The Breakdown - Deglobalization and Other Narrative Violations, Feat. Geoff Lewis

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

The battle to control narratives is the battle to shape how people understand the world around them. But the traditional gatekeepers of narratives - the media - have never had more competition to shape what is perceived as truth.  In this episode, NLW speaks with Bedrock Capital founder Geoff Lewis about what it means to seek out opportunities in “narrative violations.” They also discuss:  Why de-globalization and “onshoring” are likely to be among the most important economic drivers in the U.S. in the coming decade Why the shift to working from home may be an overblown “narrative mirage”  How important questions of institutional decay have been co-opted by the culture war  Why independent, individuals in the media have more influence than ever Why we’re in a “narrative mirage recovery”

Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond. This episode is sponsored by ErisX.com, the Stellar Development Foundation, and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund. The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. Here's your host, NLW. Welcome back to The Breakdown. It is Tuesday, May 26th. And those of you who listen regularly know that I spend a lot of time thinking. about narratives. Narratives for me are the way that we make sense of complex phenomena. They're the way that we orient lots of information and make it make sense contextually. But narratives are a battleground. Narratives are constantly in flux, and narratives, because they interpret the world around us,

different narratives offer different competing interpretations, and those tend to create political battle. You see this all the time in the crypto industry as people compete to define and explain what's important and why and what people should spend their time on and ergo where people should put their investment within. Narrative battlegrounds become the way that resources are allocated in some contexts like that. I think about narratives all the time and I'm excited to have a guest today who thinks about narratives in a really unique way as well. My guest is Jeff Lewis. Jeff was previously at Founders Fund, where he led investments in companies like Lyft, and is one of the two founding partners of Bedrock Capital. When Bedrock Capital was announced in 2018, they announced it with

a letter that got a lot of attention for talking about narrative violations. And effectively, their thesis was that instead of looking for companies that met the conventional wisdom about how the world was or how the world was changing, they were going to go look for companies that actually violated current narratives in ways that they thought were powerful and offered an opportunity for asymmetric return. As you'll see in this conversation, the idea of narrative violations is not something that I think is strictly speaking a venture capitalist or investing concept alone. I think it's about a way of seeing the world and trying to peel back narratives to understand what the counter-narrative might be. I think especially now, that's a really important

skill. Being able to see through narrative mirage, which is another term of Jeff's, is a really, really important skill. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. And as always, interviews that are long like this, we edit only very lightly to keep the conversation as natural as it was. So with that, let's dive in. All right, we are back with Jeff Lewis. Jeff, thanks so much for joining. Good to be here. So I remember when you launched your venture fund, you launched it with a letter which got a ton of buzz and the central conceder, one of the central ideas was the search for narrative violations. This is something obviously that I think about a huge amount, just narratives in general. I think they're a hugely important and often

under-examined force in society and business. But I'd love to hear just from you what this idea of narrative violations really means, and how did this notion of organizing capital around it start to form? Sure. So, you know, I'd start off by saying that it's sort of the power of narrative is sort of one of these things that sort of always been hiding in plain sight and in business. And so it's sort of like, for the narratives to work, you can't explicitly. you can't explicitly talk about them in the context of being a narrative.

And so, you know, there's a sense in which, you know, Bitcoin became a store of value because people believed that it was going to become a store of value. But if you actually said, well, we need this store of value narrative to work for Bitcoin to become valuable, it wouldn't have become valuable over time. So there's a sense in which the narratives are very powerful. They sort of have an impact across all areas of business, the markets. And then it's sort of very dangerous to talk about, to talk about them explicitly as narratives because you might burst the bubble and they might stop working.

And so what we wanted to try and do with Bedrock was in venture capital, there are sort of two ways that you can, two ways that you can make money. You can either invest in something that people generally believe is going to work. So you can be sort of more bullish than everyone else and something that folks are already bullish on. And so, you know, recent examples of that would be something like, you know, Figma, which is sort of a design collaboration tool where sort of everyone's sort of felt it's going to work for a long time. And folks can just compete to pay higher prices to invest. but there's sort of a consensus view that it's a business that's clearly working in the consumer space. You know, something like Snapchat's been doing well in the public market.

So you can sort of obviously Amazon is sort of consensus good company. So you can, you can, when these businesses are private, you can be more bullish than everyone else in saying that everyone's bullish on. Or you can be bullish on saying that others are, others are bearish on. so you can believe something's going to work that others just think is going to fail. In my case, Lyft would be sort of the modal example. When I led the financing around in that company, it was like everyone thought it was this crazy thing with these pink mustache that was going to get destroyed by Uber. This was back in 2012.

But with Bidork, what we wanted to do is try and carve out this third way of actually what are businesses, what are markets that are just completely not captured in the narrative. at all. So the narratives are always these hyper-polarized. It's either, you know, going to change the world and give way to this sort of utopia, or it's sort of going to destroy the world. And then technology, the narratives are especially polarized in a positive or negative direction. And so our whole idea around narrative violations, which you wrote in our letter is, can you find companies that are not captured in either one of those extremes and actually a powerfully cut against or ignored by sort of the narrative. And, you know, I'll pause there, but sort of one of the implicit things in narrative

violations is that the narratives tend to be, have historically tended to originate from the media. So there's a sense in which narrative violations investing strategy is kind of a contra legacy media investing strategies. So you sort of do the, you would sort of want to avoid things that the legacy media is hyper focused on. It's interesting. I think we'll talk a lot about media because I do think that it's a, it's a good, it's a good note, I think, to start or to have right in this upfront where it is interesting how much of this new kind of mental space because it's interesting because in a lot of ways, and I think that you, you experience this a lot

in your conversations on Twitter, you're bringing this idea of this as an investment discipline or investment strategy. But really, it's kind of a way of seeing the world strategy that happens to have investing implications if you want to sort of apply it to that. Is that a fair thing to say? Yeah, it's a fair thing to say. It's sort of how one can make money with it. So that's sort of why one would want to investigate it. Yeah, it's interesting. One of the parts of the letter I was rereading it before our conversation, And you guys wrote, allowing a popular narrative to decide for you is the most seductive of shortcuts. And I thought that was a really particularly insightful line.

And so I guess, you know, we're now living in this world where the narratives seem pretty up for grabs. I mean, is that your sense coming out of COVID that there's been kind of a big Overton window shift on some previously firmly held narratives? or do you think it's been overstated because we've been living through this, actually, I guess, let me clarify, do you think that the scale of these shifts in, you know, people's bands of perception are truly expanded, or is that a momentary blip based on kind of the strange situation of quarantine? Well, you know, I'd like to, I'd like to believe that it's the, I'd like to believe that it's the, I'd like to believe that it's the form. And so I'm certainly a seduced by the idea, seduced by the idea of believing that that folks actually realize that the narrative gatekeepers actually haven't really known what they're talking about. And the fact that the fact that we had sort of no comprehensive pandemic preparedness plan and there was no sort of, you know, mobilization of all the smartest people in the country to, you know, back in February to figure out what we ought to be doing. and instead it's sort of just been this haphazard disaster at literally every level at the federal level, municipal level, the state level.

It's, you know, the way in which the stimulus has been executed to me feels sort of extraordinarily dangerous, you know, the sort of economic cure is going to be worse than the virus over many years. Certainly one would, well, it's seductive to believe that that everyone's, that everyone's sort of sees that the emperors, quote unquote, have no clothes. But then at the same time, I actually feel that most people, you sort of experience, I think most people will just experience this as a sort of hyper traumatic event. And when a sort of hyper traumatic event happens, you sort of just want to forget that it happened and sort of move on with your life. And so I sort of think there's going to be this bifurcation where on the one hand there's the subset of of of of of the

world that the overton window has been sort of massively expanded for and and and and and and that's a very positive thing and on the other hand I worry that actually I it just um it it it uh I worry that sort of not enough people sort of have the ability to think about these things in this way and and therefore it's sort of just weird just this weird degradation it's like everything is the way it was except worse or something like that. Yeah, it's, you know what? I was kind of watching. I think this is a strange thing to celebrate,

but I think that there is actually something potentially good in the fact that the crisis of institutional leadership was so cross-cutting across every political perspective, every political party, every type of institution. You know what I mean? And there was a moment where I think, it could have been a conversation more broadly about the nature of those institutions that caused such spectacular failure. But instead, as it seemingly always does, just created new battle lines

around the same culture war. Like, instead of having a mass conversation about how we let ourselves get into this and what sort of structural things we need to change, it so quickly became the much easier, like masks as a symbol for, you know, what, what you already believed politically going into this. And that's a perhaps not surprising, but certainly a bummer, I think, from where I'm sitting. Yeah, it's, it's, it's been really, really, really disappointing. You know, I sent this tweet early on in the, in the epidemic that the virus broke woke. And, and I think that, I think it probably did break the sort of woke, the old version of woke, but now there's sort of this even dumber, it's been replaced sort of even dumber, even dumber culture were around,

around masks, around, you know, around opening up or not. And I'd like to point out that I don't think this is a uniquely U.S. phenomenon. So I would argue that actually, in most of the Western countries, there've sort of been versions of, of the same thing that sort of played out, it sort of maybe less polarized. But, you know, there's this right at France, obviously one of the countries in Europe that's been quite hard hit. There's this French writer, well back. He writes in this open letter that he published about a month ago, sort of, you know, try and translate it. The way the epidemic has panned out is remarkably normal. COVID-19 is a banal virus with no redeeming qualities. It's not even sexually transmitted. It will only push further

the obsolescence of human relationships. And ends with the West has not the eternal divine right to be the richest and most developed zone in the world. And that's sort of like the negative depressing conversion. And of sort of how this maybe just sort of accelerates these maybe somewhat dystopic, depressing a trend. And then maybe there is this, I'm hopeful, I'm optimistic, somewhat optimistic. There's maybe this positive version where we realize that we can't, you know, group communities and the sort of small localized decentralized way, realize you can't depend on any of the legacy institutions. You have to build your own sort of hyper local, you know, organizations. You know, maybe there's a crypto version of this with, you know, local ways that on a very local level, you sort of try and.

try and build something new, but certainly, it seems really bad, really bad for all of the institution, legacy institutions, and quite bad for capitalism at large in the West, I would say. Yeah, let's, I mean, so I think that this, this idea of this is a force for localism is definitely a pretty clear outcome. And I think you're seeing that on multiple levels. obviously you're seeing it in the fact that communities have sort of had to step up and take care of each other, right? I mean, you know, we were just talking about this before, but I live in a tiny little town in the Hudson Valley. And the main kind of sources of community support during this time have not been, you know, PPP loans. It's been, you know, the one restaurant that's still operating doing, you know, free meals for families Monday, Wednesday, Friday that are, you know, totally anonymous and no questions asked, right?

So you're seeing kind of that sort of community resilience infrastructure kick back in. But I think that there's also this larger conversation about what it looks like to redesign the economy more structurally to be resilient, or at least some people are thinking about that. And now it's interesting because, you know, there are some sort of public market actors like Chimov who have talked about the need for resilience in the economy. but by and large, most of kind of the public market actors are just kind of rooting for more of the same and this V-shaped recovery. How do you see the conversation playing out about these larger structural shifts that we need in terms of the economy? Things like supply chains coming back home, the ability to manufacture masks or PPE or whatever it is, you know, near.

And how much is that going to be driven by kind of existing companies versus entrepreneurs from the ground up. I think there's a, I think, I think there's just going to be a complete 180 on the supply chain side. And so, you know, I sent, sent out this, we're basically, we've had this 30-year trend of, of offshoring and, and, and, you know, if you're a large company, sort of hire a McKinsey to figure out how you can create a, create a, create a hyper-complex sort of offshoreed supply chain to cut costs. And sort of the, the globalization story of the last, literally, 30 years. And I think that that is, that is, for anything, quote unquote, essential, that, that, that is going to 180. You're going to have to, you're going to have to do things within the

U.S. and have basically, you know, most of the supply chain within the U.S. I'd say there's other countries that we can, we can partner with that aren't China specifically. So there's, you know, obviously Mexico, that relationship, I think it's going to become more important versus less important over the years to come, I'd argue we're going to have a more important relationship with India than we've had historically. So I think the era of the sort of somewhat globalized supply chain is not completely, not completely done, but certainly for essential things. Having a much more localized supply chain is going to be going to be important. And I do think there's a very solid startup opportunity there. I mean, certainly in a biotech context, there's

huge sort of entrepreneurial opportunity there with sort of a local supply chain for the drugs. I mean, the drug supply chains historically tend to be very dependent on China. That obviously has to change in a sort of coordination, just helping businesses re-coordinate, reorganize their supply chains. I think there's probably a technology startup opportunity around doing that, which is quite quite interesting. And I think this is something that folks sort of intuitively, intuitively understand. And so I tweeted this thing yesterday, which was sort of, you know, I was sort of using McKinsey as a scapego or as a sort of, you know, buzzword for globalization.

I wasn't actually picking on McKinsey specifically. But I tweet out, you know, McKinsey wanted McKinsey, but for helping companies reverse whatever McKinsey's recommend it over the past 30 years. The idea there is really that era of helping companies globalize is just, I think that's just done. Because the sort of globalization, the whole predicate for globalization has been these ties with China. And that clearly is done now. Yeah, that tweet definitely hit a nerve, right? I think the last time I looked, it was like more than 6,000 people had favored it or something. So clearly there is a shared sensibility with that.

Or people just hate McKinsey. I think people are looking for scapegoats. And so I feel sort of bad at the tweet because it was like, well, sort of, you know, scapegoating McKinsey. It's not actually really McKinsey's fault. They were an actor in this system. And the system was just really, has just been really screwed up. And so I'd say it's a statement on. people are extremely angry, people want scapegoats, but I think people viscerally feel and understand

that this globalized, globalized world in which we could just be BFF with China and depend on them for these critical infrastructure needs from supply chain standpoint. That era is done. I think people do viscerally understand that. Support for this podcast and this message come from Eris X. With Eris X, you can trade spot and regulate. futures on cryptocurrencies through a licensed U.S.-based exchange. ArisX believes in fair access for all.

Sign up today to take advantage of zero fees and learn more at erisex.com slash consensus. This episode is also sponsored by the Stellar Foundation. The Stellar Network connects your business to the global financial infrastructure, whether you're looking to power a payment application or issue digital assets like stable coins or digital dollars. Stellar is easy to learn and fast implement. Start your journey today at Stellar.org slash coin desk.

Our final sponsor is Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund. In times like these, diversification is key. Consider Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund, ticker symbol GDLC. It's the only publicly treated investment product that offers diversified exposure to large cap digital currencies, all from your brokerage account. For more information, visit grayscale.co slash coin desk. That's G-R-A-Y scale.co slash coin desk. I think that part of why, you know, part of your context, it's almost like, there's another tweet that I think could be paired with it that you sent out, which is basically saying

prediction that the people who create the next normal, who actually pave the path for the next normal, will not be those same people who crafted this ludicrous global supply chain dependency while self-actualizing solely through frequent flyer status. And I think that the point here, and I mean, putting words in your mouth now is there's a sense of you see all of these companies, like doing 180s literally overnight and trying to, like getting contracts from cities to reimagine things. you know what I mean? And it's sort of like, it's a little bit of a bitter pill to swallow that they're just able to kind of shift on a dime and reposition themselves as experts in this new thing, which is by definition because it's new, a thing that people don't really have expertise in. Yep, totally. Totally agree. It's going to be this new crop of companies of people. And then I think the, I always like to think in terms of time scales. And so, you know,

one of the things implicit with narrative violations is something can be a narrative violation, counter narrative at one moment in time. So there was a moment in time at which remote work, you know, many years ago, you know, things like Zoom, Slack that would enable remote work were counter narrative, were narrative violations. That was a good moment in time to invest. Now those are popular narratives, the narrative of remote work, work from home. So it's arguably a sort of overheated moment in time. I wouldn't necessarily want to get involved in sort of remote work companies today as an investor. There's the time scale element to this. And I think that there is a massive time scale element to the shift that we're now going through.

So I think folks are tempted to be like, oh, well, we're reopening. And sort of, so yeah, it's going to be like a year or two years. And we sort of, you know, can repair things. But actually, I think we're sort of, there's like a 10-year time horizon. And we're just all of these things are going to change. You know, I sort of liken this to a platform shift like the, like the iPhone. It's been just this consumer behavior shock to the system. And so there's going to be this sort of 10-year wave of new innovations that ideally will come out to address new needs that we didn't have before pre-virus.

And so I think folks have a tough time thinking in 10-year time horizon increments, but that's actually the type of timescale that this is all going to play out on. And so that's a long-wind way of saying, you know, maybe McKinsey will pick up a few projects over the next few months, but long-term, they're kind of screwed. Yeah. Well, and it's, there's, there are people who are going to, you know, there's a lot of people who are having kind of those heterodox ideas validated now, right? Like one person that we had on the podcast before is Peter Zan, who wrote Disunited Nations. And it looks particularly prescient now in the context of this. And it's basically arguing that, you know, we were in the next 10 years going to end this era no matter what. It's just that Corona did it in a massive fashion. And so I think that, you know, in the same way as sort of like those ideas were out there, right? But again, they were kind of lurking in these narrative violations versus kind of in the mainstream. And you might see the people and companies who are in those spaces start to emerge now. So another question for you that I want to actually come back to work from home.

And maybe just, you know, we'll go through a number of the different pertinent narrative battlegrounds almost right now. But before that, you know, so a piece that you tweeted out, which I also really liked, John Luddig wrote this great piece about the tailwinds adventure capital. And the argument was basically that we're shifting in a kind of an era way, away from just the total blue oceans. I was almost thinking about the westward expansion when there was just so much of America to claim. And then at some point, it started to get competitive.

And the thesis is that you're starting to see actual zero-sum competition. You're going to see more zero-sum competitions between Internet companies because you don't just have the kind of unlimited tailwind of growth of just more people coming online, more people spending more time online, right? At some point, people are spending as much time online as they can. And a lot of his piece is about why venture capital might need to shift back towards being really about vision because there's going to be a new financial infrastructure, things like Clearbank that fund debt, right, and change the way that even these new companies fund themselves. I wonder, do you think, that this sort of tenure shift that you're describing of a real reworking of the global economy is a new space that will, is it basically a new type of tailwind? The sense that we have to kind of start a mass scale project to redesign the economy to bring it back closer to us, at least around these essentials, does that create a kind of a different tailwind for venture capital for entrepreneurs?

You know, I'd like to believe that would be sort of the positive version of it. I worry that actually, certainly in the world of the internet, which I think is what John Luddig, former colleague at Founders Fund, really focused on his piece talking about software, talking about innovation on the internet. that my sort of abstract sense not having thought about it would be that actually what we're getting through COVID is this crazy acceleration and internet ubiquity from everyone being at home, which would basically mean that once we're on the other side of this, we'd seen even faster deceleration because we'll be closer to full internet penetration than we were before. but definitely if there's sort of, so I'd almost argue that it's actually not even clear that that this is going to not even clear this is going to, not even clear this is going to, there's a positive version to the John argument.

Now, all of that said, it does feel like where it's sort of version 2.0 of all of these key things, So like video conferencing, online education, you know, online entertainment. You know, we've got versions of companies doing these things. So there's, you know, there's Zoom. There's the online education companies. I'm an investor company called Lambda School, which is one of them. Other, you know, obviously the streaming companies. It seems like streaming is probably the most baked in terms of the table set of who the players are.

I'd certainly say that the video conferencing, it feels like there's actually just a lot of room for new entrance there. And yeah, it'll be sort of zero-sum competitive or, you know, it's sort of quite winner-take-all. But I don't think Zoom is sort of the terminal video conferencing company. I'd say online education, huge open field. And that's going to be less zero-sum than video conferencing. There can be multiple winners. And it's really unclear what those companies are going to be. I'd say we're just getting started on, you know, something Apology, mutual friend of ours, I think, called this decentralized, calls this decentralized healthcare, the idea of, you know, obviously telemedicine, but that's just sort of piece one,

if you could imagine, just a much more decentralized healthcare industry, and it feels like that's a big white space. And so, and so, yeah, there is, there is potentially this, this, this set of new tailwinds, but I think the Luddig argument is just, is just, it's just basically is just more true now than it was pre-COVID. Yeah, I think that's a, that's a really good point. You know, it's interesting, the online education piece, kind of validating what you were just saying. So I spent a couple years a long time ago now, six or seven years ago, with a company

called Learn Capital, which is one of the first, one of the first San Francisco investors to focus on education exclusively as, like, it wasn't a double bottom line fund, right, where they were trying to have, you know, social impact as well. It was just a traditional venture fund. In fact, I think that their first fund was a carve-out from founders fund way back in the day. Really? That was before I joined. Yeah. Like, I don't like double bottom line fund. So good to hear that was one of those. Those never were. Yeah. Yeah. And it was just, you know, it was the, their whole thesis was like, look, you know, this is a hugely important economically massive area of the economy. Like, you can have good, like, it's not that they didn't care about the sort of the social impact of things.

It's just going to be a byproduct of funding good companies. But it was interesting because at that time, I got in, I joined, well, one, because I thought that the guys who were running it were incredibly smart and I really wanted to learn from them. But two, because to me, the education system is one of these singular most broken things. I mean, it absolutely destroys people's ambition in so many contexts. And I think it needs a total structural reimagination. The problem was, when I got. into it is that the most valuable thing you could be doing in education in 2011, 2012, 2013 was to basically get a big piece of the, you know, effectively regulatory capture or capture,

you know, government dollars going into local schools. So as more dollars became available for kind of mandated technology to communicate between parents and students, going and capturing that was much more interesting economically than starting a big new version of a company, right? General Assembly was one of the investments back in the day. And it's just more more valuable to go after the kind of the K-12 normal market. I think that when you start to see an actual opening in the higher education model and that huge money honeypot for reimagining things and designing it differently, you're going to see a lot of a lot of new entrance to the space that look really radically different than what we've seen before. Yeah. So I agree with that. And then I think the,

the challenge on it is that a world in which we can actually have the, the, the, the truly disruptive online education innovation writ large. So by that I mean sort of the end of a four-year residential colleges with a few, with a few exceptions, a world in which that's, and, you know, sort of the rise of sort of more decentralized, not necessarily homeschooling, but certainly a sort of much more decentralized approach to K to 12. A world in which that's true, I think, is a world in which basically, the virus ends up being really, really bad. And so I don't know if we want to live in that world. Yeah, we've got to root for that much.

You need to just, you need to basically, you need to disrupt sort of people's willingness to go to campuses. So it needs to be bad enough where people aren't going to go to campuses anymore because you're sort of two congregated in large groups. And I have a tough time sort of, I don't actually think that's the direction we're heading. And so the online education, decentralized education is all, it's, you know, there's maybe these narrow areas, I think there are these narrow areas where you can build these large companies. And so we're optimistic on something like a Lambda school or, you know, something maybe like an outschool where you can maybe narrowly with Lambda build it with reskilling for, you know, tech and tech adjacent jobs. You can maybe narrowly build it with homeschooling with outschooling

or wonder school or those companies. And then to have a sort of huge paradigm shift, I think maybe the virus would have to be worse than it is. And I don't want that to happen. Yeah, I agree, actually. I think, and this is my general feeling. Maybe this is a good context, actually, to get into work from home. I think that we have this tendency when we're talking about these shifts. And it's understandable, right? Because you kind of zoom out to like, well, what's the opposite of the system we have now? And is that what we're headed into? When really what a lot of times these shifts look like, I think, is natural market forces of increased choice coming back in in some ways, right? And so, you know, for me, going back to your point, I think what we'll start to see with higher education is not, you know, a closure of all these four-year universities. It'll be a different calculation among people about what the cost-benefit analysis is, which might put pressure on certain parts of the market, you know, to reduce prices.

Or you might see a lot more Lambda school for X, right? And I think that a lot of the success of those perhaps industry-focused training things will be about do companies actually decide. that they like hires from those areas, right? If you started a Lambda school for marketing, would the DDBs and whatever of the world actually hire those people? Or are they just going to be looking for kind of traditional paths? And who knows? But it's going to be less or my guess is that it's less a full-scale shift from one paradigm to another

and more just these things kind of creeping around the margins and creating more optionality. And I think that, you know, we were talking about work from home in a similar light. You've had kind of an interesting journey following on Twitter for the last two months or so. in your work from home thoughts. Take us through kind of how you thought about it at the beginning and then how it's kind of shifted to where you are now. Sure.

So I've been pretty schizophrenic on it for many years and certainly gotten more so over the past few months. And so of long thought, it's what we would call a narrative mirage. So it's sort of this thing where you've articulated, it can maybe exist on the margins. It works for some companies to be fully remote, but sort of an overhyped sector. you've got sort of a million remote work enablement and collaboration tool startups out there.

They're all really well funded, lots of competition among VCs who invest in. So you've long thought it was sort of this overhyped area because ultimately I'm a big believer in you get a lot more. You will give a lot more and get a lot more out of your work if you feel sort of very deeply interpersonally connected to the people you're working with. there's something sort of elemental to work, to sharing a space with people, being live with them in person, which meant that remote work would never fully take over. And then just on a more basic level, if you're the CEO of a company, you sort of, I think, in the old paradigm, wouldn't want your teams all working remotely because you want to actually be making sure people are actually working by seeing them in the office.

And that's sort of the easiest proxy for seeing people are actually working is are they in the office doing things on their computers? And so had been quite skeptical of it. Obviously, we've seen just an insane acceleration in remote work over the last few months, given everyone's basically, everyone in a white collar jobs, basically had to have to work remote in almost every state. And so I basically, where I've netted out is, is it sort of, it's incidentally, the hype was warranted because of this, because of this COVID accelerations, there certainly is going to be a lot more, a lot more remote work across the board. But I think it is actually going to be predominantly concentrated in areas that are going to be less and less important. the future. And so, um, and so, you know, I, I, I, I, I, in, uh, in terms of functioning within a company. And so, um, uh, you know, I, I'd say, uh, that I, I actually, um, you know, I, I think it's real. Um, but actually there are these, you, uh, anything that's sort of

essential, the essential worker categories, um, you know, those folks can't really work remotely. Um, and, uh, the blue call. categories that we're going to become increasingly dependent on, certainly in a context where we're insuring wide swaths of our supply chain over the next decade, those folks can't work remotely. And then I don't think the hybrid really works. I think you have to be either entirely remote or entirely in the office. And so I'd say it's the hype to date has been justified, but I think we're probably on the verge of it of remote work being overhyped. yet again. And then we'll probably land in a equilibrium where, you know, there's some companies

that are fully remote. It works well. You know, I think it'll work well for a number of the large Silicon Valley companies that, you know, don't, you don't really need that many people to do much work because they're sort of natural monopolies. So like a Google would be an example in search. And then I think there'll be a subset of companies that you actually will have people, employees, and their families will actually co-locate with the company, like a resurgence in company town. So you have the Citadel hedge fund did a version of this where Ken Griffin, the founder, moved all of their traders into the Four Seasons Palm Beach. I think they're all still there to do sort of makeshift company town.

And I think in certain key essential industries, certainly in the food supply chain, and others you might see a resurgence in company towns where families co-locate with their company. And then I think there's going to be a lot of companies that just have to take all of the sort of all of the public health, quote unquote public health stuff that you'd expect or many people would expect a government to take care of. We just have to privatize that and do it themselves, that people can come into the office. So that's like, you know, all of the basic sanitization, temperature checking. you know, symptomatic surveillance, et cetera, stuff. I think that's going to have to just be executed by companies. I think a lot of companies are just going to go back to offices.

Yeah, I think that it's an interesting point that there's these, the question of how hybrid you can make it versus that being kind of a structural decision from the ground up will be really interesting to see. What are other areas, you know, as you're sitting here and thinking about narrative mirages versus real shifts that you think are, I guess, what are narrative battlegrounds that you're watching right now in terms of trying to understand how much things are going to change post-COVID-19? I'd say that one I'm quite obsessed with is the media. And so I sort of argue that that may be one area where things really do change going forward is

The legacy has just gotten so many things so wrong at this point that I think this might be the breaking point where it actually does go in a much more, in a much more decentralized direction. You see early efforts, things like substack that sort of enable anyone to start their own media company. Certainly you can monetize a following on Twitter through someone like a, someone like the guy behind strategic. This is very well-known technology newsletter, Ben Thompson, has been able to really prove there's a business model there. You know, something like Jessica Lass, with the information, has done it on a larger scale. I think there could be a wave of citizen journalists, a centralized media. I think that's a very interesting area to watch. I think the – I think the whole idea, while I don't believe we're going to see the sort of end of the four-year residential

sort of liberal arts college in the United States, unfortunately. Yeah, I do think that sort of the end of career tracks. And so, you know, when I graduated college in sort of, you know, 2004, there was sort of the consulting, eye banking, brand management type tracks if you, if you had a business degree that you would go on. You know, for a number of years, recently, there was sort of like, well, you would do product management or software engineering or finance or consulting still stuck around. And I do actually think it's the end of those tracks. And I think we're going to see people are going to just be doing much more idiosyncratic things. And there's probably business people around that. And so you'll sort of have these weird

idiosyncratic influencers in all of these micro niche areas. It's kind of like what you do. You're sort of this idiosyncratic influencer. And I think there can be millions and millions of people like that that own these specific niches. And I'm really quite interested in what are the tools that can enable those folks, because that is kind of the direction, I think. I think things are going. There's a sense of which being an influencer in a sort of very narrow area, having a highly engaged but relatively small audience. is kind of like now the new aspirational thing to do versus joining a McKinsey. Yeah, it's really interesting, too.

I think that what people have discovered is that these niches, because of the power of the internet to converge people of shared interest, these niches can actually support an individual, like really, really well, right, from an economic standpoint, even if they're really narrow. I mean, you see this too, not just with, you know, kind of the types of things that I'm spending time on, but like in gaming, right? You can have micro, obviously the people look at the, you know, the biggest Twitch streamers all the time. But there's this huge long tale of games that have enough of an audience to support some number of independent media professionals, basically, you know, who are creating content. And it turns out the economics as an individual look really different when you start to rehabilitate people to also.

pay for content that they like, whether it's directly in terms of subscription like Ben Thompson's newsletter or just in terms of kind of the, you know, the streaming monthly subscription type things, which don't really get you anything different. It's just a way of supporting those creators. I think that that's a, I tend to agree that I think that it's an early trend. I also think that we still are at the front end of figuring out the right ways to monetize it. If you look at the difference in the Chinese podcasting market versus the American podcasting market, it's massive from a revenue standpoint. And it's because- It's crazy.

It's wild that we don't have that. It feels like that shift is definitely going to happen here over the next number of years. Sorry, keep going. No, no, no. So let me ask a question to two about, I think that the media thing is particularly interesting. You know, my vantage point is influenced. a little bit by the particular kind of business niche that I'm in in the context of the Bitcoin industry, because this is, I think, one of the things that's fascinating is that you have

independent media brands that grow up alongside the kind of the mainstay media brands, right? You have, you know, Coin desk in the block, but then you have a lot of people who are getting their analysis, not from those sites, but from kind of the independent voices that they can subscribe to either via, you know, podcast or whatever it is. And I would argue that a lot of those folks are as influential as anyone at, uh, at these media sites. And I don't think that's basically, by the way, a knock on the, the kind of the legacy style media. I think it may just be a different paradigm. In fact, you know, my, my relationship with Coin desk is I'm independent, but partnered with them for distribution, which is, I think, a really interesting, a very different way to go

about it. And when you start to see, you know, the Matt Tybies of the world who left Rolling Stone, to start their substack, do that more and more often, you're going to have a kind of power shift in the relationship between people that could get really interesting. And I think that we're, you know, right now, you know, I know that one of the things you've been noticing or spending time on, too, is we're seeing kind of the, it feels like a new all-time high or apex in some of that in terms of the kind of the individual influence or power of both Rogan and more recently during this quarantine of Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'd say there's a, I'd say there's this sort of, there's this sense in which we're, you know, where, where, we're, so I'd say Portnoy and Rogan are different. So I think with Rogan, I think the Rogan story is maybe, is maybe a story of actually, of the power of, of, of, of, of the power of, of, of, of, of, of, of the power of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of the power of, of.

of platforms. It's sort of, you know, like someone like Rogan, you think about him just in the context of society, he's probably like the most well-like person in America. So, you know, he's someone who could, if he ran for president, he'd probably win. He, you know, he is just universally, I don't think there's anyone in America who would say they dislike Joe Rogan. You know, one could argue whether he's overrated or underrated. but certainly he's very likable, has a huge audience,

and you really can get anyone, anyone he wants on his show. And sort of the fact that sort of did this deal with Spotify, sort of this three-year type deal, to me is more of a comment on the power of platforms than, you know, I would have expected Rogan to have created his own platform or something like that. I would have hoped you would have created his own platform. versus someone like Portnoy who, you know, he founded Barstool Sports and now he's sort of become a media personality, sort of going in a, I would argue maybe a different direction of might actually be doing more of the trying to have political influence or create his own platform or something like that. But I guess with Rogan, my feeling is I, I'm a little bit disappointed because if like the most loved person in the country, if like this is it for him, this, you know, reported 100 million,

probably a fair amount more Spotify deal. It's like, wait, does that put a cap on what you can actually do as an influencer and how does that impact with the influencer economy? My hope is that he's just this idiosyncratic person and it doesn't. But I was actually somewhat disappointed with that news, although I'm a fan of Spotify. Yeah, it's really interesting, actually. I think it was fascinating to see people's Insta reactions. and, you know, in general, people are free to do whatever deal they want.

And it's a ridiculous amount of money for something you created from scratch, you know, so respect whatever the logic was. But it was funny to see people who are like, oh, this makes so much sense. He's been so worried about YouTube censorship. He's been talking about it all the time. It's like, well, the answer to that is to move to a different centrally complied platform and negate your ability to put this thing on any other platform. It's like, that's not an answer to censorship, you know? But I do think, you know, one of the things that it also brought up for me, which specifically with podcasting, is that I realize that we don't really know what the half life of a podcast is supposed to be, right? We have a rough sense of what, like, how long a TV series lasts, even though that's also shifting based on different models and how Netflix does things versus how HBO does things or whatever.

But like, you know, if you have a successful show, you're expecting it to go seven or eight seasons, right? if it's a drama, maybe a little bit longer if it's a, you know, whatever, a comedy or something, a sitcom that doesn't matter. We have no idea. It's like our most podcasts, three-year things, and then they do a different podcast. Are they five-year things? Are they 10-year things? It's like early enough in the medium that it's actually hard to know.

And I think part of, you know, there were some people who pay more attention to Rogan than I do who are like, dude seems tired. And if you're tired and all of a sudden, you know, there's, and who knows what sort of pressure he feels being the middle ground for everyone, you know, it seems like sometimes or it could seem like, you know, and someone offers you a ridiculous nine-figure deal. Like, maybe you just, of course you're going to take it. But I do think it's an interesting question that you bring up of what it means in terms of the full upside potential of an independent kind of media enterprise. Yeah. Really, really, really good point. And I don't think we fully understand the value of the back catalog either on these podcasts.

So, you know, there's a sense in which a lot, most of the revenue for, in the historical sort of cable television paradigm, the bulk of the revenue was sort of from reruns, actually. And maybe there's some version of that that's true for podcasts. I don't know. I think it's too early. Yeah, it's really interesting. Well, I've picked your brain on a ton of different things and really appreciate the time. Maybe just by way of wrapping up. You had one other tweet that I thought was really, really interesting.

And I want to see it's a month on from when you said it. And I want to see if you're, if you still feel this way or if it's evolved at all. So this was on April 30th. You tweeted out, if you run a zombie company, now is the time to try and sell it. If you work for a zombie company, now is the time to change jobs. It'll be years until folks are as optimistic on the economy as they're going to be over the next three months. Narrative mirage recovery. So first, I guess, what did you mean by narrative mirage recovery?

And second, how has the last month changed or reaffirmed this take? Oh, I believe it now more than ever. And so I would say it's a narrative mirage recovery because basically the Fed is, it's sort of the perma-QE Fed money printing on steroids plus HGH. I mean, the amount of stimulus that's gone is just insane. And then the reality is just that can't do it. You can't infinitely do it. And so I'd say that it's very much a narrative mirage recovery. That'll become clear starting in Q4.

And then the reality is actually, I think, regardless of the fact that it's the narrative mirage recovery, the U.S. is on a relative basis still better off than most other countries. You mentioned Peter Zahn. I think he makes the argument quite articulately that survival. a relative basis, we're still probably better off than most other places. But that doesn't mean that it's that the economic miracle is going to continue. I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

the year. Def, awesome to talk to you. Great to get your insights. Let's do this again sometime. Sounds good. Thanks a lot, man. My pleasure. The thing that stands out to me after that conversation is this idea of how much we think things are going to change when we see a new force for change in society. So the work from home example and the higher education example were the two that we discussed most extensively in this context. But we have this tendency to assume or, or something, somehow get into this headspace that when new forces present themselves, it's going to change things wholly and immediately, rather than being a gradual incremental process where first bits in the margins start to change, and then it slowly goes more mainstream until big swaths of what was

previously outside the mainstream have become normalized. I think that's what you're going to see in higher ed, as I mentioned in the show, where different industries get their own version of Lambda School, get their own version of Y Combinator that becomes as, if not more respected than traditional degrees. I think that's what's going to happen with work from home. I don't think that cities are all of a sudden going to lose their appeal overnight, but there's big sets of people demographically with different types of interest who are going to design their lives around the ability to work from home now, and that's all of a sudden going to be massively more respected among corporations. I think that it's really important not just to peel back narratives, but also to look at both scale and breadth

of impact over time and really try to have a more nuanced view of the world. Anyways, that is my battle and my cross all the time, this idea of bringing nuance to digital conversations. Anyways, I appreciate you at least allowing me to do that by hanging out with you today. Until tomorrow, guys, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.