Arthur Kroeber

No, no, no.

I think basically the analogy with the VC fund is a pretty good one.

I've made it many times.

Think of China as like a giant VC fund that is just willing to lose huge amounts of money for a really long time on the assumption that a few of the bets will pan out.

Right.

And so China as a as a state, as a government is uniquely able to throw a lot of money at things for a really long time, not care about what the returns are and say, we're going to identify this universe of potential winners.

We're going to promote all of them, basically.

And some of them may work and some of them may not.

And the successes will pay for the failures.

So, a couple things.

So, first of all, I would say that even if you go back to, like, 2005, 2006, when they started thinking about this...

Saying that green energy was going to be an important industry in the future, everyone was saying that, right?

You had the Kleiner Perkins guy, John Doerr, right?

John Doerr was the big VC who said, circa 2007, I'm going to put all of my bets on green energy because this is the future, right?

He turned out to be wrong from the standpoint of his investment returns.

But he turned out to be, I think, totally correct in terms of saying this is a really big thing.

So it was just not that wild a bet to say that green energy was going to be really important.

And so we should place a lot of bets on that.

But why does this work and why is this different from a central planning thing, right?

I think that's a really important point.