I used to tell everybody to read Steven Pinker but I think even with a similar intellectual framework, it is even better than Rosslyn. However, I’m afraid  a lot of people don’t make time to read what’s a fairly academic and super profound both veterans of our nature and enlightenment now.

I was born at a time where I can go out and learn all these things. Then I have friends, if I’m trying to understand quantum computing, a lot of times I get confused. So, it helps to have friends who can come and straighten you out. It makes your willingness to try to learn something, even trying to understand tornadoes, which are this funny 3D thing. 

Having somebody who could show me where the visualization was and the unique conditions… I don’t think I would have done that, if I didn’t have a group of people that had stayed intellectually curious and that we had the internet to kind of feed us access to the latest thing. 

The time I was born in a meeting policy in the microprocessor, the idea that a young person that started a company here is a super nice thing, because although people at first are skeptical, as soon as they realize their normal model of what I knew and what I could do, and I didn’t fit that normal model. 

Then, they assumed I knew way more than I did. I could solve all sorts of problems. I had no clue how to solve them but it’s nice that people are kind of on guard. We built this company and have done these things from a young age.

I think the culture of America, the American Dream type success story, worked out. Then, not being in Silicon Valley, but not being far from Silicon Valley, that ended up working for the company in a great way.

Preston Pysh  5:18  

Stig, to me listening to his response. I don’t know that he necessarily answered the question directly. It was more of a reflection of that period in time and kind of the attributes that added to his success from my vantage point, at least.

Stig Brodersen  5:31  

I think you’re absolutely right. Perhaps it has something to do with him not wanting to talk more about why he dropped out of Harvard. I think he’s been asked that question a million times, like the most famous drop out.

I really like how he framed how he was thankful. That really also goes to how much of a learner he is,because he keeps being humble and that’s kind of the trait we see from people who keep on learning all the time. He was so humble and so thankful in terms of where he was born. 

When he was born, he was lucky in many ways. He talked about that nature and nurture thing, too. There’s so many things in his life where he’s just very, very lucky.

Preston Pysh  6:11  

I can’t remember which book this was. I know it was a Jim Collins book that we read where these people that were ultra successful that had done really well almost always attributed their success… The number one thing that they attributed their success to was luck. 

Collins gets into a great discussion about how it’s not necessarily luck that they’re attributing it to but that’s what they say whenever they’re asked. 

However, what Collins says is they have more of an appreciation for all the unknowns and they have an understanding for all the unknowns and the things that they didn’t really have any kind of control over that went in their favor. 

They’re just quick to acknowledge those truths as opposed to a person who has a lot more ego and a person who isn’t necessarily seeing things as clearly as somebody like Bill Gates.

Bill Gates obviously saw the world throughout all his success. They basically slap the label luck onto it. I gathered a lot of that in what he was saying is like, “This thing went right for me. The microprocessor came along, which was huge.” 

For me, that’s really the learning point when you listen to him respond to that is how he falls right into that Jim Collins’ model that we had read about earlier.

Stig Brodersen  7:19  

Yeah, I absolutely loved that book. It’s “From Good to Great.” He calls this the window test: do you sit inside and look outside and blame everyone else? Or are you looking inside of yourself and saying, “Oh, look at how many good things that are happening to me in my life that is not my responsibility at all”? 

Bill Gates talks about here in another interview about how microchips became a million times cheaper, while he was in Microsoft. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a million or whatever it was, but to me, it was amazing. He said, “I couldn’t do that, if that hasn’t been the case. Otherwise, we couldn’t have done our job. Otherwise, we couldn’t have grown exponentially.”

That has nothing to do with Gates. There was just something that was a given and something that came from the outside. He has been so lucky. I definitely don’t want to take anything away from Bill Gates. I think calling Bill Gates just lucky and not calling him smart or a hard worker would probably be the understatement of the century. 

It’s actually very interesting if you have seen some of the interviews with his parents. I mean, it is no coincidence that there’s a smart kid coming out of that family, giving him a book allowance since he was just a kid. They just want to give him unlimited learning. How amazing is that?

I think there were a lot of good things that really were in his favor. He also mentioned when he was born, he was hired as a computer programmer before the title was invented. He had a lot of good things going for him for sure.

Preston Pysh  8:45  

Alright, so let’s go ahead and play another question. This next question Bill was asked, “Becoming successful takes a lot of motivation and focus. What helps you stay motivated and focused?” This was his response.

Bill Gates  8:58  

Being successful means having as much money as I do, it also takes a ridiculous level of luck, in addition to whatever other factors are involved. I had no idea that writing software would be so profitable. It’s nice. Now I have the opportunity and responsibility of giving that money back through the various things I’m doing. So, it’s a very nice deal. 

Working on something where you love it and you feel like there’s a sense of progress. Now, our foundation does a lot of things that seemed to go very slow or very tough. We’re involved in trying to improve K through 12 education in the United States. 

Even though we put a lot into that, I would say, we can’t say for sure whether that money will cause a significant change for high school dropout rates, college attendance rates, kids who enjoy college, kids get a good job, whichever metric you pick. Those metrics in the last 12 years we’ve been involved had moved basically not at all. 

There are points of light. You can go to some charter schools that we’ve done to wow. There are 500 kids there but there are 50 million kids in the K through 12 system. Even despite these nice little groups of 500, if you look at the aggregate measures, there’s really no meaningful change that has come out of the reform movement. Maybe some hints of what we need to scale up and in the future for that. 

My basic advice is pick something you like. It’s very good if the skill of reading and learning new things is something you retain as you get older. One thing I have that I think other people have lost a little bit is the willingness to learn a new subject area and to pick up a book and read pretty deeply about that. 

When I think why am I willing to do that, well partly, I have enough friends who know a lot that if I get confused or stuck, I can just send an email and they’ll straighten me out on the thing. I’m not at much risk of falling into utter confusion. 

Having smart friends who can rescue your dead ends is a pretty good thing. Wanting to learn and understand stuff and wanting to meet the scientists who might have a chance of making breakthroughs in new areas, it makes things a lot of fun. I find myself working as many hours as I did 10 years ago. 

Now in my 20s, I didn’t go home at night. I didn’t believe in weekends and vacations. I’m not as fanatical as I was in the first decade of Microsoft. That was a lifestyle for somebody in their 20s with no wife, no girlfriends. They don’t have parents who don’t require them to come around too often. That was pure fanaticism. I’m semi-fanatical at this point because it’s fun and energizing.

Preston Pysh  11:53  

For me, it just sounds like he just loves what he’s doing and anything that he’s worked on. He’s always loved what he’s doing and it’s a lot easier to stay motivated when you love what you’re doing. 

I would tell you if you want to read a fantastic book on Bill Gates, I personally like the Paul Allen book. I thought that it gave such an accurate account of Bill Gates, especially early in his life when he was learning how to code in high school. These stories about Bill Gates when he was in his teens were just fascinating from this Paul Allen book that we read a while back. I think it’s called “Idea Man.”

Another thing that I wanted to quickly highlight was that he briefly touched at the very beginning there, when he’s talking about all the money that he’s made about his foundation. My wife right now is getting a master’s degree in nonprofit management at Johns Hopkins. She’s looking at a lot of 990 forms. 

A 990 form is basically like an income statement and balance sheet for nonprofits. One night she was studying and she was looking at something. She was doing research on the Gates Foundation. She was looking at the financial statements, the 990 form, and she said, “Preston, come here and look at this”

I came over and I looked at the form. Then she said, “Look how much money this guy is giving away each year.” 

I truly had no idea how much money the Gates Foundation was giving away. I know that they’re a billion dollar nonprofit. Well, I look at the financial statement and this guy is giving away $5 billion a year. When you hear that number, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a lot of money.” 

However, what’s neat about his filings is he publishes in the 990 every single dollar that is given to whatever organization, whatever foundation. The list just keeps going and going and going.

We were then flipping through the form. We see a million dollars here. $500,000 here and $1.3 million here. The list just goes and goes. You’re looking at, and you might think, “How can one human being accomplish such an enormous amount of…” I don’t want to use the word power, but how can he capture that much work through money and then give that much back? It’s just mind boggling. 

I’ll tell you if you ever want to see something that will just kind of blow your mind, search 990 form and Bill Gates Foundation. Look through it.

So sorry to go off on a tangent there, but I really wanted to highlight the work that he’s doing because everyone knows him from Microsoft. However, I’ll tell you, the stuff that he’s doing in the nonprofit sector is somewhat unbelievable. It is at a whole different level that the world has never seen before and he’s doing that today.

Stig Brodersen  14:41  

Yeah, I’m very excited also to talk about the next question. I have a few more notes to this question but the next question, we will talk more about his foundation. It is absolutely amazing what he’s doing and just like he was disrupting the world of software. 

I think you can easily say he’s doing the same thing to philanthropy. It’s absolutely amazing what he’s giving away, even if you compare it to other countries, which in itself is either impressive or very sad. 

One quick thing I would like to highlight about how Bill Gates is keeping up his motivation and focus, what he talks about when learning a new area, because he was not talking about just learning. He was not talking about, if you’re a coder, you will be even better writing code by reading this book or taking this course. That was not what he was saying. 

He’s very interested in different subjects. I think that is very, very appealing. For him, it’s a way to just learn about life also, but I think it’s a way to stay motivated in the sense that he’s always on a steep learning curve. 

Whenever you’re really good at something, if you’re someone like Bill Gates, I’m sure you can teach him something about software, but he’s probably not on a really steep learning curve the same way, as if you’re going from subject to subject. I like that: learning to learn. Keep being motivated, not plateauing. 

I like that mindset in terms of honing your own skills rather than just being focused on one thing you want to excel at, especially in the day and age where specialization seems to be more and more important. I think what we need to specialize in even more is learning to learn new things.

Preston Pysh  16:19  

All right. I obviously agree with you, Stig. I mean, that’s really what the point of our whole show is. 

Okay, so we’re gonna go ahead and play the next question here. This one piggybacks on some of the comments that we were saying before and the question is, “What inspired you to take on philanthropic work?”

Bill Gates  16:34  

Well, my work at Microsoft was about taking technology out to the masses. I never liked the idea that computers were just for big companies or governments or things like that. 

The kind of empowerment idea that we could all be creative and communicate with computers, that was always there in the Microsoft realm. As part of my Microsoft work, I would travel to India, China and South Africa. I got a little bit of familiarity that to be honest, I didn’t have when I was in college. I only had the vaguest numeric awareness of what the poorest 2 billion, the situation they were in. 

I remember going to a slum in South Africa, right by Johannesburg and taking there a free computer. I was giving them a computer, took them a few hours to find a power cord that was long enough to get to where the electricity was. They kind of plugged it in. It was clearly not that relevant to the need for foo, medicine and the very basics. 

That kind of started me on a journey to understand what was up with the poorest 2 billion, what was being done for their health and agriculture. I was kind of stunned that the world wasn’t paying enough attention to those very basic needs. 

For example, in the 90s, when I was early in philanthropy and just doing a modest amount. I gave a $40 million grant for malaria. Somebody said, “Now you’re the biggest funder of malaria in the world.”

I thought, “Well, that’s ridiculous. It kills a million children a year.” People are spending hundreds of millions on baldness drugs to avoid male baldness and nobody’s died yet. 

What are the priorities of the world? Maybe capitalism alone doesn’t necessarily signal us to help the people whose voice in the marketplace is so limited because they don’t have money. They’re pretty quiet in a sense, in terms of the R&D budgets of the world. 

I started to get that glimpse. Of course, in a sense, I was always going to have the challenge that through the good luck of my Microsoft ownership being extremely valuable. I was either going to spend it on myself. I only need a limited number of hamburgers per day. Was I going to give it to my kids? I had a view that that would kind of distort their life and actually not be beneficial to them. 

Then if I wanted to give it back to society, I’d better figure out where it could go. I know it would have some sort of research, innovation type aspect. But I had to spend a lot of time in Africa and in the poor parts of India to kind of get these basic health needs, the agricultural needs were pretty fundamental. 

Yet, there were advances taking place that would let us really make big progress on those. It kind of evolved from the early 1990s that I first got in mind until, you could say 2008, which was when I left my full time work at Microsoft. Since then, I’ve been full time doing the foundation work.

Preston Pysh  19:44  

The thing that I really like about this discussion that he’s having here is it gets into his mindset. It gets into how he thinks about solving a problem. The discussion about the baldness, he looks at where are the most people dying in the world and what are they dying from? Is there an easy solution? 

I’ll rack and stack all of these different issues that we see around the world. Let me categorize how much money I think it’s going to take to solve each one of those in the probability of success. That’s how he thinks. 

He starts with the big picture and where can I have the most impact? It’s like the pareto principle. You get a glimpse of that. I mean, what a comment.

He put down $40 million into malaria research and you got $100 million dollars being spent on baldness, which just shows you that society, I guess, treasures vanity much higher than the other. That’s crazy. My hat’s off to Bill Gates and with what he’s doing. This is amazing stuff. Absolutely amazing stuff. 

Stig Brodersen  20:50  

I’m a big fan too of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I think what I really like is how he tries to run this as a business and having different metrics that you would typically have, if you were a country. Annually, around a hundred billion dollars are given in foreign aid and $4 billion is given in health and agriculture, which is primarily where Gates Foundation is working.

If they’re giving away up to $5 billion a year, this is a pretty significant player, not just as a foundation, but as a country. 

Another thing that I think you need to mention when you’re talking about this foundation is that they’re giving real money. What I mean by that is, there’s a lot of things that are not completely transparent whenever countries talk about how to meet a certain quota given by the UN, or any kind of way that they’re describing or explaining how much that they’re really giving. 

This is something that especially Western Europe has been doing. They’re giving loans to a poor country, which of course is great, but the interest of those loans is just really, really high. They know they’re not getting it back. 

In a way, to donate a lot of money, they’re writing off the interest as a donation for that year, then the next year. So, they’re not really giving any new money away, but it looks like they’re giving millions and millions of dollars. 

This foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is giving real dollars away, which just has another type of impact as you can imagine. As Preston said before to the question, right now, it’s around $15 billion in assets. It’s rapidly growing right now. 

Some of you might also think that how does that add up with Warren Buffett saying he wants to donate 99% of his fortune. Bill Gates said that he will donate at least 95% of his fortune to charity. How does that all add up? 

It really does in the sense that they are giving every year for different reasons, including tax. They have so much they can give away. I think Warren Buffett is around $3.4 billion every year he can give away in Berkshire shares. Then if he was to *inaudible*, then he can give all of it away. 

It is actually very significant what they’re doing. When this foundation was built in 2010, the so-called Giving Pledge, so many other billionaires have contributed to this, not just only to this foundation, but also to other foundations. Right now, $175 billion assets, plus to give at least 50% of their fortune away, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sara Blakely.

This is quite significant, also on a larger scale. I think we need to applaud that. I really like that we get a chance to bring that up here also on the show.

Preston Pysh  23:40  

All right, so let’s go ahead and play another question. Let’s talk about tech. The question that was proposed to Bill was, What’s the difference between the products that Microsoft, Apple and all these other large competing companies have been making during the last 15 years versus today? What do you think there’ll be making in the next 15 years?” 

So this is a futuristic tech question for Bill. This was how he responded.

Bill Gates  24:01  

Well, it’s an industry that’s had very dramatic change. Of the first 500 software companies that came into existence to write software for the personal computer, Microsoft was the very first, but the rest of the 500 are all gone. 

There have been a lot of dead ends. People doing games, people doing accounting software, people doing system software. People remember the ones that survived.

Apple did a great job actually went through a tough period and then survived. It’s a phenomenal story where they contributed a lot. 

Google is still sort of in its first iteration, where its very first product was so immensely successful, both in terms of volume and profitability, that they’re coming in and doing new things. 

We’ve then come a long way as an industry. Things that used to be hard like to print things and that was a big deal. It used to be hard to set up email, that was a big deal. Videos had too many bits and the speed of decoding was too slow. These are things we take for granted today. 

There’s a lot of wonderful engineering that went into those things and everybody just gets to build on top of that work. The work for the future, a lot of it has to do with how we engage with the device. 

The keyboard is still going to be around, but voice, touch pin, video recognition, all of these things that some people call new user interface or NUI, to sort of say it’s a generation past the thing that we’re building off of, which is the GUI, graphics user interface. That’s going to be such a phenomenal change in these devices and these devices are going to have to work together in more coupled ways. 

As you walk into a room with a screen, your phone would just be able to use that screen in a rich way. If there’s a camera in there, it can do recognition off of that camera and say ideally, you won’t even think about the different computing platforms. They’re just helping you out. They’re just pervasive in the environment. 

Particularly if you look at the fact that you’ll have flexible screens that are almost like papyrus roll, that you’ll be able to cover the walls with high resolution screen capability, that you’ll have motors that are cheap enough with robotic type capability, including even arm manipulation, you’ll just take that for granted. 

What we can do in the digital realm in the next 15 years, it’s kind of the sky’s the limit. It’s almost scary in terms of the number of jobs that software-driven activities will be able to automate in a very rich way. The scale of how we can use machine learning and rich databases behind these things to behave in a far more intelligent fashion. 

Machine learning has now evolved to a thing called deep learning where it actually can take and recognize what the key characteristics are. It’s not proven, but it’s believed that it is probably similar to the mechanisms that the brain uses to try and learn things.

Both on the depth of the thing and how it reaches out into the world and interfaces with you, things will look radically different than they do today. The fact that screens are rigid right now, people will look at that and say, “Well, what was that about?” 

The fact that you can’t project onto your eye and create sort of an infinite resolution, augmented reality experience, you’ll just take that for granted. So, I’d say that the innovation is going faster now than ever before.

Preston Pysh  27:34  

That’s some interesting stuff but I can’t really say that it’s anything different than what we had probably heard about and kind of thought was coming in 15 years. I will say this, this augmented reality stuff that you’re basically creating 3D in your own room, and it appears as if somebody there is pretty fascinating stuff. 

I know Microsoft had built an augmented reality visor, and also a company called Magic Leap just recently launched their hardware. Some of this stuff is getting really, really fascinating. 

If you’re not too up to speed on augmented reality, I’d tell you do a Google search. Look at some YouTube videos. We’ll throw some videos up in our show notes, if you want to check those out of augmented reality.

It’s actually 3D mapping the environment around you so if you’re sitting in a room, you basically have LIDAR technology that scans the room and comes up with a 3D map of what everything looks like. Then the software understands what that 3D mapping looks like of your environment. Then as it places objects into the room…

Think about Skype. If we were sitting at a table, the person that I’d be chatting with if they had some type of 3D mapping on their end, basically what the software can do is place that person at the same table that you’re seeing in your house and they put them on the other side of the table and as be as if they’re sitting there. You wouldn’t see the bottom half of their body because it’d be blocked by the table because the software can recognize that there’s a table between you and where it’s placing the 3D object. 

It would appear as if there was somebody straight across from you. Believe it or not, this stuff is becoming real. There are companies like Magic Leap. It is a private company. I believe they raised funding in excess of a billion dollars. 

This stuff is happening and now how far along they are, you can make that judgment based on the videos that you can watch. I think it’s a little bit further along than people might realize. The hardware is still clunky, let me just put that out there. Like you’re going to look a little crazy walking around with this stuff on your head. However, there’s some neat stuff happening in the space that he was talking about.

Stig Brodersen  29:40  

Oh, it’s just so fascinating what you can do and then of you building on top of all this engineering that’s already been done, just being passed on from generation to generation. 

One of the things that I have really been looking into here over the past few weeks, talking about learning new subjects, there has been more in machine learning and AI to get a better understanding of this because I think that whenever we listen to Bill Gates or someone like that in the tech industry, they’re always talking about the future. It’s difficult to understand the scope of what we’re really talking about, in many ways, especially if we’re not as visionaries as they are.

However, let me give you an example of what we could mean whenever we talk about artificial intelligence. This is an example of how you are perceived as a human being and then what artificial intelligence can do.

Imagine James Cameron. I guess a lot of people say that he’s one of the most successful and intelligent directors in our time. James Cameron, in an AI sense, is very inefficient. He’s very inefficient because he spent years learning how to read and write, because you need that before you can become a director. He spent years watching movies, figuring out what it is that the audience likes. That took a long time too. 

So, imagine what AI can do then. Well, it can already read and write and if you had to teach that to the computer, now you can do that in a few minutes. 

Now, with the processing power we have today and especially the processing power we have in the future, you can watch thousands or millions of movies in the matter of seconds or minutes. When James Cameron’s like 25 or 30 years old, whatever, you can do that in an afternoon, at least in the future, in the way of thinking about AI. 

James Cameron will have to pay for his actors, AI can basically just animate them. AI can ensure that the movie has been translated into multiple countries because it can mimic the way that people will talk in that language. They can automatically translate that into that local dialect, if that’s what needs to be done. 

Now, you can’t do all of this today, but it’s not as far as you might imagine. I just wanted to give that as an example. Definitely not to say anything bad about James Cameron, but just to give you an idea of how is it that you can be a talented and intelligent human being, and perhaps how will that be replaced by a machine in the future?

Preston Pysh  32:19  

What we’re going to do now at this point in the show is to transition to taking a question from a member of our audience question. What we’re going to play today comes from Trevor Cowen. Here’s Trevor’s question. 

Trevor Cowen 32:30  

Hi, guys. My name is Trevor. My question is in regards to the ever shrinking public market. The number of publicly traded companies is roughly half the size that it was in the mid 1990s, and roughly 25%, smaller than it was in 1976. Do you think that this trend will continue and is it a cause for concern? Thanks very much and keep up the great work.

Preston Pysh  32:49  

All right. Trevor, I really, really like this question and I have an opinion on it. I don’t know if this opinion is valid, and the example that I’m about to tell you might be way oversimplifying things, but this is how I understand it. 

If you’ve ever played a game of Monopoly, what happens is the game continues to progress. If you start off with four players, you start off with six players or whatever, as the game continues to go on. There’s domination and capitalization. 

There’s domination that occurs whenever you’re dealing with free markets. There are winners and losers. If you allow that game to continue to go on, and you allow businesses to fail, and you allow other players to basically take possession of those assets, you have what’s called consolidation. 

Now, imagine playing that game, but the banker isn’t allowing other businesses to fail. Instead, what they’re doing is they continue the person who’s playing the bank and the game continues to add liquidity into the game by adding more money. So a player is getting ready to fail. 

The bank steps in and says don’t fail, let’s give you another hundred dollars. So you keep feeding liquidity into the game. Those players are going to be able to continue to play, but their chance of winning continues to go down and becomes less and less probable, because that money continues to flow to the asset holders, the main asset holders in the game. 

So yes, you can keep the number of businesses in there, but they become weaker and weaker and weaker, and the ones that are amassing all the wealth are becoming stronger. 

I believe that’s an example of what we’re seeing in modern economies right now. The central bankers through quantitative easing, and Japan was the first one to start doing this back in the 1990s. During this last credit cycle, you’re now seeing it occur in Europe and the United States. 

I think as we go into yet another credit cycle whenever that happens, I think things are going to get really, really interesting, because you’re getting to a point where they’ve manipulated the financial markets so much that interest rates are pushed to zero. 

We even saw Japan this last credit cycle push their interest rates into the negative territory. If you’re talking about real rates, which are inflation adjusted, they’re negative all over the place, depending on what duration you’re talking. 

I think that that is a major issue and I think that one of the results that you’re seeing out of that is the consolidation of what you just described. That’s my personal opinion. I might be really biased or have gaps in my thinking, but that’s the way I see it.

Stig Brodersen  35:26  

Trevor, I really like this question too. I don’t think we ever covered anything remotely connected to that. That’s a really interesting point that you have.

Whenever I look at some of the stats here, I think there are quite a few reasons why you are seeing this 50% shrinkage. I think right now we have around 3600 listed companies and it used to be double that, just before dot-com burst.

There are quite a few reasons IPOs, they’re no longer as popular for venture capital as they have been. Back in the 1980s, we were around 80% of the IPOs that came from the venture capital background. Last year, it was only 15%. 

There’s also this tendency that you will keep your company private longer if you can. Facebook would be an example. It was just massive when it was listed. You see more and more consolidation just in general. That was also what Preston was getting at before. That’s easily a few hundred companies here over the past decade. 

Those are some of the reasons why you see this decline.

I have a few arguments why it’s not a problem. It’s not a problem in the sense that when it comes to disruption, that growth comes from new businesses. We will still have startup companies, even though we didn’t have a listed market or we didn’t have as developed public markets as we have today. 

Also, a lot of the companies that are disappearing on the exchanges, they are nano and micro cap. Most money is poured into the major indexes. I guess for most stock investors, it’s not necessarily a big deal. 

There are also quite a few reasons why it could be a problem. One thing that is evident is that the fewer players you have in the market, the higher prices you will get. So, for you as a consumer, it’s probably not a good thing. 

One example comes to mind would be something like the airline industry and the more consolidation you have seen here over the past 10, 15, or 20 years, I think for frequent travelers, you will have experienced that it’s been more expensive, not just inflation, but it is actually more expensive than it has been. 

There’s another concern that private companies they’re not forced to disclose as much information as public companies. So that could also, if that’s the side of the fence you are on, will be a problem. 

The more power you have to companies again, like what’s the reason for the existence of a company? That is to make money and profit is really what you as a company must focus more on than everything else, at least for most companies. 

You will have more powerful companies, perhaps also more powerful companies than nations and states. Again, depending on which side of the fence you’re on, that could also be a problem for this. 

Trevor, really, really insightful question. I think this is a tendency, or I think this is a trend that very few people actually are aware of. It can change the business landscape and perhaps also the political landscape, perhaps even democracy to some extent. So, it’s a very interesting topic that you bring up.

Preston Pysh  38:31  

All right, Trevor, thank you so much for submitting your question. For asking it, we’re going to give you a free subscription to our paid course where we teach people how to conduct intrinsic value calculations for individual stock picks. If you’re interested about this course you can go to TIPintrinsicvalue.com to learn more about it.

Trevor, you’re going to get a free subscription. We really appreciate you calling in.

If anyone else is listening to this who wants to get your question played on the show and potentially get a free course, go to asktheinvestors.com to record your question and if it gets played on the show, you’ll get a free course like Trevor.

Stig Brodersen  39:05  

All right, guys, that was all that Preston and I had for this week’s episode of The Investor’s Podcast. We will see each other again next week. 

Outro  39:13  

Thanks for listening to TIP. To access the show notes, courses or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. To get your questions played on the show, go to asktheinvestors.com and win a free subscription to any of our courses on TIP Academy. 

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