what did your doctor give you to make you lose all this weight what is it what is your celebrity doctor giving you tell the truth people people on twitter are like your your twitter account sounding a lot more like jake out and i'm like i think we're on the same diet i think
that's what's going on here [Music] and they've just [Music] hey everybody hey everybody welcome to another episode of the all in pod with us today of course the queen of quinoa and from his castle in italy the cackling uh dictator trim off paulie hoppetea nice gardenias
and back from his big big battle his brawl unblocked and undefeated the rain man himself david sacks and judging by the comments uh i'd say dominant oh you read the comments just another sign of your obsession with how you're perceived rule number one don't read the comments
we're not doing it again it shows because you're not listening to the comments so it makes sense oh okay go ahead and you've got your whole troll army how many people have you hired on your social media team to troll me from anonymous accounts on twitter now to prove your points
now you're paranoid too all right i'm not going to don't be paranoid don't be paranoid anyway we've patched things up don't break the peace we have dayton all right so freeburg is busy uh writing tweet storms now um about the drought in california which seems to be
uh just gonna be a really bad year basically so freeburg walk us through it how bad is california's drought gonna be this year so the drought is already very bad um i put out a lot of tweets at two in the morning last night i think i drank way too much caffeine yesterday i'm in
the mountains and like the only way i can avoid having headaches is like drinking caffeine all day and it was a mistake it kept me up all night you're sure it's not fair maybe you're so excited about this that you so you know the the big tweet storm i put out at two in the morning last night
kind of highlighted that there was a paper published in 2018 2019 that showed how you know north america particularly the western half of north america is in this you know mega drought that we haven't seen in you know 500 plus years and since that paper was published you
know um in 2019 conditions have only worsened i we talked about this a few pods ago but like the snowpack level in california reached zero percent throughout the entire state by june 1st that has never happened before temperatures in british columbia as you
guys know reached over 120 degrees for several days in a row last week which has never been seen in history in british columbia um you know there was a paper published today that estimates that over a billion animals and life forms were wiped out in the coastal region of british columbia
because of this heat wave and the temperatures in in california are obviously excessive as well not as bad as they were last year but what matters most is that the moisture conditions in our forest land is lower than we've ever seen at this time of year
in history and so this all sets us up and and the other kind of big consequence the high temperatures is causing an increased demand for air conditioners that's the big variable in power demand on all grids and the low snowpack means that we're not getting hydroelectric power
hydroelectric power is down by 70 percent in the state of california over where we were in 2019 because there's no snow that's melting causing the rivers to flow and about 11 to 15 of our state's electricity comes from hydroelectric power so we're gonna have more power demand
we have less power available we have extremely dry forests um and so this is setting us up for a number of possible disasters this year and so rather than just trying to sound the alarm bells what i'm pointing out is that there may be some things that we should
be thinking about doing to try and get ahead of some of the consequences of these um these big risks like you know having enough masks for people to breathe outside so we don't have to shut down schools and shut down outdoor work and all the things that might happen having
community centers that have power available the state is scrambling to find excess power on the grid right now but um you know it just highlights that there's a moment here that is almost like where we were going into covid it may not happen but the probability is high enough that something bad may
happen that we should probably start to get prepared for it you know we should probably be talking about the things we're doing to get prepared for it and we're talking about and we should be talking about the things we're going to do to make sure that communities are safe and people are
safe and businesses can keep operating because if the state of california has 150 aqi which is the air quality index workers can't work outside and all the outdoor work which employs three million californians has to shut down and you know you kind of start to add
these things up it's like what are we going to do as this happens not if this happens and we should kind of be planning for it and i don't see much happening in terms of planning and preparation and talking about the opportunity history rhymes because if you remember uh
and this is all going into a recall election in the fall uh this was a different but kind of equivalent setup where you guys remember we were having all these blackouts and brownouts when uh gray davis was recalled and then schwarzenegger just swooped up out of nowhere and
you know people thought ah that there's no chance and people were just frustrated because the quality of life took a measurable step backwards uh in the intervening six or nine months before the recall election and so it'll be really interesting to see how
gavin newsom manages all of this because if he can't get the state's act together and you have all of these issues at hand and a credible candidate emerges um you could have some really interesting political fireworks in september a big part of this correctness from wrong friedeberg is that
we live in essentially like a lot of desert area here in california and we just haven't invested in the desalination plants we have one that's come on since 2005 and i think there's another one in socal that was mothballed and they during the last round wanted to open it
up again but we now have one in carlsbad the uh clawed bud lewis carlsbad desalinization plant that is now i think that cost us a billion bucks but israel correct me if i'm wrong is now they charge three times as much for water than we do so people take water seriously and they actually
monitor their water usage and they have desalinization and they have more water than they need per capita well desal doesn't really solve a number of these problems that i'm highlighting you know the probability of the the forest land on the west coast not just in california
but all up and down the west coast catching on fire is very high no number of desal plants is going to put out those fires when that happens the air quality is going to get really bad you know like we saw last year i don't know you guys remember i escaped to lake
michigan last summer when the the remember yeah and it was um it was insane you know it doesn't desal plants don't solve the air quality problem where people can't work outside your kids can't go to school et cetera et cetera um desal plants don't solve the problem of hydroelectric
plants which require snowpack to melt to get rivers to run to turn those turbines to generate electricity for the state nuclear would solve that though nuclear would solve that certainly and so you know the point is we're kind of reaching this apex of
are we going to do climate change adaptation are we going to have um you know kind of long-term systemic solutions that we're going to start to put in place for these risks that we face and more importantly from an acute perspective in the near term
what are the actions we should be taking to protect communities and get ahead of this problem so it's not a scramble after the crisis which is what we typically do with these sorts of criteria we're not investing in infrastructure if we put in some nuclear power plants if we did more desal
and we did more forest management or put more fire breaks into you know all this i'm talking about the simple solutions like those three things would be massive wouldn't they well those are long-term solutions i'm talking about like for this summer this summer is it even solvable we need
community no but we need to prepare for what is going to happen this summer so when communities get run out what are we going to do you know do we have community centers set up where people can get water and power do we have masks available so that outdoor workers can
keep working in the state you know all of these things that we could be doing to get in front of the inevitable consequences of these risks i think are things that we should be actively if you're in california you should order your air purifiers now we ordered six more of these conway ones
that we used last year that were amazing get in there we have the n95 maps we ordered them already and we're gonna put in a power generator which i know not everybody is able to do but you can buy a portable one for as little as three or four hundred bucks i
think now so portable generator in case you lose power stock up on everything else we need those solutions like i think there's gonna be a big kind of power generator push right like distributed power's always been something that's the whole point of
solar you get the solar on your roof you get your own power um but how are you going to keep your ac running when it's 120 degrees outside if you have no power you know that that's kind of a very scary um circumstance of heat waves and it's um it's something that we should have a
real plan around and if i were the governor or if i were kind of california leadership or leadership up and down the west coast you know the western governors i'd probably be running a daily press conference starting now saying let's just get in front of this problem and
talk about what are the risks we're seeing what are the problems they're seeing and what we're doing about it just so people feel reassured because you know scrambling after a crisis doesn't make anyone feel better you know showing that we're prepared and we're taking action to get in front of
this crisis which is not 100 certain but it's a greater than zero percent probability is something that could helpfully kind of reassure and start to put the pieces in place um for the near term by the way just just for those that don't really appreciate how interconnected everything
is the basics the science basics on drought as i learned about them were really really incredible so you think okay well how how is all this stuff connected it turns out that you know as we have warmer and warmer temperatures yeah i didn't know this freeberg you
probably do this but it accelerates soil evaporation and then there's this really terrible feedback loop that starts which is you have drier soil which means you have less vegetation and then as a result you have less what's called evapotranspiration which means there's less regional
precipitation and then this whole thing just starts to spin and spin and spin you have warmer temperatures that results in less snow pack the snow plaque the snowpack melts earlier and we have a situation now in the united states which is just incredible i saw a graph which is
one of soil moisture and it shows basically the western half of the united states is in the first percentile of soil moisture looking back over many many decades so well and then all of that vegetation dries up and then no jason we're well even worse than this we're in a
position where you know we are threatening our own food supply and just just just to put a uh a finer point on this it's not just the western half of the united states that's now suffering from this it's brazil it's the mediterranean and southern europe and it's large parts of
africa you add up all those number of people there are many countries there that are actually self-sufficient which will then no longer be will have to import food that food quality is you know questionable at best in some cases so we're in a really tough position here
and saw it's isn't this all solvable with technology i mean if we just tax people a little more for the water usage if we really invested in the desal plants if we really invested in nuclear we could actually flip this whole thing the same way it's spiraling in the wrong
direction it could spiral in the right direction two things on the water side i've been looking at water investing for a while there's a there's a real problem which is you know when i when i looked at this uh my team found some incredibly interesting opportunities largely it
it evolves around owning water rights right and then basically selling them back to the state and when states get in difficult situations the problem is i think it's politically intolerable for let's just say somebody like me um to own those kinds of waters
yeah i think i think it's i think it's no bueno the the idea then that i had was like well maybe what we should be doing is buying these things and sticking them in a foundation so that we can guarantee water for people in certain states maybe that flies
i'm not so sure that's the government's job that's the government's job but then they're not doing their job but they're incompetent they're unfortunately not uh not as skilled as you'd want them to be on this stuff sax how would you spin this uh out of this death spiral and into abundance
is there a way well i mean the the first thing to realize here is that this is not a black swan event i mean this is entirely foreseeable drought conditions have existed in california for a long time in fact 200 years yeah well and even maybe going back millions of years i
mean geologists have found evidence that you know millions of years ago you would have millions of acres of california burning every year and so drought conditions have existed for a long time has climate change amplified that and made it worse yes but this is entirely foreseeable we
know we're dealing with these conditions and in fact back on his first day in office in 2019 newsom held his very first press conference about this issue on emergency preparedness for fires but the problem is there's been no follow through and so um
news you know to go back to chamas point about the political ramifications here you could have a gray davis like situation with the recall where all of a sudden newsome goes from being the favorite to potentially losing because of fire season um but by the way i mean the whole reason why
the the recall election is happening in september now instead of october november is because newsom is precisely worried about the gray davis scenario and there this recall is supposed to happen in the october november time frame they've moved it up to september because
newsome thinks there's a higher chance of fading the worst of fire season by doing the election sooner the problem for him is that fire season now starts in august and so we could be in the middle of fire season when this recall election happens and this thing could boom rang on him but
back to the point about you know newsome held this press conference back in in january of 2019 and the problem is there hasn't been any real follow through on forest management so you know newsome was recently caught in a lie saying that you know they had basically
treated 90 000 acres this is what this uh article i'll put in the chat said in reality that only really treated about 11 000 acres even 90 000 would be inadequate right they're not doing enough and the way um you know i talked to a very prominent person who knows
california politics well and knows all the players and what he said is look the fundamental problem is that gavin is not operational right he's fantastic at fundraising he says all the right things at press conferences but but not everything is about running for reelection
and the problem is he has not managed to this outcome and and so now we're in the situation where to freebird's point we're going to be scrambling after the fact now what is newsome's excuse going to be it's going to be you know climate change it's going to be global warming
it's kind of the all-purpose dog ate my homework excuse for anything that goes wrong as eakin is blaming on climate change but the reality is we knew about climate change climate change something we have to live with even if we stop it in its tracks from this point forward
we're not going to be able to reverse the effects it's already had and so we need leaders who will step up and and get much more aggressive about preventing this problem i think my and by the way my tweet i didn't mention climate change at all i got you know i don't think that that's
even the point the point is we are facing acute conditions on the in the western half of the united a number of st and severe consequences those acute conditions you know you could blame them on climate change and say that they're part of climate change it doesn't change the
reality they are here today and we have to deal with them um and i think yeah we have a we have a couple of things that are that are uh going to happen here in short order that i think can make this thing accelerated a little so there's a uh an organization a a department in the
united states government that's not very well known called the u.s bureau of reclamation usbr and they are the ones that will make formal assessments of water levels and there's a really important assessment that's going to happen in lake mead at the end of this year and the reason
why it's critical is that if the u.s bureau of reclamation measures lake mead under um a certain threshold they can declare a tier one shortage and what that means just practically speaking cutting through all the you know jargon is that initially the
state of arizona will be denied around 600 000 acre feet of water next year what does that mean that's about 15 of the demand for that state and so you're going to start you know to deal with these sort of like rolling i don't know what we're even going to call these water out
scenarios where uh it's not just about watering your lawn that's not going to be possible it's going to be a whole bunch of other things now there is a solution and this is where california can come to the rescue for most of the western united states if they really want to
or at least for the rest of california which is there is an enormous untapped groundwater uh aquifer in southern california which is the size of lake mead um it's an incredibly unique thing it's actually owned by a public company and the whole goal was okay well let's
just build a pipeline right from the aquifier to deliver drinking water to folks that you know are lacking water and this has been a multi-year you know bordering on multi-decade slog because of california politicians because water has become highly politicized no one
wants to pay the full cost for a commodity that they frankly view as a right but then they don't want to step in to do the work to actually make it reasonable and viable so this whole thing is just again that david as you said the dog ate my homework and now we're really playing
with some very complicated things that are really out of the control and intellectual capacity of the of frankly state governments which is the interconnectedness of weather temperature water our soil our food supply it's uh i think what's so frustrating about this is this is so easily
stoppable and we are not doing the blocking and tackling the free throws the basic things if you look at just monitoring our water usage i invested in two companies one of them didn't work out but both of them were to monitor water usage and what we learned was at a
campus like stanford they have like four water meters like they're not going down to the building level in some cases there'll be like four buildings on one water meter and you can very easily at each sink at each you know shower head you can put a device that cost
25 bucks installed it just wraps around the the the water the the the pipe and it could tell you how it's flowing and we lose 20 30 percent of our water to leaks nobody is monitoring their usage because there is no cost to it to chamat's point and then you look at these crazy
insane almond and other uh agriculture in the the middle of california they are using flood irrigation which i'm sure friedberg can give us an education at versus what you know the trip irrigation that they use and other reclaiming methods in israel and other places
so we look at water as like to chamots point some crazy god-given right that we can just splash it everywhere we can take 20-minute showers and then we allow how crazy is this we allow the bottling of water in california we allow these companies to bottle water and then sell it
and we don't even monitor our usage we have well we are so entitled it is gross nuisance biggest donors uh who who's that family that grows all the almonds or whatever whoever they are the resnicks the resnicks single biggest do them in the teachers unions oh linda
resnick and those palm people with the palm stuff it's total political corruption right i mean they get it's chinatown it's literally the movie chinatown yeah well i think so to this point about why aren't politicians solving the problems i mean to make a meta point
there's a great tweet from thomas soul or the person who manages the thomas soul account where he said no one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems they're trying to solve their own problems which are getting elected
and re-elected that's number one number one stay in office that is their right goal three is far behind and and that that's basically the situation we have is i think newsome actually is a little bit like trump not in his personal style but in that he thinks he can talk his way
out of problems and he's not going to focus on solving a problem when he can just spin his way out of it by the way i just think you guys should know the you know because a lot of people talk about residential water use that is also kind of an acute and local problem
where depending on your water supply how much water you have available to your community but in terms of aggregate water use the vast majority of water in california is used in agriculture it's about 10x what is used for residential applications so california agriculture
by the way it's not a bad thing it's a huge part of our economy uh that water has generally been fully available in aquifers people bought that land with rights they paid a premium for those rights to those aquifers this is a very complicated problem uh in california and that
you know supports a large part of the california economy so you know you can't just kind of blow them away but 90 of water use in california is associated with ag and it's not just a generally we need to save water problem it's very specific to a region and a
community and their particular water source on whether and how much you need to save versus do you have abundant supplies and so on um and so it's it's a little bit more complicated but yeah but we should be focused on abundance freeburg if if you look at the new nuclear power plants
that you know bill gates has invested in and then you look at desalinization which is an energy issue we can desalinize for roughly two or three times the cost that we're getting more water for now so just put a nuclear power plant next to a desalination plant and you're done
great that's a 20-year project and you've got why is it a 20-year project china does it in two you're going to need to be more bold in this country it is completely ridiculous that we accept that everything has to take 20 years we need this now where's the leadership that says [ __ ] it
let's do it immediately let's set a goal of two years to build 10 of these spend the [ __ ] money i'm not sure it solves our acute problems it solves long-term problems associated with climate change and energy we can't do both we can't do both let's do both sure we
should do everything but right now the you know the the conditions indicate that there are some specific things that we can and should be doing to kind of support the state in terms of what's going to happen in the next year or two and yes we should also be funding
long-term projects that create water security and energy security for everyone in the united states but sac to your point and by the way if you guys ever want to read an interesting book about how the grid operates um there's a book called the grid uh and it talks about how the electrical
uh power grid system was built in the united states and how inefficient it is and all the problems there are a lot of structural problems that need to be solved not just you know dropping in cheap power saks who is the good operational candidate that you've seen that's
running for governor of california in this recall is there someone that stands out in your mind because i i don't seem to hear anyone talking about hey there's a good alternative to gavin newsom at this point yeah i mean we don't a clear alternative has not emerged yet
um you know i guess the and part of the problem is that because there was no republican primary you haven't sort of consolidated the opposition to a leading candidate there are a couple of i guess interesting candidates on the republican side i need to spend more time getting to
you know know them i mean i have never met them or talked to them but the the two who are i think mentioned quite a bit are uh this guy falconer who's the mayor of san diego who is sort of a socially liberal republican and then there's a state assemblyman named kevin kiley
who who i think says a lot of interesting things and he just announced he's running there's another guy as well john cox but he got trounced by news in the last election i think it's time to let somebody else take a shot against him and then of course you've got caitlyn jenner but i
think people are still trying to figure out if her campaign is real or how real it is um so yeah look we the the opposition has not consolidated against newsome the way it did with schwarzenegger you know back in 2001. i'm voting i'm voting republican just to
create a counterbalance i don't care who it is and i'm not a republican i'm an independent but i'm voting across the board i'm just going to go to republican for every position in california and i'm going to just run my finger down and check every single one how does it feel to be a radical trump
supporter listen talk to us about nuclear and what we can do to get to reverse what these hippie dippy well-intentioned no nukes concert set us back 50 years and let's be honest a lot of the climate change problems we have today we would not have if we had
invested in nuclear yeah i i said theory well i sent her on an image uh nick maybe you can stick it in the show notes or something so that people can see but if you if you look at if you graph the construction of nuclear reactors from the 1960s 1960s to today essentially what and you
color code them by country what essentially you see is uh a transition from the able from the frankly from countries that basically were just right at the that leading the pack and it was really the united states building building building and then two things really happened there was three
mile island and then there was chernobyl and there was an incredible over reaction to not really understanding either the cause and or the remediation to two events now could you imagine if there were two airlines that crashed and we stopped flying how basically we would have you know
[ __ ] the progress of the world and now you impose it on something like nuclear energy which is consistently proven to provide an enormous the abundant cheap and clean form of sustainable energy and it actually solves a bunch of the problems we talked about before so for example
if you look at the power consumption for desalination it's off the charts quite honestly okay that's why people say that it can't be done credibly if you look at even just like the amount of energy that's required to clean water and to you know sanitize water and
make it drinkable the the the standards that are defined by the government are incredibly stringent but the the implication of it operationally is an enormous amount of power that goes into it but jason you are right which is that if we have small forms of sustainable abundant energy
that can be basically hyper localized and located where we can do these jobs the jobs to be done it's transformational now why doesn't it happen it doesn't happen because the same folks who really want to sound the alarm bells on climate change which is the
progressive left are not really willing they are intellectually lazy when it comes to nuclear they don't do the work they make a br bland sort of broad-based prognostication about how we need to do something about climate then they will point to solar and wind
without really understanding the contamination of the earth that we do in order to mine the rare earths and the actual metal and mineral inputs that are required for solar it's yes nuts but it sounds better right it sounds better it sounds better oh we're using air in the
sun and it's like if i could show you what what tailings are and like the dirty after effects of mining copper and nickel out of the ground which is what we need for batteries and how countries like indonesia are literally dumping it into the ocean dumping it faster that they can get
their hands on it so that they can sell copper and nickel and cobalt um to us so that we can make batteries you would actually say to yourself if you knew all these facts you'd actually say to yourself you know what maybe nuclear isn't so bad and maybe i overreacted to
it you want to understand this you just have to look at the laziest group of individuals and society the french they want to take the laziest route and do the least amount of work and have the most amount of leisure sorry to our french listeners 70 percent of the energy in france is
from nuclear they figured this out they said how do we take more time off and not work and have unlimited elections 70 percent nuclear they're so smart well the the the french are actually smart because after fukushima because after fukushima what happened is if you had
you know sort of like woke politicians germany a bunch of germany they completely unwound their entire nuclear agency which which was insanity insanity and so now here they are they're writing laws faster than they can make them up they're basically pivoting entire
industries to try to now adopt batteries and storage without any real understanding about the downstream implications to the earth that they are going to create the net consequences if they had just stayed the course on nuclear they would be in a much better place and
and to france's credit they were like what the [ __ ] are you people overreacting about again just think about this guys we stopped flying after two airline crashes where would the world be where would the world be i mean be pragmatists here do we want to deal with high energy prices
and brownouts and all kinds of problems and rolling blackouts or do we want to put this issue behind us if we just go on a manhattan project literally to make new nuclear we would be this issue would be behind us and we could focus on something else like education it's so dumb the
very scary thing about nuclear is despite all of the progress it will get bogged down in litigation and bureaucracy these are the last two things that should be in front of science and physics especially when it comes to energy independence i just think it's it's freeberg any way out
any way we can get people to what's the best way to convince the american public to embrace nuclear and force our politicians to do it open your mind and think for yourself right please well uh marc andreessen had a good term uh he said we're living in a vitocracy
as in the word veto um i think he it was an interesting interview with um antonio garcia martinez on his blog anyway um yeah they were talking about the inability of the us to build anything anymore especially when you compare us to some you know place like china
and you whether you want to call it nimbyism or vitocracy there are just too many people in groups who have the right to say no to anything and block anything important from happening but we got us we got to stop letting our politicians off the hook by making excuses you know just because
there's climate change doesn't mean that the politicians can't do anything about it i mean welcome to the downstream consequences of a successful democracy right like a democracy over time doesn't reduce the number of laws it has every year politicians need to do their
job and they create new laws as new laws accumulate like things get clogged up right like when have you seen a law that gets passed by a local government a state government or federal government that makes it easier to do something i get that but where where does it say in
the constitution of the united states that being part of a democracy also means shutting your brain off and becoming a dumb cynic yeah that's that's not part of what being part of a democracy is i by the way i wanna i wanna talk about that for one second there was this thing
that i sent you guys in the chat and nick hopefully you post post that in the show notes as well but there was a study that was done about cynicism and it went back and it did like a qualitative assessment of more than 200 000 people and their attitudes and
their measured iq their measured literacy their measured numeracy and their measured earnings and here's what they found cynicism is associated with lower iq lower literacy lower numeracy and lower earnings the idea of cynical individuals being more competent appears to be a widespread yet largely
illusory lie so i think yeah i think this makes sense i mean i i was shocked by that study because i actually generally think cynical people must be smarter because they're thinking more rationally and maybe i'm being emotional it turns out they're [ __ ] stupid well
here's the thing there's cynicism and then there's people who are cantankerous and not content and i think people sometimes conflate those two things if you look at the constant constant pervasive cynicism is not a feature of democracy it means that you
just stop thinking for yourself as a protective mechanism right but but the people we know uh who have changed the world and who they seem to be they're not cynical they're not cynical they're actually delusional and optimistic or they wouldn't have started a company to make electric cars
you know or you know whatever piece of software or climate.com or synthetic biology you have to be a radical optimist i mean and we're literally trying to attack our incredible capitalists who are actually solving these problems while our politicians can't get their
[ __ ] together and make desal plants and nuclear plants the private market seems like the only solution sacks well there's an old saying that uh pessimists get to be right and optimists get to be rich and uh yeah i mean if you think about it if you
think about it you know pessimists don't create companies right they're they're no they throw rocks they become journalists they become shitty posters on twitter they become critics yeah anton ego right sax what do you think about this idea that uh you know if we get into the throes of it
uh for water the folks that own water rights i think that this is going to be like an eminent domain issue where the government is at some point just going to say sorry i need it back it's mine yeah during an emergency for sure for sure but i mean i i i i hate to
i hate to use the words um i agree with j-cal but but you know look there's not a shortage of water in the world right i mean the world is mostly water so it is a function of building desalination plants if that's what we need there has to be a solution for that
problem and freeberg's right that maybe it does take a decade or two to put in all place all that infrastructure but then why didn't we start 10 years ago you see we should be starting a program where we convinced the american public that abundance would lead to them having more freedom and our country
being stronger electrical abundance with nuclear water abundance with desalinization and agricultural abundance with those previous two because if you had unlimited nuclear energy and you had unlimited clean water the price of agriculture would go down and we'd
have more free food for everybody or lower cost food i'll tell you i'll tell you a theory i have on this um and it's basically an anti-science theory which is that um you know culturally we've kind of developed this anti-innovation anti-science mentality broadly speaking across
uh kind of modern culture in the united states if you remember coming out of world war ii and i think it has its roots in the cold war um you know out of when world war ii ended you know we were all in it together you know this country everyone bought the same stuff we all had rice krispies
every day we all kind of you know we're excited about our our homes that look like everyone else's home on the block and technology was empowering all of this right there was a space race on um there were plastics that were suddenly allowing us to make all sorts
of amazing things there were chemicals that were creating new drugs for humans and new applications for agriculture that was making an abundance of food and increasing lifespans and so on but then what happened in the late 60s and 70s is we realized we got ahead of ourselves
and um you know there was uh cancer from ddt there was uh you know three mile island there was um a number of um pollutants that got into the environment that permanently damaged the environment from chemical companies and we started to wake up and say like wait a second
all of this technology that we thought was so great and was giving us this extraordinary abundance it turns out it's really risky and can cause massive unknown consequences and if you watch i think i talked about this in our podcast once but one of my favorite videos to watch there's a
video on youtube from the disney channel history institute and they show the history of tomorrowland at disneyland when tomorrowland opened in 1955 every ride was all about adventuring into space and like traveling into the human body and they even had a ride from monsanto where you
would go into the micro world and look at plastics and stuff and it was all about this amazing abundance and technology and the guy the narrator on the video says beginning in the late 60s early 70s we changed all the rides and the rides all became about the fear
of technology it was all about aliens attacking earth it was all about um captain eo was like you know the world became robotic and got taken over by unnatural things even star tours was about a robot that went awry and the robot doesn't know what it's doing so it drove us off
course and we had to survive the robot and so everything became you know subconscious or subliminally a little bit this negative technology sentiment and i think that that still persists you know there is an asymmetry people take for granted the abundance over time
because you get used to it but you feel the acute pain of the loss when technology goes awry and then that becomes the social conscience and i think we're still grappling with that and i i don't know how you reverse it are we not experiencing this right now everybody with kovid
where there's one group of people who are like oh my god the science we were able to deploy in covet and get through this so quickly is so promising that the world's going to be better net net after the pandemic even with all the suffering you could make an argument that that
suffering is going to lead to more prosperity and there's another group of people who are like the delta variant let's get our masks back on uh and people want to take the cynical route on as an individual i don't want harm done to me or my kids or my environment
that's that's the i think the general kind of conscience right and i don't care about the abundance because i've basically taken it for granted and so now i find myself as an individual saying you know what we shouldn't do nuclear because look at what happened in fukushima
forgetting the fact that you've been living off of free electricity practically for decades or whatever the you know the case free water and free water and all these things and i think the the abundance that technology delivers to humans because humans are only programmed to recognize
change they're not programmed to recognize absolutes uh there's a lot of good socio us an example psychological that give us an example like if you know if you go to the store every day and you're used to just getting a one dollar can of coke you don't say oh my god i feel
it's an amazing world i live in i get a one dollar can of coke you never praise that one dollar can of coke now if you went to the store and the can of coke went up to two dollars you'd be like what the heck why does coke cost so much and so um you know so we habituate but
we habituate to the great things about the price of coke dropped to 50 cents you're like okay that feels good and then you get used to the price of coke being 50 cents and a few weeks later if it goes up you're upset but you're not as happy on the other way so
human emotion is kind of asymmetrically you know defined by these negative consequences and i think over time you accumulate these negative consequences as your core psyche and you have an aversion to doing you know innovative things as a whole not all people but as a whole that's how we
operate um and it's why technology kind of gets land-based over over time this is the most frustrating thing to me chamoth is that we have so many amazing things happening in technology and nobody will 10x or 100x on them from the uh government perspective or the public i had
a company called zero mass on my podcast which i think is now called source and you're aware of this company maybe you could talk a little bit about the impact hydro panels would make if we just embrace this technology well i mean source is an incredible incredible company
um basically there's a there's a guy who runs a cody friesen who when he was at mit basically um developed a uh essentially a material a membrane that can absorb the ambient um water that's in the atmosphere um and basically allow you to collect it and to separate it into its components
and to basically create potable salinized or potable drinkable water in a panel that looks like a solar panel so you put these solar arrays everywhere and out of the back you put a little pipe and it collects the humidity in the ambient air and and it spits out water it's
it's an incredible thing and he's able to go and rewire schools and and the thing is he can go anywhere because again he doesn't need anything right you literally put it on your roof it's incredible and it makes you if you i think he told me at the time when i interviewed him two
or three years ago he said you could put two of these on your roof and get like four cases of bottled water a day no matter where you were on the planet and by the way he's moving to a place which is really cool he told me this i'm not sure if i'm allowed to say it but
i'll say it anyways are you saying this might be beeped no where he is no he'll have an eventual app where you can kind of direct the hydro panel to make the kind of water that you like so if you love avion or if you love um fiji water or if you love smart water or
you're on the voice right specifically because it's the most expensive i love i love smart water i i i have a very gratuitous reason why i remember when i met jobs he drank smart water and i thought it's good enough for him he's good enough for me i'll tell you when i knew
i just gotta copy people like you gotta copy the good ones and i was just like this is a personal anecdote this is when i knew chamoth made it we used to play poker in his garage in his little 3000 square foot palo alto house in berlin whatever he had this little
tiny house and we're in the garage and he's like look i'm putting up a flat panel i'm going to like paint the walls no we had a little uh you had a little uh easel and you'd write on chalk how much you oh you know then chamat's like i got a new house he's got his new house we come over he's
like jacob you want some water i'm like yeah i'd love a glass he's like oh jay how do you want a bathroom yeah it's like a glass of water and uh he goes oh and he walks over to iraq and in the rack like you know those things you push wine on there's a rack for water and there is
voss in the glass bottles there is avion in glass bottles old and you're not like the avion that you get at the regular supermarket like somebody sourced the avion bottles that restaurants have and then he had the smart one i mean they're sixteen and then like i just
wanted a glass of water but okay i'll take the avion in the glass bottle it was delightful sax i got three different bounce passes i can give you just where you want it do you want cancel culture do you want chesabudan or covet what do you want or covet i can
give you any of these i can i'm ready to pass i'm talking about any of those sound good to me i mean i the the it might be time for a chase update because we haven't done that in a while the killer d.a the killer d.a yeah oh by the way i just want to say i found the journalist
you know the journalist sacks don't say her name and she is setting up her llc and the 60 000 we raised from the gofundme is going to go to her to cover the da's office for the next six to twelve months in a newsletter website right and just
to be clear because i think people kind of misinterpreted what you're trying to do there with the gofundme jcal yes this is not for opposition research this is not no this is not digging up dirt this is reporting on uh on public policy on what should be public facts with respect to
what the da's office is doing how chase is performing in his job isn't it interesting though how the left journalist when i hired an investigative journalist to cover criminal justice accused me of hiring an oppo researcher and these are investigative journalists and i told them explicitly
i'm just hiring an investigative journalist to cover crime in san francisco there's no oppo research here and they insisted on saying i wanted to get into chess's personal life and i explicitly said that's not what this is for well let's face it there aren't too many
journalists anymore who are investigative who are actually in the business of turning up new facts about elected officials they're too busy pushing a narrative they're engaged in agenda journalism and actually we saw a really good example just to tie into
to what's happened what happened over the past week is you had this story in the san francisco chronicle which is basically pure propaganda uh from you could see the the um the passing from chaser to this reporter of this this farcical uh claim that crime is falling in san francisco
uh i mean this claim is so preposterous we this is the same week we saw viral videos of 10 robbers bursting out of neiman marcus you know with with every handwriting yeah exactly and so you know plus you had the vibe it's scary yeah you had the viral video of the the guy going into
cvs and just you know it wasn't even shoplifting it was did you see brian sugar's uh video of the person who broke into his house stole his kids ipads and everything while they were in the house right and cyan banister who had another home invasion just tweeted home invasions are now
um not prosecutable crimes in san francisco well no what they're doing is what cyan reported about her case is and by the way her case is in the public eye okay so it's very brazen for the d.a to be doing this but what they did is they dropped the home invasion charges
and they're just treating it as basically a a theft of you know a few hundred dollars you know that does not capture the violation of breaking into someone's house and how dangerous that is but i originally i thought okay why is the da's office doing this originally i
thought well maybe it's just because you know chase doesn't want to incarcerate anybody but it's more than that you see if they drop the charges down to petty larceny then he can include it in a different stat you see home burglaries are up by some gargantuan amount like 50
year-over-year they want to be able to claim crime is falling it's now they're juking the stats by reducing the charges from the more serious crime to the less serious crime and then what they do they're shaping the stats they're juking the stats you ever watch the the show the wire
that's where this expression comes from is you know first the the politicians get held held accountable to the statistics then they realize that then they start manipulating the facts and that's what's basically so dirty it's so dirty but but the next step in the process
is they then feed these juke stats to these compliant reporters i mean the fact that they keep repeating these statistics as going down when people are stopping reporting crimes because they won't prosecute them right then they mischaracterize them and then they never say 85
of the commuters coming into san francisco are no longer coming into san francisco and target announced like walgreens that they are either closing stores or reducing the hours because they can't deal with the crime and they're saying explicitly this is the highest crime we've ever
seen in any of our stores and then this crazy communist are they communists on the left here cvs walgreens and target are all closing stores or reducing store hours because they understand the hit to their bottom line but you have this mantra it is it is communist like where it's
like the commandments written on the barn in animal farm where it is propaganda that's so at odds with reality it's just absurd okay it's farcical it's farcical but then how do they enforce it what they say is anybody who questions this narrative is a bad person
is in fact a clan a racist and a klansman so so this is the other thing that happened over the past week is that you had this is crazy but basically michelle tandler who is a moderate and as nice a person as you could ever find concerned citizen concerned citizen san francisco
born and raised yes who tweeted that all of her friends are thinking about leaving the city and then in response to that you had this this senior policy advisor to chase abu dean who works for the da's office named uh kate chatfield attacker basically implying her views
were you know were kkk values for for for having the audacity to warn that people are worried about crime in san francisco so she gets attacked by the way uh this this chatfield person the top of her profile is the clenched fist of the communist revolution jkl so this
is who's running the da's office but but look it's not just trolling and it's not even just slander it's i think an abuse of power for someone in the da's office to go after and attack a concerned citizen like this okay but this is how they enforce can you
read the tweet that she did you have that there because she basically is the people who have experienced home invasions are concerned for the safety of their families and what this uh woman did michelle i believe is her name she just said like people are scared for their families and then
kate chatfield referenced birth of a nation and compared her to oh our wives are not safe because of black people and that's a kkk everybody knows everybody understands the representation yeah the original name of birth donation i think was the clansmen yeah yeah it's like a kkk piece of
propaganda wow but it's really outrageous she just blocked me kate chatfield blocked me wow this is a public policy advisor who is now hiding her account well why i mean a public official should not do that i mean they should and so this set you off let's be let's
be honest i know michelle taylor she worked at yammer you know and i didn't i thought it was out of bounds for uh not just a public official but someone in the da's pro office who what did you do well you went into revenge mode let's be honest you got a little bit you were a little
bit tweaked i donated another fifty thousand dollars to the recall chasing campaign and you dedicated it to kate yeah you said this is for you yeah because look this is threatening every american should have the right to criticize their government without having its law enforcement arm
come down on them and so here you have a legitimate concern expressed by a private citizen and the da's office is coming down on them that's not acceptable i think i need to break some news here i didn't want to talk about this publicly but i'm so outraged now that i think i
should let this out so while i after the we in the weeks after i started that campaign to hire an investigative journalist for chess's office this is breaking news i haven't talked about this publicly but i'm gonna break it now do you know who contacted me
the da's office you know what they contacted me about they were investigating a startup that i had invested in i won't say which one and they wanted to interview me about my involvement with that startup because that startup uh had some complaint from a downstream investor who
felt that they were committing some type of fraud or problem coincidence are are you serious i'm serious this is literally becoming chinatown they literally tried to intimidate me and i didn't want to bring it up and i talked to the person on the phone the
the the person from the da's office who was investigating this and he's i was like do i need an attorney for this why are you calling me because and he's like well you know we just want to talk to you about this and i was like yeah no like we have a bunch of questions and
i just said you know what uh subpoena me i'm not you know file something and i'll come in with my attorney to talk to you but i'm not gonna talk with you on background no so they literally tried to intimidate me you know what and i kind of let them because i didn't want to make it public
but i'm making it public now you should make it public because it's public now we'll begin and this is two weeks after i said let's hire the journalist it's intimidation tactics that's intimidation i will not be intimidated chessa all right but what you can see here is okay
look i mean i was intimidated now that i think about it like i didn't do anything wrong here i put 50k i put 50 or 100k into a company that didn't work out and now some other investors complaining and they're trying to tie it back to me somehow but jason did you
of course you're going to be intimidated the chief law enforcement officer of san francisco is basically trying to make you the target of an investigation because of what you said publicly of course that is intimidation guys isn't it possible that they're just
interviewing you about a fraud claim i mean like what this could wait hold on but think about the timing free bird it's two or three weeks like three weeks a police officer drove past my house last night yeah free bird okay wait it's the first and only time i've ever been contacted by a
law enforcement officer over an investment i'm sure it's just a coincidence stop committing fraud 350 investments yeah listen chasa has not had time he's almost two years in office now and he has not had time to successfully prosecute one murder trial
not one but his office has time to run down whatever they're trying to run down with jake out they don't have time to prosecute the the home invader who broke into cyan banister's home or brian's or brian's they don't have time to do that but they somehow have time to contact jake out
he tweeted the video let me explain what's going on here there's two things going on i think one of which is becoming very well understood but the other one is not the first one is the gothamization of san francisco we understand that crime is out of control
cynicism and resignation people are just kind of given into it it feels like san francisco has become gotham city these viral videos of the robbers brazenly committing daylight theft they're beating up ups drivers in the street they're beating a ups driver because there is no consequence okay but
there's a second thing happening which is the orwellianization of san francisco government and san francisco politics you not only have the crime you've got the brazen lies about the crime you've got this insistence on this animal farm commandment that crime is falling and if you
question it you are a black person and you're a klansman and then they get their the you know the kate chat feels to push this out and then they get academics to back this up okay there are now they get their friends in the media and in the academy to give these spurious claims credence
and then the final step is that the rich virtue signalers pay these people off they pay the protection money who's paying off the dustin moskovitz's the mike kriegers the reed hastings and you know even actually the biggest contributor to chaser right now is a guy who's under
sec indictment for the ripple scandal oh no yeah chris chris yes exactly so people who need to curry favor either because they're they've got their own problems or they just like to virtue chris laurel chris larson is chess's biggest campaign oh wow that is dark
brian sugar released the video and that person's not going to be prosecuted i mean that is the crazy part you get somebody on camera and they won't prosecuted them and people forget these are organized gangs that are doing this this has been proven this is not a poverty issue
these are not poor people who are stealing bread for their families or trying to make their rent it's organized gangs right did you realize that 47. did you see the getaway cars for the nema marcus heist yeah they're all like the mercedes they're driving great
beautiful cars with their license plates off this is like mob behavior and if you give criminals trust me i grew up in a criminal environment in brooklyn if you give criminals a window they will figure it out you give them an opportunity if you give them something to hack
they will hack it period and you basically have green light of them okay listen it's enough of us complaining about this uh i am going to stop complaining about this and i'm moving either let's do this i'm moving to texas or to florida i'm making the announcement now
hold on is that for sure jkl listen i you know i'm in a partnership and my partner doesn't want to be here anymore and i'm half and half so i'm not sure why i'm here anymore i mean i think california's my position right now is california is going to be on a decade-long slide and
i'm working for 10 more years i decided i'm 50 i decided i'm going to go to 60 i'm going to try to invest in 100 to 200 companies a year for 10 years and then i'm done so why would i spend 10 years in a place that is on a death spiral can this be reversed in our in the next
decade how does it feel how does it feel to be completely red-pilled i'm purple pills i want to live in a pear i want to live in a reasonable place and it seems to me that austin and miami are purple you know and they're not communi i don't want to live in a right-wing place
alt-right and i don't want to live in a communist place i want to live in an american place i want to live in a place where americans can talk about issues without being villainized period that's that's what people feel about this pod you're not being villainized just give
me a break all right just be you people really want to know if you went to dinner with tucker can you just make that statement that you didn't have dinner with jacob what do we got next you just made what have we got it was a joke why can't you admit if you did or not
listen i have 15 minutes we gotta go covid uh delta people are panicking but the numbers keep going straight down pfizer says israel says maybe pfizer is 65 instead of 94 65 seems pretty great we at any risk well okay let me jump into this because i've been affected personally by it
um so yeah on the last pod i did i get to give the stat which was that um at that point that the best data we had even a week ago was that the the pfizer vaccine was holding it pretty well against the um delta variant it had reduced the effectiveness from about 95 to 88
that's sort of the numbers i think uh on monday israel released a new study showing that the effectiveness of pfizer against delta had been reduced to 64 now it that's against you know getting symptoms and testing positive it was still 93 against serious cases requiring hospitalization
but that 93 is down from you know 99 plus so there has been reduced effectiveness by delta it's um it is a little bit concerning and as if to underscore this point someone very close to me ju who was double backs with pfizer just test a positive he did test positive yes
so he he woke up yesterday morning with um with cold symptoms he had um sore throat runny nose but he's fine and a slight fever which then graduated into a headache he went and got tested and he tested positive for covet so i think he's fine what city was he in when this happened
l.a okay let me ask a question to friedberg is it not the best possible situation i know this sounds like a stupid question but i am the lowest iq guy on the pod is it not the best situation to have the pfizer or whatever have this amazing then to get a mild case of kovid and
then be doubly protected is that in some way an ideal situation if there is no long-haul covid it's not really clear if that's going to make a difference you know again like remember acquired immunity uh is on a spectrum right so a virus can get in your nose starts
replicating and if you've got a ton of antibodies that immediately get to your nose it'll shut down that virus before you experience anything if that virus gets in your nose and starts replicating and you've got a kind of you know your antibodies to that specific virus
um you know aren't as concentrated it's going to take your body a little bit longer to fight off that virus but you're still well ahead of the game as a way to think about it and so you know to some extent what we're seeing most likely is this delta variant um having a greater escape velocity from
people that have been vaccinated than you know the alpha variant or any of the other variants we've seen um and so as a result you know people are getting to date luckily knock on wood mostly mild and moderate symptoms and only a minority of people uh that are exposed are getting um you know
that condition but it's being tracked really closely i mean like like zach said in israel they have now said that you know if you're uh vaccinated with fizer double backed with pfizer you're now 64 um you know effective and you're you know that that means that
if you're exposed to covid there's a chance you can actually get these symptoms but the hospitalization rate and the fatality rate is still way way low because you have built up enough immunity you've built up enough antibodies to have a good strong defense to keep
things from getting out of control and so knock on wood right now we're still looking good in terms of fatality and hospitalizations but there's certainly you know what do you think of this situation and jamaat are markets kind of worrying about this because i'm kind of
wondering like as as market participants see this stuff are they trading it in a way that's like fearful and does this lead to some market conditions in the next couple days and weeks i mean i think that there's a very good chance that um some politicians are going to try to use
this uh for another shutdown in the fall i thought yeah i think you're right and i think the teachers unions the nea and the aft are already putting all sorts of demands on going back to school i don't think this date so first of all i think we have to be intellectually
honest that this is a bad data point this is really the first bad data point that we've gotten until now all the data's been good the protection from the vaccines last longer it had been completely holding up against the variants but this data point from israel is not a
great data point i want to see more of them uh more data yeah but i don't think that um this by itself wait a second didn't israel only get to like 55 60 vaccinated oh no they're they're way higher no no they're way higher than that yeah half of the infections they're seeing in
israel are children that were not vaccinated and then the the other hats are the other half are adults um and so if you look at the adult infection rate it looks like it's something around um 15 percent uh of uh you know these k or yeah i i forgot the number but there's some
uh statistic that shows that it's not uh the majority being vaccinated that there are unvaccinated people that are uh look we're gonna probably we're gonna probably need a booster and we're probably going to be on a cocktail but beyond that i think we need to make
a moral decision that we are all getting back to life as normal yeah 100 i'm done i'm not there there will be both there will be boosters for sure right like this fall yeah yeah exactly and i think the the the question about this this data is does it warrant a change in
policy and i would say not yet you know 100 not yet i mean we the whole policy idea was icus being filled and if you look at the stats in the united states at the debts we are now at a seven day average of under 200 i think it's 150 debts per day some again i'll ask you free break how
many of those are with covid versus from kovacs yeah it's unclear but like israel hasn't had a single death in two weeks from covet right so what are we talking about despite this increase in numbers it's it's still uh right it's not it's not what the media likes to portray
which is variants punching through right i mean it's not like delta varian is just sweeping through israel okay there is a slight increase in cases and we're definitely seeing elevated cases here in the u.s i mean delta variance can become the main
the dominant strain if it isn't already look it's mostly sweeping through areas that have not been vaccinated but there are now cases i'd say mostly mild cases of people who have been vaccinated i mean i think it's all the more reason why if you're an adult you should get
vaccinated we really do need all adults barring some sort of um you know highly specific immune condition that where you you need to be on some sort of different treatment but almost all adults in the us really should get me vaccinated otherwise we're going to have keep
having these variants sweep through i'll tell you i had a really good conversation with an infectious disease doctor yesterday who's a research specialist and well-known in this space and he pointed out that the evolutionary cycle of this virus is a function of how many people are not
vaccinated because the more bodies the virus has to hop the faster the more evolution it can get the more it evolves right yes and so um you know certain virologists and epidemiologists will model this where they will highlight kind of the epi the evolutionary rate of the virus as a
function of unvaccinated people getting infected every day and so the more people that we get vaccinated the longer the timeline it takes for the virus to evolve and get to a breakthrough variant and so we need to accelerate and continue to push people to get vaccinated worldwide
to reduce the available pool for evolutionary um success of the virus yeah it's it's to put it in maybe layman's terms all these unvaccinated people are basically like a giant petri dish for the virus to keep to keep mutating and we do need i think like a marshall
plan to help all these other countries get vaccinated i mean i think we have enough vaccines in the u.s but what have we done to help all these other countries it directly benefits us if we reduce the size of that petri dish this delta variant came from india why
there's like a billion plus people there who you know for the virus to mutate on i mean obviously with the petri dish that big you're going to get a variant now there's a new variant coming out of peru which looks potentially scary now these are not full breakthrough variants
yet but to freeberg's point is just a matter of time you guys want to guess the bottom two states in the country i mean it's just mississippi in terms of mississippi and alabama alabama exactly can you imagine mississippi and alabama 33 come on get your act together
what is it i mean it's going to whip through those places and you're all going to die you're going to kill your grandparents is that an evangelical movement issue is that it's it's it's well we talked about this the last pod there's two groups in america who are most republican men oh no let's be more
specific it's evangelicals and african-americans those are the two groups who are most you keep saying you keep saying and then what does how do you pronounce it eventually evangelicals it's actually male republicans why can't no that's you're not being specific enough yeah
guys i gotta i got i gotta run love you free bird love you guys we love you free see you later love you big boy let your winners ride rain man david sack and it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] besties [Music] we need to get back