Skip to content
Who's in the Video
Patrick M. Byrne is the CEO of the Internet retailer Overstock.com. Byrne received his B.A. from Dartmouth, studied at Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar, and earned a PhD in[…]
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

Byrne is not as optimistic as Friedman.

Patrick Byrne: I used to ask . . . I’ve asked Milton Freedman actually that same question, and he . . . he always said that I was lucky in that I was just a born optimist. No matter how bad things got; no matter how statist the intellectual class became in the ‘40s, and the ‘50s, and ‘60s, I was always an optimist. I always . . . I knew the books weren’t going to be burned. I thought that we would come out of it. I guess I’m not so . . . I don’t . . . I can’t be as optimistic as he was. I’ve become in the last two or three years, as I’ve discovered that the system is just turtles all the way down, I don’t think that we’re gonna be able . . . Well I think it’s a 50-50 thing whether we’re going to be able to fashion the responses that we need to deal with the largest problems we face.

Recorded on: 10/29/07

 


Related