Let's Know Things

This week we talk about plug-in power, renewables, and Germany.
We also discuss inverters, solar arrays, and microgrids.
Recommended Book: Consider This by Chuck Palahnuik
Transcript
Most climate scientists and knowledgable folks in adjacent fields will tell you that, as a species, we’re way behind where we need to be if we’re going to avoid a whole lot of negative consequences caused by global climate change.
We’ve blazed past a bunch of tipping points already, and while the worst-case scenarios we were worried about a decade ago are no longer likely because of the energy-generation and related changes we’ve made globally, since then, the damage caused up to this point is already doing some pretty bad things to our water cycle and other temperature-regulating systems, and that’s looking like it will get even worse over the next several decades—even if worse no longer means cataclysmic in the sense of ending all life on the planet.
That said, even noting that progress has been a lot slower than most experts would prefer, progress is happening in regards to the deployment of renewable energy sources, and in the replacement and retirement of dirty, carbon- and methane-spewing sources, like coal, petroleum, and gas.
As of 2026, the global share of total electricity generation, so all electricity produced by all sources for all purposes, is about 33.8% for renewables, marking the first time renewables have been used to produce more than a third of the total electricity produced, globally; that also means renewables have surpassed coal for electricity generation for the first time.
While hydro and wind continue to contribute to the growth of renewables deployment and electricity generation, solar power is by far the biggest growth area for renewables right now, and solar, alone, covers 75% of total electricity demand growth in 2025—which means as countries around the world deploy more electricity generation assets to account for electricity demand growth, three-quarters of that demand is being met by solar. And this is notable because typically that kind of demand, the majority of which arises in huge, rapidly scaling countries like China and India, has up till recently been met by the dirtiest of energy production sources, coal.
There’s also been a .02% reduction in fossil fuel generation, year-on-year, which is a very small number, but that level of production is massive, and there are a lot of subsidies and other mechanisms that keep fossil fuels flourishing around the world, so every little sliver of fossil fuel energy production reduction is still a pretty significant thing.
Many of these renewables-related wins, in recent years, have been attributable to the large-scale installation of solar facilities, backed by massive, utility-scale battery backups, primarily in China.
China is by far the largest producer of solar panels and related technologies—Chinese companies produce somewhere between 80-90% of all the key components and perform the same portion of all key manufacturing stages for the global supply chain, while also controlling the vast majority of resources necessary to manufacture solar panels. And it has been on a tear over the past decade or so, installing just a silly amount of solar infrastructure. Which is good, because China is also seeing a lot of growth in energy demand, so if they weren’t deploying that much solar, they would likely be deploying that much coal infrastructure, instead.
That said, while huge solar arrays are important to renewables growth, there’s also been a recent boom in smaller-scale solar energy deployment in recent years, especially but not exclusively across Europe. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today: the emergence of so-called ‘balcony solar,’ and what it might mean for the further expansion of solar’s footprint around the world.
—
In 2025, Utah, which is a deeply Conservative, Republican state, became the first US state to pass a bill that makes it easier to legally install plug-in solar panel systems.
As of mid-2026, about 30 states have followed suit, and even more are considering it, laws allowing for the installation of such solar technologies winding their way through legislative bodies on the back of the popularity and seeming no-downsides nature of this tech product category.
Plug-in solar, also sometimes called balcony solar or garden solar, is currently most popular in Germany, which is the biggest market for this product right now, with about four million such systems installed as of 2025.
To understand the popularity of this type of solar installation, it’s useful to understand that conventional solar installations have typically required a decent amount of electrical surgery to install. They’ve usually involved a large number of panels operating as an array, and that array has produced quite a lot of electricity that then has to be funneled as a direct current either back into the local grid using what amounts to two-way wiring, which makes these arrays function like any other power plant, or that electricity is converted using an inverter into an alternating current, where AC is the electrical standard, anyway, so that it can directly power a large building like a hospital or school, or be stored in a large battery facility.
All of these options require a huge up front investment, and a reworking of local energy infrastructure so that solar can be incorporated. And that investment requirement, and the necessity to hire specialist electricians to get it all done, severely limits the range of this tech, because there are only so many entities that can afford it, only so many spaces that can deploy that number of panels, the number required to make that investment make sense, economically, is generally quite large, and there are only so many specialists of that kind in a given country, so the labor aspect of this is a big deal, too, these sorts of projects often severely backlogged.
Plug-in solar, in contrast, is usually sold as a kit with one or two small- to medium-sized panels and a microinverter or plug-in inverter, depending on whether the end-user’s existing electrical setup uses an AC or DC current.
A home owner or even a renter with a balcony or garden, or the right amount of space outside one of their windows, can buy one of these systems, hang or place the solar panel or panels in a location where they will get a decent amount of sun, and then plug them in, via the inverter, directly to their home’s outlet.
The electricity generated by the panels is then shared through the building’s existing wiring to all of their outlets, and this allows the resident to use that available energy, first, only drawing energy from the local grid when there isn’t enough from the solar panels available. And all of this happens automatically—the solar energy is used if available, and if not, energy is drawn from the grid like normal.
This creates a layer of essentially free, clean energy for the resident with a usually fairly small up-front cost: these plug-in solar kits can cost as little as $500, with larger systems that generate more electricity costing between $1200 and $3000; so even on the high-end, because there’s no additional installation cost, the home owner or renter setting it all up themselves, this is an investment that can easily pay for itself, usually within 2-5 years.
There are caveats here, including that not all grid systems are complaint with this use-case, so would-be plug-in solar users have to check to make sure their local setup can handle this sort of application, and there are many places where this product type still isn’t legal, in some cases because of concerns about people installing it without checking to make sure their wiring and the local grid can handle it, and in some cases because of old laws that favor local energy grid companies and their business models, or which favor fossil fuel energy production.
The explosion in use of this type of small solar setup, though, speaks volumes about how good a deal it is for many people, and even those who don’t live in particularly sunny areas—so places where traditional solar arrays wouldn’t make sense, economically—are finding them useful, because they still pay for themselves within some number of years, due to energy bill savings. It’s also possible to install home-scale battery systems alongside these balcony solar systems, which means even small trickles of solar energy production can add up, and can be used at night, when the sun isn’t shining at all.
There are quite a few possible ramifications of this trend.
At the local, household level, these sorts of systems can dampen the impact of energy price increases, due to global issues, like the gumming up of the Strait of Hormuz, and due to local issues, like the trend of energy companies increasing prices because of new data centers being added to their grid. That, in turn, can reduce the impact of certain aspects of inflation on individuals home owners and renters.
Larger-scale, though, these systems also serve as a sort of deconstructed secondary energy grid.
In Germany, for instance, as of late 2025, around 1.14 gigawatts of energy was being produced by balcony solar systems across the country. That’s 1.14 GW of pressure taken off of local energy grids, and that represents more resilience for these grids, too, as reduced pressure means fewer brown-outs and similar negative fluctuations. It also means people who have such systems won’t be as negatively impacted by issues that take down grids; and that means normal, brown-out like issues, but also problems related to potential cyberattacks and hacks and even physical conflicts. That kind of resiliency is what every nation hopes to have, because it makes strikes on them less damaging, and this is one way to achieve that kind of resiliency—a deconstructed network of microgrids, underpinning the macro-scale one—all at a relatively low cost.
These sorts of systems are also becoming more widely available, IKEA selling several kits in many countries where they’ve been made legal, and other retailers, like Lidl and Amazon are also getting in on the action, making these kits more widely available as the trend spreads.
China still controls the vast, vast majority of solar energy asset production, so there’s a chance, especially in the case of a theoretical future conflict, that they could turn off the tap on this and these types of assets would go away for a time, which would be bad if local grids come to rely on them taking some of the pressure off the local macro-grid.
Those theoretical economic warfare concerns aside, though, if legalization continues to spread, plug-in solar could be one of the best and most successful methods for deploying clean energy to areas where it hasn’t been a particularly compelling sell, and where local infrastructure or politics has made such deployment unlikely or impossible up till this point.
Show Notes
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/opinion/solar-panels-balcony-backyard-plugin.html
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/globally-86-percent-of-the-new-generating-capacity-was-renewable-in-2025/
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/soaring-solar-and-a-surge-in-hydro-push-more-coal-off-the-us-grid/
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/global-growth-in-solar-the-largest-ever-observed-for-any-source/
https://www.iea.org/reports/sdg7-data-and-projections/modern-renewables
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2026/
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-solar-cell-exports-grow-73-in-2025/
https://rhg.com/research/minerals-metals-and-megawatts-how-chinas-power-generation-drives-its-industrial-metals-ecosystem/
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/what-to-know-balcony-solar
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-taking-state-legislatures-by-storm
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-panels-germany-utah
https://www.energysage.com/news/plug-in-balcony-solar-panels/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balcony_solar_power
https://www.pv-tech.org/maine-passes-balcony-solar-law-virginia-and-colorado-to-follow/
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/plug-solar-power-could-be-coming-balcony-near-you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel
https://www.ingka.com/newsroom/solar-energy-for-the-many-ikea-belgium-to-offer-balcony-solar-kits/


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This week we talk about LDL, HDL, and cardiovascular issues.
We also discuss one-time therapies, statins, and pharmaceutical economics.
Recommended Book: Blood by Dr. Jen Gunter
Transcript
Cholesterol is the most common type of what’s called a sterol, which is a type of steroid, but also structurally technically an alcohol. But functionally, and classified by scientists, cholesterol is a lipid, which in this case is similar to a fat in all but how the body uses it. Cholesterol is the type of sterol most commonly found in animals—other types are found in plants and fungi—and its function, and this is where it varies from fats, which are used to store energy, is to basically help hold the cell membrane together, and it also serves as an intracellular messenger.
Cholesterol is especially prevalent in the brain and spinal cord of animals, but it’s found throughout their bodily tissues, as well, and again, it’s vital for holding everything together and helping things communicate, in addition to being a precursor for vitamin D, steroid hormones, and bile.
You want to have cholesterol, then, as without it you would be dead.
Too much cholesterol in the blood, however, can also make you dead, especially when it’s bound to what’s called low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, as that contributes to cardiovascular disease like heart attacks and aneurysms, which can massively impact one’s overall wellness and quality of life, and at extremes lead to the whole system shutting down as a consequence of heart attack, stroke, and the like.
A lot of things can contribute to the development of cardiovascular disease, including habits like smoking, genetic predisposition, and the enthusiastic consumption of alcohol and unhealthy foods. But high blood cholesterol, of the LDL variety, is one of the top contributors, as these low-density clusters of lipoprotein can clog the pathways that blood takes throughout our bodies. Other, denser types of lipoproteins, HDLs, can clear it, like a heavier, denser substance pushing through clogs of less-dense materials that are gumming up a pipe, but LDL is at times accumulated as a result of consuming delicious but unhealthy foods, which are hard to avoid, and for some people the only consistently available and affordable foods; and for other people LDL accumulates as a result of their genetic predispositions—two things that are devilishly difficult to change.
What I’d like to talk about today is a new type of therapy that may be very good news for people who struggle with the accumulation of LDL, and why this is being seen as very good news more broadly, at the scale of entire nations, as well.
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Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is testing a new, experimental drug called VERVE-102 which is a one-time infusion that is currently administered over the course of about four hours, and once completed, it turns off a gene called PCSK9, which is responsible for making a protein that regulates cholesterol levels in humans.
As I said, this drug is still being tested, so these are early results. But in a study of 35 people with high cholesterol levels, high levels of LDL or LDL-C, which is short for lipoprotein cholesterol, they found that this infusion, which again, is a one-time treatment, so get it once and then theoretically at least you never have to get anything done ever again, it reduced those LDL and LDL-C levels by as much as 62%, and that reduction was maintained a year and a half after the infusion; that’s how far out they’re retested so far, and the hope is that each retest will continue to show the same.
On the strength of those very promising results, a Phase 2 study has been planned by the end of 2026, and the US Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, previously fast-tracked this existing study, because of the promise and potential this drug already demonstrated in early studies; all of which is considered to be very significant progress and possibility.
To understand that significance, though, it’s useful to know some health stats. And I’m going to focus on the US here, as that’s where this drug is being developed, but many wealthy countries have similar stats, at least in terms of cardiovascular disease struggles.
As of 2024, which is the last year we had good, cohesive data on this in the US, it was estimated that about 11-12% of the US adult population has high cholesterol levels. This typically doesn’t come with any symptoms, but it can contribute a higher risk for all those cardiovascular diseases, including heart attack and stroke. A further 86 million US adults have borderline or elevated cholesterol levels, which can easily tip higher, but also, even in that existing, elevated state, contribute to negative cardiovascular outcomes.
There are treatments for high cholesterol, the most common of category of which are called statins, which reduce the production of LDL by inhibiting an enzyme that produces cholesterol in the body.
Unfortunately, these drugs do come with some usually minor side effects, which can cause patients to stop using them, and they have to be taken daily, ideally at the same time each day. That necessity for consistency leads to a lot of incorrect or incomplete usage, which reduces the effectiveness of these drugs. But it’s also estimated that only about 54.5% of US adults who would benefit from statins are currently taking one—so that’s people who could benefit and who have it prescribed, and then within that number are all the people who are taking this drug incorrectly or incompletely, reducing the effectiveness. So a relatively small number of people who should probably be on these things are getting the full benefit they offer because of the nature of the drug.
And that’s not great, because in the US alone, heart disease is the leading cause of death for pretty much every adult demographic; men, women, people of most racial and ethnic and economic groups, you name it, heart disease is the biggest threat to their lives.
One US citizen dies every 34 seconds of some kind of cardiovascular condition, and as of 2023, 1 in every 3 deaths in the US was caused by the same, adding up to just over 919,000 people that year.
Between 2021 and 2022, alone, the cost of services and medications related to heart disease added up to more than $168 billion; again, that’s just in that period, and just in the US.
And once more, these are ailments that are caused or heavily influenced by high levels of cholesterol, which are themselves amplified by common lifestyle choices, environmental factors that are hard for many people to avoid, and just by raw, dumb luck because of genetics.
This treatment category, then, is being seen as a pretty big deal because a one-time infusion means those who receive it don’t have to remember to take a pill every day at the same time, and won’t experience those statin-based side-effects.
It also means that people who are currently costing the medical system a bunch of money each year, because they need treatments for all the issues they suffer as a result of high cholesterol, will suddenly cost the system a lot less money, for treatments and medications. Not for nothing, their health and quality of life will likely improve as well. So in addition to having better, healthier outcomes personally, their cost to healthcare systems will drop.
Eli Lilly’s drug isn’t the only one currently working its way through clinical trials, either.
Amgen is working on a similar treatment, and Novartis and Ionis Pharmaceuticals have drugs that are even further along in the process, their medicines that cut heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular deaths could be approved by the FDA as soon as next year.
There are a lot of caveats worth noting here, including that the science is still out as to whether this approach, silencing proteins that lead to the creation of more LDL and a similar substance called Lp(a)—which is more dangerous because it’s stickier and thus more likely to get stuck in important blood pathways, and it’s also more likely to be caused by genetics than lifestyle—the word is still out on whether reducing these things in the body actually reduces hearth attacks and stroke.
Some people have had this particular risk variable dramatically reduced, but have still suffered from cardiovascular events, which raises the question of whether this path is the right one to take in trying to reduce this category of health issues; the correlation between LDL and heart attacks and strokes might not be a clear-cut as long assumed.
There’s also the issue of price. Drug-makers are economically incentivized to sell treatments over cures, because that means they can continue selling their product over time, potentially for the life of the patient, and a cure, in contrast, is a one-time hit that in theory should alleviate the need for future treatment.
There’s a chance, then, that the drug-makers will decide they need to make these one-hit treatments really, really expensive in order to make their R&D dollars back and to make the kinds of profits their investors expect from them. That could then reduce the potential audience for these treatments, even if they are effective, and could further slow their deployment and future research in this space.
If these trials continue to go well, though, there’s a good chance that this combination of similar but distinct treatment types will provide a more sustainable alternative to current options, and that, like the recent bogglingly rapid and widespread deployment of GLP-1 treatments for all sorts of issues, could lead to a new paradigm in this facet of the medical world.
Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholesterol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiovascular_disease
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_cholesterol
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10982736/
https://www.cdc.gov/heart-disease/data-research/facts-stats/index.html
https://www.who.int/health-topics/cardiovascular-diseases#tab=tab_1
https://www.ama-assn.org/public-health/chronic-diseases/what-doctors-want-patients-know-about-high-cholesterol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statin
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42187087/
https://abcnews.com/GMA/Wellness/new-drug-game-changer-people-high-cholesterol/story


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This week we talk about initial public offerings, Anthropic, and investment flywheels.
We also discuss AI, financial entanglements, and backstops.
Recommended Book: Superconvergence by Jamie Metzl
Transcript
An initial public offering, or IPO, is what happens when a private company goes public and starts selling shares of itself, occasionally to just institutional investors like banks and sovereign wealth funds, but usually also to retail investors, which means normal people who buy stocks as part of their investment strategy.
Often private companies go this route, go public, because it’s one of the primary ways of gleaning new, oftentimes large inflows of money, and that money can then be used for investments in assets for the company, but it also allows employees who have shares in the company as part of their compensation to cash out, to get paid possibly a huge bonus for all their efforts, and it’s often a means by which executives garner huge paydays for themselves, because they can now sell their accumulated shares, or borrow against them, or because they have something in their contract that says they get x amount of bonus money or new shares if they take the company public, or achieve a certain valuation goal—and going public is a good way to do that.
This is also one of the primary ways investors in a company, whether that’s a bunch of smaller seed investors or big-name venture capitalists, to get their money back; the 10 or 100x-ing of their investment, getting ten or 100-times the money they put into the company, generally happens through an IPO, because it can balloon the valuation of that company, and it gives them a more conventional and reliable way of getting money back for their shares: they can just sell those shares on the open market.
So an IPO allows a private company to make shares of itself available to others, on scale. And the ‘initial’ part of initial public offering points at the early days of the process, during which the baseline price of a share of stock is established.
A fairly arcane and complex process has emerged around this, and it’s an entire industry at this point, with some institutions specializing in taking companies public, helping them get as high an initial price on that stock as possible. They also help them leap all sorts of regulatory hurdles set by the Securities and Exchange Commission, if they’re going public on a US exchange, at least, other bodies handle such things in other countries, and these going-public entities, called underwriters, which are usually investment banks, also typically have their own stake in the matter, earning compensation through a fee called a ‘gross spread,’ which is the difference between a discounted rate on the stock and what the stock is sold for on the open market on that first day it’s available.
What I’d like to talk about today is a wave of very closely watched unusual, impending IPOs that are coming later this year, and one of them in particular that looks to be even more unusual than the rest.
—
SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are three of the largest companies in human history; on paper, at least.
And that’s an important caveat. Market valuation for private companies is generally determined by how much investors are willing to spend on a percentage ownership of the company. So if you start a lemonade stand and I offer to buy 1/10th of that lemonade stand from you for $100, that implies, using this logic, that your lemonade stand has a valuation of $1000; 10 times that $100 that I offered to pay you.
Such valuations are also informed by independent analyses from outside experts and institutions. SpaceX, for instance, pre-IPO, is estimated to be worth somewhere between $780 billion and nearly $2 trillion, depending on who you listen to, based on their assets, their potential future earnings, and any advantages they might have in the markets in which they operate.
AI company Anthropic is estimated to be worth something like $965 billion, based on a May 2026 series H funding round, through which it raised $65 billion; based on that funding round, the calculations were done, and just shy of a trillion dollars is what the math says the company is worth, though some outside analyses say it’s worth a bit less than that, while others suggest it’s maybe closer to $1.4 trillion.
OpenAI, a direct competitor of Anthropic, is valued at about $100 billion less than Anthropic based on its most recent $122 billion funding round, but again, analyses put the company’s actual value, what people and investors would pay for it on the open market, all over the place.
Each of these companies have different variables acting upon them heading into a period in which it’s expected that all three will IPO.
OpenAI kicked off the current AI race, for instance, but it’s burning money at an incredible rate, and has yet to make a profit, losing billions per year, and will probably continue to lose billions each year for a while into the future.
Anthropic, on the other hand, offers a similar product as OpenAI, but is projected to post its first quarterly operating profit of just over half a billion dollars in Q2 2026, making it one of the first frontier-model-making AI companies to make a profit, as most of these companies are investing so heavily in research and infrastructure like data centers that they’re still in heavy cash-burn mode.
SpaceX is distinct from these other two also high-flying, cash-burning tech companies in part because of its colorful and controversial owner, Elon Musk, and in part because it’s a rocket launch company that also sells internet services beamed down to earth from satellites, and until recently, most of its reliable income has come from that single offering, selling internet access. But it also recently had X, formerly called Twitter, a social network, and an AI company meant to compete directly with OpenAI and Anthropic, called xAI, folded into it.
So it’s now a multifaceted company with several edgy, but somewhat mature and difficult to compete with offerings, most of which make no money, but all of which in theory at least kinda sorta orient around AI and other sci-fi goods and services.
The surge in interest and investment in AI over the past several years led to a pivot for most of Musk’s companies, and that led to the merging of the smaller xAI and X into SpaceX, which was the only really profitable company of that trio of companies, and that merging, until just recently, made SpaceX unprofitable, as well.
Because of the unprofitability and relative unpopularity of xAI’s offerings, like the controversy-ridden Grok chatbot, SpaceX has recently taken to leasing out its data centers to competitors, like Anthropic and Google, each of which are paying around a billion dollars a month to use some of SpaceX’s data center capacity, which xAI hasn’t needed, because of the unpopularity of Grok, for their own AI services. That, in turn, has suddenly made SpaceX a little bit profitable, which is important for reasons I’ll get into momentarily.
This portion of the US-based AI industry is kind of a tangle in many ways, all of these companies competing, but also intersecting and overlapping, often investing in each other and in the infrastructure that underpins them, while also being invested in by those same infrastructural entities. And these three companies’ IPOs are being seen as something of a weathervane, their success or failure, and the degree to which they succeed or fail hinting at the direction of this industry, and whether or not this is a financial bubble that will soon, or eventually, pop.
There are hints that those at the top of these companies are attempting to hedge their bets, in case their IPOs don’t do what they need them to do, or don’t do what they need them to do at the right magnitude.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s also fairly controversy-ridden CEO, has been very close with US President Trump, and has reportedly been holding meetings about the possibility of the US government taking a significant stake in OpenAI, and maybe other AI companies as well. The idea here is that US funds, so taxpayer dollars, would be invested in these companies, and that would tie the companies more closely to the US government, which could be beneficial if these companies then increase in value, making the US government a profit on that investment. This would be beneficial for the companies, in turn, because they would basically be backstopped by the US government; the US would be more likely to help them stay solvent to avoid losing that invested capital, with its regulations and laws related to AI, but it would also make these companies too big and too important to fail, giving them a lot of leeway in how they behave and compete, or fail to, from that point forward. And if they do still fail, the US taxpayer would be paying for a significant portion of that loss while those in charge, investors and the higher-ups of these companies, would walk away with a bunch of money.
SpaceX is taking another approach to IPO bet-hedging, by asking top US stock indices, like the Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500, which track top stocks, ‘top’ designated by value, but also other metrics, usually related to stability and profitability, to ignore some of those other metrics and allow SpaceX entrance into their indices more rapidly than would typically be allowed.
These indices are meant, in part, to help protect investors from volatility. High-flying startups might surge at the beginning, immediately after their IPO, but then fizzle out when it becomes clear their fundamentals aren’t good, and they’re not actually a solid investment, long-term.
What SpaceX wants is to be allowed into this club of valuable, long-term profitable and stable companies, because it is big and flashy and might have the largest IPO in history. And if these indices don’t want to be left out of all that, the argument goes, they should allow SpaceX into their club, regardless of those long-time rules of admittance.
Nasdaq, which runs the exchange where SpaceX will be listed, agreed to a rules change in May of 2026 that will allow large private companies, like SpaceX, that go public on their exchange, fast entry onto the Nasdaq 100 list.
This change of rules was made exclusively for SpaceX, and it could have a significant impact on the company’s IPO, because many index funds and exchange-traded funds, ETFs, track the Nasdaq 100, which means they balance their portfolio based on what’s in the Nasdaq 100, keeping things relatively or absolutely proportionate to that fund.
That means because of this change, a lot of everyday, passive investors, who have their retirement funds and pension plans and even their personal portfolios in index funds and ETFs that track the Nasdaq 100 will automatically end up holding some or a lot of SpaceX stock, despite it being an untested, new, currently unprofitable company. Some of these funds are automatically managed and will just buy SpaceX because that’s what they’re programmed to do, and others are managed by humans, but because they’ve promised their customers to keep their funds aligned with the market, more money going into SpaceX means they’ll be inclined to join the club and buy a bunch of SpaceX, as well. And because of how this works, the more funds buying SpaceX stock, the more funds will be required or inclined to buy; it’s a sort of stock flywheel.
That exposes all these investors to more volatility of the kind they maybe hoped to avoid by tracking this index, which isn’t supposed to be volatile. But SpaceX’s Musk was able to demand this change because, again, this is looking to be the biggest IPO in history, the company valued at $1.77 trillion dollars after the IPO. As a result, he can demand these sorts of things, and typically be listened to.
Some other stock market indices have also said they would allow quick entrance to their lists for SpaceX and possibly OpenAI and Anthropic, as well.
The S&P 500, however, after assessing the possibility of quick entry, has rejected the idea, saying it won’t bend its rules, no matter how big these three IPOs are looking to be. That means folks with money in S&P 500-tracking funds will be protected from that initial volatility.
That said those recent deals SpaceX made with Anthropic and Google nudged them into profitability, and if they can maintain that profitability for a year, post-IPO, then they’ll be able to enter the S&P 500. And because Google’s parent company Alphabet is a significant investor in SpaceX, they’ve already made money, on paper, on the deal they made with SpaceX for that datacenter capacity, paying out less than they’re making back in valuation.
So that tangle of relationships is likely to continue to enrich those in charge of these companies, and those who hold a bunch of shares of their stock, but it’s also likely to get more of these massive, but volatile companies into ostensibly less-volatile indices, faster, which could have repercussions for the one-third of private US wealth that is currently invested in the stock market.
Show Notes
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/ipo.asp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-05/spacex-s-75-billion-ipo-draws-more-orders-than-shares-available
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-needs-the-cultish-support-of-everyday-investors-to-pull-off-the-massive-spacex-ipo-08e7ea49
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/spacexs-ipo-dream-runs-into-wall-streets-oldest-test-chart-of-the-day-114542191.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/tech-download-anthropic-ipo-ai-valuations.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/technology/spacex-indexes-401k.html
https://nypost.com/2026/06/04/business/one-third-of-americans-wealth-is-now-tied-to-the-stock-market-a-record-high/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/sp-500-blocks-fast-spacex-entry-wont-waive-rule-for-unprofitable-ai-firms/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/we-pissed-off-a-lot-of-people-giant-data-center-plan-cut-50-amid-protests/
https://www.notus.org/technology/trump-ai-stake-openai
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/05/google-will-pay-spacex-920m-per-month-for-compute/


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This week we talk about the Merchant Marine Act, trade routes, and incentives.
We also discuss Wesley Jones, foreign competition, and artificial monopolies.
Recommended Book: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
Transcript
In 1920, the then-Senator for the state of Washington, Wesley Jones, who was also the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, introduced the Merchant Marine Act as a method by which the American merchant marine could be sustained and remain competitive in the face of external competition, and in the wake of the destruction of a bunch of ship during WWI.
The US Merchant Marine is all the commercial water-going vessels that are US flagged, and the crews of these vessels. During peacetime, these boats and ships conduct trade and other services along the United States’ coasts and throughout its internal waterways, its rivers and lakes. During wartime, these vessels and their crews are tapped to help move troops and weapons and supplies for offensive or defensive military efforts.
The theory of this proposed Act, then, was to ensure that the US Merchant Marine would remain well-funded and well-taken-care-of, because lacking some kind of government support, there was a good chance it would either slowly degrade, not having enough business to pay for itself, or—and this has been a persistent concern for similar pseudo-fleets of merchant vessels around the world for the past few hundred years—it would fall into disrepair because it would be outcompeted by vessels and crew coming in from elsewhere that would charge lower prices, creating unsustainable economics for the locals and thus slowly degrading this economic and military asset.
When this Act was proposed, in 1920, the preservation of this asset was on the mind of many US politicians, as the world had just emerged from World War I, and in that and previous conflicts, the US Merchant Marine had been pretty vital to ensuring the US eventually came out on the right side of things. It was also fundamental to the rebuilding of the US economy following difficult conflicts, because the moving of cargo from city to city along coastlines, and throughout long expanses of rivers—getting food from place to place, getting building supplies where they need to go—has always been important, especially following periods in which there isn’t a lot of building going on, and when supplies chains are reoriented toward other purposes, like fighting.
So in addition to all the language the helps regulate trade within US waters and between US ports, and which says how the crew of such vessels have to be treated, this Act was also meant to provide protected status to US Merchant Marine vessels and crew, giving them a pseudo-monopoly on certain types of trade activities in the US.
It was also—and this is important context—meant to give Senator Jones’ state of Washington a de facto monopoly on trade with Alaska. But it was sold to the rest of Congress and the country as a means of bolstering the funds flowing into the US Merchant Marine. Section 27 of this act, often called the Jones Act, requires that all goods transported between US ports be carried by US vessels built in the US, flying the US flag, owned by US citizens and with majority US citizen and permanent US resident crews.
What I’d like to talk about today are the other consequences of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, and in particular the Jones Act component of it, and why there’s been renewed opposition to the Jones Act in recent months.
—
The logic of the Jones Act, at least on the surface, is pretty straightforward.
If you’re worried about foreign competition coming in and taking all the shipping jobs, swooping in from areas where crews aren’t paid as much, and where ships can be built cheaper, so they can charge less than US-made and -manned ships, all you have to do is require all the ships and people on the ships are of US-origin, and you’re good to go. Those foreign competitors aren’t allowed to take the jobs, and that sets the standards in a different place, allowing US vessels and their crew and owners to charge whatever they need to charge to sustain themselves.
This, in theory at least, should also stimulate the US ship-building industry, as that monopoly means anyone who builds new ships stands a pretty good chance of making their money back. After all, there’s no dramatically cheaper competition out there, so you’ve got relatively little downward price pressure and seemingly plenty of customers, because there’s a lot of US coast, and a lot of internal waterways that have traditionally be used for trading purposes.
In practice, though—and this isn’t uncommon with protectionist measures; things that seem like they should work for the intended purpose actually leading to other, less ideal outcomes—the Jones Act is often blamed for increasing prices on pretty much everything, and for increasing prices dramatically in places like Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and other US territories, like American Samoa and Guam, that are reliant on imports to survive.
If open competition isn’t allowed, prices don’t tend to go down, and in fact they can instead go up, especially if the number of entities providing these services drops over time.
That means places without other options, without the ability to ship food and electrical equipment and other such fundamentals using highways or regularly flying, large cargo planes, they are forced to pay increasingly high cargo ship prices, instead. And there’s no chance that a competitor will emerge, because there just aren’t enough ships available to haul all the stuff these places need at a regular, sustaining, cost-effective cadence.
These higher prices are kind of built into the monopoly model, but they’re made even worse by the state of the US shipbuilding industry, which for a while, from about the mid-1800s until the mid-20th century, was top of the line, producing more ships than any other country during WWII, and before that churning out some of the best and fastest ships in the world for trade purposes.
But after the two world wars, and a surge in shipbuilding infrastructure that was rapidly deployed in the first half of the 20th century, US government subsidies for the industry began to dry up, many of the ships built during the war were sold to foreign countries and private owners for a quick buck, and most of that infrastructure was mothballed, the more efficient processes it developed decommissioned in favor of less-efficient, more expensive approaches.
During WWI, the US churned out more then 5,000 ships at the over 100 shipyards it had operating at the time, and was able to produce more naval tonnage in three years than it had produced in the entire history of the nation’s existence, up till that point.
Post-WWI, though, the US was already less efficient than foreign competitors, especially European competition, and post-WWII, the emergence of overland infrastructure in the US, like the burgeoning national highway system, made shipping via trucks increasingly competitive with the previously dominant approach of shipping via internal waterways.
Airline shipping became a competitor, too, around that same time. So the technological developments and new overland infrastructure of the post-World War era meant that in the US, although coastal shipping in particular remained a solid option for many types of shipping, using trucks on the nation’s growing highway system usually ended up being cheaper and easier, and in some cases much faster, too, and eventually air cargo became even more competitive for some types of jobs and clientele.
The oil crises of the 1970s amplified this trend, collapsing the market for oil tanker ships and seriously damaging the overall shipbuilding industry, including in the US. Even with new US government subsidies meant to support the flailing industry, building ships in the US usually just didn’t make much economic sense, the cost of building on US soil costing nearly twice as much as it did in some foreign ports.
During the Reagan administration, even those 1930s-era subsidies were dropped, and that led to further collapse in the US shipbuilding industry. Before the end of these subsidies, the US was producing about 20 commercial ships per year, already a catastrophic drop from the World Wars era, but after the end of the subsidies, it produced five commercial vessels in the next eight years, combined.
Some new subsidies were introduced in the 90s, when the Cold War ended, but the industry was in such bad shape at that point, orders from the US military and from commercial traders often went unfulfilled, or went wildly over budget. Some ships were finished, but riddled with so many flaws that they were unusable.
US shipbuilders blamed foreign government subsidies, claiming they were really bad at their jobs because other countries were giving their shipbuilding entities more money to exist, and President Bill Clinton was able to secure an agreement with many of the US’s trading partners to temper these subsidies a bit, in response to those complaints. Though when US shipbuilders realized this agreement would also mean they would lose some of their subsidies, in the tradeoff, they switched to campaigning against it, and the US ultimately wasn’t involved in that agreement.
The US’s shipbuilding efforts improved a bit in the late-90s and early 2000s, but efforts elsewhere were better, and while the US produced about 3% of all commercial shipping tonnage, of all trade-related naval vessels, basically, in the early 1970s, by 1999, that was down to 0.25% of global tonnage.
At this point, following that aforementioned agreement to reduce subsidies and others like it, much of the world’s shipbuilding industries are on pretty solid footing without government support, while the US’s is protected by the Jones Act, and very much not in solid shape; it’s completely uncompetitive and wildly unproductive, and this has led to many secondary, knock-on issues, like increased prices, especially in places like Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, but this actually reportedly costs the US economy something like 0.1 to 0.4% of its total GDP, so about $31.8 billion to $127.4 billion each year. And it’s also hobbled our efforts to invest in things like offshore wind farms and other such infrastructure, because we simply don’t have enough ships in operation to do that sort of thing. These ships also just cost so much to use, even when they’re available, that the price of shipping and deploying things is overwhelming, especially compared to doing the same in other countries.
In mid-March of 2026, the second Trump administration issued a Jones Act waiver for some types of product, including energy products, fertilizer, and related inputs, like ammonia. That means on an emergency basis, foreign-flagged, built, and staffed ships can operate in US waters, bringing these types of trade goods from US port to US port, without penalty.
Within just two months of the waiver going into effect, dozens of foreign vessels entered the US trade market, reinforcing slumping trade routes and even creating new ones. The Gulf Cost to West Coast route has proved to be especially popular, seeing four times the trade activity from the Gulf to California in just those two months as we previously saw over the whole of 2025, combined, and a an entirely new route emerged, too, shipping naphtha from California to Texas.
More shipping also arose between the US mainland and Puerto Rico, bringing propane to Puerto Rico in a usable volume for the first time because there are no liquified petroleum gas tankers in the Jones Act fleet; this meant that despite the large amounts of LPG produced in the US, Puerto Rico usually has to import their LPG from Chile and other foreign sources; this waiver allowed them to get it from the US mainland, instead.
In April of this year, the Trump administration announced a 90-day extension of the Jones Act waiver. This waiver is intended to help moderate surging prices on all sorts of good, especially energy products, at a moment in which the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has created shortages of such products on global markets. That shortage has stoked inflation, all over the place, but especially in the US, hence this effort to temper that inflation; it is an election year in the US, after all.
The waiver seems to be helping, in some limited regards at least, and it’s providing all sorts of data for groups that oppose it, illuminating what seems to be latent demand for such trade routes, that demand typically unmet because of the limitations of the Jones Act on waterway and coastal trade in the US; there just aren’t enough US-made and created and flagged ships performing this kind of trade because of that artificial monopoly.
The American Maritime Partnership, however, which is a lobbying group put together by the US domestic maritime industry, recently launched an ad campaign aimed at ending the waiver, saying, basically, that the Jones Act protects the US maritime industry from unfair foreign competition, and that it protects the US from foreign threats that might otherwise infiltrate and negatively impact US markets; the implication being that terrorists or some such might come to the US with trade vessels, and then wreak havoc by doing terrorist things via these vessels, or maybe use them to bring more drugs into the country.
Given the power such lobbying groups have in the US, there’s a solid possibility that when an agreement is eventually reached with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, and if global trade then returns to something like its previous default, this waiver will go away. That would be the politically expedient move by the Trump administration, because most people don’t know enough about the Jones Act to care, but the maritime industry very much does, as without this artificial monopoly, they would probably be required to fundamentally change if they wanted to stay alive.
There’s evidence that getting rid of the Jones Act permanently might be beneficial on multiple fronts, especially in terms of inflation and overall economics, but also in terms of forcing the US maritime industry to make those costly, foundational changes. Despite the many possible benefits of doing away with this act, though, the ‘protect our borders from foreign invaders’ aspect of the Jones Act might be enough to sway this administration toward fully reinstating it as soon as the conflict in Iran and inflation allows.
Show Notes
https://apnews.com/article/jones-act-trump-trade-abcac596db839bff3679b3117d2e81b2
https://www.cato.org/blog/jones-act-waiver-data-reveals-universe-blocked-american-trade
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2019/04/local-content-requirements-and-their-economic-effect-on-shipbuilding_f81e0027/90316781-en.pdf
https://www.cato.org/blog/jones-act-contributes-offshore-wind-growing-pains
https://www.engine.online/news/us-maritime-group-urges-end-to-jones-act-waiver-7c1b
https://gcaptain.com/chinese-cosco-tanker-delivers-asphalt-to-connecticut-under-jones-act-waiver/
https://gcaptain.com/jones-act-waiver-reshapes-u-s-oil-trade-as-foreign-tankers-flood-domestic-routes/
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/j/jonesact.asp
https://www.winston.com/en/legal-glossary/what-is-the-jones-act
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/jones-act-burden-america-can-no-longer-bear
https://www.atlasnetwork.org/articles/the-jones-act-is-costly-harmful-and-dangerous
https://www.maritime.dot.gov/ports/domestic-shipping/domestic-shipping
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Merchant_Marine
https://www.cato.org/blog/jones-act-contributes-offshore-wind-growing-pains


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This week we talk about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, malaria, and healthcare infrastructure.
We also discuss militants, Uganda, and the Bundibugyo virus.
Recommended Book: We Should Get Together by Kat Vellos
Transcript
Ebola, which is more formally called Ebola Virus Disease or Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever, is caused by an infection by a type of RNA virus called an orthoebolavirus.
There are six known species of orthoebolavirus, and four of them have at some point infected and caused illness in humans. Those four are the ebola virus, sometimes called the Zaire ebolavirus, which historically has been the strain responsible for the biggest, most devastating outbreaks of this disease, the Sudan virus, the Taï Forest virus, and the Bundibugyo virus, the latter three each causing a variant of the disease that carries the same name.
The other two orthoebolavirus species that we know of, the Reston virus and the Bombali virus, have been known to infect animals, but have not, at this point at least, been known to make the jump to human hosts.
Ebola symptoms vary a bit between specific viruses and between hosts and infection conditions, but in general those who are afflicted by ebola begin to experience symptoms between a few days and a few weeks after infection, and they’ll start by experiencing cold and flu-like symptoms, like fever, sore throat, headaches, and general muscle pain. Soon after that, though, they’ll start experiencing diarrhea and rashes, they’ll begin vomiting, and they’ll begin to experience liver and kidney dysfunction, and around that same time, they’ll start to bleed internally and externally.
Once infected, a person has between a 25 and 90% chance of dying, depending on the strain of ebola, and if they die, usually due to what’s called hypovolemic shock—a severe and sudden loss of bodily fluids, including blood—they usually die between 6 and 16 days after those first symptoms are reported.
What I’d like to talk about today is a new outbreak of ebola centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and why this one stands out from other recent outbreaks in the region.
—
Ebola was first officially reported in medical literature in 1976, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and there have been semi-regular outbreaks in that region, of various sizes ever since, and very likely before that, too.
This disease is spread through direct contact with the body fluids of someone who’s infected, and it’s thought that this is probably how the disease made the leap from animals, like primates, to human beings: locals sometimes come into close contact with local primates, either while just coexisting, or while hunting bushmeat, hunting monkeys for food.
It’s thought that fruit bats serve as hosts for the virus, long-term, and it then spreads to other animals, and then sometimes to humans, in some cases causing illness along the way in those other species, but not always; bats are not negatively afflicted by it, for instance, but humans very much are.
Despite not being an airborne pathogen, so it’s not spread by coughing or talking too close to someone, like a cold or Covid-19, ebola can still be spread person-to-person through bodily fluid contact. That means fluids like saliva and blood and semen and breast milk, and research has shown that even after someone survives and recovers from ebola, the disease can linger in their fluids for months. So if someone catches it, survives, and then breast-feeds their child, or kisses or has sex with their partner, or gets a cut and then someone else comes into contact with their blood, like a health worker, that can lead to the transmission of the disease, despite their having been well and seemingly fully recovered for weeks or months.
That lingering contagiousness is a confounding factor with this disease, as it requires that people be very careful, even to an antisocial degree, and even well after it seems like that’s no longer necessary, because they feel good and healthy again.
This also means that if someone dies of ebola, contact with their bodies can be incredibly dangerous. And past outbreaks have stemmed from or been further enflamed by locals wanting to perform community funerals and wakes, during which the body is often on display and touched by attendees, and that has led to further spread of the disease—which in many cases is difficult to tie back to that wake, because again, symptoms don’t arrive right away, and ebola symptoms are similar to what locals experience all the time from other afflictions, like colds and malaria.
This past week, in Bunia, which is located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, locals stormed a regional hospital in an attempt to recover the body of a beloved local figure who died of ebola. In the process, the hospital’s isolation ward, which was being used to keep ebola victims separate from everyone else, to keep the disease from spreading further, that ward was burned to the ground.
There are no vaccines or treatments for the Bundibugyo Ebola species that is at the core of the outbreak, and the spread of misinformation in the area had locals believing that these health workers were trying to kill their patients, not save or isolate them so no one else caught ebola.
The man at the center of this, who died five days after being admitted to the hospital, was thought, by his family, to have malaria, which is common in the area and has very similar symptoms, at least in the early days of an ebola infection.
They demanded the hospital release his body so they could bury him, and the staff refused, saying doing so right now could lead to more ebola spread. The family gathered more locals, who threw stones at hospital workers, they broke through the gates of the hospital, police fired into the air to try to disperse the angry crowd, and the ebola ward caught fire during the melee. During that fire, five patients who were in the ward, all suspected of having ebola, fled, and they haven’t yet returned—so they are possibly out in the open, no longer isolated, suffering and maybe dying from their infection, and possibly spreading it to others, as well.
There’s a lot going on in this story, and misinformation spread by local traditional healers who don’t like the hospitals and the medical workers who tell locals medical information rather than folk healing information are part of the problem, but the local medical establishment not doing a good job of educating locals about what they’re doing and why are arguably the flip side of that same coin; more investment in that kind of information dissemination by the government would go a long way to preventing this sort of thing in the future, and health workers globally could use more resources and overall infrastructure to help protect them while they’re carrying out their work.
That said, this is just one small facet of what’s become a much larger story. As of the day I’m recording this, this new outbreak, which was first reported in the Ituri Province of the DRC, has caused 186 confirmed deaths, with 82 more confirmed cases and 836 suspected cases.
As I mentioned, it’s caused by the Bundibugyo ebolavirus, which is less common, at least at this scale, and thus typical response efforts used against the more common Zaire ebolavirus, don’t seem to map onto this strain as well as was hoped, and the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on May 16, as while this is unlikely to become as significant an issue as Covid-19 or other aerosol-spread infections on a global level, regionally it’s causing a lot of damage, and its nature, and the state of international aid for this sort of thing—which is currently substantially reduced, in part because of pullbacks on such programs by the current US administration—means it could continue to flare for several more months, before eventually starting to slow, killing many, many people, in any incredibly painful and contagious manner, in the process.
This is the 17th ebola outbreak in the DRC since the disease was first recorded in the medical literature, and the third outbreak of this strain—the first of which was in the Bundibugyo District of Uganda in 2007 through 2008, that’s where it got its name, and then another in 2012 in the DRC.
This isn’t the deadliest strain of ebola, only killing between 25 and 50% of those afflicted, but because of those aforementioned issues, plus it having flared in a region where governance is complicated by the presence of several militant groups, this wave of infections has created a broad and precarious situation; lots of people have been uprooted from their homes because of conflict between these militant groups and the government, and those refugees have been spreading ebola to other areas throughout the region, making contact tracing difficult or impossible, and leading to surges of new infections in neighboring, and a few further-flung, provinces.
According to a predictive model of the outbreak published by the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, the current number of infected people could actually be well over 1000, in part because of how difficult it’s been isolating the infected, and because the early symptoms are so similar to other common local afflictions; so people are less likely to visit hospitals and get an accurate diagnosis, because they assume it’s just a bout of something else, something less deadly and contagious.
Getting resources into the area is becoming more difficult, too, as those militant groups are fairly active, one such group recently taking over a primary regional airport, which has disallowed the import of necessary medical equipment for regional hospitals.
This hasn’t had much of an impact globally, yet, though cases have been documented in neighboring Uganda—a total of five confirmed infections, as of the day I’m recording this—and the World Cup team from the DRC was ordered to isolate before entering the US to compete, forced to remain in Belgium for 21 days to confirm they aren’t carrying the disease before being allowed into the States for the competition.
Far more likely than mass global spread, though, is more regional spread, which could lead to temporary border lockdowns and similar efforts to keep those who are in currently impacted regions from scattering, understandably fleeing either the outbreak or the militants in these areas, and thus carrying the disease into different provinces or countries.
Local and international aide organizations are scrambling to prevent this, and to identify and isolate infected people where possible, but it’ll likely be a while before they have the necessary on-the-ground resources to do this correctly, and a lot more spread could occur before they’re able to do so at an effective level.
Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_African_Ebola_epidemic
https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/about/index.html
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5175058/
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/congo-ebola-outbreak-cases-are-top-iceberg-coalition-says-2026-05-21/
https://apnews.com/article/congo-ebola-outbreak-who-4e08d8df6d9c34039a9e0b8bad7a8954
https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/ebola-outbreak-explained-4ab4414f
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/5/23/uganda-confirms-three-new-ebola-cases-bringing-total-to-five
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/may/23/dcr-world-cup-squad-isolate-ebola-outbreak-congo-united-states
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/world/africa/ebola-congo-clinic-burned-protests.html
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/23/nx-s1-5831963/u-s-passengers-flying-from-ebola-affected-countries-rerouted
https://www.cdc.gov/han/php/notices/han00530.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ituri_Province_Ebola_epidemic
https://edition.cnn.com/health/maps-ebola-charts-vis
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/21/ebola-outbreak-public-health
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/suspected-ebola-cases-reported-rebel-held-congo-area-2026-05-21/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/world/africa/ebola-outbreak-deaths-congo-who.html


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe