E42: China's tech crackdown, CRISPR breakthrough, practical climate change solutions & more

China’s 2021 crackdown turned regulatory risk into direct control over private wealth and business models. Didi was pulled from app stores, tutoring firms were forced nonprofit, Tencent lost about $100 billion in three days, and Gaotu founder Larry Chen’s reported fortune fell 99%.

The panel’s deeper China conclusion was that the old bargain—get rich, stay out of politics—was being rewritten. They pointed to stalled U.S. IPOs, state access to company data and possible Didi privatization as reasons Western capital would demand a much larger political-risk discount. (Reuters)

CRISPR had crossed an important threshold: gene editing was being infused directly into patients rather than performed on cells outside the body. The amyloidosis trial targeted liver cells producing the destructive protein, providing early proof that programmable in-body gene editing could become a reusable treatment platform. (New England Journal of Medicine)

Form Energy’s iron-based long-duration battery mattered because it attacked storage economics with an abundant material rather than scarce battery metals. The panel saw cheap grid-scale storage using iron instead of nickel, cobalt, manganese or lithium as potentially important infrastructure for making intermittent clean energy far more practical.

Carbon markets become more useful when they create paying customers for technologies that actually remove carbon, but verification remains the weak link. The panel described unreliable forest credits and argued that carbon tariffs could eventually force imported products to carry the cost of emissions generated throughout their production.

Chamath said all four promising superconductor researchers he had examined were immigrants, and one endured four years in which his experimental progress actually reversed. That researcher’s response—essentially “it’s nothing”—captured the unusually long persistence required for breakthroughs that may eventually transform energy transmission.

Quentin Tarantino spent two or three years shooting an unfinished film on weekends while working at a video store, only to discover the developed footage was bad. During those years he wrote True Romance, then Reservoir Dogs; selling the former and finding producer Lawrence Bender finally gave him the path into filmmaking.

The COVID debate had already shifted from government mandates toward private institutions using access and money to enforce vaccination policies. Danny Meyer required vaccination for staff and customers, the NFL attached financial consequences to outbreaks, and Google and Facebook tied office access to vaccination or testing.