Speaker 1: We can trailings and I'm Eric Beltis Eric. There's this
Speaker 1: thing happening in the world, coronavirus. Kind of concerned about it.
Speaker 1: How concerned are you? Um, I'll be honest zero A.
Speaker 1: I think this stuff gets blown out of proportion by
Speaker 1: the media because they can hit Trump over the head
Speaker 1: with it. So I think I have to divide by
Speaker 1: two the media attention number two. If you look at
Speaker 1: the fatality percentages and the actual cases, I think it's
Speaker 1: a little overblown. Plus, I live in Philly, so my
Speaker 1: immune system gets a big workout every day. And like
Speaker 1: the consultant experts, so I'm going everywhere. I shake hands,
Speaker 1: I ride trains, I went to the mall last weekend.
Speaker 1: Bring it on. I'm somewhere between the two and eight
Speaker 1: depending on the moment. But the point of this episode
Speaker 1: is to actually like, bring E t F into this conversation.
Speaker 1: Who are we gonna talk with? Yeah, so there is
Speaker 1: no coronavirus et F obviously, but where we got our
Speaker 1: next guest was I remember back in ten there was
Speaker 1: a filing for something called the bio shares biothreat e
Speaker 1: t F with with which is god of the ticker GERM.
Speaker 1: Remember the time that it is, and I was like,
Speaker 1: this is a little crazy. Come on, now. We went
Speaker 1: back and we looked in the prospectives. We looked at
Speaker 1: the stocks that would have held, and these stocks were
Speaker 1: up thirty to a hundred and forty each over the
Speaker 1: past week after the because their virus fighting biotech firms.
Speaker 1: You know, I think this e t F might have
Speaker 1: had its hack moment where you know, like hack launched
Speaker 1: right before the Sony hack and return maybe triple the
Speaker 1: S and P over the next couple of months, one
Speaker 1: of the big success stories in et launchers. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you're a small issuer with a product that's niats, you
Speaker 1: need that kind of moment. This it didn't happen for
Speaker 1: this fund. However, the company that that issued it has
Speaker 1: two other funds called the Vertice Life Side, Biotech Clinical
Speaker 1: Trials et F, and the Product So they divided biotech
Speaker 1: into clinical trials and the product side, and biotech is
Speaker 1: just interesting. We've never covered it. So I figured this
Speaker 1: would be a good time to discuss, uh, the virus,
Speaker 1: what biotech companies do in order to fight it, and
Speaker 1: a little bit about the E t F side of things.
Speaker 1: So joining us this time, Paul Yuke and Ryanson only
Speaker 1: of life side ventures. This time I'm joining the biotech frontier. Paul, Ryan,
Speaker 1: Welcome to trillions. Thank you. So whose big idea was
Speaker 1: this company? Slash ets? So this is Paul speaking Hi,
Speaker 1: thank you for having me. So I came up with
Speaker 1: the idea of creating some new biotech ets. You know,
Speaker 1: at the time when we launched BBC and BBP, this
Speaker 1: was two thousand and fourteen, there were really only two
Speaker 1: established biotech ets and they remained the big grilla biotech
Speaker 1: ets today IBB an XBI, and they had the lion's
Speaker 1: share of the assets, and really, if you look at them,
Speaker 1: I called them fairly dirty biotech ets because they were
Speaker 1: not pure biotechnology sector funds. You take Ryan Net who's
Speaker 1: next to me, who's a PhD, twelve years of bench
Speaker 1: science and then additional five plus years investment banking and
Speaker 1: investment experience. I've been twenty twenty four years in this
Speaker 1: space now, and we wanted to create a true biotech
Speaker 1: ETF created by sector experts. And the first and most
Speaker 1: important thing we did is we said biotech is really
Speaker 1: two sectors. You've got emerging let's call it risky companies
Speaker 1: and we call those clinical trial companies. They sell zero
Speaker 1: drugs and they are experimental. They're they're testing their yeah
Speaker 1: and they and when they have a positive result, the
Speaker 1: stocks can go up two in one day. On the converse,
Speaker 1: when they fail a clinical trial, they can drop. The
Speaker 1: other side of the equation are more established companies. You
Speaker 1: have many of them now. They're selling today life saving medicines,
Speaker 1: am Gen, Biogen, Regenera on Gilliad. Some of these are
Speaker 1: now household names. What's exciting about them is they don't
Speaker 1: have the same risk profile, but they're still growing probably
Speaker 1: twenty plus percent revenue growth per year in an economy
Speaker 1: that's growing two or three. So that's what's great about
Speaker 1: those two buckets. We separate them out and that's the
Speaker 1: biggest change that we made. I'm shocked no one else
Speaker 1: has done that in the past five or six years.
Speaker 1: You know, we've spoken to Brad Longkar, he's got that
Speaker 1: cancer immunotherapy. There's been some of that. But you're right,
Speaker 1: and biotech is an area that has a ton of assets,
Speaker 1: and you know, I think a lot of new ETFs
Speaker 1: come from these India issuers that see something wrong with
Speaker 1: the big guys. Ryan, You're a PhD. I'm gonna ask
Speaker 1: you the same question they ask Eric, how concerned on
Speaker 1: the skill want to don Are you about the coronavirus? Yeah? So, um,
Speaker 1: I think that obviously when new viruses present themselves, it
Speaker 1: can be a bit scary. But obviously the world has
Speaker 1: seen coronavirus is before, and my feeling is that it's
Speaker 1: early days. But what we've seen in China is that
Speaker 1: sort of rapid containment strategy that they employed has worked
Speaker 1: pretty well in the sense the cases over time have
Speaker 1: been coming down and the spread through the country seems
Speaker 1: to have been relatively contained. Unfortunately, you can't keep everybody
Speaker 1: sort of locked up, right, and so what we now
Speaker 1: have is the emergence of I'm sure you've heard the
Speaker 1: buzzword sort of community presentation and so that is where,
Speaker 1: you know, you can't really track an individual case back
Speaker 1: to travel to China or exposure in in in Korea
Speaker 1: or elsewhere. So that essentially, I think, you know, has
Speaker 1: presented initially in the state of Washington, and now we're
Speaker 1: seeing you know, a number of cases emerging there. We've
Speaker 1: seen a pretty rapid response by by our government and
Speaker 1: by the agency's CDC and others and I imagine that
Speaker 1: you know, we'll continue to sort of have updates as
Speaker 1: this sort of experience plays out. So put your investment
Speaker 1: hat on for a second. What's the opportunity that you
Speaker 1: see here? I mean, Paul described theres to to sort
Speaker 1: of buckets. But from a science perspective, what do you
Speaker 1: what do you look at? Sure? I mean I think
Speaker 1: from from the outside, when when you have an outbreak
Speaker 1: like this, um you think about, you know, what are
Speaker 1: the needs in order to sort of contain And initially
Speaker 1: we heard that there was essentially a lack of resources
Speaker 1: on the diagnostic side, and so the CDC really had
Speaker 1: one of the only kits that was being used here
Speaker 1: in the States, and there was a shortage. We were
Speaker 1: not testing patients as rapid or potential patients as rapidly
Speaker 1: as we could. And so over the course of the
Speaker 1: last week or so, I think we've we've seen a
Speaker 1: number of press releases from some of these smaller cap
Speaker 1: biotechnology and diagnostics companies that have said, hey, look we're
Speaker 1: working on these next generation diagnostics. It turns out that
Speaker 1: these kits that help diagnose patients are not necessarily sophisticated.
Speaker 1: It's really just about sort of implementing the manufacturing UM
Speaker 1: and and getting them out to uh, to the clinics. UM.
Speaker 1: So I think there's been a real push. So you know,
Speaker 1: we've we certainly have been looking at companies that we
Speaker 1: think that you know, are on the forefront of putting
Speaker 1: new diagnostics out there. UM. In addition, you know, we're
Speaker 1: looking at companies that have means of of sterilizing nursing homes, hospitals, schools,
Speaker 1: subway cars for example. And there's some interesting technologies out
Speaker 1: there that we've come across and against small cap companies
Speaker 1: where they have hydrogen peroxide based mists or sprays for decontamination. UM.
Speaker 1: And then finally, obviously there's um, you know, there's therapeutics
Speaker 1: and vaccines, and that's probably you know, closest to home
Speaker 1: to what you know, Paul and I do. And so
Speaker 1: there have been a number of companies that have announced
Speaker 1: that they're working on either vaccines or they've identified potential
Speaker 1: therapeutics by looking at the components of of some of
Speaker 1: the of the blood of infected patients and so UM.
Speaker 1: You know, those companies as they continue to sort of
Speaker 1: move those early stage products through development, I'm sure we're
Speaker 1: going to hear more and more about them. We'll go
Speaker 1: into German a minute. But what are in terms of BBC.
Speaker 1: Are these companies that that do these things? Are they
Speaker 1: in BBC or BBP that's the clinical trials or the
Speaker 1: product stage? And which companies are they? So the BBC
Speaker 1: and BBP are very specifically biotechnology drug companies. You know,
Speaker 1: the term biotech is used colloquially UM to cover a
Speaker 1: wide range of approaches, whether their business orienters sometimes not.
Speaker 1: Even business cloning. For example, animals is sometimes considered biotech.
Speaker 1: We don't consider that a biotech investment. We consider a
Speaker 1: drug that's put into a human to be a biotech stock.
Speaker 1: In this case, the last segmented companies Ryan mentioned, which
Speaker 1: I think is potentially the most lucrative on an ongoing
Speaker 1: basis financially UM. These are the medicines that will cure
Speaker 1: affected patients or vaccinate and prevent in action of the
Speaker 1: broader population. I think that's going to be the big
Speaker 1: business here for corona virus and other similar types of outbreaks.
Speaker 1: There are a handful of those stocks which happen to
Speaker 1: be in BBC and BBP because they're strong scientific players.
Speaker 1: Let's take a look at Maderna. It's a leading biotech
Speaker 1: company about a ten billion dollar market cap with a
Speaker 1: real leadership position in RNA therapeutic technology. They jumped very
Speaker 1: quickly to said to say, we can move and and
Speaker 1: develop a vaccine to prevent coronavirus outbreaks in the future,
Speaker 1: like within weeks, within weeks, within weeks. So that company,
Speaker 1: they're not selling any drugs. They're in clinical trust for
Speaker 1: other compounds, but they are in BBC, the C standing
Speaker 1: for clinical. On the other side, Gilead, which has a drug,
Speaker 1: an anti viral drug that was already in testing for
Speaker 1: other coronavirus. Let's keep in minding coronavirus has been been
Speaker 1: around for a while. It's a type of a virus.
Speaker 1: Common colds are caused by some forms of coronavirus, also
Speaker 1: stars and merser coronaviruses. So Gilliad had a drug wasn't
Speaker 1: that wasn't testing for prior forms of coronavirus. This drug
Speaker 1: looks like it works in one patient tested in the US.
Speaker 1: That patient recovered very quickly, so they're studying it very
Speaker 1: quickly in corona patients and the stock is reacting very
Speaker 1: well because it looks like this could be a winning
Speaker 1: agent in this war. Talk to me more about the
Speaker 1: science of this and how quickly things have improved, because
Speaker 1: you've mentioned mers and stars, like when when we're developing
Speaker 1: treatments at that stage, it was taking months years to
Speaker 1: get something and here we're seeing it just in like
Speaker 1: a matter of weeks, where there's potential solution that's even
Speaker 1: been identified. Right, this all plays too how quickly biotech
Speaker 1: is moving. You know, when I first entered the industry,
Speaker 1: the rule of thumb was it would take thirteen years
Speaker 1: to move from that pre clinical phase to f D approval.
Speaker 1: That was just the rule. Thirteen years, maybe twelve if
Speaker 1: you're very fast. We now have examples of drug hugs
Speaker 1: that got from lightbulb moment. Aha scientists says, let's try
Speaker 1: this to f D approval and dosing in a commercial patient,
Speaker 1: a patient who paid insurance company paid the bill in
Speaker 1: four and a half years, and targeted cancer effect. Ryan
Speaker 1: worked on one of those drugs that was approved targeted
Speaker 1: cancer and is selling today treating patients. So that if
Speaker 1: you think about that speed thirteen going to four and
Speaker 1: a half, that's science that's regulatory abouties. The FDA has
Speaker 1: now created pathways where you can move, or accelerated approval,
Speaker 1: breakthrough approval designations, UM, new clinical trial designs that say
Speaker 1: you don't have to do sometimes things that don't make
Speaker 1: sense in a clinical trial. And for all of those reasons,
Speaker 1: we can react much more quickly today to an outbreak
Speaker 1: than we could with stars or abola. What you just
Speaker 1: described make me want to invest in biotech, and I
Speaker 1: think that's a lot of what people are attracted to. UM,
Speaker 1: help me explain the relentlessness of this sector because every
Speaker 1: year we have the leaderboard, know which ETFs are like
Speaker 1: at the top and the top twenty, it's usually like
Speaker 1: they come and go right, they have their moment because
Speaker 1: you're usually very concentrative. But biotechs on there a lot.
Speaker 1: And you look at XBI that's the equal weighted biotech.
Speaker 1: It's up three, D and six over the past ten years.
Speaker 1: The S and ps up two and even this health
Speaker 1: care sectors are only up two, so they're up a
Speaker 1: lot already. Right, UM, how much of this is priced in?
Speaker 1: I mean, how much are we pricing in the future
Speaker 1: expectations versus what has already happened. So I think today
Speaker 1: what you're asking about is UM, you know, we look
Speaker 1: at things ultimately as net present values. I mean, we're
Speaker 1: both of us here sitting here are former bankers, and
Speaker 1: you've got to boil things down to DCF analysis. And
Speaker 1: in a typical it's called a widget manufacturing business. UM,
Speaker 1: when we project out cash flows, we'll see something like
Speaker 1: sixty of the value in the near term casules that
Speaker 1: you project out in the terminal value. In biotech, it's
Speaker 1: flipped around dramatically, so in most cases it's maybe in
Speaker 1: the near term casual terminal value, so it's really all
Speaker 1: terminal value. Having said that, today what we see is
Speaker 1: real tangible evidence that drug will work. Companies are often
Speaker 1: acquired after they show in a phase two study that's
Speaker 1: maybe two years before they're marketed. UM, then they're acquired.
Speaker 1: That's when a drug company knows it's going to be
Speaker 1: a real drug. So Gillyad two days ago announced the
Speaker 1: acquisition of forty seven fts V ticker f ts V,
Speaker 1: which is in one of our funds. And the reason
Speaker 1: they paid five billion dollars for that company is not
Speaker 1: because they're selling today, because they're not, but it's because
Speaker 1: the evidence from the early clinical trials are now tantalizing
Speaker 1: and show with very high probability that this will be
Speaker 1: a major drug, a major new drug class. And I'm
Speaker 1: looking at your fun BBC. It's equal weighted, right, and
Speaker 1: XBI is equal weated. We've written about XBI in particular
Speaker 1: because it's crushing IBB and we feel like the equal
Speaker 1: waiting gives bigger waitings to the small companies and it's
Speaker 1: gotten what we call m and a pop um. Talk
Speaker 1: at the importance of that, is that why you equal weighted,
Speaker 1: so that you'd give a little more waiting to the
Speaker 1: potential targets because unless you have inside information, you don't
Speaker 1: know who to own. But here you're putting your eggs
Speaker 1: in an equal basket to get that kind of pop
Speaker 1: Is that was that the goal in the design of
Speaker 1: the product. That is probably the biggest reason for the
Speaker 1: difference between the XBI and the IBB, the IBB being
Speaker 1: market weighted. If you think about what are the largest
Speaker 1: companies in the space, they dominate the market, CAB, gilead
Speaker 1: am Gen, regen Eran, and these are companies that are
Speaker 1: unlikely to be acquired anytime soon, and if they are
Speaker 1: relatively modest premium because they're becoming big pharma like the
Speaker 1: difference between a MRK and a visor and ultimately an
Speaker 1: AM genery Gilead is blurring. But the companies like forty seven,
Speaker 1: I mean, we're talking about a stock that's gone up
Speaker 1: fifteen to twenty fold in the last six to twelve months.
Speaker 1: Fifteen to twenty x, not percentage points, and that's fairly
Speaker 1: typical for a small cap biotech company that a shows
Speaker 1: that a trial goes from being high risk to to oh,
Speaker 1: this works as cures patients, and then be going to
Speaker 1: a big farmer company or multiple big farmer companies saying
Speaker 1: we have to own that in our pipeline and that
Speaker 1: those are the valuation inflects that happen in really in
Speaker 1: the whole sector. But unless you equal weight, as you said, Eric,
Speaker 1: you're not going to capture that alpha. So that's why
Speaker 1: we do it. So let's talk about GERM for a second,
Speaker 1: because great ticker not on the market right now, and
Speaker 1: so my question is sort of like, in the middle
Speaker 1: of all of this, do you kind of like hit
Speaker 1: your forehead and go doll like we had the thing
Speaker 1: and it's not out right now. So GERM, just for
Speaker 1: a little bit of background, GERM is an index that
Speaker 1: we have created and we created it back in two
Speaker 1: thousand and sixteen, and the overarching index is called the
Speaker 1: Bioshares bio Threat Index, and it's designed to invest in
Speaker 1: companies that can protect and guard against a wide variety
Speaker 1: of biological threats. Now, first and foremost of course, that
Speaker 1: is disease outbreaks, Bola and that's existing and new so Bola, sars, coronavirus.
Speaker 1: Now also biological warfare, sarin gas war. I mean, you
Speaker 1: just don't know what's going to happen in the future,
Speaker 1: and so protecting homeland security in the borders, things like chlorox,
Speaker 1: I mean, we think about very basic industries. Clorox has
Speaker 1: been a big component of that index. Clorox went up
Speaker 1: every day of the Corona outbreak because they are selling
Speaker 1: every unit that they can make, and so there's a
Speaker 1: wide variety of aspects that go into the Germ Index.
Speaker 1: But the mechanics, no one knows better than Eric of
Speaker 1: launching an independent et F is it's expensive and it
Speaker 1: sits out there for a while, sometimes until you have
Speaker 1: an outbreak. So we're in high gear right now, um
Speaker 1: with respect to potentially getting something out there that's investible.
Speaker 1: You know, we all love to invest and the problem
Speaker 1: with investing in coronavirus doxes are so little. These stocks
Speaker 1: are generally small cap. They trade fifty to a hundred
Speaker 1: million shares a day today whereas they traded fifty thousand
Speaker 1: six months ago, and the volatility is insane. So you
Speaker 1: need to invest in a basket, and we're seeking to
Speaker 1: create that kind of a basket. And in the Germ index,
Speaker 1: you know, some of the tickers you send over that
Speaker 1: would be in here are include something like Cleveland bio
Speaker 1: Labs via Biotechnology Co Diagnostics, which, by the ways, up
Speaker 1: three last week when the market fell eleven, I think
Speaker 1: they had to halt it, right, it was halt on
Speaker 1: the upside um? Those are small. We look, those are
Speaker 1: all small microcap. Would you balance that out with a
Speaker 1: Clorox or a Gilliad or somebody? So, what would what
Speaker 1: does this index look like? And how much was it
Speaker 1: up last week? We've been told not to talk about
Speaker 1: the index right now just because it's uh, lawyers, come on,
Speaker 1: but lawyers, clients. No, the the index is fun. Let's
Speaker 1: think about it as a It does have a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of larger companies in there, and some
Speaker 1: of them did very well. Some of them didn't do
Speaker 1: as well, but overall, the let's say you're to date,
Speaker 1: you're talking about double digit out performance over the SMP.
Speaker 1: So the way the index works is it is modified
Speaker 1: market cap weight with a four point nine percent maximum
Speaker 1: waiting about fifty four stocks currently in the index, and
Speaker 1: it has several different buckets, not just coronavirus or other
Speaker 1: virus companies, but also companies that will assist in sterilization.
Speaker 1: Um think about companies, hospital cleaning companies like Sterocycles actually
Speaker 1: done very well. Companies that make disposable gloves or mass
Speaker 1: like these are companies that everyone knows Kimberly Clark, three
Speaker 1: M chlorox as we mentioned. And then of course the
Speaker 1: drug companies like Gilead, which was already a leader in
Speaker 1: anti virals and very quickly they were able to jump
Speaker 1: on and help with this outbreak. Okay, Ryan, I want
Speaker 1: to bring you back in, especially on the investor beware
Speaker 1: side of this. Right, like biotech, for all the promise
Speaker 1: out there, it's also had bus moments and and big ones.
Speaker 1: You know in the Thoronos question is probably still hangs
Speaker 1: over the industry to some extent. Where do you come
Speaker 1: down in terms of like how an investor should approach
Speaker 1: what could be you know, massive returns but also like
Speaker 1: a total bust. Yeah, for sure. And I think with
Speaker 1: the stocks that we were just discussing, you know, a
Speaker 1: NETF approach would certainly be what I would recommend. There's
Speaker 1: just a ton of volatility in these names, as Paul mentioned, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, companies like co Diagnostics or Cleveland, or even
Speaker 1: in the names like in Ovo Um we've seen in
Speaker 1: just in the past day have gone up to and
Speaker 1: they'll come down to in in less time, and and
Speaker 1: certainly Um for for the average retail investor investor out there,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's quite challenging to be able to time
Speaker 1: those traits. So that's why we're so excited about putting
Speaker 1: together this Jeremy TF because we think, you know, certainly
Speaker 1: provides an opportunity for folks to get involved in a
Speaker 1: relatively de risked way. Paul, I see you at conferences
Speaker 1: at the booth there sometimes, you know, and I consider
Speaker 1: you an indie issuer. Um. Besides obviously what you've already
Speaker 1: proven here, which is that indie issuers are very close
Speaker 1: to the ground, their local they know their material, very well,
Speaker 1: in some cases better than the bigger issuers, but they
Speaker 1: typically also have a lot of other things going on
Speaker 1: in their business life. So talk about these ETFs are
Speaker 1: just the small sliver of your whole operation. What else
Speaker 1: do you do? Yes? So, Life Size Partners is headquartered
Speaker 1: in New York City. We have about a hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy employees globally at this point. We're a leading consultancy
Speaker 1: to the biotechnology sector as well as the broader healthcare space.
Speaker 1: We have a number of different business units that can
Speaker 1: provide executive search, investor relations, consulting, investment banking. As you know,
Speaker 1: the operations of an e t F that's passively managed
Speaker 1: like ours doesn't require a lot of day to day UM. Really,
Speaker 1: the business once the funds have been up and running
Speaker 1: in ours have been out there for over five years,
Speaker 1: is to make sure that the indexes are maintained properly
Speaker 1: and regular ausly. UM. So we do that and twice
Speaker 1: here we rebounce. What Ryan and I spend the vast
Speaker 1: majority of our time doing is seeking out private companies,
Speaker 1: and so we we run a venture fund called LIFESID.
Speaker 1: Venture Partners were out there generally looking to invest maybe
Speaker 1: one year or two years before these companies become public
Speaker 1: through an I p O, in which case they would
Speaker 1: enter most likely the BBC et F And what size
Speaker 1: of investment are you guys looking on the VC So
Speaker 1: we're generally participating in this round that's called a crossover
Speaker 1: round or maybe a Series B or C round. Those
Speaker 1: are usually fifty to a hundred million dollar rounds. Today
Speaker 1: we're writing ten ish million dollar checks. Um, we're just
Speaker 1: we just had our first clothes on our latest fund,
Speaker 1: our second fund, which is a two million dollar fund.
Speaker 1: But we would join as a syndicate member across you know,
Speaker 1: we'll lead a couple of deals a here, but we'll
Speaker 1: join you know, three to five other investors in that round.
Speaker 1: So if I zoom out a little bit and just
Speaker 1: think about all the various industries and sectors that have
Speaker 1: sort of had moments and you know, maybe reached a
Speaker 1: certain plateau and like we've seen tech just over the
Speaker 1: last twenty years just boom in a big way. Biotechs
Speaker 1: had those boom moments, but it hasn't reached maybe the
Speaker 1: same exponential growth that we've seen from the tech industry.
Speaker 1: And if you know about Moore's lawn sort of what's
Speaker 1: happening in sort of the tech industry, Like maybe there's
Speaker 1: a thought that we could see a plateau, there is
Speaker 1: this biotech moment. I don't know that this is biotex
Speaker 1: moment per se. I think it's been, you know, a
Speaker 1: more of a gradual curve up, and I think moments
Speaker 1: like outbreaks like this is the industry's chance to shine
Speaker 1: and really show everyone else what's going on. One of
Speaker 1: my first bosses in the industry, um, a senior banker.
Speaker 1: Goldman once said, Um, this was back in the early Now,
Speaker 1: it's probably in the late nine You said, there's really
Speaker 1: no biotech sector. In my view, biotech companies are really
Speaker 1: just small pharma companies. And I think that's a view
Speaker 1: that was long held for a while, and I think
Speaker 1: people really understanding that that things have changed so dramatically
Speaker 1: that the DNA of a biotech company is so utterly
Speaker 1: different than that of a farmer company. Eric, you said
Speaker 1: you're from Philly. Philly is one of the original homes
Speaker 1: of those mainline farmer companies Smith Klein, Beach, um Roan
Speaker 1: poolong Roarer, and these are companies that all along the
Speaker 1: main line of near the Philadelphia area, they've now merged
Speaker 1: and merged and these are in some cases fifty or
Speaker 1: a hundred year old businesses. These are people who join
Speaker 1: a company and will stay and retire and have their pensions.
Speaker 1: In biotech, it's very different. These are superstar scientists, superstar
Speaker 1: executives who are free agents and and will solve a problem,
Speaker 1: sell the company, move on to the next. And it's
Speaker 1: a it's a dynamic industry and it's growing faster and faster.
Speaker 1: Besides GERM maybe coming out at some point, do you
Speaker 1: have any other that are you know, farther down the
Speaker 1: road that are sort of cutting edge kind of indexes
Speaker 1: that could btfs? Yeah, we are. You know, we're constantly
Speaker 1: looking to see what other indexes that we can innovate
Speaker 1: on within healthcare. And there are a lot of other
Speaker 1: spaces that I think that are investable that are not
Speaker 1: served by the current market. There's nothing I would say
Speaker 1: earlier than the bio threat index. Um, we're being very selective.
Speaker 1: We've got a lot on our plate. Last thought, Ryan,
Speaker 1: you didn't give me a number scale of one to ten.
Speaker 1: Where are we on the coronavirus? Here's what he wants
Speaker 1: you to do. He wants you because you're an expert
Speaker 1: PhD to overrule sort of embarrass me for my I
Speaker 1: don't care. Yes, this is what's going on. So the
Speaker 1: higher the number, the better he'll feel. But don't don't listen,
Speaker 1: don't do it just for him. Yeah. I think we're
Speaker 1: somewhere around the five or six. Yeah. Yeah, you just
Speaker 1: made Joel very happy. I'm still a point to Paul Ryan.
Speaker 1: Thanks for going, Thank you, thank you, Thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to Trillions. Until next time. You can find us on
Speaker 1: the Bloomberg Terminal, Bloomberg dot com, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and
Speaker 1: where else you'd like to listen. We'd love to hear
Speaker 1: from you. We're on Twitter, I'm at Joel Webber Show,
Speaker 1: He's at Rick Faultunos, and you can learn more about
Speaker 1: Life's Side Partners at Life side Partners dot com. This
Speaker 1: episode of Trillions was produced by Magnus Hendrickson. Francesca Levy
Speaker 1: is the head of Bloomberg Podcast. Bye