All right. The United States is a huge country. Things can be very different from one place to the next. Florida's been in the news over the last month or two. We had a really bad surge with Delta taking over. That seems to be firmly in the rear view. I'm looking right now at our seven day moving average. We peaked here a good three weeks ago. We plateaued and our case has been falling. Nationally, the cases have been falling. Kind of weird because we didn't see this kind of a peak in a lot of Northern states like we've seen in Florida. It's been a Southeastern phenomenon, although cases have ticked up elsewhere.

Are we over Delta? I think it depends, to a large extent, on where you live. Here in Florida, like I told you, it's hot, it's muggy, it's rainy. The way you guys live in winter up North, we live like that in summer down here. We tend to stay indoors where it's air conditioned and comfortable. That might have something to do with the fact that states like mine have seen a lot more COVID-19 over the last couple of months than some of the Northern states have. Again, not a certainty, but a very strong possibility.

So it's possible that states like mine have peaked, but other states up North in the Northeast where it gets colder now, it's going to start getting cooler, people will start going indoors more. We might see an uptick there. None of this is for certain. Yogi Berra once said, predicting is really hard, especially about the future. So I'm cautiously optimistic that we've peaked on a national level, but we could still see some regional flare ups and especially in areas that haven't gotten hit that hard. We've had parts of the world that didn't get hit that hard in previous waves, and now they're getting slammed. Southeast Asia is really having a hard time dealing with the Delta variant. Cases are just going through the moon there. Nationally, I think the peak is behind us, but we still could see some parts of the country where you'll see cases accelerate.

The arbitrariness of things invites a total disrespect for our institutions, authority, the law, and all this kind of stuff. It's been a real problem. It's been extremely politicized. And then we've got the mandate that you mentioned. It's really politicized this issue. I don't think it's going to be very helpful. If the President's goal is to get more people vaccinated, this is just going to harden opposition to vaccination. Americans, constitutionally, we don't like being told what to do. We've got a certain conception of our... We're an individualistic society. We talk about our declaration and our constitution and how our institutions are supposed to protect our liberties. And here, you've got the chief executive of the federal government saying he's very disappointed in you. Hey, it doesn't work that way, buddy. It's not for you to be disappointed in the people. You work for us. We're the ones that can be disappointed in you if we don't like the job you're doing.

So the mandate, I think, is going to be very counterproductive of... The lawsuits are going to fly. First of all, this is not going to happen right away. OSHA's got to draft, because he's using OSHA to do this. OSHA's got to draft this. The rule doesn't make a whole lot of sense the way he said it. If you have more than 100 employees... I work from home. I'm endangering nobody. What if I have natural immunity? My daughter caught COVID a month and a half ago. What if I've been exposed and I have natural immunity, and I can prove that? Why should I have to be vaccinated? And things like that.

Last week we took my nine month old son for his checkup and everything. And the nurse practitioner, who's been the person that sees him and my daughter, who's three years old, she's been our family doctor for years now, she says, next time, she might not be there because she is very against taking one of these mRNA vaccines. She doesn't want to take it, and she's willing to quit. What's going to happen if you've got a lot of people that just... Even 10, 20% of people. I just read an article today. There's a hospital in Texas where the CEO of the hospital says he thinks 20, 25% of the people are going to walk. He's going to have to shut the hospital down. And Biden saying, "If you don't comply, we're going to cut off your Medicare and Medicaid money," And this is a poor part of Texas, everybody's on it. It's going to create more problems than it solves.

I don't think it's going to push the vaccination numbers a lot higher over what would happen otherwise. And it's going to create a lot of resentment and anger. Maybe this is just a political ploy to distract from the debacle that was the Afghanistan withdrawal. I don't know. It might be just a cynical political maneuver to change the conversation. But like I said, this thing can't be implemented for a while. Once the rule is written, there's, I think, 75 days before it actually goes into effect. As soon as it's written, they're going to sue the pants off of it. So who knows how long this thing gets held up in court.

By the time this thing gets resolved one way or the other, I think Delta's going to be firmly in the rear view, and we may be back to where we were at the beginning of the summer where we just have a trickle of cases and steady declines. And the vaccines have been imperfect, unfortunately. We had really high hopes for it. The protection is far from perfect. One good thing you can say about it, it does appear to be protective against severe cases of COVID. So there's definitely that in its favor. But a lot of people just constitutionally, they're just... When you tell them, "You gotta do it-"

Sure. Ivermectin belongs to a class of compounds that was discovered decades ago by Satoshi Ōmura. That's not the Satoshi that invented Bitcoin. This is a different Satoshi. And then another person that did a lot of work with it and perfected it is William Campbell. And both these guys shared a Nobel prize for the discovery of ivermectin, and not because it's good for horses. Although, a lot of drugs that are used by humans are using animals. The reason it won a Nobel Prize is because it's very useful in poor, tropical areas of the world to fight off parasitic diseases, for example, like river blindness. People in some parts of Africa live close to rivers, there's a fly that bites them, the fly transmits a worm, and the worm eventually migrates into your eyes and blinds you.

But everything from head lice to ascariasis, other things like that, it's a very powerful drug for that. Well, it's also really useful for your pets and for animals. We give humans antibiotics, we give animals antibiotics, does that mean when you take an antibiotic, you're taking a horse drug? No. There's been a lot of political bologna on both sides of this. Here in Florida, we mentioned mosquitoes. Mosquitoes carry heartworms for dogs. When I had a dog, I used to give him Heartgard, I think it was once a month and that's Ivermectin for dogs, so they don't get heartworms. Stuff like that. Is Ivermectin good for COVID 19? All right.

There have been analogies, there have been meta-analyses, there have been studies, showing that there's a really strong survival difference between people that get Ivermectin, that they have symptomatic COVID 19 and people that don't. What we do not have is the gold standard, a double blinded placebo controlled study, with a placebo control group and an Ivermectin group to compare those things. The FDA does not officially endorse, neither does the CDC because we don't have that gold standard of evidence. We do have a lot of evidence, but not the gold standard for these regulatory bodies here in the United States.

Now, if I had symptomatic COVID 19 and it wasn't looking too good, based on the evidence I've seen, I would get my doctor to prescribe me some Ivermectin stat, okay? That said, the FDA can't officially one way or the other without the level of proof being where it wants it to be. That's where we are right now. You've got people saying you're stupid, you're taking horse paste because some people are buying the veterinary version and then you've got other people saying, why won't we use this, if there's evidence that it works? The situation we have right now is guess what, your doctor could prescribe this off-label if you wanted to, like doctors do for all kinds of other drugs, where it's only officially approved for this, but the doctor believes it can help you with this and under his professional guidance, you will receive this drug to help you with it. Ivermectin has a lot of evidence in its favor that it can help with COVID 19.

We're closing out a couple of services. Breakthrough Technology Alert, which I've had the privilege to be a part of going back to 2009, and FDA Profit Alert. We're closing those out just to start fresh. Right now I'm still the editor of Catalyst Trader and all of our best ideas are going to go there. Our FDA service, it was a lot of catalyst trades based on clinical data, regulatory timelines, those ideas are going to be going in the Catalyst Trader. Our reserve members are still going to get my best ideas.

My best micro, small-cap, moonshot-type of tech and biotech place, that would've been in Breakthrough Technology Alert, the best ones are going to be going in the Catalyst Trader. I'm already talking with you guys. Hopefully we can launch some new product here in the not-too-distant future, give me some more stuff to work with, which I would definitely enjoy. We're in a little bit of a transition, but you'll still be hearing a lot from me here in the coming weeks and months.

Yeah. Cybin is one of these new psychedelic therapeutic companies and there's a few ones out there. Quality companies like Compass, Mindmed and Cybin. These are powerful drugs. People take them recreationally and they have the psychedelic experience, they can be hallucinatory, they can be revelatory. On a biochemical level, these compounds act like they can reboot your brain. Why will we care about that? Well, they could be powerful therapeutic tools for stuff that we can't treat right now, like treatment-resistant depression, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that. They could be very useful. They have already helped a lot of people under controlled circumstances and trials. What I like about Cybin and I think Cybin is special, unlike the other two companies that I've mentioned.

These other companies are largely working with existing compounds. They're doing psilocybin-assisted therapy. and as you know psilocybin is the main active psychoactive compound in the psilocybin mushroom, the magic mushroom. Cybin is developing a library of synthetic psychedelic substances with different properties. The company's lead program is psilocybin lead program, but the delivery method is unique. They have a sublingual, I think it's like a thin film sublingual delivery instead of oral ingestion, which is bit problematic with psilocybin because the amount of time for it to kick in is quite variable and the amount that you actually absorb through your digestive system can also be variable. Obviously when you're giving a prescription, you want to know that something works very consistently. Their sublingual formulation psilocybin, quicker uptake, avoid second pass metabolism, it's a more consistent delivery method than orally, but that's not what I'm most excited about.

Like I said, they're building a library of synthetic psychedelics with different properties. Let's say there's a case for a psychedelic compound that has a very mild effect, but a very long duration, for a certain type of therapy, for some sort of mental illness. Well, they're working on stuff like that. They're working on deuterated versions of psychedelics, which have delivery properties and half life in the body. What if you want something that's fast-acting, works really quick and goes away quickly? You're working on psychedelics that do that and psychedelics with different kinds of subjective, mental state properties and different interactions with your neurotransmitters. Maybe they bind more tightly to one neurotransmitter and more weakly to another.

The nice thing about this, from a commercial perspective, companies like Mindmed and Compass, can patent the actual application of psilocybin and they are and there's an uproar about that by the way, but they can't patent the actual compound itself, the molecule because they didn't invent it, it's been out forever. We discovered it back in the '50s when they were able to extract it from the psilocybin mushroom, but Cybin, with these compounds, does not have that problem. They're patenting left and right, these compounds because they're inventing them and they're building a library of them for future clinical study and they actually have compositional matter patents, which really strengthens their position a great deal.

They're going through the moon. We're not going to be able to do this without nuclear energy. Put that to one side. We should be going crazy developing-next generation nuclear technology. There are some really interesting new technologies out there, like the small modular reactor technology being developed by NuScale. Here in a couple of years they're going to start building one in Idaho or Utah. Going back to renewables and best battery energy storage systems. You got solar, you got wind. When the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, you've got a little bit of a problem with these renewables. You're not generating what you might need, which is why you need a base load. If you want to be clean, nuclear is the cleanest and it's cleaner than solar and it's cleaner than wind in terms of how many units of carbon you add to the atmosphere, per unit of energy that you output. Put that to one side, the way you deal with this is that when there's lots of sun, there's lots of wind, more than you need for your grid, you put it, you store it in your piggy bank. All right? You store it in some sort of energy storage and the battery is the biggest one. There are other ways of doing it, but battery grid-scale, giant battery technology is the way they're doing this. So as we scale, and it's predicted we're going to scale big time here over the next decade, in terms of renewables, there's a huge market opportunity for these battery energy storage companies like Stem, which is working with lidium. Another company is working with zinc, which is really interesting. It's Eos Energy Enterprise (EOSE).

Stem is big. Okay? They've actually gotten more grid-scale batteries out there than Tesla right now. And they got lots of projects coming down the pipe. So they're growing by leaps and bounds. It's a great play. Eos Energy isn't working with lithium, it's working with zinc battery technology. Not the kind of battery technology that would work in your car. Okay? It's heavier. It's a little bit less energy dense, but for grid-scale, it has some definite advantages. It's less prone to catch on fire, which, if you're going to put some battery storage at a data center, in an urban core, Manhattan or something like that, it's propensity to burn is a major consideration under those circumstances. Number two, I expect our lithium supply lines, supply chains will, I expect, be strained for years as the electric automotive boom really gets into gear here.

So the nice thing about this is that you're not tapping into that supply chain for your energy storage batteries. And zinc is cheap and plentiful. So there are some real advantages there also for them. So this is going to be a trillion dollar market here in 10 to 15 years. It's a couple of ways to play it. High-quality companies are growing by leaps and bounds. Lots of opportunities there.

All right. So everybody was waiting with bated breath yesterday for the Apple announcement. And it was a little bit of a sad trombone at the end. We got a slightly better iPhone and a bunch of new emojis, big deal. So there was a report last month by Ming-Chi Kuo, who is the... you might call him the Apple whisperer. He's got a bunch of people in the Apple supply chain talking to him. So he's a really good bellwether of what Apple might be doing in the future.

So they published in MacRumors and other Apple related websites that Apple was having QualComm build them a special communications chip that was capable of communicating... I believe it's on the S band or L band. I think S bands. Capable of communicating on S bands. "Why would you want to communicate on S band?" Well, hey, there's these two satellite constellations up there. Iridium and Globalstar. Maybe Apple's finally releasing AppleFi, the satellite phone. Right? And these two companies... Iridium used to be in our portfolio. I sold them not too long ago. I kind of kick myself, "Man, what if I did my research?" And I said, "These frequencies don't carry a whole heck of a lot of data. We're not going to have a video call like this with this level of clarity on these bands. Okay? I don't find the rumor very plausible."

I thought to myself, "I think when Apple rolls out satellite phones, it's going to be just mind-blowing. It's going to be amazing. It's not going to be this piddly bandwidth." And maybe you can make an emergency call and I can see the utility in that, but that's not usually Apple's mode of operation. Apple usually goes really big and they really perfect something before they release it to market. So I did not recommend Globalstar. Iridium was out of our portfolio. I didn't see how it would've worked with Iridium anyway, because the bandwidth in the rumor, the actual band that supposedly was going to go into the new iPhone was not Iridium's anyway. It was Globalstar's, though. Turns out it was a big let down.

There's nothing in the iPhone that is satellite communications specific. They mentioned none of that in their presentation yesterday. A better chip, a better this, a better that, a much higher price for the pro version, the iPhone 13 Pro. So we're going to have to wait on that, but it doesn't mean that it's not coming down the pipe. We've got a company in Catalyst Trader called ASTS. They seem to have perfected a cell phone tower in the sky that will be able to bring 5G or 4G-like speeds to any phone on the face of the earth, including your existing phone without any modification. Whether you have a Samsung, an Apple, whatever it is, you'll be able to connect to that. And they've already signed deals with Sprint and American Tower in the United States. So don't quote me on that. I don't remember if it's Sprint. It could be Sprint. I think it's Sprint. So Sprint, once they get these satellites up in space, you will have AppleFi to your Apple and to your non-Apple phone. So that's coming down the way, even if Apple isn't actually building any functionality into its phone.

The metaverse is an idea that we're working on right now. We don't have any published picks in it, but if you look at our portfolio and Technology Profits Confidential, if you've bought some of those plays, you already owned metaverse plays. So what is the metaverse? So the term is a sci-fi term. It comes from the science fiction author, Neal Stephenson. He wrote Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash. Yeah, it actually comes from Snow Crash.

So metaverse is the new buzzword, it's the latest thing. We've actually been writing about the metaverse for years without using that name. It just never caught on. So it's augmented reality, virtual reality, virtual worlds. We're going to be living in these virtual worlds and we are, to a certain degree right now in the 2-D fashion, you and I are having a virtual interview here even though we're a thousand miles away from each other. But it's going to go to a much richer and deeper level of realism where you might be a virtual version of you, you might be sitting here in my office, or I might be sitting there in your home. So it's something I've been writing about specifically, at least since 2015.

And it's coming along. The thing is the base technology to make it possible has to really get better. Realism, all that stuff has to improve. Everybody's working on it. So Microsoft is the portfolio. It's going to require massive graphics processing capabilities. We have Nvidia in the portfolio. It's going to require the world's greatest chips. We've got Taiwan Semiconductor, the world's greatest chip maker in the portfolio with their four nanometer process, which is what they use in the iPhones. And we've got several other companies. So there's the hardware side and there's the software side, and there's different ways to play it. And Apple is supposed to be working on Apple Glasses where you'll have an augmented experience. You've got Microsoft working on its Halo. I tested a developer version of Halo I'm going to say four years ago, five years ago, maybe four years ago. Blew me away. Okay? Absolutely blew me away. And it's only going to get better. So they're trying, but they wanted something small. Remember, nobody wants to have a huge pair of goggles on their head. Imagine something like this, like your glasses.

So Joby Aviation, there's a number of companies trying to do what they're doing. I think they're probably best of class. And certainly they're the only one that's listed on public markets right now. It's another company called Blade, but they're working with helicopters. They do want to go to this e-vertical takeoff for landing, eVTOL model in the future. So Joby Aviation has developed a eVTOL electric vertical takeoff for landing aircraft. Very sleek, beautiful looking aircraft that carries four passengers and one pilot. Has 250 miles of range, extremely safe, but an incredible amount of redundancy built into this thing. It's got four propellers, rotors, propellers, whatever you want to call them. One of them can fail and the thing can still land safely. Each motor for each propeller has two power converters. So one can fail and the other one will still work fine, supplying all the electricity the electric propeller needs.

It's got four batteries built into it. One battery fails, you just make an emergency landing, or you maybe even have still enough range to land at your destination. So they've really thought this through. The Air Force loves what they're doing. The Air Force has worked with them. It's already cleared to fly. The Air Force has cleared it. The Air Force would love the short range vertical takeoff for landing craft for obvious reasons. It's quite a capability. I mean, remember everything, they invested in the Osprey for example. And Joby's working with the FAA to get type certification so this thing can go into commercialization stage.

There's a number of pieces that need to fall into place. So they've got the basic plane. The design is basically frozen or almost frozen at this point. The craft itself has autonomous technology so that the pilot of a standard airplane can get checked out on this thing and be able to fly without having to get some separate certification. If you're an airplane pilot, your helicopter license is a completely different license. They're not going to have to do that. The automation built into the plane will make it supposedly much safer than other kinds of aircraft. Of course, there's all this redundancy built in that I already mentioned. The other feature that it's got going forward is as this technology evolves, maybe by 2030, which is what they've talked about, they'll be able to have fully autonomous aircraft. So imagine, we want to go to wine country. We land in San Francisco SFO, we hop on a Joby and 20 minutes later, we're in Napa without having to fight all that traffic. And the cost per mile is actually really low. According to their numbers and their estimates, it's going to be super cheap. It's not going to be as cheap as an Uber, but it's going to be cheap. And Uber actually is part of this whole thing. You're going to be able to call one on your Uber app. Uber was working on air taxis and they sold all their air taxi technology to Joby. So all that software stuff comes from Uber, which, I'd say they know how to do this kind of software. They've done pretty well with what they've got.

They sold it to Joby, Uber's going to be part of this, and then you got to get the infrastructure in place, right? Where are we going to take off? Where are we going to land? Air terminals, where are they going to be? So there's the infrastructure side. The big thing right now is the FAA certification, which should be, I think, maybe by 2023, and then mass production, and then target markets. They want to come to Miami. Fly into Miami, let's go to South Beach. We're there in ten minutes, five minutes, real quick, because you're going 150, 200 miles an hour. You're flying over all that congestion. From the city planner perspective, it should help relieve a little bit of congestion for the troglodytes down below, you know what I mean? With people going up, like the Jetsons, going from one place to the other, the Flintstones below, the Jetsons above. This iMobility thing is a big investment theme. Joby's the only pure play right now. I think they're probably the most advanced company in terms of getting to market, and I think that introduces some scarcity into Joby stock, which I hope, over time, will bid it up to stratosphere heights, and then we can exit with a nice fat profit like we did with Virgin Galactic.

All right. This one's mind blowing. So you mentioned you talked to, you said the CEO of Cybin and he's from Johns Hopkins. When it comes to psychedelics, Johns Hopkins is the premier research institute in the United States. Well, as it just so happens, I spent several hours talking to a chief scientific officer of a different company, and he was director of the ketamine research center at Johns Hopkins where they do this kind of research, and he's working on something completely different. Man, where do I start with this? So his name is Adam Kaplan, and the company is MYMD Pharmaceuticals Inc (MYMD) and they're now in Catalyst Trader. If you want a little bit more color straight from the horse's mouth, they presented it at HC Wainwright on Monday, and that webcast is still available if you want to look up the press release.

But just to give my own rundown on it, and they've got a couple of compounds. I'm just going to talk about MYMD right now. It's a tobacco alkaloid derivative. It's been modified in certain ways and it just so happens to be a powerful TNF alpha inhibitor. Now, what does this mean? So, TNF alpha is one of these master inflammatory cytokines that you have in the body, and the best selling, most successful drugs in history are TNF alpha blockers. It did more than $20 billion in 2019 or 2020. $20 billion drug and it blocks TNF alpha. It actually was first approved in 2002. It was the first antibody therapeutic approved by the FDA, and it blocks TNF alpha. It was approved for rheumatoid arthritis. TNF alpha is involved in all kinds of inflammatory autoimmune conditions.

The developers of Humira have been able to get approval after approval after approval for Crohn's disease and this and that. $20 billion a year drug. And if you add the couple of others that have come on the market since then, like Enbrel, actually, there's $40 billion a year in TNF alpha blocker sales. It's just a mind blowing market. It's huge, but they all have the same problem. They work by blocking TNF alpha directly, and that's very problematic because TNF alpha isn't there for nothing. When you get an infection or an injury, your TNF alpha amps up to deal with that. It amps up the inflammatory response, it starts the cytokine storm, inflammatory cascade, telling disease cells to kill themselves, so people that are on these TNF alpha blockers, they're at greater risk of certain kinds of cancer because there's an inflammatory component to that, and they're at greater risk of infection, so it's a major downside.

The other downside for the TNF alpha blockers on the market now is that they don't cross the blood brain barrier, so you've got all these inflammatory conditions like Alzheimer's, and there's a very, very strong correlation between TNF alpha levels and depression, but none of these drugs cross the blood brain barrier to lower your TNF alpha levels and lower inflammation in your brain. Here comes MYMD1, the small molecule derived from a tobacco alkaloid that crosses the blood brain barrier easily and lowers inflammation in those tissues. And it's been studied, and they're prepping it to, first of all, this drug has other properties.

They did a study on mice. It hasn't been published yet. The study was done at Johns Hopkins. They had three groups of mice. They had one receiving MYMD one. They had one receiving rapamycin, which is a known life extension drug, and they tested it, another group of mice on Rapamycin and Metformin. These are known already to work on mice and extend their lifespans. They took 19-month-old mice, which is the equivalent of 58 human years, and they had a group on each, and the ones on these known life extension molecules compounds died off pretty fast over the next several months, they went to the human equivalent of 85 years. The MYMD group shows little indication of death. Very few mice died. I'm not going to say it's an immortality drug, but just think of the potential.

Because there's a huge inflammatory component in aging. They call it inflammaging. Years ago, there was a Time magazine with a cover, 'inflammaging phenomenon," how your immune system changes as you age. It ages, you get this background inflammation going on, you get these autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis. There's a major involvement with the development of cancer, which is why cancers are generally much more common in older people. I believe this molecule this company has could become a competitor in this 40 billion market. Plus, it's shown that it's very safe so far. And it could become a competitor and new inflammatory indications that nobody is in touch. They're going into clinical trial now, phase two, in COVID 19 depression. There's a huge TNF alpha component there. As you know, if people have bad COVID 19, there's a runaway inflammatory response, which is what kills a lot of people. It's called the cytokine storm. They're going into a clinical trial for that.

They're going to go into clinical trials for sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is muscle wasting. When you get older, your muscles start to waste away. There's a big TNF alpha component in that, and you get frail. Older people are frail. In this mouse study that I just told you about, I know it sounds hilarious, but they did a grip test on the mice and the ones on MYMD retained their grip strength, which means they retained muscle mass, which means there's an application for sarcopenia in older people. I could talk about it for a while, but I'll be writing a lot about it in Catalyst Trader.