Mass Mental Exodus
Gather close, I have a story to tell you, it involves lizards and science and greed and corruption and emigration!
Some time in the 1980’s, someone somewhere stepped out of their wood paneled station wagon, chain smoking while eating from a Styrofoam container, and was stopped in their tracks by the most incredible thought;
“Why do Gila Monsters only eat once a year, and how do they regulate their energy usage so well? I MUST KNOW!”
And so began a multi decade study of the spit of a giant lizard and a eureka moment that would lead to one of the world’s most successful and fastest growing medical interventions. A drug called Semaglutide, or as we call it, Ozempic or Wegovy.
You see, the mundane and ubiquitous items we now carry in our pockets, and the drugs we use to lose weight, manage diabetes, literally stomp disease into nonexistence and, errrr, help us in the bedroom; all started with a random question someone had in a parking lot, or kitchen, or boardroom: What the?!
GLP-1 mimicking drugs, MRNA vaccines and other interventions have been studied for decades, and their origins are often found in very interesting questions and ideas. These initial ideas are not at all profitable and are thus not funded by private industry. Governments around the world fund research into some of the craziest and bizarre ideas, and sometimes, those wild questions turn into some of the worlds most incredible products.
The smartphone you’re probably reading this on, the device that would shape the world around it for everyone alive to see it, wasn’t cooked up in Jim Apples mind. (Yes, Steve Jobs, but whatever.) Its origins are from tax payer funded research and study groups. A lot of what we use today has lineage to billions of dollars worth of public funding sent to DARPA, that over decades worth of work, culminated in patents that would be used by various companies to eventually build the iPhone and spark a communications, information, marketing revolution.
Of course the real story of these products is far more complex than the few hundred words above would have you believe, but the reality is, nearly everything we see in the world, nearly everything we touch and use to make our lives better (or worse, let’s be honest) can be traced back to public funding of research into any number of weird ideas that pop into someone’s head, who can think of a hypothesis and write a legible grant request.
Its taken untold billions of dollars to put people into space, to help people manage their weight, their diabetes, their heart conditions, to trade stocks via “siri”, to online bank and send money to others in an instant, etc.
Over the last 70 or so years, maybe longer, most of that money was spent in the USA.
The vast majority of breakthroughs in just about every STEM and healthcare field have come from American universities and or publicly funded research centers. An incalculable number of people, the literal smartest humans to have ever walked the earth, have moved to America to study and then do study on any number of topics.
this has led to the growth of the markets in America and made it the most powerful and wealthy nation to have ever existed. It has been what has morphed our neighbor to the south into the tech and healthcare mecca of the globe.
The largest and most profitable companies to have ever existed, Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, etc ALL exist and are this large today directly because of publicly funded research.
Touch screens, WiFi, Bluetooth, data compression and decompression, AI; none of these exist today without publicly funded research.
youtube and Netflix, legitimately could not exist without it. TV’s and VCR’s couldn’t have existed without it. Mass telephone communication couldn’t exist without it.
So, why is the government of the United States of America making sweeping legislation to cut public funding into research and development of new technologies?
I won’t answer that here, there is a 920 page document called Project 2025 that explains in detail why they are doing it, you can read that here. Neither you nor I are interested in that.
I want to tell you why we at Financial Value Inc. are beginning a long process of systematically moving a good percentage of our money out of America, and investing internationally for the long term.
Brain drain: the emigration of highly trained or intelligent people from a particular country.
We are about to see, at least in my opinion, one of the largest intelligence exodus’s in the history of this planet. Out of America and into the world.
Governments will be looking to spend trillions of dollars around the world to attract these minds. We have a government that has a leader who has said in his past that one of the best things a country can do, is attract intelligence. Fund research and pay well for it. Mark Carney, like him or not, knows what I am talking about, and hopefully will take it upon his government and through his affection for large projects, will consider spending a lot of money to attract the brightest of minds from America, to come work and research here.
RFK Jr. has vowed to cancel research into so many different healthcare initiatives that could change the world. Canada has the resources AND the infrastructure AND the capital to fund that research here.
MRNA vaccines to tailor cancer treatments to the individual? Funding cancelled.
MRNA vaccines to tailer HIV/ AIDS treatments to the individual? Funding cancelled.
thousands if not tens of thousands of trials and products in various stages of testing; FUNDING CANCELLED!
those researchers will take their brains somewhere else, clock it. We are already seeing the exodus, and history provides a template as to how this looks. This linked article is from July 29 2025.
Countries in the EU and Asia are going to spend a lot of money attracting highly intelligent people to their countries, we ought to be doing the same here in Canada. As with all things, time will tell if we do.
Point is, America no longer has a strangle hold on the future. People are now investing elsewhere, and so should we be.
This isn’t to say we won’t continue to make good returns in America, over time. We absolutely will. But we are also being presented an opportunity that simply hasn’t existed in many years, one where international markets will come alive and more money will be invested in those markets.
We’re also selling at a good time, as the USD has fallen in value, while the Canadian Dollar has increased in value. As of September 1, the swing is about 14.5%, so selling massive profits from a decade of growth to buy with a strong dollar is good business.
Long term, global research hubs will create opportunities where there simply were none before, and while it is too bad for America, it is good for us.
We owe a lot to the saliva of a large lizard. A strange ‘AHA’ moment, from an unexpected place. The world can seem bizarre, but with some information and critical thought, we can find opportunity.
We see long term opportunity in our model, the Three Circles, and it demands global diversity. Trump has given us an opportunity, and we believe the world is ready to jump on it.
As the governments of the world legislate to spend on research and development, on infrastructure and begin to accept the world as it will be, not how it was; we believe we will see continued growth and solid returns.
Thank you weirdo researchers and scientists!
Darris Cameron
CEO, Financial Value Inc.