00:00:00
It's hard to make money. It's just so
00:00:02
hard. And if you view making money as
00:00:06
some derogatory thing and you put a
00:00:09
bunch of impediments in the way, the
00:00:11
downstream impact is interesting ways to
00:00:13
make money will be out of fashion and
00:00:16
simple ways of making money will be the
00:00:17
only things that people do. The problem
00:00:19
is that society doesn't move forward if
00:00:21
all you do are simple things. You need
00:00:24
people who are willing to put risk
00:00:25
capital to buy these lottery tickets.
00:00:27
And if you marginalize the upside,
00:00:30
you're just going to have exactly that,
00:00:31
a stagnant society of marginal things
00:00:34
that doesn't move along. If you look,
00:00:36
for example, in the last 5-year period
00:00:38
in China or Canada, two totally
00:00:40
different political regimes, but they
00:00:42
both had the same thing happen, which is
00:00:44
the amount of investment capital that
00:00:46
went into both of those countries fell
00:00:48
off of a cliff for two totally separate
00:00:50
reasons. And you can look historically
00:00:52
back and we know what this looks like,
00:00:54
which is countries stagnate. In the
00:00:56
absence of investment in risk capital,
00:00:58
not to slag Europe, but part of what
00:01:00
Europe got wrong was that compact didn't
00:01:02
exist. Too many administrators, too many
00:01:04
hall monitors, not enough ability to put
00:01:07
risk capital to work and actually get
00:01:08
gigantic outcomes. The most important
00:01:10
thing we can do on that dimension is to
00:01:13
figure out how to have less regulation,
00:01:15
have these companies fight it out, and
00:01:17
create the incentives for these smaller
00:01:19
businesses to be bought and/or to go
00:01:21
public. And unless people fundamentally
00:01:23
embrace that idea, we're going to lose.
00:01:25
We being America.
