Podcast

It must be exciting though. Like I miss. Because we've been. We're in our 20th year of business and I miss that lean, dynamic, fast, agile, chaotic, scary startup phase. You might.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, to some degree, maybe that's why I'm here. Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I get to do all of that. Again, politics is different though obviously there are some similarities, partly because again, when Nigel came back after having been leader, that was like nothing. I mean people really underestimate people. You became chairman. What was your desk like? Desk didn't even have an office. Nothing. It was literally nothing. And so. Which just shines a really bright light on what an achievement that was.

Yeah.

To win 4 million votes, no infrastructure at all, up against these behemoth old parties.

Yeah. Literally 200 years. Yeah.

It's not no joke.

No.

So to now I've gone from whatever that was. 14% vote charter, where we are today, which is the average of the polls are 26, 27. We've done that in eight months. And it's such a testament to the team, to our supporters, to our members and. And I think you probably get a sense of this too because obviously you've been a very kind and you know, sort of been advocating for us in the context of business owners, entrepreneurs basically. People just want to improve their lot in life, you know, for them or for their families or for their kids. You know, some of my parents. Yeah, my parents gave me love and they gave me a great education. I made huge sacrifices for me and I think that that's what's really sad right now, that that mentality is under assault.

Yeah.

In this country.

Yeah. I was, I was with. I had dinner with Nigel last week and he just thinks the biggest problem in the UK is the culture of anti success and how we pull everyone down. Yeah.

And he's one of the only people who can even talk about that. Because most politicians have no chance of moving the cultural needle.

No.

Literally none. Right. What they do is the opposite.

Right.

They'll do an opinion poll out or focus group and go, okay, well that's what they want. Let's. Okay, yeah, let's just go and do that. And if you view all of the Tories policies, Sunaks mad, three different policies a week, national service and this, all of that. That's what that was. Right. It was a focus group or a poll. And some spads, they call them sort of people in their 20s on 30s who frankly have never really done proper jobs in their lives without being rude.

Yeah, yeah.

And no real life Experience. And so they go, you should announce national service because this group. And it doesn't work because partly because I think of the Tories, the brand was so torched, no one was listening. What is it anyway? Yeah, but also because that's not how, that's not how human beings work. People can see through that. If you just go around and trying to bribe everybody and go, I will give you this and this. That's never been a successful political strategy.

No.

Human beings, like, at the end of the day, people are actually quite smart and they can sense it and they much. You know, the reality is people would be happy to pay more tax. I'm sure you'd be happy to pay more. I'd be happy to pay more. If you could tell me we were going to reduce NHS waiting list by 90% and you could go into a hospital, your parents would be able to go into a hospital having paid tax their whole lives in this country and be seen by world class doctors and nurses at once. I'd gladly pay more tax. And so most people, the problem is we get the opposite of that. Mean, probably cover this, but it's a total opposite. And I think that's what Nigel. That's why I'm back, Nigel, and why I'm here. Because Nigel's just not someone who complains about the weather. He can change it.

Yeah. Well, if anyone has the brand to change, surely it's called reform. It is, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because just in the name Conservatives and Labor, they, they're not going to be able to sell hard change, are they? You know, you are the disruptive party.

Yep. So beyond branding and marketing, the reality, there's a fundamental reality here, which is that an assessment I made as someone who isn't a politician came that they had a business career, had no real intention to go into politics, frankly, I'm here because I could see a, albeit narrow opportunity, this was last summer, where there was a shot that this country could be turned around and not just sort of saved, but turned into awesome country. A country that we would be so excited to live in. You know, there's still a real shot of that and I don't think anyone of the system, with all due respect to the Tories and anyone who's been brought up in that system has some entrenched loyalty. They owe a great deal of patronage to that system, therefore they will never disrupt it, they will never change it. It just is what it is. And therefore the change by definition had to come from the outside, without.

Yeah, yeah.

Disrupted Google to Use an example. Ironically, Google had that tech before OpenAI did. And a lot of you viewers will know this, right? They have that, you know, attention is all you need. They had this for years, but they didn't want, you know, it's called the innovators dilemma. Right. They didn't want to disrupt their amazing monopoly.

Why would you? Yeah.

And so that change, what Open ChatGPT did, was deliver this. Basically the only thing that could actually threaten Google, which was a sort of 10 times better experience for the customer. And what we think about a lot at reform, we're a very practical party, Rob. If you talk about left and right wings, we got a lot of formatory voters coming to vote for us. We got a lot of former Labour voters coming to vote for us, particularly in the Red Wall, but all over the country. And we've got a lot of people who. Particularly young people who have never been engaged with politics.

Yeah.

Where frankly, they're not even registered to vote yet. And that's a big piece of work we've got to do to get them registered to vote. And so it's not about cobbling together some coalition. You know, you hear a lot of this stuff. It's not what this is about. It's about saying, you saw the values that are up on our wall. As soon as you walk in, family, community and country, if you believe in those values, then regardless of your background, this is a place that you can come. And while we're a very small team, you know, we've raised a tiny. The Tories raised 11 times more than we did last year. A general election year. Labor raised 14. Sorry, labor raised 11 times. Tories raised 14 times more than us, who's leading in the polls right now. And so that's because of the enthusiasm and almost of this zeal that we have across the country, from our sports, I'm sure you know, from who you interact with when you meet a reformed person. They're simultaneously extremely concerned about the trajectory the country's on, just like we are, but they're also unbelievably optimistic about how incredible the country can be. And I feel like that's when I meet former Tory ministers. And some of them are really good people, to be fair, But a lot of the narrative. And I asked, well, why couldn't you stop the boats? Why did. Why did all of these things happen? That as someone who's outside of politics at the time and had voted, Tories, trusting them so much of it just comes down. Well, the civil service didn't do this or that. There's always this sort of very low agency to use a business response.

Yeah.

You know what I mean by. As an entrepreneur, you understand that, right. A low agency person is someone who you give a task to and they, three days later you go back to them. How did that get on? Well, I call them and they didn't return my call or I emailed them, they didn't respond. Okay. And then your high agency person you give that same task to, not only have they made contact, they've negotiated a new contract, created a new P L and they're building some empire over there. We know how important these people are to any organization's success, particularly a growth organization. And so frankly. So even the. The Tory ministers whose hearts were in the right place. Some of them were, some of them weren't. But there are, there are people in that category. The agency wasn't there someone in the civil service, some bureaucratic, pushed back. And you understand this. If you try and run a business like that, going from zero to one. Yeah. You fail at the first hurdle.

Yeah.

And so, look, obviously running a country is not the same as running a business, but we need that level of agency again. We need to be able to think about the most heroic Brits of all time. Is there a higher agency human that has lived than Winston Churchill?

Yeah.

Or Margaret Thatcher or any of these people. You know, you could talk about Disraeli and Gladstone. People have gone down in history is embarrassed Kingdom Brunel, someone I'm a huge fan of. So we've really lost the thread to what it means to be a really formidable British leader. We really haven't had those. And I will say I do think Nigel is in that category.

Yeah.

I think it's formative in that category. I think it's why it's so important. It's why we have a shot. And I remember before the general election when I sat down with Nigel and I said, look, I want to help you win your seat in Clacton. That was the goal at the time. I looked at the betting odds and it's always interesting. I mean, I don't place bets, but it's always interesting looking at betting markets because there's real money there. And so Nigel had a 32% probability to win his seat in Clacton today. Eight and a half months on, he's almost 40% odds on to be the next prime minister. That's happened in eight months.

Wow.

Unbelievable. And I think partly that's because Nigel's built a brand, obviously over decades, people increasingly know what Nigel stands for. And if you look at Nigel's favorability ratings, they keep ticking up.

Yeah.

Starting from when he went into the jungle, you know, Good move. It's a good move because here's the point with Nigel as someone who works with him. I speak to Nigel like 7am in the morning, 9pm at night. It's very much like a startup founder sort of relationship because Nigel's working so hard on building, you know, know the branches and building our ecosystem with the team. But fundamentally he is somebody who he, I've never heard him say something to the press or in public that he won't say in private and vice versa. And that's what's so interesting because when I talk to people in other parties about how decisions are made, almost these executive decisions made about policy, it's total opposite.

Right.

You know, there's this private position, there's a public position. There's a constant obsession with looking at polling and looking at focus groups and not that we should listen, of course we need to listen. But leadership means something. And leadership, as we just talked about moments ago, is Nigel saying there's nothing wrong with being, being successful is a good thing. Attacking Nigel for having earnings outside of being an MP is insane. Nigel is one of the most highly productive individuals in, in this country.

Right.

He is working really hard. He adds value to his viewers on GP news and the other business relationships he has. I will tell you how hard he works in Clacton and how hard he works for his constituents. And obviously as leader of party you have obligations there and the results are there to see. If you look at when he became leader, we had about 25, 30,000 members. Today we have 220,000 members. That's happened in about nine or 10 months. The blink of an eye.

Well, it helped with Kemi sharing it all around the Internet for you, didn't it?

Well, I mean that was extraordinary. Extraordinary, wasn't it? I mean it was, it was just without relitigating the whole thing, it was just totally incorrect. Yeah.

And, but surely a good thing for your.

So we signed up in the 24 hours after she did her tweet over the festive period. We signed up more members in that 24 hour period than we had ever done. Even more than when Nigel announced he was coming back as leader. So yes, it was a very positive.

Who are their media team? I, I, I obviously follow conservatives, labor and the main leaders. Their, their media and social media is terrible. Yeah, it is terrible.

But Rob, that's because I think.

Do you agree, by the way, I.

Will say this without I. I actually have a view that no matter how good your social media team is or your advertising team is, or even how big your marketing budget is, if you're amplifying a symphony, that isn't a symphony. It's a cacophony of noise that doesn't make any sense and doesn't resonate with any people. Yeah. It doesn't matter. And you know, do you remember when Mayor Bloomberg ran for president and he spent hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money and he went down in the polls. He went down in the polls.

Wow.

Because the product. Not to disparage him, you know.

Yeah.

But you know, so I think where we are now is. And similarly, think of you, the biggest social media accounts you find follow. Or we just talk, you know, we talk about Joe Rogan or someone like yourself. You know, you didn't build your enormous following through pummeling marketing dollars. Right. You did it through actually creating value for people and organic. And people tune in and they want to listen. Likewise with Joe Rogan or any of these other hugely influential podcasters they have. The reason why podcasts are so interesting is because they're long form. They allow the listener or the viewer to really get a sense of building a relationship. It's quite an intimate thing, isn't it? When you're listening with your AirPods.

Yeah. And your ears. Yeah.

And you're walking your dog or something, you really feel like you're part of the conversation. And you know, podcasts were very influential on me. You know, we just talked about the stuff that you've done as someone who's built a business and is very passionate about private enterprise and helping small and medium sized business owners grow. But the reality is, regardless of how good Chemie or Starmer's comms teams are, I put it to you that the product, the underlying message.

Yeah.

It says it just isn't there. Nobody knows what the Tories stand for anymore. I call them socialist double agents because I, I seriously, when you talk to our members or supports our voters, the word that comes up a lot. And this is someone who, you know, I never really had any involvement in politics before I got involved with reform other than being a member of the Conservative Party. I just joined right. And it's a direct debit. But as somebody voted, Tori voted to leave, I felt hugely betrayed. I was so excited when Boris had this big majority. I thought this is brilliant. I was building my business. I thought I really feel like there's a bit of our moment, of. There was a moment, a window here, where we could use that to make the most of this opportunity of Brexit, because that's what Brexit is. Brexit was an opportunity. There's nothing guaranteed with it. And what it did was take, say, look, we don't want unelected bureaucrats in Brussels making our decisions. We want elected officials in Britain making decisions. Unfortunately, the elected officials in Britain making those decisions made catastrophic decisions. And I use that word advisedly. So the word betrayal comes up a lot, Rob, when you talk to our voters. And betrayal's a very powerful emotion. A very powerful emotion. And that's why I think the Tory brand is toast. Nobody knows what they stand for anymore. The more they talk now about. I mean, how many times do they talk about some problem in the country? And you look at it and go, you do know that you are responsible for that disaster? And I call it, you know, it's like an arsonist turning up. You know, arsonists don't get to be fired. Firefighters. No, you literally cause the problem, whether it's our borders. I mean, you look at immigration, right, something. And I'm obviously second generation immigrant. My parents came in the early 1980s. They didn't really have anything to name other than my father had a medical degree and had come in. They go wherever the work was. A real kind of classic immigrant story. So my elder brother went to umpteen primary schools. I was born in Bells Hill in Scotland. My little sister was born in Truro. We'd go all over. And thankfully, by the time I started going to school, we'd sort of settled in Hampton in southwest London. But they worked unbelievably hard. My mom then qualified as a nurse. So between them, they've done 50 years plus more than 50 years of service for the NHS.

Yeah.

And. But they worked so hard for me. They took out a second mortgage. They both worked two jobs to be able to send me to an independent school where I got a scholarship to be able to go.

Yeah.

And so there was that real sort of classic, you know, we want to provide a better life for our children mentality that I'm very grateful my parents gave me.

And UK used to be great for that, didn't it? Used to be great for that.

It was. It had one of the most successful immigration. But again, you look at the numbers, Rob, right? So when my parents came in the early 1980s, net migration was sub 100,000, 50, 70,000, and assimilation is Important. Integration is important.

But the point is there would be an environment, an opportunity for people to come and be successful who were an immigrant.

You're so right. And this is one of the things I said when I first came into politics, I wrote something in the Telegraph and I said, this is still a country where people literally risk their lives to come to. Even from France, they're risking their lives to come here. Right. It's actually quite mind blowing. People risk their lives. Hundreds of people have died crossing the Channel, making that journey with human traffickers. If we're not careful, that will change. If we're not careful, we will no longer have a country that people fall over themselves wanting to come to. And we are hurtling there very, very quickly. It's deeply unfair on the people who are already here. People are not in the sheer numbers. I mean, a, the numbers are insane. And then you actually look at the arguments that are made. So, you know, we talk about the Tories, Boris Johnson, the last 3.1 million people who came into this country from non EU countries, less than 20% of them are working.

Wow.

Right. And so this argument that we need these people to fill jobs, it completely bogus. Totally the opposite. And so not only are they not filling jobs, they're actually stressing. Yeah, they're stressing our health service. I mean, try getting an NHS GP appointment or a dental appointment. Try. Almost a third of our young adults, 18 to 30 still live at home with their parents. They can't even rent a home, Rob, let alone. I'm sure you talk to these people, let alone a lot of your audience. I'm sure that's partly why they want to go out and start businesses, because that's their only path to even be able to move out of their parents home and rent a home, let alone buy a home. So the whole social contract in this country now is hanging by a thread. It really is, at every level. You know, if you are somebody who has lived in this country for decades, paid taxes your whole life, and I hear these harrowing stories of pensioners who go into accident and emergency. 19,000 British people last year had to wait more than three days for a E, Think about that. Heaven for it. I don't when the last time you or loved one had to go any.

It's not right now. My dad's 81 and he. He was in A E with chronic chest pains at age 81 for 11 hours before they saw him. Then they sent him home.

Yeah.

Then an ambulance was called a few days later. It took Six hours for the ambulance to turn up.

Where is he? Posed.

And Peterborough. And the paramedic in the ambulance pulled my mum to the side and said, look, I'm sending a harsh email here to your GP to get this moving, but all these new systems and this automation NHS is not working. The NHS has broken. And that was a paramedic in the ambulance that was six hours delayed to see my dad. He needed a blood transfusion. They worked that out weeks ago. He's only just got a bed on the renal ward yesterday. And it is. If you were a private enterprise running like that, you'd be immediately bust, of course. Yeah.

I'm so sorry to hear that. And it's. But what's tragic about that story, Rob, I'm hearing these stories all the time. All the time. That, that is not an exception. That is now, unfortunately, par for the course in the NHS parts of Wales where the advice is basically, if you call an ambulance, don't expect one to come at all. Because there's. So the stories I hear about people don't have, you know, the staffing shortages because people don't have rotors. There's a cap on the number of British graduated medical students we can graduate each year. I mean, insanity, absolute insanity.

And so what's unemployment now?

How many people are unemployed, unemployment at the moment? Well, here's the problem with the unemployment number, Rob. It's a fugazi. What they do is because a lot of these people say it depends on people who are economically enacted. That number is very significant, double digit percentage. But the unemployment number, the employment number is a single digit, a low single digit percentage. Yes. But what they do is they move people over into economically inactive. So if you're, if you're not seeking work, because we can get onto the whole benefits thing and all of the ballooning bills that are happening there. The problem is that the statistics that are coming out on what. So if you define unemployment as people who, if they were your sibling or some of your friend, you would say you need to go and find work.

Yeah.

You know, just. Yeah, you might feel a bit depressed or whatever it is. And don't be wrong, there are people who need benefits and that's fine and it's important those people are taken care of. But there are some people, Rob, and we all go through ups and downs in life, but where we are today is you can just go on an app, book an appointment with a gp and the barrier, you know, the, the actual process by which somebody makes a call that you are signed off work and gives you a fit note is largely non existent. It doesn't exist. There is no thoroughness to that whatsoever and it doesn't help the individual. I say this from experience of having friends who have been in this situation.

Yeah.

If you truly care about somebody, if they are capable of working, work gives you dignity, it gives you meaning. And you know this because if you, if you talk to people who do, you know, my mother's been a nurse for decades, you know, she doesn't earn very much money at all. People will be shocked at how little money nurses earn. And sometimes I say to my mother, go and ask for, I find out how little she earned. And I said, you should go and ask for a pay rise because she works hours beyond the end of her shift. These are caregivers, Rob. You know, they, yeah, I get it. They just want the patients to get the best possible outcomes. And she says, yeah, I wouldn't dream of that. I'd rather they spent the money on medicines. I said, mom, that's not where that money is going. Do you know? It's going well, it's going to NHS administrators on huge six figure salaries.

DEI, DEI senior. 90 grand salaries for people just managing DEI I saw recently.

So if you look at the, I mean the DEI thing, I did a tweet a few weeks ago where I pointed out that the head of cyber, the job of being head of cyber security for the treasury was being advertised at £60,000. Head of Social Security. Think of who you're up against. Think of your foes are right, North Korea, China. Think of these sort of people that are up to no good and our adversaries who are going to be trying to get into our systems and the data the treasury has on British citizens. And then think about that salary, okay. And then think about the fact that in an NHS trust in London, I forget which one, but it was a London NHS Trust north of £90,000 pounds for a diversity, equity and inclusion officer. There's also something you can say somewhat facetiously, but not entirely, which is that in London, 50% of the NHS are ethnic minorities. The stuff. So I don't know, maybe that DEI officer is actively pursuing, maybe white people. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know what they're doing. But you know, the fundamental point, the DEI thing is one thing, but if you are a really well paid, very well compensated executive in the nhs, fundamentally, you know, reform, we don't have any issue with that in the sense that when we, you know, we're Going to work really hard to win the next election and to get Nigel to be the Prime Minister. You will find there were members of the Civil Service who are very well paid. But, Rob, they will be people who have targets who have KPIs, and they have to hit those targets. Listen, if you can cut the weighting lists by 50% within a couple of years and you are instrumental in doing that and delivering great outcomes for patients.

You should have a big salary. Yes, yeah. Or big commission.

Yes. Yes. You should be compensated according to. And here's the problem in the nhs. As someone who has family, who worked there and worked there for decades, I hear these stories and so many people reach out independently as well.

Yeah.

This is the opposite. It's not just. Not that. It's totally the opposite. They get promoted and then you hear about people involved in our, you know, our energy planning process or HS2, or you hear about stories about defense procurement. It's exactly the same. Not only are they not. Not only do they do, frankly, an awful job, not all of them, but the vast majority, actually, if you just look at the results, they are rewarded for that and they are promoted and they go into the House of Lords. And so the whole incentive structure, you know, Charlie Munger, who's. You obviously will know, an amazing man who sadly passed away not too long ago, obviously Warren, Buck Buffett's business partner. And so much wisdom, obviously, because they just spent so much time thinking. Right. And brilliant people, you know, he said, show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcomes. It's a brilliant. I love. I love insights and wisdom that are that simple and cover so many different spheres of life. But if you think about that and then you look at government generally, Rob, if we just sorted out procurement and this country did procurement on behalf of the taxpayer in a way that was competent and not corrupt, you would transform government that is 80, 90% of the country's problems. Not all of them, but a huge number of them. And this is someone. We're doing a huge amount of work behind the scenes already on policy. But before we can really come up with what the prescription is for the country, we need to truly understand what the challenges are. And frankly, unfortunately, what I love doing is finding out about a story like that awful story that you've just recounted with regards to your father's experience trying to get an ambulance and being in A and E. And then you look at that and then you try to peel back the onion as to how does that happen, how as a British citizen who has given so much. This country paid their taxes for 65 years.

My dad paid taxes. Yeah.

How are they being treated in that way? And by the way, we can get onto this. But that sense of unfairness where somebody can come here illegally, their first act is to break our laws and gets to go into a hotel and get priority on many, not all, but many of these public services, they get priorities is actually pretty disgusting. And that sense of unfairness is something that I think is a real. I think that's a real force right now because British people have, I would actually say have the most acute sense of fairness of any country in the world. So look, we need a total reset of how the government runs in this country. And we're very clear eyed, Rob, about the task at hand. You know, some people go, what are all your policies? Listen, number one, whether we like it or not, I would love for there to be a general election next year because the country's headed in a very dark direction. It's basically what the Tories did on, you know, on steroids. It's basically what it is. But we still think it can be turned around. It's difficult to know exactly what the prescription for the patient, to take the health analogy a bit further, is going to need to be in a few years time because Mad Ed Miller Band and who knows what disasters are going to befall us. We could even have a fiscal event given that there's no growth in the economy. And now we're talking about spending enormous amounts of on defense, which by the way, we were the party that were talking about this before. You know, basically labor have just taken our policies. But here's the problem, Rob. You need the money to fund it. It's all very well, you know, we somewhat jokingly say Starmer wants to increase the percentage of GDP spent on defense. But it looks like because of Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband, they're going to hit that target by reducing gdp, not by increasing spending. That's what we need. We should know our economy if we. So we're 27th in the world in terms of GDP per capita. 27th.

How quickly we have fallen.

A couple hundred years ago we, we were number one. And we still have enormous assets. So many advantages. Right, which is why so many people want to come here. We have. Not that we don't obviously many people are leaving too, sadly, but they would come back, I'm sure. You know, a lot of these people, people like me and you and probably a lot of people listening to this are people who are like, no, you know, my view on this is that I love this country. It's given me so much, so much opportunity. I'm going to stay and fight. And I still think we can turn this around. And I know that's your view too.

It is.

But the reality is that the. If we just had a government that wasn't actively, actively legislating against the interests of the British people. We had a civil service that wasn't actively hostile to the interests of the British people. We'd been the top 10 just from not doing insane stuff like not drilling in the North Sea, not building nuclear, having the most expensive electricity, industrial electricity in the world, which already, as soon as you have the most. There's no example of a high growth industrial economy in the world. Developed economy that has high energy costs. There's not one example.

Many industrials. That's one of their biggest expenses, isn't it?

Correct.

Yeah.

What is gdp? It's output.

Yeah.

What is energy? It's output. Right. So. So it's insane. And China is going to produce 4.8 billion tons of coal this year. China cannot produce enough coal, can barely produce enough coal to power the plants in which all the solar panels and wind turbines that Mad Ed Miliband is buying from. That's what's really tragic about this. It's not helping us. It's not actually making the world any great, greener or cleaner anyway. Look, we all want to breathe clean air, you know. My view on energy and industrial policy is it should be driven by three goals. Number one, it should be. It should promote the flourishing of British people. That's critically important. Number two, emphasis, by the way, on citizens of the United Kingdom. Number two, it should create great jobs for British people. And thirdly, yeah, it should provide clean air for us to breathe and a beautiful country in which we all get to live. That's super important for our kids and our grandkids and so on and on. Every single one of those goals, if you agree with those goals, Miliband's energy policy fails catastrophically. So did Theresa May. So did Boris Johnson's. I could go on. It was the Tories who created a net zero minister. Remember, they were the ones who infined all of this into law. We shouldn't forget that, you know, and so now when they talk about how anti British it is, how counterproductive it is, everybody listening to this needs to not forget. I call them socialist double agents. Because if they get back in again. Rob, I'm just telling you that we will be Unable to turn this country on. It's why when we talk about pacts, it's like. Well, it's nothing with being tribal or anything. I mean, listen, what we could fundamentally, what reform is, is a group of people across the country now, millions of people who are patriotic, who want to see this country fulfill its potential, who want better lives for their children and their grandchildren, who are fundamentally extremely optimistic about what this country can be. But we also know all of the forces. We're fully aware of the forces that stand in the way of us achieving that as a country. And if it were easy, it would have already been done. I mean, again, I have met former Tory ministers, including very senior people who I think are fundamentally good people. Not all of them, but a decent number of them. But they didn't take on the task at hand with an understanding. So, no, no, of course the Civil Service are going to come after. Of course, the bank of England are going to the left. The far left have marched through our institutions, whether it's the national. All the things we hold dear. The National Trust, the. Yeah, you know, the bank of England, the obr, you know, we talk about the OBR or the ons, the Office of National Statistics, we talk about forecasts. They got last year's immigration number wrong, backward looking to the tune of 20%. They upgraded from 800,000 to a million. And this is legal. These are people literally scanning their passports, walking through the turnstiles. If you were to go to any corporate in London, you enter GlaxoSmithKline or the BBC, they would be able to tell you in real time how many people in their office, if a fire alarm goes off, they would know exactly who was in and who was out. Even this office can do that for you because you've got your scanner parts and you've got signing guests. How on earth do we as a country have no idea about 200,000 people, again, who came here legally and literally scanned their parts? And here's the. Here's what I've realized. They don't want to know.

Right, the system.

Yeah, they don't want to know for all of the reasons that we have talked about. So the good news is. So that's. There's a lot of bad news. But the good news is, Rob, that a lot of the hardest. That a lot of the biggest challenges the country has are actually relatively easy to solve if you have the political will and you're backed. And that's why I say not only must Nigel be the Prime Minister, he needs to be flanked by 350 to 400, you know, turquoise blooded Reform MPs who are in no uncertainty about why they've been elected. Where when some Humphrey character from the civil service rocks up and try to. Well, that's a very brave, courageous decision. They will tell them where to go. And look, we're going to have to come into. Not only must we win, we need to come in with a plan ready to execute on day one immediately. Because the countervailing forces. When you talk to people in our military, when you talk to people in our civil service. And again, there are some really good people. There are, yeah, there are some really good people there who are truly patriotic in our home office, who look at the asylum backlog and all of these things where, you know, the asylum backlog only ever goes up, it never goes down, and then that is then used as an excuse to just grant an amnesty to everybody. That's what happens. It happens consistently. And so.

Okay, so on this note, should we start the podcast?

Oh, have we not even started?

I'm semi bantering with you.

Okay, all right, fine. There you go.

You've covered a few things on the. On.

Okay.

On my list. But I want to go straight.

I thought we were already in it.

No.

Okay, fine. Or whatever.

You're very comfortable and relaxed. Yeah, we are. We are all in it. How are you going to fix broken Britain?

I think, as we were just saying, I think some of these problems, like the boats, like legal migration, these are actually relatively straightforward to solve. If you define straightforward as not needing rocket science and Nobel laureates to give you the answer. What you need is the political courage. You need real leadership. But then you also need the mandate. So as I said, not only must we win the next general election, we can't do it in some ragtag coalition with a bunch of Tories who also kind of Lib Dems, really, and don't want to leave. The ECHR are unwilling to do what it's going to take to deliver the results that we need. So there are some things that are relatively strong, straightforward to solve. Now there's. What do you think? Much more complicated.

What do you think of the straightforward things to solve?

Like if you could list them to the boats. So when I speak to senior people in His Majesty's Royal Navy, they say, listen, we could stop those votes within 48 hours.

Oh, wow.

If. If there was the political clarity and the political will. Now, stopping the boat is a mult. There are multiple things that are necessary, multiple steps that are necessary, albeit insufficient, so we need to leave the European Convention of Human Rights. You know, there's this cottage industry of lawyers out there who spend all of their time basically working against the interests of citizens of the United Kingdom in the interests of.

That feels like everyone in the civil service is working against us.

Not everyone. Not everyone. There are some good people. Yes, agreed. But that's again, because of Rob. In any large organization, just like in a large business, inertia is a very powerful thing. And a lot of these people, their bills to pay. You know, I speak similarly in the military. They said, listen, as much as the navy could. By the way, when I say the navy could stop the boats at 40 hours, this is a humanitarian mission.

Yeah.

In which nobody would be harmed. Not that you can have zero risk of anything, but relatively straightforward. It's not hard to surveil. It's a relatively small passage of water. They could surveil it using drones and use relatively small agile vessels, board them in and take them. And by the way, the laws of the sea. And we need to get into this, but this argument that the laws of the sea, forbidden the opposite. Hundreds of people are dying making that journey. The laws of the sea actually dictate that. No, if people are making those journeys, you have an obligation to go and help them. Now, the problem is that we need to have a very difficult conversation with France. Yes, we do. You know, you'll go, wow, the French going to react. Well, if we're not willing to have a. If the Prime Minister of this country is not willing to have a difficult conversation with France about the sovereignty of our territory and the security of our borders, on what topic would we be willing to have a difficult conversation? And by the way, we're paying them hundreds of millions of pounds a year to stop these boats, and there's no sign that the boats are going to stop. So, look, these are people whom we know virtually nothing about. We need to be very clear that if you come here illegally, you will never get the right to remain under any circumstances and you will be deported to the country from which you came. Once you. Again, we talk about Charlie Munger's axiom. Show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. Let's look at the incentives. Now, if you make that journey across the Channel from France, not Syria, not Gaza, not places that are torn apart by war. I mean, if they were, somebody should tell the millions of British people who go to France every year on holiday, France is a safe country. So they're crossing the Channel, they're coming Here, they get free hotel accommodation, they get priority in terms of getting health checkups and things like that. Many of them get phones, all sorts of PlayStations.

Egregious.

Totally egregious things. Right. When you look at. There are so many people in this country who do need help and can't get GP appointments, can't get dental appointments awaiting for a council house, you know, whatever metric you want to look at, it's totally egregious.

No winter fuel payments.

I mean, yeah, to save a supposed £1.5 billion, which sounds like, obviously it's a large amount, but in the grand scheme of the amounts of money that are being willing to spend on climate capture. 10 billion on net zero, at a minimum of taxpayer money. That's before the subsidies. North of 5 billion on asylum hotels, at least. That's just the Home Office's budget. The reality is the real number's probably much bigger. 15 billion on foreign aid, and yet. And they didn't even do an impact assessment, Rob. They didn't even do an impact assessment. So they basically said, yeah, we're fine with British pensioners suffering from a cold winter, and there's no excuse for that whatsoever. And I think that that's a big reason why there is so much disillusionment with politicians in this country, because if you just judge any decision through the lens of, is this in the interest of British citizens? Pretty much every policy announcement we have had from the Tories over 14 years and now Labour in the eight months they've been in power fails at that first hurdle.

How can we have a party in Britain that is so anti Britain or two parties in Britain that are so anti Britain? How can we.

Yeah, that's. That's a really good existential question. And I think part of it comes down to there's a. There's a lot of politicians who, number one, are totally out of touch with what voters actually think, including their own constituents. And you saw that with Brexit and all of the efforts that were made to undermine the referendum result, which was actually the biggest mandate, in absolute terms, that had ever been delivered for any political action in this country. There is a sense that people want to be seen. You know, we talk about virtue signaling, and that's a phrase that may be often overused, but I really think it's accurate here. One of the problems is people in Westminster, these politicians, they live in a bubble. Having now been in politics quite intensely for, what, eight months now, there's a real bubble. They are very conscious of how they are perceived at these, you know, at the dinner parties and, you know, in high society. And there is this sense of, well, look how virtuous, look how pro the environment I am. I want to make Britain the Saudi Arabia wind or some other harebrained. I mean, that was Boris Johnson. Right. And the problem is that almost none of these people, Rob, have ever had serious jobs outside of politics. As Nigel says, this is the best paid job they're ever going to have, most of them. Right. Whereas at reform, for most of us.

Actually, you're real costing us people.

Yeah, it's costing us. Yeah, of course, in terms of opportunity. So not that I change it for the world, I consider a privilege, but that's the problem. And so if you are. If you are people like us and the people listening to this podcast and you believe that leaders should be judged on their outcomes, then all of these politicians fail at those hurdles. But I'd say a few other things. Obviously, there's still a lot of lobbyist money in politics, and there isn't really. And most of the people come into politics. Right, Rob, are career politicians. Right, they are. And once you're a career politician, you are at the mercy of the whip. You're reliant on the party for your. For your salary, because if the party disowns, it's going to be very difficult for you to win your seat again as an mp.

So defining this career politician thing, so I'm not sure people really understand it, do you mean they stay in politics to earn as much money being in politics as opposed to wanting to change the country and the world and do good for the society?

That's exactly me. That's exactly it. So what are you. What is your.

So that's a disincentive. That's where incentives are misaligned. Then using what Charlie Munger said, because if you believe in something strongly but you know it's going to upset the status quo of your political career, you speak out, you lose your job, Is that what you mean?

A thousand percent? That's exactly. Put it very succinctly and very well.

Wow.

Are you here. What, what is your goal function? What are you actually trying to do when you wake up in the morning? Are you trying to make the country better for British people, or are you trying to optimize for your career over actually a very short period of time, one thing about politics and then get.

A job in Facebook for many millions of pounds once you finish, or get a quarter of a million pounds, keynote speech fees at the end or get a book written for you and sell millions of books.

Nick Clegg would go around. I mean, I've never met Nick Clegg, but he's worth tens of millions of pounds as a result of his engagement with Facebook.

Yeah.

During a period, by the way. I mean, I know Zuck's gone through this, you know, this transformation. Yeah, he has. And fair play, it's better than he has done. But let's not forget they did deplatform President Trump. They did some pretty awful things by all accounts. They really censored the FBI and yeah, you know, the Hunter Biden, they censored and prevented the distribution of a true story that without a doubt had a meaningful impact on presidential election. And he made tens of millions of pounds. And then when you look at his rhetoric when he was a politician, totally misaligned with everything we just described. Now, look, I don't want to go into too many personal attacks on one individual. The problem is, again, we talked about why we're here, why it feels like a startup here, why my reform. Yeah, reform. Because any, anyone who has been brought up in the system, Tory, labor, that whole Westminster ecosystem, will be unable to fundamentally change how the system works. And that is what we have.

They're so in their indoctrinated, institutionalized.

That's exactly.

And your explanation element, you're an outside disruptor.

Yes, correct. And yeah, and you see it because sometimes you go to these establishment events occasionally, and I don't really enjoy this. And you sort of see Nigel, he is so obviously not part of that, you know, in the best possible way. You know, because Nigel is obviously formidable, formidable politician, incredibly well read, deeply patriotic, actually quite predictable in terms of, you know, one of the reasons why we've gone up so much in the polls is because people feel like they already know where we stand on a lot of issues. They have a high degree of confidence that we'll stop the votes. For example, this partly because Nigel has this brand built over decades where he hasn't flip flopped, you know, to take President Trump, you know, his friendship with President Trump goes back years, goes back to 2016. He's not somebody who looks at which way the weather is. You know, the weather vane is pointing and changes views. And where we are now, Rob, as we just talked about, is the. There is a whole class of politician where it's career politics. It didn't used to be like this, by the way. Decades ago, there were a lot of really senior politicians who had real experience in the real world, who were doing had gone into politics as a true form of service to the country. There were some big personalities and real intellectual heft. If you look at Westminster and I look at the Tories, look at all, I mean, they've had six leaders in eight years. Probably couldn't even remember what most of them, you know, who they were, what did they stand for? You know, we talked about this before we started Rishi Sunak, who fundamentally, I've never met him, but he actually seems like quite a decent man. He doesn't seem to me like a. A bad person. But, you know, he did a podcast recently with Nick Robinson for the BBC and you know, he basically said, look, I come, I become Prime Minister. I didn't win a leadership election. Even with the Tory membership. He didn't even win that. He hadn't won a general election. So he basically had no mandate. And basically the Tory party, as we know, so divided, Rob, that you can't really get anything meaningful done. So if you talk about wanting to lead the echr, if you really push the boat out and try and do that as a Tory, Tory leader, there's a reason why no Tory leader has done it. Because the number of letters that will go into the 1922 committee from disgruntled left wing people who call themselves Tory MPS will spike. And that's when you talk about incentives, Rob. Kemi Badenok. The reality is, whatever your views are on Kemi, she has an impossible job because half her party are small c Conservatives, where if they were in this room, they'd largely agree with most of what we're saying. The other half of the party would totally disagree. No, absolutely not. We shouldn't leave the echr. We should allow these lawyers to keep sticking up for rapists from foreign countries to be able to stay in this country and commit, continue to commit crimes, partly because we have no prison space and not act in the interests of the British people. So whoever is the Tory leader, Rob, fundamentally that is an insoluble physics problem. Whoever is the leader, you know, even if she goes and it's generic or cleverly, it doesn't matter, whoever that is will never be able to take the decisive actions that Nigel will be able to subject to him, and I keep saying this, not only must Nigel win and we must win the next general election, we need 350 to 400 Reform MPs who are going to back that legislation. We're going to have to undo the trampling of the constitution that has happened in this country over two decades because we have an unwritten Constitution, Right? So that has allowed our justice system to get captured. I mean, how many ridiculous judicial decisions do you see these days where you just look at it and you can't even believe it? You cannot even believe it. Somebody who was convicted of accessory to murder for supplying a machete was let out of prison early. And as a teenager who was murdered, tragically, that kid was let out of prison early to make room for people who made, albeit appalling, Facebook posts. And this is happening time and time and time again.

I can't even get my head around.

Why that would happen.

How. How can that happen?

So there are two reasons. One is that the Tories, in their 14 years, they grew the population by six and a half million people and they left the country with about 400 new net prison places. If you grow any population by six and a half million people, Rob, you're going to have any. You've had some very prominent social scientists on your podcast, right? So people know this, that if you have a large population, a tiny percentage will be antisocial and a small percentage of those will be violently criminal. And frankly, those people end up committing the vast disproportionate amount of the violent crime. And if they're not locked up, they terrorize people and it's very dangerous. And so while, of course, we should try to rehabilitate people who can be rehabilitated, a lot of these people, unfortunately, the data suggest that they can't. So they need to be locked up if they're committing crimes. If you explode the size of the population and fail to build enough infrastructure, they left the country with fewer hospital beds. Six and a half million people were added through migration as a result of 14 years of Tory rule in this country. And they left the country with fewer hospital beds and about 400 net new additional prison place. So that's one reason to be fair. But the other reason is, yes, we have a. A judicial system where not all of them, but there are a lot of judges who I would argue are pretty activist, pretty left wing, and are unwilling to face the reality that if somebody, you know, if somebody's an accessory to murder with a machete, they should not be being released from prison early. And you see this now. I mean, you walk around. We're in London at the moment. Most people now, they walk around if they've got their phones, they're holding onto their phones with two hands.

Yeah, don't usually wear a watch here.

Yeah, just phones, anything, a wallet. I mean, how many of these stories do you hear. Because you know, if you shoplift less than £200, that's not a crime. Do you know what percentage that is?

Ridiculous.

So again, you talk about incentives. So phone theft. Okay. Do you know what percentage of phone thefts? In what percentage of phone thefts is the suspect even identified, not arrested, not convicted, who just identified?

Well, I'm gonna say conviction rate is less than 3%, 1%.

They even identified.

Wow.

Even identified. And now that's just because the police, for whatever reason, and I have some sympathy for this, because when you look at. Yeah. They underfunded and underfunded the amount of DEI paperwork. Most of their time is spent asking you, you know, what gender you are, what gender you go to bed with. They're not actually going out. You know, how many stories do you hear where people have said, I've gone on find my iPhone or whatever. I've literally shown the police where this phone is, and they still won't do anything. And what that does is create an incentive structure. What does that do? It basically says theft. It's illegal in this country.

So from the ground up, we're not controlling the petty crime. And that's cascading up. Is that not. Is that the broken windows theory?

So the broken windows theory, as I said, something that came from America, which is really focused on. Yeah. Where there are a lot of broken windows that's going to be generally heavily correlated with other forms of crime.

So if you fix more windows and sort out bits of graffiti, you're starting in the details at the bottom.

Yeah.

And. And it stops the. The crime at the source.

But, Robert, you can even. You can even.

There's even models of that. That's what Giuliani did, didn't he?

This Giuliani did. Actually, Bloomberg did a very good job, actually.

Fair. When he was mayor.

This is the irony, you know. So one of the reasons I think Bloomberg was such a catastrophe as a presidential candidate, he spent hundreds of millions. I think it was like 700 million of his extraordinary amount of his own money on his presidential campaign and went down in the polls. He actually lost support is because nobody believed what he was saying. And, you know, in America, they call. So stop and search. They call it stop and frisk there. And he actually did implement stop and search in New York, and it worked.

Yeah.

And a lot of lives were saved. But instead of standing, obviously he was running to be a Democrat.

Right.

And on that debate stage, and people might remember this, you know, Elizabeth Warren, and they all there instead of standing up for that and saying, I'm actually really proud that we brought violent crime at the hand of deadly weapons down to such a great degree. I'm very proud of that. He did the opposite. He tried to disown it.

Oh, wow.

And so people looked at that. Well, look, the reality is that the accusation is often made with regards to things like stop and search and say it's racist because it. What you look at what you find in the data, and this is true, that the proportion of the people who are being stopped and searched by the police usually are disproportionately of one particular minority. Right. That is true. But what they don't tell you, Rob, what the people who make that claim never tell you, is the blood of almost invariably young men, often teenagers, that soaks the streets as a result of that crime is exactly that same ethnicity. And if you speak as I've done to. I spoke to a lady, a Somali lady whose son, thankfully, he survived, was attacked at the hands of a pretty large knife. If you ask her whether she would prefer that her son maybe had to deal with a polite, respectful police officer searching him not constantly, but, you know, maybe once or twice across a period of time to reduce the chances that she would receive a knock on the door from that same police officer to deliver the kind of news that no mother should ever have to hear. I can tell you what you'd say because you told me, Rob, and this is the problem. We're not having these honest conversations. And that's what reform will get. The knives off our streets. We'll get. Thankfully, we don't have as much, you know, a gun problem in the way that.

No, but we have a knife problem.

Serious knife problem. And what are labor doing? They're trying to make it harder to buy knives on Amazon. You can't find a knife in every kitchen in this country. This is the incentive.

Or they'll find a screwdriver.

They're trying to go after Jeff Diesel.

Yeah, that was outrageous. Yeah, because he's a billionaire.

But that's the government of this country. When I talk about easy solutions to some things, don't be wrong. There are some things that are much more complicated, much more endemic. Yeah, but that's a really relative. Every the number of studies, there have been longitudinal studies about the impact of stop and search, where violent crime is committed using deadly weapons. Without fail, it works. So the only reason it doesn't happen is because there is a lack of political leadership and will. And that won't be the case when Nigel's the Prime Minister.

Right, so this is great. Let's go back because at the start we're talking about you fixing broken Britain and you started with you thought some relatively easy fixes. One of them was the boats, it looks like. We've talked a bit about the police. I really personally, really, really like that. What else are easy fixes to save Britain?

So we have to freeze net migration, not forever in this country, but we have to allow our infrastructure to catch up. We have to allow enough homes to be built to give our young people a real opportunity. We have to allow for us to train enough doctors and nurses homegrown to be able to do these jobs, enough prisons. But, you know, all the things we've covered right now, that again will have some downsides and some things that we'll have to adjust to, but it has to be done. We have to allow. By the way, again, culture is important. I really believe this. And again, I say this to someone who's a second generation immigrant.

Yeah.

Politicians in this country for two decades now have basically said culture doesn't matter. You can just import enormous amounts of people and it doesn't have any impact. Now, again, a country is not the same as a business.

It's the problem when you talk about this though, you just get labeled a racist.

I think that is becoming far less effective than it was partly because reform is now polling and the average of the polls at 26, 27%. So if you're leveling that charge at people who support reform, you're now claiming that of four, one in four people in this country, anyone who's been in this country for 20 minutes will tell you that that's obviously absurd on its face. And so look, culture matters and we should be very proud. So you talk about lot of people listening to this, understand business and understand scaling a business. You've scaled a business, I've scaled a business. We've hired large numbers of people in a short period or doing it here right now, you still have to be conscious. What do you, do you think about cultural fit?

Right.

When you're interviewing candidates? And that's got nothing to do with people's skin color, their religion, not asking those questions. But you are the best person for the job. For the job. But also people are going to work well with your team. Yeah, of course, some people put it that, you know, would you want to have a drink, would you want to sit next to this person at a dinner? Right. All of those things.

And to know the culture of the person you're employing, you have to know the culture of the organization that you have, and that has to be very clear.

Exactly. So that's so important. And, you know, there are these discussions where people go, well, are some cultures are better than others? Yeah, they are. Like, our culture is better than many cultures, not all, but many cultures around the world. And you can see data on that, which is why still so many people don't wrong. A lot of talented people are leaving, but a lot of people are still trying to come here and falling over themselves to come here. We shouldn't take that for granted, Rob. So, yeah, look, we. So we have to freeze migration. It's relatively straightforward to do it again. It just requires political will and it requires planning. So, for example, if we say we're going to freeze net migration, okay, that's going to cause some shortfalls in terms of the supply of labor in certain industries. So you've got to think about that, right? So you've got to think, okay, to the degree that we are going to have people come here and it'll be a much. You know, it'll be a net zero number. So the number of people allowed to come here each year will not exceed the number of people leaving. So we've got to think about where are there genuine acute labor shortages that are critical to the economy? You've got to do that analysis properly. You've then got to implement that. So only the people you know, so people applying for those jobs are assessed properly, those visas are handed out in an inappropriate way. And yes, we will have to make some compromises, sacrifice in other places. Right, for sure, for a few years. No doubt about that. But again, I go back to this point, this argument that we have to have open borders, Rob, and infinite unlimited numbers of people coming here from all over the world, otherwise the NHS will collapse or whatever. You could restart every doctor and nurse in the entire NNHS, just with six months of net migration from last year alone.

Wow.

So over 80% of the non EU, 3.1 million people who came over the last six years are not even working. Wow. So this is all. They're basically falsehoods that have been propagated by what we call the Uni Party, you know, the Tories and now Labour. So that's another one that's relatively straightforward. And again, when I say straightforward, Rob, I mean, I. There's a reason why it hasn't been done. So I don't want people to misinterpret this as I want people to understand what I mean by this. It means that I have 100% confidence. If Nigel's the Prime Minister, we have a formidable cabinet around it, which we will. And we have three, you know, a significant majority of Reform MPs. These things will get done very quickly.

Great. And then on the other end of this net migration, all these tens of thousands of millionaires leaving.

Yeah.

And many of my friends are going. Every single conversation I have in business, it's, we're only staying because our roots are here or we're planning to leave. Two of my best friends have what, 270 beds in their care home. Business. Minimum wage has just gone through the roof. Obviously all the national insurance changes. And everyone who's making money that I'm talking to is thinking about or leaving. And you've got Dubai dangling the carrot and Portugal and everywhere else. What is it? The top 1% of earners, I think pay 29% of all the tax revenue. And I think It's. The top 10% is in the. I think 45 may have slight. But it's about those figures, I think. What is going on?

Well, there's a few things that have happened predominantly actually under the Tories, ironically.

Yeah.

Talk about betrayal. They started creating an environment in which if you are somebody who wants to go above and beyond. And a lot of people listening to this are those people. They're willing to work hard, they're willing to make sacrifices to make their lives better and better life for their children, that classic story. And an environment has been created in this country where those people are being made to feel unwelcome. Obstacles keep getting put up against them. And as you just said, there are countries out there who have very smart leadership, who are building extraordinary. I mean, look, let's take the uae, right? Dubai, anyone who goes out there, you look around and just look at what they built in the middle of the desert. It's unbelievable.

And they're not stopping.

They're not.

They are not stopping.

They're not stopping. And they're very smart. You look at their rules around how you can become a. You know, there are a lot of rules around. If you came here as a foreign person to the uae, what you can and can't do. But they, you know, it's not just tax, it's also about crime. You know, people leave their. You talk about watches or phones, they leave their keys in the ignition of the car, leave the keys in the ignition of their sports cars in, in Dubai. So there's a totally different. Now look, there's a lot of other things that we wouldn't want to emulate around Dubai, but the UAE has created an environment and now Saudi Arabia is doing similar things. And look at what they're doing in terms of investment in sport and all sorts of things, despite the, you know, the human rights record that, that we all know about. But here's the point, Rob. We have a country which those countries would give all their oil wealth to have so many of the, the advantages that this country has. Right. The history, the architecture, the beauty. I mean, you walk around in the U.K. no, I'm convinced as someone who's been fortunate enough to travel the world quite a lot, Nobody, no country does a summer stay like the United Kingdom, partly because we're so grateful, but there's so much going still for this country, and that's what makes us so optimistic. So, look, we need to make sure that those people understand. And if you're listening to this now, I totally understand why you, you either are leaving or wanting to leave. Keep an eye on what we're doing. Because we've gone from 14% of the support in the general election to 27% in the average of the polls. We only need to get to 31% to win.

Right.

Hopefully we'll be at 33, 35 plus in order to win a significant majority. We're a few years away, obviously, from the general. A huge amount of work to do. But I am so. I get so excited for all the problems that this country has. When I think about the country that this can be under Nigel's leadership, with an amazing cabinet around them, it's gonna, you know, look, we can you talk about taxes and look, taxes are important, but they're not everything. I mean, we shouldn't forget the richest people in the world. Rob, they're not in the uae. Right. They, they basically built their business in California. And that's not a low tax jurisdiction. Right. So taxes and everything, it's important, but it's not everything. Now, Silicon Valley has a unique culture that's impossible for anyone else to emulate. But look, we need to stop wasting taxpayer money. You know, we talked about procurement. If we just did procurement in this country in a way that was competent and not corrupt, I. E. How we.

Invest the tax money.

Exactly. How your taxpayer money is spent. If we treated that with the reverence that you would spend your own money or your own business's money, it would be the country's already infinitely better.

Yeah.

That will allow us to. Then, you know, we need to get a lot of people who are on benefits at the moment into work. And look, here's another. You know, it's got easy solutions to some things. Here's another one. So how this is still true to this day is beyond me. If you are. One of our flagship policies is that we want to eliminate income tax on earnings below 20,000 pounds a year. So if you earn 19,821 pounds per year, you pay zero income tax. Now, one of the reasons we need to do this is because there are a lot of people we speak to who are on benefits who say, look, we want to work, but if we come off, if we start working more than 16 hours a week, do you know what their marginal rate of tax is? If you take into account the loss of benefits over 100%. So they literally. It's not like, oh, the work's not really worth it because no, no, you literally have less money at the end of the month to spend on food and living and rent than you would have done had you not gone to work.

And you probably get a free house.

Insane. Absolutely insane. And so let's just start with that. You know when I talked about just taking the handbrake off, stop putting in place insane policies, like I said, capping the number of homegrown medical students that can graduate, having a marginal tax rate of north of 100%, literally punishing people financially who are on benefits, who want to start working. Let's just start with that, Rob. And then, you know, the other thing is that people who listen to my read. You read Atomic Habits by James Clear, Brilliant book. Right. And what he really captures in that book in a very practical way is how when you start any new, you know, habits have a short half life. Human behavior, generally those changes have a short half life. So you want to try to create some consistency even around relatively small changes if they're taking you in a positive direction for your life.

Yeah.

And if you take something like work, one of the things that not having tax on earnings below £20,000 of. What does it do? It helps the youngest in society and actually some of the oldest. Yeah. Some of the people, you know, someone like my mom who now works part time, who. And a lot of people do want to still feel useful and add. So eliminating that income tax means that, that for those first steps you are taking out in the world as a young person, whether you graduate from university or not, whether you're an elderly person, may retired and now thinking of coming out of retirement to do some work, which we're going to need, frankly, given some of the demographic changes that are happening in this country. Those who want to do it, we should be giving them every incentive, every reward. And look, hopefully people are not, I mean, look, my mum's earned, whatever it is, 21 grand her entire career and she's very happy with that, that she wants to be a nurse. She never set out to try and earn lots of money. But hopefully if you're ambitious, I mean, my first job was on three pounds five pence an hour at Moss Pharmacy. Yeah, I learned a huge amount from it. I still remember I was working Saturdays, I was still at school and I was so proud to get that paycheck. I mean, I was still annoyed how much tax got taken even with that, but earning three pounds an hour and it was hard work. You know, it was not an easy job, but I learned a lot and I always had the view that hopefully one day I would earn more than that. And thankfully the country's given me enough opportunity where that has transpired to be true. So Rob, we've got to, given where the country is right now, it's a very different country to the one that we lived in when I was doing that job. Yeah, as you said, a lot of the wealth creators, a lot of the people who are the people who really drive an economy forward, that allow us to spend more money on our military, that allow us to ensure that the most vulnerable in society can go and see a doctor or a nurse and get world class treatment as good as the wealth. And you don't get any of those things unless you have a thriving high growth economy. And that's what we have lost the thread to in this country because there's been no one courageous enough to even make the case.

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 credit 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% 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, 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.directbullion.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.

You know, to even have the conversations that we're having. And Nigel is someone who will do it. He did that in the House of Commons after the budget. He was the only politician to talk about culture. He stood up in the House of Commons, Robyn, instead of, you know, obviously, we criticized a whole bunch of things that were in the budget that were appalling. But his fundamental point that he made in his speech in the House of Commons as an MP was this, that we need to change the culture in this country, return our culture to one where success is viewed as a good thing. Yeah.

Stop hating landlords, Stop hating business owners. Stop hating millionaires. Wow. What about incentives to start a business? Because it's hard. I'm going to come to your business story in a minute because you've got a great business story, but we are in the very low majority of people who succeed in business. It is hard. And yet why couldn't there be the same thing? Why couldn't there be the first hundred grand you earn, you pay a very small amount of tax on so we can get more people starting a business? Why can't we bring all the billionaires back who all left? The Russians all left. We sent them home. Why can't London be what it was, the financial hub of the world where we give, you know, an incentive to come and bring big companies here and bring thousands of jobs? Why don't we do that anymore? Why can't we do that? Would you do that in reform?

So, absolutely. We need to make this country one of the most attractive countries in the world to start a business for people here and for people. You know, listen, if the brightest and best people, truly the brightest and best people, and look at Trump. He's announced a $5 million golden ticket for green cards. You see this? I have seen write a check to the American government for $5 million, you get a green card and actually a bunch of tax breaks and he thinks he'll raise a lot of money from it. I think he will.

And. And he's qualifying the right people to come over because people who can afford to write a cheque for 5 million can afford to start a business there and drive the economy up.

And I think there will be a bunch of conditions around that too. Yeah. So, look, if you're going to come here and you're going to contribute in a meaningful way and create jobs, we want you. We want you. Absolutely. So. So again, we go back to that point about culture. And the problem is, Rob, we've had politicians for decades, Tory and Labour Cabinet ministers, who have no real experience of starting businesses, no real experience of what it's like, you know, me and you know what it's like to have a payroll that you need to hit and you're not sure whether you got enough cash, you know, about what, what that means. And then you've got a bunch of lawyers talking to you about GDPR and you've got a bunch of accountants talking about corporations, all of these things. This is all in our contract with the people already, Rob, from the last general election. We need to raise the threshold at which corporation tax starts to apply. Yeah, we need to, you know, all of these things, get rid of things.

Like IR35 and GDP.

Got to make it easy for people. I mean, it's so hard, as you said, it's hard enough as it is. And look, we're not. We don't have a Silicon Valley in this country, but we do still have many advantages. Look, I was a tech entrepreneur. I am reasonably aware of what's coming down the tracks in terms of artificial intelligence and how that is frankly going to upend society in ways that we probably most of society and certainly politicians do not seem to be aware of. Right. Of what's coming. But what I will say is we have a significant percentage of the best AI engineers are in this country. Sir Demis Acebas, who's the founder of DeepMind, Brilliant Guy's podcast. On your podcast, he. They sold their business to Google several, you know, some time ago, but they're the ones who won a Nobel Prize for science for a computer program around something called AlphaFold. It's an unbelievable piece of software that can predict protein folding, which allows you to start. I mean, it was basically one of the greatest conundrums of biology. Basically an insoluble problem that has now been solved that has huge implications for drug discovery and, you know, extending human life and curing cancer, all sorts of things. Now we have these people graduating from British universities. Four of the top 20 STEM universities in the world are in this country.

Wow.

They graduate. What? You know, how are we commercializing these opportunities compared to the Americans? How are we translating that, Rob, into a better life for everybody in this country? So we have so much. Let's call it, you know, the, the technical term might be like human capital.

Talent.

Talent. Yeah, talent. We have so. And then, by the way, we also have so many dynamic people listening to this, who've got a plumbing business, who have got an estate agency, people who are building. Exactly.

Running their own business.

Exactly. Whether it's just sole trader and they're happy with that, or people who want to build and keep building. You're going to have people who are doing tech businesses. All of these people are going to be listening. Right now. We need to think about how do we make this country one of the most attractive. Do it so part. So a huge amount of it, Rob, is cutting the red tape. Okay, so which is. The opposite's happening right now. So you have this Orwellian, they call it the Workers Rights Bill, you know, classic sort of Orwellian communists sort of call the bill something that it is not right. In the same way that, you know, North Korea is not a people's republic. Right. But here's the, here's the challenge. You know, a lot of these, you know, you look at fast food restaurants, you know, where there are a lot of people campaigning for a higher minimum wage in America and California for fast. And listen, of course, people who earn the lowest amounts in any society do need some protections. And yet there are absolutely bad employers out there. Those do exist and you do need to have some regulation for that. But what ended up happening is they campaigned so hard for the minimum wage to go up that in the end they got what they wanted. And what happened? You now have all those kiosks. And you could argue that those kiosks in these fast food restaurants were coming anyway. But what happened? They just massively accelerated those and it reduced the number of people who had those jobs. And most of those jobs. Right. Most people who work in those fast food restaurants are not there doing that their entire career. Some are, but most aren't. Most of them are more like when I did my job at Moss Pharmacy. And so there has to be a clearing of the decks of. Has to be a first principles approach here where, you know, like, almost like, you know, businesses talk about a zero budget, whether if there's a business that's wasting loads of Money, you basically have to look again and go, okay, every pound has to be justified again.

Yeah.

So rather than reducing you and then you're starting again, we've got to do that again for regulations. And we had an opportunity when we had Brexit. There was, there were thousands of EU laws that were on our statute books that had been pledged to be removed because now we didn't need to have them anymore. It was vetoed. And do you know who vetoed it? A lady called Kemi Badenok. It's true, she stopped thousands of those laws. And the justification, she stopped them from being removed from our statute books. And the justification she gave, and I'm quoting her here, was I am a conservative and not an arsonist. And as a result, we have insane rules around all of this stuff. I mean, all these cookie banners and how much, as Elon said here, how much of human life has been wasted accepting.

Accepting and rejecting.

Yeah, yeah.

So why do they not understand this? So, like, I'm a landlord, I have 345 rental properties and I have one source of income, it is my tenants. So every time they punish me and make the law really hard, the only choice I have, other than selling the properties or going busted to put my rents up, it's the only choice I have because it's the only source of income. I run a business. They put national insurance up, so they make me pay more per staff and they put the minimum wage up. The only choice I have is either to put my prices up, which means the consumers pay more, which is essentially a tax, or I have to hire less people, which means there's less jobs. This is the most fundamental, obvious, simple supply and demand. But you don't even have to have done economics to know this. Anyone would know this. What do they not understand?

They've never been in that situation. They can't think of any form of second or third order effect. And also remember, most of these policies they come up with come from a focus group or a poll. So let's take the increase in national insurance contributions for employers that Rachel Reeves announced right now. What has that done? It has. I'm sure you've spoken. I speak to people who are shutting down their pubs because they increase the minimum wage. So you talk about. Okay, you know, let's go back to this fundamental point. Okay? Let's assume you are even. You're well intended with these rules, right? Maybe you are, maybe you aren't, but let's say it's well intentioned. So you want to increase minimum wage because you want the bar staff to have a better life. Cool. What's actually resulted in many, many cases, entire hospitality businesses are shutting down and all of those people, many of whom are like, you know, 16, 17, 18 are losing their jobs. The national insurance contribution is adding huge amounts of cost to businesses way for thin margins. They're already suffering from insane energy prices, insane business rates, corp tax gone back up, all sorts of ridiculous costs, legal fees, accounting fees, all of this stuff and it only ever gets worse, it never gets easier. As you grow, you start as you.

Know, we have to hire more people just to give out returns. Half our finance department essentially work.

That's another one for HMRC because yeah, we have to raise the threshold at which point you start paying vat. All of these things. You got to let businesses build what I call the, the, the immune system a bit. You've got to let them get beyond that embryonic stage where it doesn't feel like you're fighting a fire every hour. And that is how most business owners.

Feel disproportionately hard at the start, isn't it? So if you made it much easier at the start, why, why didn't you have a sliding scale whereby the, the more they've been going, the more they charge and you work your way up.

To paying more tax. So, so we're going to do a lot of work on all of these specific points, right in terms of the specifics because we, we take that very seriously. By the time we. One of the reasons we haven't announced loads of policies since the general is partly because the next general unfortunately is years away, as I'd love it to be not be true. It is. The Tories got through how many prime ministers without calling a didn't even one of several of them weren't even voted by their members, let alone the people. So yeah, unfortunately because of our unwritten constitution, the chance of a general election before early very low. So we've got to use that time Rob, to understand how this is going to work, cost it properly. But you know, again, here's the thing. Whenever you look at all of these bodies like the OBR and all these independent bodies that mark the homework of the politicians, the politicians introduce these bodies because what it does is allow them to wash their hands of making important decisions. That's fundamentally what it's about. And if you go and look at the OBR's predictions, you would be, you would struggle to find in fact a really good money making strategy was just betting on the opposite of what the OBR says, seriously, they're going to bout to cut their GDP forecasts again for this country. You know, all of the forecasts that these taxes were going to rate, you know, how much money was supposed to come in from the inheritance tax raid and all of these things. And what's going to happen now is those changes in inheritance tax, aside from being appalling and just attacking farmers who do so much for this country, they're going to result in a net negative impact on the Exchequer. Why? Because people change their behavior. You know, so we need to, we know we need to do things like reduce capital gains tax, we need to reduce income tax. We've got to do it in a way that ensures that revenues actually grow for the exchange. See, that's the fundamental point that most particularly far left operators don't understand, which is that, look, if you massively increase, if you increase capital gains tax, what happens? People are less inclined to sell assets. They'll just hold assets longer and be more inclined to disappear from the country at the point that they have a major liquidity. Yeah, and capital gains tax is one of those taxes that is classic sort of 80, 20 rule. Right. It's a small number. You go and look at somebody sells a business for big billions of pounds. If you're getting a capital gains tax event, as the Chancellor very pleased about that, it'd be a large amount of money. If you crank the tax up beyond a certain point, what happens? That individual goes, oh, you know what does what Eduardo Savarin does, you know where he went for a marriage? He went to Singapore. Yeah, right. So you've got to think about how, how do we make this an attractive place for people to come create jobs. They've got to pay taxes. That is important. We do need to pay for public serves and we can't waste money, but we do need to do that. But there's so much to be done by, as you said, making it easy for people, making this a place that people go. Now actually, the UK is incredibly supportive. Now, I will say there are some things in this country that are advantageous. EIs, SEIs, you know, these are interesting programs the likes of which the Americans don't have. We don't market those very effectively or make it particularly easy. You look at things like entrepreneurs relief taken away, taken away now retroactive.

It's not a million quid, it's nothing.

Saja Javid, Tory Chancellor just rug pulled people who, you know. So look, and that's another problem when you have so much instability. I Mean, I think we had three chancellors in a week at one point. Right. So if you have that much instability, Rob, then it's very difficult for anyone to plan, whether you're a multinational corporation or an individual entrepreneur. So look, yeah, we've got to get the government out of the way for the most part. Right. Of course, some regulations are upon. But listen, if you're starting a, an estate agent or, you know, you want to start a plumbing business, broadly speaking, you should be given, let the person go and build some business, hire some employees. You know this workers rights bill. Again, of course, workers should have rights, but by giving people the ability to claim for unfair dismissal from day one, that's ridiculous. What that does is what that does for anyone who has ever made a decision to hire somebody. What does that do? It increases the jeopardy for a small business owner. It's not going to affect GlaxoSmithKline or Goldman Sachs. They don't care about that. Yeah, the rounding error for them. But if you're a small business owner who could one day own a massive business or just someone who's working really hard on their business and takes pride in it and they need extra help, they have to now risk, adjust. What if that person maybe.

Yeah.

Isn't what I thought. Could they turn out to be a huge cost to me straight away? When, by the way, there's no shortage of costs already. So what happens? The behavior changes. They just won't make that high. And so that's my point. They call it the Workers Rights bill in this Orwellian way, sort of animal farm way. Yeah, but it does, it does the opposite. It harms, it harms working people. And that's the point about the national Insurance thing, because they tied themselves up in knots about this manifesto claim. Yeah, we won't raise taxes on working people. As if people were that dumb that they wouldn't understand. Well, yeah, fine. I can't see it directly on my paycheck. At least you can't see that number. But if your cost to your employer has just increased, what happens when you go in asking for a pay rise? Or of course there's going to be less. And by the way, when inflation's still running at 3, 4%, that's what they tell you people, people still struggling to, to afford basic groceries and then you have another 10.

Interest rates have gone up a lot recently.

Council tax. People's council tax is being raised by hundreds of pounds every year as a result of all of this waste. So people are really struggling, Rob and again, there are some problems in this country that are really difficult to solve from an intellectual standpoint, and there are some that are easy to solve. Again, I keep saying this. You have the right leader backed by the right MPs around them.

Right. I would love to talk about you and your story, because my podcast used to be called Disruptive entrepreneur, and for 400 episodes, maybe I just interviewed entrepreneurs. And I would have loved to have interviewed you back then as well. So is it true you sold your company for £230 million?

Won't comment on the exact number. It was a successful exit. Very pleased with it. Our investors made money. Our team, you know, our management team had a lot of money.

So which company was that?

It's called Velocity Black.

Okay, and how long did you run that business for?

So we started it in 2014. Yeah, we sold it in 2023, about 18 months ago.

Oh, wow. So nine. Nine year business. And you won't comment, but obviously I can use Google or Chat GPT. So, you know, you had a mass, relatively massive exit by UK standards. Yeah, yeah. That's really impressive. Well, nine years.

Yeah. You're an entrepreneur and a lot of people listening to this are entrepreneurs. And I can tell you that to have a successful business, you need a number of things to go well for you.

Right.

You need to have an amazing team, which we did. Unbelievable team. You need to have a lot of resilience. But look, there were some very challenging times, as you can imagine. I'd really encourage people to be aware of this, that however glossy something looks on the outside. And I know this because I've spoken to people in Uber and Airbnb, things are actually much more successful than what I built. But it's the same thing. It always feels super chaotic. It always feels like the world's about to end, fires burning everywhere.

Yeah.

But do you know what's really interesting is that, you know, one of the reasons I've come into politics is because, thankfully, as a result, I didn't come from money, but thankfully, as a result of selling my business, I no longer need to work for money.

Yeah.

It's a very privileged position to be in. I'm still relatively young. Yeah.

And you must just under 40, are you?

I'm 38. 38. And I feel like this country has given me so much opportunity. You know, people talk. You know what's really interesting, Rob? When I first came into politics, invariably sort of white liberal journalists would ask me, because obviously I'm part of reform. And we were talking about freezing Migration they gave. Yeah, but see, aren't you just trying to pull the ladder up from behind you? And so, you know, I, in hindsight, what I probably should have said was, look, I was born here and raised here, so I didn't climb clamber here up a ladder. But you know, it's an insight into their psychology. But, but what I will say is there is a ladder I do care deeply about and that's making sure it is never pulled off, which is the ladder of social mobility. You know, this is a country where someone who did, came from a family, didn't really have means, who worked unbelievably hard, gave me every possible advantage that they could within means that they had that was able to create jobs, pay millions of pounds in taxes and contribute. Right. Economically and in other ways. And so that's a big part of what motivates me is that I really feel that that aspect of social mobility is being severely curtailed and is disappearing fast. That's a big reason why so many young people who have the option are leaving. And the ones who, where many of them who don't have the option to leave, Rob, are leaving by other means, which is opting out of the workforce. Right. A lot of them are. We have a record number of young people. Well, no, I'm just talking about people who are young people who aren't even are on benefits. We have a record number of under 30s and under 25s now on benefits. And so you've got to ask yourself, how do we change that? And yes, there's a policy element to this, of course, but there's of course also a cultural element which is how do you make people feel, at least to some degree excited to wake up in the morning to go to work? Because they feel if you don't can't draw a link between waking up in the morning. And again, I say to someone who's worked jobs in minicab call centers in pharmacies, you know, I've done all of those jobs. I did those at university. I was working in a minicab call center at night to pay my, my rent at university because my dad couldn't afford to pay to do that. And it was like such a, I remember I was earning, I think it was about 5, 50 an hour or something on a night shift while doing my university degree.

Yeah.

And I remember there was, I'd get the tube and I'll be coming back to my dorms and I'd see Burger King as I've got to get Out I'd spend like two hours of my work, my pay on, on the Burger King, but it still fell. But you know what's really interesting when you, when you're building a company, Rob the memories we have of when it was super simple, it was, we weren't that successful. Those are the memories that I'm sure it's the same for you as well that you really treasure and you have those stories and it really is true. I will say this too. As someone who thankfully did have a successful exit, the novelty of that wears off very quickly and you look back and you still really feel like you need the sense of purpose. And again, this is why I say I feel very privileged to be the chairman of Reform. And so why do you need seven days a week?

Why didn't you go and start a new business instead of getting into politics?

So yeah, really good question. That was originally my plan and frankly if Nigel hadn't come back, I probably would have done.

Yeah.

When Nigel said he was coming back, obviously before the general election Reform had no MPs I could see there was an opportunity. I've been reasonably good at sort of spotting inflection points and obviously in business and in tech you've got to think long term. I could see that in Nigel. There was someone who was a generational talent. You know you talk about a startup founder. He is which you know, you need to be very good in order to make massive impact. Nigel is someone who's a seminal generational talent. Talent. Yeah. Politically him coming out of retirement and making, saying I'm willing to make all those sacrifices all over again at his stage of life. Yeah. It's not nothing.

It's got amazing energy, hasn't it? I mean people do not understand.

I, I, yeah, I mean listen people watching this, I will tell you I consider myself and I take great pride in being a high energy person. Nigel makes me feel love energy. I don't know how he does it. Yeah, no, but now it's just like I'm starting, you know, so I'll speak to him at 6, 45, 7 in the morning, we'll talk about something and obviously politics is non stop and as I said, we're building the whole infrastructure of a party from scratch which may not be evident to everybody but that's what we're having to do and it's a core part. I mean if we fail to do that, it doesn't matter how good our policies are, we won't succeed. But then, you know, by the time we still get at 8, 9pm he's still buzzing with ideas.

He's got this.

He's doing his gb. He's the most productive, industrious, energetic and creative person I've ever worked with. And it's truly inspiring, truly inspiring to work with someone like that. I honestly didn't think I'd have a boss again. Right. You know, once you've been an entrepreneur and all of that.

Yeah.

But such an inspiring.

Is he your boss?

Well, he. He appoints me as chairman.

Right.

But what I will say, he is a very good delegator, actually, and he is putting people around him just like Trump did, where, you know, he had Elon and Vivek and RFK and Tulsi G Gabbard. He put this team around him. Now we haven't. He put those in place in the last 18 months before the general, before the election in America. We've still got. We have still got time and work to do on that. I will tell you, Rob, the. The people coming forward wanting to help us, both wanting to be candidates, we're going to announce more of those soon. We've already announced some incredible Olympic gold medalists like Luke up in Hull, but we've also got brilliant entrepreneurs, tech people. We've got people wanting to help us behind the scenes.

Yeah.

People who've had contact with the Blob that we talked about, come unstuck, but say, look, we don't want to do anything publicly, but we want to help you behind the scenes. So you understand what you're up against when you go up against that civil service, when you go up against those Cabinet secretaries, when you go up against the House of Lords or, you know, the. All other aspects of the civil service that will try to block you.

Yeah.

The judiciary. Let us help you and give you the data we have from our experience. It's really cool. And so much of what we're going to do around policy and how we implement things. Yes, we'll work with think tanks and stuff. They have a role to play. There's some really good people there, but the majority of it's actually going to come from industry and from business and for people who've worked in the NHS for decades, including on the coal face. So that when they tell us that nobody can run a rotor rob in the nhs, which is why everyone gets paid bank rates, you know, the agency rates that are much, much higher, and no one's incentivized or incentives.

Yeah.

No one's incentivized to point that out and say, well, why don't we just build a proper rotor so that everyone isn't being paid bank rates? Why? Because otherwise, what's that going to do for most people's pace for users? So, again, not everywhere, but you hear these stories and you peel back the onion and you see these issues we have got to bring. Outstanding. Again, this is where there is a parallel with business. It's going to take outstanding, outstanding people. The best this country has, the brightest and best. Just like it did cracking the Enigma code at Bletchley Park. We're going to need that sort of just like it did for the Manhattan Project for the Americans. We are going to need our own version of the Manhattan Project. We're gonna have to crack the Enigma code many times over over the next five to 10 years, and that's what we intend to do. And again, you will see some of these announcements. Maybe we'll get to come on your podcast again with some of these people. You should have them on. Unbelievably talented people, frankly. People. You might. People will be quite surprised. These sorts of people even want to be involved in politics because they're deeply patriotic.

Yeah.

They can see that the country's at a crossroads and they want to help.

Okay, so there's two questions. I want to go back to your business career because, as you know, it's what I love the most. And then I want to really understand what it. What you're almost like daily schedule is of being the chairman of Reform. So if my maths is right, you must have started your business 24, 25 years old. The one that you exited. Okay. Was that your first company?

It was.

You are a very humble man. Your first company, you sold for an undisclosed £230 million in nine years. I mean, do you not think, wow, I am. I won the lottery and I'm good.

I do feel extraordinarily grateful for a huge number of things, as I said.

But you're also good.

I. I feel I do have strengths. Yes. I have weaknesses, too, just like, you know, just like everybody, Rob. But, you know, again, I'd say when I look back at the journey, you know, we had months where I didn't know whether we were going to be able to make payroll and.

But that's normal, isn't it?

Yeah, totally normal. That's my point. And so, you know, there were many points where you have you going to the gym and thinking, oh, God, how are we going to. How are we even going to get to next week? Yeah. There were these moments, and you. You end up just being, again, really grateful for the team that you had and they walked through walls for the business. Do you think that so hard?

Do you think that was the main driver? Because you said you've got weaknesses. I guess you outsourced your weaknesses.

To the degree that I could, yeah. I mean, and that's what you learn, though. I mean, it was my first bit business. I'd never even run a team really, prior to that. Right. And so. And how much alone? All of this on. On the job?

Yeah. How many staff did you have when you exited?

170 or so. Yeah, yeah, it was a lot. And the majority of those were in the US at that stage, so it wasn't easy. And obviously even just managing an acquisition and a buyer and stuff over actually quite a prolonged period of time between letter of intent and actually closing.

18 months longer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 18 months, yeah, yeah.

People don't understand how running your business and trying to sell it at the.

Same time, especially when you can't even talk about it with most people.

Yes.

And you know, there's a lot of ways things can go wrong and not many ways you're not. There's no upside really at that point. So, yeah, you've got to. But you know, you've got to keep going through, through those processes. But thankfully, again, I keep going back to it. It's people, it's culture, it's what does it mean to be part of this team? And I've tried to bring that, instill that here too. Reform is unapologetically a meritocratic, high performance place. We have to be, because as I said to the team, we are taking on the two old parties that have been around for centuries, that for all of the faults of their leadership, they still have these formidable incumbencies. I mean, how long could you could put the most incompetent CEO in charge of Coca Cola Cola? It's still going to run quite a long time and be difficult to disrupt. Right. So, yeah, these things have been around a very long time. There's a lot of muscle memory entrenched in people voting Tory or voting Labor. And if we succeed on this mission, I mean, already what we have achieved, thanks to our members and our supporters and our team, is unprecedented in British history. Now, how long?

20 issues.

Well, there were various guises, Right. So there was obviously the Brexit party and stuff. Reform is around 3, 4 years old or so. But if you look back, even the start of last year, reform was polling at 6,7% and had about 15,000 members today we're polling at average 26,27%. Some polls have us at 29, but the average is 26,27. And we have almost a quarter of a million 220,000 members growing very fast. We will overtake local labor to become the biggest party in the country in terms of membership, at least from paying members within the next few months. And now look, still a long way to go and things that, you know, we take nothing for granted. But just like we did with the start, I did my startup, me and Nigel spend a lot of time thinking about the long term. That's why we drafted the constitution with a, you know, from scratch. We worked with a brilliant team of, of lawyers to help us with this. But we took that responsibility on with the seriousness of knowing that we believe this will be the governing constitution of the next party of government for the United Kingdom. And we hope and aim for us to become the new natural party of government in the United Kingdom. So we have to think about that. Yeah, we think about, you know, look, Nigel, our goal is to make Nigel the next Prime Minister, but we have to, I just genuinely think about, okay, well, what does it look like in 100 years time, what does a reform Prime Minister in 100 years, what does that man or woman, what goes through their minds? What, what governs their behavior? You know, look at a company like Apple, right, where Steve Jobs, you can make a case he was the greatest entrepreneur of all time, definitely in the top five or 10. And to this day, you walk around any Apple store, you can feel his legacy in there. You know, you can feel that meticulous. And so where we are now is again for us, it's about values of family, community, country. It's about having integrity, it's about standards in public life. It's about making decisions based on what's in the interests what in our sincere view, what's in the interest of citizens of the United Kingdom, regardless of the short term consequences of making that statement. And again, people don't really give Nigel or the rest of our MP, by the way, the courage it takes to say things like we don't care about diversity for its own sake. We do think that we need to care about our national debt. We do think, by the way, you know, in the nhs that the way the nhs, it's not working at the moment, right? So you take two decades ago, the cost of the British taxpayer, the NHS per person was about 2,000 pounds per person. Today, per capita, that's 3,000 per pounds per person. And that's adjusted for inflation. That's the real change. Are we getting 50% more value? The opposite, yeah. Elective waiting list. Two decades ago were a million. Today there's six and a half million.

Wow.

The catastrophes. In a E, we talk about people dying. Thousands of people die every year in this country, avoidably because of undue weight and A and E. So we are the only party in the uk and I say this is someone whose family have given decades and decades of service to nhs. I love the nhs, very important to me. But we know it's broken and we have to be willing to stare that challenge in the eye and have difficult conversations and look at the melee, the maelstrom that you saw from the two old parties. But that's the way that they operate. They operate based on how can we attack reform in the polls and what's that focus group saying on that? And again, yes, of course, we've got to listen to people. No one does that. I'd argue better than Nigel.

Yeah.

But it's really important to. To set the agenda and offer leadership.

Yeah. So the Chairman of Reform, what's the job description? What's the daily routine?

Well, the mission is to win a majority in the House of Commons in the next general election and make Nigel the next Prime Minister. That is the mission and everything we do has to be in some way helping us achieve that. Now, in terms of my day to day, obviously, as you can imagine, it's incredibly varied, but it will usually start with, catch up with Nigel. You know what's on the agenda today. Now, one thing about politics relative to business is that because of the news cycle, there will just be things that hit your to do list that are just. You just got to deal with more so than happens in, in business.

So you mean you'd be more adaptable, less structured, you have to react more.

But we still always have to. And you'll probably notice here, most of the people in this office are actually not working on the news cycle over the next 24 hours. They're working on building things for the next month and the next year.

Yeah.

And that's a big advantage, I think, for us because from what I can tell with the other parties, everyone's so short term in politics, they just care about winning the next news cycle in the next 24 hours. And look, I get that there's some importance to that.

Yeah.

But that's half the problem, Rob. If you make all your decisions in your business based on how do I optimize my own popularity over the next 24 hours, like, you're not going to last long in business. Sometimes you have to be thinking much longer cycles. So what I'm focused on is building, number one, a, an infrastructure that allows us to convert the support that we have in the country into wins, into votes.

Yeah.

And wins. Because that's the only way we're going to change things in this country. We have to win many, many elections, ranging from local elections. We obviously got the English County Council elections in May. That's been a huge focus for us. Look, last May, before I was involved, before Nigel had come back as leader, this party failed to stand in 93% of the council seats that were up in May last year. Now that they still. It's still a huge effort. You know, it was a very much embryonic startup at that stage. This year, we're going to stand in 100% of the 1600 seats. Right. That in itself. And by the way, that's with the vetting process. Like last year, there was no vetting process, so we vetted thousands of candidates. We've stood that up from scratch. So it is a bit like a business. You do have to create these systems, these machines that will allow you to do that. A lot of my time is spent recruiting. Yeah, of course. Right. Because, you know, we have such an incredible. I feel so proud. You've obviously met some of them. But, you know, you notice people here, they, you know, we get so many interesting comments sometimes, like a former Tory donor, Mike, come in and they'll say, oh, you know, it's really interesting here. Everybody's really, well, formally dressed, very strange. You know, it's not like that in most other places. People are very friendly and, like, we don't have an office manager here, someone whose job it is to come and offer people drinks, for example. But we have a culture, hopefully, that happened here where people turn up and they go, can we get you a tea? You know, so, yeah, there's a culture of real hospitality that's there. And then you look at our media team, our social media team, they do an unbelievable job, even. Even though they're much smaller actually than. Than the other parties. But fundamentally, everyone is mission driven.

Yeah.

And that's the similarity with the startup. Right. Which is that. But here it's actually obviously a much bigger, I would argue, loftier goal in the sense that what we're here trying to do is everybody here could be making more money in the price, you know, working for a business or something. But they're doing this because they believe in our country and they understand how important it is and we're very grateful for that. So I spend a lot of time, I mean, I'm usually in the office from about 8:30 in the morning till about 6 or 7, sometimes 8. Then obviously you'll have my dinners with people. Your media stuff. Yeah. But so much of my job actually is about working to build the infrastructure around the country, the branches, all of the ability to deliver literature, run effective campaigns. And remember, we're doing that, obviously, cater for the. Grow the membership, you know, quite proud of that. When I arrived as chairman, we had around about 60,000 members. Today we have 220,000 about eight months later. And so everything we're doing, we're standing up a merch store. We've just done that for our branches and our candidates. But, you know, even something as simple as that, right, so something that is growing this explosively, as soon as we say, oh, you can come by reform hat, how orders do you think we're going to get on day one? It's going to be ballistic. Right. We know that because even when our branches order leaflets, order, you know, yard signs or whatever it is, they've been huge volumes. And so there's a huge logistical element to that that needs to be done. But fundamentally, my it. It's very varied. A lot of my job at the moment is recruiting, working with the voluntary ecosystem, all the amazing people who give their time for free the thankless job of knocking on doors and, you know, evangelizing the message across the country, garnering more support. Obviously working with our MPs. Policies are really important ones. So we're standing up an internal policy unit that's going to be well staffed and work with counterparties and partners. But fundamentally, policy will be done in, in house here. And the majority of the task at hand for us is actually how do we implement the policy, not just what the policies must be. So there's a huge amount of work going in there too.

So it sounds like an entrepreneur. That's like an entrepreneurial job.

We are political entrepreneurs here. Yeah, that's exactly right.

And I think that's what our country needs, more people who I was with, Richard, was it two weeks ago. Harry.

Yeah.

He's got a business background and Rupert's got a business background, hasn't he? These people, like. I don't know why it's taken so long.

I think, you know, one thing I will say is that sometimes, you know, it's the old phrase, you know, the night's darkest before the dawn. You know, sometimes a bit like it's happened in America has to get so bad to change.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because, you know, when, when Boris had won that majority, as I said, I was super excited. I'm brilliant. Here's an actual Conservative. They've got a big majority. Brexit's going to get done now. They're going to stop blocking all of the great opportunities and things we could do. They're going to secure the borders. And obviously he did literally the opposite of all of those things. And so that's a lot of what animates us and motivates us. And I said all those people you just mentioned, they cost them money to be doing this. I think about the opportunity cost that's there. But again, money isn't everything and we love our country. And again, I feel incredibly privileged, like I've the energy. Hopefully you can feel it. Right, yeah. In this office. Yeah. And I'm. Like I said, I keep thinking about what an incredible country. Like one day, I don't know how long I'm going to live, but I really hope, and it's what I think the purpose of life ultimately is, is to be able to look back on one's life with retrospect and say, I'm. Yeah, I'm glad I lived that life and I felt like I made a difference. And if you think about it through that lens, I would. There's nothing I'd rather be doing than this.

Excellent. So sorry to change the subject for a bit of doom, but in light of what's happened recently, it feels to me like it's the closest I can feel we've been to World War 3. Does it not feel like we're right on the edge at the moment, globally, with everything that's going on. America, Russia, Ukraine, Europe, the uk. What are your thoughts? Because world wars happen and if you go back through history, it's been a long time since we've had one.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Are you scared?

I'm not scared because I don't think that's a particularly constructive perspective to have on anything. And again, I'm fundamentally an optimistic person and I think we will get through this, but that doesn't mean we're not clear eyed about the gravity of the situation.

I mean, public arguments with global leaders.

Yeah, yeah. And look, we came. You know, I wasn't alive during the Cuban missiles crisis, but I know people who were. And obviously that was a very dangerous time. With retrospect, even more dangerous than people realized at the time. Kennedy, President Kennedy didn't know half of how serious some of this stuff was. We are in a situation where obviously Vladimir Putin is a murderous, abominable dictator. He does have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. And it's very difficult always, you know, to assess risk around you because you talk to some people and they go, oh, there's no chance it ever get used. It's like, well, I don't know, how do you price that probability? We did under the Biden administration. If you remember, they were talking about, you know, when they start talking about the Storm Shadow missile missiles and firing those deep into, deep into Russian territory, into built up areas with the help potentially. So you're getting into obviously a very dangerous place now. I believe, and the party believes and Nigel believes that peace is best found through strength. This country has catastrophically under invested in its defense for decades. That is true. And actually most of that happened under the Tories. Right.

And the world knows about that.

The world knows and that's scary. If you talk to people in our military, the people I speak to, they say, look outside of our SAS and sbs, obviously formidable world class troops, there's not that many of them. Outside of that it's going to take north of six months to put a British boot on the ground anywhere anyway in anywhere of the relevant regions around Russia. So that's an unacceptable situation for this country to be in. You look at our Trident program, you look at any important military program, it's deeply under invested, it's ill prepared and this is, I mean this is despite the incredible people, you know, the servicemen and women who staff our military. But look, we have to invest more in it. But we go back to this original point. If you're, if you're saying, oh, we're going to increase the percentage, well fine. But if your economy isn't growing, Rob, you're going to find yourself in a severe problem very, very, very quickly. We need to be growing our economy 3, 4, 5% a year. I think we can grow at 5% a year if we get this right. And then suddenly, yes, we can take military, you know, we want to take to three and then to three and a half percent of an economy growing at 4 or 5%. Now that's, now then we'll have a military. And by the way, we then need to meet, do procurement properly.

Yeah.

So we don't change the requirements 5,000 times during a program which allows defense companies to balloon the price. Not dissimilar. You know, if you're building a house, right, the way the constructors you will know this. You need to be very precise about what you want from the beginning, if you want the best value. Very similar on, on defense projects. We also need to make sure that our military is purchasing equipment and preparing for the world that we live in today. So, people, you can go and look at companies like Anduril. I mean, look what the Houthis were doing where they managed to initiate a naval blockade, you know, up against these extraordinary military machines, basically using, in some cases, consumer drones. So the world is changing very, very quickly. We need to make sure we are spending money again. Procurement is done by super smart people, Rob, who understand the way these things are going. Look, that's the only path that we have, which is to invest in our defense. Yes, we need a great relationship with the United States of America. But look, President Trump has been very clear. America first. He is going to run America on the basis that there are no sacred cows and what's in the interests of American people. And so we need to start thinking about what's in our interests. We need to start investing in our military. Of course, we need close partnerships with our friends in Europe and European. But they've also catastrophically under invest. Remember, it was the Germans for all of the saber rattling they're doing now. Remember, they were the ones who laughed at President Trump in his first term as president when he said, what are you all doing, you know, being reliant on Russian gas. Do you remember that? He called them out for being totally reliant on Putin for their energy. And they laughed at him and mocked him. They shut down vast amounts of their nuclear power. They've debilitated their. I mean, actually, our economy in the UK sadly, is in a bad way. The German economy is in a much, much worse state. So a lot of these countries are now on a collision course with reality where it's all well and good. Keir Starmer standing in front of a Union Jack and doing fine. And again, Putin is a murderous dictator and the Ukrainians deserve support and have made huge sacrifices to defend the sovereign territory that was invaded. But fundamentally, if you want to be a major player in statecraft as we sit here in 2025, Rob, you need a formidable military and living in some delusional world where you think that you're a super powerful country when you have a military that is ill prepared and underfunded and ill equipped, that's not going to work anymore.

Wow. Will Elon Musk help reform be the next party in power?

I think so. On the basis that at A minimum. He has been a hero with regards to protecting free speech in this country without which it would have been very difficult for reform to have even got to where we are today because a lot of the common sense things that we say and Nigel and our MP say would have been censored, full on censored under the old regime of Twitter saying that boys can't become girls or you know, that yeah, we need to be, we need to stop, you know, our culture is better than many other cultures in the world. All of these sorts of things would have been full on censored. You wouldn't have been able to say them now. So yes, in that regard he is obviously shone a very bright light on the grooming gangs in, in this country and the appalling cover ups and, and the horrific things that have happened. No one did more actually to shine a bright light on that and enforced the debate which needed to be had and continues and clearly much more needing to be done in terms of a donation. I don't know to be honest. I will say this, that we have 220 odd thousand members now, Rob. 90% of our costs as a party are met by our grassroots supporters. I'll tell you as chairman, I actually love that. I love that and I will say.

So you haven't had the hundred million yet. That was no banded around.

No, but although I don't know where that came from that, that figure, neither do we need it. So look at last year, calendar year.

20, you don't need it. So if he offered you 100 million, would you take it?

It's a really good question. It wouldn't just be solely my decision but I would say that as a party that is incredibly passionate about one of the biggest problems being the interests of British citizens is not being put first and foremost in decision making. Could you make the case that $100 million from a foreign citizen is unhelpful to that? Probably, yeah. I think look, if you wanted to give us some money, we take 100 million was never going to happen anyway. But I will say this, I like the idea of this being a party which is fundamentally supported by our members, by our supporters, by ordinary British people and we also don't need it. And when I say don't need it. So last year the Tories and Labour party raised 11 and 14 times more than us respectively.

Right.

In a general election year and who's leading in national opinion polls right now? So look, yes, we need more money and if you're listening to this and you want to donate to Reform. Please do, because we will use it wisely.

How can people do that if they Want to donate?

Reformpty.uk donate. Or if you want to join Ford's ReformParty com.uk forward/join. You can see the counter tick up time. You get to come to our amazing events. We're doing a big rally probably it'll be one of the biggest rallies of political rallies of our lifetimes, Rob, at the end of this month.

Where's that?

In Birmingham.

Okay.

So that's going to be probably 12 odd thousand people. That's going to be crazy. And you know, we'll have pyrotechnics and all sorts of really cool things only Nigel can pull off. I mean, can you imagine Keir Starmer trying to do pyrotechnics? That is exactly. That would be the reaction. Right. It would feel like a Harry Enfield sketch. So, so look, we are, I really like, look, we have got serious interest from larger donors and stuff. But yeah, look, I don't. I'd be actually be pretty uncomfortable and not that in favor of anyone giving us 100 million, any one individual. Because giving us 100 million, you think.

They'D have some demands. That money wouldn't come without demand.

Yeah, look, I think again, we live in the real world. Political parties need money. Right. And you know, but I'd say particularly given he is basically part of the Trump administration and I'm a huge Elon fan. I as a tech entrepreneur, I've read almost every book, every bit of material I could to try to digest as much as I can his genius to the degree that I could. He's an amazing entrepreneur, I'd argue is greatest entrepreneur of all time, given his. You'll think about the challenges he's taken.

And the breadth of what he's done.

Like making electric cars a thing where nobody thought they could basically taking on the ent the entire oil lobby in doing so, building out the charging network and then autonomous driving the humanoid robots he's building with Optimus Neuralink, the human machine brain connection, SpaceX replaceable rockets landing back.

Yeah.

Starship heavy. So it's not just about the money he's made, it's the. Which is obviously extraordinary and unprecedented, but it's about the challenges he's taken on and how much those things we just talked about about are going to benefit our species across time. So I mean, this is the irony, right? You know, no one has actually done more to get us to quote Net Zero than Elon Musk. Right. Through. Through electric cars. So, you know, we're in a situation where we've got to reform is about looking out for the interests of citizens of the United Kingdom. So I have enormous respect for. For Elon, it wouldn't just be my decision, but again, I would say I really love the fact that this is a party that is funded by.

So it's funded by them. Is it funded by your.

The membership fees that people north of 90. Over 90 of our costs are met by our members and our supporters. Wow. Small donors and the membership.

So, again, to join, I'm a member. Just thank you out there and obviously, as you know, I support you greatly. I know Nigel has been on the.

Show a few times.

Times, I think. I think we've got RER next and then I think pretty much all your senior. Most of your senior people would have been on the show. I'm a great fan of what you all do.

Thank you.

I've felt like we've needed this for so long, so I will support you to the hills. So, yeah, could you just tell us that link if people want to join.

Yeah, please. It's ReformParty.uk join. If you're not a member already, I really encourage you to come to our events. But the big ones, like those big rallies, your local branch meetings, no one is going to do more. I will tell you this. This year, no political party will come close to the number of events we're doing. And I'll take the energy. Rob, have you been to one of our events?

Not yet.

Come to the one.

No, I've just been to some of ours. I'll have to return the flavors.

Yeah, yeah, no, you guys should definitely come. I'll tell you, the energy, it's unbelievable. It feels like a rock concert. The positivity, the optimism and you just because you're bumping into other people from all walks of life, all different backgrounds, but they, they share this zeal for turning this great country and it's so rare to find that. Right. Because there's so much negative energy in the media and negative energy around, frankly, politics. I mean, most of the time when you hear a politician speak these days, they're talking about tough choices. And by the way, the tough choices invariably involve screwing over British people in favor of foreign people. Right, right. Or vested interest. It's like, no, no. Yeah. We don't have 1.5 billion for pensioners to heat their homes.

Yeah.

But we do have 10 billion for climate capture, including a billion going to some African country to help their. And by the way, the responsibility for that lies with that African country. That they should be, of course, they're the ones who should be improving the lives of their people. The job of our government is to look out for British people and so you really get that sense at our events. You should definitely come.

I will. I'm sold. So let's do the disruptors round. So these are quick fire questions. Actually, no, I've got one more. Because you've got a finance background, as I understand who controls the world's money.

Fundamentally, my assessment of it is the central banks, right? They are the ones who, however, independently get to decide. They're the ones who can print more money. And if you are able to print more money, you can look at the M2 money supply. That is largely going to give you a lead indicator of any major financial index that you might choose now. So that's the first thing and you can get into a really important debate about how independent they should actually be. And obviously a lot of those changes are quite recent and you can question how successful they have been. On the flip side, huge amounts of money, 1.2 trillion pounds in this country to bring it back to the UK is spent by the government. Rachel Reeves, Ed Miliband. I mean, could you think of the worst people? I defy you. You spent a decade scouring the country to find two worse individuals to entrust.

Any budget to spend other people's money. Because if it was theirs, that is.

The important thing, probably. And so, you know, we are so, in terms of controlling money, we've got to shrink the size of public spending for that philosophical reason, in part, which is that, you know, people, it's much better to allow private individuals to spend their money generally than the government. Now where the government does need to spend money clearly are in areas that are necessary, whether that's defense or health service or benefits for people who need them. But obviously we've got to eliminate all of the waste. And then we've got to, as we talked about through our tax policy, through reducing taxes but also massively cutting red tape, getting rid of all of these nonsense regulations that exist, allow people to go and build companies and create jobs for people and build cool products and make the genuinely the brightest and best people want to come here to start businesses or to engage in hard science and move not just British people forward, but humanity forward. I mean, that's what Britain has done, by the way. You know, look at, we talk about building stuff. This country has lost the thread as to how we can build anything. These days, right. I made the point of question time a few weeks ago that we heard this big announcement about a third Runway. It was going to take, according to Rachel, was going to take 10 years. 10 years to build a piece of tarmac. Right. Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the Royal Albert Bridge. It's thousands of feet long and it carries trains 200ft above the water. He built it in five years and he did it 175 years ago and it still works today. The Chinese build a Runway in a year. The uae, similar. The Chinese build an international. Whole International Airport in five years. We're going to take 10 years to build a piece of tarmac, Rob. So we have lost the thread to the incredible pedigree. I mean, go look at our architecture. It's not just building stuff. The beauty of it. Go and look at King's Chapel at Cambridge. I mean, how many kings of England did it take to dedicate their entire will and narratives to help build that thing? And it's awe inspiring. Or go and look at the Natural History Museum is an unbelievably beautiful piece of architecture. And again, we've lost the thread. Look at all these modern buildings that come up there. What's the word? Not pretty.

Pseudo modern.

Pseudomon. And so we don't. We build far too slowly with far too much red tape, far too much bureaucracy. But yet I will tell you the there still remains this pedigree inside this country. And so, so long as that remains, I remain very optimistic. We need to cut taxes, we need to reduce the size of the state and we need to get all of this red tape out of the way and tell people we're on your side. By the way, the way we're going to demonstrate, demonstrate we're on your side, Rob, is getting the hell out of your way and letting you do your thing. And generally when you do that for British people, you end up with extraordinary successes.

Amen. Disruptors round. So as quick as you like. What's the biggest risk you've ever taken?

Quitting my job in the city to start a company. Yeah. It never. I always was convinced. I knew I was going to do it when I quit my job. I was working for an American bank at the time in a lot of people. So that I was a bit crazy. They said, well, you know, you're sort of on a really good path here.

And guess you're paid quite well.

Yeah, I was, yeah. And you know, and I felt like I'd learned a huge amount. I'm so grateful for that time that I worked in the City, I was very great. Like, I had an amazing team that invested in me and, you know, really taught me stuff, which is so important. That's, by the way, the whole work from home stuff is such a disaster. I think in my career I would have been. I wouldn't be sitting here today if. If I hadn't had incredibly gracious colleagues willing to help me in that way and for me to learn from. But, yeah, that was it. And. But I'd always known that I needed to go out there and try and build something. I've always. I've always had that twinkle in my eye. And I also felt like Jeff Bezos. I saw an interview with him where he talked about. It's a bit nerdy, but he talked about the Regret minimization framework, which is a super nerdy way of saying that you will always end up regretting something. So which decision path is less likely to result in me regretting something? And almost invariably when you talk to people about risks that they took, because we've all taken risks that worked and they didn't, but they regret not taking risks much more than they didn't. And by the way, I feel quite confident, even if it hadn't worked out with my company, I would be grateful and glad that I took that decision. But I think, look, everyone's different. And for me, as I said, I was always really keen to go out and start a company and grow it. And I felt like my learning curve in the city had sort of started to flatten.

Yeah.

And I was quite young and I thought, well, if I'm not going to do this now, then who will? And I took that similarly in terms of coming into politics. I mean, you could argue maybe the decision I made last summer to throw myself headfirst into British politics, having had no real involvement previously. But again, it never really felt like a risk because to me, again, I feel like it's a privilege and to get to work with Nigel and the MPs and the team is. Is unbelievably fulfilling and we're mission oriented and anything I can do. So when I sold my company, I thought about starting a foundation.

Yeah.

Thought deeply about it. And I was probably going to be focused around education. But what I realized was the highest, the best form of public service I could do, actually, was doing what I could to make Nigel the Prime Minister. That's why I'm doing this.

And what's your most brutal life lesson?

I think the most brutal life lesson is that if you. So one thing I think a lot about is I have quite a fear of to the ground, fearful of anything. It's unfulfilled potential. It's the sense that I could have gone and done this thing, however risky. But if you didn't do it and then there's just an element of your life that you never really delivered upon. And I think that's particularly important where you're in sort of, let's say a privileged position, as I said, where, you know, this country's been really kind to me, had great opportunities. I work really hard, of course, but I no longer need to work for money. I have some resources, I have my time and my energy and I love this country. So I'm going to go do that thing. Which is why it was a really easy decision for me to make to the degree that I have had to learn lessons. Well, look, yeah, you know, when you're, when you have lots of people relying on you, it's a heavy burden to carry and you have to carry yourself in a manner that is conducive to showing true leadership. And that's much easier said than done. You know what it's like, you know, if you're a chief executive, if you're a leader, every word, and this is especially true in politics, every word is important. Your intonation. I mean, even when I. The time when, you know, we weren't sure whether me and my co founder, we weren't sure whether we were going to be able to make payroll with the startup, I still had to come in your chest out and let any sense that to your team that that's fatal. Right. Once people get, you know, and I knew what my job was that month, it was to ensure that everybody in my team was going to get paid on time and wouldn't even know that there was a problem that was, that was the responsibility that I had. Thankfully we were able to. To do that. And so look, I think fundamentally that sense of are you willing to take on. I always feel like I want to try to take on as much responsibility as I can in my, my small way to be as productive to people around me that I care about as possible. And right now that's manifesting with this. But yeah, it can be, it can be very challenging given everything that gets thrown at you, to remain, you know, focused on that mission and ensure that all the people who are relying on you, that you do justice to them. And that's also why, by the way, I have so much respect for Nigel. I mean, he's someone who's given so much of his life, decades of his life. He has, you know, quite a large security team now around him. There's so many things that he has to deal with that are truly sacrifices that he is making because he loves Britain and he loves the British people. Whether you agree with his politics or not. I will tell everybody listening to this podcast that is categorically true. But again, that's what inspired. That's what leadership is, Rob. That's what inspires me, again, as someone who, you know, thought I would just be running my own, you know, businesses. And that really inspires me and it motivates me and it motivates everyone else around us. And by the way, that follows all the way through to, you know, the music playing as he comes on stage and the pyrotechnics. That's all real. It's real. People love him, and they love him because they can feel in their bones that he means what he says and he loves them.

What's the most disruptive thing anyone's ever said or done to you?

Well, I'll tell you. When I first started in the City, there were definitely some characters who, let's just say they weren't fully focused on setting you up for success as a grad or whatever it is is right. And they would put you through a bit of a. So, you know, I'd go over to talk about a company with one of the sales traders or something on the trading floor. And, you know, I'd walk over and I'm quite nervous and want to make sure I knew what I was talking about. And I went over and started talking to him. And while I'm talking to one of them, he just starts dialing a number and starts talking to someone else on the phone. Literally, while I'm talking to him, I'm thinking, okay, yeah, this is happening. So there were these sorts of weird things that would happen. You know, when I turned up on my first day at one of them, I didn't even have a chair. And. But, you know, all of these things, I mean, these all obviously seem very minor. Right. But they, they contributed to this sense that in that place, the culture was, well, you know, you find a chair and you, you gotta. We're not gonna spoon feed you here. Right. And that was quite formative for you.

Yeah.

Obviously, you know, there have been challenging times during your. My childhood, you know, my parents. I'm incredibly grateful for them. But just like all couples, sometimes they'd have arguments, and some of those arguments end up being quite disruptive to your psychology when you're a kid and just like everybody, you know, who goes through that sort of thing, you know, obviously the passing of my grandparents and, you know, those sorts of things. But fundamentally, you know, I Rob, again, when I talk about gratitude, I feel like I have been very lucky in many aspects of my life. You know, people, many people have had much, much, much harder lives than I have. And so while I've worked really hard, again, this is what animates me and motivates me all of the time. Thankfully, I've never come up against a challenge or, you know, like I said when I was at university, I had to go and work in the nights as a. In a minicab call centre to be able to pay. But I look back on all of that and I feel like it helped me grow and I feel so, again, it made me appreciate being at university perhaps more than I otherwise would have done. It makes me understand that journey we're talking about here, which is how do you create a Britain where somebody can go through, you know, little z, when he's 16, working at Moss Pharmacy, can go through and do all of these things. Again, my story, I don't think is even possible in any other country. I really don't. And so.

And it's good to remember that I've been a bit critical of the decline of the uk, but it is still a great environment where you can and have a hard upbringing and still come and make a living and fulfill your dreams.

Absolutely, I feel like that. But, you know, again, that. That's so precious and there are so many countries that be would give so much to have that. And it's been built over centuries, Rob, centuries. And we got to take that seriously. So, yeah, look, I. I think for many people, I would say the challenge, how you react to any challenge gets thrown your way, ends up defining how you think about things and how you frame it. And do you see it as a, like, you know, Jocko Willink is someone. I enjoy listening to the Park. He's got this thing that's become a bit of a meme, you know, he talks about. He says he reacts to any bad news, ostensibly bad news, by saying, good. Yeah.

Why is that good? Yeah.

But, you know, the point he's making there, and he's backed up by an enormous amount psychological literature is, oh, you know, you read Man's Search For Meaning, for example, right. I mean, incredible, incredible book. But again, it's. How did he get through the most horrific. I mean, Brings you to tears reading those, those accounts. But how he managed to get through it, that the fortitude of mind that you hear from many obviously Holocaust survivors. So, you know, in many ways, therefore, as I said, it puts, helps put all of the challenges that I might face on a day to day basis or you might face into context.

Yeah.

And it makes you very grateful for. Well, you try to be. It's not that easy these days. Right now I still absolutely will get frustrated about something relatively minor. Absolutely. But one does try to remember how lucky we are to be here. I feel very grateful as I said that I, to the degree that I can get to play my part in turning this great country around. And as I said, one day I don't know how long I live, but I sincerely hope I'll be able to look back on my life with some pride and say I'm glad I made that contribution.

And then what would be your biggest failure or regret?

I would say probably. Look, I've made. When you're running a business, they're significant. So there's maybe part of my personality, I, I consume myself in my primary thing. I generally don't have multiple things going on at once. And so when I was running my business, it was all consuming, you know, and that meant it was difficult to find time for personal relationships. I didn't see some of my really good friends and I see them now more so. But you know, there were some of my really good friends from school I didn't see for years. Years sometimes because traveling all of the time. And even my parents, you know, I think a lot about as they get older, how many times am I going to see them again? I try to go and see them once a week now, but there were periods of my life when I didn't see them or talk to them as much as I feel like I could have done. And so do I regret that it's difficult to answer that question because, you know, everything in life is about what are you willing to sacrifice for the thing you're working on on. And if I hadn't started my business and done, I probably wouldn't be doing this right now. I wouldn't have learned the lessons that I have. I wouldn't be able to probably have what I feel hopefully now is the positive impact that I can make. So I don't regret those things. But they are things that one thinks about and they are really important. I mean, we all know, I mean, again, I do this as a volunteer. I do it seven days a week and big Opportunity cost of doing anything else. But I look at and we, I'm sure, you know, people much wealthier than you or I, that you look who are probably not that happy, probably, you know, have maybe focused a bit too much on just purely material wealth and not everybody, but you know what I mean. So I think it's got to come down to what are your values as a person. Everyone is different, I don't think. I wouldn't recommend everybody make the same decisions that I did, but I'm very grateful that I made the ones that I did. And as I said, thankfully, a. Because of the opportunity set that this great country has allowed, but also some luck, for sure, it's allowed me to have to, thankfully, not regret any of those things. Have I made mistakes along the way? Of course, but I do my best to try to learn from them. And thankfully, as I was said, even in the business we made, me and my co founder made many, many errors. Thankfully, none were fatal.

Amen. And the last question, this show is called Disruptors. We even have this now for our mobile setup. What is the word? I mean, you must love that word, disruptive. As an entrepreneur, what does that mean to you?

Well, I don't think disruption is useful for itself. In itself. Does that make sense? So, you know, and in many ways, obviously reform.

So not for the sake of it.

Not for the sake of it. And so I think what the way I like to think about the value of disruption is, is Elon's idea of first principles thinking. And so what can often happen when you've got these old institutions or processes or large groups of people is that group think sinks in and everybody's sort of doing things a certain way for no reason other than the person next to them is. Yeah, and that's fine. And that works in many places. But after a while that can become. That can ossify very quickly. And so in order to have that fresh perspective, especially in a world where technology is advancing at a astonishing, quite alarming rate, there is so much opportunity for just coming at something and going, why are we doing things like that? Yeah. So when Elon said, why do we not have reasonable. So why have we not gone to Mars? Well, it's because it's so expensive to run one of these missions because you have to throw the rocket away on every mission. He said, why do we throw the rockets away? He said, well, because you can't land them back. Well, let's see if we can't land them back. And he went to Russia and he tried to go and buy an icbm. I mean go and read the stories. They're ridiculous. So for me, disruption is about the value of disruption is coming at things with the perspective of how can we make this better, how do we make this person's life better, how do we make this product better, how can we deliver a better service there? How can we solve a problem that hasn't been solved before? And thinking really carefully about how you can do that completely without, without prior, Too much prior deference to how things were done historically. And in terms of politics in this country, it we, God, we're in need of that. If you listen to any interview with any cabinet minister or prime minister over the last two decades and you sort of put it through a voice synthesizer and you don't know whose name it is, they all sound almost exactly the same, Rob. You can barely tell who you're actually listening to because they're all products of the system, so they're never going to change it. And where we are now, as we said, there are so many things we've talked about. I feel like this has been quite positive. Podcast actually, thankfully and often that's not, you know, most of the time when you just start recording, reading political news, they call it doom scrolling bad news after bad news. But that's because people like you and I and people at Reform and people listening to this podcast, again, fundamentally were optimistic people. You don't become an entrepreneur unless you're optimistic. I mean we all know pessimistic people. How many people listening to this said, I'm gonna start a business or whatever. A number of people who tell you, including smart, high IQ people, bad idea. Have you not seen that company that fails, failed. A number of people told me you're, it's insane. Your idea is never going to work. And have you seen this company? You know, and of course there's all any number of reasons. And that's what Jobs talked about as well. He talked about the, really the fundamental difference between successful entrepreneurs, at least the ones in society's eyes that are successful. I remember you can go look this up on YouTube. He said it's basically this resilience, this willing to be almost irrationally willing to just keep moving forward and persist and persevere. Yeah, and again, I think that that's set us up well for politics in this country because you can be sure there are many, many people out there who want to see us fail and have quite a lot of resources and are willing to go to quite alarming lengths to, to do that so, you know, we've got to continue to work on our mission. We've got to stay positive. And so far it's working, Rob. And I think if we carry on, you know, people talk about how do we maintain the lead in the polls. I always tell the team, we're not here to maintain our lead. We need to build our lead. And the way that what. The way that's going to happen is through talking to people. The more people learn who we are, the more people learn who Nigel is and Richard, you know, the other mps, the more they realize that. Yeah, but these people, they're not those things that some of these newspapers claim that we were. They're just sort of common sense people who say things that make total sense. And it's actually insane that the boats keep coming or it's insane that if you're on benefits and you start trying to go to work, you have less money at the end of the month. Or it's insane that there are people after my question time, I did question time a few weeks ago that had no idea there was a cap on how many British bought, how many homegrown medical students could graduate in this country. And nobody can give me a satisfactory answer as to why that should be. So we just got to keep getting our message out there. And I think if we do that, I'm optimistic that we can turn this ship around.

And where can we follow you? Where are you most active online?

Twitter, mainly. Yeah, yeah. If you just go on X, what's your follower name it ISOF uk. But if you. My name's reasonably unusual, so if you type Ziyusuf, you'll find it.

Yeah. I've really enjoyed this. Thanks for bringing us to your headquarters and giving us all this time. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Rob. My pleasure.

This episode was brought to you by.

Disruptive Media, helping bold entrepreneurs stand out through podcasting, video and and social content. Visit disruptivemedia.co uk to learn more.