This Week in Startups - E1042: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) shares insights on Recode incident, need for decentralized citizen journalism, techlash through the years, potential COVID-19 endgames: bull, bear & base case scenarios

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

0:55 Jason intros Balaji Srinivasan and tees up his incident with Recode's piece: “No handshakes, please”: The tech industry is terrified of the coronavirus 4:28 Balaji shares his experience with the story and his issues with corporate journalism 15:16 Balaji explains why he reacted the way he did to Shirin Ghaffary's request for an interview 19:52 History of techlash: 1995-2020, when things turned from positivity to overwhelming negativity 26:26 Balaji brings up a sentiment analysis chart published by Recode 31:25 Did both sides of the political spectrum fail in their coverage of the virus? Is citizen journalism the answer? 39:40 Balaji envisions for a new kind of journalism 41:43 Are corporate journalists too like-minded in their approach because of not being representative of the demographics of the US? 48:16 What is modern journalism's biggest blind spot? 51:22 Tips on how to start decentralizing media 54:34 Are modern journalists uncomfortable with subjects playing an active role in the reporting of the story? Did Recode & other outlets fail their readers? 1:01:55 Will the US "let it rip" strategy of dealing with COVID prove catastrophic? 1:05:53 Endgame scenarios: Bull, Bear & Base 1:10:08 Should we be experimenting with "Challenge Trials"? 1:18:52 How culpable is China for the spread of COVID-19? Should wet markets be shut down for good? 1:23:39 Why is the US still behind on mass testing? More on endgame scenarios 1:31:03 Possibility of COVID-19 being a biological weapon? 1:36:27 What should we learn from this crisis? What societal changes will happen?

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All right, everybody, welcome to another episode of this week in startups. We're recording this on April 2nd. And it's important that I say that because every day is blending into the next and I'm losing track of what day of the week it is, where I am, and how long this coronavirus outbreak pandemic is going to continue on. And early on, I was able to track this in January and February, thanks to one of my followers and a friend of the show, Belaji Sri Navasin, Shri Navasan, Belaji Sri Navasan. I think I got it right there. is, and formerly I knew him because he was working at Coinbase and in Drescent Horowitz. He's an angel investor. He was on the pod back on episode 769. A lot of you love that back in October of 2017.

And he's one of these smart investors, science folks on the Twitter. And he was taking this very seriously talking about it and giving us a warning. And many of us who are watching on social media, specifically the Twitter, were watching these videos going, This seems pretty scary what's going on in Wuhan. This does not seem normal. And Bellaghi was telling us it was not normal. And I saw a tweet. I'll pull it up here real quick.

And it was this experience that I've had with what I call late-stage journalists or late-stage journalism, in other words, the end game of journalism. Kind of feels like we're in the final inning of journalism and something new will come out of this. But a journalist had DM'd him slid into the DMs, which journalists do. And it's kind of just absolutely annoying when you're a person of note who gets quoted by the journalist to have every story seem to be spun or like you're being set up or like the context is going to be missing or they're doing a hit piece or they're doing something that is just off the mark. And you want to try to help that journalist. And so we got this email here. Hey, I am Shrearind, Jeffrey, and I'm a reporter for Recode.

We're doing a story about concerns about coronavirus and Silicon Valley, the Bay Area. So are your tweets on the topic. Would you be available to chat more about this on a brief phone call? Please let me know. Writing on this deadline, you can reach here, and I'll just slide up. Belaji says, hey, you're not covering technologies the Chinese are using to fight the virus, hardware implications of supply chain disruptions, what biotech is doing in terms of anti-riles vaccines, which you are covering is covering your tweets, right?

I'm just going to ask you straight up. When you got that tweet from the recode report, reporter. You kind of got that intuition. Welcome back to the pod, by the way. Thanks for coming on. I know you're busy. I guess it's kind of a laugh, right? I know you're busy, but I'm more busy now than I've ever been with so many companies in trouble. But when you got that, first all, are you doing okay? Family's okay? Friends okay? Yes, fortunately. By gosh, Grace. I feel like we have to ask each other. We're talking before the show that when you mentioned, when we ask each other, how are you doing?

We actually, like, really care to hear the answer now. Yep, that's right. So two questions to start us off here. Number one, what teed you off to this being such an important issue? How did you get on it so early in January? And then number two, when you got that, when you got that DM from the Recode reporter, what gave you that, what was your reaction to it? Yeah, so, I mean, my background, I'm a molecular diagnostics guy before I got into crypto.

I think a lot of people didn't know that, actually, because I hadn't been on Twitter while I was doing that. But that's actually my formal training is in, you know, biology, genomics, genetic circuits, bioinformatics, et cetera. And I taught that at Stanford and also, you know, founded a company based on that, sold a company based on that for 375 on diagnostics. So all the stuff that's happening now with the FDA blocking tests and so on, that's an area that I have some background in. I've actually like innovated, you know, so to speak, in that area. So I had some disciplinary expertise to bring to bear. And, you know, it was basically around the time that the lockdown of Wuhan was announced on January 23rd is when, you know, I'd sort of seen the virus in my peripheral vision.

then among a thousand other stories that you kind of read about or track. But the lockdown on January 23rd was an unfakable signal that this was incredibly serious because that was an unprecedented event. China's legitimacy, the state's legitimacy, rests on delivering economic growth for its citizens, even if it doesn't have a political say. And so for it to sacrifice economic growth for something meant that this was an extraordinarily, yeah, exactly. That's right.

So knowing you didn't have to be like a rocket scientist, you know, to realize, oh my God, you know, that's these are not, they're not stupid people, right? Like the, you know, the Chinese government has engineers in there, you know, people, there's a lot of things you can say about what they did. We'll talk about that with the censorship and so on. But they're not like dumb and self-destructive. And or at least not in this way. Yeah. So that's what kind of like flagged. Oh, my. God, this is actually really serious, then dug into the papers and started reading these papers. And, you know, they're, they're like horror stories. They're written in like the inverse of clickbait, you know.

So you hear about, you know, an A, like, you'll hear about a patient and they've got a compassionate use, you know, prescription and, oh, they had bilateral pneumonia. And basically what they're actually saying is, okay, this healthy 35-year-old, for example, the first case in the U.S. was knocked to the ground by this illness, had basically no pre-existing conditions, was brought to death's door, and had to be saved by an experimental drug. That's a real headline. It's not written like that in an academic journal. So that's what got me concerned. Then what's your second question? Please remind you. Oh, and you get this DM from a journalist, and this is where I think the journalist kind of, I don't know, trivializing the issue or maybe not understanding the severity of it, I think actually when you look back on it historically was a really good moment for everybody because

it led to you then when the story came out and it was in fact a link baiting story that kind of missed the point of this and the severity of it. You then did a tweet storm where you said, Incredible last week I called out a journalist who I thought was writing a piece that would be a disservice to public health. It's a very measured language by the way. Unfortunately, my concerns proved well-founded. Recode virus piece ignores W. W.H.O. and CDC gets the signs wrong and focuses on handshakes. Here's a thread. And you went through it and just took the piece apart. Bullet point by bullet point. That has now 1,300 retweets and 10,000 plus, I think, likes. And I'm curious as to your thoughts on the journalist's motivations. And then, of course,

after you did this sort of blow by blow taking apart why the story was wrong, I'm sure they did an incredible retraction and amoeia copa and explain to you exactly what they would do differently the next time. So take me through, you know, how they are the outreach and how they made up for this in grave errors and your thoughts when you first saw the piece. Yeah. So, so the outreach came on like February 7th. And by the way, you know, this story is just, uh, it's just symbolic. It's representative. I, I, you know, there's, there's hundreds of other stories that were like this that were written at that time and then probably, I don't know, thousands, tens of thousands that you and I have seen over the course of our careers that are like this. But this one just, it just sticks out

for a few different reasons because on February 7th, I'd basically now been kind of tweeting full-time about the virus for like the last two weeks because China was at war. It was, it was, you know, using drone delivery. It was, you know, doing thermal scans. It was having telemedical hospitals. It was basically throwing the full weight of the centralized Chinese state against this with every technology and policy that they could bring to bear. It was like a stunning kind of series of events. And the videos that were getting out on social media, you know, from a fairly censored Chinese environment, where of, you know, basically sci-fi movie scenarios, people being welded in their homes, you know, people like body bags on chairs and hospitals.

you know, crazy, crazy kind of events, people dropping dead in the street. So this was like this absolute, you know, like insane thing that was happening overseas. And there were a number of implications of this. Well, there could be shortages in the U.S. There, you know, there could be technologies where we could learn from the Chinese in terms of, you know, what they're doing. You know, there's, we could interview Chinese people and, and see what's happening here in case this comes to our borders. And so, but what happened was on February 7th, I got this outreach message, and I could tell

immediately that just the way it was phrased, see, normally, you know, as you're aware, and maybe not all of your audiences, but the story behind the story is more important than the story, typically. And what corporate journalists do, and I'll come to the distinction between corporate journalists and citizen journalists, they will employ a technique, which is called befriended and betray. And so they'll send a seemingly. polite message, often one that butters you up and that flatters your preconceptions as they see them,

talking about, you know, oh, you were ahead of this or, oh, you know, you're an important person to talk to, et cetera. And then when the actual article comes out, you're knifed. And then you're like, whoa, that wasn't what we talked about at all. They just use one or two quotes from a 30-minute interview, and then they pulled them out of context and used them to say with whatever they intentionally intended to say. And so this one was actually a more, to a layman looking at this, somebody who hadn't actually dealt with corporate journalists before, it seemed like a polite outreach. But the key there is I'm talking about concerns in Silicon Valley about this. Right.

And the further context, right, was that on Twitter. There's a little tip off. It's like, yeah, concerns in Silicon Valley, like, yeah. That's right. Because so the further context, you kind of need the secret decoder ring to be able to figure this out. The further context was, A, re-code runs a lot of negative pieces about tech. It's basically like a gossip column that masquerades as tech journalism. You don't read about the latest Bluetooth or, you know, post-GIS releases or anything like that.

It's not actually like a tech outlet in the sense of being savvy about technology. It's a gossip column because it only talks about the personalities of people. Oh, my God, how rich they are, all this type of stuff. So that's one. That's the outlet. And then two is the friends of this person, or I shouldn't necessarily friends. Let's say the social network of this person. For example, former RICO journalist like Mike Isaac or, you know, Teddy Schleifer,

you know, folks like that were very negative towards the idea that the virus was anything to pay attention to. You know, some of them were, you know, saying, oh, you know, know, like, for example, Dan, I'll get his name wrong, but Super Magadu on Twitter. I think Dan McMurdy, or I forget his last name, but he had been talking about supply chain issues related to this and was called a racist for his troubles, which, of course, those supply chain issues are causing drug shortages now, right? And so the second context was just like journalists on Twitter, tech journalists in particular, are very contemptuous towards this and like, oh, you

paranoid. It feels like recently it's been very class warfare. VC's out of touch, VCs narcissists, and, you know, it's a serious topic, and so you kind of get that sense that you're about to be knifed. When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk about the role of citizen journalists in this, and then when you saw the story, what your response was when we get back on this week's startups. If you want to turn your next idea into a new website, then you could blog and publish content, sell products and services, promote your physical or online business, or just announce an event or a special

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You knew him when he was on Jason Horowitz, Angel Investor. You can follow him on the Twitter, B.A.L.J.I.S. if you want to get really smart, really fast. So you know that this thing is going to be possibly, you know, you're going to get shanked by this story and they're going to make it about handshakes in Silicon Valley and how VCs are weird and don't want to shake handshapes. Right.

Story comes out. And did you wind up talking to the journalist? You just passed. No. No. And the thing is, the, the journalists themselves basically is acting on effectively cultural orders from the,

you know, both, both Recode and Kara and Vox more generally. And then, you know, the journalistic, the tech journalism establishment. So I didn't engage,

what I did was I basically called out the tweet. Yeah. I mean, because here's the thing, by the way, as, again, I'm not sure your audience. knows this. If you talk to a journalist under any circumstances, it's like talking to the police.

Anything you say can and will be held against you, right. Not only can and will will, will. I think you just take the can out of it. It's just will. That's right. That's certainly how it feels as a subject. That's right. So here's the thing, though. You and I are citizens, not subjects. Right. Right. You know, the folks who are at these media companies, they aren't the police, you know, there wasn't, there's no license that they have. They don't have JDs or MDs. There's no government granted thing. They also don't have usually technical expertise. Their, you know, their sense of, oh, we're here to hold you accountable and so on. I never signed up for that. And I frankly don't, don't, don't bend the knee or whatever to these folks because I think of them as employees of another

corporation, namely a media corporation. Right. A media corporation that is often a direct competitor of tech companies for advertisers and influence. And so once you see them as just employees of another corporation, well, you know, Google isn't giving interviews to, you know, a random person from Microsoft, you know, anytime soon, right? Tell me, tell me about everything you're doing. Well, no, thanks, you know. And if, you know, Coke went and attacked Pepsi on their blog, people would immediately be

able to see through it that, well, okay, you're a competitor in the marketplace. for some reason, and I think it's going to become, it is becoming more obvious. None of the media outlets disclose their rampant conflict of interest, which is that they're selling ads to, you know, they're competing for, for example, for Rolex ads or, you know, Mercedes ads. The New York Times runs all those kinds of ads, okay, with Facebook, right? And, you know, so they're competing on the back end, but even more importantly, they're competing on the front end for average, for influence. right, for viewers for time, right? Yeah. Attention. Yeah. And, and, you know, Jill Abramson acknowledges this in her book, Merchants of Truths,

former editor of the New York Times. She talks about how business imperatives help shape editorial judgment. Because a lot of journalists will deny this. They'll say, oh, there's a wall between advertising. The firewall, the Chinese wall, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Now, by the way, that exists or at least existed for a long time at Google and Facebook and so on as well. There was a wall between the product side and the ad side where one wasn't meant to influence I'm not sure if that's still present, but it was for a while. But the thing is, it's a somewhat of a disingenuous answer because while, you know, reporters may not be out there pitching ads and they may not be conscious of all the backend stuff, they're certainly conscious of the fact that, you know,

there's layoffs in the media industry and that it feels in general, with some exceptions like NYT subscribers, it's on a kind of a secular downslope. And so they're very resentful and negative on that dimension and that I think colors a lot of it. So it's like a declining industry for many folks, or at least they feel like it. And then, oh, these tech guys, you know, or whatever, they're the agents, we're essentially to blame. For the decline of media. Yeah. And it's not, they're not wrong. I mean, if you're not wrong. Craigslist gutted the classified business. The idea that you would advertise in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or re-code over Facebook or Twitter or Google, which would be much more effective.

You know, in general, it doesn't mean you don't advertise in these other ones, but, you know, it's these other networks have far more reach and they have better tools. So they are, they have been decimated by the tech industry. They're advertising, descriptions, businesses. That's right. And so basically what they can't win in the market, they want to win in terms of PR. And so, you know, like I basically kind of bucket into three eras. 1995 to 2012 was sort of like the honeymoon period where, you know, for the most part, tech and, you know, journalism did fine together.

And then after Obama's reelection, the sharp disjunction, if you go back to December 2012, there were still positive stories being written about how tech helped Obama get reelected and so on. I don't know if you remember that, like the engineer, right? Yeah. And there was an optimism about tech in the world. It was massive optimism in that first era and a lot of optimism in the second. Well, right. So I think from 2013 to 2019, it was 2013. It's like a switch flipped where there's different mental models of it.

You know how some people, for example, will date World War II all the way back to like the invasion of Manchuria rather than the invasion of Poland or whatever. You know, you can date the tech clash arguably back to the death of Steve Jobs because I think that he would. have rather acquired the New York Times than let this eye economy series of articles come out, which was, oh, Foxcon, people are jumping off buildings and so on. It didn't necessarily put the suicide rate into the background of, you know, what the overall Chinese suicide rate was. But that was like one of the first big negative stories. And I think that was in 2012, but it was before everything to negative in 2013.

Call that like a precursor to the tech lash. And so in 2013, that was like a switch flipped. And you started to get essentially folks. in East Coast media realizing that they could get clicks by attacking tech, number one. And number two, I think at a broader macro level, you know, there were kind of four power centers, you know, on the coasts. So there's, you know, Boston, which is academia, and you had L.A. with Hollywood. And you had, you know, you have New York with finance and advertising and media. And you had D.C., which is the seat of government. And tech in San Francisco in Silicon

Valley was just another partner to those four until by about 2013 when after Obama's re-election, you know, tech is a member of the Democratic coalition. People in these other groups, especially, you know, the press realized, wait a second, tech isn't like accepting its role as a junior partner anymore. It's coming for all the marvels. It is disrupting Hollywood, right? And it's disrupting academia with MOOCs and so on. And it's, you know, not obeying all the regulations with Uber and Stripe and, you know, a PayPal and, you know, it's also obviously going after media. And basically it was a delayed reaction to kind of the 2009 to 2012 financial environment where tech was just eating so much, right? And so basically post-2013, it was, okay, you know, the backlash to technology taking all this territory.

And folks who couldn't win in the market would try to win the PR war by attacking the reputations of tech people and tech companies and so on. And again, like, I think of this as literally Coke versus Pepsi because I don't think of them as having any moral high ground. It's basically old money versus new money. Well, you know, in fairness to them, I think, you know, the original goal of journalism was to, you know, find the truth. And a lot of people who joined and signed up for it. I know I did when I was in the 90s and I was actually a journalist and had publication. So can I report it back in the day. you know, we were really trying to get to the truth, but we didn't have to contend with,

we had a viable business, and so your business was viable. You really weren't struggling. And so you had this great, you know, you had advertising, the guys and the gals would sell everything. You'd be fine. And then you could have a really good church and state. And then when the advertising got bad and went away and the, and the resources went away, you had to file too often, you know, and you didn't have fact checking. and you were just so resource constrained,

you couldn't actually put the quality product on the table you wanted. So it's almost like not only were you in a battle with the tech industry, but you're under-resourced, right? You're like insurgents. You don't really have the same firepower, you know? It's not like the New York Times has the money or the power of the influence to even do a lot of this journalism the way they used to. And so it's...

Yeah, one could say necessity is a mother of hostility. or necessities a mother of defamation, basically. Because exactly, exactly, you're right. Like, you know, when they were happier and wealthier than they could afford to be magnanimous or generous at times. Not that, you know, there weren't negative articles obviously written in the past or what have you, but they could afford to be magnanimous at times. And then once I was not the case, well, they certainly weren't going to celebrate somebody's funding round when they're just being layoffs at their friends, you know, journalism company or, you know, news

organization, right? You know, local journalism is, you know, kind of going out of business. And so just, you know, tech got a lot of that stick and it was all sublimated. But it was very real. And these disclosures, by the way, were never, you know, had any company had such a massive conflict of interest that they covered and had not disclosed. They had a field day on it. Yeah, for sure. But their own enormous conflict of interest on every level.

This is the same thing, by the way, with their articles. Many of these journalists basically pickfights on Twitter, yell at people, are extremely rude, nasty, and then covered the same people without any disclosure in their articles and basically settle personal grudges. That's a very weird thing. I almost feel like the journalist did themselves such a disturbance by not acting magnanimous or classy on Twitter.

and they just, you know, allowed anybody to go buck wild and say whatever they wanted on Twitter. And it just made it clear that they had picked aside. And that feels like another big mistake. You know, you used to be able to, in your mind, think the New York Times was kind of taking it down the middle. CNN was going to try to be down the middle. Maybe they were a little bit left. Wall Street Journal was trying to be down the middle. But with the success of Fox News, it feels like everybody just decided picking aside,

gets subscriptions and gets people to your tribe. and going down the middle means you don't get the left or the right. So how much of this has to do with Trump being elected? Is that the third stage of all this? Yeah. So, well, I mean, the thing is there's actually a graph on recode of all places, but it comes from a guy named Joe H-O-V-D-E. Actually, maybe you can, I don't know if you can pull up a terminal on your screen.

Yeah, Nick, see if you can pull this up. Google, recode Facebook sentiment analysis? We code Facebook sentiment analysis, he'll look for it. Explain what it is while he gets it up. Sure. It basically shows that what you and I are thinking is not, you know,

all in our heads or whatever. You know, that'll be another thing that often has done. Oh, what about this positive article? You're imagining, you know, that there's negative coverage at all, you know?

They'll do that. That's a frequent thing. They'll pull one article. What this does analyzes, yeah, that's a one. And if you scroll down, this is actually, it's recode,

just reprinting and independent guys, you know, that graph, if you zoom in on that graph, Nick, just zoom in if you can, Command Plus. There you go. So let's take a look at this, okay? Starting, you know, everything was fine up until 2012. Then starting in 2013, you can see it start trending down and it goes from positive to neutral-ish by early 2015, way before Trump has come on the scene. Yeah. And then Trump comes on the scene in the, in the, in the 2017 area and you see, boom, it goes super negative. That's right. But the critical thing is it wasn't just Trump. It was definitely trending down before then. Okay. So, so this is, this is something, I mean, Trump was only on the scene like May or June 2015, if I recall correctly. And, but you can see

that it's already, you know, the 2015 coverage is already starting to veer sharply negative relative to where it was. At least it's around, it's around zero, right, as opposed to just trashing them all the time constantly, right? And, And so, you know, what often, by the way, the reason a graph like this is helpful is if you talk to a corporate journalist about this. And by the way, I want to make sure we use the term corporate journalist and citizen journalists. I'll come back to that. For sure. Talk to a corporate journalist about this.

In early, they'll quote like one positive story in like the early 2018 story or something to be like, well, see, there's a positive thing as well. So you have to actually use numbers like this as opposed to words. because it's much harder for them to argue with numbers. I think that's a very, very important macro concept. And, you know, you can try arguing with words, and that's useful. I mean, you're arguing with words with people who are trained in words. You've got to come out of with data and have any kind of chance at convincing them. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know how much of that Facebook is self-inflicted wounds from Facebook, the Trump effect,

or the New York Times maybe becoming more. far left, woke, and anti-corporate. Where do you see this sentiment coming from? Because is it the same journalist writing those negative articles? Or did they replace the classic journalists in tech and in business with a new breed of journalists? We get back on this week in startups. You crazy about efficiency like I am?

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All right, welcome back to this week in Stor-Urups. Hope everybody's okay and taking care of their families. We're having a wide-ranging discussion about late-stage journalism, corporate journalism versus citizen journalism, social media, the media business with Belagie. You know him. Follow him on Twitter, B-A-L-L-A. J-I-S. He is incredible at the Twitter. So when we look at that chart and we see the sentiment

is totally flipped. The New York Times goes from being, you know, positive, you know, some critical stories here and there to being just almost universally seriously criticizing Facebook. Do you correlate that with the journalists turning over there or journalists and the world feeling powerless against Trump being in office and taking it out on Facebook? for being neutral and helping in their minds, put Trump in office. How do you unpack all that? Because there's so many factors here. There's a few different factors.

One factor that I think is under-discussed but important, Nick Christoph, who is a fairly honest guy at the New York Times, wrote a column, I think it's titled like the, you know, the columns you won't read or something like that. It came out a few months ago before the whole virus thing. But I think it was Q4. And he essentially said that the columns that he had, as it mentioned Trump, get like, you know, far more page views than the ones that don't.

And, you know, people have talked about the Trump bump for journalism and what have you. So, so part of it is, you know, this thing where, you know, clearly there's a strong financial incentive for them to, to mention Trump constantly and, you know, so on. Trump equals rating. Right. Trump equals rating. So it's like this K-Fabee thing. Have you heard that term K-Fabee? No, tell me.

K-Faby, this is actually like Eric Weinstein's thing on Twitter, if you know him. Yeah, of course. Basically, yeah, so like, you know, WWE, the World Wrestling Federation or whatever the E stands for now, has fake wrestling matches, but they don't call them fake. They call them K-Faib, where it's actually fake, but everybody's supposed to like play their roles or whatever on both sides, right? And so we sort of had this K Fabe wrestling match until pretty much after the impeachment this year. And then the virus is bringing people into reality. So we had this silly back and forth nonsense-e, you know, basically social cold war between, you know, these different factions, which I tried to stay out of as much as possible because I think it's so stupid.

and we're seeing it in our country how stupid it is where because of that, there's people cannot agree on the basic biology of a virus that's going to kill people, you know. But, you know, and by the way, the so-called conservative media has not done themselves any favors on this virus thing. I mean, I want to be clear about that, right? It's an incredible fail all around. If we look at it, you had the right saying it's a hoax. This is just a continuation of Russia Gate, the Ukraine.

train gate, perfect memo. It's just all trying to get Trump out of office. And it's like, okay, wait a second. Under what circumstance would a virus be designed to take a presidential candidate out of office? You can't argue with this. And then the left is so hysterical about this. They can't even have a sensible discussion about the virus. Let's get back to this third role, because you do have the left and the right who seem to have lost because of Trump derangement syndrome or Trump loyalism, any conception of reality. And then you have citizen journalists, people who are looking at the numbers, trying to have an intelligent conversation on Twitter about it, which I would put us into that sort of bucket.

What do you see the role as citizen journalist versus the corporate journalists? Yeah, so I have a piece coming out of this, which maybe you can share with your audience after this, but we'd love to. Yeah, basically, so the title is. decentralizing media. And the question is, because, okay, you can go and criticize, you know, corporate journalists work, a late stage journalist work on Twitter. And, you know, that is, that is fine to do. But ultimately, it is like, you know, complaining to a company that you don't like their product. At a certain point, you want to just go and build a better one. And how did you go

about doing that? And also, when you do that, by the way, I just want to make a point. If you do that, then you're putting yourself into their crosshairs and their colleagues crosshairs. So when I defended you and used the term late stage journalism, I got Paul Graham, who doesn't give an F, which is why I love him. He's just like, I'm just going to say, I support Jason's position on your position on. I had, for every person who publicly said like right on, there were 50 who DM to me or texted me and said, I would never mix it up with those journalists. I would never bring it up. When I retweeted you, people are like, you're crazy because they're going to go after you now, and they're going to try to attack you and attack your companies.

And it's a real thing. People, even if it's not true, people are scared. And I told this to Kara Swisher as well, who I consider us friends, colleagues, you know, you don't want to be in a world where people are actually scared to talk to you or think that you're going to do retribution, which I don't think Carol would ever do. But I do think there's some other journalists who like to circle the wagons and might actually take a swing at me. or take a swing at you or whoever, just because we challenged them on this subject. Absolutely. I mean, like, there's no question that there is retaliation,

and that retaliation is intentional, premeditated, and often passive-aggressive, where what happens is there's a conflict along one axis on Twitter or whatever. They'll try and hit a company on a later time on a different axis just to get them back for something, right? Yeah. Actually, you know, who's admitted this is,

I think John Ronson in So You've been publicly shamed. You know, he mentions that there was, there's some person who he'd had a conflict with, and so he followed him closely to see if he could get that guy for something else. Oh, wow. It's like a dirty cop. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right. And so that's really interesting because, you know, you start getting far away from the public interest there

and going more to a personal grudge. And those two things are, of course, conflated. And then of course, you know, like other things corporate journalists do, they'll, they will get a leak of information. And then, you know, they'll hold it over your head and try to bargain with you and say, okay, give me more information or else I'm going to put this out there and write a negative story. Right. And it's like negotiating with a terrorist who's basically stolen information. I mean, you know, when Aaron Swartz went and liberated information from MIT servers, he was prosecuted for his troubles. and, you know, Snowden as well, had he not gone and paired up with the journalist who has a license to print secrets, essentially, for money, thanks to the Pentagon papers and the Watergate precedence and, you know, New York Times versus Sullivan and so on, like essentially media companies have special powers where they can do things. They can't be initially sued for defamation as easily. They can print secrets.

So that's like actually a special privilege. Yeah, whistleblower. And it's an important role. Right, right, right. But here's the thing is that is not actually granted to a normal citizen. No. Right. So it's something which is asymmetric and even the term subject, right?

I don't know if you remember this, but in Rome, people were citizens. And then once it became the Roman Empire, they were subjects. Right. You know, so subject has a dual meaning, the subject of a story, but also the subject in the sense of someone who is subject to a rule of some kind. Yeah, subjugated. Subjugated, exactly. So I think that a bunch of these things are being reassessed. And I think that the goal is not just to criticize, though I think that is necessary.

I think the goal has to be to build a different vision for what journalism is. And let me give a few riffs on that and a few thoughts. Okay. So there's really at least two major axes to this. And one is the social and the second is the computational. So let me talk about the social part first. So, you know, I had a tweet storm on this and I've got a longer article, you know, coming discussing it. But there's this concept I have, not just my concept, but the concept of a citizen journalist, right?

And a citizen journalist is somebody who actually has a day job and has expertise. in some area. And frankly, that could be, for example, today, I would really like to hear from an Amazon delivery driver, right? Or somebody who has a nurse, somebody who has on-the-ground experience, who's not a professional writer, and because they're not a professional writer,

because they're not a corporate journalist, their incentives are not primarily those of clickbait and page views and maintaining status within the journalist community, which is sort of like academia in the sense of, you know, it's kind of hard to leave academia and come back in. It's also kind of hard to leave journalism and come back in. You leave for PR or something like that you're considered corrupt and selling out. So it's journalism is culturally centralized. Even if you start a new media company, I'll come back to that.

If you start a new BuzzFeed or Vox or vice, it'll eventually get pulled into the Brooklyn Matrix because, you know, that's how the people you hire get Pulitzer's and, you know, how they seem to advance. in terms of getting props on Twitter and whatnot, right? So you need a different approach. You can't just start like a new media company. The alternative is to not have a media company, but to have every company be a media company, to not have a special class of corporate journalists, but for everyone to become a citizen journalist.

Because we need information to guide our society. We need true facts. The issue is the disalignment of incentives that comes from having a separate and special media class. Now, the funny thing about this is their surveys of journalists where they themselves admit this, like NYMAG did something several years ago, where they will actually all admit that the separateness of them is an issue, that they are not democratically representative of the U.S., let alone the world. And, you know, folks have talked about this, how many of them have, you know, trust funds. Many of them are, you know, actually from wealthy backgrounds, but they pretend that they're slumming it. I think Melissa K. Chan on Twitter talks about how to be a foreign correspondent, you need to have a trust fund or some money or something like that.

And basically... Why is that? Because you need to have the resources to be able to travel? Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, it's here, I'll find the exact one. So... And it's interesting when you bring this up because they do have this kind of bubble that they're living in. And when you get that group think, if you're in that bubble, you're going to do things like, you know, you're going to have this group think where what percentage of the journalists writing for the New York Times hate Trump and voted for Trump, right? So they just, and I'm not saying I'm a fan of Trump. Everybody knows I'm not.

You just have to look at my Twitter handle. But you do get this group think where they just have no conception of how they're perceived. And that is really a weak spot. and they don't know how they're perceived by the subjects. The subjects are like, oh, my God, these journalists don't know what they're talking about. I'm trying to help them. I spend 30 minutes on the phone, 45 minutes on the phone, trying to educate them on the topic, and then they pull out two quotes, and they barbecue me.

And it's like, I had the good faith to get on the phone with you and spend 45 minutes, and you didn't even have, you know, and I did that for you, right? So here we go. I have the Melissa Chan quote. Want to be a foreign correspondent. Sure, as long as you have no college loans. and can freelance for $200 an article for years. It's not impossible to make it on your own.

But the secret is a lot of us come from at least an upper middle class background and don't like to talk about it. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's wrong. And then if you go down a little bit further, it's like, you know, journalists are becoming increasingly like artists, people who pretend they're slumming it when many have at least a healthy rainy day fund or a small apartment, a distant aunt left them, you know, because industry is that unstable and crazy. Oh, right. Another way to be a journalist if you're married and he or she happens to be a bank or a lawyer. And then if you look at the second link that I sent the media on the media, right?

The interesting thing is, you know, when they talk about the biggest issue associated with the media, the thing that is the most legitimate issue is so question number 12. Journalism's biggest blind spot on its coverage is group think. We draw from a limited pool of people who generally have a similar background in class. They're simply unable to see the perspective of people who are not like them. and tend to drive out those who don't fit in. It is interesting having been a journalist in New York. I can tell you it is its own group of people who have their own group think.

And then when I moved out here and then running inside, it's very hard to find journalists who just want to take it down the middle and try to pursue truth. And we've had this ongoing discussion at inside.com. Do we want journalists who have this kind of like super far left-leaning, anti-capitalist, you know, agenda, or do we want people who just want to report on the topic? And it's like, we just want to report on the topic as straight as possible. We're not actually looking to score points through virtual signaling on the media here.

Yeah, I think the issue with folks tipping to one side or the other, because you also have, obviously, you know, the Fox, you know, thing. You have Fox and you have Fox, right? So I think there's an interesting Z-axis take on it, which is it comes from full-time corporate journalism. So, you know, for example, the founding fathers had this concept of how a standing military was dangerous to the republic, because you'd have a separate Praetorian class with, you know, arms that was well organized and that if it thought of itself as separate from the citizens, it would have, you know, you know, you. incentives, it would always be tempted to take over to abuse its power in different ways, et cetera, right? Yeah, they'd be hawks, right?

They would be their own class. They'd be their own class, exactly. And, you know, this is, that's something that has at least partially come to pass with the military industrial complex and so on. So with politicians, it's come to class, right? Like, also the founding fathers saw people would become politicians for one or two terms and then go back to whatever their jobs were. That's exactly right.

And so if a standing military is bad, the concept of a standing media, a media that is separate from and distinct from the people. So that leads to two different kinds of distortions. Either A, people think of themselves as the guardian democracy, or B, people dislike them as, quote, the enemy of the people. But I think the solution is to be neither guardian of the people nor their enemy, but just the people. All right. When we get back from this quick break and final break, we're going to go pull up that Intelli John Sear article from the New York magazine of 130, 113 journalists. Answer the question, why they're so despise.

When we get back on this weekend startups, good teaser. Silicon Valley Bank is built to move bold ideas forward faster. And for more than 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped startups go from the seed stage to the Series A stage and beyond with that kind of experience they know. How fast the world of innovation can change. That's why they offer services that can expand with you at your pace. And if you're a startup, you're moving fast, right? That means insights, expert advice, and scalable solutions for each stage. of the startup journey. They anticipate your needs before you do. Maybe that's why 69% of US venture capital

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All right, Belashi's on the pot again. If you want to hear his first appearance episode 769, B-A-L-A-J-I-S on the Twitter, go follow him. He's got good things to say. Journalist's biggest blind spot in coverage is group think. We draw from a limited pool of people who generally have a similar background in class, simply aren't able to see the perspective of people who are not like them and tend to drive out those who won't fit in. These are the writing responses.

Will for ignorance and distaste for views that don't support our own, the environment, how income inequality, racial, and quality influence society politics. Interesting. Yeah, exactly. Covering its friend of benefactors. There's, you know, not of toughness than too much snark. This is, it's useful because it's actually like kind of an interesting. journal admission and it's as representative of a survey as one is going to get.

And I think the issue that people have been stuck in is they've been stuck in this, you know, false dichotomy of, oh, you know, like journalism is bad. Oh, we need, you know, good journalism, though. So we need to fund the same thing more. But a paradigmatically different approach is rather than having one journalist making, let's say, $100,000 a year, you have 100 people who make $1,000 a year part time, they've got day jobs, but they have one or two or three articles a year and they make a thousand bucks from that. And it's kind of something which is like the substack model,

for example. And you essentially decentralized journalism and you make it a large enough class that it's harder for them to collude and that they actually are the citizenry who are popping up to speak their mind and they actually have domain knowledge when they do so. You know what? It's already happened. If you look at podcasting, I think the reason podcasting has become so prominent is that people are looking at link baiting and they don't trust the media. Media is at an all-time low. The picking of size, the tribalism. It makes people just feel icky and they feel like it's just not healthy. And then when they listen to a Joe Rogan podcast and they watch him interview Bernie Sanders or whoever he happens to be

interviewing for two hours or three hours or you and I doing an hour and a half, you feel like, I got a pretty good sense of what's going on here or a better sense. And I can really let the person unpack what they're saying. And you as the subject, like, how do I misrepresent you in this podcast? I'd have to do some post-production and really screw with the audio. And I always tell people we don't. One thing we'll ever take out of the audio is if you told us there was something you said that you regret and you reasonably don't want to be misunderstood.

And we're like, yeah, we don't want you to be misunderstood. Well, and that's happened twice in a thousand episodes, I think. Somebody said something they felt would be misconstrued. They made a joke about communism or something, and they didn't want to be crass. No, it's a true story. It happened this year. And so, I don't know. What do you think?

You think podcasting is a reaction to this in some ways or a solution maybe? Yeah, so I think actually podcasting is part of it. So let me give my kind of 10-ish pointers on, it may not actually add up to 10. Let's say N pointers. on how to decentralize media. So one of them is every company, a media company. And what I mean by that is we need to go from content marketing to full-stack narrative. And the entire podcast thing that VCs have been doing is essentially the burgeoning of, you know,

what I think of as the West Coast media ecosystem, where it's not just text or audio, but it should soon become movies and everything. Basically, tell your whole story. And there's a site which has like 110, 100. It's called, gosh, what's the name of the site, which is making videos, Wistia, W-I-S-T-I-A. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so Wistia gives a good, I think,

a great example of what full-stack narrative looks like. And full stack narrative is you do not have to go to somebody else for distribution. I mean, for example, Rachel Maddow doesn't appear on Laura Ingram's show or vice versa, right? She has her own show. They have their own show, exactly. And so that's related to kind of premise. So first, every company, a media company, and relate to that, build your own distribution to avoid distortion. you need basically, you know, for tech companies and for more broadly, but the companies we invest in,

but just really true for any company, you know, 80, 90, 95% of your content is stuff that is related to your vision and your mission and stuff that people find useful. You know, the next step after content marketing are, you know, videos that are helpful, all the type of stuff, which kind of tech has already been doing, right? Yeah. But what is a new concept is that 5% of the time or 1% of the time, you're going to get in a scrap where your company's reputation or brand is being attacked by often corporate journalists to benefit their own companies, right? Because they get page views, right? They put your name, which you've built up over the years, into their headline, and they get clicks.

And they can literally make money from that because anybody has right access to your reputation. reputation, they can debit from your reputation, whereas they can't debit from your bank account in the same way. So the distribution that you build up over years of providing useful content to your followers as a company can in that 1% case be used to actually fight back because that's how you have a million or whatever million followers at that time. So every company, media company, build your own distribution to. avoid distortion. Related to this,

you know, the tech industry, we've talked about learn to code. You know what comes after Learn to Code? What? Learn to write, report, publish, and direct. Love it. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, and this is the great irony, the woman, Shirin, Jeffrey, who is at Recode, and I mean to, you know, pick on her in any way,

I think she was, like, very new at her job at Recode, who was just hired. She has 3,000 followers, and you have close to 200,000. So it's not like she's doing you any favor by including you in her, you know, ridiculous article that people in, because the punchline, which we never got to in the beginning of the show was,

she said you predicted this article would be a hit piece and would be, would miss the mark. And it was, I forgot the exact title, but it was like Silicon Valley people are strange for shaking hands. Yeah, yeah. It was funny because here's what I found remarkable about that. I called it out very publicly, right, in a way that's unusual.

And it got a lot of flack for that from folks. I mean, some people support it. It definitely wasn't like 991, but it was like 50-50, those people who, you know, had context and distrusted corporate journalists, corporate journalists themselves. And then folks who were in the middle who were like, hey, why are you being mean to this person or whatever, right? Because it's set up to be passive aggressive. It's set up to be deniable. Right.

That's actually part on their side. And there was a really hilarious exchange where, you know, I said this was going to be an article about handshakes on Sand Hill. And, you know, this woman, you know, Golden Gate Blonde on Twitter and Kara both denied it. And they said, oh, how do you know that? Are you a psychic? And the article came out and it was, oh, no handshakes, you know, how Silicon Valley is terrified and paranoid, right? And it was kind of amazing because they were on such autopilot. it because here's what they could have done, right? What they could have done is they could have

taken the criticism and either just shut the story down and done something else or actually write the good story on the technologies that Chinese were using and, you know, the supply chain issues and all that type of stuff. And either of those would have made me look like I was paranoid or crazy, right? But instead, you know, they just like went down the middle in this. kind of blind way because what they're not used to is their subjects being not subjects, but citizens. Citizen journalists own and active participants who don't play along with it. You know, for example, I'll give you another quote.

Let me see if I can find this. Well, it was interesting because Kara Swisher responded to it and her, what she said was, oh, please with the dopey snark. She's doing a story, a full story, and we have discussed every one of these issues you're raised in detail and pivot, try to keep up. One thing I don't want to get lost in all this is this was the greatest crisis in modern American history, which is now obvious, right? And that was apparent, you know, what I was trying to say was, look, this is a public health emergency. The Mayo Clinic says it's a pandemic. CDC said the virus may take a foothold. All of these things now take on a completely new

light six weeks later. Yeah, this is February 14th, just so people know, it's like a lifetime ago, and it's like six weeks ago at the same time. That's right. Exactly. So, so, you know, and the thing about it, the useful thing about this particular episode is a good chunk of the press has shape shifted into Weaver Right all along. And, you know, like Fox News is bad. Now, Fox News has definitely screwed this up in many different ways, okay? But there wasn't a second for, I mean, there's basically one person, I think, Alexis Madrigal, who actually reckoned with this and is actually like a thoughtful person.

And he's actually an honest person who I encourage people to read him. He's actually also helping, he set the COVID-19 tracking and so on. So there's definitely, you know, pound, not all journalists, right? You know, but a lot of them just kind of pretended this never happened and have, you know, to use one of their favorite terms, gaslit people, which is kind of this remarkable thing. And what they're leaning on and what they're relying upon is their distribution. Yeah. And their brand, right?

And their supposed process. And I've asked her like two or three times on DM. You don't know this. I asked her at least twice on DM and two or three times on Twitter publicly, hey, are you going to give us an update? And I said earlier in the first segment here, I'm sure she's done an update. And they've done a mea copa and explained what they got wrong in that story. So have they even followed up with you?

Or are they, because that would be, it would be such a credibility building experience for them to say, hey, you know what? We should have, you know, done this. See, here's the issue is if I press that, then it looks like I'm pressing some triviality from the past when people are dying and so on and so forth. Right. However, if a tech company ever messed up in, in this way, they would be hounded. I mean, remember, you know, I had another tweet on this, right? People are fired for just a joke. What is a penalty for just the flu?

Yeah, right. Right. Just the flu. Yeah. Penalty should be like, yeah. And so just so people know, the headline was, no handshakes, please, in question marks, I mean, in quotes, the tech industry is terrified of the coronavirus. And it's like, really? on. Like, and she says in the story that you should, that like there's no, that, you know, the health officials are saying it's not that big of a deal. Yeah, exactly. I mean, like,

literally the story is official misinformation. It is riddled with, um, quotes that are misleading, quotes that are selective, like quoting some anonymous county official when national and international officials have said the opposite. And Wuhan is under lockdown saying that, oh, it's fine to be in Beijing when Beijing had an outbreak. Like literally every paragraph had had falsehood and not just falsehood. Falsehood that was damaging to public health, as is now incredibly obvious. Like, you know, clickbait helped cause lockdown. Right.

Right. The reason people are cowering in their homes is because the press failed as being a behavioral immune system as being an early warning. Crazy. You know, it's actually insane. it's literally caused trillions of dollars in damage and thousands of lives dead. Yeah. I'm not saying this article alone.

I'm just saying like, you know, the entire thing, you know. Let me ask you since you do have some expertise here, and I have you on the line, what is the end game for the coronavirus and this pandemic? We have a month of mandatory quarantine here in San Francisco. the numbers out of China people believe are fake. But Hong Kong and Japan, South Korea supposedly are going back and have normalized. The factories are refilled in China. Not sure if I believe that.

Is this going to end in your estimation and when? There's a huge, huge error bars on this where literally the outcome can be different by multiple orders of magnitude depending on the choices people make at this time. Okay, and even even still. So that wanted to preface it with that. So with that said, the U.S. appears to be having a de facto let it rip strategy, unfortunately, where I don't know if you saw, but, you know, a week ago, we were at about 100 new deaths per day. And now we've crossed a thousand deaths per day. And the testing may not be keeping up.

So it may just go past that to 10,000 deaths per day or more. We may not even see the numbers, and that may give people a false insecurity because to, you know, to scale testing to that level is non-trivial, right? You may start to see it as you've seen it in Italy and already seeing in New York City in so-called all-cause mortality. Are you familiar with that term? No, explain. As you can see on screen here, this is what a spike in all-cause mortality looks like at the national level. If you scroll down, that is, if you see that huge spike, that's the Spanish flu in 1918. And you can see that that's very visible on the graph.

You don't need special statistical analysis to pull it out. It's a huge spike in deaths relative to the general trend in the 20th century, right? And so overall infectious disease mortality rates have leveled off is the first one here. And we're showing just Spanish flu is just a major peak. I think it was 1918 or something like that. Yeah. And then, boom, we went crazy. And now the second link.

So that same spike is shown in a different way here. It's not a graph, but the table. If you click that table there, how many people are dying in Italy? So just zoom in on that. It's just a table that there's an Italian engineer that I've been collaborating with, and we came up with the idea for this chart. And it's pretty bad. Basically, what that ratio shows is the ratio of deaths in the current week in Italy

to the same week the previous year. year. Got it. So the number of deaths per week from the previous year is four to eight X. That's right. That's scary, you know, that's crazy. So you think they're greatly underestimated the number of debts in Italy and that came out eventually? Yeah. So we published, this is a great example of citizen journalism. This was online for those who saw it. And then it was written up in the Wall Street Journal several days later. And it gave a lower ratios to X. It didn't include this table or graph or what have. you. But yeah, deaths are actually being underestimated because it's now the virus is at a scale

where it's causing a change in all-cause mortality, which is frankly terrifying. It basically is something where it's such a blip that it's, all the people who are saying, oh, just the flu. Well, guess what? I think as of yesterday, the virus has gone to the scale where it is larger than any daily flu total has ever claimed. And it's one of those things where people, are saying just the flu, they're comparing a constant or a rough constant to a variable, or really to an exponential. It's like, it's like comparing a car that's standing still to a car that's going 100 miles an hour. Yeah, yeah. Or to like a local restaurant's revenues to that of a startup, which if a startup succeeds, it can be like $3 billion in revenue in five years.

and at local restaurant just does not have that upside. Typically, they're not built for venture scale. The flus that we saw before were just not capable of killing 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 people a day. Especially, and they weren't going to go and scale from 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000. It was more of a constant. It was a known quantity. It wasn't going to mutate to such an extent, right? Okay, so you asked like what happens with this pandemic.

I mean, I can give basically a couple of scenarios. Yeah, give me the best, give us the best. Give us the best case scenario and then give us the expected and then give us the, you know, oh, my goal. Okay. So, all right. So bull bear and base, right? Okay, so bull base and bear. So the bull case is that there's some dayus ex machina that comes into play.

For example, masksforall.co. Okay. If you just bring this up, actually I meant to plug these guys. That's CEO. Yeah. So this is by my colleague, Jeremy P. Howard, becoming a friend who basically has put together this great website that is encouraging everybody, if you must go out, wear a mask. It can be an improvised mask.

It can be a cloth mask made out of a T-shirt. So this is something which is a DASX mock, not even, but an intervention, rather, which is cheap, which is scalable, which has no downside, which is easy to understand. understand and that which has worked in the Czech Republic. People believe Austria has made it mandatory and certainly it's been a big deal in Asia. So it's possible that if we can get this out there, this could reduce the degree of contagion. Okay. You know, if 50% of the population wear wear a mask, you know, only 50% of be infected ones, 80% wears a mask the outbreak can be stopped immediately. Holy cow. This is incredible. And this is because, and I was having this conversation

with my wife and we've been trading roles back and forth. I don't know if you're having this in your personal life, where you're not taking this serious enough, you're taking this too serious. And we were just having this debate of if it's airborne or not. And there seems to be a big debate about, is it airborne? It's not about it being airborne. It's about you touching your mouth after you touch something

or if you're sick, you coughing and putting it on the table in front of you for the next person to touch. If everybody wore these goddamn masks, then anybody who has it, if they cough, it doesn't go all over the place. And then anybody who's using that mess, if they did touch the door handle for some insane reason, if they touch door handles with a bare hand, they might not touch their mouth and nose. They might only touch their eye, right?

Right. So here's the other thing, though. Airborne is a technical term where, you know, in the sense, can the virus be transmitted by a cough or a sneeze? Absolutely a can. That's droplets, right? So those droplets are flying through the air. Airborne is like a more technical term, which is like, you know, is it born on the air? You know, is it like flying through the air even without like a droplet?

But absolutely, masks protect you from spreading it to others. They stop you from touching your face. And I believe they will also protect, you know, it depends on the kind of mask, but they can prevent some viral products from coming in. It's one of these completely common sense interventions that's cheap and scalable that, of course, of course we haven't done, you know. And it's so obvious Japan has always done this and they get through flu season. And Japan is the most dense place.

in the world. And it's like, so they know something about what they're doing. That's right. I mean, Japan is, you know, people think it's screwing up a bunch of stuff and it might actually have an outbreak, but it hasn't been extremely bad yet, despite very high population density and so on, because people have this culture of wearing masks in public. And washing hands and being sanitary. That's right. That's right. So I think, you know, if you can get people to wear masks, that could be something that could bring this temperature down considerably. It's also possible there's other kinds of things which I'll enumerate. Maybe some miracle drug is found, which has high effect size.

And by the way, it's often not just the drug, but it's the formulation and the dosing and when you have it, like, you know, do you have it early in the course of the illness? All those kinds of things matter, not just the drug itself, right? You can iterate on a drug, just like you can iterate on a problem. This is something people don't know. Yeah. So maybe there's some drug. Maybe, you know, we get a vaccine.

Well, this was not going to happen on any short-term time scale. But Mark Lipsich of Harvard has proposed something very, very important that your audience should also know about. I tweeted this. Very brave for him to publish this. And he deserves our support. Okay. Essentially, he talked about a challenge trial. Do you know what that is?

No, explain. So a challenge trial basically is you take healthy people, you give them an experimental vaccine, and then you actually have them exposed to the virus of a known dose in a controlled environment. Got it. Okay. And so this way you're not just doing like an observational study of who gets it or who doesn't, you know, out in the wild, right?

You are, you're actually exposing them on purpose to a known viral load. And it's in a controlled environment. And so if they get sick, they have the best hospital care and so on. They get paid for doing it. You know, their volunteers, et cetera. And this could radically accelerate progress towards not just a vaccine, but trials of multiple different kinds of vaccines because you'd basically see whether the vaccine worked. So you could get there.

Go ahead. Let me unpack that. So now we're doing human trials on the vaccine. These people are opting into it and they're getting paid some large amount of money to do it. But this flies against everything. that we think about in terms of individualism and classism and who would have to take this money to do it. But these people would be heroes for doing it.

And if you ask people to volunteer for this, especially if they were young people or on the younger side who were lower risk, this could be like incredible service. That would be the equivalent. It would probably be less dangerous than going into a war zone. That's exactly right. I mean, basically the issue is

America is now paying the risk-averse premium, right? You've heard the term the risk premium? Yep. After 50 years, you know, Peter Thiel was the person, really, who pointed this out earlier and more loudly than anybody else. America, for 50 years, has become unable to innovate in the physical world because it's been unwilling to take physical risk, which means people can die in the physical world.

You know, a building can collapse, a drug might not work, a vaccine might not work. But the issue is, is that if you, don't take any physical risk for 50 years, you become unable to quickly innovate in the physical world, and then you start to try to solve a virus crisis with a trillion in stimulus, right? Which is not the right thing, you know, and the biology of it, the virus is going to kill you otherwise. So the virus is sort of waking people up to the fact that if you don't take calculated

physical risk along the way, an uncalculated physical risk will be imposed on you, and then you're in trouble. I'm trying to do a thought experiment here just on a morality basis, and I'm no Sam Harris, but I'm friends with Sam. If you were to put out there that how many people would you need to do these kind of trials to have a chance at finding something quicker? 10,000, 100,000, 1,000? So I don't know the exact number. I think it'll depend upon like. Let's call 1,000.

Let's probably in that range. That's right. So I'm going to pick a number, 5,000. 5,000 people, and you give them a million dollars each, pretty sure. that's $5 billion. We, there are 5,000 people right now who would say, infect me, give me the million dollars tax free. I would like to take that opportunity.

And there are other people who are going to war as soldiers for 60,000 or 50,000 a year for 20 years and probably have a greater chance or being in a deep sea, you know, like people who are cleaning windows or whatever. So you're basically compressing the danger into one month and then giving them this big reward. It's dystopian and it's hard to talk about. But there's 5,000 people who would want to do that 100%. So I don't think this is dystopian at all. In fact, I think it's actually putting us back on a positive course as a society.

The dystopian course would be one where we don't take any physical risk at all and then we're wiped out by something where you had to take physical risk in order to beat it. And what I mean by that is, the only reason we have airplanes is there were test pilots. You know, they're folks willing to risk their lives. The only reason that we have anything in space is because folks risk their lives. And in some cases, like on the Challenger, they died. The only reason we have a U.S. military, again, people are willing to risk their lives. And today, people are allowed to risk their lives for bungee jumping or skydiving.

You know, they're allowed to do those things. So they're allowed to do it for casual reasons. but somehow they're not allowed to do it for society or to make money or for both. Or to help to help save the planet and because economics is there. But if you think about it, a lot of people are doing very dangerous things like playing football for millions of dollars a year. And they're assured of getting brain damage. It's the perfect example. That's right.

That's right. So we're in this paradoxical spot where the less societally valuable, the risk that is being taken, the more permissible it is. Right. wing suits. These people jump or or actually Alex Arnold, Harnold, whatever his name is, who climbs, you know,

climbs mountains without ropes. He free climbs, right? The base jumping type stuff also. Yeah, it's just like people are doing this for the rush, they're getting paid in adrenaline for something that one out of every 500 people who does dies. That's right. And other people have to clean up the mess, you know, typically, right? Yeah. And so this is something very different where,

So let's call this the vaccine, the challenge trials, I think are a really, really important thing that we should support. Because also, here's the thing, even for the person who's doing it, they could just have a personal risk-adjusted calculus that they'd rather be of 1,000 people or 100,000 or 10,000. Actually, it's in the range of 2,000 to 8,000. I looked at the size of these. Let's say it's like 50,000 people, okay? Those folks are exposed to this. And yes, you know, the vaccine may not work. yes, they have a percentage chance of getting it,

but they would be treated in a hospital setting, which was optimized and set up for this. And they might actually have a better outcome than the alternative scenario of where the virus spreads through the population crashes every hospital, and then that person as well would not be able to get medical care, right? I mean, when you think about it that way,

it's almost like we have this invading alien species and we're like, we're going to send some people up to the moon to fight them there before they get to Earth. And it's like, well, you can either wait. here and get killed here and you can die on your knees or you can die on your feet and you can put up a fight. I mean, that's right.

Can you imagine the snowflake reaction to even just hearing this concept? It's going to short circuit people's brains, right? Well, so here's a funny thing is Mark's paper has gotten a good reception right now. It has. And I think that, I think that, you know, Jeff Lewis has mentioned this. I think the virus broke woke. Because broke woke, yeah, for sure. Right?

Like real problems rather than fake problems. are basically taking away clicks and, frankly, relevance from woke. After this, it's hard to get, you know, to head up about a microaggression when there's a very macroaggression in the form of the virus, right? Species ending versus microaggressions really like the exact opposite ends of the spectrum. Yeah, exactly.

And this is not, so, you know, I remember talking to somebody about this. This is not species ending in the sense of if you, you know, like scientific notation, 1E0, 1E1, and so on. like 10 to the zero, 10 to the first, and so on, right? Like 1E6 is a million. You're familiar with that, right? Yep. On that scale where 1E0 is one death and 1E10 is 10 billion deaths and the end of humanity,

yeah, this is not a 10. Right. But it is potentially a 6 to an 8, right, which is like between a million to 100 million deaths, depending on, you know, where we catch it, right? And it is, it is already, you know, looking at the latest, you know, tolls, it's already, I think, 100,000 deaths. Where's the numbers at today? It's 50,000 deaths. Okay.

But let's say it's probably going to get to 100,000 deaths, right? So it's already 1E5. It's between 1E4 and 1E5. So, yeah, it's not a 10. It's not the end of life on Earth. But it could very well be a 6, a 7, or an 8, which is a million to 100 million dead. And the 100 million is a really bad scenario, but that's if this just goes rampant in Africa and South America and other places that don't have great healthcare systems. Because if it's doing what it's doing in the U.S., who the heck knows what it can do.

Let me do another politically incorrect exercise with you. Please, snowflakes, if you're listening, please cancel me so I can retire. I've been asking you guys, I'm going to be 50 in November trying to retire by 50. And the only way I'm going to get there is if you cancel me, because I'm going to keep going to work. but if I opened a chicken farm in upstate New York and I don't know two or three pandemics, just giant outbreaks occurred there. Who's responsible? Right.

Yeah. So, you know, this is basically the question of, you know, China and the wet markets and should they shut them down and so on and so forth. And they shut them down last time. And then they reopened them. So if I had this and I killed a bunch of people, I shut it down. and then I reopened my chicken farm in upstate New York and kill more people. Who's responsible?

Me? And are we allowed to talk about the fact that the Chinese have some responsibility here for these wet markets? Or no? Is that politically incorrect? So, is that unfair? No, I mean, like, you know, it's certainly like a, well, okay, here's how I saw a report recently that said that the wet markets had been allowed to reopen. And but the thing is that I've seen so much incorrect reporting in other areas that I always take

this stuff with a grain of salt. Yeah. And I want to see a second and a third and a fourth confirmation. Actually, like a crypto concept, by the way, you know, a transaction doesn't go through until you've seen multiple confirmations. Well, I'm not even talking about now reopening. I'm talking about after SARS and all these other things have occurred. Oh, oh, oh.

And there's been these like huge, like, there's been this huge outcry because I did a search prior to 2019, people talking about wet marks and I went down the rabbit hole. And I found all these people saying after SARS and the bird flu and all this stuff, hey, you got to shut these things down. This is way too dangerous to be killing pangolas. Is that the name of the animal? Panglins. Panglins, which I didn't even know this animal existed before this.

Bats and all these other things. And they want to cut them up and butcher them live, which I understand. Listen, I've eaten sushi live. I've had all these, like, fresh things. I understand the, like, desire to have fresh cuisine. But it's too dangerous. It's too dangerous for these things to exist in the world. They don't just exist in China, by the way.

They're in Africa and other places. Yeah, the zoonotic stuff. This is the source of these outbreaks, correct? Well, I mean, that is certainly the hypothesis now. You'd have to do so-called molecular phylogenetics to really get at the root of it. Molecative phylogenics will basically reconstruct like an evolutionary tree that shows which viruses are related to which other ones. And there might be some archival work. Maybe it wasn't bats, for example, it was pangolins, that kind of stuff people can try and figure out.

But yeah, I think certainly as a precautionary measure, those markets should be closed. And that's not just a public health measure. It's like a global health measure. Yeah. It's just crazy that that is not even a topic right now. Well, but I will give one asterisk on it, which is I think, yes, there's a lot of stuff, a lot of people to blame on this. And I think, you know, China certainly, you know, shares some significant responsibility for this whole thing. However, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, the neighbors shouldn't have been playing with matches, but we need to put out the fire on our own house before going and yelling at the neighbor, right?

For sure, yeah. Yeah. From a focus standpoint, the other issue is from a pragmatic standpoint, starting to fight with China when all the manufacturing is over there. And maybe this is already. Not the right time. It's not the right time to do that. And the problem is they're already doing things where they're blocking PPE exports to the U.S. And, you know, it's just, look, I think that China's a huge country.

It's 1.4 billion people. And while I certainly don't agree with, you know, a lot of the things they do, I also want to recognize that they really did innovate a lot in terms of trying to stop this virus. and a lot of their medical workers were very brave and risked their lives to go and fight it. So it's a big country that's got internal diversity just like the U.S. You know, not everybody here agrees with every policy of the government and so on. So I want to also be careful to paint with a broad brush. There's a bunch of Chinese who are just as angry at their countrymen and country women for having these wet markets as, you know, people in the U.S. are mad at other people for not social distancing, for example. People also, I think, don't know the history of it, but HIV and AIDS,

the leading vices is that people eating chimp meat, which is called bush meat, which some people do, is that that's how it actually jumped into the human species. Yeah, I've heard that hypothesis. I don't actually know the latest on it. Yeah. I just know that was the, they knew it came from chimps and monkeys and chimps eating monkeys and then humans eating chimps. But the whole thing is, and what do you think about this?

mass testing and why we're not there yet. I mean, if you were talking about this in January, how come we're not, we don't have mass testing already online? And then if we could all just get tested every week and wear masks, which seems like we're, I don't know, 30 days away from being able to do, if we could all get tested within 30 days of mess, aren't we all going to just go back to work? I don't think so.

And the reason is that, well, okay, masks could help these vaccines. Because, you know, just to recurs back up, you ask what's the bull case, the base case, the bear case, right? So the bull case is we get on interventions like A, masks, right? Yeah. Everybody wearing masks when they go out. B, stay at home unless you have to go out, right? C, maybe these challenge trials, we could accelerate things. D, you know, scaling up tests.

The problem is that scaling up tests, we need something paradigmatically different because it is it is something where to scale up tests, you're behind the exponential now. So it's not trivial to run these tests at a large scale. So when you're talking, there's a big difference, as you know, between 100,000 tests a week, a million tests a week, 10 million tests a week. The virus doesn't care. It uses, it lives off the land, right? It just uses your own body to just wreck your own body.

But we don't have, I mean, to scale that much testing capacity that quickly is actually not. trivial. So a paradigmatically different approach would be something like diagnostic grade wearables where you just wear oar rings or things like that at all times. And that is just taking a lot of telemetry and uploading it. And there's already a lot of, you know, individual evidence that those kinds of things can can predict the onset of this disease, both individuals who've had these. Yeah, exactly. It's the temperature, but it's also, you know, heart rate because this thing seems to attack the heart, right? There's a bunch of subtle signals, right? But in terms of things that could be rolled out, so just to recap, A, maybe,

you know, people get masks out there, hopefully, B, maybe these challenge trials get a vaccine out faster. C, maybe there's a miracle drug. D, you know, we have some DASX Machina. For example, you have more natural cross-immunity to the coronavirus and we thought because there's other coronaviruses, so maybe your antibodies bind to this one. I think it's shot in the dark, but Nobel laureate Michael Levitt has proposed that. Or some factor we don't understand that makes it drop off. Maybe it does, like, you know, it doesn't do as well in the summer, and that's enough to bring it down. That's the bold case that there's some intervention that brings a virus down. Okay. What's the base case? I think the base case is, even if the virus went to,

way tomorrow, the economic devastation of the lockdown and frankly the crash of the health care system and the supply chain disruptions from overseas and the closing of borders, you know, pausing the economy like this for many companies, it's like you tell somebody to hold their breath for 20 minutes. And you come back, you're like, oh, here's all the oxygen you need. It doesn't work like that. You might get all the oxygen in the world at the end of that. It doesn't matter. It's too late, right? Too late. And so, like, essentially, we have faced, we're seeing total demand destruction in much of the, what I call the want areas of the economy, right?

So the want areas are travel, entertainment, physical entertainment, at least, concerts, events, restaurants even. Everything that's a want, basically, you know, it often involves being around other groups of strangers. Movies. And movies, right, exactly. So those are just going to zero, physical movies, physical movie theaters. And then the needs have dramatically risen, of which biomedicine is huge, number one, and then food. And, you know, just like basic, we're down the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right?

You know, people are just talking survival in many ways. And so that itself is an enormous re, billions of people have had their utility functions changed. permanently. And so even if everything, quote, went back to work, people will be afraid to go to movie theaters or get on airplanes. It's just not going to like snap back like that. I think it could be quick for people to have short memories. We had this thesis about people flying after 9-11 and they came back quick.

So it really depends on if we have that second wave, right? And the chances of that are 100%. I mean, like looking at all past. you know, who can ever say 100%, but looking at past pandemics, I posted some of the graphs on this, but they do seem to come in waves. H1N1 came in waves, Spanish flu came in waves. It's not just a straight exponential. It peaks, it drops.

People, quote, get back to work, and then it comes back like a predator. Really, only a vaccine can really stop it. So I think the base case is, frankly, a generational rebuild. And the reason I say a generational rebuild is, you know, this, even though this is not an economic event alone, it's really a biological and physical event. Certainly it has economic ramifications. And if you look at the graph of, you know, the Great Recession, that took 10 years to come back, right? And there is a, there's a really good tweet, which you might, you know, put up on screen. I'm going to find it by this guy who points out.

out, this was two weeks ago, by the way, March 18th said, so as best as I can tell this morning, we now have a pandemic crisis, a supply chain crisis, a demand crisis, a labor market crisis, an equity market crisis, an oil crisis, a brewing bond market crisis, a developing currency crisis, a potential housing market crisis. Yeah, anything I left off the table there? Yeah. I see you crisis. Yeah, everything.

Yeah, well, you know, we, we, there's probably more. That's right. I see use drugs. Exactly. like we haven't seen are things like, you know, so the most scary things to me are, you know, the headlines like, and you come from a family of police. So I'd actually like to hear, you know, reverse the interview a little bit and hear your take on this. Yeah, no, the headline, I'm the striking Amazon workers and the police having 6% not show up for work are the ones that make me nervous. If that's the headline, that's about to pop up.

That's right. That's exactly right. And not just that, but also the aircraft carriers getting shut up. down, right? So, I mean, the ramifications of that are tremendous because basically the virus is sinking our battleships, or at least it's putting them on shore, you know? And that's true, not just for one aircraft carrier, but it's the entire U.S. Navy. It's every nuclear submarine. Yeah. Like, so if it's sickening police and if it's putting military personnel on shore and having them sitting in hotel rooms, shields are down in a way that they've never been before in

society. Almost makes you feel like this was a biological weapon designed to benefit somebody. Not that it's possible because you, I mean, let's explore the absurd for a moment. Would there be any circumstance where this could potentially have been created by humans? I mean, it's obviously potentially possible, but did your, has your mind ever gone there for a when you heard China created this in a biolab. Is that even possible to create something like this in a biolab? Okay.

So I'm going to just send you a link just to post. Okay. This is from 2015. So here we go. The scientist lab-made coronavirus triggers debate. The creation of chimeric, am I pronounced not correct? Soros-like virus has scientific. Chimeric.

So this, by the way, let me just give context on this. You're asking a question of, is it possible? I'm only going to answer that question of, is it possible from a scientific standpoint. I'm not speculating. I personally do not believe it was a bio weapon or anything like that. You ask, is it possible to create a more deadly virus in a lab? As a scientist, that it is possible to do that. Okay. So this in 2015, basically, and you can see there update at the top, okay? But, you know, essentially it is possible that a more deadly virus could be created in a lab. And this is actually a that is, you know, from 2015 being discussed, controversial study, so-called gain of function mutation, that, you know, makes, made a virus more... Not only is it possible, it's been done. It's been done.

And you have people in the article saying things like, you know, a virus should have a Pasteur Institute. If a new virus escape, no one could predict trajectory. These, or NIH director of Francis Collins, these studies entail biosafety and biosecurity risk, which needs to be understood better. So those are, you know, like credible people who were saying gain of function research is dangerous. Now, the reason that people are doing gain of function research is they want to understand how these things could become pathogenic, how they could mutate. There's a genuine scientific rationale there, right, which is, you know, you could say, oh, hey, this thing isn't bad right now, but one base pair alteration, it could get really bad.

So we need to design our vaccine for that. For example, that's one reason. Okay. So it's not, I want to be clear that it's not necessarily malicious work. It's just like, you know, it's sort of like playing with nuclear isotopes or radioisotopes, right? Yeah. Don't do it. Well, or just be really, really careful, you know.

And it's something where there are downsides. The second link that I sent is from the bullet. of the atomic scientists. And again, you ask just like, is it possible? I'm not talking about whether it's probable. So this is a credible organization, Bolton of the Atomic Scientists. You know, experts know the, they're basically folks who have been focusing on, you know, like tail risk type stuff, right?

Expert knows that new coronavirus is not a bioweapon. They disagree on whether it could have leaked from a research lab, right? And that summarizes the article. Okay. Now, you know, my personal belief is I think that the, it is probably a zoonotic thing. Right. They say here the experts agree that it isn't the product of human engineering and the ant-eating pangolins, as we discussed previously, are potentially the source. Yeah, but basically, like the thing is, the pangolin theory hasn't been, I mean, you know, you have to do like a bunch of archaeology, essentially.

when everything is calmed down to figure it out. And China may not want you to ever do that archaeology, you know. So, so, so, you know, who, like, what I would say is, you ask me whether it was possible for this to be lab made. I showed you an article from 2015 that shows that it is possible to add gain a function to a coronavirus and another thing from the bulletin of the atomic scientist. But I want to be absolutely clear. I'm not saying it's a bioweapon. I'm not saying that China did it or anything. I don't think we should start a fight with China.

I think that that could be the absolute worst thing that the world needs at this point. And I also think that for such an extraordinary claim, you need incredible evidence, which we do not have. And so even speculating about it or something is not responsible. So that's why I just want to be clear about that. You asked me a possible question. I gave you a possible answer, but I don't think it's probable. All right. Well, this is a terrifying moment in time, but it feels to me like we will get through this and we'll be stronger before. As we wrap up here, what is the lesson that humanity needs to learn coming out of this so that when the next one comes and instead of having a bunch of people who are asymptomatic and a small number of people who, you know, die, what if it's the other.

opposite, you know, and a lot of people are symptomatic and a lot of people die because there have been these kind of viruses, from what I understand, that could have a 30% death rate. What do we learn here? Well, so what should we learn here? Ideally. What should we learn? Yeah. So one thing is the 2020s are going to be the decade of biology.

So essentially, you know, biotech has been, you know, operating for some time. But now I think biotech and tech merge. because everybody now, I mean, just like after the financial crisis, you had a greater interest in finance because it affected you. I can't count the number of engineers, entrepreneurs, et cetera, who've asked me for intro to bioinformatics, intro to, you know, like how to work with viral sequences, that type of stuff. And I think that, you know, this has already been there with things like Health Kit and Fitbit and whatnot with wearables.

That's like one angle of like health. Also, EHRs, EMRs. there have been areas of tech and biotech that have intersected. But I think they become, you know, like it becomes a major thing. And every tech VC gets into this, number one. Number two is, I think that the, you know, when we talk about the budgets moving over from want to need, the budgets for bio are going to be essentially unlimited this decade at the individual level, the corporate level, the government level, the defense budget level.

And, you know, because this is not the last pandemic. One of the issues people have been talking about COVID-19 potentially becoming endemic, which is to say it recurs periodically in mutant form. So maybe you have COVID, yeah, so COVID-22 and COVID-26 and so on. So what we need to do is like absolutely level up our bio, you know, our biomedical science, such that we're pulling technologies from 2030 or 2050 or 2100 into the present, like the Manhattan Project, so that we can, you know, For example, do you know what Iron Dome is? No. The missile defense?

Okay. Oh, I do know. Yeah, yeah. Missile defense, yes, of course. Yeah, yeah. So, Israel, it built a missile defense system that moves at the speed of the missile. So, you know, the missile comes up and you don't have time for like a human to target it. You have to have an autonomous system that tracks the missile and as people say, hits a bullet with a bullet, you know, knocks a thing out of the sky, right?

And does so in a safe way that doesn't land on, you know, people and what have you. So it has to move at the speed of the missile. And what we are going to need is, you know, a pandemic defense system that moves at the speed of the virus. I actually talked about this in the context of what China would do. You know, I think this is going to be China's third great wall. Great wall, great firewall, great bio wall of China, where they're just scanning the population constantly. They're looking for these viral fires breaking out, somebody who has a high temperature because they've got temperature checks everywhere, you know. And then they quarantine that person.

they probably quarantine maybe the people around them, but they stop it from becoming epidemic and they isolate them from their family, and they just keep doing this. It's similar to Tomas Puyo's post, The Hammer and the Dance. They managed to knock the virus down such that it wasn't crashing the healthcare system, but they have to scan for it constantly until they can get a technology that they can vaccinate people and just stop it entirely. You know, can't see that being abused in any way, like some political rivals. Like, oh, yeah, no, no, we took this person because they were sick.

We saw their biometrics and we arrested them and put them in jail because they went out with a temperature of 104. That's exactly. So the problem with this is, you know, and I tweeted about this very early on because, you know, frankly, one of the reasons I was also thinking about this beyond the incredible importance for public health is the philosophical challenge it poses to, you know, like a pro-freedom worldview, you know. because, you know, I tweet about this on February 3rd. I think it holds up fairly well. But, you know, if the coronavirus goes pandemic, and it seems it may, the extreme edge case becomes a new normal. It's every debate we've had on surveillance and deplatforming and centralization all accelerated,

right? It's emergency powers for the state even more than terrorism or crime. And the way I think about it is, you know, sometimes, so there's A and there's B and then there's C. A would be, okay, quarantine everybody, just let the state. unleash, go after it. B is, hey, there's a lot of side effects to the unlimited government. You sure you want to give these people that much power because they're going to abuse it very quickly over time, you know, even if it does solve the problem. And then C is, well, you know,

we may have no option in both sense of the term. Both you as an individual are powerless to stop it and society has no option other than this kind of quarantine, you know, surveillance system. But you, you know, you can't stop it from happening. What you can do is build a decentralized alternative to check their power. And I think what that's going to mean is the virus is accelerating both centralization and decentralization. Centralization in the sense of states are powering up where they can essentially imprison innocent people, right? That's what quarantine is of the form that, you know, Wuhan was. It's quarantine the entire city, you know, 11 million people are exposed, considered to expose, right?

It's on scale is like the Soviet Union where you had a internal passport system to get between places. That's coming. You're going to need proof of health to get into every building, to get into every company, to get into every country. In a sense, it's just an extension of vaccination certificates where you need that already to get into the U.S. But it's like real-time vaccination certificates. You need to present real-time proof of health. We're all going to be wearing like those wristbands. you get at Disneyland with the RFID in them?

It's going to be like, yeah, you want to get on the bus? You want to get on the subway? Sure. We're going to take your temperature and we need to see your biometrics. We're going to need to see your past. You're going to have to have been tested. That's right. Now, one fortunate thing is that with crypto and with, you know, not just blockchain stuff,

but also secure multi-party computation, private joint and compute, there are technologies that will allow people to present proof of health without revealing other things about themselves. Yeah, absolutely. And that would be, yeah, perfect. It would be amazing if the actual use case behind money store and transfer for crypto and smart contracts and blockchain and all of this wound up being proof of not sick. Proof of health. Exactly. Proof of health. And so that's, you know, it's in once a vaccine is out, it's your vaccination. It's if you don't know a vaccine, it's a serology test where it shows that you're already immune to at least this particular variant. And then you're, you know, it's in once, once a vaccine is out, it's your vaccination. It's, if you know, it's a vaccine is a serology test where it shows that you're already immune to at least this particular variant. And then. And then you. And then you, you can go all the way back to did you have a fever check, you know, an hour ago. That's a lower quality test, but it's something. So I think proof of health becomes a big thing. And if you can do private or privacy preserving proof of health, we may be able to preserve some of the norms of

Western civilization rather than being like under this constant surveillance thing. And I do think that, you know, I said centralization gets powered up at this, but I think decentralization also gets powered up in the sense that people have seen the FDA fail. They've seen the CDC fail. They have seen, you know, the press and the state at every level, city, state, federal level, fail. They've seen hospitals as valorous as doctors and nurses are, many of them who are treating this on the front lines. You know, many of them also, you mean, the hospitals were not prepared or they're trying to prevent doctors from going out and speaking about PPE, right? I think that's going to be the big thing that comes out of this is we start realizing we just

optimized for optimization and speed and not for resiliency, not to be anti-fragile, not to be redundant. And, you know, we just got too obsessed with efficiency and taking out friction and not enough with, yeah, you know, maybe we should put a spare tire in the car. Like, you know how cars used to always have a spare tire? And now it's like, you don't need a spare tire. It's like, we need some fucking spare tires right about now, you know? That's right. We're basically a leverage society, right? Where more upside came at the expense of more downside. Because, yeah, like take that spare tire example.

Yeah, you have less weight. And in the base case, you're spending less money on gas. But in the downside case, you're in a much worse situation. And you multiply that across society in many, many different ways. I think that's where we are. And then I think that's where we're going to have to fix. Yeah. I mean, just beds per citizen is we're going to have to rethink that.

You know, do we make drugs in this country anymore? Do we have manufacturing in this country anymore? We're really stress testing, you know, can, America survive without China? Well, yeah. So I think what's going to happen on this, the one thing that America does have, I mean, not the one thing, one of the things that America does have going for it is shale oil, right? And it's got huge, you know, like fields in the middle of the country. So it can become energy and food self-sufficient, which is good. It has the natural resources to do that. It's not an island. However, the rethink, so you mentioned like beds per citizen, I think we have to rethink a lot of

so that's not beds at a hospital, but it's your bed at your home. Yeah. And we're pushing medicine to the individual. You're putting all this diagnostic stuff into the phone. By the way, this is actually something where the FDA helped cause this pandemic in many different ways. One way is the most obvious way that people know about where CDRH, the FDA's Devices Division, essentially blocked emergency use authorizations for tests during the crucial month

of February such that we were flying blind. But there's other ways as well. Even more recently, they're blocking at-home tests. So they're forcing people to essentially go to COVID-19 meetups, meaning hospitals. Yeah. And stand in a line. You want to stand in a COVID-19 testing lines. Yeah, no.

We're going to test if you have it. If you didn't have it now, you have it after coming to the waiting line and getting online. That's exactly right. And it's basically a risk calculus that is simply divorced from reality because, you know, okay, yes, it's possible that you mess up sample collection at home. But if that happens, there's actually ways to detect it. For example, you have positive mega controls at the lab, and you can detect if somebody didn't collect the sample.

There isn't human DNA on it. So it's like a unit test prior to an integration test. You have pre-flight checks before you just release a test to them and say you don't have it. So number one, they blocked the EUAs. Number two, they blocked the at-home tests. Number three, this is more subtle. But six, seven years ago, Apple was trying to do an Apple watch that was actually bristling with more sensors.

Yeah. And do you know why they didn't do it? Let me guess. The FDA. Exactly. And this was reported at the time in the Wall Street Journal. The FDA forced them to actually take out sensors and nurf the Apple watch because essentially what have happened is Apple becoming an FDA regulated business

means that they're under so-called design control and all this bureaucracy that people in tech would just lose their minds at. design control basically means you have to round-trip everything through Silver Spring, Maryland, which is where the FDA is, to make significant modifications to your device. Now, of course, the FDA has never shipped anything of the complexity of an Apple Watch, yet they're being put in a supervisory role over something they don't understand. And, you know, same with medical apps, they blocked a bunch of medical apps and whatnot. So they also fought personal genomics.

That's the reason that we don't have a billion personal genomes now, is the entire industry was attacked, you know, 23 and me was a tank. They couldn't give any recommendations. They kind of neutered the whole service. They neared the whole service. So these are just some of the things that are in diagnostics. And so had, you know, in the alternate universe where we had diagnostic grade wearables, where we had personal genomes, where we had fast tests, where we had at-home tests,

this would be a much less serious thing because we have knowledge about it. You wouldn't have to have everybody at home because you would know where the green zones and the red zones were. You know the green and red people, at least to a greater degree of confidence, right? I'm not saying it's the only factor, but it's a major, major factor. For sure. I mean, they have that thermometer, that test and then uploads it to the cloud, and they're starting to get an idea of where the things are breaking out already.

Those should just be standard issue. We should make, as part of the surplus, give every person a connected thermometer for free and just take your damn temperature. And so the FDA helped cause this, and they're continuing to, by the way. They're under finally pressure to approve drugs and to ship devices. Like they got the Abbott Labs kind of thing out there. But the Abbott Labs thing is good. It's just not at the scale that is necessary.

At home testing is going to be part of it. Anyway, I think we're going to need to decentralize the FDA as well where you go to – there's a lot of pathways, by the way, outside the FDA that people don't know about, like Clea, like compounding pharmacies, like right to try, like other countries. Like MDs can prescribe off-label. So there's paths around them in different ways. I think we're going to need to systematize that and allow governors at the state level to set up alternate regulatory pathways that take all these other things and kind of put them under one umbrella

expanded right to try. And the idea is you still have a regulator, but it's the local state regulator. It's let's say California state in collaboration with Stanford signs off on something. Yeah, we could be much more aggressive because we know what we're doing and we want to take that risk for the reward. Back to the risk reward, if you want to go to the moon, like somebody's got to put themselves on a tip of a giant bucket of kerosene and see what happens. Exactly. And so I think what we get are, let's say, 10 different parallel regulatory regimes. It's, let's say, you know, the West Coast or California has Stanford.

Yeah, northeast, California. Northeast has Harvard, you know, Minnesota area has the Mayo Clinic. Perfect. You know, right? Decentralized. And you get a couple of different experiments going. You see which one produces the best results. Exactly.

And now once you've got that, once you have even a relatively small amount of quote, competition, some of those regions will stake their way out as being the most entrepreneur friendly and with the, you know, like most risk tolerant and others will take a more conservative approach. And so now you can actually have some degree of intelligence in the system where there's, frankly, a control, right? People talk about, you know, RCTs, randomized control trials for everything other than regulation itself. Anyway, we got a wrap. We did two hours. I knew we would. This is incredible.

Thanks for doing. I'm going to have you back on the pod in a couple of weeks, I think, because we're going to need an update in 30 days from you. Everybody follow El Lajie. He's B-A-L-A-J-I-S. Thanks for coming on the pot again. And be safe, my friend. You too, sir.

Okay. Talk to you soon. Have a great night. And thank you to all the frontline workers. And I mean everybody on the front line, whether you're a janitor, cleaning up at a hospital, a nurse, an ambulance driver,

Instacart, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Uber drivers, bus drivers, anybody who's keeping those essential services going, we are in awe of you and the sacrifice and the risk you're taking. You're no different than those soldiers on the front lines as far as I'm concerned and as far as we're concerned. And we're in awe of you. And if you are listening to my voice and you are a part of a privileged class that can listen to a podcast like this thing in startups, you can give a 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 or $100 tip, go ahead and start tipping those workers. If they're not going to get tips. from Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

Please, Jeff, if you hear my voice, can you put tipping in Amazon Prime? Wouldn't that be great, Belagie, if I could just set a tip for Amazon Prime deliverers of giving them $10 or $20 every time they bring me a box? These folks should get hazard pay, basically. Hazard pay. Double pay. It's a no-brainer. Yep. Double their pay. We're also going to strike,

and then we got chaos. Okay. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.