TRIGGERnometry - How Britain is Destroying Its Economy - Daniel Priestley

00:00:00.840 It's the greatest time in history to be an entrepreneur.

00:00:03.440 There's never been better time.

00:00:05.200 Minus the crime, London's just an awesome city.

00:00:08.360 I think Britain's lost more millionaires than any other country in the world.

00:00:11.340 Why do you think that is?

00:00:12.320 If you create a game where entrepreneurs can't really operate or win,

00:00:16.320 you lose those entrepreneurs.

00:00:19.040 1% of people earn 14% of the income but pay 30% of the taxes.

00:00:22.380 So let's just get that because I think most people don't get this.

00:00:25.720 The top 1% that we always are told are the evil blah, blah, blah.

00:00:29.260 They pay 30% of the income tax.

00:00:33.360 You know, anyone who has come from Eastern European countries, Soviet Union,

00:00:38.060 you know that state-run big government just doesn't work.

00:00:42.560 Our ancestors, your grandparents, great-grandparents,

00:00:46.120 they would trade places with you in a heartbeat.

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00:01:55.200 Daniel, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:56.580 Thank you very much for having me.

00:01:57.800 It's been a long time coming.

00:01:59.380 Really looking forward to our conversation.

00:02:00.940 And before we get into economics and finance

00:02:03.460 and entrepreneurship and business,

00:02:05.080 which we want to talk to you about.

00:02:06.420 And of course, the various tax policies

00:02:08.280 that are being proposed and talked about here

00:02:10.340 in Britain and elsewhere.

00:02:11.760 Just tell us a little bit about your background.

00:02:13.520 Who are you?

00:02:14.100 How do you happen to be here?

00:02:15.320 Yeah, so I started my first company when I was 21 years old.

00:02:18.100 I've been an entrepreneur ever since.

00:02:19.860 I've had multiple startups.

00:02:21.920 I've had businesses.

00:02:25.340 As you can tell, I'm Australian.

00:02:26.820 So I launched my first company in Australia.

00:02:28.400 But 19 years ago, I moved to London.

00:02:30.740 And I've had multiple startups here.

00:02:32.360 Today, I have a group of software companies,

00:02:34.840 a training business.

00:02:36.500 I've owned some agencies.

00:02:39.080 I've built companies and sold companies.

00:02:41.000 I've done business in Australia, Singapore, UK, USA, and Canada.

00:02:47.000 And yeah, just basically working a lot with entrepreneurs.

00:02:50.840 One of the things I've been doing is running an entrepreneur accelerator,

00:02:53.480 where we work with 5,500 businesses to take them through a program on entrepreneurship.

00:03:00.220 I work with a lot of entrepreneurs because we have software for entrepreneurs.

00:03:03.460 So I hear a lot and get a lot of data.

00:03:06.440 And over the last 10, 15 years, I've been writing a lot of books about entrepreneurship.

00:03:10.760 So I've written six books on entrepreneurship.

00:03:14.840 So I guess you could say I'm up to my elbows in all things entrepreneur related.

00:03:18.820 And you've also become quite a significant commentator on economics and government policy

00:03:24.400 about certain things, because I think it ties into entrepreneurship,

00:03:28.360 which is a really important part of the economy.

00:03:31.200 People who create new things, create jobs for other people.

00:03:34.260 And it does feel like that's become a big part of the conversation here in Britain,

00:03:39.520 because it feels to me, and you're probably better informed,

00:03:44.240 that we're actually doing at a government level, at a policy level,

00:03:47.560 a lot of things to discourage people to take risks, to create companies,

00:03:52.040 to generate wealth here in Britain.

00:03:55.800 Is that fair to say?

00:03:57.320 Yeah, it is fair to say.

00:03:59.000 You know, entrepreneurs want to be positive.

00:04:01.620 These are people who, myself included, love freedom, love autonomy.

00:04:07.300 They're trying to change their life.

00:04:09.300 They're trying to do something that improves their wealth and their circumstances.

00:04:14.440 And these are people who love solving meaningful problems in the world.

00:04:19.000 They're incredibly hardworking.

00:04:21.380 They're wired towards solving problems.

00:04:25.340 They're wired towards adding value for others.

00:04:27.720 But ultimately, if you create the circumstances where you just can't get ahead,

00:04:32.600 where if you win, you lose it all in taxes,

00:04:36.360 where if you try and raise money, you create tax problems for yourself.

00:04:40.160 If you create a game where entrepreneurs can't really operate or win,

00:04:44.400 you lose those entrepreneurs.

00:04:46.840 And the other thing that has really happened is that in 2020,

00:04:51.960 the prime minister comes on TV and says,

00:04:53.900 hey, you've all got to work at home and you've got to do lockdowns

00:04:56.340 and you have to figure out how you're going to basically live

00:04:59.840 without leaving the front door.

00:05:02.780 And in that year, 2020, 2021,

00:05:06.120 most entrepreneurs discovered that they could run their businesses remotely.

00:05:09.460 They were forced to figure it out.

00:05:11.160 So a lot of entrepreneurs moved their businesses into the cloud.

00:05:14.180 They moved their teams remote.

00:05:16.440 They started investing into building software

00:05:18.700 and putting software in place to be able to run their businesses online.

00:05:22.260 By 22, 23, a lot of successful entrepreneurs

00:05:26.220 who were running offline businesses

00:05:27.840 had put everything in place to be basically living and working from anywhere.

00:05:32.340 Even traditional businesses like restaurants and gyms,

00:05:35.480 you now have the systems in place to essentially live remotely

00:05:39.160 and run those businesses remotely.

00:05:41.480 So COVID lockdowns really forced the entrepreneurial community

00:05:45.740 to figure out how to be digital and how to be anywhere

00:05:48.720 and how to be in the cloud.

00:05:50.080 So what we now have is that we've left that side behind us.

00:05:55.100 That era has now hopefully passed.

00:05:57.240 But we now have a situation where we're putting all these taxes on entrepreneurs.

00:06:01.300 But a lot of entrepreneurs are saying,

00:06:02.920 hey, wait a second.

00:06:03.960 If this isn't the best place to run a business,

00:06:06.160 if I don't have to necessarily be here,

00:06:08.920 where would be better?

00:06:10.520 So in the same way that if your local supermarket

00:06:14.900 started putting all of its prices up,

00:06:16.480 you might go, oh, actually, maybe I should shop somewhere else.

00:06:18.480 Maybe I should get a better deal.

00:06:20.380 So a lot of entrepreneurs are saying, hey, maybe I should be in Dubai

00:06:23.440 or maybe I should be in Italy or maybe I should be in the USA

00:06:26.800 or maybe I should run my business from a beach in Thailand.

00:06:31.100 And all of that's actually possible.

00:06:32.940 It's not hard to do now.

00:06:34.900 So we now find ourselves in a really awkward situation

00:06:38.000 where we do have a lot of the value-creating employers, innovators,

00:06:44.300 who have a lot more choice as to where they're going to run their business for.

00:06:47.460 And we see that in the statistics.

00:06:49.260 So I think Britain has lost more millionaires than any other country in the world,

00:06:52.180 except maybe China.

00:06:53.340 But if you take a per capita comparison,

00:06:55.260 you can tell how bad the situation has become.

00:06:57.700 And is that because of the things you're describing

00:07:00.340 or is anything else going on?

00:07:01.640 Because I imagine if you're quite a wealthy person

00:07:04.780 or if you've done well for yourself,

00:07:07.400 actually, you're probably quite well insulated

00:07:10.280 against some of the issues that most people day-to-day deal with in Britain,

00:07:14.500 you know, whether it's like street crime or whatever.

00:07:17.440 You're sort of protected from it.

00:07:18.700 You probably live in a comfortable, nice place.

00:07:22.220 And actually, the upside of being in Britain is very high.

00:07:25.440 You know, the infrastructure, the theatre, the restaurants,

00:07:28.260 all of that stuff really is very special here.

00:07:30.560 So I know that a lot of people are quite reluctant to leave,

00:07:33.520 and yet they are leaving.

00:07:34.720 Why do you think that is?

00:07:35.760 Well, that's a really great point.

00:07:36.800 London is one of the most exciting cities in the world.

00:07:38.940 You know, it's an amazing city, especially when it's well run.

00:07:42.660 And if there's not crime, you know, minus the crime,

00:07:47.560 London's just an awesome city.

00:07:49.400 It's just such a great, especially London on a sunny day.

00:07:51.760 It's very hard to beat.

00:07:54.360 But yeah, look, there's a few things that relate to very wealthy people.

00:07:58.260 Which is, we changed the non-DOM status.

00:08:01.620 And it's a really misunderstood set of rules.

00:08:05.620 If you have, and you know, London was presented as a very global city,

00:08:10.540 a city that you can be here and run a global business from here.

00:08:14.200 So a lot of people who run global businesses like being in London,

00:08:17.140 and they like running their empire, you know, that's around the world

00:08:20.260 and being based in London.

00:08:22.420 But if you create a system where everything that you do everywhere in the world

00:08:26.300 is also going to be taxed in the UK,

00:08:29.140 then it makes very little sense when other countries don't have that system.

00:08:34.880 You know, if you, let's say, have, let's say you've got a manufacturing business

00:08:38.900 and it's in the family and it's in India,

00:08:42.340 then you're an Indian person who's chosen to live in London.

00:08:45.200 You don't want to have a situation where everything that's happening

00:08:47.520 in your family business over here is also being taxed by HMRC.

00:08:51.500 If you were to die in this country, we have some of the highest death taxes,

00:08:54.840 inheritance taxes.

00:08:56.120 So you then find yourself in a situation where you could lose 40% of everything

00:09:00.160 that you own just because, you know, of the death taxes here.

00:09:05.420 Death taxes or inheritance taxes when it relates to entrepreneurship

00:09:08.360 is very, very dangerous because fire sailing a business

00:09:11.380 to pay those kind of taxes crashes the value of the business

00:09:15.680 and you actually essentially destroy the business.

00:09:18.480 You know, businesses are very delicate things.

00:09:20.000 So, you know, if you overtax them, if you put in regulations,

00:09:25.620 often they're just not competitive.

00:09:27.260 We live in a global world where you have to be globally competitive

00:09:30.920 and, you know, that's what's happening.

00:09:34.900 Britain has tipped this balance of being a globally competitive

00:09:39.020 and desirable place to run a business to really just tipping across

00:09:43.160 to being, oh, there's too many things, the crime, the taxes,

00:09:46.280 the inheritance tax, the non-DOM status, you know, the ability to trade,

00:09:53.380 all that sort of stuff.

00:09:54.220 It's just kind of tipped over to where a lot of people who are from

00:09:58.200 around the world have just gone, oh, actually,

00:10:00.200 I can either go back to where I'm from or I can move on

00:10:03.620 to the next entrepreneurial hub.

00:10:05.140 A lot of people will be listening and watching this and going,

00:10:08.920 well, you know, these people are super rich.

00:10:10.760 Like, you know, the rich don't pay, the rich need to pay their fair share.

00:10:14.320 That's a phrase that I hear a lot.

00:10:16.520 And I actually genuinely don't, I mean,

00:10:20.520 to say that someone should pay their fair share without ever quantifying it

00:10:23.900 is kind of a slogan that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

00:10:28.040 I don't always know what people mean and therefore I don't know if I agree or not.

00:10:31.640 What's your take on that idea?

00:10:34.040 The rich need to pay their fair share.

00:10:36.020 Well, let's kind of break it down first principles.

00:10:39.420 The government spends about £18,000 per person, man, woman and child.

00:10:43.680 So government spending is very, very high.

00:10:46.480 45% of the UK economy is now government spending.

00:10:49.600 So we are essentially a, you know, 55% real businesses

00:10:54.640 and independent businesses that could run anywhere

00:10:56.960 and then 45%, which is spending from the government.

00:10:59.900 So that's very, very high.

00:11:00.880 It's historically high.

00:11:02.060 It's about as high as it's been since World War II.

00:11:04.340 So a peacetime high for government spending.

00:11:07.400 So we have this huge government and it's £18,000 per person.

00:11:11.680 So you might say that anything north of £18,000 per person,

00:11:16.080 you are paying your fair share.

00:11:17.380 You're covering your lot.

00:11:18.160 If you're paying more than £18,000 per person,

00:11:20.620 now bear in mind, if you've got a family of four,

00:11:23.480 you've got £72,000 to pay in taxes, right?

00:11:25.620 So it's quite a lot.

00:11:26.680 So you could say, oh, anyone who pays more than that

00:11:29.120 is covering their fair share and then some.

00:11:31.600 I don't think that's how people think about it.

00:11:33.900 That's how people are thinking about it.

00:11:35.340 But then you could say, oh, isn't it interesting

00:11:37.920 that 1% of people earn 14% of the income, which is high,

00:11:41.860 but they pay 30% of the taxes.

00:11:43.660 So they're earning 14% and they're paying double the equivalent in taxes

00:11:47.900 because as soon as you hit a certain threshold,

00:11:50.420 the taxes just go sky high.

00:11:52.560 And I can imagine that for someone who's never hit that threshold,

00:11:57.520 you probably go, why are these people complaining?

00:11:59.980 Because Britain actually is one of the best places in the world

00:12:05.200 to have a fairly low income.

00:12:07.160 So if you have a moderate income, if you're smack bang in the middle,

00:12:11.100 and especially historically since World War II,

00:12:13.660 this is the best time to be earning average.

00:12:16.000 You know, the tax-free threshold of £12,000,

00:12:20.960 the 20% rate up to £50,000, you know, all of that is historically low.

00:12:27.260 So, you know, back post-Warrior, you paid about 35%

00:12:32.520 on a moderate income.

00:12:35.400 So you sit there and go, oh, why are these people complaining

00:12:38.600 about taxes?

00:12:39.760 But here's what the UK have done.

00:12:41.060 They've basically said as soon as you enter that top bracket,

00:12:43.940 we basically double it.

00:12:46.160 Everything doubles.

00:12:47.280 So if you're a dentist and you run a dental practice,

00:12:50.280 you know, you might be paying reasonable taxes

00:12:51.940 as you approach $100,000 a year.

00:12:54.080 As soon as you get over $100,000 a year,

00:12:56.000 it jumps to this weird bracket where you're paying 60%

00:12:58.480 of every marginal pound.

00:13:00.060 And then as soon as you get up over $150,000,

00:13:02.640 you're paying 45% on this,

00:13:04.120 and then you're paying all these other taxes.

00:13:05.820 If you try and take some money out of your business,

00:13:08.080 you end up paying the corporation tax,

00:13:11.400 and then you pay the 45% tax

00:13:13.220 because you've now taken it into your personal name.

00:13:16.740 Then you pay 20% when you spend it.

00:13:19.540 So there's like basically as soon as you get up

00:13:21.820 into this top bracket, it's just crazy levels of tax.

00:13:25.560 So what happens is, you know,

00:13:27.360 if you're talking about fair share,

00:13:28.560 14% of people earn, sorry, 1% of people earn 14%

00:13:32.140 of the income but pay 30% of the taxes.

00:13:34.060 So let's just get that because I think most people

00:13:36.020 don't get this.

00:13:37.260 The top 1% that we always are told are the evil,

00:13:40.240 blah, blah, blah.

00:13:41.120 Yeah.

00:13:41.360 They pay 30% of the income tax.

00:13:43.740 Yeah.

00:13:44.320 In the country.

00:13:45.060 And it's not just income tax.

00:13:47.420 All tax.

00:13:48.560 It's also, if you look at who's paying corporation tax,

00:13:53.420 it's also the same group of people.

00:13:55.260 And it's, if you say who's paying stamp duty,

00:13:57.440 well, it's those people as well.

00:13:58.760 Right.

00:13:59.000 And these people probably, I mean, I know it's,

00:14:02.080 I know the world's not fair, right? 0.99

00:14:03.280 It sucks. 0.97

00:14:03.700 The world isn't fair. 0.98

00:14:04.840 But it is that group of people who are spending the most,

00:14:07.660 paying the most in VAT, paying the most in other taxes.

00:14:10.160 They generate the most in corporate tax.

00:14:12.840 It's the same group of people who pay all the taxes.

00:14:15.660 Right.

00:14:16.040 Because when you put it like that, if 1% of people,

00:14:19.660 and look, they're doing very well, right?

00:14:21.840 But if they're paying 30% of all the tax intake in the country,

00:14:27.660 I don't know how you can argue that's not fair.

00:14:30.240 It's historically high.

00:14:31.680 Yeah.

00:14:32.600 And I've been not very, I've been poor.

00:14:36.420 I've been really poor.

00:14:37.040 I've been wealthy at times.

00:14:38.780 There's times when I've done all right.

00:14:40.280 It's never really made much sense to me,

00:14:42.340 the attitude we have in this country to people who are successful.

00:14:45.840 And I think partly is, I think I've said this before,

00:14:48.200 I think because Britain had a landed gentry 1.00

00:14:51.080 and an aristocracy.

00:14:52.520 That's it.

00:14:52.880 A lot of people think that if you have wealth,

00:14:56.940 it's because your granddad was rich

00:14:58.920 and you now have ill-gotten gains that you did nothing to do

00:15:03.140 and all you do is spend your time playing polo or whatever.

00:15:06.720 Believe it or not, that category of person, globally,

00:15:10.640 the UK is actually very, very low for inherited wealth.

00:15:15.520 Really?

00:15:16.000 Yeah.

00:15:16.280 We have very high inheritance taxes.

00:15:18.040 We do have a small aristocratic elite who still exist.

00:15:24.540 But no, the vast majority of people in the UK are self-made.

00:15:27.760 If they're millionaires, they're self-made.

00:15:29.760 And let's just clarify what that means as well, Daniel,

00:15:31.980 because self-made effectively, I'm sure there are exceptions to this,

00:15:35.300 but by and large in a capitalist system,

00:15:37.680 if you've made a million pounds,

00:15:40.180 that means you've provided millions and millions of pounds worth of value

00:15:43.640 to other people who've been willing to pay you money for it effectively, right?

00:15:47.260 Yeah, well, when we say self-made, we're talking about you didn't inherit it.

00:15:50.940 Right.

00:15:51.180 You weren't given large amounts of gifts or loans by parents or family.

00:15:54.820 You didn't have some sort of amazing, massive head start in life.

00:15:58.920 You might have, you know, look, you might be from a two-family,

00:16:02.080 upper-middle-class household, but you still go off and start your own business

00:16:06.420 and you start your own thing.

00:16:07.920 So there's different categories of self-made.

00:16:10.560 Look, I've got friends and clients who literally started out being born in slums

00:16:16.460 in Philippines or India and they've become self-made millionaires.

00:16:20.980 You know, that's the wonderful world that we live in at the moment.

00:16:23.100 It is actually possible in the world that we currently live in

00:16:25.600 to start with absolutely nothing and become a multimillionaire.

00:16:30.020 But self-made in this country just simply means you didn't inherit it,

00:16:33.060 you didn't get any major loans or gifts in order to get onto the wealth ladder.

00:16:38.420 And then if you think about entrepreneurs as a group,

00:16:41.780 the only way that you can actually be successful as an entrepreneur

00:16:44.340 is that you solve a valuable problem that other people want to exchange their cash for.

00:16:48.740 You know, we have a free market system where ultimately I'm going to build something

00:16:52.820 or develop something and you're going to say, hey, you know,

00:16:55.580 I would rather that than my £100.

00:16:58.240 So I'm going to give you my £100 and you're going to give me the thing

00:17:00.680 that you've built the service or the product or the software, you know.

00:17:05.500 So ultimately, like, you know, for example, for me, I've created software.

00:17:09.700 One of the companies that I've got, scoreapp.com,

00:17:12.860 we have over 8,000 businesses around the world that are paying subscribers

00:17:17.220 to our software.

00:17:18.320 So they, every single month, have the choice to cancel their software

00:17:23.140 or subscribe or pay even more.

00:17:25.040 And they get so much value from what we deliver that they continue to pay.

00:17:29.740 And we have to keep delivering more and more value every single month

00:17:33.420 so that they don't want to cancel.

00:17:35.720 You know, so, yeah, so the whole system as to how I've made my money

00:17:41.000 is by coming up with ways to add value to people at scale.

00:17:43.680 Daniel, do you think also part of the problem is, is that cost of living crisis,

00:17:49.760 housing crisis, everything seems to be in crisis in this country.

00:17:53.960 And people are quite understandably angry and frustrated about that.

00:17:58.460 They feel like the system is rigged.

00:18:00.800 So it's a potentially good vote winner.

00:18:04.920 Yeah, of course.

00:18:05.700 Yeah, absolutely.

00:18:07.200 At these sorts of moments, we see populism on both sides.

00:18:10.420 You might have a vote winner that is, you know, anti-migrant,

00:18:13.600 or you might have a vote winner that is anti-rich.

00:18:16.140 Any of those highly emotional things.

00:18:18.060 People want to blame somebody.

00:18:20.880 There's a couple of things that are happening.

00:18:23.620 We, you know, there's this term called late-stage capitalism.

00:18:28.140 I don't really believe in it.

00:18:29.320 I think there's late-stage government spending.

00:18:31.640 And what happens is that as capitalism works,

00:18:35.060 the government figures out how to capture more and more of it.

00:18:37.380 It leverages up as much debt with its central bank as it possibly can.

00:18:40.840 We get 100% GDP to debt ratio, and then we spiral out of control.

00:18:45.900 You are then servicing, you're spending more money on debt servicing

00:18:49.360 than education or military defense.

00:18:51.540 So you're just paying interest payments at that point.

00:18:54.920 Lots and lots of interest payments.

00:18:56.460 And where we are right now is late-stage government spending

00:18:59.560 and government debt.

00:19:00.740 And they all do it.

00:19:01.840 They all overspend, overdebt.

00:19:03.920 You know, 45% of the economy shouldn't be government spending.

00:19:06.800 That's not a healthy way to be.

00:19:09.140 So we're in that zone there.

00:19:11.560 There's something else that's happening at the moment, which is...

00:19:14.740 Can I just stop you there?

00:19:15.800 So you explain that situation really beautifully.

00:19:18.920 What does that mean for the average person on the street

00:19:21.700 living in that type of society or that economic system where it's 100%?

00:19:27.460 Well, what it means is if you had a house and that house had credit card debts

00:19:32.420 and every single month you're earning money, but a lot of your money is going to the interest

00:19:38.020 on the credit card, it's non-productive payments.

00:19:41.060 Basically, you're paying money out, but you're not getting anything back from it

00:19:45.100 because you're just paying the interest on the credit card.

00:19:47.880 So we have a system where the government is able to bring money forward from the future

00:19:54.440 using a central bank, right?

00:19:57.600 And they make a promise and they basically say,

00:19:59.860 we promise that if you give us this money now, we will indebt our citizens into the future

00:20:05.060 and forevermore, they will have to service that debt.

00:20:08.220 And we're hoping that bringing money back from the future or from the future,

00:20:12.360 we hope that we can spend it wisely so that that creates growth

00:20:16.240 and it won't matter that the citizens are indebted, right?

00:20:19.720 So what they're doing is they're basically just burdening future generations little bit

00:20:24.540 by little bit.

00:20:25.840 And that's great.

00:20:27.400 If you bring money back from the future and you spend it on something very productive,

00:20:31.460 if you build highways and bridges and if you build schools and hospitals

00:20:36.080 and you basically build a society that's working, that was a smart decision

00:20:40.500 to bring that money back now so that we can have those things now

00:20:43.440 that create productivity in the future.

00:20:45.300 And sure enough, let's say you bring $10 billion back from the future,

00:20:48.580 you make a promise that we will service the debt and then you spend it wisely

00:20:52.620 and then, oh, $10 billion is nothing because look at all the productivity gains we got, right?

00:20:56.640 It was worth spending that money.

00:20:57.860 It was worth that activity.

00:20:59.240 Now, if you bring $10 billion from the future back here

00:21:02.880 and you don't spend it wisely, too bad, so sad.

00:21:06.680 You have to keep servicing that debt.

00:21:08.740 So roughly speaking, government debt, let's say it's 5%, right?

00:21:12.140 We now have $2 trillion worth of government debt.

00:21:14.620 That means we have $100 billion a year split between all of our working people

00:21:19.320 that has to be paid and it's just interest.

00:21:21.820 It just, right?

00:21:22.800 We never pay it down, right?

00:21:24.240 We never get rid of it.

00:21:25.160 It's just interest payments every single year.

00:21:28.660 We'll be back with our guest in a minute.

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00:22:53.820 And now, back to the interview.

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00:23:26.100 I suppose you're looking at it, if it was like a household, eventually it comes a point

00:23:32.680 where you can no longer service a debt and you go bankrupt, you lose your assets.

00:23:38.460 What does that mean for a country?

00:23:40.180 Well, countries can't die.

00:23:41.200 So what happens with countries is that the difference with a household is we have to project based

00:23:48.740 on the fact that you're going to get old and die.

00:23:50.740 So countries don't get old and die.

00:23:53.360 Countries, the way that they...

00:23:55.600 If you go to the bank and you say, I want to take out a loan, they say, well, how much

00:24:00.740 do you earn, right?

00:24:01.740 And they look at your income.

00:24:02.720 When we go to countries, they say, what's your population?

00:24:06.940 How many people do you have?

00:24:08.360 So what countries tend to do is they say, quick, get more people in, right?

00:24:12.180 Let's let more people in because the central...

00:24:13.780 That sounds familiar.

00:24:14.660 Yeah, it would never happen in real world, right?

00:24:17.340 But they basically say, when we go to the central bank, we need to show that our population's

00:24:22.220 growing because the central bank calculation is how many people have you got and is your

00:24:27.500 population growing?

00:24:28.500 And if your population grows, what they do is really simple mathematics.

00:24:32.960 They go, what is your GDP per capita, right?

00:24:36.360 And then what is your population?

00:24:38.420 So they basically do their calculations on that.

00:24:41.300 So the government, rather than dying, they bring people in if they can't get productivity.

00:24:46.040 They can sell stuff off.

00:24:48.140 They can perpetually raise taxes to the point where it becomes totally oppressive and there's

00:24:54.180 no joy in the economy because we're just paying off this debt.

00:24:57.660 And it really doesn't change unless there's some massive change in productivity or if

00:25:03.300 the country has to refinance its debts or something along those lines.

00:25:08.640 But countries can't die.

00:25:10.120 So in this new type of economics, you can just keep printing money, keep printing money

00:25:14.540 and hope for the best and see what happens.

00:25:16.120 But surely there will come a point where it becomes unsustainable.

00:25:20.080 For instance, if you hit hyperinflation, for example.

00:25:22.740 They will, yeah.

00:25:25.580 So there are countries where that happens, right?

00:25:28.060 We've seen that socialist countries all the time have this collapsing moment where the

00:25:32.220 currency goes out of control.

00:25:34.360 So we've had a number of things that have happened over the last, since World War II,

00:25:38.700 we did a number of things that were a little bit interesting boosts to the economy or one-off

00:25:44.580 tricks to the economy.

00:25:45.420 So, for example, when the blitz happened and everything was bombed, it was wise to then 0.83

00:25:51.820 get everybody working to rebuild the country.

00:25:54.000 So we had a productivity boom around rebuilding after the war.

00:25:57.520 And that was good economically, rebuilding activities.

00:26:01.180 Like Dubai, they're putting buildings up, so it creates a lot of wealth.

00:26:04.400 So we were doing that for a long time.

00:26:06.380 Then we had a baby boom and we had lots and lots of young people.

00:26:09.960 And when you have lots and lots of young people, Beatlemania, we buy stuff, we invest in schools, 0.98

00:26:15.600 we invest in infrastructure for that, right?

00:26:17.260 And also you can forecast forward and say, oh, these people are going to be taxpayers soon.

00:26:21.240 So we can borrow against what they're going to do.

00:26:24.180 Then we did this thing of saying, okay, let's make sure women enter the workforce. 1.00

00:26:28.640 And that means that every household has two taxpayers.

00:26:33.060 So now we can actually, because women's labor was never taxed. 1.00

00:26:36.840 So therefore, it couldn't be taken into consideration for how much you could borrow.

00:26:41.260 So we said, oh, no, we've come up with these ability to tax women. 1.00

00:26:44.760 So what we'll do is we'll now indebt women. 1.00

00:26:47.400 So we can now double the amounts of money that we do because we've got female taxpayers. 1.00

00:26:53.360 And also, when it comes to buying a house, rather than saying we've got 12 paychecks per year,

00:26:59.820 we've got 24 paychecks per year.

00:27:02.020 So we can double the value of houses.

00:27:03.580 We can leverage up the amount that it costs to buy a house.

00:27:06.320 So we pulled all these levers as we went through.

00:27:09.680 We then got productivity gains through technology.

00:27:12.940 So there's all this technology.

00:27:15.160 But we started to do this terrible thing in the 70s where we said, actually, you know what?

00:27:19.120 Let's just focus on this information technology, this intangible technology.

00:27:22.700 All these people who do mining and production and manufacturing, we can do that really cheaply in China.

00:27:28.880 Let's all go all in on moving all of that there.

00:27:31.540 These people don't have jobs anymore.

00:27:32.860 So we started to erode what we actually do internally.

00:27:36.820 And here we are where we find ourselves today.

00:27:39.540 Well, the one thing that I think Francis – well, two things, actually, I think that you made really good points,

00:27:45.340 which I think we should delve deeper into, is ultimately – I know you've debated Gary Stevens and Gary's economics.

00:27:51.520 And look, we can agree or disagree.

00:27:53.860 He's become popular for a reason.

00:27:55.240 There's no doubt about that, right?

00:27:57.620 We first wanted to turn to him when he was quite small.

00:28:00.240 And in that time, he's really become quite a significant commentator.

00:28:03.620 And I think there is a reason for that, which is what Francis is talking about,

00:28:06.720 which is ultimately, for all the conversations we can have about the top 1%, the 30% tax,

00:28:12.760 a lot of people, particularly since 2008, as you well know, GDP per capita hasn't recovered.

00:28:17.220 Hasn't moved, yeah.

00:28:17.640 Right?

00:28:19.100 People are not better off.

00:28:21.080 The ordinary person is not better off.

00:28:23.400 And in that situation, a lot of people's natural reaction is going to be,

00:28:28.700 well, we've got to get the money from somewhere.

00:28:30.500 Look at this guy with a massive house and three cars and four wives or whatever it is that rich people do.

00:28:35.420 I don't know.

00:28:37.040 Let's get some money from him.

00:28:39.240 That's how we sort this out.

00:28:40.800 Yeah.

00:28:41.000 Right?

00:28:41.580 Why isn't that a good idea?

00:28:44.700 Why can't we do that?

00:28:45.820 Where were you born?

00:28:47.320 I was born in the Soviet Union.

00:28:48.880 Soviet Union.

00:28:49.640 But look, just to steel man the argument, the Soviet Union was like,

00:28:53.180 let's take everything from everybody and then redistribute everything.

00:28:56.860 People are just talking, like right now, the Labour Party is discussing a wealth tax, right?

00:29:00.920 Someone's got 10 million pounds and a man of money that's inconceivably large

00:29:04.820 to almost everybody who lives in this country.

00:29:07.160 If someone was to pay 2% tax on that, they're going, well, he's got 10 million.

00:29:12.240 He pays 2% tax on that.

00:29:14.500 Is that a big deal?

00:29:15.460 Really?

00:29:16.760 Well, it wouldn't even be 2% on that because they're saying a tax-free threshold of 10 million.

00:29:21.200 You don't – initially, they're saying that you'd have a 10 million wealth where it's not taxed,

00:29:26.280 but it could eventually come down and often does come down.

00:29:30.900 But do you see – just before you get – do you see why to an ordinary person,

00:29:34.800 they're just like – it's hard to understand what the counter-argument to that is, really.

00:29:38.760 No, look, simple-sounding solutions are amazing and they make you feel great.

00:29:44.300 They do.

00:29:44.620 You know, like it's like anything.

00:29:47.520 You just go, oh, how do I lose weight?

00:29:49.380 Oh, just eat right and exercise.

00:29:50.920 Okay, that sounds pretty cool, right?

00:29:52.440 So it's like anything that sounds –

00:29:53.680 It's not.

00:29:54.020 I've tried it.

00:29:55.060 Yeah, right?

00:29:56.020 Yeah, the implementation is harder than the idea.

00:29:58.740 Right.

00:29:59.520 With all ideas, the implementation is a little bit harder than the idea.

00:30:02.740 So there's a lot to unpack here.

00:30:04.460 But look, there's a few things that are going on.

00:30:06.720 The first things first is that Britain is full of a lot of wealthy people who are from somewhere else, right?

00:30:14.080 So they came here.

00:30:15.440 They live in London.

00:30:16.760 They might have a global empire, all of those sorts of things.

00:30:19.800 When someone is from somewhere else, like myself, for example, you've got multiple passports.

00:30:24.180 And you tend to – if you've ever lived around wealthy people, they live very differently to most people.

00:30:30.860 I've also spent a lot of time around very wealthy people.

00:30:34.720 And also I grew up without a lot of wealth.

00:30:40.420 Most wealthy people have a very different relationship to the world than people who don't have means.

00:30:48.300 They often have multiple homes around the world.

00:30:50.960 They often have multiple passports that they hold.

00:30:53.720 So they're dual residents.

00:30:55.820 They do already have houses elsewhere.

00:30:58.260 And they run their businesses digitally.

00:31:00.280 And they have teams of people around the world.

00:31:02.300 So we've never had more mobility when it comes to being a wealthy person.

00:31:07.500 If you run a business now, there's a chart that I had there which basically shows that 90% of the value of your company is digital.

00:31:14.580 It's all in the cloud.

00:31:15.560 It's all digital, especially British companies.

00:31:18.460 We don't manufacture physical things.

00:31:20.220 People think about what is wealth and they go, oh, it's land and houses and all this sort of stuff.

00:31:24.920 Land and houses-ish, but actually most land and houses and stuff is as a result of having a big family business or having a big business that's powering.

00:31:32.480 So most wealth is equity in a business.

00:31:34.160 Equity in a business.

00:31:34.900 And that's the engine room of wealth.

00:31:36.920 And also we think about houses and buildings and land.

00:31:40.460 But those houses, buildings, and lands are held by companies and trusts.

00:31:44.660 So, for example, let's say I've got a couple of houses and I put those in a company.

00:31:50.160 If I go and move to Dubai, I can essentially make that company full of debt and any surplus income I can pay it out as a director's fee.

00:31:58.160 And living in Dubai, I don't have to pay income on that if I'm physically out of the country.

00:32:03.000 So, yes, it would be very easy to say, oh, let's just tax the rich. 0.71

00:32:07.600 The rich and entrepreneurs have a mindset of wanting to succeed, wanting to be proactive.

00:32:14.880 I'll tell you what really makes the rich move.

00:32:17.420 I'll tell you what really makes entrepreneurs move.

00:32:19.240 It's the mindset of tax the rich more than anything else because there is a mindset that in order to succeed, you have high agency, you get stuff done, you solve problems, and you get rewarded for that.

00:32:32.320 And then there's a mindset that in order to succeed, you play the victim, you play your weaknesses, you downplay your strengths, you hide, and ultimately you're the enemy if you're doing well.

00:32:45.820 So that mindset of this is an anti-wealth country, this is an anti-entrepreneurship country, I'm seeing a lot of people even just moving to other parts of the world that have similar taxes, but they're just not anti-rich, and they're just not anti-wealth.

00:32:59.560 Well, quite a lot of states in America where you might want to live in, New York, California, I mean, they all have a bad rep for various reasons, but people shouldn't get confused.

00:33:09.620 There might be a lot of crime in New York and LA, but there's a lot of really nice places you could live in both of those states, right?

00:33:15.200 And they have higher taxes than we do in Britain, but they do not have that culture. 0.99

00:33:19.220 They don't have the culture of scratch the Ferrari versus celebrate the Ferrari.

00:33:22.440 If they see – it's actually hilarious.

00:33:25.480 In the USA, they love British brands.

00:33:27.420 They love Rolls-Royce's, Bentley's, McLaren's, all of these Range Rovers, all these British-founded brands.

00:33:34.440 They love those British brands.

00:33:35.740 And if you turn up in a Rolls-Royce somewhere in the USA, it's like, oh, that'll be me one day.

00:33:40.560 I'm going to be successful.

00:33:42.180 That person must have created an amazing business.

00:33:44.560 I'm curious to learn how they did it.

00:33:46.700 So there is that mindset in most of America.

00:33:50.540 There's obviously pockets that aren't.

00:33:52.420 But, yeah, so plenty of people, when a country turns to the only way to succeed here is to essentially get money out of government.

00:34:02.140 See, the thing about big government is this is the other thing that's really important.

00:34:06.200 A lot of people would say, oh, it's really greedy not to want to pay taxes.

00:34:09.180 But a lot of wealthy people understand that big governments are just a feeding pool for companies, large companies, that figure out how to get money out of government.

00:34:17.520 So it's no coincidence that our prison system is run by private equity and a lot of our social care system is private equity backed and a lot of our health care system is now private equity backed.

00:34:28.780 And once you work in the world of money and wealth and business, you start to see, oh, these people work in government and then they go and get a 600 grand a year job working for a PE firm and they figure out how to go and take all the money out of government and then they go and make all the profit over here.

00:34:46.400 And actually, that's cronyism.

00:34:49.220 And what big governments create is cronyism.

00:34:52.460 They are essentially a monopoly on money and anyone who's making any gets sucked into the government and redistributed to the PE firms who know how to hire ex-government employees and siphon the money off.

00:35:05.260 So it's not necessarily – it could be greedy to say I don't want to pay taxes or it could be incredibly patriotic.

00:35:11.040 You could say this is not good for the country.

00:35:13.000 This is not the direction.

00:35:14.440 The Economic Freedom Index says that what's good for the majority of people is economic freedom.

00:35:20.920 That creates low poverty, high affluence for the majority of people.

00:35:25.100 What's bad for people is big governments.

00:35:28.840 Big governments create poverty. 0.53

00:35:30.380 Big government – like it's almost like clockwork that you can actually see big governments getting bigger and bigger and bigger, poverty is rising, rising, rising, and then eventually the damn breaks and they eventually cut right back and guess what? 0.90

00:35:42.840 It's good times again.

00:35:44.440 So the countries that you would want to live in right now, they all have small governments, low crime, small government.

00:35:51.840 Okay, let's push back on that.

00:35:53.100 People go, yeah, but what about Norway?

00:35:55.280 Yeah, well, Norway, it has this amazing thing called a sovereign wealth fund.

00:35:58.520 And I actually think it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a sovereign wealth fund in the UK.

00:36:02.000 So the sovereign wealth fund is where you say, okay, we've got some family silver called oil and gas.

00:36:07.940 And actually, that belongs to the people of our country.

00:36:12.260 So what we're going to do is we're going to ring fence that oil and gas resource.

00:36:15.720 And we're going to have other companies that we might charge a little – or sorry, we might allow them to earn a little bit of money through the processing and extraction.

00:36:24.460 But ultimately, the wealth stays with the country.

00:36:27.140 So this is where you essentially build a sovereign wealth fund.

00:36:30.640 So the majority of why Norway works is that sovereign wealth fund.

00:36:35.380 Like it literally creates such – I mean, it's something like – I mean, that sovereign wealth fund owns half of London, by the way.

00:36:42.120 I don't know if you know this, but Norway and Qatar own more than the royal families combined.

00:36:45.720 So two sovereign wealth funds, the Qatari sovereign wealth fund and the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund.

00:36:52.080 We actually have $100 billion worth of natural gas under Lancashire.

00:36:55.580 We could create a $100 billion sovereign wealth fund out of that.

00:36:58.520 We also have the different parts of the North Sea.

00:37:02.060 We could create a sovereign wealth fund.

00:37:04.080 We do actually have all sorts of natural resources that the UK could access under the structure of a sovereign wealth fund.

00:37:10.740 It wouldn't be a bad idea.

00:37:11.940 So I guess the question is why don't we do that then?

00:37:15.720 We don't do a lot of smart things.

00:37:20.700 There's a long list of really smart things that we don't do.

00:37:25.160 I'm not against that.

00:37:27.100 I just think –

00:37:27.940 Well, that would be net zero, I'm guessing, right?

00:37:30.060 Well, a big reason why we don't do it is because apparently it's a lot greener to produce steel in China and then ship it to the UK.

00:37:38.620 He's being sarcastic for our American listeners.

00:37:40.660 Yeah, and it's also a lot greener if you get your natural gas from another place and you bring it here on a boat as opposed to just bringing it out of your own ground.

00:38:19.020 We don't protect as much of the environment as possible.

00:38:21.000 I just think it's absolutely insane that we somehow think that it's better and more virtuous to do this stuff offshore and that that somehow impacts global temperatures for the better, right?

00:38:33.320 So it's silly stuff.

00:38:34.580 Anyway, but yeah, that's one of the main reasons why we don't do it.

00:38:36.920 So you touch on economic freedom and I find this concept quite interesting, actually.

00:38:42.400 So let's delve into it.

00:38:43.660 First of all, what do you mean by economic freedom and actually what are the benefits of it?

00:38:48.660 So economic freedom, essentially, as a big picture, you've got state top-down control where a controlled economy is that the government is making most decisions and really dictating how money gets spent in the economy.

00:39:01.260 And then you've got economic freedom, which is individuals make decisions about their own lives and they get on with making their own life.

00:39:07.140 If they want to buy a car, they buy a car.

00:39:08.640 If they want to start a business, they can start a business.

00:39:12.200 Now, there are certain things the state should do to protect economic freedom, like rule of law, policing, fast core access to justice, right?

00:39:20.000 All of those types of things are associated with economic freedom and they're state-run things, right?

00:39:24.060 So there's definitely a huge role for the state to protect economic freedom.

00:39:28.600 But then there's this crossing the line and you say, oh, wait a second, we're going to get out of the business of like creating a good playing field.

00:39:35.100 We're going to get in the business of actually telling people how to live their lives and how to spend their money and all that sort of stuff.

00:39:41.820 So as you get bigger and bigger governments and more and more state control, you erode economic freedom.

00:39:47.600 And then essentially you go from like 1% to 4% poverty rates to 25% poverty rates, right?

00:39:54.240 And it's almost as predictable as clockwork, right?

00:39:56.740 As you go this way, right?

00:39:58.180 And you actually, and the reason I say that is there are actually countries that have become more economic free.

00:40:03.860 They've pushed for economic freedom and poverty rates have dropped and affluence has gone up.

00:40:08.020 And then there's affluent countries that have gone this way and gone towards socialism and poverty goes up.

00:40:12.980 The UK is a classic example.

00:40:15.740 When I arrived here in 2006, it was extremely high on the economic freedom index and it was one of the best places in the world.

00:40:23.940 Everyone was coming here.

00:40:24.920 Entrepreneurs were coming here.

00:40:26.240 It was just one of the best places you could possibly be.

00:40:28.720 And the entrepreneur hub of the world was London.

00:40:31.360 And then in the global financial crisis, we implemented all sorts of rules and regulations and higher taxes and all of these kind of things.

00:40:39.880 And we brought economic freedom index, I think, from like early 80s down to 70s, right?

00:40:44.580 And then today we're in the 60s.

00:40:46.500 So as our economic freedom has been eroded in the last 20 years, we've just seen rising poverty, lower affluence, wider inequality.

00:40:57.620 So I just blame government for that stuff.

00:40:59.640 I just see it like it seems counterintuitive.

00:41:03.680 But the more money you give to government, the more inequality and more poverty and all this sort of stuff.

00:41:10.180 Big governments, you know, anyone who has come from Eastern European countries, Soviet Union, you know that state-run big government just doesn't work.

00:41:20.620 You know, people are lining up for bread.

00:41:22.820 And then in free markets, there's just so much abundance.

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00:43:11.780 I guess there'll be people listening going, right, okay, Daniel, with certain instances, I agree with you.

00:43:30.800 But let's look at, for instance, the healthcare system.

00:43:33.560 The NHS has got a lot of flaws, a lot of problems, but I'd rather live in the UK where there is an NHS as opposed to America where I'm just going to pluck a figure at random.

00:43:43.320 It costs 30 grand if you break your leg, for example.

00:43:46.320 I tend to agree.

00:43:48.800 Like, I tend to agree that there's plenty of stuff.

00:43:50.740 Like, I think there is a role of the state to try and protect the game that we're playing.

00:43:57.040 Like, for example, investing into good schools means that you have productive citizens later on.

00:44:02.500 It's a good investment.

00:44:03.660 You can see that that investment is going to go in a good direction.

00:44:07.420 I can also see that, you know, if someone is injured or, you know, it's in everyone's interest to make sure that they heal and that they're back, you know, and all of that sort of stuff.

00:44:19.300 So I think there's definitely things the government should have a monopoly on and, you know, like emergency care and ambulances and all of that sort of stuff.

00:44:29.200 I think it's, you know, I agree.

00:44:30.520 Like, the American system where calling an ambulance could wind you up bankrupt seems pretty heartless and seems like, just seems unnecessarily harmful.

00:44:39.720 You know, it makes sense to have ambulances.

00:44:42.180 One of the issues that we have is that in order to have these systems work, you almost have to have a culture within the country that I will only draw on the system as a means of last resort, right?

00:44:57.340 Like, there has to be that.

00:44:58.220 Like, you know, you look at post-World War II Britain.

00:45:01.440 Even people who had lost legs in the war felt that it was their responsibility to find a job and get to work and do something.

00:45:09.880 There was this kind of, like, it's the last resort to go and be on benefits.

00:45:15.300 Like, you know, it's a safety net, but it's not a hammock.

00:45:18.340 You can't hang out there.

00:45:19.620 It's not a way of life.

00:45:20.660 It's not a multi-generational family thing.

00:45:23.480 It's a – we use this as a means of last resort and nothing more than that.

00:45:28.720 But if you have that culture, then all of these social systems work.

00:45:34.700 But if you have a culture where you go, oh, actually, it's a benefit.

00:45:37.940 Oh, like, oh, that's a benefit of a citizenship.

00:45:40.120 Oh, I wouldn't mind that benefit.

00:45:41.540 What other benefits are you offering, right?

00:45:44.240 You know, hey, actually, why would I work when I could hang out and just get paid the same anyway?

00:45:49.900 You know, we have this enormous number of people in the UK.

00:45:53.080 I think it's like 25% of people under 35 are on benefits.

00:45:56.680 It's 51% of households are on more benefits than they collect – than they earn.

00:46:03.140 So we now have this situation where one way to win in this economy is to play the victim.

00:46:10.680 You know, we have – there's this video that I saw – it's a video I saw on YouTube.

00:46:16.140 And basically this crow had crashed into the glass and the owner of the house had given some milk and bread to the crow, right?

00:46:25.020 And this crow had been given free food.

00:46:28.860 And then these three other crows flew to the glass, lay on their backs, and looked like they'd crashed into the glass because they'd witnessed that you get free milk and bread if you play the victim.

00:46:42.540 And I know it's – look, I'm not at all criticizing someone who has genuine reasons that they need state support.

00:46:47.600 But we have actually gotten to the point where a lot of people have figured out, oh, easiest way to get a BMW, I'm going to play this little system over here.

00:46:56.120 There are websites dedicated to telling you what to say in order to get certain benefits.

00:47:03.540 And we can see this in the charts of how much benefits get paid for certain things.

00:47:06.680 You can see that these schemes come in at like a billion, two billion a year, and then they're eight billion, then they're 12 billion.

00:47:12.340 I think one in five new cars in the country is now part of the mobility scheme.

00:47:18.380 You know, like I'm not saying some people don't need state support.

00:47:21.100 I'm definitely not saying that.

00:47:22.080 In fact, you want to protect it because you want the people who need it to have as much as possible.

00:47:27.260 You don't want to have a situation where it's being abused by people who don't really need it because then people who genuinely need it, you know, they don't have as much to access.

00:47:35.340 Or there's not enough to do with for other things that we need to do in the country as well.

00:47:41.100 Well, we have the Fraser Nelson on to talk about this, to talk about the issues with the benefit system.

00:47:46.640 And one of the things, you know, you mentioned that people need to have a really good reason.

00:47:50.420 But I think it's also a self-fulfilling thing as well, because let's say you've got three friends and one of them is a bit anxious and another one is a bit depressed.

00:48:01.120 And you are, you know, you might not have the job of your life, your life circumstances might not be great.

00:48:05.900 Well, I've been there and I don't remember like being joyous in that moment, right?

00:48:09.860 Now, if your mates who are slightly anxious and slightly depressed are on benefits because they're depressed and anxious, well, you go, well, I'm a bit depressed, I'm a bit anxious.

00:48:19.700 And they are getting these things.

00:48:21.280 So if that's what's available, why wouldn't I claim it?

00:48:24.060 Yeah, absolutely.

00:48:24.940 It does happen like that.

00:48:26.060 I remember when I was at university in Australia and all my friends were getting $1,500 a month on this particular student benefit.

00:48:34.340 I just felt very wrong about it.

00:48:35.660 I just didn't want to do it.

00:48:36.660 But I was feeling like, oh, you know, I'm entitled to it.

00:48:44.240 I really wrestled with it because I have this personally at that age, I had this belief of if I can't afford to be at university, I'll quit.

00:48:51.280 I did quit and I couldn't afford to be there.

00:48:53.060 I was working four jobs and living on a concrete floor, on a mattress, on a concrete floor, in a shed, in a garage.

00:49:02.380 So, you know, but I just didn't want to take state benefits.

00:49:05.560 I didn't feel like I was entitled to it.

00:49:07.140 But I certainly thought about it because all my friends were getting it.

00:49:10.200 Right.

00:49:10.940 And it creates this vicious cycle.

00:49:13.060 And difficulties politically, it's very difficult to deal with because once people are used to something to which they feel at this point.

00:49:20.460 We now have multi-generational, like literally where kids whose parents and grandparents have never worked.

00:49:28.980 And that just means that's game over.

00:49:30.740 Like, how do you break that cycle?

00:49:33.100 Well, exactly.

00:49:33.840 And if you talk about entrepreneurship, I do think entrepreneurs, I'm guessing, are quite different to most people in the way their brain works, the way they look at the world.

00:49:44.740 Right.

00:49:45.200 Is that fair to say?

00:49:46.000 Freedom.

00:49:46.860 Right.

00:49:47.200 The desire for freedom is a big thing.

00:49:49.900 Agency, personal agency.

00:49:51.460 I want to make my own way.

00:49:55.680 Delayed gratification.

00:49:56.940 I want to do something that's hard now in exchange for some sort of payoff into the future.

00:50:03.160 The understanding of fair exchange.

00:50:05.580 I'm going to have to do something that you want to do in exchange for you to give me the money that I want.

00:50:11.180 Right.

00:50:11.740 So it's that whole, how do we build something fair exchange?

00:50:14.880 Environment dictates performance.

00:50:16.480 I have witnessed people who, like I do a bit of work in prisons.

00:50:21.500 And in particular, I do a Dragon's Den experience in prison where we get ex-offenders or offenders to come up with business ideas.

00:50:34.380 And in exchange for, we don't have money, we have books, right?

00:50:36.600 So we have all these business books that we take in there and we give business books to these guys.

00:50:40.460 And in many cases, by the way, some of these guys have run seven-figure businesses in the past.

00:50:43.840 Right.

00:50:44.120 Just not legitimately.

00:50:46.080 Amazing 24-hours-a-day customer service.

00:50:49.120 Yeah.

00:50:49.560 All sorts of things that.

00:50:51.620 Quality product.

00:50:52.340 Quality product.

00:50:53.040 Building big teams of people who are out working all the time.

00:50:55.440 So some of these guys, you know, they really naturally gravitate towards entrepreneurship.

00:51:00.200 But what's interesting is that I watch the power of the environment that you can get some people who are very negative about their situation.

00:51:09.160 And as soon as we just introduce the idea of what business do you want to start when you get out of prison and what, you know, and one of them will come up with an idea.

00:51:16.840 I want to do this.

00:51:17.640 And then suddenly another one goes, oh, yeah, I want to do a landscape gardening business.

00:51:21.860 I want to do like a Mexican food restaurant.

00:51:26.280 Okay.

00:51:26.760 I want to do, you know, I want to do this.

00:51:28.640 I've been thinking about starting a clothing line.

00:51:30.780 I've been thinking about doing that.

00:51:31.780 And then suddenly, like popcorn, it all just starts popping off and the energy in the room just lifts.

00:51:37.920 And you see it go from like a weird, like we always start out in a bit of a circle and everyone's a bit quiet and not sharing their ideas.

00:51:44.060 And then suddenly it's like this vibrancy pops in.

00:51:47.380 And so I do really have hope that for a lot, especially young people, show them that you actually can be successful and you and there's that just suddenly there's this like liftoff moment with energetically.

00:52:00.360 It's important to say it's the greatest time in history to be an entrepreneur.

00:52:03.720 There's never been better time.

00:52:05.480 There's more money available than ever before.

00:52:07.600 The technology is freely available.

00:52:09.400 You can build teams remotely.

00:52:11.480 All the technology that you need is lying around the house.

00:52:14.040 You know, there's bigger markets than ever before.

00:52:19.260 You can sell into all sorts of markets.

00:52:22.140 Like it's just this glorious time for entrepreneurship.

00:52:25.480 Like it's the best time ever.

00:52:27.420 And I've been an entrepreneur for 20 something years.

00:52:29.380 Like this is the moment where like everyone's been – if you're even just slightly entrepreneurial, this is the most incredible time.

00:52:37.860 Easier than ever.

00:52:38.720 The only thing is, is that entrepreneurs want to be in a country that's positive.

00:52:42.940 You know, it's – I love that you say that because you hear this kind of doom and gloom narrative about country, about late-stage capitalism, et cetera, et cetera.

00:52:55.240 And look, conditions are never going to be optimal.

00:52:57.780 But that doesn't mean that you should not chase your dream.

00:53:00.680 And it's always going to be tough for whatever reason.

00:53:03.160 If the economy is booming, there's loads of competition.

00:53:06.200 If the economy is not doing great, it's going to be harder to raise capital.

00:53:10.140 So true.

00:53:10.620 So true.

00:53:11.080 There's actually hard things about good economies and there's good things about bad economies.

00:53:15.040 Yeah.

00:53:15.980 Entrepreneurs, you know, there's this mindset of let's play the hand that we're dealt, right?

00:53:21.960 So, you know, you've dealt me some cards.

00:53:24.100 Let me play that hand.

00:53:25.380 And that's a really positive mindset.

00:53:27.820 You know, I've got this incredible friend of mine who's a quadruple amputee.

00:53:31.640 And he's gone off and built a seven-figure chain of clinics that do rehabilitation.

00:53:36.160 And he's amazing.

00:53:37.360 He's literally built this incredible global destination for amputees to come and rehabilitate.

00:53:43.560 And he's a quadruple amputee.

00:53:45.040 He runs an amazing business with dozens of employees, seven-figure revenues in Brazil.

00:53:49.280 And, you know, he literally was amputated above the elbow and above the knees on all four limbs.

00:53:57.000 But he said, okay, this is the hand I've been dealt.

00:54:00.220 Can't change it.

00:54:01.120 How do I play this hand?

00:54:06.240 Sorry, Pedro.

00:54:08.580 And the answer is you build a new hand.

00:54:10.280 Yeah, exactly, right?

00:54:11.740 Build it up.

00:54:12.480 So, you know, the thing I love about entrepreneurs is that they often turn problems into opportunities.

00:54:17.340 You know, my personal first experience as an entrepreneur was in my house when I was 10 years old.

00:54:23.460 There was a small house fire.

00:54:24.940 Flames leapt up onto the curtains.

00:54:27.780 And there was smoke damage.

00:54:29.900 And fire went through a few of the cupboards and all this sort of stuff.

00:54:34.140 And it was insured.

00:54:35.320 But my parents were going to throw away the microwave and the fridge and a few of the things that got damaged.

00:54:41.720 And I said, hey, what if I clean these things and I sell them?

00:54:45.500 I was 10 years old.

00:54:46.320 I don't know where I came up with the idea.

00:54:47.480 But I said, oh, what if I clean these things and I sell them?

00:54:49.520 If you want to, but you've got to do it quick.

00:54:51.400 So I got to work and I cleaned it up.

00:54:53.180 And the following weekend ran a garage sale.

00:54:55.380 I went to the neighbors and they got stuff and they put stuff in my garage sale on a 50-50 joint venture.

00:55:01.800 And at 10 years old, I had my first experience of just like turning a negative experience into a positive experience by selling stuff.

00:55:09.600 And, you know, there was this magic moment where this guy comes up and he says, how much for the microwave?

00:55:15.980 And I said, oh, it's $10.

00:55:17.120 And he says, I'll give you $5 for it.

00:55:19.420 I say, oh, no, it's $10.

00:55:20.840 He goes, I want to talk to your dad.

00:55:21.780 But dad comes out and he says, oh, I want to bargain with you on the microwave.

00:55:26.100 And he says, well, it's his business.

00:55:27.260 You need to negotiate with him.

00:55:28.760 It's like, wow, right?

00:55:30.700 But imagine if my parents had have said, oh, you can clean and sell all that stuff, but we keep the money.

00:55:37.980 Or we keep 50% of the money.

00:55:39.660 Yeah, or 60%, 70%, right?

00:55:42.300 We'll keep all the money, right?

00:55:44.240 We'll keep the majority of the money.

00:55:45.600 I'm going to sit there and go, oh, okay.

00:55:48.080 Well, under that circumstance, I'll just wait to get toys at Christmas.

00:55:50.900 I'll just wait for mommy and daddy to give me the things, right?

00:55:54.340 So if you take away the rewards, the entrepreneurship just doesn't happen.

00:55:59.660 It's such an obvious thing because the government, it's a weird thing with tax because people instinctively know that the government is always trying to put a sugar tax, an excise duty on petrol.

00:56:13.280 It's constantly trying to disincentivize things by making them more expensive.

00:56:17.760 This is it.

00:56:18.300 But they don't seem to understand that when you put a tax on work, on jobs, on employment, you also disincentivize those things as well.

00:56:26.740 Yeah.

00:56:26.880 So you disincentivize, you make it less appealing for people to create jobs, to do jobs, to work hard and to create businesses.

00:56:35.020 There's something called second order consequences.

00:56:36.920 And a lot of people don't understand this idea of second order consequences or unintended consequences.

00:56:41.620 So if we had a tax on long hair, we said if your hair is below a certain threshold, then you have to pay more tax to have long hair.

00:56:50.560 All the conservatives are applauding you right now.

00:56:53.200 I'm in favour of that for men.

00:56:55.560 So, of course, what you would see is people will alter their behaviour.

00:56:59.180 The vast majority of people will make sure that their hair is not longer than that threshold so that they don't pay extra taxes.

00:57:05.000 Some people, small percentage of people, might grow their hair out as a statement of like, look how rich I am.

00:57:10.860 I don't care.

00:57:11.900 Right?

00:57:12.060 So you get a small bit of flaunting it.

00:57:13.960 But the vast majority of people are going to, in some way, it's going to have consequences.

00:57:17.300 There will be second order consequences. 0.99

00:57:18.740 Now, what economists tend to do, which is so stupid, is they go, oh, how many people out there have long hair? 0.99

00:57:26.660 Oh, there's five million people with long hair. 0.99

00:57:29.620 Okay, well, then if we just tax all of them ten pounds, then we end up with this much money.

00:57:34.120 And they create a calculation that doesn't include second order consequences.

00:57:38.080 So it's this stupid thing of like, how many people times this amount, this is how much we'll collect. 0.96

00:57:42.700 And then they go, oh, wait a second. 0.99

00:57:44.060 What just happened?

00:57:45.020 Everyone cut their hair.

00:57:45.800 Of course, everyone cut their hair because you taxed it.

00:57:50.060 So this idea, in Spain, they came up with a whole bunch of taxes and regulations if you had long-term tenants.

00:58:01.640 And they said any tenancy above 12 months, it triggers all of these additional taxes and regulations.

00:58:07.220 So guess what?

00:58:07.900 Now we're kicking out the tenants, I'm guessing.

00:58:09.800 In Spain, you can only get an 11-month lease.

00:58:12.260 You can rent a place for 11 months.

00:58:14.000 You can't get a 12-month lease.

00:58:16.040 And then they have all these under-the-table things where you have to – they have two houses with two different things.

00:58:21.720 And you have to scrap houses every 11 months, right?

00:58:25.140 It's the most Spanish thing I've ever heard.

00:58:27.780 Well, Daniel, the thing is you are a very optimistic natural guy.

00:58:31.060 It's why you do what you do.

00:58:32.120 But I read this quote, and I genuinely thought that it sounded true to me, which doesn't mean it is true, but it did worry me.

00:58:40.700 I can't remember whose quote it is, but there's basically a guy – I think he might have been part of the Scottish Enlightenment.

00:58:44.940 I should really have looked this up.

00:58:46.180 But it was basically the idea that democracy can never last forever because once people work out that they can vote to be paid more money by someone else, it just – you don't come back from that.

00:58:58.280 Yeah.

00:58:58.600 It's sort of starting to feel like that to me.

00:59:01.200 Unfortunately, we're now – I think 52% of households receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes.

00:59:09.940 Now, what happens when you cross that threshold is that democracy starts to be this compounding –

00:59:15.060 But it's also about culture, like you said before, because, look, I've spent – I probably – no, I don't think I've ever been in a position where I've taken more out of the system than I've paid in.

00:59:27.240 But I've been not very wealthy for all my life, basically, until we started.

00:59:32.380 Well, just quickly on that, you probably – in those times, the government was probably spending 18 grand per person.

00:59:39.220 Yeah.

00:59:39.480 And you weren't paying 18 grand, so you were getting more out of the system than –

00:59:42.840 Theoretically, but I was young and healthy, not using the NHS.

00:59:45.780 I get it.

00:59:46.280 Didn't have kids, et cetera.

00:59:47.740 But let's even say that, right?

00:59:50.460 I never thought that, well, like we need to raise taxes on people who are doing well even more.

01:00:00.200 And partly it's because I kind of always thought that I would also do well.

01:00:03.840 I think it's partly true.

01:00:06.040 But partly also it doesn't – like what I mean about culture is if there's a culture of like,

01:00:12.840 shared responsibility, like what we've got to do is like really make the right decision for the country as opposed to for me.

01:00:20.540 And I think we've transitioned very much into that mentality, which is what's the right system for me only?

01:00:27.780 But I am in favor of paying – like I'm – this might be controversial with people, especially people who do well.

01:00:35.440 I am happy with the tax burden as it is in Britain now.

01:00:38.940 And I – we're doing reasonably well.

01:00:40.880 I'm happy to pay 40% tax if I felt that it was well spent, which it bloody isn't.

01:00:48.020 And also if I didn't feel like it was just putting taxes further and further up was a way of solving the problems that we're actually should be talking about,

01:00:57.920 which is lack of productivity, which is net zero, which is we're not generating enough of our own revenue,

01:01:02.900 which, you know, mass low-skilled immigration that's not productive, all of these other things.

01:01:07.280 And my worry is that the culture is now such that people are so incentivized to only really think about what's good for them.

01:01:16.800 At all ends of the spectrum.

01:01:17.980 At all ends of the spectrum.

01:01:18.680 Yeah, right.

01:01:19.520 So –

01:01:20.280 Because I also don't want us to be Dubai.

01:01:22.600 I don't want zero percent tax.

01:01:24.180 I don't think that works for a country like Britain.

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01:02:25.820 Low-tax countries tend to do quite well.

01:02:30.300 And also, Dubai has got plenty of police, amazing hospitals.

01:02:34.060 It's got all sorts of other ways of raising money through properties.

01:02:38.120 Dubai's system is, when you interact, you pay a lot.

01:02:41.920 So if you rent a big house, you're paying a lot of tax on that.

01:02:44.960 If you buy something, you're paying tax on that.

01:02:47.240 So they tax the wealthy through interacting with their system.

01:02:51.860 But there's a very low default.

01:02:53.880 Like, there's...

01:02:55.000 I mean, this country, actually, for a long time, didn't have high taxes either.

01:02:58.660 And we did really well.

01:02:59.740 We're, you know, booming.

01:03:01.000 You know, one of the best countries in the world.

01:03:02.520 We're able to do that without having a lot of taxes.

01:03:05.900 Same as the USA. 0.69

01:03:06.880 The USA did incredibly well without a lot of taxes.

01:03:09.740 So there are ways to do it.

01:03:11.280 What you really want is you want great services and you want this.

01:03:14.400 One thing that you may start to object to is this idea of the wealth tax.

01:03:18.600 And the reason for that is if we take trigonometry,

01:03:20.960 I bet I could get a team of very smart people to build a case as to why your business is worth $25 million.

01:03:31.560 And the reason we could do that...

01:03:33.300 Really?

01:03:34.100 Who wants to buy it? 0.66

01:03:35.380 Whoever wants to buy it for $25 million, it's solved.

01:03:37.780 Bring it on.

01:03:38.720 Your point is something else, though.

01:03:40.140 I see where you're going.

01:03:40.760 Well, the reason I can do this is I can say you've got 1.4 million subscribers on the YouTube channel.

01:03:45.160 And we can extrapolate, well, Mr. Beast said that he would sell his business for a billion if this happened.

01:03:50.680 We can find some other transactions.

01:03:53.060 We could find a particular magazine that had 1.4 million subscribers and we could say,

01:03:56.840 oh, well, let's extrapolate that over here.

01:03:58.720 There's a lot you can do with theoretical valuations.

01:04:01.100 I can also do a big forecast and say this is what we intend to do.

01:04:04.980 We're going to launch these products and we're going to sell this many to this number of people.

01:04:08.560 So we do an economic forecast.

01:04:10.280 I could probably get some investors, if we pitched it well enough, to say,

01:04:14.860 okay, we'll put in $2.5 million to make that happen, right, for 10%.

01:04:18.960 So they would be buying into the big future direction.

01:04:24.620 However, on paper, you've got a $25 million business.

01:04:27.820 Now, imagine what that would do if suddenly you had to start paying 2% every single year

01:04:32.540 on this theoretical valuation.

01:04:34.320 So you've raised money once.

01:04:36.200 You haven't raised money again.

01:04:37.600 But now you've got this $25 million valuation.

01:04:40.060 You've got to pay 2% of $15 million.

01:04:41.520 So you've basically just created this additional tax burden.

01:04:47.780 So that's what, $300,000 a year?

01:04:49.500 Yeah.

01:04:50.480 Right.

01:04:51.000 Taxation is theft.

01:04:53.060 So now you've got to, right?

01:04:55.320 No, but that would destroy our business.

01:04:56.720 It would destroy our business.

01:04:57.240 The business wouldn't exist if we had to do that.

01:04:58.700 And now, imagine, magic wand scenario, all you have to do is register the business somewhere

01:05:04.340 else.

01:05:05.660 Which is what we would do.

01:05:07.120 I'm not going to lie.

01:05:08.080 If it came to that, we would either have to shut the business or move somewhere else.

01:05:11.940 That's just a fact.

01:05:12.860 Now, let's also imagine a realistic scenario.

01:05:16.420 You go to investors, and the investors are big-minded global people, and they say,

01:05:21.800 oh, by the way, UK is not a good place to register your business.

01:05:25.760 We want to invest, but we want you to set up in Delaware.

01:05:28.760 We want this to be a Delaware corporation.

01:05:30.700 Or we'd like you to set this up in Abu Dhabi.

01:05:33.780 And you go, okay, $2.5 million invested.

01:05:36.620 We just set it up in Abu Dhabi.

01:05:38.420 Now, this is the problem.

01:05:40.080 If trigonometry somehow, let's say, I'll give you a real-life example.

01:05:44.380 This is a real-life example.

01:05:45.440 Yesterday, I was talking about a strategic partnership with a US company, and part of the strategic

01:05:50.260 partnership was access to big distribution, and part of it was a little bit of money skin

01:05:54.480 in the game, and it would have been, if we do it, it would be $500,000 of cash at a $50

01:06:00.780 million valuation on one of my businesses, and then access to the distribution gets them

01:06:05.480 a little bit of extra equity if they hit certain targets.

01:06:11.420 So we're saying $500,000 to get you in so that you're committed, and then another $500,000

01:06:16.900 for this target, another $500,000 for this target.

01:06:18.900 So we're structuring a strategic partnership to grow into the USA.

01:06:22.600 Now, in that situation, that little tiny $500,000 strategic capital to get them to commit

01:06:28.700 to the strategic partnership triggers $50 million, $40 million above.

01:06:33.780 So now we've got 2% of $40 million.

01:06:36.460 We have to now have $800,000 a year worth of taxes for that particular...

01:06:44.680 That's insane.

01:06:45.320 They can't do that, surely, Daniel?

01:06:46.620 That's what wealth taxes is. 0.87

01:06:48.060 It's a tax on unrealized gains.

01:06:50.300 But that's insane.

01:06:51.160 It is insane.

01:06:52.080 But that's just going to ruin everything.

01:06:54.100 Do you know in the Nordic countries, they tax musicians' music catalogs if they believe

01:06:58.460 the music catalog is worth something?

01:07:00.380 So they actually say, oh, you're a famous musician, Ed Sheeran.

01:07:04.880 Oh, we're not just going to tax you on the $30 million you made that is real, that's actual

01:07:09.520 real money.

01:07:10.220 We're going to say that based on that $30 million, we value your catalog at $200 million.

01:07:14.100 And we want 2% of that $200 million as well.

01:07:15.960 But we already did that in the 70s and all our rock stars left.

01:07:20.880 They all left.

01:07:21.620 The Beatles were out.

01:07:22.460 The Rolling Stones were out.

01:07:23.400 We missed out.

01:07:24.520 They all went to Amsterdam, right?

01:07:27.180 Netherlands.

01:07:28.200 We missed out on all of that British iconic bands, all The Who and all these amazing bands.

01:07:35.460 They all relocated their catalogs to the Netherlands.

01:07:39.760 And ever since, the Netherlands has been getting that tax income from some of the best iconic

01:07:46.020 British bands because of those taxes.

01:07:48.480 You see, this is insane because, look, if someone has a high income and you take a significant

01:07:53.520 chunk of that, I think there's a perfectly legitimate argument in a country with really 1.00

01:07:59.000 people won't feel like it's the truth now.

01:08:02.760 But historically, geographically, comparatively speaking, good infrastructure, relatively good

01:08:07.560 public services, all of that, right?

01:08:10.500 That's all right.

01:08:11.580 But when you're taxing people on money they don't even have for things that you've imagined 0.99

01:08:16.500 in your head that are worth something that you've made up, that's fucking insane. 0.98

01:08:22.280 Yeah. 1.00

01:08:22.500 So crazy.

01:08:23.080 And at that point, you no longer are being reasonable.

01:08:27.420 At that point, you are just literally driving people.

01:08:30.160 Because for us, you see, people think that rich people are greedy.

01:08:34.200 But in the example you're giving, it's not about greedy.

01:08:36.480 It's about survival.

01:08:37.360 It's just unworkable.

01:08:38.420 And once people either can survive or not, they will leave.

01:08:41.640 Yeah.

01:08:41.880 You're not going to get investors who buy into that system.

01:08:46.060 They don't want to hold British stock if they're investors.

01:08:48.780 Right.

01:08:49.140 Do you know what actually ends up happening?

01:08:50.400 What ends up happening is the value of assets crash in the country that has wealth taxes.

01:08:55.880 And foreign investors who are not subject to wealth taxes come in and buy through their

01:09:01.460 private equity firms.

01:09:02.600 So what you end up with is you have a crashing economy and then BlackRock comes in and says,

01:09:07.060 oh, we'll take those farms. 0.99

01:09:09.180 We'll take, like, look what's happening to the farms.

01:09:10.960 The farms are having to be sold really cheap.

01:09:13.320 I'll tell you what's happening to the UK farms.

01:09:15.380 They're buying up bits of farmland and sticking solar panels on it.

01:09:18.760 And because the economic model of sticking solar panels justifies a higher price, a small

01:09:24.960 sale of farmland to put solar panels on it falsely inflates the value of these farms.

01:09:30.100 Right.

01:09:30.260 So all these farms around where they're just simply using it as an underpinning of the

01:09:34.720 farm work, these farms are now worth not $3 million or $6 million.

01:09:38.740 Oh, now they're worth $9 million.

01:09:39.840 And these farmers, when they die, they have death taxes on $9 million, which is based upon,

01:09:45.720 oh, down the road, this farm sold for this amount of money per hectare, but it's sold

01:09:49.740 based on solar panels.

01:09:51.440 Right.

01:09:52.000 Now, these guys aren't doing solar panels.

01:09:53.880 But guess what?

01:09:54.800 They have to sell the farm to pay the death taxes.

01:09:58.280 And who buys it?

01:09:59.820 BlackRock.

01:10:00.880 BlackRock comes in.

01:10:01.980 And BlackRock has a $1.4 billion, I think, farm fund for British farmland.

01:10:07.100 All of these assets get bought up by private equity firms, big foreign private equity firms,

01:10:13.440 Norway, Qatar, buying up London. 0.96

01:10:16.180 Why?

01:10:16.740 Because the value of the assets crash based on terrible policy.

01:10:20.720 And it's not British people who end up buying those assets.

01:10:24.740 It's foreign private equity firms.

01:10:27.080 You know, and this goes back really to the start of our conversation, whereby if you disincentivize

01:10:33.960 people from being entrepreneurial to set up their own company, the single biggest thing

01:10:38.780 I would say that has changed my life is myself and Constantine starting this business.

01:10:42.780 It changed my mindset when it came to money.

01:10:45.000 It changed my politics, to be honest with you.

01:10:49.060 And they...

01:10:49.440 He started out on the right.

01:10:50.840 And he's moved further right.

01:10:52.340 He moved further right.

01:10:54.160 To sit for off.

01:10:54.920 No, but you used to be like old school lefty.

01:11:00.480 Yeah, old school lefty.

01:11:01.720 And the more you...

01:11:03.320 Because when you realize, when you run a business and you work in a business and you grow a business,

01:11:09.560 suddenly you connect with reality in its most brutal, unpleasant way at times.

01:11:14.640 Yeah, yeah.

01:11:15.480 Because with the nature of running a business, you know this better than anyone.

01:11:18.560 You're the last person to get paid.

01:11:20.020 Yes.

01:11:20.840 Yeah.

01:11:21.000 You all get paid before us.

01:11:22.460 Everyone else gets paid.

01:11:23.020 Wipe that look off your face, Jack.

01:11:25.080 Right?

01:11:25.760 So...

01:11:26.240 But, you know, we joke around, right?

01:11:28.460 Trigonometry, just for people who are wondering, we started in April 2018.

01:11:34.160 Mm-hmm.

01:11:35.180 Until 2020, so for two years, we put our own money into it and never took a penny out.

01:11:43.220 And in 2020, for the first time, we paid ourselves a salary, which was £1,000 a month.

01:11:49.940 Mm-hmm.

01:11:50.720 I've been there, yeah.

01:11:51.680 And that was the case for quite a while.

01:11:55.560 I've had multiple businesses where I'm the lowest paid person on the team.

01:12:00.560 Right.

01:12:01.040 Building the business, making sure that everyone gets paid other than myself, taking risks.

01:12:05.540 And I've had many, many, many months where if we didn't make those last few sales on Thursday afternoon before payroll, we were in serious trouble.

01:12:14.880 Yeah.

01:12:15.040 And you're taking that risk because you hope that at the end of it, there is some kind of general reward.

01:12:20.020 But carry on, mate.

01:12:20.740 So you've become more right-wing.

01:12:22.540 But there's a very important point underneath all that.

01:12:25.840 So I now have a far greater appreciation of money.

01:12:28.600 I have a far better understanding of how money is made, how money is created.

01:12:32.740 And by doing that, that changes the way I interact with the world.

01:12:38.460 But when I was a teacher, I didn't know any of those things.

01:12:42.260 So the idea of just taxing the rich…

01:12:45.080 Sounds totally reasonable.

01:12:46.820 Yeah.

01:12:46.880 Sounds totally reasonable because you don't understand.

01:12:48.940 And I guess what I'm saying is when you disempower people from going out, starting their own business, pursuing their own dreams, what happens is they get disconnected from the way that money is made, money is created.

01:13:02.120 So these ideas, which I now understand are bad and will make people poorer, sound better.

01:13:08.040 They sound good, but then they don't work.

01:13:09.680 They shut off the engine room of the economy.

01:13:11.920 You raise an important point that education is really important, that if you don't educate people about how the system works, then they fall for smart-sounding things or sensible-sounding things.

01:13:23.860 You know, Gary's economics comes along and says, oh, just do a 2% income tax.

01:13:29.260 You know, I spoke to Gary's economics.

01:13:31.280 I was shocked that he doesn't distinguish at all between revenue, profit, wealth.

01:13:37.360 He doesn't distinguish between houses and business equity.

01:13:40.400 He just got a very simple-sounding soundbite.

01:13:44.840 I'm actually shocked that he's LSE and Oxford educated, and he literally just goes with these super soundbites, and then when challenged on it, gets angry.

01:13:53.800 But what happens is that you get vast numbers of the population who basically fall for this stuff.

01:14:01.080 But let's be honest as well.

01:14:02.840 This will sound unpleasant to people, but I also just think it's true.

01:14:06.400 So we should say it because it's important.

01:14:08.940 It's easier to think that way, and it's comforting to think that way because you go, well, it's not my fault.

01:14:17.660 It's the system.

01:14:19.040 It's the rich.

01:14:20.040 It's the this.

01:14:20.720 It's the that.

01:14:21.600 You had that same opportunity.

01:14:23.240 I don't know about that.

01:14:24.660 I push back on that because it's very disempowering.

01:14:29.040 You hand over all your agency when you think that way, and it's a horrible feeling.

01:14:33.280 Yes, but imagine, see, you can't understand it because you don't think like this.

01:14:37.340 Imagine that you had to face the fact that you have all that agency and you haven't done anything with it.

01:14:43.380 Then it's much more comforting to think that it's not your fault.

01:14:46.500 It's someone else's fault, right?

01:14:47.980 That you haven't got to where ideally you would have liked to get.

01:14:50.560 See, even in Britain where everyone thinks being rich and wealthy is a terrible thing and you're disgusting if you want to do well and all the rest of it, people still want to make money.

01:15:01.300 People still want to do well.

01:15:02.660 People still want a nice house.

01:15:03.580 I really want to make sure your listeners know this is the moment in time where you can go from zero to a million in like – it happens fast now.

01:15:13.160 We regularly get our clients launch and get a million of revenue in their first 12 months.

01:15:16.780 Like this is not a hard thing to do.

01:15:21.280 It's often the case because we have access to global markets, lightning fast technology.

01:15:26.780 It's often the case that if you want to turn it around, let's say you're in your 50s and you go, oh, I've discovered I've got all this agency and I've done nothing with it.

01:15:36.020 Great.

01:15:36.500 Two and a half years from now, build yourself a serious business.

01:15:40.340 You really can turn it around fast.

01:15:42.180 If you switch your mindset on and you go, actually, you know what?

01:15:46.260 I want to do things differently.

01:15:48.400 This is not a – like it used to be that you had to spend your entire life building something of value.

01:15:52.820 Things can become – especially in an AI-powered world, which is going to further polarize people, there are people who can start with nothing and make seven-figure revenue in their first 12 to 18 months.

01:16:05.720 It does happen all the time.

01:16:07.000 And think about how much information is available, including your work and loads of other people in a way that – like even Francis and I never really had access to.

01:16:14.840 If you're interested in doing something now, the world of information is all there.

01:16:21.420 Well, ChatGPT is literally an advisor that knows everything and you can just talk to ChatGPT and say, oh, how do I set up this?

01:16:30.600 How do I do this?

01:16:31.260 How do I make this happen?

01:16:33.020 Help me create a marketing campaign.

01:16:35.060 Help me – you can literally say, ask me questions and help me come up with a business idea.

01:16:39.200 Like it's wild, you know.

01:16:42.720 Yeah.

01:16:43.080 Yeah, I was going to say, you know, I always remember this moment during the pandemic when everything locked down and had a kind of bleak moment.

01:16:50.420 And I spoke to Andrew about this, the comedian Andrew Schultz.

01:16:53.420 And I saw a video of his where he just did a little direct address to the camera.

01:16:56.620 And he's – and this actually changed my life where he went, you've always complained that you've never had time.

01:17:05.380 You've never had time to write the book, write the movie script, start a podcast, start a business, do follow your dreams.

01:17:11.520 Well, now you have time.

01:17:13.260 So what are you going to do with it?

01:17:14.260 And not to say, look, people have kids and whatever else.

01:17:17.320 No, it's not everybody has the same opportunity.

01:17:20.280 But that reframe of a situation was so powerful for me.

01:17:25.580 And I think – and I really want people to take this away from this conversation is you've got more power than you would admit to yourself.

01:17:34.800 Our ancestors, your grandparents, great-grandparents, they would trade places with you in a heartbeat.

01:17:41.860 I mean, if they could see what's available, if they were sitting on the sidelines and saying, oh, my goodness, you mean you've got – you can start a YouTube channel and no one – you don't even ask any permission, you just start it?

01:17:53.620 Oh, you mean you can just set up a Shopify store?

01:17:56.060 You mean you can just go connect with people on Instagram?

01:17:58.420 You can just use ChatGPT and, like, get every answer to every question and, like, literally customized, tailored to your circumstance?

01:18:05.040 You can do all that?

01:18:06.300 Oh, man, oh, man.

01:18:07.720 Like, tap out.

01:18:09.500 Let me in, right?

01:18:10.200 Like, most people are sitting there going, oh, but, you know, but I've got tennis elbow.

01:18:14.020 It's like, oh, come on.

01:18:15.120 You know, let's hit it.

01:18:16.760 Yeah.

01:18:17.040 Well, I will take credit for this. 0.99

01:18:19.420 We have inspired a lot of people to start things similar to what we do because they're just like, well, if those two idiots can do it, we definitely can. 0.99

01:18:26.920 And that genuinely is true. 0.99

01:18:28.440 There are a lot of people like that.

01:18:31.060 But I think you're totally right.

01:18:33.140 And that is always worth remembering because, ultimately, like you say, you can only play the cards that you've been dealt with.

01:18:40.680 Life's not fair.

01:18:41.580 No.

01:18:41.820 Life is not fair.

01:18:43.360 And you know what?

01:18:44.640 That's just how it is.

01:18:46.520 And this idea that we're going to wait until there's some sort of fair scenario.

01:18:50.700 You'll be waiting the rest of your life.

01:18:52.020 You'll be waiting forever.

01:18:53.080 You know, it's not fair that my friend, quadruple amputee, just totally unfair, another friend of mine, he was riding his bike as sun was going down.

01:19:03.560 A drunk driver hits him.

01:19:05.400 He's in a coma for six weeks.

01:19:07.480 He almost, like, just lives, just lives.

01:19:11.060 But he destroys his entire, like, everything in his life was completely destroyed as a result of a drunk driver.

01:19:17.420 As soon as he can, he's up.

01:19:19.400 He's starting a business.

01:19:21.120 He's now living in Thailand.

01:19:22.240 He's running his global business from Thailand and Dubai.

01:19:26.120 He's basically like, yeah, I'm glad I got a second chance at life and I'm ready to go again.

01:19:31.620 So, totally not fair.

01:19:34.020 Gets on with it.

01:19:35.340 Daniel, before we head over to Substack and we ask your people's questions to you, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

01:19:42.540 We must change the schooling system.

01:19:44.960 We are now living in a world where we're training people for an industrial revolution system that doesn't exist.

01:19:50.200 That schooling system was designed to create cogs in machines.

01:19:54.220 We don't need cogs in machines anymore.

01:19:56.660 It was designed to basically fill up local factories and local offices with people who were component labor.

01:20:03.940 That system is not going to serve us.

01:20:06.340 We are already living in a post-AI world and all of the jobs that the schooling system is preparing us for, they will not exist.

01:20:14.280 They're going away or they're going to go mostly away.

01:20:17.480 We have to prepare children for the world that is coming and it's coming in thick and fast.

01:20:22.420 We've urgently got to be changing the schooling system and preparing kids for the world that's coming.

01:20:27.240 Completely agree with you.

01:20:28.440 As someone, there were times when I was teaching, I'm like, I have no idea where we're teaching kids about how to use a compass, for example.

01:20:36.860 And that was as recent as 2020.

01:20:40.240 But I don't teach kids about what APR means on a credit card.

01:20:43.580 Don't worry, if the world keeps going the way, his compass is going to become useful again.

01:20:48.380 Anyway, he used to be a teacher.

01:20:50.000 All right, head on over to Substack where we're going to ask Daniel your questions.

01:20:55.320 Daniel, as someone who loves building new things, creating new realities,

01:20:59.060 what would you say are the most important creative abilities for an entrepreneur?

01:21:03.300 Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything, like packing a spare stick.

01:21:26.900 I like to be prepared.

01:21:28.500 That's why I remember 988, Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline.

01:21:32.400 It's good to know.

01:21:33.300 Just in case.

01:21:34.560 Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a trained responder.

01:21:38.800 Anytime.

01:21:39.960 988 Suicide Crisis Helpline is funded by the government in Canada.

01:21:43.260 All right.

01:21:43.920 All right.

01:21:47.860 Did it with us go out of the field?

01:21:52.100 I was just listening to my ministry.

01:21:57.160 That's enough.

01:21:58.400 All right.

01:22:02.960 Huh?

TRIGGERnometry - August 27, 2025

How Britain is Destroying Its Economy - Daniel Priestley

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