Jim Balsillie
speaker
218 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jim Balsillie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is economics. This is economics 101.
Let's say carbon... Well, he thinks they're scarce enough to show capital, and he wants to transition to a green economy. Right, right. Which is what we're going to go to in the next part of this discussion.
And thus we'll import what we're bad at. Right. And we'll export what we're good at. That's right. Right. Which is a path towards... 40 cents to the American dollar in terms of GDP. And he says that will lead to an innovation transition. And that is true because when you price something, you signal to the market, bring in something else. Yeah.
And that's fine, that will affect a green transition, but he's using a closed economy model that says Canada will get its fair share of that transition. But it's- Which we haven't. We've had decade, we've had poll positions in these systems over decades. We've got really smart people. We've invented really good ideas.
We spent tens and tens of billions of dollars and we have 10 cents on the dollar to show for our dollar. And he has nothing to say about how we're going to resolve that dichotomy.
So that we get some of the money for our deficit. And in his book, he has one sentence on IP right near the end says intellectual property is becoming increasingly important to companies and therefore we need to enforce it better to protect their investments. And that's it. Yeah, right.
That's a drive-by nothing burger in the most structural change that I talked about happen, where he's been a central... So he's a central actor in attention to intellectual property.
Whether that's a good idea or bad, he's using Ottawa's failed economic logic of the 70s to affect the norm of a green transition or anything else.
And I'm not making a normative case whether it's a good or bad idea. Well, that's me making the normative claims. He's just... It's going to fail, and it's going to fail in obvious economics. Okay, and what will failure look like? Well, there's a second leg to the failure. Okay. That the most profound force in the history of mankind in economics is the data-driven AI economy.
And he has nothing to say of data as a factor of production and input to AI and how we have to own and control that and harness our own AI. He says nothing about it. He has two sentences about be careful about privacy and social media, and that's it. And so if you look at every market, Energy, mining, agriculture, lumber, they're all AI and, excuse me, IP-driven.
And so he has nothing to say about that. Why are they AI and IP-driven? Well, because the force of it is allowing, I mean, as Schlumberger, who's one of the top 10 AI IP owners in the world, and the large oil, sorry, Halliburton, sorry, but Chambler's A2. The oil is a digital economy that you need digital AI and IP to get it out of the ground, get it refined. Right.
It's like the delivery taxicab business. It became IP-driven. Right, right. The medallion used to be worth $2 million. It went to zero because it's this superstructure of IP and data. And the same applies to, you know, shopping.
Everywhere. It even transforms the reason. It's horizontal. Right. It's horizontal. And there's no... There's no articulation of that. So it's very important. He defines, he lays out a path that affects us to an adverse outcome because of the dichotomy. And he says nothing about the innovation structure adjustment.
But he uses further 1970s economic analysis that he says, because he very famously said, businessmen are sitting on dead money. It's a very famous expression, he said. And he said that we use shovels instead of excavators, backhoes. He said that, which means we don't invest in technology. So the key is that if you just...
If business people stopped being lazy and they opened up their wallets and just threw it in there, they would do great.
But it's also a variation of complacency. Yes, exactly. Resource-cursed complacency. And I've been doing business in this country for 35 years. I have never met a CEO who says... I'm just going to take it easy and be on the dock this weekend. I don't want to double my profits this year. I've dealt with money managers all that time, both for investing companies and me putting my money to work.
I have never met a money manager who says, you know, I'm happy to be third quartile this year rather than first quartile because the fishing's good.
yeah and and the fact of the matter nobody's sitting back on their laurels every businessman has this nose that they're sniffing for money and they're sniffing how to make money that's the game everybody does that all day every day and for somebody who's been fundamentally a career civil servant and to make these broad articulations
who has never gone out and got a purchase order and traded Canadian goods globally, that actually means that he doesn't understand the nature of how capital goes in the productivity function. But he's also shuffling off responsibility. Well, the issue is if you don't have the IP... And you don't have control of the AI function. If you put the money in that, that accrues to the owner of that.
So it's like you building a house on land you don't own. And we had an economic policy of never owning the land underneath it. And then he says, well, look, if you build a house on that, it's going to be a great, big, beautiful hotel. Don't be so lazy. Where the business kind of goes, I know I don't own the land. I don't know how to own that land.
Showing 161–180 of 218 · page 9 of 11
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