aware of this company, maybe you could talk a little bit about the impact hydro panels

would make if we just embrace this technology. Well, I mean, source source is an incredible,

incredible company. Basically, there’s a there’s a guy who runs a Cody Friesen, who when he was at

MIT, basically developed a essentially a material membrane that can absorb the ambient water that’s

in the atmosphere, and basically allow you to collect it and to separate it into its components

and to basically create potable salinized or potable drinkable water in a panel that looks

like a solar panel. So you put these solar arrays everywhere. And out of the back, you put a little

pipe and it collects the humidity in the ambient air and, and it spits out water. It’s, it’s an

incredible thing. And he’s able to go and rewire schools. And, and the thing is, he can go anywhere

because again, he doesn’t need anything, right? You literally put it on your roof. It’s incredible.

And it makes you if you I think he told me at the time when I interviewed him two or three years ago.

He said you could put two of these on your roof and get like four cases of bottled water a day,

no matter where you were on the planet. And by the way, he’s moving to a place which is really cool.

He told me this. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say but I’ll say it anyways. Are you saying this

might be beeped? No, where he’s gonna be candidate? No, he’ll have an eventual app,

where you can kind of direct the hydro panel to make the kind of water that you like. So if you

love alkaline, or if you love dial it in water, or if you love smart water, or you’re on the

vault, right? Specifically because it’s the most expensive. I love I love smart water.

I have a very gratuitous reason why I remember when I met jobs, he drank smart water and

is good enough for him is good enough for me. I just get a copy people. I get you got to copy

the good ones. And I was just like, this is a personal anecdote. This is when I knew Chamath

made it. We used to play poker in his garage in his little 3000 square foot Palo Alto house.

Burlington Berlin in Berlin, whatever he had this little tiny house. And we’re in the garage. And

he’s like, Look, I’m putting up a flat panel. I’m gonna like paint the wall. We had a little

you had a little easel and you’d write on chalk how much you know,

then Chamath like I got a new house. He’s got his new house. We come over. He’s like,

Jake, how you want some water? I’m like, yeah, I’d love a glass. He’s like, Hey,

how you want a beverage? But yeah, it’s like a glass of water. And he goes, Oh,

and he walks over to a rack. And in the rack, like, you know, those things you push wine on,

there’s a rack for water. And there is Voss in the glass bottles. There is Evian and glass

bottles old and you’re not like the Evian that you get at the regular supermarket.

Like somebody sourced the Evian bottles that restaurants have. And then he had the smart

one. I mean, there’s 60 and I’m like, it’s one on a glass of water, but okay, I’ll take

the Evian in the glass bottle. It was delightful. Saks, I got three different bounce passes I can

give you just where you want it. Do you want cancel culture? Do you want Chesa Boudin? Or

COVID?

What do you want? Or COVID? I can give you any of these.

I can.

I’m ready to pass.

I’m talking about any of those sound good to me. I mean,

the, it might be time for a chase update because we haven’t done that in a while.

The killer DA?

The killer DA. Yeah.

Oh, by the way, I just want to say, I found the journalist, you know, the journalist Saks,

don’t say her name. And she is setting up her LLC and the $60,000 we raised from the GoFundMe is

going to go to her to cover the DA’s office for the next six to 12 months in a newsletter website.

Right. And just to be clear, because I think people kind of misinterpreted what you were

trying to do there with the GoFundMe, J-Cal.

Yes.

This is not for opposition research. This is not no, this is not digging up dirt. This is

reporting on on public policy on what should be public facts with respect to

what the DA’s office is doing, how Chesa is performing in his job.

Isn’t it interesting, though, how the left journalists when I hired investigative journalists

to cover criminal justice, accused me of hiring an oppo researcher,

and these are investigative journalists. And I told them explicitly,

I’m just hiring an investigative journalist to cover crime in San Francisco. There’s no

oppo research here. And they insisted on saying I wanted to get into Chesa’s personal life.

And I explicitly said that’s not what this is for.

Well, let’s face it, there aren’t too many journalists anymore who are investigative who

are actually in the business of turning up new facts about elected officials. They’re

too busy pushing a narrative. They’re engaged in agenda journalism. And actually, we saw a

really good example just to tie into what’s happened, what happened over the past week,

is you had this story in the San Francisco Chronicle, which is basically pure propaganda

from you could see that the passing from Chesa to this reporter of this, this farcical claim

that crime is falling in San Francisco. I mean, this claim is so preposterous. This is the same

week, we saw viral videos of 10 robbers bursting out of Neiman Marcus, you know, with with every

handbag. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, plus, you had the virus Gary. Yeah, you had the viral

video of the the guy going into CVS. And just, you know, it wasn’t even shoplifting was

sugars video of the person who broke into his house, stole his kids iPads and everything while

they were in the house, right? And cyan banister who had another home invasion just tweeted home

invasions are now not prosecutable crimes in San Francisco. Well, no, what they’re doing is what

cyan reported about her case is and by the way, her case is in the public eye. Okay, so it’s very

brazen for the DA to be doing this. But what they did is they dropped the home invasion charges.

And they’re just treating it as basically a theft of, you know, a few hundred dollars,

you know, that does not capture the violation of breaking into someone’s house and how dangerous

that is. But originally, I thought, okay, why is the DA’s office doing this? Originally,

I thought, well, maybe it’s just because, you know, Chase doesn’t want to incarcerate anybody,

but it’s more than that. You see, if they drop the charges, down to petty larceny,

then he can include it in a different stat. You see, home burglaries are up by some gargantuan

amount, like 50% year over year, they want to be able to claim crime is falling. And so now

they’re juking the stats by reducing the charges from the more serious crime to the less serious

crime. And then what they do is shaping the stats, they’re juking the stats, you ever watched the

the show, The Wire, that’s where this expression comes from, is, you know, first, the politicians

get held held accountable to the statistics, then they realize that then they start manipulating the

facts. And that’s what’s basically so dirty. It’s so dirty. But But the next step in the process

is they then feed these juke stats to these compliant reporters. I mean, the fact that

they keep repeating these statistics as going down, when people are stopping reporting crimes,

because they will prosecute them, right, and they mischaracterize them. And then they never say

85% of the commuters coming into San Francisco are no longer coming into San Francisco. And

target announced, like Walgreens, that they are either closing stores or reducing the hours

because they can’t deal with the crime. And they’re saying explicitly, this is the highest

crime we’ve ever seen in any of our stores. And then this crazy communist, are they communists

on the left here? CVS, Walgreens and target are all closing stores are reducing store hours,

because they understand the hit to their bottom line. But you have this mantra.

It is it is communist like where it’s like the commandments written on the barn in Animal Farm,

where it is propaganda that’s so at odds with reality. It’s just absurd. Okay.

It’s farcical.

It’s farcical. But then how do they enforce it? What they say is anybody who questions this

narrative is a bad person is in fact, a racist, a racist and a Klansman. So this is the other

thing that happened over the past week is that you had this is crazy. But basically,

Michelle Tandler, who is a moderate and as nice a person as you could ever find

concerned citizen concerned citizen, San Francisco born and raised,

yes, who tweeted that all of her friends are thinking about leaving the city. And then in

response to that, you had this this senior policy advisor to chase a booty and who works for the

DA’s office named Kate Chatfield attacker basically implying her views were, you know,

were KKK values for for having the audacity to warn that people are worried about crime in San

Francisco. So she gets attacked. By the way, this this Chatfield person, the top of her profile is

the clenched fist of the communist revolution. So this is his office. But But look, it’s not just

trolling. And it’s not even just slander. It’s, I think, an abuse of power for someone in the

DA’s office to go after and attack a concerned citizen like this. Okay. But this is how the

enforce Can you read the tweet that she did? Do you have that there? Because she basically is

the people who have experienced home invasions are concerned for the safety of their families.

And what this woman did Michelle, I believe is her name. She just said, like people are scared

for their families. And then Kate Chatfield reference birth of a nation and compared her to

Oh, our wives are not safe. Because of black people. And that’s a KKK.

Yeah, the original name of birth of a nation, I think was the Klansman.

Yeah, yeah, it’s like a KKK piece of propaganda. Wow. But it’s really outrageous.

She just blocked me. Kate Chatfield blocked me. Wow. This is a public policy advisor who’s now

hiding her account. Well, what I mean, a public official should not do that. I mean, they should

and so this set you off. Let’s be let’s be honest. Well, I know Michelle Chandler. She

worked at Yammer, you know, and I didn’t I thought it was out of bounds for not just a public official,

but someone in the DA’s office. Who did you do? Well, I just went into revenge mode. Let’s be

honest. You got a little bit. You were a little bit tweaked. I donated another $50,000 to the

recall chasing campaign. And you dedicated it to Kate. Yeah, I said this is for you.

Yeah, because look, this is threatening. Every American should have the right to criticize

their government without having its law enforcement arm come down on them. And so here you have a

legitimate concern expressed by a private citizen and the DA’s office is coming down on them. That’s

not acceptable. I think I need to break some news here. I didn’t want to talk about this publicly,

but I’m so outraged now that I think I should let this out. So while I after the week in the

weeks after I started that campaign, to hire an investigative journalist for chess’s office,

this is breaking news. I haven’t talked about this publicly, but I’m going to break it now.

Do you know who contacted me? The DA’s office? You know what they contacted me about?

They were investigating a startup that I had invested in. I won’t say which one. And they

wanted to interview me about my involvement with that startup because that startup had some

complaint from a downstream investor who felt that they were committing some type of fraud or

problem. coincidence. Are you serious? I’m serious. This is literally becoming Chinatown.

They literally tried to intimidate me. And I didn’t want to bring it up. And I talked to

the person on the phone, the person from the DA’s office who was investigating this. And he’s I was

like, Do I need an attorney for this? Why are you calling me? Because he said, Well, you know,

we just want to talk to you about this. And I was like, Yeah, no, we have a bunch of questions. And

I just said, You know what, subpoena me, I’m not, you know, file something, and I’ll come in with my

attorney to talk to you. But I’m not going to talk with you on background. No. So they literally

tried to intimidate me. You know what, and I kind of let them because I didn’t want to make it public.

But I’m making a public now. You should make it public. Because public now. Well, because this

is two weeks after I said, let’s hire the journalist. It’s intimidation tactics. That’s

intimidation. I will not be intimidated, Chesa. All right. But what you can see here is okay,

look, I mean, I was intimidated. I’m not gonna have me intimidated again.

Now that I think about it, like I didn’t do anything wrong here. I put 50k I put 50 or 100k

into a company that didn’t work out. And now some other investors complaining, and they’re trying to

tie it back to me somehow. But Jason, you of course, you’re gonna be intimidated. The chief

law enforcement officer of San Francisco is basically trying to make you the target of an

investigation because of what you said publicly. Of course, that is intimidation.

Guys, isn’t it possible that they’re just interviewing you about a fraud claim?

I gotta tell you something. A police officer drove past my house last night. Yeah.

Freeberg. Wait, it’s the first and only time I’ve ever been contacted by a law

enforcement officer over an investment. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. Stop committing fraud.

350 investments. Listen, Chesa has not had time. He’s almost two years in office now. And he has

not had time to successfully prosecute one murder trial. Not one. But his office has time to run

down whatever they’re trying to run down with Jake out. They don’t have time to prosecute the

home invader who broke into cyan banisters home or Brian’s or Brian’s they don’t have time to do

that, but they somehow have time to contact Jake out. He tweeted the video. Let me explain what’s

going on here. There’s two things going on. I think one of which is becoming very well understood,

but the other one is not. The first one is the Gothamization of San Francisco. We understand that

crime is out of control, cynicism and resignation. People are just kind of given into it. It feels

like San Francisco has become Gotham City. These viral videos of the robbers brazenly committing

daylight theft. There is no UPS drivers in the street. There is beating a UPS driver

because there is no consequence. Okay. But there’s a second thing happening,

which is the Orwellianization of San Francisco government and San Francisco politics.

You not only have the crime, you’ve got the brazen lies about the crime. You’ve got this insistence

on this animal farm commandment that crime is falling. And if you question it, you are a bad

class and you’re a Klansman. And then they get there, the, you know, the cake, the cake,

Chad feels to push this out. And then they get academics to back this up. Okay. There are now

they get their friends in the media and in the academy to give these spurious claims credence.

And then the final step is that the rich virtue signalers pay these people off. They pay the

protection money. Who’s paying off the Dustin Moskovitz is the Mike Kriegers, the Reed Hastings,

and, you know, even actually the biggest contributor to chaser right now is a guy

who’s under SEC indictment for the ripple scandal. Oh no. Yeah. Chris, Chris. Yes, exactly. So people

who need to curry favor either because they’re, they’ve got their own problems or they just like

to virtue signal. Chris Larson is Chess’s biggest Orwellian campaign. Oh, wow. That is dark. Brian

sugar, release the video. And that person’s not going to be prosecuted. I mean, that is the crazy

part. You get somebody on camera and they won’t prosecute them. And people forget these are

organized gangs that are doing this. This has been proven. This is not a poverty issue. These are not

poor people who are stealing bread for their families or trying to make their rent. It’s

organized gangs, right? Did you see 47? Did you see the getaway cars to the Neiman Marcus? Yeah,

they’re all like the Mercedes driving great beautiful cars with their license plates off.

This is like mob behavior. And if you give criminals, trust me, I grew up in a criminal

environment in Brooklyn. If you give criminals a window, they will figure it out. You give them an

opportunity. If you give them something to hack, they will hack it. Period. And you basically have

green lighted them. Okay, listen, it’s enough of us complaining about this. I am going to stop

complaining about this. And I’m moving either to Texas, I’m moving to Texas or to Florida. I’m

making the announcement now. Hold on. Is that for sure? Jk? Listen, I you know, I’m in a partnership

and my partner doesn’t want to be here anymore. And I’m half and half. So I’m not sure why I’m

here anymore. I mean, I think California is my position right now is California is going to be

on a decade long slide. And I’m working for 10 more years, I decided I’m 50. I decided I’m going

to go to 60. I’m going to try to invest in 100 to 200 companies a year for 10 years, and then I’m

done. So why would I spend 10 years in a place that is on a death spiral? Can this be reversed

in our in the next decade? How does it feel to be completely red pilled? I’m purple pill. I want

to live in a I want to live in a reasonable place. And it seems to me that Austin and Miami are

purple, you know, and they’re not coming. I don’t want to live in a right wing place. All right. And

I don’t want to live in a communist place. I want to live in an American place. I want to live in a

place where Americans can talk about issues without being villainized period. That’s how I feel about

this pod. You’re not being villainized. Just give me a break. All right. Just be you. People really

want to know if you went to dinner with Tucker, can you just make that statement that you didn’t

you just made it was a joke. Why can’t you admit it or not? Listen, I have 15 minutes we got to go

COVID Delta people are panicking. But the numbers keep going straight down.

Pfizer says Israel says maybe Pfizer is 65% instead of 94% 65% seems pretty great. We at any

risk? Well, okay, let me jump into this because I’ve been affected personally by it. So yeah, on

the last pod I did I get to give the stat which was that at that point that the best data we had

even a week ago was that the the Pfizer vaccine was holding up pretty well against the Delta

variant. It had reduced the effectiveness from about 95 to 88%. That’s sort of the numbers.

I think on Monday, Israel released a new study showing that the effectiveness of

Pfizer against Delta had been reduced to 64%. Now, that’s against, you know, getting symptoms

and testing positive. It was still 93% against serious cases requiring hospitalization. But that

93% is down from, you know, 99% plus. So there has been reduced effectiveness by Delta. It’s,

it is a little bit concerning. And as if to underscore this point, someone very close to me,

who was double vaxxed with Pfizer just tested positive. He did test positive. Yes.

So he woke up yesterday morning with, with cold symptoms. He had sore throat, runny nose,

but he’s fine. And a slight fever, which then graduated into a headache. He went and got tested.

And he tested positive for COVID. So I think he’s fine city was he and when this happened,

la. Okay, let me ask a question to freeberg. Is it not the best possible situation? I know this

sounds like a stupid question, but I am the lowest IQ guy on the pod. Is it not the best situation to

have the Pfizer or whatever have this amazing, then to get a mild case of COVID and then be

doubly protected? Is that in some way an ideal situation if there is no long haul COVID?

It’s not really clear if that’s going to make a difference. You know, again, like remember,

acquired immunity is on a spectrum, right? So a virus can get in your nose starts replicating.

And if you got a ton of antibodies that immediately get to your nose, it’ll shut

down that virus before you experience anything. If that virus gets in your nose and starts

replicating, and you’re you’ve got a kind of, you know, your antibodies to that specific virus,

you know, aren’t as concentrated, it’s going to take your body a little bit longer to fight off

that virus. But you’re still well ahead of the game as a way to think about it. And so, you know,

to some extent, what we’re seeing most likely is this delta variant, having a greater escape

velocity from people that have been vaccinated, then you know, the alpha variant or any of the

other variants we’ve seen. And so as a result, you know, people are getting to date, luckily,

knock on wood, mostly mild and moderate symptoms, and only a minority of people that are exposed

are getting, you know, that condition, but it’s being tracked really closely. I mean, like,

like Zack said, in Israel, they have now said that, you know, if you’re vaccinated with Pfizer,

double vax with Pfizer, you’re now 64%, you know, effective. And you’re, you know, that that means

that if you’re exposed to COVID, there’s a chance you can actually get these symptoms. But the

hospitalization rate, and the fatality rate is still way, way low, because you have built up

enough immunity, you’ve built up enough antibodies to have a good, strong defense to keep things from

getting out of control. And so knock on wood right now, we’re still looking good in terms of fatality

and hospitalizations. But there’s certainly a mouth, you know, what do you think of this situation?

Are markets kind of worrying about this? Because I’m kind of wondering, like, as, as, as market

participants see this stuff, are they trading it in a way that’s like fearful? And does this lead

to some market conditions in the next couple days and weeks? I mean, I think that there’s a very

good chance that some politicians are going to try to use this for another shutdown in the fall.

I think you’re right. And I think the teachers unions, the NEA and the AFT are already

putting all sorts of demands on going back to school. I don’t think this date so first of all,

I think we have to be intellectually honest that this is a bad data point.

This is really the first bad data point that we’ve gotten until now all the data has been good.

The protection from the vaccines lasts longer, it had been completely holding up against the

variants. But this data point from Israel is not a great data point. I want to see more of them.

More data. But I don’t think that this by itself didn’t Israel only get to like 5560%

vaccinated. Oh, no, they’re they’re way higher than they’re way higher than that. Yeah,

half of the infections they’re seeing in Israel are children that were not vaccinated.

And then the other half are the other half are adults. And so if you look at the adult

infection rate, it looks like it’s something around 15% of, you know, these cases, I forgot

the number, but there’s some statistic that shows that it’s not the majority being vaccinated,

there are unvaccinated people that are, look, we’re gonna probably, we’re gonna probably need

a booster, and we’re probably going to be on a cocktail. But beyond that, I think we need to

make a moral decision that we are all getting back to life as normal. Yeah, 100%. I’m done. I’m not

there. There will be boosters for sure. Right? Like this fall? Yeah, exactly. And I think

the question about this, this data is does it warrant a change in policy? And I would say not

yet. You know, 100% not yet. I mean, we the whole policy idea was ICUs being filled. And if you look

at the stats in the United States, at the deaths, we are now at a seven day average of under 200.

I think it’s 150 deaths per day. Some is again, I’ll ask you freebrew, how many of those are with

COVID versus from COVID? Yeah, it’s unclear. But like Israel hasn’t had a single death in two

weeks from COVID. Right? So what are we talking about here? Despite this increase in numbers?

It’s still a right, right. It’s not it’s not what the media likes to portray,

which is variants punching through, right? I mean, it’s not like Delta variant is just

sweeping through Israel. Okay, there is a slight increase in cases. And we’re definitely seeing

elevated cases here in the US. I mean, Delta variants can become the main the dominant

strain if it isn’t already. Look, it’s mostly sweeping through areas that have not been

vaccinated. But there are now cases, I’d say mostly mild cases of people who have been

vaccinated. I mean, I think it’s all the more reason why if you’re an adult, you should get

vaccinated. We really do need all adults barring some sort of, you know, highly specific immune

condition that were you need to be on some sort of different treatment. But almost all adults in

the US really should get vaccinated. Otherwise, we’re going to have keep having these variants

sweep through. I’ll tell you, I had a really good conversation with an infectious disease

doctor yesterday, who’s a research specialist and well known in this space. And he pointed out that

the evolutionary cycle of this virus is a function of how many people are not vaccinated.

Because the more bodies the virus has to hop, the faster the more evolution it can do,

the more it evolves, right? Yes. And so, you know, certain virologists and epidemiologists

will model this where they will highlight kind of the evolutionary rate of the virus as a function

of unvaccinated people getting infected every day. And so the more people that we get vaccinated,

the longer the timeline it takes for the virus to evolve and get to a breakthrough variant.

And so we need to accelerate and continue to push people to get vaccinated worldwide

to reduce the available pool for evolutionary success of the virus.

Yeah, it’s to put it in maybe layman’s terms, all these unvaccinated people are basically like a

giant Petri dish for the virus to keep mutating. And we do need, I think, like a Marshall Plan

to help all these other countries get vaccinated. I mean, I think we have enough vaccines in the US,

but what have we done to help all these other countries? It directly benefits us

if we reduce the size of that Petri dish. This Delta variant came from India. Why?

There’s like a billion plus people there who, you know, for the virus to mutate on. I mean,

obviously, with a Petri dish that big, you’re going to get a variant. Now there’s a new variant

coming out of Peru, which looks potentially scary. Now, these are not full breakthrough

variants yet. But to Friberg’s point, it’s just a matter of time.

You guys want to guess the bottom two states in the country? I mean, it’s just

Mississippi and Alabama, Alabama. Exactly. Can you imagine Mississippi and Alabama,

33%? Come on, get your act together. It’s going to whip through those places and you’re all

going to die. You’re going to kill your grandparents. Is that an evangelical movement

issue? It’s, it’s, it’s, well, we talked about this the last pod. There’s two groups in America

who are most Republican men. Oh, no, let’s be more specific. It’s evangelicals and African

Americans. Those are the two groups who are most you keep saying evangel, you keep saying

evangel, what is it? How do you pronounce it? Evangelical evangelicals. It’s actually male

Republicans. Why can’t you? No, that’s you’re not being specific enough. Yeah, guys. I gotta,

I gotta, I gotta run. Love you. Freeberg. Love you guys. We love you. See you later.

Besties are gone.

This is my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

Oh man.

My avatar will meet me at Queens.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they’re all just

useless. It’s like, it’s like sexual tension, but they just need to release it somehow.

Let your beat be. Let your beat be.

We need to get merch.

Besties are gone.

I’m going all in.