All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E39: West coast super drought & climate crisis, Nuclear virtue signaling, chaos in SF & more

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

Show Notes: 0:00 Super drought & climate crisis on the west coast 25:53 Nuclear energy, virtue signaling, cognitive laziness, positive signals of optimism 36:50 Friedberg's "anti-science" theory 44:48... San Francisco chaos, "crime is down" controversy, viral crime videos 59:42 Are Israel's recent COVID vaccine findings problematic? Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: Nuclear energy timeline https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GSIb-vyIvZalcE9LCBFqbQjsvE4uu-c-/view?usp=sharing The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future https://www.amazon.com/Grid-Fraying-Between-Americans-Energy-ebook/dp/B01DM9Q6CQ MarketWatch - Target shortens hours in San Francisco due to ‘alarming rise’ in shoplifting https://www.marketwatch.com/story/target-shortens-hours-in-san-francisco-due-to-alarming-rise-in-shoplifting-11625688560 Israel Ministry of Health - Decline in Vaccine Effectiveness Against Infection and Symptomatic Illness https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/05072021-03 Tweets: https://twitter.com/friedberg/status/1413044148735672322 https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/1411362359734542343 https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/1411943649231851522 https://twitter.com/cyantist/status/1412478525014085632 https://twitter.com/briansugar/status/1412507632267534340 https://twitter.com/activeasian/status/1412252070829182976 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1412160046046203909 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1412163715676327950 https://twitter.com/ThomasSowell/status/1412858750747217922 https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1412899033933307911 https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1409170317826793474 https://twitter.com/briansugar/status/1412507632267534340

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 What did your doctor give you to make you lose all this weight? What is your celebrity doctor giving you tell the truth? You know people people on Twitter are like your Twitter account standing a lot more like jay count. I'm like I think I'm the same diet. I think that's what's going on here. In. Three. Two. Hey everybody, hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the All in Pod with us today. Of course the queen of Kenwak and and from his castle in Italy the cackling dictator, Trimoff Polly Hoppati and nice gardenias and back from his big big battle his brawl unblocked and undefeated the rainman himself David sacks and judging by the comments, I'd say dominant. Oh, you read the comments. Just another sign of your obsession with how you don't like you don't even I never read comments.
Starting point is 00:01:13 Rule number one, don't read the comments. We're not doing it again. It shows because you're not listening to the comments. So it makes sense. Oh, okay, go ahead and you get your whole troll. 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 your paranoid too. I'm not gonna. Don't be paranoid, don't be paranoid. Anyway, it's not even leave patch things up. It's patched up. Don't break the piece, we have Daytont.
Starting point is 00:01:38 All right. So Freeberg is busy writing tweet storms now about the drought in California, which seems to be just gonna be a really bad year, basically. So Freeberg walk us through it. How bad is California's drought gonna be this year? So the drought is already very bad. I put out a lot of tweets at two in the morning last night.
Starting point is 00:02:04 I think I drank way too much caffeine yesterday. I mean, 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 sure it's not fair? Maybe you're so excited about this. That you were just can't sleep with your eyes and needles. Nick, you could beat this out. Nick, you could beat this out. No, no, no, keep that. Keep that. So, you know, the big tweet store I put out at 2 in the morning last night, kind of highlighted that there was a paper published in 2018, 2019 that showed how, you know, North
Starting point is 00:02:41 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 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,
Starting point is 00:03:11 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 off 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
Starting point is 00:03:33 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 snow pack 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.
Starting point is 00:03:58 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,
Starting point is 00:04:25 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, like 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're
Starting point is 00:04:51 talking about, 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 158QI, which is the air quality index, workers can't work outside and all the outdoor work, which employs three million Californians have to shut down. And you know, you kind of start to add these things up. It's like, what are we gonna do as this happens? Not if this happens.
Starting point is 00:05:12 And we should kind of be planning for it. And I don't see much happening in terms of planning and preparation and talking about the opportunity. History rhymes because if you remember, and this is all going into a recall election in the fall, this was a different, but kind of equivalent setup where you guys remember we were having all these blackouts and brownouts when a great Davis was recalled. And then shorts and eggers just swooped up out of nowhere and you know, people thought, oh, there's no
Starting point is 00:05:39 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 trick, but from wrong, Friedberg, is that we live in essentially like a lot of desert area here in California, and we just haven't invested in the desalination
Starting point is 00:06:19 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 route wanted to open it up again but we now have one in Karlsbad, the Claude Bud, Lewis Karlsbad desalination plant that is now, I think that cost us a billion bucks, but Israel, correct me if I'm wrong, is now they charge three times as much for water than we do so people take water seriously and they actually monitor their water usage and they have desalination and they have more water than they
Starting point is 00:06:51 need per capita. Well, desal doesn't really solve a number of these problems that I'm highlighting. You know, the probability of the forest land on the west coast, not just in California, but all up and down the west coast catching on fire is very high. No number of diesel plants is gonna put out those fires. When that happens, the air quality is gonna get really bad. Like we saw last year, I don't know, you guys remember I escaped to Lake Michigan last summer when the, this was okay. We remember the threads, yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:16 Yeah, and it was, it was insane. It doesn't, diesel plants don't solve the air quality problem where people can't work outside, your kids can't go to school, et cetera, et cetera. 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. So, you clear what's off that, though? You clear what's off that, certainly. And so, the point is, we're kind of reaching this apex of, are we going to do climate change
Starting point is 00:07:44 adaptation? Are we going to have, you know, kind of long-term systemic solutions that we're kind of reaching this apex of, are we gonna do climate change adaptation? Are we gonna have, you know, kind of long-term systemic solutions that we're gonna 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,
Starting point is 00:08:02 which is what we typically do with these sorts of crises. We're not investing in infrastructure. If we put in some nuclear power plants, if we did more diesel and we did more forest management or put more fire breaks into all this, I'm talking about the simple solutions like have a two or three things would be massive, wouldn't they? Well, those are long term solutions. I'm talking about like for this summer, we need community, no, but we need to prepare for what is going to happen this summer. So when communities get run
Starting point is 00:08:29 out, what are we going to do? 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, or things that we should be actively pursuing. If you're in California, you should order your air purifiers now. We ordered six more of the Conway ones that we used last year that were amazing. Get in the end, and I'm doing it. We have the 95 masks.
Starting point is 00:08:58 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 four hundred bucks I think now. So a portable generator, in case you lose power, stock up on everything else. We need those solutions Like I think there's going to be a big kind of power generator push, right? Like distributed power has always been something that's the whole point of solar you get the solar in 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? That's kind of a very scary circumstance of heat waves.
Starting point is 00:09:30 And it's something that we should have a real plan around. And if I were the governor, or if I were kind of California leadership, or leadership up and down the West Coast, 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 scrambling
Starting point is 00:09:51 after a crisis doesn't make anyone feel better. 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 reassure and start to put the pieces in place for the near term. By the way, just for those that don't really appreciate how interconnected everything is, the basics, the science basics on drought as I learned about them were really, really incredible. You think, okay, well, how is all this stuff connected?
Starting point is 00:10:20 It turns out that, you know, as we have warmer and warmer temperatures, I didn't know this, the freebergue 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.
Starting point is 00:10:44 You have warmer temperatures. That results in less snow 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 isn't the first percentile of soil moisture looking back over many, many decades. So then all of that vegetation dries up and then becomes hotter for more fires. No Jason, we're in a worse and this we're in a position where we are threatening our own
Starting point is 00:11:19 food supply. And 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 questionable at best in some cases. So we're in a really tough position here and saw, it's, isn't this all solvable with technology?
Starting point is 00:11:51 I mean, if we just tax people a little more for the war usage, if we really invested in the diesel plants, if we really invested in nuclear, we could actually flip this holding the same way it's spiraling in the wrong direction, it could spiral in the right direction. Two things on the water side. I've been looking at water investing for a while.
Starting point is 00:12:07 There's a real problem, which is, you know, when I looked at this, my team found some incredibly interesting opportunities. Largely, it evolves around owning water rights, right? And then basically selling them back to the state. And when states get in difficult situations, the problem is, I think it's politically intolerable for, let's just say somebody like me to own those kinds of water. To be a water baron.
Starting point is 00:12:31 Yeah. I think it's no bueno. The idea then that I had was like, well, maybe what we should be doing is buying these things and sticking them in a foundation so that we can guarantee water for people in certain states. Maybe that flies, I'm not so sure. That's the government's job.
Starting point is 00:12:46 That's the government's job. But then they're not doing their job. But they're incompetent. They're unfortunately not, not as skilled as you'd want them to be on this job. Saks, how would you spin this out of this debt spiral and into abundance? Is there a way? Well, I mean, the first thing to realize here is that this is not a black swan event. I mean, this is entirely foreseeable. Drought conditions have existed in California for a long time. In fact, 200 years, yeah. Well, and even maybe going back millions of years, I mean, geologists have found evidence that, you know, millions of years ago, you would have
Starting point is 00:13:23 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.
Starting point is 00:13:53 And so to go back to Jamas' point about the political ramifications here, you could have a great Davis-like situation with the recall where all of a sudden Newsom goes from being in the favor to potentially losing because of fire season. But by the way, I mean, the whole reason why the recall elections happening in September announced that October and November is because Newsom is precisely worried about the gray Davis scenario. And there are, this recall is supposed to happen in the October and November timeframe. They've moved it up to September because News new some things, there's a higher chance of fading the worst of fire season by doing the election sooner.
Starting point is 00:14:29 The problem for him is that fire season now starts in August. So we could be in the middle of fire season when this recall election happens. This can could boom rang on him. But back to the point about, you know, new somehow this press conference back in January of 2019. And the problem is there hasn't been any real fall through on forest management. So Newsom was recently caught in a lie saying that
Starting point is 00:14:54 they had basically treated 90,000 acres. This is what this article I'll put in the chat said in reality, that only really treated about 11,000 acres. Even 90,000 would be inadequate, right? They're not doing enough. And the way, you know, I talked to a very prominent person who knows California politics well and knows all the players. And what he said is, look, the fundamental problem is that Gavin is not operational, right? He's fantastic at fundraising. He says all the right things at press conferences. But not everything is
Starting point is 00:15:26 about running for reelection. And the problem is he has not managed to this outcome. And so now we're in the situation where to freeberg's point, we're going to be scrambling after the fact. Now what is nuisance excuse going to be? It's going to be, you know, climate change can be global warming. It's kind of the all-purpose dog ate my homework, excuse for anything that goes wrong as he can his blame on climate change. But the reality is we knew about climate change, climate change is something we're gonna have to live with.
Starting point is 00:15:54 Even if we stop it in its tracks from this point forward, we're not gonna be able to reverse the effects it's already had. And so we need leaders who will step up and get much more aggressive about preventing this problem. I think, 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.
Starting point is 00:16:14 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, I say 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 going to happen here in short order that I think can make this thing accelerated a little.
Starting point is 00:16:42 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?
Starting point is 00:17:28 It's about 15% of the demand for that state. And so you're gonna start to deal with these sort of like rolling, I don't know what we're even gonna call these water out scenarios where it's not just about watering your lawn, that's not gonna be possible. It's gonna 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 aquafire in Southern California, which is the size of Lake Mead. It's an incredibly unique thing. It's actually owned by a public company.
Starting point is 00:18:08 And the whole goal was, okay, well, let's just build a pipeline, right, from the aquafire to deliver drinking water to folks that are lacking water. And this has been a multi-year 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, as David, as you said, the dog ate my homework, and now we're really playing with some very complicated things that are really out of the control
Starting point is 00:18:50 and intellectual capacity of the, frankly, state governments, which is the interconnectedness of whether temperature, water, or soil, or food supply. It's a, I think, I think- Well, so frustrated, this is so easily solved. It's so possible. And we are not doing the blocking and tackling the free throws, the basic things. If you look at just monitoring our water usage, I invested in two companies, one of them didn't work out, but both of them were to monitor water usage. And what we learned was at a campus like Stanford, they have like four water meters.
Starting point is 00:19:26 They're not going down to the building level in some cases. There will be like four buildings on one water meter. And you can very easily, at each sink, at each shower head, you can put a device that costs 25 bucks installed. It just wraps around the pipe. And it could tell you how it's flowing. And we lose 20, 30% of our water to leaks. Nobody is monitoring their usage
Starting point is 00:19:55 because there is no cost to it to Shamaats 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 freed bird can give us an education at versus what, you know, the trip irrigation that they use and other reclaiming methods in Israel and other places. So we look at water as like to Tremots Point, some crazy God-given right that we can just splash it everywhere, we can take 20-minute showers. And then we allow, how crazy is this? We allow the bottling of water in California. We allow these companies to bottle water and then sell it. And we don't even
Starting point is 00:20:35 monitor our usage. We have, well, newsroom. We are so entitled. It is gross. Newsom's biggest donors, who's that family that grows all the almonds or whatever? Yeah, they are. The resnicks. The resnicks. Single biggest donors uh... who who's a family that grows all the almonds or whatever who are the uh... the rezniks the rezniks single biggest dot them in the teachers union single reznik and those palm people with the palm stuff i i know it's it's total political corruption right i mean they get it it's chatted down it's literally the movie china town
Starting point is 00:20:58 yeah well i think it's so to this point about why aren't politicians solving the problems i mean to make a metta point there's a great tweet from tomasol or the person who manages the Thomas Sol account Where he said no one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems They're trying to solve their own problems Which are getting elected and reelected that's number one number two What that is they're going to go three is far behind. And that's basically the situation we have is, I think Newsom actually is a little bit like Trump,
Starting point is 00:21:30 not in his personal style, but in that he thinks he can talk his way out of problems. And he's not gonna focus on solving a problem when he can just spin his way out of it. By the way, I just think you guys should know, the, you know, because a lot of people talk about residential water use, that is also kind of an acute and local problem, where depending on your water supply, how much water you have available to your community.
Starting point is 00:21:54 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. 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.
Starting point is 00:22:22 That supports a large part of the California economy., you know, you can't just kind of blow them away But 90% of water use in California is associated with ag and it's not just a generally we need to save water problem It's very specific to a region and a community and their particular water source on whether and how much you need to save versus Do you have abundance supplies and so on and so it's a little bit more complicated But yeah, but we should be focused on abundance, Freiburg. If you look at the new nuclear power plants that Bill Gates has invested in, and then you look at desalination, which is an energy issue, we can desalinationize for roughly two or three times the cost that we're getting or what are for now.
Starting point is 00:22:58 So just put a nuclear power plant next to a desalination plant and you're done. Great. That's a 20 year project. And you got to go Great, that's a 20 year project and you got to go. Why is it a 20 year project? China does it in two. You're going to need 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.
Starting point is 00:23:20 Let's do it immediately. Let's set a goal of two years to build 10 of these. Jason, I'm not sure. I'm not. And I'm not sure the fucking money. I'm not sure it solves our acute problems. It solves long-term problems associated with climate change and energy security. We can't do both. We can't do both. Let's do both. Sure. We should do everything. But right now, 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
Starting point is 00:23:45 We should also be funding long-term projects that create water security and energy security for everyone in the United States But sax 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 dropping in cheap power. Sacks, who is the good operational candidate that you've seen that's running for Governor of California and 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 Newsome at this point. Yeah, I mean, a clear alternative has not emerged yet.
Starting point is 00:24:25 You know, I guess the, and part of the problem is that because there was no Republican primary, you haven't sort of consolidated the opposition to a leading candidate. There are a couple of, I guess, interesting candidates on the Republican side. I need to spend more time getting to, you know, know them. I mean, I have never met them or talked to them. But the two who are, I think mentioned quite a bit, are the Sky Falconer who's the mayor of San Diego, who is sort of a socially liberal Republican.
Starting point is 00:24:57 And then there's a state assemblyman named Kevin Kylie, 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 Caitlin 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 back in 2001. I'm voting Republican just to create a counterbalance.
Starting point is 00:25:35 I don't care who it is, and I'm not a Republican, I'm an independent, but I'm voting across the board. I'm just going to go to Republican for every position in California, and I'm going to just run my finger down the Republican line. 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. How does it feel to be a radical Trump supporter? I've listened, I have not for Trump, but Chimoff talked to us about nuclear and what we can do to get to reverse with these hippie, hippie, well intention, no nukes, concert, set us back 50 years.
Starting point is 00:26:06 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 theory. Well, I sent around an image, Nick, 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, 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
Starting point is 00:26:41 it was really the United States building, building, building. And then two things really happened. There was three-mile island and then there was Chernobyl. And there was an incredible overreaction to not really understanding either the cause and or the remediation to two events. Now, could you imagine if there were two airlines that crashed and we stopped flying, how basically we would have retarded the progress of the world. And now, you impose it on something like nuclear energy, which is consistently proven to provide an enormous, the abundant, cheap, and clean form of sustainable energy. And it actually solves a bunch of the problems we talked about before. So for example, if you look at the power consumption for desalination, it's off the charts,
Starting point is 00:27:32 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 sanitize water and make it drinkable, the standards that are defined by the government are incredibly stringent, but the implication of it operationally is an enormous amount of power that goes into it. But Jason, you are right, which is that if we have small forms of sustainable abundant
Starting point is 00:27:58 energy that can be basically hyper localized and located where we can do these jobs, the jobs to be done, it's transformational. Now why doesn't it happen? It doesn't happen because the same folks who really want to sound the alarm bells on climate change, which is the progressive left, are not really willing. They're intellectually lazy when it comes to nuclear. They don't do the work. They make a brand sort of broad-based prognostication about how we need to do something about climate.
Starting point is 00:28:26 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 nuts. But it sounds better, right? It sounds better. It's better. Oh, you see air in the sun. It's a water. And it's like, if I could show you what what tailings are, and like the dirty after effects of mining copper and nickel out of the ground, which is what we need for batteries, and how countries like Indonesia are literally dumping it into the ocean, dumping it faster that they can get their hands on it so that they can sell copper and nickel and cobalt to us so that we can make batteries.
Starting point is 00:29:14 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 with this. You want to understand this. You just have to look at the laziest group of 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,
Starting point is 00:29:32 sorry to our French listeners. 70% of the energy in France is from nuclear. It's nuclear. They figured this out. They said, how do we take more time off and not work and have unlimited elections? 70% nuclear. They're so smart.
Starting point is 00:29:48 Well, the French are actually smart because after Fukushima, what happened is if you had sort of like woke politicians, Germany, a bunch of Germany, they completely unwound their entire nuclear agenda, which was insanity. And so now here they are, they're writing laws faster than they can make them up. They're basically pivoting entire industries to try to now adopt batteries and storage without any real understanding about the downstream implications to the earth that they are going to create. They're just the net consequences.
Starting point is 00:30:25 If they had just stayed the course on nuclear, they would be in a much better place. And to Francis Credit, they were like, what the fuck are you people over reacting about? Again, just think about this guys. The problem with Tism is delightful. The problem with Tism is delightful. The problem with Tism is delightful. The problem with Tism is delightful. The problem with Tism is delightful.
Starting point is 00:30:41 The problem with Tism is delightful. The problem with Tism is delightful. The problem with Tism is delightful. The problem with Tism is delightful. The problem with Tism is delightful. The problem with Tism is delightful. The problem with Tism is delightful. The problem with Tism is delightful. two airline crashes, where would the world be? Where would the world be? I mean, be pragmatist here. 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?
Starting point is 00:30:57 If we just go on a Manhattan project literally to make New Nuclear, we would be, this issue would be behind us and we could focus on something else like education It's so dumb the very scary thing about nuclear is despite all of the progress It will get bogged down in litigation and bureaucracy these are the last two things that should be in front of science and physics Especially when it comes to energy independence. I just think it's creeper anyway out.
Starting point is 00:31:29 Anyway we can get people to what's the best way to convince the American public to embrace nuclear and force our politicians to do it. Open your mind and think for yourself. Right. Well, Mark and Dr. Mason had a good term. He said we're living in a V talker see as in the word veto. Um, I think it was interesting interview with, um, Antonio Garcia Martinez on his blog. Anyway, um, yeah, they were talking about the
Starting point is 00:31:56 inability of the U.S. to build anything anymore, especially when you compare us to some, you know, a place like China. And whether you want to call it an inbiasm or V talktocracy, there are just too many people and groups who have the right to say no to anything and block anything important from happening. But we got to stop letting our politicians off the hook by making excuses, you know, just because there's climate change doesn't mean that the politicians can't do anything about it. I mean, welcome to the downstream consequences of a successful democracy, right? Like, a democracy over time doesn't reduce the number of laws it has.
Starting point is 00:32:33 Every year, politicians need to do their job and they create new laws. As new laws accumulate, like, the things get clogged up, right? Like, when have you seen a law that gets passed by a local government, a state government, or federal government that makes it easier to do something? I get that, but where does it say in the Constitution of the United States that being part of a democracy also means shutting your brain off and becoming a dumb cynic? Yeah. That's not part of what being part of a democracy is.
Starting point is 00:33:00 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. Synicism is associated with lower IQ, lower literacy, lower numeracy, and lower earnings.
Starting point is 00:33:37 The idea of cynical individuals being more competent appears to be a widespread, yet largely illusory lie. So I think, it could totally, I think this makes sense. I mean, I was shocked by that study because I actually generally think cynical people must be smarter because they're thinking more rationally
Starting point is 00:33:58 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 contancorous and not content, and I think people sometimes conflate those two things. But the constant, constant pervasive cynicism is not a feature of democracy.
Starting point is 00:34:14 It means that you just stop thinking for yourself as a protective mechanism. Right. But the people we know who have changed the world and who, they seem to be, they're not cynical. They're not cynical. They're actually delusional and optimistic or as they wouldn't have started a company to make electric cars, you know, or, you know, whatever piece of software or climate.com or synthetic biology, you have to be a radical optimist. I mean, and we're
Starting point is 00:34:41 literally trying to attack our incredible capitalists who are actually solving these problems while our politicians can't get their shit together and make desal plants and nuclear plants. Private market seems like the only solution, Saks, how do you say that? 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 it, you know, pessimists don't create companies, right? They're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, they become journalists.
Starting point is 00:35:15 They become, they become, they become critics. They become critics. Yeah. And Ton ego. Right. Right. To, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, what do you think about this idea that, uh, you know, if we get into the throes of it, uh, for water, the folks that own water rights, I think that this is going to
Starting point is 00:35:29 be like an eminent domain issue where the government is at some point just going to say, sorry, need it back. It's mind. Yeah, during an emergency for sure. For sure. But I mean, I hate to, I hate to use the words, I agree with J. Cal, but, but, you know, look, there's not a shortage of water in the world, right? I mean, the world is mostly water. So it is a function of building desalination plants if that's what we need.
Starting point is 00:35:59 There has to be a solution for that problem. And Freeberg's right that maybe it does take a decade or two to put it in place, all that infrastructure, But then why didn't we start 10 years ago? You see, we should be starting a program where we convinced the American public that abundance would lead to them having more freedom and our country being stronger. Electrical abundance with nuclear water abundance with desalination 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
Starting point is 00:36:39 I'll tell you I'll tell you a theory I have on this and And it's basically an anti-science theory, which is that culturally we've kind of developed this anti-innovation anti-science mentality broadly speaking across kind of modern culture in the United States. If you remember coming out of World War II, and I think it has its roots in the Cold War, when World War II ended, we were all in it together. This country, everyone bought the same stuff.
Starting point is 00:37:06 We all had rice crispies every day. We all kind of were excited about our homes that looked like everyone else's home on the block. And technology was empowering all of this, right? There was a space race on. There were plastics that were suddenly allowing us to make all sorts of amazing things. There were chemicals that were creating new drugs
Starting point is 00:37:24 for humans and new applications for agriculture that was making an abundance of food and increasing life spans and so on. But then what happened in the late 60s and 70s is we realized we got ahead of ourselves. And you know, there was cancer from DDT. There was, you know, three mile island. There was a number of pollutants that got into the environment that permanently damaged the environment from chemical companies. And we started to wake up and say, like, wait a second, all of this technology that we thought was so great and was giving us this extraordinary abundance, it turns out it's really risky and can cause massive, unknown consequences.
Starting point is 00:38:02 And if you watch, I think I talked about this in our podcasts 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, a 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 on Santa
Starting point is 00:38:21 where you would go into the micro world and look at plastics and stuff. And it was all about this amazing abundance and technology. The narrator on the video says, beginning in the late 60s, early 70s, we changed all the rides. The rides all became about the fear of technology. It was all about aliens attacking Earth. It was all about Captain EO, the world became robotic and got taken over by unnatural things.
Starting point is 00:38:43 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. Everything became subconscious, or it's a little bit, this negative technology sentiment. I think that that still persists. 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,
Starting point is 00:39:07 and then that becomes the social conscience. And I think we're still grappling with that. And I don't know how you reverse it. Because people are so sensitive. People are so sensitive. Are we not experiencing this right now, everybody, with COVID, where there's one group of people who are like, oh my God, the science we were able to deploy in COVID
Starting point is 00:39:23 and get through this so quickly is so promising that the world's gonna be better net, net, after the pandemic, even with all the suffering, you could make an argument that that suffering is gonna lead to more prosperity. And then there's another group of people who are like the Delta variant, let's get our masks back on,
Starting point is 00:39:42 and people wanna take the cynical route on that. As an individual, I don't want harm done to me or my kids or my environment. 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 a free electricity practically for decades
Starting point is 00:40:08 or whatever the case might be. And free water. And free water and all these things. And I think 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 sociological and evolutionary
Starting point is 00:40:22 effectiveness. Give us an example of that. Give us an example of that. Like 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, 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?
Starting point is 00:40:44 And so, you know, it's a great thing to do. So, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it is asymmetrically defined by these negative consequences. I think over time, you accumulate these negative consequences as you're Corsicae and you have an aversion to doing innovative things.
Starting point is 00:41:11 As a whole, not all people, but as a whole, that's how we operate. It's why technology gets land-based over time. This is the most frustrating thing to meet you, Moth, is that we have so many amazing things happening in technology and nobody will 10X or 100X on them from the government perspective of the public. I had a company called Zero Mass on my podcast, which I think is now called Source, and you're aware of this company. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the impact hydropanels would make if we just embrace
Starting point is 00:41:41 this technology. Well, I mean, Source is an incredible, incredible company. Basically, there's a guy who runs a Cody Freason who, when he was at MIT, basically developed essentially a material, a 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
Starting point is 00:42:17 the back you put a little pipe and it collects the humidity in the ambient air and it spits out water. It's an incredible thing and he's able to go and rewire schools and the thing is he can go anywhere because again, he doesn't need anything, right? You literally put it on your roof. It's incredible. And it makes you, 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
Starting point is 00:42:46 No matter where you were on the planet. And by the way, he's moving to a place which is really cool He told me this I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say it But I'll say it anyways. Are you saying this might be beeped? No, where he's got a beep candidate? No, he'll have an eventual app Where you can kind of direct the hydropanel to make the kind of water that you like so if you love Apple on or if you love Tyland in water or if you love smart water or you're on the floor, right? It's big specifically because it's the most expensive. No, I love I love smart water
Starting point is 00:43:17 I have a very gratuitous reason why I remember when I met jobs He drank smart water and I thought bo boop, is good enough for him? Is good enough for me? How do you want to knew Chamoth me? I just get a copy, people. You got a copy of the good ones and I was just like, this is a personal anecdote. This is when I knew Chamoth me.
Starting point is 00:43:34 We used to play poker in his garage in his little 3,000 square foot Palo Alto house. Little. Burling in Burling in. In Burling, whatever. He had this little tiny house. And we're in the garage and he's like, look, I'm putting up a flat pan,
Starting point is 00:43:46 I'm gonna paint the walls. No, we had a little, you had a little easel and you'd write on chalk, how much you owe it, you know. Then, Chimaz, I got a new house. Oh, get deep. He's got his new house, we come over. He's like, Jake, how you want some water? I'm like, yeah, I love a glass.
Starting point is 00:44:01 He's like, I'll Jake, how you want it? I'm like, yeah, I'll take a glass of water. And he goes, oh, and he walks over to a rack. And in the rack, like, you know those things you push wine on, there's a rack for water. And there is Voss in the glass bottles. There is avion and glass bottles, old. And you're not like the avion that you get
Starting point is 00:44:19 at the regular supermarket. Like somebody sourced the avion bottles that restaurants have. And then he had the smart, I mean, there's six to. I'm like, it's one on a glass of water. But okay, I'll take the avion 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 cancel culture? Do you want Chesa, budin 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 I the it might be time for a chase update because we haven't done that in a while
Starting point is 00:44:52 The killer DA the killer DA. Yeah, oh by the way I just want to say I found the journalist you know the journalist sacks. Don't say her name And she is sending a per LLC and the $60,000 we raised from the go find me 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 trying to do there with the GoFundMe, Jake Alps. This is not for opposition research. This is not digging up dirt.
Starting point is 00:45:19 This is reporting 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 journalist when I hired an investigative journalist to cover criminal justice, accused me of hiring an Oppo researcher, and these are investigative journalists? I told them explicitly, I'm just hiring an investigative journalist to cover crime in San Francisco. There's no Oppo researcher.
Starting point is 00:45:49 And they insisted on saying, I wanted to get into Chess's personal life. And I explicitly said, that's not what this is for. Well, let's face it, there aren't too many journalists anymore who are investigative, who are actually in the business of turning up new facts about elected officials. They're too busy pushing a narrative. They're engaged in agenda journalism. And actually, we saw a really good example just to tie into what happened over the past week. Is you had this story in the San Francisco Chronicle, which is basically pure propaganda
Starting point is 00:46:20 from, you could see, the passing from Chesa to the supporter of this this farcicals Claim that crime is falling in San Francisco. I mean this claim is so preposterous. We this is the same week We saw viral videos of 10 robbers bursting out of Neiman Marcus, you know, with every handling. Yeah, exactly.
Starting point is 00:46:46 And so, plus you had the viral. It was scary. Yeah. You had the viral video of the guy going into CVS. And just, you know, it wasn't even shoplifting. It was, it was, it was, Did you see Brian Sugar's video of the person who broke into his house, stole his kids' iPads
Starting point is 00:47:03 and everything while they were in the house? Right. And Sian Bannister, who had another home invasion just tweeted. Home invasions are now not prosecutable crimes in San Francisco. Well, no, what they're doing is what Sian reported about her case is, and by the way, her case is in the public eye, okay?
Starting point is 00:47:22 So it's very brazen for the D.A 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 a few hundred dollars. That does not capture the violation of breaking into someone's house and how dangerous that is. But originally I thought, why is the DA is office doing this? Originally I thought, well, maybe it's just because, you know, Chase, he 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
Starting point is 00:48:04 crime is falling. It's now they're juicing the stats by reducing the charges from the more serious crime to the less serious crime. And then what they do is they're shaping the stats. They're juicing the stats. You ever watch 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 going to happen.
Starting point is 00:48:30 It's so dirty. But the next step in the process is they then feed these juke stats to these compliant reporters. I mean, the fact that they keep repeating these statistics as going down when people are stopping reporting crimes because they wouldn't prosecute them. Then they mischaracterize them. 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.
Starting point is 00:49:01 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 communist on the left here? C-V-S Walgreens and Target are all closing stores are reducing store hours because they understand the hit to their bottom line. But you have this mantra,
Starting point is 00:49:20 it is communist like, where it's like the commandments written on the barn in animal farm where it is propaganda that 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 plant. is in fact a clansman. Racist. Racist and a clansman. So this is the other thing that happened over the past week is that you had. This is crazy. But basically Michelle Tandler, who is a moderate and is nicer person as you could ever find.
Starting point is 00:49:55 Concerned citizen. Concerned citizen. San Francisco born and raised. Yes. Who tweeted that all of our friends are thinking about leaving the city. And then in response to that, you had this senior policy adviser to Chase Aboudin, 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 Chesa booting who works for the DA's office named Kate Chatfield. A attacker basically implying her views were KKK values for having the audacity to warn
Starting point is 00:50:23 that people are worried about crime in San Francisco. So she gets attacked, by the way, this chat field person, the top for a profile, is the clunch fist of the Communist Revolution, Jake Elso. This is who's running the DA's office. But look, it's not just trolling, and it's not even just slanderer, it's, I think, an abuse of power for someone in the day is office to go after an attack,
Starting point is 00:50:47 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, 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.
Starting point is 00:51:05 She just said, like, people are scared for their families and then Kate Chadfield referenced birth of a nation and compared her to, oh, our wives are not safe because of black people. And that's a KKK. She was birth of a nation. Everybody understand the person nation. Yeah, the original name of birth of a nation, I think, was the Clansman.
Starting point is 00:51:29 Yeah. Yeah, it's like a KKK piece of propaganda. Wow. But it's really outrageous. She just blocked me. Kate Chaffell blocked me. Wow. This is a public policy advisor who is now hiding her account.
Starting point is 00:51:41 Well, I mean, a public official should not do that. I mean, they should be. And so this set you off. Let's be honest. I said to you. Well, I know Michelle Tan, she worked at Yammer, you know, and I thought it was out of bounds for not just a public official,
Starting point is 00:51:56 but someone in the DA's office who, what did you do? Well, I just do. You went into revenge mode. Let's be honest. You got a little bit, you were a little bit tweaked. I donate another $50,000 to the recall chase campaign. And you dedicated it to Kate.
Starting point is 00:52:15 Yeah. You said, this is for you. Yeah, because look, this is threatening. Every American should have the right to criticize their government without having its law enforcement arm come down on them and so here you have a legitimate concern expressed by a private citizen and the d.a.'s office is coming down on them that's not acceptable i think i need to break some news here i didn't want to talk about this publicly but i'm so outraged
Starting point is 00:52:41 now that i think I should let this out. So while I, after the week, in the weeks after I started that campaign to hire an investigative journalist for Chess's office, this is breaking news. I haven't talked about this publicly, but I'm going to break it now. Do you know who contacted me? The DA's office. You know what they contacted me about? They were investigating a startup that I had invested in. I wouldn't say which one.
Starting point is 00:53:13 And they wanted to interview me about my involvement with that startup because that startup had some complaint from a downstream investor who felt that they were committing some type of fraud or problem. coincidence. Are you serious? I'm that serious. This is literally becoming Chinatown. They literally tried to intimidate me and I didn't want to bring it up and I talked to the person from the DA's office who was investigating this and he's I was like, do I need an attorney
Starting point is 00:53:42 for this? Why are you calling me? Because, 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? Serpent of me. I'm not, you know, file something
Starting point is 00:53:54 and I'll come in with my attorney to talk to you. But I'm not going to talk with you on background. No. So they've just literally tried to intimidate me. You know what? And I kind of let them, because they didn't want to make a public, but I'm making a public now. You should make it public because public now.
Starting point is 00:54:07 Well, because this is two weeks after I said, let's hire the journalist. It's intimidation tax. That's intimidation. I will not be intimidated, Chesa. All right. But what you can see here is, okay, look, I mean, I was intimidated. So, no, I mean, I'm like, I'm not going to have me intimidated again. But, not that I think about it. Like, I didn't do anything wrong here. I put 50 K, I put 50 or 100 K into a company that didn't work out.
Starting point is 00:54:35 And now some other investors complaining. And they're trying to tie it back to me somehow. But Jason, thank you. Of course, you're going to be intimidated. The chief law enforcement officer of San Cisco is basically trying to make you the Target of an investigation because of what you said publicly. Of course that is intimidation guys Isn't it possible that they're just interviewing you about a fraud claim? The timing
Starting point is 00:55:00 Three weeks Like I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got It's two or three weeks after a beer, like two or three weeks after a beer. I got to tell you something, a police officer drove past my house last night. Yeah. Free bird, okay. Wait, it's the first and only time I've ever been contacted by a law enforcement officer over an investment. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.
Starting point is 00:55:18 Stop committing fraud. 350 investments. Listen, Chesa has not had time. He's almost two years in office now and he has not had time to successfully prosecute one murder trial. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, to say in banisters home or Brian's or Brian's they don't have time to do that but they somehow have time to contact Jake out. He tweeted the video makes my 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.
Starting point is 00:55:56 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. There is no use in the street. There is.
Starting point is 00:56:12 There is no use in the street. Because there is no consequence, okay? But there's a second thing happening, which is the orwellianization of San Francisco government and San Francisco politics. You not only have the crime, you've got the brazen lies about the crime, you've got this insistence on this animal farm commandment
Starting point is 00:56:29 that crime is falling. And if you question it, you are a clansman. Our clansman. You are a clansman. And then they get their, you're the cake chat feels to push this out. And then they get academics to back this up, okay? There are now, they get their friends in the media
Starting point is 00:56:45 and in the academy to give these spurious claims credence. And then the final step is that the rich virtue signolers pay these people off, they pay the, they protect your money. Who's paying off? The Dustin Moskovitz's, the Mike Krieger's, the Reed Hastings, and you. And even actually the biggest contributor to Chase the right now, is a guy who's under SEC indictment for the Ripple scandal.
Starting point is 00:57:12 Oh no. 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. Chris Larson. Chris Larson is Chess's biggest. Chris Larson is Chess's biggest.
Starting point is 00:57:27 Oh, wow. That is dark. Brian Sugar released the video and that person is 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.
Starting point is 00:57:43 These are not poor people who are stealing bread for their families or trying to make their rent. It's organized gangs. Right. Did you see the getaway cars for the Nima Marcus Highest? Yeah, they're all like Mercedes. They're driving great beautiful cars with their license plates off. This is like mob behavior and if you give criminals, trust me, I grew up in a criminal environment in Brooklyn. If you give criminals a window, they will figure it out. You give them an opportunity, if you give them something to hack, they will hack it. Period. And you basically have green light of them. Okay, listen, it's enough of us complaining about this. I am going to stop complaining about this and I'm moving either to Texas.
Starting point is 00:58:24 I'm moving to Texas, Florida. I'm making the announcement Texas. Look through, COVID. I'm moving to Texas, Florida. I'm making the announcement now. Hold on, is that for sure, Jake? Listen, I'm in a partnership and my partner doesn't wanna 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's gonna be on a decade
Starting point is 00:58:41 long slide and I'm working for 10 more years, I decided I'm 50. I decided I'm gonna go to 60, I'm gonna try to invest in the 100 to 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 the 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 R in the next decade? I don't know.
Starting point is 00:58:57 How does it feel to be completely red-pilt? I'm purple-pilt. 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, or right, and I don't want to live in a communist place. I want to live in an American place.
Starting point is 00:59:15 I want to live in a place where Americans can talk about issues without being villainized, period. That's the way I feel about this pod. 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 do it? You just made it. It was a joke. Why can't you admit if you did or not? Listen, I have 15 minutes. We got to go. COVID, Delta, people are panicking,
Starting point is 00:59:46 but the numbers keep going straight down. Pfizer says, Israel says maybe Pfizer is 65% instead of 94%. 65% seems pretty great. We at any risk? Well, okay, let me jump into this because I've been affected personally by it. So yeah, on the last pod, I did, I 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 it pretty well against the Delta variant. It had
Starting point is 01:00:18 reduced the effectiveness from about 95 to 88 percent, that's sort of the numbers. I think on Monday Israel released a new study showing that the effectiveness of Pfizer against Delta had been reduced to 64%. Now that's against you know getting symptoms and testing positive. It was still 93% against serious cases requiring hospitalization but that 93% is down from you know 99% plus. So there has been reduced effectiveness by Delta. It is a little bit concerning. And as if to underscore this point, someone very close to me, who was double of acts with Pfizer just has to positive. He did test positive. So he woke up yesterday morning with cold symptoms. He had sore throat, runny nose.
Starting point is 01:01:10 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? LA. Okay. Let me ask a question to Freeberg.
Starting point is 01:01:23 Is it not the best possible situation? I know this sounds like a stupid question, but I am the lowest IQ guy on the pod. Is it not the best situation to have the Pfizer or whatever have this amazing then to get a mile case of COVID and then be doubly protected? Is that in some way an ideal situation? If there is no long-haul COVID? It's not really clear if that's going to make a difference. Again, like, remember, acquired immunity is on a spectrum. So a virus can get in your nose, it starts replicating, and if you've got a ton of antibodies
Starting point is 01:01:57 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 going to take your body a little bit longer to fight off that virus, but you're still well ahead of the game as a way to think about it. To some extent, what we're seeing most likely is this Delta variant variant having a greater escape velocity from people that have been vaccinated than the alpha variant or any of the other
Starting point is 01:02:30 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. Like SAC said in Israel, they have now said that if you're vaccinated with Pfizer, double-vaxed with Pfizer, you're now 64% effective. 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
Starting point is 01:03:15 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... Shamaaf, you know. What do you think of this situation? At Shamaaf, are markets kind of worrying about this because I'm kind of wondering like as market participants see the stuff, are they trading it in a way that's like fearful and does this lead to some market conditions in the next couple days and weeks?
Starting point is 01:03:37 I think that there's a very good chance that some politicians are going to try to use this for another shutdown in the fall. I don't know. I don't know. I see. 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
Starting point is 01:03:58 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 last longer, it had been completely holding up against the variance, but this data point from Israel is not a great data point. I wanna see more of them, more data, but I don't think that this by itself
Starting point is 01:04:18 or more. Well, yes, I didn't Israel only get to like 55, 60% vaccinated. Oh no, they're way higher. No, no, no, they're way higher than that. Half of the infections they're seeing in Israel are children that were not vaccinated. 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.
Starting point is 01:04:48 They're unvaccinated people that are... Look, we're gonna probably need a booster, and we're probably gonna be on a cocktail, but beyond that, I think we need to make a moral decision that we are all getting back to life as normal. Yeah, 100%. I'm done. There will be boosters first done. I'm not.
Starting point is 01:05:07 There will be boosters for sure. Like this fall. Yeah. Exactly. And I think the question about this data is does it warrant a change in policy? And I would say not yet. You know, 100% not yet. I mean, the whole policy idea was I see use being filled. And if you look at the stats in the United States at the deaths, we are now at a seven-day
Starting point is 01:05:25 average of under 200. I think it's 150 deaths per day. Some, again, I'll ask you, free, but how many of those are with COVID versus from COVID? Yeah, it's unclear. But like Israel hasn't had a single death in two weeks from COVID. Right. So what are we talking about here? Despite the increase in numbers, it's still a great deal.
Starting point is 01:05:42 Right, right. It's not what the media likes to portray, which is variance punching through, right? I mean, it's not like Delta variant is just sweeping through Israel, okay? There is a slight increase in cases. And we're definitely seeing elevated cases here in the U.S. I mean, Delta variant is going to become the main, the dominant strain, if it isn't already. Look, it's mostly sweeping through areas that have not been vaccinated, but there are now cases, I'd say mostly mal cases, of people who have been vaccinated.
Starting point is 01:06:11 I mean, I think it's all the more reason why if you're an adult, you should get vaccinated. We really do need all adults barring some sort of, you know, highly specific immune condition that where you need to be on some sort of different treatment. But almost all adults in the U.S. really should be getting vaccinated. Otherwise, we're going to have to keep having these variants sweep through. I'll tell you, I had a really good conversation with an infectious disease doctor yesterday who's a research specialist and well-known in this space. And he pointed out that the evolutionary cycle
Starting point is 01:06:46 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. The more evolution it can do. The more it evolves, right? Yes. And so, you know, certain virologists and epidemiologists will model this, where they will highlight kind of the
Starting point is 01:07:04 evolutionary rate 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
Starting point is 01:07:22 for evolutionary success of the virus. Yeah, to put it in maybe layman's terms. All these unvaccinated people are basically like a giant petri dish for the virus to keep mutating. And we do need, I think, like a martial 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
Starting point is 01:07:47 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 the Petri dish that big, you're gonna get a variant. Now there's a new variant coming out of Peru,
Starting point is 01:08:02 which looks potentially scary. Now, these are not full breakthrough variants yet, but to Freeberg's point is just a matter of time. You guys want to guess the bottom two states in the country? I mean, it's just... It's the terms of Mississippi. Mississippi and Alabama. Exactly.
Starting point is 01:08:17 Can you imagine Mississippi and Alabama, 33%, come on, get your act together. What is it? It's going to whip through those places and you're all going to die. You're going to kill your grandparents. Is that an evangelical movement issue? It's it's it's it's well we talked about this the last part. There's two groups in America who are most of us. All know let's be more specific.
Starting point is 01:08:39 It's evangelicals in African Americans. Those are the two groups are most you keep saying eventually invent you keep saying and then what is the heavy pronounce it even Evangelical even gelicals It's actually male Republicans. Why can't that's you're not being specific enough? Yeah guys, I gotta I gotta run love you freeberg. We love you free later. Love you big one Rain man David We love you, Fred. We love you, big one. We love you, big one. We're like your winners, ride. Rainman, David, Zach. We open source it to the fans and they've just got crazy with it. I'm going on a race.
Starting point is 01:09:11 I'm going on a race. What? What? What? What? What? What? What?
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Starting point is 01:09:47 What? We need to get merch. I'm doing all this! I'm doing all this! you

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