E40
E40: A Bestie gets COVID, Delta breakthrough, Billionaire Space Race & more
2021-07-16 spoken.md · speaker-labeled ▶ watch ← E39 all episodes E41 →
5
ideas born
8
ideas moved
15
captures · 4 voices
3
dissenting
+186.3
conviction added
-74.1
decay · 66 silent
Every number here is replayed from score_events — the same ledger the pool ranks on. Decay is what the 66 ideas nobody mentioned gave up this week; it applies only when an episode is processed.
Tier crossings
conviction thresholds crossed by this episode — 65 / 45 / 15 · ideas born here show where they landed. why 65 isn't always green
▲ +48.4
📈 Boosters become routine — recurring revenue for the mRNA vaccine makers
born at
watch
48.4
▼ -18.7
🌍 Delta is not the last one — more variants this fall, a tough winter
green threshold
→
watch
66.5 → 47.8
Kill dates that landed since E39
0 hit · 0 partial · 2 miss — windows that closed after 2021-07-09 and up to 2021-07-16, auto-scored against price data and never hand-set. verdict · R · α
| idea | verdict | R | α | closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 📈 Facebook short: ad boycott + political-ad ban | MISS | -46.6% | -87.0 | 2021-07-11 |
| 📈 Point-of-care antigen testing scales — BD wins | MISS | -1.6% | -42.0 | 2021-07-11 |
Who moved the board
each voice's force on conviction this episode — supports and opposes, weighted exactly as the replay applied them · share = % of this episode's movement
What got argued (8 ideas)
ordered by how hard each idea moved · quotes are verbatim from the transcript, timestamps deep-link into the episode
NEW
▲ IRDM
🤖 Pervasive satellite internet covers the whole earth within five years
closed 18
▲ +64.1
0.0 → 64.1
LEO constellations (Starlink, Swarm and competitors) make broadband available on every square inch of the planet inside five years, bringing one to two billion new users online.
plays
IRDM ·primary
GSAT
VSAT
evals 2026-07-16
The two most important companies in satellite communications are Starlink and Swarm. And Swarm was a company that I seeded and Sacks did the Series A. ... And I think that within the next five years, we'll probably have pervasive Internet access everywhere in the earth. And that's transformational.
NEW
▲ MRNA
📈 Boosters become routine — recurring revenue for the mRNA vaccine makers
closed 36
▲ +48.4
0.0 → 48.4
Waning antibody titers plus Delta breakthroughs make a third shot inevitable, hitting the market within a month and settling into a roughly six-month booster cadence — a recurring, not one-off, vaccine market.
plays
MRNA ·primary
BNTX
PFE
evals 2022-01-16
if you put a different RNA strain, RNA sequence into your body, which Moderna and Pfizer have slightly different sequences, you end up creating different antibodies and having more diversity of antibodies can kind of provide greater immunity. So it's almost certain we're going to get boosters and that we're going to end up seeing them hit the market next month.
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 we'll be getting boosters.
NEW
▲ SPCE
📈 Virgin Galactic starts commercial flights within two to three quarters
closed 9
▲ +35.2
0.0 → 35.2
Chamath, from inside the company, says the Branson flight was the last data-gathering step and commercial passenger operations begin in the next two or three quarters.
plays
SPCE ·primary
evals 2022-04-16
No, I feel really confident that we know what we're doing. This flight was so critical because it was about figuring out what it was like to have passengers in the back and how they would all behave when you had multiple folks. I think once that readout is done and Richard apparently took a bunch of notes, we'll be starting commercial ops, I think, the next two or three quarters.
Printing rockets and engines (Relativity Space) divides launch-hardware cost by ten and makes additive manufacturing structurally important — a big upside leg for the 3D printing industry.
plays
DDD ·primary
SSYS
evals 2022-07-16
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? ... So I think that additive manufacturing has an enormous upside here in space.
E-bikes extend the practical range of a bike ride enough to replace car trips, and are already changing European and Chinese cities — a major urban-transport shift.
plays
NIU ·primary
FOXF
evals 2022-07-16
With these electric bikes, instead of going 10 miles on the way there, it takes your 10 mile ride and just puts 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.
▼ JETS
🌍 Delta is not the last one — more variants this fall, a tough winter
closed 0
CONTESTED
▼ -18.7
66.5 → 47.8
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 are going to be nervous to fly, people are 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.
The point is, guys, Friedberg 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.
This is not a big deal. I mean, for me, okay, 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.
I'm not 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 taking my kids out and having a good time. I'm not going back in lockdown.
▲ TLT
🏦 Inflation may not show up — breakevens are rolling over
closed 19
CONTESTED
▲ +10.5
40.9 → 51.3
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 has kind of come out of the equation already. So, the markets have taken that pricing out.
▲ ARKX
🤖 The space industrial age — Apollo's semiconductor payoff, round two
closed 10
CONTESTED
▼ -1.4
29.1 → 27.7
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 suborbitally or basically into space, we are completely reimagining how the human race can work.
So there's clearly a great deal of momentum in this industry. The question is always what's the market at the end? ... And we're going to find out over the next couple of years, is there a tourism market? Historically, there's been an interest in a market for visual satellites. But if you look at some of the financials of companies like Planet Labs, they did a few acquisitions in space imaging. And the revenue hasn't really taken off there. And then mining was always this other question. Can we go out and mine rare minerals from space? And that one is just, if you do the math on it, it's so far away, it's impossible to kind of model.
Episode digest
written during extraction and stored in data/extractions/ep040.json — the auditable source of truth, including everything market-adjacent that did not earn a capture
Two blocks, both tradeable. (1) Sacks discloses a Pfizer-breakthrough Delta infection (mild, 99.9F fever, his 11-year-old caught it too) and the group turns it into a macro argument. Friedberg makes the episode's strongest and most repeated call — table-pounding it three times — that breakthrough infections among the double-vaxxed will produce a *self-imposed* social lockdown even absent policy: 'people are going to be nervous to travel... nervous to fly... nervous to go to restaurants,' 'all it takes is 10% of the population' to put ripples through an economy he calls 'a very, very, very, very delicate economic recovery' with 'no more stimulus dollars available'; he personally would delay Disneyland 'six to 12 weeks.' Chamath agrees on the outcome but explicitly rejects the mechanism ('I have a slightly different point of view here... I don't think it's going to come from people' — people are exhausted and want normalcy); his version is top-down: politicians will seize the window to re-lock in the fall, plus 'economic discrimination' against the unvaccinated, so 'economically, we are going to take a step back.' Sacks and Jason take the other side of the behavior question and refuse to change their own conduct, making this the rare idea with two supports and two opposes inside one episode. Second capture from this block: Friedberg's booster call — antibody titers wane, Israeli breakthrough data skews toward January vaccinees, so boosters are 'almost certain' and 'hit the market next month,' with Chamath assuming a standing six-month cadence. Buried in the same Friedberg turn is a genuinely falsifiable macro lean worth tracking: lumber has round-tripped below the start of the inflation panic, therefore 'a lot of this kind of inflation risk has kind of come out of the equation already... the markets have taken that pricing out' — a call that CPI would demolish over the following twelve months. (2) The billionaire space race, five days after Branson's flight. Chamath (Virgin Galactic chairman, cried watching it, 'the beginning of the beginning') gives the single most scorable item in the episode: commercial passenger operations begin 'the next two or three quarters' — the Branson flight existed to gather passenger-cabin data and the readout is nearly done. He also discloses seeding Swarm (Sacks did the Series A), leading Relativity Space's Series A, and predicts pervasive global internet 'within the next five years'; Jason extends the same thesis to 'a billion or two billion people' getting broadband 'within a decade' via Starlink and three competitors; Friedberg calls Starlink 'such a no brainer' that 'they could build an incredible business out of this.' Friedberg is the designated bear on the sector itself: VC into space went from ~$350M/yr (2011-14) to ~$10B in 2020, 'there's clearly a great deal of momentum' — but 'the question is always what's the market at the end?', Planet Labs' imaging revenue 'hasn't really taken off,' space mining is 'impossible to kind of model,' and comms are cheaper terrestrially outside rural. His 15th-century-shipping analogy (insurance, tort law, carry, Lloyd's of London all emerged downstream) is the bull case on a multi-century horizon, not a twelve-month one, so it is captured as near-term skepticism against the sector idea rather than support. He also flatly rejects Jason's exotic-space-materials thesis ('I don't subscribe to that thesis') on the grounds that molecular engineering will make extraplanetary resources irrelevant. NOT captured, deliberately: Chamath's 'basically 100%' odds of a killer variant emerging if 40% stay unvaccinated 'two or three years from now' (real prediction, but epidemiological — any instrument mapping would produce a garbage verdict); the vax-passport/employer-mandate debate (no clean instrument); the Kármán line spat and Blue Origin's pre-flight tweet (culture, not price); Sacks' defense of Branson against 'the very online people' (no directional content); and Jason's closing note that Melvin Capital lost $5B and is down 46% — that touches the open `gamestop-mania-ends-badly-2021` idea (eval_by 2022-01-30) but is news restatement plus schadenfreude with no view on where GME goes, so no mention was attached. Era hygiene: `covid-normalcy-summer-2021` closed 2021-06-19 and `covid-testing-scaleup-2020` closed 2021-07-11, so every COVID claim here is a new idea; no crypto content at all this episode, so nothing touches the two crypto slugs in the wave. Judgment call flagged: Chamath's SPCE commercial-ops prediction was NOT attached to the open `chamath-spac-complex-2020` idea — that thesis is about SPACs as IPO 2.0, not about one portfolio company's flight schedule. Labels: no anomalies. All four besties present with substantial turns (Jason 99, Chamath 86, Sacks 57, Friedberg 47), fingerprints all consistent (Sacks/Craft-libertarian and PayPal-mafia framing, Chamath's Nat + plane + Italy, Friedberg's science corner and pregnant wife, Jason's syndicate-adjacent Starlink research), and no merged-turn markers found.