Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos told a “New York Times DealBook” Summit on Wednesday that he is optimistic about a second Trump administration and that he would gladly “help” the 47th president accomplish his goals, especially when it comes to reducing the vast regulatory state.

“I’m actually very optimistic this time around that we’re going to see — I’m very hopeful about his — he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. From my point of view, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him because we do have too much regulation in this country. This country is so set up to grow. By the way, all of our problems, all of our economic problems, like if you look at the deficit and the national debt, and how gigantic it is as a portion of GDP — these are real problems, and they’re real long-term problems. And the way you get out of them is by outgrowing them,” Bezos told host Andrew Ross Sorkin.

“You’re going to solve the problem of the national debt by making it a smaller percentage of GDP — not by shrinking the national debt, but by growing the GDP. You have to grow the denominator. That means you have to grow GDP at 3%, 4%, 5% a year, and let the national debt grow slower than that,” he continued.

“If you can do that, this is a very manageable problem. So we need a growth orientation in this country. This is the most important thing: a growth mindset,” Bezos went on.

He added:

We are the luckiest country in the world. We have all these natural resources, including energy independence. We have the best risk capital system in the world, by far. People get confused about why the United States has so much venture success, so much entrepreneurial success. Why are the big tech companies here and not somewhere else? What’s really going on with all this dynamism in this country compared to what we see elsewhere in the world? There are a lot of reasons for that, but the biggest one, eight out of ten points, is that we have better risk capital.

It’s not the banking system. We have a good banking system, but so does Europe. What’s different here is that you can raise $50 million of seed capital to do something that only has a 10% chance of working. That’s crazy, but the people who are giving you that seed capital know that their expected value is still positive, in many cases — or they’re at least gambling that that’s true. That risk capital system we have in this country is turning out to be very hard for other countries to replicate.

We have that. We speak English, and English is turning into the language of the whole world. There are so many advantages here, but we are burdened by excessive permitting and regulation. You can’t build a bridge in — you know what they are. We see the examples all over the world. We need to build solar fields and everything else.

At that, Sorkin sought to clarify that Bezos was “optimistic” about the coming Trump term.

“I’m very optimistic that President Trump is serious about this regulatory agenda, and I think he has a good chance of succeeding,” Bezos replied, adding that this time around he sees Trump as being more “calm, more confident, more settled” than during his first term.