The Pomp Podcast - 288: Keith Rabois on the State of the World

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

Keith Rabois is a General Partner at Founders Fund and is one of the most respected minds in Silicon Valley. He previously was part of the PayPal mafia, served as the COO of Square, and co-founded real estate company OpenDoor. Keith also has invested in many industry defining businesses including Yelp, Linkedin, and hundreds of others.  In this conversation, we discussed the coronavirus, the economic crisis, the Federal Reserve's actions, the issue with bad data, what we should learn from all of this, how OpenDoor is doing, what an economic recovery may look like, why Sundar Pichai should lose his job at Google, and how Chinese spies may have infiltrated big tech companies. You don't want to miss this episode. ============================= This episode is brought to you by Koyfin.  It is the only software tool that I use when trying to better understand the financial markets. They are a web-based platform that lets you analyze stocks, ETFs, mutual funds and other assets all in one place. I’ve been using it every day to track what's going on in the market and I think if you try it, you will too. Koyfin has a ton of high quality data, powerful functionality and a clean interface. The best part is that it is free. You can sign up at http://www.koyfin.com ============================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 45,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at www.pompletter.com

This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Keith Raboy is a general partner at Founders Fund and is one of the most respected minds in Silicon Valley. He previously was part of the PayPal Mafia, served as the COO of Square, and co-founded real estate company Open Door. Keith has also invested in many industry-defining businesses, including Yelp, LinkedIn, and hundreds of others. In this conversation, we discuss the coronavirus, the economic crisis, the Federal Reserve's actions, the issue with bad data, what we should learn from all of this, how Opendoor

is doing, what an economic recovery may look like, why Sundar Pichai should lose his job at Google, and how Chinese spies may have infiltrated big tech companies. You don't want to miss this episode. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Koifin. It is the only software tool that I use when trying to better understand the financial markets. They're a web-based platform that lets you analyze stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, and other assets all in one place. I've been using it every day to track what's going on in the market, and I think if you try it, you will too.

Koifin has a ton of high-quality data, powerful functionality, and a clean interface. I promise you'll love it. The best part is, it's free. You can sign up at koifin.com, K-O-Y-F-I-N.com, or go in the description and click the link. Again, a free product that just works, koifin.com, K-O-Y-F-I-N.com. Also, don't forget, I write a daily letter to over 45,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various

aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, Pompletter.com. I actually used Coifin for charts when I included in the Pomp Letter. So go check out Coifin. Go check out the Pomp Letter. Now let's get into this episode with Keith. I hope you guys enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to

make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have Keith here. We are going to try to basically just download his brain on the state of the world and go for as long as we can. Thanks for doing this. Pleasure to be with you. For those that don't know who you are, the very few, what is your background? Let's just kind of go through that first so people understand what perspective you're coming from.

Sure. So I'm Keith Arboye. I'm a general partner at Founders Fund. I've been there a little bit over a year after spending six years as a VC at Coastal Ventures. So basically, I've been a professional VC for about seven years. Prior to that, I spent about 13 years at Silicon Valley operating companies, running companies uh moved out here in 2000 late 2000 to join this bunch of misfits at a company called

paypal um went through sort of a sine wave distribution uh curve of ups and downs but eventually made the company pretty successful after that we both had an ipo in 2002 and then later subsequently sold the company ebay after that kind of reunited uh with peter thiel and and worked on incubating and funding new companies, new startups, particularly consumer startups, in the wake of the internet bubble collapse when basically nobody else in Silicon Valley wanted to fund new and interesting companies

other than really Peter and Reid Hoffman. So a lot of people came to us, had some interesting ideas, promising ideas. We got involved in them in very early stages, everything from what became LinkedIn, what became Yelp. I got involved in both of those companies as well as several others, joined the board. some companies became pretty active angel ambassador uh so spent um the next three years

or so doing mostly that working through uh biz dev corp dev revenue generation uh at linkedin um after we changed ceos at linkedin i left to reignite with our cto co-founder paypal max leptin at a company that will not be remembered um called slide that was actually eventually acquired um we built applications on social platforms uh originally myspace for those of you old enough to remember myspace and facebook um acquired by google um left that uh a week later after being acquired um joined this kind of crazy startup again trying to reinvent payments for smbs and micro merchants uh became the 21st employee prior to launch uh the company called They became well-known as Square and went through kind of a rocket ride there.

We grew really, really rapidly once we figured out how to launch properly, where to launch, and how to legally do it, and then became a VC. But during the 13 years I was actively running these companies, I probably invested in about 80 companies as an angel investor, many of which went on to be pretty interesting companies from, let's say, Lyft to Airbnb to YouTube. So it's sort of been all over the map in the Silicon Valley. I started as a lawyer, which I'm not sure I would recommend. I spent most of my 20s in law school, clerking in the Fifth Circuit and litigating of all things, and then jumped sort of cold turkey into the Internet world in 2000. You've basically done nothing.

Like, it's like you're just starting out. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, like, look, I got 30-something. And the current standards, I've got over 30, I've got about 30 years to run for president. So, you know, it's plenty of time. I love it. All right. So you've had a lot of thoughts on COVID-19 and kind of the health crisis. I want to cover the health crisis first and kind of what your general assessment of what's

happened so far has been. And then we can get into kind of some of the steps that should occur moving forward. But just what's happened so far from your view? Well, I mean, I think, first of all, let's start with this is fairly unprecedented, at least in the Western world. I think the Asian countries had an advantage because, to some extent, SARS was an early version of the same. And so most of the countries that have dealt best with the problem saw earlier generations of viruses that were out of control and learned what that might look like. Whereas I think in the U.S. and Western democracies, either we didn't have the experience or didn't believe it was credible that a virus would kind of escalate to this level. And we're basically caught off guard or with almost disbelief, even though the logic made sense.

There's a lot of fundamental emotional disbelief. But it turns out, obviously, the virus did spread fairly rapidly, maybe not as rapidly as people projected. Certainly nothing like smallpox or anything like that. But in the modern era, let's call it post-1958, really, we haven't really seen a virus like this in the U.S. And so I think the bureaucrats didn't really react that well. The politicians may or may not have reacted that well. They didn't really react that well anywhere in the Western world for the most part. Germany's been a little bit better, but only a little bit better than other democracies in the West.

And so I think we've sort of confronted basically an unprecedented problem without a lot of preparation. Trying to wing things in the middle of a crisis is usually not the best idea. We've seen lots of mistakes by the media, seen lots of mistakes by the CDC, lots of mistakes by the FDA, probably a lot of mistakes by the elected politicians. They've compounded. Now the question is, what do you do about it? For sure. And one of the things I want to start with is just the access to information and the kind of accuracy of that information. So this is everything from the qualitative stuff of just, hey, it's bad, it's not bad coming out of China early on to the actual quantitative data that we're seeing even here in the United States still. Kind of what is your viewpoint today as to like how accurate is this stuff? And really through the guise of it's hard to make good decisions if you're actually looking at bad data.

Yeah, well, the data lags, in this case particularly, but in many cases, both time to infection, time to test, time to get results, you have to cohort on that, time to have severe severity like where you have to be hospitalized, where you might die, and you have to try to re-cohort this like we do in our startups and use the proper timestamp and time cohorting, the data is going to be a mess. So that's one. And then a lot of information is rapidly evolving. So those are all like, you know, pretty fundamental challenges for everybody.

In addition, I think the Chinese government had an incentive to mislead people and clearly did, which led to people being more complacent around the globe. They suppressed, you know, the severity of the human, the possibility of human to human transmission, the severity of the transmission, the, you know, potential impact in a variety of ways banned research from both researchers and journalists from investigating the origins and what was causing this in the first place. They suppressed the doctors, arguably killed the doctors in China that were trying to warn the world.

So the world got off to a bad start through the active mismanagement by China with intent. After that, though, for a variety of reasons, the experts didn't react very well. So we were told that closing the borders to people from China was racist, which of course it wasn't, and would have been very helpful if it had been done even two weeks earlier. We were advised that this can't be spread through the air, so you don't need to wear masks, et cetera. It turns out, well, whether or not it can be spread through the air is still a good idea because it prevents it from accumulating on surfaces.

Masks are fairly effective in limiting the viral transmission of the virus. All the experts say you need to wear a mask from the media to the World Health Organization. Just every single possible piece of advice that the medical and media world gave us turned out to be wrong. Some of it just pure difficulty of predicting in a rapidly environment world. some of it I think ideologically suspect and some of it actually actively misleading. So fortunately these days there are alternative sources of information, social media being one of the best ones, where individuals who have some access to data or ground truth can report it to

the world and disseminate it. Social media platforms haven't acted that well. I mean, Zero Hedge, which probably got the whole story right, was banned by Twitter, which someone someone should investigate who banned them, how were Chinese spies involved in that decision. Secondly, to this day, it shocks me beyond belief that YouTube is barring videos that are inconsistent with the World Health Organization, where the World Health Organization has been wrong on every single possible topic about the virus. I think it's insane. I think after the virus is over, the government absolutely needs to call into account, needs to absolutely go after Google very aggressively, investigate this very carefully.

Sundar and Susan probably should lose their jobs over this. I think it's not bad. And, you know, the Senate needs to seriously investigate Google's role in basically propaganda. And I think that will, but I don't think you should do it in the middle of the virus. I think it's something you do after everything's calmed down in the world and, you know, with a little bit benefit of history, but it's not going to look very good for Google. I think the social media on Twitter, you know, that was very helpful is obviously our friend Balaji, you know, as early as late January warned the world that this was a very severe problem, that it was absolutely going to spread in the United States specifically, that people needed to start taking serious action that absolutely we needed to adopt masks and vigorous testing um investing the technology to trace which we still haven't done you can argue

the wisdom of that but um you know one bellwether was there were early warning signs on twitter that allowed some people to take action um insofar as any experts that seem to be somewhat right scott scott godlieb's look pretty good um he's mostly been ahead of the curve um notwithstanding his FDA background. He was at BC before that, and maybe the ability to do first principles thinking has helped him. But it's really been a catastrophe of errors, like left, right. Ideologically, the spectrum is pretty broad. Nobody's been perfect here. Yeah. So on the qualitative side, one of the things that this brings into question is, you mentioned YouTube using uh, the world health organization as like the bar for accuracy, um, of information. Obviously

we now start to question, well, if they were telling us not to wear masks and then they have to reverse the decision, you know, how do you kind of give them credibility? And so how do you think about, um, you know, if you are YouTube, if you are Twitter, like how do you come up with where those sources of information, um, are and what can you trust and what can you not basically? I don't think social media platforms should be moderated content based upon substantive accuracy, period. This is something human history has resolved centuries ago. We have standards for what can be published in books. You can't publish pornographic material.

You can't publish libelous material, defamatory material. Other than that, you should be able to publish anything you want. We have, you know, centuries of experience. There should be no difference on what can be published on Twitter versus if you can publish in a book. It should be on Twitter, it should be a YouTube video. Anything other than that makes no sense whatsoever, it doesn't work, it backfires. You want to read some great logical and historical works on this, Stratechery and Ben Thompson have done a great job talking about the fallacy of content moderation, and the mask example

the WHO is just the economical example of what goes wrong when you allow people to censor based upon perceived accuracy. Yeah. And then you also mentioned the possibility that whether it's Chinese spies or people with agendas on the political spectrum inside of the companies actually having a hand in some of that moderation, like how do you, how do you kind of break that down or evaluate that? Is that something where an internal investigation can kind of come to conclusion or do you actually have to go to a government organization or a third party to actually have a true kind of unbiased investigation to figure that out? You may at some point have to involve the government. You know, there's like, there's a compulsory process, you know, that only

the government has access to in certain ways. And in, you know, the Pentagon has always believed that Chinese spies have infiltrated tech companies in some scale. Google, some of the protests against budget may have been absolutely driven by Chinese spies. Google's done some internal investigations on this, but at the end of the day, that's the province of law enforcement, not necessarily companies, but you could at least look and see whether there's anything suspicious of who is involved in the decisions, who routed the decisions, who voted for the decisions. And then if there's anything that seems awry, absolutely the FBI or whoever's the appropriate government enforcement agency should be consulted yeah the part to me that uh just throws me for a

loop is it's one thing if the who or cdc saying hey don't wear a mask and you make a video that says wear a mask like very contradictory to their recommendations yes you are taking it down because it doesn't agree but you're also censoring but i've even heard of videos being taken down that say simple things like drink vitamin c because it boosts your immune system and that's not a WHO or CDC approved message for fighting the coronavirus yeah that's insane first of all with retro with that is almost surely going to be inaccurate meaning like people take vitamin c will have done better than the people who didn't take vitamin c um secondly you know the classic vitamin c controversy has been controversial about all kinds of health benefits since the 1960s

and two-time noble prize winner you know linus pauling um trying to get involved and censor content about things that are very debatable um makes no sense whatsoever because it turned out that most things that look most things many things that become paradigm shifting look very odd and very controversial you know Galileo took on the pope um otherwise you know we wouldn't have had any revolution in you know physics um it took taking on the pope at the time um and that's pretty common for many things. Many of Einstein's theories were pretty damn radical. He was a patent clerk out of nowhere that basically changed physics and the human understanding of the universe literally in one year in three papers as some random patent clerk. So if

anybody had filtered on the basis of credentials or alignment with perceived wisdom, all of his breakthroughs would have been suppressed. I just read today, and I didn't read the underlying article, so maybe there's some distortion here, but that Charles Darwin held publishing Origin of Species for 20 years because he was afraid of being persecuted. So that's not what we want. We want human advancement requires the publication and the dissemination of new ideas, new information as fast as possible, not as slow as possible. And that's what we're encouraging with these censorship sort of paradigms. For sure. And this brings us to kind of the quantitative data, right? So in New York City, one of the things that just blows my

mind is at some point they were reporting 12,000 deaths. Only, I think it was 7,000 people actually had tested positive for coronavirus, but you didn't actually have to die from the virus. As long as you had the virus and died, they counted you. And then the other 5,000 were quote unquote probable deaths so if you died at home and they thought you were you know susceptible they counted you and so it just feels like uh there's a lot of uh data analysis that's going on data that we don't have any accuracy or confidence in it actually being um maybe even directionally correct let alone actually accurate yeah let's start with first principles when i when i'm involved in a company as a board member as an executive the most important thing i always try

to teach and apply is you need to have directional accuracy it's like flying a plane you need to know whether your nose is going up or down any any variable any kpi any metric where you're not sure if the variance is is within the directional accuracy is the most dangerous thing on the planet to use once you establish your constant content uh confidence interval is above a certain you know direction or below then it's very easy just to not you're going the right direction just how fast you go but once you go when you do not know you shouldn't be doing anything almost until you establish your confidence interval and make sure you're at least directionally right and i think a lot of decisions were made that without the confidence that they were directionally right

that said in any new environment new virus etc you are going to have some of these challenges even with the best people doing the best analysis for a while it's going to take data to some extent could to sort that out. But I don't think there was a lot of attention paid to is this direction right? I mean, for example, there's good studies out today that take any of the Western countries, the percentage of people who've died that were living in nursing homes ranges from the low end 25% to the high end 54%. If you knew in advance that a majority of the deaths were going to be a function of living in a nursing home, the entire set of policies one might rationally adopt would be very different and in fact actually the governor of florida was very criticized particularly in

the left-wing media and among the blue check marks on twitter it turns out florida is going to have one of the best situations in all the united states in terms of deaths per thousand residents that's per million residents economic lack of economic damage um resuming you know the citizens to normal, at least mental states, as fast as possible. One of the subtle things the governor did, though, was he was very attuned to the evidence that the virus spreads in nursing homes. And he more quickly locked down nursing homes than beaches. Beaches do not generally spread the virus.

But everybody in the media was focused on who the hell is on the beach and why are all these people on the beaches, et cetera, whereas the deaths are all being caused by people in nursing homes. And he had very strict policies very quickly about nursing homes. So sometimes you get distracted with the wrong shiny object, which prevents you from paying attention to the things that really matter. In this case, if we had done nothing except obsessively compulsively focus on what can we do to limit the virus spreading in staff and among staff and among residents of nursing homes, probably would have caught the death rate in the U.S. by somewhere between 30 to 50 percent, doing nothing else, period. And so when people were so focused on,

should you be allowed to go for a run outside? Should you go to the park? Governor Newsom still focused on the damn beaches in California. In China, if you believe any of their data, there was like two external transmissions of the virus. But we're doing all the wrong things in many ways. Certainly the opportunity cost of focusing on problems that are not real problems has major consequences,

just as they do in our companies. When the executives focus on the wrong things, So by definition, they're not focused on the great things, which means those companies deliver subpar optimization, subpar performance, compared to companies where the senior executives know exactly their business equation. They focus on the two or three key variables. All the initiatives are prioritized against those two or three variables. So, for example, in this case, I still don't know, and this is a critique that applies across the political spectrum, what's the variable we're supposed to be optimizing? Is it, for example, infections, hospitalizations, death, deaths, death rate? If you picked one of those, you would probably land on very different policies about what

we should have done initially, which is revisionist history, so maybe not that important, but certainly prospectively about what should be open, what shouldn't be, what are the standards for opening sequentially other things, but nobody's talking in terms of clear goals, and if you don't have clarity around the goal how the hell do you hit the goal with with tactical policies so i think that's the first step and i very don't hear many people certainly in the u.s of any political orientation articulating a goal yeah well i'll take it even a step further one of the things that has been very confusing is as they go to reopen a lot of these economies kind of what are the metrics right what are those kpis that they're looking at so that if at some point

they trigger something and they realize wait we should stop right we should actually send people back inside. It just feels like it's kind of, hey, let's reopen, let's turn businesses back on because we're getting that pressure. And we'll cross our fingers and hope it works. But they really don't have any sort of granular understanding of what they're measuring, if you will, as they do that. Yeah, no, I think there's some real critique here of like, what should be the first principle goal? You can argue what that could be like, some people will argue it should be zero infections. I don't think that's the right goal for the West right now, but I think one should specify what the goal is and then design a set of strategies that maximize the chance of getting there and minimize the collateral damage. Yeah. If we can go back, what do you think could have been done differently to get more accurate data? Is it just testing and actually doing it the correct way? Or is there other things that you think could be a lesson learned?

so if this happens again, we're better prepared? No, I don't think testing really – I mean, everybody talks about testing, more testing, more testing, more testing. But the truth is because of this virus, people are asymptomatic for a period of time and perhaps for a very long period of time or at least maybe permanently in some cases. Just testing people, unless you're testing a very random sample or basically everybody, wouldn't have necessarily been this perfect panacea because by the time you go get tested, people had symptoms or at least had direct exposure to someone closer than who had symptoms.

And so it would have been difficult to stop the spread just on a testing regimen with the tests that were available. So scaling testing could have been done better. There's a lot of, the New York Times actually, to their credit, did do a pretty good expose on how the CDC botched the ability to scale testing in the U.S. Really, there were private tasks available, private companies willing at scale to provide the tasks, and the FDA and CDC in combination allowed them for weeks, arguably months. That was a major catastrophic error, but it wasn't a political decision. This was not something that was elevated to the secretary of HHS or president.

It was the bureaucrats, and those two to four or six weeks had material impact. what's your thoughts around uh whether it's a cure or some sort of treatment that mitigates the symptoms kind of how are you thinking about that how realistic is it that we'll one see it and two in a short time period well i think the time frame matters this is like if you're you know you're saying compress the time frame to weeks you know what's the likelihood of that pretty low months pretty low your quarters gets better years gets better you know so i think it does matter Also, when you say, you know, vaccine or cure, are you talking like 100%, 50%? Like flu viruses typically have a 49% or 45% efficacy.

Some solutions to major problems like Truvada, whatever, has like a 99.9% efficacy against HIV, which turned out to be miraculous. So, but I think we're probably somewhere in between. There was some, you know, interesting, there's some progress in Israel today. there's some progress in the UK, but even if whatever the substance, whatever the technique they're going to use proves to be both safe and fairly effective, scaling, not producing it, et cetera, distributing it, isn't going to happen overnight. So I think there is a sustained timeframe almost in any likely scenario that this is not something that we wake up June 1st, everybody snaps their fingers, and you're like, thank

god is still yeah you um uh you've obviously been paying attention to a lot of uh the various drugs that um at least are showing early signs of potentially working uh and you you and uh zach weinberg lit up uh twitter with a uh a knockout drag out fight over uh what i think to a lot of people was uh the nuances of uh health care testing uh maybe kind of help us understand just like The two arguments there and kind of how you think about why your argument tends to tends to be more. Well, I mean, I was very straightforward. I think any I think a lot of people if are so blind, so furious with emotion against President Trump, anything he says, they just discount. Doesn't matter what the topic is. It can be like a recommended treatment. It can be whether China was responsible for the virus.

It can be some other policy. It's like what I'm borrowing from actually a left-wing author, Brett Austin, is Trump derangement syndrome. I think most journalists and many people, including those popular on Twitter, tend to have Trump derangement syndrome. And they just don't think rationally after Trump puts his name on something.

And so when Trump endorsed the prospects and probability that chloroquine or hydrochloroquine or zinc would be effective, I don't think many people have thought through whether it was or was not, and they're kind of applying a different set of standards to that treatment versus other treatments. I think the truth is, it's almost surely not a perfect panacea, or the people taking it, you know, you'd see statistically very different impact. However, it's almost surely effective, at least with some people, if taken early enough, And the countries that have vigorously prescribed some version of the protocol using chloroquine or hydrochloroquine, which is basically a malaria drug that's been prescribed for 70 years, have seen very different results.

Like Korea, Israel, Costa Rica have seen incredibly different results than other countries. But, however, there's some studies that have been done that are certainly controversial. There are typically studies that have been done on the drug with people, patients that have already suffered severe symptoms, i.e. they're hospitalized. It's most likely this is sort of like Tamiflu, which is a common treatment. It's not really a treatment. It's a common drug prescribed for suppressing some of the severity and symptoms associated with the flu.

Tamiflu only works if you start taking it in the first 24 hours when you experience a symptom. So a lot of the media that jumps on these studies and says, say it doesn't work, blah, blah, blah. Well, it's not designed really to work for those patients, so it's not surprising. You need to take it very, very early among non-severe patients. But in any event, at some point, this will all get studied to death, whether or not it matters to death. At some point, maybe too late by the time we figure it out, which is my general point. The traditional way science looks at, or medicine has looked

at this, is to use random control experiments. The problem is they take, there's several One is they take time. Depends on what the log is, on what the effect you're looking for. But let's say you wanted to do a random controlled experiment on whether something extends your life. Well, good luck with that. I mean, let's say you did it on somebody who was 40. You're going to eat either lots and lots of users, because people in their 40s don't die

very frequently, or you're going to have to wait 30 years. That makes no sense. like, are we going to wait to solve aging, which is probably more a disease than a natural state, because there's no way to do a random control? That makes no sense to me. I think we should be using statistics, and there's an example of math statistics working very well. The positive version of this was we discovered that there is a drug that was prescribed for people with diabetes that tends to extend people's lives, and it just showed up by accident in lifespan data.

Secondly, and this is especially among for compounds and substances that have already been shown to be safe in humans, generally regarded as safe stuff is a lot less risky to just use pure stats on. But pure stats can be about when you can do something across millions of people,

tens of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, you can get to an answer that random control experiments don't show. So for example, if there's a bias in how you do your control, so let's say some genetic mutation is important. If you don't control for that in your controlled experiment, good luck getting results that are meaningful. If there's some variable that you don't understand,

which is rapidly emerging new viruses moderately likely, you're absolutely not going to control for that correctly in your experiment. You can even argue to some extent some placebo effects are a function of not understanding the control group really well and what the driver is. So I prefer mass stats, mass data, especially if the substance is widely accepted as safe over highly stylized control groups. But this is a very vigorous debate. Traditional medical practitioners love their control experiments. They grew up in a paradigm of the 20th century, not the 21st century, when either this mass scale data wasn't available or this district techniques to parse it and infer causation versus correlation, which does exist, despite

what you're taught in Stats 101, weren't as profoundly understood. To some extent, we got to the smoking causes cancer by cheating. There was never a control group or random control experiment that showed that smoking caused cancer. It was a mathematical derivation from statistics, and people said, oh, we're just going to look the other way because our ideology supports this. I think people are very hypocritical. It's at least

a minimal viable critique. There was a famous VA study that studied the effect of hydroxychloroquine regressively, retroactively, so a non-controlled experiment, and showed it didn't work. The same experiment, the same

technique was used in another experiment where it was just using retroactive data that showed that hydroxychloroquine was incredibly effective, like incredibly productive, with a probability of like sub-0001, so it passed any statistical significance test. The media covers one with headlines everywhere, front page stories. The second study, you can barely find, you can find it on Twitter, the media covering

it. The methodology between the two studies is identical. I defy anybody to point out any improvement in the VA study versus the second one, but the media coverage is at least 100 acts, if not 1,000 or more acts on the VA one. So I think people are just very ideologically hypocritical here. So another way to think about it is if you ask doctors what would they do, 34% of American doctors would prescribe hydrochloroquine

or some version of that protocol to their patient if they had, you know, early symptoms, 28% wouldn't. So it's controversial, debatable, and 24% are like confused. So I think it is very debatable. But the idea that there's some gold standard that's magical, and those who are using other standards are wrong, is totally ridiculous. And people are being blind because they hate Trump so much. What, um, speaking of Trump, what would you give him as a grade kind of through this whole thing? right are we talking a plus a minus b plus c minus what would kind of the grade be i think i think you'd have to decompose it i think in february you know c and i'd say c instead of

worse because if you look at what many other western democratic leaders did in february specifically it wasn't any better um in march actually i'm not sure what else he could have done. I mean, he's got his usual misstatements and self-enforced errors and stuff. He doesn't always express things as clearly, cogently as he should and precisely. But the fundamental policies of the administration starting in March seem pretty damn accurate. Even Biden has run these ads, but he hasn't answered exactly what he would have done differently in March other than tweet less and infuriate people less and be more sympathetic. But he You can't identify a single policy starting in March, I don't think, that he would have

done differently. So I think starting then, the administration got its act together, and it's been pretty damn good, and pretty damn thoughtful, pretty aggressive, and is trying to innovate, trying to suspend regulations that didn't make any sense. For example, the FDA historically in the United States, doctors couldn't cross state lines, so we needed more doctors in New York, California doctors couldn't help, but they said it's not possible, at least on a temporary basis. So a lot of positive innovation around the regulatory constraints has been driven by

the administration when they think it's a very good and healthy thing. Hopefully some of this will persist. I mean, it makes no sense that doctors in California can't treat patients in New York as if there's regional variation and they're a perfect standard of care. That makes no sense. It's very protectionist. So in any event, I think the grades get better over time, but I don't know that too many people had great grades in February,

other than some people in the Asian countries, particularly Taiwan, to some extent, Korea, less, a little bit more mixed in Singapore. Israel seems to have been slow to the game, but very thoughtful and very productive starting in March. So it depends on the country really, but I don't think anybody other than really like the Taiwan, New Zealand, New Zealand's kind of a different,

demographic geographic you know dispersion there's a lot of issues in New Zealand New Zealand's obviously handled this extremely well yeah uh one last thing I want to talk about the virus before we get into some of the economic stuff is uh there in maybe we're talking about six weeks ago Zero Hedge came out with the uh the connection between the virus and the virology lab in Wuhan uh not only were people literally like hey that's conspiracy theory Twitter and the internet uh twitter you know banned them um and i remember talking to people and they were like that is literally crazy talk fast forward six weeks and we now have uh intelligence uh organizations saying we you know have a strong evidence that we believe this is accurate uh you've had uh elected

officials on television kind of pushing this narrative etc not so much like do you believe it or do you not but how do you think through um you know one will we ever actually know and then And two, kind of would that change anything in either what's already transpired or how we should respond moving forward, whether it did come from the lab there in Wuhan or if it's kind of more of the wet market narrative? Yeah, so I absolutely do believe that one way or the other, some people will know. There's an article, I think in the New York Times today, but maybe it's the Washington Post, that said the administration has electronic intercepts of the Chinese leaders talking about the origin of the virus. That's going to be incredibly compelling. The problem is going to be whether the administration is willing to release those or not, because by definition, if they do, it's going to reveal how the level, the precision, and probably

the methods we're using to intercept the communication among the leadership of the Chinese government. And that's going to be problematic. And so there's going to be significant tension there. Yesterday, when the Secretary of State said unequivocally it came from the lab, the Secretary of State is a very serious, thoughtful person. Everybody in Washington respects him. He was previously the director of the CIA. When he says unequivocally, there's no doubt that there's stuff sitting on his desk in my mind that proves beyond a shadow of belief that this originated in the lab. Now, I don't believe it was originated by intent.

I think this is more either negligent, reckless disregard for human life, not an intentional creation of a destructive thing to unleash on the world. I think that is not true based on any evidence I've seen. But whether people acted improperly, had improper policies that led to this problem being confronted in the world, I think it's highly likely, and I think the U.S. government and intelligence agencies absolutely have evidence of that. It was pretty obvious to me months ago because, again, Senator Tom Cotton, who's widely regarded, widely respected, has aspirations and was surely running for president, is very close to both the Defense Department and CIA. He was a CIA agent himself. He's been tweeting publicly for months that this theory originated in the lab.

He was not going out on a limb. He's not the kind of person who goes out on a limb. He has a lot of reasons not to. He was clearly being fed solid intel that suggested this months ago. So I think it's inevitably going to be proven. But the willingness of the government to validate this with unimpeachable evidence is going to be one of these classic espionage tradeoffs. The other thing that confirms this in my own mind is my understanding that the senior Democrats, there's a process for briefing the other party, both the House and Senate have intelligence committees and minority versions of the same, that when there's highly confidential intelligence, they are briefed as well. And despite Democrats' general willingness to criticize Trump on everything, every utterance, every policy, they've been pretty damn quiet.

In fact, I can't think of a single prominent Democrat who's criticized Trump on this specific point. And I think the reason why is I think they've been briefed, too, and they kind of know the truth. They don't want to look stupid. And they know they can look really stupid all of a sudden. So I think this will eventually be the consensus view. Now, whether it matters or not, I do think it matters depending upon how negligent or reckless the CCP was, whether the appropriate reaction is to retaliate in some ways or not and what the appropriate steps are.

So I don't think it's irrelevant. I think they clearly mishandled the communication of the severity and that's caused a lot of pain on the rest of the globe. And it was partially one way or the other designed to not look bad themselves to prevent exposure of the truth, that alone has caused a lot of damage. It could be a fundamental justification for some degree of retaliation and reaction. That is sort of unimpeachable that the Chinese government suppressed information, misled the world intentionally, at least during a period of weeks, if not months, regardless

of the origin. So I don't think we need to go all the way back to the Argent story. I think the Argent story does matter, though, if you want to kind of understand what the likelihood is if you confront something else. This is why it's pretty important, is if we're going to see something similar, understanding how it happened affects your opinions

and probabilities about the likelihood of seeing something similar in the near term. So part of the reason why I love the internet is the second that what was previously considered a conspiracy theory looks like it has legs, you then get the other conspiracy theories that come out from there. And probably the most legitimate argument I've seen is a concern that this could be, you know, kind of this decade's WMDs in Iraq type story, right, where there's a pointing of, hey, here's a new enemy because of X or Y reason. Do you have concerns about that or how can we mitigate those concerns if they exist?

Well, the way to mitigate them, subject to my prior points, is I think the U.S. government may have to release some of the evidence eventually because of that historical problem with the Iraq situation. There's going to be some people who are credible about it. that said, if enough intelligence, you know, Democrats are briefed, including someone like Biden, and they realize that they can't grovel in being critical because, you know, Trump will eventually unclassify the information that we need to, you know, at least the non-conspiracy theorists being pretty nuanced. So, yes, I think anytime, I mean,

the reality is anytime the government loses credibility to that thing, and this is why, you know, I've never liked President Trump. You know, I dismissed him as a sociopath in May of, publicly on Twitter in May of 2016. So, you know, I think people who have this propensity to lie about mundane things, it really burns you later when you need the credibility for important things. So I think this is a fundamental problem with the administration. Like, for example, the first day of the inaugural, when he got in trouble manipulating the size of the crowds, I was actually pretty furious about that.

not because of the crowds thing but it's like that's exactly when you don't want to burn credibility you need social capital and political capital for when you have to you know ask people to trust you um and but i think we may be more like in the cuban missile crisis you know kennedy actually had to show the photos and that was very controversial at the time too because it obviously revealed the precision of our satellite but i think the u.s public and the rest of the world might have acted differently, except, you know, especially in the light

of the Russian denials, the Soviet denials, until they put the photos out there. And it was pretty hard to debate. We may have to do something like that, even at the expense of admitting that we have capabilities that the Chinese government

didn't know about. And that's obviously got long-term, you know, downside implications. That said, I think this isn't like a new enemy. I think people shouldn't pay more attention to what the Chinese government was up to for a very long period of time.

I think we've misjudged their intent, misgaged their capabilities. And, you know, one of the positives, even though Trump is, you know, not my favorite president ever, he did call attention to Trump and has called consistent attention to China and the threat posed by China. Even as a candidate and as president, he's, you know, been very active and shining a light on some of their misbehaviors. And I think that's been a healthy thing. It's actually becoming a bipartisan sort of crusade, which is nice, actually. In this era where people say there's no bipartisan agreement, there is starting to be a bipartisan consensus that we need to treat the threat posed by China much more severely and seriously than we have over the last 30 years. I think that's a welcome development. And it does seem to be achieving 50, 60, 70 percent support in the United States at the moment. So one of the things that occurred, obviously, is this health crisis. And we've tried to address it, I think, the best that people could, whether they were right or wrong. But now we've created an economic crisis off kind of the back end.

And really kind of the biggest point, I think, is around this government mandated shutdown and the shelters in place. Let's just start at a high level, kind of how you look at or assess what's caused that economic crisis and good, bad, should we have done something differently in kind of how you look at that? Yeah, absolutely. Well, the economic crisis is pretty easy to understand. We had the best U.S. economy in my lifetime as of January by any metric. And we, by government fiat, made commerce basically impossible in major metropolitan

markets. So that will cause an economic mess. So the derivation is pretty easy. This is not a consumer-driven recession, a consumer-driven depression by any means. There's government policy saying now you shall not transact in ways you're used to. So that's caused massive unemployment because the people that you can't transact with obviously cannot afford to maintain employees, rents, et cetera. So that's the first generation of this is clearly government fiat. I do think that the government probably could have done things better, and even if you didn't have a Sweden strategy, if truly 50% of the people that were going to be most devastated were in nursing homes, obviously could have changed behavior there immediately in a very dramatic way without affecting the rest of the U.S. economy.

Secondly, it does appear that social distancing is very different than lockdowns and shelter in place. So the idea that people should have more dispersion, whether it's six feet apart or some other metric, the general density being a way to protect oneself clearly does help in reducing transmission and severity. But people were adopting, actually, there's evidence people were adopting social distancing prior to government mandates. So we probably could have done a lot of social distancing and had a lot of the benefits, sort of like 80% of the benefit and 20% of the rules right away. In addition, obviously, we talked about masks, but had we embraced masks either voluntarily or by mandate very early, the transmission rate and the safety associated with the virus or the downside associated with the virus would have been tremendously different, and

we wouldn't have had a lockdown economy if people were wearing masks. um you know so i think a lot of the most draconian measures particularly the true shelter in places like in what we have in san francisco which is more severe and more draconian than many other u.s cities and many other countries actually um probably could have been avoided without increasing certainly the hospitalization or their death rate uh there's evidence of that in australia for example, Australia has had a very successful management of the virus on par, not quite as good as New Zealand, but started later and has done very, very well. In Australia, some small groups of activities are enabled. So below a certain size assembly, you can certainly go to your house and

visit your friends. So I think we could have probably managed the virus without completely interfering with people's ability to be sane because i think what we're also doing is a classic bubble optimization problem of the health benefits the health disadvantages and downsizing the virus are very clear in the short term but locking people up in isolation has been proven for 100 years to cause all kinds of health disadvantages whether depression or other diseases there's a reason why people who become isolated die fast when they retire when their spouse dies etc um so we do not want to be isolating people more than we have to and so even if you didn't allow large groups large assemblies traditional commerce we obviously

want to get people out of their houses and want them to be able to see at least some people as much as humanly possible unless they're probably above the age of call it 50 60 65 or otherwise immunocompromised. Yeah. And I guess part of this is, did they have another choice, right? Given the data we had, like I keep going back to, it's easy in hindsight for us to say, hey, there was probably some sort of overreaction, but go back to when they started to implement this stuff. I remember, I think it was Hoboken, New Jersey was the first city to say that they were going to put some sort of mandate. They were going to shut bars and restaurants and stuff.

And the mayor's kind of explanation at the time was we literally had a fight outside of a bar. And rather than our first responders being able to go to the hospital and take care of people with the virus, they're responding to a fight outside the bar. And he was really just fed up. There was no kind of scientific data behind the decision.

So I don't know how you think about, like, was it the right decision at the time and maybe we could have reversed course, or actually we just overreacted at the time. Well, I think that's right. I think it's fair to say, you know, look, we have a crisis, let's take draconian steps right away. But then I think it's also fair to say, well, as soon as you put into place draconian steps that have consequences. What I was saying when I got cut off was, I think there's some evidence that the impact of the virus is more

concentrated in certain environments, indoor environments, nursing homes, etc. So as we had more of this evidence i think we could have made adjustments faster um in some places and that would have you know enabled the economy to be less affected less people lose their jobs less than the smbs and my conversions to fail permanently etc but i don't i don't critique the immediate reaction of let's figure out what the hell is going on like of anything i think we should have been more rapid in shutting down travel from Europe, more travel certainly from China, and then we waited too long and the whole history of the U.S. could have been different if it had been one to three weeks earlier on some of those decisions.

So acting fast in a crisis is not a product problem, but then looking at what are the signals that suggest I can do this to get 80% of benefits with 20% of impact as fast possible is also part of the responsibility of you know elected officials how do you think about um on that government mandated shutdown of the small businesses the decision between like what's essential and what's not um i saw that you uh you retweeted uh jeff lewis talking about hey alcohol you know is immunosuppressant but we have them open i joked earlier uh or a couple weeks ago saying like it's funny how you can still buy lottery tickets you can still go buy alcohol You can do all the things that drive government revenue.

I'm not saying that they went into a room and decided, like, let's keep our revenue channels open. But there's some questionable things on what's essential and what's not. Like, what's going on there? Yeah, I mean, obviously, this betrays the idea that this is purely just a health care driven decision. Opening, you know, liquor stores being open is certainly not a health driven decision. As Jeff tweeted correctly, alcohol is an immunosuppressant. The last thing you really want to do if you're optimizing your health and your immunity system is drink alcohol. So I think that was done either for the political reality of avoiding a revolt,

which politicians are very attuned to. If I take away people's alcohol, they're going to complain, whine, and protest sooner, so appease. or maybe revenue-driven, and a lot of these states, et cetera, depend upon sales of liquor revenues, or maybe both. But it's clearly not in the best interest of we're going to maximize or minimize the number of deaths in the United States, so we're going to keep liquor stores open. That seems kind of silly.

I mean, imagine, like, it is so perverse in California right now. It is insane. Our beaches are shut down. Our parks are shut down. and the liquor stores are globally open that there's no rationality that makes any sense behind any part of that statement and anybody who's you know people should be really criticizing governor newsom on this is yes if you want to be a zero defect no infections no hospitalizations no deaths in california great keep your parks and beaches closed and make people sit at home

and you know suffer but how the hell can you let them go to liquor stores drink alcohol versus going to a park for a walk on a hike six feet apart from people. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. And I guess kind of going off of that as well then is there's a lot of businesses that, let's say you're a CVS, you're a Duane Reade. So you get lumped into, hey, you're an essential business, you're allowed to stay open. But the small business competitor in many cases is being shut down or not allowed to compete. And it just feels like it's very arbitrary, right?

So I'm not even saying that I've got an idea as to what a better solution to determine it is. It just feels like once you step into the game of playing kingmaker, really, right, saying, hey, your business has to shut down, but yours doesn't. It's a slippery slope that I just don't think that there's a good answer. But I don't know how you think about it. Yeah, there are some lines that, you know, probably are more logical and more defensible. And there are some that are clearly judgment or judgment based, bias based, lobbying based. you know for example i don't think anybody wants to shut down the provision of food you know food supplies etc um and so i think there's not a lot of debate about that so there's

always going to be line drawing you know um challenges and i think to some extent the health of like 50 different states different communities within each state allowing them to draw different lines and seeing what works and what doesn't is a great thing like the federalist system people a lot of people are learning the benefits of federalism for the first time um something taught certainly in high school and maybe people gloss over absolutely law school you debate and you know contemplate the history of and learn the principle the legal principles of precedent behind but it's still somewhat um abstract and now people are seeing you know why it may be better to help 50 laboratories of democracy, using, I think, the Jeffersonian phrase.

So I think right now, allowing regional variation and experimentation is a good thing, and that should apply to the definition of essential businesses as well. So obviously, that government-mandated shutdown has created absolute economic chaos. We've seen 30-plus million Americans file first-time unemployment in the last six weeks. You've got hundreds of thousands, if not millions of small businesses that are shut down. Some percentage are not coming back. You've got a number of industries that have literally seen all of their economic activity evaporate. My favorite stat was the third week in March in 2019, U.S. domestic box office did $200 plus million in weekly revenue.

This year, it did less than $5,000, right around $5,000. So you got 99% evaporation of revenue. uh and the fed steps in and they stepped in with all kinds of um actions what's just high level good actions bad actions how do you think about you know their um goal of trying to at least stem some of the issues and and uh and and relieve some of the pain really well i don't know because they've been fairly effective actually at sort of propping up as much as possible but what are the long-term consequences of that I don't know and how to measure that I'm not a big macro economic thinker in where there's always price to these decisions but how bad is it a price is unclear

so for example you're already a lot of debt right obviously period um now the problem though is is not quite as severe as it might have been in other times in American history because the interest rate of that debt currently is so low, so that one of the things you care about is the debt service level, right? Like any other company. It's like, what's the ongoing burden of the debt?

With interest rates so low, the amount of repayment per year is actually more tolerable than it might seem given the magnitude of the debt. So to some extent, it's unclear how this all nets out. um typically you know these are bad things they should generate you know it shifts burdens to generations uh but the generations either aren't voting or don't track this well so there's a lot of distortions that are going on but in the short term and it feels like the fed has minimized the short-term impact on the u.s economy thoughts around bailouts and kind of some of the more

specific actions to either bail out of specific companies or industries and for that against that yeah well generally I mean I'm conservative I don't sort of like Nikki Haley resigned from the board of Boeing you know because they were going to apply for government money I don't believe the government should be bailing out industries or companies however I think where government policy specifically prevents you from doing business because of some greater good and there's an explicit rule that you can't engage in business. I'm much more sympathetic to those types of businesses being eligible for certain kinds of government relief,

whether it's a loan, whether it's a bailout, whether it's some suspension of something. But that makes sense to me. If the government strictly interferes with your business out of nowhere and says you can't engage in the business that you've been able to engage in for 100 years because we need to shut it down temporarily, that's a little bit different to me than generally your businesses are doing that well, here's a bailout. So I think there are some lines there

that I'm more sympathetic to. Got it. And then speaking of the bailouts, one of the things that I think a lot of people have not been paying attention to is there's actually local and state governments that are going to the federal government for bailouts as well. So in New York City, for example, subway rides are down 95%. Obviously, that's a big revenue source. And that's in a major metropolitan, you go out to some of these local governments, and they're really, really suffering. Does that same logic kind of apply at that local and state government level? Yeah, because it's mostly the state governments are making these decisions. The federal government has not generally shut down

almost anything. The general rules by the FDA and CDC right now are commerce can continue as long as you don't have an assembly of more than 10 people. So that, or unless you have a group of compromised, immunocompromised or otherwise susceptible individuals. So the federal government has not said that you can't engage in commerce. It's the states that are actually doing this. So the states bear responsibility for their decisions and also the states tend to deficit spend or be very um reckless in their reservoirs like they're asking the federal government to bail out the states when the states know that they're overspending so for example california california gets about 54 i think of their entire state income a state budget comes from extremely

wealthy people in california measured in hundreds to maybe a thousand and we pay for literally half the state government, state government expenses. As soon as there's an economic crisis affecting technology, half the revenues in California are going to disappear. Everybody knows this. Gavin Newsom admits this. He's actually admitted it to me years ago. No one is unaware of this problem, so if the government of California doesn't take steps

to protect itself in good times so that when the technical elite are not making a lot of money and then paying for the entire government, I'm not very sympathetic to, oh, we ran out of money. This has been a problem. It's been a known problem. We saw this, actually. The data was very compelling in 2000, 2003. The government was less reliant, state budget was less reliant then, but the pronounced

impact was very clear. even Governor Terry Brown, who's certainly now a conservative, started to create a reservoir of savings because he saw how dependent the California budget was on like a thousand people and that's an insane

place to be long term. So I think governments need to take their obligation of weathering a sine wave seriously and at the state if the governor, if the governor wants to shut down the state that's great, he's welcome to do that to protect the citizens but he also needs to pay for it and he shouldn't ask the people

let's call it nebraska or whoever to pay for his decisions yeah um one of the things over the long term that people are worried about with all of these bailouts and the printing of money is uh do we go into some sort of inflationary or hyperinflationary um scenario uh i think the counter argument to that is hey we're in such a deflationary environment that it can soak up the liquidity do you think through that as you're making investments and kind of what's your gut tell you is the likely outcome there you know the historical economical economics is of course it leads to inflation but you know you can't find any signals of anywhere um anything you see deflation um you see deflation and property values um deflation almost really going to

not been in commercial real estate. So, and I don't, as I said, not being a superb macro economist here and not remembering all my macroeconomics, I don't totally understand why there's no inflation signals, but there are now. Now I can definitely tell. You know, if you can look at any economic indicator

you like, you can look at all the data reported by the Federal Reserve, there are no signs of inflation in the United States at all. So in the short term, it feels like kind of crazy to worry about inflation, but I need someone much smarter than me to explain a conceptual framework of why there's no inflation and where the negative, which must occur, where we substitute to. Yeah. You mentioned real estate. Let's go to Open Door.

Maybe just a quick one minute on what is Open Door, and then you guys made some announcements today, and kind of what's the health of the business, so we can get into how that will play out through this crisis. Yeah, so Open Door allows anybody to sell their home in basically three minutes online. So if you own a house and you want to avoid the historical process of listing on MLS or on Craigslist basically, waiting 90 days on average and paying a realtor 6% for the privilege of bringing people through your home, we will give you an offer in roughly three minutes

that's finding and you can have your cash as early as three days and move out on your own schedule whatever you want. So you don't have random strangers coming to your own house, you don't have the uncertainty to have clothes, you can go forward with your life whether you want to move new cities, upgrade to a new house, you can do that whenever you need to. And so we've been live, we started the company roughly in 2014, live in 22 U.S. cities, basically call it about half of the U.S. population, plus or minus, maybe it's 40%, percent somewhere around there um phenomenal value proposition uh basically allows you to basically trade in your house like you trade in your car 54 of americans trade in their car when

they buy any car the same you know same percentage should be trading in their house uh so we started this process rolled it out nationally in march uh we had a phenomenal month actually the best in the history of the company, you know, many, many of our markets are cashflow positive, we're doing really well. Zillow, which is a publicly traded competitor, decided that their business was archaic, their business model was archaic,

and about a year ago said, we need to switch completely to copy Open Door. So I think they see the writing on the wall of where the world's going to, that everybody's gonna want to instantly be able to sell their house without this pain and friction. We did temporarily suspend operations across the markets as governments mandated shutdown orders.

The fine selling house in most states was not considered an essential transaction or business. Some states actually would have qualified, but generally speaking, it wasn't. So to protect the safety of our users, our consumers, and our employees, we basically pause all transactions as did our competitors. The good news is, this is actually what people realize,

that actually buying and selling a house through Opendoor is safer and better than the historical process. It's basically a contactless transaction. So you can buy a house, you can sell a house first through Opendoor without having visitors and strangers and real estate agents in your home. And in today's world, that's very compelling and attractive.

People do need to move. They may need liquidity because of unemployment or downsizing. They may want to move for new jobs, new opportunities, or safer health environments. So people are going to still move, and we enable them to move instantly with never having to touch human beings. So that's a more compelling value proposition than it was two months ago, and it's really resonating. Secondly, we allow you to buy a house basically without having to encounter other people.

All of our homes are equipped with keyless entry and cameras so that you can basically 24-7 visit the house and purchase the house without having to go to an attendant open house, an inconvenient open house, or schedule through a realtor. So you can also contact this way, buy a house through Opendoor, which is also now a much more compelling, obvious value position. So we announced today that in Phoenix, we're ready to go. We're live again. We're buying and selling offices as of today. And in several other markets, within a week or so, we'll be live. And then we bring on more and more markets back to business as normal as soon as possible. But I think this is one of those clarifying moments where the value proposition, which was taking over the world maturely, you know, our market share was growing and every market was, you know, helping also explain to the world that this is the future. it's going to be amplified by a lot because of people's unwillingness to engage with strangers and really understand the convenience of a snap decision that gets the money into your bank account without having to encounter tens of people walking through your house

or going to these open houses with 40 other people. So I think we're going to grow much faster with the right product, the right technology, the right value proposition, a little bit like telemedicine. So telemedicine they've been doing really well But growing up fairly linear over the last five years, all of a sudden, people realize why the hell am I going to a doctor's office for many, many potential issues? All they do at a doctor's office is have to commute across the city, sit in a waiting room, and get exposed to germs. None of that makes any sense for 40% to 60% of our medical needs.

So telemedicine companies have been exploding during this virus crisis. And I think the same thing is going to be true of Opendoor, the demand for our contact list transactions with the house is going to explode and i think we'll grow you know at double digit rates for the rest of the year what do you attribute the growth in march because it was kind of right as the virus was being taken seriously across markets was it the market volatility and people needing liquidity or what do you kind of attribute that to personally i think it's more internal operational like excellence i think like any company um figuring out exactly we're like a bits and items company so like jordash or instacart we have a lot

of people in the real world um they're involved in a real estate transaction a lot of processes figuring out how to master those two nodes dial those in master the communication of value proposition i think the right team doing the right things was really starting to take hold the first quarter of this year so we had an incredible march in a very strong first quarter just getting everything right you know busy you're always tuning your business equation and your operating operations and it really started to click obviously the last week of March and the first two weeks of April were weird times for everybody but I've seen some evidence from other real estate companies home

builders etc that last week or two April started to return to normal and are continue you know the growth rate with new home construction new home transactions is it's back you know kind of the the rate of growth you'd like to see so i suspect we're going to do phenomenally well there's pent-up demand to move because people suspended for a few weeks a month maybe moving and there's pent-up demand to sell so i expect q2 to be amazing yeah and i guess kind of for the larger real estate market um there's a lot of people speculating on what are some of the longer term trends that will change here. So things like commercial real estate will suffer because more people move remote to being a migration from very dense urban areas to kind

of less dense urban areas. Anything that you think about in real estate where you give credence to some of these or some that you say, hey, actually, I completely disagree and don't think that we'll see that happen. I do think there's going to be some impact in commercial real estate, but it's quite as um direct and predictable as people think so for example yes people will probably want smaller um well some people will value remote working and uh minimize their commute time however the density per employee may also be required by law or by uh attractiveness be reduced so yes they may have less offices but they need more you know real estate per employee uh so that may net out um i think a lot of activities and

businesses are going to unfortunately fail and so the demand for certain types of certain classes of real estate retail etc may be significantly the last period um the fundamental economics of some of these industries like restaurants if you need minimum density i think you have to rethink the entire experience of a restaurant so there's some fundamental transformations but And let's say an accountant, a solo practitioner, a lawyer, they may have had an office because they felt like they needed an office for credibility. This working from home for two months may cause them to rethink whether they actually need an office, period.

And they may be more willing to not have an office. And that would, you know, at scale, across all this material that impacts commercial real estate, do people shift out of dense urban environments, perhaps, and maybe that, you know maybe that's a true trend hard to tell so i think there's a lot of implications but what what's predictable right now versus a second order of fact and how do people adjust to react isn't as clear to me i think there's a bit of chaos theory that's going to happen of there'll be a lot of disruptions a lot of transformations a lot of volatility and it's going to take some time to retain where the real transformations occur

For sure. Another area that you've got a lot of experience with is digital payments, things like Square. What's kind of the general, you know, evaluation you have of that space as of right now? I know that you're generally long FinTech and digital payments, but anything specific there? well you know clearly people have been transacting online at a higher rate than you know two months ago partially because the offline equivalents have been shut down so the companies that process payments whether they're straight paypal square etc have obviously been doing well people are buying um you know large um exercise equipment whether they're like a tempo is something i'm involved in this is like weight training at home or the canonical peloton people are financing products like that through a company i'm involved in called a firm so people are buying things at unusual rates which is leading to the payment providers and the loan providers and debt

providers that service that world you're growing at rapid clicks that said um how much of that is a fundamental shift is unclear to me do people revert back to when i have the choice going to a gym or do i use my call time when i have a choice do i go you know using instacart for delivery or do i go back to whole foods and you know serendipitous discover what food i want and what meals i want to make not as obvious so how much of this is a step function change that just persist versus a temporary you know sort of wave yeah it almost feels like the virus has accelerated some trends but also some of them may be false positives as well right right so let's let's talk about one that's i think really easy for people to talk let's talk about dating imagine you're

going on a first or second date what do you do at least last 50 years what people do on first or second dates they go out for a drink they go to a meal a restaurant they go to a movie possibly a play sometimes a concert or something you know like music might go for it uh if the weather's nice the hype a lot or something um most of those options are basically not available so like the top four to seven choices for people going on a date are basically really banned or unlikely to come back in the short term in the same way um so people aren't going to stop wanting to go on a date when they're allowed to get out of their house, so something is going to substitute for those.

What is that? I have no idea, but the demand to meet somebody, have a common experience, and filter, and decide whether you want to spend more time with someone, or go to a coffee shop. That's what people do. Before the virus, I would not have been willing to probably fund a new version of first or second date product. I think the inertia around these, or go shopping, shopping malls, what we did in high school, all these seven or eight activities, the inertia was so great. The gravitational pull towards reverting to kind of the normal things would have been so hard to unlock

a new dating experience. But right now, I don't see people going to a dentist restaurant where the cost of the meal is 2x. I don't see people going to a movie theater, maybe ever, but certainly not at the same scale music venues certainly not set up for the initial post-virus world so i think there is a chance to create a new dating experience for the first time and this is just a metaphor of how there's a dislocation creating an opportunity because the demand the consumer psychology psychological demand isn't going to be evaded but someone may be able to channel it into something completely new yeah and i guess on the digital payment side specifically um are you worried that some of this uh kind of rise will actually uh dissipate and go

back to the more traditional methods or do you think that it's something where um there is kind of a net gain but but it doesn't continue to grow at the same rate there's just a plateau uh at that new kind of higher level i think it matters it's like you just have to go industry by industry or segment by segment to see what happens um i mean obviously shopify which is taking advantage you know he's obviously benefited from this trend is trading at all-time market cap levels it's a massive amount you know since the virus because people are doing a lot of engaging a lot of commerce online and shopify is the default sort of infrastructure for a lot of those that commerce but do people want to go back to real world experiences i suspect at least

in part they do there are parts of shopping for things online that are extremely difficult to do think of apparel and sizing think of serendipitous discovery i think there are great products online for when you know what you want finding it and transacting very conveniently in a utilitarian way but being seduced to buy something you didn't know you want i think is still extremely difficult to to do online, and the real world is much better at that. And people like, people definitely vote with their feet. About 50% of expenditures are utilitarian in a decision to fulfill a specific need that I know I have,

and about 50% are discretionary and induced by seduction. Merchandising is the euphemistic way to describe that. I think merchandising still happens in the real world when the virus issues are ameliorated. Yeah. Before we move on from digital payments, let's talk about Bitcoin and kind of cryptocurrencies. How do you think through, one, what's transpired so far, given that the macro backdrop? And then two, what's the outlook you have as that ever being a legitimate either store value, medium of exchange in the digital payment space? Good question you know it's interesting because to some extent crypto has proven

to be less counter cyclical than people thought, almost everybody thought from what it's at at points it seems to basically be more correlated with let's say called the Nasdaq than you would have guessed I do think

as a store of value it's given the draconian And somewhat unprecedented steps that governments all around the world have taken. I think the clarity of why one might take their wealth and put it in a place that's very difficult and virtually impossible for the government to get their hands on is probably substantially clarified. you know whether it was Elizabeth Warren pronouncing and running a platform for wealth tax to the government

basically banning things that people have done for centuries overnight I think will lead to a I want to place some of my resources in a way that regardless of what the government does wherever I want to locate I can have access to and so I think

that demand is substantially increased just because a lot of normal people now understand that it's not some crazy theory that the government might try to deprive you of your livelihood. So I think that will increase the attractiveness of crypto as a store of value. On a transactional basis, not so sure. Yes, there are kinds of transactions in the world though that maybe have been done for trust reasons have needed to be transacted in person. I think like purchasing a house in India is basically still done in person with cash. So trustless transactions,

if there's fear of germs and viruses the need for a trustless transaction being enabled by technology could increase too um so those may be areas where actually bitcoin or other crypto you know takes off because the value proposition is just more compelling than it was three months ago got it what other areas of uh you're investing are you either changing because of the virus or uh you're becoming excited about that that you might not have otherwise been looking at Yeah. I mean, I don't think we've changed our areas of excitement. I think we do ask the canonical VC question, which is why now? So every time we invest in a new company, we ask a version of why now? Why is this company more likely to succeed than before? Why is it more likely to succeed than people who've gone before trying to do something similar? So as the virus has reshaped the world, some things are more obvious why now than they were before. So for example, actually, I invested in, I've been looking to invest in for two to three years,

something that would make homeschooling more successful and less full of friction. Turns out I already invested before the virus, but I can see why now more people would appreciate it, because they're confronting the challenges of homeschooling, the benefits of homeschooling, There's all the products and services that help them, so that's easier to nudge it. We're just asking a version of the why now, but we really want an answer in a post-virus world. Why is this better, more likely to succeed than it would have been previously? Where there is a change is, at least in the short term, there are three kinds of investors

who succeed. There's founder-driven investors, market-driven investors, and technology-driven investors. And there's successful examples at the high end of the venture community for decades that are one of these three types. I think it's been much more difficult. I'm a founder-driven investor. Like 90% of my decision is, are these the right founders to potentially pull off this miracle? And it's obviously very hard to evaluate founders remotely. So in the short term, I feel like a fish out of water,

like I'm deprived of oxygen because I can't meet new people. And Zoom is a proxy, but it's not a perfect proxy. It works pretty well for people you already know because there's a lot of social capital, a lot of social cues already embedded in my ability to converse with people. So even board meetings, most of the boards I'm involved in are executives and teams I've worked with for years, even the other board members from other VCs

or people I've known, perhaps, for a decade plus. So they don't feel as difficult to pick up on these cues. But I think Zoom isn't very effective for meeting someone from scratch. And so I'm having significant difficulty in pulling the trigger on new investments. So either I'm going to limit the number of new investments until all these real-world meetings are possible, or maybe shift or risk

appetite and just invest less dollars so maybe where we might have committed five million dollars maybe we'll commit two or three for now as the new world evolves but I think you know I made my first investment ever in 20 years of investing

professionally as an amateur angel with founders that I had never met basically this month and that felt a little out there um but the founders were at least people that were one degree removed from people i knew well they both came to some sort of facebook instagram world and so we had lots of connections in common not the chief of staff i'd actually worked with one of them before so it's like taking one step removed from what i might normally do but it didn't feel that far out

there but uh right now yeah it's it's very challenging for founder driven investors the technical driven technology driven investors probably not that difficult but at the end of the day assessing technology through a zoom call isn't that difficult and if you're depending on the transformative nature of the technology um you're not betting as much on the founder it's a lot easier so i'm somewhat jealous of my competitors that are technology or markets driven investors at the moment. But we'll be back. The founder and chairman of investors will be back at some point. I love it. I want to run through, you've been incredibly gracious with your time. And so people sent me a million questions. I kind of cherry picked the ones that I thought

you would enjoy answering the most, which tends to be, you probably have the most interesting answers. So let me run through a couple of those. The first is thoughts around SoftBank in that entire situation? Yeah, I mean, I've had lots of news for years about SoftBank. They were paying very high prices, somewhat adversely selected into companies, and the return to them had sucked that. But I think the most important thing,

most important dimensions to that were twofold. One, the strategy of money dictating the winner in a technology uh market is intellectually bankrupt that's never been true no i can think of maybe one example in the history of technology but fundamentally technology is not about having the biggest bank account it's about having the best value proposition and the best team the team you build the company you build the product you have the architecture behind that is 10x to 100x to a thousand x more important than your bank account and in a calculator in a normal world the capital will flow to the people. Appropriate capital will flow to the people who have the right

value proposition and the right team. So that was just purely wrong, period, end of story. The strategy made no sense and wasn't going to work. Second, though, and then there's a moral component to this, which is something I've spoken about, which is I don't see how Americans are comfortable raising money where the LP, the primary, if not arguably the exclusive LP, runs a country where women are second-class citizens by law explicitly. Gays are subject to execution. Jews are prohibited. I just don't understand how anybody in Silicon Valley can, with a straight face,

accept money from people who legally are opposing these rules on large components of society. We had a boycott of North Carolina from some tech folks, tech leaders, and tech companies over whether the bathroom signs were correct or not. These are countries where literally you're executed if you're gay or you're Jewish or if you're a woman, you're not allowed to drive a car or vote. The comparison, those are orders of magnitude greater. It's a crime to be any of these minorities, and yet we won't do business with a city or a state

that has arguably not the perfect bathroom signs. I think the hypocrisy of people in Silicon Valley in being willing to consider money from South Bank Saudi Arabia was so off the charts that it basically meant that people, you know, weren't taking their morality seriously. So I think the combination of those three things was disaster. So, you know, fortunately, I think that era is over.

I think something for many reasons isn't going to be a player in the Silicon Valley ecosystem in the future. What was the most common response if you were to ask somebody, like, how are you comfortable taking the money? was there something that kind of bubbled up and people used as the explanation or excuse or was it just all over the board it was all over the board depends on the founder you know the company specifically I never heard a compelling you know response honestly but lots of people are creatures of convenience the

highest price people you know people will work with people who offer them more money at a higher price sometimes at the expense of principles um and yeah i i never heard a really compelling answer to that there are some people who are somewhat neutral i can see a compelling neutral answer which is i'm actually not going to impose values across any of the decisions we're going to make as a company. But then you have to actually act that way. And I don't think many people were actually willing to act that way in Silicon Valley, but I think that would be

a consistent intellectual approach. One could absolutely say, like, my employee base is 1,000 people. They have different views, different religions, different political affiliations. I'm not going to get in the middle of triangulating what's right and wrong. We're not as a company. Our customers are all over the map, all over the globe. We're going to be as neutral as possible.

That is an intellectual coherence. position. But that also means that you can't be complaining about Trump. You can't be complaining about Trump's immigration policy. You can't be complaining about North Carolina's bathroom policy at the same time. So I think you have to be intellectually and consciously consistent, but there is a way to be consistent if you really wanted to. Got it. How would your advice change for young people graduating college? I had a bunch of them asking, you know, hey, look, basically I'm graduating into a virus, into an economic crisis. what's the best advice for me and anything that you've said in the past

that would change now? I don't know that I would change any of my advice. My advice is typically find the opportunities that will give you the greatest challenge with the people that will challenge you the most. People who can learn from the most will challenge you. And so you want to have the deepest possible learning curve and the steepest possible challenging curve that you can find. And I think that's always true.

in fact it may even be more in a post virus world people may be more willing to grant you unique opportunities because they have to but I would always be looking for the same things I think A number of people asked about

some variation of your longevity stack or what you do from a longevity standpoint what's kind of the daily routine right now Well, so first of all, I highly recommend this book called Lifespan by David Sinclair. He's probably the single best reliable expert. Read it.

I'll tweet it about it so you can find the links, you know, on my Twitter or media tab. But fundamentally, the things I definitely believe in, NAD, NAP supplementation. I believe in high-intensity interval training designed to both partially elongate your telomeres, There's reduce your or extend your two-minute recovery as a way of measuring on your Apple Watch in a non-invasive way. I do believe in severe calorie restriction, but I don't personally do it. I try some variants of intermittent fasting, which I think does get you maybe for 20% of the effort or paying 80% of the benefits. I think those are the three things that are most obvious. I also believe in sleep is the panacea for everything optimizing your sleep ensuring you

get a reliable seven eight hours as much as possible as consistently as possible another book I highly recommend reading on this topic is why we sleep by Matthew Walker the single best thing you can do for your life for your happiness for your lifespan for your success professionally to sleep more? I could say from personal experience, I was an anti-sleeper. And when I started sleeping more, it was life-changing for sure. Another big thing was around supply chains, national security, and this whole idea of like a resilient economy versus an efficient one, which was a framework that Chamath presented a couple episodes ago. Kind of how do you think about any shift there that we'll have to make from a seeking efficiency to something that looks more

resilient i agree that we're going to shift to a more um i don't know it's exactly the right vocabulary but a more controllable supply chain meaning like more under our control so you know For example, I believe it's true that there's no antibiotics currently manufactured in the U.S. That is probably a position that isn't wise. So I think we're going to take a look at various things that U.S. society, U.S. health depends upon and ensure that there's enough volume and production capabilities in the U.S. so that we're never exposed. I mean, we went through this in the oil world, right?

It's funny, ironically, now to look at it, where oil has basically no price to it. But in the 1970s, we were exposed to foreign oil, and it caused a lot of consternation and arguably political decisions that were less than ideal because we were dependent on foreign oil. And we made a conscious decision as a society to minimize that dependency on foreign oil. We eventually got to a place where we were an oil exporter, and I think it's led to a lot more flexibility in American decision-making. And so I think we're just going to have to do that across all parts

of our dependencies, food chain, drugs. The more vulnerable we are, the less we're going to want to do that. And there may be both short and medium-term costs to that. I mean, the truth of comparative advantage is true. Like economic comparative advantage across the globe is a true statement. So there is an inflation, at least in some period of time, for some period of time, to having control of your destiny through various manufacturing techniques.

Now, some of that can be offset at some point with automation. We are capable of investing in lots of other automated ways to manufacture that would potentially displace some of the costs that have led to the traditional comparative advantage overseas. But I think we're going to have to accept a temporary rise in costs to ensure that we have fundamental control of our economic destiny. The road to recovery for the American economy,

what does that look like from a timeline standpoint and any estimation as to how many small businesses don't make it out the other side of this? So my estimation is it's certainly measured in quarters, not weeks or months. And that probably means, I think this is more like, in Silicon Valley vocabulary, 2000 to 2003 than 2008. And so I think it will take a while, partially because I don't think there's going to be

a binary instant healthcare solution. It's going to be more of a gradual set of solutions that add up to being less threatening to all of us. And because of that, the economy is going to be impacted, even if not as severely impacted for a very long time. The evidence is true in China, even people did not, even using government stats, which were probably biased on the optimistic side, people did not snap back into immediate commerce right away.

And the biggest fear is that consumer fear, which is the traditional cause of the recession or depression, actually gets layered onto government fiat recession, depression, so that even when the government liberalizes the rules, people don't spend, or they can't spend. Disposable income has either been evaporated or their willingness to spend has decreased substantially because of perceived volatility of fear. And if that happens, then it's going to be a very long recession. I saw today that in San Francisco, as much as 50% to 60% of SMBs may fail.

And maybe that's a little paranoid. Maybe that's a little pessimistic. But the cushion associated with operating an SMB has never been great. The margins in many of these businesses are small. The fixed costs are often high. So I do fear that the permanence and the devastation may be quite high. And then if you're right that some of the beneficiaries of the designations of essential businesses have been larger entities, chains, national brands, they may be disproportionately set up to compete in a way that they weren't before, which would amplify the problem. I haven't studied, you know, you don't have to say this is segment by segment basis. It also depends upon how certain rules around density apply, you know, to healthcare providers, like dentists, apply to restaurants, apply to bars and pubs, gyms, how those are rolled out and how consumers behave.

very hard to predict at this moment but I think you know it could be catastrophic it could take a very long time one style I saw that's moderately predictive is the month before 9-11 occurred in the U.S. we hit a domestic in 2001 domestic peak travel record in early September and it took until may of 2004 to re-hit that peak so pretty pronounced and elongated in that vertical and so you know that may be a benchmark that's appropriate to look at for the most effective verticals anyway yeah one of the most interesting verticals uh to me is just the health care system right and how all of the ancillary services elective surgeries and kind of high margin revenue has completely disappeared and they're having an explosion of the ER rooms and things

like that. And it'll be very interesting to see how many of them, you know, have lasting effects from going through this versus not. Yeah. I mean, I think obviously that, you know, one of the perverse impacts of this is we were allegedly, you know, locked everybody down to quote unquote, flatten the curve, which is designed to avoid overloading the healthcare systems. And what we actually did is start the healthcare systems of revenue and patients. That one may revert fairly quickly. I think a lot of the healthcare postponements of what the surgery of treatment, which is unfortunate, will lead to more severe conditions,

will unfortunately have to rebound because people are going to get sick and eventually need their ACLs replaced, et cetera, et cetera. So that one, at least from a demand perspective, may see some resurgence pretty quickly, and the types of people who have the credentials, nurses, nurse practitioners, and doctors who have been furloughed, I think will be in demand again because that's a fairly specialized and regulated sort of profession. so we'll see but right now primary care practices are probably the most effective and maybe permanent I could see a primary care practitioner who's let's say over the age of 50 you know basically pseudo-retiring and not reopening primary care we've had a sort of shortage and concerns about a shortage of primary care particularly especially in certain markets in the U.S. and that may that may be a there may be some severe impact on primary care

But in terms of the hospitals and the acute care, I'm not as worried if, you know, if we're not locking down people for months. Got it. Last two for you. The most important book you've ever read. From a professional standpoint, high output management. It's really the Bible of how to run and operate and manage a high-growth startup, which has been what I've done for the last 20 years, and it's probably still the only book that really nails it and is something I try to reread once a year because it's written in 1982 by Andy Grove. From a personal standpoint, probably Upside of Stress, which was something that actually

didn't change my beliefs about the benefits of stress and challenging yourself and how to manage stress and challenge to be more successful, happier, and live better, healthier, longer, etc. But it's very contrarian. And most people didn't believe my philosophy. And so it's given me a tool for proselytizing in a way that's incredibly compelling. You cannot read this book and walk away the same person with the same attitudes um that you did before you read the book so i love the book i store copies of it at home in the office i've been years ago i used to give people books to read on my dates um so i was pretty crazy about like this is my covenant um but i said probably the most important from a political standpoint um the go-to one

Thomas Sowell wrote a book, The Vision of the Anointed, that I read probably 30 years ago. And again, clarified my own thinking, really reinforced my own thinking. And, you know, it actually probably still is reflected in my tweets today. Only you would name a book that you think could use as firepower to prove a point.

I love it. Last question for you is aliens, believer, non-believer, and why? yeah this is fascinating um at least let's say the ufo version of this um i had a debate about this you know over the weekend and um it's it's so much shocking that you know last week basically the pentagon confirmed that there's ufos and it's about the third or fourth or fifth thing that people are talking about between the virus there's more people probably talking about the michael documentary than ufos and and like it's almost like people are so confused by the confirmation

in the evidence that they don't even know how to express the insanity or the you know inconceptual uh intention with everything they've been taught i mean think about this is a classic way of needing to close but if any of these social media people or platforms have been regulating content or moderating content based upon credibility, we would have suppressed all this UFO stuff and fiction, nonfiction, people who are proselytizing about the existence of UFOs would have been banned from Twitter or from Medium. And yet given all the current evidence, pilot testimonials, photos these days, videos, measurement instrumentation it's almost surely true that there's there's objects of some sort that either

violate the rules of physics that we understand or there are aliens or something and we would have surpassed this for generations if any of the people who believe in content moderation and your social media platforms ensuring accuracy have their way we live in absolutely wild times where uh ufos don't get coverage and i think part part of it though i will uh say that uh it had leaked already right a couple years ago some of the videos so i think people may have been a little desensitized to to the novelty of it but still the fact that they uh they released it one was a big deal but two also like why now right it's my first question like like what why is now the time when you choose to do that versus some other time I guess well the New York Times to

the credit different a four-page story in 2019 about this but there is a little bit more details in the confirmation of the video self-fantasy by the Defense Department is interesting I don't know why now but certainly it was designed to distract people from the virus definitely didn't work it may be a little bit too you know there are positives to the Trump administration which is things that more traditional establishment people are taking for granted, he's willing to rethink and declassify some of this, you know, might be consistent with, you know,

some of his willingness to roll the dice the way that traditional presidents happen or wouldn't of either party. But it is going to be interesting to see what else the Pentagon and other people are willing to declassify over time, because there's almost surely more evidence out there. For sure. Well, listen, I appreciate you taking the time to do this. I think people really enjoy it. Where do you want to send them if they want to learn more about you or Founders Fund?

Well, Founders Fund, you know, we have a couple options. We have a website that has, you know, basically team members, a little bit of content, some stuff. We have several podcasting series that our colleague Mike Solano puts on every year that's thematic, where we get people who have interesting perspectives. You can hear them talk in their own voice. Obviously, social media. I use Twitter, some of my colleagues use Twitter, some of them use it at all. I think Peter has tweeted once.

So a variety of different practices there, but we like, we will, you know, some of us blog or use Substract. Like my colleague, John Mulligan, wrote a really interesting, fascinating piece about the future of Silicon Valley and growth markets and growth investing. So I highly recommend checking out all of our perspectives. We think differently. We're willing to debate each other.

We were going to, unfortunately, put on a conference, you know, in May called Hereticon, where we had an awesome assembly of speakers, a variety of different topics that due to virus concerns, we've obviously had to postpone, but we'll eventually bring that back and, you know, expose the world to a lot of different voices, divergent voices that they probably haven't heard from. I will I will vouch for you guys and that my favorite part about founders fund is I've never seen partners at the same venture firm literally fighting it out on Twitter over a topic like just just absolutely see us in person I can only imagine all right well listen I appreciate you taking the time to do this and we'll have to do it again in the future great thank you