All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E40: A Bestie gets COVID, Delta breakthrough, Billionaire Space Race & more

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

Show Notes: 0:00 Bestie game show: Who got COVID? How was the experience? 9:30 Delta breakthrough causing concern, potential new approaches, vaccine mandates 24:26 Implications on the economy, will people self-isolate even without government shutdowns? 40:09 Billionaire Space Race: Addressing the negativity, benefits of innovators 47:29 Investments in space, parallels to 1500's maritime shipping, potential for global broadband 1:04:07 Besties go to space, Bezos' cheap shot, Elon's support, Melvin Capital's tough first half of 2021 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: WSJ Opinion - What Drives GOP Resistance to Vaccines? https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-drives-gop-resistance-to-vaccines-11623190392 NYT - Some Republican Leaders Speak Up for Vaccines https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/14/world/covid-variant-vaccine-updates Reuters - Living with COVID-19: Israel changes strategy as Delta variant hits https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/living-with-covid-19-israel-changes-strategy-delta-variant-hits-2021-07-13/ Study Finds - Over 200 COVID ‘long hauler’ symptoms identified, many lasting longer than 6 months https://www.studyfinds.org/200-covid-long-hauler-symptoms/ CNN Opinion - Richard Branson's disappointing space jaunt https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/12/opinions/richard-branson-jeff-bezos-space-flight-is-a-waste-thomas/index.html Truth Out Op-ed - Billionaire Tax Cheat Travels to Space for a Few Minutes https://truthout.org/articles/billionaire-tax-cheat-travels-to-space-for-a-few-minutes Fox News - Richard Branson says critics are 'not fully educated' on benefits of space travel https://www.foxnews.com/media/richard-branson-critics-not-fully-educated-space-travel CNBC - Investment in space companies put at record $8.9 billion in 2020 despite Covid https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/25/investing-in-space-companies-hits-record-8point9-billion-in-2020-report.html Bloomberg - Melvin Struggles to Shake Reddit Attack With 46% Loss So Far https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-08/melvin-can-t-shake-reddit-attack-with-46-loss-in-first-half Books: Andy Weir - Project Hail Mary https://www.amazon.com/Project-Hail-Mary-Andy-Weir/dp/0593135202 Jeremy England - Every Life Is on Fire https://www.amazon.com/Every-Life-Fire-Thermodynamics-Explains/dp/1541699017 Tweets: https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1415287991954640901 https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1415122089720254467 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1414157827145404419 https://twitter.com/blueorigin/status/1413521627116032001 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1386825367948644352

This week we're gonna play our favorite new game show guess who's got COVID. Yes, that's right Somebody on the pod COVID it it it's not the me oh Sorry, so here's the game Person who got COVID have they been vaccinated or no? Okay all four of us have been vaccinated We covered that on our previous sponsor. Everybody's been vaccinated. Double Vax.

Everybody's been double Vax. They'd be all good Pfizer. I was Pfizer. Pfizer. Pfizer. Okay, so Pfizer across the board, we got quads. And this is a break through infection. Has anybody taken a Z- pack after a night of party

I was good. I was good. Okay, so number one clue number one this bestie got a Breakthrough infection outdoors at a restaurant. Number one, got it outdoors. Number two, got it from somebody who was also vaccinated. Number three, this bestie does not fly commercial. And he's not a fan of being interrupted. And he is not an evangelical. David, the breakthrough vaccine. David, it sucks. David, it sucks.

I'm glad that my getting a breakthrough case of COVID is comedy fodder for you somehow. Oh, I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave. We open source into the fiamines and they've just got a reason for it.

Love you, that's nice. Queen of kilowatt. I'm going to leave. Saxipook, break it down. Walk us through the, like, what happened and then how you felt. Yeah, okay. So what happened? And we're glad you're safe, obviously, obviously.

We wouldn't be joking. You're still living away. You lost five pounds. So, yeah, yeah, yes. You may want to read some of the beautiful text messages we sent you when we found out this. Yes. Jason, what would you say Jason?

You said I was just like wow big about who we could recruit for the fourth spot. We keep your boy. We get Peter teal in here. I said that I really, really hope you didn't die. But if you did, I would love to have your plane as a support plane for my plane. I was thinking, you know what? I might be pro San Francisco.

If you die, I might want to. I will. Sorry, guys. I'm gonna live. Sorry, Jason. I'm gonna live. Here's basically what happened. Okay.

Is, so Tuesday of last week, I had dinner with a few friends. And then my friend just wear out outdoors. Yeah, I'll tell you exactly where we're at Monsahesa in LA, which has this. Oh, in the outdoor parking lot. Yes, the outdoor parking lot area, which is a covered outdoor area. So, you know, these like covered areas are effectively inside because it traps here and there. But in any event, we had dinner there.

The next day day he woke up with a fever and sore throat. He went and got a COVID test. He test a positive. He is also double-vaxed with Pfizer. Okay. So, and I reported this to you guys last week on last week's show. So I went out right away on Wednesday, got a COVID test, was negative. I repeated the test on Friday, was negative. And then Sunday rolls around and I wake up and I got a fever. I don't really have a sore throat, but I've got kind of a, I'd say an occasional dry cough. And I've got, and I've got some sinus congestion.

David, mild fever or like like 99.9 or like 102.1? It topped off at about 99.9. It's barely a fever. Yeah, barely a fever. It's barely a fever, but I mean, it was definitely there. And I took Tylenol and it brought it down to the low 99s. And so any event, first thing Monday morning, I went and got the COVID test, and sure enough, I had COVID.

They can't confirm that it's Delta variant, but they think it is, because that's like exploding in LA right now. And so, yeah, I mean, look, I mean, the good news is, it's dealt to very empty think it is because that's what's like exploding in L.A. Right now And so yeah, I mean look I mean the good news is it's very mild. I mean, I'm it's now Thursday and I feel like I'm like 99% recovered. I don't have a fever anymore My feet are you 10 days in now this no no no no no this is you know I came down with symptoms on this past Sunday, and it's now Thursday. So I am. And when did were you exposed? Tuesday night. So I was exposed. Yes, you're right. It's about 10 days from the initial exposure. But actually, you're convinced that was the only way you could have gotten it,

right? Yeah, because somebody else at the dinner got has symptoms now too. Ah, so is a super spreader at Matsuhisa. Yeah, yeah, basically, but it shows you how virulent this new Delta variant is. I mean you've got there are four people out that night plus the person who who had it and two out of the four. Basically got it and we were all vaccinated including the person who had it. And of course he didn't know he had it. He didn't have any symptoms till the next day. So, and, you know, I got it, I got it five days after exposure. It's that five days is like clockwork, you know. Did you, did you have like a pulse ox? Did you measure any of these other things? Did any of that stuff change at all? Yeah, I mean, I have the pulse ox meter and it's been around 95%. So it is down slightly.

Oh yeah, you should be like 98, right? Yeah, it is down slightly. It is down slightly. And if you go to 92 or 93, they say go to the emergency room, I think. And did you self isolate from your family? Yeah, I did, but we were lulled a little bit into a place of overconfidence because.

There are many days. Yeah, exactly. Well, I remember I got COVID test on Wednesday and then Friday and they're both negative, I thought we're through it. So I was at home and then so my 11 year old got it even though I was isolating. This thing is so contagious. So what I've read is that Delta variant is 60% more transmissible than the UK variant, which was the alpha variant. The alpha variant was 60% more transmissible than original COVID. So you're looking at a transmissibility, you multiply those together of two and a half times the original, and the

original COVID had an R0 of 2 to 3. So you multiply 2 to 3 by 2 and a half times, and you're looking at 5 to 8. And, you know, at the age of eight. Explain to the audience what that means in terms of reality. It means the R-NOT is how many people does the average infected person transmit before they know they have it and can fully self isolate. And so you're going from, the original COVID was two to three,

Delta variant might be like eight, we're getting up into like smallpox territory with this thing. And it's all the more transmissible because vaccinated people can get it. The Israel data that we talked about in the show last week was 64% effectiveness. That Israel reported that the effectiveness of Pfizer had gone from like 95% to 64% in terms of preventing infection. So you have maybe a third of vaccinated people can get it. And then they can spread it without even knowing they haven't.

So I think we're at the point now where if you're not vaccinated, you're going to get, you're going to get the Delta variant. We're seeing now cases explode, you know, all over the country, even in LA County, they've now had a, the five day average of cases has jumped 500% in one month. So pretty much. And Jason, you've tweeted this. If you are not vaccinated, you are choosing to get the Delta variant at this point. I mean, this thing is extremely transmissible. That's what there was a great tweet by Scott Adams, the guy who, the cartoonist who I wouldn't who listens to the pod, by the way, who does listen to the pod.

He had a really great quote. He's like, today is either Wednesday. Yeah. For those that are vaccinated or yet another day where the unvaccinated amongst you are likely to get COVID. Something like that, right? Was that the two? Yeah, I was basically today's Wednesday for people who are vaccinated or it is the day you're going to get, you know, the virus.

Yeah, we got to stop messing around with this thing. Now, here's some good news actually is, so on the Wednesday when we found out that my friend had test positive, but again, I was still negative. I had no symptoms. I had nothing. I told my wife, she had gotten one shot, she hadn't gotten the second shot. And we were on the fence about whether my 13 year old

should get the vaccine. They both raced out that day, got vaccinated. But we did not get the virus. So they had basically call it three or four days of the vaccine to trigger an immune response in their system and it protected them, they did not get sent. Sure, and David, did you take anything else like prednisone, you took nothing, no steroid,

nothing. The only stuff I, so my friend did take, he did get prescribed prednisone, my doctor thought that was unnecessary or a bad idea for me. All I took, okay, was Tylenol to control the fever and I took flow nays to reduce the science congestion. Look, I mean, I don't want to overstate this. It was a very mild

cold for me. And that is why I think everybody should run out and get vaccinated. What did you pair it with like a Papi van Winkle or did you go with a screaming eagle? What did you pair your girlfriend with? Free bird. Also, the worst part is not so he said has such a shit wine list. You probably drank this like random swill. That's probably why I'm drinking some like Nigeri Saki in all likelihood. Free bird last week, I was asking you, or maybe it was two weeks ago,

I was considering getting the Moderna because I was like, I think getting two of these things will boost you into the high 90s. You said I was crazy. Has your position changed on that? Yes. Okay, explain. Because this is the one time I'm ever gonna be right

about science a week before you. So I think the data up to that point didn't necessarily kind of validate that additional level of action, but now it does. And I think new data is coming out. So I saw an executive from a pharmaceutical company a few days ago, who broke down some statistics that they looked at in Israel. And what they were identifying was that of the newly infected cases in Israel, of people

that are vaccinated, nearly two thirds of those people were vaccinated in January. About 30% were vaccinated in February, and less than 10% were vaccinated in March. And I'm just approximating, and I'm just kind of transcribing, from kind of what I remembered him saying. And so he said, the more recent vaccinations were not seeing breakthrough cases, breakthrough infections.

So the more recently you're vaccinated, the less likely you are to have this. And then I met with a pretty well-known virologist a few days ago as well, who highlighted for me that we are seeing antibody titers decline over time in people, but there's other studies that are showing, which means that the antibodies against COVID

in your blood after you get the vaccine slowly go down over time. So we're seeing that. We knew that, right? We knew that to some extent, but there was another study that showed that memory B cells, B cells are the immune cells that make antibodies, and they remember the antibodies to make.

And they were worried, are we losing those B cells in the human body? And another study found actually, they're in your lymph nodes. So they went in, they pulled them out and they identified, look, these B cells are persistent. We are having a persistent immune memory to COVID

when we get exposed to the vaccine or the virus. And so, those two data points, both of them kind of said, I think we're gonna need to do a booster very soon for everyone, and we're gonna need to get a third shot. At the tail, freeberg seems like it's like six months. Yeah, it sounds like he was saying that you're gonna see an efficacy drop

to that kind of two-thirds level after about six months of your, after getting your vaccine. And, you know, he said, look, this Delta variant is virulent, but, you know, he said, look, this Delta variant is virulent, but, you know, the more pressing kind of point isn't that it's this variant that's breaking through. It's that the efficiency of these vaccines at this point looks like it's such that we're going to need to do boosters. Now, Pfizer went to the White House this week with some of this data, and they presented

it to the White House. And the White House said, if you guys follow the news, I'm here, I'm repeating what I read in news reports at this point, but what they said was, we're not ready to kind of commit to doing booster shots. For a couple of reasons. One is there are a lot of people out there that haven't had their first shots. And we're seeing the people that are having these breakthrough infections almost universally,

not always, but very large majority having very mild symptoms and not getting hospitalized and the death rate is still very, very low. In other words, the vaccine did its job. The vaccine didn't prevent an infection, meaning that the virus starts replicating in a way that's uncontrolled in your body, but that your virus starts replicating in a way that's uncontrolled in your body, but that your immune system had enough of a defense to keep it from causing severe disease in your body. 99% of the people going to the hospital are unvaccinated, right?

Exactly. And so we're seeing that great success still with the vaccine, but they are seeing in their Ardenile studies that I think reference to your earlier point, that if you put a different RNA strain, RNA sequence into your body, which Moderna and Pfizer have slightly different sequences, you end up creating different antibodies, and having more diversity of antibodies

can kind of provide greater immunity. So it's almost certain we're gonna get boosters and that we're gonna end up seeing them hit the market next month. It's a temper. Yeah. Is the is the booster? Different than the original. So for example, if I get a Pfizer booster and am I only basically getting still an expression of that RNA strand that I'm supposed to basically like is it the same formulation the same dosage? So both of those options are still up in the air. And so we may still get the same vaccines that we were getting before.

You could go get a maternal shot, you could go get another Pfizer shot of the exact same RNA sequence that you got before. Or they may introduce some new ones. And so all the pharma companies are proposing both approaches and they're pursuing both paths right now and we'll see where we end up. And what about swapping between an RNA approach

and a traditional vaccine approach? So getting J and J plus Moderna or Pfizer versus, like there's a lot of AB testing we need to do to figure out what is the most efficacious and best of path. This is exactly like the, this reminds me exactly of HIV where it took 10 years for them to figure out what cocktail actually work the best.

And now look HIV is, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of like nothing. It's really not that, not that bad. And the way that we probably, for those of us in our 40s, having emblazoned in our mind is how bad it is versus how bad it is. It was a death sentence. It wouldn't, it seemed like a death sentence. And today it's kind of more, it's more manageable than, frankly, it's a chronic disease now. That's my best.

It's like having diabetes or something. I have another crazy statement here, which is that if you take the case fatality rate of COVID, and now you think about the fact that there's gonna be call it 60% of America that's vaccinated, and then every six months we'll be getting boosters, and then you have the Petri dish on the other side of the 40% where you'll just be ripping through variant after variant after variant.

Eventually, it stands to reason that if 40% of Americans remain unvaccinated two or three years from now, the odds that there will be a strain that is the killer strain that does meaningful damage to those people, I think is basically 100%. And if you think about a case fatality rate that's meaningfully high, what you're effectively going to do is start to call these people from the earth. And that is a crazy idea, but that's what folks who choose to not get vaccinated are setting themselves. I mean, it's the quintessential, you know, uh,

is that just not probabilities? Like, am I getting something wrong here? Probably, holistically, isn't that? This is what I'm concerned about. And it's not just a Americans not getting vaccinated. It's the rest of the world. I mean, even if we got to extraordinarily,

extraordinarily high vaccination rates in the US, this can be large, you know, numbers of people outside the US, you never get vaccinated. It will continue to be a Petri dish. To give you comparison, the common cold has 1800 variants. That's why we can't get vaccinated. So we're on the Delta variant right now. I think they actually have numbered variants up to Lambda.

We're going to run out of letters the alphabet really soon. How long will it be until there are these color variantsary and stuff that I mean, look, I mean, that could punch through, that can punch through the, the vaccines. It's pretty scary actually. And I would say that this is like quite a come down off where we were just two weeks ago, you know, where we thought the Pfizer vaccine was still 95% effective. Now it's 64% effective. I mean, look, I, I do want to like underscore that the vaccine worked in the sense that what I got was super mild. I mean, it was really just like getting a cold. I mean, I didn't need to take anything more serious than Tylenol, but it does show that

the virus is mutating really fast. It's highly transmissible. And I'm not sure what you're saying. You still have it. You still have not sure what you're going to say. You still have it, right? I still have it, yeah. Yeah, so when will you get tested to figure out when you don't have it anymore? I'll probably go in tomorrow, because it feels, I feel to me like I'm about 98% better.

Freeberg, is there any data about the pattern of people who are vaccinated getting this thing? Like, is there, remember how like, there was early data that showed, you know, women had a different immune response than men. And like people who were, what was it, opositive or, you know, a certain blood type, effectively had inborn immunity.

I haven't heard or read anything like that. And so this is still an emerging issue, I think, you know, we're seeing. Yeah, and by the way, I was vaccinated a few months ago, guys. Like, I mean, I am like, you're saying you're sick. Six months in, you're three of those, right?

When was your second shot? Basically, like a few months ago. Yeah, it's my- Mine was in March. Yeah. One thing I think it's worth highlighting just to reinforce the vaccine importance. You know, the virologist, the infectious disease guy

in that was telling me that, you know, one way to think about this is the more opportunity the virus has to replicate, the more opportunity it has to evolve. And so when you're vaccinated and you have a mild case and your body recovers in a few days, just to give you guys a sense, the difference when someone that's not vaccinated has COVID and they've measured the viral load in the nodes from day one when they start having their infectious kind of presentation to day four, which is when they peak, the viral load is 10 to the eight higher. Okay, that's like a hundred million times higher. And so that's a hundred million times more viruses that are being produced on day four

than we're being produced on day one when you were already showing symptoms. So every time a virus is being produced and is replicating within your body, it's getting a chance to mutate. The important point he emphasized was what matters most is we get the most number of people on planet Earth vaccinated as fast as possible. Because the faster you can get more people vaccinated, the fewer opportunities you give the virus to replicate and find itself a mutational path that can ultimately break through all these vaccines and cause real severe loss of life. And so the presentation that SACS kind of described is encouraging in the sense that it likely means that the virus did not create that there wasn't that much of a viral load or huge viral load relative to what there would have been if he wasn't vaccinated.

And so even though he did have an infection, you know, the virus didn't get as much of a chance to spread to other people, it didn't get much of a chance to be there. But it did, but it did because my friend who I got it from after one, having dinner one night, he was double-vax with Pfizer. And it might, you know, my 11 year old daughter got it. It's for her again, it's just like a cold. Yeah. But so this thing is highly transmissible.

And it changes the equation, I think, on some policy questions. So that's what I was gonna ask you. What does it mean for the fall? What now, what? So two weeks ago, I thought that because I was vaccinated, I didn't need to care whether other people were vaccinated because up until that point, the data was you were 95% plus

effectiveness, so why care if other people get vaccinated? Now we can say for sure that unvaccinated people can, or vaccinated people, even can get, other people can get you sick, even if you are vaccinated. So I think it absolutely changes the equation on. So for example, colleges were acquiring students to get vaccinated to return in the fall. Like before, I didn't think that necessarily made a lot of sense because if you wanted to protect yourself, you just get vaccinated. But now it makes sense, right? Because the college needs to get to herd immunity

to protect everybody against potentially Delta variant, right? So I do think it changes the equation quite a bit and I think we need to make a big push here to get everyone vaccinated. How are you then, in fact, sacks for Vax passports, which as a libertarian, I think, is I think part of your political, I think everybody on this call has kind of got a little libertarian, like you got to make your own choices here.

But does it change your thinking about that? I.e. employers, colleges, city state workers, teachers, are either getvaxed or don't come back to the office and you're fired? Well, I'll tell you, I don't like the idea of government having the power to stick a needle in your arm, but I do think that employers, workplaces, schools, I think it's very reasonable for them to say, if you want to come back to the workplace, you have to get vaccinated because you're unvaccinated status creates a risk. It creates an externality for everybody else.

Should they be able to fire you? If you're a teacher, should they be able to fire you? If you're a bus driver, if you're a pilot, yes. Okay. So here's the craziness. This is a self-inflicted wound. We are down to only 700,000 vaccines being given a day. We peaked.

We had the ability to do five million shots a day at the peak. Back in April, we hit over five million shots in one day in the United States. And that's a country where, you know, whatever, 270 million adults were able to get it. In other words, two percent of the population in a single day could have gotten it. Now we're down to 700.

We have over a billion vaccines sitting on shelves, 80% of Democrats have received one shot compared to 49% of Republicans, 27% of Republicans say that they won't get vaccinated under any circumstances compared to 3% of Democrats answering that question the same way. And an additional 9% will only do so if required. Again, 3% of Democrats said they would only do so required. So that's 36% are opting out for it. But this because we allowed it to become a position. Meaning, it's not like anybody has a position on breathing. Breathing is not a political position. It's not like I choose to not breathe or drinking water or trying to, you know, like eating three meals a day if you can.

water or trying to, you know, like, these are like eating three meals a day if you can. We have allowed the most basic of issues, in this case, you know, collective public health to be politicized in a way. And that is entirely the government's fault. It's a government's fault and it's the media's fault. And the media because the media is exacerbated it so that they can have power. People on the conservative side of the spectrum have learned to distrust the media and big corporations because end government, because they've been lied to so often, most recently with the whole. Yeah, right. Most recently with the lab leak theory. So there's this suspicion on the right, like what aren't they telling us?

Now look, I think we've got to get over this. I think we need to get everyone vaccinated for all the reasons that Freeberg said, or look, everyone's got to get over this. I think we need to get everyone vaccinated for all the reasons that Freeberg said or look, everyone's gonna get Delta variant. I mean, maybe this is a good news is that we can rapidly get to herd immunity by everyone getting Delta variant. Well, that's the inevitable outcome for any infectious disease, right?

Highly infectious disease is either you can vaccinate or everyone's gonna get it and it's gonna, you know. I mean, you've got a Delta variant maybe than whatever the, you know, whatever the- The more dangerous deadly one is, yeah. Let me just highlight what I'm most concerned about. I am most concerned about what's happening with SAX. It's just anecdotally speaking.

I'm not gonna speak to the, I'll speak to one statistic, but like anecdotally speaking, I'm hearing this happening more frequently. I don't know about you guys, other friends, other people you know, but a lot of other people I'm hearing about their double-vac that are now getting COVID. So as that starts to happen, the implications for the economy I think are pretty significant

because I think people, whether there's a policy change or not, people are going to get scared again. And people, if we're not kind of enforcing economic lockdown, people will go into social lockdown and we're going to revisit more lockdown, people will go into social lockdown. And we're gonna revisit more of the behavior we saw over the past year, where people are gonna be nervous to travel, people are gonna be nervous to fly,

people are gonna be nervous to go to restaurants, and the downstream consequences of everyone kinda locking up again, even if the government doesn't enforce lockups, could be pretty catastrophic. Is that so? Are you feeling that way yourself, Freiburg, in other words, am I gonna lock myself up?

Are you gonna go to dinner? Are you gonna go to travel to Italy or to Japan, or would you go to Disneyland with your kids? How is it affecting your personal behavior being a man of science? So my personal circumstances are a little different right now. I'm not to get into it. So my personal circumstances are a little different right now. I'm not not to get into it.

Just with my, you know, my wife's pregnant and we're moving houses. And so we've got a bunch of reasons why we're not traveling and exposing ourselves unnecessarily right now. But I would say that at this point, you know, if all other things being equal, would I go to Disneyland with my kids, I would probably wait right now, six to 12 weeks to see what happens here. Right. Well, I think if I'm feeling that way now, I think a lot of people are going to be feeling that way in the next four weeks as they hear about more friends getting COVID.

Now, the good news is the hospital is, so I am most concerned, we are in a very, very, very delicate economic recovery right now. And we have put out so much money to stimulate this economy. Everyone is so walking on the razor's edge to keep things growing. We were afraid of inflation. Lumber prices, today, by the way, are lower than they were when this whole inflationary thing started. Everyone was freaking out about it. So, lumber prices are lower than they were at the start of the year, which is, you know,

like a lot of this kind of inflation risk has kind of come out of the equation already. So the market's have taken that pricing out. And now we're gonna be in a circumstance where people might cancel their travel, people might cancel their restaurants, people might stop going to the office again, stop, you know, getting in the car, et cetera, et cetera.

So I am most concerned about like the psychological effects of what we're seeing with these breakthrough infections, the frequency of them. Now, if you look at the Israel data, Israel had zero deaths for two weeks. They're now averaging about one death a day. And despite this huge increment, they're getting about, I think, 500 breakthrough infections a day right now. So that is good statistical news, right? Statistically, these breakthrough infections are not fatal. They're not causing hospitalizations. You know, if you kind of did the math going back a year and said, these are the actual statistics of COVID, people

would be like, okay, no big deal. Let's move on. It's a tough kind of virus. But because of the circumstances where we are kind of under these feelings that this is a fatal disease and could cause fatalities. Those statistics don't matter. The fear is what matters. And people are gonna start to behave quite differently I think in the next few weeks. I have a slightly different point of view here. But I think Freeberg, you're right in some respects.

But I don't think it's gonna come from people. I don't think people are exhausted and they want to go back to life as normal. I think this summer was a window into some amount of normalcy for a lot of us. I don't think we really do want to go back. I think what's really going to happen is there's going to be essentially some form of class warfare. Instead of rich versus poor and left versus right, it's sort of between people who believe in science and then the

ideologically dogmatic who refuse to get it. And that's going to play itself out economically. I agree with you. There's going to be meaningful forms of economic discrimination against people who are unnecessarily compounding risk for the rest of us who want to deal with it, ideally, touch wood, as a common cold, like David said, and move the fuck on. And if we are prevented from doing so, because economic policy and healthcare policy has to constantly get re-rated for a cohort of people who could protect themselves and everybody else, but chooses not to, there is going to be a real pushback on that. The second thing that I think is going to happen is politicians proved that if you give them a window to cease power, they will do it.

And I think what's really going to happen in the fall is if there's even a small modicum of risk, which there will be as we just talked about. Yeah, it exists now. I think it's the politicians that are gonna wanna jump all over this and say, okay guys, lock downs here, you can't do this, you can't do that. So literally, Gavin Newsom just did the big grand reopening,

California's back, you could see him locking it back up in September. Oh, it's the best way to, it's the best way to snuff out any chance of the recall going against him, is that even if you were angry, you're not going to be allowed to basically it'll be a massive form of voter suppression. Well, I think that that was bad. That was bad. That was bad. Fire pretty bad. You saw the flip flopping that he already did actually on schools where the government of California basically said, hey, you

know, we're going to mandate a mask policy in the fall. And then Newsom came out because people freaked out and said, actually, no, each local municipality can figure it out based on, you know, what it means for them. The point is, guys, free Brook is right. These things aren't going away. We have a cohort of people who will continue to allow this thing to become worse than it has to be. And I think that there will be economic repercussions and discrimination against those people for that. And I think economically we are going to take a step back because politicians will try to slow the economy down again. And there is definitely from the right not to get political here, but they've been pretty silent about encouraging people to get vaccinated. And at CPAC and other places, people were cheering the anti-vax movement.

Mitt Romney came out. We don't control conservative media figures so far as I know. At least I don't. That being said, I think it's an enormous error for anyone to suggest that we shouldn't be taking vaccines. Look, the politicization of vaccination is an outrage and, frankly, moronic. Mitch McConnell came out and said, as a polio victim myself, and I was young, I've studied that disease. I took 70 years,

70 years to come up with two vaccines that finally ended the polio threat. As a result of Operation Warp Speed, we have not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines are unproplexed by the difficulty we're having finishing the job. This is where you can expect the politically correct companies to act first because they're the woke mob will force some action on this issue. Whether you like it or not, but this is where the next petition will come from Apple. Where the two or three thousand employees who are vaccinated, et cetera, who have people with, you know, people in their households with, with, who are immunologically suppressed. And they're going to say, Hey, guys, this is crazy.

Well, that, that, that petition might be the first application that would make sense because those employees are directly impacted by other employees who come to the workplace on vaccinated, unlike, you know, the issues around Israel or Antonio's book, whatever, that they shouldn't have taken a position on. Wait a second. You're saying Antonio's book wouldn't make them feel safe and getting COVID would make them unsafe? Yeah, actually, actually, yes. Yes. COVID is, COVID in the workplace is a real safety issue.

Not, you know, not whether somebody wrote a book five years ago. So, so I think they do, I think employees do have a right to say to their employers, listen, are we gonna be a vaccinated workplace or not? Because it does impact their risk. But Jason, to your question about, should people change their behavior in light of this news? Okay, in light of the fact that we now are learning

about some reduced effectiveness of the vaccines. Here's what I would tell people sitting where I am. This is not a big deal. I mean, for me, okay, it was not a big deal. It was like a mile cold. I am not going to change my, I'm going to go back to normal, like my pre-COVID behavior. And I would tell you, like, if you're double-vax, I don't think you need to be that afraid of this because, you know, my doctor said they are seeing a bunch of these breakthrough cases, but they're all very mild. It really is like getting a cold. I'm changing my behaviors. I made my, I made my, I made my decision. My risk assessment

is if I get it, then I'm doubly protected. And I'm not going to wind up in the hospital. I'm going to focus all my energy on riding my bike and taking my kids out and having a good time. I'm not going back and lock down. So I think that's right for you. But here, here's where it gets a little bit complicated. It is my parents who are in their 70s and one of them has an immune condition to ask what they should do. And I said, listen, if I were you guys,

I would not be going to public places. I'd be masking up. They're asking me if they should go on a trip. And I said, no, I would actually, if I were you, I would lock down until this blows over because they're at elevated risk. And so, yeah, for me, getting COVID was like a mild case, but for them maybe it could be more serious.

So all it takes is 10% of the population acting like what you just described, you recommended here parents sex for there to be economic ripples associated with this this breakthrough kind of condition for a while. And that's where I have the most concern is, again, like, you know, we're kind of, you're not concerned about the debts free, but you're concerned about the economic impact of the psychological scars that are now in place. I will explain. I said,

you guys a link to the Reuters article where they covered the press conference with the prime minister of Israel the other day. And basically, they are taking what they're calling a soft suppression strategy where they're encouraging Israelis to learn to live with the virus, involving the fewest possible restrictions and avoiding a fourth national lockdown that could do further harm to the economy. And he said, implementing the strategy will entail taking certain risks, but in the overall consideration, including economic factors, this is the necessary balance. And so it's a very kind of pointed position

that they're coming to. I think the US government, the federal government, it's gonna have to come to the same one. But we have different states and different local governments that are gonna act differently. And because we have authority vested in those different jurisdictions,

you could see different public policy officials take different positions in what we're talking about. San Francisco said restaurants have to go back to 25% capacity, it would decimate these already struggling small businesses and there's no more stimulus dollars available. And so you kind of think about this, or 10% of people canceled their vacation plans,

what's that gonna do to airlines and hotels? So again, my concern is, are we about to hit a wave of economic ripples that aren't necessarily tied to what is the right thing to do from a policy perspective or a science or health perspective, but really the psychological effects of the scared and concerned saying, you know what, there's more money available. Like, you know, we got bailed out before, we'll get bailed out again. Let's implement a shutdown, let's implement a lockdown, let's not go to work. Whatever the decision tree you may have as a business owner or a policy maker. Well, there's an important point here, which is, listen, COVID is going to be with us

for a long time. We're going to need to make really smart, cost-benefit analysis decisions and how to deal with it. We can't go back to lockdowns because they didn't work and they're extremely expensive. We spent $10 trillion battling COVID last year. We cannot do that again. We don't have the bullets that are going to keep firing at this thing like that. We got to start making intelligent decisions. Zeroism is not going to work. This idea that the premise of zeroism is that we can stamp out every last vestige of COVID. But maybe that was even a possibility when vaccines were 99% effective, but now that they're not,

there's no chance of stamping out COVID. So we have got to learn, we've got to like the Israel example, we've got to learn to live with this thing and make smart cost-benefit decisions. But I also think, you know, this is kind of a disaster for humanity. We now have this new category of illness that's rapidly mutating.

We don't know what the end of it's going to be. Like I said, there's 1800 variants of the common- You know what, though, David? That's causing these symptoms. By the way, is anyone noticed how many different symptoms this virus causes in people? There's over 200, uh, well, they worked on it for a long time, David. In fairness. Yes, exactly.

Everyone knows it's a lab engineered virus that's now a plague on humanity. This is really a disaster. This is gonna, I think permanently impact human life expectancy. I mean, this is a serious problem. We could have avoided this entire thing here in the United States at least. If people just took the win, how frustrating

is this that we would probably have cases down to a thousand a day and debts down to ten a day, like Israel, if we had just gotten everybody to take one of the billions of excess vaccines sitting on shelves and in CVS and Walgreens across this country. How stupid are we? We don't have the collectivism to make those actions. If you think about what's happening in Israel, did two different examples. In China, collectivism manifests as basically a top-down form of governance. In Israel, collectivism comes from a need for state level security. I mean, I've traveled to Israel a lot.

I've worked there. And it's crazy when you see how people cooperate together the minute you hear the missile alarms. And so there is a way for people to do cost-benefit analysis in Israel because it's a matter of life or death. And they've been trained to do cost-benefit analyses in Israel because it's a matter of life or death, and they've been trained to do that. So either it's imposed on you like in China, or people bottoms up can understand these trade-offs like in Israel. We are in a very different place, where literally, what we have are three things that are in conflict with each other, Jason. We have politics

and the desire for power. We have the deconstruction of power by social media. And then we have the traditional media trying to stay relevant. That's a toxic thing that's spinning around and spinning around and spinning around trying to allocate this very ephemeral thing called power and influence. And we don't know how it works anymore. And so we cannot get our shit together. Half the people care about vegan fucking milk, the other half the people care. I mean, it's we are in an alternate universe. As bad as we are, Europe and even Japan have done even worse because I mean, our government

was fairly efficient about the distribution of the vaccines. In Europe, they just completely botched it. Same thing in Japan. So we are not the worst on vaccination rates. Yes, it should be better, but. Well, we are the worst on the problem. This is a global problem. This is ensuring the opportunity, David.

We have the opportunity to have everybody back in. America is the most exceptional country in the world. It has been for hundreds of years. It should be for several hundred more. There is no excuse for this country to have fucked this up this badly. I've spent enough time as you guys have in Europe and in Japan. It's understandable why those countries are in the positions they're in. It is not understandable why America's in the position. So dumb. It's like having a 20 point lead and you just, with like eight minutes to go

and you just screw up and you lose the game. So stupid. All right, do we want to move on to the billionaire space race? Yeah, I think that's positive news. This company, what's it called, Virgin Galactic? There's a company called Virgin Galactic

and they take people to space. It's $200,000 stock seems to be doing pretty well. Anybody have thoughts on richer brands and getting to space. It's $200,000. Stock seems to be doing pretty well. Anybody have thoughts on Richard Branson getting to space? I don't know which is randomly go to somebody. Chimoff. No, congratulations. All seriousness, congratulations. I cried. Nat and I start the SEC transcript public statement. Here we go. Nat and I watched it together. You cried? And it was emotional. It's emotional because you know, I mean, being a little bit more on the inside, how hard

they worked. I mean, we've all been there where we're all toiling in obscurity, where there are moments where everybody thinks that what you're doing either is crazy or isn't going to work or is going to fail. And there's a moment where you just have to push through it, right? And find people that believe in you. I think I came in very late to that, but I had the opportunity to find these incredible people, believing them, help them, give them capital, which was essentially oxygen, right? That's oxygen for a company. And then to see them achieve it, it felt so special to be a part of it. So yeah, I mean, I was really emotional. And it

was, it was beautiful. So I don't know, I think this is the beginning of the beginning. I tweeted this out, but basically, if you think about, and there's other stuff that we can't talk about with some other companies that we are all involved in David and I particularly, but here's the point guys, between sending people and making us an interplanetary species by creating pervasive internet access and by enabling us to safely and reliably transport people, either point to point suborbital or basically into space, we are completely reimagining how the human race can work. And I think that's incredible. And to be a part of that is really special. There was a lot of people who got very negative on Twitter, I noticed there was a lot of people that said, you know, no, like, you know, maybe now we can deal with, I don't know, child

hunger or, you know, hey, why are all these billionaires doing this out of the other end? I took a step back and I thought, my gosh, a, people are in, there's a small virulent cohort of people that are incredibly negative. And B, doesn't even know what they're talking about because you're talking about issues of state responsibility and confusing it for what private citizens are doing to advance a set of technologies that I think have broad appeal. So those are my thoughts.

I mean, I watched every minute of it and I thought it was incredible. Just to add to that, yeah, I wanna take the part that all the naysayers and the negativity. I mean, Jamoth is right. All the very online people immediately came out attacking this extraordinary accomplishment and active bravery by Branson. I mean, this is a billionaire. He doesn't need to be risking

his life launching himself into space. I mean, this is a courageous act, you know, he's putting his his his life where his mouth is. And you had all these very online people, but you had one CNN commentator basically said, this was bad for the environment. You had another one saying that calling him a tax cheat, then there was another whiner who said, what about all the starving children in the world? I mean, it just went on and on like this. And Mike Salana had a pretty funny tweet summing up the sort of the left's argument, though, sleep, said number one, this is their argument according to Solana.

One money is evil, two, therefore people with money are evil, three, therefore things people with money care about evil. I mean, that is basically the level of sophistication of the argument that's being made. And so that's the argument that the left is making. Everybody's a bond villain. Right. But here's the problem is that, first of all, we do get tremendous benefits out of these innovators who are pushing the boundaries of science and technology and engineering.

Branson actually went on Stephen Colbert's show and defended it. He said, listen, I think they're not fully, this is Branson. He said, I think they're not fully, this is Branson, he said, I think they're not fully educated to what space does for earth. It's connecting the billions of people who are not connected down here. He said, every single spaceship that we've sent, putting satellites up there,

monitoring different things around the world, like the degradation of rainforest, monitoring food distribution, even monitoring things like climate change. These things are essential for us back on earth, so we need more spaceships going up to space, not less. So, you know, they're really just kind of ignorant about the benefits of technology. And what do they want to do with the money anyway? You know, we've got all the, yes, we do have all these problems on earth. But so many of our problems are not a problem of underfunding. We have tons of money going to the problem of homelessness in California, it just keeps getting worse

because we have the wrong approach. We have on education, we have very- We have the wrong ideas, we have the wrong organization, we have the wrong execution, fix the operating details, it's not a money issue. Exactly, take education in California, we have very high levels of purple spending and our test scores keep going down. Why? Because we have unions controlling the schools. There's no competition.

Don't worry, Dave. We're getting rid of testing. We've eliminated a test. We solved that problem. We spent more as a percentage of GDP on health care than any other Western country in the world, yet the life expectancy of white men, which is basically the top of the pyramid of health care is now sub-A 80 years old. What is going on? If all of these negative naysayers could actually just get into the arena and try to do something. Right, instead of whining, instead of whining, instead of whining, they have no ideas, they have no ideas, they have no solutions, they just have gripes and no ability to execute apparently. Yeah, why don't they come up with new programs, actually test new programs at a hyper-local level

to see what works. Can I tell you why? Can I tell you why? These sort of like leftist whiners are not motivated to actually do the hard work. Meaning, even if they have an idea for education, the precondition to working on an education program or a healthcare program is they may need to spend four or five years in the bowels, in obscurity, just learning. Paying their dues, they don't wanna do that either because they grew up in a culture of kindergarten soccer,

everybody gets the gold star, everybody gets to touch the ball, everybody gets to be at the front of the line, and they're not willing to put in the work, because the minute they realize how much actual work is demanded of progress, they run away because they're scared. And the reason they're scared is because some were along the way, somebody tricked them, that it was not actually about trying, it was actually about succeeding. And that is the biggest failure that we could do to people. Is all of a sudden tricking them to believe you have to have it to work.

So they'd rather be huge monitors. They'd rather be critics. And feel rather be critics. They'd rather be critics. Failure is just as good because you're one step closer to succeeding. Somewhere along the way, unfortunately, they were not taught that incredible secret hiding

in plain sight. Friedberg, what do you think of the space race and the Hall Monitor, Wine or Class? If you guys look, I was gonna send these statistics earlier, but if you look at the amount of venture capital money that's gone into private space companies, space technology companies, I think it was a few hundred million dollars, call it three to four hundred million dollars,

pretty consistently from 2011 through 2014, pretty flat. And then in 2015, I think this is when SpaceX started to kind of create a lot of momentum and hype that private companies can't actually build businesses in kind of call it the space industry, the number jumped to three billion a year. And then it was a little over three and a half billion and 16. And then it jumped to almost five billion and 17.

It was a little bit down in 18. 2020, it's climbed to almost 10 billion. And in two, one of this year, I think we're at two billion of venture capital money going into private space companies. So there's clearly a great deal of momentum in this industry. The question is always, what's the market at the end? And so if you break out, how do these companies make money?

One is to provide services to governments, you know, launch services and taking people to the space station. What have you in SpaceX has obviously built a tremendous business in that. There has been obviously a lot of interest in tourism. And I think it's, you know, we're seeing this first breakthrough with Virgin Galactic, and we're going to find out over the next couple of years is there a tourism market. Historically, there's been an interest in a market for visual satellites, but if you look

at some of the financials of companies like Planet Labs, they did a few acquisitions in space imaging. The revenue hasn't really taken off there. Then mining was always this other question. Can we go out and mine rare minerals from space? That one is just if you do the math on it, it's so far away, it's impossible to model. I think over the next, and then finally, it's communications. Communications are cheaper to run on Earth if you're in cities versus you know the SpaceX model is to reach rural areas that it's going to be more affordable to do this through space. And so you know there's obviously a ton of momentum and a ton of interest in private companies getting to space. Everyone right now it seems is trying to figure out what's the market right what's the how big is the market how big is the business and

you know how quickly can you actually see that capital turn around into real revenue? So, you know, there's this kind of market question that I think is still outstanding. In terms of, you know, the opportunity, if you go back to like the 15th century, I think something like 60 to 70% of ships, maritime travel, you know, got into shipwrecks. You know, that's around when we sailed across the Atlantic or the Spanish sailed across the Atlantic or funded or they disappear. Yeah, they disappear. I mean, they basically crashed and didn't work.

It was a one-way trip. Sometimes to the bottom of the ocean. If you were sitting in Spain in 1450 and someone said, hey, these ships, it's gonna be a great business. We're gonna build lots of ships and we're gonna go out. Maybe we'll get trade routes going, maybe we'll discover new land, maybe we'll make money, maybe we'll take people on trips on these ships. You would be like, this is crazy,

half the people are dying, there's no market on the other side. So, you know, we are in that in that, you would have been totally wrong. Yeah, and you are in that 15th century moment right now with the space industry. Now, would anyone in the space, would anyone in the ship business in the 15th century have been able to predict carnival cruise lines or been able to predict evergreen ships taking stuff from China to America with these huge shipping crates. Would anyone have been able to predict going down to the bottom of the Atlantic?

All of the technology and the entire industry that came out of that set of pioneering activity in the 15th century transformed the planet, transformed the economy, transformed humanity. And it's very hard to sit here today and say, hey, I know where the space industry is going. I know what's going to be possible, but I can tell you that if history is any predictor of the future, this pioneering work that's going on, which is burning tons of money and everyone's questioning whether there's businesses here. It could transform our species once again. So, yeah.

David, your 15th century shipping example is so beautiful. Three things that came out of that, which I think we all value. One, insurance. Two, tort law. And carry. Exactly. And three was basically how they did risk management so that each ship would take a little piece of everybody else's cargo so that some of the cargo would always get to.

Marketplace of the merge. Loids of London came about. Marketplace. Yeah, Loids of London emerged because of the maritime insurance that was required. And almost all P and C insurance can trace its roots back to maritime insurance during that era. Well, so these ancillary industries that emerged were surprising, right? It's almost business models emerged because you have to figure out how you do the arbitration.

Carry is the perfect example. People don't understand the venture capital. Carry, we get 20% of the profits was designed so that people with ships, the captain would get to say, we get 20% of whatever makes it there now You're aligned whatever makes it there you get 20% of okay I'm gonna I'm gonna go through that storm and I'm gonna try to get it there and we know there's so many unknowns But just looking at the one thing, you know starlink I was doing a little research today about internet penetration. We've got you know close to five billion people on the internet now But a very small number of them are on broadband.

It's like 20%, 30%, somewhere on that number. It's hard to get an exact number there. But if you think about what's going to happen to humanity, we're talking about billions of people who did not have access to broadband and they are going to go from not having, you know, if you think about what we went through in the West when the internet first came out and we got our first bronbed connections, you know, to find us like DSL or whatever. We had libraries, we had books, we had colleges, we had stores everywhere, Barnes and Noble, so the internet was unbelievably transformative, but we were in a modern society. Now you go to the developing

world and they're going to go from not even having running water in some cases in their homes or electricity or variable to having broadband. And they're going to have access to YouTube, circa 2022, 2023. They're going to have access to MIT courseware or brilliant.org and all of this information and shopping. We're going to take a billion or two billion people and give them broadband instantly within a decade. This is going to change the face of the planet. I think that that's the revolution and it's not just Starling doing it. There's like three competitors to Starling. Obviously Starling's got the biggest lead.

Yeah, but for SpaceX doing this and there were others, there was a company called O3BB It was stood for other three billion and they had raised a ton of money to do this I just I by the way, I just want to speak to like a trend that we've seen and And also speak to the Quality of Elon's leadership So many companies have tried this Google talked about it for years, which is how you connect have tried this. Google talked about it for years, which is how do you connect? Well, Project Loon was a follow on to what we talked about early on at Google, which was putting up satellites. And ultimately, Google had a satellite program that was killed in favor of buying a company called Skybox. And Skybox was this coastal ventures back startup

that was trying to make a smaller scale startup. And if you guys will remember around the early 2010s, there were a bunch of startups that emerged that were all about building small-scale satellites that could go up into lower Thorbit and do things like imaging and communications. A bunch of these companies were banking on the fact that the cost per kilogram to get your payload into space was declining pretty precipitously. So they were like, let's make super cheap commodity space imaging or space communication boxes, put them in space.

And after a couple of years, they'll fall out or bit and burn up. But it doesn't matter if we can get enough use out of them and they cost so little to put into space and they cost so little to make. Let's put hundreds of them up. So there's a company called Planet Labs that does this. I think going public via SPAC. Now they've been challenged with building the business and imaging, but there was a Google bought a company for I think half a billion dollars called Skybox trying to do this, which it was like imaging slash

comms, and they had a bigger refrigerator side box that they were trying to put up. Ultimately, Google spun that out to Planet Labs, and the whole thing kind of became imaging. But I just want to highlight that this has been a big trend for a while, and it speaks to the quality of E-Rot on his leadership, because the fact that this guy did what 20 other, 30 other people have tried companies have tried to do for the past decade or so, and he said, you know what, instead of just providing the infrastructure to get all these devices into space,

we're just gonna build the actual devices, get this thing up, and just go crazy with it and put our capital into it. And it's really impressive to see because it's such a no-brainer and people have been talking about this this opportunity for over a decade. And these guys just have absolutely rushed the field and they could build an incredible business out of this. You know, the two most important companies in silent communications are Starlink and Swarm. And Swarm was a company that I seeded and sacked to the series A. And if you talk to the founders of that company, you know, they'll give you this use case. And I think it was in 2014. Do you guys remember there was a like a Malaysian Airlines flight that just disappeared?

Yeah. Disappeared. 370. Yeah, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. And it was like 230, 240 people that passed away. And the most indelible question that I remember from this was, we couldn't track it. Not them myself. How is that even possible? How do you lose a flight in the middle of the earth? It's not possible.

It turns out it is because our internet coverage is so sad that it only covers small areas. And it made obvious that we should live in a world where there is absolutely pervasive internet access everywhere, every single little shred inch of the world should be covered and saturated that should never happen You know the people should be able to have closure They should be able to go and get that plane recover the bodies give them proper funeral These are simple things, but they're human things that we should be doing as human beings, right? And you just think about the IOT And the internet access enables this and the idea that we can't do that is shocking and so

I agree with you fever. We are Elon's incredible. And I think that within the next five years, we'll probably have pervasive internet access everywhere in the earth. And that's, that's transformational. You know, the, the second most valuable private company in space is also a company that, you know, I invested in, led the series A called Relativity Space and their idea, which I think will help everybody that wants to go to Mars and other places is, why don't we just 3D print the rockets? And why don't we 3D print the engines? And why don't we make that functionally useful? Because it basically takes the cost of a rocket and divides it by 10. And these printers are small enough where you can

actually send them to and dismantle them and take them with you to Mars and set them up there. And all of a sudden, you can print the parts that you need to get back to Earth as an example. So I think that additive manufacturing has an enormous upside here in space. And I think that that's another area that's gonna be really, really interesting. Anybody read Andy Wears' Hell Marriott, the guy who did the Martian? He's a science fiction author.

It's really great, because you don't actually know what you're gonna find out there. I think that's one of the things that, you know, to Freeberg's point, what do we find out there? What if we find a compound out there that like plutonium has some attributes

that we could leverage in very small amounts to create unlimited energy or unlimited prosperity in some ways. There are things that can exist that we have not been exposed to. And of course, the probability is there are many things that we have yet to be exposed to. 100%. Yeah, look, I don't subscribe to To that thesis I'll tell you I'll tell you why and and this may be also speaks a little bit to some of the counterpoints against the space industry getting the attention and resourcing it has relative to call it other places to allocate capital and human resourcing And that is like the tools that we have in science and engineering today as a species

continues to expand at kind of a geometric pace And that is like the tools that we have in science and engineering today as a species continues to expand at kind of a geometric pace, our ability to convert any molecule into any other molecule is basically fulfilled now. It's a function at this point of how much energy and time it takes to do that work. So almost all industry, the function of industry, is to convert molecules from one form to another. And we have tools ranging from hardware engineering, mechanical engineering, and more recently in the early 20th century chemical engineering and in the 21st century biochemical engineering. Those tools are allowing us to invent, discover, and convert molecules, and even in some cases kind of elemental forms that intonially anything else we want to produce. And the technology is accelerating in such a way, the set of technologies compound that if you think about 100 years from now, 200 years from now,

500 years from now, the human species theoretically for very minimal time and very minimal energy, should be able to have something that looks akin today to the Star Trek replicator. You basically type into a device what you'd like to make, and it makes it for you in a few minutes. And you could just like Mr. Fusion and back to the future too, you could put any input you want into the thing, you could throw in bananas and cans and whatever, and outcomes this thing you want to make. So as the human species evolved towards that capability and we don't need to get into the details, that's just like the general trend line. It becomes less relevant that we need to go get other molecules or go get other things from extra planetary sources.

The planet earth has, you know, on the order of 10 to the 23rd atoms, you know, two-thirds of the surface is water. There is so much that is like unexplored and untapped from a resource perspective within this spaceship that we're already on, that the argument would be made that our technology is allowing us to effectively recreate all of our fantastic dreams right here where we live today. And, you know, first thing we're going to have to do is fix this planet and fix the ecosystems that are kind of at risk. But as we progress and as these technologies progress, we can do these extraordinary things

that we don't necessarily need to rely on extra planetary travel and colonization in order to achieve those objectives. So that's the optimistic counter-argument. Yeah, but we keep finding things like these molecules and titans atmosphere, etc. that we can't explain. And we're finding those two telescopes, let alone we get out there. I mean, we might be able to create them, sure.

Yeah, but we're gonna discover them in other places. We, they may be beyond our human comprehension that these things could even exist, David. There were interesting things we're seeing there, for sure. And I think, you know, there's a, I think I mentioned this book before, it's so esoteric and difficult,

but it's called Every Life is on Fire by this guy named Jeremy England. And he highlights how all of evolution is effectively predicted by statistical physics. And the energy bath and the molecules within a system create a structure of molecules that you wouldn't see except for that condition, meaning that over time, the complexity of that system evolves to create an equilibrium with the energy

that it's covered in. So, what we see on planet Earth, he argues, is organic molecules in what we call life, which are these molecules that are really good at copying themselves to absorb energy and dissipate energy. So, the molecules and the energy state of, you know, Titan is different than what we see at Earth. So, the way the molecules have evolved there are so different than what we've seen on Earth. And you can see these incredible concepts of what we wouldn't call life today, but really could be defined as life there. And so, there's certainly a lot to learn and a lot to explore. It doesn't mean that we're limited in terms of our ability to kind of realize those things here on planet Earth.

But you're absolutely right. Exploration is the core of being a human, right? And for people who don't know, Titan is one of the, it's the largest moon of Saturn. And it's got its own really weird dense atmosphere. That's icy and slushy and we don't even, we can't even comprehend half the stuff going on there yet. Would any of you guys take the Richard Branson trip? Would you do the, you know, like next week or two years, I guess at what point would you be comfortable taking it? To not them. Sure, you've taken your time. I can answer for sacks, the answers now. 600 and 600 and something. So how many flights more would you want to see? You would want to do 10 more flights, 20 more flights?

No, I feel really confident that we know what we're doing. The this flight was so critical because it was about figuring out what it was like to have passengers in the back and how they'd all behave when you had multiple folks. And I think once that readout is done and Richard apparently took a bunch of notes. So we'll be starting commercial ops, I think, the next two or three quarters. Wow.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Well, I mean, if I had a $500 million super yacht like Jeff Bezos, that's where I'd be hanging out. I don't think I'd be blasting. I wouldn't be blasting myself into space. But I mean, look, more power to them.

I mean, they got, you know, they certainly have got guts. Yeah. He's doing both. Yeah. J.K.L. would you do it? You know, my theory is with kids, I kind of think differently about it. But if I was over 70, like Branson, certainly I would do it.

Yeah. I would have to have that conversation with my spouse and my kids and say, you know, hey, this opportunity exists. They've done, let's call it a hundred flights. Somewhere in that neighborhood, I think I would feel pretty comfortable doing it, but I would want to check in with my family and kids and see if we were all in sync on taking that level. I stopped riding motorcycles as an example. I think that flying in space tourism in the next year or two will be safer than riding a motorcycle

and then eventually it'll be safer than, you know, driving a car or something. It's quite possible. I was watching a space show with my daughter. She's three years old on the couch the other day. And then she was like, oh, space, it looks so fun. And I'm like, make, you know, I said, do you want to go to space? And she said, she looked back at me and she said, I want to go to space with you. And it made me

cry. It was the first time I'd ever thought like, man, I first time you'd ever cried, first time I ever cried. Yeah, we just uploaded that to his firmware. Yeah. But I was like, what are these water particles on my chin? But I had no desire, I would say before, she said that to go to space, but it was a, can I do an idea? It was kind of a poignant moment that like, man, this like moment of like inspiration of like going to space

is something that like I think is gonna inspire, you know, a generation. And I told my daughter, I said, you know, you are gonna go to space. I hope I can be there with you. Yeah. Can I give you an idea? Two different ideas, but they're roughly related.

When each of your kids turn 18, buy them a ticket to space so that they become an astronaut, which I think is like a beautiful kind of an idea. We're like, you know, what an incredible present to give somebody as they mature into age. You know, if you read, if you, if you basically have heard all these astronauts, I've said, the overview effect, like when you're above the earth looking down, it has this completely transformational effect on your outlook on life and the planet. And so, to the extent that that's a quantifiable thing to give that to your child seems like an enormous gift or

or When everybody's a age or whatever where all of you guys go as a family so that the whole cabin is your family That would be really cool to either those ideas. I will do one of those two a second Shabbat. There were four people correct in this flight if I remember this one There's four passengers. Yeah, okay. Wait a second. There are four besties How are you not setting up a flight for the hundredth episode of All In to be on verge of clack. Can you imagine watching David cry? I'd be so scared. I can pretty much guarantee you. I don't know about that. Obviously, you guys have to buy tickets, but I can pretty much guarantee you that if the three of you

decided to buy tickets, I'm pretty sure I can organize that we all go on the same flight. That would be ratings, that would be good. That's all I need is to be entombed with you guys for eternity. You know you wanted, you know you wanted. Hey, Chi-Moth, can you address the von Karman line controversy around what's the right point to be in space?

It came up a lot this week in the news. I didn't want to kind of bring it up by one person. Well, no, no, there was people talking about on the news and stuff. Like maybe you can just share for everyone. It's just blue origin being lame. Honestly, that's so petty by Bayesos. Maybe just share what happened and kind of, you know, the point of view on this. Be awesome. Basically, the question is, what defines space? Right? So, if you just like start from the bottom, from ground level, right? You have the trophosphere, right? So you have like the first kind of like 10, 20 kilometers or so, right? Then you have the stratosphere, right?

That's where like, a lot of like, whether balloon activity happens. That's a 50 kilometers. Then you have the mesosphere, right? That's where you'll see things like meteors and stuff. Then you get to basically the carbon line, which is around, I don't know, 100 kilometers or so. There are a bunch of countries that either have no opinion or point to this kind of group to define what the beginning of space is. And they define that at about 100 clicks, which is, I want to say 62 miles. Okay. Then there's the United States and the DOD and NASA, et cetera.

And we define it at a different level, 50 odd miles. And so in the United States, you need to pass the US regulatory body's definition of what the threshold of space is to be considered in astronaut. There is other countries that would then point to a different line, the Carmen line, as the line. I think the point is it's all much to do about nothing.

I think in the end, I think Virgin stated that they went to 52 and a half or 53 and a half. Things are iterative, so over time, folks will get higher and higher. But the point is, okay, and what? You basically go into space, you get to see the planet, you get to feel microgravity, you know, you get the benefit of the overview of fact, whether you're at 52 and a half, I'm guessing you'll get the same effect at 58 or 60 or 61, and then you come back to Earth. So I thought it was kind of a little cheap and unnecessary. Because there's nothing experience-wise

that changes, right? I mean, like the... Not to my understanding. Yeah. Blue Origin did a tweet from the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the carbon line. So none of our astronauts would have an asterisk next to their name.

For 96% of the world's population space begins 100 kilometers up in the interest of the blood. It's just like, why would they do that the days before the Richard Branson goes up? It's just totally classless. It shows that Bezos has a competitive streak, which is just not graceful, I would say. And I think there's a little bit of bitterness there. And then you look at Elon, what did Elon do? He went. He went.

He went. And he took a picture with Branson. And he went to support him and wrote a congratulatory tweet. Elon does not feel he's in competition, but for some reason, you know Bezos had to draft and approve this specific tweet from Blue Origin. And I just thought it was classless

and just stupid, Jeff, really. Made you look so bad. Elon was so fabulous. I mean, it just shows you what a class act he is and what he cares about, which is like he cares about advancing humans and our ability to do things that are incredible and inspiring. And when other people do it, he's not zero sum about it. As you said, Jason, he was there. He was supportive. It was just

lovely to see. I think Bezos is still stung for when Elon said he couldn't get it up. Meaning, he couldn't get his, couldn't get his rocket into space. So I don't know if that was too classy of Elon. Well, it was funny. It was funny. Yeah. Well, I don't know if you guys have seen Jeff's rocket. Kind of small. His rocket is, I mean, Jason, you're doing it. Kind of tiny rocket.

Just so we put a pin in it. Melvin Capital, the people who Went to war with the reddit traders or vice versa lost five billion dollars. Couldn't happen to a nice group of people I mean, they're down 46% Which is just shocking in and of itself and this kind of upmarket, but then to actually quantify it they lost five billion dollars Fighting a bunch of self-proclaimed Rs. I wouldn't say the work is gonna get canceled but they call themselves Rs on

f***ing retards. Retards, retards. They cost them five billion. Jason, you can say it. You're not calling them that. They call themselves that. They call themselves that, yes. All right, listen, love you besties.

Sacks were glad that you're safe and you're healthy. No thanks to you. No thanks to you. I didn't put any jokes in there. I have so many jokes I'm gonna save them. I mean, honestly, my thought on your recovery is no comment. I'm just jealous you're gonna lose another five freaking pounds because of this.

Oh yeah, I'm down to 178 by the way Come on stop are you really yeah, man or rucksack? I can't even break one when when when he's gonna stop Was there a bet or not no bad? I I'm gonna lose that bet that'd be like me playing sacks and chess It's just like Jason. What what are you tipping the scales that right now one 90 one one 90 and you're about to come to Italy and Basically, you're gonna gain 15 pounds. For sure. No, I'm doing one meal a day.

One meal a day. That's it. Come on. Come on a meal a day. That's it. I'm eating one meal a day. That's what you're gonna turn down the food. But what if you eat for three hours in that one meal?

I just, I try everything. I'll just try and then I have discipline now. Just like I stopped using Twitter. I'm stopping Twitter. Can I tell one funny story about J. Cal and Italy, talking about discipline? Okay, so we were there in Italy. When was this J. Cal?

A few years ago, whatever? There's a long time ago. Is this when we were in Venice? Yeah, you were with Jade and I was with J. Cal. It was a great story. And we went to some ice cream place, right? And so we all had, we all had these like ice cream, jala with like two scoops or whatever on there. So Jason finishes his in like five seconds, And so we all had, we all had these like ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j

ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j

ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j

ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream j ice cream offering ice cream to that's the reason. It was like a bulldog. It was like a bulldog just eating your ice cream. But how good was that fish that we got? Remember that restaurant I found? Yeah, the derad, the derad. The derad.

I mean, we still talk about that place. That was the problem. That was one of the best meals we've ever had. I've been having a gelato guys every day, every day. But they're so small. That's what I love about the Italian food. It's so small. It's a little, it's such a cute little.

And it doesn't feel like there's like a lot of preservatives and stuff in there. Oh, it's just like butter and sugar and heavy cream. Whatever it is, it's so good. It's so good. It's so good. How the tomatoes right now? I can't wait to just be incredible, incredible. I mean, I eat them, I bathe in them, I rub them on my face. Rub them on my face. What about the muts? You got the muts? How's the barata and the muts? I can't believe it. Oh, he's gonna gain 15 pounds. He's 100% gonna break.

Look at him. 100%. We should do away in when we get there. 100%. We ain't at the end. That would be the bet. I don't know how you're gonna turn down this food. I don't know how you're gonna say no to the pasta.

You'll have pasta, lunch, pasta, dinner. You're just gonna go crazy. I'm gonna just have two bites of everything. Two bites of six different pastas and I'll be fine. And by the way, by the way, the the the the biggest the best kept secret is the Italian the quality of Italian white wine is outrageous. Really? It's outrageous. We should play some cards in drinks of wine. I think we're going to play. No, for the next. How many calories are in the white wine, Chimaz? Calories?

I mean, I have no idea. But, you know, look, the thing in the summertime here is you end up walking. So I end up walking a lot or bicycling a little bit, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, like, you're burning through everything. I got to say this e-bike I got, I got a rad power bike. No, no, no, the whole point is to not have a motor that powers it. You fucking lazy bastard. No, no, no, you don't understand this. Because you have the motor in it, you ride your bike normal, but then like let's say you do have dinner or something like that, or you want to go to dinner 10 miles away or 15 miles away,

you might not take your bike. It's too long of a ride with these electric bikes instead of going 10 miles on the way there, it takes your 10 mile ride and just put you at 25 But you're still burning the same number of calories. It's like augmenting. I Really think that electric bikes are gonna change cities like in a major way They're already starting to in Europe and in China, but all right everybody. We'll see you next time on the island podcast Love you, sacks. I catch you Sacks. I hope I hope you get better. Thank you Thanks guys. Yeah, I'm better. better. Still better. Thank you. Thanks, guys.

I'm better. I'm ready better. Don't worry about it. And wait, freeberg, you have nothing to say. Computer. It did not come out. I've seen the three of you. It was nice to check off the box for my social interactions for the week.

I will now go back. I have done 75 minutes of social interaction. Powering down in three two one mom mom mom mom see you next time bye bye well let your winners ride bring man David Sack we open-source it to the fans and I'm going to the movies! What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What?

Besties are gone! Besties are gone! That's my dog. Take it away. Wish you a driveway. Oh man, my hamlet has your witty ass. You should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two. Because they're all good. It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release that down then.

What your feet, what your feet, what your feet. What's good for you? Why do you get my cheese aren't I? I'm doing all it! I'm doing all it! I'm doing all the good!