This week we’re going to play our favorite new game show.

Guess who’s got COVID?

Yes, that’s right.

Somebody on the pod.

Hey, hey, hey, somebody’s got COVID.

Hey, hey, hey, it’s not the me.

Oh, you’re ruining the game, Jamal.

Oh, sorry.

So here’s the game.

Person who got COVID.

Have they been vaccinated or not?

Okay, all four of us have been vaccinated.

We covered that on our previous pod.

So everybody’s been vaccinated.

Double vax.

Double vax.

Everybody’s been double vaxed.

Did we all get Pfizer?

I was Pfizer.

Pfizer.

Pfizer.

Pfizer.

Okay, so Pfizer across the board.

We got quads.

And this is a breakthrough infection.

Has anybody taken a Z-Pak after a night of partying?

I have.

Oh my God.

A hunk of the pod lasted 39 episodes.

I’m done.

That was good, that was good.

Okay, so number one.

Clue number one.

This bestie got a breakthrough infection outdoors

at a restaurant.

Number one, got it outdoors.

Number two, got it from somebody who was also vaccinated.

Number three, this bestie does not fly commercial.

And he’s not a fan of being interrupted.

And he is not an evangelical.

David Sachs.

The breakthrough vaccination is David Sachs.

I’m glad that my getting a breakthrough case of COVID

is comedy fodder for you somehow.

I’m going all in.

Let your winners ride.

Rain Man, David Sachs.

I’m going all in.

And it said.

We open sourced it to the fans

and they’ve just gone crazy with it.

Love you guys.

Nice queen of quinoa.

I’m going all in.

Saxy Poop, break it down.

Walk us through what happened and then how you felt.

So what happened is.

And we’re glad you’re safe, obviously, obviously.

We wouldn’t be joking.

You’re still losing weight.

You lost five pounds, so.

Yeah.

Yeah, we hate you for this.

You may want to read some of the beautiful text messages

we sent you when we found out this week.

Yes.

Yeah, Jason, what did you say, Jason?

You said.

I was just like, wow,

think about who we could recruit for the fourth spot.

We get Keith Raboy, we get Peter Thiel in here.

I said that I really, really hope you didn’t die.

But if you did,

I would love to have your plane as a support plane

for my plane.

And I was thinking, you know what?

I might be pro San Francisco.

If you die, I might want to.

Well, sorry guys, I’m going to live.

Sorry, Jason, I’m going to live.

Here’s basically what happened, okay,

is so Tuesday of last week,

I had dinner with a few friends and then my friend.

Just where, outdoors in a restaurant.

Yeah, I’ll tell you exactly where we were.

We were at Matsuhisa in LA.

Which had this.

Oh, in the outdoor parking lot.

Yes, the outdoor parking lot area,

which is a covered outdoor area.

So, you know, these like covered areas

are effectively inside because it traps the air in there.

But in any event, we had dinner there.

The next day he woke up with a fever and sore throat.

He went and got a COVID test.

He tested positive.

He is also double vaxxed with Pfizer, okay?

So, and I reported this to you guys

last week on last week’s show.

So I went out right away on Wednesday,

got a COVID test, was negative.

I repeated the test on Friday, was negative.

And then Sunday rolls around and I wake up

and I got a fever.

I don’t really have a sore throat,

but I’ve got kind of a, I’d say an occasional dry cough.

And I’ve got some sinus congestion.

David, mild fever or like 99.9 or like 102.1?

It topped off at about 99.9.

That’s barely a fever, yeah.

Barely a fever.

Barely a fever, but I mean, it was definitely there.

And I took Tylenol and it brought it down

to the low 99s.

And so in any event, first thing Monday morning,

I went and got the COVID test and sure enough, I had COVID.

They can’t confirm that it’s Delta variant,

but they think it is because that’s what’s like exploding

in LA right now.

And so, yeah, I mean, look, I mean,

the good news is it’s very mild.

I mean, it’s now Thursday and I feel like

I’m like 99% recovered.

I don’t have a fever anymore.

My fever-

So this is, are you 10 days in now, this infection?

No, no, no, no.

I came down with symptoms on this past Sunday

and it’s now Thursday.

So I am-

And when were you exposed?

Tuesday night.

So I was exposed.

Yes, you’re right.

It’s about 10 days from initial exposure.

You’re convinced that was the only way

you could have gotten it, right?

Yeah, because somebody else at the dinner

has symptoms now too.

Ah, so it was a super spreader at Matsuhisa.

Yeah, yeah, basically.

But it shows you how virulent this new Delta variant is.

I mean, you’ve got, there were four people out that night

plus the person who had it

and two out of the four basically got it.

And we were all vaccinated,

including the person who had it.

And of course he didn’t know he had it.

He didn’t have any symptoms till the next day.

So, and you know, I got it five days after exposure.

It’s that five days is like clockwork, you know?

Did you have like a pulse ox?

Did you measure any of these other things?

Yeah.

Did any of that stuff change at all?

Yeah, I mean, I have the pulse ox meter

and it’s been around 95%.

So it is down slightly.

Oh yeah, you should be like 98, right?

Yeah, it is down slightly.

It is down slightly.

And if you go to 92 or 93,

they say go to the emergency room, I think.

And did you self-isolate from your family?

Yeah, I did.

But we were lulled a little bit

into a place of overconfidence because-

For many days, yeah, exactly.

Well, I remember I got COVID test on Wednesday

and then Friday and they’re both negative.

I thought we’re through it.

So I was at home and then so my 11-year-old got it,

even though I was isolating.

This thing is, I mean, this thing is so contagious.

So, you know, what I’ve read is that Delta variant

is 60% more transmissible than the UK variant,

which was the alpha variant.

The alpha variant was 60% more transmissible

than original COVID.

So you’re looking at a transmissibility,

you multiply those together

of two and a half times the original.

And the original COVID had an R-naught of two to three.

So you multiply two to three by two and a half times

and you’re looking at five to eight.

And, you know, at the end-

Explain to the audience what that means

in terms of reality.

It means the R-naught is how many people

does the average infected person transmit

before they know they have it and can fully self-isolate.

And so you’re going from, the original COVID was two to three

Delta variant might be like eight.

We’re getting up into like smallpox territory

with this thing.

And it’s all the more transmissible

because, you know, vaccinated people can get it.

You know, the Israel data that we talked about

on the show last week was 64% effectiveness

that Israel reported that the effectiveness of Pfizer

had gone from like 95% to 64%

in terms of preventing infection.

So you have maybe a third of vaccinated people can get it

and then they can spread it

without even knowing they have it.

So I think we’re at the point now where

if you’re not vaccinated, you’re gonna get,

you’re gonna get the Delta variant.

We’re seeing now cases explode, you know,

all over the country.

Even in LA County, they’ve now had a,

the five-day average of cases has jumped 500% in one month.

So pretty much, and Jason, you’ve tweeted this.

If you are not vaccinated,

you are choosing to get the Delta variant at this point.

I mean, this thing is extremely transmissible.

That’s what, there was a great tweet by Scott Adams,

the guy who, the cartoonist, who I wouldn’t.

Who listens to the pod, by the way.

Who does listen to the pod.

He had a really great quote.

He’s like,

today is either Wednesday.

Yeah.

For those that are vaccinated

or yet another day where the unvaccinated amongst you

are likely to get COVID.

Something like that, right?

Was that the tweet?

Yeah, it was basically today’s Wednesday

for people who are vaccinated

or it is the day you’re gonna get, you know, the virus.

Yeah, we gotta stop messing around with this thing.

Now, here’s some good news, actually, is,

so on the Wednesday when we found out

that my friend had tested positive,

but again, I was still negative.

I had no symptoms.

I had nothing.

I told my wife, she had gotten one shot.

She hadn’t gotten the second shot.

And we were on the fence about whether my 13-year-old

should get the vaccine.

They both raced out that day, got vaccinated.

They did not get the virus.

So they had basically, call it three or four days

of the vaccine to trigger an immune response

in their system and it protected them.

They did not get sick.

And David, did you take anything else like prednisone?

You took nothing, no steroid?

No, nothing.

The only stuff I, so my friend did take,

he did get prescribed prednisone.

My doctor thought that was unnecessary or a bad idea for me.

All I took, okay, was Tylenol to control the fever

and I took Flonase to reduce the sinus congestion.

Look, I mean, I don’t want to overstate this.

It was a very mild cold for me.

And that is why I think everybody should run out

and get vaccinated.

What did you pair it with, like a Pappy Van Winkle

or did you go with a Screaming Eagle?

What did you pair your grub with?

Freeburg.

Also, the worst part is Matsuhisa has such a shit wine list.

You probably drank this like random swill.

That’s probably what it was.

You were drinking some like nigiri sake in all likelihood.

Freeburg, last week I was asking you,

or maybe it was two weeks ago,

I was considering getting the Moderna

because I was like, I think getting two of these things

will boost you into the high 90s.

You said I was crazy.

Has your position changed on that?

Yes.

Okay, explain.

Because this is the one time

I’m ever going to be right about science.

A week before you.

So I think the data up to that point

didn’t necessarily kind of validate

that additional level of action, but now it does.

And I think new data is coming out.

So I saw an executive from a pharmaceutical company

a few days ago.

Okay.

Who broke down some statistics

that they looked at in Israel.

And what they were identifying

was that of the newly infected cases in Israel

of people that are vaccinated,

nearly two thirds of those people were vaccinated in January.

About 30% were vaccinated in February

and less than 10% were vaccinated in March.

And I’m just approximating

and I’m just kind of transcribing,

you know, from kind of what I remember him saying.

And so he said, you know, the more recent vaccinations

we’re not seeing breakthrough cases,

breakthrough infections.

So the more recently you’re vaccinated,

the less likely you are to have this.

And then I met with a pretty well-known virologist

a few days ago as well,

who highlighted for me that we are seeing antibody titers

decline over time in people,

but there’s other studies that are showing,

which means that the antibodies against COVID

in your blood after you get the vaccine

slowly go down over time.

So we’re seeing that.

We knew that, right?

We knew that to some extent,

but there was another study that showed

that memory B cells,

B cells are the immune cells that make antibodies

and they remember the antibodies to make.

And they were worried,

are we losing those B cells in the human body?

And another study found actually they’re in your lymph nodes.

So they went in, they pulled them out and they identified,

look, that these B cells are persistent.

We are having a persistent immune memory to COVID

when we get exposed to the vaccine or the virus.

And so, you know, those two data points,

both of them kind of said,

I think we’re gonna need to do a booster very soon

for everyone.

And we’re gonna need to get a third shot.

The tail Freeberg seems like it’s like six months.

Yeah, it sounds like he was saying

that you’re gonna see an efficacy drop

to that kind of two thirds level

after about six months of your,

after getting your vaccine.

He said, look, this Delta variant is virulent,

but the more pressing kind of point

isn’t that it’s this variant that’s breaking through.

It’s that the efficiency of these vaccines

at this point looks like it’s such

that we’re gonna need to do boosters.

Now, Pfizer went to the White House this week

with some of this data

and they presented it to the White House

and the White House said,

if you guys follow the news,

I’m hearing this,

I’m repeating what I read in news reports at this point,

but what they said was,

we’re not ready to kind of commit to doing booster shots

for a couple of reasons.

One is there are a lot of people out there

that haven’t had their first shots.

And we’re seeing the people

that are having these breakthrough infections

almost universally, not always,

but very large majority having very mild symptoms

and not getting hospitalized

and the death rate is still very, very low.

In other words, the vaccine did its job.

The vaccine didn’t prevent an infection,

meaning that the virus starts replicating

in a way that’s uncontrolled in your body,

but that your immune system had enough of a defense

to keep it from causing severe disease in your body.

99% of the people going to the hospital

are unvaccinated, right?

Exactly.

And so we’re seeing that great success still

with the vaccine,

but they are seeing and there are now studies

that I think referenced to your earlier point

that if you put a different RNA strain,

RNA sequence into your body,

which Moderna and Pfizer have slightly different sequences,

you end up creating different antibodies

and having more diversity of antibodies

can kind of provide greater immunity.

So it’s almost certain we’re going to get boosters

and that we’re going to end up seeing them hit the market

next month in September, yeah.

Is the booster different than the original?

So for example, if I get a Pfizer booster,

am I only basically getting still an expression

of that RNA strand that I’m supposed to basically,

like, is it the same formulation, the same dosage?

So both of those options are still up in the air.

And so we may still get the same vaccines

that we were getting before.

You could go get a Moderna shot,

you could go get another Pfizer shot

of the exact same RNA sequence that you got before,

or they may introduce some new ones.

And so all the pharma companies

are proposing both approaches

and they’re pursuing both paths right now

and we’ll see where we end up.

And what about swapping between an RNA approach

and a traditional vaccine approach?

So getting J&J plus Moderna or Pfizer versus,

like, there’s a lot of A-B testing we need to do

to figure out what is the most efficacious

and useful pathway.

That’s cocktail.

This is exactly like the,

this reminds me exactly of HIV,

where it took 10 years for them to figure out

what cocktail actually worked the best.

And now look, HIV is, I mean, it’s kind of like nothing.

It’s really not that bad.

The way that we probably, for those of us in our 40s,

have it emblazoned in our mind is how bad it is

versus how bad it is.

It was a death sentence.

It seemed like a death sentence.

And today it’s kind of more,

it’s more manageable than, frankly.

It’s a chronic disease now.

That’s manageable. At best, yeah.

It’s like having diabetes or something, yeah.

I have another crazy statement here,

which is that if you take the case fatality rate of COVID,

and now you think about the fact that there’s going to be,

call it 60% of America that’s vaccinated,

and then every six months we’ll be getting boosters,

and then you have the Petri dish

on the other side of the 40%,

where you’ll just be ripping through variant

after variant after variant.

Eventually it stands to reason that if 40% of Americans

remain unvaccinated two or three years from now,

the odds that there will be a strain

that is the killer strain

that does meaningful damage to those people,

I think is basically 100%.

And if you think about a case fatality rate

that’s meaningfully high,

what you’re effectively going to do

is start to call these people from the earth.

And that is a crazy idea,

but that’s what folks who choose to not get vaccinated

are setting themselves up for.

I mean, it’s the quintessential Darwin-

Is that just on probabilities?

Like, am I getting something wrong here probabilistically?

Isn’t that-

That’s what I’m concerned about.

And it’s not just Americans not getting vaccinated,

it’s the rest of the world.

I mean, even if we got to extraordinarily high

vaccination rates in the US,

there’s gonna be large numbers of people outside the US

who never get vaccinated,

who will continue to be a Petri dish.

To give you a comparison,

the common cold has 1800 variants.

That’s why we can’t get vaccinated.

So, we’re on the Delta variant right now.

I think they actually have numbered variants up to Lambda.

We’re gonna run out of the letters

of the alphabet really soon.

How long will it be until there are these killer variants

that act, I mean, look, I mean,

that can punch through the vaccines.

It’s pretty scary actually.

And I would say that this is like quite a comedown

off where we were just two weeks ago,

where we thought the Pfizer vaccine was still 95% effective.

Now it’s 64% effective.

I mean, look, I do wanna like underscore

that the vaccine worked in the sense

that what I got was super mild.

I mean, it was really just like getting a cold.

I mean, I didn’t need to take anything more serious

than Tylenol,

but it does show that the virus is mutating really fast.

It’s highly transmissible.

And I’m not sure we’re totally done with this thing.

You still have it, you still have it, right?

I still have it, yeah.

Yeah, so when will you get tested

to figure out when you don’t have it anymore?

I’ll probably go in tomorrow,

because it feels to me like I’m about 98% better.

Freebrook, is there any data about the pattern

of people who are vaccinated getting this thing?

Remember how there was early data that showed

women had a different immune response than men

and people who were, what was it?

O positive or a certain blood type

effectively had inborn immunity.

I haven’t heard or read anything like that.

And so this is still an emerging issue, I think.

Yeah, and by the way, I was vaccinated a few months ago,

guys, like, I mean, I am like recently vaccinated.

When were you at six months in?

You’re three of us, right?

When was your second shot?

Basically, like a few months ago.

Yeah, it’s-

Mine was in March, yeah.

One thing I think it’s worth highlighting

just to reinforce the vaccine importance,

the virologist, the infectious disease guy I met with

was telling me that, one way to think about this

is the more opportunity the virus has to replicate,

the more opportunity it has to evolve.

And so when you’re vaccinated and you have a mild case

and your body recovers in a few days,

just to give you guys a sense,

the difference when someone that’s not vaccinated has COVID

and they’ve measured the viral load in the nose

from day one when they start having their infectious

kind of presentation to day four, which is when they peak,

the viral load is 10 to the eighth higher, okay?

That’s like 100 million times higher.

And so that’s 100 million times more viruses

that are being produced on day four

than were being produced on day one

when you were already showing symptoms.

So every time a virus is being produced

and is replicating within your body,

it’s getting a chance to mutate.

The important point he emphasized was what matters most

is we get the most number of people on planet earth

vaccinated as fast as possible.

Because the faster you can get more people vaccinated,

the fewer opportunities you give the virus to replicate

and find itself a mutational path

that can ultimately break through all these vaccines

and cause real severe loss of life.

And so the presentation that Zach’s kind of described

is encouraging in the sense

that it likely means that the virus did not create that,

there wasn’t that much of a viral load

or a huge viral load relative to what there would have been

if he wasn’t vaccinated.

And so even though he did have an infection,

the virus didn’t get as much of a chance to spread

to other people.

It didn’t get as much of a chance to mutate.

But it did, because my friend who I got it from

after having dinner one night,

he was double vaxxed with Pfizer

and my 11-year-old daughter got it.

Yeah.

It’s for her, again, it’s just like a cold.

But so this thing is highly transmissible

and it changes the equation, I think,

on some policy questions.

Yeah.

That’s what I was gonna ask you.

What does it mean for the fall?

What now what?

So two weeks ago, I thought that because I was vaccinated,

I didn’t need to care whether other people were vaccinated

because up until that point,

the data was you were 95% plus effectiveness.

So why care if other people get vaccinated?

Now we can say for sure that unvaccinated people can,

or vaccinated people even can get,

other people can get you sick even if you are vaccinated.

So I think it absolutely changes the equation on,

so for example, colleges were requiring students

to get vaccinated to return in the fall.

Like before, I didn’t think that necessarily

made a lot of sense because if you wanted

to protect yourself, you just get vaccinated.

But now it makes sense, right?

Because the college needs to get to herd immunity

and protect everybody against potentially Delta variant.

So I do think it changes the equation quite a bit.

And I think we need to make a big push here

to get everyone vaccinated.

Are you then in fact sacks for vax passports,

which as a libertarian, I think,

is I think part of your political,

I think everybody on this call

has kind of got a little libertarian,

like you gotta make your own choices here.

But does it change your thinking about that?

I employers, colleges, city, state workers,

teachers are either get vaxed

or don’t come back to the office and you’re fired?

Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t like the idea

of government having the power

to stick a needle in your arm.

But I do think that employers, workplaces, schools,

I think it’s very reasonable for them to say,

if you wanna come back to the workplace,

you have to get vaccinated

because your unvaccinated status creates a risk.

It creates an externality for everybody else.

Should they be able to fire you?

If you’re a teacher, should they be able to fire you?

If you’re a bus driver, if you’re a pilot?

Yes.

Okay, so here’s the craziness.

This is a self inflicted wound.

We are down to only 700,000 vaccines being given a day.

We peaked, we had the ability

to do 5 million shots a day at the peak.

Back in April, we hit over 5 million shots

in one day in the United States.

And that’s a country where, whatever,

270 million adults were able to get it.

In other words, 2% of the adult population

in a single day could have gotten it.

Now we’re down to 700.

We have over a billion vaccines sitting on shelves.

80% of Democrats have received one shot

compared to 49% of Republicans.

27% of Republicans say that they won’t get vaccinated

under any circumstances compared to 3% of Democrats

answering that question the same way.

And an additional 9% will only do so if required.

Again, 3% of Democrats said

they would only do so if required.

So that’s 36% are opting out forever.

I get it, but it’s because we allowed it

to become a position.

Meaning, it’s not like anybody has a position on breathing.

Breathing is not a political position, right?

It’s not like I choose to not breathe

or drinking water or trying to, you know,

like eating three meals a day if you can.

We have allowed the most basic of issues,

in this case, you know, collective public health

to be politicized in a way,

and that is entirely the government’s fault.

It’s the government’s fault, and it’s the media’s fault.

And media.

And the media, because look.

Well, the media has exacerbated it

so that they can have power.

People on the conservative side of the spectrum

have learned to distrust the media and big corporations

because, and government,

because they’ve been lied to so often.

Most recently with the whole. Rightfully so.

Yeah, right. Sure.

Most recently with like the lab leak theory.

And so, you know, there’s this suspicion on the right,

like what aren’t they telling us, you know?

Now, look, I think we gotta get over this.

I think, you know, we need to get everyone vaccinated

for all the reasons that Freeberg said,

or look, everyone’s gonna get Delta variant.

I mean, maybe this is a good news

is that we can rapidly get to herd immunity

by everyone getting Delta variant.

Well, that’s the inevitable outcome

for any infectious disease, right?

Highly infectious disease is either you can vaccinate

or everyone’s gonna get it and it’s gonna, you know.

I mean, better Delta variant maybe than whatever the,

you know, whatever.

The more dangerous deadly one is, yeah.

Let me just highlight what I’m most concerned about.

I am most concerned about what’s happening with SAX.

Just anecdotally speaking, I’m not gonna speak to the,

I’ll speak to one statistic, but like anecdotally speaking,

I’m hearing this happening more frequently.

I don’t know about you guys, other friends,

other people you know, but a lot of other people

I’m hearing about their double vacs

that are now getting COVID.

So as that starts to happen,

the implications for the economy,

I think are pretty significant.

Because I think people,

whether there’s a policy change or not,

people are gonna get scared again.

And people, if we’re not kind of enforcing

economic lockdown, people will go into social lockdown.

And we’re gonna revisit, you know,

more of the behavior we saw over the past year,

where people are gonna be nervous to travel,

people are gonna be nervous to fly,

people are gonna be nervous to go to restaurants.

And, you know, the downstream consequences

of everyone kind of locking up again,

even if the government doesn’t enforce lockups,

it could be pretty catastrophic, especially-

Are you feeling that way yourself, Friberg?

In other words-

Am I gonna lock myself up?

Are you gonna go to dinner?

Are you gonna go to travel to Italy or to, you know, Japan?

Or, you know, would you go to Disneyland with your kids?

How is it affecting you,

your personal behavior being a man of science?

So my personal circumstances

are a little different right now.

Not to get into it.

Just with my, you know, my wife’s pregnant

and we’re moving houses.

And so we’ve got a bunch of reasons

why we’re not traveling

and exposing ourselves unnecessarily right now.

But I would say that at this point, you know,

if all other things being equal,

would I go to Disneyland with my kids?

I would probably wait right now,

six to 12 weeks to see what happens here.

Right.

And so I think like, if I’m feeling that way now,

I think a lot of people are gonna be feeling that way

in the next four weeks

as they hear about more friends getting COVID.

Now, you know, the good news is the hospital is…

And so I am most concerned.

We are in a very, very, very, very delicate

economic recovery right now.

And, you know, we have put out so much money

to stimulate this economy.

Everyone is so walking on like the razor’s edge

to keep things, you know, growing.

We were afraid of inflation.

Lumber prices today, by the way,

are lower than they were

when this whole kind of inflationary thing started

and everyone was freaking out about it.

So, you know, lumber prices are lower than they were

at the start of the year,

which is, you know,

like a lot of this kind of inflation risk

has kind of come out of the equation already.

So the markets have taken that pricing out.

And now we’re going to be in a circumstance

where people might cancel their travel,

people might cancel their restaurants,

people might stop going to the office again,

stop, you know, getting in the car, et cetera, et cetera.

So I am most concerned about like the psychological effects

of what we’re seeing with these breakthrough infections,

the frequency of them.

Now, if you look at the Israel data,

so Israel had zero deaths for two weeks.

They’re now averaging about one death a day.

And despite this, you know, huge increment,

they’re getting about, I think,

500 breakthrough infections a day right now.

So that is good statistical news, right?

Statistically, these breakthrough infections are not fatal.

They’re not causing hospitalizations.

They’re, you know,

if you kind of did the math going back a year

and said, these are the actual statistics of COVID,

people would be like, okay, no big deal.

Let’s move on.

It’s a tough kind of virus.

But because of the circumstances

where we are kind of under these feelings

that this is a fatal disease and could cause fatalities,

those statistics don’t matter.

The fear is what matters.

And people are gonna start to behave quite differently,

I think, in the next few weeks.

I have a slightly different point of view here,

but I think, Friberg,

I think you’re right in some respects.

But I don’t think that it’s gonna come from people.

I don’t think people,

I think people are exhausted

and they wanna go back to life as normal.

And I think this summer was a window

into some amount of normalcy for a lot of us.

And I don’t think we really do wanna go back.

And so I think what’s really going to happen

is there’s going to be essentially

some form of class warfare.

And instead of rich versus poor and left versus right,

it’s sort of between people who believe in science

and then the ideologically dogmatic who refuse to get it.

And that’s gonna play itself out economically.

I agree with you.

There’s going to be meaningful forms

of economic discrimination against people

who are unnecessarily compounding risk for the rest of us

who want to deal with it, ideally, touch wood,

as a common cold, like David said, and move the fuck on.

And if we are prevented from doing so,

because economic policy and healthcare policy

has to constantly get re-rated for a cohort of people

who could protect themselves and everybody else

but chooses not to,

there is going to be a real pushback on that.

The second thing that I think is gonna happen

is politicians proved that if you give them a window

to seize power, they will do it.

And I think what’s really gonna happen in the fall

is if there’s even a small modicum of risk,

which there will be, as we just talked about.

Yeah, it exists now.

I think it’s the politicians

that are gonna wanna jump all over this and say,

okay, guys, lockdown’s here, you can’t do this,

you can’t do that.

So literally Gavin Newsom just did the big grand reopening,

California’s back,

you could see him locking it back up in September.

Oh, that’s the best way to,

it’s the best way to snuff out any chance

of the recall going against him

is that even if you were angry,

you’re not gonna be allowed to,

basically, it’ll be a massive form of voter suppression.

Well, I think that would backfire on him.

That would backfire pretty bad.

You saw the flip-flopping

that he already did actually on schools

where the government of California basically said,

hey, we’re gonna mandate a mask policy in the fall.

And then Newsom came out because people freaked out

and said, actually, no,

each local municipality can figure it out

based on what it means for them.

So the point is, guys, Freebrook is right.

These things aren’t going away.

We have a cohort of people who will continue

to allow this thing to become worse than it has to be.

And I think that there will be economic repercussions

and discrimination against those people for that.

And I think economically,

we are going to take a step back

because politicians will try to slow the economy down again.

And there is definitely from the right,

not to get political here,

but they’ve been pretty silent

about encouraging people to get vaccinated.

And at CPAC and other places,

people were cheering the anti-vax movement.

Mitt Romney came out.

We don’t control conservative media figures

so far as I know, at least I don’t.

That being said, I think it’s an enormous error

for anyone to suggest that we shouldn’t be taking vaccines.

Look, the politicization of vaccination

is an outrage and frankly, moronic.

Mitch McConnell came out and said,

as a polio victim myself when I was young,

I’ve studied that disease.

It took 70 years, 70 years to come up with two vaccines

that finally ended the polio threat.

As a result of Operation Warp Speed,

we have not one, not two,

but three highly effective vaccines.

So I’m perplexed by the difficulty

we’re having finishing the job.

This is where you can expect

the politically correct companies to act first

because they’re the woke mob

will force some action on this issue.

Whether you like it or not,

but this is where the next petition will come from Apple.

Where the two or 3,000 employees who are vaccinated,

et cetera, who have people with,

people in their households who are immunologically suppressed

and they’re gonna say, hey guys, this is crazy.

Well, that petition might be the first Apple petition

that would make sense

because those employees are directly impacted

by other employees who come to the workplace unvaccinated.

Unlike the issues around Israel or Antonio’s book,

whatever that they shouldn’t have taken a position on.

Wait a second, you’re saying Antonio’s book

wouldn’t make them feel safe

and getting COVID would make them unsafe?

Yeah, actually, yes.

Yes, he’s correct.

COVID in the workplace is a real safety issue.

Not whether somebody wrote a book five years ago.

So I think employees do have a right

to say to their employers, listen,

are we gonna be a vaccinated workplace or not?

Because it does impact their risk.

But Jason, it’s your question about

should people change their behavior in light of this news?

In light of the fact that we now are learning

about some reduced effectiveness of the vaccines.

Here’s what I would tell people sitting where I am.

This is not a big deal.

I mean, for me, it was not a big deal.

It was like a mild cold.

I am not gonna change my, I’m gonna go back to normal,

like my pre-COVID behavior.

And I would tell you, if you’re double vax,

I don’t think you need to be that afraid of this

because my doctor said they are seeing

a bunch of these breakthrough cases,

but they’re all very mild.

It really is like getting a cold.

I’m not changing my behaviors.

I made my decision.

My risk assessment is if I get it,

then I’m doubly protected.

And I’m not gonna wind up in the hospital.

I’m gonna focus all my energy on riding my bike

and taking my kids out and having a good time.

I’m not going back in lockdown.

So I think that’s right for you.

But here’s where it gets a little bit complicated

is my parents who are in their 70s,

and one of them has an immune condition,

asked what they should do.

And I said, listen, if I were you guys,

I would not be going to public places.

I’d be masking up.

They’re asking me if they should go on a trip.

And I said, no, I would actually, if I were you,

I would lock down until this blows over

because they’re at elevated risk.

And so, yeah, for me, getting COVID was like a mild case,

but for them, maybe it could be more serious.

So all it takes is 10% of the population

acting like what you just described,

you recommended to your parents sex

for there to be economic ripples associated

with this breakthrough kind of condition for a while.

And that’s where I have the most concern

is again, like, you know, we’re kind of

you’re not concerned about the debts, Friedberg,

you’re concerned about the economic impact

and the psychological scars that are now in place.

I will explain, I sent you guys a link

to the Reuters article where they covered

the press conference with the Prime Minister of Israel

the other day.

And basically they are taking what they’re calling

a soft suppression strategy,

where they’re encouraging Israelis

to learn to live with the virus,

involving the fewest possible restrictions

and avoiding a fourth national lockdown

that could do further harm to the economy.

And he said, implementing the strategy

will entail taking certain risks,

but in the overall consideration,

including economic factors,

this is the necessary balance.

And so it’s a very kind of pointed position

that they’re coming to.

I think the US government, the federal government

is gonna have to come to the same one,

but we have different states

and different local governments

that are gonna act differently.

And because we’ve, you know, we have authority

vested in those different jurisdictions,

you could see different public policy officials

take different positions in what we’re talking about.

If San Francisco said restaurants

have to go back to 25% capacity,

it would decimate these already struggling small businesses

and there’s no more stimulus dollars available.

And so you kind of think about this,

or 10% of people cancel their vacation plans.

What’s that gonna do to airlines and hotels?

So again, my concern is,

are we about to hit a wave of economic ripples

that aren’t necessarily tied to what is the right thing

to do from a policy perspective

or a science or health perspective,

but really the psychological effects

of the scared and concerned saying,

you know what, there’s more money available.

Like, you know, we got bailed out before,

we’ll get bailed out again.

Let’s implement a shutdown.

Let’s implement a lockdown.

Let’s not go to work.

It’s whatever the decision tree you may have

as a business owner or policymaker.

Well, there’s an important point here, which is,

listen, COVID is gonna be with us for a long time.

We’re gonna need to make really smart

cost benefit analysis decisions in how to deal with it.

We can’t go back to lockdowns because they didn’t work

and they’re extremely expensive.

We spent $10 trillion battling COVID last year.

We cannot do that again.

We don’t have the bullets

that are gonna keep firing at this thing like that.

We gotta start making intelligent decisions.

Zeroism is not gonna work.

This idea that the premise of zeroism

is that we can stamp out every last vestige of COVID.

Maybe that was even a possibility

when vaccines were 99% effective,

but now that they’re not,

there’s no chance of stamping out COVID.

So we’ve got to, like the Israel example,

we’ve got to learn to live with this thing

and make smart cost benefit decisions.

But I also think this is kind of a disaster for humanity.

We now have this new category of illness

that’s rapidly mutating.

We don’t know what the end of it’s gonna be.

Like I said, there’s 1,800 variants of the common cold.

You know what though, David?

That’s causing these symptoms.

By the way, has anyone noticed

how many different symptoms this virus causes in people?

There’s over 200 long-haul COVID symptoms.

Well, they worked on it for a long time, David,

in fairness.

Yes, exactly.

Everyone knows it’s a lab-engineered virus

that’s now a plague on humanity.

This is really a disaster.

This is gonna, I think,

permanently impact human life expectancy.

I mean, this is a serious problem.

We could have avoided this entire thing,

here in the United States, at least,

if people just took the win.

How frustrating is this,

that we would probably have cases down to 1,000 a day

and deaths down to 10 a day, like Israel,

if we had just gotten everybody

to take one of the billions of excess vaccines

sitting on shelves and in CVSs

and Walgreens across this country?

How stupid are we?

We don’t have the collectivism to make those actions.

If you think about what’s happening in-

Israel did.

Two different examples.

In China, collectivism manifests

as basically a top-down form of governance.

In Israel, collectivism comes from

a need for state-level security.

I mean, I’ve traveled to Israel a lot.

I’ve worked there.

And it’s crazy when you see how people cooperate together

the minute you hear the missile alarms.

And so there is a way for people

to do cost-benefit analyses in Israel

because it’s a matter of life or death.

And they’ve been trained to do that.

So either it’s imposed on you, like in China,

or people bottoms-up can understand

these trade-offs like in Israel.

We are in a very different place

where literally what we have are three things

that are in conflict with each other, Jason.

We have politics and the desire for power.

We have the deconstruction of power

by social media.

And then we have the traditional media

trying to stay relevant.

That’s a toxic thing that’s spinning around

and spinning around and spinning around

trying to allocate this very ephemeral thing

called power and influence.

And we don’t know how it works anymore.

And so we cannot get our shit together.

Half the people care about vegan fucking milk.

The other half of the people care.

I mean, we are in an alternate universe.

As bad as we are,

Europe and even Japan have done even worse

because, I mean, our government was fairly efficient

about the distribution of the vaccines.

In Europe, they’ve just completely botched it.

Same thing in Japan.

So we are not the worst on vaccination rates.

Yes, it should be better, but this is a global problem.

Well, we are the worst on capturing

the opportunity, David.

We have the opportunity to have everybody vaccinated.

America is the most exceptional country in the world.

It has been for hundreds of years.

It should be for several hundred more.

There is no excuse for this country

to have fucked this up this badly.

I’ve spent enough time, as you guys have in Europe

and in Japan, it’s understandable why those countries

are in the positions they’re in.

It is not understandable why America’s in the position.

So dumb.

It’s like having a 20-point lead

and you just, with like eight minutes to go

and you just screw up and you lose the game.

So stupid.

All right, do we want to move on

to the billionaire space race?

Yeah, I think that’s positive news.

This company, what’s it called, Virgin Galactic?

There’s a company called Virgin Galactic

and they take people to space.

It’s $200,000, stock seems to be doing pretty well.

Anybody have thoughts on Richard Branson getting to space?

I don’t know, let’s just randomly go to somebody.

Chamath?

No, congratulations, in all seriousness, congratulations.

I cried.

Nat and I-

Start the SEC transcript, public statement, here we go.

Nat and I watched it together.

You cried?

And it was emotional.

It’s emotional because you know,

I mean, being a little bit more on the inside,

how hard they worked.

I mean, we’ve all been there

where we’re all toiling in obscurity,

where there are moments where everybody thinks

that what you’re doing either is crazy

or isn’t gonna work or is gonna fail.

And there’s a moment

where you just have to push through it, right?

And find people that believe in you.

I think I came in very late to that,

but I had the opportunity to find these incredible people,

believe in them, help them, give them capital,

which was essentially oxygen, right?

That’s oxygen for a company.

And then to see them achieve it,

it felt so special to be a part of it.

So yeah, I mean, I was really emotional

and it was beautiful.

So I don’t know,

I think this is the beginning of the beginning.

I tweeted this out,

but basically, if you think about,

and there’s other stuff that we can’t talk about

with some other companies that we are all involved in,

David and I particularly,

but here’s the point, guys,

between sending people

and making us an interplanetary species

by creating pervasive internet access

and by enabling us to safely and reliably transport people,

either point to point, suborbitally,

or basically into space,

we are completely re-imagining how the human race can work.

And I think that’s incredible.

And to be a part of that is really special.

There was a lot of people who got very negative

on Twitter, I noticed.

There was a lot of people that said,

oh, well, you know, no, like, you know,

maybe now we can deal with, I don’t know, child hunger,

or, you know, hey,

why are all these billionaires doing this out of the other?

And I took a step back and I thought,

my gosh, A, people are,

there’s a small virulent cohort of people

that are incredibly negative.

And B, doesn’t even know what they’re talking about

because you’re talking about issues of state responsibility

and confusing it for what private citizens are doing

to advance a set of technologies

that I think have broad appeal.

So those are my thoughts.

I mean, I was, I watched every minute of it

and I thought it was incredible.

Just to add to that, yeah,

I wanna take the part that all the naysayers

and the negativity, I mean, Chamath is right.

All the very online people immediately came out

attacking this extraordinary accomplishment

and act of bravery by Branson.

I mean, this is a billionaire.

He doesn’t need to be risking his life

launching himself into space.

I mean, this is a courageous act.

You know, he’s putting his life where his mouth is.

And you had all these very online people,

but you had one CNN commentator basically said

this was bad for the environment.

You had another one saying that, calling him a tax cheat.

Then there was another whiner who said,

what about all the starving children in the world?

I mean, it just went on and on like this.

And Mike Solana had a pretty funny tweet

summing up the sort of the left’s argument thusly.

He said, number one, this is their argument

according to Solana.

One, money is evil.

Two, therefore people with money are evil.

Three, therefore things people with money care about

are evil.

I mean, that is basically the level of sophistication

of the argument that’s being made.

That’s the argument that the left is making.

Everybody’s a Bond villain.

Right.

But here’s the problem is that first of all,

we do get tremendous benefits out of these innovators

who are pushing the boundaries of science

and technology and engineering.

You know, Branson actually went on Stephen Colbert’s show

and defended it.

He said, listen, I think they’re not fully,

this is Branson.

He said, I think they’re not fully educated

to what space does for earth.

It’s connecting the billions of people

who are not connected down here.

He said, every single spaceship that we’ve sent,

putting satellites up there,

monitoring different things around the world,

like the degradation of rainforest,

monitoring food distribution,

even monitoring things like climate change.

These things are essential for us back on earth.

So we need more spaceships going up to space, not less.

So, you know, they’re really just kind of ignorant

about the benefits of technology.

And what do they want to do with the money anyway?

Yes, we do have all these problems on earth,

but so many of our problems

are not a problem of underfunding.

We have tons of money

going to the problem of homelessness in California.

It just keeps getting worse

because we have the wrong approach on education.

We have very-

We have the wrong ideas.

We have the wrong organization.

We have the wrong execution.

Fix the operating details.

It’s not a money issue.

Exactly.

Take education in California.

We have very high levels of per pupil spending

and our test scores keep going down.

Why?

Because we have unions controlling the schools.

There’s no competition.

Don’t worry, David.

We’re getting rid of testing.

We’ve eliminated testing.

We solved that problem.

We spent more as a percentage of GDP on healthcare

than any other Western country in the world.

Yet the life expectancy of white men,

which is basically the top of the pyramid of healthcare

is now sub 80 years old.

What is going on?

If all of these negative naysayers

could actually just get into the arena

and try to do something.

Right.

Instead of whining-

Just stop whining.

Professional whiner class.

They have no ideas.

They have no ideas.

They have no solutions.

They just have gripes.

And no ability to execute, apparently.

Yeah.

Why don’t they come up with new programs,

actually test new programs at a hyper local level

to see what works.

Okay.

Can I tell you why?

Can I tell you why?

These sort of like leftist whiners

are not motivated to actually do the hard work.

Meaning, even if they have an idea for education,

the precondition to working on an education program

or a healthcare program is they may need to spend

four or five years in the bowels, in obscurity,

just learning.

Paying their dues.

They don’t want to do that either.

Because they grew up in a culture of kindergarten soccer.

Everybody gets the gold star.

Everybody gets to touch the ball.

Everybody gets to be at the front of the line.

And they’re not willing to put in the work

because the minute they realize how much actual work

is demanded of progress,

they run away because they’re scared.

And the reason they’re scared

is because somewhere along the way, somebody tricked them.

That it was not actually about trying,

it was actually about succeeding.

And that is the biggest failure that we could do to people

is all of a sudden tricking them to believe

you have to have it work.

So they’d rather be hall monitors,

they’d rather be critics.

Yeah, they’d rather be critics than try.

Failure is just as good

because you’re one step closer to succeeding.

Somewhere along the way, unfortunately,

they were not taught that incredible secret

hiding in plain sight.

Friedberg, what do you think of the space race

and the hall monitor Weiner class?

If you guys look,

I was going to send these statistics earlier,

but if you look at the amount of venture capital money

that’s gone into private space companies,

space technology companies,

I think it was a few hundred million dollars,

call it three to $400 million,

pretty consistently from 2011 through 2014, pretty flat.

And then in 2015,

I think this is when SpaceX started

to kind of create a lot of momentum and hype

that private companies can’t actually build businesses

in kind of call it the space industry.

The number jumped to $3 billion a year.

And then it was a little over $3.5 billion in 16.

And then it jumped to almost $5 billion in 17.

It was a little bit down in 18.

2020, it’s climbed to almost $10 billion.

And in Q1 of this year,

I think we’re at $2 billion of venture capital money

going into private space companies.

So there’s clearly a great deal of momentum

in this industry.

The question is always, what’s the market at the end?

And so if you break out, how do these companies make money?

One is to provide services to governments,

launch services and taking people to the space station

and what have you.

And SpaceX has obviously built a tremendous business

in that there has been obviously a lot of interest

in tourism.

And I think we’re seeing this first breakthrough

with Virgin Galactic.

And we’re gonna find out over the next couple of years,

is there a tourism market?

Historically, there’s been interest in a market

for visual satellites.

But if you look at some of the financials of companies

like Planet Labs,

they did a few acquisitions in space imaging.

And the revenue hasn’t really taken off there.

And then mining was always this other question

is can we go out and mine rare minerals from space?

And that one is just, if you do the math on it,

it’s so far away, it’s impossible to kind of model.

So I think over the next…

And then finally, it’s communications.

And communications are cheaper to run on earth

if you’re in cities versus the SpaceX model

is to reach rural areas

that it’s gonna be more affordable to do this through space.

And so there’s obviously a ton of momentum

and a ton of interest in private companies getting to space.

Everyone right now, it seems,

is trying to figure out what’s the market, right?

How big is the market?

How big is the business?

And how quickly can you actually see that capital

turn around into real revenue?

So there’s this kind of market question

that I think is still outstanding.

In terms of the opportunity,

if you go back to like the 15th century,

I think something like 60 to 70% of ships,

maritime travel, got into shipwrecks.

That’s around when we sailed across the Atlantic

or the Spanish sailed across the Atlantic

or funded.

No, or they disappeared.

Or they disappeared.

I mean, they basically crashed.

It didn’t work.

It was a one-way trip,

sometimes to the bottom of the ocean.

If you were sitting in Spain in 1450,

and someone said,

hey, these ships, it’s gonna be a great business.

We’re gonna build lots of ships and we’re gonna go out.

Maybe we’ll get trade routes going.

Maybe we’ll discover new land.

Maybe we’ll make money.

Maybe we’ll take people on trips on these ships.

You would be like, this is crazy.

Half the people are dying.

There’s no market on the other side.

So, we are in that kind of-

And you would have been totally wrong.

Yeah, and you are in that 15th century moment right now

with the space industry.

Great analogy.

Would anyone in the ship business in the 15th century

have been able to predict carnival cruise lines

or been able to predict evergreen ships

taking stuff from China to America

with these huge shipping crates?

Would anyone have been able to predict

going down to the bottom of the Atlantic?

I mean, all of the technology and the entire industry

that came out of that set of pioneering activity

in the 15th century transformed the planet,

transformed the economy, transformed humanity.

And it’s very hard to sit here today and say,

hey, I know where the space industry is going.

I know what’s gonna be possible.

But I can tell you that if history

is any predictor of the future,

this pioneering work that’s going on,

which is burning tons of money

and everyone’s kind of questioning

whether there’s businesses here,

it could transform our species once again.

So yeah.

David, your 15th century shipping example is so beautiful.

Three things that came out of that,

which I think we all value.

One, insurance.

Two, tort law.

And carry.

Exactly.

And three was basically how they did risk management

so that each ship would take a little piece

of everybody else’s cargo

so that some of the cargo would always get to.

Marketplaces emerged.

Lloyd’s of London came about. Marketplaces.

Yeah, Lloyd’s of London emerged

because of the maritime insurance that was required.

And almost all PNC insurance can trace its roots

back to maritime insurance during that era.

Wow.

And so these ancillary industries that emerged

were like surprising, right?

It’s almost business models emerged

because you had to figure out how you do the arbitrage.

And carry is the perfect example.

People don’t understand that venture capital carry,

where you get 20% of the profits,

was designed so that people with ships,

the captain would get to say,

we get 20% of whatever makes it there.

Now you’re aligned.

Whatever makes it there, you get 20% of,

okay, I’m gonna go through that storm

and I’m gonna try to get it there.

And there’s so many unknowns.

But just looking at the one thing, Starlink,

I was doing a little research today

about internet penetration.

We’ve got close to 5 billion people on the internet now,

but a very small number of them are on broadband.

It’s like 20%, 30%.

It’s hard to get an exact number there.

But if you think about what’s gonna happen to humanity,

we’re talking about billions of people

who did not have access to broadband,

and they are going to go from not having,

if you think about what we went through in the West

when the internet first came out

and we got our first broadband connections,

defined as like DSL or whatever.

We had libraries, we had books, we had colleges,

we had stores everywhere, Barnes and Noble.

So the internet was unbelievably transformative,

but we were in a modern society.

Now you go to the developing world

and they’re gonna go from not even having running water

in some cases in their homes or electricity

or variable to having broadband.

And they’re gonna have access to YouTube circa 2022, 2023.

They’re gonna have access to MIT courseware or brilliant.org

and all of this information and shopping.

We’re gonna take a billion or 2 billion people

and give them broadband instantly within a decade.

This is gonna change the face of the planet.

I think that that’s the revolution.

And it’s not just Starlink doing it.

There’s like three competitors to Starlink.

Obviously, Starlink’s got the biggest lead.

Yeah, before SpaceX doing this and there were others,

there was a company called O3B.

It stood for other 3 billion

and they had raised a ton of money to do this.

By the way, I just wanna speak to like a trend

that we’ve seen and also speak to the quality

of Elon’s leadership.

So many companies have tried this.

Google talked about it for years,

which is how do you connect-

No, Project Loon, yeah.

Well, Project Loon was a follow-on

to what we talked about early on at Google,

which was putting up satellites.

And ultimately, Google had a satellite program

that was killed in favor of buying a company called Skybox.

And Skybox was this coastal ventures-backed startup

that was trying to make a smaller scale startup.

And if you guys will remember around the early 2010s,

there were a bunch of startups that emerged

that were all about building small scale satellites

that could go up into low Earth orbit

and do things like imaging and communications.

And a bunch of these companies were banking on the fact

that the cost per kilogram to get your payload into space

was declining pretty precipitously.

So they were like, let’s make super cheap commodity,

space imaging or space communication boxes,

put them in space.

And after a couple of years,

they’ll fall out of orbit and burn up,

but it doesn’t matter.

If we can get enough use out of them

and they cost so little to put into space

and they cost a little to make,

let’s put hundreds of them up.

So there’s a company called Planet Labs

that does this that’s, I think, going public via SPAC now.

Again, they’ve been challenged

with building the business in imaging.

But there was a Google bought a company

for I think half a billion dollars called Skybox

trying to do this, which it was like imaging slash comms.

And they had a bigger refrigerator-sized box

that they were trying to put up.

Ultimately, Google spun that out to Planet Labs.

And the whole thing kind of became imaging.

But I just want to highlight

that this has been a big trend for a while.

And it speaks to the quality of Elon and his leadership.

Because the fact that this guy did what 20 other,

30 other people have tried,

companies have tried to do for the past decade or so.

And he said, you know what,

instead of just providing the infrastructure

to get all these devices into space,

we’re just going to build the actual devices,

get this thing up and just go crazy with it

and put our capital into it.

And it’s really impressive to see

because it’s such a no brainer.

People have been talking about this opportunity

for over a decade.

And these guys just have absolutely rushed the field.

And they could build an incredible business out of this.

The two most important companies in satellite communications

are Starlink and Swarm.

And Swarm was a company that I seeded

and Saks did the Series A.

And if you talk to the founders of that company,

they’ll give you this use case.

I think it was in 2014.

Do you guys remember there was like a Malaysian Airlines

flight that just disappeared?

Yeah.

Disappeared.

370.

Yeah, Malaysian Airlines flight 370.

And it was like 230, 240 people that passed away.

And the most, you know, indelible question

that I remember from this was we couldn’t track it.

And I thought to myself, how is that even possible?

How do you lose a flight in the middle of the earth?

It’s not possible.

It turns out it is because our internet coverage is so sad

that it only covers small areas.

And it made obvious that like, you know,

we should live in a world

where there is absolutely pervasive internet access

everywhere.

Every single little shred inch of the world

should be covered and saturated.

That should never happen.

You know, the people should be able to have closure.

They should be able to go and get that plane,

recover the bodies, give them proper funeral.

These are simple things, but they’re human things

that we should be doing as human beings, right?

And just think about the IoT.

And internet access enables this.

And the idea that we can’t do that is shocking.

And so I agree with you, Friedberg.

Elon’s incredible.

And I think that within the next five years,

we’ll probably have pervasive internet access

everywhere in the earth.

And that’s transformational.

You know, the second most valuable private company in space

is also a company that, you know,

I invested in, led the Series A called Relativity Space.

And their idea, which I think will help everybody

that wants to go to Mars and other places is,

why don’t we just 3D print the rockets?

And why don’t we 3D print the engines?

And why don’t we make that functionally useful?

Because it basically takes the cost of a rocket

and divides it by 10.

And these printers are small enough where, you know,

you can actually send them to and dismantle them

and take them with you to Mars and set them up there.

And all of a sudden, you can print the parts

that you need to get back to earth, as an example.

So I think that additive manufacturing

has an enormous upside here in space.

And I think that that’s another area

that’s going to be really, really interesting.

Anybody read Andy Weir’s Hail Mary yet?

The guy who did the Martian?

He’s a science fiction author.

It’s really great, because you don’t actually know

what you’re going to find out there.

I think that’s one of the things that, you know,

to Friedberg’s point, what do we find out there?

What if we find a compound out there

that like plutonium has some attributes

that we could leverage in very small amounts

to create unlimited energy

or unlimited prosperity in some ways?

There are things that can exist

that we have not been exposed to.

And of course, the probability is there are many things

that we have yet to be exposed to.

100%.

Yeah, look, I don’t subscribe to that thesis.

I’ll tell you why.

And this maybe also speaks a little bit

to some of the counterpoints against the space industry

getting the attention and resourcing it has

relative to call it other places

to allocate capital and human resourcing.

And that is like the tools that we have

in science and engineering today as a species

continues to expand at kind of a geometric pace.

Our ability to convert any molecule

into any other molecule is basically fulfilled now.

It’s a function at this point

of how much energy and time it takes to do that work.

So almost all industry, the function of industry

is to convert molecules from one form to another.

And we have tools ranging from hardware engineering,

mechanical engineering,

and more recently in the early 20th century,

chemical engineering

and in the 21st century, biochemical engineering.

Those tools are allowing us to invent,

discover and convert molecules.

And even in some cases kind of elemental forms

that into nearly anything else we wanna produce.

And the technology is accelerating in such a way

the set of technologies compound

that if you think about 100 years from now,

200 years from now, 500 years from now,

the human species theoretically

for very minimal time and very minimal energy

should be able to have something that looks akin today

to the Star Trek replicator.

You basically type into a device what you’d like to make

and it makes it for you in a few minutes.

And you could just like Mr. Fusion

and Back to the Future 2,

you could put any input you want into the thing,

you could throw in bananas and cans and whatever,

and outcomes this thing you wanna make.

So as the human species evolved towards that capability,

and we don’t need to get into the details,

that’s just like the general trend line.

It becomes less relevant

that we need to go get other molecules

or go get other things from extra planetary sources.

The planet Earth has the order of 10 to the 23rd atoms,

two thirds of the surface is water.

There is so much that is like unexplored

and untapped from a resource perspective

within this spaceship that we’re already on,

that the argument would be made

that our technology is allowing us

to effectively recreate all of our fantastic dreams

right here where we live today.

And first thing we’re gonna have to do is fix this planet

and fix the ecosystems that are kind of at risk.

But as we progress and as these technologies progress,

we can do these extraordinary things

that we don’t necessarily need to rely

on extra planetary travel and colonization

in order to achieve those objectives.

So that’s the optimistic counter argument.

Yeah, but we keep finding things

like these molecules in Titan’s atmosphere, et cetera,

that we can’t explain

and we’re finding those through telescopes,

let alone we get out there.

I mean, we might be able to create them, sure,

but we’re gonna discover them in other places.

They may be beyond our human comprehension

that these things could even exist, David.

There are interesting things we’re seeing there, for sure.

And I think, I think I mentioned this book before,

it’s so esoteric and difficult,

but it’s called Every Life is on Fire

by this guy named Jeremy England.

And he highlights how all of evolution

is effectively predicted by statistical physics.

And the energy bath and the molecules within a system

create a structure of molecules

that you wouldn’t see except for that condition.

Meaning that over time,

the complexity of that system evolves

to create an equilibrium with the energy

that it’s covered in.

So what we see on planet Earth, he argues,

is organic molecules in what we call life,

which are these molecules

that are really good at copying themselves

to absorb energy and dissipate energy.

So the molecules and the energy state of Titan

is different than what we see at Earth.

So the way the molecules have evolved there

are so different than what we’ve seen on Earth.

And you can see these incredible concepts

of what we wouldn’t call life today,

but really could be defined as life there.

And so there’s certainly a lot to learn

and a lot to explore.

It doesn’t mean that we’re limited

in terms of our ability to kind of realize those things

here on planet Earth.

But you’re absolutely right.

Like exploration is the core of being a human, right?

And for people who don’t know,

Titan is one of the, it’s the largest moon of Saturn.

And it’s got its own really weird dense atmosphere

that’s icy and slushy.

And we don’t even, we can’t even comprehend

half the stuff going on there yet.

Would any of you guys take the Richard Branson trip?

Would you do the, you know, like next week or two years?

I guess at what point would you be comfortable

taking it?

Chamath, I’m sure you’re signed up.

I can answer for Sachs.

The answer’s no.

600 and something, so.

How many flights more would you want to see?

You would want to do 10 more flights, 20 more flights?

No, I feel really confident that we know what we’re doing.

This flight was so critical because it was about

figuring out what it was like to have passengers

in the back and how they’d all behave

when you had multiple folks.

And I think once that readout is done

and Richard apparently took a bunch of notes.

So, you know, we’ll be starting commercial ops,

I think, you know, the next two or three quarters.

So.

Wow.

Yeah, I mean, when you have Sachs.

Well, I mean, if I had a $500 million super yacht

like Jeff Bezos, that’s where I’d be hanging out.

I don’t think I’d be blasting.

I wouldn’t be blasting myself into space.

But I mean, look, more power to them.

I mean, they got, you know, they certainly have got

gots.

Yeah, he’s doing both.

Yeah.

Jekyll, would you do it?

You know, my theory is with kids,

I kind of think differently about it.

But if I was over 70, like Branson,

certainly I would do it.

Yeah.

I would have to have that conversation

with my spouse and my kids and say,

you know, hey, this opportunity exists.

They’ve done, let’s call it 100 flights

somewhere in that neighborhood.

I would, I think I would feel pretty comfortable doing it,

but I would want to check in with my family and kids

and see if we were all in sync on taking that level.

I stopped riding motorcycles as an example.

I think that flying and space tourism

in the next year or two will be safer

than riding a motorcycle.

And then eventually it’ll be safer than, you know,

driving a car or something.

It’s quite possible.

I was watching a space show with my daughter.

She’s three years old on the couch the other day.

And then she was like, oh, space, it looks so fun.

And I’m like, yeah, I said, do you want to go to space?

And she said, she looked back at me and she said,

I want to go to space with you.

And it made me cry.

It was the first time I’d ever thought like, man,

first time you’d ever cried.

First time I ever cried.

Yeah, we just uploaded that to his firmware.

Yeah. Crying.

But I was like,

what are these water particles on my chin?

But I had like no desire,

I would say before she said that to go to space,

but it was a kind of a poignant moment that like,

man, this like moment of like inspiration

of like going to space is something that like,

I think is going to inspire, you know, a generation.

And I told my daughter, I said, you know,

you are going to go to space.

I hope I can be there with you.

Yeah. Yeah.

Can I give you an idea?

Two different ideas, but they’re roughly related.

When each of your kids turn 18,

buy them a ticket to space so that they become an astronaut,

which I think is like a beautiful kind of an idea where like,

you know, what an incredible present to give somebody

as they mature into age.

You know, if you, if you read, if you,

if you basically have heard all these astronauts have said,

you know, the overview effect,

like when you’re above the earth looking down,

it has this completely transformational effect

on your outlook on life and the planet.

And so, you know, to the extent that that’s a quantifiable

thing to give that to your child

seems like an enormous gift,

or when everybody’s of age or whatever,

where all of you guys go as a family

so that the whole cabin is your family,

that would be really cool too.

Either of those ideas, I will do one of those too.

For sure.

Hold on a second, Shabbath.

There were four people, correct, in this flight,

if I remember correctly?

In this one, there’s four passengers, yeah.

Okay, wait a second.

There are four besties.

How are you not setting up a flight

for the hundredth episode of All In

to be on Virgin Galactic?

Can you imagine watching David cry and be so scared?

I mean.

I can pretty much guarantee you.

I’m talking about sex, obviously.

You guys have to buy tickets,

but I can pretty much guarantee you

that if the three of you decided to buy tickets,

I’m pretty sure I can organize

that we all go on the same flight.

That would be ratings bonanza.

That would be bigger than sex and COVID.

That’s all I need is to be entombed

with you guys for eternity.

Yeah.

You know you want it.

You know you want it.

Hey, Shabbath, can you address

the von Karman line controversy around

what’s the right point to be in space?

Because it came up a lot this week in the news.

I didn’t want to kind of bring it up.

Came up by one person.

Well, no, no.

There was people talking about it on the news and stuff.

Like maybe you can just share for everyone.

Yeah, that was just Blue Origin being lame.

Honestly, that’s so petty by Bezos.

Maybe just share what happened and kind of,

you know, the point of view on this.

Be awesome.

Basically, the question is what defines space, right?

So if you just like start from the bottom,

from ground level, right?

You have the troposphere, right?

So you have like the first kind of like 10,

20 kilometers or so, right?

Then you have the stratosphere, right?

That’s where like a lot of like

weather balloon activity happens.

That’s at 50 kilometers.

Then you have the mesosphere, right?

That’s where you’ll see things like meteors and stuff.

Then you get to basically the Karman line,

which is around, I don’t know, 100 kilometers or so.

There are a bunch of countries that either have no opinion

or point to this kind of group

to define what the beginning of space is.

And they define that at about 100 clicks,

which is I want to say 62 miles, okay?

Then there’s the United States

and the DOD and NASA, et cetera.

And we define it at a different level, 50 odd miles.

And so in the United States,

you need to pass the US regulatory body’s definition

of what the threshold of space is

to be considered an astronaut.

There is other countries that would then point

to a different line, the Karman line as the line.

I think the point is it’s all much ado about nothing.

I think in the end, I think Virgin stated

that they went to 52 and a half or 53 and a half.

You know, things are iterative.

So over time, folks will get higher and higher.

But the point is, okay, and what?

You basically go into space, you get to see the planet,

you get to feel microgravity.

You know, you get the benefit of the overview effect,

whether you’re at 52 and a half,

I’m guessing you’ll get the same effect at 58 or 60 or 61.

And then you come back to earth.

So I thought it was kind of a little cheap and unnecessary.

Because there’s nothing experience wise that changes,

right?

I mean, like the-

Not to my understanding.

Yeah.

Blue Origin did a tweet,

from the beginning,

New Shepard was designed to fly above the Karman line.

So none of our astronauts would have an asterisk

next to their name.

For 96% of the world’s population,

space begins 100 kilometers up and then it goes blah, blah.

It’s just like,

why would they do that the days

before the Richard Branson goes up?

It’s just totally classless.

It shows that Bezos has a competitive streak,

which is just not graceful,

I would say.

And I think there’s a little bit of bitterness there.

And then you look at Elon,

what did Elon do?

He went-

He’s so classy.

He went-

He’s so classy.

And he took a picture with Branson

and he went to support him and wrote a congratulatory tweet.

Elon does not feel he’s in competition,

but for some reason Bezos,

you know Bezos had to like draft

and approve this specific tweet from Blue Origin.

And I just thought it was classless

and just stupid, Jeff, really.

Made you look so bad.

Elon was so fabulous.

I mean, it just shows you like what a class act he is

and what he cares about,

which is like he cares about advancing humans

and our ability to do things

that are incredible and inspiring.

And when other people do it,

he’s not zero sum about it.

As you said, Jason, he was there,

he was supportive.

It was just lovely to see.

I think Bezos is still stung

for when Elon said he couldn’t get it up.

Meaning he couldn’t get his rocket into space, so.

So I don’t know if that was too classy of Elon.

Well, it was funny.

It was funny.

Yeah.

Well, I don’t know if you guys have seen Jeff’s rocket.

Kind of small.

His rocket is, I mean-

Jason, now you’re doing it.

It’s kind of tiny rocket.

I’m just joking.

Just so we put a pin in it,

Melvin Capital, the people who went to war

with the Reddit traders or vice versa,

lost $5 billion.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.

I mean, they’re down 46%,

which is just shocking in and of itself

in this kind of up market.

But then to actually quantify it,

they lost $5 billion fighting a bunch

of self-proclaimed Rs.

I won’t say the word

because I don’t want to get canceled,

but they call themselves Rs.

On reddit.

Redditors, redditors.

They cost them $5 billion.

Jason, you can say it.

You’re not calling them that,

they call themselves that.

They call themselves that, yes.

All right, listen, love you besties.

Sax, we’re glad that you’re safe and you’re healthy.

No thanks to you.

No thanks to you.

No jokes.

I didn’t put any jokes in there.

I have so many jokes, I’m going to save them.

I mean, honestly, my thought on your recovery

is no comment.

I’m just jealous you’re going to lose

another five fricking pounds because of this.

Oh yeah, I’m down to 178, by the way.

Come on, stop.

Are you really?

Stop, you man of wrecks.

I can’t even break one.

When are you going to stop?

Was there a bet or no?

No bet.

I don’t want to lose that bet.

That’d be like me playing sax and chess.

It’s just not cool.

Jason, what are you tipping the scales at right now?

190, one.

190 and you’re about to come to Italy

and basically you’re going to gain 15 pounds for sure.

No, I’m doing one meal a day.

One meal a day.

That’s it.

One meal a day.

That’s it.

I’m eating one meal a day.

How are you going to turn down the food?

But what if you eat for three hours in that one meal?

I just, I try everything.

I’ll just try.

And then I have discipline now.

Just like I stopped using Twitter.

I’m stopping Twitter.

Can I tell one funny story about J-Cal in Italy?

Talking about discipline.

Okay, so we were there in Italy.

When was this J-Cal, a few years ago, whatever?

This is a long time ago.

Is this when we were in Venice?

Yeah, you were with Jade and I was with Jacqueline.

That was a great story.

And we went to some ice cream place, right?

And so we all had these like ice cream,

gelato with like two scoops or whatever on there.

So Jason finishes his in like five seconds.

It was like, just disappeared.

And then he walks up to Jacqueline

and just goes like that.

And in one fell swoop,

he ate the gelato off her ice cream cone.

That’s not true.

It was like a bulldog.

It was like a bulldog just eating your ice cream.

But how good was that fish that we got?

Remember that restaurant I found?

Yeah, the Dorad.

The Dorad, I mean, we still talk about that place.

Yeah, that was like one of the best meals we ever had.

I’ve been having a gelato, guys, every day.

Every day.

But they’re so small.

That’s what I love about the Italians.

They’re so small.

It’s a little, it’s such a cute little-

And it doesn’t feel like there’s like

a lot of preservatives and stuff in there.

No, it’s just like butter and sugar, heavy cream.

Whatever it is, it’s so good.

It’s so good.

It’s so good.

How are the tomatoes right now?

I can’t wait to eat some tomatoes.

Oh, incredible, incredible.

I mean, I eat them, I bathe in them,

I rub them on my face.

You rub them all.

What about the mootz?

You got the mootz?

How’s the burrata and the mootz?

I can’t wait.

Oh, he’s gonna gain 15 pounds.

100% he’s gonna break.

Look at him.

100%.

We should do a weigh-in when we get there

and a weigh-in at the end.

That would be the bet.

I don’t know how you’re gonna turn down this food.

I don’t know how you’re gonna say no to the pasta.

You’ll have pasta at lunch, pasta at dinner.

You’re gonna go crazy.

I’m gonna just have two bites of everything.

Two bites of six different pastas, and I’ll be fine.

And by the way, the best kept secret

is the quality of Italian white wine is outrageous.

Really?

It’s outrageous.

We should play some cards and drink some wine.

I think we’re gonna play, you know, for a couple days.

How many calories are in the white wine, Chamath?

Calories?

I mean, I have no idea.

But, you know, look, the thing in the summertime here

is you end up walking.

So I end up walking a lot or bicycling a little bit,

blah, blah, blah.

At the end of the day, like,

you’re burning through everything.

I gotta say, this e-bike I got, I got a rad power bike.

No, no, no, the whole point is to not have a motor

that powers it, you fucking lazy bastard.

No, no, what you don’t understand is

because you have the motor in it, Chamath,

you ride your bike normal,

but then, like, let’s say you do have dinner

or something like that, or you wanna go to dinner

10 miles away or 15 miles away,

you might not take your bike.

It’s too long of a ride.

With these electric bikes,

instead of going 10 miles on the way there,

it takes your 10 mile ride and just puts you at 25,

but you’re still burning the same number of calories.

It’s like augmenting.

I really think that electric bikes are gonna change cities,

like, in a major way.

They’re already starting to in Europe and in China, but.

All right, everybody, we’ll see you next time

on the All In podcast.

Love you, Sax.

Back at you.

Sax, I hope you get better.

Feel better. Thank you.

Thanks, guys.

Yeah. I’m better.

I’m already better.

And wait, Friberg, you have nothing to say?

Computer.

It does not compute.

It is nice to see the three of you.

It was nice to check off the box

for my social interactions for the week.

I will now go back.

I have now done 75 minutes of social interaction,

powering down in three, two, one.

Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom.

See you next time.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

We’ll let your winners ride.

Rain Man, David Sax.

Uh-oh, I’m going all in.

And it said, we open sourced it to the fans

and they’ve just gone crazy with it.

Love you, Westies.

The queen of quinoa.

I’m going all in.

Let your winners ride.

What?

Let your winners ride.

I’m going all in.

Besties are gone.

I’m going all in.

That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway, Sax.

Wait, no, no, no, no, no.

Oh, man.

My avatar will meet me at Woodson.

We should all just get a room

and just have one big huge orgy

because they’re all just useless.

It’s like this like sexual tension

that they just need to release somehow.

Let your beat be.

Let your beat be.

Let your beat be.

What?

We need to get merch.

Besties are gone.

I’m going all in.

I’m going all in.