Mike Driver on the Entrepreneurial Mindset and the Futility of Predictions
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Length
1 hour and 2 minutes
Words per minute
172.2151
Harmful content
Misogyny
4
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33
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Hate speech
19
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Summary
In this episode, Francis and Conner chat to serial entrepreneur Mike Driver about how he went from a PhD in game theory to running one of the UK's largest technology companies. They talk about the early days of selling photocopiers, how he built a company from the ground up, and how he sold part of it to Goldman Sachs.
Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissinger.
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And this is a show for you if you're bored of watching people on the internet having arguments
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over subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts,
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we ask the experts. Our brilliant guest this week is a serial entrepreneur, Mike Driver.
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Welcome to Trigonometry. Good morning, thanks for having me.
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Yeah, it's good to have you here. You've given away the time of the day that we record the show at, so now people know how to chase us down. Good.
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Yep, it's exactly the experience I have every night.
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Now, we obviously know and love you, but tell everybody who hasn't seen you before, who are you, what do you do, what's your background, what's your story, how are you in the seat that you find yourself in now?
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I went to university, came out of university in 1991.
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I made the mistake of studying economics, and I made the further mistake of taking up
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It's unfinished, and if any of you want to pop back up to Manchester and have a go at
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So I came out of, I was persuaded to drop that game theory.
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Well, I was actually approached by my supervisor
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who told me there were only a few people in the world
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who understood game theory, and I wasn't one of them.
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to the film A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe, John Nash.
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But actually, what got my interest in game theory
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he failed and he was a terrible poker player and he lost a lot of money at it which basically
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summarizes my experience in the field the very latest version of game theory which you might
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be aware of was Yanis Varoufakis who we both know well Yanis felt it was a good idea to try and use
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game theory to negotiate with the European Commission the European Union I think that
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he was particularly unsuccessful and I think you could probably ascribe most of that the fact that
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game theory doesn't work in negotiation which which somewhat undermines its uses I think at all
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so so so left there I was persuaded out of that by a friend of mine who'd come back from the
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Caribbean where he'd been selling timeshare and he said we should start a business so I said oh
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good what are we going to do and he said we'll sell photocopiers now I didn't even know what a
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photocopier look like at this time I'd never seen one I knew they existed in concept but I didn't
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really know what one was but you know anything was better than an academic career and uh so we
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started selling photocopiers we we would uh we had a uh a tiny little room about the size of
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your studio I've given away the size of the studio don't give the location because then we're truly
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screen. We had one desk, one phone, and a rented brown Hyundai pony. I don't know if you've ever
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seen a brown Hyundai pony. I don't advise it. But they were eight quid a day. We had two grand.
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We had the serviced office. This is how we started off. And we literally used to collect 50 compliment
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slips from office buildings in the morning. And we would call those compliment slips in the afternoon.
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we didn't have a reseller agreement to sell any photocopiers if we were lucky enough to sell a
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photocopier we had to go to somebody who was far more experienced than us who had a reseller
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experience reseller agreement and who would extract the maximum profit from us and that's
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how we started off somehow by hooker by crook we grew that business over the next 14 years
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scan archive, retrieval, print, all this stuff.
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we sold part of that to private equity in 2006.
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So I had then what the Americans call a liquidity moment.
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which wasn't particularly wealthy, is quite nice.
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I stayed in the private equity world for a little while.
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Basically, he went to very, very expensive schools
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The best description I can give you of private equity
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is they couldn't find a coconut on Coconut Island.
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So lovely human beings, no idea about business.
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So I eventually left that business and I decided that it would be a good idea because it was something, again, that I knew absolutely nothing about to go into investment banking or corporate finance.
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When I'd been selling my business, quite often your options for who can help you sell a business, the advice people give you to sell a business is someone from PwC, KPMG, Deloitte, or EY.
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Maybe I shouldn't have said all four of those things.
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What I would do is I would sit opposite those guys, and I would think, two questions, really.
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and the answer to those questions would normally be not very much and probably not yeah so i had
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the idea is could we start a business that was providing unconflicted advice to entrepreneurs
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so that's essentially what i do now started that business um and over the last eight years or so
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um we have helped uh probably 77 businesses either sell or raise funds so we've sold over
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two billion pounds worth of entrepreneur-ly owned businesses.
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So I probably met with more entrepreneurs, I imagine,
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There'll be 70, 80 businesses, two or three directors.
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So I've met literally thousands of entrepreneurs.
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let's start with that because one of the most fascinating things I ever heard you talk about
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was the entrepreneurial mindset. A lot of people kind of look at videos on the internet and go,
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oh, how can I become an entrepreneur? And you have a totally different take on what makes an
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entrepreneur. Well, I do. And yeah, I'm going to sort of invalidate an entire industry here,
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I think. But I don't think you can actually decide to become an entrepreneur. I think the
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only way you could decide to become an entrepreneur if you could invest in a time machine. I'll
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explain why. So in all of the conversations I've had with entrepreneurs, I always ask the same
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question. I've been very suspicious of where entrepreneurialism comes from. I think it might
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be epigenetic. So I always ask the same question, is what did you do when you were a kid for work
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and did you have any challenges or problems when you were younger? And invariably, entrepreneurs
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will have had difficulties and challenges in their younger years. And the one thing you can
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guarantee they would have done it they have hustled like crazy when they were kids they would
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have you know for instance when i there's the guy who does the paper round i was the guy who marked
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up the papers before you got in to do the paper round because an extra fiver to be had for marking
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the papers up did you i used to sell porn mags at school the new war yeah we used to buy them cheap
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and then because we went to a school and this was in the days of the internet we used to sell them
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off for massive markups to you obviously have some entrepreneur we managed to combine both things
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the trauma and the entrepreneurial thing at the same time, which is quite nice.
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Sorry, just spoke something. I mean, carry on. Apologies, yeah.
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Yeah, well, you learn something new every day about your business partner.
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The closest thing I would relate entrepreneurialism to is actually anorexia.
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Okay, so the latest thinking about anorexia is it's epigenetic,
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and epigenetic means that circumstances of the environment
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cause certain genes to be expressed that wouldn't have otherwise or overexpressive genes.
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In anorexia, obviously, it's the suppression of appetite which the environment and the
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circumstances cause. And we're seeing a rapid increase in incidence of anorexia. At the same
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time, we're seeing a rapid increase in the prevalence of social media, social media bullying
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and so on and so forth being the adversity perhaps
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And I suspect that something very similar happens to the entrepreneur.
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It would make sense for entrepreneurialism to be epigenetic.
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You only want some people to be entrepreneurial.
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If everybody was entrepreneurial, it would be chaos.
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So, yeah, I think in terms of the industry itself
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how I made it you know the base yeah I basically summarize the how I made it books is is I went to
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this news agent to buy my lottery ticket that that is about the similar a similar amount of
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information that you will get from from a story about how somebody made it the only real way to
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become an entrepreneur would be to invent a time machine travel back in time and traumatize yourself
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at the age of 11 and then I think you've got so so so I don't think it's something you can learn
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but it does explain quite a lot of behaviors of entrepreneurial people.
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even though they've made fantastical amounts of money,
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and they're stupid enough to start another business
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but it also more subtly and more importantly explains a mode of behaviour which is essential
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in entrepreneurialism and does not really manifest in other walks of life and this is
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essentially a way to deal with an unknown future. So the future isn't predictable
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The future is not predictable because it is unimaginable.
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So how do you learn to deal with a future that you cannot predict?
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Now, what most people do is they try and narrow it down
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to forecasts and models and all of those kinds of things,
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which, you know, the future is waiting around the corner
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with a baseball bat for those guys who are carrying the model.
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You need to find a way to adapt to the unknown.
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What entrepreneurs do is something I call serial redundancy.
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So serial redundancy is a mode of behaviour where a way of looking at it would be little bet poker.
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So you don't bet all of your money on one good idea.
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You trial and error, trial and error, trial and error, never bet your whole stack,
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never risk all of your capital so that when your opportunity comes along,
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the product that works whatever it is you get after it you know you've tested the market the
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market says yes and then you take the risk so it's it's controlled risk it's not it's risk
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management um more more than more than is risk taking and that that that mode of behavior is
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common across pretty much all of the entrepreneurs that that I've met and I think it's unusual that
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that a cross-section of people from every background from every race from every different
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part of the country and every different part of the world would all follow a very similar pattern
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would all follow a very similar mode of behavior and I think that traces back to them being faced
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with challenges the challenges in youth might have been positive challenges by the way but usually
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it will have been stress and that's very Darwinian if you think about it you need stress in a system
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for a system to progress it's interesting you say that i remember i'm a big fan of basketball
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and i remember watching a few coaches in america discussing uh how they scout players and one of
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them said i i never i never pick a player from a house with two cars in other words if the parents
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were wealthy the child isn't gonna have the drive that it takes to really be so determined to fight
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through the injuries, to compete at that level, to not get comfortable once they get to a certain
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stage and just to keep going. And I think a lot of what you're talking about actually applies to
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sport quite a lot as well. A lot of the people who make it to the very top in sport seem to be
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coming from that kind of place. Well, I think it's the other comparison I'd make with sport
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is the thing that you need to be very comfortable with as an entrepreneur is the word no.
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as comedians we hear that a lot both from promoters and audience i i was i was looking
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before i came today and i was looking back at last 25 years and i reckon i've probably done
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6 000 face-to-face meetings in in the last 20 25 years selling something service or products or
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or solution or business or whatever it might be and my hit rate in those 6 000 meetings is
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But actually, to set those 6,000 meetings in the first place
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That makes your success rate, or my success rate, not yours,
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I'm sure more than 0.2% of people laugh at your jokes when you're in a...
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So that leaves me with a success rate of about 0.2%.
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What's even more interesting, if you kind of take it to the next level, if you think
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about negotiation, which is an interesting topic at the moment, if you actually look
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at those 0.2% of times that I have been successful, within the negotiations, I mostly lose.
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so you lose the little battles along the way and eventually someone says yes so if you actually
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look at the the actual times that the actual conversations where you have come out on top
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they're a tiny fraction of the 600,000 times that you attempted to speak to somebody so you're
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hearing no uh at almost pathological level um and I always say that that winning is easy
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yeah I know how to lose yeah and that that's one of the ways I would define that
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the entrepreneur isn't somebody and we we see survivorship bias we see the winners and we see
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them being very good at winning actually most of us we get here because we're very good at losing
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it's fascinating that you say that and you're talking about the mindset because the average
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person wouldn't be able to hear no that many times without thinking do you know what this isn't for
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me i just don't have it in me whereas the entrepreneur or somebody who is truly dedicated
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But it's that design, the determination to push through
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that really sets the successful people apart in many ways.
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has thousands and thousands and thousands of people
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who never make it. Actually, we all owe them a debt of gratitude. They're the people that we
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should be thanking, really, because we are statistical anomalies. That's what we are,
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really. We're not something that can be constructed. We're something that emerges
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from continued interactions in the economy. Most people fail, and we've got those people to thank.
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We can never be sure. And one of the most interesting subjects, I think, you really
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don't want to think about it because you most entrepreneurs think but let me give you three
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categories of entrepreneur there's those that make it by dint of being you know fantastic business
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people huge amount of empathy a huge amount of understanding of their market remarkable in every
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way fantastic human beings okay so that's that's the first category the second category will be
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those that make it by dint of having an awkward personality.
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The reality is we're in some combination of the above.
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And what's difficult for most entrepreneurs to reconcile
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which is difficult, I think, in all walks of life.
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And you see very often where people have been very, very successful
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in one business, and they're not very successful in the next.
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Now, they just might be unlucky in the second business,
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but they might have been lucky in the first business.
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Our liquidity moment is a couple of years off, Mike,
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We're almost not having to pay for ourselves anymore.
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it's interesting because I remember doing some research on this.
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I was doing kind of like a personal development course at one point,
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and they were talking about this Eastern European guy,
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to deal with people at the time when call centers had just emerged,
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And they were having literally approach anxiety to the phone
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for someone to just call you out of the blue and start selling you something.
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So these people would pick up the phone, call someone up,
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What he did is he got them to go out and make ridiculous requests of other people,
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or go to a Chinese restaurant and order a burger
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And he managed to train them out of having that negative reaction
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in terms of being able to kind of take and know so many times.
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Whether people necessarily want to put themselves in that position
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I think he's taught them something slightly different
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to what the call centre is asking them to achieve.
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So what they've done is they've learnt to get over
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the initial embarrassment of speaking to a complete stranger.
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It probably helps to be doing that in a group of other people
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and this probably goes back to what I was talking about before,
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he's not able to teach them to have the necessary empathy
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to convert that person that they've got over the embarrassment of talking to to convert them into
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whatever the call to action is for the for the phone call i guarantee no matter how many psychologists
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or how successful he was about getting him over the initial hurdle of the embarrassment there
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will have been 20 of people who or smaller even but 20 of people is the usual number who would
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have been able if you had the sufficient empathy if you like to to to convert that phone call into
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a sale or whatever the course of action is. So I don't think he was necessarily teaching
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them an entrepreneurial skill. He was teaching them a useful life skill. Don't be embarrassed
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when you ask somebody a really annoying and stupid question. You two seem to have.
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I know. I know. I know. Mike, we were talking about the mindset of an entrepreneur and you
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you related it to trauma how much of it do you think an entrepreneur has a desire for control
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and how much of it do you think stems from control because you will compare it to anorexia
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i used to work in a girl's school my girlfriend's a psychologist and she used to work in a center
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for teenagers with eating disorders and she's i remember her explained to me about anorexia
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it's about control it's about controlling your portion size it's feeling in a world where you're
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surrounded by chaos but you can control this one thing yet that makes you feel more secure in
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yourself do you think entrepreneurs being an entrepreneur comes from that in that I have my
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business I can control this I can control that I can control these elements of it I think it could
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be that okay that is definitely one possibility I think that will possibly be for a number of
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entrepreneurs what I think it more likely to be is that people are uncontrollable so so I think I
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think I go back to what I said before about it not feeling like a choice that
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most people who who become entrepreneurs who go on to do this sort of thing
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they've had jobs along the way and the moment that they are told to do
00:21:53.300
something they feel that's like deep-seated desire not to do it yes
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because so I probably go the other way but I take your point on the on the
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control side that we tend we tend to be control freaks you know we do tend to we do tend to you
00:22:15.000
have to a really interesting example of somebody who isn't an entrepreneur in my opinion because
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literally because he is displayed not having any control free careers Luke Johnson I don't know if
00:22:29.660
You've seen recently the Patisserie Valerie situation where they've discovered a 94 million
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Now, a true control freak entrepreneur will be able to tell you the margin in every chocolate
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cake that he sells, let alone how much money he's got in the bank account to the nearest
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Luke Johnson wrote the entrepreneur column in the back of the Sunday Times.
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And this goes to what I was saying about the future being unimaginable.
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When he was sat comfortably writing his missives about entrepreneurialism in the Sunday Times,
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he had no way of forecasting that next year the accountants would find a £94 million hole
00:23:24.980
in the accounts of his business um so so i i think the control is a necessary element of
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entrepreneurial behavior but i think the thing that shoves you into it is is actually the
00:23:38.420
inability to submit to control if that makes sense so it's in the same and how much of that
00:23:44.140
is distrust in systems because i remember that my dad was a solicitor and he um he went into local
00:23:50.820
government because he believed it was safe and it was stable and that would provide him with
00:23:54.320
regular employment. My father, for no fault of his own, lost his job. And I always remember him
00:24:00.100
coming to pick me up when I was 15 and him saying, I've lost my job. And we were going back and there
00:24:06.100
was no way of paying for things. And my mum ended up going back to Venezuela for a bit and being in
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this episode of chaos. And me realising at the age of 15, oh, there is no safety. There is no
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safety net. It's all illusory in many ways. Do you think entrepreneurs have a distrust of
00:24:25.080
those particular systems as well, where they feel, you know what, no one's going to have my back.
00:24:29.180
I've got to do it for myself. Yeah, well, I think what most people still perform is a delusion
00:24:34.640
of control. It doesn't really exist. I think what most entrepreneurs, and they might not even
00:24:41.280
be able to elucidate it, but what they instinctively feel, and we've evolved over millennia
00:24:48.280
instinct and humility as a way of dealing with a lack of control, as a way of dealing
00:24:53.940
without being able to control the future. And I think what pretty much all entrepreneurs
00:25:00.480
do is they instinctively realise is that they cannot control the future. So to take your
00:25:05.360
unfortunate situation, if you like, you had the opposite of redundancy. Your father had
00:25:11.740
all these eggs in one basket in a job that ultimately he had no control on the desk of
00:25:18.540
the destiny of if you like he had he had everything on red yeah the ball lands in black and here you
00:25:24.960
are yeah in the situation you're at I think what entrepreneurs instinctively realize is is there's
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always a chance um that it can go to shit I remember we I remember we first got we first
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to do a private equity and my first i was forced then to to produce a budget and a forecast
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is something that i'd always avoided previously and uh i was asked by the guy from pwc you know
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what's this cost line here 50 000 pound a month and i said well it's for the shit
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watch it well i said the shit that we don't know what it is yet yeah take it out you know take it
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Yeah. So what you were, what your situation was, is you were, strangely, you were optimised.
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Optimisation is really bad. You know, nature doesn't optimise. Evolution doesn't optimise.
00:26:17.960
The only way evolution progresses is by mutation. You know, optimisation is an evolution that we call this act.
00:26:26.180
So you had everything on red. It came up in black.
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And what an entrepreneur instinctively realises is never to put everything on red.
00:26:32.800
Yeah. And that goes back to what before I was talking about, serial redundancy and how you give yourself multiple points of failure.
00:26:40.100
And the way I describe it is what an entrepreneur does actually isn't even necessarily coming up with a great idea.
00:26:47.880
What they do is they fall over opportunity. So I say stay alive to fall over opportunity is a really good examples of this.
00:26:54.960
So take Amazon, for instance. Amazon's online retail business is debatable whether that's even profitable.
00:27:01.660
I would say that if you were to factor in the way they pay the staff, so stock-based
00:27:06.020
remuneration, it possibly isn't even profitable, which would be a surprise to most people.
00:27:11.440
Now, what they do have is a very, very profitable web hosting business called AWS.
00:27:20.640
They built the web hosting facility, the Amazon Web Services, for their own business in order
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to sell you shit that they can't make any money on the internet and then one day they wake up and
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go christ we could sell this to other people now that is a hugely profitable business that bezos
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never came up with it he never thought to himself i'm going to go he said i'm going to go and be the
00:27:45.740
everything store he never said i'm going to go and uh you know have have this cloud business that's
00:27:52.240
going to be the most successful the cloud didn't even exist when he started off so i think that
00:27:56.580
what entrepreneurs do is they stay alive long enough to fall over opportunity and again what
00:28:03.040
we do afterwards is we meet normal human beings and normally human beings want rational explanations
00:28:08.220
for things so rather than say oh it just fell on me you know and it was there and I thought oh wow
00:28:13.860
you know let's do it well I started off with this strategy I wrote this business plan I mean it's
00:28:20.160
all hindsight bias and post hoc yeah it's such an interesting point Mike because a mutual friend
00:28:24.840
of ours actually tells a story about jack d the famous comedian here in the uk yeah uh who has
00:28:29.280
this very sour dour personality uh and apparently uh this was he was struggling as a comedian he
00:28:35.480
really wasn't having much head not getting very far and uh with the kind of normal character like
00:28:41.080
a normal comedian and then one day he got so fed up with the whole comedy world and with comedy and
0.98
00:28:46.780
how he was doing that he turned up at this gig and he was like you know what fuck it i'm just
0.95
00:28:50.660
going to one last time i'm just going to do this last gig and he was really angry and kind of
0.98
00:28:55.800
frustrated and that frustration is what he brought to the stage and suddenly he found himself doing
00:29:00.600
really well like he stumbled onto this thing and it's fascinating because i think what you're
00:29:06.520
talking about really is in some ways the power of resilience as well which is you keep going
00:29:11.380
until something falls in your lap it's interesting uh there's a there's a book called anti-fragile by
00:29:18.180
and Asim Taleb, who we've both met at Kilconomics.
00:29:24.280
So he talks about things that exhibit convexity
00:29:30.020
So it's not just being able to withstand the stress,
00:29:34.780
the stress in the system actually improves your performance.
00:29:47.080
is you actually get better you you don't think to yourself uh oh my god i'm a terrible human
00:29:52.200
being everyone hates me you think i just need to be a little bit better yeah what did i get
00:29:56.980
wrong in that conversation what could i have said differently what didn't i understand about that
00:30:00.680
person and and so you are benefiting from what what other people would see well certainly the
00:30:06.860
majority of humans would see as stresses but you're getting better as a result of interacting
00:30:34.860
this is the last time, if he said this is the second
00:30:39.160
worked maybe a different personality would have made
00:30:40.900
the next time and I think that's what also what defines it defines an entrepreneurial mindset
00:30:46.820
yeah we're almost congenitally incapable of saying this is it I'm not doing it again
00:30:51.280
it's a bit like comedians yeah yeah it's very much like comedians except entrepreneurs don't
00:30:56.580
pretend to be left wing I think I might be the only one that ever has
00:31:01.380
Mike um at what point does resilience and all these amazing qualities and getting through it
00:31:11.880
At what point does that tip into self-delusion?
00:31:14.180
Because we've all met that person who talks a great game
00:31:18.680
and then gets up on that stage and you're like,
00:31:34.740
You're actually riding off the backs of the people
00:31:37.820
you know you need all the if everybody who stood up on stage who decided they were funny was funny
00:31:42.660
it'd be a very crowded stage wouldn't it so so we're all kind of right so i i think i think you
00:31:48.240
get you get two things the people who try and make it as an entrepreneur you get the people
00:31:53.120
who just try it doesn't work out and they go back to doing a normal job and all that kind of thing
00:31:58.560
and that's great but what you get at the other end which is probably i think i think sort of
00:32:03.360
where you're aiming at is something they call acquired psychopathy and I was asked I think
00:32:10.600
I was asked a question recently at a show uh a kill economic show where where somebody said
00:32:16.520
why do people in the UK or people in Europe sell their businesses and people in the United States
00:32:25.580
just keep going and my answer was we're not psychopaths you know so you get an English guy
00:32:30.640
a German guy or whatever and you know he can pay the kids school fees he can he could buy a nice
00:32:36.980
house in Spain and drive a decent car and put enough money away you know I'll take that you
00:32:43.800
know he probably starts again but he you know he's relatively balanced in the way he thinks
00:32:48.160
you know in America no they want to take over the world you know and not only that is they
00:32:55.020
want to remake the world into something that that they recognize and I think we
00:33:00.460
see that with there's a controversial point for you with somebody like Bill
00:33:04.000
Gates and what the Gates Foundation is doing in Africa at the moment is that
00:33:09.660
really helping? Many many scholars there's a book called The Tyranny of
00:33:14.400
Experts if you want to sort of it's kind of current this with the kind of
00:33:18.600
controversy around comic relief lately but if you want to research this a
00:33:23.880
a little bit more there's a really interesting book by William Easterly called the tyranny of
00:33:27.280
experts really what we should be giving to people in developing countries is freedom
00:33:34.280
and what we shouldn't be doing is imposing western solutions from western companies
00:33:40.520
pretty much all those solutions that you'll find that Mr Gates recommends will be coming from
00:33:46.620
people like Monsanto you know you have to you have to have certain pesticides certain crops
00:34:03.660
of aid is much easier when you've got a despot.
00:34:24.360
So I think you get this thing at the very top end
00:34:27.100
where people become literally trying to remake the world
00:34:36.020
And that may or may not be helpful to the rest of us.
00:34:39.380
All right, well, we can wrap up the entrepreneurial section
00:34:41.580
by saying if you're not already an entrepreneur,
00:34:47.280
know you're probably a fucking psychopath so we can just leave it there but we started just there
1.00
00:34:52.660
talking about some stuff that's a bit different and I've always really enjoyed listening to you
1.00
00:34:57.640
talk about different ideas because you have a very counterintuitive set of ways of thinking
00:35:03.780
about stuff so you've mentioned in the past that the way we think about everything is wrong
00:35:07.980
or maybe misguided or that we you know what is it that we kind of don't get about how the world
00:35:14.520
is or what to be in your opinion. Well let's take politics which is an interesting example at the
00:35:19.760
moment. So people think or have thought for many many years that the battleground is this left
00:35:27.000
v right which you see you know to some greater or lesser degree across the world. See I don't
00:35:36.080
agree with that at all. I think the real battleground that we face now is between command
00:35:41.080
and control technocrats on one side and adapt and survive emergence on the other. So I think
00:35:49.960
we might be the least perceptive and most dangerous people who ever lived. I mentioned
00:35:58.580
before about the educational institutionalization of hubris above humility. We believe, if we
00:36:10.460
think rationally, that we can understand and therefore
00:36:25.040
saying I said before about the future being unpredictable.
00:36:29.700
It's unpredictable not because we can't understand enough
00:36:34.080
It's unpredictable because what's going to happen
00:36:39.120
A good example, should I do an example of that?
00:36:42.180
The example of that is, I'm quite sure how old you guys are, but...
00:36:50.100
So is this what you put on your Tinder account?
00:36:54.880
I want to talk about internet dating as being a good example of something which has changed the world,
00:37:06.640
So when I first started looking to date people of the opposite sex, one would go to a public house and drink.
0.82
00:37:16.700
And that would be the circumstances whereby you would overcome your fears without the help of an Eastern European psychiatrist.
0.67
00:37:25.160
I'd walk up to people for the members of the opposite sex.
1.00
00:37:28.940
When you said the word Eastern European, I thought you were going to take it in a wholly different direction, Mike.
00:37:37.960
Wetherspoon says an Eastern European Psychiatrist
00:37:58.180
the realm of possibilities. The internet didn't
00:38:04.300
he did. And I don't know if he had dating in mind. He probably had porn in mind when
00:38:09.360
he invented the internet. To me, as the pre-internet person, the concept of Tinder would be completely
00:38:19.580
alien as to be impossible to predict. Whereas the thing is, apparently now, the internet
00:38:30.900
So they are meeting and basing their initial contact
00:38:38.680
to the drunken criteria that we based it on in the 80s,
00:38:42.480
which was definitely helpful to certain people.
00:38:56.080
But what's actually the outcome of that? The outcome of that is new relationships. The outcome of new relationships is a whole different and new set of human beings who couldn't possibly have existed prior to the Internet.
00:39:11.020
So, and that is going to create an entirely different society that couldn't have existed because these people will be the people who make the progress in medicine or, you know, turning, you know, sunlight into effective, whatever they do into effective power.
00:39:30.420
The future dictator of the world will be in this population of people
00:39:37.900
And that is completely and utterly unpredictable.
00:39:43.760
No, no, no, because I was going to say, it just sparked something in me
00:39:46.300
because I was reading about how the nightclub industry said
00:39:48.860
that their business model has been really badly affected by Tinder
00:39:52.400
because in our generation, the only reason you really went to a nightclub
00:40:15.680
So the stats for scoring away from home had increased.
00:40:21.020
that the players didn't go to nightclubs anymore
00:40:24.640
So they wouldn't go to a nightclub before the game.
00:40:28.740
or whatever they get down them in the nightclub
00:40:39.640
If predictions don't actually work, as you say,
00:40:54.920
And this comes down to what we're trying to do is we're trying to classify, we're trying to categorise, we're trying to model the future.
00:41:09.700
So we put things in categories, we classify things, and then we model in order to be able to predict what happens in the future.
00:41:16.860
And we do that because we're afraid, because people don't like to think that they don't know what's coming around the corner.
00:41:22.760
I mean, in this country, that could be described as a middle-class malaise.
00:41:28.760
So you see it really in the way middle-class parents want to educate their kids with an inch of their lives.
00:41:42.440
One of the guys who's in the investment company that bought the business
00:41:46.060
was explaining to me that his nanny needed to speak Mandarin
00:41:57.900
but he wasn't sure whether he was going to speak English at home yet
00:42:00.540
because the children would obviously get the English at school yet.
00:42:03.380
So he was considering whether to learn another language.
00:42:07.180
And speak to his children in a non-native language.
00:42:10.020
You can't bollock your kid in a non-native language.
1.00
00:42:15.180
When she was angry at me, it was always Spanish that she went to.
1.00
00:42:18.780
And so you're familiar with many, many Spanish swear words.
00:42:25.480
Which means, what the vagina do you think you're doing?
1.00
00:42:29.880
I don't think it's going to work over here.
0.97
00:42:34.040
In fact, this podcast will probably not be broadcast now you've said that.
00:42:39.260
This podcast, what we've said so far is entirely acceptable
00:42:45.900
But we do need to be able to make decisions, though, Mike, right?
00:42:50.480
Like, we need to be able to make electoral decisions.
00:42:53.140
We need to be able to make negotiating decisions.
00:42:55.280
We need to be able to try and have some idea of the future,
00:43:04.520
where we recognize that what you're saying is true?
00:43:11.580
You start from a position where, I mean, a really good example of this is the current debate that we're having at the moment or not having at the moment in this country, which is between Remain and leave.
00:43:25.400
One of the things that I think is, and I've been fairly ambivalent on this, I'm probably the only person who initially sat on the fence.
00:43:32.360
and one of the things i've noticed with with remain uh the remain argument is that nearly
00:43:39.700
half the population seem to have become experts in economics business negotiation that is so true
00:43:47.720
and uh and and they are absolutely certain um and there is there is certainly and there can be no
00:43:56.960
argument that we do not know the path that will be followed if we stay. There is uncertainty in
00:44:05.180
staying. Whether there is more uncertainty in staying or more uncertainty in leaving is a
00:44:10.160
matter for debate. But it is completely remiss to imagine that there is some certainty in a European
00:44:17.100
Union. And look, you know, we're not allowed to have a debate where those people who want to leave
00:44:25.000
are able to elucidate a leave argument on the basis of economics or on the basis of some flaws
00:44:33.680
that they perceive in the European Union. They've all been tarred with a certain brush, you know,
00:44:39.640
which is really disappointing. But I think it's a really good example where you have nearly half
1.00
00:44:44.580
the population, and I'm probably doing most of them a disservice, but certainly the vocal
00:44:48.840
elements of the Remain campaign, who are absolutely certain of something.
00:44:55.620
were a little bit more open to the uncertainty of either course of action,
00:45:01.540
it might have been a little bit less divisive. It's interesting you say that
00:45:05.180
because Francis and I both voted Remain. Because we're good people.
00:45:08.100
There we go. That's a recurring joke on the show that pisses off most of our viewers.
00:45:12.620
but now people have started to demand it yeah yeah we get comments yeah we get twitter comments
00:45:17.480
saying when are you going to start selling t-shirts we say i voted remain because i'm a
00:45:21.200
good person no no well the the sell of remain is it is is it is you you you are immediately imbued
00:45:26.800
with moral moral superiority to the leave people so so you know i i understand why that's a popular
00:45:32.060
yeah so so so we both voted remain but we are both increasingly uncomfortable at just how
00:45:39.360
polarizing this issue has been and how certain people are that what they're saying is like I'm
00:45:43.980
at the point where I voted remain in the first referendum but I feel like given that we're
00:45:49.060
sliding away from what the people actually voted for if there was a second referendum I may well
00:45:54.140
vote to leave and to support that decision and what you've said has given me so much
00:45:59.500
kind of understanding of my own view because I've always felt that it's an issue that's not clear
00:46:06.420
It's an issue on which there are no guaranteed outcomes.
00:46:12.420
but the idea that I knew what was going to happen
00:46:15.120
and I know what's going to happen if we don't leave
0.87
00:46:17.980
and I know what's going to happen if we leave is ridiculous.
00:46:21.900
I think there's incredible cognitive dissonance on the Remain side.
00:46:29.040
There is, without a doubt, the euro is an incredibly flawed mechanism.
00:46:34.600
You know, you can't have a single currency without fiscal union.
00:46:39.320
You can't have fiscal union without political union.
00:46:42.420
And is political union even something that could ever happen?
00:46:48.080
So you've got a currency which has benefited Germany at the core,
00:46:51.760
impoverished the southern states and led to incredible unemployment
00:46:57.100
and the complete annihilation of the Greek economy,
00:47:00.480
although it is coming back now which is testament to the resilience of the Greeks who are absolutely
00:47:08.160
fantastic but but that you know there is a flaw right at the heart of the European project and yet
00:47:16.020
nobody you know very rarely will anyone accept yes well okay we want to stay but we realize that
00:47:23.820
we're we're only safe because we've still got the pound so so if maybe if someone on the remainer
00:47:29.400
side say we want to stay but we can guarantee we'll never give up the pound and we'll always
00:47:33.320
be slightly addended to the European project that might have been a little bit of a better
00:47:38.240
promotery tool than to say if you don't vote to remain then you're a racist which I think
00:47:45.820
hasn't helped at all. So I exactly agree with you. It is not clear either way and anyone who
00:47:56.600
is aware of history that goes back further than 1939 probably isn't that optimistic about
00:48:03.980
a union of countries lasting forever because they never do they always break up and how much of it
00:48:12.140
is do you think people just want to buy into an easy narrative and then go I do this I vote remain
00:48:18.140
therefore this means this this and this whereas it takes time and it takes the ability to sit and
00:48:28.140
The more you reflect, the more complicated the issue becomes.
00:48:32.180
The more you try and learn about a subject, the harder it becomes almost to be certain.
00:48:39.000
I think the European Union contains some great opportunities.
00:48:44.480
The ability to go and work in other countries for young people in the UK is a great thing.
00:48:51.360
but it contains an awful lot of flaws. I mean, I go back to cognitive dissonance. You look at,
00:48:59.100
say, Mr. Juncker, who is President of the European Commission. So Mr. Juncker, previously
00:49:05.220
Prime Minister of Luxembourg, previously Finance Minister of Luxembourg. So I saw a lovely graph
00:49:11.580
and you look at the amount of tax-avoiding businesses and the amount of tax-avoiding
00:49:19.400
business who's registered in Luxembourg and the amount of tax that is, you know, revenue that's
00:49:27.680
funneled through Luxembourg at a low tax, in a low tax environment. And it's nothing when Mr.
00:49:34.560
Juncker started as finance minister. And by the time we get to today, Luxembourg is one of the
00:49:40.580
biggest facilitators of tax avoidance in the world. So it's quite difficult. Obviously the
00:49:49.460
Remain argument has sold moral superiority to those people who bought that side of the argument.
00:49:54.860
The reality is there's some pretty unsavory details within the European Union itself and
00:50:02.520
certainly if you look at the way Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Ireland have benefited from
00:50:11.320
having, shall we say, useful tax regimes for multinationals, it does make you wonder. I often
00:50:19.900
say about tax avoidance is it's best envisaged as a massive pile of premature baby monitors.
00:50:42.780
facilitates a tax avoidance scheme in Luxembourg,
00:50:47.460
So I tried to imagine a beach on the Caribbean,
00:50:51.560
that's been filled with essential medical equipment.
00:51:01.580
Now, Jean-Claude Juncker at the top, there is an incredible amount of circumstantial evidence, although he denies it, to say that in some way he facilitated the removal of essential medical equipment from our hospitals and our society, and it passed through Luxembourg, was never taxed, and the corporates concerned now have large cash piles in the Cayman Islands or where they have them.
00:51:29.440
instead of us spending that money on essential services in the UK.
00:51:36.300
I think that's such an important issue as well.
00:51:40.240
we're going to look back on the tax structures around the world
00:51:47.760
And we're going to go, how is that even possible?
00:51:50.820
Like this idea that people can just put billions of pounds away into these places
00:51:58.440
that the Russian oligarchs can just stash all their money in this place without paying any tax
00:52:03.900
on it. We're going to look back on that and go, how was that even possible? Well, we might look
00:52:09.040
back even more credulously because what we then hear is, how do we pay for it? If somebody wants
00:52:17.280
a particular project or somebody wants to do something useful in society, all we hear from
00:52:22.180
politicians is, oh, well, you know, there's priorities. How do we pay for it? Well, I meant
00:52:27.540
there is enough money. If we just collected the taxes that are on the statute, if we collected
00:52:33.600
the taxes on products and services that are sold in this country in the correct manner,
00:52:38.840
we don't need any new laws. There is enough money for us to do all the things that we'd love to do
00:52:45.040
to help people less fortunate. But I think it's even more important than that. So human beings,
00:53:17.640
get richer, but these people come up a little bit with them
00:53:23.740
theory says, actually, I want you down here. I'm competing with you. I'm not looking at my
00:53:30.620
nominal. There's a lot of evidence for this, actually, that inequality essentially makes
00:53:35.500
people at the top and at the bottom feel less good about themselves, be more unsafe, have more
00:53:41.900
mental health problems, et cetera, because we're competing with each other. What that Darwinian
00:53:46.180
competitiveness that we have does is it pushes money profits up the pyramid to the people at the
00:53:54.400
top that's just how it is we compete with each other and those people at the top uh you know
00:53:59.400
what they want to do and what they are doing is they pull the ladder up when they get there they
00:54:02.740
pull the ladder up and they want to keep other people the people at the bottom from getting up
00:54:06.340
to the top of where they where they are and the history of man uh since since we you know walked
00:54:12.320
out the bush or climb down for the tree is more feudalism than it is democracy. So there
00:54:19.460
is a serious side to it. The whole point of taxing the people at the top is to get the
00:54:23.720
money going the other way. And you want to get this circular motion. So it's not that
00:54:28.340
you don't want inequality or in some way that you're going to stamp inequality out. What
00:54:34.440
you want is the people at the top not to stay at the top. And if they do stay at the top,
00:54:38.480
they have to work very hard to stay there and you want this this opportunity in this this circularity
00:54:43.360
this circular flow uh and if you don't tax the people at the top what will they do they will do
00:54:50.780
what people have done is they will pull a ladder up and establish their feudal empire so so it's
0.84
00:54:56.300
actually it goes to much more than just having money to buy shit it goes to getting that hedonic
0.61
00:55:03.420
treadmill going, where we have a society, where we have that movement, opportunity of movement
0.97
00:55:08.800
for everybody. If we don't tax people, the people at the top will stay. If we tax people too much,
00:55:13.860
they'll stop working. So you have this, what you have, going right back to the beginning,
00:55:20.220
if you like, where I said the battle between, isn't really between the right and the left.
00:55:25.200
The right and the left both hold untenable views about the economy. So the right say that by all
00:55:32.680
of us acting in our selfish interest the the perfect solution will somehow pop out of a
00:55:38.660
benevolent society yeah well that's clearly unlikely and we end up with the the feudal
00:55:45.180
situation what the left say is that somehow they will change us into into our human nature into
00:55:51.400
becoming benevolent that's not going to happen either no no so so we have to accept both we have
00:55:56.220
to get both things working so look competing with each other profit is going to go up to the top
00:56:01.300
government taxes correctly, not too much, not too little, and it injects that money into the base
00:56:06.460
of the pyramid to give opportunities to people to get up to the top of the pyramid. And if you
00:56:10.860
stop doing that, I don't think we need new taxes. I think we have sufficient taxes. We just need to
00:56:16.380
collect them. So which ones are we not collecting then? Well, what we have, interestingly, is we
00:56:21.920
have in the revenue, we have tax inspectors, tax collectors, and so on and so forth.
00:56:29.640
all we need to do is we need to fund the difficult cases yeah so the difficult cases so we need to
00:56:36.040
look at everything that was done in Luxembourg so there's a recent leak of all the tax avoidance
00:56:42.160
that was done we need to unpick that is it legal I'm going to say much of it isn't legal you know
00:56:46.920
because it has a barrister's opinion because it was approved by a big four account it doesn't
00:56:51.220
mean it's legal so we just need to fund the revenue to chase the difficult people what the
00:56:57.740
revenue tends to do as we all would is go after easy wins so we need to go after the tough stuff
00:57:03.160
so we need to go after apple we need to go after google we need to go after the uh starbucks we
00:57:09.140
need to go after the big conglomerates and say okay well you you know this is this is your tax
00:57:14.000
arrangement is it legal and we need to tax people we need to tax businesses for the sales of the
00:57:20.560
products and services they make in this country and that doesn't happen at the moment do you think
00:57:24.320
there's ever going to be an inclination to do that though because i mean there's there's there's a
00:57:28.820
part of me who is incredibly suspicious how much of the government is tied into you know these big
00:57:33.820
corporations i'll give you an example it always seems to be that a person who's in government
00:57:38.320
they're a minister they then retire and then they take a cushy job as an advisor at one of these big
00:57:43.020
companies earning a lot of money and you think well that's not direct corruption but is it
00:57:48.880
indirect well the revolving door is is very pernicious and there's there's some ideas there's
00:57:55.700
people had some ideas around how you do this one of the ideas that i had recently was uh anything
00:58:01.500
that you earn above a certain amount five years after you leave government is paid back to the
00:58:05.780
treasury so so i absolutely agree with you but uh i i think it's is it's not it's not in the
00:58:14.880
discourse you know it's not it we're not particularly in the public discourse is it we
00:58:18.620
seem to have had our our our discourse guided towards looking at something else and you guys
00:58:25.240
have had some experience with this lately we're looking at what they call rights yeah so we're
00:58:29.820
focused more on rights and I just think that humans humans want a lot more than just to be
00:58:36.860
consumers with rights you know we need we need much so that we're creative we're nurturing people
00:58:52.660
We need many, many things which seem to have been substituted by,
00:58:58.800
and I'm not, this isn't having the argument about whether these rights should or shouldn't exist,
00:59:04.640
but it just seems to me that they seem to have taken a primacy in the discourse,
00:59:07.720
whereas the things that have nourished us as humans for millennia
00:59:11.980
seem to have almost disappeared from the discourse.
00:59:19.300
And I think where we seem to be going is that we have a society
00:59:32.560
And I think it's very interesting when you talk about the discourse,
00:59:35.960
We talk about what, you know, what your distrust, if you like, of politicians is, is everybody thinks it, but nothing is being done about it.
00:59:50.140
Why are we focused on one certain set of considerations and not these at least equally important considerations?
00:59:59.140
That's why we started the show is we're trying to have conversations about things that a lot of people think but aren't able to express.
01:00:05.460
And we're going to try to bring down the government from the inside.
01:00:16.200
But listen, Mike, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you entirely expectedly, I should say.
01:00:21.440
The last question we always ask is what's the one thing that no one's talking about that we ought to be talking about?
01:00:26.980
Well, I think I probably hit the nail on the head.
01:00:38.620
No, just basically that we're losing the things
01:00:52.760
Jordan Peterson talks about meaning quite a lot,
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Yeah, I think not in a way that I particularly relate to.
01:01:09.440
He's obviously got an audience, but I think, yeah, no, he's not for me.
01:01:17.860
This is going to be terrible, the comments on it.
01:01:22.640
He always tweets and retweets interesting stuff.
01:01:24.980
As always, follow us at TriggerPod on all the social media.
01:01:28.820
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01:01:31.600
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01:01:41.060
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01:01:44.700
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01:01:49.180
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