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Chapter 1: Why is Ireland the worst country for young entrepreneurs?
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, the 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?
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.
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How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. John, you're chugging away there, but we're talking about a very serious topic today. Yes, we are.
We're talking about a serious topic because 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 the age of 20 and 29
involved in entrepreneurial activity, doing their own thing. Really? Self-employed, self-starters, etc. Only 5.1% of young Irish people are doing their own thing. And how does that compare to others? So Slovakia, it's 12.2%. Right. So that's, you know, more than double in Slovakia. And it obviously goes from Slovakia down to Ireland. Yeah. 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 is so unattractive? That you would get a job before that.
That's the crucial thing. We're going to talk about that in Ireland. 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.
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Chapter 2: What are the statistics on young Irish entrepreneurs compared to other countries?
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. 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 yeah 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? Would he have been working at that stage if he was now in one of the big four, where he had a good salary, where he was paying rent, all that sort of stuff?
I wonder, has 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
Oh, we love a bit of Schumpeter.
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Chapter 3: How does wealth extraction affect local entrepreneurship in Ireland?
And when he died, didn't they look after her very well? And I'm looking at her going... Exactly. When you die, you'll be looked after. Yeah. But my question to that is, so... that was a mindset that was very prevalent among that generation. So has that mindset been 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?
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, Then 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.
So 500,000 people now work for American multinationals at a very, very high, sophisticated level, very...
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Chapter 4: What role do multinational companies play in the Irish economy?
capital intensive, the best techniques, the best management, all that sort of stuff. But again, that is an extractive industry because we are extracting wealth from somebody else's entrepreneurial ability. 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 because entrepreneur is kind of, It's almost like a trope. It's almost like a cliche.
But this is the kind of the mindset we're kind of talking about. There's two different kinds of mindset. So to be an entrepreneur requires a certain way of thinking. 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?
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 create a new product, right?
Yeah.
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, And entrepreneurs see possibilities where other people see limitations, right?
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Chapter 5: What challenges do young entrepreneurs in Ireland face?
You have no idea when you start something if it's going to work or not. Yeah. Right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that requires, as you said, a totally different mindset, a kind of a cussed 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 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've done failed more failed 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? 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, 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. 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?
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Chapter 6: How does societal perception impact entrepreneurial risk-taking?
And great things are passion projects. But great things also start as small things. And this is the interesting thing. There's big companies. Always start at small companies. Yeah, 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, yeah, yeah.
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? I think this is a really important... aspect to it, because culture is two things. 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 or encouragers? Right? Yeah. Right? So the knocker is, I have two more pints there. Right? It's that, you know, you know, Max Savage. Yes.
Who was in school with us. Yeah, yeah.
You know, his really horrible barman.
Yeah.
He's got that heart of, ah, fuck off. That's 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?
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