And all of it slows down human capital potential. Like, if you take a sports analogy to America: if you’re running a sports team, you look forward to free agency. In free agency, it allows you to wipe page and say to yourself, okay, who are the people that I want on the field, on the court? Why, for what reason? And then you can choose: athletic capability, cultural capability, teamwork… all of these different characteristics. And then around them, you build the team that you want. And then you go out, and you compete, and you try to win.

Similarly, for the United States, while that doesn’t express itself in the year, it’s expressed itself, that way, for hundreds of years.

The long arc of America is the best run sports franchise you can imagine. Championship after championship, after championship. Whether or not you like the Patriots, it’s the Patriots of the 2000s, or it’s, maybe the current Warriors.

My point is America has done this exceptional job of being a beacon for human capital. For guys like me, for people like you, the deck is stacked against you, and that’s the one place where I can flip all the cards the other way. What an amazing thing.

And now you see it in a different light. People don’t want to come here. And that’s so tragic. There are these amazing people all around the world who would otherwise abandon everything that they have built up to come here and start with nothing to rebuild themselves on behalf of this team.

And the idea that we wouldn’t want the best of those people to help us, to advance the ball, and then to push everything to everybody else around the world, to me… it’s insane.

And that’s happened in a year. That literally changed in a year. And that really saddens me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TOnKXBabpM (10:20)

Forget even, adults, dealing with it. How do younger people deal with it? Or people that are dealing with more severe issues, whether they are physical or emotional or otherwise?

Adam Bain and I were in New York this weekend, and I took a photo, and I really thought about [the filter for 15 minutes]. And I think at some level, that’s really okay. But at some other level, I’m just consciously wondering, to myself, “Wow, that was not a behavior that I even knew existed within my value framework a few years earlier.”

I’m trying to, as I get older, self-actualize around these kinds of things and ask these kinds of questions, because I think they’re worth asking. I suspect other people think about it, and, if you have an opportunity to vocalize some of this stuff… I just have to do a better job of how I do it.

Part of my takeaway, as well, is I have to grow up and realize that I actually do, for the most part, say what other people are thinking. But I have to do it in a more constructive way. This press cycle that’s been happening is completely unnecessary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TOnKXBabpM (3:20)

And it’s come to a point where, years ago, the context of the stuff that was awkward and uncomfortable would have been cyberbullying. And maybe that was the extent of it. But in 2017 and beyond, I think we all know now, the extent of, that very, very, small percentage of things that may not go right, are much more insidious potentially.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TOnKXBabpM (1:10)

It’s not for me. I look at my kids and think, they’re so lucky that they can be around what all of this is, but they’re so cursed because if I did it the wrong way, they would think like they deserved it. They didn’t do a fucking thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dUbrL8b9l8 (56:03)

So the morality is changing. And so in that morality, changing to a different place, you have people like that who have the opportunity to seize it. It’s not unacceptable in the way that it was in the 60s, or the 70s, or the 80s. So we’re dealing with a very different dynamic, in terms of how society believes there’s an expectation in your behavior.

And so that’s why it exists. I’m like kind of just like fascinated sitting on the sidelines just like watching it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njj6HZvixK8 (4:15)

Are we gonna tell Google they can’t build Google Glass because all of a sudden some guy is running around and he’s built an app that allows people to identify women’s faces? That’s a really bad thing, I get it. But what about the surgeon that can also then perform remote surgery using Google Glass?

My point is that these are not clean answers. You have to have the courage to basically say as long as this stuff generally outweighs the bad, you gotta move forward. So we are living in a world where you have to either confront it and say, “I’m gonna live my life transparently,” or hide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDVDWNguPs4 (55:50)

We have this decision to make, because we’re in a transitory state. Do we still want to be the rich country that is still rich? We have to figure out how to open the doors to get more people to the starting line, because then we’ll keep winning.

https://www.recode.net/2016/3/21/11587128/silicon-valleys-homogeneous-rich-douchebags-wont-win-forever-says (1:03:00)

This is not a Silicon Valley problem. It’s a political problem.

We’re at a point right now where there’s a massive capitulation amongst the insider races and classes. The insiders are getting extremely worried that we are now challenging historical norms in a way that’s really counter-productive to the folks that are already in power. In politics, it’s happening entirely on the right.

It will create a wave of racial and gender equality.

It’s the step where you burn the boats. “We’re staying or we’re going to die.”

The last gasp before the establishment croaks exists in politics, in finance, in all parts of the economic structures. What’s great about Silicon Valley is that you can uproot and turn over those structures so quickly. That’s why I think it’s a 10 year problem, at the maximum.

You’re going to see so many female startup billionaires, African American, Hispanic, Chinese, Indian, successful people. In that, they’re going to assert their values on the world. That’s an amazing thing.

https://www.recode.net/2016/3/21/11587128/silicon-valleys-homogeneous-rich-douchebags-wont-win-forever-says (46:05)

The reality is that these organizations exist for a reason, and that they provide belts and suspenders that are, frankly, necessary. The reason I say that now is that after having gone through that gauntlet with a couple of our companies a few times, I am so glad that that exists. For a very practical reason, we are that much more likely to build de facto standards and monopolies because I know that nobody else is going to take the brain damage to go through what we just went through. That’s a practical perspective.

Regulation has existed for years in all of the markets that we’ve operated in other than consumer internet. I think we amplified what the consumer internet was like, which was this free-wielding wild, wild, west where nothing mattered, you could do whatever you wanted.

I remember in 2003 or 2004, the team that I was a part of at WinAmp, we released some open-source software on AOL servers. That software became the root cause of Bearshare, Limewire, and all these peer-to-peer headless networks that effectively destroyed many content businesses. It seemed so cool at the time.

Now I look back on it and I’m like, I’m glad I went through those experiences, but, in any other market, if something like that had happened, we would have been prosecuted and put in jail.

I think we have to mature and grow up and realize that we’re doing serious things, we have to do serious things, serious things require working with serious people, in a serious way.

[Regulation] is great, just buckle down, spend the time. It’s not about the quickest, fastest thing, it’s about the right thing. Let’s just go.

What will happen is that we’ll filter out all of the charlatan, fly-by-night, people, who really don’t have the wherewithal and the courage to go through that gauntlet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqy6CcU84Xs (36:00)

There’s no revenue, there’s no pipeline. There’s just the drug, and a story.

The regulatory framework has created the ability for a company like that to go public and financiers to capitalize on that.

We can’t have the way the system works today because it’s not exactly working for everybody.

The protectionism has to revert to something that’s slightly different. I don’t know what the answer is.

Otherwise, what will happen is, most of us will build quality systems, launch in Europe, figure out how to go to China, going into Southeast Asia, where we have direct relationships with all of the governments and they can fast track us…

What happens is, unfortunately, these developed markets, and the United States, get starved of the actual advancements that are actually happening on its soil. Which is tragic.

When we think about now funding these things, the most important decision we make, after the amount of capital against the idea, is, “Where do we go with it?” We think all the time now: we have great relationships with the Indian government, we have great relationships with the Vietnamese government, with Indonesia, Sri Lanka.

Because all of these developing countries are like, “We want to win. Get my population to be best of class. We’re ready to run. Get us to the start line.”

And we’re like, “Okay.”

The idea that we know what happens to anybody at the n of 100 or the n of 1,000 trial is a crock of horseshit. It’s not statistically significant anymore. I’m just going to put that out there.

We want to go through this farce of, “Don’t worry, it works on n of 100, let’s just go.” And it costs $1 billion to get a drug to trial. It’s crazy.

That has to change.

We have to have a regulatory framework that isn’t just based on Eric Lander’s genome.

I would like the ability for companies to literally be able to say here is a project, and I would like people who are of sound mind and body to be able to just opt in and decide what they want to do and let an entire regime allow that pathway to exist and then see what happens.

I think that there will be some cases where this stuff is puzzling and terrifying but I bet you you’re going to see overwhelmingly amazingly beautiful things of young energetic companies with great ideas who can get to the start line unimpeded.

We do that in technology, and great things happen. Are there bad consequences to Twitter and Facebook, etc? [Yes.] But the net effect is generally positive.

If we could find a way to ease the regulatory oversight where adults can basically go and choose to participate in systems and products and things that can actually meaningfully help them change the trajectory and the course of things that they are suffering from, and figure out then how to have a more lightweight approval once you have some statistically significant sample size.

Maybe you can only do it on 10 people, but you can do it with absolutely no oversight. Then you can do 20, 50, then 100, and 1,000, and 2,000, 5,000, 10,000. You show some genetic diversity of the whole thing, then you can go back and say, “I’m ready to go.”

You’d probably find ways to do it a lot cheaper. You don’t have to contract out to a bunch of contract research organizations and spend hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars and hire consultants to talk to the person at the FDA.

The entire system isn’t set up for success.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wswvcdpVu8 (19:00)