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There is literally no example on planet Earth of a high-functioning society without big government.

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That's not true. Big government is sucking the life out of small businesses

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and the Oxman countless hours with businesses and they're like you can't succeed in the UK.

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As soon as you earn anything they'll just tax it off you.

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So pop off to Dubai run the business virtually and pay no tax. It's idiotic.

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I don't know how you can look at that and think this is a good system.

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No, no, no. What needs to happen is reduce the taxes and the pressure on the small businesses

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because everyone in this economy needs to own stuff. We need to own a house, own a business,

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and own shares. But not everybody can be an entrepreneur.

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Correct. Look, it would be wonderful if everybody owned something.

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But ownership starts with earning enough money so that you can save money so that you can

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begin to own something. So the problem is wages because most people want to be able to go to work

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and be treated decently. Oh no, earn enough money so that I can feel secure.

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I just want to be married. Have kids own a house. All that. That's what I hear you.

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I want to keep that and I want that for everyone. That's gone away.

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Houses are unaffordable. Local jobs don't exist. Technology has cut out all the middlemen.

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No one's paying healthy wages. We have the most unhappy population.

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And if you want to fix that, you have to enact this.

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Well, I've seen nix policies implemented and I don't feel it's enough.

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You haven't seen all the policies. But we need people to know that the rules that we grew up with

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have changed and people have to learn the rules of this new economy.

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Yes, yes, yes, I totally agree. And if you want to get the economy back on track, the starting point is...

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Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins.

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The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently

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in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes,

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if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this one right now and hit that

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follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

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Nick, I want to start with your background and your context. So I can understand your perspective

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and who you are. You sold a company for almost $7 billion. Correct.

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And what's so fascinating about you is you typically billionaires have a certain narrative

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and perspective on the world. You seem to have a very different one. I do.

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Who are you? Where have you come from? And what is your perspective on the world?

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As it relates to the subjects that you know we're going to discuss today.

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I was raised in a civic family, I should say. What does that mean?

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It means a family that takes civic responsibility seriously. But we were middle class people and my

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father started to work for this tiny family business that his father had started

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manufacturing bed pillows and down comforters, which is how I got my start in business and to make

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an incredibly long story short. I had a very early intuition about the internet and the role

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that it would play in commerce. And as luck would have it, I had a friend who agreed with that

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proposition and his name was Jeff Bezos. And so he wanted to start an e-retailer. He was working

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in New York for a hedge fund dating one of my closest friends. And for a variety of reasons,

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he ended up sending his stuff from New York to Seattle to my house and we started Amazon.com

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together. But from that, started starting other tech companies. You know, I've helped run

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you know, manufacturing businesses, e-commerce businesses, my friends and I own a bank, you know,

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but you know, and I think that that very broad perspective on markets began to inform and

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intuition that everything that people are taught about economics today, that's sort of the

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conventional view, is a pack of lies. And that if you take it seriously and enact policy on the

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basis of it, the only thing that can happen is that the rich will get richer and everyone else will

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get poor. And you know, a signal piece of that evidence for me, a sort of a thing that really

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sort of galvanized my interest was that I got to look at the IRS tax tables in 2007, 2008,

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which showed American income shares and the history of that. In 1980, the top 1% of Americans

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shared about 8.5% of national income. By 2007, that 8% had grown to 22%. As I recall, so triple

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largely as a share of national income, while the bottom 50% of Americans, their share fell from

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about 18% in 1980 to 12% in about 2007. And what I did is I took those numbers and I stuck them

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in a spreadsheet and said, what happens if this trend continues for another 30 years? And the answer

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is revolution. You know, it's just it's just arithmetic because you cannot sustain a capitalist

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democracy if the top 1% controls 45 or 50% of income in the bottom 50% shares 5. It is not a deep

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political insight. This is just math. And I and I freaked out and decided that I needed to devote

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myself to trying to figure out why this happened and how you could fix it. And so I have been writing

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about this and working on it since then. Why did this feel so important to you? I've had you

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talk about pitchforks. Even a cursory reading of history will tell you that when societies get

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as unequal as the societies we now live in, terrible things start to happen. This leads to either a

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police state or a revolution. And I believe that the pitchforks are here. I think the Trump

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administration is the is the, you know, one of canonical examples of a society beginning to tear

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itself apart. And I just think it's the responsibility of people with power and resources to do

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the right thing. Done. Same question for you. Yeah, I grew up in Australia and as a teenager,

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I discovered entrepreneurship. I got an entrepreneurial mentor very early on and I did two years in a

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startup and it was really exciting and I loved it. And I felt like I discovered a cheat code in

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life, which was entrepreneurship and starting businesses and small businesses. And then at 21 I

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went up and started my own company, which was my first agency and it grew really rapidly. Went

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from zero to a million in its first year and then 10 million in year three and it was like this

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exciting young company with all these cool young people working there and living there. We actually

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kind of did. We actually were in a big house and we kind of spent a lot of time together. Yeah,

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I just fell in love with entrepreneurship and small business and family business and all of those

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kind of things. And I also 15 years ago started an entrepreneur accelerator where people who want to

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get together and talk about entrepreneurship and figure out how to run their businesses can get

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together and figure out how to do that. So for the last 15 years, I've spent countless hours with

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five and a half thousand businesses all over the world who are getting together talking about how

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entrepreneurship works. And over the years, I've also come to similar conclusion that the technological

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revolution that we've seen in the last 25 years has hollowed out the middle class. And I basically

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said, I can't play by the rules that I grew up in. I have to learn the rules of this new economy,

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this digital economy pretty quickly, or else I'm going to be displaced and disrupted. And I

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don't have a fallback position. I didn't come from any form of wealth or money. I also didn't take

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on any venture capital. I self-funded bootstrapped my own businesses by cobbling together credit cards

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and things like that. And yeah, I think one of the things that I really truly believe is that

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we are in a very big danger at the moment that if more people can't participate in the benefits

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of capitalism, they're going to do crazy things and vote in socialism. And the pitchforks will

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come. And inequality is going to be a toxic corrosive force in the economy. So like I'm a

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capitalist who wants lots of people to benefit from capitalism. That's been my whole stick forever.

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And I just want to include more people in the benefits of capitalism before we do dumb things.

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And I guess the question therefore is how, how do we do that? The prevailing narrative, and I think

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one of the most dominant narratives is we've attacked people like us a lot more. What's your view

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of that, Daniel? So it's very easy to have a bad guy of a rich person. So you could imagine this

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billionaire rich person, right? Nick, maybe it could be a bad guy. And you could sort of do that.

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When I look at the economy and what's draining it out, it's harder to conceptualize. But we have

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these mega corporations and we have these mega funds. So here in the UK, all the houses are being

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brought up by BlackRock, a massive private equity fund that wants the entire population to be a

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rental class forever. And our Prime Minister has walked down Downing Street, hand in hand with the

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CEO of this big fund saying, yeah, come in and buy up stuff and financialize houses. And that

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is causing a lot of trouble. And then you've got big companies like Microsoft, like Amazon,

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and they say, hey, we want to do business in your country, but we don't want to pay tax there.

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We want to pretend that we're in Luxembourg or we want to pretend that we're in Ireland. And

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we're going to send something from our British warehouse to our British consumer, but we're not

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really in Britain at that time. So we don't pay tax. And then you've got Starbucks that says,

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you know, we want to do business and sell coffee next to a mom and dad family business coffee shop.

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But we have to pay this license fee for the Starbucks logo. And that has to go to Bermuda. And,

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you know, so when I look at who's hollowing out the middle class, you've got massive mega

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corp businesses that are the absolutely bigger than we could have ever conceived them to be there

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as big as nations now. And you've got mega corp funds, which are also trillion dollar funds.

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And one thing I'm worried about is that a lot of people think that a guy like me who's basically

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a dynamic entrepreneurial person or even a billionaire like Nick is the enemy. And you know,

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when you get a James Dyson who invents a cool vacuum cleaner and sells a lot of them,

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that's not the enemy. When you get Paul McCartney who writes a bunch of songs and becomes a famous

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beetle and makes a billion dollars, that's not the enemy. The enemy is the financialisation of our

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homes. The enemy is big mega corps that don't want to pay tax. And that's where we need to,

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we need to be a little bit more nuanced and clear who's hollowing out the middle class.

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And how do we make policy choices to make sure that doesn't happen?

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So you're saying taxing a rich isn't the answer. Taxing the rich is like a headline that creates

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enemies who aren't actually the enemies. But let's just end the UK then. If you were Prime Minister,

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would you increase the tax rate on the top one percent? You could do that for political reasons,

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because it would make people feel good, but it won't change the economy. What needs to happen is

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we need a thriving entrepreneurial class. We are small businesses are the answer. The biggest

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mistake the UK government is making is they don't see that the 5.7 million small businesses are

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their biggest asset, that we could get those going, that we could create an entrepreneurial

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uplift that would create jobs and it would create better opportunities. I would definitely curb

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the issue that we're having with these mega funds. And I would definitely stop pretending

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that Amazon is in Luxembourg and Google's in Ireland. So those sorts of things I would definitely

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do. What about yourself Nick? Do you want the top one percent to pay more taxes? Is that important?

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So it is not true that the richest people in the United States pay a lot of tax because the

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American tax system is riddled with loopholes that allow the richest citizens to pay taxes at a

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rate of one half of what ordinary people pay. I absolutely believe that in a high functioning

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democracy, the wealthiest citizens will pay taxes equal to or greater than the typical citizen.

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And that is just objectively not the case in the United States as a percentage as a percentage.

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And I think that that is you know sort of table stakes in making an economy function and a democracy

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go. But it is not the biggest problem. The problem is wages. So here's the most important socio

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economic fact in the United States that the median full-time worker today earns in the range of

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$60,000 a year. If that person had maintained their same share of the economy since 1975,

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instead of earning $60,000 a year, they'd earn close to $120,000 a year. That effect by the way

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goes up to the 90th percentile. If you earned $180,000 in 2018, 2020, if you had maintained

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your same share of GDP, instead of earning $180,000, you'd earn like a $250,000 a year.

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So in the United States, over 50 years, the only people who benefited directly from economic

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growth and productivity gains were the people on the top 10 percent and the majority of benefit

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went to the top 1 percent. And that is the problem. And that is trillions of dollars a year that used

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to be wages for ordinary Americans and now ends up in the pockets of the richest people. By the way,

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utilizing precisely the mechanisms that Dan just outlined and what we have done is we have massively

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tilted the economic playing field, which once favored small and medium-sized businesses and

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local companies towards these giant corporations, we used to have an economy that actively encouraged

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small businesses and entrepreneurship. I mean, basically what we call neoliberalism. This

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set of ideas around economic cause and effect that came into force in the 70s and 80s,

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Reaganomics, Thaturism, all this stuff, cut taxes for rich people, deregulate powerful people,

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and suppress the wages for working people, basically trickle down economics. Those policies

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went into effect in the 70s, 80s and 90s. And what happened is a huge shift in concentration

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from smaller businesses to bigger businesses and a huge shift in income from ordinary Americans

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to the very rich. And that's the core of the problem. And of course, I think rich people should

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pay their fair share. It is ridiculous for somebody who make half a billion dollars a year and

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pay 15 percent tax rate. Somebody makes $200,000 a year pays 40. I just think that's stupid and

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wrong, which is the case in the United States. It may not be the case here in the UK. But the

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bigger problem is wages. And if you want to get the economy back on track, you have to address

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that problem. And you say that optionality and entrepreneurship will do more to raise wages than

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any government policy? Yeah. So I believe that optionality is the most important thing. When someone

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has lots of options, then they don't accept terrible conditions. So give me some color on that.

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Well, if I have 10 companies that are wanting to hire me, I'm going to choose the best option.

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But if I live in a town where there's only one employer, let's say there's one massive company

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that employs people and you either work for that company or you're unemployed, then I have to

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accept whatever they're dishing out. So the most important thing in creating better quality of

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life is optionality. We need lots of optionality. One of the options that I want people to have is

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I want us to teach entrepreneurship in schools so that people have the option to start a family business

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as one of their options. They may not take that option, but at least it's not a mysterious black box

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that they just don't understand that that would actually be one of their options. Also, let's say

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you had no minimum wage. But if you had 10 employers and a limited pool of people who were available

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to work at those companies, they're going to have to bid against each other to create better and

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better working conditions and better and better pay. So you kind of only need to have minimum wages

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when there's not enough optionality. If there's enough optionality, it pushes everything up.

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Is that you'll view as well? I agree with the spirit of that. It just turns out that is never the case.

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So there's a lot of economic theory that sounds a lot like that, but exists in an imaginary world

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where people have power and optionality. And in the real world, that actually doesn't ever exist.

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So by way of example, there's a principle of economics, the theory of marginal productivity.

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Have you heard of that? No. So that's a theory that is embedded in the center of economics,

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which says that because markets are efficient, the amount of money you earn reflects precisely

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the contribution that you make to it. So if I'm $15,000 a year, that's because I'm giving $15,000

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of value in the world. Correct. And if I earn $500 million a year, rubbing money together to make

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more money, that is an accurate reflection of the value I'm creating in the world, which is

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really central to capitalism, isn't it? It is absolutely central to capitalism and there's

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central to economic policy making. But here's the thing. If you understand where that came from,

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it gives you pause. So in 1879, a guy named Henry George writes a book called Progress in Poverty

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in the United States. And basically, it's the first book about the rich stealing from the poor.

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And this book isn't just the best seller, it is the best seller in the history of the United

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States. And the powers that be freak out. And JP Morgan brings this guy John Bates Clark to Columbia

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University, which is sort of the home of like Wall Street and stuff like that in New York,

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and says fix this. And so Henry George writes a book called The Distribution of Wealth,

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in which he invents this idea called Theory of Marginal Productivity, which asserts this idea.

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But he says the quiet part out loud in the book, he says, look, we have to prove to working people

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that no matter how much they make, whether it's a little or a lot, it reflects their value. Because

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if they conclude that their work is worth more than they are paid, they will revolt and kill us all

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and that would be bad. And that idea will not surprise you to learn was very attractive to a bunch

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of rich people and got swept up into economics. And today is a core idea in economic theory. And it

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would be true potentially if markets were perfectly efficient in all this optionality existed.

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But there has never been a case where that was been true. It has materially harmed the welfare of

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most people. Because as Dan says, your ability to earn is related to your power to negotiate,

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not some magical number that the market decides. And it's how easy you are to replace because

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if I run an ad for a job and 400 people apply for the job, right? Which really does happen.

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I know this happens for you, Steven. That essentially you run an ad and 400 people. So you don't

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think about raising the wage because 400 people applied. And they're all good. They're all really

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like super-qualified people. And this happens all the time in the UK right now.

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It happens everywhere. I mean, there are almost zero circumstances where workers have more power

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than owners. And even Adam Smith in the wealth of nations outlined this asymmetry of power.

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And the thing is that if you persuade people that what they earn is all their worth,

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then you've created this narrative that makes rich people richer and everybody else poor.

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And what's the solution here? Is it to put a higher minimum wage on society?

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Well, that's a policy solution. But if you really want to solve the problem,

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the starting point is getting people to understand economics in a way that actually reflects

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how the economy actually works, not this stylized invention, dating back to 1787,

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that if you take seriously and enact policy on the basis of it, the only thing that can happen

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is that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poor, which is a story of the last 50 years.

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So what is the policy solution? A policy solution is most definitely to apply a standard which

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requires companies to pay people a living wage. So the minimum wage is a perfect example of a great

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policy. Another policy in the United States, which is really, really important is the overtime

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threshold, which I don't know whether you have here in the UK, but it's the salary threshold below

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which you automatically get paid over time, which is time and a half here too. 48 hours.

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48 hours is an up a limit of a week working week. Okay, so in the United States, it's 40 hours.

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So if you work more than that, you get paid over time. And so one of the things, so that standard

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used to apply to virtually every worker in America in 1970, 1965, today that standard applies

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to less than 10% of workers. Now, why does that matter? Because people like me at the scale of

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tens of millions have turned 340 hour week jobs into 260 hour week jobs and pocketed the difference.

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You may be doing that here, right? You put gummy bears in the lunch room in a ping pong table and

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yet forced people to work 60 hours a week and then you can have two employees instead of three.

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If you do that 30 million times, you've taken 10 million jobs out of the workforce.

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So do you agree with this, Daniel, this approach? Not as much. Well, here's the issue. I agree with

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that at one level, but almost every solution that Nick has recommended the UK's had for the last 20

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years. So we have a minimum wage that is pegged two thirds of the median and it ratchets up.

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We've got 28 days worth of paid holiday every year. We've got sick leave. We've got maternity and

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paternity leave. We've got the ability, very, very difficult to hire someone if they've been with

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you for more than six months. So we have this unbelievable set of workers' rights and all of these

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recommendations from minimum wage right through to how to handle employment. We have the most unhappy

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population. Our economy is not growing. We have a million young people out of work. We have no

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one's hiring at the moment. So it hasn't created those conditions have not created runaway prosperity

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and that gives me pause to think something deeper is going on. And the reason that I think this

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is that I think we need to make more participation in capitalism. Capitalism is about ownership.

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You have to own an asset. And if you don't own anything, if you're just selling labor in the

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current economy with digital and AI and robots and all this sort of stuff, the real reason that the

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wages, because what Nick's saying is that the amount of money people would should be earning right

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now is like in the hundreds of thousands. And what I think is happening as another major part of this

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is that the rules of the economy have shifted. Technology has cut out all the middlemen.

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Technology has hollowed out the middle class. We used to go to the video store and the video

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rental store used to have 12 people working there. And now we just go to Netflix. And we used to go

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to a little local retailer and buy a CD. And now we just go to Spotify and we just go to Amazon.

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So it's hollowed out all of those supply chains that used to create amazing jobs.

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The value of the labor has been eroded because it's very easy to outsource labor to another

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country. It's very easy to simplify a job down to automated parts using technology. So the

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fundamental value of actual labor has diminished because of technology. Technology has reduced the

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actual utility of this thing that we call labor for 90% of people. It is only going to get worse

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with AI. And with AI and with robots, it's going to go down. So if you just simply say,

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oh, this is about lifting work standards, you're going to miss the point that we can't compete

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with technology. Technology is better at this stuff than we are. And the answer, the solution

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is ownership. We have to everyone in this economy needs to own stuff. We need to own a house.

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We need to own a family business. We need to own shares in the companies that are growing.

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So you cannot outrun this. This is like trying to run against someone who's in a car.

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And they say, oh, you just need nicer shoes. No, the shoes won't change things.

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We've already tried nicer shoes in the UK economy. And it's made no difference. Everyone's miserable.

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So that's one of the things that I, that's where you and I would disagree. I mean,

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both things can be true. The minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 an hour or $2.13 plus

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tips. It's half, it's a third of what it is here in the UK. Okay. But you have twice the

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disposable income that we have. Your median wage is one and a half to two times what our median

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wages, we're now a poor country relative to the US. And even though your minimum wage is terrible

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and horrific and inhuman, however, it's magically done it, your country and your citizens are so

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much richer than ours. Yeah, except if you consider that out of that median wage,

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you have to take $20,000 a year to pay for health care. Right? Like I think it's still

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you 30% better. Even adjusted. I think if you look at the AIC OECD, it would be interesting.

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We might be able to look it up. I can't remember. But I bet it's about 10% different.

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Even when you subtract out of pocket health care costs and insurance premiums, the average American

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worker still takes home significantly more money than the average UK worker. Yeah. The average

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US salary is around $74,000. The average UK salary is around roughly $50,000. Americans pay

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heavily for health care. The average employee in America pays about $6,000 to $8,000 a year in

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premiums and out of pocket costs. Brits do not pay for health care because of the NHS. If US

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worker makes $74,000 in spends eight carren health care, they are they are at $66,000 before relatively

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low taxes. The UK worker starts at $52,000 before relatively high taxes. The bottom line is the

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gap in base salaries and tax rates is simply too large for UK free health care to close. The US

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wins on pure disposable income per person. Yeah. There's no doubt the US has had a much more

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successful economy than the UK. Brexit being a catastrophe. Can I push back on one thing though

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with the minimum wage or the companies that hollowed out the middle class, big tech companies,

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big finance companies, those mega corporations and I agree with you, they can afford to pay their

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workers more money. One of the issues that I feel and this is what I'm concerned about is that

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in the UK, the majority of businesses that do pay minimum wage like a friend of mine owns a pub

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and that pub has razor thin margins. It's losing money. He's not taking any money out of it. He's

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massively impacted by taxes and minimum wage. So the companies that I see that are the ones who

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have to pay minimum wage workers and give people the on ramp into the economy pubs,

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little retailers, mum and dad businesses, these are the ones that really do get squeezed out of

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the economy. They have razor thin margins and you put more pressure on them. You say you've got

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more government regulations, you got more taxes and now you've got more minimum wages and they just

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go, I've had enough, I can't do it. The companies that hollowed out the middle class,

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the Microsofts, the Googles, the, you know, Amazon's, they go Starbucks, yeah, the Starbucks,

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they go, yeah, we can absorb it and also we're not paying tax anyway, so we'll just kind of like do

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that. So one of the things that you could do, one of the things that we recommend is that you

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impose these standards progressively, that the biggest companies have the highest minimum wage,

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medium size companies pay slightly less and small businesses pay less. But even within that

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context, ensuring that everyone pays enough for people to have enough money to continue to buy

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stuff, I mean, it's finding good to say, look, I don't want to pay high wages in my pub. But

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surely the people working in the pub should make enough money so that they can go to the pub themselves

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and buy a beer, right? You have to, I mean, you know, the National Restaurant Association in America

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is that, you know, famous for this, like they want everybody in America to be able to go to a

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restaurant and eat, except for the people who work in the restaurants, right? Can I just say something

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with your friend that owns the pub as well? Yeah. So say you own Starbucks. Yeah, you own a pub. Yeah.

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I'm a worker. Yeah. If you're going to pay me more because you have this progressive minimum wage

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and you're going to pay less, I'm sorry, Daniel, I'm not going to apply for the job. I'm going to

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want to go work at Starbucks. So is there not an issue where you're not going to be able to attract

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talent because you're not going to be able to pay them as much? There are many reasons why

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you would work for a small business as opposed to a mega-corp. But I'm saying you're paying me

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four pounds minimum wage. He's paying me eight. So does he not end up getting all the best talent?

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He might get the best talent. And also for my pub, I might be able to have to, I might match

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it, right? So maybe it works that I just pay it. But I'm not necessarily legislated to pay it.

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So here's the thing. Look, it's a small business owner. There's all sorts of techniques that

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you can use to retain people because you're going to have more optionality as a big company.

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Yeah, because you can you are going to definitely pay me more. Well, being bigger is always better.

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It is absolutely true that that high standard will put pressure on throughout the economy.

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But the small pub owner is also going to benefit from the fact that all, I mean, we're using Starbucks

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whatever whatever whatever example we're using. All these people now own now earn so much more

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that they can afford to go to the pub and buy stuff. So one of the interventions that I was part of

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in the United States was the $15 minimum wage. But we cooked that up in Seattle, Washington. And so

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I spoke to many, many, many, many, many, many small business owners who are absolutely terrified

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by this because, you know, look, we are all business owners, right? And so you can do a calculation

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in seconds about the risks and the expenses of higher wages, correct? But what you cannot calculate

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is the benefit of living in, of operating your company in a regime where everyone earns more,

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right? And the benefits that accrue to you from that. Look, a ham sandwich in, I don't know,

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Somalia costs 25 cents. It costs $25 in Switzerland. What kind of economy do you want to live in?

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Right? You know, yeah. What are you going to say about your friend?

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Well, the friend who earns the pub, his pub is actually full most nights of the week. They have

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lots of people going there. The issue is taxes and costs. He's got a big government. In the UK,

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we have all of these things like everything that you've mentioned, we have it and we've had it for

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25 years. We don't have an affluent middle class that's been created. We have an eroded middle class.

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So the actual numbers here is that my friends, he took no money himself and the pub lost $180,000

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pounds last year because of VAT. And he feels like he's carrying the weight of training people in

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their first job. He's creating jobs as one of the only employers in his little town. And also,

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he didn't create this mess. Amazon and Microsoft and Google and Facebook and big funds,

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they are sucking money out of the economy. We're in violent agreement about this. So I've just

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feel like the issue is like, I really want to make sure that we're super, super clear that small

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businesses are currently squeezed here in the UK. I don't know what's the same in the US.

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Like, they are so squeezed and they are squeezed by big tech and now AI has come along. They feel

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like they have to learn this new thing and they have to start posting or linked in 45 times

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using AI posts or else they get drowned out and they have to edit videos and become a Tiktokco

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as well. So it's all of this constant pressure caused by this tech sector and these big funds,

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like one of the biggest threats to my friends pub is that a big American private equity fund

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wants to buy the pub and turn it into a block of flats. So they want to financialize this

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community asset and he's trying to fight to keep his pub. So what I don't want to have

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is I don't want to have big government create a new framework that basically squeezes

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for small family businesses even harder. We're losing two pubs a day here. They're closing

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down. They go out of business and then we end up with big clubs, big funds who can't afford to

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absorb it and they own everything. And I also want to be clear that the reason people are struggling

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is they don't own anything. It's not because of working conditions. They don't own anything.

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And if they don't own anything. No, it would be wonderful if everybody owned something.

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But ownership starts with earning enough money so that you can save money so that you can

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begin to own something. One of the lessons that we learned was that trying to give stock options

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to everyone in a company often doesn't work. It's a catastrophe because for 90% of the workers

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in a company that their concerns are immediate and they don't value the stock options.

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And if you give them the choice between cashroll stock options, it's not even close.

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And so again, I agree with the sentiment. It's just that I have never seen and I do not believe

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there is an existence proof for it working on planet earth. What certainly worked great in the

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United States for 40 or 50 years was a set of standards that required companies to fairly split

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the value they create with their employees through a variety of mechanisms unions, which can be

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problematic for sure. But labor standards like the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and

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so on and so forth, coupled with a set of policies to discourage consolidation and discourage

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the kind of exploitation that you have, I think, very smartly articulated so that we can have

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a dynamic economy. The only difference that happened back in the time that you're describing

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where workers had to be included is that it was nearly impossible for a company to outsource

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their customer success team to the Philippines. And it was nearly impossible for a company to come up

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with a piece of software that would do 80% of the heavy lifting of the job. And one of the issues

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that we have right now is that when you put a lot of pressure on all sorts of companies,

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we're living in the age of AI and robotics where you essentially, one of the options that companies

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have is just the option, well, we'll just outsource the labor to another country, we'll automate it,

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we'll simplify it. Okay, but those the rules that enabled people to do that were written by the same

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people who are consolidating industries and taking advantage. I mean, you don't have to live in a

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world like that. There are other ways to organize the world. The neoliberals promised that free trade

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was going to make all of us richer. And what it did is it flooded our markets with cheap stuff

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from China, but it is absolutely not clear that it made people's lives better.

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I think Chinese people's lives, Chinese people's lives better, but it certainly didn't make people

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in the UK's life better and it certainly didn't make people in the United States's life better. And

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so you could have imagined approaching that in a fundamentally different way. I guarantee you that

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if the United States could go back and do it again, we would have resorted. There's a few ownership

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models that I think are important that could be looked at. Number one is a sovereign wealth fund.

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So the countries like Norway, Singapore, these countries, they own natural assets in a sovereign

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wealth fund. And essentially every citizen therefore owns a piece of some asset. There is an asset

384
00:35:59.120 --> 00:36:03.440
that is owned through a sovereign wealth fund. It's a very successful model. It seems to work so

385
00:36:03.440 --> 00:36:08.000
incredibly well that it's dangerously well. Half of London is now owned by the Katari

386
00:36:08.480 --> 00:36:12.480
sovereign wealth fund, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. We're literally losing all of our

387
00:36:12.480 --> 00:36:16.160
property to the sovereign wealth funds of the world. So the sovereign wealth fund model is

388
00:36:16.160 --> 00:36:22.480
incredibly powerful. So just for someone that doesn't know what that is, you have natural assets

389
00:36:22.480 --> 00:36:28.400
within the company owned in part by the States. So the UK did a stupid thing. We discovered the

390
00:36:28.400 --> 00:36:34.960
North Sea back in the 80s I think it was. And Norway had half and we had half of this Norwegian,

391
00:36:35.040 --> 00:36:39.760
this North Sea oil. And the Norwegian said, hey, we'll just own this in a fund that all of our

392
00:36:39.760 --> 00:36:45.040
citizens will benefit from. And that will be a state owned fund. And then we'll take the profits

393
00:36:45.040 --> 00:36:50.240
of that. We'll reinvest it into assets. And every citizen will benefit from those assets.

394
00:36:50.240 --> 00:36:52.800
And the UK said, we'll just sell a license to British petroleum.

395
00:36:52.800 --> 00:36:55.040
Yes. We'll make the rich people richer.

396
00:36:55.040 --> 00:37:00.320
Yeah. And Australia is so stupid. We have all this incredible natural resource, no sovereign

397
00:37:00.320 --> 00:37:05.280
wealth fund. Britain, when we took over the whole world, or 25% of the world, we operated

398
00:37:05.280 --> 00:37:08.560
sovereign wealth funds called the East India trading company and all this sort of stuff. And

399
00:37:08.560 --> 00:37:12.320
basically our business model world sovereign wealth funds for many, many years.

400
00:37:12.320 --> 00:37:16.400
So sovereign wealth funds number one. So that would be one. The other one is to put shares into

401
00:37:16.400 --> 00:37:21.440
babies names. So when a baby's born, you have a piece of the stock market, like $1,000 worth

402
00:37:21.440 --> 00:37:26.560
of shares. It's a baby buy. Yeah. And Trump's doing both of these things, isn't he? Sovereign

403
00:37:26.560 --> 00:37:29.840
wealth fund and the baby bond. It's calling it the Trump fund or something.

404
00:37:29.840 --> 00:37:33.040
Yeah. Well, they're experimenting with some version of this right now.

405
00:37:33.040 --> 00:37:39.360
Yeah. Yeah. So if if a baby by the time they hit 18 has had 18 years of compounding of

406
00:37:39.360 --> 00:37:44.800
owning that asset, then by the time they hit 18, they're literally getting an asset that they

407
00:37:44.800 --> 00:37:50.880
can then turn into another asset if they want to. That's pretty powerful. And then the biggest

408
00:37:50.880 --> 00:37:57.440
issue is the financialization of houses. So if you take a value of a house about half the value

409
00:37:57.440 --> 00:38:01.440
of the house is what you might call the utility value of the house, which is it's a house to live in

410
00:38:01.440 --> 00:38:05.760
and I want to live in it. And then the other half of the value is the financial speculation value

411
00:38:05.760 --> 00:38:10.160
of the house, which is how much value does a fund have if we can rent this out to people for the

412
00:38:10.160 --> 00:38:14.160
rest of their lives. I looked at the black rock thing and it said the idea that black rock is

413
00:38:14.160 --> 00:38:19.520
buying up UK homes is a myth. They are a financier, not a landlord. They provide loans and

414
00:38:19.600 --> 00:38:24.480
debt facilities to property developers, but they do not directly own or manage residential housing

415
00:38:24.480 --> 00:38:30.960
stock. Oh, Lloyd's bank is buying 70,000 UK homes forever. The number of single family homes,

416
00:38:30.960 --> 00:38:36.960
black rock directly owns the managers in the UK zero. Okay, but he's right. Yeah. I don't know

417
00:38:36.960 --> 00:38:41.600
what the details are, but this is a private equity thing that's going on in this country and in

418
00:38:41.600 --> 00:38:44.720
the United States right now. Yeah. In the United States, I've heard a lot about black rock

419
00:38:44.720 --> 00:38:50.240
buying up. I'm not sure what the entities are. It may be true. I don't know what they come up.

420
00:38:50.240 --> 00:38:54.880
They come up with structures to do it at arms length. Yeah, but like I guess you kind of own it

421
00:38:54.880 --> 00:39:00.160
if you're financing it as well. Or you loaned it to a subsidiary or somebody else, whatever it is,

422
00:39:00.160 --> 00:39:05.440
but the but the meta point here is that homes used to be owned by people. Yeah. And they both

423
00:39:05.440 --> 00:39:10.720
involved them to live in and they bought them to live in. Yeah. And one of the nefarious things

424
00:39:10.880 --> 00:39:18.240
going on in the West, driven by this neoliberal consensus that the only purpose of the economy is

425
00:39:18.240 --> 00:39:24.000
to make rich people richer, is this idea that private equity should buy all these homes and turn

426
00:39:25.440 --> 00:39:29.360
ordinary people into this rental class. Just a bit confirmed, yeah, Lloyd's been

427
00:39:29.360 --> 00:39:32.800
car doing that through something called Citro living. They're buying up thousands of new built

428
00:39:32.800 --> 00:39:37.920
homes and apartments. It's a direct private corporate landlord. They view the structural shift

429
00:39:37.920 --> 00:39:41.840
away from her ownership towards long-term renting as a major profit opportunity for them. Yes,

430
00:39:41.840 --> 00:39:47.120
that's it. Right. They want to have a permanent rental class that people never, you'll own nothing

431
00:39:47.120 --> 00:39:51.360
and be happy is the idea. And people are not like that. People love to own stuff. I want to go

432
00:39:51.360 --> 00:39:54.560
back to the central point we were talking about, which is like, how do you solve this? Because you've

433
00:39:54.560 --> 00:40:00.800
got two different views on how you solve this inequality. What I find interesting is the UK has

434
00:40:00.800 --> 00:40:06.240
better worker rights, but it is you also have much less inequality here. I mean, just to be clear,

435
00:40:06.320 --> 00:40:13.360
that is true. So the US is significantly more unequal. The US top 1% holds over 30% of the nation's

436
00:40:13.360 --> 00:40:18.960
wealth compared to roughly 20% in the UK. And the US consistently ranks as the most unequal of

437
00:40:18.960 --> 00:40:26.160
the G7 nations. However, the US is growing much, much faster. If you look at 2009 to 2026,

438
00:40:26.160 --> 00:40:32.480
the US has grown over 100% faster than the UK. And the UK is vastly more protective of workers.

439
00:40:32.480 --> 00:40:37.600
We have the things Daniel said, like paid vacation, paid maternity leave, the UK mandates up to 39

440
00:40:37.600 --> 00:40:43.200
weeks of statutory pay. The US mandates zero, correct, which is unbelievably, correct, horrific.

441
00:40:43.200 --> 00:40:46.960
But I mean, one of the things that happened in the UK, Steve, is Brexit.

442
00:40:47.840 --> 00:40:53.600
That happened in 2016. And that's taken, that's taken, what does that take an eight or 10% out of UK

443
00:40:53.600 --> 00:40:59.520
growth rates? It is affected on unemployment by 4% productivity gains by 4%. I mean, the list

444
00:40:59.520 --> 00:41:08.160
goes on. So that own, I mean, part of part of why people in the UK are feeling down is this

445
00:41:08.880 --> 00:41:14.400
unbelievable mistake that a country made. But it's the same in Germany. It's the same in Australia.

446
00:41:14.400 --> 00:41:19.600
Germany has unbelievable workers rights, Australia, unbelievable workers rights. In fact,

447
00:41:19.600 --> 00:41:25.840
the USA is the outlier of all the modern capitalist economies. Absolutely. But we're confusing things.

448
00:41:25.840 --> 00:41:30.000
People are pissed off everywhere in the world. Everywhere, yeah. That's where we live in the world.

449
00:41:30.000 --> 00:41:35.280
I don't, I want the pitchforks to go away as well. But these workers' rights are not putting

450
00:41:35.280 --> 00:41:40.560
the pitchforks away. Like all of this stuff, we've given this stuff to Australian New Zealand,

451
00:41:40.560 --> 00:41:46.320
Canada, all of Western Europe, all the English speaking democracies. Other than the USA,

452
00:41:46.320 --> 00:41:52.240
USA is the only one that has virtually no safety nets and no safeguards. Everywhere else has

453
00:41:52.320 --> 00:41:55.680
healthcare systems that are much more generous and welfare systems that are more generous.

454
00:41:55.680 --> 00:42:00.640
And like maternity leave, I mean, it's just in humane that USA doesn't have maternity leave.

455
00:42:00.640 --> 00:42:04.000
So all of that stuff, but we've got all of that, but we've got the pitchforks here too.

456
00:42:04.000 --> 00:42:09.200
Yes. And this is why I'm saying I'm really zoning in on the idea that people need to own a house.

457
00:42:09.200 --> 00:42:12.720
They need to own a business and they need to own shares. And it's like if they own stuff.

458
00:42:12.720 --> 00:42:17.680
I could not agree more. And I don't know how to get them there unless they are paid well enough

459
00:42:18.240 --> 00:42:24.560
to do that. Let me tell you an anecdote. During the George Floyd riots, people were burning stuff

460
00:42:24.560 --> 00:42:29.760
down in the United States and there was this fantastic interview with this woman. And the reporter

461
00:42:29.760 --> 00:42:34.960
said, you know, I just, I cannot believe that you don't have respect for property rights.

462
00:42:34.960 --> 00:42:41.600
And the woman said, we have no property. You know, well, why should I respect property rights?

463
00:42:41.600 --> 00:42:47.360
That's it. No one I know owns anything. You know, like, so I am 100% with you. But I think

464
00:42:47.440 --> 00:42:55.840
at the core of it, the core of it is that inequality is way more than an economic inconvenience for

465
00:42:55.840 --> 00:43:01.920
the people that it affects. What it does is it shreds the reciprocity norms that make social

466
00:43:01.920 --> 00:43:09.920
cohesion and democracy possible. Yeah. It's this dog eat dog. You're all on your own. Grab what

467
00:43:09.920 --> 00:43:14.160
you can. Obviously, the Trump people burn the place down. That's right. And burn the place down.

468
00:43:14.160 --> 00:43:19.440
Obviously, Donald Trump has created a permission structure for the worst kind of behavior, right?

469
00:43:19.440 --> 00:43:26.480
The worst kind of corruption, basically stealing has come back into style, right? And you know,

470
00:43:26.480 --> 00:43:33.920
there's all sorts of reasons that are generating this malaise, this, this sense of unfairness and

471
00:43:34.560 --> 00:43:42.560
lack of control, right? And the thing is, I just, I agree 100% with your sentiments. I really do

472
00:43:42.560 --> 00:43:46.640
about entrepreneurship and ownership. And you know, at the end of the day, the cool thing about

473
00:43:46.640 --> 00:43:51.360
entrepreneurship is you're in charge. Yeah. Like you're in charge here. Not everybody can be an

474
00:43:51.360 --> 00:43:55.760
entrepreneur. Correct. Correct. And so I do think that that's a little bit unrealistic.

475
00:43:55.760 --> 00:44:01.600
The issue is that like 70% of all jobs that get created are created by small businesses. And

476
00:44:01.600 --> 00:44:05.680
not governments, not big companies. They're, you know, they don't create jobs, small businesses,

477
00:44:05.680 --> 00:44:11.280
great jobs. And if we just not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but if we had 100,000 entrepreneurs

478
00:44:11.280 --> 00:44:16.160
who are all hiring 10 people, we'd, we'd have a million jobs and we'd have 100,000 options

479
00:44:16.160 --> 00:44:22.160
for people with jobs. So like I, I don't think that we discount the whole idea that entrepreneurship

480
00:44:22.160 --> 00:44:27.440
is a big part of the solution. Can I take us briefly back in time? This is not the first time

481
00:44:27.440 --> 00:44:33.120
this has happened. The K-shaped economy has happened in the Engelspors. Yeah. So the, what do you mean by

482
00:44:33.120 --> 00:44:38.160
K-shaped economy? So the K-shaped economy is where, so a normal economy is one where everyone agrees

483
00:44:38.160 --> 00:44:41.920
it's going up or down or sideways. Everyone can sort of say, oh yeah, roughly speaking,

484
00:44:41.920 --> 00:44:46.560
it's a good economy. It's about economy. It's, it's rising and falling like a tide. A K-shaped

485
00:44:46.560 --> 00:44:51.200
economy is where it's really good for someone really bad for others. It's a disrupted economy.

486
00:44:51.200 --> 00:44:55.040
Yeah. Right. So the top percentage are going up and the bottom percentage are going down.

487
00:44:55.040 --> 00:45:00.480
Now the headlines that we run today are the exact same headlines that were run in the early 1800s

488
00:45:00.480 --> 00:45:07.120
in Britain. And it was essentially record profits for industrialists and workers haven't had any

489
00:45:07.600 --> 00:45:13.520
improvements. Like you could almost take every grievance that we have today and you could just

490
00:45:13.520 --> 00:45:19.520
overlay it in the early 1800s and you get the exact same words. The solutions. One of the big

491
00:45:19.520 --> 00:45:24.000
solutions in the early 1800s was we need to export people. We need to get rid of people. And what

492
00:45:24.000 --> 00:45:28.720
they did is they sent everyone to Australia. So they sent, they sent, they picked up people and

493
00:45:28.720 --> 00:45:33.840
they put them in Australia, right? So they same sort of thing, mass, mass emigration or whatever

494
00:45:33.840 --> 00:45:38.160
you call it, remigration. So they got rid of people out of the country. So it was very similar

495
00:45:38.160 --> 00:45:44.320
and we call this the Engles Paws, but we understand what caused a 1790, 1840. Yeah. So what caused

496
00:45:44.320 --> 00:45:49.760
it was technology and it was this new is the industrial revolution. Yeah. So is the new technology

497
00:45:49.760 --> 00:45:56.320
where we introduced a steam engine, we introduced a spinning loom, we introduced tractors, we

498
00:45:56.320 --> 00:46:01.120
introduced all of this sort of new technology and the owners of that new technology and the people

499
00:46:01.120 --> 00:46:05.600
associated with that new technology went like that. They leveled up because of tech and the people

500
00:46:05.600 --> 00:46:09.600
who were not part of that technology went down. Very simple picture you might want to have in your

501
00:46:09.600 --> 00:46:16.000
mind is a farm that had a hundred workers farming versus one farm that had a tractor. The tractor

502
00:46:16.000 --> 00:46:20.720
farm went like that and they all the workers went like that because of technology. The interesting

503
00:46:20.720 --> 00:46:28.720
thing about the Engles Paws is that for approximately two generations, 50, 75 years, with the

504
00:46:28.720 --> 00:46:34.000
exception of the owners of capital, basically everybody else on planet earth went backwards.

505
00:46:34.000 --> 00:46:43.120
It was hell. It was hell. And what happened is that over time, the political consensus changed

506
00:46:43.600 --> 00:46:49.840
and working people clawed back some of that value through unions, through labor standards,

507
00:46:49.840 --> 00:46:54.240
so on and so forth. So I guess the essence of what I want to get to is, I mean,

508
00:46:54.240 --> 00:46:57.920
something you've always talked about down as well is that if you start applying pressures on these

509
00:46:57.920 --> 00:47:01.760
companies or entrepreneurs, they can just now get up and leave. And that was quite different from

510
00:47:01.760 --> 00:47:06.560
that era where we weren't dealing with technological businesses. We weren't dealing with IP in those

511
00:47:06.560 --> 00:47:10.240
things. So if you start imposing some of these measures, will these companies get up and leave

512
00:47:10.240 --> 00:47:13.600
and go somewhere else where market conditions are preferable? A lot of you, Karen,

513
00:47:13.600 --> 00:47:18.640
entrepreneurs are, as we've seen from some of the numbers recently, choosing to go work elsewhere.

514
00:47:18.640 --> 00:47:22.720
Okay. I think one of the things that just needs to be acknowledged and put on the table is one

515
00:47:22.800 --> 00:47:28.400
of the challenges you have here is you have the Europe or the world has built this incredibly stupid

516
00:47:28.400 --> 00:47:35.920
system where you can operate a business here, take advantage of the UK's market, take advantage

517
00:47:35.920 --> 00:47:43.520
of the UK's rule of law, take advantage of the UK's infrastructure, put your stuff in a box,

518
00:47:43.520 --> 00:47:52.080
move to Dubai and pay no tax, right? It's idiotic. It's just idiotic and sub-optimizing as an

519
00:47:52.080 --> 00:47:57.920
American. I pay tax wherever I go, right? So I cannot come to a place and take advantage of it

520
00:47:57.920 --> 00:48:06.480
and then skirt the laws. So this is such a profound, disincentive to do the right thing.

521
00:48:06.480 --> 00:48:12.960
Well, yes, but the real culprit is what companies can do because US companies can do it. You can't

522
00:48:12.960 --> 00:48:18.080
do it as an individual, but you can set up an office in Ireland in Luxembourg, which is even worse.

523
00:48:18.080 --> 00:48:23.040
And it's the corporations that are the bad guys, which is, but you have both problems because

524
00:48:23.040 --> 00:48:28.560
you have you have UK-based entrepreneurs who are like, well, I can stay here and pay 40% tax

525
00:48:28.560 --> 00:48:33.200
or whatever it is, right? Just pop off to Dubai, run the business virtually and pay enough.

526
00:48:33.200 --> 00:48:38.320
So what are you saying should be done with those people that do that? I think that UK citizens should

527
00:48:38.320 --> 00:48:43.120
pay UK tax wherever they go and German citizens should pay German tax wherever they go.

528
00:48:44.000 --> 00:48:48.560
I don't think that will solve it because it's not citizens, it's corporations that are the bad guys.

529
00:48:48.560 --> 00:48:52.560
It will solve one problem. This other problem needs to be handled.

530
00:48:52.560 --> 00:48:58.080
The giant vampire squids of the world are companies that are pumping money out of the economies

531
00:48:58.080 --> 00:49:03.440
and their faceless corporations that have figured out how to play this game. So for example,

532
00:49:04.160 --> 00:49:09.120
let's take YouTube, for example. YouTube is serving up a ton of videos to people all over

533
00:49:09.120 --> 00:49:14.720
this country and they're running ads, but that is pretending to be in some distant place.

534
00:49:14.720 --> 00:49:19.200
It's not pretending. It's not being in the UK. And what we used to do in the UK is we used to have

535
00:49:19.200 --> 00:49:24.560
a broadcast license. If you want a broadcast in the country, you pay a flat fee and you can broadcast.

536
00:49:24.560 --> 00:49:31.360
Why is YouTube not playing a broadcast license? If they are broadcasts or effectively and running ads,

537
00:49:32.160 --> 00:49:35.600
they sit there and say, oh, but there's this and we shift our profit through here and oh,

538
00:49:35.600 --> 00:49:39.840
we have to, I'm so sorry, but we have to buy our licensing from this company over in this

539
00:49:39.840 --> 00:49:44.800
other Vanuatu or whatever. It's like, no, no, no, we don't care about that. It's like, look at how

540
00:49:44.800 --> 00:49:49.120
many... Should you do business in the UK? You should be... Just as simple as you've got this many

541
00:49:49.120 --> 00:49:53.840
views and the broadcast license for you is this much. Okay. So do you agree on both points then

542
00:49:53.840 --> 00:49:59.520
that you should tax corporations based on where their customers are consuming and you should tax

543
00:49:59.520 --> 00:50:04.560
individuals irrespective of where they decide to fly off to? Look, I think in a globalized world

544
00:50:04.560 --> 00:50:09.280
that we live in, an individual should be allowed to make a new life for themselves if they want

545
00:50:09.280 --> 00:50:15.200
it, right? So for example, if I genuinely... I make a new life for myself in the UK 20 years ago,

546
00:50:15.200 --> 00:50:19.680
I came here from Australia and I don't want to pay tax in Australia because I was born in Australia.

547
00:50:19.680 --> 00:50:24.400
I paid a million dollars with a tax in Australia, but I now live here. I've got three kids here

548
00:50:24.400 --> 00:50:28.640
and I've got a house here and my whole life is here. I don't like the idea that just because I was

549
00:50:28.640 --> 00:50:33.440
born in Australia, it's not possible for me to make a new life. Okay, but we have a tax treaty.

550
00:50:33.440 --> 00:50:39.280
Yeah. Like there are ways of handling this, but this ridiculous look, every rich person I know in

551
00:50:39.280 --> 00:50:45.280
Europe is playing this ridiculous game of trying to avoid taxes, right? I don't know how you can

552
00:50:45.280 --> 00:50:50.400
look at that and think this is a good system. But the issue is you and I both know it's so easy to

553
00:50:50.400 --> 00:50:56.720
just turn this into a company game. So like for example, if... We have to appropriately close the

554
00:50:56.720 --> 00:51:04.480
loophole. But I just... I'm seeing so many people demonize people like Nick, right? They go,

555
00:51:04.480 --> 00:51:10.160
oh, this guy, he's a rich guy and he's like, you know, it shouldn't be so rich. Honestly,

556
00:51:10.160 --> 00:51:15.200
he's not the problem. I'm sure you pay a bunch of taxes and also you create economic activity around

557
00:51:15.200 --> 00:51:21.680
you. These mega corporations do trillions of dollars out of economy. If we take a mega

558
00:51:21.760 --> 00:51:27.440
corporation, you know, think of one in your head and we decide to tax them where their customers are.

559
00:51:27.920 --> 00:51:31.040
I was looking at some of the research and it says corporations rarely just absorb the tax. When

560
00:51:31.040 --> 00:51:37.440
countries like the UK or France introduced taxes based on local uses, tech giants like the biggest

561
00:51:37.440 --> 00:51:41.520
in the world immediately raised fees and prices for the consumer and small businesses inside

562
00:51:41.520 --> 00:51:46.080
those specific countries to offset the cost. If we had a global tax system that prevented this,

563
00:51:46.080 --> 00:51:50.400
then they wouldn't do it. They couldn't do it. If the compliance cost of tracking user locations

564
00:51:50.560 --> 00:51:54.080
and paying to local taxes outweighs the profit from the region, companies also tend to simply

565
00:51:54.080 --> 00:51:59.040
block users in those countries or pull their products entirely. Great, great. And that opens up

566
00:51:59.040 --> 00:52:05.680
a possibility of a local company to do it. Worse. Huh? Worse. Maybe better. I was thinking here

567
00:52:05.680 --> 00:52:11.040
about the large language models and I was thinking about that as an example. If the UK tried to take

568
00:52:11.040 --> 00:52:17.360
on Gemini or chat GBT, et cetera, we would be using a significantly worse technology.

569
00:52:17.840 --> 00:52:23.920
The truth is that those mega clubs, those mega clubs, they don't do this. They want to own the

570
00:52:23.920 --> 00:52:27.760
world and they want to dominate the world. They're not interested in cutting countries out,

571
00:52:27.760 --> 00:52:32.240
right? None of them actually cut countries out. When do you think Facebook is just going to leave

572
00:52:32.240 --> 00:52:38.240
the UK? Yeah. They're not going to do that. And the other way is how you do it. So if you simply

573
00:52:38.240 --> 00:52:42.240
tried to do that in Australia, though, with the news publishing business, they might do it very

574
00:52:42.240 --> 00:52:49.040
briefly as a way to punish political dissent. But ultimately, they operate globally. They have a

575
00:52:49.040 --> 00:52:55.760
global business model. Essentially, too, we just need to say, I'm sorry, you've had your 20,

576
00:52:55.760 --> 00:53:01.120
30 years of not paying taxes anywhere, but we're not doing that anymore. We are very good at

577
00:53:01.120 --> 00:53:07.440
coordinating when we want to coordinate. We need to say the bad guy here, it is really just pulling

578
00:53:07.440 --> 00:53:13.040
money out of our economies and taking it to other places. One of the reasons that the USA has

579
00:53:13.040 --> 00:53:19.040
become so wealthy with its stock market is because it is the end valuation where all of these

580
00:53:19.040 --> 00:53:24.000
vampire squids end up with their balance. If I look at what happened, it was Australia

581
00:53:24.000 --> 00:53:28.160
I was thinking about, but it also happened in Canada where they passed a law called the online

582
00:53:28.160 --> 00:53:32.800
news act requiring tech giants to pay local publishers whenever Canadian users shared or viewed

583
00:53:32.800 --> 00:53:37.920
news links. And immediately, instead of paying the user location tax, meta-simply blocked all

584
00:53:37.920 --> 00:53:43.200
news content from every user in Canada because the cost of compliance just wasn't worth the hassle

585
00:53:43.200 --> 00:53:46.880
for one particular market. And you have the same thing happen with Amazon where several U.S. states

586
00:53:46.880 --> 00:53:51.680
like California tried to force Amazon to collect local sales tax simply because Amazon had

587
00:53:51.680 --> 00:53:56.080
independent affiliates, like bloggers, etc, living in those states. And rather than dealing with

588
00:53:56.080 --> 00:54:00.800
the complex local tax collection, Amazon instantly terminate thousands of affiliate accounts.

589
00:54:00.800 --> 00:54:06.560
If every state required Amazon to collect local sales tax, then obviously they couldn't do any of

590
00:54:06.560 --> 00:54:12.320
that. They would have to deal with it, right? It's just these big corporations have a massive

591
00:54:12.320 --> 00:54:17.680
advantage over the jurisdictions that they're operating in because they have so much more power

592
00:54:17.680 --> 00:54:24.720
and so much more flexibility. So what is your solution then, Daniel, to so for this inequality

593
00:54:24.720 --> 00:54:29.520
problem that we're experiencing? Because you know, you seem to be less interested in the sort of

594
00:54:29.520 --> 00:54:34.480
workers rights piece because that seems to we've tried it. You're saying we tried it. Yeah,

595
00:54:34.480 --> 00:54:39.040
what I would like personally is I want to see way more small businesses and I want the government

596
00:54:39.040 --> 00:54:44.160
to favor small businesses and essentially say we're going to reduce the taxes and the pressure

597
00:54:44.160 --> 00:54:48.240
on the small businesses. We're going to advantage local small businesses that are here in paying tax.

598
00:54:48.960 --> 00:54:53.680
We're going to create special economic trading zones if your business is based here and is a

599
00:54:53.680 --> 00:54:59.280
smaller size. We're going to basically make ourselves highly competitive for small businesses to show

600
00:54:59.280 --> 00:55:05.280
up and do their A game. What about big businesses? Punish big businesses that are. I wouldn't punish

601
00:55:05.280 --> 00:55:12.960
them. I would just tilt the play. I'm 100% with him. Tilt the playing field towards smaller businesses

602
00:55:12.960 --> 00:55:17.280
and startups. You know, I I'm not sure if you've heard about this thing that I just joined the

603
00:55:17.280 --> 00:55:23.440
board of called Enterprise Britain. I'll call that Brent Holberman who does founders for them. Yep.

604
00:55:23.440 --> 00:55:28.640
And Steve Fitzpatrick who founded Ovo just started. It's called Enterprise Britain. It's a group of

605
00:55:28.640 --> 00:55:35.440
us who have gotten together with the express purpose of doing exactly pretty much what you would

606
00:55:35.440 --> 00:55:41.920
you describe, which is to try to make Britain an even better environment for business and

607
00:55:41.920 --> 00:55:46.480
mostly small and medium size businesses. One of the great challenges here is to try to find

608
00:55:46.480 --> 00:55:52.160
capital structures that allow small companies to turn into larger companies while remaining here

609
00:55:52.160 --> 00:56:00.720
and not fleeing to a better place. But I'm I am 100% in agreement with this. And you can have an

610
00:56:00.720 --> 00:56:07.360
incredibly dynamic fast growing economy where all of the benefits flow to the people at the very

611
00:56:07.360 --> 00:56:14.560
top and everybody else gets screwed. And you have to do both. You have to do both. I've spent the

612
00:56:14.560 --> 00:56:18.480
last decade building and investing in companies. And so often the conversation around marketing

613
00:56:18.480 --> 00:56:23.200
budgets follows the exact same pattern. The budget gets approved but then the results don't come

614
00:56:23.200 --> 00:56:28.560
back. And most of the time the creative pitch and the offer is fine. The problem lies with the

615
00:56:28.560 --> 00:56:34.560
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616
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635
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I mean, one of the most important subjects at the moment in society is artificial intelligence.

636
00:58:27.360 --> 00:58:31.440
And we probably saw recently out Schmidt did a commencement speech in front of thousands of students

637
00:58:31.440 --> 00:58:37.040
and every time he said the way AI. One of the things that anthropic or one of the leading AI

638
00:58:37.040 --> 00:58:42.320
companies said recently is that entry level jobs are at risk. And I've got this graph here showing

639
00:58:42.320 --> 00:58:49.200
the decline of entry level job postings. I believe it was on LinkedIn pulled from somewhere.

640
00:58:49.200 --> 00:58:53.920
And it shows that they're consistently dropping and dropping and dropping. AI is, I think about

641
00:58:53.920 --> 00:58:58.480
it so often. I was up late last night trying to think through some of this stuff because

642
00:58:58.480 --> 00:59:02.720
anthropic released a report yesterday showing that AI models will be able to improve themselves

643
00:59:02.720 --> 00:59:08.400
theoretically in the future. And what this might mean. How disruptive do you think AI is going to be

644
00:59:08.400 --> 00:59:13.120
as it relates to job losses? You know, I don't think Bernie Sanders latest idea is terrible.

645
00:59:13.120 --> 00:59:20.320
US will earn 50% of all the AI companies. It is absolutely true that AI has monetizing for free

646
00:59:20.320 --> 00:59:25.600
humanities intellectual property. And a few people are going to directly benefit from that.

647
00:59:25.600 --> 00:59:32.240
And I think that in the same way that Norway created a sovereign wealth fund with this enormous

648
00:59:32.240 --> 00:59:39.600
asset that they had, creating a sovereign wealth fund with 50% of the value created by AI and

649
00:59:39.600 --> 00:59:46.320
recycling that into, I think it's unclear exactly how those benefits should be, should be recycled,

650
00:59:46.320 --> 00:59:52.560
but trying to find a way to make some of that value a cushion for the disruption that it will

651
00:59:52.560 --> 00:59:57.600
inevitably cause. I don't think that's a crazy idea. It's a good idea for China and the US.

652
00:59:57.600 --> 01:00:04.880
Yes. Yes. They're not for anywhere else necessarily. It's not going to help Senegal or Southampton much.

653
01:00:04.880 --> 01:00:10.640
No. In fact, it will damage a lot of those places. The Philippines has benefited enormously

654
01:00:10.640 --> 01:00:16.080
by being the outsourced back office for a lot of small businesses that AI can now do a lot of

655
01:00:16.080 --> 01:00:23.840
those jobs. One of the things that I always come back to is the idea that say the UK has 5.7

656
01:00:23.840 --> 01:00:29.280
million businesses. We have a million unemployed people. We need one fifth of the businesses to

657
01:00:29.280 --> 01:00:34.560
employ one person. AI does actually make your business better. AI is really good at helping you

658
01:00:34.560 --> 01:00:39.840
with your marketing. AI is great at helping you do legal contracts. There are 100 ways that AI

659
01:00:39.840 --> 01:00:45.600
could actually make 5.7 million businesses a little bit better to the point where they want to hire

660
01:00:45.600 --> 01:00:50.480
someone. If we can incentivize those things to happen, businesses are trained on how to use AI

661
01:00:50.480 --> 01:00:57.280
to their advantage and tax breaks for small businesses that are hiring. There's actually 5.7

662
01:00:57.280 --> 01:01:02.640
million businesses and a million unemployed people. That's a good match there. A lot of people

663
01:01:02.640 --> 01:01:08.320
have been talking about AI agents. What an AI agent can do, for anyone that doesn't know, is it can

664
01:01:08.320 --> 01:01:13.280
go on your computer and it can get any task you want done on the computer. Whether that's

665
01:01:13.280 --> 01:01:17.840
editing tasks or whether it's manual data entry tasks or whatever it is, it can click around on

666
01:01:17.840 --> 01:01:23.120
the computer and do things. A lot of the entry level roles we're often given are that kind of

667
01:01:23.120 --> 01:01:27.200
work. I think my entry level job after I dropped out of the university was kind of doing that

668
01:01:27.200 --> 01:01:31.440
kind of thing. There was also a little bit of a sales component where I'd cold call people.

669
01:01:31.440 --> 01:01:35.760
AI can now do the cold calls too. And increasingly, if we just play the rate of development forward,

670
01:01:35.760 --> 01:01:40.960
we'll be able to do those things. So if these businesses get more and more efficient, again,

671
01:01:40.960 --> 01:01:47.520
it comes back to this entry level point is what role will entry level team members have in these

672
01:01:47.600 --> 01:01:52.880
kind of companies? So what's interesting for me, I have a group of companies, small businesses,

673
01:01:52.880 --> 01:01:57.600
dynamic small businesses. We've implemented AI in all of them and as a result, we've hired people.

674
01:01:57.600 --> 01:02:02.640
Who have you hired? So entry level people. We've hired some entry level people who are augmented

675
01:02:02.640 --> 01:02:07.840
by AI so they become more valuable because of AI. But things like appointment setting, we've

676
01:02:07.840 --> 01:02:12.640
ended up hiring more salespeople because we get more appointments. We use it with our marketing

677
01:02:12.640 --> 01:02:17.280
and we end up hiring people who can actually have those final conversations with people. At the

678
01:02:17.280 --> 01:02:23.040
very core of my organizations, we have an AI layer and the AI layer has context and skills

679
01:02:23.040 --> 01:02:29.360
and models and security layer, all in there. And it spits out amazing information and data and

680
01:02:29.360 --> 01:02:33.200
reports and tells us who to talk to and why to talk to them and what to talk to them about. All

681
01:02:33.200 --> 01:02:36.480
these things are happening because of AI. But it doesn't get around the point that like if you

682
01:02:36.480 --> 01:02:40.800
think about Uber, Dara has been pretty clear that the 9 million drivers they have, I think it is,

683
01:02:40.800 --> 01:02:45.120
are going to lose their jobs in the future. If you think about the other sort of work

684
01:02:45.120 --> 01:02:50.880
color professions we've described, those roles won't exist in the future. Well, I should say those

685
01:02:50.880 --> 01:02:59.200
roles will be changed. Correct. If I put on my more optimistic hat, the thing is that all businesses

686
01:02:59.200 --> 01:03:05.680
operate in a competitive environment and there are two ways to compete. One is to be cheaper.

687
01:03:05.760 --> 01:03:14.480
The other is to be better. Right. And the thing about AI is that, yeah, there are tasks

688
01:03:14.480 --> 01:03:23.680
that you can automate away. But one person with good AI tools may be able to do the job of five.

689
01:03:24.480 --> 01:03:30.720
Right. And yeah, you could eliminate that job or you could keep that person, give them the right

690
01:03:30.720 --> 01:03:35.520
tools and outcompete your competitors. The right tools. The right tools. There's an assumption,

691
01:03:35.520 --> 01:03:40.080
not well. I mean, this is of course what happened with computers, right? I mean, I am older than

692
01:03:40.080 --> 01:03:48.480
you guys. So I remember when calculators hit, you had to be there to realize how freaked out people

693
01:03:48.480 --> 01:03:53.600
were about calculators, right? Like people were talking about like, well, what are the

694
01:03:53.600 --> 01:04:01.280
accountants going to do? And will kids learn math anymore? I mean, it was it was like extremely

695
01:04:01.280 --> 01:04:08.880
controversial to bring a calculator to school. And then along came computers. And the truth is

696
01:04:08.880 --> 01:04:13.360
that computers didn't reduce the amount of work that people did. They increased the amount of

697
01:04:13.360 --> 01:04:18.800
work that people did. And I do believe that there are ways in which AI is probably going to do that.

698
01:04:18.800 --> 01:04:25.520
And so the job loss may not be as apocalyptic as it now feels like it may be, because again,

699
01:04:25.520 --> 01:04:32.800
at the end of the day, you have two ways to choose to compete. If you, you know, you can get rid

700
01:04:32.800 --> 01:04:38.480
of somebody and do X, but you could keep that person and have them do five X and outcompete,

701
01:04:39.200 --> 01:04:44.000
you know, your competitors in another dimension. I think that that will be something that people

702
01:04:44.000 --> 01:04:48.800
are likely to do. Doctors are just going to be better doctors. I think I definitely agree that

703
01:04:48.800 --> 01:04:53.120
there's going to be this sort of augmentation of certain individuals. I think maybe the difference

704
01:04:53.120 --> 01:05:00.000
between like calculators or computers versus this is AI is coming into a technological economy.

705
01:05:00.960 --> 01:05:08.000
And it is coming in with instant scale in a way that when anthropic ship their new model last

706
01:05:08.000 --> 01:05:15.040
week, it went to all of us at once, everywhere in the world. We were all bum step-changed with

707
01:05:15.040 --> 01:05:19.280
computers. I remember the day that like my dad ordered the first computer for our house and we

708
01:05:19.280 --> 01:05:23.440
waited for weeks and weeks and weeks. And then we got it super expensive to get one. We unboxed

709
01:05:23.440 --> 01:05:27.280
our members all stood around it, looking at, and it was like this Windows 95 machine that had like

710
01:05:27.280 --> 01:05:33.360
no memory on it. So the distribution, this sort of disruption was much slower. The pace, the pace

711
01:05:33.360 --> 01:05:38.960
was much slower. Right. And I understand that like with my, with our team, there's no intent,

712
01:05:38.960 --> 01:05:43.600
we have no intention at all to let anybody go because of AI. We're re-skilling people, training

713
01:05:43.600 --> 01:05:49.600
people. However, would we end up hiring less people, especially in the near term than we would have

714
01:05:49.600 --> 01:05:54.480
otherwise? I think that's maybe conceivable. Yeah. And a lot of companies I think are in that

715
01:05:54.480 --> 01:05:57.360
position where I actually was speaking to someone yesterday and they said we're just letting the

716
01:05:57.360 --> 01:06:05.280
natural attrition in our call center take care of the shift, which means they have, they

717
01:06:05.280 --> 01:06:09.840
use 25% of people from their call center naturally. They're just not hiring other people back in.

718
01:06:09.840 --> 01:06:13.600
And actually Klanis CEO said the same thing. He said we're just letting the attrition take care

719
01:06:13.600 --> 01:06:19.120
of it. I'll give you another example though, just to counter that. I work with a husband and wife

720
01:06:19.120 --> 01:06:26.000
couple in the north of England who they had a little video production agency and like one or two

721
01:06:26.000 --> 01:06:31.360
people who did a little bit of contracting with them. They used AI to create a piece of software.

722
01:06:31.360 --> 01:06:36.480
And that piece of software helps automate script writing and a few of the things that they do.

723
01:06:37.600 --> 01:06:41.200
They launched a waiting list for this. They got five and a half thousand people to join the waiting

724
01:06:41.200 --> 01:06:45.840
list. They then signed up their first 1500 clients to a piece of software that cost almost nothing

725
01:06:45.840 --> 01:06:51.440
for them to build in four months. And now they're hiring a team of 10 people. And this is a husband

726
01:06:51.440 --> 01:06:58.400
and wife who had a small constrained business who are now building out a bigger business. And

727
01:06:58.400 --> 01:07:04.560
this is something that could never have happened. They haven't had to raise millions of dollars.

728
01:07:04.560 --> 01:07:11.040
They haven't had to hire 30, 40 people. So this tiny little SaaS opportunity is suddenly possible

729
01:07:11.040 --> 01:07:16.640
because of AI. And take that AI away. And that fast growth dynamic little businesses.

730
01:07:17.200 --> 01:07:20.160
Yeah, I think anecdotally I could come up with lots of examples as well where

731
01:07:20.160 --> 01:07:23.520
particular people are highly entrepreneurial. They come across an opportunity. But there's this

732
01:07:23.520 --> 01:07:28.080
broad if you just zoom out on the way that people generate value in the economy at the moment.

733
01:07:28.080 --> 01:07:30.960
So much of that is going to change. And it's going to be quite quick. It feels like

734
01:07:30.960 --> 01:07:34.080
Oh, totally. And I don't know what you do about. Like what do you do about that?

735
01:07:35.280 --> 01:07:40.560
This happened in the heavens paradox. The person who had a tractor displaced a hundred people

736
01:07:40.560 --> 01:07:45.760
who were in the field. And those hundred people went into the city looking for work all at once.

737
01:07:45.840 --> 01:07:51.120
And it was Charles Dickens wrote the tale of two cities. He wrote all of the twist.

738
01:07:51.760 --> 01:07:56.480
Guess who else came out of the heavens paradox? A good friend Karl Marx who came up with the

739
01:07:56.480 --> 01:08:01.120
most toxic ideas ever created and written down. Right. He came off the back of the heavens paradox.

740
01:08:01.120 --> 01:08:01.920
So what you do about it?

741
01:08:03.360 --> 01:08:08.560
UBI. I'm not a big fan of UBI at the moment. Is that kind of what this 50% Bernie Sanders thing would do?

742
01:08:08.560 --> 01:08:13.680
Well, it's it's sovereign wealth fund basically. But you have to find a way to help manage through

743
01:08:13.680 --> 01:08:20.320
this transition. And you have to, I think, depend on the value created. Look, the whole the whole

744
01:08:20.320 --> 01:08:27.920
valuation that AI is predicated on is job disruption. You can't you can't get to those numbers

745
01:08:27.920 --> 01:08:35.280
unless you're displacing lots of jobs. Exactly. And and if that's true, then we should grab some

746
01:08:35.280 --> 01:08:41.280
of that value that is created and recycle it into the economy to try to cushion the disruption

747
01:08:41.280 --> 01:08:45.360
that it creates. This is a bit of a socialist idea, right? I don't call that socialism.

748
01:08:45.360 --> 01:08:49.840
What'd you call that? I don't know. Just common sense. Wouldn't that broadly apply to all

749
01:08:49.840 --> 01:08:55.440
companies and rich people if there's if they are disrupting the economy and taking an unfair share

750
01:08:55.440 --> 01:09:00.080
of that disruption? Should we not just grab and recycle back in? But that's the that is the

751
01:09:00.080 --> 01:09:05.680
basis upon which every high functioning democracy in the in the world operate. I mean, every high

752
01:09:05.680 --> 01:09:10.640
functioning democracy in the world has progressive taxation, labor standards. There's a difference

753
01:09:10.640 --> 01:09:16.240
between seizing private property, which would be a socialist way of doing things and a communist

754
01:09:16.240 --> 01:09:24.560
way of doing things and owning strategic assets, which which are private properties. So for example,

755
01:09:24.560 --> 01:09:33.200
the the Dubai government owns the physical hotel buildings that that run Dubai and it leases those

756
01:09:33.200 --> 01:09:38.160
out to hotel operators, but it keeps money in its sovereign wealth fund because it says basically

757
01:09:38.240 --> 01:09:42.960
a big part of Dubai is that we own these kind of land assets. So do you think we should

758
01:09:42.960 --> 01:09:48.480
go and take a proportion of these companies? The difference was that the Dubai government actually

759
01:09:48.480 --> 01:09:52.880
developed those assets. Right, but we're we're already too far down the line with within a capitalist

760
01:09:52.880 --> 01:09:58.240
society like. So we might say we might say that data is the new oil and data is a common good and

761
01:09:58.240 --> 01:10:04.080
it is a common asset that has been sequestered illegitimately by these companies. So therefore

762
01:10:04.080 --> 01:10:07.920
you're not seizing what they created. You're you're basically saying I'm sorry, but you need to

763
01:10:07.920 --> 01:10:13.360
pay a license back to this sovereign wealth fund because you're using a common asset that you

764
01:10:13.360 --> 01:10:18.560
were able to essentially see. You stole it from Africans and British people. You stole it from

765
01:10:18.560 --> 01:10:22.880
people in Australia. You stole it from people in Canada. The biggest issue that we're having

766
01:10:22.880 --> 01:10:28.560
is that we're actually the nature of the entire economy is changing. So this happened 250 years

767
01:10:28.560 --> 01:10:33.120
ago where the nature of the economy was land and we had an economic system called feudalism and

768
01:10:33.120 --> 01:10:39.760
colonialism. And then the nature of the economy was industrialization and we had an economic system

769
01:10:39.760 --> 01:10:44.320
called socialism and capitalism. And now the nature of the economy is actually fundamentally

770
01:10:44.320 --> 01:10:48.240
changing. So in economics there's four factors of production, land labor capital enterprise.

771
01:10:48.240 --> 01:10:52.960
We're now swinging like a pendulum from land through capital labor and now we're actually in an

772
01:10:52.960 --> 01:10:58.240
enterprise economy. And we need some sort of economic system that reflects the reality of how

773
01:10:58.240 --> 01:11:05.440
money and wealth is made. Is that go to an open AI, take 50% of their company and then pay out

774
01:11:05.440 --> 01:11:10.560
the profits of that 50% to the people. I'm always skeptical of any socialist ideas. If it comes

775
01:11:10.560 --> 01:11:15.200
from Bernie Sanders, I'm skeptical. Bernie Sanders isn't a socialist. Like let's speak

776
01:11:15.200 --> 01:11:23.520
of this. He says he's a socialist. Socialism is. Socialism is, you know, the government owning

777
01:11:23.600 --> 01:11:31.440
all the means of production, right? Look, there are a million forms of capitalism, right? Every

778
01:11:31.440 --> 01:11:39.440
country operates slightly differently. And I don't think that Bernie Sanders is saying that

779
01:11:39.440 --> 01:11:47.680
we should abandon markets. What he is saying is we should manage markets for the public benefit,

780
01:11:47.680 --> 01:11:52.640
not exclusively for the benefit of the owners of capital. And I think that's really different.

781
01:11:52.720 --> 01:11:57.680
You know, with like an Amazon, they're using the roads and the infrastructure.

782
01:11:57.680 --> 01:12:03.680
Correct. So would you go take 50% of those companies as well for public benefit and then pay it

783
01:12:03.680 --> 01:12:10.480
out to no, but the citizens. We effectively do take part of them in the form of taxes, right?

784
01:12:10.480 --> 01:12:14.480
Now, now the taxes that we impose on those companies, I would argue and

785
01:12:15.120 --> 01:12:22.960
Dan made it may agree are insufficient. They do not accurately reflect the value that we give

786
01:12:22.960 --> 01:12:28.000
them. They don't return equal value that we think increase the taxes on companies like

787
01:12:28.000 --> 01:12:34.560
Amazon. You both agree? Well, Amazon is very successfully avoiding taxes. So would you agree

788
01:12:34.560 --> 01:12:38.080
to increase the taxes? I think we need to have, we need to close tax loopholes. We need to make

789
01:12:38.080 --> 01:12:42.480
sure that they're paying taxes like all other companies that operate within the economy.

790
01:12:42.480 --> 01:12:48.560
Like the guy at the pub that you're talking about pays, right? Yeah, exactly. And the retailers

791
01:12:48.560 --> 01:12:52.800
and all that stuff, who in competition with Amazon, look, one of the biggest issues that we have

792
01:12:52.800 --> 01:12:56.160
is we have widespread incompetence in governments. And I'll give you a quick start on this.

793
01:12:56.640 --> 01:13:03.120
In the UK government, you are 10 times more likely to die than to be fired for poor performance.

794
01:13:03.120 --> 01:13:09.920
And the UK government fires people at one 600th rate as normal businesses for incompetence.

795
01:13:09.920 --> 01:13:15.440
So we have an accumulation of massive incompetence in government. So the idea, you can come up,

796
01:13:15.440 --> 01:13:22.160
we can come up with all the best ideas under the sun at this table. We have a fundamentally

797
01:13:22.160 --> 01:13:29.360
incompetent set of people who have misaligned incentives. We have basically a revolving

798
01:13:29.360 --> 01:13:33.840
door between financial industrial complex technology and industrial complex.

799
01:13:34.560 --> 01:13:39.840
Well, the Singaporean government, they basically said that we're going to have a very

800
01:13:39.840 --> 01:13:45.200
high degree of meritocracy in government that essentially we promote and fire based on outcomes

801
01:13:45.200 --> 01:13:51.120
in merit merit. Singapore is a miracle of governance. Amazing. It's a miracle of governance,

802
01:13:51.120 --> 01:13:57.200
but it is a very small place. Totally. And perhaps the only place in the history of planet Earth

803
01:13:57.200 --> 01:14:07.440
that is benefited from a well-meaning dictator. It's an astonishing story of capability,

804
01:14:07.440 --> 01:14:13.840
competence, foresight. So what is the solution with this AI revolution? I think we will agree

805
01:14:13.840 --> 01:14:17.680
that there's going to be job disruption. And there's going to be a new type of job. There's

806
01:14:17.680 --> 01:14:22.880
going to be probably a delta of people transitioning to those new types of jobs. I've said this

807
01:14:22.960 --> 01:14:27.440
before, but I even noticed that within our recruitment processes now, we are really looking for people

808
01:14:27.440 --> 01:14:31.360
that have a certain set of skills. We always ask. And it's harder and harder and harder to find

809
01:14:31.360 --> 01:14:36.960
those people. Well, that's training. That's education and training. It takes time. The school system

810
01:14:36.960 --> 01:14:41.200
needs to produce people that you would want to hire. Yeah, and that takes a lot of time. In my

811
01:14:41.200 --> 01:14:45.920
hiring, I asked the question, how deep are you in the AI rabbit hole? Anyone who says, oh,

812
01:14:45.920 --> 01:14:50.720
a lot, I'm like, okay, join the team. And also, if you think about humanoid robots, Elon Musk's

813
01:14:50.720 --> 01:14:55.520
pay packet mandates him to deliver millions of humanoid robots, where else he doesn't get his big

814
01:14:55.520 --> 01:15:00.560
pay packet. If we think about robotics and humanoid robots coming through, we watch the other day,

815
01:15:00.560 --> 01:15:05.520
figure AI released this video showing a humanoid robot sorting packages on a production line for

816
01:15:05.520 --> 01:15:10.720
eight days straight, beating a human sorting those packages on the production line by car

817
01:15:10.720 --> 01:15:16.480
in Los Angeles now drives itself as do the taxis. And there's a huge race to make autonomous

818
01:15:16.480 --> 01:15:21.280
vehicles. I'm sure there's new jobs created and I understand in four sites, hard to understand

819
01:15:21.280 --> 01:15:26.160
what those will be. I assume there'll be more human jobs, more sales jobs. My only thing that I can

820
01:15:26.160 --> 01:15:32.560
say is that the future is small businesses. It's small teams of 10 people making YouTube channels.

821
01:15:32.560 --> 01:15:38.240
It's small teams of 10 people making software. When you have millions and millions of little small

822
01:15:38.240 --> 01:15:42.480
businesses, everyone's happier. But if you read what Anthropic released yesterday, they're making

823
01:15:42.560 --> 01:15:49.280
the claim that actually we're getting to a point where it will be an individual with a team of agents

824
01:15:49.280 --> 01:15:53.920
who can now make a trillion dollar company without hiring a single person. And actually when you

825
01:15:53.920 --> 01:15:58.480
said about making software, making that they would they might argue that that'll be agents making

826
01:15:58.480 --> 01:16:03.840
that software. Anthropic said their amount of code each individual's producing on their own is eight

827
01:16:03.840 --> 01:16:07.040
times. And this one particular quote, which I actually screenshot on my phone last night,

828
01:16:07.040 --> 01:16:12.240
comes from an engineer anthropic who was saying they feel useless because now they say they

829
01:16:12.400 --> 01:16:15.840
haven't read a line of code in months and months and months. The anthropic engineer was basically

830
01:16:15.840 --> 01:16:20.800
saying like, I come to work. This agent writes the code for me and I kind of sit and watch and I feel

831
01:16:20.800 --> 01:16:27.280
useless. So all those examples you gave. Okay, but what would happen in that situation is you would

832
01:16:27.280 --> 01:16:33.040
have a massive deflationary effect. If there was one person doing all sorts of things in the economy,

833
01:16:33.040 --> 01:16:39.040
then the cost of that would go to the cost of the electricity to run it. So massive deflationary.

834
01:16:39.040 --> 01:16:43.440
And then the question becomes, well, what does everyone do? What do we all do? We do human

835
01:16:43.440 --> 01:16:48.240
things, right? Humans always come up with things to do with each other. Like if I was to tell my

836
01:16:48.240 --> 01:16:53.120
grandfather that there is a job called a personal trainer who takes you to the gym and counts your

837
01:16:53.120 --> 01:16:58.800
reps, right? My grandfather would go, that's insane. And I say, oh, there's 50,000 personal trainers

838
01:16:58.800 --> 01:17:04.240
in gyms all over the country. So there are always these crazy new jobs that get created. I look at

839
01:17:04.320 --> 01:17:08.240
what trust fund kids do, right? Because a lot of trust fund kids, they go, they don't have to

840
01:17:08.240 --> 01:17:11.760
worry about money and they don't have to worry about resources and they go find something to do.

841
01:17:11.760 --> 01:17:16.400
And it's always weird. We're going to traverse through, you know, potentially the jobs we have now

842
01:17:17.120 --> 01:17:22.560
involuntarily go through this transition moment where I think history is quite clear on what happens

843
01:17:22.560 --> 01:17:28.240
in these transition moments. It gets ugly. And then we'll come to, you know, what I'm hearing is

844
01:17:28.240 --> 01:17:32.800
that you're saying we will come to some kind of utopia on the other end of this. No. No.

845
01:17:32.800 --> 01:17:39.280
I don't think there's going to be a utopia. What do you think? Look, I don't think utopia

846
01:17:39.280 --> 01:17:44.800
has exist. I do think that markets are the greatest social technology ever invented for creating

847
01:17:44.800 --> 01:17:50.720
prosperity and for enabling the human spirit. That is not because markets are efficient allocators

848
01:17:50.720 --> 01:17:56.800
of scarce resources, which is the conventional view. Markets are an evolutionary system that enables

849
01:17:56.800 --> 01:18:02.080
groups of people to come together and solve complex problems. And solutions to human problems

850
01:18:02.160 --> 01:18:09.920
is what prosperity actually is. It isn't GDP or money. And the best world that you can build I think

851
01:18:09.920 --> 01:18:20.240
on earth is a market economy governed by a robust democracy that robustly includes all citizens

852
01:18:20.240 --> 01:18:28.080
in that economy. And your answer is small business. And I'm 100% behind you and I wish you all

853
01:18:28.080 --> 01:18:33.840
the success. My answer is that a lot of people are going to end up working for large companies

854
01:18:33.840 --> 01:18:40.240
or medium companies and that we have to ensure my part of the answer is that we have to have

855
01:18:40.240 --> 01:18:47.120
standards in place to ensure that those companies treat people well enough so that they can

856
01:18:48.160 --> 01:18:54.320
be dignified participants in both the society and the economy. And that will require

857
01:18:54.880 --> 01:19:02.640
innovation and laws and rules and all sorts of mechanisms to enable that. But that there is no

858
01:19:02.640 --> 01:19:09.920
alternative if you want to live in a decent society. But the higher order bit for me and the reason

859
01:19:09.920 --> 01:19:16.640
I work on economics is that the existing economic paradigm basically says markets are perfectly

860
01:19:16.640 --> 01:19:22.400
efficient. We should just let them run and what comes will come. So you're really focused on

861
01:19:22.400 --> 01:19:29.760
increasing the workers lives and pay. So if you understand the economy from the conventional point

862
01:19:29.760 --> 01:19:37.760
of view, including people in the economy is a liberal luxury that you can afford if and when

863
01:19:37.760 --> 01:19:44.320
you have growth. And I think everything the new economics says is that including more people in

864
01:19:44.320 --> 01:19:51.680
the economy more robustly is actually the technical mechanism that makes both economies grow

865
01:19:51.760 --> 01:19:57.520
and democracy's function. So to simplify that, what does that mean from a policy perspective?

866
01:19:57.520 --> 01:20:03.440
It is very hard to answer in an uncertain future. In an AI, if you don't know what's going to happen

867
01:20:03.440 --> 01:20:08.880
with the economy. I mean, we have no idea how much job loss there will be. We are, I think Dan

868
01:20:08.880 --> 01:20:13.520
says quite rightly, going through a transition where the shape of the economy will change.

869
01:20:13.520 --> 01:20:20.240
So do we do nothing through the trust? No, we aggressively experiment with ways to include more

870
01:20:20.320 --> 01:20:26.080
people in the economy. Bernie Sanders idea is an experiment. What's the worst that can happen?

871
01:20:26.080 --> 01:20:30.880
Like just think about it. What is the worst that can happen? The worst would be is that you give

872
01:20:30.880 --> 01:20:36.320
government more money and they leverage more debt. And as soon as the government has the economy,

873
01:20:36.320 --> 01:20:42.880
the United States does not need assets to leverage more debt. We just created that. We didn't need

874
01:20:43.680 --> 01:20:49.040
that is not true. That is just not true. We have $37 trillion of debt, all of which was basically

875
01:20:49.120 --> 01:20:55.520
given away in wars or tax cuts for rich people. But they can print more money. Absolutely.

876
01:20:55.520 --> 01:21:00.400
But these two things, they are not connected. But the truth is that the worst that can happen

877
01:21:00.400 --> 01:21:07.120
by running that experiment is that there will be a few dozen guys who are worth $100 billion

878
01:21:07.120 --> 01:21:13.360
and not $200 billion. That is the worst that that can do. Is that going to be the end all?

879
01:21:13.760 --> 01:21:18.800
Will it work perfectly? I have no idea. But what I do know is that democracies need to move

880
01:21:18.800 --> 01:21:26.160
aggressively to try to make sure that these technological innovations benefit the society broadly,

881
01:21:26.160 --> 01:21:30.560
not just a few people narrowly. If I think about the UK, if you implemented something like that here,

882
01:21:31.360 --> 01:21:37.760
would would people leave? So if you implemented, say we had an AI company here and you said,

883
01:21:37.760 --> 01:21:40.800
what the UK is going to own half of it, would that company just get a structure?

884
01:21:40.800 --> 01:21:44.800
Somewhere else because it is digital. They probably would. But you are back to this all problem.

885
01:21:44.800 --> 01:21:48.960
We have seen this with the data centers. People are going, I read a report that said,

886
01:21:48.960 --> 01:21:53.120
the reason OpenAI did not open their data center in the UK, which they said they were going to,

887
01:21:53.120 --> 01:21:56.720
is because energy costs four times more here. So they said, we are not going to do that.

888
01:21:58.400 --> 01:22:01.200
Would that not be the case here where you get this sort of brain drain?

889
01:22:01.200 --> 01:22:07.680
The risk that you run with this Bernie Sanders model is that we leverage the government's

890
01:22:07.680 --> 01:22:12.960
balance sheet or non-balance sheet to take out huge debt in the name of our kids and our grandkids

891
01:22:12.960 --> 01:22:19.440
that they have to repay. They buy up all these intangible assets and then they're left holding

892
01:22:19.440 --> 01:22:26.720
those assets that may or may not perform and will have debt regardless. Then the super clever little

893
01:22:26.720 --> 01:22:31.520
anthropic guys say, oh, actually, we're just going to restructure to Vanuatu now. Leave you guys

894
01:22:31.520 --> 01:22:36.160
holding all of that toxic debt and we're going to run this from somewhere else. That could happen.

895
01:22:36.160 --> 01:22:41.600
The other thing that could happen is if, let's say OpenAI as one example, are making a hundred

896
01:22:41.600 --> 01:22:45.120
pounds profit at the moment, a hundred dollars profit at the moment. And Bernie Sanders says,

897
01:22:45.120 --> 01:22:51.920
we want $50 of that profit. China are going to have an additional 50 theoretically, an additional

898
01:22:51.920 --> 01:22:55.360
$50 to invest in their frontier models in getting ahead of it.

899
01:22:55.360 --> 01:22:58.960
One reason saying, oh, I'll take $50, you're 50 percent of your profit.

900
01:22:58.960 --> 01:23:03.280
What is he saying? I'll take 50 percent of your stock, which means that then the US would have

901
01:23:03.920 --> 01:23:10.320
equal voting power. Well, then you're going to get gridlock in terms of voting. If the US

902
01:23:10.320 --> 01:23:14.480
owned 50 percent of the company and Sam Holtman, let's say owns 50 percent, they're going to have

903
01:23:14.480 --> 01:23:19.600
to vote on decisions. Well, you could put some directors from the public on that board.

904
01:23:19.600 --> 01:23:24.160
And what happens to a company when you have the government on the voting board?

905
01:23:25.440 --> 01:23:29.440
You effectively have this in lots of countries where labor has aceded the table.

906
01:23:30.400 --> 01:23:34.160
With one of your companies, if half of your board were the government, do you think you'd be able

907
01:23:34.160 --> 01:23:37.760
to be as innovative, move as fast? We talked about the bureaucracy of the government.

908
01:23:37.760 --> 01:23:41.360
Yeah, I'm not suggesting that half the direction should be on the government.

909
01:23:41.360 --> 01:23:46.400
Yeah, mind you, China has as well. China has got essentially the CCP on the board of all of those

910
01:23:46.400 --> 01:23:50.640
companies as well. And they move pretty fast. There's slightly different government, isn't it?

911
01:23:50.640 --> 01:23:54.960
Yeah, it is. And there's different levels of competence and meritocracy hierarchy.

912
01:23:55.440 --> 01:24:00.000
I worry about all of these solutions that empower government because I don't trust government.

913
01:24:00.000 --> 01:24:05.120
My entire life has been one thing after the next made worse by government. That's my reality,

914
01:24:05.120 --> 01:24:08.800
born in 1981. I've never had a good experience with government.

915
01:24:08.800 --> 01:24:18.080
Okay, but dude, you grew up in Australia and you live in the UK. If you hate government so much,

916
01:24:18.080 --> 01:24:25.920
move to the Congo. Seriously, you are, look, I mean, it's just no one likes to be constrained.

917
01:24:26.480 --> 01:24:33.120
Everyone wants other people held the Ohio standard. And it just, seriously, there is no

918
01:24:33.120 --> 01:24:39.120
libertarian paradise in my field where nobody follows any rules, nobody pays any taxes and

919
01:24:39.120 --> 01:24:44.640
everybody lives like a king. If you hate government, there are plenty, there are 220 countries in the

920
01:24:44.640 --> 01:24:51.600
world. 150 of them effectively have no government. Why do you not move your base of operations to

921
01:24:51.600 --> 01:25:00.320
those places? Because you would instantly be somebody's, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not

922
01:25:00.320 --> 01:25:06.400
not an anarchist. When a government doesn't fire incompetent people, right? But everybody

923
01:25:06.400 --> 01:25:10.560
appreciates the previous government. Everybody appreciates democracy is the worst.

924
01:25:11.040 --> 01:25:22.080
Except for all the others, right? Like, of course, it is easy to point to these things and say

925
01:25:22.080 --> 01:25:28.800
they're incompetent, but it is, it is just not honest to say that government doesn't improve our

926
01:25:28.800 --> 01:25:35.200
lives. There is literally no example on planet earth of a high functioning society without big

927
01:25:35.200 --> 01:25:40.160
government. I'm not saying, well, without big government, that's not true. Give me an example.

928
01:25:40.160 --> 01:25:47.040
Sample. Singapore is insanely big government from 22% of GDP. Okay. But they are involved in

929
01:25:47.040 --> 01:25:54.160
every element of people's lives. High competence. They fire incompetent people. And again,

930
01:25:54.160 --> 01:26:00.240
we're in violent agreement that we should have governments that do that. Yeah. You should work hard

931
01:26:00.240 --> 01:26:07.040
on the politics in the UK to bring in reforms that would increase the velocity of competence.

932
01:26:07.040 --> 01:26:11.520
Because I love that. That's the answer. Yeah. That is the answer is to work hard,

933
01:26:11.520 --> 01:26:16.400
to build a government that is as high functioning as they can be. But here's the thing. And I think

934
01:26:16.400 --> 01:26:22.800
you will agree. Look, look, Microsoft, big companies are equally incompetent. Microsoft bought

935
01:26:22.800 --> 01:26:28.320
my company at Kwanut for $6.4 billion. This is a company that was growing at 40% year over

936
01:26:28.320 --> 01:26:34.240
years. It's been so long. 30, 40% year over year, $750 million in sales, $200 million in EBIT,

937
01:26:34.240 --> 01:26:40.160
or something like that, $3,000, $4,000 of the best internet advertising people on planet earth.

938
01:26:40.160 --> 01:26:48.800
And in one year, it was gone. Wow. Gone. And they wrote the entire $6 billion off five years later.

939
01:26:48.960 --> 01:26:56.320
Competence lives everywhere. Yeah. And I just don't think it is realistic to say, oh,

940
01:26:56.320 --> 01:27:04.880
Poxen them. You know, they suck. I just, Dan, there is no place on earth without government

941
01:27:04.880 --> 01:27:10.880
co-creating prosperity for sure. Here's where I put my hope in this post-Ai world. I want to stack

942
01:27:10.880 --> 01:27:15.040
the favor. I want to stack the economy in the favor of the small family business and the small business.

943
01:27:15.040 --> 01:27:20.800
You and me. I'm 100% with you. Yeah. I agree. I agree. The question is, how do we get there?

944
01:27:21.200 --> 01:27:28.240
And you and I are completely aligned in some ways. We need to aggressively tilt the balance of power

945
01:27:28.240 --> 01:27:34.240
in the economy from the biggest, from the biggest, most exploitive companies to small and medium-sized

946
01:27:34.240 --> 01:27:41.760
businesses. So I see big government and big corporate sucking the life out of little people and

947
01:27:41.760 --> 01:27:48.080
little businesses. And I think you are no doubt correct in some cases, but the only thing in

948
01:27:48.080 --> 01:27:52.720
human societies that has the power to confront big businesses, big government, right? There's

949
01:27:53.200 --> 01:27:59.760
in the history of the world, there has never been another force that had the power to address

950
01:27:59.760 --> 01:28:06.720
this problem. And the reason I care so much about this economic paradigm is that all of the problems

951
01:28:06.800 --> 01:28:13.680
you were describing are a consequence of an economic paradigm that was designed to create those

952
01:28:13.680 --> 01:28:21.520
problems. That's why we are in the box we're in is because neoliberalism literally said the bigger

953
01:28:21.520 --> 01:28:26.800
is better and that we should afford no protection to small businesses, that we should actively

954
01:28:26.800 --> 01:28:34.800
advantage the largest players. That free trade is good for everyone. All of these things that weren't

955
01:28:34.880 --> 01:28:43.280
true and decided and ended up advancing in this room me effectively and you know a few

956
01:28:43.280 --> 01:28:48.720
thousand people from around the world and disadvantaged everyone else. And I think the starting

957
01:28:48.720 --> 01:28:56.880
point for change is addressing the fact that we just understood economic cause and fact

958
01:28:57.360 --> 01:29:03.760
in inadequately that the things that we thought would lead to growth led to concentration,

959
01:29:04.640 --> 01:29:09.520
right? And the things that we thought were bad for the economy in many cases those were good

960
01:29:09.520 --> 01:29:14.880
for the economy because look again you know the UK so much better than me and I hate to argue

961
01:29:14.880 --> 01:29:21.600
with you about it. But the truth is that you cannot sustain a capitalist system unless most

962
01:29:21.600 --> 01:29:27.280
people are paid enough to buy the stuff that the system produces and there has to be a balance

963
01:29:27.280 --> 01:29:33.440
and they're and again in the history of the world there is no example of a thriving economy

964
01:29:33.440 --> 01:29:40.960
that did not impose those standards or create through some mechanism the countervailing power

965
01:29:40.960 --> 01:29:47.520
that enabled the owners of capital and everybody else to work together to benefit everyone in the

966
01:29:47.520 --> 01:29:56.640
long term. And you and I are in so much agreement on most of it. So I've seen next policies

967
01:29:56.640 --> 01:30:00.880
implemented and I don't feel it's enough and the reason I don't feel it's enough is I think people

968
01:30:00.880 --> 01:30:04.800
are more than consumers they're more than wallets. Okay you've only heard me talk about the

969
01:30:04.800 --> 01:30:09.760
minimum wage and something else you haven't seen all the policies. But the missing piece for me

970
01:30:09.760 --> 01:30:16.800
is ownership. When people had houses they felt really good about communities. When people had

971
01:30:16.800 --> 01:30:22.000
small businesses that they owned they felt really good about their communities and when people

972
01:30:22.000 --> 01:30:26.800
own some shares in the overall economy of the fastest growing companies in the economy

973
01:30:26.800 --> 01:30:31.200
then they feel like they're participating. So for me the non-negotiables of fixing this problem

974
01:30:31.200 --> 01:30:35.440
is that people can easily own a house own a business and own shares in the fastest growing

975
01:30:35.440 --> 01:30:42.320
economy. Yes yes yes and how do we get there? Yes yes yes I totally agree and I think I just

976
01:30:42.320 --> 01:30:47.920
think that Dan and I have a slightly different view on the path. I think capitalism is ownership.

977
01:30:47.920 --> 01:30:53.200
It's ownership. That's what capitalism is otherwise if you don't own anything you're not a capitalist.

978
01:30:53.200 --> 01:30:59.120
Now you're growing the path but this is where you grew on the outcome but the path. Yes

979
01:30:59.120 --> 01:31:05.040
but how did Nick get rich? Like Nick started companies. He owned he owned a family business.

980
01:31:05.040 --> 01:31:11.040
He leveraged the family business into an investment into Amazon or another bet. But it's ownership

981
01:31:11.040 --> 01:31:17.120
ownership ownership and did a lot with it. But I'm saying let's be fair. How are you applicable?

982
01:31:17.120 --> 01:31:20.560
Do you think other people should do what Nick did? Yeah but it's hard to get born into a family

983
01:31:20.560 --> 01:31:25.280
that owns a small business. Well if there's more people who own small businesses then they're

984
01:31:25.280 --> 01:31:30.640
all easier. Then it is easier. I just want I do want more people. What would you mean by this?

985
01:31:30.640 --> 01:31:36.400
Well it's all about how how you get there right? You have a look the fact being born on third base

986
01:31:36.400 --> 01:31:41.280
we should aim for more people to be born on third base. If more people. If her base is coming from

987
01:31:41.280 --> 01:31:49.360
a family that owns a small business. Or whose parents earn enough income to enable all of that

988
01:31:49.360 --> 01:31:56.320
right? And look not everybody who is affluent. In fact a tiny minority of people who are affluent

989
01:31:58.400 --> 01:32:04.240
are small business owners right? They are mostly doctors and lawyers and professionals of

990
01:32:04.240 --> 01:32:10.800
a variety of kinds who work in big companies in middle management roles. I'm not saying everyone

991
01:32:10.800 --> 01:32:15.520
should be a small business owner. So anyway I just think that I think the higher order bit here

992
01:32:16.320 --> 01:32:24.800
I mean for me and this may sound like too squishy for you is that societies have both the right

993
01:32:24.800 --> 01:32:31.840
and the responsibility to organize their economies in ways that benefit everyone. Is socialism

994
01:32:31.840 --> 01:32:38.560
the answer? No socialism is most definitely not the answer because socialism again we need to

995
01:32:38.560 --> 01:32:44.720
operationally define that term. If socialism means look it up in the dictionary the state ownership

996
01:32:44.720 --> 01:32:52.080
of the means of production that is a catastrophe right? And it's a catastrophe because all socialism can

997
01:32:52.080 --> 01:33:02.320
do is split up existing prosperity in a fairer way. It can do that. The problem is is that socialism

998
01:33:02.320 --> 01:33:09.280
does not know how to create more prosperity. So for one minute you can make everybody better off

999
01:33:09.280 --> 01:33:16.160
but 10 years later everyone is poor because once because this is the power of markets is what

1000
01:33:16.160 --> 01:33:23.680
markets do is evolutionary systems is they generate increasing prosperity. That's what solutions to

1001
01:33:23.680 --> 01:33:30.880
human problems is right going from aspirin to antibiotics is economic progress right? And the beauty

1002
01:33:30.880 --> 01:33:37.520
of markets is that they're evolutionary systems where every business effectively is an organism

1003
01:33:37.520 --> 01:33:43.920
competing to fill a niche. Yeah. Which is the perfect product for whatever market segment they're

1004
01:33:43.920 --> 01:33:50.000
creating. Your canonical example of this right? What you have done here and thank goodness for it

1005
01:33:50.000 --> 01:33:56.240
right? Because in a world where there wasn't capitalism there's no way you you you have effectively

1006
01:33:56.240 --> 01:34:02.000
independently created what was a television network. It's miraculous. Like you have more reach

1007
01:34:02.000 --> 01:34:09.840
than MSNBC dude. That is the power of markets but you know they have to be harnessed to benefit

1008
01:34:09.920 --> 01:34:15.920
people broadly. This does not mean that the profit mode of shouldn't exist but somehow though

1009
01:34:15.920 --> 01:34:19.440
this is what I'm trying to get to. And there sounds a little bit like there's this middle ground

1010
01:34:19.440 --> 01:34:24.720
we're like playing with where socialism on one end is okay you know short term whatever you said

1011
01:34:24.720 --> 01:34:28.320
then on the other end you've got this like extreme capitalist approach and I was looking at

1012
01:34:28.320 --> 01:34:34.480
those are the laissez faire capitalism right? And this socialist status control. Both of those

1013
01:34:34.480 --> 01:34:38.800
things are terrible ideas. Am I right? We want something in the middle. On the left side then on

1014
01:34:38.800 --> 01:34:43.760
the socialism side you get lower growth in your economy over the long term. Correct. Okay and then

1015
01:34:43.760 --> 01:34:49.200
in a capitalist economy you might have higher growth but then you have more inequality. Correct.

1016
01:34:49.200 --> 01:34:55.760
And the sweet spot and this is this is the one of the most important this is an important matter one

1017
01:34:55.760 --> 01:35:01.440
of the most important points I would like to make is that all of the evidence suggests that when you

1018
01:35:01.440 --> 01:35:09.280
come to the middle and you have a market economy that is actually actively managed to include people

1019
01:35:10.000 --> 01:35:16.560
that is the growth sweet spot. You have more growth. So you have more growth. Absolutely. GDP

1020
01:35:16.560 --> 01:35:21.680
growth rates in the United States were four or four and a half percent for decades 40, 50, 60s

1021
01:35:22.320 --> 01:35:28.480
and then as soon as the neoliberals took over in 1975 GDP growth rates fell first to three

1022
01:35:28.480 --> 01:35:33.760
percent and now to two percent when they did want. Cut taxes for rich people deregulated powerful

1023
01:35:33.760 --> 01:35:39.600
people and suppressed wages for everybody else. So the most important socio economic fact as I've

1024
01:35:39.600 --> 01:35:44.320
said many times before in the United States is that the median full-time worker is about $60,000

1025
01:35:44.320 --> 01:35:51.600
a year today. If they had maintained their same share of GDP since 1975 instead of earning 60 they

1026
01:35:51.600 --> 01:35:57.200
would earn $120,000 a year. So there's no trade off in the middle because there's trade off some

1027
01:35:57.200 --> 01:36:00.320
both ends, right? We just described the trade-offs. You're saying that in the middle there's this

1028
01:36:00.320 --> 01:36:05.600
is the sweet spot where there's where there's maximum amounts of growth, maximum amounts of

1029
01:36:05.600 --> 01:36:12.560
participation, maximum amounts of political stability. This is what Darren Asimu-Glu and James

1030
01:36:12.560 --> 01:36:19.280
Robertson call the narrow corridor. This perfect balance between laissez-faire capitalism and socialism

1031
01:36:19.360 --> 01:36:27.520
is stupid because it kills markets. But this impulse to more fairly share, let's call that

1032
01:36:27.520 --> 01:36:33.520
where socialism comes from, this impulse to have a society which is more egalitarian. But what

1033
01:36:33.520 --> 01:36:41.520
all the data suggests is that when you build a market economy that basically tries to make sure

1034
01:36:41.520 --> 01:36:47.360
that everyone participates where workers get a fair share of the wages, where as the company,

1035
01:36:47.440 --> 01:36:54.240
as the economy grows, as it did for years and you've got another, you have a great graph in here.

1036
01:36:55.600 --> 01:37:04.800
So for decades, as productivity grew, everybody benefited. And then in the 70s it decoupled.

1037
01:37:06.800 --> 01:37:12.720
As soon as it decoupled GDP growth rates fell, right? If we had, and all of this,

1038
01:37:13.680 --> 01:37:21.040
all of this was a consequence of policy. So here's another thing the new economics teachers

1039
01:37:21.040 --> 01:37:26.800
is that there's this idea that a middle class, a thriving middle class, is the consequence of

1040
01:37:26.800 --> 01:37:31.680
economic growth. That if we just let the economy grow, we'll get this great middle class.

1041
01:37:31.680 --> 01:37:38.080
And that is because economists assume the economy is something called ergodic. Now, ergodic means,

1042
01:37:38.080 --> 01:37:42.480
let me show you the difference between two games. One is ergodic, one is non-ergodic.

1043
01:37:42.480 --> 01:37:48.800
Rock paper scissors is an ergodic game. And what that means is the outcome of the next game

1044
01:37:48.800 --> 01:37:56.000
has nothing to do with the game before. Right? Monopoly is an onergodic game. And in monopoly,

1045
01:37:56.720 --> 01:38:02.800
no matter how much, how many times you go to monopoly school, if you play a game on monopoly long

1046
01:38:02.800 --> 01:38:08.000
enough, one person will own everything and everybody else will have nothing. And that is what

1047
01:38:08.000 --> 01:38:14.240
a market economy is. It is characterized by luck, path dependence, and compounding.

1048
01:38:14.240 --> 01:38:20.640
The past. Well, it's the past, right? Where you start? Yeah. Right? Some of us started on

1049
01:38:20.640 --> 01:38:26.640
third base. Some of us, like you, as I recall, started on actually first base or home playing

1050
01:38:26.640 --> 01:38:30.320
or something like that. Well, I think, yeah, probably second base. Okay, maybe second base,

1051
01:38:30.400 --> 01:38:35.120
but whatever. But we can have parents that love me like just your house. Okay, fair point, right?

1052
01:38:35.120 --> 01:38:40.640
You're very capable and good looking and all the rest of it, right? No, I mean, if we're just

1053
01:38:40.640 --> 01:38:45.440
being honest, right? We're just being honest. You had some natural advantages. But you know,

1054
01:38:45.440 --> 01:38:50.320
in monopoly, you land on Park Place, the first role, you're rolling. You get four good roles in

1055
01:38:50.320 --> 01:38:55.760
monopoly. You're going to win the game, right? And compounding the better you do, the better you do.

1056
01:38:55.760 --> 01:39:01.200
And the thing about in an on our gothic system is that both advantages and disadvantages

1057
01:39:01.200 --> 01:39:06.400
compound. Surely you know people in your life who have had a couple of things of bad luck, right?

1058
01:39:06.400 --> 01:39:14.080
And then they spiral into oblivion, right? And so what that means is that a middle class

1059
01:39:14.080 --> 01:39:22.480
and thus a high functioning society with social cohesion is always a deliberate construction.

1060
01:39:22.480 --> 01:39:31.360
It is always created by policy always. And all of these things that we are pushing back against

1061
01:39:31.360 --> 01:39:37.280
him and his way, me and my way are our consequence of basically an economic theory that said to policy

1062
01:39:37.280 --> 01:39:43.920
makers, do it that way. And it was a mistake. And we should recognize that mistake and try to

1063
01:39:43.920 --> 01:39:49.360
heal these mistakes, which we can. We can have a great society. We can have an ownership society.

1064
01:39:49.360 --> 01:39:56.480
We can have anything we want. We just have to decide to do it and not let a small group of

1065
01:39:56.480 --> 01:40:02.400
incredibly rich people dictate the terms of the economy. This is within our grasp. What are your thoughts

1066
01:40:02.400 --> 01:40:06.240
on? I agree in principle with all of that, especially the last bit, a small group of very,

1067
01:40:06.240 --> 01:40:11.360
very powerful people dictating the economy, meeting up in Davos, come out with how our lives should

1068
01:40:11.360 --> 01:40:20.720
live. There's more to the story here. In the early 70s, they decoupled the dollar from gold and

1069
01:40:20.720 --> 01:40:24.800
they created the Fiat system, which meant they could print money that inflated assets as

1070
01:40:24.800 --> 01:40:31.040
financialized assets, including the family home, which meant that as soon as we could print

1071
01:40:31.040 --> 01:40:34.560
money, we could inflate the value of family homes and make it out of reach of most people.

1072
01:40:34.560 --> 01:40:38.720
And then finance took over and became 20% of the economy. We ended up with this.

1073
01:40:38.720 --> 01:40:43.840
We ended up with these two massive institutions, which is the technology industrial complex

1074
01:40:43.840 --> 01:40:50.080
and the finance industrial complex. And those two institutions have driven a wedge in society.

1075
01:40:50.080 --> 01:40:55.760
My only difference with Nick, and it's a small difference, is that I don't believe raising the

1076
01:40:55.760 --> 01:41:02.240
floor is going to be enough. I really do. I didn't say it's enough. It's table stakes.

1077
01:41:02.320 --> 01:41:10.560
It's a minimum. It's because I've seen the minimum and the pitchforks are out here in the UK,

1078
01:41:10.560 --> 01:41:17.360
where we have that minimum. My worry here is that where we are, the technology economy and the

1079
01:41:17.360 --> 01:41:23.440
finance economy is erasing as if it's in a car. And then all of the workers who are selling time

1080
01:41:23.440 --> 01:41:28.000
for money, labor for money, it's as if they're running and we're saying, you guys just need

1081
01:41:28.080 --> 01:41:31.840
better shoes. You need comfy shoes. If we give you a pair of Nike's, will you guys be happy?

1082
01:41:31.840 --> 01:41:37.600
And it's like, this is not going to close that gap. We have to acknowledge that technology and

1083
01:41:37.600 --> 01:41:44.240
finance are the two big funds and big tech are basically hollowing out the middle class.

1084
01:41:44.240 --> 01:41:48.400
And if we don't acknowledge who the real bad guys are, when I say bad guys, I'm not sure

1085
01:41:48.400 --> 01:41:54.480
they're real bad guys, but essentially, systemically, they're the bad guys. We need to essentially

1086
01:41:54.640 --> 01:41:59.520
say big finance, big tech. You can't financialise our houses. That's for us to live in and for us

1087
01:41:59.520 --> 01:42:06.000
to own. And you also can't just eradicate all of our little small businesses. We need to tip the

1088
01:42:06.000 --> 01:42:10.960
scales back in the favour of those small businesses because little towns, you go into any town in

1089
01:42:10.960 --> 01:42:15.920
England, little towns in England, the thriving towns that everyone wants to live in,

1090
01:42:15.920 --> 01:42:19.520
they have lots of small businesses. They have a butcher, baker, candlestick, and a maker type.

1091
01:42:19.520 --> 01:42:23.520
Like stuff is going on. By the way, the best high street in London is the one I live on.

1092
01:42:23.520 --> 01:42:27.280
Malibu, which is Malibu and High Street. So you agree? 100%. Yeah.

1093
01:42:28.480 --> 01:42:33.280
I've got 60 seconds and I'm going to show you how much I can get done because of our sponsor

1094
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1095
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1096
01:42:43.440 --> 01:42:48.480
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1097
01:42:48.480 --> 01:42:55.600
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1098
01:42:56.560 --> 01:43:00.320
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1099
01:43:00.320 --> 01:43:07.200
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1100
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1101
01:43:11.760 --> 01:43:16.640
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1102
01:43:17.600 --> 01:43:22.400
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1103
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1104
01:43:29.040 --> 01:43:33.440
I've done almost 700 interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world. And one of

1105
01:43:33.440 --> 01:43:38.560
the things you learn, which is unexpected, is that vulnerability is the doorway to connection.

1106
01:43:38.560 --> 01:43:43.280
And after sitting here for two, three hours with a guest, I feel a deep sense of connection to

1107
01:43:43.520 --> 01:43:49.840
them. And as they leave, what I get them to do is to write a question in the diary of a CEO.

1108
01:43:49.840 --> 01:43:56.560
We've taken all of the questions from the diover CEO. We have put the question here on this card

1109
01:43:56.560 --> 01:44:01.280
with the name of the person that wrote it. So you can sit at home as I do with my fiance and my

1110
01:44:01.280 --> 01:44:06.080
colleagues at work and other people in my life, whenever we get a minute, we play the diover CEO

1111
01:44:06.080 --> 01:44:11.600
conversation cards. And it is incredible what happens. These are great if you're in a romantic

1112
01:44:11.600 --> 01:44:15.520
relationship and you want to connect your partner more. These are also great if you're in a team

1113
01:44:15.520 --> 01:44:19.360
and you want to bond your team together. And I have to say they're also great for families that

1114
01:44:19.360 --> 01:44:24.160
want to learn more about each other and that need a good excuse to spend some time in a digital

1115
01:44:24.160 --> 01:44:30.720
world in the analog environment connecting human to human. It is remarkable what the right question

1116
01:44:30.720 --> 01:44:37.280
at the right time can do. Go to the diary.com and you can get these conversation cards right now.

1117
01:44:38.400 --> 01:44:41.280
One thing I find interesting is you're saying that there's this sweet spot in the middle.

1118
01:44:41.280 --> 01:44:46.080
Yes. Where you still get the you get dynamism. You think there's a sweet spot in the middle.

1119
01:44:46.080 --> 01:44:51.200
Indeed. It's a very narrow sweet spot and it's very hard to achieve because

1120
01:44:52.000 --> 01:44:58.800
Germany has really tried so hard and their economy is collapsing. Their economy is going so

1121
01:44:58.800 --> 01:45:04.160
badly at the moment. And they've tried everything. They've got workers have to be on the board,

1122
01:45:04.160 --> 01:45:08.880
for example, of every company you've got to have a worker on the board. So they're doing as much

1123
01:45:08.880 --> 01:45:13.760
as they can to do inclusion and the German economy. So where does it work? Okay, but here's

1124
01:45:13.760 --> 01:45:21.840
the thing is it is simply not fair to say the German economy is collapsing. Like have you been to

1125
01:45:21.840 --> 01:45:30.400
Germany? Yeah. Come on. Like have you been to Stockholm? Like these places are definitely a function.

1126
01:45:30.400 --> 01:45:34.480
Yeah, there's definitely a Ford momentum. But the German car industry is getting

1127
01:45:34.560 --> 01:45:40.720
hollered out right now. China. China. China. Okay, but just because workers are on the

1128
01:45:40.720 --> 01:45:48.800
board of German companies and German people are unhappy, you can't necessarily connect to these

1129
01:45:48.800 --> 01:45:53.600
things. I just want to acknowledge though that like there are places like Dubai, which are very

1130
01:45:53.600 --> 01:46:00.160
close to laissez faire capitalism with a sovereign wealth fund. And just hold on. If you talk to

1131
01:46:00.160 --> 01:46:05.280
someone who lives in Dubai, they freaking love Dubai. Like they are they're the happiest people

1132
01:46:06.160 --> 01:46:10.800
are like and they talk. They talk millionaires, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial people. Yeah, rich

1133
01:46:10.800 --> 01:46:16.080
people. Not the poor brown people who are well, because they're bus Indians and don't they?

1134
01:46:16.080 --> 01:46:20.800
Well, they they yes. And also when I talk to a lot of the Uber drivers there and I talk to

1135
01:46:20.800 --> 01:46:24.320
people who work in cafes there and all that sort of they're all quite pro Dubai as well.

1136
01:46:24.320 --> 01:46:28.960
Isn't it? But that's because their other options are horrific. Yeah, it's probably more

1137
01:46:28.960 --> 01:46:35.680
extreme quality, isn't it? It's extreme quality because the place is growing until recently

1138
01:46:35.680 --> 01:46:40.320
obviously was right because the place is growing. It feels like there's a rising tide for everybody.

1139
01:46:40.320 --> 01:46:44.800
There's something about economic growth that makes people very, very happy. And there's something

1140
01:46:44.800 --> 01:46:49.200
about a lack of economic growth that makes people miserable here in the UK, for example. Okay, but

1141
01:46:49.280 --> 01:46:57.200
just again, Dubai is a place the UAE has been powered by the most extraordinary

1142
01:46:57.200 --> 01:47:02.960
gusher of free cash. Probably the planet has ever seen. I mean, you can look up on your

1143
01:47:03.760 --> 01:47:11.440
iPad there. The like the tailwind that economy gets from the unlimited resources. I wouldn't say

1144
01:47:11.440 --> 01:47:15.520
that's why people love to buy it. They love it because of the entrepreneurial vibe. Like

1145
01:47:15.520 --> 01:47:24.000
who loves it? Like ambitious people. Yeah, so this is the rich. No, I see young people who want

1146
01:47:24.000 --> 01:47:28.000
to have a crack. And that because they're rich relative to the people doing the work.

1147
01:47:28.000 --> 01:47:33.760
Well, they're what they're looking for is a place where their work will be rewarded. Let's

1148
01:47:33.760 --> 01:47:38.640
imagine the UK where your ability to get on to capitalism, your first million or your first

1149
01:47:38.640 --> 01:47:45.040
two million is very easily low taxed in order to get things going for you economically. I just

1150
01:47:45.040 --> 01:47:50.960
want to see a situation where ambitious. Yeah, like you're ambitious people. Like what I hate

1151
01:47:50.960 --> 01:47:55.040
is that I see these young people who are really super smart. I wish they were here building and

1152
01:47:55.040 --> 01:47:59.440
they're like, you can't succeed in the UK. They'll just tax it off you as soon as you earn anything

1153
01:47:59.440 --> 01:48:03.120
they take it. What if you're not ambitious? And they leave. I think you're benefited by a lot of

1154
01:48:03.120 --> 01:48:08.160
the ambitious people. So when when you get one in a hunt, if you get one in ten people who are

1155
01:48:08.160 --> 01:48:11.680
entrepreneurial or one in a hundred people who are entrepreneurial, they're creating optionality,

1156
01:48:11.760 --> 01:48:16.400
they're creating companies. The US is this. The US is sort of set up for the American dream.

1157
01:48:17.280 --> 01:48:21.040
This is more of a US approach, isn't it? Well, what we have there is higher inequality.

1158
01:48:21.040 --> 01:48:27.040
Well, give you to one extreme, the US, you hit the top rate of income tax when you hit $700,000.

1159
01:48:28.000 --> 01:48:35.600
In the UK, it's 100,000. And it immediately goes to 60% tax, 62% tax. And then it drops to 45%

1160
01:48:36.320 --> 01:48:41.600
after that. But there's this kind of like. Does it really? Yeah, it's this. It's this weird pain.

1161
01:48:41.600 --> 01:48:49.680
No, it's the same thing where you basically pay 20%, 40%, 60%, 45% and it's this kind of

1162
01:48:49.680 --> 01:48:55.840
fine. But to the point, people say the US, the US approach sounds like we're leaving to the US.

1163
01:48:55.840 --> 01:48:59.840
Like a lot of Brits are actually going to be. And the US has an inequality, has higher inequality,

1164
01:49:00.640 --> 01:49:03.600
which means it's completely more likely that the pitchforks will come out.

1165
01:49:03.600 --> 01:49:07.520
Well, for an ambitious person, they don't care about inequality, right? Inequality is the

1166
01:49:07.520 --> 01:49:11.920
opportunity to get ahead. Yeah, they might not, but from the social perspective, the pitchforks

1167
01:49:11.920 --> 01:49:16.720
are probably going to come out sooner in the US because of that inequality than somewhere else.

1168
01:49:17.920 --> 01:49:22.800
They seem to be coming out here in a big way. They're coming out here, but they're also coming

1169
01:49:22.800 --> 01:49:29.440
out in the United States. Look at it. Zach Polanski is gaining a huge political movement.

1170
01:49:29.440 --> 01:49:35.200
Zorhan Mandani in the UK, and they're entering New York, we're seeing a rise of socialism in

1171
01:49:35.200 --> 01:49:40.800
the United States. Okay, but Zorhan Mandani calls himself a socialist because he does not have another

1172
01:49:40.800 --> 01:49:46.000
word for what he is doing. He has said sees the means of production. He's said it and he's said

1173
01:49:46.000 --> 01:49:52.720
take houses or landlords. Like he's a cod carrying socialist. Yeah, but he hasn't done any really

1174
01:49:52.720 --> 01:49:58.080
socialist things. I just think that there's a bit of a confusion, but asking wealthy people to pay

1175
01:49:58.080 --> 01:50:04.960
a little bit more tax is not socialism. Standing up grocery stores in food deserts

1176
01:50:04.960 --> 01:50:12.240
because no grocery store will do it because it's not profitable enough is not socialism.

1177
01:50:12.240 --> 01:50:19.520
This is the government provisioning benefits to citizens, fixing potholes, making

1178
01:50:19.520 --> 01:50:25.120
bike ramps, whatever the stuff he's doing. These are not socialist things. What they are is not

1179
01:50:25.120 --> 01:50:30.240
strictly neoliberal things, which is just like letting rich people run roughshard over everybody

1180
01:50:30.240 --> 01:50:38.080
else. The thing that I see with say a food desert and a store is that the tax system is so punitive

1181
01:50:38.080 --> 01:50:43.680
that a small opportunity like setting up a grocery store with all the taxes and all the regulations

1182
01:50:43.680 --> 01:50:47.920
and all the stuff the government puts on you is just not worth doing it. There are better opportunities

1183
01:50:47.920 --> 01:50:52.480
out there. Like I'm not talking about remove it for rich people. I'm saying for startups, for small

1184
01:50:52.560 --> 01:50:58.160
businesses, for businesses that employ less than 200 people, if you basically create very positive

1185
01:50:58.640 --> 01:51:03.280
very positive conditions for small businesses to get started, they will set up a grocery store

1186
01:51:03.280 --> 01:51:08.320
in a bad neighborhood because they go, yeah, you know what? I can figure out how it works in this.

1187
01:51:08.320 --> 01:51:13.360
Do you think there's a chance that we have a bit of a bias as entrepreneurs? Everyone at this

1188
01:51:13.360 --> 01:51:17.200
table is an entrepreneur. Yes. And for whatever reason, I think a lot of mine might be some like,

1189
01:51:17.200 --> 01:51:21.760
I don't know, trauma or whatever. I had a bias towards setting up a business and taking that risk

1190
01:51:21.760 --> 01:51:26.800
whereas like my other three siblings, they didn't do that. And I don't know what I did to have

1191
01:51:26.800 --> 01:51:32.000
that bias within me. Like if you really think about it, it was probably something my parents didn't

1192
01:51:32.000 --> 01:51:36.640
intend to do, which meant that at 18 when my four three siblings went to university and sort of

1193
01:51:36.640 --> 01:51:41.600
followed that more, one could say safer part. Well, yeah, safer path. I dropped out. How angry

1194
01:51:41.600 --> 01:51:44.800
were your parents when you dropped that? Oh, they didn't speak to them. My mum was, yeah.

1195
01:51:44.800 --> 01:51:48.480
My mum was Nigerian as well. So she didn't, she left school when she was a child, didn't get an

1196
01:51:48.480 --> 01:51:55.200
education, can't read, can't write tough conversation understatement of what happened. But for

1197
01:51:55.200 --> 01:51:59.280
whatever reason, that's the path that I took. And I can acknowledge that I'm in a bit of a

1198
01:51:59.280 --> 01:52:05.440
minority. Yeah. And I think I sometimes consider like, maybe I don't realize that through privilege

1199
01:52:05.440 --> 01:52:09.360
or through some genetic privilege or whatever, I had this particular orientation towards like

1200
01:52:09.360 --> 01:52:15.200
entrepreneurialism that maybe other people don't always have. And that means that the start

1201
01:52:15.280 --> 01:52:19.760
the grocery store. I get crucified in the comments, not everyone can be an entrepreneur, right?

1202
01:52:19.760 --> 01:52:23.200
I'm not saying everyone could be an entrepreneur. I've never said that. But the grocery store

1203
01:52:23.200 --> 01:52:27.920
analogy that is someone would start that grocery store if it was easier. Well, not everybody

1204
01:52:27.920 --> 01:52:32.480
would. There's always a risk to reward ratio. And government brings in all sorts of regulations.

1205
01:52:32.480 --> 01:52:35.760
And government only really thinks about big businesses. If you talk to anyone in

1206
01:52:35.760 --> 01:52:39.920
governments, more businesses don't exist. And they just simply think why hasn't Tesco done it or

1207
01:52:39.920 --> 01:52:45.680
why hasn't like Walmart done it? Yeah. I've never started a business in the UK. But I can tell

1208
01:52:45.680 --> 01:52:51.760
you that in the United States, the the barrier to setting up a grocery store in a food desert is

1209
01:52:51.760 --> 01:52:59.600
not the regulation. It's safe way. It's the supply chain. It's the it's all the stuff that you've

1210
01:52:59.600 --> 01:53:06.640
described, which makes it incredibly difficult for for for somebody to operate a single location

1211
01:53:06.720 --> 01:53:10.880
grocery store like your first part. Yeah. And this is what you do about that.

1212
01:53:12.080 --> 01:53:19.520
So what I would do is I would I would and again, in the United States, we used to have lots of laws

1213
01:53:19.520 --> 01:53:25.200
that pointed the economy towards small businesses. So if I was in charge, I would impose a much

1214
01:53:25.200 --> 01:53:30.960
higher minimum wage, but I would do it progressively. All the labor standards, all the all the regulations

1215
01:53:30.960 --> 01:53:36.720
would be imposed progressively. And in terms of regulation, I would make it far like for a big

1216
01:53:36.720 --> 01:53:42.240
company, there's a lot of wrecks, right? You have to follow every rule to the tee. For a small

1217
01:53:42.240 --> 01:53:48.080
business, you have a lot more flexibility. Yeah. It's because because we need the standards,

1218
01:53:48.800 --> 01:53:54.000
but it turns out to be really hard as a single proprietor, even to even to read the manual, right?

1219
01:53:54.320 --> 01:54:00.880
Know what you're supposed to do. Yeah. So to me, would all be progressive. So it would be easy to get

1220
01:54:00.880 --> 01:54:06.240
capital, easy to start a business, relatively unencumbered by by regulation, although constrained

1221
01:54:06.240 --> 01:54:11.200
to a certain extent, there are terrible things that small business people do too. How do you make

1222
01:54:11.200 --> 01:54:15.280
it easier to get capital? Oh, you could have government programs that were designed to help

1223
01:54:15.280 --> 01:54:21.280
solve businesses get off the ground. We have the British bank that on the rights for the first

1224
01:54:21.280 --> 01:54:25.840
25,000 of loans. Yeah, we've had small business administration in the United States that do a lot

1225
01:54:25.840 --> 01:54:31.360
of that work. Yeah. So we have a lending institution here that is 75% underwritten by government

1226
01:54:31.360 --> 01:54:36.480
for 25,000 pounds start-up loan, right? So there is some schemes that can work. I started all my

1227
01:54:36.480 --> 01:54:41.600
companies on a credit card. The key thing is there's a difference between entrepreneurials and

1228
01:54:41.600 --> 01:54:45.680
start-ups that are intending to scale and just small businesses that want to exist as a small

1229
01:54:45.680 --> 01:54:50.160
business. I'm really big on the idea that we want communities that have lots of small businesses,

1230
01:54:50.160 --> 01:54:54.080
even if they have no intention to scale and exit and any of those sorts of things. That old

1231
01:54:54.080 --> 01:54:58.720
fashion thing, right? You just had a grocery store. Yeah. And it's a good thing. And you weren't

1232
01:54:58.720 --> 01:55:02.560
trying to create Walmart. Yeah. You just wanted to run a grocery store. It's hard though, isn't it?

1233
01:55:02.560 --> 01:55:07.760
Because if you want to be CBS or you want to be a network. But with a grocery store idea,

1234
01:55:07.760 --> 01:55:11.280
if you've got Mum and Pop grocery store here, the next to it, you have let's say, I don't know,

1235
01:55:11.280 --> 01:55:15.440
in the UK it's called Spa, which is a grocery store, 7-11. The problem is if those are next to

1236
01:55:15.520 --> 01:55:24.480
each other. And one has economies of scale. Ice, 7-11 can buy the cucumber for 20% of the cost

1237
01:55:24.480 --> 01:55:29.520
of the Mum and Pop shop. Then if you're on that street, the 7-11 is going to survive.

1238
01:55:29.520 --> 01:55:36.000
That's why we tilt towards it. The United States used to have laws that expressly prohibited that.

1239
01:55:36.000 --> 01:55:40.960
And why did they get rid of them? Neoliberalism. So they got rid of the restrictions on...

1240
01:55:40.960 --> 01:55:46.400
Yeah. There used to be express laws to make sure that big companies could not buy raw materials

1241
01:55:46.400 --> 01:55:52.800
cheaper than small companies. Like when I was young, when I was your age, if you wanted to buy

1242
01:55:52.800 --> 01:56:01.360
a competitor, you were sweating bullets because that had to be reviewed by a body. And if they thought

1243
01:56:01.360 --> 01:56:05.840
that you were consolidating too much, they would just say no. But if you think about all my friends

1244
01:56:05.840 --> 01:56:09.840
that have opened retail stores through their companies, and they only do that when they get really

1245
01:56:09.840 --> 01:56:14.000
big because that e-commerce business is supporting it. So if you think about I know the gym

1246
01:56:14.000 --> 01:56:18.320
sharks, the represents, the other actors. So you can't... Okay, with respect to retail, you're

1247
01:56:18.320 --> 01:56:22.080
are largely correct. It depends on what kind of retail. Like you could have a gym. You can't

1248
01:56:22.080 --> 01:56:28.000
e-commerce a gym. You know, there are all kinds of retail, some of which is somewhat immune from

1249
01:56:28.640 --> 01:56:33.280
e-commerce and some of which is getting destroyed by e-commerce. It doesn't matter if we're talking

1250
01:56:33.280 --> 01:56:38.960
about retail. There are regional manufacturing companies, regional everything. And it all went

1251
01:56:38.960 --> 01:56:47.280
away. And you have never experienced a world in which that used to exist. Your entire business

1252
01:56:47.280 --> 01:56:52.240
experience is this sort of neoliberal world of giant companies. It's true. And the world I grew

1253
01:56:52.240 --> 01:56:59.920
up in... Yeah, we're young. I'm so old. But I remember what it was like to go to the video store and

1254
01:56:59.920 --> 01:57:05.680
select videos from the video store. I remember what it was like. Yeah. I remember going to the CD store

1255
01:57:05.680 --> 01:57:10.240
and listening to music and talking to the retail employees. When I was growing up,

1256
01:57:10.240 --> 01:57:14.960
the cool kids worked at the CD store, the geeky kids worked at the bookstore, and everybody worked

1257
01:57:14.960 --> 01:57:19.680
at the... Everyone else worked at the grocery store. And all of those business models are gone. And

1258
01:57:19.680 --> 01:57:24.640
this is what I mean. We need to kind of tip back towards small business experimentation being

1259
01:57:24.640 --> 01:57:29.360
protected and all of that. The other thing too, and I should raise this about minimum wage and

1260
01:57:29.440 --> 01:57:37.280
giving people more money. The bottom half of taxpayers in the UK pay 9.5% of all the income taxes.

1261
01:57:37.280 --> 01:57:44.560
The government could remove taxes off of 50% of workers in one move and it would cost 33 billion

1262
01:57:44.560 --> 01:57:48.800
and you just get rid of that. And then every single person in the bottom half of income earners

1263
01:57:48.800 --> 01:57:54.400
gets a 10% pay rise to 15% pay rise, right? I love it. So where do we get the 32 billion from?

1264
01:57:54.400 --> 01:57:59.040
Just keep in mind, their budget is 1.4 trillion. I know, I know, I know. But we're going to have to

1265
01:57:59.040 --> 01:58:03.200
if we... 1.4 trillion. You're talking about this much to take 15 million people.

1266
01:58:03.200 --> 01:58:06.160
Yeah, I agree. I'm just saying, where does the money cut? Because I know what's going to happen.

1267
01:58:06.160 --> 01:58:11.760
Keir Starmer is saying they found this 20 billion dollar black hole in the finances.

1268
01:58:11.760 --> 01:58:15.280
And that's the reason why they're saying they've had to cut back on pensions and these kinds of

1269
01:58:15.280 --> 01:58:20.160
things. So if we add another 30 billion to that, where do we get the money from?

1270
01:58:20.560 --> 01:58:26.720
You're talking about reduce the amount of administrative burden to tax 15 million people and keep

1271
01:58:26.720 --> 01:58:32.320
on top of the tax on 15 million people. Just the sheer volume of people who have to work at HMRC.

1272
01:58:32.320 --> 01:58:35.760
I agree. All of this insanity... No, I'm saying where does the money come from?

1273
01:58:35.760 --> 01:58:42.880
Yeah. So out of 1.4 trillion, I'm pretty sure we could find half of 1% of it or whatever to get

1274
01:58:42.880 --> 01:58:47.920
these number of people out of tax. I think we could tax big corporations who are taking the piss.

1275
01:58:48.880 --> 01:58:53.680
And I also think the economic spending rounds of getting those people, the poor,

1276
01:58:53.680 --> 01:58:58.320
the poor half of people should not be paying tax. If you give them more money, they'll spend more

1277
01:58:58.320 --> 01:59:05.200
money, right? Then I agree with you. So you're saying tax big corporations more in the UK at

1278
01:59:05.200 --> 01:59:10.640
point of consumption? Personally, I would make it like it's very similar to a broadcast license

1279
01:59:10.640 --> 01:59:15.760
that it's a fixed fee that's very hard to wiggle out of. So if I may, let's say I'm an open AI.

1280
01:59:16.400 --> 01:59:20.960
Yeah, you might have a broadcast license to pay to access this market.

1281
01:59:20.960 --> 01:59:26.000
So you're going to try to... I'm going to try to open an AI 4 billion, 5 billion to access

1282
01:59:26.000 --> 01:59:30.960
our market. For example, Facebook is very much broadcasting videos and content all the time.

1283
01:59:30.960 --> 01:59:34.720
So is YouTube, so is Google, all that sort of stuff. So you just simply say,

1284
01:59:34.720 --> 01:59:38.720
guys, the cost of doing business in this country, if you want access to this market,

1285
01:59:38.720 --> 01:59:42.800
is a fixed broadcast license fee of 500 million a year or whatever it is. And you just say,

1286
01:59:42.800 --> 01:59:47.040
based on the number of views that you guys get and how much attention you suck out of our economy,

1287
01:59:47.040 --> 01:59:51.600
we just essentially tax the attention. You'll literally, if people are spending an hour a day on

1288
01:59:51.600 --> 01:59:57.440
their phone, doom scrolling, that is a broadcast. You're broadcasting to our people. So,

1289
01:59:57.440 --> 02:00:01.440
therefore, we've got a broadcast license. So those are the types of things that I would look at,

1290
02:00:01.440 --> 02:00:05.840
because they're very hard to wiggle out of. Do you think that these companies, like an open AI,

1291
02:00:05.840 --> 02:00:10.080
with Ben, as we said earlier, just increased the subscription fee in this market? And you see

1292
02:00:10.160 --> 02:00:14.080
that sometimes we're in certain countries, something is cheaper. I remember going to the United,

1293
02:00:14.080 --> 02:00:16.960
I used to go to the United States to buy my Apple products because it was cheaper there.

1294
02:00:16.960 --> 02:00:21.040
Yeah. And then in the UK, it cost me like not even a little bit, but it was like hundreds of

1295
02:00:21.040 --> 02:00:26.320
dollars more to buy a laptop here, the same laptop in this market versus this one cost different

1296
02:00:26.320 --> 02:00:31.680
amounts of money. They may choose to try and pass on that consumption tax to consumers. Maybe

1297
02:00:31.680 --> 02:00:36.640
they do do that. Maybe we could try and avoid, maybe we could try and legislate against that,

1298
02:00:36.640 --> 02:00:40.560
that they have to essentially be on parity with where they are in other markets, that they

1299
02:00:40.560 --> 02:00:48.240
have to charge parity. If we don't do anything, we essentially have nurses and

1300
02:00:51.600 --> 02:00:56.080
teachers and all the people who are in the normal 50% of the economy, whose job is now to hold up

1301
02:00:56.080 --> 02:01:01.360
the economy while Starbucks doesn't pay taxes, while Amazon doesn't pay taxes, while Google doesn't

1302
02:01:01.360 --> 02:01:06.000
pay taxes. Steve, I think all your questions are really, really good, but they all point to the same

1303
02:01:06.000 --> 02:01:15.440
thing, which is that the economy is a collective action problem. And now it's a global action problem.

1304
02:01:15.440 --> 02:01:23.360
It's a global collective action problem. And if we want robust solutions to these problems,

1305
02:01:23.360 --> 02:01:30.720
we're going to have to robustly coordinate activity across the world. And during the Biden

1306
02:01:30.720 --> 02:01:36.880
administration, they tried really hard to do this global profit tax, but that collapsed under

1307
02:01:36.880 --> 02:01:42.320
the weight of pressure. But all, again, all of your questions, I think, are really good, but they

1308
02:01:42.320 --> 02:01:48.480
all point to the same fundamental weakness of governance. And Nick, you need to talk to your

1309
02:01:48.480 --> 02:01:54.000
billionaire mates and also say, if we don't start investing in the economies that we do business,

1310
02:01:54.000 --> 02:01:58.080
which you are saying, right? Of course, right? It's a lonely business, I'll just tell you.

1311
02:01:58.080 --> 02:02:05.280
But it's like, it's like those CEOs of those companies, you drain the whole economy out,

1312
02:02:05.280 --> 02:02:11.520
and then what next? I think on this pass through problem, I was looking at different

1313
02:02:11.520 --> 02:02:15.040
ways that this ends up being applied. So if you think about the Big Mac, the Big Mac costs

1314
02:02:15.040 --> 02:02:19.760
different things in different states, depending on how much tax that that state charges.

1315
02:02:19.840 --> 02:02:25.120
So in Oregon, the Big Mac is $8, whereas in Chicago, it's almost $9. If you think about like

1316
02:02:25.120 --> 02:02:29.600
bookstores, you can buy one book on the high street for $20, the same book online is $10,

1317
02:02:29.600 --> 02:02:34.000
because they're passing through the costs. So it's conceivable that if we say the big corporations

1318
02:02:34.000 --> 02:02:39.360
right, you guys are going to pay a big attack to sell into the UK, then the UK consumer,

1319
02:02:40.000 --> 02:02:45.200
they might pass that onto the UK consumer. And they might look at different markets,

1320
02:02:45.200 --> 02:02:47.760
because they might say as a company, we want to make 30% margin.

1321
02:02:47.920 --> 02:02:51.120
The way to make 30% margins in the UK is to bump the costs.

1322
02:02:51.120 --> 02:02:54.720
You can consume, you could say, I'm going to use a VPN and pretend that I'm going to be in a

1323
02:02:54.720 --> 02:02:58.880
different market and pay a lower price. And it doesn't matter, you still have to pay the broadcast

1324
02:02:58.880 --> 02:03:03.760
license if you want to be available in our country. These are hard problems, and we need to know

1325
02:03:03.760 --> 02:03:08.160
who is the person that we're targeting. It's the black rocks of the world. It's the

1326
02:03:08.160 --> 02:03:14.000
it's the big banks of the world. It's the big more like I had a private conversation with a

1327
02:03:14.000 --> 02:03:19.760
CTO of a very large company, technology business. And he was saying to me, he goes, I don't think

1328
02:03:19.760 --> 02:03:25.120
the UK understands the situation it's putting itself in and the EU with all this regulation.

1329
02:03:25.120 --> 02:03:32.640
He said to me that we sell this particular product. It's a physical product. And because the UK

1330
02:03:32.640 --> 02:03:37.760
and I think EU have put this new law in, where you have to have removable batteries.

1331
02:03:38.320 --> 02:03:44.080
Interestingly, the unintended consequence of that is we have to stock more lithium batteries,

1332
02:03:44.080 --> 02:03:48.240
more of them go into landfill. And also your device is break because they're no longer waterproof.

1333
02:03:49.040 --> 02:03:53.200
So you're going to actually, it's harming the environment. And also, he said, the thing you guys

1334
02:03:53.200 --> 02:03:57.760
don't realize is that you're actually not a big market anymore for us. And because South America's

1335
02:03:57.760 --> 02:04:01.680
coming online, we actually don't have to sell the product here. And you think about this in terms

1336
02:04:01.680 --> 02:04:06.400
of some of the regulations around AI as well. When a new product launches on a chat GBT,

1337
02:04:07.120 --> 02:04:12.400
it goes in the US first because of regulations. And then maybe the US first because of the

1338
02:04:12.400 --> 02:04:18.400
biggest market. Biggest market, but also we have our regulations around some software and GDPR

1339
02:04:18.400 --> 02:04:22.640
and all these kinds of things means that sometimes we just don't get the features. And sometimes in

1340
02:04:22.640 --> 02:04:28.400
my history, in our history of building the previous business I was in, as creators, we would sometimes

1341
02:04:28.400 --> 02:04:33.760
have to wait 12 or 18 months to get the same tools that my competitors in the United States could

1342
02:04:33.760 --> 02:04:38.560
use, monetization tools. They'd have the monetization tools first. Then we'd have to wait 18 months.

1343
02:04:38.560 --> 02:04:42.720
The economy is a set of trade-offs. Like that is the problem. Like economics is called a set of

1344
02:04:42.720 --> 02:04:47.680
trade, the actual definition of economics is making trade-offs and picking your trade-offs. I

1345
02:04:47.680 --> 02:04:54.880
totally get it. Like regulation does actually suck for consumers and for businesses. And like the

1346
02:04:54.880 --> 02:05:00.320
EU is now over-regulated to the extent that you can't even take a lid off of a bottle without,

1347
02:05:00.320 --> 02:05:04.560
you know, the government being involved with how the lid comes off the bottle. And it's

1348
02:05:04.560 --> 02:05:08.480
killing, it's killing our dynamism. We are really just like-

1349
02:05:08.480 --> 02:05:14.080
And the US is under-regulated. And if you buy chicken in a store and don't cook it,

1350
02:05:14.080 --> 02:05:20.560
could be anything. One in three chances, you'll get either E. coli or some vanilla.

1351
02:05:20.560 --> 02:05:26.160
Well, and your life expectancy is low. And exactly. Everyone who eats in the US-

1352
02:05:27.120 --> 02:05:31.760
It comes back from the US and goes, oh my goodness, I hate eating food in the US.

1353
02:05:31.760 --> 02:05:35.920
It's all trade-offs. It's all trade-offs. Does this not mean our ultimate conclusion of

1354
02:05:35.920 --> 02:05:42.080
this conversation is around morals and ethics, around the trade-offs that we think are the

1355
02:05:42.080 --> 02:05:45.600
right ones to make? Yes. And so it's a question really of morals and ethics. Yes.

1356
02:05:46.560 --> 02:05:52.000
Human flourishing. Yes. 100%. The purpose of the economy is-

1357
02:05:52.000 --> 02:05:59.680
Human food. The way to do this is to massively maximize small business power because

1358
02:05:59.680 --> 02:06:05.760
when people have to- When I have to work shoulder to shoulder with my workers,

1359
02:06:05.760 --> 02:06:11.520
I treat people well. When I'm a mega corporation who have faceless workers down on the factory

1360
02:06:11.520 --> 02:06:15.600
floor that I will never meet, I will never sit next to on a plane, I will never come in contact

1361
02:06:15.600 --> 02:06:19.120
with my workers, I can treat them however I like. Why do you think that's reductive, Nick?

1362
02:06:19.360 --> 02:06:25.520
Well, I think that what Dan is saying is true and massively insufficient. Of course,

1363
02:06:25.520 --> 02:06:30.160
I mean, we're in violent agreement about this small business point. Like, I don't want to be

1364
02:06:30.160 --> 02:06:34.560
naive and think we should go back to the 60s or something like that. Like, I don't think that's

1365
02:06:34.560 --> 02:06:40.640
true. But again, here's what the new economics shows. That corporate consolidation

1366
02:06:41.440 --> 02:06:49.600
increases prices, lowers wages, decreases consumer choice, and decreases the rate of innovation.

1367
02:06:49.600 --> 02:06:55.680
Right? And I 100% agree. Because innovation, again, the conventional view of innovation,

1368
02:06:55.680 --> 02:07:01.840
the conventional economic view of innovation is this sort of great man theory. You have this smart,

1369
02:07:01.840 --> 02:07:06.880
rich guy who's seeing somewhere and he hears she has this amazing idea and that's innovation.

1370
02:07:06.880 --> 02:07:11.360
That is not what innovation is. Innovation is always combinatorial.

1371
02:07:12.320 --> 02:07:20.480
Technology makes itself out of itself. You start with a rock. The rock was our first technology.

1372
02:07:20.480 --> 02:07:25.440
And you had a lot of stuff with rocks. And we also had sticks, actually sticks were our first

1373
02:07:25.440 --> 02:07:34.080
technology. But you tie a rock to a stick. You have a hammer, a spear, an arrow, an axe,

1374
02:07:34.080 --> 02:07:40.960
a shovel. It goes on and on and on. And what that means in terms of policy is that because

1375
02:07:40.960 --> 02:07:48.560
innovation is combinatorial, the more diverse people in a network who come together with different

1376
02:07:48.560 --> 02:07:54.400
ideas and different sets of experiences, that is what drives the rate of innovation. And this is

1377
02:07:55.760 --> 02:08:02.720
mathematically demonstrated that a diverse group of people working on a problem will absolutely

1378
02:08:02.720 --> 02:08:09.200
consistently outperform a homogeneous group of high performers. And then when they become

1379
02:08:09.200 --> 02:08:14.000
really successful, which will happen eventually, if you let that system play out, you have this

1380
02:08:14.000 --> 02:08:19.200
inequality, unless you intervene at some point and recycle it. And then when you go to recycle it,

1381
02:08:20.640 --> 02:08:25.920
you go get back to this issue of us having meeting global cohesion. Yes. Because some people

1382
02:08:25.920 --> 02:08:29.760
won't want the recycling. Correct. And they'll say, well, I'm just going to go to Ireland or

1383
02:08:29.760 --> 02:08:33.920
I'm going to go to Dubai or I'm going to go somewhere else. And this is maybe a function of the new

1384
02:08:33.920 --> 02:08:38.880
economy where people can just get up and leave and take their value with them. Yes. And this is

1385
02:08:38.880 --> 02:08:46.720
the conundrum. This is the conundrum. But the meta issue above the conundrum is recognizing that

1386
02:08:46.720 --> 02:08:52.880
citizens have both the right and the responsibility to want to address that problem. And you grew

1387
02:08:52.880 --> 02:08:58.960
up in a world where it was illegitimate to address that problem that economics told you,

1388
02:08:59.840 --> 02:09:04.080
don't worry about those problems. The market will sort it out. Is there like a radical idea of

1389
02:09:04.080 --> 02:09:09.840
how to solve this? Do we need like all the very, very rich people in the world to come together,

1390
02:09:09.840 --> 02:09:14.240
collectively and say, we're going to create a new model? Like, how do you, I don't know,

1391
02:09:14.240 --> 02:09:18.320
is there any radical ways to solve this stuff? Or is it just all trade-offs once again?

1392
02:09:18.320 --> 02:09:24.080
One of the big radical ways is breaking up companies and it's unthinkable. You know what you

1393
02:09:24.080 --> 02:09:29.280
are doing. You know Jeff Bezos, right? So it was in my wedding. I wonder if he would lose more

1394
02:09:29.280 --> 02:09:33.760
sleep about higher taxes or having his company broken up. Oh, for sure, broken. Because if you

1395
02:09:33.760 --> 02:09:40.960
broke up Google from YouTube, if you broke up AWS Amazon Prime and Amazon, the biggest thing that

1396
02:09:40.960 --> 02:09:46.400
scares the billionaires is backing competition with the market. And it's like, oh my goodness,

1397
02:09:46.400 --> 02:09:49.520
I don't want to have to compete. I've got this amazing monopoly that just works.

1398
02:09:49.520 --> 02:09:53.840
100% right? So is that a perfect solution? Because I was thinking, it's not a perfect solution.

1399
02:09:53.840 --> 02:09:58.000
Pretty good solution. It's the least worse solution available. It's pretty good. It's pretty good.

1400
02:09:58.000 --> 02:10:00.560
It's pretty effective. I mean, this is what Teddy Roosevelt did.

1401
02:10:00.560 --> 02:10:04.240
These companies are making any money, though. They're like being subsidized by the mothership.

1402
02:10:04.240 --> 02:10:09.040
So like in an, let's say Amazon Prime, that's competing against Netflix and dude,

1403
02:10:09.040 --> 02:10:15.280
these companies make money where they want to make money for tax optimization and strategic reasons.

1404
02:10:15.280 --> 02:10:19.440
Look, I mean, you know, like when we started Amazon.com, I'm not sure if you guys remember,

1405
02:10:19.440 --> 02:10:26.240
the whole hit on it was it's not profitable, right? The secret to Amazon.com's success is the

1406
02:10:26.240 --> 02:10:33.920
negative cash conversion cycle, right? Virtually every business on planet earth to grow requires capital,

1407
02:10:33.920 --> 02:10:38.880
right? For all of your businesses, growth requires capital. But for Amazon.com,

1408
02:10:39.840 --> 02:10:46.960
we took an order, we put up the website, you take an order, you instantaneously transmit that

1409
02:10:46.960 --> 02:10:53.120
order to a book warehouse, which has all of the titles in stock. It's shipped the next day,

1410
02:10:53.120 --> 02:10:59.280
it's received the next day. You ship it out, hit the person, hit the person's credit card,

1411
02:10:59.280 --> 02:11:05.680
but then you don't have to pay the book seller for 90 days, right? And what that means is the bigger

1412
02:11:05.760 --> 02:11:10.000
the company gets, the better cash flow gets, whether you're making money or not. So we didn't have to

1413
02:11:10.000 --> 02:11:15.760
make money because we had most companies have to make money because if they don't, they don't have

1414
02:11:15.760 --> 02:11:22.000
the cash flow to continue like Amazon Prime businesses and yeah. And so there are things available

1415
02:11:22.000 --> 02:11:27.520
that we could have made money in one minute just by increasing our prices by three or four percent.

1416
02:11:27.520 --> 02:11:31.520
Yeah, these companies are also not worth trillions of dollars because they're not profitable.

1417
02:11:31.520 --> 02:11:35.680
They're worth trillions of dollars because they are making money. But the issue is that have

1418
02:11:35.680 --> 02:11:40.800
strategic monopolies. And if you really want to make them lose sleep, you need to break up strategic

1419
02:11:40.800 --> 02:11:45.360
monopolies. You need to say there's an actual limit to how big a fund can be. There's an actual

1420
02:11:45.360 --> 02:11:51.040
limit as to how big a strategic monopoly can be. You can't have things that hedge naturally against

1421
02:11:51.040 --> 02:11:58.240
each other and prevent real competition. So like these things are ways of, and also it ties up

1422
02:11:58.240 --> 02:12:02.720
their attention. So while they're thinking about not getting broken up, they're also not competing

1423
02:12:02.720 --> 02:12:07.760
with all the other guys out there. So like it's, it's basically capitalism runs on competition.

1424
02:12:07.760 --> 02:12:13.040
And this is the one thing that we've missed that the we have less competition. Yeah, like when Adam

1425
02:12:13.040 --> 02:12:17.680
Smith said capitalism works, he said it only works when there's competition. If there's one bakery

1426
02:12:17.680 --> 02:12:22.960
in town, any bread and any quality at any price is what you have to pay. As soon as there's two

1427
02:12:23.040 --> 02:12:28.240
bakeries in town, it has to be the best quality of the best price. Although with two, you can collude.

1428
02:12:28.240 --> 02:12:33.840
But you can have five. It's very hard. So Amazon, so Amazon has an monopoly over a strategic monopoly.

1429
02:12:33.840 --> 02:12:39.760
A strategic monopoly. So what does one do with Amazon? You break it up into what? AWS Amazon Prime,

1430
02:12:39.760 --> 02:12:44.800
Amazon retail. Fine, but they've still got an monopoly in online e-commerce theoretically.

1431
02:12:44.800 --> 02:12:48.480
Yeah, well, it's just harder. It's easier for someone to come along and compete. Right now,

1432
02:12:48.480 --> 02:12:53.360
it's very, very hard for me to compete with Amazon because they are pulling in cash from AWS.

1433
02:12:53.360 --> 02:12:58.160
They're pulling in cash from all these other subscriptions. There's so Amazon basics. You could

1434
02:12:58.160 --> 02:13:01.760
break up the retail. You could say you can have a bookstore. You can have enough electronic

1435
02:13:01.760 --> 02:13:06.560
store. You can only say you can't be the everything store. Right. So you could, there's all sorts of

1436
02:13:06.560 --> 02:13:10.080
ways that you, but you have to acknowledge when someone has achieved a strategic monopoly.

1437
02:13:10.080 --> 02:13:15.200
That's a good idea. Do you still own shares in Amazon? No, sadly. Okay. I wouldn't be here talking to

1438
02:13:15.200 --> 02:13:26.720
you guys if I tell you. No, no. Definitely. No, no. Sadly, I sold my shares. But, you know,

1439
02:13:26.720 --> 02:13:33.840
I am open to all of these ideas because I know. I mean, I am completely with Dan. I know that

1440
02:13:33.840 --> 02:13:38.560
the world would be a better place if these companies were smaller and we had more competition.

1441
02:13:38.560 --> 02:13:45.360
And again, there are no silver bullets to these complex problems, the world faces.

1442
02:13:45.360 --> 02:13:50.560
We are not at this table going to come up with this algorithmic idea that is just going to make the

1443
02:13:50.560 --> 02:13:57.200
world a better place. None of these solutions are perfect. They are always going to be the least

1444
02:13:57.200 --> 02:14:05.840
worst thing that we can come up with. But I think at the level of principle, living in a world where

1445
02:14:05.840 --> 02:14:15.360
we try actively to limit concentrated power in all its forms, where we try actively to include

1446
02:14:15.360 --> 02:14:21.360
people in whatever way, whether as entrepreneurs or just workers, as robustly as possible,

1447
02:14:22.160 --> 02:14:27.280
where we try to make sure that people are engaged enough in the economy so that they will be

1448
02:14:27.280 --> 02:14:33.040
supportive of the democracy, not want to burn it down. These are high level principles that I think

1449
02:14:33.040 --> 02:14:38.400
reasonable people can agree with. And they come into conflict with people like Elon Musk and

1450
02:14:38.400 --> 02:14:43.120
Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg who do not want to live in that world, who want to live in an

1451
02:14:43.120 --> 02:14:51.600
oligarchical world. And I just think that we should have that fight and win.

1452
02:14:53.200 --> 02:14:56.000
We have a close-in-tradition with Alaska sleeves a question for the next not knowing who they're

1453
02:14:56.000 --> 02:15:00.480
leaving it for. And I think it's quite a relevant question. I'll ask you first, Dan. The question is

1454
02:15:00.480 --> 02:15:05.760
in a world with so many challenges, what can we do to restore hope and trigger engagement?

1455
02:15:10.800 --> 02:15:17.280
Getting back to what we were talking about, we need people to know that the rules of the game

1456
02:15:17.280 --> 02:15:23.040
have changed and that the rules that we grew up with, where we grew up in a particular industrialised

1457
02:15:23.040 --> 02:15:28.240
late-stage industrialised world that had those rules. And we now live in an early-stage digital

1458
02:15:28.240 --> 02:15:33.200
revolution world. And the thing that gives me hope is I know how the rules of that world work,

1459
02:15:33.200 --> 02:15:37.040
right? Someone explained it to me. They actually explained, this is how you start a business,

1460
02:15:37.040 --> 02:15:41.600
this is how you grow a business, this is how you make a million, this is how you hire some people,

1461
02:15:41.600 --> 02:15:46.160
this is how you get a great team work inside by side, that gave me an enormous amount of hope.

1462
02:15:46.160 --> 02:15:52.240
I have a pathway out of where I was born and the wealth I was born with and where I am now,

1463
02:15:52.240 --> 02:15:57.120
someone explained to me the pathway, here's how the rules work and here's how you make success.

1464
02:15:57.840 --> 02:16:02.000
One of the things that makes people feel hopeless is that they're stuck in a game where no one

1465
02:16:02.000 --> 02:16:07.120
explains the rules. So explaining the rules. So I would say we need a schooling system, the thing we

1466
02:16:07.120 --> 02:16:11.760
don't talk about enough is that the schooling system has to explain to kids the relevant

1467
02:16:11.760 --> 02:16:16.560
information as to how to function in the current economy. So I played that forward in my head and

1468
02:16:16.560 --> 02:16:20.720
I was thinking, okay, you get a million kids and you explain all of the rules to them. At some point,

1469
02:16:20.720 --> 02:16:27.600
if you just give it a year or two, they all knew the rules. There's still an edge and some of them

1470
02:16:27.600 --> 02:16:32.400
would figure out the edge and then you've got this pocket that knows everyone knows the rules but

1471
02:16:32.400 --> 02:16:37.040
then others know this particular way to beat the system and that could be with, I don't know,

1472
02:16:37.040 --> 02:16:41.040
they learn about AI, they learn about whatever and then you're kind of back into the same place and

1473
02:16:41.040 --> 02:16:47.280
you were one such person who got the edge. Someone came to you and went, you know, they're saying the

1474
02:16:47.280 --> 02:16:52.080
rules of this. That's actually there's a way to get an edge and you had it within you for whatever

1475
02:16:52.080 --> 02:16:58.000
reason to capitalize on that edge and now you're a multi-millionaire. So there's always going to be

1476
02:16:58.000 --> 02:17:02.800
the rules and then the rules get instantly spied. Every single day after you explain the rules

1477
02:17:02.800 --> 02:17:08.080
to someone, there's a new set of rules. The only consistent is change and at the moment,

1478
02:17:08.080 --> 02:17:13.520
most people I encounter who've never had any explanation going on about how the world works now,

1479
02:17:13.520 --> 02:17:19.280
they are hopeless, they feel completely hopeless. I see kids who are sending out

1480
02:17:20.560 --> 02:17:26.880
CVs to Microsoft or to some major company, they don't realize that those companies are getting

1481
02:17:26.880 --> 02:17:31.280
3500 applications. I get it. The day after you explain the rules to them,

1482
02:17:31.280 --> 02:17:37.040
the rules are one day less relevant and so it's true, you'd have to go to school every single day.

1483
02:17:37.040 --> 02:17:42.080
Well, yeah, lifelong learning, you do have to do lifelong learning. Part of the rules is lifelong

1484
02:17:42.080 --> 02:17:45.760
learning. That is actually one of the rules, which is the only consistent is change.

1485
02:17:45.760 --> 02:17:48.560
It sounds like you're saying though that if we teach people the rules of business,

1486
02:17:49.200 --> 02:17:54.000
then people will have more hope. But there's so many people that I know, like my fiance who

1487
02:17:54.560 --> 02:17:58.880
she doesn't, she cares about something else much more than she cares about business. She cares about

1488
02:17:58.880 --> 02:18:05.360
like she just started, she set up Bali breathwork and she was able to create Bali breathwork.

1489
02:18:05.360 --> 02:18:10.880
Hashtag art because, well, I said it, not you. She was able to figure out how to

1490
02:18:11.600 --> 02:18:17.200
turn her passion into something that is commercially sustainable. But I'm just using her as an example

1491
02:18:17.200 --> 02:18:24.720
because maybe she got it in part because she has a dad, who's an entrepreneur. She has a

1492
02:18:24.720 --> 02:18:30.240
she has the support network like she supports me. I support her. She knows how to enroll people

1493
02:18:30.240 --> 02:18:36.320
into her her success. All of that is called pitching, publishing content, creating a product offering.

1494
02:18:36.320 --> 02:18:40.720
I only know one thing that I've seen work again and again and again and again, which is I teach

1495
02:18:41.680 --> 02:18:46.000
people who learn the entrepreneurial method suddenly feel agency and hope. I agree. I'm not saying

1496
02:18:46.000 --> 02:18:50.720
that's for everyone. It's not for everyone. It's for people like that had whatever mean you had

1497
02:18:50.720 --> 02:18:54.560
in terms of like the upbringing, the lack of whatever, the fortune. I'm not saying everyone's

1498
02:18:54.560 --> 02:19:00.720
going to be an entrepreneur. My answer to that question is the entrepreneurial tool set gives

1499
02:19:00.720 --> 02:19:04.400
people a lot of hope. I get that. And that's one of the things that we have to acknowledge is that

1500
02:19:04.400 --> 02:19:09.680
that's a certain type of person who has a certain type of goals. There are some people who actually

1501
02:19:09.680 --> 02:19:15.040
just want to go outside and they want to work. Maybe they want to work one day a week or two days

1502
02:19:15.040 --> 02:19:18.720
a week. Sure. I don't want to do push-ups and I don't want to do sit-ups. I don't want to go to

1503
02:19:18.720 --> 02:19:23.600
the gym. But if you ask a fitness professional, how do you improve your body? How do you feel good?

1504
02:19:23.600 --> 02:19:27.040
Right. The fitness professional says, hey, these are all the things that I've seen working for a lot

1505
02:19:27.040 --> 02:19:31.200
of people about going out and getting fit. And you might not want to do them initially. But actually

1506
02:19:31.200 --> 02:19:36.160
the people who do these things, I hope. The people that do those things might have an inherent

1507
02:19:36.160 --> 02:19:40.480
privilege, right? Right. Like the monopoly. The world's not fair. Like the world's not fair.

1508
02:19:40.480 --> 02:19:42.960
Some people are born on this. I need to know your answer to the same question.

1509
02:19:42.960 --> 02:19:51.680
I think we need to have vital democracies that manage economies in ways that are optimized around

1510
02:19:51.680 --> 02:19:58.640
human flourishing and not capital efficiency, not capital accumulation, that we live in a world

1511
02:19:58.880 --> 02:20:05.520
you completely grew up in a world where the highest good was capital efficiency. The capital

1512
02:20:05.520 --> 02:20:11.120
efficiency and godliness were the same. And we have organized society in this way. In the United

1513
02:20:11.120 --> 02:20:17.360
States, we had literally have a norm and a set of regulations around maximizing shareholder value

1514
02:20:17.360 --> 02:20:24.640
for corporations, right? This was invented out of whole cloth in the 1970s. This whole idea

1515
02:20:24.720 --> 02:20:29.520
that the purpose of the corporation should be merely to enrich shareholders and the evil of

1516
02:20:29.520 --> 02:20:37.360
that idea isn't what they weren't saying was screw the poor. What they said was if you maximize

1517
02:20:37.360 --> 02:20:42.720
value for shareholders, it will be good for everybody. And that was the lie because it wasn't good

1518
02:20:42.720 --> 02:20:48.560
for everybody. It was good for a tiny minority of people. And the lie was that when you do that,

1519
02:20:49.360 --> 02:20:55.520
growth rates will go up. GDP will go up. We'll have a rising time. And the tide didn't rise.

1520
02:20:56.240 --> 02:21:02.560
It fell. And what modern economics says is that we can have a different construct. We can have

1521
02:21:02.560 --> 02:21:08.480
a different society that purposefully includes people in a robust way, whether they're a worker,

1522
02:21:08.480 --> 02:21:15.120
whether they're a small business. And if we do that, everyone will benefit. The economy will

1523
02:21:15.120 --> 02:21:20.400
grow faster. People will be paid better. Prices will be lower. We will have more innovation.

1524
02:21:21.360 --> 02:21:26.080
This is within our grasp. We just have to decide to do it. You should go into politics.

1525
02:21:26.880 --> 02:21:32.640
I am in politics. Well, I hear that. One thing I don't like is waiting for the world to change.

1526
02:21:32.640 --> 02:21:38.480
And I like personal agency. And at Nick's level that he's playing at, I love the fact that he's

1527
02:21:38.480 --> 02:21:43.120
in politics and he's using his wealth and his power and his influence to change the system.

1528
02:21:43.120 --> 02:21:48.400
For most people, waiting for the world to change does not feel empowering. And I guess where I'm

1529
02:21:48.400 --> 02:21:55.600
coming from is like, yes, tilt towards this because that's the political movement that's required

1530
02:21:55.600 --> 02:22:01.200
to make sure the world includes more people in capitalism. And I love that. And while that's

1531
02:22:01.200 --> 02:22:06.320
happening, take personal accountability, personal agency, figure out what is your next move,

1532
02:22:06.880 --> 02:22:14.080
watch all the episodes of die of a CEO, learn from people and, you know, and, and, and figure out,

1533
02:22:14.080 --> 02:22:20.720
yes, subscribe, right? Do me a favor, subscribe to the channel. But if that, if that is done,

1534
02:22:20.720 --> 02:22:26.320
like people, people who do that end up feeling hopeful because hope comes from having personal

1535
02:22:26.320 --> 02:22:31.120
agency and personal agency is knowing your next move that's going to benefit you and move you

1536
02:22:31.200 --> 02:22:36.640
forward. I agree. And I really, I, you know, the older I've gotten, the more I realize my own

1537
02:22:36.640 --> 02:22:42.400
privilege. And my privilege isn't necessarily that I built a business and that I have money now

1538
02:22:42.400 --> 02:22:48.400
and all those things. My privilege is something happened when I was young from the point of maybe

1539
02:22:48.400 --> 02:22:51.600
where my parents got to live. But do you feel guilty about it? I don't feel guilty about it,

1540
02:22:51.600 --> 02:22:58.080
but it just has allowed me to see my own bias and to realize that I have this unknown and known.

1541
02:22:58.080 --> 02:23:02.160
Unfortunately, that's growing by the day because I'm getting more entrenched in my own privilege.

1542
02:23:02.160 --> 02:23:08.320
And what I mean by this is like, I play out the scenario theoretically. My dad left my mom and my mom

1543
02:23:10.080 --> 02:23:13.680
still struggles to read and write. And she would have had like four kids,

1544
02:23:14.320 --> 02:23:19.520
can't read or write, can't really get employment. She worked at St. Luke's Hospice as a volunteer.

1545
02:23:19.520 --> 02:23:23.760
And I go, God, if that one thing had happened, how different would my of life have been?

1546
02:23:24.480 --> 02:23:30.320
And so that's like a privilege that I've never even acknowledged because it's kind of inherent.

1547
02:23:30.320 --> 02:23:35.760
It was like built into my life. And then would I be sat here now? Would I be the person I am today?

1548
02:23:35.760 --> 02:23:40.560
If that one little thing had happened, no, would I be ambitious and optimistic about the world?

1549
02:23:40.560 --> 02:23:45.200
Or would I be theoretically, could I be resentful? Could I be like some of my other friends who came

1550
02:23:45.200 --> 02:23:50.880
from the same city where I came from who didn't have a father who made, I've said to some of my friends,

1551
02:23:50.880 --> 02:23:55.040
I said to one of my particular friends back home, if you would just get a job for a couple of months,

1552
02:23:55.040 --> 02:24:02.160
I will pay your rent for years. Didn't happen. Can't get a job for three months so that I would pay

1553
02:24:02.160 --> 02:24:07.440
his rent for years. I ended up helping him anyway. But I just remember saying that. It just highlighted

1554
02:24:07.440 --> 02:24:12.720
to me that there's a real deep inherent privilege that I have that I'm not even aware that I have.

1555
02:24:13.440 --> 02:24:19.120
Sometimes it's trauma, my DNA, my brothers are all very smart naturally. And what if I didn't?

1556
02:24:20.000 --> 02:24:23.520
What if I didn't have those two parents? And what if I didn't have the whatever genetic

1557
02:24:23.520 --> 02:24:30.800
composition I had? Then would the advice apply? The advice I give to the world would it apply?

1558
02:24:30.800 --> 02:24:37.200
So I mull that and go, it's got to pass that lens for it to be broadly applicable and therefore

1559
02:24:38.000 --> 02:24:42.880
I think effective advice. I love your level of compassion and empathy for people and the fact

1560
02:24:42.880 --> 02:24:47.440
that you're having that self-exploration means you're an incredible type of person.

1561
02:24:48.080 --> 02:24:53.520
With each individual, each person wants to do the most with what they've got. I'm saying that if I

1562
02:24:53.520 --> 02:25:00.080
was to visit a small town that had a thriving 10, 15, 20 businesses in there, there were enough

1563
02:25:00.080 --> 02:25:04.880
entrepreneurs to create optionality for people. That would be a good town to go to. And if I go to

1564
02:25:04.880 --> 02:25:08.800
a town where there are no entrepreneurs and there are like everyone feels downtrodden and there's

1565
02:25:08.800 --> 02:25:14.320
one big Costco and that's the only employer in town, that's going to be a shit town. So all I'm

1566
02:25:14.320 --> 02:25:22.160
saying is you need a critical mass of people who have agency and that lifts up the, like having a

1567
02:25:22.160 --> 02:25:28.000
few, you know, in Japan they call it the Shogun family and the Shogun family lifts up that little

1568
02:25:28.000 --> 02:25:33.280
community and around that Shogun family you end up with lots of other businesses and lots of other,

1569
02:25:33.280 --> 02:25:39.520
like it flows out. But when you have one monolith in the world that is the only company in town

1570
02:25:39.520 --> 02:25:45.200
and it is the only place that ships stuff to your door and there's only one place to get your CDs

1571
02:25:45.200 --> 02:25:49.280
and there's only one place to get your Netflix, then pretty much everyone else is just reduced to

1572
02:25:49.280 --> 02:25:56.240
being a consumer. What do you think, Nick? Again, I've said it before. I agree with this sentiment 100

1573
02:25:56.240 --> 02:26:03.040
percent. I am an entrepreneur myself, but I expect that operating an empowerment applies to,

1574
02:26:03.680 --> 02:26:09.200
it will no doubt apply to a high percentage of the people who watch your show, right? Lots and lots

1575
02:26:09.200 --> 02:26:14.400
of people who watch the show are entrepreneurial, want to be entrepreneurial, so on and so forth.

1576
02:26:14.400 --> 02:26:19.600
But I suspect you're talking about less than 5 percent of people on planet Earth that fit that

1577
02:26:19.600 --> 02:26:24.160
paradigm. And I want to create a paradigm that works for everybody. And you're saying if you hit

1578
02:26:24.160 --> 02:26:29.760
those 5 percent. Well, even in UK, it's six million self-employed people out of 30 million workers.

1579
02:26:29.760 --> 02:26:36.640
It's not, it's not tiny. It's a pretty decent percent, right? It is a major opportunity that more

1580
02:26:36.640 --> 02:26:40.960
people than ever could take part in. If you asked a health professional, how do you get hope?

1581
02:26:40.960 --> 02:26:45.840
Go to the gym, go for a run, all that stuff. You're asking an entrepreneur, how do you get hope

1582
02:26:45.840 --> 02:26:50.640
through personal agency? I'm going to tell you what's worked for me is the entrepreneurial method.

1583
02:26:51.360 --> 02:26:56.640
To me, we need to ask a broad group of people. But I suspect that what they will come back to you with

1584
02:26:56.640 --> 02:27:02.400
is the quiet miracle of a normal life. If you want that, that's great. I want that and I want

1585
02:27:02.400 --> 02:27:09.120
that for everyone. That's gone away. It's gone. Houses are unaffordable. Sorry. Local jobs don't

1586
02:27:09.120 --> 02:27:15.040
exist. No one's paying healthy wages. Like all of that stuff that I want as well. It's great to

1587
02:27:15.040 --> 02:27:19.120
sit there and want it, right? But that doesn't give me hope. That gives me disappointment that it

1588
02:27:19.120 --> 02:27:25.120
used to exist, right? Might the family home that most people would love to raise a family in?

1589
02:27:25.120 --> 02:27:30.960
It's 1.2 million pounds now, right? And if you want to fix that, you have to enact this. Yeah.

1590
02:27:31.600 --> 02:27:35.840
You have to do these things. Most people are going to wonder what's on that piece of paper.

1591
02:27:35.840 --> 02:27:44.000
So this is the main body of my work is coming up with a different economic paradigm,

1592
02:27:44.000 --> 02:27:49.840
a way of understanding economic cause and effect that leads to the world that Dan prefers,

1593
02:27:49.840 --> 02:27:56.000
that I prefer. I don't know, but I sense it's the world that you prefer. And what you have to do

1594
02:27:56.000 --> 02:28:02.080
is you have to rip down the existing economic framework and replace it with a 21st century

1595
02:28:02.080 --> 02:28:08.000
thing that inclines policymakers to make good decisions, not bad ones. And the booklet itself,

1596
02:28:08.000 --> 02:28:15.120
that can you show the booklet? Yeah. So this booklet is 21st century economics. Now this is

1597
02:28:15.920 --> 02:28:23.840
aimed at policymakers and professionals. Yeah. But if you go to marketsbuiltforhumans.org,

1598
02:28:23.840 --> 02:28:30.960
you can download this for free. And that is merely an expression of the paradigm itself going

1599
02:28:30.960 --> 02:28:38.240
from believing that we should just increase capital efficiency to human flourishing, going from

1600
02:28:38.240 --> 02:28:43.680
understanding human beings is homoeconomicus to homo sapiens, going from understanding the economy

1601
02:28:43.680 --> 02:28:49.520
as a parade of optimal equilibrium to a complex to an ecology, all this stuff. But when you

1602
02:28:49.600 --> 02:28:54.400
understand it in a new way, you come to very different conclusions about how you should organize

1603
02:28:54.400 --> 02:29:00.640
the world. And that is the starting point for global transformation. I love it. He's already a

1604
02:29:00.640 --> 02:29:04.640
billionaire. He's got time on his hands and he's got money to fly around the world doing it,

1605
02:29:04.640 --> 02:29:09.120
do it. And while he's doing it, all I need is for people like you to help me explain it.

1606
02:29:09.120 --> 02:29:14.320
Yeah. And like I love it. I'm not against it. I'm just saying what will give most people hope is

1607
02:29:14.320 --> 02:29:18.160
taking agency over their life where they can do something this week to improve their life.

1608
02:29:18.160 --> 02:29:22.720
So while next time I see there will be a test and download download it, give it to your

1609
02:29:22.720 --> 02:29:26.880
lawmakers. Well, so what I'll do then, I mean, we've got some different reading materials,

1610
02:29:26.880 --> 02:29:30.320
people that are listening, Connor can pursue here. And we've got Dan's books here,

1611
02:29:30.320 --> 02:29:33.920
which I'll link below. Dan, is there a particular best book to start with in your opinion?

1612
02:29:33.920 --> 02:29:38.000
The most recent one is called The Lifestyle Business Playbook. And it's basically how to get

1613
02:29:38.000 --> 02:29:42.080
started with a small business and a business that will give you more fun freedom and flexibility.

1614
02:29:42.080 --> 02:29:46.160
And I like the idea of supporting anyone who's trying to create a better economy.

1615
02:29:46.160 --> 02:29:50.400
Some of the most miserable people I know are waiting for the system to change.

1616
02:29:50.400 --> 02:29:53.280
And I don't want you to be that person. I want you to be doing something in your own life.

1617
02:29:53.920 --> 02:29:57.520
And then over here, I mean, you know, I'm going to link all of your books below as well,

1618
02:29:57.520 --> 02:30:03.680
better. Yeah, I mean, I just think that a starting point for global transformation is under,

1619
02:30:03.680 --> 02:30:09.040
look, economics is the operating system of the world. If it's the wrong operating system,

1620
02:30:09.040 --> 02:30:15.440
you end up with a very bad circumstance in economics is invisible to most people. They don't

1621
02:30:15.440 --> 02:30:21.200
even understand it's the water they're swimming in. They don't understand that policy makers

1622
02:30:21.200 --> 02:30:27.200
are making decisions that affect their lives based on a particular understanding of how the economy

1623
02:30:27.200 --> 02:30:33.280
works. And if that's wrong, then you're going to make some terrible decisions. If you believe that

1624
02:30:33.280 --> 02:30:39.360
prosperity trickles down from the top, you're going to enact a certain set of policies. If you believe

1625
02:30:39.520 --> 02:30:45.920
that growth is built from the middle out, you will make an entirely different set of policies.

1626
02:30:45.920 --> 02:30:51.520
If you believe that the middle class is a consequence of economic growth, you will go one way.

1627
02:30:51.520 --> 02:30:56.320
If you believe that the thriving middle class is the cause of growth, you will do a completely

1628
02:30:56.320 --> 02:31:02.240
different set of things in terms of policy. All of them aligned with what Dan wants. But

1629
02:31:03.280 --> 02:31:08.080
that's where you have to start. That's the medic, those are the meta questions that you have to

1630
02:31:08.640 --> 02:31:14.720
answer. And then you deduce logically to all of the things that Dan prefers.

1631
02:31:15.360 --> 02:31:19.760
But you have to start up here. You have to start with the set of ideas that govern

1632
02:31:19.760 --> 02:31:23.120
how people see economic costs and effect. And that is what this is.

1633
02:31:26.400 --> 02:31:30.560
I should link it below. Thank you so much. We're done. Thank you. You are fantastic.