PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ My Journey
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Summary
In this episode of Brokernomics, I speak to the brilliant economist, philosopher, writer and all round brilliant bloke, Dan Farquharson. We talk about his early days in school and how he came to understand the world around him, how he got into economics, and what it's like to be a socialist and a right winger.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Brokernomics. Now in this episode I have for you an absolute treat. I'm
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going to be interviewing possibly one of the most inspiring, savvy, charming, debonair,
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insightful chaps that I have the pleasure of knowing. I refer of course to myself. Dan,
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welcome to Brokernomics. Well thank you Dan. I appreciate the honesty of that introduction
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and may I say it's an absolute pleasure to be working with somebody such as yourself. Really
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look forward to coming on the show. Well no, thank you for coming on. You're very much an
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audience favourite so it seemed only natural to get you on the show and I'm just delighted that
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you could be here, that you could make the times a lot. So look Dan, you're simply a fascinating
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person to speak to but really what I wanted to try and get at in this interview is I wanted to find
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out about you and more to the point we get lots of questions on Brokernomics about how it is that
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you put your thesis together, your framework, how it is that you look at markets and how you
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understand it and I kind of wanted to get to the bottom of how it is that you have come to see the
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world in this way and as well as just you know finding out a little bit more about you because
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you are quite honestly an endlessly fascinating person and I think we'd just like to hear your
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stories. So you know if it's all right with you, why don't we just get your journey?
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Well yes, sure Dan, yeah I mean I'd be perfectly happy to go through that so yeah I'll just kick
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off then shall I? Well all right, my journey, where to begin? Where to begin? Let's start with the
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earliest days. I have to give a special hat tip to my good old dad, good chap he is, he is a boomer
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but he's actually quite based and very very sensible so it's all kind of okay. Some of my earliest
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memories is you know he would present me with you know newspaper headlines or something like that of
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something that the you know the government was doing or the Labour Party was doing or something
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like that and you know their various plans and he would he would say well what do you think of that
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then boy? And you know I was, these would tend to be fairly you know right-leaning biased tabloids
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so I mean I would look at the framing of it and of course you know when you're when you're six years
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old you just think well yeah well that sounds very silly indeed I don't I don't like that so I'd say
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you know well that doesn't seem very sensible dad I don't I don't seem to like these Labour people
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and he would then give me a very broad smile and you know rub on the head and say well done boy
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I'm glad I'm not raising a bloody socialist. So yes the reason I have to thank him for that is
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because I never went through that phase that most people do of starting out a bit lefty and then
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getting more right wing as you get older. My good old man he made sure that I was you know right on
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the right from from basically day one which I think saved me a lot of time so so that was you know
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very much appreciated thanks dad for that. Also again early in my sort of political journey I
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best friend when I was a little kid was a socialist. I don't think it was really his fault his parents
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were socialists so you you sort of have to be given for this and I like arguing a lot with
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with basically anyone I can get I mean shopkeepers if I need to but you know ideally with a you know
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an intellectual equal is is good fun so we would spend many hours arguing about political concepts
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that we barely understood and that was jolly good fun and I was able to sort of take the
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the right wing position he could take the socialist position but you know back in those days I mean this
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is well whatever it is 40 odd years ago you you could be a right winger and socialist and still be
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friends that that was possible in a way that it's not today he he's now completed his journey he he's
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now very based and and on the right but he he did the thing that most people do which is to sort of get
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there by experience rather than having it drilled into it at a young age. So yes
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schooling you know I was I was also a fairly argumentative child at school to be fair although
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in my mind it was not being argumentative I was simply pointing out the logical fallacies in the
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assertions that the you know the various teaching staff were making this was sort of spelt out to
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me one time when we had a um a new teacher assigned to the school and uh I asked the first question
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and he immediately said what's your name and I told him and he said ah yes I was warned about you and I
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asked if if he was warned about anyone else in the school of whatever it was 350 something people
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and he was told no no I was just warned about you so um uh yes but um a good argument is the basis of
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of so much um growing up in the in in the 80s uh the the key difference uh that the the younger ones
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of you might not realize is is just how boring being a child in that period was because we didn't have
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the interweb um we did have tv channels but unless it was between like three and
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half four there wasn't any sort of programming that you'd find even remotely interesting
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so um bored quite a lot so I read I read a lot um as a young chap so I sort of finished off every
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book in the house um which to be fair didn't take that long um and then I would just you know from
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from a young age as soon as I could ride a bike go into town um get five books a week um take them
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home read them swap them out the next week so so so I read a lot um in fact I was a bit like my
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granddad in that respect um dear old granddad not with us anymore but um he had he had whole rooms
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literally stacked up to the door deep in books because he consumed so many books I've been I've
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been a bit like that um I do a quick a quick granddad story while while we're on the granddad because
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he was he was he was he was quite the man was was old Jim uh he was in the war and um so he so he
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enlisted uh went off to you know serve king and country and all of that and um was it a queen at
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the time I forget no it was king at the time and um he wrote he rose through the ranks of sergeant
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major fairly quickly and he was he was in the north italian campaign and um the the americans
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basically shared a base uh with the brits and um anyway at one point some american patrol had gone
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off and and they'd managed to get their hands on a on a luger and um you know the famous german gun
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and and they were they were sort of you know trying it out they'd lined up some beer bottles um
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you know a couple of hundred feet away and were trying to hit them with a luger anyway so granddad
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walks past and they're like hey sergeant major come and try this so um he he takes the gun and
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and he said it was so heavy he could barely lift the bloody thing um so he he kind of kept it low
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and then just swung it up and fired up a shot as he swung it up and then sort of carried on swinging
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it up to some sort of you know james bond pose um and and by sheer fluke he managed to take the bottle
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cap off the top of the beer bottle and leave the beer bottle standing on the wall
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so um they were absolutely amazed and sort of immediately asked him to do it again and he sort
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of just casually mentioned oh no i'm far too busy and um sort of you know hurried off uh because of
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course he knew he could never replicate that shot ever again um but he he was treated like something
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of an action hero on base after that so um yeah good old grandpas but anyway no back to me um
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yeah read a lot as a kid um don't read much anymore uh because well basically back in those days you just
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didn't have really any option you know you just what what else were you going to do i mean you can
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you can muck around with your mates for a bit but you know winter's evenings on a school night you
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there's not not really an awful lot you can do so so so read a lot don't really lot um anymore
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because you know these days you've got so many other options and you can go on youtube and watch
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the lotus eaters or brokonomics on lotus eaters.com um you know i spend a lot of time these days um
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interacting with um the ai programs just drilling down into an issue so so for me now a typical day when
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i'm not doing something else is is i'll line up a series of youtube videos just bang through them
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at double speed while i'm conversing with you know one of the ai programs on on something you know
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whatever it was the last topic i got into was um theoretical advancements in metallurgy um which
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for some reason you know piqued my interest on that particular day so uh you know these days i i'd
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probably barely read a book a week to be honest um guys in there are very good
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books everywhere uh back back in the lotus eaters office harry and bo in particular so harry's desk
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is just piles of books and a little space for a little piddly laptop thing in the middle and then
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bo sits in the corner next to me and he he's basically got like three bookshelves which are
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full and then he's piling up on top as well so yeah very very bookish people around here but um but
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you know i barely get through one a week at the moment um more about me um early on um
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dad was doing well um he was um he had a business which he started up and was building it up
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um but um parents were divorced because they were baby boomers and uh if you've ever met a baby boomer
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they're they're always divorced you know even if they don't need to they're just divorced so um so
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so lived with my mum and um she was a nurse and and we were quite poor um very poor actually growing
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up very poor and i basically concluded that i didn't like it it it wasn't for me um resolved that
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this state of affairs was not going to um stay in place because you know didn't suit me i was
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i i suppose you could say i was proto-trans rich um even at that early age so anyway me and this
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this aforementioned pal of mine from sort of eight or so um we got this we got this car washing
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business going you know we we we we managed to get a couple of buckets uh brushes and a bottle of
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car wash thing and and basically we would just walk around the more affluent neighborhoods of town
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um knocking on doors offering to offering to wash their car for five pounds a pop
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um which was a bit expensive um you know especially back then in whatever that was early 90s or late
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80s i i forget now um i mean these days you get your car done at one of those you know whirly
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brush things for for five pounds so you know inflation adjusted that would have been a fair bit back
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then but um i think people just appreciated seeing a youngster being industrious so you know
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most of them just kind of went for it um and you know we we'd often finish the day um you know
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somewhere between 100 and 200 pounds uh in our pocket you know split two ways you know you you'd
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often end up with like 75 80 queen um for a day's work which when you're eight and you're living in the
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late 80s i mean there's a lot of bloody money and um yeah i like this uh that that was that was very
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good so so so did that for a while um and then um uh then i got into into the fast food business
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so when i was what was it about 13 or so i shot up because um there was no seed oils back then so so
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i hit you know whatever it was six foot something by um by by sort of 12 13 or so so i lied about
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my age when i worked in one of those um you know fast food places um again um sort of very industrious
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worked lots of hours um i i wasn't that far off a full even though i was part-time i'm just sort of
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doing it evenings and weekends um i wasn't that far off full-time hours so again when you're when
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you're young when you're a teen early teenager um you know that was that was reasonably good money
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even though it was a bloody fast food place and i used to do the um what they call the night porting
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you know when you when you when you sort of basically take the machine that does the burgers you
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take it apart and clean that and put it back together again um because it was basically you you got
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paid extra um and you got lots of hours um that way reliably so um yes did did that for a while
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um schooling uh did did did perfectly well at um gcse's and a levels uh and then i elected to go to
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to southampton university uh for the simple reason that it was the only ivy league um university
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um within a short enough distance to home that i could drive back at the weekend to get my washing
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done for me so um probably wasn't the best criteria but i could also go back and i and by then i'd moved
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on to um you know working in um you know one of those um uh shops where they sell tvs and washing
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machines and stereos and all that sort of stuff so i could i i could come back there and and work at
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the weekend and earn some money because i quite like earning money um you know i had a had a bought
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myself a car when i was 17 and most people didn't have one and you know so that so it was all good
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and you know i basically liked being able to do whatever the hell i wanted to do so um yeah so so i did
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that um i was quite good at the sales thing yeah i was i was very good as so again um you know with
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that i was i i would usually be the top earner in the store even though i was only working weekends
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and the and the full-time staff would work an extra three or four days on top of it uh because of the
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commit because you've got a little bit of commission and i basically sold loads um i i started to realize
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that because what most people do in shops like these is they kind of wait for somebody to
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um call them over or or they go around aimlessly asking can i help you just browsing something like
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that uh but but but people who are seriously interested in buying something they've got a
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different set of um behavioral characteristics you know if if you look at it enough you can you can
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see that they just behave differently so i basically figured out what the what the sort of
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subtle behavioral clues were so that i could just sort of stand there in the corner and scan like a
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hawk and then and then when i realized okay that person is that person is you know in the expensive tv
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section uh but they're giving off the wrong signals it'd be a waste of time that guy's in the mid-range
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hi-fi section and i think he's a buyer so um i'm not going to waste my time on on you know tv man who's
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just whiling away a saturday i'm going to go to i'm going to mid-range hi-fi man so get in there
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have the sales technique down bish bash bosh get him done get the next one another kill after kill after
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kill so um yes so um yeah found out a bit of an affinity for sales that was was great um university
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itself um i mean it was great fun um some respects good bunch of lads there um
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to be fair though i did have two two major challenges at university um the first one was that
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i mean everybody knows this now that universities are full of um insufferable leftists
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but this would have been late 90s and and and i i hadn't quite appreciated that then we didn't
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have any social media remember back then so you know you just turn up so i thought i i did this um
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politics and economics course in my head uh what what was going to happen on that course is we would
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sit around and we would discuss why hong kong um outperforms uh um per capita against um you know
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bloody sweden or something you know you know socialist country what what i actually found was that
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um well for example i i had one lecture where the lecturers spent the entire lecture wasting our times
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reminiscing about the fact that you could you could literally go and sit in the same chair
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at the british library that karl marx had once sat in and he spent a lecture on that about where it
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was and the times that he'd sat there and the thoughts that he'd had whilst sitting in the same
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physical chair as karl marx now as you can imagine um not resonating entirely with me
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um the other aspect of it was um that um for some reason academic economists have this massive
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inferiority complex where they think they should be a science but clearly they're not because you know
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if you get a degree in economics it's a um it's a bachelor of science which should clearly be a
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bachelor of arts because it's all about making arguments it's about understanding people and
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and systems and cause and effect um but they wanted it to be a science for whatever reason
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so they were endlessly devising um more and more complicated formulas
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to try and basically predict behaviors in economics and it was a nonsense because you know you'd be
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presented with this massively complicated formula and then you know there would be an e in it or
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something and you'd say okay well what does the e stand for and that would be oh that's human
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behavior but right well how do you quantify that then no we can't right so what's the point of the
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equation then what are you doing um i i i continued my my argumentative streak in in my very first
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was it the very second economics lecture uh i managed to get hauled up in front of the authorities
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because basically the the lecturer was was making the arguments that minimum wage um does not increase
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unemployment and i was like well of course it does and and poor man was trying to give a lecture um
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a socialist lecture and and i was just arguing with him it's like well look and i i i explained all
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the reasons because basically what a minimum wage does is it makes is it is it doesn't increase the
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wages of people it makes it illegal for anyone whose labor is worth less than a certain level to have a job
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um and he was trying to give me some bloody formula and i was trying to give him real world examples of
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of how he yeah how he does exactly that and you've got to factor i won't go into the whole bloody thing
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now um but yeah so he took my name and um that that began the um you know the first time i was reported
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to the um um uh the university higher-ups for for being a bit of a difficult bastard which which to be
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fair i had my whole life anyway um so the point is um they didn't actually do that well at university
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um i mean i i i had moments of being good i mean if if so so for example in in the first year you
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had to do a a statistics course and apparently on that i got the i got the highest grade that they
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had ever had a on that course i saw something like 98 and a half percent or something which is
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quite good for an exam um that presumably means i got one question wrong and i still don't know what
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it is um but but basically because of this kind of um this weird uh combination of leftist globalist
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thought combined with this sad attempt to turn economics into a science where clearly it's an art
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i just i just did not connect with it at all so um you know i i remember the halfway through the third
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year getting called into my whatever it is overseer's office and he was saying um you you do realize
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you're going to be lucky to scrape a third right which is which is not good at all um i mean what's
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the point of you just completely bloody wasted three years if you do that so um yes what wasn't happy
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with that so in the last semester of the third year i kind of pulled it out a bit and and i decided
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okay which is basically what i should have done the entire time is i decided oh i'll just play the
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bloody game then um i'll just i'll just tell them whatever they sodding want to hear and and basically
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in in that last semester of the third year i was consistently getting high firsts in everything i did
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which was enough to take me from the bottom end of a third to um most of the way up a 2-2 i would
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have liked to have got the 2-1 but um yeah it's a bit weak really isn't it a 2-2 um but i mean it could
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have been a lot worse it could have been a third so um yeah a bit of a shame and i really should have
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been playing the whole game from the beginning and i think that young students today i think i think
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they understand uh because they've been pre-warned by social media that when you go to university is
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going to be leftist dogman crap the whole way through and and you've just got to sort of play
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along with it but i didn't know that at the time so i bristled against it um somewhat so yeah um
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university was a bit of a waste of time um and then having a 2-2 that you know that that shuts you
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down from going into the upper epsilons of of finance jobs which you know when you wanted i knew i
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wanted a finance job because as previously established i like money and i thought well if
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if you want money why mess around with bloody widgets or something you know just just go and
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work directly with the money uh so that was a plan so yeah so that was the first challenge of
00:23:38.860
university the other challenge of university is that um i was an ugly bastard now i don't see this much
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i don't see this much anymore um so presumably new cures have been have been discovered um but back
00:23:58.120
in um back in the sort of 80s and 90s um you know if if you got acne bad you know it was
00:24:05.840
nothing they could do i mean you know you just just had to kind of put up with it to be honest
00:24:11.040
um and and so yes in in a room of 100 people i i would probably be the ugliest person at 100 out of
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100 um you know i look like i've been infected by nerve or i look like i had um you know head
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butted my way through the display cabinet at the wuhan lab um it was annoying because there really
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wasn't a damn bloody thing you could do about it you just kind of had to wait with you know to get
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old for it to go away so so that was very irritating um and and the reason it irritated me the most
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is because um universities are full of um 19 and 20 year old young women everywhere and
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i was an absolute state which which was no good so i i did what i could in those circumstances went to
00:25:02.960
the gym a lot and then my plan was that through a combination of tight t-shirts dubious nightclub
00:25:10.680
lighting um really working on perfecting my game i i could i could squeeze through with the minimum
00:25:18.860
acceptable level of panani for those three years and and just about managed that so um yeah managed to
00:25:27.760
get through it but no those were um those were wasted years against the potential lean years lean years
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but uh well you you everybody faces adversity in life and and i think that was mine right so um
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yes finished university um decided that i wanted to work in finance very good uh lacked the degree because
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um i i i hadn't been playing that whole game thing correctly probably should have done it so i thought
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um oh sorry i'll do politics then so um i i'd been involved in in party politics a bit and it just so
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happened that when i was coming out of university uh there was a um a leadership challenge for the
00:26:11.740
conservative party yes don't judge i was i was a member back then and um if if if you're old enough to
00:26:17.820
remember michael portillo was going for the leadership up against um ken clark and in duncan
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smith and um portillo was the was the chap who had all the charisma and energy and um you know i
00:26:33.500
thought okay well he's a sensible type so i sort of networked my way into that and um basically he had
00:26:40.120
this uh on barton street which is a street just around the corner from uh from parliament uh very nice
00:26:46.340
house apparently it was worth 12 million at the time but it would probably be worth 80 if not a lot
00:26:53.140
more uh today um this this guy had basically given over his house as the sort of campaign hub uh for
00:27:01.520
for this uh for this poor tillow chap so uh yes when work there and um however long it was maybe it was
00:27:09.680
two months um that sort of leadership campaign something like that uh it was interesting lots
00:27:15.320
me got to meet lots of um interesting people i'm trying to figure out if i met rupert lowe there
00:27:22.240
was was rupert lower conservative back there i definitely the reason i ask is because i think
00:27:29.240
rupert lowe did spend time being the chairman of of um southampton football club and i definitely met
00:27:36.100
one chairman of the southampton football club i remember because he offered me a job um you know
00:27:41.960
i got because people coming in at interesting people coming in out all the time um and and and i would
00:27:47.900
chat along with them and a number of them would think oh like this young man um lots of potential
00:27:53.780
there so you know maybe i'll offer him a position and i do remember i was offered a job at
00:27:58.280
um this football club but i had to refuse it on the basis that i don't know anything about
00:28:04.140
football and i don't find it remotely interesting i think it's a silly game um so some areas of the
00:28:09.500
things sort of came up there um it was also interesting that oh yeah i met um uh what's her
00:28:15.780
name oh pretty pretty patel um recently the home secretary i thought that she was a vapid um social
00:28:23.320
climber um and hold to that view in fact um but in fact yeah i met i met a number of the characters
00:28:29.820
who would later appear in this last but one run of government the last tory run and um at the time
00:28:40.280
yes my my impression was of a lot of them was weak um the older characters the grandees they were
00:28:49.820
quite good but i mean they've all died off now um but the but the younger cohort coming through i
00:28:54.460
didn't think much of them and was proved correct in that in that view quite evidently uh but yes i
00:29:02.900
the other thing about working on a political campaign was you got to see how much the papers lied
00:29:07.360
about everything um you know they just basically make stuff one particularly poignant example
00:29:15.580
was uh the campaign received a a fairly large check from somebody then anyway they looked at this and
00:29:22.800
we thought we can't really it's just too much can't take it so uh yeah they had a bit of a discussion
00:29:28.080
um and then the check was handed to me uh and and they said right okay go across london and return
00:29:36.280
this check to the owner and say thank you very much appreciate blah blah blah um can't take it
00:29:43.800
reasons reasons and while i was on the way there i stopped at a newsstand to see the first edition
00:29:51.500
or because it was late in the day about this one see the first edition of of tomorrow's newspapers
00:29:56.580
and the tabloids were going after this um and and they basically had everything wrong i mean they
00:30:05.200
so there was a nub of it that was true which was you know a check had been sent or something like that
00:30:10.980
but every detail in the story was wrong the amount was wrong um you know the whole sequence of events
00:30:20.320
was wrong and i'm and i i'm stood there reading this newspaper um about this story with the bloody
00:30:27.640
check in my pocket at the time it's like they just made it up you know they they took the germ or
00:30:35.460
something they just made it up so um you know i mean that that was the first of many examples where
00:30:40.340
i've come to see that that legacy media is just quite honestly it's trash if you would like to see
00:30:47.440
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