SPEAKER_02: What did your doctor give you to make you lose all this weight? What is your celebrity doctor giving you? Tell the truth. Do you get that new shot? People on Twitter are like, your Twitter
SPEAKER_00: account is sounding a lot more like Jake out. And I'm like, I think we're on the same diet. I think that's what's going on here. In three, two, Rain Man David Sacks.
SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In Pod with us today. Of course, the queen of quinoa from his castle in Italy, the cackling dictator trim off poly hop at Tia 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.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, you read the comments. Just another sign of your obsession with how you don't even I never
SPEAKER_02: read comments. Rule number one, don't read the comments. We're not doing it again. It shows
SPEAKER_00: because you're not listening to the comments. So it makes sense. Okay, go ahead. And you got
SPEAKER_02: 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
SPEAKER_00: don't be paranoid. Don't be paranoid. Anyway, it's not even like patch things up. Don't don't break the piece. We have detente. All right. So freeberg is busy writing tweetstorms now about the drought
SPEAKER_02: 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
SPEAKER_03: 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?
SPEAKER_02: Maybe you're so excited about this. That you just can't sleep. Nick, you can beat this out.
SPEAKER_00: No, no. Keep that. Keep that.
SPEAKER_03: So the big tweetstorm I put out at two in the morning last night highlighted that there was a paper published in 2018-2019 that showed how North America, particularly the western half of North America, is in this mega drought that we haven't seen in 500 plus years. And since that paper was published 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. 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 big risks like 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 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. We should probably be talking about the things we're doing to get prepared for it. And 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 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,
SPEAKER_01: 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 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 states 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
SPEAKER_02: 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 Claude Budd, Lewis Carlsbad desalinization plant that is now I think that costs 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.
SPEAKER_03: Well, the 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. And it was insane. You know, 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 requires 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 crises. We're not investing in infrastructure, if we put in some nuclear power
SPEAKER_02: plants, if we did more desal, 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
SPEAKER_03: be massive, wouldn't they? Well, those are long term solutions. I'm talking about like, for this summer, we just summer is we need we need community. So no, 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
SPEAKER_02: six more of the Conway ones that we use last year that were amazing get and do it. We have the 95 mass 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
SPEAKER_03: 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, it's something that we should have a real plan around. And if I were the governor, 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
SPEAKER_01: 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, yeah, 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 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 why then all of that
SPEAKER_02: vegetation dries up, and then we're in a position hotter for more fires. No, Jason, we're even worse
SPEAKER_01: than this. We're in a position where, you know, we are threatening our own food supply. And just just 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 will 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
SPEAKER_02: more for the water usage, if we really invested in the desal plants, if we really invested in nuclear, we can 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
SPEAKER_01: 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 rights. Yeah, I think it's I think it's no bueno. The 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,
SPEAKER_01: not as skilled as you'd want them to be on the stock. Sax, how would you spin this out of this death spiral and into abundance? Is there a way?
SPEAKER_00: 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.
SPEAKER_02: Well, and even maybe going back millions of years, I mean, geologists have found evidence
SPEAKER_00: 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 Chamas' 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 was 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'll put in the chat, said, in reality, they'd 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. But not everything is about running for reelection. And the problem is he has not managed to this outcome. And so, now we're in this situation where to Freiburg'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.
SPEAKER_00: 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.
SPEAKER_03: I think my 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, and 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 couple of things that are
SPEAKER_01: going to happen here in short order that I think can make this thing accelerated a little. So, there's 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 decade 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, 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
SPEAKER_02: solvable. And we are not doing the blocking and tackling the free throws the basic things. If you look at just monitoring or 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, they'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 cost 25 bucks installed, it just wraps around the the the water, the pipe, and it can 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 my 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 traumatic points, 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 news. It is gross, nuisance biggest donors, who's that
SPEAKER_00: family that grows all the almonds or whatever, whoever they are, the resonance, the resonance, single biggest, them and the teachers unions, single, Linda Resnick, and those palm people
SPEAKER_02: with the palm stuff. I know them. It's total political corruption, right? I mean, they get...
SPEAKER_00: It's Chinatown. It's literally the movie Chinatown.
SPEAKER_00: 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 Sowell or the person who manages the Thomas Sowell 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. Re-election. Which are getting elected and re-elected. That's number one, number two. Stay in office. That is their only goal. 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
SPEAKER_03: the... Because a lot of people talk about residential water use. That is also 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 supports a large part of the California economy. So you can't just 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.
SPEAKER_02: Freeburg 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 get in our 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 to buy 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. Let's spend the fucking money. I'm not sure it solves our acute problems.
SPEAKER_03: 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, the 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 Sacks 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. Sacks, 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
SPEAKER_00: 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, Falconer, 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, the opposition has not consolidated against Newsom the way it did with Schwarzenegger, you know, back in 2001. And I'm voting Republican just to create a counterbalance. I don't care who it is.
SPEAKER_02: 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. Jake, how does it feel to be a radical Trump supporter?
SPEAKER_02: Listen, I'm not for Trump, but Shammoth, 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 said, Well, I sent her on an image. Nick,
SPEAKER_01: maybe you can stick it in the show notes or something so that people can see. But if you look at if you graph the construction of nuclear reactors from 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 over reaction 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.
SPEAKER_01: 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 standards that are defined by the government are incredibly stringent, but the 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 broad 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's better. Oh, we're using air and the air, the sun
SPEAKER_02: and water. And it's like, if I could show you what what tailings are, and like the dirty after
SPEAKER_01: 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 it and want to understand this, you just have to look at the laziest group of
SPEAKER_02: individuals and 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. They figured this out. They said, how do we take more time off and not work and have unlimited electrical 70% nuclear? They're so smart. Well, the French are actually smart because
SPEAKER_01: 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, 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 earth that they are going to create. The net consequences, if they had just stayed the course on nuclear,
SPEAKER_01: they would be in a much better place. And and to France's credit, they were like, what the fuck are you people overreacting about? Again, just think about this, guys. The pragmatism is delightful. We stopped flying. After two airline crashes, where would the world be? Where would the world
SPEAKER_02: 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
SPEAKER_01: 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 Kreeberg anyway out. Anyway, we can get people to what's the best way to convince the American
SPEAKER_02: public to embrace nuclear and force our politicians to do it open your mind and think for yourself.
SPEAKER_01: Right, please. Well,
SPEAKER_00: Mark Andreessen had a good term. He said we're living in a vitocracy as in the word veto. I think it is 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 vitocracy, there are just too many people in groups who have the right to say no to anything and block anything important from happening. But we got to stop letting our politicians off the hook by making excuses. 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 successful democracy, right? Like a democracy over
SPEAKER_03: 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 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
SPEAKER_01: Constitution of the United States that being part of a democracy also means shutting your brain off and becoming a dumb cynic? That's not part of what being part of a democracy is. By the way, 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 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 we have to do really, I think this makes sense. I mean, I was shocked by that study,
SPEAKER_01: 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
SPEAKER_02: 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
SPEAKER_01: mechanism, right? But but the people we know, who have changed the world and who they seem to be,
SPEAKER_02: 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, and 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 de sau plants and nuclear plants. The private market seems like the only solution sacks out. Well, there's an old saying that pessimists get to be right, and optimists get to be rich. And yeah, I mean, if you think about
SPEAKER_00: it, if you think about it, you know, pessimists don't create companies, right? They're No, they throw rocks, they become journalists. They become shit posters on Twitter. They become
SPEAKER_02: critics. Anton Ego. Right.
SPEAKER_01: 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. Marshall. Yeah, during an emergency for sure.
SPEAKER_00: Stan. For sure.
SPEAKER_00: Marshall. But I mean, I hate to use the words, I agree with J-Cal, 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 Freiburg'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? Stan Mallow You see, we should be starting a program where
SPEAKER_02: 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 unlimited clean water, the price of agriculture will go down and we'd have more free food for everybody or lower cost food. Scott Benner I'll tell you a theory I have on this. And
SPEAKER_03: it's not just about the economy, it's about the economy. And I think the American public is very important to us, right? Because we're 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. And so, you know, we were in the mid-90s and 70s, as 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 thing is so risky and can cause massive unknown consequences. And if you watch, I think I talked about this in 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 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 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. You know what, are we not experiencing
SPEAKER_02: 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 on as an individual, I don't want harm done to me or my
SPEAKER_03: 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, free 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 examples of that give us an example. Like if you know,
SPEAKER_03: 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, so we habituate habituate to the great things in our life, 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
SPEAKER_02: happening in technology. And nobody will 10 x or 100 x on them from the government perspective or 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 we 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,
SPEAKER_01: 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.
SPEAKER_02: 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
SPEAKER_01: really cool. He told me this. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say it, 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
SPEAKER_01: app where you can kind of direct the hydro panel to make the kind of water that you like. So if you love or if you love dilating g water, or if you love smart water, or you're on the boss, right?
SPEAKER_02: Specifically because it's the most expensive. No, I love I love smart water. I have a very gratuitous
SPEAKER_01: reason why I remember when I met jobs, he drank smart water and I thought, it's good enough for him is good enough for me. I just get a copy people like 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
SPEAKER_02: poker in his garage in his little 3000 square foot Palo Alto house. Little Berlin, Berlin, Berlin,
SPEAKER_01: in Berlin, whatever. He had this little tiny house. And we're in the garage. And he's like,
SPEAKER_02: look, I'm putting up a flat panel. I'm gonna like paint the wall. We had a little you had a little
SPEAKER_01: easel and you'd write on chalk how much you know, then chametz like I got a new house. He's got his
SPEAKER_02: new house we come over. It's like Jake, how you want some water? I'm like, yeah, I love a glass. He's like, Oh, you want to buy a glass of water? And he goes, Oh, and he walks over to Iraq. And in the rack, like, you know, those things you push wine on, there's a rack for water. And there is vast in the glass bottles. There is Evian in glass bottles, all and you're not like the Evian that you get at the regular supermarket, like somebody source the Evian bottles that restaurants have. And then he had the smart work. 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. Sax I got three different bounce passes I can give you just where you want it. Do you want to cancel culture? Do you want chess a boot in or COVID? What do you want? Or COVID? I can give you any of these. I can read it. I'm talking about any of those sound good to me. I mean, the the it might be time for
SPEAKER_00: a chase update, because we haven't done that in a while. The killer da, the killer da. Oh, by the way, I just want to say I found the journalist, you know, the journalist,
SPEAKER_02: sax don't say her name. And she is sending up her LLC and the $60,000 we raised from the go find me 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're
SPEAKER_00: 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 chase is performing in his job. Isn't it interesting, though, how the left journalists when I hired an investigative
SPEAKER_02: journalist 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 researcher. And they insisted on saying I wanted to get into chess his 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,
SPEAKER_00: 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 to 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 the passing from chase 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 scary. Yeah, you had the viral video of the the guy going into CVS. And just, you know, it wasn't even shoplifting. It was, did you see Brian sugars,
SPEAKER_02: 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
SPEAKER_00: invasions are now not prosecutable crimes in San Francisco. Well, no, what they're doing is what
SPEAKER_00: 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. It's 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... Wow, they're shaping the stats.
SPEAKER_00: They're juking the stats. You ever watched the show The Wire? That's where this expression comes from is, you know, first, the politicians get 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
SPEAKER_02: these statistics as going down when people are stopping reporting crimes because they won't prosecute them, then 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? CBS, Walgreens and Target are all closing stores or reducing store hours, because they understand
SPEAKER_00: the hit to their bottom line. But you have this mantra. 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 klansman. A racist and a klansman. So this is the other thing that happened over the past week is that you had... This is crazy.
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_00: 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.
SPEAKER_00: Yes. Who tweeted that all of her friends are thinking about leaving the city. And then in response to that, you had this senior policy advisor to Chase Aboudin, who works for the DA's office named Kate Chatfield, attacker basically implying her views were KKK values for having the audacity to warn that people are worried about crime in San Francisco. So she gets attacked. By the way, this Chatfield person, the top of her profile is the clenched fist of the communist revolution, Jay Cal. So this is who's running the DA's office. 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 enforced... Can you read the tweet that she did? Do you have that there? Because she basically is...
SPEAKER_02: 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, people are scared for their families. And then Kate Chatfield referenced birth of a nation
SPEAKER_02: and compared her to, oh, our wives are not safe because of black people. And that's a KKK... Birth of a nation. Everybody understands what birth of a nation is.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the original name of birth of a nation, I think was the Klansmen. Yeah, it's like a KKK piece of propaganda. Wow. But it's really outrageous. She just blocked me. Kate Chatfield blocked me. Wow.
SPEAKER_02: This is a public policy advisor who's now hiding her account. Well,
SPEAKER_00: a public official should not do that. They should be... And so this set you off. Let's be honest.
SPEAKER_02: Well, I know Michelle Tamler, she worked at Yammer. And I thought it was out of bounds for
SPEAKER_00: not just a public official, but someone in the DA's office who has the power... Well, you went into revenge mode. Let's be honest. You got a little bit... You were a little bit
SPEAKER_02: tweaked.
SPEAKER_00: I donated another $50,000 to the Recall Chasing Campaign.
SPEAKER_02: And you dedicated it to Kate. Yeah. You said, this is for you.
SPEAKER_00: 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,
SPEAKER_02: but I'm so outraged now that I think I should let this out. So while I... 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 gonna break it now. Do you know who contacted me? The DA's office. Do 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?
SPEAKER_01: I'm dead serious. This is literally becoming Chinatown. They literally tried to intimidate me, and I didn't want to bring it up.
SPEAKER_02: And I talked to the person on the phone, the person from the DA's office who was investigating this. And I was like, do I need an attorney for this? Why are you calling me? And 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.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_00: Well, because this is two weeks after I said, let's hire the journalist.
SPEAKER_02: It's intimidation. It is intimidation tactics. That's intimidation.
SPEAKER_01: I will not be intimidated.
SPEAKER_02: All right. But what you can see here is okay, look, I mean, I was intimidated. I'm not going to have me intimidated again.
SPEAKER_01: 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.
SPEAKER_02: And now some other investors complaining and they're trying to tie it back to me somehow. But Jason, of course, you're going to be intimidated. The chief law enforcement officer of San Francisco is basically trying to make you the target
SPEAKER_00: of an investigation because of what you said publicly. And he's going to be intimidated. I'm basically trying to make you the target of an investigation because of what you said publicly. Of course, that is intimidation.
SPEAKER_03: Guys, isn't it possible that they're just interviewing you about a fraud claim? I mean, like what the... Oh, really? Wait, wait, hold on. But think about the timing, Freeburg. It's two or three weeks after... Like conspiracy theory, like... Two or three weeks after... You know, guys, I got to tell you something. A police officer drove past my house last night. Yeah. Freeburg. Okay, look.
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_02: Wait, it's the first and only time I've ever been contacted by a law enforcement officer in the past. I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Stop committing fraud. 350 investments.
SPEAKER_00: Listen, Chase 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 JCal. They don't have time to prosecute the home invader who broke into Sian Bannister's home. Or Brian's. Or Brian's. They don't have time to do that, but they somehow have time to contact JCal. 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 punishment. Beating up UPS drivers in the street. Beating a UPS driver in the street. Because there is no consequence. 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 person. You're a Klansman. And then they get there, the Kate Chatfield 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 money. Who's paying off? The Dustin Moskovitz's, the Mike Krieger's, the Reed Hastings. And even actually the biggest contributor to chase it right now is a guy who's under SEC indictment for the ripple scandal.
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_00: Oh, no. Yeah, Chris. Chris. Yes, exactly. So people who need to curry favor either because they've got their own problems, or they just like to virtue signal. Chris Larson. Chris Larson is chess's biggest campaign.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, wow. That is dark. Brian Sugar released 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 realize the past 47?
SPEAKER_00: Did you see the getaway cars to the name of Marcus? Hi. Yeah, they're all like the Mercedes driving great beautiful cars with their license plates
SPEAKER_02: 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 I'm moving to Texas or to Florida. I'm making the announcement now. Hold on.
SPEAKER_00: So for sure, Jacob.
SPEAKER_02: 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 debt spiral? Can this be reversed in our in the next decade? Jake? How does it feel? How does it feel to be completely red pilled?
SPEAKER_02: I'm purple pilled. 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.
SPEAKER_02: That's the way I feel about this pod.
SPEAKER_02: You're not being villainized. Just give me a break. 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 have? You just made what do we got? It was a joke. Why can't you admit it or not? Listen, I have 15 minutes we got to go COVID.
SPEAKER_00:
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_00: We had any risk? Well, okay, let me jump into this because I've been affected personally by it. On the last pod, I did give the stat, which was that at that point, the best data we had even a week ago was that 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 getting symptoms and testing positive. It was still 93% against serious cases requiring hospitalization. But that 93% is down from 99% plus. So there has been reduced effectiveness by Delta. It is a little bit concerning. And as if to underscore this point, someone very close to me who was double vax with Pfizer just tested positive. He did test positive?
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
SPEAKER_00: So he woke up yesterday morning 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. What city was he in when this happened?
SPEAKER_02: LA. 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.
SPEAKER_02: 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 gonna make a difference.
SPEAKER_03: Again, remember, acquired immunity is on a spectrum. 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've got your antibodies to that specific virus aren't as concentrated, it's gonna 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, to some extent, what we're seeing most likely is this Delta variant having a greater escape velocity from people that have been vaccinated than the Alpha variant or any of the other variants we've seen. And so as a result, 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 that condition. But it's being tracked really closely. I mean, like Zach said in Israel, they have now said that if you're vaccinated with double vax with Pfizer, you're now 64% effective. And 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... Chamath? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: What do you think of this situation? And Chamath, are markets kind of worrying about this?
SPEAKER_03: Because I'm kind of wondering, as market participants see this stuff, are they trading it in a way that's fearful? And does this lead to some market conditions in the next couple days and weeks?
SPEAKER_01: 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. For fuck's sake. Well, I don't see...
SPEAKER_00: 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... Wait a second. Didn't Israel only get to like 55-60% vaccinated?
SPEAKER_00: Oh, no. They're way higher than that. No, no, no. They're way higher than that. Yeah. Half of the infections they're seeing in Israel are children that were not vaccinated.
SPEAKER_03: And then the other half are adults. And so if you look at the adult infection rate, it looks like it's something around 15% of 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 going to probably need a booster and we're probably going to be on a cocktail.
SPEAKER_01: 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. Period.
SPEAKER_02: There will be boosters for sure.
SPEAKER_03: Right. Like this fall. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00: And I think the question about this data is, does it warrant a change in policy? And I would say not yet. 100% not yet.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, 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... Israel... Again, I'll ask you, Freeburg, how many of those are with COVID versus from COVID? Yeah, it's unclear.
SPEAKER_03: But 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... Right. It's not what the media likes to portray, which is variants punching through.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's not like Delta variant is just sweeping through Israel. There is a slight increase in cases. And we're definitely seeing elevated cases here in the US. I mean, Delta variant is going to become 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 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 keep having these variants sweep through. I'll tell you, I had a really good conversation with an infectious disease doctor yesterday,
SPEAKER_03: 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 virus can hop. The more evolution it can do. The more it evolves, right? Yes. And so, 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, to put it in maybe layman's terms, all these unvaccinated people are basically like
SPEAKER_00: 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 gonna 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 Freeberg's point, it's just a matter of time. You guys want to guess the bottom two states in the country?
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's just... Mississippi. In terms of vaccination. Mississippi and Alabama.
SPEAKER_01: Alabama. Exactly. Can you imagine Mississippi and Alabama 33%?
SPEAKER_02: Come on. Get your act together. What is the big... I mean, it's gonna whip through those places and you're all gonna die. You're gonna kill your grandparents.
SPEAKER_03: Is that an evangelical movement issue?
SPEAKER_00: Well, we talked about this in the last pod. There's two groups in America who are most... Republican men. ...called... No, let's be more specific. It's evangelicals and African Americans. Those are the two groups who are most vaccine-hesitant.
SPEAKER_02: You keep saying... what is it? How do you pronounce it? Evangelical. Evangelical. Evangelicals. It's actually male Republicans. Why can't you... No, that's...
SPEAKER_00: You're not being specific enough.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Guys, I gotta run. Love you, Freeberg.
SPEAKER_01: Love you guys. We love you, Freeberg. See you later. Love you, Big Blue.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, man.
