Ireland Is Killing Its Entrepreneurs

0:00David McWilliams: Just before we start, a heads up on what is coming up on the show. Today's podcast is all about the fast, rapidly disappearing Irish entrepreneur. Eurostat has just released figures that shows that Ireland is not only the third worst, the fourth or fifth worst in Europe in terms of entrepreneurs. It is the worst place in Europe for young entrepreneurial talent in terms of the people in their 20s who are actually out building businesses. Only 5 % of young Irish people are building businesses, as opposed to 12 % of Slovakians. And we're going to look and see, why is this? What does it mean? Why is it happening?

0:44David McWilliams: And will this make the economy less or more vulnerable to shocks in the future, such as AI? That's all coming up in a couple of minutes.

1:25boost. See Experian.com for details. Every idea starts with a problem. Warby Parker's was simple. Glasses are too expensive. So they set out to change that by designing glasses in-house and selling directly to customers. They're able to offer prescription eyewear that's expertly crafted and unexpectedly affordable. Warby Parker glasses are made from premium materials like impact resistant polycarbonate and custom acetate. And they start at just$95, including prescription lenses. Get glasses made from the good stuff. Stop by a Warby Parker store near you.

2:03To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast.

2:14David McWilliams: How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. John, you're chucking away there, but we're talking about a very serious topic today. Yes, we are. We're talking about a serious topic was Eurostat, which is obviously the statistical office of the European Union, which amalgamates all sorts of statistics all over Europe, and then gives us a snapshot of what's happening, published something last week. And it says in 2025, in Ireland, we had the lowest number of young people at the age of 20 and 29 involved in entrepreneurial activity, doing their own thing. Really? Self-employed, self-starters, etc.

2:56Only 5.1 % of young Irish people are doing their own thing. And how does that compare to others?

3:04David McWilliams: So Slovakia, it's 12.2%. So that's, you know, more than double in Slovakia. And it obviously goes from Slovakia down to Ireland. Is there something in the water there in Slovakia? The point is, what is an entrepreneur? Why are entrepreneurs so important? And what does it mean for a society where young people are not backing themselves? What else might be going on which militates against people becoming risk takers? So what is going on in the society that means taking a risk, backing yourself so unattractive that you would get a job before that? That's the crucial thing. We're going to talk about that in Ireland.

3:44David McWilliams: Again, it's against the background of the few podcasts we've been doing over the last couple of weeks, which are highlighting, again, this extraordinary disparity between the alleged wealth of the nation on paper and the reality of life here. Now, what we do know in economics is it's impossible to sustain wealth over a generation without that wealth being created. Explain that. So what we're looking at in Ireland is our wealth is extracted. So the multinationals come in. Yeah, yeah. They make stuff here. They pay taxes. That wealth is therefore extracted by Ireland. It's not created domestically by people here because wealth creation domestically, I mean, the greatest example of wealth creation in Ireland would be something like Ryanair.

4:32David McWilliams: It starts from zero. There's no industrial base here. There's no industrial base in aeronautics. We've never made an airplane. We've never made a wing. There was no air force. there was nothing really of substantial significance of which to build an airline industry. And Michael O 'Leary, through his own genius, has built the biggest airline in the world. Yeah, right? Yeah, yeah. In a generation. So therefore the wealth created in Reiner is created internally by Irish entrepreneurs within the society and within the company, right? So the question therefore is, why don't we have more of them? And the question then is why would O 'Leary at the age of 25 today have taken the risk that he took then which was he was given the opportunity by somebody else to take it up?

5:27David McWilliams: Would he have been working at that stage if it was now in one of the big four where he had a good salary, where he was paying rent, all that sort of stuff. So that's the back of it. I wonder if he won the million though. What I'm saying is that societies that have entrepreneurial talent generate the wealth and the innovation and that tends to be more permanent than societies that extract the wealth because of course societies that extract the wealth if the wealth extraction argues against people getting up off their ass and doing something that will make you quite fragile so what we're going to talk about john is Schumpeter.

6:08Oh, we love a bit of Schumpeter.

6:10David McWilliams: Nassim Taleb we're going to introduce. We're going to introduce why entrepreneurs are crucial. In actual, they are the heroes of economics and what they actually do, which makes them the spark that drives the economy. And then what we can do in the society maybe to make the world a little bit warmer for the risk taker. Because without the risk taker, you've no return. Without return, you've no economy. Okay, so there's a lot there. There's a lot to unpack. As the Americans say, there's a hell of a lot to unpack. But what's wrong with being a 95er, an employee? You're an extractive person. You don't generate wealth.

6:51David McWilliams: So you're dependent on other people to generate the wealth. No, no, I get that. But I mean, presumably the job that they're doing in an office or whatever it is, is contributing to the company or to the organization that they're working in. And therefore generating some sort of wealth. There's nothing wrong on an individual basis. But if the entire society are employees, who's the employer? Yeah. Who actually takes the risk to make the whole thing work? My fear is that being an employee misdiagnoses stability for resilience. Right. Okay. So if you are working in a big company or in the public service or whatever it happens to be, what you think is that the world is stable, my life is stable, I'm outsourcing risk to other people, I'm buying insurance in a way.

7:48David McWilliams: Because basically when you take a job, you say, you know what I'm doing? I'm actually buying security. Now, what you've then figured out is that the world is secure by virtue of the fact that you're in a secure job. Yeah. In a world of AI, for example, is there such a thing as a secure job? I'm not too sure. But think about it this way. The more protection we buy, the less resilient we become. Think about it in the context of, for example, your immune system, John. Yeah. So if you take a child and you mollycoddle that child and you protect that child from all the pathogens, the unpleasantness, and you basically wrap that child in cotton wool, you think you are protecting the child.

8:32David McWilliams: But what you're actually doing is you're making that child much, much more exposed to pathogens and diseases down the road because their immune system has not developed. It hasn't identified the alien creatures. And built up their... Their immunity. Yeah. So consider the economy to be something similar. The same way as, for example, if you train, if you play sport, if you put your bones and muscles under stress. The more stress you put your body under, the more resilient it becomes. You build up a sort of a muscle mass, a muscle memory. Your bone density becomes actually stronger. So the people who actually end up being weak are the people who sit on their arses doing nothing.

9:15David McWilliams: Yeah. Right? Okay. So imagine that the economy works the same way, that there is no such thing as inherent stability. There are moments where the society might be stable, but underneath the economy is always unstable. This is why classical economics was obviously conceived on a blackboard and not out in the real world. Yeah. Because classical economics talks about this thing called equilibrium. And it says that there is a position where stability reinforces stability and there's no incentive to our momentum to change. Yeah. Now that is a totally and utterly academic understanding of the way the economy works.

9:56David McWilliams: In reality, the economy is constantly in flux. There's never a moment it's asleep. It is always adapting. It's always changing. So if we take that as our starting point, and we've said it before, that evolution is probably a better framework, biology is a better framework to look at the economy than physics, right? If you accept that that's evolution, the more persuasive way to look at the economy. Then let's look at the secure job idea. The more you are protecting yourself from the outside world, the deeper you bury yourself in the large corporation. If everybody in the large corporation is burrowing themselves into the corporation, what happens if the corporation fails?

10:45Yes. What happens to those people?

10:47David McWilliams: It's like the difference between a taxi driver and a bank manager, right? Yeah. So a taxi driver goes out to work every day, whether it's on Uber or whatever they're having to do. Yeah, and he has to hustle. They hustle all the time, right? They're hustling. They're figuring out, for example, a taxi driver today is figuring out, okay, bank charges. How will I use that? Okay, will I tap Uber? How much does it cost? Okay, petrol charges. Okay, that's going to change. Uber itself, that changes my world. Immigrants who are coming in. oh my God, these immigrants are coming in, they're undercutting me, that the taxi driver, Dublin taxi drivers or Irish taxi drivers, every day are going through a whole host of calculations, right?

11:25David McWilliams: But you know what I mean? They're living in the adaptive economy every day. Think about the bank manager in one of the large banks who in effect becomes a very, very good bureaucrat. When a bank crash happens and those banks that look really secure turn out to be insecure, the chances of that bank manager, when they get laid off, being able to hustle are probably very, very low. Why? Because that muscle memory. Yeah. They've never had to do it. They didn't learn it. I mean, it is. It's a learned. It's a skill that you learn, you know, how to network, how to hustle, how to. How to sell. Yeah. How to sell, how to buy, how to sell.

12:11David McWilliams: So what I'm just saying, so there's nothing intrinsically wrong to come back to your question about being an employee. But if the society becomes a society of employees, then structurally that society is hyper fragile to technological change, to political change, to demographic change. And that is where I would like to take this podcast, which is that when you see something like Ireland being at the bottom of the European League and Europeans are usually at the bottom of the global league when it comes to entrepreneurialism because our natural proclivity is insurance and protection and all that, right?

12:56David McWilliams: Then you have to actually digest that figure and say, what does that mean? And a lot of economists and people would say it just means something for the economy and whatever. I think it means something much bigger. Let's get into this because, you know, yeah, Why is that the case? I mean, when we were growing up, our parents always said, you know, get that good job at the pension. I remember telling you that story about my aunt saying, why don't you join the cops? Get a proper job. Big tall fella like you. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And her reason for it was, sure, a friend of mine, her husband, became a Garda.

13:35And when he died, didn't they look after her very well? I'm looking at her going...

13:40David McWilliams: Exactly. When you die, you'll be looking after her. Yeah. But my question to that is, so that was a mindset that was very prevalent among that generation. So was that mindset being passed down or is there something much more going on? Okay, I think they're very, very good questions. So I think that is where we start. So in Ireland in the 1960s, 1970s, there was the mindset of getting a good job. there was a fear of risk-taking. Risk-taking was degraded, it was looked down on. You know, they'd say, ah, he's a bit of a chancer. So somebody's actually doing their thing as a bit of a chancer. And of course, what was the outcome of that?

14:25David McWilliams: It was a society characterized by very low income, very low wealth, and huge rates of emigration without any immigration. And all the chances went into politics. All the chances went into politics, right? Okay. But then you think, okay, And something odd happened in Ireland, which was the arrival of the American multinationals in the 1990s. And what they did was they replaced the need for local entrepreneurs with a massive capital transfer from the United States. Yeah. So 500 ,000 people now work for American multinationals at a very, very high, sophisticated level, very capital intensive, the best techniques, the best management, all that sort of stuff.

15:09David McWilliams: but again that is an extractive industry because we are extracting wealth from somebody else's entrepreneurial ability yeah so what i would like to do on this podcast is go back to this idea of what the entrepreneur is why they're important it's a fancy word for the small business person so let's call them the small business person okay because entrepreneur is kind of it's almost like a trope it's almost like a cliche but this is this is the kind of the mindset we're kind of talking about there's there's two different kinds of mindset so to be an entrepreneur requires a certain way of thinking so completely so can you define an entrepreneur okay well look i mean i've always thought that first of all right the most important thing about entrepreneurs is they create demand where it didn't exist now this is something they're like the magician in the economy Now, Schumpeter, Joseph Schumpeter, who in effect made the entrepreneur the hero of his worldview, he basically said that the entrepreneur is a combiner, right?

16:14David McWilliams: Yeah. They combine resources to make new things. He said they combine new products. So there's things all around them. And the entrepreneur is the person who brings them all together. Yeah, yeah. Be it labor, be it technology, be it, but basically they're creating. Capital. They create a new product, right? They usually and sometimes create a new way of making that. They open new markets that didn't exist before. They capture new sources of supply and they create new organizations in industry. So that's the way in which, right? But in reality, what I would say is that, you know, entrepreneurs see possibilities where other people see limitations, right?

16:57David McWilliams: Where other people say, oh, you shouldn't, I wouldn't do that if I were you. I joined the guards. If I was you, I'd join the guards. I know. Notions, that fella, right? Okay, this is the Irish thing, right? They have skin in the game and they bring the previously unimagined, this is the key thing, into being. So a new product, a new idea, you know, even a new podcast. Yeah. You bring it into being. You actually go and do it. And you don't talk about it. You don't beat around the bush. You don't besmirch other people. You say, okay, I'm just going to do that, right? And therefore they have this skin in the game and they're on what I would call, they perform on the stage of jeopardy.

17:35David McWilliams: Now, this is very important because jeopardy is the risk. And the interesting thing about products and bringing new products to the market, John, and putting all your effort into them is that you only know if it's successful after you've put all the effort in. Yeah. And this is critical. Yeah, because you need the cojones to actually get up and do it, Which requires confidence. Which requires confidence, but it also requires something different. Because if you know that success comes only after you do things, well, then you have to be really open to the world and open to the knocks that are going to come your way.

18:15David McWilliams: This is very different to the employee. The employee is not open to the knocks. The success for the employee is getting the wage. Yeah. right yeah yeah yeah where success for the entrepreneur is something very very different because it's a very long term horizon and you've no idea this is the crucial thing you have no idea when you start something if it's going to work or not yeah right yeah yeah so that requires as you said a totally different mindset a kind of a cusset mindset it's like fuck you mindset yeah you know it's sort of like i'm going to do it my own way mindset okay but if you if you think about it like you know failure for an entrepreneur is is brutal and success is often only the prelude to another failure if you see what i mean yeah so people who don't fail more fail better oh yeah yeah exactly so what's going on there i think that these people are kind of they're they're driven by a willingness to express themselves commercially right there's something inside them, right?

19:16David McWilliams: They're independent. I think they're sometimes unreasonable. They're also very often very difficult people, right? Yeah. But they don't want a bus. They don't want a wage. They don't want an insurance policy. They don't want somebody telling them what to do on a Monday morning. And from a macroeconomic perspective, as I said before, they create a demand where the demand didn't exist before they produced the product. Now, this is really exceptional because this is the elixir of economics. And it's the key to economic innovation. And there was an amazing quote, and I think it's really important.

19:55David McWilliams: They always are driven by, or at least the optimism of their will overshadows the pessimism of their intellect. So think about that. So our intellectual side as human beings is wired for pessimism. We want to find fault with Cartesian thinkers. We come from the Greek tradition of proof, proof, proof again, right? So our intellectual hinterland is by definition pessimistic. And yet our human urge to get out of bed in the morning is by definition optimistic. But these two constant battles between the pessimism of our intellect and the optimism of our will. Now, the man who came up with that expression was a very well-known communist called Gramsci right it's a beautiful expression right he was talking about other things but he was talking about the political innovator so all or lots of human endeavor is kind of a seesaw I would say between pessimism and optimism and what you find in the entrepreneur unlike the critic right yeah a critic can sit back and say, oh, I wouldn't do that.

21:14David McWilliams: Oh, well, somebody else would have better. But the entrepreneur's DNA is opposite to the critic because the entrepreneur's DNA is kind of the optimism of that let's do it is kind of greater than the pessimism of let's not do it. So I wonder that battle between optimism and pessimism, you know, the determining factor of which one is going to win out is how much of that is cultural. For instance, you know, you're saying that we've got 5.1 % young people. Which means 95 % are not doing this. Yeah. So do we have a culture that is very much against entrepreneurship compared to, say, America or Slovakia?

21:59Or Slovakia.

21:59David McWilliams: Well, these Europeans. Well, I mean. It's more nurturing. Now, this is a really interesting question because what we're talking about is passion projects. So entrepreneurialism is about passion. and most projects when you look around the world you realize that most things weren't there at one stage they are passion projects i'm talking about pubs bars restaurants yeah yeah yeah yeah barbers that i know you were worried about the other day right you know when you look around the world things don't just exist they don't just happen yeah people make them happen and the people who make things happen are usually driven by a passion and great things are passion projects but great things also start as small things and this is the interesting thing is that big companies always started small companies yeah yeah now i know this silicon valley thing is oh we all started in the you know bedroom of this that and the other or the garage but most things do start yeah you know there so the question is then this is your point about culture is how do you encourage that passion to back yourself and how do you undermine that passion so much so that the default position of the young Irish person now seems to be to get a job and not back yourself now this is I think this is a really important aspect to it because culture is two things.

23:28David McWilliams: It's psychological and sociological. So the psychology of the individual that becomes an entrepreneur is one thing. But what you're talking about is the sociology of the country that either supports or denigrates that tribe in society. And I think that the psychology is something that a lot of thinkers focus on. What type of person? You know, you said the Michael O 'Leary, are they one-off people, right? That is maybe for another podcast, but what you're talking about is the sociology of the society that either cultivates or denigrates this type of person. Another way of saying is, are you from a society of knockers?

24:24David McWilliams: are encouragers, right? Yeah. Right? So the knocker is, I have two more points there, right? It's that, you know, you know, Max Savage, who was in school with us. Yeah, yeah. You know, he's a really horrible barman. Yeah. He's got that horrible, ah, fuck off, I would have that, right? That creature, that knocker, if the society is taken over by fellas like that, right, and women like that, then you have a problem. So the question then is, what is important. Is the important thing in society the number of entrepreneurs or is the important thing in society the attitude of the rest of us towards them?

25:05David McWilliams: And I think it's much more the latter. Right, okay. So I think that the societal attitude is crucial. So if a society says to every person who tries and fails, I could have told you that now. Yeah. Do you know what I mean i would have done that now i had told you so yeah i told i told you so the i told you so exactly exactly i i told you so the straights right but you know i mean i uh no yeah well i didn't want to tell you at the time yeah right if your society becomes captured by knockers and denigrators and slaggers then there is no doubt that the slightly wide-eyed optimistic entrepreneurial risk taker will after being knocked once find it very difficult to actually drag themselves up and go again if your society is one that encourages that and says you know what you can't succeed unless you fail failure is basically a war story you tell once you're successful learning go again have a go we back you we encourage you then of course what you will find is that more of those people will back themselves so that's the sociological side but there's a third side which i think is the practical side and this is what we might be missing in ireland yeah we had a young fella who had emigrated to brisbane i think last year on the podcast john i think his name is matthew ruddy yes i remember that basically said look i emigrated to Brisbane because eventually I ran out of road trying to make things happen in Ireland.

26:50David McWilliams: He was making the point, my rent started at, I think it was 800 euro a month. By the time he left it was two grand. So 1200 euros a month was extracted out of his pocket by a landlord. After tax. After tax. So he said eventually he had to get a job. He couldn't pay his rent. He couldn't risk any more of his income because his income was going on rent. He then made the point that his friends who are in their 20s who have started things up are in Dubai, they're in America, they're in Australia, they're in the UK, they're in London, because it's simply too hard to reject the lure of the good permanent and pension job that's been offered by the multinationals, For example, in Ireland.

27:41So it's a fascinating paradox,

27:45David McWilliams: which is you can have objectively an incredibly successful economy, which is generating well-paid jobs for graduates, for intelligent people, for get-up-and-go people in Ireland, which looks on the surface to be really good. But he's saying, and what I'm saying, is that the cost of that is the proportion of those young people who might have started something on their own and build wealth over time give up early doors because it's just too hard. Now, of course, at the centre of that, what Matthew was saying is the housing crisis. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about Ireland and its way of doing business and more specifically the cost for people.

28:34I mean, you just mentioned rents there, but the costs, all the other costs involved in setting up a company or just going out on your own. Let's talk about that after a bit of this.

28:45David McWilliams: Fair enough.

29:06utilities, rent, and insurance. I wish dating kind of worked like that. Connect your bank account, add those on-time payments to your Experian credit file, and your FICO score updates right away. You could instantly raise your FICO score by an average of 14 points with Experian Boost. Download the Experian app for free today. Results will vary. Users who received a boost improved their FICO score 8 from Experian by an average of 14 points. See App Store or Experian.com for details. Results will vary. Not all payments are Boost eligible. Users who received a Boost improved their FICO score rate from Experian by an average of 14 points.

29:41Some may not see improved scores or approval odds. Not all lenders use Experian credit files, and not all lenders use scores impacted by Experian Boost. See Experian.com for details. If your eyes are the windows to your soul and your glasses are the windows to your eyes, then it's pretty important to find your perfect frames. That's why at Warby Parker, we've made shopping for eyewear as easy and fun as can be. Peruse endless styles in our stores, or use our app to virtually try on frames and get personalized recommendations. To find your next favorite pair of glasses, sunglasses, or contact lenses, or to locate your nearest Warby Parker store, head over to warbyparker.com.

30:18That's warbyparker.com. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread? It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals. Zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it compliance. Get it? Join the 15 ,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to vanta.com slash com.

30:54So, Mike, what you're saying is that there's only, what was it, 5.1 % of the working population are entrepreneurs.

31:03David McWilliams: At the moment. At the moment in Ireland. Yeah. But on the other hand, we have a very young population. Yeah. We have a well-educated population. You know, we have the smarts and we have all the, what would you think is the... Yeah, you're speaking, you're in the European Union, we've got a very big welfare state, we've got income. All the raw materials. All the raw materials. So what are the barriers and what are the costs maybe for somebody to go out on their own? Well, I think the major thing, okay, so just take, for example, a 27-year-old who graduated a couple of years ago, is good at their job, is on 50 grand, 52 grand a year, right, in a big company, and they say, look, you know, I'd love to set up my own, let's say, marketing agency.

31:46David McWilliams: I'd like to go out with my Todd. I have a couple of clients. I think I can work this. The question is, can I get up off the ground? Can I get up off the ground without being totally overwhelmed by cost. So let's say you're on 52 grand a year, that means your net salary is about 37 grand after tax, it's about 3 ,100 per month into your hands. So that's where you're starting with to pay yourself, expand the company, and survive, and go on to the next phase. So you've got to figure out, okay, what's the cost structure, right? So the first thing is they have to live Yeah Right So they've got to pay rent Right So if you take the average rent For a new tenant Is about 2 ,200 In Dublin Right That means that She's already Cutting her salary Dramatically And her 3 ,100 Is now about 1 ,900 Yeah To live Get an office At 600 quid Yeah Employ somebody That's like a WeWork kind of A WeWork place Employ somebody It's another 600 quid Yeah For desk space And suddenly you can see how things are becoming, because of the rent, prohibitive in terms of allowing this person live the life she should be living at 27 or 28 and begin the process of employing somebody and starting up without knowing what I said before, that success comes after you do all this, not before you do all this.

33:23David McWilliams: and of course if you employ somebody you got to pay them and if you got to pay them you got to pay them i don't let's say 35 grand right and suddenly you're in a situation where your income i mean you started at 52 you're trying to you're trying to say yourself is it worth my while yeah yeah it's not worth your while because your initial costs are so enormous that before let's say we're going to call this girl Kira, pays herself, right? She's hired in a junior at 36 grand. She's got her office desks at 14 grand. Before she even pays herself, she's in the hole for 53 grand, which is more than she was earning the last time, right?

34:08David McWilliams: So the confluence of rent, just rent we're talking about here, we're not talking about anything else, and employment costs means that she would have to be bringing in 120 grand to allow her to have the same standard of living as she had on 50 grand. Yeah. So you can see that we're talking, it's incredibly difficult. Now, if rents keep rising, that window of enthusiasm for change narrows dramatically. Yeah. So you figure out, okay, well then, what happens when, if you don't rebalance all these costs, what you will find is that tribe that make things happen. I describe as entrepreneurs as the sort of people who make the economy dance.

34:58David McWilliams: It's a nice image, John. Yes, it is. Lovely. You and I, dad dancing on the floor at somebody's wedding, embarrassing the hell out of everybody, demanding tracks from the 1980s, from the mid-1980s, exactly. So imagine the people who make the economy dance are the entrepreneurs. They're the ones who take all the, as you said, All the resources combine them to something different. And that different creates products and that products creates innovation. And then as Schumpeter talks, the gales of creative destruction will emanate from the economy. Good companies will elbow out bad companies. And the great revolution of commerce continues to revolve and evolve.

35:40David McWilliams: And you need that because that's the lifeblood of the economy. But with that example of Kira just there, metaphorical Kira, right? What you see is it's incredibly difficult. So how do we balance this in favor of the entrepreneur? There is one idea that we've ventilated on this podcast before. So if you think that it's the attitude of society that is as important as the psychology of the individual. and that the sociology of the society will bleed into the psychology of the individual over time, what you're trying to do is change the notion of what it is to be an Irish person. Are we a risk-taking, get-up-and-go culture or are we a risk-avoiding, sit-on-our-whole culture?

36:32That's a big ask to change that mindset.

36:35David McWilliams: It is, but it has to be done. So what all countries do, it's quite interesting. When Ireland became independent, we didn't change the mindset at all. Like we changed the flag. We changed the national anthem. We changed the language in primary school. We changed lots of things cosmetically. But we didn't change the idea that we are an independent nation with an independent spirit. We didn't, as the Americans say, lean into that idea. Yeah. In fact, you could argue that for 100 years, we created a rather negative, cynical society that looked down on those people who did independent things. Overshadowed by the Catholic Church.

37:23David McWilliams: All that stuff, all that stuff. And we didn't take on those big institutions. Yeah. We actually decided to allow them do their thing. Not just the Catholic Church, but the way in which Irish people set themselves up. Yeah. Now, I think you can change the DNA by incentives. So what we do know about microeconomics, we know one thing is that people respond to incentives. If the incentives are there to do something, we will do it as opposed to not do it. So then you think of, for example, this big windfall, because we started with our friends, the multinationals. And what the state is doing is either spending this for current expenditure or saving it for a rainy day fund or, in effect, a pension fund, right?

38:11David McWilliams: But we don't need a pension fund in this country. We need a startup fund. So rather than saying to people who are presently working in the country, don't worry, we're going to use all this American money so that you can take Ryanair flights to Malaga when you're 70, which is what they're doing, in effect, in Plague Goff, why don't we say we're going to take a certain percentage of this money and set up a startup fund. Now, what would that do? So if you go back to Kira's example, the only way that Kira can actually make this work is by borrowing right now for five years to build the business, pay that money back, and in that period have grown the business into something reasonable, right?

38:54David McWilliams: But the problem for Kira is when she goes to the banks and says, look, I have an idea here, I want to set up a marketing agency and I have a couple of clients and I need 40 grand or 50 grand to get through this year. The bank will look at them and say, well, what collateral do you have, Ciara? And Ciara will say, I have none. And the bank will say, well, you can whistle Dixie, off you go, right? But could you imagine if Ciara had some collateral? And what might that collateral be? That collateral might be a percentage of the startup fund. So if you think that we are throwing off billions of euros of American money and the pension fund run by the NTMA is putting them into stocks and we are hoping that those stocks will be worth something in the future.

39:47David McWilliams: We're gambling. We're gambling them that they'll be worth something in the future, right? But we're only going to pay people when they get to 65. Yeah. So that means all the people who are 25 don't get a sniff of this, right? Yeah. Now, imagine if we said, no, what we're going to do is that stock portfolio that you have is yours now, not when you retire. And that stock portfolio you can use as collateral to the bank, which de-risks your idea. So rather than say, well, I don't have any collateral, you say, well, Kierkegaard can say, well, I actually have 30 grand worth of collateral, which is the state's money, which is my money.

40:26David McWilliams: And then what you do is you pledge that to the bank. Kira gets her money. If her business fails, the bank gets the shares. So there are quids in. And you incentivize and you bias the society towards risk-taking. So by de-risking the first five years of her venture, you re-risk the entire society yeah and you do something spectacular you create a totally new type of person here yeah and therefore we know that all movements need heroes so when kira are the types of cares when they succeed that makes all the other kira say i'll do that too yeah i'll set up this i'll set up this and literally within a generation you migrate from being a risk-terrified nation that elevates failure over success.

41:26David McWilliams: And when people are failures, says, I told you so, to a society that actually elevates success over failure. And you use the American money to do that. Could you set up, instead of using the pillar banks who are out for profit anyway, could the government set up a government-run bank that is purely based on dishing out the kind of the company money, this startup fund? I think you could, but I think that you have to change the banking system too. So the thing about the banking system here is there's 160-odd billion on deposit here. So it's buckets of money. Right. But the banking system is a gatekeeper.

42:08David McWilliams: What you've got to do is you've also got to turn the banking system into an integral part of this dynamic entrepreneurial economy. So everybody wins. So also the thing about the banks is they have got gatekeepers for a reason. They have got risk assessors for a reason. So they're going to look at the proposals of the likes of Kira to make sure, well, actually, does that make sense? Are we really going to do it? But their goal, though, is to reward their shareholders as opposed to Kira and the rest of us. Well, the interesting thing is that you can change regulations for banks. That means that it's not just shareholder value all the time.

42:52David McWilliams: Because shareholder value has, as I've always said, the easiest way to rob a bank is to run it. It goes bad from the inside out, right? Shareholder value, I don't see why shareholders should be preferenced over stakeholders in a society. I really don't understand this. It's a very narrow definition of capital comes from Milton Friedman, who probably got most things wrong, even though he's been elevated to deity status by lots of economists. I think what we're talking about here is a totally reimagining of the society and how it works. And that ultimately, John, we have to put right back in the centre, not the employee, but the entrepreneur.

43:39not because the employee is wrong or bad or whatever,

43:44David McWilliams: but because the dynamic of the economy comes from this magician that makes things happen. And those people need to be supported, understood, encouraged, because as I said, the sociology is as important as the psychology. And the great thing is we have the chance now to do it. And the chance to do it comes from the multinational money, but the trigger comes from the evidence from Eurostats that were falling miles and miles behind. So let's do it.

44:37You stopped waiting for permission and started building yourself, your dreams, your credit. Experian Boost could turn your on-time payments into instant FICO score gains. Every bill you paid could become proof of your power. Self-made? Absolutely. Self-funded? Experian could help you get there. Download the Experian app today. Results will vary. Not all payments are Boost eligible. Some may not see improved scores or approval odds. Not all lenders use credit information impacted by Experian Boost. See Experian.com for details. Experian. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread?

45:11It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals. Zero chaos. Call it compliance, or call it compliance. Get it? Join the 15 ,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to Vanta.com slash com. Thank you.