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This week we're going to play our favorite new game show. Guess who's got COVID? Yes, that's right, somebody on the pod. Somebody's got covered. It's not the me. No, you're Rudy McCabe JAMA. Ohh, sorry. So here's the game. Person who got COVID, have they been vaccinated or not? OK, all four of us have been vaccinated. We covered that in our previous post. So everybody double vaccinated, double vaccine, double has been double vaxxed. Did we all get Pfizer? I was Pfizer, Pfizer, Pfizer, Pfizer, OK, so Pfizer across the board, we got quads. And. This is a breakthrough infection. Has anybody taken AZ pack after a night of party? I have. The pot lasted 39 episodes. Was good. It was good. OK, so number one clue. Number one, this bestie got a breakthrough infection outdoors at a restaurant. Number one, got it outdoors #2 got it from somebody who was also vaccinated. #3 this bestie does not fly commercial, and he's not a fan of being interrupted. And he is not an. Evangelical, David. The breakthrough vaccination is sad. David Sachs. Glad that my getting a breakthrough case of COVID is is comedy fodder for you somehow. Let your winners ride. Man David. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy. Queen. Saxy poop. Break it down. Walk us through that. Like how what happened and then how you felt. Yeah. OK, So what happened? And we're glad you're safe, obviously. Obviously, we wouldn't be joking. You're still losing weight. You lost £5. So yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You may want to read some of the beautiful text messages we sent you when we found out this week. Yes. Jason, what would you say? Jason, you said I was just like, wow. Think about who we could recruit for the 4th spot. We? Keith, were. Boy, we get Peter Thiel in here. I said that I really, really hope you didn't die. But if you did, I would love to have your plane as a support plane for my plane. And I was thinking, you know what? I might be pro San Francisco if you die. I could. I might want it. Well, sorry, guys. I'm gonna live. Sorry, Jason. I'm gonna live. Here's basically what happened, OK? Is so Tuesday? Of last week I had dinner with a few friends and then my friend just wear out outdoors in a restaurant. I'll tell you exactly where we're at matsuhisa in LA, which has the store parking lot. Yes, the outdoor parking lot area, which is a covered outdoor area. So you know, these like covered areas are effectively inside because it traps the air in there. But in any event, we had dinner there the next day. He woke up with a fever and sore throat. He went and got a COVID test. He tested positive. He is also double Vaxxed with Pfizer. OK. So, and 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 in 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 and barely a fever. Fever, really fever. But I mean, it was definitely there. And I took Tylenol and it brought it down to the low 90 nines. 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 what's like exploding in LA right now. And so, yeah, I mean, look, I mean, the 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. Are you 10 days in now this? No, no, no, no. This is the, you know, I, I came down with symptoms on this past Sunday and it's now Thursday, so I am. And Wendy, were you exposed Tuesday night? So I was exposed. Yes, you're right. It's about 10 days. But you're convinced that was the only way you could have gotten it, right? Yeah, because somebody else the dinner got has symptoms now, too. Ah. So it's a super spreader at matsuhisa. Yeah, yeah, basically. But it shows you how virulent this new delta variant is. I mean, you've got, there were four people out that night plus the person who 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 5. 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've I have the pulse ox meter and it's been around 95%. So it is definitely 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 and did you self isolate from your family? Yeah I did. But we were lulled a little bit into a. The place of overconfidence because yeah, well, I remember I got, I got COVID test on Wednesday and then Friday and they're both negative. I thought we were through it, so I was at home and and then and then so my 11 year old got it. Even though I was isolating this thing is, I mean, this thing is so contagious. So, you know, what I've read is that Delta variant is 60% more transmissible than the UK variant, which was the alpha variant. The Alpha variant was 60% more transmissible than original COVID. So you're looking at a transmissibility. You multiply those together of 2 1/2 times the original and the original COVID had an R nought of two to three. So you multiply 2 to 3 by 2 1/2 times and you're looking at 5:00 to 8:00. And you know at this point to the audience what that means. In terms of reality, it means the Arnaud 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 3D variant might be like 8. We're getting up into like smallpox territory with this thing and it's all the more transmissible because you know vaccinated people can get it. You know the the Israel data that we talked about on the show last week was. 64% effectiveness that Israel reported that the effectiveness of Pfizer had gone from like 95% to 64% in terms of preventing infection. So you have maybe 1/3 of vaccinated people can get it, and then they can spread it without even knowing they have it. So I think we're at the point now where if you're not vaccinated you're 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 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 this into the pod? He had a. He had a really great quote. He's like. Today is either Wednesday, yeah, for those that are vaccinated, or yet another day where the unvaccinated amongst you are likely to get COVID something like that, right? Was that the tweet something? Basically today's Wednesday for people who are vaccinated or it is the day you're going to get, you know, the the virus. We gotta stop stop messing around with this thing. Now. Here's some, here's some good news, actually, is. Is so on. On the the Wednesday when we found out that my friend had tested positive but again I was still negative. I had no symptoms, I had nothing. I told my wife she had gotten one shot, she had gotten the second shot and we were on the fence about whether my 13 year old should get the vaccine. They both raced out that day, got vaccinated. They did not get the virus. So they had basically call it three or four days of the of the vaccine to trigger an immune response in their system and that protected them. They did not get sick. And and David did you take? Anything else? Like Prednisone. You took nothing. No steroid, nothing. Nothing. The only stuff I so my friend did take, he he did get prescribed Prednisone. My doctor thought that was unnecessary or a bad idea for me. All I took OK was Tylenol to control the fever, and I took Flonase to reduce the sinus congestion. Look, I mean, I don't want to overstate this. It was a very mild cold for me. And that is why I think everybody should run out and get vaccinated. What, did you pair it with? Like a Pappy van winkle? Or did you go with the screaming Eagle? Your your government free bird. Also, the worst part is Matsuhisa has such a **** wine list you probably drank this like random swill that's you were drinking some like nigiri sake and all likelihood freeberg. 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? OK, explain because this is the one time I'm ever going to be right about science. A week before you. So I I think that 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. OK. 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 2/3 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 and and I'm I'm I'm just kind of transcribing, you know, from kind of what I remember him. OK. And so he said, you know, the the more recent vaccinations we're not seeing breakthrough cases, breakthrough infections. So the the more recently you're vaccinated, the the less likely you are to have this. And then I I met with a, 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 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. They they went in, they pulled him out and they identified look that these B cells are persistent. We are having a persistent immune memory to COVID when we get exposed to the vaccine or the virus. And and so you know those two data points, both of them kind of said, I think we're going to need to do a booster very soon for everyone and we're going to 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 going to see an efficacy drop to that kind of 2/3 level after about six months of your after getting your your vaccine. And, 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 I'm hearing this, I'm, I'm repeating what I read in news reports at this point. But what they said was, you know, 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, very large majority having very mild symptoms and not getting hospitalized. And the and the death rate is still very, very low. In other words, the vaccine did its job, the vaccine didn't didn't prevent, you know, an infection, meaning that the virus starts replicating in, 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 that great success still with the vaccine, but they are seeing and there are now studies that you know I think reference to your earlier point that you know if you put a different RNA strain or RNA sequence into your body which Moderna and Pfizer have slightly different you know sequences, you end up creating different antibodies and having more diversity of antibodies can kind of provide greater immunity. So it's almost certain we're going to get boosters. And that we're going to end up seeing them hit the market next month in September. Yeah. Is the is the booster different than the original? So for example, if I get a fizer booster? Am I only basically getting still an expression of that RNA strand that I'm supposed to basically like, is it the same formulation, the same dosage? So, 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 maderna shot, you could go get another fizer shot of the exact same RNA sequence that you got before, or they may introduce some new ones. And so all the pharma companies are proposing both approaches and they're pursuing both paths. Right now and we'll see where we end up and what about swapping between an RNA approach and a traditional vaccine approach, so getting J&J plus Moderna or Fiserv versus like there's a lot of AB testing we need to do to figure out what is the most efficacious and useful. This is exactly like the this is reminds me exactly of HIV where it took ten years for them to figure out what cocktail actually worked the best. And now look HIV is, I mean it's, it's, it's kind of nothing, it's really not that not that bad and the way that we probably for those of us in our 40s have it in. Ways into our mind is how bad it is versus how bad it is really. It's a death sentence. It seemed like a death sentence. And today it's kind of more, it's more manageable than frankly, it's a chronic disease now that's it's like having diabetes or something. Yeah. I have another crazy statement here, which is that if you take the the case fatality rate of COVID and now you think about the fact that there's going to be, call it, 60% of America that's vaccinated and then every six months will be getting boosters and then you have. The Petri dish on the other side of the 40% where you'll just be ripping through variant after variant after variant eventually. It stands to reason that. If 40% of Americans remain unvaccinated two or three years from now, the odds that there will be a strain that is the killer strain that does meaningful damage to those people, I think is basically 100%. And if you think about a case fatality rate that's meaningfully high, what you're effectively going to do is start to call these people from the Earth. And that is a crazy idea, but that's what folks who choose to not get vaccinated are setting themselves up. I mean, it's the quintessential, you know, is that just probabilities that am I getting something wrong here probabilistically? Isn't that. That's what I'm concerned about. And it's not just Americans not getting vaccinated. It's the rest of the world. I mean, even if we got to extraordinarily, extraordinarily high vaccination rates in the US. There's going to be large, you know, numbers of people outside the US who never get vaccinated. We'll continue to be a Petri dish to, to give you to, you know, comparison. The common cold has 1800 variants. That's why we can't get vaccinated. So, you know, 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 the letters of the alphabet really soon. You know, how long will it be until there is, there are these killer variants that 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 comedown 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 I do want to like under score that the 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 but it does show that the virus. Is mutating really fast? It's highly transmissible and I'm not sure if you still have it. You still have it. 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, it feels to me like I'm about 98% better freeberg is there. Is there any data about the pattern of people who are vaccinated getting this thing? Like, is there? Remember how, like, you know, there was early data that showed, you know, women had a different immune response than men? And like people who were what was it O positive 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 we're way I was, I was vaccinated a few months ago, guys like, I mean I am like really you're not six months, you're three. When was your second shot? Basically like a few months ago. Yeah, it's mine was in March. Yeah. One thing I think it's worth highlighting just to reinforce the vaccine importance, you know, the virologist infectious disease guy I met with 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 8th higher. OK, that's like 100 million times higher. And so that's 100 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 it's 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 and and cause real severe loss of life. And so the, you know, the presentation that Sachs kind of described is 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. Lateral 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 to it, but it did because my friend who I got it from, after one having dinner one night, he was double Vaxxed with Pfizer and it might, you know, my 11 year old daughter got it. Yeah, it's for her again. It's just like a cold, but so this thing is highly transmissible and what is it? The change, it changes the equation, I think, on some policy questions. So, yeah, that's what I was gonna ask you. What does it mean for the fall? What now what? So two weeks ago I thought that because I was vaccinated I didn't need to care whether other people were vaccinated because the, you know, up until that point the data was you were 95% plus, you know, effectiveness. So why care if other people get vaccinated? Now we can say for sure that 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. We're requiring students to get vaccinated to return in the fall. Like before, I didn't think that necessarily made a lot of sense because if you wanted to protect yourself, use get vaccinated. But now it makes sense, right, because the college needs to get to herd immunity to protect everybody against, you know, 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 back. Are you then in fact sacks for VAX passports, which as a. You know, Libertarian, I think, is, I think, part of your political I think everybody on this call is kind of got a little libertarian. Like you got to make your own choices here, but does it change your thinking about that, IE employers, colleges? City, State workers, teachers are either get vaxxed or don't come back to the office and you're fired. Well, I'll tell you I I don't like the idea of government having the power to 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 to be able to fire you. If you're a teacher, should they be able to fire you. Yeah, or a bus driver if you're pilot. Yes. OK, so here's the craziness. This is a self-inflicted wound. We are down to only 700,000 vaccines being given a day. We peaked, we had the ability to do 5,000,000 shots a day at the peak back in April we hit over 5,000,000 shots in one day in the United States and that's a country where you know, whatever 270,000,000 adults of you know were able to get it. In other words, 2% of the adult population in a single day could have gotten it. Now we're down to 700. We have over a billion vaccines sitting on shelves. 80% of Democrats have received one shot. Compared to 49% of Republicans, 27% of Republicans say that they won't get vaccinated under any circumstances, compared to 3% of Democrats answering that question the same way. And an additional 9% will only do so if required. Again, 3% of Democrats said they would only do so required, so that's 36% are opting out for. I get it, but this because we allowed it to become a position, meaning it's not. It's not like in anybody has a position on breathing. Breathing is not a political position. Right. It's not like I choose to not breathe or drinking water or trying to, you know, like, 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 the 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 learnt to distrust the media and big corporations because and government because they've been lied to so often. Most recently with the. Yeah right. Most recently with like the lab leak theory. And so, you know, there's this suspicion on the right like what aren't they telling us, you know? Now look, I think we got to get over this. I think, you know, we need to get everyone vaccinated for all the reasons that. Freeburg said or look everyone's gonna get Delta variant. I mean maybe this is the 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 going to, you know I mean kind of delta variant may be than whatever the, you know, whatever dangerous deadly one is. Yeah. Let me just highlight what I'm most concerned about. I, I am most concerned about what's what's happening with sacks. It's just anecdotally speaking, I'm not going to speak to the, I'll speak to 1 statistic. Like anecdotally speaking, I'm hearing this happening more, 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 backs 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, you know, more of the behavior we saw over the past year where people are going to be nervous to travel, people going to be nervous to fly, people going to be nervous to go to restaurants and you know, the downstream. Consequences of everyone kind of locking up again, even if the government doesn't enforce lockups, could be pretty catastrophic, especially you feeling that way yourself, freeberg. In other words, am I going to lock myself up? Are you going to go to dinner? Are you going to go to travel to Italy or to, you know, Japan, or, you know, would you go to Disneyland with your kids? How is it affecting you, your personal behavior, being a man of science? So, so my personal circumstances are a little different right now. Not not to get into it just with my, you know, my wife's pregnant and we're moving houses and so we we've got a bunch of reasons why we're not traveling and and and exposing ourselves unnecessarily right now. But I 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, 6 to 12 weeks to see what happens here. So I think like if if I'm feeling that way now, I think a lot of people are going to be feeling that way in in the next 4 weeks as they hear about more friends getting COVID. Now, you know, the good news is the hospitals and so, so I am most concerned we are in a very, very, very, very delicate economic recovery right now. And you know, we have put out so much money to stimulate this economy. Everyone is so walking on like the razor's edge to keep things, you know, growing. We were afraid of inflation. Lumber prices today, by the way, are lower than they were when this whole kind of inflationary thing started and everyone was freaking out about it. So you know lumber prices are lower than they were at the start of the year which is you know like a lot of this kind of inflation risk is kind of come out of the equation already. So the markets have taken that pricing out and now we're going to be in a circumstance where people might cancel their travel, people might cancel their their restaurants, people might stop going to the office again, stop you know getting in the car etcetera, etcetera. So I am most concerned about like the psychological effects of of what we're seeing with the these breakthrough infections the the frequency of them. Now if you look at the Israel data, so Israel had zero deaths for two weeks. They're now averaging about one death a day. And despite this, you know, huge increment, they're about, I think 500 breakthrough infections a day right now. So that is good statistical news, right? Statistically, these breakthrough infections are not fatal. They're not causing hospitalizations. They're they're, you know, if you kind of did the math going back a year and said these are the actual statistics of COVID, people would be like, OK, no big deal, let's move on. It's a it's a, it's a tough kind of virus, but because of the circumstances where we, we, we are kind of under these 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 going to 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, you're. I think you're right in some respects, but I don't think it is going to come from people. I don't think people. I think people are exhausted and they want to go back to life as normal. And I think this summer was a window into some amount of normalcy for a lot of us and I don't think we. I really do want to go back. And so I think what's what's really going to happen is there's going to be essentially some form of class warfare. And instead of rich versus poor and left versus right, it's sort of between people who believe in science and then the, you know, ideologically dogmatic who refused 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 has a common cold like David said, and move the **** on. And if we are prevented from doing so because economic policy and health care policy has to constantly get rerated 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 seize 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, it exists now. I think it's the politicians that are going to want to jump all over this and say, OK, guys, you know, lock downs here, you can't do this, you can't do that. Literally just did the big grand reopening. California's back. You could see him locking it back up in September. Oh, this is the best way to. It's the best way to snuff out any chance of 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 number 2 is, by the way, on him. That would backfire pretty bad. You saw the flip flopping that he already did, actually, on schools where the 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 what it means for them. The point is, guys free. Brooke 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 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 you know at CPAC and other places people were cheering the anti VAX movement, Mitt Romney came out. We don't control conservative media. Bigger 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 politicized politicization of vaccination is an outrage and frankly, moronic. Mitch McConnell came out and says a polio victim myself, when I was young, I've studied that disease. It took 70 years, 70 years to come up with two vaccines that finally ended the polio threat as a result of operation warp speed. We have not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines are perplexed by the difficulty we're having finishing the job. This is where you can expect the politically correct companies to act first, because they are the woke mob will force some action on this issue. Whether you like it or not, but this is, this is where the next petition will come from, Apple, where the two or three thousand employees who are vaccinated, etcetera, 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 Apple petition that would make sense because those employees are directly impacted by other employees who come to the workplace unvaccinated, unlike, you know, the issues around Israel or Antonio's book whatever that they should 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, yes. COVID 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 going to be a vaccinated workplace or not? Because it does impact their risk. But but Jason, to your question about should people change their behavior in light of this news? OK, 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, OK, it was not a big deal. It was like a mild 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 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 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 but here's where it gets a little bit complicated as my parents, who are in their 70s and one of them has an immune condition, asks what they should do. And I said, listen, if I were you guys, I would not be going to public places. I'd be masking up. They're asking me if they should go on a trip. And I said no. I would actually, if I were you, I would lock down until this blows over because they're at elevated risk. And so, yeah, for me, getting COVID was like a mild case, but for them, maybe it could be more serious. So all it takes is 10% of the population acting like what you just described. You recommended to your parents tax for there to be economic ripples associated with this, 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 deaths Freeburg, you're concerned about the economic impact and the psychological. Cars that are now in place, I will explain I I sent you guys a link to the Reuters article where they covered the press conference with the Prime Minister of Israel the other day. And basically they are taking what they're calling a soft suppression strategy, where they're encouraging Israelis to learn to live with the virus, involving the fewest possible restrictions and avoiding a fourth national lockdown that could do further harm to the economy. And he said implementing the strategy will entail taking certain risks, but in the overall consideration. Including economic factors, this is the necessary balance. And so it's a, it's a, it's a very kind of pointed position that they're coming to. I think the US government, the federal government is going to have to come to the same one, but we have different States and different local governments that are going to act differently. And because we've, you know, we have authority vested in those different jurisdictions, you could see different public policy officials take different positions. And what we're talking about in San Francisco said restaurants have to go back to 25%. Capacity. It would decimate these already struggling small businesses and there's no more stimulus dollars available. And so you kind of think about this or 10% of people cancel their vacation plans. What's that going to do to airlines and hotels? So again, my, 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 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. But, you know, we got bailed out before we'll get bailed out again. Let's implement a shutdown, let's implement a lockdown, let's not go to work. It's whatever the the decision tree you may have as a business owner or policymaker. 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 were extremely expensive. We spent $10 trillion battling COVID last year. We cannot do that again. We don't have the. The bullets are going to keep firing at this thing like that. We got to start making intelligent decisions. Zero ISM is not going to work. This idea that the premise of heroism 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 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 is causing these symptoms. By the way, is anyone noticed how many different symptoms this virus causes in people? There's over 200. 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 going to. I think permanently impact human life expectancy. I mean, this is 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 1000 a day and deaths down to 10 a day like Israel, if we had just gotten everybody to take one of the billions of excess vaccines sitting on shelves and in CVS and Walgreens across this country. How stupid are we? We don't have the collectivism to to make those actions. If you think about what's happening in Israel. Did. Two different examples. In China, collectivism manifests as like basically a top down, you know? Form of governance, OK. In in Israel, collectivism comes from a need for state level security, right? I mean, I've travelled 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 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 that. So either it's imposed on you like in China or people bottoms up can understand these trade-offs. 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 **** together. Half the people care about vegan ******* milk, the other half the people care. I mean, it's it's we are in a alternate universe as bad as we are. Europe and even Japan have done even worse because I mean, we our, 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. Vaccination rates, yes, it should be better, but well, we are the this is a global capturing the opportunity, David. We have the opportunity to have everybody back in America. America is the most exceptional country in the world. It has been for hundreds of years. It should be for several 100 more. There is no excuse for this country to have ****** this up this badly. I've spent enough time as 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. Biomerica is in the position so dumb. It's like it's like having a 20 point lead and you just with like 8 minutes to go and you just screw up and you lose the game. So stupid. All right. Do we want to move on to the billionaire space race? Yeah, I think that's positive news. This company, what's it called? Virgin Galactic. There's a company called Virgin Galactic, and they take people to space. It's $200,000 stock. Seems to be doing pretty well. Anybody have thoughts on Richard Branson getting to space? I don't know, which is randomly go to somebody chamah. Now congratulations and all seriousness, congratulations. I cried. Nat and I start the SEC transcript public the statement. Here we go. No, Nat. Nat and I watched it together. You cried and there was emotional. Uh, and 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, believe in them, help them, give them capital, which was essentially oxygen, right? That's oxygen for a company. And then to see them achieve it, it felt so special to be a part of it. So, yeah, I mean, I was really emotional. And it was 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 sub orbitally. Warp 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, Oh well, you know, no, like, you know, maybe now we can deal with, I don't know, child hunger or, you know, hey, why are all these billionaires doing this? Out of the other 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 was I, I, I watched every minute of it and I thought it was incredible. Just to add to that, yeah, I want to, I want to take the part that all the naysayers and and the negativity, I mean, chamath is right, all the very online people. Immediately came out attacking this extraordinary accomplishment and act of bravery. By Branson, I mean, this is a billionaire. He doesn't need to be risking his life, launching himself into space. I mean, this is a courageous act. You know, he's putting his, 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 Solana had a pretty funny tweet summing up the sort of the lefts. Argument that thusly you said #1. This is their argument, according to Solana. One money is evil 2, therefore people with money are evil 3 therefore things people with money care about evil. I mean, that is basically the level of sophistication everybody's talking argument that's being made. It's it's that that's the argument that the left is everybody's a bond villain, right. But here here's the problem is that first of all, we do get tremendous benefits out of these innovators who are pushing the boundaries of science and technology and. Engineering, you know, Branson actually went on Stephen Colbert show and defended it. He said. He said, listen, I think they're not fully this is Branson, he said. I think they're not fully educated to. What space does for Earth is connecting the billions of people who are not connected down here, he said. Every single spaceship that we sent, putting satellites up there, monitoring different things around the world, like the degradation of rainforests, 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, very wrong ideas. We have the wrong organization. We have the wrong execution. Fix the operating details. It's not a money issue. Exactly. Take education in California, we have very high levels of per pupil spending and. This test scores keep going down. Why? Because we have unions controlling the schools. There's no competition. We're getting rid of testing. We've eliminated testing. We solved that problem. We spent more as a percentage of GDP on healthcare than any other western country in the world. Yet the life expectancy of white men, which is basically the top of the pyramid of Healthcare is now sub 80 years old. What is going on? So security, all of these, if all of these negative naysayers could actually just get into the arena and try to do something right instead of whining. Just fine whining instead of whining. Whiner class. They have no ideas. They have no ideas. They have no solutions. They just have grapes 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. OK, can I tell you why? Connect. Can I tell you why? These sort of like leftist whiners. Are not motivated to actually do the hard work. Meaning, even even 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 bowls in obscurity, just learning, paying their dues. They don't want to do that either, because they grew up in a culture of kindergarten soccer. Everybody gets the Gold Star, everybody gets to touch the ball, everybody gets to be at the front of the line. And they're not willing to put in the work, because the minute they realize how much actual work is demanded of progress, they run away because they're scared. And the reason they're scared is because somewhere along the way, somebody tricked them. That it was not actually about trying, it was actually about succeeding. And that is the biggest failure that we could do to people is all of a sudden tricking them to believe you have to have it work. So they rather be home monitors. They'd rather be critics and feel rather than try. Failure is just as good because you're one step closer to succeeding somewhere along the way. Unfortunately, they were not taught that incredible secret hiding in plain sight. Freedberg. What do you think of the space race and the hall monitor Weiner class, if you guys look? I was going to send these statistics earlier, but if you look at the amount of venture capital money that's gone into into private space companies, space technology companies, I think it was a few $100 million, call it 3 to $400 million, pretty consistently from 2011 through 2014. Pretty flat. And then in 2015, I think this is when SpaceX started to kind of create a lot of momentum and hype that private companies can actually build businesses in kind of, call it the space industry. The number jumped to 3 billion a year, and then it was a little over 3 1/2 billion in 16, and then it jumped to almost 5 billion in 17. It was a little bit down. In 182020, it's climbed to almost 10 billion. And in Q1 of this year, I think we're at 2 billion. 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 and taking people to the space station and what have you. And SpaceX is obviously built a tremendous business and that there there has been obviously a lot of interest in tourism and I think it's, you know. We're seeing this first breakthrough with 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 interest in a market for visual satellites. But you know, if you look at some of the financials of companies like Planet Labs, they did a few acquisitions in space imaging and the revenue hasn't really taken off there. And then mining was always this. Other question is can we go out and mine, you know, rare minerals from space and that one is just, you know, if you do the math. And it's so far away it's impossible to kind of model. So I think over the next and then finally it's communications and communications are cheaper to run on Earth if you're in cities versus you know the the the SpaceX model is to reach rural rural areas that it's going to be more affordable to do this through space. And so you know there's there's obviously a ton of momentum and a ton of interest in 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 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, the and you know, that's around when, you know, we sailed across the Atlantic or the the Spanish sailed across the Atlantic or funded or they or they disappeared or they disappear. I mean they basically crashed. It didn't work. It was a one way trip sometimes to the bottom of the ocean if you were sitting in Spain in 1450 and someone said, hey, these ships. It's going to 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. And you would have been totally wrong. Yeah. And you are in that 15th century moment right now with the space industry. 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, you know, going down to the bottom of the Atlantic? I mean, like all of the technology and the entire industry that kind of came out of that, you know, that that that set of pioneering activity in the 15th century transformed the planet, transformed the economy, transformed humanity. And, you know, it's very, it's very hard, it's very hard to sit here today. And say, hey, I know where space is going, where the space industry is going. I know what's gonna be possible. But I can tell you that if history is any predictor of the future, you know, this pioneering work that's going on, which is burning tons of money and and everyone's kind of questioning whether there's businesses here, it could transform our species once again. So yeah, David, your 15th century shipping example is so beautiful. Three things that came out of that, which I think we all value 1. Insurance. Two, tort law and carry. Exactly. And three was basically how they did risk management so that you know, each ship would take a little piece of everybody else's cargo so that some of the cargo would always get to marketplaces. Emerged Lloyds of London marketplaces. Yeah, Lloyds of London emerges because of the the maritime insurance that was required and the and almost all PNC insurance can trace its roots back to maritime insurance during that that era and so. So these these ancillary industries that emerged were like surprising, right? It's almost business models. Emerged because you had to figure out how you do the arbitrage and carry is the perfect example. People don't understand 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, OK, I'm going to, I'm going to go through that storm and I'm going to 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. Million people on the Internet now, but a very small number of them are on broadband. It's like 20 percent, 30%, somewhere in 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 brown bag 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 Nobles. So the Internet was unbelievably transformative, but we were in a modern society. Now you go to the developing world. And they're gonna go from, you know, not even having running water in some cases in their homes or electricity or, you know, variable to having broadband. And they're going to have access to YouTube circa 2022-2023. They're going to have access to, you know, MIT courseware or brilliant.org and all of this information and shopping. We're going to take a billion or 2 billion people and give them broadband instantly within a decade. This is going to change the the face of the planet. I think that that's the revolution and and it's not just startling doing it. There's like 3 competitors to Starlink. Obviously Starling's got the biggest lead. Yeah before SpaceX doing this and and and and there were others, there was a company called O3B, it was stood for other 3 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 do you connect? Yeah, well, Project **** was a follow on to what we talked about early on at Google, which was putting up satellites. And ultimately Google had a satellite program that was killed in favor of buying a company called Skybox. And Skybox was this coastal ventures backed startup that was trying to make a smaller scale startup. And if you guys will remember, around the early 20 tens, there were a bunch of startups that emerged that were all about building small scale. Satellites that could go up into low Earth orbit and do things like imaging and communications. And a bunch of these companies were banking on the fact that the cost per kilogram to get your payload into space was declining pretty precipitously. So they were like, let's make super cheap commodity, you know, space imaging or space communication boxes. Put them in space and after a couple of years they'll fall out of orbit and burn up. But it doesn't matter if we can get enough use out of them. And they cost so little to put into space and they cost a little to make, let's put hundreds of them. So the company called Planet Labs. That that does this, that's I think going public via SPAC now they again they've 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 Coms and they had a bigger refrigerator size box and they were trying to put. Ultimately, ultimately, Google, Google spun that out to to Planet Labs and the whole thing kind of, you know, became imaging. But I just want to highlight that this has been a big trend for a while. And it speaks to the quality of Elon and his leadership because the fact that this guy did what 20 other 30 other people have tried, companies have tried to do for the past decade or so. And he said, you know what? Instead of just providing the, the infrastructure to get all these devices into space, we're just going to build the actual devices, get this thing up and just go crazy with it and put our capital into it. And it's really impressive. Deep, because it's such a no brainer and people been talking about this opportunity for over a decade and these guys just have absolutely rushed the field and they could build an incredible business out of this. And you know, the two most important companies inside like communications are Starlink and Swarm. And Swarm was a company that I seated and sacks to the Series 8 and the if you talk to the founders of that company, you know, they'll they'll give you this use case. And I think it was in two 2014. Do you guys remember there was like a Malaysian Airlines flight that just disappeared, disappeared 370? Yeah, Malaysian Airlines flight 370 and it was like 200 and 32140 people that passed away. And the the the most you know indelible question that I remember from this was we we couldn't track it and nothing myself. How is that even possible? How do you, how do you lose, 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 it it made obvious that like, you know we should live in a world. Where there is absolutely pervasive Internet access everywhere, every single little shred inch of the world should be covered and saturated. That should never happen. You know, the people should be able to have closure. They should be able to go and get that plane, recover the bodies, give them proper funeral. These are simple things, but they're human things that we should be doing as human beings, right? And just think about the IoT Internet access enables us, and the idea that we can't do that is shocking. And so. I agree with your fever. We 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 it basically takes the cost of a rocket and divides it by 10. And these printers are small enough where you know you can actually send them to and dismantle them and take them with you to Mars. And set them up there and all of a sudden you can print the parts that you need to get back to Earth, as an example. So I think that additive manufacturing has an enormous upside here in space. And I think that that's another area that's going to be really, really anybody can read Andy Weir's Hail Mary yet the the guy who did the Martian. He's a science fiction author. It's really great because you don't actually know what you're going to find out there. I think that's one of the things that you know to, 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, there are, 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, 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 the tools that we have in science and engineering today as a species continues to expand at a 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 industries 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 and even in some cases kind of elemental forms that into nearly 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, the order of 10 to the 23rd atoms, you know, 2/3 of the. The surface is water. There is so much that is like unexplored and untapped from a resource perspective within this, 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 that 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, so that that that's that's that's the that's the optimistic counter argument, yeah. But we keep finding things like these molecules and Titans atmosphere, etcetera that we can't explain and we're finding those telescopes let alone we get out there. I mean we might be able to create them, sure, yeah. But we're going to discover them in other places. We we they may be beyond, beyond our human comprehension that these things could even exist. David. There are interesting things we're seeing there for sure and I think, you know there there's a I I think I mentioned this book. Or, uh, it's so etheric 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 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 concept of what we, we wouldn't call life today, but really could be defined as life there. And so there's certainly a lot to learn, a lot to explore. It doesn't mean that we're limited in terms of our ability to kind of realize those things here on planet Earth, but you're absolutely right. Like, exploration is the core of being a human right. And for people who don't know, Titan is one of the it's the largest moon of Saturn, and it's. Got its own really weird dense atmosphere that's icy and. Slushy and we don't even we 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 or two year I guess at what point would you be comfortable taking it? I'm sure you're you're, you're sorry I can answer for sax the answer is no, 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, 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 you know we'll we'll be starting commercial OPS I think you know the next two or three quarters. So wow. Yeah, I mean, when you have sex, well, I mean, if 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 he's doing both. Yeah, he's doing both. Would you do it? You know, I my, 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 I would have to have that conversation with my spouse and my kids and say. You know, hey this opportunity exists. They've done, let's call it 100 flights somewhere in that neighborhood. I would, I think I would feel pretty comfortable doing it, but I I would want to check in with my my family and kids and see if we were all In Sync on taking that lever. I I stopped riding motorcycles as an example. I think that flying in space tourism in the next year or two will be a safer than riding a motorcycle and then eventually it'll be safer than you know driving a car or something. It's it's quite possible. I was I was watching a space. Show with my daughter. She's three years old, on the couch the other day. And then she, she was like, oh, space. It looks so fun. And I'm like, 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, first time you've ever cried, first time ever cried. Just uploaded that to his firmware. Yeah, crying. But I was like, are these water particles on my chin? But I have no desire, I would say, before she said that to go to space. But it was a. Can I, can I, can I give you an idea? Poignant moment that like, man, this like moment of like inspiration, of, like going to space is something that like, I think is going to inspire, you know, a generation. And and I told my daughter, I said, you know, you are going to go to space. I hope I could 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 where like, you know what an incredible present to give somebody as they mature into aged. You know, if you, if you read, if you, if you basically have heard all these astronauts have said, you know what the the overview effect like when you're above the earth looking down, it has this completely transformational effect on your outlook on life and the planet. And so, you know, to the extent that that's a quantifiable thing, to give that to your child seems like an enormous gift or or when everybody's of age or whatever, where all of you guys go as a family so that the whole cabin is your family. That would be really cool, too, either of those ideas. I will do one of those two second. Chamath, there were four people, correct? In this fight. If I remember this one, there's four passengers. Yeah. OK, wait a second. There are four besties. How are you not setting up a flight for the 100th episode of all in to be on Virgin Galactic? Can you imagine watching David cry and be so scared? I mean, I can pretty much guarantee you. 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 I'm pretty sure I can organize that. We all go on the same flight. That would be a ratings bonanza. Yeah, that's all. That's all I need is to be entombed with you guys. For internity. You know you want it. You know you want it. Can you address the von Karman line controversy around, you know, what's the right point to be in space? Because it came up a lot this week in the news. I didn't want to kind of came up by one person. Well, no, there was people talk about on the news and stuff like maybe you can just share for everyone. Blue origin being lame. Honestly, that's so petty by Bezos. So maybe just share what happened and kind of, you know the point of view on this be awesome. But basically the question is what defines space, right? So if you if you just like, start from the bottom from. Ground level, right? You have the troposphere, right? So you have like the first kind of like. 10 to 20 kilometers or so, right? Then you have this stratosphere, right? That's where like. A lot of like weather 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 Karman line, which is around, I don't know, 100 kilometers or so. There are a bunch of countries that either have no opinion. Or point to this kind of group to define what the beginning of space is. And they defined that at about 100 clicks, which is I, I wanna say 62 miles, OK. 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 bodies definition of what the threshold of space is to be considered an astronaut. There is other countries that would then point to a different line, the Karman line, as the line. I think the point is it's all Much Ado about nothing. I think in the end I think Virgin stated that they went to 52 1/2 or 53 1/2. You know things are iterative so overtime you folks will get higher and higher. But the point is, OK, and what you basically go into space, you get to see the planet, you get to feel microgravity. You know you get the benefit of the overview effect whether you're at 52 1/2. 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 not, there's there's nothing experience wise that changes, right? I mean, like the, you know, my understanding, yeah. Blue Origin did a tweet from the beginning. New Shepherd was designed to fly above the Karman line so none of our astronauts would have an* next to their name. For 96% of the world's population, space begins 100 kilometers up in the interest, blah, blah. It's just like, why would they do that? The days before the Richard Branson goes up? It's just totally classless. It shows that Bezos has a competitive shriek, 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 so classy. He went so classy, and he took a picture with Branson and he went to support him and wrote a congratulatory tweet. Elon does not feel he's in competition, but for some reason, Bezos, you know, Bezos had to like, draft and approve this specific tweet from Blue Origin, and I just thought it was classless and just stupid. Jeff really made you. Looks so bad, Elon. Elon was so fabulous. I mean, it just shows you like what a class act he is and what he cares about, which is like he cares about advancing. Humans and our ability to do things that are incredible and inspiring and when other people do it, he's not 0 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 it, couldn't get his rocket into space. So. So I don't know if that was 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. It's rocket is. I mean, it's chasing now you're doing it. Got a 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 $5 billion. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of people. I mean they're down 46%, which is just shocking in and of itself and this kind of up market. But then to actually quantify it, they lost $5 billion fighting a bunch of self-proclaimed ours. I won't say the word because I don't get cancelled, but they call themselves ours. Odd. Unread redditors. Redditors cost him 5 billion chasing. You can say it there. You're not calling them that. They call themselves that they call themselves that? Yes. Alright, listen. Love you, besties. Sacks, we're 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 my thought on your recovery is no comment. I'm just jealous you're gonna lose another five freaking pounds because, Oh yeah, I'm down to 178, by the way. Come on, stop. Are you really? Yeah. Manorexia. I can't even break one. When? When? When are you gonna stop? Was there a bit or not? No. Bad. Lose that bet. That'd be like me playing sax and chess. It's just like, Jason, what are you tipping the scales at right now? One 91190 and you're about to come to Italy and basically you're going to gain £15 for sure. No, I'm doing one meal a day. One meal a day. That's it. One meal a day. That's it. I'm eating one meal a day. That's my 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 Jake Allen? Italy talking about discipline. OK, so we were there in Italy. When was this Jake? All few years ago. Whatever. This is a long time ago. This is when we were in Venice. Yeah, you were you were with Jade and I was with with Jacqueline and and we went to some ice cream place, right. And so we all had we all had these like. Ice cream Gelato with like 2 scoops or whatever on there. So Jason finishes his in like 5 seconds. It was like just disappear. And then he walks up to Jacqueline and just like goes like like that and and in one fell swoop he ate the the the Gelato off her ice cream. It was like it was like a bulldog. It was like a it was like a bulldog just eating your ice cream. But how good was that fish that we got? Remember that restaurant I found with the rod? Fraud. I mean, we still talk about that place. That's. Yeah, that was like one of the best meals I'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 people. It's a little, it's such a cute. It doesn't feel like there's like a lot of preservatives and stuff in there. It's just, you know, butter and sugar, 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 be incredible. Incredible. I mean, I eat them, I bathe in them. I rub them on my face. What about the mutts? You got the mutts? How's the barada? In the months, I can't believe he's gonna gain 15 pounds. That's gonna break. Look at 100%. We should do a weigh in when we get there and weigh in at the end. That would be the bet. I don't know how you're going to turn down this food. I don't know how you're going to say no to the pasta. You'll have pasta at lunch, pasta dinner. You're just going to you're going to go crazy. I'm going to just have two bites of everything, two bites of six different pastas. And I'll be, by the way, by the way, the, 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 and drink some wine. I think we're gonna play no for a couple of days. How many, how many calories are in the white wine chamath. Calories? I don't. I mean, I have no idea. But, you know, look, the thing in the summertime here is you end up walking. So I end up walking a lot or bicycling a little bit, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, like you're burning through everything. I gotta say, this E bike I got, I got a rad power bike. No, I don't know. The whole point is to not have a motor that powers it, you ******* lazy *******. No, no, you don't understand is because you have the motor in it. Chamath you ride your bike normal. But then, like, let's say you do have dinner or something like that. 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 going to change cities like in a major way. They're already starting to in Europe and in China. But alright everybody, we'll see you next time on the island podcast. Love you, sacks back. Atcha sacks, I hope. I hope you get better. Feel 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. Compute the three of you. It was nice to check off the box for my social interactions for the week. I will now go back down 75 minutes of social interaction, powering down in three to one. More. More. More, more, more. Yes. See you next time. Bye bye. Let your winners ride Rain Man David Sasson. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you. Why? Besties are. That is my dog taking out your driveway. Ohh man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge **** because they're all kinds of useless. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release some out there. B. See what we need to get Murphy's?