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SPEAKER_02: So just so anybody knows, this is an interview with my friend Glenn who runs Redfin. Good to see you, Jason.

SPEAKER_06: Good to see you. It's going to be a kind of different interview. We're starting from wherever and catching up with each other. I'm in Florence. He's in, you want to disclose where you are?

Chamath Palihapitiya: I'm in Seattle. You're in Seattle. You're in Seattle. And we've been friends for over a decade, I guess. We met at Sequoia back in the day, I guess. And you were-

SPEAKER_16: Not only that, I was at war. I just want all of your investors to know that I got into a funk with my investors. And I talked to you because I thought about quitting, or I didn't know what to do, and I was being totally dysfunctional. And you told me just to grow up and to grow a pair, which I did. And it was some of the best advice I've ever gotten. So whenever you asked me to be on this podcast, of course, I have to say yes. And it's also just a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_19: Well, you know, it's like that scene in The Godfather. He comes, Godfather, Godfather, I need this pod. And he goes, you can start by acting like a man.

SPEAKER_26: I think I'm Fredo. I think I'm Fredo in that. Slap me around a little, Jason.

SPEAKER_19: Basically, I gave you the tough love. But you know, to your question, I always tell people on this podcast, if you see me on the street, even if I'm with my family, it's no big deal, just say, hey, J-Cow, I love the pod. If you want to tell me an episode or a guest you love, oh, I love Sok, oh, I love Glenn. I love this person in the pod. That even makes me feel better because I know you're a legit fan. The only thing I do ask is don't be weird. Like somebody sat next to me in a restaurant and at the end of dinner, and I had a whole conversation with my fiance, now wife at the time, for an hour and a half in New York.

SPEAKER_28: And the person was sitting right next to me. At the end, he just leaned over. He goes, I love the podcast. I love the show. And I was just like, oh, man.

SPEAKER_29: I just overheard the whole conversation. That's a weird time. And then you're rewinding. Say, what did I just say?

SPEAKER_02: Well, that's exactly what I was thinking. And then second, the other one that's happened multiple times that you, what would be the

SPEAKER_19: most inappropriate time to pitch an angel investor?

SPEAKER_32: I think that's real. I'm drinking your espresso.

SPEAKER_33: When you're losing it with your kids.

SPEAKER_35: That would be terrible. Yeah. If I'm like trying to get the kids to behave, that would be actually worse than what I was

SPEAKER_19: thinking. And that's my time to, you know, to just be there with one, reflect and get one thing done.

David Friedberg: Release. Release. Yeah. It's just about the release. And I, you know, and you're, I already have a hard enough time in a public bathroom, get things started. You know, every man has a little bit of that. You're trying to get the flow going. Jason, what?

SPEAKER_39: I thought you were the one person confident enough to always let it go. All right.

SPEAKER_19: Usually I would, but it kind of breaks your flow when somebody starts pitching you and you're starting to just get going. It kind of puts a, it breaks the flow. I'll leave it at that. I don't want you to.

SPEAKER_16: You, you lead an entirely different life than I do. I have never once been recognized anywhere.

SPEAKER_42: Maybe being on this podcast will change it. It will start every once in a while. My twin brother is recognized where people say, you're going to walk right by me and he'll say, I'm not Glenn.

SPEAKER_16: And they'll say, come on. But he is, he's my twin. We just look the same.

SPEAKER_45: He's your twin. Yeah. Listen, there was a lot of reasons why I wanted to have you on the pod. One to catch up like this. It's always fun. Yeah.

SPEAKER_19: But number two, so much is going on in real estate. And I was so confused by trying to understand the market. I was like, who do I know who's really smart? And I thought, Glenn, Redfin.

SPEAKER_06: Now you didn't try to be smart. You didn't come to real estate for background here. Like you didn't come to Redfin and become, you know, and run Redfin as CEO from 2005 to the present because you loved real estate. You were going to be a doctor and you're going to go to med school, all this kind of stuff. Yeah. But you then figured out you loved it and you've done a lot of innovative stuff there. Let's start with, and we'll get into Redfin and all the innovations that have gone on in the space. Yeah. I wanted to start with, what is your take on what is going on with the housing crisis slash

SPEAKER_55: bubble slash appreciation? Because I've never seen anything like this. And I lived through the last bubble, the 2008 time when I bought my first house. So just generally, people are watching housing prices go through the roof, people migrating. I don't get the sense that a lot of the people in our circles are selling their original home. They're just buying a second home. And then they're sitting on the first one because it's appreciating faster than the stock market, which then is screwing with supply. Tell us everything from where you sit because you have the data.

SPEAKER_59: Oh, wow. Well, I don't know where to start. I think there are two trends. And one is that chickens are coming home to roost. And the other is that the dam is broken.

SPEAKER_42: And you've definitely spoken to that second trend, which is that all this money built up in San Francisco and New York, everyone in Pittsburgh and Tulsa, Oklahoma, were talking about how they could create Silicon Valley wherever they were. And we never thought they would, but now they finally have. And so I think it's actually good for the country that technology expertise, professional

SPEAKER_16: classes can live anywhere, but it does create these social disruptions. People moving to Nashville are paying nearly twice as much as the folks who live there for

SPEAKER_42: a home. They come in with monopoly money from New York or California, and they send home prices shooting through the roof. And the reason that those prices have continued to go up is that in San Francisco, when prices went up, it just reached a natural limit. But for someone moving to Boise, Idaho, you could pay three times as much, and you're still spending less than a million dollars for a house.

SPEAKER_62: So it feels so cheap. It's just that the people who started in Boise are suddenly priced out of the market. So this idea that you could have a working class job and be able to afford the American dream was still possible in the middle of the country. And that has changed not over a 20-year period, but over a 20-week period.

SPEAKER_63: And it's just a massive disruption. And so that's the first thing, is just, we are now all free to move about the country.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: So we have the pandemic. People realize they can work from anywhere. Big companies paying big salaries to tech workers, information workers, say, we want you to come back. And then they realize, oh, wait a second. We are in a prison dilemma here. You know, Netflix and Apple said, you have to come back. It's not negotiable. And then the employees were like, yeah, you know, we're not coming back. I'm going to go work at Google or Twitter or Square because Jack believes we can work from anywhere. And they were like, okay, you can work from anywhere because we're not losing our top talent. That's kind of what happened, which means now people can live anywhere and do that arbitrage. A $3 million condo or a house in San Francisco, a $3 or $4 million brownstone in Brooklyn now

SPEAKER_55: gives way to a million-dollar place in Austin. And you feel like, wow, I'm a genius. And the people in Austin are like, you paid a million dollars for that. I paid $600,000 two years ago. You're an idiot.

SPEAKER_69: That's exactly it. And it's a ratchet. I've seen this over many, many moves.

SPEAKER_42: The people who suddenly get a three-car garage and have a bedroom for each kid never go back. Even if you're a zillionaire, you get addicted to the cost of living in Texas or Florida. So I think in Florida, for every one person who's leaving the state, seven are coming in. In Texas, it's five. And in general, for low-tax states, for every person leaving, four are coming in. So there's just this great migration. And it's also causing a political upheaval because San Francisco, New York, Seattle have

SPEAKER_72: all gone through protests, Black Lives Matter, a bunch of issues that have really roiled the

SPEAKER_42: social fabric. And they want to invest in that. And some of them will call you as an entrepreneur or a CEO and say that we want you to support higher taxes, which is something that I've always been supportive of.

SPEAKER_63: But now, when they ask, are you going to leave Seattle, they act as if my personal decision matters when, really, we don't have one office in Seattle anymore. We have 1,000 offices, each employee deciding, do I want to live in Florida or North Dakota or Texas or Utah? And they are migrating to the lowest-cost place to do that.

SPEAKER_42: So I think it's actually destroyed some of the leverage that big cities have had to raise revenues and solve some social problems. And that's just going to put more pressure on the federal government. So there's all sorts of fun implications about it.

SPEAKER_73: But I think the second challenge is that we just had so long to build housing. Like for 10 years, I've been saying we just need to build more housing. And we've argued about whether it should be affordable housing or housing for rich people. It doesn't really matter because when you increase the supply, you're going to lower

SPEAKER_72: prices overall. And whether it's a left-wing person or a right-wing person, we have not been able to get behind that, especially on the left. You have a lot of nimbyism where people worry about the character of neighborhoods. They worry about zoning. They don't want density. Mayors who used to be proud to go to a ribbon-cutting ceremony with a developer are just absolutely averse to that.

SPEAKER_63: They wouldn't be caught dead with a developer because people are so opposed to growth. And so that's one of the reasons that I ended up leaving San Francisco is just because the city just stuck its head in the sand. You know, I lived in the Mission for a long time, which was a very diverse area. It became an absolute tech zone by the time I left. And it was because we couldn't build any more housing. And so that has happened from San Francisco up to Seattle, down to Denver, out to Portland,

SPEAKER_42: over to Boise. The money just arcs from one place to another. And in every place, it just wrecks home prices.

SPEAKER_63: And so I think that's the other challenge is we just have to figure out how we can get very aggressive about building houses because this is still an incredible land.

SPEAKER_73: There is so much space in America compared to where you are or anywhere else in the world. And we just have more room to grow. We worry about inflation.

SPEAKER_63: But I think one check on that is this idea that we can just spread out in a way that no other country can. And so I think that's happening, but I still wish we could invest more in housing. I think it would help the working class. I think it would help the whole country.

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SPEAKER_06: I want to unpack one piece of that because, and this is one of the reasons I wanted to have you on this show, is that you're not afraid to talk about the second order and third order effects of this. You have a nimbyism here in San Francisco, in the Bay Area, that is very peculiar in that you have a very liberal city that wants to solve social problems, is very woke, is very progressive. I mean, the most progressive in the country, let's face it. There's no place more progressive, I think, on planet Earth than San Francisco.

SPEAKER_55: But at the same time, they refuse to build more housing. And you said all units help the housing because if you add supply, then the price is the law of supply and demand. Yes. It's just a law of supply and demand. But we in San Francisco, in the Bay Area, have been so nimby that they are fighting and they have now tainted the concept, like you're saying, of developers building luxury units because in their mind, luxury units signal something bad. But if you had luxury units going up, then affluent Facebookers or Googlers would not be taking a three-bedroom with one bathroom in the mission. Yeah, they wouldn't be gentrifying another neighborhood or another house.

SPEAKER_86: They would take the one that's already done.

SPEAKER_88: Yeah, the economics on this are universal. You can't find an economist who would argue against building more housing as a way to limit

SPEAKER_42: home price appreciation. I would prefer affordable housing too, but you are still making housing more affordable by building anywhere. And I think some of the issues are about what type of housing we build, but some of them are much more selfish than that. People are worried about shade. They're worried about traffic. In my own neighborhood, I was at a block party where my neighbor was trying to get me to sign a petition to block a condo development that is now about 40 yards from where I'm sitting. And my wife was like, just sign it. It's so important to her. She made the macaroni and cheese.

SPEAKER_16: She walks our dog for us. We should really do this. And I just said no, because that's the whole problem is in single-family neighborhoods where

SPEAKER_42: you have just a lot of houses, we need a little more density. We're close to transit. It's a perfect place to build a condo building, and it's made the neighborhood better. It's made the neighborhood more diverse, and it's limited home price appreciation. So, you know, I guess I wish my house were a little more expensive, but I don't wish that housing in general were more expensive. And that's the other problem is that some of these groups almost function like cartels. So you have these neighborhood associations that try to block construction because people want to maintain the value of their own home. And we're not thinking about that as a cartel, where whenever you systematically organize to limit supply so that you have a monopoly on a good and increase the price of that good, you are damaging society to your own benefit and acting in anti-competitive ways. But that's exactly what it is.

SPEAKER_73: So I am tired of seeing the Black Lives Matter sign and the Not My Backyard sign in the same freaking lawn. It is such a contradiction in terms.

David Friedberg: It's basically the same thing. And they've really dressed it up by saying, well, we want to protect the shade. We don't want this park to get shade for 45 extra minutes. Or, oh my God, the traffic is going to be unbearable.

SPEAKER_06: But what they're really saying is, we don't want a certain group of people to live here. A person who could afford a $1,200 studio, a $1,500 one bedroom is different than the

SPEAKER_95: people who can afford a $7,000 a month mortgage on a $1.5 million house. I kind of think that's what's really going on.

SPEAKER_59: I think that's part of it. And I think people just generally prefer space.

SPEAKER_16: And part of what we need to do is just make room for everyone. So there will be a little more traffic. But density is also good. Yeah. You know, you get another coffee shop.

SPEAKER_99: Let me ask you a question. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: With the density, I think what people don't realize, and having grown up in New York, when things got more dense, the single family homes skyrocketed in value. Yeah. Skyrocketed. Yeah. So if you built an apartment, and if you made a six-story, you know, whatever, 20-unit apartment complex, in an area where there were a bunch of single-family homes, and a bunch of people lived in that, not only would those apartments become more

SPEAKER_19: valuable because you had a good school district, et cetera, all the houses around it would become more coveted. Everybody wanted to be in that area. Yeah. Yeah. In a way, they're working against their best interest.

SPEAKER_107: Yes. Yes. So dumb. Yes. These people are dumb. It's unbelievable.

SPEAKER_59: Yeah. Well, I don't know if they're dumb.

SPEAKER_16: I just think that they haven't squared their broad political aspirations with what they're doing at the neighborhood level to welcome different types of housing and different types of people. And so we're getting better at it. We're getting better at it.

SPEAKER_06: What's the best argument to these, or is there a great argument to these NIMBY people to get them, especially these crazy liberal ones, to get them to just appreciate more development in San Francisco?

David Friedberg: Is there any argument in your mind that you've ever seen permeate their NIMBYism?

SPEAKER_15: I have seen it.

SPEAKER_16: I've seen a lot of people switch on this issue, and I think the best argument is that all of

SPEAKER_42: your progressive ideals don't square with your anti-development stance because everyone has a narrative that I am basically a good person. And when you appeal to their goodness, and when you talk about how just one part of their ideology doesn't square with all of their other aspirations, I think people can change. And then maybe the other argument is that people have Manhattan as the model of what they don't want, and your hometown of Brooklyn is probably a better model.

SPEAKER_119: You don't have to go up 40 stories right next to my house. That's more than 45 minutes of shade.

SPEAKER_120: That's almost all day, but what about five? What about seven? What about four?

SPEAKER_122: That's progress.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, especially when it's a single family home and it becomes a five story, you could have 10 units in the place that was one unit. One home could be 10.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah.

SPEAKER_125: Yeah.

SPEAKER_127: And so there are cities that have handled it well, and there are cities that haven't.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. You don't want to. So you basically have to sell them. Listen, it doesn't have to be Hong Kong and Manhattan. It could be Brooklyn and Austin or something like that.

SPEAKER_06: Is there a city that is doing this well that NIMBY people could look at and say, wow, that's another city where like Brooklyn's one. What's another or let me phrase this question differently. What's a city that is the most pro development in the country or what three cities are the most pro development and have are booming because of it? Who's winning? Well, let me give you two examples.

SPEAKER_135: Yeah. So Nashville would be an example of a city that is booming because it is so pro construction.

SPEAKER_42: People are voting with their feet. If you're not going to build housing in San Francisco, I'm going to move to Nashville. And I actually am a progressive person for the most part, but this would be one AB experiment where the conservative side has won. Almost everyone is moving to more conservative parts of the country, even if they personally are liberal, because we're building more housing there. The cost of living is lower there and the taxes are lower there. And so some of that is a race to the bottom that they want good schools and good roads without paying the taxes, or they want to start a company in California and then sell the stock for it in Texas, which you can take issue with. But some of it is about just the fact that I can find a home to buy at almost any price

SPEAKER_62: because in Nashville, they are building them hand over fist.

SPEAKER_44: And so, yeah, what's the next city after Nashville, you think? Atlanta would be another example.

SPEAKER_33: Let me give you another tale of two cities is just Seattle and Vancouver.

SPEAKER_42: So Vancouver is about three hours north of here. It's in Canada. It does actually look a little bit like Hong Kong. It's been very welcoming to immigrants. And that city has been booming when there was this huge real estate crisis in the United States. Canada did not have that problem. There were plenty of people who wanted to move there. Prices kept going up, but at a reasonable rate because they have built so much density. And so if you were to compare Seattle to Vancouver, two cities that used to be very similar, there is much more density in Vancouver.

SPEAKER_146: And it's an incredible, beautiful, walkable city. If you're an urbanist, you love Vancouver. It's wonderful.

SPEAKER_06: I actually went there and I was just like transfixed with how vibrant it was. I was like, this reminds me of Sydney, another high functioning city. I love city by the bay. And that is very interesting. The two cities, both of them very liberal. And then during the Trump era, correct me if I'm wrong, those four years, United States was blocked off for Indian or Asian immigrants in large part. And Canada, I had a person very high up in the government say to me, J. Cal, you have people you want for your startups. We'll take them here. We'll give you tax credits. And the cost of living will be lower. We will get them a visa in under 10 days. Just email us. And I was like, I've never gotten that phone call from Trump's office or from Biden's office

SPEAKER_19: or Obama's previously. I was like, Canada is aggressive.

SPEAKER_55: It is a competition right now for talented people. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_42: Well, we've had people get stuck on the wrong side of the border where you employ a Chinese national who goes back home and then can't get into the United States to do his job at Redfin. And so we ended up opening an office in Vancouver for that purpose. And I know so many other tech companies that are doing that.

SPEAKER_16: So I guess there's something for everyone of every political stripe in this so far. There's some liberal policies that work. There's conservative policies that work. I hope you can be ecumenical about it and really pick the best ideas regardless of your politics.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Well, I mean, it is one of the great things about, you know, it's not this isn't a this isn't this is a podcast about innovation and startups.

SPEAKER_06: And I think what you're saying is the 50 states in the United States, as well as some, you

SPEAKER_55: know, next to us, like Canada and regions are actually like startups now. And they're innovating and they have an offering for consumers. And those consumers are businesses and citizens. And that means two types of real estate. I know you don't work in the commercial real estate space, but we have something like 14 Salesforce towers of open office space in San Francisco.

SPEAKER_06: What is going to happen in commercial real estate in a city like San Francisco, given that you had massive building of commercial real estate in San Francisco, and at the same time, work from home appeals, most of the companies who were there, and nobody, including yourself or myself, wants to live in San Francisco, I lived in San Francisco, I left, it wasn't safe for my family, I wanted more space, and I didn't appreciate that, you know, the way it was being run.

SPEAKER_154: And so what happens to all that commercial real estate if you had to speculate?

SPEAKER_156: Well, first of all, I think San Francisco is mostly a safe city, and it's a beautiful city.

SPEAKER_42: So I left for my own reasons, but it's not a rejection of the city, I do wish that they had been more aggressive about solving the housing crisis by building more housing. But massive deflation is what's ahead for commercial real estate, because even if you convert some of those buildings into condos, the rationale for living downtown was to be next to Twitter, or Salesforce, or whatever your employer was. And now when people are working remotely, I don't think they necessarily want to live downtown as much. So just looking at the housing market, the housing market for single family homes, as you had already observed, has been red hot. The housing market for condos has been less so. Some of that's about sharing a air conditioning or heating system with other people, but mostly it's just about the fact that people have wanted more space. So I don't think that converting commercial real estate into residential is going to solve many problems. I actually, my kid is on a soccer team with another kid whose parent holds the, owns the building that Redfin leases. And he was telling me that I know y'all are coming back commercials going to be back bigger than ever.

SPEAKER_160: That's just watching the game.

SPEAKER_159: I don't think so. Yeah. Okay, fella. Yeah. That's optimistic.

SPEAKER_161: I mean, being delusional is part of being a great entrepreneur, isn't it? Like you have to be a little delusional, but that's straight up delusional.

David Friedberg: The idea that tech companies are going to be able to take people who have left and relocated, like you said, to a bigger space and who are working from home, I mean, that's just farcical

SPEAKER_166: that that'll happen in our lifetimes, I think.

SPEAKER_42: Yeah. I mean, almost every CEO right now is comparing the length of their leases because we're all trying to figure out when we can get out.

SPEAKER_167: Yeah.

SPEAKER_42: Oh, you just signed a 10-year lease in 2019. Oh, man. What are you going to do about that?

SPEAKER_119: Then somebody else would say, I signed a 10-year lease in 2011. And so it came to do it the perfect time. And if you look at the companies.

SPEAKER_169: I mean, people are getting the feedback, yeah.

SPEAKER_72: Yeah, yeah. Well, we sort of went through peak office in 2020 or 2021, early 2021, where Facebook and

SPEAKER_42: Google weren't just doing the sushi chef and the little ball thing that you jump into. But they were also thinking about building housing for their employees next to the campus and

SPEAKER_72: Apple had broke ground and Salesforce had this big tower and it was just peak office. And now the companies that were most militant about asking people to come back are the ones

SPEAKER_63: that had the biggest edifice complex, the ones who had either built their own space or signed a very long lease or did something that was sort of an ego trip kind of landscape architecture

SPEAKER_42: and crazy building architecture. And it just seems a little silly now.

SPEAKER_174: And so it turns out people work well remotely as you've probably already established on this show.

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SPEAKER_182: Once again, c-a-l-m.com slash tw-i-s-t.

SPEAKER_183: I have a I have a friend whose theory is he's very he's one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever and I'll leave it at that. And his theory was Taj Mahal syndrome.

SPEAKER_06: When people start to build their like Taj Mahal syndrome at their company, like they want to build that Frank Geary building. No offense, Frank Geary. Yeah. IM pay for CAA, Frank Geary for Zuck, whatever the Apple headquarters, whoever designed that. Yeah. When you're when you get into that mode, it's so encompassing to build your, you know,

SPEAKER_55: structure. It's like your pyramid. It's like your Taj Mahal that what about the business that got you there?

David Friedberg: Like, are you putting the same amount of consideration into the next iPhone?

SPEAKER_55: Is Instagram and Facebook's next update as considered in the ad network and privacy settings as considered as the Frank Geary building? I'm guessing Zuck and, you know, Tim Cook put as much time into those buildings during that six month period or year when they were being built as any other thing on their plate. And that's, yeah, it's a waste. But okay, what about converting? Because you said you think that's too hard because a centralized system. But if this, you know, work from home then continues, then you will convert,

SPEAKER_42: but it'll still be deflationary. You're just never going to get the money back that you put into that space because being downtown, it just isn't as good of a location as it once was. So I believe in cities long term. I am an urbanist. I love density. I love walking to restaurants and coffee shops and grocery stores and all the rest. But the actual downtown business space where all the lawyers and bankers were, I just think that that has been overvalued. And now we're going to see the air come out of that balloon almost entirely.

SPEAKER_62: And there's just nothing that's going to make it stop.

SPEAKER_44: Now, were you 100% work from the office before the pandemic?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Were you 80%? Where were you? And then how do you think about it as the CEO of a, do you said a thousand person company?

SPEAKER_189: How do you think about it?

SPEAKER_190: Because you're listening now. Yeah. No, I know.

SPEAKER_191: I hope they are. Mostly we worked from an office.

SPEAKER_42: And I've had time to reflect on how much of that was my own ego. The feeling that I got when I walked into the office and seeing everyone working hard and feeling the buzz of the culture. How important was that to me? One of the reasons that I got involved with startups almost right out of college was because there was this huge hole in my life. I missed the dorm. I missed the sense of purpose that I had as an idealistic college student. And I found it again in working 24-7 with other entrepreneurial people, first to build plum tree software and later to build Redfin. And so I really wanted us to all be together. And I still think that there is a living death doing one Zoom after another. I sometimes feel like a zombie. But I also know that cracking the whip and just making people come in when they have to commute 70 or 80 minutes to get to the office, it ain't worth it. And what you have because of a housing crisis, every employer is going through this, is people say, especially when they work at a housing company like Redfin, I'm a software engineer, I'm a highly paid professional, and yet I still don't make enough to buy a house in one of the core parts of the city. And when they say what I'm going to do is work remotely, you don't have to give me a raise. I'm moving to Nebraska and suddenly my wife can actually stop working or my husband can stop working because one income is going to be enough to pay the bills on a $250,000 house.

SPEAKER_63: All you feel is relief. You don't try to tackle them and say you've got to stay in Seattle. You feel relieved.

SPEAKER_42: And our challenge had been that we have a San Francisco office and a Seattle office. And we always wanted people to move to the San Francisco office because the home office with Seattle was easier for us to recruit there. And so some people would want to do that, especially younger folks. San Francisco is so beautiful. But then when they went down there, even though we were offering to pay them 50 or 60% more, they'd say it's not worth it because they tore homes over the weekend and say, I'm not going to move into that shoe box. So we have had, you know, a slow migration and America had had a slow migration

SPEAKER_62: out of these major urban centers for a long time. The pandemic was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

SPEAKER_120: People have been leaving California for five years before.

SPEAKER_55: It feels to me like the pandemic is a massive accelerant because we were already having this conversation and employees come to us and say, Hey, can I stay where I am? I'm like a top tier employee. I might leave if you don't. And it was like this negotiation. Now it's like the balance of power. I don't know if you saw Apple folded, Netflix folded. Everybody's basically folded and just said, you know what? Okay, do what you want. As long as the ball keeps moving forward. What have we lost? Because some of the things in coming to an office, you know, the esprit de corps and the energy was palatable.

SPEAKER_201: So for everything that is gained, getting rid of the commute, all of that seems amazing. And I think it's probably, I don't know what percentage great and upside, but what is lost? And then what percentage is, you know, in this trade-off in your mind? Is it 80% good, 20% downside or all upside? What do you think?

SPEAKER_88: Um, I think it's on balance. Good. It's definitely on balance.

SPEAKER_42: Good for the employee, especially if you have a family. I think it hurts new hires who are just trying to learn the lay of the land, especially if you're younger and you don't already have a network of friends and family in town. There was this time when work, especially at a startup was almost like going to a church that people met their friends that way. They met their spouse that way. They got their sense of purpose in life from that office. And now it's all being mediated through this screen. And that is definitely a downgrade. Yeah.

SPEAKER_62: Yeah. So I think in general, work has become less important for Americans. And what's been hard for me is that I was never the smartest entrepreneur in the world. I was just the hardest working one. So somebody else would figure something out in 30 minutes, but I was willing to be there all night to grind it out. And if you develop that blue collar ethic generally across the company that we're just going to have to work a little harder to deliver more value for our customers, it doesn't quite square with the labor shortage that we now have, the remote work liberation that we've all gone through.

SPEAKER_42: I have lunch with my kids and I'm still a driven nut job. I work all the time. You were asking me about my vacation. Yeah. And it's just this anxiety that I'm not a good enough CEO to slack off. So I need to figure that out. And I think Silicon Valley to figure that same thing out.

SPEAKER_55: Yeah. But so tell me where you are in this, because there is also you and I are both Gen Xers. Yeah. We were raised with like, well, maybe we could take over the system and we could be in charge and we could start our own thing. Yeah. And now this seems like this is other generation is like, why would you want to give that up when you could become a freelancer and take six months off and YOLO and go to Coachella both weekends? And, and we're trying to manage a workforce that now is disconnected from what we wanted from our lives. They want something different. It seems work-life balance, I guess is how most people say it. So did you think it's generational? Cause that's kind of my thought here is like, when I hear work-life balance, I'm like, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_210: I don't understand what you're talking about. I love what I do. Why would I want balance? I love this.

SPEAKER_212: Well, have you ever read? I know this is a bizarre reference, but there was this, I think 10th or 11th century

SPEAKER_42: monk, the venerable beat. And I remember reading him in college. He said that the monks now and you know, 1050 are so much worse than the monks in 1030.

SPEAKER_16: And I was like, oh, please, all of you were very religious and very devoted. And so I try to avoid the crankiness that one generation is lazy and another generation

SPEAKER_42: isn't. But I do think that, I do think that for me, um, I've needed a calling that in between plum tree and redfin plum tree went public. I made plenty of money. I could have gone anywhere in the world and learn kite surfing or sat on a beach in Costa Rica. And what I really wanted to do was to make a difference in my life. You referenced at the beginning of the show that I had this crisis of conscience where I almost became a doctor, which would have been the worst thing that could have ever happened to me because it is so rules driven and narrow in some ways and so good in other ways. But I just had to be free and creative, but I still had to figure out a way that I could make a difference. And I'm not sure that speaks to everyone in the same way. Um, you know, some people feel that in joining a company and signing up for a mission, they're just giving up their freedom. And so there's always going to be that group of folks who want more degrees of freedom, who want less meaning out of their work and just more time to spend on their hobbies. And then I think they're going to be those special little freaks who I still want to gather around me who really want to change the world and are willing to put their shoulders to the

SPEAKER_73: wheel and work together with other folks to do that. And, and I don't know how else to change the world. I don't think you can just do it by yourself four hours a day, contracting and dialing in.

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SPEAKER_55: this amazing episode. I am so in agreement with you. And I think it's not, you can't paint with a wide brush because there are millennials that I invest in constantly and Gen Z people who are exactly like us. They have a sense of purpose. They're starting a company, but they're self-selecting

SPEAKER_06: into the entrepreneurial class. And then there's a group of people who, for whatever reason, I think also their debt and the disillusionment from the American dream is part of this. And since we're going there and talking big picture in this conversation, which I love, um, you know, I think that maybe what happened to them in college, getting $200,000 into debt or a hundred thousand and not being able to afford a home because of the centralization of cities, the lack of development, we kind of said to them like, you're screwed. We've pulled up the ladder behind you. Education for us was basically free. I mean, Fordham when I went was nine, 10 and 11,000 a year, I was a commuter. And so total $40,000. My first, I was making 60,000 when I was working and go to school at night for 40,000. Now you graduate with 200,000 in expense, and you still make 40,000 or 50,000 when you graduate. And then they can't buy a home. So

SPEAKER_55: do we blame them for saying, you know what, this is screwed? Why would I participate? I'm opting out.

SPEAKER_33: I think the other cynicism is about capitalism. Yeah. You just hit on it. And some of that is well-founded because sometimes you join a startup and you think we're all in this together and you're

SPEAKER_42: told that you're getting 10,000 options or 20,000 shares and you never ask how many shares are outstanding. And then you realize that the founder owns 90% of the company. And of course I revere founders. I've started a company myself. It's gone public. It was a great experience, but I just

SPEAKER_62: think that we're going to be challenged more and more if we want to subscribe to this rhetoric that we can do this together, that we really invest in the we and give up a little more of the equity

SPEAKER_42: so that we all win in the end. And that has been a challenge for me is that I think there are so many tech startups that expect us to all be in it together, but they never publish the cap table that just shows how asymmetrical it is. And of course the founders should get more than everybody else. It's just the question of how much more. And that is also driving some of the cynicism about this. And

SPEAKER_63: who am I to object to that? I think people are right to be cynical about it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I think you're pointing out like even in our backyard, in our little world, there are things

SPEAKER_06: we can do better to make it more equitable. And I think two things I've seen that are really important is the options window. A lot of people are now saying a five year or a 10 year option window. So if a player leaves the company, you know how painful this was for some people, 30 days to execute your options. Yeah, and you got to write a $40,000 check or a $10,000 check even when you're leaving the company to keep your options. And you're like, most startups fail, I'm not going to do

SPEAKER_232: that. Now people have a 10 year window. They're like, yeah, or just give more options. Just give

SPEAKER_119: more. I mean, I think that's the most basic thing. And this is maybe an experience you can speak from personally. Once you've made a decent amount of money, the difference between 10 million 100 million

SPEAKER_42: and $1 billion is zero. Except if you want to be a senator or the President United States, then why

SPEAKER_55: explain to people why because in people's mind, they think 100 million is 10 times and 100 and 100

SPEAKER_237: million to a billion is 10 times 100. I don't know what going from 100 million to a billion is like, but

SPEAKER_238: not yet. Keep it up. I mean, well, by choice, to some extent. Yeah, the stock is doing well. But

SPEAKER_69: I really believe that every Redfin employee should benefit from that. And I would just say that it's

SPEAKER_119: going to be why I've got cheese on my cheeseburger, man. I've got like, yeah. So look, you can drive a

SPEAKER_62: Ferrari to drop off your kids at elementary school, and they will become insufferable little brats.

SPEAKER_42: Yeah, but what's really, you know, I mean, look, people are just going to get cynical about it and say, I want to make 100 million dollars and then decide. But the stuff that you're going to buy with 10 million dollars, I'm really into cycling, I already have a bicycle that's used in the Tour de France, it was $12,000. And that felt splurgy to me. And I basically buy the same clothes, and

SPEAKER_73: I go to the same places. I think especially if you have a family, it limits just how splurgy you could be on yourself. And then if you're environmentalist, it kind of limits how splurgy you could be on yourself. You know, you want to get a private jet? Okay, but you know, you're going

SPEAKER_248: to have to live with the global warming consequences. I just think you could only go so far before you

David Friedberg: screw up your kids and screw up the planet. You explained it perfectly with the bike metaphor. This is what I tried to explain to somebody recently who was talking about this. And they were trying

Chamath Palihapitiya: to ask me, with FU money, what's the number? And I said, Listen, FU money is 10 million, period. And

SPEAKER_06: let me explain to you why. Once you get to that level, if I'm sitting there, and I have 10 million, and you're sitting there, you have a million, and then, you know, Jeff Bezos is sitting with us, and Glenn is sitting with us, and we're all having, and we go to a restaurant, there's nothing on the

SPEAKER_55: menu that one of us can't afford. Maybe you can get on the wine list and get obnoxious and order a $5,000 bottle of wine. No offense, Chamath, not, I'm not picking you out specifically. But, you know, like, the cheeseburger tastes the same. You did just figure out specifically.

SPEAKER_161: He stuck me with the bill that time. I'm still upset about it. I paid the bill and he ordered like a multi-thousand dollar bottle of wine. I was like, I'm picking up the tab. He goes, okay, I'm ordering the wine. Put it aside. He's one of my great LPs and supporters of all time. It was,

SPEAKER_55: it was a valid use of that. I'm standing by that. But you're right. And what's the difference between

SPEAKER_258: your $12,000 bicycle, the six, and the six, and the $1,200? Let me tell you another story.

SPEAKER_262: It's marginal. It's marginal. Yes. Yes. And it's marginal.

SPEAKER_62: Every year, all the people who helped build Plum Tree or a bunch of them go on a trip together. And because they made some money, and I made some money, we can all rent the same boat. And that is way better.

SPEAKER_42: You are going to be more proud when you're 40 or 50 or 60 of the people that you built up, of the network that you've created, where folks have gone on to run other companies.

SPEAKER_62: Then you will be of like the product that you shipped. And I'm a product person. And I say that

SPEAKER_44: I never thought I'd say that in my 30s. But I want to ask you about Redfin and what's happening with

SPEAKER_06: your change from, okay, we're going to put everything on a map. That was an incredible innovation in the early days. We talked about that on previous episodes. And then you said, hey, what if we employed the real estate agents? Okay, wow, that's really interesting. I am a huge advocate. I sold two. No, I bought two homes. Yes. And had an amazing experience. Thank you. Thank you for your business. Anybody who's not using Redfin for buying, crazy. I tried to sell one. Didn't work out, but it wasn't your fault exactly. It was the first time you were ever working in the high end in the Bay Area. And the market was just very hard. No, it wasn't your fault. It was literally I wanted to sell the price for a certain home, and there were not buyers for it. But I will say, during that time period, I felt a little bit of tension between the other

SPEAKER_55: agents and the Redfin agents. Where are you at with that tension in the industry? Because while all this has been happening, and you were such a pioneer in saying, hey, we're going to hire people, and we're going to give them salaries as opposed to commission only, we're going to give them benefits. And then I see companies coming out now, there's for sale by owner, there's this thing, Rex, there's all these people innovating, there are people like Keith Raboy's company buying companies.

SPEAKER_201: What is the innovation that's happened since the time you decided to bring real estate brokers in

SPEAKER_33: house? Probably since you listed your house, we've invested a lot in the high end. And I think we

SPEAKER_42: tripled our share of high end listings year over year. So that's been a problem that we really needed to solve. And it's just by paying people more money at the high end, giving them more upside. We kind of wanted to run an equitable company, but a million dollar agent is a million dollar agent, and it's really led to better service. And so I think what's going on in the industry kind of gone through two or three phases. The first was getting all the listings on a map. And the second

SPEAKER_63: was actually changing the quality of the service itself. Redfin has been a pioneer there. And now you're just seeing massive vertical integration where you have the website, you have the brokerage, you have the lender, you have the title company, you have the iBuyer, which is where you buy the home lock, stock and barrel. And all of that is converging because it used to be that the lender would pay the broker a little bit of money. And then the broker would pay the title company a little bit of money so that they would send each other customers. And it was just a huge amount of economic waste. And given the fact that there's now 50 or 60 billion dollars pouring into property technology, there's a venture firm that exists just for property technology. The face is massively overfunded. And so you just have lenders trying to add brokerages, you have brokerages trying to buy title companies, you just have this massive consolidation. And the goal is that it shouldn't take six months to move where you got to figure out how do I line up the money to get a mortgage for my old place and a mortgage for my new place when it's really hard to do that? How do I close quickly?

SPEAKER_42: How do I compete like a cash buyer? There should just be much more liquidity in the housing market. It should be easy to move. It should happen in a matter of weeks instead of taking all summer.

SPEAKER_274: And so what's interesting to that, like just making it super simple for the customer to not

SPEAKER_99: have to deal with as many parties. And not have to deal with as many parties,

SPEAKER_72: but also everybody knows what's going on. So some of that's about a fast closing, but it's also about

SPEAKER_42: if we're the ones selling your house, and you're trying to buy another place, you shouldn't have to submit a pre-approval letter and try to pretend that you have the money. You should just get the money. We should give you bridge financing to give you the cash to go into the old place because we know that into the new place because we know the old place is going to

SPEAKER_72: sell that it's going to sell for at least, you know, $800,000 or $1.4 million or $3.8 million or

SPEAKER_42: whatever it is. So I think the consolidation is going to not just lead to more convenience, a faster closing lower costs, it's going to lead to structural change, where the way that people buy

SPEAKER_276: a home is going to be really different.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Is the eventuality that you'll be holding some amount of real estate, and then people will come

SPEAKER_06: to Redfin and say like, I'm moving to Austin from San Francisco, I have a million dollar home, I'm going to have a million dollar, you have a million dollar condo, I'm going to get a million dollar home, you say, okay, we'll buy that off you for a million, we'll represent you in Austin, and instead of 6%, you're going to pay this lower fee. And yeah, we'll just take that house and we'll, we'll take the risk, we'll buy it now price of 950. Well, well, that's what we're doing.

SPEAKER_69: Yeah, we're doing that right now. Opendoor is doing that Zillow is doing that.

SPEAKER_32: Explain how that has changed the industry this we're going to just buy it now.

SPEAKER_279: Well, I mean, I think what's interesting to me is happening. Yeah.

SPEAKER_42: If you were to describe this from an investor's perspective, it used to be that you really only made media sites that nobody wanted to be in the business of employing real estate agents, because that was capital intensive. And then the idea that you would either become a lender and have, you know, all these loans on your books, or become an iBuyer, where you have properties on your books was so capital intensive, it was just unthinkable. And as the amount of money flooding into technology companies has increased, and as the appetite for risk has increased, you have seen businesses that were just unthinkable now become totally possible. And some of it is this arbitrage opportunity or this asymmetry. So consumer credit is actually pretty tight still. Ever since 2008, you know, we heard about strawberry pickers buying houses in the Central Valley, about half of America can't qualify for a loan. But at the same time, a company like Redfin or any other companies in property technology have sovereign states in Singapore, in the Middle East and the Far East, just throwing money at us where you see these convertible notes coming with zero coupons, you're basically borrowing money for free. And so the consumer can't hold two loans at the same time, the old house and the new house, and it's just really hard for them to move. And tech is basically becoming a provider of liquidity, because our access to capital is so much easier. So yeah, we'll buy someone's house and say you go ahead and move. And the money we used to buy that house was almost free. Whereas the money that the consumer would try to get their hands on to move up is very hard to come by for them. And so very easy consumer credit, or very tough consumer

SPEAKER_69: credit right now to hold two mortgages, very easy corporate credit. And that's what's driving

Chamath Palihapitiya: a little bit. You said you kept saying I buyer, what does that mean?

SPEAKER_119: Yeah, it means institutional buyers. So you basically have companies, you sometimes see

SPEAKER_62: these signs when you drive around the United States that say we buy ugly houses on telephone

SPEAKER_284: poles and stuff like that. That is now we buy ugly houses.com tech companies using machine learning

SPEAKER_42: algorithms to price the property without having to walk through it. It turns out I used to be a little bit old school and would hesitate to buy a house where a human being hadn't walked through it. But actually sending the human being through before you make the offer only creates a relationship between the seller where you kind of want to give them a good price because you understand that they're in a jam. The machines have been better at pricing helps you still need to make sure the foundation isn't cracked and that the roof doesn't need to be replaced. Sometimes that machine can't do that, right? You get an inspection, but mostly, um, you know, houses weren't like stocks, you know, stock, you can look it up on Yahoo and you can see the price of every single stock instantly. And with housing, what it would really trade for was always a little bit of mystery. And that mystery has been compressed and it's created a lot of liquidity where we're willing to give you an offer within a few seconds of your submitting a request. Just give us the address. We'll crunch the numbers and, and send you a bid. And so people are doing that because they don't want somebody walking through their house during COVID, but increasingly they're doing it just because they don't want to clean up the house

SPEAKER_119: every day. You have two, five-year-olds. If you were listing your property, trying to get them to clean up their room is impossible. So you get more money. Yeah. Get more money. Yeah. You get more money.

SPEAKER_62: If you list it, um, you get a little more convenience if you just take the, the cash offer.

SPEAKER_16: Um, and just the world is moving toward convenience. Um, not everyone, most people are going to list, but some people are going to do this, this cash off. Okay. So you have this

Chamath Palihapitiya: massive innovation on one side. Now I want to get to the controversial topic, which I leave always

SPEAKER_06: towards the end of the interview. You're not going to hurt my feelings. No, but I, this is my interview

SPEAKER_55: technique. I got, I got all the softballs and then I get into some of the more challenging stuff at the end. Cause I got you warmed up, but I can tell you that cause we're friends. Um, but also, by the way, as a note, isn't it funny that the investment community, like 10 years ago when you were struggling

SPEAKER_210: and it's dogfighting trying to make advertising work, like totally like gave up on your business. And now everybody's throwing money at it just 10 years later. I mean, what do you take from that as an

SPEAKER_16: entrepreneur? You know, I don't know, uh, John Foley very well, and I don't want to pretend that I do, but I did go on a run with him once. He's the founder of Peloton. I think I have his name, right.

SPEAKER_62: And yeah, I told him nobody's ever been passed on more than we have. And he said, that is not true.

SPEAKER_305: I remember he stopped running. Try starting a hardware company.

SPEAKER_119: Selling bikes. Try selling an exercise bike as Facebook, that it's a social network. And yeah,

SPEAKER_42: so many investors were just really wary of going into the real world. The old model was Instagram, 13 employees, billion dollar exit. Everybody would love that, but it's just so hard right now to build an audience. The person who pitched you on an app in Florence, yeah, their challenge isn't, you know, building exercise bikes or hiring real estate agents. Their challenge is that they're going to be giving 40% of their revenue to Facebook every month. And so it's just really hard to build an audience. And I think also entrepreneurs just want to go out

SPEAKER_119: into the real world and make a difference in the real world. Most of the media company plays have been played. So I'm excited about it. I'm excited about it. Well, if you think about it, like what

Chamath Palihapitiya: Elon did with Tesla and SpaceX, and then Joe, you know, at Airbnb, and then Travis at Uber, like,

SPEAKER_06: those companies really were like, we'll go into the real world. And the funniest story ever, like, I'm trying to help Travis raise the first round, the seed round $5 million valuation for Uber. And literally one of the most prominent investors that you and I both know was like, can you get him to not do it as a consumer full stack play? Can you get him to sell enterprise software to taxi companies? Because Jesus, I shouldn't have said that word. But yeah, no, Jesus, Jesus spoke to me at that moment and said, turn the other cheek, J Cal. And I was going

SPEAKER_28: to tell the person, you're a moron. But they were like, so famous as an investor. I couldn't say that to them because I was starting my career. And I didn't want to say you're a moron. So Jesus

SPEAKER_19: whispered to me glad and said, Tell him that's really fascinating. You'll think about it. And I said, that's really fascinating. I'll think about it. And Jesus said, Good job. Now turn the other cheek, walk away and never speak to that person again. And I didn't speak to them again. And I went to

SPEAKER_55: Travis and I said, I said, You know, somebody was talking about doing enterprise software. I'm sure you've considered that. And he stopped me right there. He goes, what that mean? And I told him the story. And he said, what that doesn't understand is that we're getting rid of the taxi companies. They're the problem. They're taking 70 cents of every dollar. And we're going to take 30 cents of every dollar and give 70 cents the drivers and it wound up being 20%, whatever. But he's like, they don't understand. We're taking them out. It's like taking out the middleman. We don't want them in here. Okay, now to the controversial question. You have this massive innovation happening here. And then I see that the DOJ goes after all these MLS services and the National Association of Realtors and says you're a cartel. And that all these MLS systems, which are run locally, which have a grip on the system, I think, and I don't know exactly how it works. But my understanding is MLS systems are local. A bunch of realtors say, hey, if you want to be on this, you have to play by these rules, which we're setting. And then there's a bunch of innovators like yourself or Keith Raboi and what he's doing, or I guess this company wrecks other people out there trying to innovate. And then they say, Oh, well, you can't have access to the MLS. And I saw Zillow. I was doing a search there. And I love your product much more than Zillow period. But putting that aside, I think your interface much more. They had this like little tab that was like other listings and they get wise, the other listings. I don't know if you're doing the same thing. What is going on with the DOJ, the ghettoization of like half the listings and then this cartel going on. And then I saw Biden said, Hey, he, he, in his executive order,

SPEAKER_201: which doesn't really mean anything. It's an executive order. It's just like a, a mandate,

SPEAKER_55: I guess. But he asked to address the persistent and recurrent practices that inhibit competition, including unfair trying practice tying practices or exclusionary practices in the brokerage or listing of real estate. What is going on here? Unpack it for us. I'll do it as fast as I can.

SPEAKER_119: And of course, you'll get you'll get my take on it. And first, I just want to establish my

SPEAKER_42: credentials. Redfin has refunded $1 billion in commissions. We are interested in burning down the whole 6% structure. We have testified before Congress. We've done all sorts of things to favor

SPEAKER_63: the consumer. The whole reason I'm in this isn't just to make a buck. It's to make real estate better for everyone. However, I think there are some parts of that narrative that I would disagree with. I don't think the MLSs are the villain here. They were the villain 10 or 15 years ago. All they do is they collect all the listings from different real estate agents and share them with every broker so that if somebody has a better website than Redfin, they can get access to all the data and beat us at our own game. They can beat Zillow at their own game. And what's happening among some brokers is they're

SPEAKER_42: withholding listings. It's such a hot market right now. They pocket the listings. This is especially prevalent in Austin, Texas and Chicago and the fancy neighborhoods of San Francisco, so that people just can't see all the homes for sale. And that helps them build their own little website. And they've tried to sue to say, we're stopping these monopolists at the MLS. And it's just such a crock of SHIT. It really, really is. It is a fair housing violation. If you ask people who try to make sure that black people and white people and brown people can all see the same homes for sale, they say the number one thing you should do is not pocket listings. And so that is a wolf in sheep's clothing. But there's this other thing that the DOJ is doing. The DOJ hasn't really been involved in that. What the DOJ has been involved with is saying that most people think the buyer's agent is free. You ought to have it really clear to the consumer what the buyer's agent is making. And consumers should be able to choose what price they pay the buyer's agent. And I'm like, yes, I love that. So I think there's one case that is sort of a red herring. And then there's another case that is just an arrow right at the heart of the way the whole system is work. There's no other place in the world where you pay to real estate agents as much as you do in the US. And the DOJ has taken

SPEAKER_44: dead center aim at that. So when I went to look at homes in Austin, because as I told people in the

SPEAKER_06: podcast, I'm considering leaving the Bay Area in the next couple years. And I looked at Florida, Miami, I looked at Austin, I'm considering it. I'm 5050. Right now, it's kind of a coin toss for me and my family. But we're thinking about it. And I was like, what did people pay for that home? I saw a couple of months ago, that's all they're like, we don't know. And I'm like, well, I looked it up on Redfin. I don't see it there. Where is it? And then they would send me homes. I'm like, I can't find it on Redfin. And they're like, Oh, that's a pocket listing. I'm like, Okay, what's going on? Right? I'm just want to see the homes. And I'm trying to understand what they're selling for. What did

David Friedberg: Joe Rogan pay for his house? And they're like, Well, it's a no register state or something or no

SPEAKER_156: disclose. Yeah, there's also two issues here. So Texas is a non disclosure state,

SPEAKER_42: where the county tax records are not disclosed publicly what you paid for a house. And most other states in the country, you can you can see what anybody paid for a house, just by going to the county register and a bunch of websites figured that out. And we all started publishing it. But in Texas, the county doesn't always disclose that information. And then we try to get it from individual real estate agents. So that's one thing, which is just what people paid for houses is hard to get in the state of Texas almost nowhere else. The United States is that the case. And then the second thing, the second thing is that when a listing agent meets you in your living room, it says I want to sell your house instead of putting it on the open market, he'll market it to

SPEAKER_119: only his own clients, which helps him build his own business. And when he's doing that, he's obviously screwing you because you would rather have 10 offers than one offer. Why would he go for that? Well, the argument would be that we're not going to put your listing on the web that we can get a

SPEAKER_42: quick sale. And I would just argue that if you want a quick sale, the best way to do it is to put it on the internet and get as many buyers as possible. Sometimes a real estate agent is just kind of playing his own game where he's trying to build his own business. And so agents have started withholding listings so that you come to them. And the reason they're doing that is because of the rise of Redfin and Zillow and Realtor and Trulia, where they think, oh, God, you know, the only reason somebody's kind of come to my little website is if I have a listing there that nobody

SPEAKER_72: else has. And so they have started to secede and splinter and balkanize the market. And look, if you're selling electric shavers or ab crunchers or desk chairs, go mess around all you want. But running the housing market is a public trust. And you have been hired to sell this house. You have a fiduciary obligation to the person who hired you to get as many bidders as you can. But you also

SPEAKER_328: just have this public trust that it makes people feel terrible when a moving van shows up in front

SPEAKER_73: of a house where there was never a yard sign. We should all get a chance to live in that fancy

SPEAKER_42: neighborhood. And right now, you kind of have to know the secret handshake in a couple of places in America. And it is so evil and wrong. It goes back to the whole smoke filled backroom BS of the

SPEAKER_44: real estate industry in the 50s. So yeah, feels a little racist, baby feels it feels racist. So the DOJ case with the National Associated Realtors was supposed to be resolved. And then the just said,

Chamath Palihapitiya: Hey, we want to audit some stuff. And they I guess the National Associated Realtors backed out. What's that case about for a you know, a layperson?

SPEAKER_135: Well, what it's been about is just Redfin wants to be able to show for every listing how much you pay a buyer's agent. So when you sign

SPEAKER_42: up to sell a house, you agree to pay the agent who brings you a buyer 2.5% or 3%. And by the way, one juicy, weird little fact, I know this complicates the matter slightly, but it's worth it, I promise you, is that when I buyers when businesses sell houses, they pay real estate

SPEAKER_339: agents much, much less. How much? 50% less, the fee is half or 1%? Yeah, 2% instead of 3%, 1.5%. They're driving it down. And basically, that's because

SPEAKER_42: people who worked on Wall Street as asset portfolio managers are now charged with liquidating a thousand houses. And of course, you look at the commissions you pay and you get a bulk discount. And so what we wanted to do is just tell all the other people listing their houses, you don't have to pay a buyer's agent that much, we want to publish the commission on our website. So you can see what each listing is paying. And there was a little bit of a brouhaha about it. The DOJ and the National Association of Realtors worked it out. And now they have decided that they're at odds with each other. And I think the real juicy thing here is that not just publishing the information, that used to be like, okay, that's what we're going to fight about. Now it's about, actually, we want the buyer to be the one who pays the buyer's agent. And when a buyer has to get out $20,000 or $30,000 to pay a buyer's agent, they are suddenly going to become very sensitive to the prices they're paying. And that

SPEAKER_63: is going to compress the market quite a bit. So I think it used to be about an obscure website

SPEAKER_42: feature. And now it's about the whole dual agent system in the United States that doesn't exist anywhere else, where you pay two agents, and you pay them both what you would normally pay just one.

SPEAKER_345: And it was the seller who paid both. What you're saying is that the seller could say,

SPEAKER_348: the buyer is respire is my agent. You Yeah, you want to have an agent to negotiate against me? Great. You pay them. That might be what you pay them. This is so brilliant. Because what it does

SPEAKER_55: is it makes two customers for the real estate agent. One of the problems with healthcare in our end in our country is when you and I get knee surgery, we don't know what we paid and we didn't comparison shop. But if and that's the same thing I suspect, correct me if I'm wrong in real estate, which is if I if I don't have to pay the buyer, if I'm the buyer, and I don't have to pay the buyer commission, I don't care what it is. That's how the seller screwed the seller. I hate the seller. They're making too much money. But if I have to pay them, yeah, I'm going to say, you know, a 3% a little too rich. If I'm buying a $4 million home, I don't pay you 120,000. I'll pay you 25,000. But I'm not paying you 120,000. Forget it. Yeah, so they're going to create a second buyer

SPEAKER_06: in the system. Wow. So you're saying I can when I list on Redfin, I could say, I want them. Not only may I'm not going to give you 3% or two and a half percent, I want you to pay it. I'm paying $0.

SPEAKER_135: Well, I think that's what the DOJ is trying to get to. They're trying to force that issue. And

SPEAKER_42: it would. And I just think that, you know, listen, if you're a great buyer's agent, and you do a lot of work to protect someone from buying a house that's about to fall apart, you should be paid for it. But the person who should be paying you is the buyer. And that person is going to be careful about how much it's worth. So what turned into, like I said, or what started as sort of a nerdy little, can we publish this one little fact, has become much more existential and

SPEAKER_16: exciting. By the way, Jason, I thought what you were going to ask me about, I thought you were

SPEAKER_357: going to get to the only dust up we've ever had, which was about the New York Times. Do you remember

SPEAKER_359: that? No, tell me. Well, I thought was maybe it wasn't with you. Well, it was definitely with some

SPEAKER_345: Andreessen guys. My memory is going away. So what was the New York Times? No, no, no. I was in favor of

SPEAKER_72: having CEOs talk to the New York Times. And you were saying that sometimes these journalists have an agenda. Oh, yeah. And they take advantage of a naive entrepreneur. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Anyway. Yes.

SPEAKER_55: And we don't have to dredge it up if you don't want. No, I want to this is okay. So I tweeted my position today was now because the New York Times and I picked the New York Times specifically has gone so far left that they are anti-capitalist and talking to them. They are going to spin your words. So I told my CEOs who asked entrepreneurs, listen, it's you're going to get misquoted. If they're calling you, the angle is 90% or 95% negative and bad for you. Therefore, you should write your own blog post to your own podcasts or only do podcasts because you can get your full message out and you should only do email exchanges if you do talk to a reporter, but don't talk to a report on the phone, period, because they'll talk to you on the phone. Then they have this background that they can transcribe it. You don't have a recording or they they selectively quote you leave out the second half of your sentence where you say, well, on average, I believe this. But there are situations when this happens and then they just leave out everything that you just said and leave out the back and they have

SPEAKER_201: an agenda when they started. Yeah. Don't talk to the New York Times. You took the other side. Why? Why are you right? And I'm wrong. What's your point?

SPEAKER_373: Well, first of all, I've gotten coverage where I had to lie down. I turned out the lights,

SPEAKER_42: closed the door and I had to lie down because it annihilated me. So I understand where you're coming from. But I don't know where to start. I first of all, think that most journalists are trying to get it right. Everybody has a point of view. Different newspapers tend to have one point of view or another. I get that. But I think most journalists are trying to get it right. And most

SPEAKER_63: startups don't get enough attention. The world doesn't know that they exist. So you can't be different or better if people don't know you exist. And then you definitely want to build a relationship with the journalists because the reason that they don't understand what you do is because you've never talked to them. And so I would talk to a journalist just for self-interested purposes to try to get the word out. And some of it is not going to be perfect. If it was exactly the way you want it, it would be an ad. You used to be in this business. So you know. Yeah. But I think there's a deeper issue, which is just that if you're going to run a major technology platform, at some point it is a public trust and you just have to be accountable to the press. Of course, they're going to ask you nasty questions. Joe Biden doesn't like all the questions that Fox News asked him. Donald Trump hated the New York Times questions. And yet still, it's just a level of accountability. And I think that we can say, oh, all these tech companies are doing beautiful things. Why are they being challenged? But the history of tech over and over and over again has been that it's had unintended consequences that we didn't fully consider. And so I would just be accountable to that and talk to the press. We're going to raise these issues because your employees are already thinking about it. Your customers are going to worry about it at some point. Face the music. I think it's a reasonable position.

SPEAKER_44: And I do think like Facebook should be accountable. I think what's happened is

Chamath Palihapitiya: almost every time I've had a founder talk to the New York Times and give them that benefit of the doubt,

SPEAKER_06: they've been treated unfairly in my mind. And I feel like it used to be that, you know, there was like a reasonable take. But I feel like a lot of the journalists are coming into it with too many anonymous sources and not enough of a balanced approach to it, where they take the anonymous sources and run with it. But you're the one encouraging anonymous sources. Because

SPEAKER_42: every journalist would rather have it on the record and attributed. And instead, they want the only

SPEAKER_339: people in tech who will talk to them. Yeah. Oh, they totally want. They want the

SPEAKER_45: they would much rather have it all be on the record. Yeah, I kind of feel like they like this is

SPEAKER_06: my take on as a former journalist. I think you get more juicy quotes when you give people off the record because they'll go a little ham and they don't feel any accountability. So this is what I think this younger generation of what I call activists journalists, like they really have an agenda base, you know, they want to get Trump out of office, they want to stop capitalism, they want to stop, you know, wealth disparity, a lot of journalists are coming to the table, I think with this advocacy approach. And I think they love when they can get I don't know if you

SPEAKER_55: saw the away CEO coverage, but this poor woman who was the way CEO, kind of was, Wait, what was it? The way away a w a y the luggage company, she was stern in her approach with employees like, Okay, we have to do this, we have to hit our numbers, you know, everybody buck up. And

SPEAKER_119: yeah, she was Yeah, I saw some of her emails. But that's an example where if you actually just saw the primary documents, they spoke for themselves. And I don't know, I just think we're used to really

SPEAKER_402: glowing coverage. I agree. So I think that you were right, like maybe a couple years ago,

SPEAKER_55: where like, we were used to glowing coverage, then it got a little harder. And now I think it's the pendulum has swung the other way. And I just thought their coverage of her was particularly unfair and sexist. Because if that had been a male CEO was like, Listen, y'all got to buck up, we're gonna work 12 hours a day, if you can't handle it during the holidays, you're at the wrong company, because this is a company that is driven by customer support. And people buy us during the holidays. There's no vacation on Christmas and over the holidays, we got to get this done, whatever

SPEAKER_06: she said. And I just thought they treated her unfairly. And I think if it was a male CEO, we'd all be given high fives. Oh, male CEO puts the hammer down tells everybody to buck up and

SPEAKER_406: work harder. I don't know. We're going to agree to disagree on this one. We I think we probably

SPEAKER_408: agree. I do disagree. But lots of love for you, Jason. I love you too. Good. This has been great.

SPEAKER_19: Thank you for doing it. I'm glad my Florence, I let's do it again. I said I'm booking it right now. I know your PR people are very like the they get a lot of they're awesome. They're great. But they get a lot of requests. And I even I had to work a little bit here to get this on. I'm going to put you on the books for a year from now. Is that okay with you? One year from today? I put you on the show. Angela's on the phone with me. We'll do it together. We're locking it in now. One year from now, we're going to do this yearly thing where we check. Why don't you see the ratings and then decide,

SPEAKER_414: Jason? I don't know if I'll be the top pillar. Here's how it goes, Glenn. This is how I've always

SPEAKER_45: run the show and why it works. If I find the conversation interesting, I think that's the proxy for the audience. If I think it's interesting as a startup founder and angel investor, that's it.

SPEAKER_06: All right. Continued success. If you want to own a great stock, Glenn can't say this. I think Redfin is a great stock to own. He can't say it. I can. And if you want to work at a great

SPEAKER_55: company with a great leader who cares about you, that's Glenn. So go ahead and apply. Go to redfin.com slash jobs or careers or careers.redfin.com. It's one of those. Just type in Redfin jobs. Jason, Jason. Go work for Glenn. Thank you. Thank you. He needs to hire more people, especially if you're a million dollar agent. If you're one of those crazy million dollar agents selling Malibu homes or Palo Alto homes, go work with Glenn. It's going to give

SPEAKER_424: you a lot of RSUs. Jason, I really appreciate it. All right, Glenn. Have a good time. We'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.