E42: China's tech crackdown, CRISPR breakthrough, practical climate change solutions & more
2021-07-30 spoken.md · speaker-labeled ▶ watch ← E41 all episodes E43 →
Every number here is replayed from score_events — the same ledger the pool ranks on. Decay is what the 72 ideas nobody mentioned gave up this week; it applies only when an episode is processed.
Tier crossings
conviction thresholds crossed by this episode — 65 / 45 / 15 · ideas born here show where they landed. why 65 isn't always green
Who moved the board
each voice's force on conviction this episode — supports and opposes, weighted exactly as the replay applied them · share = % of this episode's movement
What got argued (7 ideas)
ordered by how hard each idea moved · quotes are verbatim from the transcript, timestamps deep-link into the episode
The first successful in-vivo infusion of a gene editor (Intellia's amyloidosis trial) converts CRISPR from theory to a working platform — an 'AWSification' of biology where the toolchain stacks and biological problems become programming problems. mRNA COVID vaccines are the first product of that stack, not the last.
So I think what we're saying is that we're seeing this platformization, this AWSification of a biological toolchain with things like CRISPR and all of the other modalities that need to stack on top of it so that the next person can view it as a programming problem. ... But this was an enormously important breakthrough because it validated a lot of what CRISPR was beyond a lot of theoretical innovation that up until now was basically what it was known for.
Climate gets solved on the production side via markets, not consumption mandates: EU/China permit exchanges plus an eventual carbon tariff on imported embodied emissions create a genuine buyer for negative-emissions tech. Carbon allowance prices rise as the schemes tighten and spread.
And one of the interesting things that's happening now, I think we should talk about is in Europe, they're creating this new carbon trading plan. I think China is even trying to set up one of these markets. And so they're creating these new marketplaces to trade carbon permits. ... And that's what's really cool about these new tradable permit schemes is they create a buyer for those nets. And I think that's ultimately how we're going to solve this problem of climate change.
The big thing that none of these folks have gotten to yet, but I think if you look at the laws in Europe, they're going there, is the idea of a carbon tariff. And I think these carbon taxes, if they actually exist properly, will look like a tariff. ... I think that that's where the world is going. And that's probably, David, to your point, it's going to be a really big value unlock because the amount of money that will get both made but also destroyed in that process will be incredible.
Delta's breakthrough infections mean vaccine efficacy decays, so third shots plus at-home testing plus newly arriving oral antiviral pills become the default protocol — recurring revenue for the vaccine and antiviral makers rather than a one-and-done campaign.
there's one other piece of news that came out that I think is very positive on COVID, which is the availability of these oral antivirals, the pills. ... So I think that, you know, with the reduced effectiveness of vaccine, what we're going to have to do is supplement the vaccines and the boosters with home testing.
HOOD's 22M members survived the GameStop mess, the company keeps shipping products, and a generation is learning markets on it — so the $30B IPO price is a floor, with multi-bagger upside from here.
Yeah, you know, right now, it's my third biggest win, Uber, Comm, and then this one. And, you know, time and market. I think Robinhood going out of 30 billion, there's a chance this could go 10, 20, 30x from here. I think it could be a trillion-dollar company someday. 22 million members, even through all the craziness that we talked about on this podcast.
if I was a betting man, which I am general, but I'm not in China, because just don't understand the market, it's super, great casino, it's a stupid place to bet. ... I think that what we're starting what we're starting to see is the beginning of nationalizations.
And I think the last thing that's going on here that's different is you saw China put the kibosh on. There are 34 IPOs of major Chinese tech companies that were scheduled to IPO in US markets, and they have sort of shut that pipeline down. ... I would come out in the middle and say they've just attached a discount rate that now every investor has to consider political risk when they invest in China, because the future is very uncertain.
But there's no more game in terms of building companies and investing in China. How is the West ever going to trust? How is Goldman Sachs or Sequoia, you know, launching a venture firm there or retail investors or hedge fund investors? How are they ever going to want to participate in that market? ... And I just don't see anybody wanting to invest there anymore.
By throttling entrepreneurs and killing the Deng bargain, Beijing has shot itself in both feet: talent and capital stop showing up, innovation stalls, and China's economy declines relative to the US rather than compounding. This is the axis the besties actually fought over.
I disagree with you. No, I disagree with you. And the reason I disagree with you is... ... Because you know what, if you're coming from China, and you can only make a billion versus 45 billion, I think you still take the shot. ... Everybody, guess what? Because if you want a shred of fucking lithium, if you want a battery, if you want nickel, if you want anything to happen, you need to work with China.
And it just does make the Bitcoin. In hindsight, it does look like they shut down Bitcoin a couple of months before making these actions. So your point, David, they probably anticipated that people would start shipping their money out using Bitcoin. And so they banned Bitcoin.
Episode digest
written during extraction and stored in data/extractions/ep042.json — the auditable source of truth, including everything market-adjacent that did not earn a capture
Three-man show — Friedberg is explicitly out ("Friedberg's out. That means you're going to get by default, 33.3 percent of airtime"), so the 3-label roster is correct and no merge/swap repair was needed; Jason and Sacks even joke about the empty science chair, which is why the CRISPR and climate blocks are handled by Chamath and Sacks. The China segment (17:12-41:08) is the meat and the surprise is that NOBODY takes the buy-the-dip side: all three are bearish on Chinese equities, they just disagree about China itself. Jason (strength 3, repeats it five-plus times) frames the tutoring ban, the Didi App Store pull, Tencent's $100B three-day drawdown and Gaotu's $140 -> $3 collapse as proof the asset class is finished — "there's no more game in terms of building companies and investing in China... I just don't see anybody wanting to invest there anymore." Chamath delivers the single highest-signal capture of the episode, a disclosed avoidance: "I'm not in China, because just don't understand the market, it's super, great casino, it's a stupid place to bet" — paired with his core call that this is "the beginning of nationalizations" starting in tech, that China is now "a distribution of risk where it's closer to Russia now than it is to the United States," and that Didi's rumored take-private will be backstopped by a Chinese entity. Sacks brings the most structured bear case (strength 3): data expropriation by law, the CCP treating founders as rival power centers, and above all China reshoring the IPO business — 34 scheduled US listings killed, financial-market decoupling, "gigantic hits to the valuations" — landing on "they've just attached a discount rate that now every investor has to consider political risk." The genuine clash is one thesis lower: Jason says the crackdown spirals China's economy DOWN and is "amazing for American tech companies"; Chamath flatly refuses ("I disagree with you. No, I disagree with you"), arguing Chinese founders still take a $1B shot over nothing and that the West is captive to China on lithium, nickel and batteries; Sacks positions between them ("not... a binary decision... they're gonna be hedging their bets"), so that idea carries a 1-support / 2-oppose split. Sacks's capital-flight leg — Chinese billionaires "gonna be buying Bitcoin" — was attached to the existing bitcoin-institutional-adoption-2021 idea per the wave's crypto anti-duplication rule even though the mechanism (capital flight, not treasury allocation) differs; Jason echoes it at strength 1, noting China banned Bitcoin months earlier precisely to pre-close that exit. On CRISPR, Chamath pounds the table on Intellia's in-vivo amyloidosis result as the validation event and pitches an "AWSification of a biological toolchain"; Sacks adds the mRNA-is-a-platform leg. Climate produced two instrument-backed claims — Sacks on compliance permit exchanges creating a buyer for negative-emissions tech, Chamath predicting carbon TARIFFS as the endgame with "the amount of money that will get both made but also destroyed" — though Chamath later trashes the voluntary offset market as fraud-ridden ("a tree that's been sold like 80 billion times"), a caveat that cuts at offsets, not the compliance allowances KRBN tracks. Two things were deliberately NOT captured for lack of any instrument: Chamath's Form Energy iron long-duration battery shout-out (private) and his room-temperature superconductor prediction, the only >12-month framing in the episode ("in the next 20 to 30 years") — unscoreable, so no idea was created and no horizon was padded anywhere else. Last capture is the tape's cruelest: one day after HOOD's IPO, Jason discloses it as his third-biggest win ever and calls 10-20-30x upside and a trillion-dollar outcome — the kill date will not be kind. Vaccine mandates, ByteDance/TikTok's halved private mark, and the Tarantino/poker blocks were skipped as untradeable. Read through the final turn at 1:16:24.