Mike Green on how passive investing is distorting capital allocation

That is actually a very important role: taking money from bad companies and giving it to good companies is a critical role in the capitalist system, effectively allowing those who are efficient and intelligent allocators of capital, to give money to management teams that have good prospects in terms of generating future wealth.  What we've created now is a distortion that's a funhouse mirror effect, right?  Where we've presumed everyone is doing this for us where it is a fool's game to do it for ourselves.

~ Mike Green, "Why The Rise of Passive Investing Might Be Distorting The Market," Odd Lots podcast with Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, January 23, 2020

Mike Green on evolution, fragility and survival of the least fit

People think about evolution as progress.  Evolution's not progress.  Evolution is fitness within an environment.  And it actually breeds its own fragility, right?  If I'm a finch who happens to inhabit the Galapagos Islands and nobody has a beak that's seven inches long that can reach into a particular pine cone, then I can grow a beak that is first 1 1/2", then 2", then 3", and eventually it's 7"; it provides a huge advantage.  But if that environment changes, a 7" beak becomes an extraordinary disadvantage and I go extinct almost immediately.

What we have done is create a system that is so stable and where the focus itself becomes stability -  preserving the status quo - that we've created all the problems of specialization and fragility and inequality associated with it, where very few members of our society control so much of the resources and are actually in a position to defend those resources...  That sort of environment needs to be disrupted.

~ Mike Green, "The End Game Ep. 3," The Grant Williams Podcast, 1:25:35 mark