#259 The Reckoning to Come

The FDA, for example, it's set up to go and regulate Merck and Pfizer, not a million people doing personal genomics. The FAA is set up to go after Boeing and Airbus, not a million drone hobbyists. The SEC is set up to go and regulate Goldman and Morgan and the NASDAQ, not millions of crypto people trading at home.

The Internet means more variance—more upside and more downside, more highs and more lows. And so, on almost any issue, we can identify a downward deviation. We can identify QAnon, but we can also identify often an upward deviation; we can identify 'SatoshiAnon.'

You said, 'The one thing that we were successful on was the vaccine,' and I think it's important to determine what 'we' was there because what 'we' was was really, in many ways... the private sector of technology, you know, biotechnology, and the state mostly got out of the way. It wasn't the FDA that was developing the vaccine pe se; they were sort of forced to get out of the way...

So, basically, on the other side of the world, we're seeing essentially something where the winners of the 20th century, the US and Western Europe, have gotten... civilizational diabetes—so fat and happy at the end of history that they had to sort of invent internal conflicts and drama to make things meaningful again, and now they have...

You can't really say 'End the Fed' or 'End the FDA' ... I don't think it's practical. What you can't do, however, and this is very important, is you can exit the Fed, exit the FDA.

I think, this century, the numbers overpower the letters.

There's a book that's really worth reading. Have you heard of the book 'The Sovereign Individual'? ... I think of it as an important book to understand where we're coming from, where we're going. It actually holds up very well despite being written about 20 years ago.

Why can you not take your phone, scan a barcode of a drug at the store, and see every single review that anybody's ever had of that drug—ideally linked to their personal genomics and ideally linked to yours?

As a venture capitalist, you need to have the possibility of a hundred-million and billion-dollar exit to fund the riskier 10 billion and hundred-billion dollar IPO.