E0: COVID-19 Political, Economic & Social Ramifications featuring David Friedberg

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the first episode of the All-In Podcast with Chamath, Palihapitiya, and Jason Calacanis. That cackling voice.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:10)
Where we're trying to save ourselves from the end of the world.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:15)
It is literally, we thought we'd start this podcast on April 1st, Chamath. And everybody thinks it's a big joke, that it's an April Fool's joke. It just happened to be the time. It was perfect. We had full intentionality of starting the podcast, but we're sitting here at home, quarantined.
How many days have you been home? When's the last time you went out of your house?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:36)
Well, I've gone out, but I've basically been self-quarantined for two weeks now.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:44)
I haven't left my house since Tuesday night. And I think I've been taking a shower in about 72 hours.
Chamath and I decided since we're going to talk about, obviously, the coronavirus today, we'd bring in the smartest person we know in terms of the biotech and health space, and that's David Friedberg, who's a close friend of ours. He founded or co-founded climate.com Metro Mile, and he now is the CEO of The Production Board, which is a biotech incubator accelerator startup. How do you refer to it, David?

**David Friedberg** (1:28)
Yeah, we're a foundry in broadly life sciences, food, agriculture, and human health.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:34)
Got it.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:34)
Jay, actually, before we do that, can we actually give a shout out to our sponsor, which is all the incredibly shitty enterprise software that nobody fucking uses, and there are no coupon codes because there are no ads. There are no ads in this podcast, nor will there ever be. Back to you, Jason.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:54)
Which I really appreciate. It's like, this deal gets better and better. Chamath's like, hey, Jason, I want to do a podcast.
I want you to put all your resources into it and all your time into it. And here's the best part.
The entire business model is we lose money. Thanks, Chamath. It's fantastic.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:10)
It's like a microcosm of the venture industry all in one podcast.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:15)
So let's just talk about and start off here with, we're sitting here and today is the 14th of March. This entire coronavirus epidemic and essentially the chaos really has only started here in the United States in the last 72 hours or so that people are actually taking it seriously.
They cancel the NBA and I think that is the definitive tipping point of when it hit public consciousness that this is no joke and it was really kind of dramatic and obviously you're a part owner of the Warriors and so I think it's a good thing for you to discuss. When you saw that announcement that at tip-off they found out that one of the players tested positive and they canceled the game and sent people home, what were you thinking? Obviously there's a financial aspect to this, but the more important one is the unprecedented nature of this.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:17)
I actually had two thoughts. The first thought was it's incredible that all these organizations, other than the federal bureaucracy, were taking such swift measures on their own.
I mean, typically these things, a reaction to a pandemic should be institutional and very much top-down. I think even every libertarian amongst us would sort of say, I mean, this is the kind of thing where the president and the government needs to step in first and kind of like dictate how things should happen. Instead, it was local governments, state governments, sports leagues, companies, all making decisions in the absence, in a vacuum of leadership. That's the first thing I thought. And then the second thing I thought was these actions are too unpredictable and they're too all over the place. So you have some states and some organizations acting in a really decisive, aggressive way and others not. And so in the absence of highly coordinated action, this kind of half in half out approach is probably as bad as the no strategy, sort of clapping as a strategy in Blackjack.
And so those are my two thoughts. I don't know, David, how did you react?

**David Friedberg** (4:38)
I mean, it seems like it's a bad time. You know, we're kind of a little bit behind the times in terms of the behavior on on reducing social isolation. There were a lot of people calling for it weeks ago that the US is behind the eight ball on this thing. We really missed it, Mr. Mark.
But obviously, as soon as a person shows up and tests positive at a game, it's like, and you know, your objective is don't put anyone at risk. You got to shut it all down.