Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…They were phone makers, so there’s an advantage to that, okay? But I would not feel safe, not because of danger of expropriation or nothing like that, but the bankruptcy laws are not there, right? It’s not necessarily always fair competition. Things don’t happen necessarily in an orderly manner. If you have a competitor, you can have a very evil competitor, and evil competitors are there everywhere in China. They would call the police on you, put you in jail, spread false rumors about you. Maybe that happens also in the US, but there’s a different level in China. Also, the mold that you can have to protect yourself, the IP protection, that’s much weaker in China, because the legal system is not very effective. If you have a good idea, you’ll be copied, and there’s a lot of work. You have to dine and wine with the local governments. I mean, that’s not allowed anymore, by the way, but you dine and wine, figuratively speaking. You have to have a very good relationship with them. That’s a different kind of work. The wine and dine and the evil competitors is an interesting challenge. That, in some maybe distant ways, akin to the problems of the Soviet Union, I think, I guess in the United States there’s less of that, and I don’t even know if that’s based on laws, because there’s a lot of lawyers in the US that could do the same kind of evil competitor stuff, technically. That’s true. The potential negative ramifications are there, but I think personal protection is a big difference. If you make a mistake, if your company’s not run well, you go to jail. I think that the US is much, much more tolerant on entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs on failure.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.