Daniel Priestly | Why Millionaires Are Leaving the UK & What Entrepreneurs Need to Know

Wow. Daniel, that Diary of a CEO episode, Gary Stevenson versus Daniel Priestley. One sentence, summarize how that was for you.

Incredibly exciting. It was a moment. One. A million out of a million people in the UK watched it. One in 35 people in the UK watched that episode. It's been a spot, it's been something that has sparked a huge conversation in the country. Obviously it's a conversation that people want to have and it was, yeah, it was exhilarating.

So is Gary Stevenson somewhat on the edge of a nervous breakdown?

He's definitely sitting on a lot of anger. He's, he's, he's angry, which I understand he. From his point of view, wealth inequality is something to be very angry about. The people who are relating to his content, they want a voice of anger. They want.

Is he, is he angry with the wrong people?

Yeah, he's misguided. He's definitely misguided. He's very low resolution. He has a very low resolution view of the world, which is. Well, there's no real nuance. It's essentially wealth inequality is getting worse in his opinion. Right. He doesn't share a lot of facts or data. He doesn't actually tell you where he draws that opinion from other than personal anecdotes and personal observation, which is fine, that may be where he draws it, but he never shares anything. Any broader research. So wealth inequality is getting worse. The rich are responsible and are accumulating too much wealth and therefore the only solution is to tax wealth. And that's it. That's the whole, that's the whole argument there.

Wow. Well, I mean, just to jump in, you got to define wealth. Lots of different definitions. And also this really pisses me off when we need to talk about this. You need to define the rich.

Yeah. Well, he defines it as 10 million and up.

Right. But you've got billionaires, corporations, you've got the individual billionaires, the corporations. You've got the hundred mil companies. You've got. Because in the UK, if you earn 130 grand a year, you're probably defined as rich. Well, you're raped for tax.

Yes.

Like, you know, the 100 to 125 gram bracket, 60% of that goes 60% in that bracket.

That's not included. That's what you keep. That's not including the national insurance on top.

Yeah.

It's not including what you then spend. That gets VAT tax. It's not including the fact that at that level you're probably also paying for private health care and private schooling and those Sorts of things. So you really are in a. There's a wall that is designed to stop you from getting past about 120,000 a year. In the USA, the top rate of tax kicks in at about US$700,000. At about $700,000, you're paying about 40% tax. That's the US, which is not a low tax environment, that's a high tax country. But 700 grand is where the top rate kicks in. Typically in the UK it's £50,000 or $65,000. So we are talking about about 1/10 of the USA is where we start paying the top rates of tax. Whereas in the USA it's a slow progression up. This is actually a really interesting point about how you define and develop and design a tax system that works. One of the things that's interesting about the US is that it's a very slow, gradual wall. So they typically add 5% more, 7% more. So it's a progressive tax system, but it's gently progressive. Gently progressive. And there's little jumps, little jumps, little jumps. So earning a little bit more, it's like, oh, okay, I'm paying a little bit more in taxes, but I'm earning a little bit more. There's no big deal. So.

So that you're not disincentivized to grow.

One of the most insane things about the British system is this £50,000 is where we go from 20% to 40%. Now I know a personal trainer who earns up to 50,000 per year and then stops. That's it. Because just categorically I don't want to pay 40, 40% on the additional people, always.

And they could earn 125 grand and virtually net no more money.

Well, I know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, you know, half their week is now spent working for the government. So, you know, the issue is like, do we want to incentivize people to be productive or not? Now people try and argue this way with percentages and things like that. They say, oh, but as a percentage of your total income, it's not that different. And they say, you know, but you know, you should be fine because it's only just on the marginal extra. But for the person who works extra time, where they say, oh, I'm getting paid extra because I'm working extra, it's like, well, why wouldn't I just do four days a week rather than five days a week and keep roughly the same, right? Like, like I don't, you know, I've got other things to do. With my time.

So there's loads of places I want to go here. Daniel, let's start with should we tax the rich more? Yeah, we should.

Yeah.

Okay.

Of course, if you. Look, we need it. Here's the thing. Let's just start with what is an economy for? And why does an economy exist?

You know, I'm going to disagree with you. I don't think we should tax the rich more. But I'm going to let you talk first.

Well, what I mean, should we tax the rich more than most people? Right. Is that there should be a progressive tax system. Because ultimately, let's be real about society, you need to tax people who earn a lot of money. An amount where you take some of that and then you get.

We already do.

That's what I mean. We already do.

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

So 1%.

I might have misunderstood. I must. I might have misunderstood the question because I thought you were sort of saying, fundamentally, philosophically, should the rich people be paying a lot more in taxes? And I'm saying, yeah, of course.

And I was asking, like, practically, should we increase the taxes on the rich? Which is what Gary Stevenson is saying.

Should we go higher than what we're already going? So that's probably what you meant. So. So philosophically, yes, I agree the rich should be taxed and taxed more. Why don't we just do it flat, however? Well, because. Because the problem is, is that a flat tax, which, which would be the fairest tax, would significantly harm the lower half of society realistically.

So why couldn't we progressively go up to a flat ceiling?

If. If I could create the perfect tax system, in my mind, the vast majority of people wouldn't even pay tax. It would only be above a certain threshold and on certain types of income that you would start to tax. Because I. I personally think the vast majority of people, it's actually more administration than it's worth to even tax them. So if someone's on 20,000 a year and they're paying a couple of grand a year in taxes, it's almost here or there. Like by the time you actually have an administration point. Yeah. When you think about how much you collect from that group of people and.

How much it costs time and admin and staff. Like all the civil servants.

Exactly. So it's just kind of like, you know what? We're not even going to bother taxing you up to maybe 50, 60,000 or whatever. Like, just, just leave those. We've got that. We've got all of those sorts of things.

Which also means they can quickly get to 50 grand.

Yeah, exactly.

They can start producing, which means they don't want to sponge off the benefit system. They don't want to be homeless and get given a house and beg on the streets because they can get quickly to 50 grand without paying any tax.

People respond to incentives. So, like, that's just how humans are wired, whether you like it or not. And a lot of people don't like this idea that we respond to incentives. People respond to incentives. There is no way around that. So if you tax alcohol, it reduces the alcohol consumption. If you tax cigarettes, you reduce cigarette consumption. You tax luxury goods, you get less luxury good sales. So a tax is a break. It's a. It's an inhibitor. It slows things down. So you've got to figure out really carefully, do the benefits outweigh the drawbacks now, definitely there is a point where you get a lot of benefit for not a lot of drawback, so you've got to sort of maximize that. The issue the UK is having at the moment, we're at historically the highest tax burden we've ever had since World War II. So 45% of the UK economy is now government spending. Just even pause on that. 45% of our economy is government spending. Almost half of every pound spent in the economy is spent through the government.

That is on the government.

It's the government spending. Like it's the government spending. Half our economy is the government.

Well, let's just be really clear. The government don't do any spending. It's all taxpayer.

It's all tax. That's. Well, it's not all taxpayer money. No, that's. That's true.

A lot of money.

It's a lot of debt.

Yeah, yeah.

So the way this. The way this new system works, that's taxpayer money.

Because we end up paying.

We end up paying. Well, we end up servicing it. It never gets paid back.

But we're paying the ongoing debt.

Yeah, the way the situ. The way the system works now is that it used to be we tax from rich people in order to run the economy. Including benefits. Including everything. And the books balance. Yeah, that's not how we run anymore. What we do is we tax so that we can service debt. And the debt is the thing that actually runs the economy. And the taxes just pay the interest on the debt. That's the new economic model that all countries have kind of adopted since the 70s.

And that's why all these people who are against fiat currency say it's a Ponzi scheme. I mean, we put 132 billion extra debt on in the last 12 months and when.

And we're now paying something like that in just interest. We pay more in interest payments than we pay in defense and in education. So the defense and education budget over 10%.

Yeah, 130 billion, whatever it is, is over 10% of our full tax spend.

Our debt is now 3 trillion pounds.

Yeah, well that's what we're told.

Yeah, well that's not including pension liabilities and all that sort of stuff. So point is, is that we have a government that's out of control. We have a government that is now spending 1.3 trillion per year in pounds. So for Anyone in the US that's getting close to 2 trillion for an economy that's about the size of California, you know, so we have, or California is slightly bigger than the UK economy, but we, we have a fairly small economy and we have a government that's just out of control.

Yeah.

Where they're spending 45 of the economy is government spending now.

Yeah.

Now historically, countries that do quite well are around 30 to 35% of the gov. Of the spend of the economy is government.

Right.

So about a third. So if you work on.

When you say spend of the government, just to be clear, do you mean running the government?

No, I mean in the economy. So for example, the, the total size of the economy is I think in the UK something like I'd have to, I'd have to be GDP. Yeah. So our total GDP about 45% of GDP is our government spending. Right. So this is everything we spend money on. So it could be the prisons, the hospitals, everything. But almost, almost one in two pounds that is flowing around the economy. Is the government pulling strings on that? That means it's a monopoly. That means there's no incentive to make it more efficient. That means that it's run by a bureaucrat, not an entrepreneur, not a, not a person who's incentivized in any way to improve it. So half the economy is a socialist economy that doesn't have any real market pressure. And then the other half of the economy is essentially the first mover in the economy that you need. If you don't have a real economy, you run out of other people's money in order to have government spending. So if you go to Africa, it's not like they have an NHS or a police force or prison systems or any of the stuff we enjoy because they don't have a big enough economy to afford those things. We're just, you know, we're essentially dining out on, you know, on the. On our past success, which probably is even a flow on from the British Empire. Still, a lot of our buildings and infrastructure probably came from that period of time. The building we're in is a British Empire age building, a Victorian era building. So we're dining out on this kind of like past success of Britain. We have a dwindling real economy which cannot sustain this government economy that is there. The government can only function if there is a real economy. Paying taxes.

Yeah.

So it's kind of like if. Imagine if you had a husband and wife. She's a dentist and she makes 300 grand a year. And he's really good at spending the money and buying trips to Disneyland and security systems for the house, education for the kids. And he says, oh, look, I'm just as valuable as you are because I'm really good at spending all the money you're earning. And it's like, well, I hate to say it, but if she goes down and stops being a dentist, the whole family stops.

And then imagine if he started wasting it all. Well, he went on a holiday that wasn't good. Yeah, Put it in repairs that didn't work.

Let me give you some numbers around that. Britain ran the entire British Empire. A global empire. The likes the world had never seen. The sun never set on the British Empire. A global, continental, intercontinental empire. How many people do you think we had in the civil service? Including everyone. And I'll give you. I'll give you a hint. Today we have 6 million people working in civil service.

Yeah, I was trying to work it from that.

So if we've got 6 million today, in order to 6 million to run one island, how many did they need to run the global empire? And mind you, they didn't have email, they didn't have phones, they didn't have fax machines. They didn't have any of that technology.

Buying me time to guess this, though. I hate it when people do this on the show because I get it so wrong. I'm gonna say 80,000.

Well, that. That would be impressive. It was half a million.

Okay, right, So I was way wrong again.

But still.

Stop playing these games, everyone on my show. All right.

Still, we're talking like orders of magnitude down. So, you know, we're talking about.

That's 1 12th.

Yeah.

And they're running the globe. Not. Not a Little Island.

1/12 of what we now have as a civil service was. Was running a global empire. So.

So we have 6 million people in the civil service. Yeah, that is creating a blockage and a bottleneck for the money trickling down.

Yeah. And mind you, look, I don't begrudge anyone who is an actual frontline worker. If you're a doctor, a nurse, you're a police officer, you're a firefighter. Because everyone uses those examples and they say, oh, well, are you saying that you don't want.

No one begrudges. Let's be honest, it's just a bullshit argument.

Exactly.

No one begrudges a nurse or a.

Teacher, you know, or. Or even someone who's a social worker. Frontline social worker. But where we've gotten to is something like 50% of these people are bureaucrats. They are just this huge blob.

So in the NHS, they pay 90 grand salaries for DEI consultants, you know.

Yeah.

Diversity, equity and inclusion. Just 90 grand just to make sure that, you know. And they're not hiring enough British doctors and nurses and how much of that is going on.

So, you know, as a business owner and an investor, it's incredibly hard to make productive investments. Productive investments get incredibly difficult to do. And so if we think most fail, most fail. So, for example, let's say you just simply wanted to hire a salesperson. How hard is it to hire a salesperson? It's hard. You typically have to hire four to end up with one who's okay and one who's good, and then the other two don't work out. And that's if you go through a whole hiring process.

Yeah. And if they don't lie on their CV and all these other.

Exactly. So it's difficult to get one good hire. Now, if you try and multiply that by the government, for starters, if they hired four people in a role, they'd never get rid of two who weren't performing. That could keep the fall.

Because it's not their money.

Because it's not their money, they don't need to be efficient. So ultimately, just any productive investment is very hard to make. If you take a simple example, because a lot of people don't understand this idea of productive investment. If you take a simple example and say, I've got two young men, one is going to take out a loan for £500 to buy a suit, shirt, tie and go and do job interviews, the other one's going to do £500 to buy some alcohol and a PlayStation to have entertainment and alcohol. We know that one of those is a productive investment that is likely to yield a return and the other one is likely to actually have negative consequences. Right. So that's an extreme example for the.

Big companies that own cigarettes and alcohol.

Yeah. Or maybe they're going to be a streamer on Twitch or something like that. Right.

But yeah, that's just props that they need.

So. So the. So we know that there's this idea of productive investments or unproductive investments. The government specializes in unproductive investments.

Bureaucracy.

So much like bureaucracy. And the problem with bureaucracy is the more bureaucracy. The more bureaucracy you need.

Yes.

The more it becomes this big tangled mess. So out of those 6 million, there's a few hundred thousand teachers, there's a few hundred thousand armed forces, there's a few hundred thousand police officers and firefighters and that. There's a few hundred thousand new frontline workers for the NHS. So you're probably getting up to one and a half, maybe 2 million actual frontline workers and then there's 4 million people on top of that.

Civil servants, you mean?

Yeah, yeah. I don't know what they do.

No.

Right. I know that we spend 1.3 trillion on stuff, but where's it all going? Like 1.3 trillion. Like, this is the most insane thing ever. Like, think about how many people are required to run Apple. Like it's, you know, Apple is obviously bigger than the entire. Every. Every business in the UK economy is probably worth Apple. Yeah. How many people work at Apple? Obviously it's not a fair example because it's a very simple business model. It's a more simple business model. But take Microsoft, for example.

164,000 employees. So what is that, 1%?

Yeah.

Was it sick? No, it was 6 million.

Take. Take a more.

3%. Three. They have 3%.

Yeah.

But they make net, what, nearly 100 billion.

Yeah.

And we're net down.

Yeah.

And we have 6 million, 6 million stuff.

Take a more complex company like Samsung or, or Tata Group, because that, because that's complexity. Right. I understand that we're not running a. Like Apple's known for simplicity, but let's.

Take Samsung, Samsung, 267,000 total. Global.

267 now.

Global.

Let's think about this. 267,000. And they do everything from air conditioners, fridges, phones, computers, nuclear devices, energy systems, defense systems. Like Samsung's in all of that stuff?

Yeah. In 76 countries.

In 76 countries. And they've got 270,000 people. What about Tata Group?

So they've got one 24th.

Yeah.

Of the staff. Let's look at, see what the revenues of Samsung.

So 207 billion was in 2023.

So, so, so Samsung do about a quarter of the revenue of the UK tax total revenue about 30.

Yeah. Oh, wait, yeah.

On 1 24th of the staff.

Yeah. Yeah.

Now, here's the thing a lot of people don't do, and I don't think Gary Stevenson did this, they don't see the UK as a plc, as a company. And a company is an economy, an economy is a company. And why don't we see the UK as a plc?

Because we live in a world that was historically governed by geography and people had very little opportunity to get outside of the geography. So if we look at the whole history of the UK, 90% of people plus never really traveled much outside of the uk. When we think about the last couple of hundred years countries, and mind you, national. National identity was an invention of the Industrial Age. Prior to the Industrial Age, there wasn't really strong national identities, but national identity sprung up with the Industrial age. And we, in that period of time, we made everything about geography and it's all like national government. You know, all governments became geographically based. So the London City Council has a defined geography, British government has a defined geography, the US government has a defined geography. So they're all about defined geography as the first thing that you learn about any government or any system like that. The problem is we now live in a world that is digital. So people like myself who run a digital company and have a software business, I have a client base in 152 countries and I have employees in 15 different countries. So I don't really think in geography, I just think in time zones. Are we on the same time zone to talk? I think in users, I think in Internet speeds, I think in languages. Right, should we put this in Spanish? Should we put this in Portuguese? Should we make this a Japanese translation? So I think in those terms, but I don't think in geography. So what's happening at the moment is we have people who are undefined by geography, we have money that's undefined by geography, but we have governments that are limited by geography and therefore we end up with some of the mess that we've now got.

But what if we got a board of billionaires? So I'm going to come back to the should we tax the rich?

More questions.

We didn't finish it, but I often try and think about how the UK can solve his problems. Passionate, an entrepreneur. So one of the reasons I don't think we see the UK as a proper economy or company is because we've got no one in government who's ever run a Company.

Yeah.

So they don't get what an economy is.

And just pausing on that, if you've never run a business, you never have to make full contact with reality. So only with, when you run a business, you have to make full contact with reality. Every decision has consequences. Those consequences hurt. You make a bad hire, that hurts.

You have to fire them. You've got to lose money.

You've got to fire them.

You have, you're in an employment tribunal, you get hate and criticism them online.

Or you have to pay them every month and, and you know, six months go by and you've paid them the equivalent of a car.

Yeah.

And they haven't done anything, you know, so you feel it. Every decision, you feel every decision is. It's a full contact sport with reality. You are on a crash course with reality at all times. Whereas once you're on in government, you are in no way personally held accountable to reality. Once you're in that bureaucracy, you can make bad decisions and that doesn't matter. It doesn't.

Our accountability.

Yeah.

So I think I'm going to come back to my proposal for you. But on this point, two things I think. One, there isn't a pay structure in government that rewards success and penalizes failure. You earlier said we are, we are sort of pleasure pain motivated incentive.

We respond to incentives.

We do so that there's no. If you go under budget or under time, you get a bonus.

Oh no, you get punished if you do.

If you don't spunk the money, you lose. Reverse, what is it? They called them perverse incentives. So there's reverse incentives in government. So that's fundamental issue number one. Fundamental issue number two, they are not spending their own money.

Yeah, yeah. It's not painful at all. In fact, within government there is a belief that all money spent is a good thing because it's in the economy. So they don't distinguish at all between productive or unproductive spending. Purely spending itself is perceived as good. So just spending is just a good thing.

So for example, if it's creating addictions.

And it doesn't matter if you're, if you're giving money to an addict, then that's fine. If you're hiring way too many nurses and they're just standing around, that's fine. If you, if you've got 10 administrators managing three doctors, that's fine. They do not distinguish between any good or bad spending. They only believe that all spending into the economy is bad, is good. Sorry.

Wow.

It's just stimulus. They just see it as Making the economy work.

So there's the somewhat, I guess, Marxist view or the belief that the government create the wealth. The entrepreneurial view is that the private sector, the entrepreneurs create the wealth. Is this part of the problem? Because.

Well, it's not. I mean, it's not because we've been true, is it? We've run the experiment many times. We've done A versus B on that, on that exact experiment. We've done North Korea versus South Korea. We've done West Berlin versus East Berlin. We've done the USSR versus the. We've. We've taken the Eastern bloc countries where we've said let's operate them for decades under socialism.

Communism.

Communism. Oh, they run out of food pretty quick and they starved and they died. Okay, let's remove the iron curtain and let them operate under free markets. Oh, they're some of the most productive people on the planet and their economies are growing double digits and they're the best people you'd possibly want to work with.

So what the fuck is going on with the UK then?

Why do we need to run the experiment ever again?

Yeah, why are we descending into far left socialism?

You can also look at this just from first principles. If you imagine how something would spring up, you get highly productive people who are acting independently, doing productive things, and then they want to coordinate their efforts and make sure that they have shared services, such as a shared security border, shared teachers who can teach their kids. They want to have a share or you know, shared hospital and healthcare if, if someone's sick. So they invest in shared situations. Now if we actually look, how do things spring up? California Gold rush would be an interesting example. Or the Australian Gold rush would be an interesting example. People head out to the middle of nowhere where there's nothing going on and they basically start building, literally a desert. They start building stuff of value, they start becoming productive, highly productive, and then they invest into the shared. Increase shared services within the economy and.

Then they're penalised by government. It's all taken off.

Yeah, and then what happens is the government hits a certain tipping point in this country. We now have 55% of households receive more benefits than taxes that they pay. So their net beneficiaries of benefits. So we're in a dangerous position in this country because 55% of people are turkeys voting for Christmas. If they get rid of, if they try and make the government more lean, you know, we now have.

Right, yeah.

We now have a situation where they're.

Personally going to lose out on the benefits they're receiving.

We're doing what's right for the country would be a personal attack, a personal disadvantage. So that is a very dangerous position. This is where countries tip off the edge and it goes all totally haywire.

Wow.

We're about to hit a tipping point in the uk. And the UK is about to have a situation where the very wealthy, the very rich people say this doesn't represent a value proposition.

No, we're not about to.

It's happening, it's happening.

It's the mass exodus of millionaires.

There's an exodus of millionaires. So they say the value prop. So they're all saying the same thing.

Let's come to the millionaires in a moment. I want to do a whole, whole section on that.

But basically we're hitting a tipping point where we have a majority of voters who are net beneficiaries of the state and they're reliant upon a tiny minority of millionaires who pay for it. And they're saying, hey, this isn't a fair deal anymore. Yeah, Right. So that's where the stage is set for the UK's collapse.

Well then let's get to there a bit later on. I've got a conceptual idea for you. We have a board of billionaires. These aren't tech company greedy billionaires. These are 70 year old people like Richard Branson and Ray Dalio or the UK equivalent who are in their stage of life where they clearly want to contribute and give back. And we have a board in the UK that helps the government run the country and helps the government run the economy. Well, bring in all their contacts and we give some reliefs to bring back other billionaires that they know. London used to be one of the best tax havens in the world. We're sending away all the billionaires now and we start doing some deals with billionaires. So if, if billionaires have put their companies in Ireland or other places because they can pay 4% corp tax instead of 25, we say, look, come to the UK, pay 6, pay 7. Because I can imagine Donald Trump doing this. Donald Trump gets all the billionaires around the table and he does, he does deals.

He's selling 5 million for a golden visa. So. And he's just sold a thousand of them. Yeah, yeah.

I mean that's smart. Yeah.

He's just raised 5 billion for just people wanting to have access to the US and live there.

And it'll probably give them sort of favorable tax breaks.

Yeah.

And he'll encourage them to produce.

It's essentially the non dom Scheme, it's the non dom scheme of the USA but you pay 5 million once up front and then you are essentially a non dom in the US. So he's just made 5 billion in the first week selling these, these golden visas.

So what do you think of the concept?

It's okay. There's all sorts of political reasons why people would be up in arms about it but it's not a bad idea having an advisory panel of this can. Bigger picture. Here's, here's a bigger picture. We need to start with a North Star for this country. And the North Star is what do we want to be? What do we actually want to be?

You mean our culture and values?

Yeah, like you have to say we're designing, we're designing the country to be something. So here's what we used to be prior to Brexit we used to internationally our brand and reputation and I know this is someone who came to the uk the brand and reputation was the head office of Europe. So we were the most logical place to set up a business. If you're outside of Europe and you want to come into Europe, we had. The UK was the place. So if you're Microsoft and you're going to set up a European head office, it's going to be in London. If you're Google it's going to be in London. If you're Facebook it's going to be.

There were some tax reliefs to come here. There was all sorts of tax incentives, global tax haven.

It was a, it was the most tax efficient, it was English speaking, great infrastructure. So for all of those reasons Britain was seen as a place in the world to be the best place in Europe.

So my concept there I've just shared with you is in a sense trying to build that back up again to trying to attract all those people back.

We can't be that because outside of the EU we're not the head office of Europe. Right. We are an island off the coast of Europe but we're not part of that system anymore.

Well we could be anything we desire to be.

I get it. We could. So, so here's going forward. We could say let's re enter the EU and, and we'll see if we can get our deal back and we can reposition there. That's one option. Second option is the option that most people like Gary, Gary Stevenson and his group are going for which is Scandinavia 6.0. So there are five Scandinavian countries. They mostly run on a democratic socialist model. High taxes, high welfare state, sovereign wealth fund based on Oil and gas and ultimately minus the oil and gas because we don't want to do that either. Right. For some reason we're heading, we're drifting towards being the sixth Scandinavian country. So essentially that's kind of the model that they want to take us towards. So that's another option.

And those countries having 3% plus economic growth.

No, they're just fading into the background. Right. They're safe places, they're happy little safe cold places, cold, wet, drizzly. So we would fit right in. Right. So right. And they're, they're. Unfortunately what's happening with those countries is that the only billionaires are there a part of hundred year old dynasties like Lego and the company that makes Ozempic and all of those big companies are essentially businesses that are 100 years old or thereabouts. They're not recent companies. All of the tech founders leave, all of the entrepreneurs leave. They move to Switzerland, they move to Netherlands, they move to usa. Right. So there is a exodus of can't.

We draw them to the uk?

Well why would they jump out of.

The Franklin right now? No, yeah, no, but we're talking about a vision.

Okay, so here's the vision, here's the final, the other option, okay, there's two more options. Back office of usa. So back office of USA is that.

We that bitch for years.

We be that bitch. So we really be their bitch. We accept their food standards, their health care system, we interface with all of their systems and we basically say we are a back office of the usa. Right. So we're, we're, we're a geographic partner, geographically removed partner for the usa but we get into lockstep with the Americans. Yeah, right. So that would be the one, the final one which is what I would advocate for would be what I would call Entrepreneur Island. Entrepreneur island is that we, we would probably normalize against Switzerland, we'd normalize against Singapore. So we'd basically say we're not going to be no tax, we're not going to be an outright tax haven. But we are going to be around the same incubator for tech, incubator for technology, for growth. We're going to be the best place to have a growth company. Yeah. So for example, we've got great universities. We could have special economic zones outside of London to incentivize growth outside of London. We could. We've got incredible media assets. We've as in like media industry. We've got all these really great industries that would support being Entrepreneur Island.

Yeah.

But to be entrepreneur island and Mind you, on top of that, we've got the time zone, right. We straddle Asia, Europe and the us so you can actually run a great business from here. We've got the banking system, we've got the rule of law when it's working. We've got. We've got all of these positives. But we would have to say, what is our place in the world? Our place in the world is to be a growth company, incubator, to be. If you're a digital business, if you're in media or technology, tech or finance or anything that's really modern and global, we are. You're going to build it here in the uk because we have good reasons for you to build it here in the uk. We have cheap electricity, we have smart people. Right. All of that is. Is the.

Everything we don't have right now.

Everything. But all of the things we don't have right now are policy decisions. None of them are laws of physics.

Yeah.

There is no reason other than policy why we have expensive energy.

Labor are never going to do anything like that, are they? Probably more likely to take the Scandinavian model.

They want. They all want the Scandinavian model. We have a country full of socialists who want the Scandinavian model.

So why haven't you left the UK then? Because you're not a socialist.

What sucks is that I have family reasons to be here. Right. The kids and their relationship with grandparents and cousins and all that sort of stuff. We live in what I think of as our, you know, the house that we absolutely adore. Our home. Big, beautiful home that we love living in, but for no business reasons am I here anymore.

Right. So take that away. That is if grandparents come with your kids come with you and it's no hassle or they're not around.

Yeah.

Where you've gone, of course you're gone.

Yeah. This country. Well, this country doesn't offer a value proposition for someone like me. You know, if I went to Switzerland right now, I'd pay hundreds of thousand less in tax. I wouldn't really even have to think about tax.

Yeah.

I spend time every week now thinking about tax.

Yeah.

Like it's such means.

You can't be productive building your thing.

It's just a drain on my time and energy. You know, my mates who are in Dubai, they spend zero time thinking about tax. They just earn money.

Yeah.

Right. They just bring it in. So I don't.

It's unrealistic. You can't have zero.

I'm not saying. I'm not saying that if taxes, if If I knew that the UK government was about 25 to 35% of the economy and that taxes were roughly synced to that and that it wasn't a complete waste and crime was low and I'm paying.

You could get in the nhs.

Yeah, you get in the like. If I knew that that was all happening. It's a, all we're talking about is a value proposition. Now. It's brutal to say this and I know that, you know, we both love the uk. I know you were born here. I wasn't born here. My grandparents both fought in World War II. My great grandparents in World War I. Yeah, they were born in London. My great grandmother was a cleaner in one of these buildings around here. So she was, she was one of the housemaids in, in Sloane Square. So like I have a very deep roots that go back generations in Britain. I love this country, but I hate to say it, we've become a three star hotel charging five star prices.

Do you know a 2.3 mile journey to get in a taxi was almost 30 quid. Do you know now a really low lower end four star hotel cost you 700 a night here, it's gone wild.

And think why? Because 45 of our economy is government spending, so therefore everything has to cost 45 more than it should, like just on the simple first principles.

And I'll tell you what pisses me off about this is the people who cite that trickle down economics doesn't work like they're blaming the rich people when it's all going on civil servants and wastage within the bureaucracy of the government.

Unproductive investments is a huge issue. Look, there's a grander issue, a much grander issue that's at play here. And I think it's worth us talking about this if I can take us in a slightly different direction.

So don't worry, don't change the habit of the first 45 minutes.

The grand issue that has to be acknowledged is that we are fundamentally going through an economic change that is wholesale global economic change. Because wealth inequality is not a local thing, it's a global thing, right? In all western developed countries, they're experiencing a widening wealth inequality, house prices, all the same issues that we have in the uk. They've got it in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, in the us, although they're changing a little bit, right? There's a global thing going on. If we were to go zoom out 300 years, 300 years ago, the majority of wealthy people owned land and they owned farms and farming and land ownership was the key to wealth. And if you weren't born into landed gentry, you didn't have wealth and you were never going to have wealth.

There's no one really self made back then, wasn't it? It was all generation, all generational.

Then technology changed things. So we ended up harnessing the power of steam, iron and coal and we actually moved forward into the industrial age. There was a 50 year period where all the gains, every economic gain went to the top. Who owned factories. And there was this thing called Engels pause and Engels Paul's basically said the economy grew, but it grew unfairly. And that gave birth to Charles Dickens novels. It gave birth to exporting prisoners to the Australian colonies. It gave birth to Karl Marx and Engels, Joseph Engels. So this period of 50 years where there was widening wealth inequality, but when we look at why that happened, it happened because of an uneven distribution of technology leverage. So the people who could leverage the new technology of coal, steam and iron were able to make vast sums of wealth. And the people who were still farming and who is still working in basic agricultural and market and cottage industries, those people didn't get the economic gains. Now what's happening that we have right now is for the last 30 years we've had a digital revolution. And that digital revolution is basically giving an enormous amount of leverage to people who use media assets, fast Internet software, who capture data and use data, who leverage intellectual property computing.

When that kicked off. Yeah.

So someone like yourself, who's written all these books, your books go whizzing around the world to people who, wherever they want them, they can get them. You create a podcast, millions of people can experience that anywhere in the world. You create something that's an online tool or online piece of leverage. Boom. That goes everywhere. So you have this superpower called digital asset, Right. That makes everything you do leveraged 100 to one or a thousand to one. This couple of hours of our time will probably be seen by thousands of people. So one hour of our time or two hours of our time leveraged to thousands of people who experienced possibly millions, maybe even millions. Right. Well, I'm not as big a guest as some of the other guests you've had. So the issue is that we now have two societies. One society is doing things the way we were taught to do it in the schooling system where they go and try and get an office job with very low leverage. And that was fine. When everyone had low leverage, there was no wealth inequality. When everyone had the same office jobs, there wasn't much you could do. If we go back to factory production, where people are producing factories, it didn't really matter if you were a genius or if you were Cindy Crawford or George Clooney, or if you were low iq, high iq, low good looks, great looks, tall, short, thin, fat, none of that really mattered. If you worked on a production line, you're pretty much. Your economic value is equalized. There was no highs or lows on a production line. If everyone has an office job, if everyone works in a factory, everyone roughly earns the same because those, those ways of working normalize the value that we create. But when everyone can go off and start their own business and have their own digital assets and have their own software company and all of that sort of stuff, those that go and leverage this new part of the economy, they can create vast sums of wealth relative to people who don't do that. So the biggest issue we now have is we have two economies. The industrial age economy that has been around for 200 years and is coming to an end, and the abundant digital age. And this is the big. This is what's driving a wedge through society. It's the analogy would be, if.

So it's not the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

It's technology. It's technology.

It's not rich, the rich avoiding all the taxes.

It's the technology that is giving all inequality. All inequality relies upon some sort of an advantage. So the advantage, the question is, what's the most logical advantage, the most logical advantage? If you look at who's getting rich? Software, media, intellectual property, data, finance. Those are the big five things that all of them have in common. It's, it's not a surprise that if you and I said, let's race across London, if I've got a bicycle and you've got no bicycle, I'm going to win. It's not because I've worked harder, it's because I'm leveraging technology. Now, if I have a Bugatti and you've got, you're out on foot, I'm going to win because I'm leveraging high tech. Bugatti in this situation means AI. Like, anyone who's leveraging AI in their daily work is going to move way faster than someone who's not leveraging AI.

So entrepreneurs at the moment, certainly Gary, Gary Stevenson is kind of like, you know, entrepreneurs just saying, be responsible, start a business. Even. Even kind of said, it's sick. It's sick.

Disgusting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It does appear that way to them, to people who are not entrepreneurs. Of course, that seems. It's like if I said to you, in order for you to get ahead, you have to become a dentist, you're like, I don't want to be a dentist.

Yeah. But being an entrepreneur, you can start a business in anything you want. It's kind of not an accurate analogy.

But the vast majority of people don't want to do that. They. And I'm not against them for that.

Yeah.

By the way, I've never said, never said everyone needs to be an entrepreneur. Never said that.

Simon Squibb does.

He does. And I disagree with him.

I disagree with him. He would walk into cafes and say, oh, quit. Start your dream. If he walked into my business and told some of my staff to quit, I'd headbutt him.

But it could also, let's say he didn't. It could also be a disaster for them. Of course. Right.

Because like, you need employees, employees need employers.

Forgetting that the idea that everyone should be a founder, it's an incredibly. It's an incredibly stressful job.

Yeah.

It's a dedicated set of skills that most people don't have.

It would make a very top heavy society. Organizationally, you couldn't have it. You can't physically have it.

Yeah. I mean, maybe with AI and robots you could. That everyone could have extremely small teams, lean teams, and everyone could be a co founder. But I mean, that's not at all what I've ever said. I've only ever said, look, I have said this. I'll tell you what I've regularly said. I've said, everyone can be more entrepreneurial.

Surely everyone can improve their life. Is that not what we should be talking about?

So everyone can improve their life through personal, agency and better decisions.

So you could go from 35 grand a year to 47 grand.

Yeah. Or you could be happier with better decisions, or you could be healthier with.

Better decisions, or you could try and get a new better job or develop your career.

You could negotiate a pay rise.

Yeah. I mean, Tim Cook wasn't an entrepreneur.

No.

He's a billionaire.

He's a billionaire. So. So I really believe that there is personal agency and at all.

I have, I. E. Take responsibility for where you are and desire and make changes to improve.

Proof. Yeah.

So why do people like Gary Stevenson hate that message? Why did. Why do they say, if you, you know, you're never going to be richer.

Than your dad, it's a slippery slope for, for. If you're a socialist or a communist or a Marxist, it's a Very, very, very slippery slope to admit that people have agency.

Right. Let me, let me read what he said. The rich are becoming more richer and the poor, well, I guess they'll just die. That's what Gary Stevenson said, word for word. Why are people lapping up his, he's what? Just be someone who's got no responsibility and no agency looks at you and if you're going tax the rich. Yeah, tax the rich.

Yeah.

So I can get more benefits and there's a lot of people like that in the country.

I think that's reductive.

What do you mean? What's reductive?

I think, I think he said no, I think what you've, what the way you've described is reductive.

What do you mean?

What I mean is that I think, I think that that's what Gary Stevenson is saying. I know, but I'm not saying it. I know, but I think, I think the way you just position that.

But that's what he said.

I know, but you, you described that.

He said the rich are becoming more fucking richer and the poor, well, I guess they'll just die.

I, I, yes, okay. By the way, that's reductive. Yeah. And also the idea that people who are poor are not trying. And I never said that because the.

Point that I never said.

Yeah, the point that he's making and.

I, he said if you're poor, you're fucked.

I take him.

So tax the rich.

One of the other points he made, which he said, which I take the point is that when you look at someone like myself talking about personal agency and all this sort of stuff, it's like, fuck you. I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm really trying.

And it's the government who are suppressing them and squashing them. It's not entrepreneurs who are teaching other people.

It makes, it makes the point that when you, when you're feeling that the economy is not working for you, then it's very easy to have a top down view of things. When the economy is working for you, when you feel that you are working your nuts off, which I bet you are. I am, but I'm highly rewarded for working my guts out, Right?

Yep. But you pay a lot of taxes.

Let's, let's think about, do you have anyone in your life who is struggling really financially?

Yes.

Yeah. Okay, so I have someone I'm thinking of. Right. And as a couple, they work really, really hard. They do work hard.

They, I think a lot of people don't work as hard as they think they work.

I think they work as hard as they can. And I don't. I think I have.

I don't agree. I think they could work harder or smarter.

They could definitely work smarter.

Yeah. The difficulty is here with generalizing.

I know.

However, we mustn't be. We mustn't be scared to say the facts that we've become a bit more lazy and entitled as a nation. It is so popular to blame someone else rather than ourselves. I was 50 grand in debt. I was blaming everyone. I hated millionaires and I didn't even know them. So I actually can relate the past me.

You still. You're also. You're high intellect. You've got a high iq.

I don't think I have.

You got a high. Well, look, average IQ is average iq. You're above average iq. Right.

The fact you've never taken the tests.

There's no, there's no, there's no question that you're above. There's no question that you're above average iq.

Do you know there's something dyslexic, multi millionaires.

There's something like 20 of the country can't read in a menu and add up the bill.

Yeah.

Right. So there's about a fifth of the country that couldn't. That could not read you the menu or add up the bill.

So why aren't the government.

I'm just, I'm just saying there's nothing. What I'm trying to do is have a bit of empathy, that if someone, if someone is feeling incredibly. That they're at the bottom of the pile and they're working as hard as they feel they can given their circumstances and they're not seeing any gains and the economy's racing ahead while, you know, let's say even they're getting ahead. Let's say that they're, they're, you know, their income is growing at 10% but the economy's inflating at 20%. Yeah. They're going to feel like they're swimming against a waterfall.

I agree.

Right.

So why does Gary Stevenson go around saying, you've got no hope, let's tax the rich? His message is wrong.

I agree with you, but it's going to resonate.

Well, that's what I mean. And so you called it reductive for me to say that, but I'm saying he's tuning in to this angst.

Yeah.

It's almost like shouting at the tv.

Yeah.

Instead of going down the gym.

Yeah. It's.

It's not judging anyone.

It's just, I, I just. Look, I, I 100 agree that the economy should provide a decent life for people who do a decent day's work, honest days, work for an honest day's pay. I think there should be a situation. I mean I agree with this idea of should. Right. So the issue that we now have is if you imagine that there's this crashing industrial economy that's coming down like this and a rising digital economy that's going like this and it's, this is just natural cycles.

If you go back through hundreds of years, it's normal.

Long, long cycles. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not like, I just want to be clear. I'm not saying that everyone has it in them to necessarily like I have huge amount of empathy for a nurse who does a 15 hour shift and I do not expect that at the end of a 15 hour shift caring for people and wiping people's asses and injecting people with medication that you should then somehow jump on masterclass and you know, learn entrepreneurship.

I agree with that. I don't really think anyone like you or I is saying that. Yeah, here's something though. Who pay the nurses?

Yeah, it's the government.

They slightly. If, if it was. If I owned a hospital and I saw people working that hard, I'd pay them more. I would because I pay people who work a lot.

Well the. Yes, and that is a really good point.

People like us are getting blamed.

That's a, that's a really good point. When you have a bureaucratic level layer that sucks up the available spend, you don't have money to pay nurses. Right. So the like we. For anyone listening to this who's not on my way of thinking, there's just not enough, mathematically, there's just not enough wealth in the country to really move the needle. Now the government has become so big. So at best estimates the richest of the rich have about 800 billion. So I'm talking about the billionaires and the centi millionaires. They have 800 billion. That's, that's the total. If you do a 3% tax, which is a huge wealth tax, that's one of the highest wealth taxes that have ever would have ever existed. A 3% wealth tax would raise 24 billion. That's less than one week of government spending. And if you were to how much.

Of that would actually filter down because it would all just get lost in.

The, it would be used to just bureaucracy cauldron. They would actually use it to leverage debt. The problem, the challenge is, is that the way our government is currently set up, if they tax 24 billion of extra money, they would leverage that up to a couple of hundred billion worth of additional debt on the country.

Right. They would then would trickle down and the working class would be paying more tax.

It would actually inflate the economy. Yeah, right. So unproductive, unproductive investments inflate the economy. So if you, if you throw money into an economy without corresponding productivity, you just get inflation.

Yeah, that is. Our money is worth. That is a hidden tax.

That is you go to Tesco and you were expecting to pay 100 and it's 110.

Yeah, yeah.

So the government is just inflating the value of things.

So the solution is not to tax the rich more?

Well, if you could get away with it, let's say.

Let's say you can by going back to my model.

No, I'm saying let's say you go to the rich and none of them respond badly to it. Let's say they're all 100% behind.

Do them a deal.

Right. But let's say that they're all 100% behind it. They say, yeah, you know what, we're not going to move, we're not going to take any evasive action whatsoever. We're just going to pay the 3% wealth tax. Okay, yeah, 24 billion. That's it. You've got one week. If we were to round that out across all of the UK, it's less than £250 per year, so you're talking about 20 pound per month. Better off if you were to.

But surely we want productivity, don't we?

Well, depends if they would have. Yeah. How would they use it, is the question. Would they just inject it in the economy? Would they create debt?

But if we brought more billionaires in, they're going to build more buildings, they're going to employ more people. So billions in vat, billions in corporation tax, billions in income tax.

By the way, some might, some might not. Some billionaires are just lazy.

No, but you just said it's a value proposition.

It's a value proposition.

So if we make the UK a value proposition, more will come.

More will come. But I'm saying some of them won't build anything. Some of them will just come and buy a big fat house and.

And still puts money in the economy.

Still puts money in the economy. Yeah, but.

And they hire a driver.

I'm not saying cleaners, personal assistant, security, all of that sort of stuff. Stuff.

But we're doing the opposite we're driving them away. Well, we're financially driving them away. And then people like Gary Stevenson are creating this narrative that we're making them like something like Mr. Burns out of the Simpsons.

Yeah.

Which is wrong.

Well, maybe there are some billionaires who are Mr. Burns out of the Simpsons, but there's no nuance to it. You know, you take someone like Dyson, who created an amazing company and employs thousands of people and then moved head office to Singapore, and you take us is an incredible chemical company, and they've just moved off.

Yeah.

Right. And this was a company that employs 25,000 people in very highly paid jobs, and it's a growing company.

This is the UK's fault.

Yeah.

This is UK plc, UK government, which, by the way, just for the avoidance of doubt, it's not just Labor's fault.

No way back. Yeah. I don't have a political team. I fucking hate them all.

What about reform?

Look, I don't particularly. I don't particularly like any political party. I'm pro entrepreneur, I'm pro small business.

Which reforms seem to be there.

Yeah. I'm just saying I don't throw my hat in with any particular party.

So you don't ever vote?

I do vote, but I'm a swing voter, so I'm gonna vote for whoever on the day has the best policies, the most believable policies that benefit entrepreneurs and wealth creators. I'm always gonna say, who did you vote last time? I actually don't even remember. I think. I think I voted Conservative.

Right.

Yeah.

So I'm saying, you know, would you vote reform in four years based on what?

You know, now, if I looked at a manifesto. Yeah. And I said, this is pro entrepreneurship, which it is. Right. All of that.

Yeah.

Then I'd run by an entrepreneur. I don't have any big alliance.

Nor do I, by the way. I know it might sound like I do. I just want to get.

And it's also very. It's also very, very easy four years out from an election just to say anything. So I'm not. I don't want to be, like, on the record for being pro any particular party. I'm pro entrepreneurs, I'm pro wealth creators. I'm deeply skeptical of anyone who's attracted to the political process. You know, anyone. Anyone who wants to get their hands on that big chunk of money. I think it's, you know, so they're.

Careerist rather than wanting to.

Yeah.

Change and do good.

So, you know, obviously on. As we get closer and closer to an election, I'm going to make a decision based on does this incentivize wealth creation and does it incentivize entrepreneurship, hard work, investment into the economy? I'm not denying that some billionaires are a leech on society. Some billionaires offer no real value. Some billionaires are probably destructive individuals. Of course. Right, yeah.

But there are also people who are in debt that are those things.

Exactly. So it's the, that's the human spectrum. I'm not, I don't have billionaires on a pedestal, but I do know they have a lot of money, a lot of investment, and if you can incentivize them correctly, they can be one hell of a force within the economy. So that's that. You know, definitely. You know, I'm not the billionaire fan club. I'm. I'm saying what do what's best for the country. What's best.

But you're the productive entrepreneur.

Productive country fan club. Yeah.

So if you're a productive entrepreneur, then you're more likely to become a billionaire. Assuming you're not handed down the wealth.

Yeah. And even if you are handed down the wealth, so the purpose, which is.

A curse at times. It's not easy.

It's not easy. But take we talked about, on the, on the debate, we talked about Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster.

Do you mean on the Gary Stevenson.

On the diary of a CEO? Diary of a CEO.

I like the way you called it a debate.

Yeah.

The gradual meltdown of Gary Stevenson versus Daniel Priestley.

He did get heated, didn't he? But, you know, Hugh Grosvenor has done an incredible job. I just want to say Duke of.

Westminster and just put it into context. What did Gary Stevenson reference?

He hates the guy. Hates him. So one of the things who makes his blood boil is Hugh Grosvenor.

Has he met him?

No, he hasn't. But, but he, he doesn't like the idea that a duke would inherit a lot of money. So for starters, the Duke is one of the highest, and I'm not the guy's fan club, but objectively, he's one of the highest taxpayers in the country. He plays the all, all sorts of taxes. A million a week in provisional tax, tens of millions in all the other taxes, nonstop. One of the highest taxpayers. But beyond that, he runs one of the best organizations. It's the Grosvenor Estates would be one of the best employers in the country that creates thousands of jobs. They deliberately give those jobs to underprivileged people of underprivileged backgrounds. They're one of the highest investors in training. The properties themselves are probably the jewel of the uk. If you think about globally, when people think of the best of British, they think of certain London properties and estates that are beautiful. Properties, estates, they're all Grosvenor estates or most. There's a huge number of those that are the Grosvenor estates. So when you think about the beautiful British properties that you would aspire to film a London movie on, it's probably the Duke of, you know, the Grosvenor Estates, that didn't happen by accident. They are an incredibly well run organization that employ a lot of people, play, pay a lot of taxes. Gary wants to dismantle that right now. He wants. Because he thinks it's unfair that billionaires exist.

Why?

Because communists, socialists do.

Yeah.

And, and here we would be, what we would be doing is just how.

Do all the people on welfare get paid?

Well, this is the thing like you by the rich. Well, you drive these people out. Let's say, let's say the Grosvenor estate says, you know what, let's not bother anymore. Yeah, right.

Like I think had enough of Gary Stevenson. I'm out of here.

You look at their website, they are one of the best places to work. Beautiful buildings, they do the nation proud. Huge taxpayers.

Yeah.

And he's saying, oh well, you know, and he's upset because he's like, oh, but I was a Citibank trader. Citibank traders add nothing to the economy. They add nothing. They are, I mean they pay their own personal taxes, but they just bet on the economy. They don't create jobs. You know, they're not actually adding something to the real economy. They're a derivative of a derivative in the economy.

Yeah.

And here he is criticizing a slice.

On the way up, a slice on the way down.

Exactly. And here he is criticizing one of the most well run organizations in the country, which should be a pride of the nation. Also, you know, the fact that we have a British aristocracy, it's a tiny group of people, there's only 30 Dukes and it's actually a feature. It's not a bug.

It's like a tourist attraction.

It's a, it's, it's something that gives us a lineage to our, our past. Like it or not, we had a background of landed gentry, we had a background of royalty. It's one of the things that the whole world finds interesting about the uk. Some of our most beautiful heritage sites are linked to those, those things. So anyway, there's plenty of good about it. It just purely and Simply, if you're blinded by a rage around the fact that technically, on paper, he's a billionaire, regardless of the fact that he works hard, that he creates jobs, that he's creating beautiful parts of the country. Yeah.

Let's put this straight because what, what frustrates me is when people say things like the rich should pay more tax or the rich aren't paying taxes, or billionaires aren't paying taxes. Okay, so let's go pro that argument. The billionaire might be able to move their company offshore. That's fine. They might be able to hire a good lawyer and reduce some of their taxes, but they have to still add VAT on everything till they sell. So they're generating VAT. This corporation tax. They, they might not pay 25, but even if they pay 6 or 8% because they've got around the rest, that's still billions. There's, you know, my dividend tax is 39. There's income tax of over that. They pay business rates. Yeah, they generate business rates. National insurance is 15, pension contributions. I mean, I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I just want to say it officially. Everyone says they pay no taxes.

No.

They've seen some meme where they've moved their company and they're avoiding corporation tax. That's one of about 12 taxes that they pay.

Yeah. And the truth is that if it was easy to live in the UK and not pay taxes, then they wouldn't leave. And they do leave. And the reason they leave is because it's hard to avoid taxes. You can't avoid taxes unless you leave. So the reason billionaires and millionaires are leaving is because they don't avoid taxes by living here.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, let's let that land. But also because you raised this point, they also leave because there's a better value proposition in Dubai.

Value propositions.

So why don't we make a better value proposition in the uk?

And of course we could, because we're living in a time.

But, sorry, I want to go back to your point because you made a really good point.

Yeah.

They're not leaving because they're paying no taxes. They're leaving because they're paying a lot of taxes.

That's it.

And they're leaving to pay less.

And if it were possible to not pay taxes, like if you could walk into KPMG and they say, oh, you don't want to pay taxes. Oh, all you have to do is whisper these magic words to the HMRC and you don't have to pay taxes if that were a real thing. If that really existed, they wouldn't be leaving at a thousand a month. Right. A thousand people a month would not be leaving there. I can afford as you can. I can afford incredibly good accountants and incredibly good lawyers and all of that sort of stuff. Here's the magical advice. Let me tell you what they all tell you. Pension contributions, right? Make sure you put your 60. Make sure you put your 60 grand a year into pension contributions. Do all of your kids ISAs, nine grand each. Do your own personal ISA, 20 grand a year. So the big. The big advice that you get at a personal tax level is like, there's a hundred grand or so that you can put into ISAs and pensions, right? Here's what else they might say. Here's the risky stuff, the really risque stuff. Why don't you add your spouse as a director to your company and they can be on 50,000 a year and then that can be 20% tax rather than 40% tax. Okay?

Whoa.

Right. So we're talking about some really big hairy stuff here. Now, if you want to get into international corporations, international corporations can do a lot to avoid tax because you can have your database in Luxembourg and pay a royalty to that. You can have your branding and logo and registered intellectual property in Jersey and pay a licensing fee for that. You can have your offshore IT team in Kazakhstan and pay them an amount over there. You can move inside a company. You can actually do this if you're a global corporation where you. It's called profit shifting. And you can profit shift. One of the reasons that. So there is.

If the UK was attractive, we'd be drawing some of our.

You'd be drawing that in. Yeah. Gary makes no distinction between the assets that billions billionaires own, the profits that sit inside their companies, and the revenues that they make as just the revenue of their business. He interchanges those three things completely. He also really makes no distinction between what is wealth. Wealth in his mind is houses. If you own houses, that's it, you've got wealth. But he doesn't take into consideration that Dyson is a $30 billion company or whatever it is, and it's mostly intangible assets, or that INEOS is actually global network of chemical production plants and most of them aren't even in the uk.

But he might be talking about working class. Yeah, but most of their wealth probably is in their house.

Yeah, but he. But when he talks about taxing billionaires, he only really talks about the idea that billionaires own houses. So in Gary's imagination. Billionaires own houses and they all produce 5% yield and there's no cost for running them and there's no debt on those houses. Right. So, so that's, that's what I mean.

If you want to become a billionaire in real estate, you have to leverage.

Yeah.

You have to have debt.

Yeah. So. And are there any houses that require no work and spit out 5% per year and that? You just don't know. Right.

So I mean, the upkeep on some of this stuff would be crazy. The yields in London are really low.

Like 3% gross in London.

You're lucky.

Yeah, yeah. And once you actually zero out any costs of running it, you're lucky.

Inflation.

Yeah, exactly. You're lucky if you keep anything.

But he's an economist, isn't he? Because he's called Gary's economics.

When he tells people these. Because he, he says this thing over and over. They're making passive income and then they're, they're squeezing you out. So his imagination is that the billionaires, they make all of this money, it's all liquid. Then they transfer that into middle class housing somehow. They, so they somehow have all of this cash with no debt and no costs associated. They then buy up all the middle class housing and squeeze everyone out and then they earn 5% passive income which they reinvest into owning more houses in the middle class, which I don't know any billionaire that does anything like this, this plan. If all the billionaires I know have created companies that become very worth a lot on paper.

The very, very few billionaires in property. Because there's very few. Because I'm in property, it's generational wealth.

Also, most billionaires in property are probably on the development side where they're developing and they're moving stock through like they're actually producing better homes. So they. A lot of the times if you're generating tax revenue. Yeah. As you would know, if you're rich in property, it's probably because you're buying dilapidated stock and bringing it back into.

The market where you hire all the laborers. Yeah, yeah. You create economy and you create houses. Yeah.

Or you're putting up new buildings which you've done. Yeah.

Or renovate existing ones. Dilapidated.

So then you go from there was no 200 houses, now there's 200 houses.

So we're solving a problem. The government arm.

Yeah, exactly. And also there's huge costs associated with it. There's not this idea that you suddenly sitting on all this money and there's no debt and all that sort of stuff. So he has this incredibly low resolution view because of that low resolution view of how it works, he's just missing the obvious angles for people to leave. Right. It's not hard to re headquarter Dyson in Singapore. It's not hard to re headquarter anyos overseas. It's not hard to kind of be a billionaire property developer. You can be a billionaire property developer in London and live in Monaco and move.

Yeah.

You know, it moves across. So when he says taxing billionaires on what they own, they just leave. And if it was possible for billionaires to not pay tax and live here, they wouldn't leave.

Yeah.

So yeah, it's this weird circular. I mean it's just based on anger and I get it. It's like, I get it.

What's he angry about though? Is he angry about the system or is it really kind of his own anger?

I think in tribal times when we were living as tribes, if you and I were involved in a hunt and.

We brought down send Gary out first.

If we were involved in a hunt, let's say we caught some game, we caught a deer. If I saw you eating something, 3/4 of the meat and I, and leaving me with a quarter and I thought, oh, there's something very unfair about this. I think that inside, inside there is a biological or almost generational hatred of people who seem to be taking a bigger share. And I think it inspires anger when you see someone like if we're, if we're in a hungry environment and someone's taking a double ration, it's like there's, there's fury at that. It's like, you know, it's traitorous. I think there's just some people who are built with a inbuilt fairness radar where it's like if you're taking, if you've got more than me, you must have stolen it, you must have taken it, you must have done something unfair about it. And, and it really greats against that inbuilt kind of fairness radar that we must, some people must have it more than others.

You don't think it's brilliant marketing and you know, a story in a book which, full of paradoxes.

He's genuinely, he's genuinely angry. I mean his book is really, it's funny. His book is a, is a, is a manual for working hard. It's incredible. It's, it's a great book by the way. I really enjoyed his book. I read it in three days. I couldn't put it down. But what's funny is that every time he applies himself, and I hate the fact we're sitting around talking about him, but every time he applies himself, he wins. Right. So in the book, he goes to university, he says, I'm going to sit in the front row and ask lots of questions so they know who I am. Right. That's called high agency.

Yeah.

And then he says, networking. Yeah. Then he says, oh, there's, there's this card game. I'm going to drop what I'm doing and stay up late figuring out how to win the card game. Right. Okay, that's on that. That's high agency. Then that only gets him. He says, oh, I won my job with a card game. No, he didn't. He won his internship with a card game. So then he gets an internship.

Only a foot in the door, right? Yeah.

He starts turning up at six o' clock in the morning and making sure he's got coffees for everyone else in the office. High agency. He makes sure that when he gets back he's got all the, all the meals correctly and he's got the change and all that. High agency. He goes out 11 o' clock at night networking with the top performers, asking them lots of questions. Read the book and you see a guy who's just high agency. So he's working from 6 in the morning till 11 o' clock at night. He's figuring out the system, he's applying himself, he's working hard, he's working smart, and he makes 2 million a year. Look at the guy in this country that he says has no mobility. He gets a scholarship to LSE, right. He gets an internship at Citibank. He gets 2 million a year. He then quits. He gets 600 grand to sit on pay to sit there, sit around doing nothing for a year while they figure him out. He writes a book and becomes a Sunday Times bestseller. He launches a YouTube channel and gets a million followers. I mean, the guy is just a walking billboard for, for social mobility.

So is it, so is his message really just a marketing campaign then?

I mean, either he's just completely oblivious to what's going on around him, or he, or he's arrogant. He just believes I can do it, but no one else can do it. Like he, he, I think he does actually think that he's super, super smart and that no one else is as smart as he is because there's this arrogance of like, oh yeah, well of course I can get up early and work and of course I can network If I want to. And of course I can sit in the front row and ask questions, but that's because I'm Gary Stevenson, right? So of course I can do all these cool things. But you can't do that. You're not smart enough, you're not clever enough. You need the government, you need to, you know, you need someone's help, which.

Is a very low agency victim mentality to perpetuate because no, not everyone can be a millionaire or billionaire. No, not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but everyone can make their life a bit better. Yes, everyone can.

No matter how hard we need to believe that, we must believe that. And there are so many great examples of the human spirit when that is believed.

And often the harder it is, the closer you are to motivation to change.

I tried to tell the story on the show, but my friend Pedro was woke up and he was a quadruple amputee. He got, he, he went out clubbing one night, he got a fever and fainted. And it turns out he had that, that disease that starts rotting your fingers. It's a horrible thing that you can get. It's. I forget the name of it. But anyway, his, his fingers started turning black and they knew he had that disease. So they amputate above the elbow. Above the elbow, above the knee. Above the knee, right?

Yeah.

So he. Imagine this, you wake up and you wake up to the. A weird smell and you wake up and you look down and you've had all four limbs amputated. So that was Pedro's life. And when he was 19 years old, he woke up and he basically said after he met with his parents and everyone felt sorry for him and everyone basically felt his life was over. He said, I decide that this is going to be the best thing that ever happened to me. That's my decision. I'm going to, I'm going to make this into something. Today he's early 30s, he's married to a beautiful woman, they've got a child on the way. He's got a rehabilitation clinic brand that he started. They're opening their third location, seven figure revenue, highly profitable. They're becoming the world's best standard for rehabilitating amputees. And you know, the guy's a superstar. He's written a best selling book. So he's made it, he goes snowboarding, he's made it the best thing that ever happened. So we have to believe in that human spirit. We've got to believe in that, you know, like, like why would we choose not to believe that? That's possible.

Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. It's like the, you know, you have an alcoholic dad and someone becomes a loser because they had an alcoholic dad, and someone becomes successful because they had an alcoholic dad.

Yeah.

So it's not. What happens to it is how you respond to it, I suppose, is easier. Like, there is a part of the human psyche. I sometimes like to wallow in my own pain and misery, and I sometimes like to. And moan and complain. I really try and pattern interrupt myself, but it seems to be a natural human thing that sometimes you just want to do that. And I know that it's not easy to go, do you know what? It's my fault.

Yeah.

Or do you know what is my responsibility?

There are areas of my life I feel a victim, so I can empathize. I feel a victim around health. So I try a lot with health, and I don't get a lot of gains. I don't get a lot of benefits. I looked at myself on that video, and I went, oh, you know, I've put on weight and all of those kind of things. And it's like I'm trying with my diet, I'm trying with my gym. I go personal training three times a week. But I don't get the health gains that come easier to some others than that. But I still have to. I have to say, but maybe it.

Doesn'T come easier to others. They just have a better strategy.

Maybe. But I have to start with the fact that I'm in control of this. Yeah, I'm responsible. It's my. It's my body. It's my responsibility. No one's coming to save me. It's not the government's fault. It's. You know, this is mine to figure out. You have, like, you have to start square one with a. With the ownership mentality. But I can. But I can totally.

But it's hard.

It's hard. It's hard. I can empathize, and I can empathize. I wish someone would tell me, dan, it's not your fault. It's the government's fault. And the government should be doing more for you to get better health outcomes.

And that.

That would be intoxicating.

Yeah, exactly. That would be addictive. I think that's one of the reasons why Gary's really popular.

Yeah.

He's tuning into that part of someone that goes, yeah, it's someone else's fault, and therefore I don't feel vulnerable and insecure about my situation.

Yeah.

And then you know that you have to Go through a stage of shame, don't you? You have to go through a stage of looking in the mirror and going, fuck.

I just want to dial back just a minute. There is genuine cause for anger. There is genuine cause for anger. Because if you're a nurse and you haven't had a pay rise in years and all you care about is nursing people back to health and you go down to Tesco and what used to cost 75 now costs 110, that. That is a genuine cause for anger. I can understand that. I really can understand this. It's not the richest fault. The government inflated the economy. That's the only difference. I'm angry too, by the way. Yeah, I'm angry.

I am. I fucking around every day about it on social media, you know that?

Yeah. Like, I'm angry that the UK government in, in just the last 10, 15 years has gone from 650 billion a year to 1.3 trillion a year. You know that angers me because I know that it's a dead weight on the economy that everyone has to carry. It angers me that the UK government used to be about 30% of the economy or 35 of the economy, and now it's coming and pushing up towards 50% of the economy and not slowing down. Yeah, I'm angry because socialism sounds so attractive on paper, but it's such a bad idea and we've tried it. Capitalism sounds nasty as hell when we.

Can'T remember what capitalism is. We can't remember what capitalism is because we haven't had it for so long. We haven't had a proper.

No, no, I agree. But on paper, capitalism sounds fucking horrible. It sounds like every dog eat dog, every man for themself. Right? Like that's extreme capitalism, but that's how it sounds to a lot of people. But the truth is that it sounds horrible and delivers the world's best outcomes. And socialism sounds like the right thing, but it delivers the world's worst outcomes. Right.

Especially like food. The food that looks and tastes the nicest is the worst for you.

Yeah, cake. Yeah, we should all eat cake. Yeah. So like, I get it, I really get it. I have empathy. I. And I also look, I'm a solution orientated kind of person. When I hear problems, I naturally go, well, what do we do to solve that? What do we do about it?

That's what we had talking.

Yeah, we can't wallow. Can I give it, like some of the solutions that I think would work really well for the uk. Special Economic Zones, Special Economic Zones have been done all throughout the world and they're really powerful. A special economic zone is where we make special rules within the country to stimulate growth in those areas. So for example, if we had special economic zones for manufacturing, if we had, if we, you know, there's the belt between Oxford, Cambridge and Milton Keynes and Bedfordshire and there's that belt. If we said that's going to be a high tech innovation center, like that's going to be the UK Silicon Valley, if we said Manchester is going to be media central, if you based a media company up in Manchester, you're going to get all these tax benefits for being a media center. Because what you're trying to do is get all the opportunities out of London and say let's spread those opportunities a little bit further afield. If we could distinguish better between the different sizes of companies. So for example, a company that has less than 50 people on the team or full time equivalents, that's going to be treated differently than a business that's got thousands of people. So at the moment, you know, it doesn't. We should make more of a distinction between Microsoft and a little tech company that's trying to hire its first few people. There's a new rule that comes in in 2026 which is about employment rights and it's going to remove the two year. This is so very dangerous. So there's currently a two year probation period that allows you to fire someone without too much trouble in the first two years. They're getting rid of that.

This recent budget should warn you that your pension is not safe and secure and they're coming for your inheritance. Do you even know how much is in your pension or where your pension is invested? Add to this the recent inheritance tax grab on your pensions and the risk of a market crash. You probably didn't know this and I didn't until recently, but physical gold can be added to your pension pot. Gold is inheritance tax free and has grown 700% percent in the last 20 years. You probably know from my content I'm investing heavily in silver and gold and that's why I've partnered with Direct Bullion. Myself and Nigel Farage are brand ambassadors and direct bullion can help you with gold to protect and grow your pension. I buy my gold and silver from direct bullion and I don't earn any money on any purchases of gold or silver if you buy direct from direct bullion. So if you go to robmore.direct bull bullion.com you can get a great price on your silver and gold. And you can get the Pension Gold investing guide completely for free. As you know, I don't do many strategic partnerships and when I do, I do them with people who are credible, who've been doing it a long time, who invest in things that I invest in too. And gold and silver's going wild. I'm investing heavily in gold and silver and I recommend you check out robmore.directbullion.com.

If Microsoft hires a bad hire in the UK and they've got 10,000 employees, that's 1/10,000th of their workforce. That is a bad hire. They can deal with that. And they can also afford the HR lawyers to get rid of that person in accordance with the lawyer. If a small business has 10 employees and they make a bad hire, that's 1/11 of their workforce and they don't have the money to get a HR lawyer to get that person out. I mean, if you told Microsoft that you have to fire 1/11 of their workforce because 1/11 they like on the same day, they just hire 1/11 of their workforce and then they have to fire that be a disaster for them as well. So treating small businesses like this with the same HR laws as we treat big businesses is so stupid and unproductive for the economy. People aren't silly, by the way. Like if you said to employees, if you join a small business, you get less employment rights because we have special rules for small businesses, okay? They can choose or not choose to be part of. You can say, oh, I'm going to go and have more job security at Microsoft, or I'm going to have less security over at a small business, but I get more contact with the founder and the owner and I get more training, okay? Swings and roundabouts. But the idea that a small business should have the same employment rights as a big business, it's just not going to work. We're not going to grow the economy that way. We've got to be pragmatic and say what's going to get the most people, you know, performing?

And for the last, what, 15 years, we haven't had anyone in government who understands it.

No one understands.

Which is back to my board of billionaires.

Could be a good, could be a strategy. I, I like special economic zones. I like treating nuance based on size.

Of organization, essentially progressive benefits.

I also like a sovereign wealth fund. So under Lancashire, there is 130 billion worth of natural gas. The government could basically say, we're going to tap that. Stop buying gas from overseas entities, right? Stop importing natural Gas, we use natural gas. Right. So it's not like, it's not like we're starting the production of something that we don't currently use. We're using it, but we're going to say that is going to be. We're going to use that 130 billion to form a sovereign wealth fund and that way we can make better investments. Because Singapore has a sovereign wealth fund, Norway has a sovereign wealth fund, it makes sense to actually have a sovereign wealth fund where we actually own and operate strategic assets. That's not a bad idea. And we already have 130 billion worth of natural gas just sitting there that we've said, oh, no, we won't touch that, we'd rather import that from somewhere else. Just insane.

And if you take out someone's mortgage or rent gas, electric's probably one of their highest spends.

Oh, it's, it's actually energy is attacks on everyone and it hits the poorest hardest.

Yeah.

So expensive energy.

Let's just keep taxing the, the billionaires.

Yeah, yeah. Wow. So, yeah, so there are plenty of, there are great solutions. There are actually plenty of solutions. We need to approach it with a bit more of a scalpel than a mallet. You know, like a blunt object, like just tax the rich is going to just drive the country off a cliff. We need to say, hey, this is the age of nuance. We can use AI, we can use software to measure things, we can do things that previous governments only dreamed of, where we can use technology to create a very nuanced economy where we can almost tailor, make and customize certain, certain tax depending upon certain categories.

Right.

So we could have. In the same way that a smart tech company has lots of pricing options to suit different customers, and a less evolved tech company probably only has two or three pricing options. We are currently behaving as a country like, you know, oh, there's, there's 0%, 20%, 40%, you know, like, whereas we could actually say, oh, we've got the technology to, to apply a better system across a wider range and we'll, we'll capture a lot more that way.

Yeah. So I've got a theory about wealth inequality which I'd like to run by you because people blame the rich. But I believe that governments create or at least exaggerate wealth inequality. Here's why. Because I think that the two things that make the rich richer are assets and inflation. If rich people have assets.

Assets and inflation. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So assets that inflate. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, assuming that the rich person has produced something and that they're investing money. If the rich have assets that go up in value because they're more likely to have assets than the poor, though, those assets will naturally go up. So they're naturally going to get richer with compounding. But then when we have high inflation, it pushes asset prices up further totally. And then when we have high inflation, it pushes the spending power down. So poor people have a limited amount of money and savings things. So they're limited amount of money and savings is being pushed down by the government. Insidious is a good word. But the rich are getting richer not because, you know, they're nefarious or taken advantage, but because they have assets.

They just bought something. Yeah, yeah.

And it's being pushed up by the government because inflation is created by. Well, the government I'm going to call it. It's supposed to be independently. Yeah, but so, so the government create inflation, which they did in high volume with lockdown. They locked us down. They needed to pay for it. They printed a load of money. So anyone who had only money got poorer and anyone who had assets got richer. So everyone's blaming the rich. When I say it's inflation, it's the government. Yeah, the government.

There's more reasons to this. There's proximity to power. So when you have a big government, you end up with people who develop proximity to the government and then they can channel money into their own means. So if a government has ridiculously high budgets, you then have all the feeders and hangar honors and all the vampires who put their little tentacles all over that government.

So I mean, they could get like contracts for PE equipment and masks, for example.

That could happen, theoretically. Yeah. So there are like Nancy Pelosi is an interesting example. She has a salary of 200 grand a year and a net worth of 134 million because she has this incredibly close proximity to big government budgets. And she knows where money's being spent. She knows how to essentially front run big budgets. If you look at the big.

So what does that mean? Does that mean she insider traded?

Well, she may not have insider traded, but she certainly had a front row seat to a bunch of decisions that you would have to look pretty hard at if you wanted the same information that she had. You know, so, you know, so for example, she might say, oh, I didn't inside a trade. Because look, there's a publicly available document that if you squirrel deep down into page 1076 of this document, then you, you would have found it.

Right, but how does someone on a 200 odd grand salary make hundreds of millions.

Yeah, exactly.

While I'm asking you.

Yeah, by, by, by insider trading. In all things other than the exact definition like so inside, the definition of insider trading is that she traded on information that's not publicly available. However, because what she can say is, well, we produced this 5,000 word report that had that information in it. If you had have read the report you would have, you would have been able to make the same trade I made. But when she's actually working closely at putting those decisions together. Yes, technically you could have sat in on the meeting because it was an open meeting. You technically you could have read the meeting minutes.

Yeah.

So she's technically. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So let me ask you an interesting question here then. If you're in that same situation, would you have not made those moves and just kept turning 200 grand a year or made those.

I'm not blaming, I'm not blaming her for doing that.

What would you have done?

Well, probably, look, it's not my game. It's not what I enjoy doing. I wouldn't like politics. But sure enough, if I found myself in that situation, I'd probably like if I was there and if I wasn't breaking any laws and it's like, hey, it's clear, as clear as black and white that we're going to allocate all this money to this new company that's over here that builds prisons. And it's like, hey, they've declared it on their statement, I've declared it in here. It's publicly available information, I'm going to trade on it. Right.

What if you could do it by changing the law?

This is what I mean, it gets slippery slow, but this is what I mean. Proximity to power corrupts and, and the bigger the government.

I guess I'm trying to say is that I'm not necessarily judging individuals for doing that because I think many other people wouldn't do it.

This is why you want a small government.

Yeah. So we'll come back because, because if you had a money printing machine and you were going to sell it for, to me for 25 million and I could print my own money, I would buy it off you.

Yeah.

And I probably, I want a bit more money. Yeah, but it's going to cost everyone else a bit. Yeah, but I want a bit. It'd be, it would be hard not to press the button.

And also if I system that needs to change also if I don't press it, I'll get Voted out and then the next guy will press it. So I might as well press it.

I love the justification.

That's. But that's how they think.

Yeah.

If I don't press it, it'll make everyone angry because I'm. Because I'm withholding things.

Yeah.

All I have to do is press here and I can give the people what they want. Yeah, Right. It's like being a parent at Christmas time. I either bam it on the credit card and the kids like me on Christmas day or I act responsibly and the kids don't like me on Christmas Day. You know, that's the, that's the conundrum the government is in. Right. But the difference is that the kids can vote them out if they don't press the printing machine.

And so I suppose I'm going to acknowledge the difficulty in that for any government.

So if governments become big, they become targets for that sort of proximity to power issue. And power corrupts absolutely. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Right. So we know that big governments create big opportunities for big consulting. If you go and look at all the big consulting firms in London, their main departments are now serving government, you.

Know, so it's big easy money.

Big easy money. Right. So they, they, you know, there's no money in helping entrepreneurs. There's no money for those companies in, you know, relocating country companies into the country. It's all about just serve the UK government. Right. And bid for contracts for the government. Right.

So it's all become big and slow.

Yeah. And it's all bureaucracy. And they deliberately create these, you know, documents that only the biggest consulting companies can get their head around. So it's all cuts out everyone from the, you know, so it's an, it's an inner circle club.

It's crazy. Do you know, I recently learned I've developed lots of property, as you know, and we go through the ridiculously arduous planning process. And we developed a property in Peterborough. 100 flats.

Yeah. Amazing property. I've seen it.

Apartment 159 tenants, 100 apartments. You know, we turned around a dilapidated building right in the center, and getting that through planning was so difficult.

Insane.

So difficult. There are 24 government departments you need to get through to get planning. There's even like the, the noise. Yeah, yeah. There's 24 government departments to get planning through.

So this is why the country is in real trouble, because go back to the British Empire, they basically said, go out there and take over everything. Yeah. We don't care how you do it.

Yeah.

Just go for it. Now, I'm not, I'm only joking. But I, but, but I'm saying we, this, this country, here's something that drives me crazy. The, the British, only a few generations just confidently went and took over the whole frickin world.

Yeah.

And also place like York was silicon valley of 1850. The, the, I mean the quantum computer of 1850 was the locomotive, right? And we, we built them, we made them ginormous steam pumps in, in the mid Midlands. Like these incredible, amazing, incredible pieces of machinery that we built. If you've, if you've ever been to one of the big industrial age steam pumps, there's ginormous steel wheels that they created and the pump goes deep into the thing and they, you know, unbelievable that we conceived and built, that we invented electricity here, right? We harnessed electricity. Like the, the stuff that has come out of this funny little Highland is mind blowing.

Where did it all go wrong? Because we created Jaguar and then we rebranded Jaguar. I mean, what we built and we've ruined it.

Rolls Royce, Bentley, Jaguar all came out of Britain. Aston Martin, you know, these, in these brilliant brands and the inventions, the, the Internet, you know, the, the electricity that, like the, the limited liability, the modern limited liability company, Cricket. Right?

All these things we're now shit at, we made.

Yeah. And, and it's in our DNA that we could do this really well. We're innovators, we're entrepreneurial, where we are not Pete with, you know, hard graft, stiff upper lip, mustn't grumble, you know, the stoic mentality, stoic method, you know, all of that stuff.

We, and you know, what about the Queen? Never complain and never explain. I love that Queen.

Wasn't she great? Yeah, yeah. You know, so, and it was the end of an era, wasn't it? Really was the end of an era. But, you know, I just feel like it's in our DNA that we could do this, we could get back to being entrepreneurial, we could be back to that. I'm not saying everyone should be an entrepreneur. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that, you know, those who can do it should do it and they should do it here. Those who are further afield and building great companies elsewhere should come back. Yeah, but we need to make it a desirable and attractive thing. We live in a world that is technologically possible to live, to live and work from anywhere and base a company from anywhere. Countries can no longer pretend that they have a monopoly on where we live and work. And it's all Intellectual capital. So you could say, oh, I'm going to put an exit tax. Okay, fine, I'll leave my assets here that I've currently created, but I'm going to go somewhere else and create new ones and you'll miss out on those. We have. We have a world that is very digital. Geography doesn't, is no limitation now. So unless you want to cut yourself off like North Korea and really go all in on. On lockdowning, locking people down, it's not going to work. And the easy option, that's a horrible option. The easy option is make it desirable. Yeah. Make it, make it the place people love being. Low crime, low taxes, everything works.

Yeah.

Only the only people you need to piss off are the bureaucrats who, who love having a job that no one needs.

And that's the problem, isn't it?

Because. Because they make the rules.

Yeah. So Daniel, the War and Peace, one of the longest famous books is about 1200 pages.

Big book.

A big book. And the tax code according to Grok is 22000 pages. And I wonder how many bureaucrats silver servants are acquired to manage that process. What about a proposal for you, a very simplified tax code that might be a 500 page document where taxes are fairly flat. What do you think?

What on Earth is in 22,000? I mean, just considering.

Yeah, I saw you went somewhere, didn't you, in your head.

Yeah, I was just kidding. Well, I was just working out. That's 20 Warren and pieces. I mean 12, 1200 words is one of. It's the biggest book. 1200 pages. I mean think about the Bible is 800,000 words and it's one little book. So how many like War and Peace is obviously big book and then there's 20 times that is just the tax code. And the thing that makes me curious is what's in there. Like do they have special rules for people who, you know, have a rose garden out the back garden of their. Like what.

I imagine they did. But if you think about how many different types of tax there is.

Yeah.

Vat, corporation tax, income tax, stamp duty, national insurance, business rates. I could go on and on and on and on and on.

Yeah. Inheritance. Yeah. Like the whole.

Yeah, inheritance tax.

So yes, obviously it needs to be simplified. There's two ways you could simplify this. Number one, you could start from scratch. First principles. Right. One of the biggest issues government has is they don't think from first principles. They think about marginal change.

So just to explain to people, first principles means going back to the very.

Basic and Starting back to the basics and saying, what are we trying to achieve?

Right.

Reverse engineer the future. We're trying to achieve this. We. So one thing I hate is when they, whenever they do a tax cut across the board, they say this tax cut provides more benefits to rich people than poor people. And it's like, well, of course, because they're currently paying the vast majority of tax. So they always describe it as how it changes the current situation as opposed to what are we trying to create? We're not, we're not changing the current situation. We're working backwards from a desired situation. So first principles is let's work backwards from the desired outcome, not forwards from what we've got. Don't forward engineer what we've got, reverse engineer what we want.

Right.

So that's kind of like first principles thinking. So you could simplify through first principles thinking. The other way we could do it in this age is, before you do.

That, before you go to your second one, I propose that if there was a flat and fair tax, I would need any accountants. Just pay it.

Although you'd get rid of 140,000 jobs right there.

But, you know, I will be straight up transparent and maybe you'd agree there's plenty of revenue in my companies. My companies are pregnant with money that I don't want to draw and pay 39% tax on when I've already paid 25% corp tax.

That's across the board. All the money is sitting in companies. Right now, I'm sitting on millions of cash.

There you go. Because you don't want to be penalized so much when you've already paid 25 Corp. Why do you want to pay 30 income?

I don't.

You don't?

I just want to sit it. I want it to sit there.

So what you do, what entrepreneurs do, is they sit there and wait until they can find a way to get it out or something changes.

Yeah.

And so that actually costs the. It costs the gdp.

I know a lot of companies, I know a lot of companies that say, sitting on millions of cash.

Billions, maybe.

And billions. Well, I know small businesses, so I know a lot of companies that are surprisingly cashed up, put it that way. And they're surprisingly cashed up because they don't want to take it out because of tax. People respond to incentives. We might not like it, we might call it greedy, whatever, but it's not.

Greedy just to hold your money. Yeah, you're saving it. So I can say this category and.

People say, oh, if you don't Spend it. Well, I know a lot of people who've got their money tied up in 5% interest accounts and they're, you know, they're doing all of the things to like, you know, they've got treasury and all that sort of stuff. Ridiculously high amounts of cash available to spend stuck, but do not want to spend it on, didn't want to remove it and, and have it spent.

And so if there was a flat, fair tax, let's just say 22% flat, I reckon people like you and I would just draw all the money out.

I just go nuts. Yeah, yeah.

In case they reversed it back.

I wouldn't, I also wouldn't think twice. I just grow and just do stuff and I just buy stuff.

Yeah. Like you grow, take it out, spend it, grow, take it out, invest it.

Look, as it currently stands, I'm very happy with. I know you wouldn't be, but I'm very happy with my current cars, so. Right. So I'm not. So like I have a 2019 X5 seven seater X5. Right. It's BMW X5 for my, as my family car. It's, it's a great car. I really like it. I don't have any real, you know, it's getting on, it's like six years old now. But I just don't really have any desire or need to change my BMW. It's quite, quite fine. I'm not as much of a car fan as you are. You'd probably change them over to every two years but if the taxes were lower I would just immediately buy a new car because I can. But I just don't like the idea of if I buy a hundred grand car, I've got to basically at the moment pay 200 grand for it.

Yeah.

Why would I bother? My car's fine. So you know, I would do. There's all this, there's all sorts of things there, you know. So.

So are you a fan of a flat flat.

Simple tax code. But with that said, I do believe that, that a wide number of people should be excluded from tax altogether or mostly excluded from income tax. I don't think most people should be. Vast majority of people. It's so stupid by the way, that we're taxing money off a nurse only to give it back, you know, and we're, we're sorry. Taxing someone for these tiny things and then we give it back to them in another way. It's like just don't tax them, just let, let, let them have their own money.

Yeah.

So look I think, I think almost half the economy shouldn't even be taxed income tax at all.

Yeah.

And then the top half of the economy should start paying tax and then slowly ramp up. I also, look, I don't have a problem with paying more taxes than most people, so, like, for example, if it's easy for me to make half a million a year, you know, just through speaking fees or something, I don't mind paying a higher percentage than someone who's working full time as a doctor or something like that.

Yeah, I personally have. If no nurse paid tax ever again, I. It would not bother me.

I'd be great.

I'd be happy.

That's desirable. Yeah, yeah. You're already serving the community. You don't have to be paying taxes on top.

Yeah.

So those sorts of things I'm all for. I don't mind, let's say most people paying 22%. I don't mind paying 27, 28. Right.

Just don't want to pay 25 then. 39, 45.

60.

Yeah. Okay. Right. So what do you think about following Donald Trump's model, where essentially he's become very focused on the US he's increasing all these tariffs and they're starting to produce everything. US focused. Do you think the UK should maybe be a bit more selfish and focus more on our own energy, our own entrepreneurship? What do you think?

There's a balance to be struck. It typically is the case that specialization is better than trying to do everything yourself. So there are certain things that we should specialize in and outsource to other countries who do it better, faster, cheaper. That is a good economic principle in.

General, but there's some things where you're going to get held to ransom.

But there are certain things that are just like, for example, electricity, food security. Right. We should have a thriving farming community because it's. It doesn't. It's actually part of our national security to have lots of independent farms having good quality natural food that our citizens can depend upon, that doesn't require any outside influence. We should have that fundamentally as a national security issue. So we want to have food security, energy security. We should definitely have cheap, freely available energy. Because, you know, we saw with Germany, they just switched it off.

Yeah.

You know, and then the. Germany's industry is on its knees right now because they switched off energy.

Well, that's it. It stops all the production because of how much energy costs.

Yeah. So there are certain things like food security, energy security that you should definitely have in. In house. There are also things like industries that employ lots of people, where it makes sense to have those in there because there's the wider benefit of the employment. So even if it's slightly more expensive to do that in house than to offshore it, it's better to have the jobs in the economy. Yeah.

Okay, so the welfare total is about 300 billion, which is more than a quarter of all national tax revenue, yearly tax revenue. Do you think we need to get that welfare really down? Do you think there are people gaming the welfare system? Do you think we should be getting a lot more people working again?

Well, let's just look at some of the numbers. Historically, 2% of people were deemed too sick to work. That's the history. Even after World War II, 2% of people were too sick to work. You got your legs blown off. Not too sick to work. Come and we'll find you something that you can do with no legs. That was the attitude in the 50s and the 40s. It was. And there was, there was an understanding that work provided dignity, it provided social benefits, self worth. Self worth. There was all community. All of these benefits were associated to work. Work was not punishment. Work was something that we want people to do because it's got all round benefits for everybody. And work was considered to be a dignified thing to do. So we all wanted to work, but 2% was too sick to work. And that was, we all agreed that 2% of people, 1 in 50 people just can't work for whatever reason, too sick. We now have 11% of people who are too sick to work.

Wow.

Now there's, I'm not, but I bet.

There'S not 11% of them who are too sick to work.

Well, we can all make our own decision.

Don't be political, dad.

But here's, here's something that's interesting. You can go and find forums on the Internet that tell you exactly what to say. So here's what happens. If you're too sick to work. You register that you're too sick to work. You get a 30 minute phone call from a GP who has no incentive to say one way or the other. If you say, these are my symptoms, these are the things that I'm dealing with, basically follow the script that is on the forum. Then that GP either that triggers me so hard, Daniel, that GP either has to argue with you and tell you that you're lying or say, well, you've said all the right things, so I just sign you off. Now, if you're a GP and you can choose to sit on the phone for 30 minutes and argue with someone and tell them you're lying about all of the things that you've just said. Or you go, well, you meet all the criteria. I guess you're too sick to work. Like at some point you're just going to go, I'm sick of fighting with people, right. I'm not like it's not, I'm not benefiting either way. I just going through the process. If you tell me that you, these are your symptoms and I have no way of proving you otherwise. So now we have forums online that tell you how to be too sick to work, what to say. We have a 30 minute phone call from a GP and then you're too sick to work and then you can.

Get months worth of years, you can.

Stay there, they don't check up, they check up once a year. Maybe, maybe.

Do you see that guy struck off sick, got like 10 years sick pay and then went to sue the company back because he wanted the inflation rise.

Because you've got time on your hands, you can come up with all of those things. And on top of that, if you have a mobility issue, you get a brand new BMW i4. Now I'm, I'm a millionaire. I've never actually owned a brand new car ever. So in all of my life I've always bought cars when they're about 2 years old.

Because you're smart, right? You let someone else take most of the depreciation.

Yeah, yeah, but I've never had a new BMW. I've had, I've had lots of BMWs, I've never had a new one. But you get a new BMW if you, if you, it's a 50 essentially it's a 55,000pound pre tax car that you'd have to earn £55,000 to get that car. If you, if you did it legitimately, but you get a BMW. We don't even make the car here, right. We don't even use that as we've got thousands of people driving around in these mobility cars and we're not even getting the jobs here in this country. We're not even manufacturing the cars that people get in that space. So stupid. Right? So one way we could solve this is AI AI has the ability to call people every day, converse with them and, and talk them through a process every single day.

Probably know how to avoid being gamified and cheated and conned and lied.

Yeah. So, and also there's only so many times that people can do that and there's only so Many times. They can remember exactly what they said all the other times.

Yeah.

So, for example, if. If you are saying that you're too sick to work because of X, Y and Z, good news. Every single day our AI agent will call you and every single day you'll get support. A 30 minute phone call, 40 minute phone call with our AI agent. It'll talk you through your daily routines, your symptoms. We'll actually find out all the things that are going on.

Give me some therapy.

Therapy. Every single day you'll get a call from our AI agent that will check.

In with you and everyone's going back to a work. No one's going through that shit.

Well. Because if essentially the AI agent says, hey, it sounds like you don't fit the profile anymore. Right. Because you can only keep it up for so long.

Yeah.

So I'm not saying that 2% of people, definitely the long term average is 2%. We're now at 11%. I'm not saying every single person is making that up, but people can draw their own conclusion as to how we, how we went from 2% to 11%.

Wow. So when I launched my TikTok a few years ago, I'd walk around the streets and interview people and talk about money and I'd give money away. And as I started to give more money away, I'm well known in Peterborough anyway, but I had a lot of people who were homeless would come up to me and I'd interview them. And categorically, everyone who was homeless told me the same story. I said, why don't you go back to work? Politely, why don't you go to work? Why don't you go back to work? There's no point. Because to get my house paid for, if I go back to work.

So just for everyone who's listening, if they're homeless, how do they get a house?

Well, I didn't. They didn't explain to me. But they're getting their accommodation paid for.

Okay.

They're not actually living on the streets. Most of the people, they're professionally begging on the street.

Okay.

And I went to the community support officers to back this up, by the way. Not everyone I know, there's 2%.

Sure.

But what a lot of people are doing is they're getting their living accommodation paid for by the government.

Government.

They're pretending to be homeless. They're begging. Do you know they earn between 150 and 200 quid a day?

Tax free.

Tax free. Because they're not going down the bank to pay that in we're in the wrong jobs, Daniel. And I said, why don't you go back talking? I said, there's no point because it will cost me more.

Well, because you and I complain about marginal rates of tax of 60%. Effectively what you're saying is a lot of people have a marginal tax of greater than 100% if they go to.

Work because they would make less if they worked.

And in many cases it would cost 40 hours a week to work for the same benefit. So the marginal rate is 100%. So it's like there's zero point in doing that. And that's. See, we need a safety net. We don't want a hammock. Right. So the idea is we have a social safety net, but you can't lay in it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good analogy. Okay, right. So should we start making more babies in the UK?

Of course.

Well, you've got three of them, so yeah. Okay.

Bring back the swinging 60s.

I mean, do we have a fundamental problem of an aging population and you know, we need 2.9 or 3.2 children, is that going to sort things out?

We have in this country 9.4 million homes that have two spare bedrooms. And if you go and look at who owns those, it's baby boomers. So over 65, if you go trick or treating. I went trick or treating with my kids and we walked down this one street that is beautiful. Big family homes, knocking on the doors, trick or treat. 65, 75, 60. Like all retirees, they're living in these huge houses with empty bedrooms. I don't blame them. That's a great decision. I can understand why they would want to do that. But the issue is, is that we have 9.4 million homes that have two or more spare bedrooms. All the big family homes that you would want to raise a family in, people bought them in 1994, they paid them off in 2020, and they don't have any mortgage. They've got a heat pump, they've got a solar panel. Low costs of ownership, and they love the idea that their family comes home two or three times a year and then the bedrooms get used for those couple of weeks a year. And then other than that, all their memories are in that home. But unfortunately, what sucks is we have a housing traffic jam. Housing traffic jam is where we now have the people who need family homes can't get family homes. And the people who have family homes don't really need them. But we don't have a post retirement type housing in this country, I don't know if you know this, but in Australia we have housing, special housing which is called retirement housing. And they're really, really beautiful homes. They're bungalows. They've got a central tennis court, swimming pool, gym, GP surgery, all of that centralized. They have walking tracks with lakes and they have off site storage where you can put all your storage stuff in there. So you end up with a semi detached bungalow in a housing estate. Now the beauty of these is that they operate on long leases, not ownership. So it's very, very cheap to basically buy 30 years worth of bungalow rental in one payment.

Right.

With a long lease. So what happens in Australia a lot is that you sell the big family home, you make, you know, a million dollars in the sale.

Yeah.

And then you pay whatever it is, 75, $85,000 for a long lease in this housing bungalow. And you've got community and all of this sort of stuff. So we've created a free up housing. Yeah. And these are big, right. There's like 6, 700 of these houses in per village. Big business opportunity. So what has happened in Australia is that it has become normalized to sell the family home and move into retirement village. And it's a phase of life and it's a good chapter and it's a really good option. And what we've done in this country is we don't have that next type of housing. So therefore people just hang on to the big family homes and sit them empty. So we have this housing traffic jam. Yeah.

We have a massive shortage of three bed houses in the uk. Massive. Which is only going to push the prices of them up.

Yeah. And what does that do? It basically means that people don't feel comfortable having a second child or a third child. If someone's living in a small terraced house, small back garden, you know, narrow staircase, small bathroom for putting the kids into the bath each night. If you've got two kids or one kid and you're living in a, in a small terraced house with narrow staircases and things like that. And the buggies and the, you know, the buggies are nowhere safe for the buggies and all that kind of stuff, you're going to say let's not have a second, let's not have a third, you know.

Right. So we're creating a problem for our future because we can't fund older people. We don't have enough money coming through from younger people getting into work.

Yeah, yeah. I mean we don't have a demographic pyramid anymore. We used to have a demographic pyramid. We now have.

We had. We had less at the top. Older.

We now have a. Like a. A Coke can or actually. It's actually starting to turn into inverted, like a.

So we're now almost more older than younger.

Yeah, yeah. And it's dangerous. Very dangerous economically. It's dangerous. Yeah.

Okay, so what about the concept of a new school system?

We need a new school system.

I mean, we need a new school system. Yes. I'm thinking a new school system where we. There's a entrepreneurial school system created.

Doesn't have to be entrepreneurial, but it has to align to the world that we're now in. So.

Which is entrepreneurial.

It's very entrepreneurial.

That book's called Entrepreneur Revolution, not, you know, Average Joe Revolution.

Yeah. But we need a. When we imagine the school system in the 1850s, we imagine. Because that's when it was born, I guess. Yeah. Industrial revolution in this country. We created three school systems. We had the elite school like Eton, we had grammar schools which were the professionals. Professional class, classic education. Then we had this state schooling, which was factory workers.

Yeah.

And essentially. And there was a guy who was given a knighthood for coming up with this system of those three levels. So ultimately we imagined that there was going to be a life period of learning, followed by working as a worker, followed by management or leadership, followed by a short period of retirement. That's how we imagine the arc of someone's life. We built a schooling system that would kind of have that arc in this current world. We have a different very fast high velocity loop, and that is identify a problem, research the problem, assemble a team, solve the problem, scale the solution, commercialize that, and then move on to the next problem. So these are the very fast loops. So. And these happen in all sorts of jobs, and they happen in all sorts. Like you could say, you could see that now in law firms that are modern law firms, accounting firms, you know, the professions, you'd see that in the trades. It's all about this fast cycle. So what we need is a schooling system that teaches you how to move through that cycle really quickly. Identifying a problem, researching the problem, assembling the right team, solving the problem, scaling the solution and commercializing it. Right. So fast, fast, rapid loops. So rather than building this kind of stupid long arc that doesn't exist for 45 years and then you retire, and they also imagine that you're going to retire for seven years and die. We now live for 20 years in retirement. Right. So the whole system's broken because we're pretending it's 1945 or whatever. So if we build a school system that is around those fast high velocity cycles, then we'll be a super highly productive economy.

Right. Is that something you're ever going to think about doing or being involved in?

I'll try it out on my own kids, I suppose.

And then when it fails, you don't scale the problem.

Well, if anyone, if anyone wants to bring me into the Department of Education, sure, I'll talk it through. But you know, I don't think I'll get very far. Too many people's jobs rely on the status quo.

Right. Okay, so why are Dubai doing better than the UK and why are so many people millionaires leaving the UK for places like Dubai? What's attractive to them? That's not attractive in the uk?

Yeah, simple formula. Low crime, low tax and really good leadership. Have you been to the Dubai shopping malls?

Yes.

Have you ever come across the vision statement for the country?

I probably have. Although I've taken a photo of it though I haven't, I can't memorize it.

Yeah, no, but, but just the fact that you go into the shopping mal center, there's a big wall and the wall says this is our vision, mission and values. This is what we're trying to achieve. These are the 12 principles that we're living by. That's public, that's right there. And you walk past it in very busy shopping malls and you actually see this is what we're trying to achieve. These are the principles and it's things like fairness, rule of law. This is what we're shooting for. We may not get it right all the time, but here's what we're trying to achieve. And very clear vision and direction for their country. Dubai is very misunderstood. It's misunderstood for a couple of reasons. It's misunderstood because everyone thinks it sits on oil wealth. They had a little bit of oil wealth, but they had neighbors with oil wealth that they took loans and they, they actually borrowed money to start Dubai. They have created an extremely nuanced pricing system. It's, it's actually not no tax. If you live in a big house, you're paying a certain amount to live in that big house which goes back. If you're building a building, you're paying a certain amount to build that. If you're buying certain things, you're paying certain taxes. But it's kind of like just a very nuanced pricing structure that it's more user pays. Turns out that if you are rich in Dubai, you are paying for all sorts of stuff that goes back into the economy and goes back to government even.

But surely that's a better, more fair model because you make your money, you keep it all and then you choose where you spend.

You want to spend it. Yeah, yeah. So there's a great vision. They're very, very clear that they are a low crime environment, they are super tight on crime and the net result is that there is no crime. So there's these great videos on YouTube where people leave a Rolex sitting on a table and they see how long it will take, so they do a time lapse and you can put. Leave a gold Rolex sitting at a coffee shop and no one does it. If they do touch it, they just take it up to the management handed in. You can leave a wallet full of cash and you can put that on the. I've seen one where it's a wallet full of cash and it's sitting on the bonnet of a car parked where all these workers are just walking past and few people notice it, but they. They don't touch it. Right. There is no crime. The other thing that they're incredibly misunderstood about is, you know, the structure of society. Yes, there are. You know, I don't want to go too deep on this because it's very nuanced topic there. There are a lot of people who work shitty jobs and work through the night doing construction jobs. Unfortunately, everyone goes there for a better circumstance than they currently have. And a lot of people have gone there because their current situation in their current shitty country was shitty and Dubai was a better option.

A bit less shitty is what you're saying.

Less shitty. So whereas it looks shitty to us, it's. It's less shitty than what they had.

Right.

And it often is the case that one person working in Dubai can provide for, like, for example, and I hate this, by the way, I absolutely hate it. Often it's the case that Dubai Uber drivers are from somewhere like Pakistan and they. One Uber driver can pay for an entire family in Pakistan. Pakistan to live. And it's heartbreaking to think that a father is estranged from their kids. But that's not Dubai's fault. That's the fact that those opportunities don't exist in their own country.

Yeah. And like, it's a lot cheaper to get taxis and Uber equivalents in Dubai than it is in 30 quid for a taxi here for two and a bit miles.

Yeah. So Dubai is so well run that it's attracting lots of people with money. So then People come and build industries around people with money. Yeah, but it is crazy that Dubai is a literal desert. Historically, no one would want to ever live in a desert. But why? Low tax, low crime. It's a, it's a, it's an absolute heady mix.

Right.

You know, here in the uk it's.

Now high tax, high crime, high tax, high crime.

Right. And 200 first, 200 pounds of shoplifting each day is not even a crime.

No.

You can just go and take something up to £200.

Yeah.

Nothing they can do about it.

Let's just, let's just let that drop.

It's the free trial for crime. It's the, it's the starter kit. It's the, it's the criminal.

Here's your incentive to get into crime. Yeah, your first £200 is free.

Let's get, let's get you on the on ramp. Yeah, yeah. £200 a day.

It's a day.

Yeah, yeah. Basically you can walk in, you can walk in and take something from a shop and it's £200. And if you do that every day, you're under the £200, pounds. And it's not really a crime. I mean, this country is a joke. You, if you, I, I, I know someone who had their camera equipment stolen, 10,000 worth of camera equipment. They had an air tag in there. They went to the police and said, there's my camera equipment. They said, I'll claim it in, claim it on insurance. Ten grand worth of camera equipment. And they, they said to the police, there it is. Like, we can literally just go over there and get it. I said, well, don't you go over there and get it because you'll be committing a crime. Yeah. They just said, is it insured? Yeah, claim it on insurance. But where's the value in stopping the criminal? Yeah, okay, maybe it is insured, but where's the value in telling society that that's not, that's not okay? You can't just take people's.

Well, I mean, crime probably starts at the bottom, doesn't it? It probably starts like anything pissing in an underground walk through and then graffitiing all over it.

It's like being a YouTuber there. Yeah, like being a YouTuber, you do it for free for a while and then you get bigger and better at it.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Okay, let's talk a little bit about business. It's our favorite subject, my favorite topic.

I'm not even into, I'm actually not even into this Gary's economic stuff or fixing the world. I just like business.

Yeah, yeah, but, but it's important to talk about these things.

Yeah, yeah, I love, I love. Yeah, I get it.

Yeah. Okay, so how can the average normal person start and succeed in a business? Give us a few little steps.

So number one, you go and become a direct report to an entrepreneur. So you go and do two years working for an entrepreneur where you are direct report that you're in meetings with them, you're seeing behind the scenes, you're behind the curtain. You want to be working with someone who is doing something digital or finance related. Intellectual property, media, technology and finance. Those are the big five. And you essentially want to see them hiring people, firing people, winning customers, servicing customers. You want to have a direct experience as to what's going on in the business. Normally the perfect scenario would be to work in a company that has less than 10 people. Because if you're working in a small business with less than 10 people, you're getting full visibility across the whole company, what it's doing. So you do two years working for someone and you, you essentially do it as an apprenticeship. You're apprenticing entrepreneurship.

Earn while you learn.

Earn while you learn. Yeah, yeah. If you get a job at a big KPMG or PwC, they're just going to shove you in a corner, give you some weird spreadsheets to edit and then they're not even going to tell you what it's for, who it's for, how much that client paid. They're not going to give you any of that information. There's no contact with the partners or the senior partners.

Yeah.

You're just going to be isolated. So you're better off going for a small company and apprenticing as an entrepreneur first.

Okay, so that's step one.

Yeah.

And then after two years, what you're going to go on your own.

And during that apprenticing phase, you're consuming content, you're reading books, you're looking at books and making recommendations to your entrepreneurial person you're apprenticing with. So you're trying out your ideas in the real world as well. Hopefully you're doing a bit of sales work and then you're going to. If you want to launch a business, you're going to start by launching a waiting list. And a waiting list is that you've got an idea for a business and you say, I'm going to be launching this if I get enough interest in it. Or I'm going to be launching this later this summer. Join the waiting list. And you might give them some bonuses for joining the waiting list. Join the waiting list and get a free copy of this book. Join the waiting list and get a free ticket to an event. Join the waiting list and I will assist with blah, blah, blah. Right, so you're just simply going out and seeing if you can get a couple of hundred people on the waiting list, conducting your first experiments. If you get people to join the waiting list, you then take that to a mentor figure and you say, I've got 150 people on the waiting list. Can you see any blind spots as to why I should join? Here's the data that we collected off all the people. Here's the questions we asked them, here's how much they're willing to pay, here's the problems they're trying to solve, here's the outcomes they want from us. Do you think this is a good idea? Right, that I should go ahead with? Once you've got that data and you'll get some advice from a couple of mentors and then you can either raise SEIs, which is the first 250,000 worth of funding, or you could fund it by making some initial pre sales. But you basically, you know, you set up your business, you set up your bank accounts. Once you've got the waiting list of 150 people waiting for you to launch the business, launch the set up, set up your company, set up your bank accounts and then figure out whether you want to raise money or not. But those are some of the first steps.

And when you say raise money or not, because this is not talked about much in the world of entrepreneurship, but I'm a big fan of raising your own money through your own cash. So I'm a big fan of raising your own money through your own cash flow by selling some of your stuff.

Pre sales is a great way to start. Yeah. A lot of great companies.

Then you're not giving away equity or you're not putting debt on your company.

Yeah, there are good reasons to give away equity for a certain type of business strategy. So, for example, if you're going to be trying to sell that company and, and sell it for a lot of money, it's really good to have a valuation ladder that you've actually gone through. So it's nice to say, you know, we started with 2.5 million valuation, we then achieved a second 7.5 million valuation. So, yeah, when someone ultimately buys the company for £40 million, it's very nice for them to be able to see that smart investors came in at all the way. All the ways along. Yeah. It kind of gives validation to the value.

Yeah.

So, you know, that's not a bad strategy. I'm not. I'm not against that. There are good reasons to. To do that.

Yeah.

But also, if you're not intending to do that, just pre sales.

Yeah.

Go and get people to. To. To sign up, you know, look, some.

Some simple mustard it with the. Was it the Model S?

Yeah. Cybertruck.

Yeah. Well, you know the one he put going to the. Into space.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You put.

You put a deposit down for that, didn't you?

Yeah, I put a deposit down for Cybertruck originally. 100 quid or something like that. He did 100. He did 100 million.

Yeah.

In pre sales for just the $100 deposit.

Yeah.

You know, here's the interesting thing, is that you could. You could. I could create a waiting list for people who want to go on a trip to space and go and do a hospitality trip around the moon. Even though it's not technically possible, I could still launch a waiting list for it and say when it, when it becomes technically possible, we'll let you know.

Yeah. And if you've sort of got it already, you can get a deposit down off them for commitment.

Yeah, you could do that. And it's. And it's. Obviously, it's buyer beware and it's. It's based on conditions and it's refundable and all that sort of stuff. With many businesses where the client. If you're doing B2B, which is probably a good place to start, you know, a client might happily pay two and a half grand up front. You get 10 clients who pay two and a half grand up FRONT. You got your first 25 grand.

Yeah. And if you've got some knowledge and experience in something, you could become a mentor, a consultant for that. And you don't have any hard costs, you don't have any IP costs.

No.

You don't have any design or sort of patent issues. You can start it really quickly.

Yeah. If this feels at all confusing or out of your depth, it won't. By the end of doing two years. Working for an entrepreneur.

Yeah.

Work for an entrepreneur for two years and you'll be fine.

And the key is access to them, because you'll see everything. You'll see lawsuits they're going through. You'll see if they're in a good mood or a bad.

What they're complaining about.

Yeah. The hiring, the firing, that you'll be privy to all the conversations and you'll.

Discover that a lot of businesses that look cool on the surface are actually like full on intense sales environments behind the scenes. You know, companies that you think are just like selling products effortlessly, you know, like 60% of the value of the first sale is in ads. Yeah. You know, those sorts of things happen all the time. So behind the scenes is where you see what really makes the business tick.

Yeah, yeah. And a lot of people are saying, oh, just start your business. Simon Squibb recruiting people, basically just start your business. Why shouldn't you just start your business? Why shouldn't you fail a couple of times?

First, I would love if Simon's message was quit your job and go work for an entrepreneur for two years. Right. But it's not, it's if, if it was, you're never going to learn much working for a large organization. Why don't you do something similar working for a small organization where you, if you, if you're interested in entrepreneurship, go work closely with an entrepreneur first. You know that to me, obviously not as good content.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was longer than 10 seconds. So it's not in a real.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm a, I'm a fan of all of that. And then, you know, once you. One thing everyone should know about entrepreneurship is that it's a lot more predictable than people think. It's actually a set of steps and stages. So what you realize having run an entrepreneur accelerator and built seven different startups, you just go through bases. There are, there's, you know, there's the founding of the business and the first sale and what's called product market fit and then go to market strategy and there's, you know, establishing lifetime value of a customer and cost of acquisition of a customer. There's certain things that start falling into place and you go through this process of scale up and then exit and all, all of that. It, it is actually a process. It's, it's a, it's a little bit like airplanes. In the first 40 years of airplanes, there was a lot of plane crashes because we didn't know everything about aerodynamics and, and we didn't know everything about the process, process of taking off and landing. But then we created processes and we created aerodynamic principles and now an airplane is the safest place, provided you follow the process. Yeah, Entrepreneurship actually is a very established process now.

Right, yeah. So you said about collecting data, getting some information on your customers. Is that what ScoreApp does?

ScoreApp is a platform that allows you to research your customers and in the same, in the same process at the same time, collect warm leads of people you can sell to. So for example, we set up online quizzes, online surveys, online IQ tests or personality tests. All of those things are these online quizzes, surveys and assessments. And then as a result of people filling those in, you collect really good marketing data and you make sales.

Right.

So scoreup is super affordable. It's like 50 bucks a month. We've got, you know, lots of small businesses who use it and then that becomes the backbone of their marketing.

Okay, so if someone wants to go and try that out, get it.

Yeah. Start with a free account.

Yeah. Where, where the, where do they go?

Scoreapp.com.

Right.

And then you get a free account.

So that's score s c o r e a double P. Yep.

ScoreApp.com.

Yeah.

And one of the first things you'll encounter is our template library. So there's 150 templates. So you go having a look for a template that's similar to what you want to achieve and then just make a few edits, launch it, see what happens.

Yeah. Build this initial data set.

Yeah.

Or pre sell some.

Yeah. Now mind you, we've waiting list, we've talked about startups. Most of our clients who use Score app are probably half a million to 5 million of revenue.

Right.

And they use it to bottom of funnel, mid funnel conversions. They are using it in many cases with their existing clients to do more with their existing clients.

You could use it internally, could you, with your, with your staff to get data from them?

Yeah, we have some customers who do happiness at work surveys with ScoreApp. Yeah. The benefit of ScoreApp is that you get an immediate result. So when people, when you ask people to fill in a survey, they answer a bunch of questions and then it says thank you. When you do score up, they answer a bunch of questions and then it gives them a score. It gives them an actual scorecard.

So it's like a quiz ification. Yeah, it's like filling in a quiz.

It gamifies. Yeah. It's like when you fill in one of those personality tests and it says, yeah, you do have a personality.

You are a narcissist.

Oh dear.

Yeah, you have somewhere between Machiavellian and narcissist. Okay. Right. How do you sell anything to anyone?

One inside people's mind is what I call the situational model. Situational model is where am I now? Where do I want to be? What's in my way? And then so if we think about what is my current situation, what is my Desired situation. What are my obstacles? So everyone has relating to anything they want. Everyone has that as their situational model. So they, they can describe that. Anytime you can present someone with a path of least resistance from where they are to where they want to be that doesn't mess with any of their obstacles or their criteria, then they're excited to move on that path, are excited to follow that. So if you said, where are you now? I'm struggling with my marketing. Where do you want to be? I just want leads that come in all the time. I want sales to be easy. I want to have, like, I want to be able to pick up the phone and talk to someone who's ready to buy. I want to ignore someone who's not my perfect client. Okay, great. That's where I am. That's what I want to be. What's stopping you from that? Oh, well, none of our marketing is working. We've tried 50 different things and they haven't worked. You know, when we generate leads, it's just name and email. People give us a fake email. Okay, great. Those are all your obstacles. What if I told you about a really great way that we generated 90,000 leads, 20 million worth of sales, we collected lots of data. We could pinpoint exactly who was going to buy and who wouldn't buy in advance without talking to. To them. Would you be interested in how we solve that problem? Yes. Okay, so we solved it through having an online scorecard, an online quiz, and then we turn that into a piece of software that you can use for 50 bucks a month. It's the most streamlined experience you've got, templates already designed. So this will get you to where you want to be with your marketing. And if it doesn't, you can just cancel it.

Bosh.

Path of least resistance.

You are definitely wasted talking about the UK economy when you can do that.

So, so the model that you want to have in the mind is, where are they now? Where do they want to be? What's in their way? Have I got a path of least resistance?

Right.

And then if, if a person can clearly understand that that. That actually works.

Yeah.

Then they'll. Then they're excited.

Okay, so is there a preferred way to present that information? Because, you know, some of us are visual, some of us are more digital, some of us are more feeling connected. So when you're presenting that path of least resistance, are there different ways to present it?

Well, visual is a great place to start. 70% of the human brain relates to visual processing. So we are visual creatures. We Love visuals. It's always important to remember a few things. Remember what it's like not to know. Right. So you know a lot about property. But if you were selling to someone like myself, who doesn't do anywhere near as much property related stuff as you do, you've got to remember what it's like to have fears and doubts and concerns and, you know, questions. So you got to relate to that person at the beginning of the journey. I use this example where if you had a song in your head or I'll do it, I've got a song in my head and I'm going to try and you got to guess the song and I'm going to clap. Right. You don't have no idea, Right?

Is it that every song it was.

Yeah, it was Castle on the Hill by Ed Sheeran.

Oh, of course.

Anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what's going on in our head is very hard to transfer, right. So it might have been crystal clear in my mind. I could hear the song like super perfectly, but it's hard to transfer. So you got to remember that for the person who's trying to buy, they don't know what's going on in your head. It's. They can you, you can hear the music. They can't hear the music. You can see it, they can't see it. So you got to try and use as much as you possibly can to make it obvious for people through visuals, through audio, through diagrams, through animation, through posters, through having methods and models. Right. Make it super, super easy. Assume that they cannot hear that music inside your head. You know, when you, when you're selling to people. So anything at all that speeds that along, perfect. But ultimately, if you want people to really buy, logic, emotion and urgency have to be present. So when we buy something, we want to logically feel that it's the right thing. We want to emotionally feel connected to that decision and positive about desire. Desire, yeah. Or removing pain or moving closer to desire. But emotionally.

Security. Yeah.

Growth, security, certainty, variety, experience, or any of those classic human emotions. And urgency is about fear of missing out. So if I was to say, why do most people buy a Rolex? So a Rolex is bought for three reasons. Logically, they hold their value. Emotionally, they communicate status and make me feel good about myself. And urgency. You go on a waiting list and then you get three days to buy it or you have to miss out. And that's how Rolex sell watches, Logic, emotion and urgency. So what. When we see businesses where there is not a lot of logic Emotion and urgency. They have a very slow sales cycle, takes a long time. Once you know that logic, emotion and urgency are the three ingredients that have to be present, you can then say, okay, well how do I help create those?

Have you ever gone bust, had to have a company go through insolvency or anything really hard that you've had to deal with in business? I think we've been in business similar amount of time, about 20 odd years. Yeah. Has it ever been really fucking hard?

There's a couple. When I was in my early 20s, I launched a company, went 0 to 1.3 million in the first year.

Was that Triumphant Events? Yeah, yeah, I remember that's sort of how we met.

I think that was. There was Triumphant Events version one back in Australia. Right. And then there was version two that.

I. Yeah, you brought Roger Hamilton, Middleton, etc just for the avoidance of John demartini. Yes.

Mike Harris. Yes. Bob Proctor.

Yeah.

So we actually had, you know, Daniel.

And I really are friends and really have been friends for 20 years.

Yeah, exactly.

I didn't get you on this just because you blew up on Gary Stevenson and Stephen Bar.

No, but it took that for you to put me on the podcast. So look, the first version was we went from 1.3 million in year one to 10.7 million in year three and UK pounds. No, Australia, which was, you know, about half that.

Yeah.

And I had 80% of my revenues coming from one relationship, one partnership.

You and Roger.

No, this was completely before this.

Okay, fine.

This was a franchise company that we were working with in Australia and we were conducting all of their marketing and they were our biggest client.

Right, right.

And they offered to buy my company when I was 24 years old for $14 million. And in order to do the deal I had to go and present to their board. And I flew over to Perth with Glenn, my. My now business partner. And while we were flying over there, we really discussed some key issues that we thought that this company weren't doing well and that could be catastrophic for their business. Stuff we had picked up on the ground and we didn't feel that they were being as ethical as they could be and that there was situation where they're bringing people on as franchisees that were never going to be successful and taking franchise fees from people that we thought were not good selected choices. So we were talking about better selection and things like that and how to improve their ability to select franchisees that would succeed. They left us sitting in a waiting room two days before Christmas for eight hours before inviting us into the boardroom and by this stage we're tired and furious at them. We went into that board meeting and just unleashed. It got so heated that Glenn slammed his hand on the table and we had this explosive fight with them and basically we broke up. So I had $14 million in the bag ready to go and then, and I just had to present the, present the deal and we ended up having a big fallout and as a result 80% of my revenue gone. So yeah. So essentially I went to my mentor and I said, so now you always.

Take protein bars in your laptop bag for when they're sweating you out in the negotiation.

I do know. I mean I was just the testosterone of a 24 year old. I just.

Yeah, but I mean I'm kind of being serious because a lot of the times if you're really fucking tired, you're just hangry.

Yeah.

I don't have meetings after 3:00'. Clock.

Yeah. Because I want to be tired. It's going to go badly. Yeah. So I went back and I basically had to say I've got to restart the whole business from scratch. And that's when I decided I was going to restart in London because I thought if I'm going to restart the business I might as well restart in a bigger market. So I came over London. So 2006, I arrive, we immediately make £4 million worth of business in the first six months. We're crushing it. That's $8 million. Right. So I'm like back in the game. And we go really, really well. I'm banking with private banking. I've got penthouse in Chelsea area. Everything's going really well. And then financial crisis hits. 2007, 2008 and we dropped 90% revenue. So I went from minions of revenue. Yeah, 90% drop. And the reason for that was Roger decided he wasn't coming to the UK anymore. He was focused on Singapore and his group was impacted. And John demartini, he was basically going to stay in Texas and a couple of other things. So it wasn't even market driven, it was just our main supply fell, all of our supply side.

So you made the same mistake twice?

Yeah.

Basically you added you too reliant on a couple of names.

Yeah. And I realized that I was running a brokerage model business.

Right.

And twice I'd basically been hit with this same issue and that's where I said I've got to own my own assets, I have to have my own intellectual property, I have to have my own book, I have to have my own videos, I'VE got to build my own brand. And that's where I started on a very different path of building software, building, building my own assets. And that's where I went through a big, big change. And within a very short space of time, we ended up with a bigger business, more profitable. I ended up being able to buy up competitors, buy up businesses. So, you know, I've now bought and sold, I don't know, maybe a dozen companies. I currently have seven different companies that I own. And yeah, they're built on the same principles that I learned during those really tough times.

What's Stephen Bartlett really like?

Amazing. Amazing. Yeah, whatever you've heard negative about him in the press. Total. He's, he's.

What do they say about. I don't know, I don't really read the press, but.

So what do they say? You know, that he's exaggerated his success and he's done this and he's done that. He's had this and he's had guests on there that he shouldn't have had on their guests who talk about health issues that shouldn't be talking about health issues. Look, the thing I'll tell you about Stephen is he's lovely, humble, warm, personable, softly spoken, great listener. He's crazy smart. Crazy smart. He has sat down with 400 very interesting people over the last few years and intently listened to them. That's, that's a level of experience you couldn't buy.

And one of the best things about being an interviewer on a podcast. Yeah, yeah.

He knows more about most topics than most people in the hot seat. Right. So if he's talking to me about business, he knows more about business. Business. He's, he's incredible. I mean, he sat down with the CEO of Google and Snapchat the other day and all this sort of stuff. So he's incredibly intelligent, but he knows how to ask the questions that the, that someone who's starting out would ask. He's, he's sat down with the world's best people talking about, you know, psychology. He knows a lot about psychology. So he's incredibly smart on a full range of topics. He's the, the experience of being on the show, the way they pick you up in the car, the way they bring it, they give you a special photo album of like, they're doing things that are just high end, ultra high end experience.

Did he give you a watch? A British brand?

He didn't give me a watch. You've one up to him on that.

Do you want to just explain what Just happened.

Oh. I asked you what is this watch that you're wearing? Because I admired it when you walked in and I said, this is a gorgeous watch. Watch. And you told me it's a British brand watch. It is William Wood. It's multi generational family business. The strap is made out of fire hose. It's. The whole thing is about the fire department. The metal is made out of the helmets and it's got an amazing heritage. You told me about it and then said, daniel, I've given this. I want to give you this as a gift. And I'm incredibly blown away by it. It's an absolutely beautiful gift. I've never been given such a lovely gift.

I've never given anyone a watch before because, as you know, I'm obsessively into your watches.

Yeah.

But no, you also said earlier that, you know, when I get into brands, I get very obsessive about them and.

You clearly want to share this with people. It's a great. It's a beautiful watch and I love the. In case of emergency brake glass on the back. I can imagine an emergency and just smashing my watch and going, now what?

I remember listening to Joe Rogan interview Lex Fridman and he gave Lex a watch I think was in a nice Amiga. He gave.

Yeah.

I remember thinking, I want to be able to do that.

Yeah.

On my podcast, I've done 1200 episodes, I'd have no watches left. But yes.

Well, there you go. You've achieved. I've helped you achieve your goal. Thank you. Very happily achieved. I love this watch. This is a great watch.

So why do you think Stephen is so successful?

He's charming, he's charismatic, he's hard work. He's incredibly hard working. Like crazy hard working. The guy pushes himself to the limits. He's a good negotiator, good listener. He builds high performance teams. One thing I'll tell you about his team. There's about 30 people who work on Diary of a CEO.

So for his podcast only, he's got 30 staff work.

It's one of the biggest podcasts in the world now.

Yeah.

So it's a team of about 30.

People on a podcast.

But I'll tell you what's amazing about his team is they are absolute content geeks. Every single person who works there loves content. They have strong opinions on what makes great content. They consume content, they produce content, they study content. They are all hugely into this. This is not some. These are not people who have been like dragged into a podcast business.

Yeah.

These are People who are now living their dream job and working at the most elite level, where they just want to. They want to strive and they want to be the best and they're, like, completely aligned. So Stephen has aligned those teams and then the other super smart thing he's done is he's used his influence to gain equity. So he owns ownership in all these companies now because he's been able to either invest or trade influence for equity. You know, some of the most successful British brands that have come up recently. He's involved in, like, which ones? Hup. You know, company. Some technology companies.

Does he advise them or does he advises them?

He makes introductions for them.

Yeah.

You know, so he's, you know, he's super, super smart. Yeah. Looks after people. Yeah. No, I. I can honestly say he's. He's better than. A lot better than. He comes across, even on the podcast. And he comes across great on the podcast.

Yeah. So what are the differences being interviewed between Stephen Barlott and Rob Moore?

Well, you've got a stronger opinion. Have I? Yeah. Butler, he loves to just ask questions and let you like he. He does. He stays very neutral.

Yeah.

Whereas I think with you, you know, you've got strong opinions, it's more of a back and forth bit of. Bit of chat. Yeah. But I think everyone's got to develop their own style as to how, you know, how they want to want to do it. I think Bartlett's style is to just simply ask the questions and. And all of that.

Yeah. Do you think he controlled the interview well enough with you and Gary Stevenson?

You know, I think it was a bit of a shock to him because he's never done that style of interview before. So this was a first for Diary of a CEO.

Yeah.

Normally it's a very easy to control environment. It's questions and answers and all that sort of stuff. But, like, it all spiraled really quickly. You got to remember very rapidly I'm talking and Gary's just firing questions at.

Me and interrupting you and talking over you.

Take me here, take me there. And, like, you can see me. I'm almost laughing. I'm like, this is really funny how. This is, like, not what I expected at all. Like, I thought we'd have a bit of a discourse.

Yeah.

And I saw, like, the look on Steven's face is like, oh, what am I meant to do in this situation? Do I break it up? But because I'm smiling and because I'm, like, talking, I think Stephen kind of looked at me for, like, do you want Me to break this up and I'm like, I'm fine with it, you know?

Yeah.

You've got to remember, I've got three kids under 10. I get them ready for school every morning.

Yeah.

Gary's a breeze. Like, I'm fine with people arguing with me.

Yeah. Do you imagine it would be difficult to be an interviewer?

Oh, it'd be incredibly difficult for me because I fucking love the sound of my own voice.

I'm glad you said it.

Yeah. I couldn't do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. Interviewing is harder than talking. Way harder.

I bet.

Yeah.

Because I would struggle not to interject with my opinion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, if I let people talk too much, I get criticized for letting them go and not to going. Controlling them. If I jump in, I get criticized for jumping in because so, you know, our first 15 minutes, there will be people that will say, I was interrupting you too much, but I needed to pull out those points.

People have shorter.

Yeah. And, you know, you'll come in here and you'll have your guide of where you want to discuss. And I've got my guide here. I've got to try and get us to meet in the middle.

Yeah. No, hats off to you for doing it. And you, you interview some. Some big characters. Some big, big characters.

Yeah. It's super fun.

I bet. Yeah, I bet. Well, do you want to be more interviewed? Do. Do you want to actually be in the seat where more people interview you?

I've probably been interviewed 7, 800 times. I'd have thought probably mostly on small pog. Smaller.

Which do you enjoy?

It depends. Yeah. Yeah. We've had a lot of viral content from me on other people's podcasts. On this podcast, I'm a bit loose and you're controlled. I'm a bit loose.

Yeah.

You know, like, you could sense where I was going down with you, and you were just like, whoa. Whereas I. You just, like, lube me up and off I go.

Mind you, he'd love that. You might have more extreme views than I have. I. I do. I actually. I'm not trying to manage the conversation. I'm trying to make sure that I'm correctly representing where my viewpoint is.

Right. Yeah. So you're not worried about the consequences of. Of what you're saying. You're trying to evaluate what you actually think.

Yeah. So.

Because sometimes it can read like you're, like, trying not to say something you shouldn't say.

Totally. And for me, and it looked like that on some of the points because Gary was trying to drag me to an extreme point of view, and I'm like, I don't have an extreme point of view. Yeah. Like, I, I don't want to go down that path because that's not what I truly think.

Which is honest.

Yeah. Like, I, I truly do believe that rich people should pay more taxes than.

But they do already.

They do already. Right. You know, I, I. And I also believe that. I, I also believe that the economy is not working for enough people. It should be working for more people. We can't have an economy that just works for the lucky few. Like, I really believe that we need an economy that doesn't require you to be a freaking elite entrepreneur who's lucky as well in order to just own a house and have a family. Like, we need everyone to feel comfortable they can own a house and have a family. Like, I want that. So when Gary's kind of like, dragging me off to. Or even in this conversation where you've sort of said, oh, billionaires are awesome.

I didn't say that. I don't think.

But there was. We were drifting in the direction of, like.

That would be a good start. Let's get to the clip, though. Let's get.

Awesome. Yeah. Let's get billionaires. Let's get billionaires to, like, advise government. Yeah. May.

Yeah. But I did put context. I said later in life, billionaire who want to give back the good ones.

The goodies.

Yeah. Because there are good ones.

Yeah. So. So, like, yeah. So, like, I'm not trying to manage the conversation because I'm worried about what people would see. I'm. I'm trying to correctly represent my own thinking on something. Yeah.

Yeah. Which I respect about you and others who are a little bit more considered.

And I am actually, I hate to say it because a lot of people won't like this, but I am actually quite centrist on most issues.

Yeah.

Like, I like, you know, you've done.

Demartini Well, I was just going to say that equal upside and downside.

I, I personally spent a year or two with demartini. He's great.

Yeah.

So I, we, we promoted some of his biggest tours.

Yeah.

So I was in the room with him countless times for a couple of years.

So you don't really. It removes polarization, doesn't it?

Don't end up with extreme views when you're around him because you realize there is good and bad in everything. You know, you have to collapse your view and say, okay, maybe there is a point that, you know, there's a reality that that person has that. That's probably accurate. You know, you've got to kind of get on their side.

Yeah.

So I've. I used to have more extreme views, and then the demartini stuff kind of center pushed me a bit more to the center.

Yeah. So you asked me just a couple of moments ago, you know, do I want to go on more podcasts? Why did you ask that?

Well, because you're talking about what it's like being the interviewer. I haven't done a lot of the interviewing. Yeah, but.

But you do, obviously, haven't you?

You've had the opportunity now to. To listen to a lot of people. I'm wondering whether has any of you.

By the way, like, like you said with Stephen. I have learned so much from interviewing people. Probably more than I learn it reading hundreds of books.

Have any of your guests profoundly impacted your worldview?

I think if I'd have done the podcast or the big guests 20 years ago. Yes.

Yeah.

I wouldn't say now. No. And because I've done John demartini's work.

Yeah.

I can look at Andrew Tate and see upside and downside.

Yeah.

You know, I can look at a right leaning on politician and see upside and downside, and then I'll go and interview a left leaning politician. I can see upside and downside.

Yeah.

So that's a difficult one to honestly answer because the popular answer would be, yeah, you know, when this really surprising guest came on my show, because I know Stephen Bartlett had a massive, profound experience with Mo Gorda, you know, and he came on my show, I. I already knew the upside of death. I already knew the upside of losing. Even though, you know. Yeah, much so. You know, Mo's experience of losing his son is profoundly shocking. But I kind of already knew.

Yeah.

That journey.

Well, if you've been in the room with Diamantini, you've actually seen people who have had that personal experience come to a greater understanding or a deeper insight around how profound that experience was. Both up and. Yeah, down. So you've actually seen people, you know, equalize those experiences in. In real time.

Yeah. So I think if there's one thing I've probably really learned, it's that running this economy in the UK is probably the most difficult job in the world. And, you know, for all the flaws of labor policy or conservative moving over to the left or whatever, it's a poison chalice of a job.

Oh, who would want it?

Yeah, like people, you know, thousands of people. Like Rob, you should be Prime Minister. No way. I'd be. I've got some good ideas. That's.

And even if I was good at it, why would I want to?

Yeah, because you could run your businesses.

What's the prize for the winner? You know, like, what do you get.

Out and get million pounds as a paid speech and you write a book and sell millions of them.

Yeah. There's some real. By the way, there's some real corruption around that.

Yeah.

There's certain ex Prime Minister who got paid two and a half million for a speaking fee that he didn't even give the talk.

Wow.

Just going to say, who was that?

Which Prime Minister was that?

Yeah, you know, Boris.

Wow.

But in fact, check me on that. Maybe, maybe he had given the talk. But I will say this just completely unrelated. If you go to a cheap restaurant, you pay for your meal and then you get the meal. If you go to an expensive restaurant, they give you the meal and then you pay at the end. If you go to a cheap country, you pay the bribes and then you get the benefits and you get the kickbacks. And if you go to an expensive country, they do you the favors and then you get the speaking fees later. You know, unrelated. But, but, but it's, but it's interesting, isn't it? Right, isn't it? Isn't it interesting that certain politicians who do stuff while in office afterwards get given these amazing board positions and speaking fees and speaking to us and very.

Senior positions in Facebook.

Yeah. Oh, and all of that sort of stuff. And it's like, oh, isn't it interesting that you do the thing and then you. And then it just happens to be, coincidentally, that you end up with a really great result after you're out of office. Yeah, it might work the same way all the restaurants work.

So this show is called Disruptors.

We might need to edit that.

No, we don't. No, we don't. Harry's already clipped that. Right now this show is called Disruptors. What does the word disruptive mean to you, Daniel?

The world is constantly being disrupted. We have to get used to that. We're living through a time of disruption. We had 200 years of early stage industrial revolution, mid stage industrial revolution, where we had a period of middle class end stage industrial revolution. And now the digital revolution is putting us into this other world. We're living through a time where AI is going to interrupt everyone's industries, everyone's jobs, everyone's businesses. Robots are coming. We're going to have an iPhone moment with robots where suddenly a company says, hey, you can have These robots and they'll do all these things and, you know, suddenly, you know, we'll have an iPhone moment where it goes from a weird thing to a very mainstream thing to have robots.

Wow.

So, you know, in essence, what you're describing is what we're all experiencing. Our lives have gone from quite stable in the 90s and 80s and 70s to, you know, everything feels like every five years it feels like we have to reinvent ourselves. It. It's funny because I've had a business career that kind of started in 2002. We came off the dot com disruption. No. Then we had the 911 disruption. And then we had the 2007, 2008 disruption. And then, you know, we went through and 2020 disruption and there was the Brexit disruption. Right. And then there was the 2020 pandemic disruption and now there's AI 2022, which is going to disrupt everything. So we have a. We've got a period now where you can't go five years without having a massive global major event that disrupts everything. I didn't even mention social media disruption and, you know, all of these kind of things. So we have.

The only constant is change.

The only con you have to learn to surf these trends. You know, you've got to become a surfer of opportunities, not someone who's expecting things to go back the way they were. We are living. We are living through big disruption. Wow.

So probably one of my top five business books I've ever read, and you know, I've read a lot of books, is oversubscribed. So if you had to pick one of your books for someone to start, which one would it be?

Oversubscribed is good fun if you're already an entrepreneur. If you're not an entrepreneur, entrepreneur revolution is good fun.

That's a clever way of getting both your books.

Yeah.

If you need a score at.

With this book, Person of influence.

Yeah.

24 assets, if you want to scale. Yeah. Like oversubscribe just keeps selling and selling and selling and selling. People, people recommend it and refer it and they love it. And yeah, you know, it's just a different way of thinking about your marketing. Yeah.

And then following you on social media, where are you most active?

If you want to see the polite version, it's LinkedIn. If you want to see the gloves off, it's X.

Right. So you do change it accordingly.

Yeah, definitely. LinkedIn is very. A bit more sterilized, so.

So you're a bit more of a lefty on LinkedIn then?

No, I'd say I've got my professional, I've got my suit, got my suit on.

I bet I probably need to learn from you there, because I haven't on.

On X. It's a bit more down the language of the pub, isn't it? It's a bit. It's a bit more hanging out, talking trash. Yeah, a little bit of that. Yeah.

And just, just your name. Daniel Priestley on both of those. What's your user?

Also an Instagram, Daniel Priestley. Yeah, yeah. So. Oh, and also, be careful, there are fake accounts out there as there are with you as well. So. I never message people unsolicited. I never share opportunities with people unsolicited. If I'm messaging, it's all. It's all public and it's. There's no underscores or any weird things, hyphens or any of that sort of stuff. It's just at Daniel Priestley. Yeah.

Boom. Well, we had three hours.

Wow.

Yeah. Thank you very much.

Finally made it onto the Disruptors podcast. This episode was brought to you by Disruptive Media, helping bold entrepreneurs stand out through podcasting, video and social content. Visit disruptivemedia.co.uk to learn more. SA.