This Week in Startups - Love.com, Lessons from Bain Crypto launch + Redfin Founder & CEO Glenn Kelman | E1405
Episode Date: March 10, 2022Jason and Molly discuss Ryan Breslow's new startup Love.com (2:03), Bain Capital Crypto’s new $550M fund announcement that backfired on Twitter (14:49). Then, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman join to d...iscuss the current real estate market and how policies are are promoting a nation of renters (54:28). Plus, Glenn turns the tables on Jason and Molly to ask them a few questions. Show Notes: 00:00 Jason and Molly intro the show: Ryan Breslow news, Bain Capital Crypto’s unaware tweet, diversity in the workplace, Interview w/ Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman 02:03 Ryan Breslow’s new startup: Love.com 10:49 Fiverr - Sign up for https://Fiverr.com/Business free for the first year and save 10% on your purchase with promo code JASON 12:22 Psychedelic startups 14:49 Bain Capital Crypto posts unaware tweet on International Women’s Day 23:21 Notion - Go to https://Notion.so and use promo code TWIST to get $250 off its annual team plan 24:53 Diversity in the workplace and how to make forward progress 36:05 Marlow - Get 15% off your individual or team memberships at https://getmarlow.com/twist. 37:31 Taking a chance on unproven talent and open minded to blindspots 54:28 Catch up w/ Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin 01:07:40 Housing price increases are sustainable 01:32:00 Supply and demand in housing 01:49:20 Shift from urban living to the suburbs 02:02:00 Jason, Molly, and Glenn on flying 02:06:37 Goodbyes from the TWIST team Check out Redfin: https://www.redfin.com FOLLOW Glenn: https://twitter.com/glennkelman FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hey, everybody, hey, everybody.
We have an amazing show for you today on his third appearance on this week in startups,
the CEO of Redfin.
He's incredibly honest, candid.
You loved him in the first two appearances.
So we're having him back in rotation, Molly.
Twice a year, he's going to be on the program.
Glenn Kelman is with us.
Heck, yeah, you're going to love his interviewing skills.
He is a master at turning the table and asking his own questions.
He got us.
Before that, though, our friend Ryan Breslo, erstwhile of Bolt,
has given us even more content to discuss.
He's tackling the opioid crisis in a deeply unexpected way.
So after that, we'll talk about Bain Capital Crypto, a new fund,
basically creating a bit of a controversy on the Twitter
by posting their seven all-male team members on International Women's Day.
That one was an ouch.
And then we're going to talk about Cheryl Sandberg and her comments that
no women leaders would ever start a war the way that Putin has.
It is, it is, look, you're going to love it.
It's a fascinating, nuanced, deep conversation about gender dynamics in the tech world and elsewhere.
And frankly, I'm proud of us.
It's going to be a great show.
It's going to be a great show.
So stick with us.
This Week in Startups is brought to you by Fiverr.
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Go to Fiverr.com and use code Jason for 10% off.
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All right.
Our friend of the pod or old friend of the pod.
From afar, we're stalking him a little bit.
He's blocking me now, but he's the fountain of podcasting news stories.
Ryan Breslow is the Bolt founder and executive, now the executive chairman.
He left the CEO slot.
You know him because he did this whole brouhaha ha ha on his Twitter where he called
YC and everybody the mafia and Stripe the Mafia.
That created a whole brouhaha.
Then he left as CEO.
Then he started a couple of other tweet storms and was dunking on people.
Well, according to the information, Ryan founded a company with the co-founder of MindMed,
a publicly traded developer of psychedelic-based medicine.
And then another co-founder of, if you remember, the vending machine startup formerly known as Bodega.
They got in a little bit of trouble for...
I don't know how I felt about that one. I thought it was more of a tribute, but okay. I didn't know that, yeah, you couldn't start a thing called bodega, but maybe. Anyway, that shut down. That was a really good idea, though. I had seen some of the bodega units, which were pretty cool. And so anyway, they have collaborated on a new startup. They got the domain name Love.com.
Which I would not feel safe putting into a browser, but okay.
Okay.
Yeah, it could go either way.
I love love, but that does feel like one of those things where you don't know what's going
to pop up on the other side.
You probably don't want to do that at Starbucks.
Yeah.
It's very impressive that they managed to get Love.com.
It's a domain the founders purchased from Yahoo.
I wonder how big a hit that took in their out.
Five million.
What?
That's my guess.
Well, I bought Games.com when I was at AOL.
Yeah.
Well, I shouldn't say I bought it.
They were going to buy it.
They asked me since I was a domain expert.
and I had some expertise in the space.
It was my specialty.
That's your jam.
And they said like, hey, should you get this or not?
And I was like, what's the ask?
And they're like, oh, it's tens of millions.
And I was like, I think 10 million, if we amortized it over 20 years, 500K a year, the SEO that you would have spent and the customer acquisition cost, it'll net out.
And then we'll own it for all time.
And so if we think about it that way, you know, we have all this cash in the bank that we're making interest on.
And I think this will increase in value.
and if we really want to make a splash in games,
like if you say we own games.com and Apple
and either the worst case scenario is Apple or Google
or Microsoft will buy games.com from us
for four times what we paid for it.
So if we have this in,
let's just grab it for $10 million and figure it out later.
And we did.
So anyway, I'm not going to take total credit for it.
They just asked me for like a reality check on
and I think we got it for $10 million.
So love to me,
four letter in the dictionary,
at least $5 million is the value of that domain.
At least, yeah.
So what is the company going to do?
And then the company, and this just gets more and more interesting with respect to Ryan himself and his behavior, but also interesting sounding company.
The company will develop nutraceutical-based drugs and focus on solutions to the opioid crisis.
Love Health said it might issue crypto tokens to participants.
Of course, by the way, like insert crypto token here, whether it makes sense or not, to participants in its clinical trials and is scheduled to launch in late 22.
If I know anything about being addicted to opioids,
is that the thing I think about during recovery is,
what does my crypto token collection look like?
If only we had brought NFTs to the tenderloin and to Skid Row in L.A.,
we could have solved the opioid crisis long ago.
Also, how did my wallet?
We could have gone to Appalachia,
and we could have Hillbilly Uly Ulogy, solved everything.
If only we had done an initial coin offering in the Appalachians.
I mean...
We missed it.
We missed it.
sitting there so obvious to all of us.
Now, I don't mean to be super critical.
Addicts just needed the right incentives and those incentives were crypto tokens.
Absolutely.
If you've ever met somebody who is suffering from opioid addiction,
you know there's just a clear path.
All of those withdrawals go away when you're super pumped and we're all going to make it.
Okay, boomer.
I mean.
I know, like I feel now we are now we are being horribly insensitive and I'm sorry.
And but it's just like it's those two things.
It's like one of these things is not like the other.
What?
The story mocks itself.
Effectively, it does.
It feels like freaking buzzword bingo.
Brezlo, who is chair of the new company said by text to the information,
that the goal of the new venture is people first, not profits.
Oh my God.
And that the startup would be, quote, effectively the first crypto first approach to pharma.
Close quote.
Yeah, he started blocking me because I retweeted him and I was like,
this guy's like, uh, become startup Jesus.
And then my other quote was like, oh, now he's going like full Naval on Twitter.
And then he blocked me because he started doing posts that were like love first,
you know, and all this stuff.
And, you know, I'm just joking.
But he took it really sensitively.
Yeah.
And he blocked me.
And then he started, he unblocked me.
He started DMing me and was like, hey, bra, I don't want to, I'm not going to read the
But let me read it to you.
But I have it up right here.
Yeah.
But I committed it to memory.
I'm not going to read his DMs.
That would be, yeah, I don't want people to think I'm just like it.
I'm not going to read people's DMs.
But I'll just tell you what I said to him.
Okay.
Because I owe my DMs, right?
I think that's fine.
Don't show your screen.
Don't show my screen, please.
A screen pop up and I pan.
So anyway, he was a little hurt that he felt I was being mean to him.
And I was like, I'm joking.
and you're saying outlandish things.
So I was like, listen, this is what I said to him.
I just think your tweet storms and going rogue have been funny.
I said, you know, if you want to mix it up on Twitter,
you've got to be prepared for some feedback, right?
And he was like offering to unblock me.
And I was like, I don't care if you block me.
I find that even funnier, I told him.
And he was upset.
I mean, he was.
He felt like I was being cruel to him.
And it wasn't being cruel.
To be clear, when we're joking about this stuff now,
he's doing some weird behavior.
So I did another tweet where I was like,
I don't think we should say it's just a joke.
Because on the one hand,
we don't know what it is.
We're having fun.
Like,
we're having fun talking about this.
Yes.
And also,
as one of our noties just pointed out,
like Jay Siddeu is like,
what does this even mean?
And then Francis is like,
oh, it means give me $100 million with no diligence.
So partly,
which,
Wait,
which nobody said that.
Well said Francis Santora.
Way to go,
Francis.
That's the,
so we're talking about,
The day.
Notie of the day.
So we're talking about this for two reasons.
One, it's hilarious.
Two, some people are going to give this man money and we're not quite sure what's going
on with him.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think Ryan is a crypto approach to Parma.
To be clear, I like Ryan.
I thought he was a great guest.
I think he's an interesting cat.
I like interesting fun people in the world.
He doesn't need to block me.
But if you're going to be full contact on Twitter, which I am, this is coming for me.
If you're going to be full contact, if you're going to say things that maybe you regret saying or you said at two in the morning or maybe you had a glass of wine or maybe because you're into psychedelics or microdosing, I don't know.
And I was like, oh, okay.
So my joke was, oh, is he been microdosing this whole time or something?
Like that would explain these tweets.
I didn't see that.
And, you know, like, and I literally on that tweet put the hashtag joking, obviously.
like hashtag joking hashtag obviously
but that was a pretty easy joke
because so many people are migrating
in Silicon Valley
oh yeah and there's and listen
there's like and no judgments on it
I think it's great if it works
I don't have the complete science
but like Tim Ferriss
there are a million incredible ways
that people are thinking of tax
I actually met with a company randomly
just because I happened to know
an advisor that is trying to do
it's like ketamine
but it's a different drug
I heard about this
the treatments have to have
they're popping up clinics
because the treatments have to happen in Mexico.
It's not federally legal here.
But it's super fast.
It literally just interrupts the brain flow.
And people are like cured of opioid addiction in a week.
It's phenomenal.
Like, please solve this problem.
But is this the guy I'm going to give it to and does it need to be incentivized by crypto?
I don't know, man.
Yeah, if you're going to put out the crypto token thing, you kind of, I think, have an obligation to just explain it a little bit more.
You don't think you're going to get dunked on Ibogame.
Thank you, Francis.
Man, Francis knows everything.
Yeah, no, we got some good ad.
adjunct producers there. Incredible.
We all know how hard it is to build something out of nothing.
That's what the startup game is all about.
And it's so easy to quit, right?
I mean, it's just the easier thing to do is just curl up in a ball and just go to bed.
Well, according to a study conducted by five or 25% of people surveyed, revealed they had a business idea in the past 18 months, but almost 60% of them never pursued it.
It's heartbreaking.
And the majority said it was due to a lack of?
You guessed it, of course.
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in startups but i i almost invested in a psychedelic startup atia life sciences a t-a-i that was peter teels
and i met with them and they were doing since i believe if i remember correctly synthetic psilocybin
which is the active ingredient and mushrooms they give you a heroic dose of it from what i'm told
i'm like how much is this and like they were like this much and i'm like holding like a size of
a like small football or a baseball like it was a lot of mushrooms but it's done to a with a
doctor, I believe, and a proctor, and they give you it in an ivy drip and you put
headphones on and like a mask or something. And it's, you know, it's a clinical setting. So
you're in a safe and a safe space.
Totally happening with ketamine now. And it's really powerful. I know people who have ketamine
prescriptions now. It's people who have, and I think you can get them online now, like,
like Kim's and Hers and those kind of like online consultations. And I know people with
depression who have told me, like, and these are people who are friends, or actually not close friends,
but I know a couple of acquaintances who are taking lozenges of ketamine, and it's supposedly
they tell me their depression goes away for weeks at a time. I know somebody's whose wife is
studying ketamine for severe depression at Stanford. She told me that for some people who they thought
would never get to the other side.
Game changer.
That is a game changer.
Mind Bloom is the company.
Is that the one that's doing ketamine lozenges?
These are ones that I've gotten advertised to via Instagram.
You're getting these on Instagram.
Instagram ads happen from popping off lately.
It's a little crazy.
It's surreal to get that like, do you need a set?
That's producer.
I mean, it is like, it's amazing how quickly that all.
Yeah.
I think they must be targeting like your age groups, like people in their 20s who work for.
are maniacal tyrants.
Peanuts.
They're like, do you work for a maniacal tyrant
who gives you huge amounts of anxiety?
Can you guys, can you guys bullet out like nine stories real quick
while we just tap dance real quick?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So anyway, Ryan, you can unblock me.
And if you're going to like be splashy on Twitter,
you've got to like go with the flow.
Come on.
Back it up.
Don't be a baby about it.
Back it up.
Buck up a little bit.
Like if you're going to, yeah.
All right, speaking of, like, backing up.
Speaking of a bad day on Twitter, I think, is how we could introduce this safely.
So apparently there's a new crypto fund.
I know you're all excited about that.
I was literally-
Thank God.
Thank God.
I was like at a dinner party the other night.
It was very funny.
They were like, somebody started talking crypto and they said, listen, if this is the point
at the dinner party when we talk about crypto for an hour, I got to go home and relieve
the nanny.
Like, yeah.
It's like, please, don't ruin the dinner party by talking about crypto.
Remember that period.
Not to like date myself,
but remember that period
in the kind of like
right around 2010-ish,
2011,
when every person
that you met was an iOS app
developer.
Yes.
Everyone.
Tell me about your app.
Everyone.
And no matter what conversation
you were in pretty soon
to start to be about their app.
It wasn't even their app.
They weren't even developers.
It was their idea for an app.
Do you know a developer
who will work for free and be my partner?
Oh my God.
That's totally true.
And a designer.
Yeah.
I have an idea.
Really? Yes. For an app. Let me guess. For an app. No, for a restaurant. No, for a zine. Like, I mean, literally, it's every generation has a wrong thing. And now it's just like, oh, a new crypto fund has occurred. So you, you tee this one up as my, my female partner here as a woman.
Why, thank you. Yeah. Do your lady thing now. Do your lady thing. Like, let's let the lady talk for a minute. Let the lady talk. Tuesday, you may know, was International Women's Day. And on International Women's Day, there were lots of nice tributes.
it's all of the women who work for lunch.
And that's most of the people I think who work, right?
It's like a slim majority.
I don't know, but we were all like giving each other hugs on Twitter.
It was just a lovely.
Let's go, ladies.
It was a lovely day.
And into this wonderful Lady Fest, Wade's Bain Capital Partner, Stefan Cohen, who tweets,
I feel privileged to introduce such a privileged.
Just must have grabbed that word out of nowhere.
I can't imagine where.
does in the ether for some reason.
I feel privileged to introduce such a special team, a thread.
And proceeded to include a photo that looked like if you went to duck, duck go and you typed in stock photo crypto investors, you would get these seven fellows who all look to be almost exactly the same age and are all men.
Same sweater.
Same sweater.
Like, it's a real, like, monochromat, you know, they photographed them all in the same background, like at Sears and went on to sort of gush for like a lot of tweets about how great this team was.
And unfortunately, that happened on International Women's Day.
And unfortunately, it was the roughly, what are we on, infinityth time that someone has managed in a world that includes 50% of,
of the humans who are women to put together a seven-person team that's all men of almost,
not for nothing, of what appears to be almost exactly the same age, if not within five to 10
years of each other.
It was pretty unique.
It was amazing.
It was pretty unique.
It was amazing.
It was, you know, just on the word privileged, I just want to tell white guys right now.
Watch it.
That's kind of like a level of gaslighting.
I said on an.
earlier podcast.
What a fan I am of gaslighting amongst friends in a playful way.
It's just a little light gas lighting.
Oh, you know what?
I actually do call that gas,
L-I-T-E, gas-light.
Ah, yeah, it was like it wasn't like a deep version.
It was just like a playful light version.
Yeah.
Right.
So here's the thing.
Yeah.
Fortunate, honored.
I mean, there's other words besides privilege.
You could even use privilege.
It was just like, it's the combo.
It was just a bad combo.
Generally speaking, I don't use.
the word privileged because it's so loaded right now.
So it's just, if you're going to make a grand pronouncement, you should think about the words.
Now, yep, the issue here, first you should think about the team.
Well, yes.
And then you should think about the words.
And when you can't think about either and you demonstrate that in such a ham-handed way,
yes.
You're going to get dunked on because there's a lot of pent up rage and frustration.
Okay.
I feel like going there.
I feel like going there.
I feel like we have like a very trusted.
relationship you and I. Let me ask you a really like sincere question. What is the number of only
male, only males, or only females in an organization or group that is statistically allowable
before you say there's a gender problem here. Could be women or men. So a podcast, a panel at a
conference, a small team working on a project at a company? At what point, is there a number,
a reasonable number, where you say, well, that statistically, three women, if, like, let's take
non-binary out of this for a minute, and we do recognize that exists in the world. But if we just
look at like a monoculture of three of any one thing, the chances of it being 50-50 is
50-50, and then I guess the chances of it being three of a kind would be whatever that.
is the chance of four a car you can actually like do the statistics on this so it's like it's not impossible
to conceive of a three person podcast tv show whatever that would be all female so is there a number
at which people should be like there should have statistically been because i have a feeling that's what
they said on behalf of your are you asking on behalf of your podcast that's four guys i'm just wondering
no i was asking on behalf of the view which is four women uh no i did prove
conclude that there because I did get criticism twice in 70 episodes for that. But just it is a reasonable
listen like there are a lot of glass houses here. And even before we started taping today, I said,
if we're going to talk about this, then we need to acknowledge our glass house, which is a calendar
issue, which is that on International Women's Day, we ran an all-male show. It was just Jason and
Doug Leo. Right, which I told you, I forgive you for. I was like, Molly, it was my bad. It's fine. Don't
let it happen again. Just a hundred. I'm in charge of the calendar.
calendar because ladies are.
No, you're in charge of lady stuff.
You're in charge of lady stuff.
Listen, if it's Bro Day, we all know that's my responsibility, but this was Lady Day.
You should have looked out for me.
But yes, literally I had this issue because I think this is like really important as intent.
You know, so anyway, to the number.
Sure.
Is there a number, let's answer the number question because I want to just go right to the heart
of this.
It's a learning moment.
It is a learning moment.
Yes.
Let's go to the learning part.
I'm so glad that we can have, by the way, this is why I think you're great, right?
because like you are do you are on the journey.
Yes.
The setting of benchmarks.
Yes.
Can introduce tokenism.
Sure.
Like as we've seen with the Rooney rule, right?
And that big NFL lawsuit.
That's, um, the Rooney rule is the NFL rule that says if you're interviewing for a head coach
position, you have to include a person of color candidate.
And then the NFL just got sued because, uh, oh, I do know about this.
Somebody accidentally texted him.
Hey, congrats on the job.
It wasn't him.
And he was like, you wasted my.
my time. Right. And I never had a shot, so I was tokenized. Because he's like, you only called me for
this interview because of the Rooney rule, even though you had no intention of hiring me, hiring me,
even though, by the way, I'm like a really winning coach. So if you set a metric, you're,
you've got a problem already. The question is, at what point are you that unaware? Right. The question is,
what are you thinking about your team? And we should be at a point where instead of thinking,
my team needs X person to slot in here.
It's who do I need to make my business better?
All the people I have on my team are exactly the same.
They're the same socioeconomic background.
They're maybe the same gender.
They're the same age.
Am I actually building a business that has the ability to address every possible market?
You don't know what you don't know.
Yes, I agree with that.
Look around the room at your crypto fund.
And you're like, huh, we could, you wouldn't be able to pick one of us out of a lineup.
You probably have problems that are bigger than just your diversity.
They're going to start to affect your business.
Right. So that's the big picture.
That's the big picture.
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People are making their own schedules.
It's a different world, folks.
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to hire and it's all dudes or all women, you're looking to hire another one that's just like
them you got a problem.
I actually was going to say the number five.
I was going to say the number five.
And it's not that there is a specific number.
But I think what this also showed was this showed a lack of awareness of how this would be received.
Yep.
Which then makes it absolutely certain of why it's seven dudes.
Exactly.
Because you're so unaware of what the reaction would be to this photo that you went out.
And not only did you say, hey, we're happy to announce.
you did a tweet storm about how privilege you are.
So the amount of enthusiasm you had in relation to your blind spot was way out of whack.
That's a great way to put it.
Like the delta, the delta was just, the alpha was crazy.
The alpha and delta there was like, the average person looked at this photo.
So the average person looked at this photo and was like, ouch.
Yep.
But none of the seven people said, ouch.
I will say in their defense,
crypto is a very weird market that is very male-dominated.
And how do I say this?
Yeah, why is that a defense?
No, it's not, okay, so it's not to their defense.
I will say the problem with crypto.
Yeah, the problem with crypto, and to further explain the dynamic.
To further explain the dynamic, so not in their defense, but to explain the dynamic,
I have heard from women that they feel very unwelcome in the crypto bro environment.
And if you go to a crypto conference, the number of female speakers is going to be dismally low.
And in other words, it was very reminiscent of 15 or 20 years ago in venture.
15 or 20 years ago in venture, if you went to a venture conference, there were no females.
I would challenge you on that date range.
I would say that that could occur.
even now.
Well, you might have to select firms.
It's possible, but not probable.
I mean, we have so many female firms.
Like, this progress is happening, but it's slow.
Yeah, okay.
So we're debating five or 15 years.
Yeah.
You know, what I think is the important go forward learning moment here.
And I think the person, I'm sure these are all good people with a blind spot.
So let me say that.
I don't think canceling these people.
like, okay, fine, you can dunk on them a little bit.
You can make it into a meme.
That's all fair game.
A person stepped in it, it's fair game.
But I think, let's judge them on how diverse and how much they learn from this.
So in one year, I would like somebody at Bain partners to just say, hey, here's where
we're out a year later.
And if you're at 10 people and you have two female partners, maybe an African-American partner
or Latino partner, like whatever is underrepresented, if you, if you're
took a shot and you made some progress, let's judge you on that. Because I really do think this is a
learning moment for people who clearly had a crazy nutcase blind spot. I would hope that it would be.
I would really hope that that's a takeaway. And the post that they put up, although it read
kind of pro forma, you know, like we're committed to diversity and whatever and blah, blah, blah.
And it was like PR comms wrote that. PR comms wrote that. But I would hope that there would be a
corresponding effort to, for example, make your first crypto event more inclusive and to be super
specific about how you can change those dynamics because you know they exist and they're not.
And again, as I have said on this show before, they're not good for an industry in which you
want everyone to adopt it.
And you know what?
People can evolve.
I'll, I evolved in my position on this.
I had two positions that were, I think I was well intentioned, but had a blind spot.
When I used to run events, I'm talking 15 years ago, my rule was it has to be the CEO.
Has to be the founder.
Right.
Like CES.
Like CES.
Now, if you do that in technology, and there are very few females running companies, and there aren't, you know, it's like Kim Polisi and Meg Whitman and Marissa Mayer and.
And it's like, we're talking 2005, like, how many people are we talking about?
Well, then you've de facto, if you, those people are overbooked.
Marissa would say to me, listen, can I do like every other event?
Or, you know, Kim would be like, I'm not the CEO anymore.
I'm like, but you were a CEO.
Can we talk about entrepreneurship?
And they're like, listen, I'm overcommitted.
Like, everybody wants me to be their keynote because they're trying to get diversity.
I can't be at everything.
I got to actually run the company.
I am, in fact, the CEO.
Yeah.
And so I kind of held the line on that where it's like, I don't want to have the vice president.
I don't want to have the president.
I don't want the CEO.
And my other thing was, I want to have the top companies.
Well, I had a discussion with Freida Kapoor, Mitch Kapoor's partner.
They run the Kapoor Capital program, and Mitch is famously the founder of Lotus 1,2,3.
She said, well, let me ask a question.
You know, do you want to see change in the world?
And I'm like, of course.
And she's like, well, I know you do.
So how are you going to be part of that change?
And I was like, it's my responsibility.
And she's like, well, you just said.
you wanted to see change.
So you're in a position
where you pick who's on the stage.
So de facto, you get to change it.
And that was just like, for me,
it just clicked.
Ah.
And I never really considered myself
as the person
who could actually make the change.
So then I just went to the,
you know,
and I'm very lucky to have
one of the original producers
of this podcast, Jackie Deegan,
who you now spend time with
who's a managing director here,
one of your peers.
And we just sat down and said,
let's brainstorm.
How do we solve this?
how do we solve this?
And it was like, well, if there's more diversity in the new startups than the large ones,
well, if a portion of the conference was with the new startups, then we could get diversity there.
And then we started coming up with a playbook to make everything more diverse.
And then it became almost like a challenge of, you know, how well we could do things.
Now listen, some people might criticize me for this.
I've had people criticize me for this.
I've had people who are friends who might criticize me for this.
we're like, you should do it based on meritocracy, meritocracy, meritocracy.
And I'm like, okay.
Happy to have that bite all day long.
Well, it just doesn't, nothing changes.
Nope.
And so.
Meritocracy doesn't exist, but okay.
Well, we can argue that in another episode, but.
We will.
We will.
There will be drinks.
The way I would say it is this no perfect meritocracies, but there is no perfect
meritocracy is a much better way to put it.
You're right.
You're right.
So I'll, and this is, I think, helpful for people is these are challenging things to discuss.
And when they see the two of us discussing this,
or I'm proud of on all in,
they see sometimes, you know,
like somebody who's very right wing
and somebody who's very libertarian
and somebody who's liberal,
discuss these things and kind of make forward progress.
I think we can make forward progress
on these things without canceling each other,
without destroying each other,
without fighting.
We can fight through the issue.
And that's what I'm always trying to do
because I look at the intent.
I know these people didn't have bad intent.
I know they feel terrible.
Yeah.
So let's give them an exit ramp.
Like, you know,
the exit ramp's kind of important.
life. And so I'm just going to give a couple of tips here. Here's some tips. I do think this rule
of you should at least interview a couple of people is a good rule. It's not a good rule if it's
air cover to make a racist decision or perpetuated. Now, this would be a fine rule if the number
of non-white coaches in the NFL was changing over time. But I just did a quick Google and there's two
black head coaches in the NFL. Exactly.
Out of 32?
And one of them is suing.
Okay.
But, I mean, two out of 32, that number seems statistically improbable.
Yeah.
And it could be that there are so many elite coaches and they have such great track records that it's hard to give somebody a shot.
So then you have to think, well, how do you actually give people a shot here?
Because winning is kind of important.
And somebody who's won the Super Bowl before is obviously the best candidate.
when compared to somebody who hasn't won a Super Bowl.
So it's not an easy decision, I think,
if you're saying, I want to win the Super Bowl,
and this person's won four Super Bowls,
and they're available,
I've got to pick that person.
So there has to be some way to do it.
I think assisting coaches and looking at that as a funnel,
what is the percentage of assisting coaches
who are, you know, next up, so to speak?
And if you focused on next up,
and I think that's what I've tried to do in my career in venture.
And I don't talk about this,
because I don't want a cookie.
I'm doing it for my own reasons,
my own selfish reasons.
I have three daughters.
You joined our company.
I think one of the reasons
that this company was attractive to you
was that I think you probably looked at it
and so the percentage of females
in the investment team,
I don't know, you tell me
and was like, well, this is interesting
because people have a perception of J-Cal,
but here's some reality on the ground.
Top two or three lieutenants are women?
Yeah.
Okay.
And not just, and women who
the democratization of this firm in so many ways is exactly, like exactly what you're saying.
And it's not just that most of the lieutenants are women.
It's that they're women who started out as your producer or who started out as your executive assistant and is now like the most badass spreadsheet investment beast I have ever seen.
Oh, you don't have to pull that up.
Thank you.
but I literally just said I don't want to score.
No cookies.
No cookies, please.
Like, that is a hundred percent why I came here because, yes, like, I do.
And this is to everybody who has sent me tweets and emails.
Yes.
And they have.
Bless you.
I'm polarizing, right?
It's part of my personality.
Look, like, A, I'm not Cinderella for what you think about all in or what you think about, right?
Like, I am not, it is not cool to ask me to clean up stuff that isn't the mess that I created.
Yes.
That's not forwarding the cause, friends.
And you comment, David Sachs' comment on my husband.
Totally.
I feel asked me to.
I'm like, he's my friend.
He's a Republican.
I'm a libertarian.
I'm a libertarian.
I'm not a freaking show with him, right?
Like, I'm not.
Like, I'm sorry I have a Republican friend.
What do you want me to do?
But yes, I 100% believe that this is a good place for me to be that you are
like democratic and supportive and open to.
to having these conversations in a great way that it, that is good for a lot of people.
And not for nothing, but on International Women's Day was the day that I signed my first,
I did not, our all female team practically, signed my first founder who side note is a woman
of color.
Okay, here we go.
It's all happening.
Yeah.
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I think it's like a very one-dimensional look
that some people have on this,
which is gender should not come into play,
race should not come into play.
I understand where they're coming from.
I actually did think that way for a long time.
I did think meritocracy, meritocracy,
meritocracy, best person gets the gig.
But then you also have to think,
well, like, what society do you want to live in?
And if there are historical things
where people are underrepresented,
at some point we have to break
a self-perpetuating list.
So to explain this to people,
there's a top 100 list of the top 100 apps.
If you rank the top 100 apps and people,
and you promote the top 100 apps list,
people will download the top 100 apps
because they go there and say,
what are other people doing?
Yes.
And they keep downloading the top 100 apps.
And then what happens is that list gets codified.
It never changes,
where it's very hard to break into it.
That's why places like Spotify or app stores like Apple
will sometimes not put the top 100 there,
but they'll say, here's an app that you could discover that is notable that may not have
100 people working on it or 1,000 people at Google working on it or 10,000 people have Facebook
or Instagram working on it.
But that maybe you should give it a shot and try it.
That's what happens.
There's a self-perpetuating function here.
There's actually a scientific term for this.
Somebody can email producers at this weekend startups.
But the self-perpetuating top 100 list phenomenon is what happened in venture, is what happens
in the Super Bowl is what happens at tech conferences and CEO slots.
And so you have to ask yourself, well, how does it change?
Well, the way it changes is somebody takes a chance on some unproven talent or less proven
talent or puts them into the number two slot so that they can inherit the number one slot.
There are techniques here.
The self-perpetuating, the self-perpetuation of biased beliefs.
Yeah, there's an even, there's like, it's like cognitive, there's another word for it.
Not cognitive dissonance.
No, it's not cognitive dissonance.
Negative bias, survivorship bias.
Anyway, one of these biases that in your mind.
Homothally, bias.
Like, when you see things that are all the same or that are like you, you are biased
toward them.
But yeah, but also there's, I think that the app, that promotion concept is genius.
Like, if you want something to be discovered, it's literally a question of discovery.
Like, that's such a good way to put it.
It's a question of discovery.
And sometimes you have to work a little harder or dig a little deeper or take a chance.
Or take a chance.
Or be willing to train.
a little extra, which you do with me every day on Sunday and all day in Slack, right?
Like, it's more, it might be more work to get that awesome outcome, but you get an awesome
outcome.
And if, if I'm being totally honest, you know, having three daughters and a wife.
Yeah.
You know, I, and having grown up with two brothers and not being a human, but it, you know,
it becomes acute when, you know, you got an Asian wife and you see Asian hate up close and
personal and you see how when I ask for something in a service situation or in any situation
I get treated differently for the same request. And then when you have three daughters,
you know, and I'm hoping one of them will want to inherit the firm when I retire at,
you know, 56 or 76, probably 76. Whenever I retire, you know, I told Jackie and Ashley.
It's like it's like the prince or whatever, they'll have a regent. She'll have a regent. I love
I know one of them is going to want to get in on this.
And for me, it would be particularly meaningful if I could take my life's work,
supporting founders and doing this podcast and say to one of my three daughters,
hey, meet Molly.
She'll teach you how to be a broadcaster.
And if one of them wanted to be an angel investor, I'd say, hey, meet, you know, Ashley,
meet Jackie.
You can work on the syndicate.
You can work.
You could do an internship at the accelerator or something.
It would be really meaningful if one or two or, you know, even three of my daughters
wanted to be in dad's business.
It would be cool for me.
They don't have to, but I would like them to inherit something and be part of something that maybe the world's changed a little bit, right?
And they would feel comfortable in.
So, anyway, I have to say, Frida, really should change my thinking.
And I think that's what I'm trying to do here.
Is there somebody listening to this who had my position in my blind spot, which is meritocracy only, best person gets the gig.
And then you've got to think, okay, think about that.
think about that homophomophily homophily.
Homophily biases.
Think about the self-perpetuating top 100 list.
Just let that stew a little bit.
And I think, you know, sometimes it's very hard because you get attacked when you do this.
That's why the person from Bain, you know, I think, you know, an exit ramp here, a path to a greater awareness is the next piece here.
So please don't go too crazy on him.
Let's judge him in three, six, 12 months.
on how he leads that firm.
You know, Ken, that's my challenge to him.
Yeah.
And when I would love to have him on the pod
to talk to the two of us, you know,
in three months or six months,
maybe he can hire two or three people
and maybe that photo looks a lot different in six months
and he can tell us how he did it
and give a roadmap and tips for other people.
Because maybe they tried to have a couple of women on the team
and they just had nobody apply.
You know, that's possible.
Sometimes you put a job description out
and you don't get any applications, right?
And I'll tell you how this is absolutely true.
I looked at the All In Summit registrations, and I asked my team, because we didn't ask it on the form.
Usually I do ask us on the form.
We didn't ask people their agenda.
So I said, hey, can you just do them with sample size and, you know, get me 100?
Click on their LinkedIn's.
We ask people for their photos.
Give me your best guest of the gender or the person.
You can usually do that pretty easily, not in all cases.
There are some people who are non-binary or, you know, are not part of either gender, you know, respect.
I know that's not a difficult thing to do in the world.
it's like you could also be attacked for that.
And we looked at it and I think it was
Indrogenous or I don't know if Indrogenes is a cool.
Non-binary, yeah.
So it was like 15% female.
Now that's to buy tickets.
So any conference producer is like,
well, the audience is going to be 85% male.
And I just said, no, the audience is not going to be
any 5% male.
We have a scholarship program.
We're going to start the scholarship program
with female
and let's give the first 50 scholarships,
or at least offer them to women at a massive discount
instead of $7,500, $500,000,
whatever they ask for.
We let them ask for what they want to pay.
So at least when you show up at the event, Molly,
you're not like, oh my God, this is a bro-down.
Oh, I'm not going to that.
You're crazy.
Of course you're coming.
Of course you're coming.
What Miami?
In the immortal words of Black Widow,
that's not a question I need answered.
I'm just getting one.
I don't know the time.
But yes.
You're not coming?
Of course.
I don't know.
We haven't even talked about it.
I know.
We're hilarious.
We're just having to work right here.
It's going to be a bro down.
I'm stoked about it.
If, sorry,
if it's going to be a bro down,
no,
winner for me with the bathroom line.
That's been my tech.
That's a,
that's for you,
the tech metric for me
for any event is basically like,
what's the women's bathroom situation?
Because if it's dead,
empty crickets,
I'm afraid I'm going to get murdered in there.
Yeah.
That's just business.
as usual. But if there's like a little bit of a line, I'm like, okay, all right, good job.
Yeah, go to the World Series of poker where they literally, there's so few women there
that, you know, there's like six bathrooms at the Rio that are like, you know, a male next to a
female bathroom. They take four of them and they make them double males. They just put a sign over
the women's one and say male. Because they're like, this makes no sense. There's like literally
thousands of poker degenerates who don't wash their hands, go to the bathroom and then
touch their play with their chips all game it's the this is why everybody gets a disease at c s and
yeah the world series of poker bleh it's the worst yeah it's the worst i can tell you stories but i won't
all right listen uh so so much for a lightning round we yeah so much we went on a massive tangent that
but i think an important one i'm glad that we did though because you know look i've only been here
two months it's come up of course it's gonna come up of course it's gonna come up i am in a
i'm in a completely different culture my audience is not a hundred percent
used to this culture.
Yeah.
There are conversations that we're all having in frankly, I think, a pretty honest and
respectful way.
And like, I don't know.
I'm, I'm, I, this is what podcasts are for.
Exactly.
All right.
Let's end on Cheryl Sandberg.
So Cheryl Sandberg had a quote.
I'm interested in your take on this.
I have my own take on it.
Might be surprising.
Might be surprising.
And she said no two con, this is on Tuesday, she said this, two days ago at
International Women's Day.
Is it International Women's Day that?
On Tuesday, yeah.
Yeah.
But that's the name of the holiday.
Yes, International Women's Day.
Okay.
Is this the first year of International Women's Day?
Because this is the first year that it's really been talked about, like in public
consciousness a bunch.
No, I think it does that happen every year.
It's probably going on for 50 years and none of us know.
I mean, women, no.
Okay.
Here we go.
I'm done.
This is the first time I'm seeing it trending on Twitter.
I mean, that's great news, I guess.
Did it trend the last couple years?
It didn't seem to, did not seem to be like as big as this year.
There's like programming around it.
Yes, this seems to be the big year.
I think if it seems like a big year, that's actually like forward progress for your algorithm.
It might be that the algorithm is like, this bro.
Because maybe for years it was like you didn't.
Yeah.
Oh, thank you, Rachel.
It was made in 1975 as when International Women's Day started.
So anyway, it's only been 46.
years that I, you know, I have this like vague awareness of it, but it seems like it's permutated,
uh, or penetrated into our industry. Like, it seems like tech is actually now on it. If it's,
if your algorithm is showing you International Women's Day, that is actual tangible progress. I'm
thrilled. So anyway, on International Women's Day, she said, Cheryl Sandberg, no two countries run by
women would ever go to war. So this was in Dubai. Uh, let's just start there. Do you agree?
with this comment
and because people
were dunking on this comment
and people were
giving flowers to this comment
and retweeting it.
What do you think?
It's a pretty
intense line.
Do you agree with it?
I mean, first of all,
I think it's a dodge.
I did see a lot of conversations
happening on Twitter about
toxic masculinity
and the sort of like
ego and boys with toys.
The truth is,
here's the truth.
We have no idea
if two countries run by women would ever go to war because we've only got like three.
So there is no evidence to suggest that women, by and large, wouldn't be more or less violent leaders.
And we don't know because we just don't have a sample size.
Right.
If we do, come back to me then, Cheryl.
But what is that even, what is that statement even about and how is that helpful?
P.S, you're literally taking ads from Chinese funded state media that are that are like, repeat.
cheating Putin propaganda.
So like,
nice dodge on the lady thing.
Why are you running Russian propaganda
about the war on Facebook and meta?
Like, mm-hmm, that's my question.
So,
we have had female leaders
in other countries.
Yep.
Perone in Dira Gandhi.
I don't think Jacinda...
Margaret Thatcher.
I mean, so this has happened.
Margaret Thatcher was a very violent woman,
exactly.
I think she went to war a couple times.
But what I will say about this quote is it rang true to me that women would go to war much less.
That rang true to me.
Now, does that mean I'm a sexist?
Because I actually put it aside your point.
It rings true to me too.
Okay.
To be clear, on the inside, I agree like hell.
I completely agree.
That's what I was trying to get us.
But you have the end, you have this other observation.
And also, though, right.
Exactly. Like, fundamentally, we don't really know. But no woman I know would go to war like that. Like, that's absurd.
Angela Merkel? Angela. Sorry. Angela, has she gone to war?
No. I'm trying to think if she supported any of the middle.
Germany hasn't gone to war in a minute. Has she supported any of the Middle East interventions or something like? No. In fact, then remember, that's such a big deal about German's foreign policy is that they haven't even really been, they haven't spending, they haven't been spending their requirements.
required amount on defense.
On defense, yes.
That was Trump's big point.
As it is, yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
So, you know, my take on this is it too rang true to me.
And I don't think it's a sexist thing to say that there might actually be a gender
difference here that the people who create life in the world might have a different view of
extinguishing life than people who are male.
I know, I know people don't like to talk about gender differences, but I can tell you,
testosterone is a unique
you know,
hormone in people's bodies
that makes them do things.
I know people who have taken
testosterone shots later in life
and become different personalities.
Definitely.
I do think the world
would be a much better
and safer place
if more women were in charge,
full stop.
I agree with her statement
directionally.
I don't know if
would ever go to war
makes sense
because if you were attacked,
if the Ukraine was,
had a female president
right now and they were attacked,
they would go to war
because it would be a defense.
So I would take defensive wars out of it.
Would they proactively go to war?
Right.
I don't believe so.
Would a female leader just like stomp into a country after, you know,
surrounding herself with leaders who only told her what she wanted to hear?
I think that would be less likely.
But what I really hope is that we get to a point where we've got 50-50 representation
and we get to find out.
That would be a great thing for the world.
There will be a crazy lady in charge of something for sure who will probably invade.
Yeah, there'll be an Elizabeth Holmes in this group.
like to see, I would like to see that day.
Always my point about Elizabeth Holmes.
People are like, is she guilty?
Is she crazy?
Is she a sociopath?
Is she fraud?
I'm like, did she, you know, is she a liar, whatever?
Is she a narcissist?
It's probably like, yeah, some combination of that.
She's guilty.
Obviously, the jury found her guilty.
It's obviously she's guilty.
Yeah.
I think all that proves is we now have had a large enough sample size of females in the
startup seat who've raised a bunch of money in order to go off the rails.
And you can now put that one example.
with the other countless examples of males doing it.
So we now have, for me, that was like, oh, good.
We've had a large enough sample size.
I did what I started watching, you know, my deal,
which is I watched two episodes of every show.
I heard, I watched the first episode.
It's pretty good.
I mean, that's interesting.
You say that.
The guys at The Watch, which is the Ringers podcast,
which is great, by the way.
I discovered it like last year or something.
Yeah.
The Ringer has a podcast called The Watch.
freaking great.
And they really understand
television and storytelling.
So it's kind of like
if somebody was listening to this
and didn't understand
startups or didn't understand
capital allocation and listened to
say all in.
Like,
I kind of feel like
I'm getting pulled up
in my understanding
of narrative television.
And they were breaking down
super pumped,
which I watched the first two episodes
of,
I won't get my comments.
We haven't talked about that.
You won't?
I will at some point.
I want to take the whole thing.
We need like a special show
for this.
Maybe a special chauffeur.
But anyway, they really like this.
And they say, what's Amanda?
Amanda Seafreed.
I don't know how to pronounce her last name.
Seafreed?
Seafreed.
So she was replacing the woman from Saturday Night Live, who was originally going to play her.
She dropped out, I believe, of the dropout.
Yeah.
Kate McKinnon.
Kate McKinnon was originally going to play her.
But I think they didn't want to go full comedian.
Right.
Yeah, I don't, that would have been, it's such a drama.
That would have been very different.
Seafreed leans into the, so to speak, the role, and now's it in terms of like the desire to be
important and whatnot. So I can't wait to watch it.
I mean, the acting is fun. Like, yes, that's such a good note because you can see her like
burning desire as a human. Yeah, it's, it's pretty fascinating. I got to say, it's really good.
It's fairly sympathetic. For now. For now, exactly. And I think it gets less sympathetic. But I
think that's great, right? It's creating depth. It's really interesting. Yeah, I listened to the
watch, the last episode of the watch, and just generally I would subscribe to that podcast. I think it's
really great. I'm a huge fan. All right, there we have it, everybody. Super excited, Molly,
to have on the program for the third time. One of this week in startups's most favorite
guests. He's now on the two-time-a-year rotation, so these appearances are going to start
racking up. None other than Glenn Kelman, you know him as the CEO and founder of Redfin.
And welcome back to the program.
Hey.
Hi, Molly.
Is that Jason?
Is that still your actual title?
He was like, wait, me?
CEO of Redfin?
Get right out of this town.
That's you.
I am.
That's you, buddy.
And for those of you who would love to dip into the archive, episode 1261, in August of last year, we discussed the great migration going on, running virtual startups, real estate, everything.
And then in November of 2016, episode 690, or the other.
or the other appearances by Glenn.
For a little background on Redfin,
they IPOed in 2017,
I think you've been running it since September of 2005.
That's right.
And, yeah, things have been crazy in real estate land.
I guess that's the starting point, huh, Molly?
I mean, that is exactly what I was going to say is I cannot imagine.
And I mean, every company has had a pretty bonkers two and a half years.
But it's hard for me to think of a company and a sector that's had more of a vomit-inducing roller coaster ride than yours.
How much vomiting has there been?
It's been, yeah.
I feel more comfortable now than I did.
I think it's better when you're trading at 20 than at 90 if you're worried that 90 is too high.
I never know what to say as a CEO when you think your multiple is too high, but I'd really
rather be in a situation where our customers are happy and our investors are worried than the
reverse.
And so the past two years, we've been scrambling to keep up with demand.
We were trading really high.
And now we've just come down to earth and we'll just have to earn it up a little bit,
which is a good place to be.
Yeah.
Being a public CEO and having a stock price that gets ahead of itself or, you know, you start going
a little bit fast, like skiing down a mountain, you're like, maybe this isn't the right speed.
And I think, you know, Elon handled it pretty well.
He just tweeted, I think our stock price is too high.
I'm not sure how the SEC feels about these tweets, but it's like one of two things.
You can either say nothing or you can do that.
You choose.
How many CEOs do you think have some secret wish that they could be like Elon, but we can't?
you tell us
the way that
more CEOs want to be
or do you think he's just
out there
well
I mean I can tell you he's
yeah he's unique
and I think he's candid
and yeah
you know the Twitter thing
is partially my fault
because he
we Bill Lee and I encouraged him
to get on Twitter famously
because we were like addicted to it
and somebody had a fake account
oh we've been friends for 20 years
planes
and eat at restaurants together?
We have been very close friends for 20 years.
I try not to talk about that too much
because now that he's super famous,
anytime I mention his name,
there's this possibility that it could be re-aggregated
because literally every time he tweets,
it launches 20 stories because that, you know,
like business insiders, like just reaggregate something.
So if I say something about Travis or Elon,
you know, or a couple of people who I'm friends with,
it just becomes.
So I have to be careful now
because of this reaggregation kind of thing.
But yeah, very close friends.
If I knew, Elon Musk, I wouldn't be careful about it.
I'd talk about it all the time.
Well, you know, the other thing is...
If I was getting in the class of milk, I'd say, let me check with Elon and see what he thinks about that.
I used to talk about Tesla all the time and support him all the time publicly before people knew what Tesla was.
So if you look at my, like, archive or on the show, I'd be like, listen, you know,
you probably don't want to bet in short Tesla stock.
Like, he's pretty good at what he does.
And I have the roadster.
And I know him for a long time.
Like, he's really good engineer.
I wouldn't bet against him.
So I would come out and defend him,
but now he doesn't need to have somebody come out and defend him.
Like the company is really successful.
But I would do that for all my friends, you know, if they were having struggling.
And yeah, it just gets complicated when one of your close friends
becomes the most famous person in the world, arguably, or the richest or whatever.
It just gets very complicated.
Like, we used to be able to go to dinner together, you know, me and Sam Harris.
It just sounds awesome.
I would love to have a close personal friend who's the real person.
friend who's the richest person. He is not a normal guy. Even before he was rich, and even before he was
famous, he was not normal. All right. He's very talented interactions with him have been bizarre.
Most people when you meet them, they do not live up to the weird. But Elon is satisfyingly weird.
He is several standard deviations away. He's unique. Every normal. I always tell people he's unique
in all the world. And he, uh, you know, he's a very good engineer.
and very focused.
And that is at the core of who he is.
And he's also got a great sense of humor and he's playful and fun.
So I think maybe that didn't come out early and then maybe it's coming out a lot now.
And so thanks for turning the tables and interviewing me.
I mean, I'm like, this is like a master class, like straight up Gail King right now.
He's just like, I'll get Jason to tell me.
Well, here's the thing.
Like I told Molly when she started here, like just like, let's not talk about Elon too much because like it just blows back on me.
Anyway, he's a great guy.
He's hardworking, and he's got a unique sense of humor, as everybody has now learned,
but I could have told you years ago.
Yeah.
And he's a very loyal and great friend.
Yeah.
Aw.
Yeah.
The first thing I learned about you is that you drove a Tesla Roadster.
I was going to meet you in L.A.
And I was hoping that you were going to be a normal person who could dispense candid advice.
And then I saw in the parking lot.
I think it was orange.
Is it a pretty orange?
Yeah.
It's number 16.
First Orange ever made.
Wow.
And that was an immediate signal that you too are not a normal person.
Yeah.
Definitely far from normal.
No help.
I love that.
I would have felt so much better.
You know what happened with that car?
I don't know.
I have four Teslas.
And what happened with that car was there was a venture capitalist named Ray Lane.
And he worked at Kleiner Perkins.
Yeah.
And he had ordered.
Before that.
Yeah.
And he had ordered number 16 of the roadster.
and like the first 100
were I think $150,000
and you ordered them two or three years
before they came out. And then Ray Lane
I think invested in Fisker
and Fisker
was a competitor
and
he said, I'm not going to get the car
so he kind of canceled his order
because he didn't want to be accused of like
bringing the 16th 1
to Fisker to... You're driving Ray Lane's
Tesla. Well, so that
I was just having dinner with E and he said, hey, do you want the 16th one?
Because I know you wanted one and the hundred got filled.
And I was like, yeah, sure, I'll take it.
And he gave me Ray Lanes.
So did Ray or you pick out the orange?
I did.
Yeah, I locked in the color.
And it is a pretty famous car because I think I had, at the time I had owned
Auto Blog and I took the Roadster to the AutoBlog.
team and then I actually brought them, I have the first Model S.
So I brought them the first Model S.
Nobody had to review the card.
I have signature 0-0-0-1.
And then there are maybe 15 what are called the Founder Series that were before the production.
So Steve Jervinson has the first of the founder series and then of the signature series,
which are the ones available to the public, I have the first.
The auto blog, yeah, there it is, the first one.
And then Autoblog had, I let them drive it and we did a whole photo shoot.
and yeah I had the Model S and I was like guys
there's going to be some problems with this thing
but I'll let you drive it
but you know please be kind
and I took them for a ride in the first one
and they were blown away by it
and then all the other press were really upset
that they didn't have access to the car
and so that was a famous review
in Autoblog
so Elon did me that favor
Those of you who are not watching the video
Orange You Glad Jason Cali Canis let it
strive his Tesla Roadster is the
headline there.
Orange you glad.
Good one.
I just drove it for the first time in like a year
because I had to get a new charging cable
because my 12 year old...
What date is that article?
I'm curious.
2013 maybe?
No.
I think it's got to be before that.
2009 maybe.
Oh, maybe.
The picture I found online is 2013.
Anyway.
Anyway, I got the car a long time ago.
2008.
2008.
Yeah.
So I literally the charging cable, I think somebody tripped on it and like something
frayed and so I had to get a new charging cable.
But I still have that car with 16,000 miles on it.
Only 16,000 miles?
Yeah, I used to drive it every dash.
It's my daily driver.
What's that?
Do you drive it to the grocery store or special occasions?
I take my daughter for rides in it.
Do you even go to the grocery store?
I'm trying to remember if you have a normal one.
I'm a good eggs guy.
I'm a good eggs and Instacart guy.
I do go to the store when I go to Truckee and I'm in Tahoe.
I like to go to the store because there's no Instacart.
So that's my, yeah, get back to reality and go to an actual store and push a card.
It's quite fun.
I actually kind of like it.
But I don't, you go to the store or do you use Instacart?
It's incredibly therapeutic to feel the oranges.
You're one of those store people.
You're a store guy?
It's a type.
It's a type.
Now you make me feel silly for going to the girls.
store when it's a totally normal thing to do.
I know.
You don't have good eggs.
Because I'm in the store with all these miserable people picking out your groceries, Jason.
All the Instacart and Amazon Foods people.
Are those people identifiable in the store?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, because they drive like a 20-year-old.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Do they have an Instacart outfit on?
Well, they often have, if you're at a Whole Foods, mostly I'm a Safeway person just to keep it
real, but they often have one of these
lanyards, and they're
also buying thousands of dollars
worth of groceries and loading
48 sacks into the back
of a 20-year-old car.
Yep.
You don't have good eggs, though, right?
You just described my exact local
Safeway. It's just like that.
It's all shopping. All the time. It's 90%
Instacart choppers and 10% me and my kid
because he loves to go to the grocery store.
Which is not a weird thing, by the way.
Oh, God, no, I don't know. I was so, I mean,
I was so grateful when this
came around just as like a mom with no time.
Single mom with no time.
I was overjoyed about grocery delivery.
And now we do consider it sort of like a fun artisanal outing.
It's inspiring to your own food almost.
We totally were like, we went to this store by ourselves.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you don't.
Do you have good eggs, Molly?
Do you have good eggs, Glenn?
Do you know about good eggs?
I know about good eggs.
I see people in the neighborhood getting it, but I haven't.
It seems like good groceries.
Good eggs without knowing that I have good eggs.
Okay, good eggs is next level.
Now you're talking like a CEO, Glenn.
Now you're getting there.
So good eggs is like, imagine if Whole Foods like took it up 30%.
Oh my God.
It's bonkers.
I think it's too much.
Who's ultra?
I'm too cheap for your eggs.
It is so elite in terms of like when they bring you your fruit, it was like when I lived in
Brooklyn and they used to deliver your, they could, you could get the fruit guy to deliver
to your house.
and, you know, he would pack, you know, two oranges or apples in one brown bag.
Then you have another brown bag with four limes in it.
They kind of do it old school like that, and you can order a case of blueberries, and everything's perfect,
and they wrap it perfectly.
You get a nice piece of fish.
Everything's just gorgeous.
And they have the glass bottles of the milk, all this kind of like, it's like an old school
delivery service with like just super premium sales.
It's, but don't you feel like once I took a cooking class with a fishmonger,
The person next to me, like, drove a truck around, and he took the fish to Safeway and to Whole Foods and to the Asian Mart, and it was the same fish.
Do you believe that?
No, that's crazy.
Well, because if you want good meat and fish, you go to the Asian mart.
Like, forget about Whole Foods and the fancy good eggs.
It's all about KP grocery.
Ah, interesting.
The Korean grocery in downtown Oakland, that's like some of the best meat and fish.
It's definitely the best fish.
All right, let's get to, we've got a good diversion here, electric car, CEO behavior, but let's get to housing prices.
What's going on with the continuing acceleration of housing prices year over year?
Now we're coming out of the pandemic, and it still seems year over year.
We have a chart here.
But the median sale price of homes in the U.S. just keeps going up 15% year over year.
Is this going to stop or is it we're going to double housing prices every five years?
Well, it has to stop at some point.
So my expectation is that the home buying season this year could be cut short by high interest rates,
but so far we haven't seen that.
So we've been tracking competitive offers, how quickly homes sell in less than two weeks for 15 years.
And we have never seen the rates that we're seeing now.
So the market is much faster than it used to be.
And some of that is for cyclical and seasonal reasons, driven by the pandemic,
where lots of people want houses.
and some of it is just a secular change driven by technology.
But it used to be that about one out of four houses would sell in a bidding war.
Now it's closer to one out of two.
It used to be that about one out of three houses would sell in two weeks.
That is now about one out of two.
And so even as interest rates have increased and the mortgage payment on a typical house
has gone up by about 50%.
People are still lined up to buy houses.
There are police.
directing traffic around open houses. You see this in Boston, you see it in Salt Lake City.
In San Francisco, we had a listing where it was an open house and there was a block that literally
went three weeks or three blocks back. It's really, really crazy right now. And some of it is
just a structural problem that the United States hasn't gotten it together to build a bunch of
houses. And some of it is a demographic change where there's more single owner households than
ever before, where it's just one person living in a house. That rate has doubled over the past
couple of decades and it's cresting right now.
So you've got this millennial baby bum and then you've also got the fact that a lot of
people are getting a divorce and living in a house by themselves.
Huh.
That's interesting.
It's like a it's like a Gen X evolution of the life cycle combined with millennials wanting
these homes.
But talk about inventory because there does seem to be increased scrutiny on companies like
Redfin and Zillow buying houses, but even more than that.
these big institutional investors and hedge funds buying up huge housing stock.
I wonder if you think, is it actually huge?
Is that, in fact, contributing significantly to this sort of shortage of homes?
Those are called eye buyers, right?
That's the category of I buyers.
I think there's more than one category of institutional buyer here.
So some of them are like us where we're flipping the property to another homeowner that
doesn't in any way reduce inventory long term.
and then some are black rock buying a home and then renting it out.
And that's basically an artifact of really low interest rates.
And by the way, individual homeowners are motivated in the exact same way.
So if you borrowed money at two and a half or three percent in 2020 or 2021, you're going to
own that mortgage for 30 years.
And so you don't want to sell the house because you'd also have to sell the mortgage.
And you end up renting that property out.
So when we meet people who want to move up, usually we represent a buyer, but we also get a listing.
Now, instead, they buy their next house and they keep their old place and rent it out.
In the first two weeks of every month, it cash flows because rents are so high and mortgage rates are so low.
And if you want to get back to what's causing that, it's that you had incredibly cheap credit that was limited in its access.
So only about 50% of America can qualify for a mortgage.
and those Americans are renting out their homes to other Americans who can't qualify for a mortgage.
And the arbitrage opportunity for them is massive.
And Wall Street has just cashed on that now, two, where, like I said, about one out of five homes that are being bought in America right now are being bought by investors and then rented out as part of this landlord nation.
Yeah.
And that's significant.
One in five is a significant dent in housing stock.
I would imagine when it's already limited, certainly in the places where people really want.
want to live too. It is. And I think part of the competitive dynamic that that drives is that cash
becomes king. So there was all this credit reform to make sure that appraisals were on the up and up
and to make sure, for instance, if you're getting a VA or FHA loan, that the home is livable,
so it has to go through extra inspections. And all that increases homeowners preference for cash offers
from investors. So it used to be that if you were five or 10,000 over an investor, offering
in cash, you could win. But now that spread is much larger because people worry that the house
won appraise. They worry that there's other checks on people's credit that will prevent the loan
from going through. And so now a cash offer can come in 50, 60, 70,000 dollars lower and somebody
will still take it because they know that that deal is going to close. Yeah, I just went through
this when we bought a ski house and it was like the mortgage rates were so low and inflation is so high
and I'm a cash buyer
so I was like
well we could lock in a mortgage
at this absurdly low rate
over 30 years like why wouldn't we do that
and then we can buy it in cash
so you have all these other people don't realize this
but people who own equities or whatever
they have all these other devices like a margin loan
so you can just buy something tomorrow
you don't have to go through any application process
and so it makes it so much easier
and so that screws up the competitive dynamic
but additionally when
I remember the whole 2008 crisis
was we were letting people
do these variable interest loans and people who shouldn't have had mortgages were qualifying,
and I guess people were doctoring the documents a little bit. So maybe you could compare that
moment in time to this moment in time. Well, I don't think they compare. It's absolutely the right
question, but there was this canonical story of a central California strawberry picker buying an
$800,000 McMansion when she had almost no cash flow. And that isn't happening right now. So you're going to
see an increase in foreclosure rates that may seem steep because they've basically been zero.
But even when we lift those moratoriums and banks can start kicking people out of houses
or aren't paying their mortgage, most people are not over their skis on their loan.
So we've seen a huge number of homes bought with cash and then the homes where people are buying
them with borrowed money, the loan to value ratio is really good.
So it's nothing like 2007, 2008.
Instead, what's going on is just there is a huge split in terms of who could afford a home
and who can't.
And so rich people aren't just buying one home.
To your point about the ski shack, they're buying a second home.
And the hottest sector of the U.S. housing market is the second home market, is the luxury
market, which is really unusual.
Usually when interest rates go up and the market starts getting skeevy, you start seeing
the second home market collapse.
The luxury market is always the canary and the coal mine.
But this time, I would say it's been a very dumbbell-shaped market where entry-level homes are getting
snapped up by investors who want to create rental cash flows and then high-end homes are still getting
snapped up because so many people still want a vacation place.
Whenever their kids get out of school, that's where they're going to live and work remotely.
So I'm not worried about the foreclosure moratorium lifting or foreclosure rates going up.
What I'm more worried about is just how many people now aren't funding a home through their salary.
they're funding it in the way that you describe.
They're using stock market gains to do that.
So if the S&P continues to get volatile,
and if you start seeing portfolio values come down significantly,
people aren't going to have the dry powder to buy houses.
But almost all of our customers are selling stock,
not saving pennies to fund the down payment.
It's so interesting because there are significant differences,
obviously, as you just described,
between sort of the last housing bubble in this one,
but ultimately they both come back to monetary policy.
They're not about, you know, some sort of economic fundamental or even really supply and demand.
It's more about how people access money.
Yeah.
And what's really weird about that that totally gets me like into a weird little cycle of like, whoa, that's so interesting is the home buying season has gotten really super compressed.
So if you look at real estate, it's always been seasonal where more people buy homes in the summer than in the winter.
But now it is like super seasonal where nothing happens January, February, March, and then boom.
It's on like Donkey Kong.
And the reason that's happening goes back to a fiscal policy where it's hard to get two loans at the same time.
So people are stuck in one house waiting until they can find another house to buy because they can't hold two mortgages.
And so they have to make a quick flip.
It's like that person you knew in college.
You could never break up with one girlfriend until he found the next.
So that has made the market really weird where it's this dating game that has to happen all at once for people to move up.
And it's just made the market a lot more seasonal.
and it's made the turn times really tight.
So it's one reason why the market is so competitive
because once somebody sells one place,
they have to immediately move to the next.
What is the impact of Airbnb and Picasso?
Picasso is taking luxury homes in Palm Springs
or at a ski resort.
They cut it into eight shares.
You buy it.
They manage it.
So if you were looking for 30, 40 days in a Palm Spring home,
instead of buying the $3 million house,
you buy it for maybe a seventh,
and I guess they get that eighth one as a spread.
So I'm curious the impact of these two things.
I saw in Napa, the Nimbis were able to block Picasso.
And then Airbnb, kind of hard to block, it seems.
But in where I am in Lake Tahoe, they're putting caps on the number of Airbnb's.
So maybe you could speak to are those two Picasso's very early, but the new homeownership
structures and rentals of actual homes that used to be primary homes or secondary homes?
Oh, so you can totally study this because if you go to a place like Orlando or if you look in Palm Springs, there are two counties right next to each other, one that allows Airbnb and one that doesn't.
And the property is on the opposite side of that line, even if it's just one street down, sell for way more money.
So it distorts the market because you have so many investors who are buying those properties and then cash flowing the properties.
I ended up going on this weird reality TV show that Netflix sponsored.
And almost everyone who was trying to sell their house to me, I was supposed to be.
this real estate tycoon and this shark tank like thing was an Airbnb.
What's the name of the show?
I know.
Is that show on?
What's the name of that show?
The working title was three tycoons, even though they had four and none of us really were
tycoons.
And I think the new title is going to be by my house.
Oh, so it doesn't exist yet.
It's coming.
It's coming out.
Well, it's in the can.
So we shot it in July in this weird mountain top football field size studio right next to
the Stranger Things lot and Better Call Saul.
I tried to sneak into the Stranger Things lot.
I got a little walkie-talkie and Morrison showed blacks and walked around like I knew what I was doing.
And the whole time I was on the phone with my wife saying, oh, shit, oh, shit, here it is, here it is.
It was incredibly exciting.
You look like you're authorized.
So anytime anybody ask you when you're sneaking into stuff, just do what I do.
All you have to do is just look him in the eye and say, it's okay, I'm authorized, which is,
I got that from law and order.
That's what Lenny Briscoe used to say to everybody, Jerry Warback, rest in peace.
You just look people in the eyes.
It's okay.
I'm authorized.
You look authorized.
Oh, for sure.
You have preternatural confidence.
But you don't think you look authorized?
No, no, you look like a detective.
You look like you're like somebody in middle management at like the studio who's going to check on stuff.
Like you could be writing a ticket or something.
Especially if you're carrying a walkie-talkie, that's like a towel you're in charge.
No, no, no.
Honestly, I'm not good enough.
All, or good-looking enough, all the production assistants are these.
gorgeous people who, you know, while they're getting you a ham sandwich, tell you about their
audition for days of our lives.
Oh, beautiful.
And they're just ridiculously beautiful.
Intriguing stories, I'm sure.
Getting you in the face.
So what happened in the show?
There was a point here.
Like, we got to get to.
The point is that all the people who came on to that show were trying to cash low properties
via Airbnb.
I hadn't quite realized what an industry it was.
But then we looked at these areas where on one.
side of the dividing line, people can Airbnb the property and on the other side they can't.
And there's a huge premium for that kind of liquidity. So Airbnb has created the sense of
liquidity. And it's also just emboldened people who were going to sell their old place when
they move up to keep it instead because he used to wonder, well, can I really get somebody to pay my
mortgage? And now in about 12 seconds, you can figure out that you can. And in fact, it'll cash flow
in September with the next three or four months, just pure profit.
It's so interesting because for the longest time, we thought that the problem with Airbnb
that the net negative there was supply.
And what you're pointing out is that, in fact, the influence is on prices, that you can
afford to pay more because you know you can get that.
And that that might be the bigger impact even than potentially reducing supply?
Or is it sort of both, I guess.
Yeah, I think demand drives supply in the classic economic way.
So as Airbnb was able to create a market and show people how much money they could get for their place,
people started holding on to places and then renting them out.
Yeah.
And you just have to examine the social impact of that.
I don't know if you've been to Kissimmee, Florida, or parts of Riverside County that are all Airbnb.
There's nobody there.
And it affects the tax base.
It affects the sense of community.
It just affects everything.
And for me, I got into real estate for emotional reasons.
I was this miserable little dude until I got a tax base.
a house. And now I like weed the little circle where cars drive around it and I know my neighbors
and I walk their dogs and stuff like that and I get off on it. And Airbnb is fantastic, but it is
gutted that sometimes. It's kind of like Europe, right? Like you go to some towns in Europe and it's
like you're kind of going to a museum or Epcot Center. Barcelona. I think aren't you supposed to
say Bartholona or Venice?
Bartholona. Yeah, you have to have a list because there was a king there who had a list so everybody
just mimicked the lisp so that the king didn't realize he had a lisp.
That was the story I was told when I was in Baph,
but I don't think you have to say it just in casual conversation.
That might be a little affected.
You can actually say, it might be a little over the top.
I mean, you can, but it might be a little like.
Are you supposed to say, I just want to get good at hanging out with rich people like you, Jason.
How does Eman say Eber?
I don't think he does.
I don't think he does.
No one says Ibiza.
That's true.
You have to say Ibiza.
I know Jeff Bezos as well, and he definitely says Abitha.
the last time we were in Abitha together
we were on the way Jeff and I
is a true story
Jeff and I were going to Abiza
and Glenn I knew you were going to regret
that sounds like here it comes
saying Abitha together
I felt the drop coming like the New York Times
Midnight oh I dropped that Jeff Bezos
Oh boom
So here's the thing
Were you seriously in Abitha with Jeff Bezos?
I don't like to speak out of school
I don't want to say I was on his boat in Abiza
so I'll just leave it at that
Um, so, uh, no, I wasn't in a mischief.
The fact that's even plausible is hilarious.
He literally never even know.
The other day he told me he was in a buy a plane and I was like, wow, really?
And he's like, what?
No.
I'm like, but it, that's within the realm of possibility.
It is in the realm of possibility.
But here's the thing about, I will say about Airbnb, that's interesting.
Um, when we moved, we live in the wider Bay area and we move from one house to another.
And then we were like planning on staging the house.
We had our own furniture in it.
And then we didn't get the price we wanted because it was like kind of in that down
market in 2016 or 2017.
There was like a little sputter in the market.
So we Airbnb beat it for a year.
And it was covering the carrying costs.
And we literally sat there and made a decision like, do we want to run an Airbnb?
Like our neighbors don't like us for doing it.
Somebody threw a party there.
The cops got called.
It became a whole brouhaha in the neighborhood.
You know, the cops were like, why are you renting this?
And they kind of gave us a little bit of a hard time.
They're like, you can rent it.
But really, do you need to rent it?
Like, then we're going to get called here.
And we had said no parties.
We have cameras on the property.
So we had to bust the person.
Do you have parties there, Jason?
You said it was the first party in that house, but I don't believe that for a minute.
Exactly.
No, this person threw, this person threw a 50-person birthday party and had signed all the documents no more than 12 people in the house.
And we caught them on the camera.
They did five or $6,000 worth of damage, Airbnb, and they covered it.
So it was no big deal.
But the main point was I kind of got to the point you were at.
I was like, it's kind of a pain in the ass to run this.
My neighbors hate me.
If I had known that the appreciation of 15% a year would have happened, I would have kept it because that would have been dope.
because you can kind of break even on the Airbnb.
I think we're charging 800 a night for a five-bedroom.
Sometimes we get a thousand, something in that range.
And so, you know, if you rented it for 20 nights, even 10 nights, you know, get $8,000 a month.
The carrying cost is 10, whatever.
You know, it's like almost worked.
But the money would have done better on the stock market.
So I was just like, you know what, isn't worth the headache.
It isn't worth the neighbors.
You're not the right demographic.
You don't need the money.
Right.
And what's been surprising to me is that there's this whole.
movement of young people who don't want to work. And I'm not trying to be judgmental about it,
but there are so many incentives on our society today to earn your income from investment,
from rental properties, from the stock market, from what have you. Fascinating. And there are so
many disincentives. You pay a higher tax rate when you get a salary. And so I think young people are
just responding to that. But it's a real trend. You only live once and all the rest where a lot
of people just don't want to work anymore.
And the entrepreneur they want to be isn't Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.
The entrepreneur they want to be is this person running, you know, some subscription business
with Shopify with four Airbnbs and driving an RV around the country.
Like that's the new dream.
Right.
Yeah.
And to be honest.
And the crypto.
And Robin Hood.
Right.
It's like you're you find two or three sources of revenue and it's enough Airbnb,
crypto, whatever, something NFTs will get you buy.
and get you more free time.
Let's be honest, why wouldn't they?
Yeah, why not?
Sure.
I mean, it sounds awesome.
I have an answer to that.
I have an answer to that.
Great.
Work has given me meaning.
I know I'm like living in this Protestant iron cage, even though I'm a little Jew,
but like putting your shoulder to the wheel.
Yes.
And building something good and terrible is an end in itself.
And maybe I'm on my high horse because I'm the CEO and I reap the fruits of other people's labor.
I've read Carl Marx about surplus value,
but I still think that working with other people
and learning a craft and building something good,
it's worth it.
So I get slinging crypto,
I get owning Airbnbs,
I get passive income and walking your dog.
But what are you going to do 10 years from now?
Yeah.
How proud are you going to be of that?
That's my case.
I'm with you.
And I know I'm on a step.
No, look, I get, I agree, right?
Like, all I do is work and all I know how to do is work.
But I don't think that work.
Work is as fun. Thanks, boss. I don't think that work is as fun for everybody as it is for the three of us. And I think it's sort of fair to acknowledge that and to say that you might be working your butt off figuring out how to sling crypto. And you might be the 12 hours a day on macro economic data to make sure that you're doing the right trades. And you know, you're flipping houses. That's a lot of work. I don't know. Who might to judge what the work is. But here's the question I really do have, which is what. And I, and I,
I want to say a serious person in the Noda gang has this question, which is the same question I have.
Do you think there will come a point as there has, you know, after World War II where we really
tried to incentivize home buying in this country? Do you think there will come a point where
we could expect some regulation on institutional buying? That, that, the type of regulation that does
exist in some other countries. Or foreign buyers, right? Because they seem to be buying up stuff, right?
It's the same category, just people buying stuff and not living in it.
Totally.
Yes. I think it's possible.
Maybe I'm acting out of my own self-interest.
Just to talk about Redfin's eye buying for a minute, we could make more money if we liquidated,
especially the underperforming part of our portfolio through institutional investors.
So there's a scratch and dent market for loans.
There's also one for houses.
If you get a flip that you can't flip, you turn to the street and you sell it for 95 cents on
the dollar like that and you're able to liquidate your losses.
And we won't do that because that reduces the amount of
inventory that's available to the market. So instead, we will always insist that we sell to someone
who's going to live in the property. And the reason we don't make a big deal out of it is because at some
point, we might have to backtrack on it. It's a principled position. But sometimes, you know,
if you're just holding $500 million or a billion dollars worth of houses, which we sometimes have on
our balance sheet, you start to get a little bit nervous. I think the bigger issue structurally with the
regulatory scheme is actually about building houses. So if you look at the
place like Orange County, there was a time when the government was completely aligned with the
builders. In fact, they were one and the same in a place like Orange County. And they just built,
built, built after World War II. And now there's Nimbism. There's environmental regulations.
I'm very sensitive to both of these issues. But I still think the United States just has to have a
pretty simple point of view that we want housing to be cheaper. And we feel that way about like
gas and bread and every other asset when the price goes through the roof, people freak.
But when housing prices go up, there's so many Americans who are part of the cartel where they
benefit from higher prices that they're happy to have another part of America with a short end
of the stick.
And so my argument would be that first of all, we just have to decide as a country that we want
lower home prices.
And really secretly, deep down in our heart, we don't because the people who own houses
have a stake in keeping those prices high.
At the very least, we shrug when it happens.
And so I would just like to see more homes being built.
And what you see in America is that people are moving out of California,
and part because of the taxes or the weather or whatever, not the weather, but the fires.
Two places where housing is cheaper, but the main reason they're moving is because
in a place like Nashville or Atlanta, they are 100% pro-builder and they are building
way more houses and as crunchy as I am.
And I can be crunchy as I'll get out.
I am pretty aggressive about saying that we need to build more houses.
And even somebody like AOC who used to be completely on the other side of this, who saw builders as the devil lately, all the housing nerds are excited because she realizes that there needs to be some private enterprise to build housing to keep rents down and keep prices low.
So that's my number one thing.
I'm not trying to switch the topic.
You want to talk about eye buying?
We can't.
No, no, no.
I think it's a valid point.
And what's interesting, I think, in what you're saying, for me,
is this prison is dilemma of sorts.
If you own a home, it's pretty great that the supply is constrained because your asset just keeps
going up in value.
And most people's retirement and their future is based on that appreciation.
And they've taken loans and they've constructed their financial future around that very fact.
So if it didn't appreciate in value, then for half the country, their retirement, their
kids' inheritance, college funds, all that stuff that would come out of.
of it would be, you know, muted or neutered.
And then on the other side, you got people who are trying to get a first home.
And luckily, there are some cities that are pro-building.
And that, I think, is the only silver lining here.
But is there any way to catch up and radically improve the amount of homes?
Because the problem I see in the Bay Area, and I think the far left has like this
misunderstanding of supply and demand.
here in the Bay Area, they are insistent that low-income housing get bought and that no more high-end units get bought.
It's really dumb because what they don't understand is every unit that gets added is added to the supplies.
And all the rich people in the Bay Area are moving and gentrifying poor areas.
So the concept that the Mission District, which was a Latino district that was lower income and cops and firefighters and TV,
and normal people live there, all the hipsters move there, renovated the apartments, and now,
you know, if they had just built the sky rises, which they are now building in Soma,
and by the baseball park in the Mission Bay area, if they just built more of those, the rich people
would move into those because it's easier and they have a concierge and they have a pool.
Yeah. Yes.
So I've donated.
So I donated.
Yes. I mean, here's the thing.
Like, do you think a rich person wants the three bedroom with a gym and a gym and a
concierge and, you know, a pool?
Or do you think they want the two, the three bedroom with only one bath in a walkup in
the mission?
They would obviously take the higher end unit.
They're just not available or there weren't traditionally none available.
And I don't even care which one they prefer.
More inventory lowers prices.
Economists are completely united on this.
I've donated a million dollars of my own money to build low income housing.
I am a staunch advocate for it.
But nonetheless, any type of increase in support.
apply lowers price pressure. And so when people demonstrate against some fancy building, they're
really just shooting themselves in the foot. It drives me crazy. Unless the fancy building is being
bought by a bunch of Russians or Chinese hiding money from those authoritarian places. Is that actually
really happening or not? The money parking in New York apartments as an example, or Miami.
Is that actually a phenomenal? Because that's separate than I buying. Do you think, because is Canada
Or Palo Alto. Remember there was like a story about Palo Alto homes just sitting empty, just being bought by Chinese officers.
It's happening. It is happening. Cupertino is ground zero for that. I just feel careful. And I'm not accusing you of xenophobia at all. But I feel careful about the xenophobic elements of that. So we have had Asian American people buying houses and neighborhoods, getting scowls because people think they're foreign investors and that the Chinese.
these are taken over town. Okay, sure, fair enough. And it's, I just feel really careful about it.
Maybe we can all agree that the Russian oligarch is now the personification of evil. Let's go with that.
We'll go with that. But what about charging them for not living there? Can I ask you a follow-up question on that?
Okay, sure. Trevor Noah made this point that you can do a Russian accent on TV, but you can't do a Chinese accent on TV.
Why are Russian accents still okay? I need to think about that. Anyway, let's go on. Let's keep moving.
Well, no, no, but should, I'll hand it off to you, Molly, but on the foreign thing, I believe Canada is in the process or they've banned foreign ownership.
And then some people are saying, if you don't live in the house, you should pay a different tax.
So let's separate out, you know, outright xenophobia and racism from, hey, a foreign buyer is buying this and then not letting anybody live in it because they're using it as like Bitcoin.
Like, it's just a store of value and they don't want anybody to rent it because they don't want to maintain it.
Should that be banned? Should that be taxed differently, not living in a home?
I like the theme that was run along the bottom of the screen here, which is just, I feel careful about any investor buying a property and not putting it to work.
So if you have an empty home where you're using that for a tax write-off or simply for the capital gain and you're not putting the property to work, I don't really care if it's somebody in Greenwich,
Connecticut or London or Moscow or Beijing, I think that having investors own properties where
people aren't living in those properties is a problem when there are people living on the
street.
And I'm not trying to be a bleeding heart on this show.
There are plenty of reasons people are living on the street.
But I just feel careful more about housing becoming an investable asset.
I mean, that's the history of the economy over the past 40 or 50 years.
It's happened with mortgages.
It's happened with all heavy equipment that all these assets have basically become something
you can trade.
And now one reason the housing market is so volatile.
It has the beta of the stock market or the beta of a foreign currency exchange is because
there is so much investor capital driving the housing market.
It isn't just people putting money under the mattress and then finally putting a down payment
on a house.
It's a bunch of investors creating more volatility in that market.
So I would regulate investment activity in housing if I were going to regulate it at all without real respect for whether it came from Russia, China or somewhere else.
Most of the money, most of the money is coming from a U.S. investment fund, but that gets its capital from its limited partners from overseas.
And so your attempts to regulate that are going to be conflicted by that.
Yeah.
I wonder this might as a minor economic tangent, but not really.
how do you, because 100% agree that we have to build more housing, and yet, you know, we have
told people for decades, and it is true that homeownership is the best way to build wealth in
the United States. And with every other than this pandemic at this moment when the stock market
and crypto actually came along and finally became something that normal people could make money
on, there isn't another avenue for wealth building at the level of homeownership. Like, I wonder how
you possibly address nimbism, like if people don't have an alternative.
Well, first of all.
And I should say by wealth building, I even mean a level of stability, right?
Like, I bought a house for first time in my adult life in the last two years.
It almost doubled in value.
I was like, holy crap, I have options as a person in America.
And I'm an advocate for that.
Yeah, I'm an advocate for that.
It's super free.
We're careful about somebody owning 50 homes or an investment fund owning
15,000 homes. Right. Like we're honing in on the real problem here, which is homes as investments
in bulk. I think so. And for me, the answer isn't to ban investment. It's to make mortgages
more competitive because today you've got all these startups, I buyers, ribbon, knock, different
companies that are providing some form of bridge financing so that individual home buyers can
compete against institutional home buyers, against cash buyers. And those are,
Those rates are often predatory.
So if we're going to buy your home as an I buyer, we are going to buy it for 95 cents on the
dollar at best.
And the reason people take that deal is because they need the cash to buy their next place
and they can't hold two mortgages.
So for me, the real answer is mortgage reform so that you can hold two mortgages at the same
time.
I think we basically overcorrected from 2008.
There was a lot of predatory lending that we should have gotten rid of.
But at the same time, we made it so hard for people to compete against cash buyers that we create
in our arbitrage opportunity for BlackRock and everybody else.
Why don't mortgage lenders provide a like parallel mortgage product if consumers need it?
Like, sounds like a great opportunity for a new product.
I think so too.
It's one of the reasons red fence in the mortgage business.
So at some point, we may do that.
There are a couple of factors that limit it.
Number one, obviously, it's hard to compete against.
the federal government. So if you write a conventional mortgage, you can sell it at an incredible
price and the margins there are good. But maybe something that's more subtle. I think many lenders
have become wary of helping the working class because the subprime lenders ended up on the front
page in the New York Times. So if you were to talk to our board and say, hey, I want to offer an
unconventional or even subprime loan to people who couldn't qualify any other way, you have to be
willing at some point to show up with a locksmith and kick them out if they can't pay the mortgage.
And the fact that nobody wants to be that villain anymore means that nobody wants to be the
hero anymore either. And so we've really created a no-fly zone for working class and middle-class
loans. And instead, we're doing jumbo loans and conforming loans to people who really don't
need the money anyway. That's kind of a bombshell there. That's kind of a big statement.
because it means that a lot of people in America are effectively shut.
I mean, 50%, I believe, was your stat?
Yeah.
Is there a mortgage reform that makes that work?
I think so.
The government just has to have a tolerance for some rate of default.
Like, we can't pretend that we can take a risk without incurring losses.
And it just depends on how much our society is committed to letting working class
people buy a house. And if we're not, then don't ring your hands over it and see what happens.
I think the past two years have been a demonstration of that where credit was very, very cheap,
but not perfectly accessible. And it was a bonanza for people like me, where you can borrow
money at two and a half percent and buy a home that you can run out to somebody else.
What's going to happen with these interest rate hikes?
What's the impact going to be?
Maybe they'll come down a little bit.
I've been an inflation hawk for the past year or so, which meant that I was wrong for nine months,
and now I've been right for three months.
People would talk about how the Fed won't do this because there just isn't the political
will, but the reality is nobody ever wants to raise interest rates.
The only reason you do is because you have to.
And at this point, the inflation pressures are profound and long term.
So I don't see a significant easing anytime soon.
The forecast is for at least seven rate hikes this year.
And the only question is whether it's going to be a 25 basis point or 50 basis point height.
And the way that translates through to the mortgage market is a little spiky because
lenders will sometimes have narrower margins where they're about to lay off a bunch of loan
officers and instead they'll take on a bunch of volume at sub-profitable prices to keep
everybody employed.
But then once they do the layoff, at that point, the margins bounce back to where they normally
were and mortgage rates tick up again.
So what you're seeing right now is that all the lenders are just eating it, trying to hang
on to volume so they can hang on to their employees.
And there just aren't enough loans to go around.
Everything in America, not just houses, everything has been refinanced five or six times
over the past two years.
And anyone who is providing credit made a transaction fee off every single loan.
and now thousands, millions of people have gotten into lending in real estate and the industry
isn't going to support it.
So you're going to see some consolidation there.
Right.
I think we already are.
We saw that Better.com is laying off something like 3,000 people.
So some of that may already be beginning.
I want to ask you about geography and housing because I think the first time I ever talked to you
on Marketplace, it was after you had written an article about how if people just moved
out of the Bay Area and we spread the tech industry,
went remote and we spread people, right, all over the country, that it would solve income inequality
and people would stop doing like stock based and, you know, payments. And here we had this like real
time experiment and some of that happened, but not as much as we might have thought. Like,
could, do you still believe that some of these pressures could be solved by more geographic
distribution? Well, I do. I was talking to this investor in Redfin, who was one of the best
investors in the world. And he said this with a touch of awe, but also this greed, that the fundamental
source of American wealth is the land itself, that in Germany or Singapore or somewhere else,
there isn't places for everyone to go. But here in America, we've had this concentration of wealth
in San Francisco, this concentration in New York, and then the rest of the country was left out.
And now that energy is finally jumping the arc into the middle of the country.
And even though an Ohio home that used to trade for $300,000 is now trading for $400,000,
that's a tragedy for the people living in Ohio who used to feel that they had some dignity
working a middle class job.
For a Californian coming in with monopoly money, it's still 60% off the million dollar home
they were going to buy there.
And so I don't think that migration is going to slow.
we track how many people are looking in their own city for a home to buy.
And it used to be that about one out of five people were looking to move outside of the place where they currently live.
And now it's one out of three.
And that reached its highest level in January of 2020, two years into the pandemic.
So that's what I love about America.
I mean, you go to Europe and you talk to people and they lived in the same little town where their parents and grandparents lived.
And it was just this very caste-based system where you were born into a particular station.
on life and America's always lit out for the territories and gone for opportunity. And that started
to stagnate in the 90s and the early aughts where people were much more likely to stay put.
Detroit was a wasteland, but nobody left. San Francisco was getting too expensive, but everybody
just paid up. And now, for whatever reason, people feel liberated. And I think that's going to
create massive economic opportunity, but also this anxiety and disruption where a place like Spokane,
which is a couple hundred miles east of here, it used to be this nice little middle class community,
is this weird little tech hub
and it's rich and it's cool
and that's good
but if you were somebody
living in Spokane who used to be an electrician
and feel like you were part of the American dream
it's freaky too.
Yeah.
Yeah, but it's, we saw it here so acutely
because there was this massive movement
of like all these moving trucks
leaving San Francisco
and it really was like this three-part kind of story
because people would move to San Francisco,
Santa Monica, Manhattan,
to eliminate their commute.
And then people are like, wait,
I don't have to commute into San Francisco on the BART,
which is like torture every day.
It's like an hour each way of literally being tortured.
And this is rich tech workers.
BART is horrific.
It's dangerous.
It smells like liquefied humans.
It's just, it's brutal.
I don't know when you were last on it.
I was on BART two weeks ago, mother f***.
It does depend on the station.
It does depend on it.
It's been pretty right.
What do you think is the worst station?
Howl?
I've been on those Markey Street once.
When I used to go out to Oakland to go to the Warriors games,
I would take the bark because it was better than two hours of traffic to go 30 miles or 20 miles.
And it was rough.
But the point is, when people left, they looked at the migration patterns.
They're like, yeah, people have left San Francisco.
And they've gone to Oakland.
Or they've gone to Napa.
Or they've gone to...
I know because I was still house hunting.
And they all came here.
They all came there, which is why the house.
prices doubled in Oakland. And so it feels like that migration pattern is now permanent,
in my mind, because people don't need to commute. And even if it becomes hybrid, which supposedly
April 4th, Google and some other folks are requiring three days a week in the Bay Area,
are you going to leave Napa? You're just going to basically take an hour and a half commute,
come in early, leave early, whatever. And you'll just, you'll have a long commute two days.
Maybe you'll stay over in an Airbnb or get a hotel or something or stay at a friend. And you'll
go to Google for two days a week and then you'll go back up to Napa for five.
That's what's going to happen in my mind.
I don't think Google's going to be able to hold the line on that policy.
Oh, really explain.
You've seen employers say, let's try three days a week, two days a week.
Let's start on January 1.
Let's start on April 1.
And whenever you start seeing 5 to 10 percent of your workforce turnover because of one
decision that you've made, you back off.
And effectively what everyone's doing now is they're deciding whether to break their commercial
lease and to burn the boat.
And before you do that, you say, we're going to try to bring everybody in.
We're going to get some coffee carts and taco trucks outside the office.
We're going to make it really fun.
And then if that doesn't work, we're done.
We're burning the office down to the ground.
And that is a major decision.
And so before you make that decision, you've got to give it one more college try.
And I think that's what many employers are doing.
I know that we're all going crazy working from home.
But too many people don't have somebody to walk their dog.
I got a simple solution far away.
Or take care of their kids.
And to be honest, they're doing that, unfortunately, at a time when we're looking,
when we, I think gas just hit its highest point ever and is probably going to go to
$5, $6, $7 a gallon in San Francisco.
So there's no way.
So you're trying to get Googlers to drive from San Francisco or Oakland.
God help them.
I mean, I'm really sorry if you moved to Oakland because Oakland is awesome, but to get from here
to Silicon Valley is the worst.
Take a helicopter.
It's the absolute worst.
Like literally an e-bibeck would work better.
I mean, the obvious solution here, if it wasn't for regulation,
would be for Google to take that campus
that can, let's just arguably say
10,000 people can work on the Google campus.
Just cut it in half,
make 3,000 or 4,000 offices
and turn the rest into apartments
for single people who are buying full homes.
And now you've added massive inventory.
You take the Salesforce Tower,
you make 10 floors of it, residential,
micro apartments or small studios.
Oh my God, that's it.
And that's it.
We're done.
I mean, can you imagine living on the Apple campus?
A bunch of young people out of school
get to have a campus-like experience.
They go from college at Stanford,
and they just pack up a couple of boxes,
put in the back of a station wagon,
and go to Apple campus,
and they live on campus.
We're done, boom.
Who doesn't want to live on the Apple campus?
There's a deeper trend that you have to account for,
which is just that the only home we struggle to sell
is like a condo right next to Amazon.
And it's because there used to be a premium
for living downtown that you could walk to work.
But it is profound the shift from the city
to the suburb, and some of that is about some kind of urban failure where cities like Seattle
and San Francisco are really struggling with homelessness and crime. And some of that is about
how the suburbs have changed. It used to be this very monotonous landscape, but now actually the most
diverse part of America isn't in the urban areas. It's in the suburbs. You have more Latinos,
you have more Asian Americans in the suburbs than you do in the city. But for whatever reason,
And the biggest shift that I never saw coming because I am such a hardcore urbanist is the shift from the city to the suburb.
People prefer having a lawn and a pool.
And they want better schools, safer streets, and they're willing to pay for it.
Is that a, I mean, is that a pandemic phenomenon?
Like, do you think there is a scenario where, you know, getting back to this campus idea, that there would be a return to a more communal living, that there would be people saying,
We're willing to, you know, live in no car, no commute communities that are planned for closeness.
Trying to make this campus idea work.
I really like this.
No, I know.
I think that the pandemic drove that, but it might be a one-way door.
I want people to live in these tiny little communities.
Young people will.
Well, yeah, this is a Gen Z thing, right?
This is planning for the next generation.
Millennials are having babies, but you're always going to have these, like, you're going to have the generation behind.
What are they want?
Because isn't the problem, Glenn, when you have young.
people who now are working for you for the last two years, you've never met them.
There's no way to mentor them.
This solves the mentorship problem too.
So if you just said, hey, listen, for your first four years at Apple, you can have the option
to live on the campus and we'll give you your apartment for free.
So you're a developer.
You can live on the campus for 500 bucks a month and you get free food and we get to mentor
you.
Boom.
You're done.
I like it.
I'll go with it.
Well, it's like, let's workshop it.
Nick was just saying it's sort of like cul-de-sac.
Like what I'm describing the sort of the planned community with no cars and, you know,
commercial area built in is kind of like that startup,
cul-de-sac.
I'm so excited about cul-de-sac.
Col-de-sac is fantastic.
And as a question of environment and high-density living,
like we are going to have to crack that nut.
And if you've already got buildings in high-density areas
that could be converted into housing minus a few little zoning issues,
which I know Samadjust goes very efficient at,
it's like, no problem.
What do you think of this, like the domain?
Let's just, let's keep double-clicking on this one.
My understanding is Disney's,
building a community that you can live in.
You can live in a Disney community.
And then there's like the domain in Austin,
which I've been to,
which is like a giant super outdoor mall
where you can walk from the Apple store
to P.F. Chang's and whatever your bag is.
But then you can like walk to your house.
And if you have to deliver something to your house,
they have like kind of a back door road.
What do you think of those two ideas
of this like new living concepts?
I'm most excited by cul-de-sac.
Just to see tech entrepreneurs raise serious amounts of capital to change how people live,
to build a carless community, to me, it's just heaven.
And I'm interested to see if people will take it when Minneapolis outlawed single family only zoning.
It was this giant experiment to see if we could get people to live in denser settlements.
And instead, people voted with their feet and moved to places like Atlanta and Nashville instead.
Yeah.
Land does matter.
The ideology of urbanists like me, I live in a really dense place.
You know, their apartment buildings about 40 feet from here.
It's a very mixed community.
I love that.
I've just been surprised that other people don't.
And that's just the experience of getting older,
is realizing that what you want is so different from everybody else.
What about Golden Oak?
I think that's the Disney neighborhood they're building.
Goldenham.
Is that going to be
Is that, does that exist?
What about what is it?
Del Bocca.
Disney communities.
People love that stuff.
Like, this is another one where, like, if you're asking me as a broker, whether we can sell it.
Oh my God.
Hand over fist, night and day 24-7.
Mm-hmm.
But would I want to live there?
Yeah.
No.
Yeah, I'm really, I'm really curious to see.
I mean, I think you're absolutely.
right and land, the allure of having land in space cannot be overestimated. As a Montana girl,
like every time I watch Yellowstone, I'm like, I need acres. But. Where in Montana? I didn't know that
about you. Oh, really? I'm from Helena. And then I went to school in Missoula. Oh my gosh.
Mm-hmm. I love Montana. My fam is still there, luckily, so I get to get back. But I do wonder,
like I do know some, my former in-laws just sold their house and moved to a condo for mobility
reasons. And my son, who's 15, is like obsessed with apartments. Like, I do wonder if there could be a
generational shift here where they're like, I don't want to, I mean, I don't want to take care of this house
forever. And it's like, you know, if my kid moves out, I'm like, I want to live in a hotel.
Yeah. Maybe I'm still, it's still just wishful. It's just wishful. You're right.
One of the things that you were seeing right before the pandemic was multi-generational housing
being built more often where there would be two, I'm not supposed to say master bedrooms anymore,
but two main bedrooms, one for your in-laws, grandma and grandpa, and one for you. And some of that
was a response to different types of family traditions, whether it's Asian American or Latino,
and some of that was a response to high housing prices. But those floor plans were all the rage
right before the pandemic. And then when the pandemic hit, it went right back to a much smaller
footprint where people could have their own space and there were more households being formed,
but smaller households.
And so the really freaky thing when you look at the demographics is that home prices are up,
rents are through the roof, but U.S. population growth has gone flatline.
And so you think, well, how can that be sustainable?
And the only real answer to that is that even though the population is flat, the number of people
living in their own little homes or having second homes has gone way up.
So for whatever reason, we are living in, like, you know how you think about like Russians?
Like my family was Russian where we would talk about, yeah, it used to be that there was, you know, three generations, 12 people, rotating beds, all in two bedrooms.
You know, we're at the far end of that spectrum now where every man has his castle or every woman.
Yeah.
It's problematic though, too, because you have a lot of people you talked about before, one person or, you know, a divorced couple where the two kids,
are going back and forth between two full-sized homes.
It's so inefficient as well.
And then I heard some of them are doing this nesting thing where the parents switch.
So one parent goes to the apartment, one goes to the house, and I guess that's more convenient.
But I mean, you would not believe the permutations of divorced parents in the Bay Area.
Let me put it because, because housing is so extreme and so extremely expensive that even when a, you know, well-to-do couple breaks up, you could, you still get a lot of creativity around housing.
I had an idea for micro apartments that I wanted to do 20 years ago.
Well, no, I was living in New York, and I was living in an illegal loft.
It was called the Starat-Lei Building.
They'll pull up a picture of it.
It was on 26th on the West Side Highway.
I had a 2,000 square foot loft.
I paid $9 a square foot per year.
So it was $1,700 a month, I think, for this 2000.
And it looked out on the Hudson.
But the problem was, it was illegal.
So there was no heat on the weekends.
you weren't supposed to live there.
And there were about 30 artists
living in the building.
DJ Spooky live there.
Is this Jason Calicanus in a microcosm?
Yeah, basically.
Slightly illegal.
Yeah.
Rules are meant to be interpreted, Glenn.
Fat pad.
Artist,
you listen, I'm an artist in some ways,
granted, and, you know,
sometimes you have to negotiate to live.
So anyway, I live in this thing.
And I just thought to myself,
is our little artist living here.
Some people had 500 square speeds.
Some people had 3,000 photographers, whatever.
And there was one guy who lived there,
and I went to his apartment.
We'd have a drink or something.
And he was an artist,
and he only had a sink.
I had built an illegal bathroom,
literally hired a bunch of guys at Home Depot in the parking lot.
And I said to them, can you build it?
Can you like in a weekend, build me a bathroom?
They're like, we can build it for you in 48 hours.
Can we sleep there?
And I was like, yeah, you can.
So I let them sleep on the couch as they built it.
But this guy just had a sink.
And then what he would do is he go to Chelsea Pierce.
it? Exactly.
They would just, this guy would go to,
he would go every morning
to the Chelsea Peers, work out,
take a shower. So he used the Chelsea Peers
as his
bathroom and gym.
And Chelsea Pierce was open 365 days a year.
They were open every day.
What a hard life. And so my idea was,
what if they created floors
and you just had a room,
maybe at the end of the hall you had single stall bathrooms,
and then you took an elevator down,
straight down to the gym slash showers.
You know, I'm private showers, of course,
but then you would remove the bathrooms from each unit,
and what would that cost in Manhattan?
You could do it for $500,000 a unit.
Listen, I've experienced this.
I used to stay even like five, ten years
into being the CEO of Redfin at the YMCA.
There's a YMCA kind of Upper West Side, Midwest Side.
Yeah.
So you have to walk down the hall for the showers.
There's a gym.
And a swimming pool.
So in that way, it's kind of lux.
It's hard to find a swimming pool in New York City, and I'm a great swimmer.
Actually, I'm an okay swimmer, but I like doing it.
But that's the Y, isn't it?
The New York City has guest rooms.
Where do they cost?
Yes.
And finally, I just got shamed out of it.
Like, you are the oldest man.
I was about to shame you.
$97 standard bunk room.
I'm looking at it right now.
This is why we love Glenn.
He's just, he's turning an idea of the CEO of a lot of.
down.
Did you say in a bunk room with another person?
I had my own room.
But I don't know.
What talked me out of it, I felt like I was trying to save the company money.
I knew that people were going to be processing my expense report.
Wow.
And that you sent a message.
I should set a good example.
But then this high exchange student on the elevator asked me, are you an American
business person?
And I said, yes.
And then he said, why are you here?
And I just said, I don't know.
I really don't know.
Wow.
So now when I go to New York, I either stay with my wife's best friend or I get a hotel room.
Got it.
All right.
Well, there you go.
I'm literally looking at the room you would get.
Glenn Kelman, most unexpected CEO.
That's why we love you.
You're not like one of those CEOs who flies coach.
You're not flying coach.
Oh, I totally fly coach.
Come on.
Across the country.
Come on.
Glenn flies coach.
Look at me.
If he flies at all because.
and 190 pounds.
I fit into a coach seat perfectly.
Glenn.
And this is not acceptable.
You've got to get in the mint.
Get the JetBlue mint.
Economy Plus.
Spend the $1,200.
Economy plus.
Kind of plus is good, but come on.
This is not becoming of a CEO of public company.
Don't you at least get a little business?
Do you ever worry you could get addicted to dushiness, Jason?
Like when I was in college,
maybe I told you this already, but when I was a...
There's a lot in that question.
There's a lot of time.
Maybe you are my friend.
But like, no, I am, I'm, I'm much too late for that.
The producer said, here's my role.
I was just waiting for that.
Under three hours, I don't care.
Over three hours, my old man body, you know, we're both 51.
My old man body over three hours, I'm going to go economy plus or, you know, business or something.
That's a lot of corporate policy.
Like corporate policies follow that.
A lot of them say if you go over four hours, you can upgrade because you have to work on the other end.
You can't be like I had a thrombose.
or I didn't get any sleep.
Yeah.
Glenn, please.
You have to work in the middle, too, while you're on the plane.
Jason, do you have a private plane?
No, no.
I was, I was thinking about something small, but then I thought about it.
I was like, I wouldn't use it that much.
Something small.
I don't even charter right now because, well, one of my friends has a Pilates and they're
perfect, the PC12, super affordable.
Do you even understand him right now, Molly?
What's a Pilates?
What's a PC12?
I don't know what that is.
A Pilates is a super turboproprop.
It's a Swiss.
plane. It's perfect if you want to go from the Bay Area to Seattle, L.A.
It's a death trap and it's not affordable. No, it's one of the safest planes ever.
Okay. It's amazing. Like for Tahoe of missions, it's like $1,500 an hour to operate or $2,000.
Is one of the seats a toilet? When we did our road show, you know, we got on a private plane just
at the end. I tried to avoid it. But then one of the seats was a toilet and that kind of ruined
the whole thing. There's a famous story. I have to go to the bathroom and then
yeah here's a Pilates
the Velcro seat
and like draw a little curtain
and then like actually I think I can wait
yeah there is a famous
yeah this the Pilates is
one of the best planes ever I've flown on it
10 times
perfect for going to Tahoe
in fact that's what surfair uses
is a single engine
it's a single engine turbo prop
but the thing is so perfectly designed
if you the engine doesn't fail
if it did fail you would glide wherever you need to go
and it's super fast
not as fast as a jet
So maybe if you were going to go somewhere an hour, take an hour of 15 or something, so maybe 25% slower.
But for short missions, it doesn't make a difference.
You wouldn't fly it across the country, but you would fly it from San Francisco to San Diego or Seattle or anything like that.
But there's a famous story.
Speaking of those seats of somebody who was on a M&A thing with like CEOs or whatever,
and somebody's working for Goldman in the M&A department, and they tell this story.
We'll end on this because it's quite graphic.
Is it the mudslide story?
Oh, great.
I don't know if it's the mudslide one,
but I remember reading it on some financial site.
It's a very famous story,
but some guy partied too much,
and he's got to go.
And they're like, sir, we're going to land in 30 minutes.
He's like, it's going to land in three minutes.
It's now a situation.
So it's one of the seats has like a, you know,
cavernous drop in it.
And what they do is they lift the seat off.
they put a curtain around you.
Yeah.
And then you have to, you know, do what needs to be done.
Supposedly, this was a very operatic movement, so to speak.
And it did not last a short period of time.
And for 10 minutes, the plane is resonating, vibrating with, you know, this operatic performance.
Jesus.
Stop.
And basically then the guy's got to like take the curtain down and sit for the last 20 minutes as if nothing happened.
I may say everybody sat in the plane in complete silence.
Punch line, they closed the deal.
So.
Punchline.
That's why it's totally the deal because everybody felt so bad for the guy with all the turbulence going on, so to speak.
And that is why.
Yeah.
We fly commercial.
Yes.
Yeah.
So anyway, I'll stop now, but it's a famous story.
And anybody who knows the origin of this story,
because I've heard it 10 times from people,
I've read it two or three times,
please find us the origin of this story.
But yes, it was the M&A turbulence operatic performance somewhere.
The aristocrats.
Ladies and gentlemen, the aristocrats.
Please don't look that up.
The movie The Aristocrats.
Don't look it up.
No.
Please do not.
Forget I said that.
All right, listen.
Thank you for giving us so much time today.
So much.
You're wonderful.
Hey, I had fun.
It's always great to see you, Molly.
It's great to see you, Jason.
Yes.
And now you get to see us both at the same.
And now you get to see us at the same time.
So that's great.
Anytime.
So we'll see you in six months.
We'll check in.
Hey, just as we leave.
Is there going to be any movement on this 6% commission structure?
I know a lot of people were talking about maybe that changes or there was some
investigations going on.
It's hard.
Just quickly.
Yeah.
There's a class action lawsuit in federal court in Chicago that's saying that,
the buyer should be the one to pay the buyer's agent. And if that happens, there won't be a small
movement. There will be a seismic movement. And then the DOJ was about to agree to a settlement with
the National Association of Realtors over just displaying commissions. And at the last second,
it pulled out. And now it's on the same issue where it's saying both parties need to pay their
own agents. And if that happens, you're going to see massive price compression. But it's still
in court or with the DOJ. Would that be better for the industry, I think? If both people,
the party paid, their own commissions?
I'm not here to make things better for the industry, Jason.
I'm here to make things better for you, baby.
Well, for the consumer, it would be better.
For the consumer, it's good for the consumer and bad for the industry.
Okay.
So that's for a place in the world where you pay two real estate agents.
Yeah.
Right.
See, I think it should be a scale where, like, for, you know, for the first X dollars,
it's one percentage.
Or maybe there's like a flat percentage for up to, you know,
a quarter million from a quarter million to 500.
and it's just like, here's what you pay.
You pay 10 grand.
You pay 10 grand. You pay one agent.
You and me?
Who works for you.
You and me, baby?
Yeah, something.
That's what you should use Redfin.
Well, if it's with the DOJ, it sounds like-
I use Redfin.
I've used Redfin twice and I love it.
Highest rating, Redfin is amazing.
If you want to save a little money and get better service,
here's your advertisement.
I've used it.
J-Cal says you should use it.
It's cheaper, better, and faster.
The end.
Thank you.
By the way, Jason, do you know how many
Grandma stopped me on the street after I've been on your show and so I saw you on Jason's
podcast. Yeah. We got Big Grandma. Your demo was broader than I thought. That's all I'm saying.
You didn't see that coming. Did not see that coming.
We'll see you next time. Bye bye, everybody.
Hey, everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS Syndicate. If you're a founder of
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