Subreddit And Forget It
What A Day
What A Day
4.6 • 12.6K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2021
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The COVID strain first discovered in South Africa was found in the United States for the first time in the state of South Carolina. This strain is more contagious, and there’s some concern that it might be slightly more vaccine resistant than the strains we’ve been dealing with thus far.
Robinhood and similar trading platforms restricted purchases of Gamestop stock and other companies targeted by Redditors yesterday, and the values of those stocks dropped off dramatically. We talk through the steps that brought us to this point, how lawmakers are reacting, and what's next.
And in headlines: nationwide protests in Poland as the government enacts a near-total abortion ban, Austin votes to use police money to fund supportive housing, and GM will stop making gas and diesel powered cars by 2035.
Show Links:
"Robinhood’s Customers Are Hedge Funds Like Citadel, Its Users Are the Product"
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | It's Friday, January 29th. I'm Achila Hughes. |
| 0:09.4 | And I'm Gideon Resneck and this is what the day where we give you the tips you need to become the wolf of wad street. |
| 0:14.8 | Yeah, to be clear, the tips are bad, but the name is really good. |
| 0:18.6 | Seriously, wolf of wad street keeps saying it to myself, look like a lunatic. I don't even care. |
| 0:35.0 | On today's show, an update on GameStop, Ben some headlines. |
| 0:39.4 | But first the latest. We've been tracking our various streams of the coronavirus have been detected throughout the world, |
| 0:45.0 | and there was a significant update on Thursday. The strain first found in South Africa, a.k.a. the B.1.351 variant was found in the United States for the first time. |
| 0:54.6 | So Gideon, what do we make of this? |
| 0:56.6 | OK, so it definitely seems not good, but not panic inducing. That's kind of the read that I've been getting. |
| 1:02.0 | So state officials in South Carolina said they had found this more transmissible variant in two people in the state. |
| 1:08.0 | They noted that because the people had no known travel history and weren't connected to each other, that it could likely mean the variant had been spreading undetected, which is not good. |
| 1:16.7 | We knew already that the variant first found in the UK has been detected in more than two dozen states, and the variant from Brazil has also been recently found in the US to. |
| 1:25.6 | So I think it's safe to say they are decidedly here. |
| 1:28.8 | And there's no evidence right now that the B.1.351 strain is any more deadly, but it is more contagious like these other strains, |
| 1:36.3 | which is why we've been hearing about them so much. |
| 1:38.4 | But the reason that scientists are more worried about this one specifically is that one of its mutations has apparently helped it escape the full effective antibodies that arise from the vaccines we have right now. |
| 1:49.3 | That's why these companies are trying to adapt on the fly. |
| 1:52.2 | Right. And Moderna and Pfizer said earlier this week that their vaccines were slightly less effective against the strain based on lab tests. |
| 1:59.3 | Then also yesterday we heard an important update from another company. |
| 2:02.7 | This is a name that doesn't come up that often, but is NovaVax. |
| 2:06.4 | And there are another company that was part of the overall operation warp speed situation. |
| 2:11.2 | So they haven't been approved yet, like the other two we mentioned, they're still in trials in the UK, South Africa, US, and Mexico. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from What A Day, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of What A Day and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.