E1: US Response to COVID-19 & Impact on Startups, Venture Capital & Public Markets with David Friedberg

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome to another edition of the All-In Podcast. We'll call this episode one. We did a test and over 100,000 of you listened to the test podcast that we did.
In a few days. In a few days. Chamath is already getting addicted to his statistics, a new podcaster.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:18)
I need to focus on something going up.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:20)
Yes, exactly.
Our portfolios are getting crushed, but the podcast numbers are going up. They're a meaningless victory to be sure. But we got a lot of positive feedback and we're all sitting at home in quarantine. As you can see, I set up my home office. I got a microphone here and Chamath is in his bedroom and David Friedberg, I think is in his wine room or something in his compound. Are you in the safe room? Is this the safe room? David Friedberg is with us again. He got a lot of great feedback and he's now on the Twitter. You can follow him at Friedberg. I don't know if he shut his Twitter down because he was getting harassed on Twitter. Welcome to the club.
Are you in your safe room, David?

**David Friedberg** (0:59)
Yeah, it's brutal on Twitter. I don't know how you guys do it. You put something up and everyone, you know, just goes after you. It's harsh out there in the Twitter world, in the Twitterverse.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:09)
Basically you have to mute and block anybody who is under a hundred followers and being an absolute jerk because it's likely a Russian bot, you know, being run out of like Manila or something like that. They've got all these like sophisticated rings of people that they just hire for 10 bucks a day to harass people online. I mean, I know it sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, but it's actually true. This large groups of bots who go after people and try to create chaos. But hey, we're sitting here. It's today's Wednesday. We did our podcast on Saturday.
The stock market has gone down another 20% since then, I guess, or so.
We are looking like this is going to be a 50% correction or something like that. We're now well past a 30 plus percent.
On the good news front, it looks like testing is actually occurring and that work on treatments is occurring. I don't know if we can call them cures, but treatments is occurring and quarantine in place is being taken seriously. I guess the biggest thing is that Trump has basically admitted that this is a crisis and he's taking it seriously. Friedberg, what is your assessment of where we are today versus when we taped on Saturday in terms of the resolution to this? Are we overreacting, reacting just enough or not reacting enough?

**David Friedberg** (2:41)
There's three things to consider, the health, the policy and then the markets.
On the health front, it seems like we have done a lot in terms of containment and we're ramping up testing. We are still not doing broad general population testing, which is necessary for us to truly understand the dynamics of this disease and also to understand the contagion of this disease. We need to fix that problem. There's a task force of 100 people out of DC being led by Jared Kushner and a number of people from the tech industry that are working on ramping up testing and doing broader general population testing.
The policy decisions are what get quite scary, and that is all of the containment, shutting down travel, shutting down borders, shutting down bridges and the economic ramifications of doing so are frightening. I think I mentioned the other day that 48% roughly of the US workforce works in small businesses, another roughly 10% work in travel, another roughly 12% work in energy. You kind of add this up and you can quickly see why Steve Muchen, the US Treasury Secretary was saying that we should expect 20% to 30% of the workforce to be unemployed by this summer if we keep this up. That is a frustrating and staggering statistic and something worth debating whether that policy decision is appropriate relative to the potential life and health and health system impact, which one is worse. Then the market question is just, I don't know how to address that, but things go from bad to worse, right?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (4:17)
I have eight things that I want to cover.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:20)
One thing at a time here.

**David Friedberg** (4:21)
I want to say one more thing and it is I think the most important data to come out today. The markets are fucked. We're all in trouble, yada yada. The most scary thing is Ford and GM just shut down their plants today. The reason they shut down their plants is because out of fear of coronavirus and auto workers and the UAW basically forced them to do it.