The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - EMERGENCY DEBATE: They Lied About The Economy Recovering! Is A Financial Apocalypse Coming?
Episode Date: March 20, 2025Is the economy on the brink of collapse? Gary Stevenson and Daniel Priestley break down the emergency financial crisis no one is talking about The Diary Of A CEO’s economics debate is joined by 2 e...xperts: Gary Stevenson and Daniel Priestley. Gary Stevenson is a British economist, former financial trader, and author of The Trading Game. Daniel Priestly is an award-winning serial entrepreneur who has written 5 books on starting and scaling businesses. In this conversation, Gary, Daniel, and Steven discuss topics such as, whether there is a financial apocalypse looming, if both the US and the UK are running out of money, how the next financial crash could be worse than 2008, and why millionaires are fleeing the UK. 00:00 Intro 02:10 Who Is Gary Stevenson? 07:30 Who Is Daniel Priestly? 10:04 The Importance of Economic Freedom 11:56 Who Are We Blaming for the Economic Situation? 13:32 The UK & US Debt We're Carrying From COVID 17:44 Is There Financial Security for Most of Us in 2025? 26:13 What Does Gary Think of Daniel's Views? 28:58 The Current Homeownership Situation 34:21 US vs UK Market With Building Technology 36:38 Taxing Billionaires 41:03 Do You Tax Their Value or the Countries Where They Trade? 45:36 Why Are Millionaires Leaving the UK? 48:49 Stopping Profit Shifting of Companies 52:40 How $10M+ Companies Avoid Taxes 58:01 Where Is the Biggest Amount of Money Going? 01:00:06 How to Bring Big Tech Companies and Entrepreneurs to the UK 01:04:45 Are Tax Evasions Causing Issues With NHS, Education, and Higher Crime? 01:10:31 Why Poor People Are Struggling to Build Wealth 01:19:49 Ads 01:20:53 How to Create Wealth in the Economy 01:37:17 Monopolies 01:40:18 Advice to Younger People 01:45:02 What to Do as a Young Person 01:47:12 Take Action: Play the Cards You Are Dealt 01:51:45 Do We Have Personal Responsibility to Change This? 01:54:05 Is the Current Education System Failing Us? 02:00:56 Inheritance Taxes 02:04:50 Ads 02:10:05 America's Approach to Building Wealth Follow Gary: YouTube - https://g2ul0.app.link/xdrUsPgERRb Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/OoThWmfERRb Follow Daniel: X - https://g2ul0.app.link/3ui4EJjERRb Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/Wa2RfsaHRRb Website - https://g2ul0.app.link/jUbxNu8GRRb Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Fiverr - http://fiverr.com/diary with code DIARY WHOOP - https://JOIN.WHOOP.COM/CEO Perfect Ted - https://www.perfectted.com with code DIARY40 for 40% off Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I'm sick of multimillionaires telling kids who can't afford to turn the heating on,
you just need to be more entrepreneurial.
It's sick, Dan, it's sick.
Well, your video where you talk about if you don't have a rich dad, you're screwed.
Well, to me, if I had have come across your content at 19, 20 years old,
I would have been screwed.
My friends can't feed their kids, OK?
If it was that easy, why is everybody not doing it?
Tell me why people aren't doing it.
It's because...
I feel like I just say one thing back on that.
Today's debate is fiery to say the least, but important nonetheless.
As I sat down with two leading experts in wealth and entrepreneurship and the economy
to discuss the state of the US, the state of the UK and the Western world.
Do you think the reason the average Brit or American are getting poorer is because they
don't know how to create wealth?
No, the reason people are getting poorer is because they don't know how to create wealth. No, the reason people are getting poorer
is because of big governments, record levels of taxes,
an outdated schooling system, technology and remote working.
You sure about that?
How do you disagree with those opinions?
Living standards are falling because of growing wealth inequality.
If you and other rich to get richer,
they squeeze the middle class and the poor class out of things like housing.
Let's cut tax on people who are working hard
and let's raise tax on the richest and most powerful people in the world.
That's an overly simplified view of things.
We now have a thousand millionaires a month leaving,
which means every ordinary person who pays 10 grand a year in tax
will now have to pay 20 grand a year in tax.
You end up cutting off your nose to spite your face.
If we are a country that don't try and do things
which are necessary because they are hard,
then our kids will live in poverty.
What do you want people to do?
There's a lot of different ways.
Buckle up.
I find it incredibly fascinating
that when we look at the backend of Spotify
and Apple and our audio channels,
the majority of people that watch this podcast
haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button,
wherever you're listening to this.
I would like to make a deal with you.
If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from
now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how
much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger which means we can expand
the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love.
If you could do me that small favour and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this,
that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever
ask you. Thank you so much for your time.
Gary, Daniel. Daniel, you've been on the show a few times before, so I want to start
with Gary and understand a little bit about your backstory and who you are. And having
been through the trading game and read and watched many, many of your videos over time,
I have a sort of deep understanding of that.
But for anyone that doesn't know you, can you give me a picture of the context
that has brought you to where you are today, writing about the things you're
writing about today and running the YouTube channel and speaking to the
subject matter that you're speaking about today?
Take me right back and give me as much as you possibly can.
OK, so my name is Gary Stevenson.
I was born in a place called Ilford, which
is in outer East London.
Quite a poor family, a little terraced house by the railway,
playing football in the streets kind of stuff.
Always very good at maths since I was a kid,
very talented maths student.
Eventually able to get into the London School of Economics,
which is an extremely elite university,
economics university in the centre of Economics, which is an extremely elite university, economics university in
the centre of London, which is basically a kind of investment banking boot camp.
Got a job as a trader, started working full-time as a short-term interest rates trader at Citibank
in London in June 2008.
Interesting time.
I went on to be one.
Obviously, exactly that's just before the big credit crash, the
big Lehman crisis.
And I watched the Lehman crisis happen in front of my eyes.
Short term interest rate trading is basically like short term loans.
And during the credit crisis, what credit crisis is, is nobody can borrow any money.
So short term loans become really, really important.
My desk, which was like historically unfashionable area of trading, became became the center of the crisis, or one of the centers of the crisis. People started making tons
of money. I was working with all these crazy people. You can imagine me, I turn up 21 years
old and then within three months, everyone around me is making a ton of money during
the credit crisis. What really interested me was what happened after the crisis itself, which was, so we're
betting on interest rates.
Long story short, interest rates come down when the economy is weak, and they go up when
the economy is strong, or when the economy is overheating from an inflation perspective.
In 2008, all the interest rates go to zero.
So suddenly, our job is basically predicting and betting on when will those interest rates
go back up, which is when will the economy recover.
And this is super interesting.
In 2008, because all the interest rates went to zero so quickly, before 2008, it's important
to remember rates would move from five and a half to five and a quarter.
And then here in 2008, everywhere in the world slashing to zero.
Half a percent.
Exactly. And everybody, all the economists were like, wow, this is going to cause a massive
recovery because they thought that interest rates were powerful. And everybody predicted that rates
would come back up in 2009, which of course we now know they didn't. Then everybody predicted that
rates would go up in 2010, which we now know they didn't. And then at the beginning of 2011,
everybody was predicting rates would definitely go up this year.
And this to me was so interesting. So interesting because, you know, I studied maths and economics at one of the best economics universities in the world.
And now I'm working with these traders who are getting paid millions of pounds a year, million pounds a year to predict the economy, to predict the interest rates.
And everybody is wrong year after year after year.
And this was, I was so amazing to me for a couple of reasons.
But first of all, it's like, wow, like this is a big thing that we as a
society should understand and like we're getting it wrong.
But secondly, if all of the best guys in the world are getting this wrong, then
if I can figure this out, I can make a ton of money here.
Gary, how much money did you make for Citibank at the age of 24 years old?
That year, so that year 2011, I put this big bet on that it would get worse forever.
And I was Citibank's most profitable trader in the world that year and I made them just over 35 million dollars.
You made them 35 million dollars. You eventually decide to leave Citibank. Why?
I mean I think that's an interesting question right, you know, in the sense that I'll just
explain to you what happened which is I made a ton of money by betting on the collapse of Western society. I did it in 2011, I did it again in 2012.
I would prefer for it not to collapse, Stephen.
And I'm trying to stop it from collapsing.
When you say it collapsing,
what exactly are you referring to
that you don't want to collapse?
So you born in Botswana, right?
Yeah.
You still have family there?
I've got family in Nigeria,
which is where my family are from.
I was born in Botswana cause we were visiting there,
but got family in Africa.
Do you go to Nigeria much?
No, I've got home in Cape Town in South Africa.
So I see it's a great place if you want to see inequality.
I think there is
a naivety in this country, in places like the US, that the kind of inequality,
the kind of broad poverty that you see in places like South Africa, in places like Nigeria,
in places like India, can't happen here.
It will happen here.
That is the future of this country.
That is the future of the US.
And I'm not just saying that, I'm betting on it. And I've been betting on it for 15 years,
and I've been right for 15 years. That is what I'm trying to avoid.
Daniel, where did you come from?
So I grew up in Australia. I was born to low income family. I grew up in a place that had 24%
unemployment. Pretty much the only jobs or opportunities around me
were things like the trades, building, construction,
pest control, hospitality and tourism.
So at 14, I got a job at McDonald's,
and then I got a job in a bar and Pizza Hut delivered driving.
And I discover entrepreneurship.
So I discover books about entrepreneurship,
and I discover that some people make millions similar to yourself. You saw Canary Warfie read a book about
business ownership. As we sit here today, can you give me the overview of your business success
since then? Yeah, so I now have a group of companies that I've either started or bought.
There's I've just sold a company. So there's seven companies in the group. I've started a couple of
software companies. One of our companies is now the fastest growing,
one of the fastest growing companies in the UK.
We're a software business.
I've got a couple of agencies.
I've got a education and training business.
And when you think about the UK
and broadly the Western world today,
what is your assessment of where we're at as a country
and what's concerning you?
Because Gary expressed quite articulately that his big concern is that because of wealth inequality,
we're gonna end up in a similar position to the likes of India. What are you concerned about?
I agree that it wasn't that long ago that we had
real serious wealth inequality in this country.
There are amazing photos from like a hundred years ago of kids working in mines and kids doing oyster shucking and all
this horrible work.
And there's a book Charles Dickens wrote called The Tale of Two Cities.
And the opening line of the book is it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
And I think we've actually gotten to that point here where some people in the UK, it's
the best of times.
If you are like in your situation, you're booming, you're a globally successful
business. I've got a globally successful business. And then there are a lot of people who completely
cannot relate to this. Energy prices are now the most expensive in the Western world. House
prices are completely unaffordable. It used to take three years to save for a deposit.
It's now 20 years, theoretically 20 years, if you can say for a deposit. Food prices are through the roof.
So we're in a really difficult, like for anyone who is not tapped into digital economy, fast
growth and all of that sort of stuff, life is getting harder and worse, and things are
collapsing, if you would go with that.
There is a predictable path countries go on.
And there's this thing called the Economic
Freedom Index.
And the Economic Freedom Index basically says how economically free are you?
How much access do you have to free markets?
Can you start a business?
Can you scale a business?
Does anything inhibit your ability to run your own life?
Countries that have high degrees of economic freedom have very low poverty.
They have widespread affluence. And countries that have low economic freedoms have high degrees of economic freedom have very low poverty, they have widespread affluence,
and countries that have low economic freedoms
have high poverty, and it can be the difference
between less than 10% right up to 70% poverty rates.
And when countries go on a path towards economic freedom,
poverty just drops.
So India, for example, has been on that path,
and they announced today that they've almost eradicated
abject poverty or extreme poverty. The UK went on that path and they announced today that they've almost eradicated abject poverty or extreme poverty.
The UK went on that path of low economic freedom to high economic freedom and we saw poverty
rates come right down.
But in 2008, when the global financial crisis happened, one of the things that happened
is the government said, we need to step in and we need to take charge and everyone said,
please do.
So they came in and they said, all right, we're going to ramp up debt,
ramp up taxes to pay for the debt,
and we're also going to put all regulations in.
And unfortunately, that starts to reduce economic freedom.
Then the pandemic happens and they say,
oh, we're going to spend more money again through debt,
we're going to have more taxes, more regulations, less economic freedom.
So the UK, we went from an 82, when I arrived in 2006, we went from 82 out of 100 down to
68 out of 100.
So we're less economically free.
And predictably, what we will always see happen if you lower people's economic freedom, more
poverty, less affluence, the millionaires and the wealth creators leave,
the people who are stuck in dead-end jobs or no jobs get incredibly frustrated.
Everyone starts looking for someone to blame.
People are angry and they're like, who do we blame?
And who do they blame?
It's very different because in the US we blame,
the US blames someone different to the UK.
So we have a historical cultural memory.
In the UK, we have a cultural memory that the people to blame are the rich.
So we have landlords and aristocracy and the landed gentry, those guys are to blame, right?
So blame the rich is what we say in the UK.
In the US, they have a very different view.
Their cultural memory is that they're anti-government.
They want limited government.
In 2023, there was this song that came out called,
Rich Men North of Richmond.
And it was the number one song in America.
And the lyrics of the song basically says,
people in Washington do not care about working people.
They are taxing everything we touch.
You can't earn money.
They depreciate the dollar.
They tax, tax, tax, tax, tax,
and they want to control our lives.
Those are the lyrics of the songs,
controlling our lives and taxing us.
So the American reaction to this is,
who's to blame?
Government.
So we want smaller government.
We want a department of government efficiency to come in.
We want someone as a wrecking ball
who will come in and smash government.
The British instinct is, hate the rich. It must be the rich's fault. So
when we look for, like all of the Western countries that implemented lower economic
freedoms created more poverty, less affluence, and more disruption to their economies. So
both US and UK, for example, and Australia as well, but both sides of the pond want someone to blame. It's just
that the Americans blame government and we blame the
rich.
Gary, I'm sure you have a lot to say there. I know you both use
the word collapsing. So you agree that there's a problem
here. But I think you from studying both of your sort of
perspectives, you think that the solution and the cause of the problem is different?
I mean, I put bets on. I put bets on. I put bet. That's what I do. I put bets on.
At the beginning of COVID, we knew the government's going to give an enormous amount of money out.
Total amount of money now. UK government deficits. Since the beginning of COVID, it's one trillion pounds.
US number is $14 trillion.
That's, you know, 20,000 pounds per UK adult.
My background is I understand that when the distribution gets worse, when
inequality gets worse, living standards fall.
So when, when the UK government was going to give a trillion pounds out, all I
wanted to know was who's going to end up with that money.
That's all I wanted to know. And I mean, the up with that money. That's all I wanted to know.
And I mean, the US number 13 trillion, 14 trillion, it's just outlandish.
But I think the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my whole life
was that at the beginning of COVID, the very beginning of COVID, we knew
governments across the world were going to be giving out tens of trillions of pounds, dollars, euros.
Nobody even thought to ask who's going to get tens of trillions of pounds, dollars, euros, nobody even thought to ask
who's going to get tens of trillions richer. Nobody in the conservatives, nobody in labor,
nobody in the Republicans, nobody in Democrats, nobody in the media, nobody in academia, nobody
in the central banks. Nobody asked this. It's almost beautiful. It's unbelievable. It's
unbelievable. So I sat down and I did the analysis at the beginning. Because lockdown is essentially banning the spending of the
rich and replacing that spending of the rich with printed money from government. What happens
is the government gives workers money, they use that money to pay their bills, to pay
their rent, pay their mortgage. It goes to the rich. The rich can't spend it because
they're locked indoors. And what you get is essentially an enormous amount of money from the government to the
poor to the rich.
And this massive, massive transfer of wealth, that was obviously going to happen at the
beginning of COVID.
Nobody discussed it, which I think is itself amazing.
Let me ask you a question, right?
If we would now, to pause the economy for two years, and during that pause, massively increase wealth
inequality, what do you think would happen to broad living conditions when we unpaused?
See, one of the things that I think happened during the pandemic is everything went digital.
And entrepreneurs and investors did actually think about what would happen. The investors immediately boomed stocks like Zoom and Microsoft, and we ended up with the
Magnificent Seven.
I don't know if you know, there's seven big tech companies in the USA market.
And those big seven companies have gone from five trillion valuation to 17 trillion valuation
in the time of the pandemic.
And if you think about what did the pandemic do, everyone had to work from home.
So we all had to have Microsoft subscriptions.
Everyone went on to websites.
So we all went to AWS, Amazon.
We all started buying and learning how to buy from Amazon rather than buying from our local high streets.
Every business in the world figured out how to run their business remotely.
We had this massive transformation. It was like it's actually a wholesale transformation of
society that we all learn how to live and work differently. I saw a boom in entrepreneurship.
So what I saw as an entrepreneur accelerator, someone who runs an entrepreneur accelerator,
is just there was this sudden boom in people launching businesses, setting up Shopify accounts,
setting up YouTube businesses.
So the money really has moved from the traditional economy, the 2019 high street economy over
to the digital economy.
And what we see is that the investors know what's going on and they just invest in this
magnificent 7 company.
I think 50% of the gains of the S&P 500 is tech companies.
So all the money just goes flooding
into the technology companies.
My belief is that technology is really dividing people,
that essentially if you take anyone from any background,
if they work in technology, if they're in media, tech, finance,
any of that stuff that operates online,
they tend to actually do pretty well after the pandemic.
Can I ask you a question?
Yeah, go for it.
Do you think the average Brit, American, Australian, wherever the person out there is watching,
if they quit their job and go work in tech, do you think they'll be able to get financial security relatively easily?
Depends when you define financial security. The issue with house prices.
The ability to raise a family, have a home.
So having a home is a big issue.
So here's what I see with houses, because houses annoy me as well.
My dad bought a house for $18,000, which is about 10,000 pounds or less than 10,000 pounds,
and it's probably worth over a million dollars today.
So something went on.
And this, by the way, is not UK specific. The socialist countries
had house prices go through the roof. If you go to Norway or Sweden, their house prices
grew by 600% in the-
It's happening everywhere.
It's happening everywhere.
It's not specific anyway. It's happening everywhere.
But what happened, what has definitely happened in the UK is we actually have a housing traffic jam. So in this country, in the UK,
we have 9.5 million homes
that have two or more spare bedrooms.
Big family homes have two or more spare bedrooms.
And when you look into who owns those houses,
78% of housing wealth is baby boomers.
And now, anecdotally,
I take my kids trick or treating at Halloween,
and we go down a street that is big family homes,
and you go knock on the doors, and it's all people over 65. And they're living in a big
family home with empty spare bedrooms.
You think the average American over 65 is living luxuriously?
The average American over 65. So more than half of the US economy is in the hands of
baby boomers. So they own all the houses. The houses got bought up cheap,
baby boomers still own those houses to this day.
The big family homes with multiple spare bedrooms are empty.
And now that creates this traffic jam,
where people my age-
My grandparents, they all owned property.
All four of them died with nothing.
All four of them died with nothing because that wealth which they had in property was used in equity release schemes, it was used in paying for their retirement, it was used
in end of life care.
Do you think when those old people die, young people today will be rich?
There is half the economy held by baby boomers.
It's either going to be passed down or passed into the aged care industry or passed into...
But the issue of why we can't get homes, two things.
Government massively inflated the value of homes through debt.
So they just injected like low interest rates that you're involved in.
Who is the debt to?
Well, the debt is to anyone who can take out a loan because if it's 0% interest rates or 2% interest rates that you're involved in. Who is the debt to? Well, the debt is to anyone who can take out a loan
because if it's 0% interest rates or 2% interest rates...
Do you think the debt is to ordinary families?
Do you think ordinary families are the creditors?
When you say ordinary families, you mean bottom third?
So if your average British or American family
now has half a million pounds of debt, who has the credit?
It's anyone who could get their...
At that particular time, anyone who could get their hands on a loan
to buy a house
got on the housing loan.
Who is on the other side of the debt?
So if the average British family has half a million pound
in debt. Well, a banking licence.
Does the average British family
have half a million pound of credit?
Well, a lot of people have got a lot of equity
in their home now.
You think the average British family
is sitting on half a million pound cash?
I'd love to look at what the actual number is,
but it's a couple of hundred thousand worth of equity.
78, but it's- What about the credit on the loan?
The credit on the loan. Who owns the credit on the loan? Bear in mind, it's a couple of hundred thousand worth of equity. What about the credit on the loan? The credit on the loan.
Bear in mind, it's disproportionately older people.
So 78%…
So you think the average British old person is sitting on millions of pounds of cash?
Not millions of cash, no.
Equity.
Well someone is on the other side of those mortgages.
Just wanted to say, the difference is if you inflate the value of a house, you don't
have cash, you have a house that's worth a lot of money.
So 78% of home ownership wealth is in the hands of people over 65 now.
It's baby boomer generation.
And they got a great gift from the government, which is the government said, we're going
to just give free loans away.
If someone previously could have only afforded to take out a 200 grand loan with low interest
rates, they can afford a 300 grand loan.
Do you think it's okay that the average British or American young person will never own any
wealth?
The issue is not whether it's okay or not.
The issue is what do you do about it?
Do you own wealth?
I've got wealth.
Do you own wealth?
But it depends what you call wealth.
I do.
So do we, three multimillionaires, do we think it's okay that the average Brit or American
young person will never own any wealth?
Because I don't think that's okay.
To me that's not the debate.
But is it okay? It's not okay. To me that's not the debate. But is it okay?
It's not okay.
No, we want widespread affluence.
Would you rather that the people who currently are multi-millionaires, would you rather that
all of the wealth was owned by their kids?
I think that the way you see the world as a trader is that the world is a zero-sum game
and that there's basically the pie is a fixed pie and it gets sliced up.
How fast is the pie growing now?
There's something like this.
You've got UK GDP growth at the moment.
Yeah, it's not high, right?
1%.
How much did your wealth grow in the last year?
Exponentially.
Okay, so if our wealth, my wealth probably grew about 20% in the last year, maybe 30%,
okay?
If our wealth is growing 30% and the economy is growing at 1%, where is it coming from
if it's not coming from our viewers?
So I'll tell you where my wealth comes from.
My wealth comes from building technology companies.
And the way it works is pretty weird, which is that I invent something out of my head
and I go to investors and I say to the investors, here's what we're going to create.
And I give them a spreadsheet.
And then they say, we'll give you a couple of hundred grand to get started, which is
called seed capital.
But that on paper makes me worth a couple of million.
But there's nothing has been taken from anyone at this point.
The investors have said, OK, we'll invest some money.
Then as the business succeeds, some more investors come along and they say, we'll give you a
little bit more money to keep growing it.
And I'm innovating something new.
And let's say investors come in and give me a million pounds
and for 10% of the company,
and the rest of the company is worth 9 million pounds
or 9 million dollars, right?
So I'm not stealing something from the existing economy.
I'm bringing something from outside of the economy
into the economy.
And my quote unquote net worth is growing exponentially because investors say, we'll
give you a little bit of money that values the rest of the pie at a lot of money.
But everyone's getting richer.
In the wealth create, there's wealth extraction, which is what traders do, they extract from
the existing economy, and they bet on the economy. And then there's wealth creation, which what entrepreneurs do, they extract from the existing economy, and they bet on the economy.
And then there's wealth creation, which is what entrepreneurs do.
They come up with new ideas, better ways of doing things, and they build wealth.
So do you think the reason our viewers, the average Brit or American, are getting poorer
is because they don't know how to create wealth?
No, the reason people are getting poorer is because economic freedoms are being eroded.
When we have high economic freedom-
And you associate that with taxes?
Well, anything that imp- it could be anything that impacts economic freedom.
So taxes and regulations are big.
Was economic freedom higher in the 50s?
50s was- okay.
So 50s was an interesting time.
We were in food rations in this country until 1956.
So we had 10 years of food rations after the war.
We had a labor shortage because only really men worked.
Women hadn't entered the workforce in mass.
There had been three or 400,000 men killed in war.
So we actually had this big labor shortage.
The whole country needed to rebuild because of the blitz had bombed it.
So we had this huge need for economic activity and not enough people to do it. We only had 2% unemployment. People who had had their
legs blown off were put to work at that particular time. So we had this boom, this post-war boom,
and we also had the post-war baby boom, which drove consumption. And then when we got to
the 60s, we had the roaring 60s or the swinging 60s, right? Pretty amazing time in Britain. And along comes high
taxes. And they put up the taxes massively at the end of the 60s. And it pretty much
crashed the economy. One of the things that happened-
So what were the tax rates in the 50s?
Well, they went up as high as 80 to 90% for the top earners.
In the 50s?
I think it was in the 60s.
You sure about that?
I think the 50s are unique because-
What is the answer, Gary?
What is the answer? I feel like you know- They. What is the answer, Gary? What is the answer?
They went up after the war.
They went up after the war.
Well, in the US, actually, tax rates got before the war.
But also the size of government as a percentage of GDP
was like 30%.
It was a tiny, like we are now 45% of the UK economy
is government spending.
We have got a massive government.
Who funds that spending?
Debt.
The Bank of England allows them to print endless amounts of debt, which deflates.
Just debt?
No taxes?
Gary, I want to get your opinion here, because you're asking a lot of questions, but I actually
don't know your opinion.
I just want to know what Daniel thinks, and I want our viewers to be able to research
Daniel's opinions.
But how do you disagree with those opinions?
Listen, Daniel's a businessman.
He's obviously a very successful businessman.
You know, I've not been anywhere.
I'm not a businessman. I'm not going to pretend to be a businessman. I'm an a very successful businessman. I'm not a businessman.
I'm not going to pretend to be a businessman. I'm an economist. I make money by being right
in the economy. Daniel's a good businessman and I'm right on the economy. It's as simple
as that basically. I'm not a good businessman, but I've got 15 years of being right on the
economy.
And look, I know you're probably a wealthy man. You probably don't want to pay high taxes.
You probably don't want your kids to pay high taxes. But we exist in an economy where wealth is being extracted out of the middle class, out
of the working class, very, very rapidly.
It's benefiting people like the three of us at this table.
It will benefit our kids.
Our kids will be rich.
Their kids will be poor.
And I just think we should be honest with them.
Capitalism's finished.
We won.
Well done, Stephen.
Well done, Daniel.
Well done, Gary. It's over now. Our kids will be rich. Their kids Stephen. Well done Daniel. Well done Gary.
It's over now. Our kids will be rich. Their kids will be poor. They'll pay the taxes.
We won't pay the taxes. We'll avoid it. I'll make money betting on it year after year.
Why are we lying to them? Why are we lying to them?
Yeah I think that's an overly simplified view of things.
It's an overly simplified view of things that has made me a multi-millionaire.
Well look, entrepreneurs take bets on the economy as well.
We take bets differently.
When we start a company, we're betting on how the economy would be.
Do you think the average British and American worker at the 50th percentile, do you think
their kids will be richer than they are?
It depends if we have economic freedom or not, right?
We're going to have a split test on this.
Do you think we will?
Right, we're going to have a split test.
We're going to have the UK seems like we're going
to have more taxes, more regulations, and it seems like the US is going to have less
taxes and less regulations. Here's what I've noticed. I've noticed that places like Singapore
that have small governments have got widespread affluence. There's not a lot of poverty in
Singapore.
Yeah, except for the cleaners living in the closets. Yeah.
You know, look.
But we don't count them in the statistics, just like we don't count our viewers.
That's not widespread in Singapore.
Well, there's a lot of people...
Whoa, I've seen them in the closets.
I've seen them in the closets.
There are some...
But they're not Singaporeans.
Well, also...
We only count the rich ones.
Look, also the issue is that they've come from
even worse conditions in many cases.
People move to Singapore for an increase in lifestyle.
You could take Ireland or Switzerland, economically free places.
Ireland was economically in a disaster in-
Do you think the average Irish person lives well?
The average 50th percentile Irish person lives well.
Their economy almost collapsed in 2011, and they went down the road of lower taxes, lower regulations
and they attracted all sorts of businesses into the economy.
Do you think that works well for the average Irishman who doesn't own a home in Dublin?
If you measure everything by home ownership…
I'm measuring people by the average.
I want to know what the average man or woman in Dublin today lives like.
I am also furious about the home ownership thing.
Everyone is.
I think it's utterly ridiculous the way...
Like, the idea that homes are now worth 10 times the average wage,
all of that.
The difference is I blame government for that.
I blame high taxes, where they've...
Because of high taxes, they can take out more debt,
they can then inflate the economy...
So do you think if we shrink the government,
if we start to slash government spending,
do you think that would improve living conditions?
Well, the UK government is 45% of the economy.
Like, that's a huge government.
So do you think US living conditions will increase
in the next few years because we have a US government now
that's planning to slash the US government?
Well, that's what the US voters have asked for.
Do you think it would improve living conditions?
Do I think it'll improve?
For the average American?
If they're smaller government.
Yeah, I trust markets.
So you think the average US American
will be richer in three years than they are now?
Here's what I trust.
I trust economic freedom.
If people have freedom,
they create better decisions for their own life.
There's two ways to make decisions.
Do you have freedom?
There's two ways.
Do you have freedom?
I've got less freedom than I did when I arrived.
Because my sister can't pay the rent. Is have freedom? I've got less freedom than I did when I arrived.
Because my sister can't pay the rent.
Is that freedom?
If you're living in a country...
She can't afford to live in the city that she was born in.
I agree.
You and I agree on the problem.
You keep bringing back to the problem.
I keep bringing it back to people because the people who watch...
We're millionaires, okay?
The people who watch us are mostly not millionaires.
Is life going to get better for them?
Life will get better if you are connected to the most productive parts of the economy.
If you pretend that it's 1955 and you recreate the post-war era conditions,
if you try to go back to 1955, I don't think that's going to work.
So let me ask on that then the point about if you're connected to the most productive
parts of the economy. I was quite surprised when I was doing some research on this to find that there's quite big differences between the UK and the US in terms of GDP growth.
In Q4 2024, the US economy grew by 0.6% while the UK growth was 0.1%.
So they're doing significantly better in that regard.
US GDP per head stands at $82,000 per head, whereas the UK stands at $49,000 per head. And stock market
performance, which is an indication of I guess whatever, rose by 300% in the US, whereas the
FTSE 100 declined by 20%, which is the UK stock market. Productivity growth since 2018, productivity
increased by 30% in the United States, which has outpaced the UK. And lastly, income growth. Since 2007, American income per head has increased by 72%,
while it has decreased by 2% in the UK in dollar terms.
So they seem to be doing better from an,
if you just look at the economy, why is that?
Is that because they lean more into technology
and to innovation and entrepreneurship?
And is it because of the things
you were saying earlier about their attitude towards the
government, like reduced government spending versus tax
the rich? Why? I'm keen to hear Gary's view on this, because I
understand yours, because you've just said it.
Yeah, I think these are great statistics. And of course, the
US has a strong reputation for being very free markets and
being very small states.
In the last five years, 10 years, 15 years, we've had a UK government that has been aggressively
slashing the state.
And the US-
The state's bigger than ever.
It's 45% of the economy.
And the US, we had a government in the last four years which has been running a massive,
massive deficit.
So in that period of time, it appears the government which has
been aggressively increasing its deficit has massively overperformed the government which
has been aggressively slashing the state. That's what it looks to be from the last...
I mean, Joe Biden enormously increased the deficit, enormously. And the conservatives
were austerity government for 14 years. Which one seems to have given the better numbers?
Well, I mean, they were austerity in name only.
They went from 30%—the state was 30% of GDP to 45% of GDP.
So do you think government services are best funded now?
No, the government is terrible at doing most things.
That's the problem.
You don't want government—
You don't think that spending on government services has been slashed?
Let me zoom out a little. Do you think the police spending has been slashed? Oh, police spending is definitely— Do you think government services has been slashed?
Let me zoom out a little.
Do you think the police spending has been slashed?
Oh, police spending is definitely slashed.
Do you think education spending has been slashed?
Do you know where it ends up?
It ends up with big corporates, big consulting, who get paid $50 million to produce a report
to tell government something.
All of these big—I won't name names, but all the big consulting firms, they're all
bloodsuckers to government.
They know that the money's in the government, and they set up business models to extract
that money from government.
And it also is in the financial trading side of things.
One of the issues that we've got, and this is a big issue as well, because you care about
wealth inequality, one of the biggest issues I see is that during the pandemic, we all
learned to work remotely,
and remote work became the norm.
And what I see at the moment is huge amounts of what would have been normal British jobs
are going to the Philippines, going to India, going to Vietnam, people who work remotely
now.
We now have a thousand millionaires a month leaving to go to Dubai.
We have 120,000 British people living in Dubai in that economy.
The world's become incredibly mobile.
And one of the things that's happening is that what would have previously been good
British jobs are getting moved overseas to lower cost countries.
And that's technology that drives that wedge.
The US is very smart in that they've built a technology powerhouse, and the UK has completely lost our technology
industry.
Our tech industry is in decline, same across Europe.
China and the US know that the game is tech,
and they're basically pulling all the tech company
into their borders.
And what's happening a lot is the erosion of good jobs
and the erosion of just normal, well-paying
jobs because they're going.
And it's a bit of a self-fulfilling loop that the more we lose millionaires, the tax burden
falls on everyone else.
So they put the taxes up, and then the millionaires say, oh, the taxes are too high, so they leave.
I've watched some of the most incredible entrepreneurs that you would want here that would employ
your sister at a high rate
And they've picked up and left because the taxes are too high.
So are you saying we should tax working people less?
Well, the overall government has to be smaller.
You can't...
So what do you want to cut in the government?
If you...
Child services?
No.
Police?
Education?
NHS?
All I know is this.
Pensions?
You go to Switzerland, they spend 25%.
Welfare for single mothers?
25%.
Saved benefits?
What do you want to cut?
Hold up.
All I know is in Switzerland, the government is 25%.
I'll tell you what I want to do.
I want to cut the taxes on those entrepreneurs and raise the taxes on the billionaires.
Because I worked my tits off.
How many billionaires are in the UK? There's a lot of billionaires in the UK.
So 150.
Yeah, so tax them all. What do they pay?
Listen, I worked my tits off, and I paid, it was 50% top-rated tax.
50% top-rated tax plus national insurance, 60%.
So a million a year.
To bring my family out of poverty.
At the same time, the Duke of Westminster inherited £10 billion
and paid nothing. Do you think that's fair?
That's not true.
OK, why is it not true?
Because the Duke of Westminster is one of the highest taxpayers in the country.
What does he pay?
Well, on the trust, the Grosvenor estate, they don't pay inheritance tax because trusts can't die.
They pay something called periodic taxes, which is 6% every 10 years.
How often? 6%? So they pay 0.6% a year.
Just one sec.
So I pay 60% and this guy pays 0.6%.
Apples with apples. Inheritance tax is 40% a year. Just one sec. So I pay 60% and this guy pays 0.6%. Apples with apples, inheritance tax is 40%
across the course of your life.
If a person who owns a trust for 70 years,
then 6% times seven would be 42.
So they actually pay more.
So he pays 0.6% a year.
Pro-rata.
You're telling me 0.6% a year.
But that would be the same as...
What percent did I pay per year? No, no, no, but that's... 60%. Hold up. So you're saying I pay, what's 60 over 0.6% a year. Pro-rata. You're telling me 0.6% a year. But that would be the same as... What percent did I pay per year?
No, no, no.
60%.
Hold up.
So you're saying I pay what 60 over 0.6?
No, no, no, no.
100 times the tax rate.
You're not comparing apples with apples.
Why is it not apples with apples?
This guy pays 0.6% a year, I paid 60% a year.
That's inheritance tax.
I paid that 60% every year, Daniel.
Every year I paid it.
You're talking income tax.
You're paying income tax.
Why do I pay more than him? The Duke of Westminster have I paid? The Duke of Westminster pays income tax.
The Duke of Westminster pays income tax.
He probably makes your bill blush.
Yeah, you think he pays income tax?
Yeah, well, if he's going to live,
he has to withdraw money to have his income.
He also, let me give you a list of all the taxes he would pay.
He'd pay income tax, corporate tax,
he'd pay stamp duty when he buys a building,
he pays any of the other
taxes, VAT when he spends money, all the same taxes apply to a duke as they apply to anybody
else.
So you think he pays income tax on the income on that?
Any income he draws.
Okay, well, I was going to search whether he pays income tax on his income.
Because I don't think he does.
Of course he pays, I mean, how could he not?
He's in a trust.
But the only difference with a trust versus income is that the trust pays periodic tax versus
inheritance tax.
At 0.6%.
But we're only talking inheritance.
That's just one type of tax.
So you think he's paying 60% on his income?
He's one of the highest taxpayers in the UK.
I'm not like his big fan club, but the truth is he's one of the highest taxpayers in the
UK.
He's one of the biggest employers in the UK.
He's one of the-
One of the biggest landowners in the UK.
Landowners in the UK, right?
So the issue is, is does he pay tax?
All the same taxes that apply to you apply to him.
If you want to set up a trust,
you can also pay periodic taxes as well,
which would be on top of all the other taxes.
So what would you say-
But it's just not true that he doesn't pay taxes.
No, what would you say,
this guy has inherited 10 million pounds,, he's inherited 10 billion pounds.
So he's worth 10 million pounds.
What would you say will be the total amount of tax
he will pay in his lifetime?
Well, I know that just the smallest...
If I make 10 million pounds, I'll pay 60%.
Just one sec.
You're talking about income versus the transfer of an estate.
So why is it that the GQ Westminster can be worth 10 billion pounds?
Just you're comparing your income versus the amount he inherited,
which is not a fair thing. That's not income.
Because that's his income.
Inheritance is not income.
So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
So if I get given 10 billion pounds, I don't pay any tax.
But if I work for 10 billion pounds, I pay 60%.
If you inherited...
If this is the tax system that you want,
you will end up in a system where the kids of the rich will own everything.
I'm just saying... That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. And that's fine because that's our kids. If this is the tax system that you want, you will end up in a system where the kids of the ritual and everything.
That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. And that's fine because that's our kids.
You're not telling the truth about his situation.
Let's have a tax system where your kids and my kids and Stephen's kids are multimillionaires
and these guys out there can't afford to feed their kids and put the heat in them.
That's not what I'm saying.
But that's what you'll get. That's what you'll get. Listen, that's what I'm betting on.
That's fine because I'll make money in the markets.
It's fine.
And you'll make money and you'll make money.
It's our viewers who will be poor.
And that's fine.
That's fine for us.
Let's explore the other alternative, right?
So let's say tax the rich, right?
So let's play the game of tax the rich.
Tax the owners, not the workers.
The owners, the owners.
So the issue that we have with the rich is that the number one most valuable assets in
the economy now are
intangible assets.
So there's this chart called the S&P 500, 500 richest countries in the world, in the
US, sorry.
In 1970s, 75% of the value of the S&P 500 was physical assets like property.
And today it's less than 10%.
It's closer to 5%.
So you think that housing is not particularly important?
Just stick with what I'm saying.
Okay.
The powerhouse, the engine room of the economy
is digital assets, and that's reflected in the S&P 500,
for example, which is 95% intangible assets.
One of the issues that we have is that the richest people
are completely mobile now.
So they can be absolutely anywhere in the world.
So if you come up with this idea of let's tax richest people 1%, if a tiny proportion
of them leave, we're all in trouble.
So-
These really rich guys, what do they own?
Companies.
And why are those companies worth money?
Because investors say they are.
And where do the revenues come from?
Globally.
The issue is that these companies operate globally now.
So if I'm a billionaire.
Take my company for example.
My company has 8,000 customers in 150 countries.
We could be anywhere.
What country is your biggest single revenue source?
Probably the US now. Let's say you move to Cayman Islands,
and the US says we're going to tax your revenue at point of sale.
What can you do?
Well, that's different, right?
Because that's not taxing billionaires, that's taxing companies.
See, when you say tax the rich on their wealth,
that's different to saying tax companies at consumption tax.
Oh, but you just said the rich own companies. You said that's what they own.
Yeah, but you're saying how do you tax them, right? So do you tax their wealth, which is
what they own, or do you tax the companies where they trade? Typically, consumption taxes
get passed on to consumers.
Oh, this is not consumption taxes. This is the tax on the ownership.
Yeah, but if you simply say when you're doing revenues, then that's a consumption tax.
So you're saying if we start to tax the profits of companies.
By the way, I'm not exactly against you on companies.
I think it's disgusting that a British company can take out a Facebook ad to sell to a British
consumer a British product, and Facebook pretends to be in Ireland on that transaction.
And Amazon, you can buy something on Amazon in Britain from a British supplier, from a
British warehouse, and Amazon pretends to be in Luxembourg in that situation.
And that sucks, right?
That does not seem fair.
And it strikes me as very strange that the government is okay with that.
Right now, the government is chasing down moms and dads who sell a few things on eBay
and chasing them for taxes,
but they don't talk to eBay. They're paranoid about someone doing a little bit of a side
hustle on Facebook, but Facebook's fine to pretend to be an island. So I don't agree
with all of that, right? Like, I think we're missing some serious tricks here. But the
idea with taxing billionaires at wealth, billionaires will just leave.
They just get up and leave.
And not just billionaires.
But what do billionaires own?
What do billionaires own?
Companies.
And where do companies get their money from?
Revenues.
And where do the revenues come from?
Purchasing.
People purchase them.
And where do those people live?
All over the world.
We can tax them at that point.
That's consumption tax.
This is the thing.
That's a consumption tax.
No, it's not.
It's a tax on profits. VAT is a tax on revenues. You can tax these guys on profits. Well, that's consumption tax. This is the thing. That's a consumption tax. No, it's not. It's a tax on profits.
VAT is a tax on revenues.
You can tax these guys on profits based on where
the revenues come from.
So it's very easy to move profits internationally.
See, Stephen had a Starbucks cup.
When he buys that Starbucks, it's
bought from a British company who
licenses the Starbucks logo from Luxembourg or somewhere like
that, so 15%.
So here we are saying, oh, we're going to tax their profits. They say, oh, I wish we were profitable. Sorry. Starbucks logo from Luxembourg or somewhere like that. So 15%.
So here we are saying, oh, we're going to tax their profits.
They say, oh, I wish we were profitable.
Sorry.
Unfortunately, we had to do that licensing deal with that international corporation.
I know how profit shifting works.
Okay.
So are you telling me a company is selling to the UK, the US, enormous amount of profit
in the US, and they turn around and say, actually, our profit is not in the US, enormous amount of profit in the US. And they turn around and say, actually our profit's not in the US.
You think the US is incapable of going and looking
if that's seeing where the really, where the profit is?
I'm not saying that you can't do this.
I'm saying that the benefits of doing it,
it's so hard to tax wealth, for example,
or it's so hard to tax millionaires and billionaires,
that you end up cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Like if we create Britain, for example, and we build a brand which is that we're anti-wealth,
we don't want you to ever have more than 10 million, if you've got more than 10 million,
we punish you.
Every young entrepreneur who comes to me and says, Dan, do you think I should start a company
here in this country?
I'm going to say, well, if you do, they'll take it.
As soon as you start to make it, they'll take it.
As soon as you, if you're successful, if you get investment,
they're going to tax you at your wealth.
If you sell the company, they're going to take it off you.
I'm going to basically say to that young entrepreneur,
don't build your business in Britain.
Go start at somewhere that they're more proactive
and positive towards entrepreneurs.
Are we seeing that now with this, they call it the millionaire exodus,
which is for people that don't know, the UK has had to lose the greatest proportion of millionaires in the world.
This parliament, I'll put a graph on the screen, which is this one here, this one here.
And that little red line here is us losing all of our millionaires at the moment.
And in 2024, it's estimated that 10,800 high net worth individuals left the UK,
which is a 157% increase from the previous year, which means that one millionaire is departing
every 45 minutes. The UK millionaire exodus is equal to losing 530,000 average taxpayers.
And another stat, the top 10% of earners in the US account for nearly half of all consumer spending the top 1% of income
Taxpayers in the UK are projected to contribute about 30% of total income tax from 2024 to 2025
Why are all these millionaires running away? Well, it's not because they're taxing their wealth because we don't have any wealth taxes
Why do you think they're leaving? I think the reason they're leaving is because the UK economy is really really weak
Because the UK consumer is really, really weak.
Because you've absolutely crushed the spending power of your average British family.
And where are they going?
I think the average British family can barely afford to feed the kids and turn the heating
on.
So why are you going to start a business here when the customers are absolutely impoverished?
Look, it corresponds with a new tax that we brought in, which was we ended the non-dom
scheme.
So the non-dom scheme basically said,
if you're living in the UK,
but you've got businesses all over the world,
then we only tax you on what you've got in the UK.
And if you die in the UK,
we'll only tax you on your UK assets for inheritance tax
if you're a non-dom.
But if you die in the UK and you've got wealth in India,
once that non-dom scheme ended,
they basically said,
we will tax you on everything globally. If you're a tax resident in the UK, everything
you've got globally, we want 40% of it. So unfortunately, every wealth manager contacted
their clients and said, you can't stay here. You're going to have to get out. It's gotten
really bad. A thousand people a month are leaving. And in the UK, 1% of people pay 30% of the taxes, 10% of people pay 60% of the taxes. And you imagine if we're sitting out
at dinner and there's 10 of us out for dinner and one person says, hey, I've got this, I'll
get 60% of the bill tonight, we say to them, no, it should be 70%, should be 80%. And they
say, you know what, I'll get up and leave. So they leave, everyone else's bill just doubled.
So what's going to happen is if we drive the millionaires out of this country,
every ordinary normal person who pays 10 grand a year in tax
will now have to pay 20 grand a year in tax.
So the reason they left it because we used to allow them to not pay tax.
On their global incomes, on their global businesses.
So isn't it a bit more like if we were 10 of us at dinner
and there was one guy who came to dinner on the condition
he wouldn't pay, then leaves?
Because these guys weren't paying tax anyway.
The reason they left is because they weren't paying tax.
No, it's like saying,
it's like saying, hey, I'll pay 60% of this table,
and they say at the table, hey, wait a second,
we also want you to pay for everything
that's happening at other restaurants as well.
Isn't it a bit more like these guys were here on a condition?
You yourself said the reason why they left is because we let them live here on the condition
that they didn't have to pay taxes.
On their global... yeah, taxes matter, right?
So why is everyone going to Dubai?
Dubai, they're going there because there's no tax.
These guys, they live in Dubai, their money comes from the West.
They are making money from the West,
while your average Western ordinary person
watching this show now cannot afford to buy a house,
cannot afford to have a family,
we can tax those revenues at the point of sale.
Why do we allow these guys?
It's called a consumption tax.
No, it's not, it's a tax on profits,
it's not a tax on consumption.
You just said at point of sale,
which means it's a consumption tax.
Yeah, based on the profits.
You look at how much profit they have.
That's not a consumption.
Exactly, it's not a consumption tax.
Like I'm saying.
No, so if you tax profits, then those profits
have to accumulate in that country.
And because of the digital ecosystem that we now have,
the world we now live in, I can lease the database off
of my company in Luxembourg.
I can license my logo from a company.
I understand how profit shifting works.
Go on.
Listen, these guys are not Gandalf.
You just say, we don't accept profit shifting.
We don't need to accept profit shifting.
China does not accept profit shifting.
We did not accept profit shifting 50 years ago.
We do not have to accept profit shifting.
But you have a government class who are extremely wealthy and a media class who are extremely wealthy saying it not have to accept profit shifting. But you have a government class
who are extremely wealthy and a media class who are extremely wealthy saying it's impossible
to tax rich people. And I would like to say, I will agree 100%, it is difficult to tax
rich people. It is very, very, very difficult to tax rich people. I don't come here saying
I want to tax rich people because it's easy. I know it's hard. I know probably I'm going
to lose. I know our viewers, kids, will live in desperate poverty. I know it's hard, I know probably I'm going to lose, I know our viewers,
kids will live in desperate poverty, I know that. I do this because it is hard. If we are a country
which says to ourselves we don't try and do things which are necessary to keep our kids out of poverty
because they are hard, then our kids will live in poverty. I don't need to be here. I'm a multi-millionaire
just like you. I could be in the Philippines drinking pina Coladas. I come in here because I come from a poor background
and it's ordinary families like my family,
like the kids I grew up with,
whose kids are going to be in poverty.
It's difficult, but it is necessary.
Sometimes we have to do things not because they're easy,
but because they are hard.
That is what makes a rich country rich
and that is what protects ordinary people.
Listen, our grandparents lived in poverty.
Did they say, let's not change it because it's hard?
No, they didn't.
They fought and they demanded, they demanded healthcare, education, housing, food, and
they got it.
They got it.
That's why my parents could live a good quality life.
They got those things.
They got those things and they were aware that in order to do that, you could not allow
the super rich who have been living lives of luxury for hundreds and hundreds of years
to eat everything while ordinary families couldn't afford to feed their kids.
I know it's difficult.
I know it's difficult.
And I know I'm probably going to lose.
I know that.
I know I'm probably going to lose.
And that means our viewers will be poor.
But I do it anyway because I do not want this country that I grew up in to fall into desperate
poverty.
I agree with you on the passion. I agree with you on the passion
and I agree with you on the problem.
I don't agree with you on the solution
because in 2019-
Well that's fine because we'll all be rich
and our kids will be rich.
In 2020, and that's not what I'm saying,
in 2020 we made a decision globally
to shut down the economy
and we taught everyone that they can live
and work from anywhere.
The biggest threat to everything you're saying
is remote working. The fact that we can live and work from anywhere. The biggest threat to everything you're saying is remote working.
The fact that we can live and work from anywhere.
Our grandparents, their boss, if their boss owned a company, that company had to physically
be in the country and the boss had to physically be in the country.
If we look at today, there are plenty of fitness trainers who work for a gym and the owner
of that gym is somewhere overseas.
Plenty of people work in a restaurant and the owner of that gym is somewhere overseas. Plenty of people work in a restaurant, and the owner of the restaurant lives overseas.
You can run a business from anywhere in the world right now.
So the problem that we face is that you're describing,
on one hand you say we need to tax it at the point of sale,
which is a consumption tax.
And then you're just not saying.
It's not a piece of tax on profits.
Okay, and then you say a tax on profit,
and then you say, oh, but then we'll stop profit shifting.
By the way, I'm also actually all for this idea
of stopping profit shifting.
I've already said, I think it's utterly ridiculous
the way that many of these global companies are treated,
and if we don't stop that, then all the money
just flows out to the tech companies.
So I'm with you on that.
But when you say tax the rich,
the actual people who own the companies, those people
can just be anywhere right now.
But their revenues can't.
Their customers are where their customers are.
Their customers are where their customers are.
Listen, Amazon doesn't pay any UK tax, doesn't pay any US tax.
Where are the customers?
In the UK and the US.
In the UK and the US.
Do you really think it's impossible for us to tax that?
Well, you're talking about taxing people at 10 million plus, right?
So this is a lot of startup entrepreneurs.
Jeff Bezos is a lot more than 10 million.
Jeff Bezos is worth a lot more than 10 million.
But you talk about anyone above 10 million is on your radar.
You don't want people worth 11 million pounds to be paying more tax.
I'm not just talking... It's not that.
Dan, you're worth more than 10 million pounds,
so if we tax people on, as Gary says, that
have more than £10 million, what are your options to avoid? Say if your objective was
to avoid that, what options do you have?
If my objective was to avoid it, I pass a board resolution that we're moving the head
office somewhere else. We move the intellectual property somewhere else. I pick up and move
my family somewhere else. And within about a week or two,
we've got a WeWork office somewhere else.
I've got a new house on Airbnb somewhere else.
And I cut ties with the UK and I'm non-tax resident here.
And I have a digital business.
I can literally make my head office anywhere in the world.
If there was a particular country
that turned hostile towards our operations,
then I'd have to withdraw service from that thing.
So that's possible, but it's unlikely that that would actually happen.
But ultimately, if I choose to get up and leave, then I get up and leave.
Now the bigger issue is would I have even come here in the first place?
And then there's another issue.
And here's the other issue, Gary, for you.
You've just had 750,000 subscribers to your YouTube channel.
It's 820, right?
It's 820, right?
So it's going up fast.
I could have one of my analysts at a consulting company
do a valuation of your brand
and do a valuation of your YouTube channel.
We could say, this is a fast-growth media company
and it's worth 11 million, right?
So we could come up with a forecast
and a projection and we say Gary's economics is actually a new fast growth media brand.
It's worth 11 million. Now your channel, now you have to pay 100 grand a year in extra
taxes because you're a millionaire.
Sorry, 1% on wealth above 10 million on 11 million is going to be 10 grand taxes.
Oh, you're saying only on the part above.
That's how taxes work.
Okay, so it's not on everything. It's okay. So it on the part above. That's how taxes work. Okay, so it's not on everything.
It's okay.
So it's a marginal tax.
That's how taxes work.
It's above.
So okay, so but is it fair that like who gets to decide what wealth is wealth and what it's
worth?
Because wealth, let's just hear me out.
Wealth is a technical term for unrealized gains, right?
It's not real.
You know, someone buys a house for 20 grand and it's worth 200
grand. They've still got the same house, but now they've got wealth. If someone starts
a business and a tiny little seed investor puts in a little angel investment, now they've
got wealth on paper. But who gets to say what is wealth? Like, for example, if you introduce
wealth taxes, theoretically, that will actually
reduce the value of wealth of things anyway, because things inside that economy are now
subject to a disadvantage. So therefore, investors will be unlikely to invest in them to a certain
point. And also, people start cutting and dodging and weaving and ducking and weaving.
So they say, oh, our UK operation is worth worth 10 million So we're now gonna start a second company over in some other country and make sure that that's where the wealth accumulates
So it's incredibly difficult because it is just unrealized gains. I know I know it's difficult
Yeah, I know these guys have the best accountants. I know it's difficult. What if there was an easier solution?
If there was an easier solution, I would support that. It's called economic freedom.
The economic freedom index.
Okay, well, this totally gives us that.
Give them more economic freedom and then they'll be rich.
Yeah, so this diagram here basically says
the most free countries have less than 10% poverty,
in fact, less than 7% poverty.
As soon as you reduce economic freedom, it jumps to 30% poverty.
You reduce economic freedom again
and it jumps up to huge amounts of poverty.
So these countries here are the least economically free and these countries are the most economically
free. The countries that get in the way of your economic freedom have more poverty and
the countries that let people make decisions for their own life have less.
What you're saying is if the governments of our countries cut taxes on us, the three
multimillionaires sitting in this table, that will improve the lives of the ordinary British
and American workers who can't afford to feed their kids.
I'll give you a real life example.
I know of a company that was going to give pay rises
to its employees and then national insurance went up
and instead of-
The national insurance, the tax on employment?
Yeah.
I'm saying to reduce that.
I'm saying to reduce tax on, I want your viewers,
the viewers here, to be paying less tax,
whilst multimillionaires pay more tax.
It's good in theory, but...
If you could tax rich people 1% of their wealth above 10 million...
I did a back of a napkin calculation, you might be able to get 20 billion.
Yeah.
That's if they don't leave. That's if they don't respond to it.
If they just happily pay it, you get 20 billion.
That's less than a week worth of current government spending.
So the government's out of control.
1.2 trillion a year of government spending is now what they spend.
OK, so let's get that 20 billion and cut the taxes for the viewers.
Cut their income taxes.
So that works out about 250 a year.
OK, so let's do more. Let's make it 60 billion.
So then you tax 3% above wealth.
Yeah, do that.
And then you also bring it down to 3.
Bear in mind, we make five or six, yeah, and then,
and that's what they did.
Do you know what they did?
That's what they did in the Second World War,
and that's why my dad could afford a house.
That's not why he could afford a house.
Okay, well, if ordinary people are losing their houses
and their wealth, which they are,
and we're getting richer,
who is it who is now owning the houses if it is not us?
The government used to own the houses and then they sold the houses.
Government wealth is collapsing.
Government wealth is collapsing.
But what they did is they sold the houses to the people.
Okay, but ordinary middle class wealth is also collapsing.
You can only do that once.
And they did it for the baby business.
So you think it's our viewers who have got my houses now?
Where is the wealth going, Daniel?
Where is the wealth going? Who has the wealth now? Who is getting richer? Who is getting the
wealth that is lost by our viewers?
I'll tell you where the biggest amounts of money are going. The biggest amounts of money
since the pandemic, 11 trillion went just to the value of seven companies that own technology.
So the biggest seven companies in the USA, 11 trillion has gone.
And you don't want their billionaire owners to pay more tax?
Would that help the UK?
Well, if you use that money to reduce tax on working people, then it would help, yeah.
They own shares in the USA, they're US citizens, so that doesn't help us here.
No, but it will help the American consumer, and then we can export the American consumer,
and it will mean the American consumer has money, and then it will show British people
how much you can achieve by taxing super rich.
You ask for it.
We can raise tax on our super rich here.
And then what I want is these guys to be taxed so much that they start to sell assets.
And then ordinary British people can buy assets again.
Because what I want is our viewers to be able to own things, to be able to own their own homes.
When I hear this, I admittedly don't know as much about these issues as you guys do,
but when I hear that there's these seven tech companies in the US,
my brain goes, can't we have one here?
Yeah.
Can't we start?
And then so my brain goes, what conditions do we have to create?
We sold one of our ones that we had.
What conditions do we have to create to have one of those seven tech companies here,
especially in this sort of AI world we're heading towards,
where when I was reading through the stats,
most of the investment in AI, which
is going to be hugely destabilizing
across every industry from driving
to any form of knowledge work, even podcasting.
I can play you a podcast now, which sounds exactly like me,
which has a 4.6 star rating on Apple, which was written by AI,
in my voice, published by AI.
Wow.
And who's accruing the value there?
Well, it's a company in America called Eleven Labs, and it's bloody open AI.
And I go, why can't we have those companies here?
We need them here.
Because China and the US are dominating this next revolution.
And I worry as a bystander that if we don't create entrepreneurship friendly environments
here, we are going to become
India.
So if you want businesses to thrive, you don't need just a good environment for entrepreneurs.
You also need people to have money that they can spend.
And we are in a country where increasingly most of the people out there have almost nothing
left over at the end of the people out there have almost nothing left
over at the end of the month. They can barely pay the bills.
Those companies are selling globally, right? So they don't need any particular company
to do well. They sell to anywhere. So like OpenAI, ChatGPT, we're all using that bloody
product and paying our $20, $30 a month.
Yeah, where do they actually get their money from? They get their money from selling data
to the rich, right?
My point was making the environment more friendly for entrepreneurs.
Because when I start a company,
I can't explain the disadvantage I'm at at the moment
if I start that kind of company here.
There's no investors.
And then all the talent seems to flock over to San Francisco.
So the British guys that built an AI company called Fixer,
which I was going to invest in, all British lads from London,
they went over to San Francisco.
They're like 25-year-olds.
They've just raised at a $60 million valuation.
In this room, this building in San Francisco
full of entrepreneurs, and they're pumping knowledge
and capital into this room.
With all due respect, Stephen, you're not a great example
for the fact that it's impossible to start
a successful online brand in the UK.
Facts.
But I also realize that the problem of...
But he started when things were different.
But I also realized I don't like using personal examples
because there's a huge amount of privilege and...
OK, is there a chat GPT in Germany?
No.
Is there a chat GPT in France?
No.
Is there a chat GPT in Australia?
No.
Is there a chat GPT in China?
It's China and...
One sec.
Yeah, exactly.
What you have here is an extremely low labor,
extremely high capital model,
which employs extremely few people across the entire world
that is focused in basically two cities.
Yeah.
Good luck competing with that.
How do we create an environment where the UK
can start to build some of these companies
which are going to capitalize
in this next technological revolution?
If you were prime minister, what would you do?
I think you need to look realistically
about what companies do we have a chance of growing.
You know, I'm not an expert in AI,
but I think trying to compete with San Francisco and London
would probably not work.
Why?
Try and do it, you know, try and do it.
And listen, I know that you can get a lot of likes saying,
let's just invest in AI, let's just invest it.
Only one city in the world outside of China has managed it.
China has managed it by basically state capitalism.
You know, this is very similar in a sense to what we had with microelectronics in Japan in the 80s, right?
When you have a new industry, especially these industries which are very capital intense and don't employ many people,
you get a first move advantage. They tend to win.
Eventually, often they get undercut by cheaper rivals. And that does happen.
You know, that does happen. And you might stand in AI. I don't think AI is going to become a massive, massive employer.
Of course, a lot of countries are going to be like,
because basically, it sounds good.
We're going to invest in AI.
We're going to invest in AI.
Personally, I think we should be looking at what
does the British person need?
We live in a country where the housing stock is falling apart.
If we say AI, when we talk about AI,
I think we're actually talking about technology, because
even a podcast like this, you don't think of this as an AI company, but actually now
the editing process, the scripting process, the transcription process, even YouTube itself
is an AI company.
So it's really technology we're speaking about here.
And I'm wondering why we can't create a better environment in the UK to start launching and
building some of these technology companies. We've even seen that. I think we should. And I think we why we can't create a better environment in the UK to start launching and building some of these technology companies.
We've even seen...
I think we should. And I think we should be looking...
How?
We should be looking at reducing taxes on people who work and make money.
This is what I've been saying for the whole time.
What about people who start companies?
Yeah, we should reduce their taxes on the income that they make.
But then if they start owning a £50 million company...
Are you telling me, if you come to me and I say,
all right, you want to start a company,
we tax you very, very little on a company that you start.
If that company becomes worth 20, 30, 40 million quid,
then we're going to start taxing you.
You're going to come and say to me, oh no, sorry,
50 million is not enough for me.
So can I ask a question on that?
So my company was valued at 50, whatever, 100 millions.
Congratulations.
And I still had, because I hadn't had an exit event,
I still had 10,000 pounds, 20,000 pounds in my bank account.
Are you saying at the point when I sell the company,
or are you saying just because I have shares in the company?
I think you can structure it a number of ways.
You can structure it a number of ways.
My preferred way is to stop people
from hoarding enormous amounts of wealth
for enormous amounts of time.
That's basically my preferred method.
There's also the wealth tax method.
There's also capital gains as a method.
There's a lot of different ways here.
There's a lot of different ways here.
But you have to deal with the problem of, if you do not tax very wealthy individuals
and very wealthy families, their share of the pie will obviously grow over time,
and they will, and they are, as we are watching, squeezing out ordinary families.
You have to deal with that.
My friend sold his company in the UK. You have to deal with that.
My friend sold his company in the UK,
it's a company everybody knows,
and I remember him saying to me at the time,
it was in the middle of the pandemic,
he had got this big exit event,
I think he'd made 300 million,
and he goes, I'm off, where are you going?
He goes, I'm going to go to Dubai and Monaco
and live between the two.
And I said to him, explain to me why.
He goes, well, the amount of tax I'd have to pay in the UK
is equivalent to me paying 20 million rent in the UK
for the next six or seven years,
which you'd have to stay here for.
So he went and he pops back in every now and then,
but it meant that he could keep that 150 million,
whatever tax he would pay.
Never had to pay it to the UK.
He's living this high-flying life now in Dubai,
drops into Monaco every now and then.
And I remember him saying to me,
well, Steve, I'd have to pay 20 million rent a year to live here.
And he all went on to say, the UK product just isn't worth it.
He goes, I'm going to get my Rolex robbed off me.
He goes, the healthcare system isn't the best.
The education system isn't necessarily the best.
And the particular one was crime,
which is I'll get mugged walking through London streets.
Steven, if you allow British people who own 300 million pounds of British assets to technically
live in Monaco and not pay tax, then you will get crime.
And you will have dirty streets, and you will have a bad healthcare system, and you will
have education.
Because if you give all of the wealth to a group of people who do not tax, there'll be
nothing left to provide things like healthcare and education for ordinary people. It's not unconnected.
These people are not technically living there. They're moving out. My friends have moved
out of the country. They don't come back to the UK. They've left and they leave with
their companies.
So they built a company here and we let them leave and pay no tax.
They typically build globally business. It's not that they pay them.
It was a global business.
Also, they don't pay no tax. They pay extortionate amounts of tax.
Anyone who's here is paying extraordinary taxes more than they've ever paid before.
One percent pays 30 percent, 10 percent pays 60 percent of 1.2 trillion a year worth of
government spending.
So this guy who's 300 million, how much tax check has he paid in his life?
I have no idea.
I have no idea.
His business was global, though His biggest customer was the US.
It's I pay 60% and our viewers will pay 30 40 50%
Do you think it's fair that your 300 million guy pays his two or three? I have no idea what he pays
Well, it sounds like he didn't pay 50%
I'd say he dashed went before he got the tax bill. Why do we allow it? Why do we allow it?
I'm not allowed to not pay my tax. What could you have done to are allowed to when you're in Japan
You wouldn't have paid UK taxes.
Yeah, because I was working in Japan and I paid Japanese taxes.
Yeah, because you were living in Japan.
This is the thing.
People can live wherever they want now.
But we're talking about...
I think we should stop obfuscating tax on people's work from tax on the assets that
they are.
No, no, but I'm saying...
So I'm talking about entrepreneurs' work generates wealth.
So when entrepreneurs often don't get-
So if I earn a billion pounds of British houses,
and then I say I live in Dubai,
and I'm getting the rent on a billion pounds of houses,
which would probably be something like,
that's gonna be something like 50 million pounds a year.
So I'm getting 50, 60 million pounds a year
of rent from British people.
And that gets paid to me from British people.
And I don't pay tax, so I live in Dubai.
Do you think that's fair?
No.
Alright, so let's change that.
Let's make people pay tax on their wealth, regardless of where they live.
The question would be, though, how would you tax people, right?
And how would you actually structure it?
Because regardless of what you feel like is fair, this is the thing.
It's not about fairness.
It's about what you can pragmatically and practically do in the modern economy.
You might say, oh, I actually, like, for example, if we said what's fair,
a lot of people would say a flat tax is fair.
You make one pound, you pay 20%.
You make a million pounds, you pay 20%.
You make 100 million pounds, you pay 20%.
So a lot of people would say the fairest tax system would just be a flat tax on everything.
Right? That would be a fair thing.
It's pragmatically, can you do it?
Is it actually good for society?
Should people be excluded from that?
So it's not about fairness.
It's about pragmatically, what can you get away with?
Well, pragmatically, what we can get away with
is desperate poverty for our viewers' kids.
If you want to have...
Can we zoom out just a minute?
I want to zoom out.
Let's zoom away from our viewers' kids.
Forget about them. They're not that poor.
I'm a dad, right? I've got three kids.
But you are a multimillionaire, dad.
You probably don't have the same problems as our viewers.
Do you know that kids born into the top
have a 60% chance of dropping out of the top?
Right?
60%.
That's the number.
It's called persistence.
You can Google it.
The persistence rates is actually only 40% for the richest,
which means 60% drop out in the second.
Do you think your kids have a 60% chance of living in poverty?
Possibly, not poverty.
Do you know what's interesting?
We're all trying to aim at the same goal, I think, here.
I'm not sure we are, boss.
That's fair, that's fair. Maybe we're not.
I suspect some of us are maybe trying to protect our kids' wealth position.
I want widespread affluence through the technological revolution that's happening.
And I don't want the people who create that to want to go somewhere else.
So you agree with me that we should cut tax on wealth creators and raise tax on wealth hoarders?
Well, broadly.
Okay, so let's do it. Let's cut tax on people who are making income, let's cut tax on people who are working hard,
creating a good product, making a good income, and let's raise tax on people who are sitting there on 20, 30, 40, 100, 200, 500 million pounds of assets
that they're going to give to their kids
and they're going to use to dominate society
and squeeze out the middle class.
Who's an example of someone who's hoarding wealth?
Rishi Sunak.
So his family owns a tech company.
His wife's dad owns a tech company.
That's what I mean.
Which he will inherit and his kids will inherit.
His net worth that is quoted is based upon his wife's...
Yeah, but that company already exists.
It's created now.
Yeah.
It's worth billions.
But they have to reinvent that business every two years.
Like it's a...
So you think that if Rishi Sanak's father-in-law stopped managing the company, it would be
valueless?
No, I think it hires hundreds of thousands of people and it's a big company.
I don't know a lot about that particular company, but I know it's a tech company.
Steve Jobs died, okay?
Is Apple valueless?
No.
Let's not pretend that these creators are the sole reason these companies are valuable.
Sure.
And what we're talking about in many cases, you know, I was a trader, okay?
And I'm worth a million quid and now that is just assets, I just own the assets.
I own the assets, and that will grow,
and it will grow, and it will grow, and it will grow.
And that will squeeze out, and squeeze out,
and squeeze out, and squeeze out our viewers.
And I'll give that to my kids, they don't even need to work.
They don't even have to work, they can just live on,
I can live off the wealth.
Is that what you want?
Do you think there are any opportunities for people today?
Like if you're born into a poor family, do you think it's possible that housing being
shit, and we can both agree on that, but do you think there are new opportunities that
didn't exist for our parents or grandparents, but they do exist for people today?
I think the reality is, for kids from poor backgrounds, it is almost impossible to realistically get even financial
security, never mind wealth.
But why do you think you could do it, I could do it, he could do it, but you don't think
other people could do it?
Well, the first thing is I'm 38 now, so I'm not a kid nowadays. Listen, I won every math
competition I've ever been in. You know what I mean? Since I was a little kid, I didn't
even have a desk in my house. I was one of the top students at LSE,
and I still had to win my job by cheating in a card game.
That's the world that we live in.
I don't think that's a very replicable strategy.
And it's very easy for people like us who've made money,
say, oh, we did it, aren't we great?
Go out and, you know, you've said that you think
if young people go and work in tech business,
they can get financial security.
If it was that easy, they'd all be doing it.
They're not idiots.
Our viewers are not idiots. They're trying. They're trying.
They want to find the good opportunities and they're working so hard.
I'm not the one saying they're idiots. You're the one who says that they can't do it anymore.
I see people do it all the time. I'm working in entrepreneurship.
People from poor backgrounds.
Poor backgrounds.
So then why are our viewers, you think all of our viewers, if it was that easy, why is
everybody not doing it?
I'll tell you why people aren't doing it.
We went through a schooling system that taught us how to get an office job.
Okay.
Right?
We went through a schooling system to prepare us for a world that doesn't really
exist anymore, which is the industrial revolution world.
And you have to go through a process of figuring out how it really works.
So what I see is that most often the people who do really well financially who are young,
they dropped out of school, they dropped out of university, they started learning how to
do things by doing their own research, they start their own business or co-found a business,
they take a very alternative path.
None of that was taught to us at school.
None of it's taught to us in normal society.
We have a school system that manufactures people for a set of skills that are not particularly valuable
anymore, and we also get them in debt for those skills.
When people sidestep that and say,
okay, I'm not gonna get into university debt,
I'm just gonna go off and actually figure out
how the world works, there's actually loads
of opportunities.
Okay, so I guess we've sorted it then.
All of our viewers need to do is go and buy Dan's book,
become an entrepreneur and become a millionaire.
It's that easy.
Why weren't you guys doing it to begin with?
They're idiots.
The viewers are idiots.
They should be just being more entrepreneurial.
It's as simple as that.
More entrepreneurial, start a business.
Listen, I come from East London, okay?
My friends can't feed their kids, okay?
And if it was as simple as going out and being an entrepreneur,
I can bet you they would do it. I can bet you they would do it. Let us, I'm sick of multi-millionaires
telling kids who can't afford to turn the heating on, you just need to be more entrepreneurial.
It's sick, Dan, it's sick. But this gives people mental illness. It gives people mental
illness. Tell them the truth, okay? We, your older generation, we took the opportunities
and now it's almost impossible to get out of poverty.
And don't just stand up and wave your millions of pounds
in front of them and say, if you're entrepreneurial like me,
you could do it, you could have it,
because it's sick because they can't.
They can't feed their kids then.
They can't turn the heating on.
Don't tell them to be more entrepreneurial.
Fix the system that drives more and more and more of them
into poverty every generation.
I find it very strange that you think it would be easier to fix the entire global economic
system than to start a business and fix your own personal economics.
The thing that I know that gives people mental health issues is feeling that they have no
agency in their life, that they can't do anything.
Your video where you talk about if you don't have a rich dad, you're screwed, there's
no such thing as meritocracy, You're never going to be successful. To me, if I had have come across
your content at 19, 20 years old, I would have been screwed. I'm so glad that I came
across people who said, Daniel, you weren't born into a rich family. You don't have any
bank of mom and dad. But it's cheap and easier than ever to start a business. Start by working
for someone who's got a business,
then figure out what's your opportunity.
And there's a way, there is a way.
I've actually worked with a lot of teenagers
from poor backgrounds.
And one of the things we do is we tell them
if it's possible for someone else, it is possible for you.
I also worked in rural Uganda with a charity
that did work with the poorest of the poor.
One of the most incredible things I ever saw was a woman who started out literally picking
food out of a trash pile.
And she was basically, they shared with her how to start a chicken business, which then
ended up as a pig business, which then ended up as a pig business, which then ended up as a cattle business, and she ended up making, hiring 15, 16 people in her local community.
The power of entrepreneurship is that starting with nothing, you can actually make improvements.
I'm not saying everyone ends up as a millionaire, and I'm not saying everyone ends up equal,
but I'm saying you can make improvements in your life.
And the thing that causes mental health issues is the feeling of having no agency or no control over your circumstances
until the world changes the whole economic system.
Listen...
I never told people, don't work hard.
I never once said that. Never once said that.
You said if your dad wasn't rich, you'll never be rich.
Which is true in 99.9% of cases.
I've never told people, don't work hard.
That's actually not true in 99% of cases.
I've never told people, don't work hard, OK? And listen, if you think that Ugandans should be more entrepreneurial, I've never been
to Uganda, maybe that's the problem out there.
Maybe that's the problem in Nigeria.
Maybe that's the problem in India.
Listen, I've never said don't work hard.
When I brought my book out last year, the hardback, I was at some event and I come out,
I was drinking in London Bridge.
And I come out late.
It was like 1 a.m.
And some guy come up to me when I was unlocking my bike.
Some guy from the United States.
He was like, I'm some guy come up to me when I was unlocking
my bike. Some guy from Newcastle, which is the North East of England. It's this quite
poor town. There's a lot of working class people there. He said, I'll be watching you
on YouTube and I love your stuff. This guy started crying. This guy started crying on the street, right, in front of me.
He's like, I work so hard, Gary, I work two jobs.
My mom's sick and I'm trying to help,
I'm trying to support and I don't understand why.
And I'm sorry that I'm crying,
but nobody ever told me that it wasn't my fault before.
That's what he said to me, okay?
And listen, listen, I believe 100% aspiration, ambition, entrepreneurial spirit.
I would never see a kid that has that and say turn it off, okay?
But the flip side of you, if you just work hard enough you can make it, is if you didn't
make it, it's because you didn't work hard enough and it's your fault.
And I would like you to sit and think very hard before you send that message to young men
and young women in our society.
Meritocracy doesn't mean that everyone
ends up with the same result.
Here's what I'm trying to achieve.
I'm trying to achieve the people who have ambition,
who can go for it, are incentivized to do it
and incentivized to build jobs and build companies
that will employ other people.
And what about the ones that just want to work hard and have a good family and take care of them
and have a home and be able to turn the heating on and be able to have financial security?
They need to work for a business, don't they?
They need to work for you?
Yeah, pardon?
They need to work for you?
They need to work for a business, some business, right?
If someone doesn't create that business, then where do they work for?
We now have, by the way, we now have 11% of working age people are now declared too sick to work.
We have a huge problem in the UK.
We also have 25% of people who are working age don't work.
It's one in seven men don't work at all.
Do you think they're lazy, Dan?
I think the system is collapsing.
Do you think the system is changing?
The average British American working is lazy?
What I think is happening is that the technology companies
are totally transforming and disrupting everything.
And what happened is around the post-war era,
we had good jobs, we had, you could work in a local thing.
What's happening now is that jobs are going to the Philippines,
they're going to, technology does three things.
It makes jobs more simple, which means them replaceable.
It makes jobs global,
where you can move them to anywhere else.
And then ultimately it automates the job altogether
and gets rid of it through code and software.
And what's really going on in the last,
especially five years since the pandemic,
is technology has decimated the existing systems
that we all relied upon when we grew up. And when I say the education system isn't really working,
it's still pretending that there are office jobs available
for people when they graduate.
And it's still pretending that there's like 1950s scenarios
available when actually my kids are going to be disrupted by AI,
everyone's kids are going to be disrupted by AI.
You know, these sorts of things are the things that really we
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I want to take this back to a point you were talking about earlier, which is about personal
agency, because I would like you, Daniel, to give the counter to your own argument,
because I want to make sure when we talk about solutions to this problem, start a business, be entrepreneurial.
You can also understand how that might, that works for people with our brains
and our mindset and whatever we had that made us do that, our risk, appetite, our
trauma, whatever it might be, but not everybody is wide in such a way.
So that's not necessarily the best solution for every.
And also we sit here with a bit of hindsight bias where we were lucky and it worked out
for us.
But when you look at the stats around businesses succeeding, what you know the stats, it's
like 90% of businesses fail.
So most of them are failing.
The ones that emerge from that, people like me, then we have a bias where we go, well,
it worked for us and you can do it too.
I don't come from money.
So I have the same bias.
Like I watched.
Well, I've built from scratch several times
because I got disrupted several times.
So I've had to start with nothing several times and build.
But you start with a certain type of person, right?
And when we say start from nothing,
you actually started with a wealth of information
and the whole game in big building business.
Is it intellectual capital?
Intellectual capital, having been through it before,
being around that mentor that gave you the information.
Also having access to a great market.
Like having access to a free market is a big thing.
I was born in Australia and I moved to London
at the peak of London's economic freedom.
So this can't be broadly applicable advice, can it?
Well, I think personal agency is broadly applicable.
Yes, I agree.
I got this friend of mine who woke up one day,
he went out clubbing, went out to a nightclub,
felt sick, collapsed, woke up
and they had chopped off all four limbs, right? So he had quadruple amputee. He was 19 years old. So he wakes
up in bed and he basically says, I'm a quadruple amputee, I was fine 48 hours ago and now I'm
a quadruple amputee. And he decides to make this decision in the hospital room that this
is going to be the best thing that ever happened to him. And he makes that decision.
Even that is a consequence of his him and his wiring.
What I'm trying to understand is that he ended up starting a clinic and it's a multimillion
dollar clinic.
Yeah.
I mean, it's incredible what people can do.
And he's the exception, not the rule.
It's incredible what people can do.
But you only need a few people to succeed and the whole economy starts to improve.
We actually, in this UK, we only at the peak of our entrepreneurial like blitzing it,
where we're doing so well, there was only 40,000 scale ups.
40,000 companies were creating jobs growth, higher wages, investment into the country.
You know, it's only 1% of people who pay 30% of the taxes and 10% of people who pay
60% of the taxes and 10% of people who pay 60% of the taxes.
So you only need one in 100 to actually create something
that's valuable and you get an extra 30% of taxes.
But so that again is, we need this one,
that's advice for the people that end up
getting into that 1%.
Yeah, but who does everyone else work for?
Like all jobs growth comes from entrepreneurs.
So what are you saying to those, the 99% now,
are you saying go get a job?
Well, you need wealth creators in the 99% there, are you saying go get a job?
Well you need wealth creators in the economy who are building something.
Like you take Gymshark, people who work at Gymshark, they're super glad that this guy
started the company.
They're really happy that there's a company.
Otherwise, where would they go?
What would they work?
Where would they work?
So if Ben decides that he doesn't want to start
that company in the UK,
or if he gets to 10 million and stops,
then all of those additional jobs are a toast.
They're all gone.
So you're encouraging the entrepreneurial,
you're not encouraging everyone to become an entrepreneur.
You're saying those that have those, that bias or that-
I'm saying we need a system
that encourages the people who can to do.
And what about everybody else?
Well, the flow-on effect is that that creates jobs, that creates wealth in the economy,
and free markets lift everybody up.
Free markets just means that everyone's trading with everyone.
It starts to, like the whole thing, I mean, it's just a tale as old as time.
As soon as economies are free and there are entrepreneurs
starting things and growing things, everyone's life improves.
Everyone's life gets better.
And what part of that do you disagree with, Gary?
I think it doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
The only period, listen, the last 70 years are not normal, Stephen.
The last 70 years are not normal.
The last 70 years in Europe and the US,
where ordinary people like my dad
could work for the post office on less than average wage
and buy a house and support family, it's not normal.
It's not normal in the world, and it's not normal in history.
Most countries in the world are not like that.
Most countries have a small super rich elite
and a very large group of extremely poor people.
That's most of the country,
and it's most of history in this country,
and it's most of history in the US. You know, we talk about Charles Dickens,
I read Hard Times. I read Hard Times and this is written in the 19th century when Britain
was like the industrial superpower of the whole world. And at the time, the government
was talking about, should we tax these industrialists? And the industrialists were saying, if you
tax us, we'll throw our factories into the sea. And it just reminds me, you know, the only time we've ever really been able to provide
decent living conditions for ordinary working people was the period after the war where we massively redistributed wealth.
And now we're losing that holding of wealth of the middle class.
Can you acknowledge though that that was a completely different time as it relates to being able to…
It was a different time, but you know, I could-
Because of technology.
Nigeria today, Brazil today, the UK 300 years ago,
France 200 years ago.
There is only one specific time
that we have ever successfully provided
broad living standards for ordinary people.
And it was a period of time where we protected
a broadly equal wealth distribution
and tax the rich at very high rates.
And you can acknowledge that that's extremely hard to do because the nature of the economy
is now different.
100%. 100%. 100%. That's the reason why all of our grandparents and our great grandparents
and our great great grandparents lived in poverty. And that's why I know I'm probably
going to lose. And that's why I bet on the economy getting worse. And that's why I know
poverty is going to increase because it was extremely difficult to get that unusually
fair share for ordinary working people. And I know we're losing the argument.
And I know that Faraj will win and I know that Trump will win.
And I know that things will get worse.
I don't think I'm going to win.
So if you know you're promoting a strategy that is not going to work, and it sounds
like you think is incredibly, almost impossible, then why would you not be
more practical in your solution Stephen if it was impossible?
I wouldn't be here. So you think it's possible. Of course, it's possible. Of course it's possible
But you believe you're not gonna win. I'm a betting man Steve. I'm a betting man
I put my bets on you know, I am if I guess okay
Okay, so my youtube channel is growing really really quickly
And you know, I'm obviously starting a bit of a movement and there's a lot of political support
And if it keeps growing we'll get more political support.
At the end of the day, I'm trying to tax the richest and most powerful people in the world.
And most of these people will come out and attack me and they'll try and stop me.
And I do not have billions of pounds, hundreds of millions of pounds to use to support my YouTube channel.
I'm counting on ordinary people like your viewers to support and share my message.
Now listen, for most of history, that has not worked.
And for most of history, that has not worked. And for most of history,
ordinary families live in poverty.
I don't think it's impossible that we ordinary people
can win and get a fairer share,
but I think it's worth fighting for Steve.
So I fight for it anyway.
He's right that for most of history,
you've had the super elite and then everyone else is down
here and it's massive wealth inequality is almost the normal
for the last 5,000 years.
And almost everywhere, you've got kings, queens, dukes, and peasants and serfs down there.
There have been economic situations that have been different.
Dubai is a really strange situation.
It's a desert.
It's inhospitable to live in.
It's the last place in the world most people would think or choose that they would want
to be. And yet it's one of the most economically last place in the world most people would think or choose that they would want to be.
And yet it's one of the most economically rich places in the world right now.
They actually didn't start with oil wealth.
They were able to borrow money to build Dubai.
But the low tax environment has now attracted some of the world's most talented people to
go and build technology companies there.
And if you I don't know, have you been there recently?
I've been to Dubai as he is going up.
So at the moment, it is the most thriving entrepreneurial community on earth outside of the US, but
probably even rivaling the US, that there are investors, there's entrepreneurs, and
the wealth is going through the roof.
I've got two friends who are personal trainers, fitness trainers.
One fitness trainer has decided to stop working more hours because he's hit 50 grand a year
and he now gets taxed at 40%.
So he's basically decided he's going to earn right up to 50,000 and then stop working.
And then the other fitness trainer went to Dubai, launched an online fitness community,
and has just bought a $350,000 Ferrari.
And one entrepreneur is super pumped and super excited about building a business because
he's not overtaxed.
The other entrepreneur has literally said, I'm not willing to do this because of how
much I have to pay.
Just want to be clear, I've always campaigned for lower taxes on working people.
On working people.
Always, always.
But here's the thing, right?
If I was asking you, you've just become one of the best-selling authors in the country.
If your publisher came to you and said, because you're in the top 1% of our authors, we're
going to halve your royalties if you sign a second book with us. You wouldn't sign a second
book with them. You would go to another publisher who says, we'll pay you more royalties because
you're so successful.
I would have written this book for free, Dan. I would have written this book for free. In
fact, the first time I got offered a deal, I said, don't pay me in advance.
Then give your royalties away.
Why?
Well, because if you... Well, what I'm saying...
Fine, I'll give my royalties away. I'll shut, because if you... Well, what I'm saying... Fine, I'll give my royalties away.
No, but I'm saying...
I'll shut my YouTube channel down.
No, but I'm...
I'll stop working.
I'm saying we respond to incentives that if your publisher,
if Penguin came to you and said,
book number two, you get half royalties because you're in the top 1%.
Would you sign with Penguin or would you go with someone else?
Dan, I walked away from a two million pound job a year
to run a YouTube channel.
Do you think I'd do the work that I do for money?
I'm not talking about that you do it for money.
I'm just saying if you had the option
to sign between two publishing contracts,
and all things being equal,
one's going to penalize you for being in the top 1%,
and the other one's going to reward you
for being in the top 1%.
Of course you would go with the normal,
like if all things being equal,
you want to write a second book anyway.
It's the same for entrepreneurs.
When entrepreneurs start companies, we can either start them in high tax economies,
or with a stroke of a pen, start them in low tax economies.
I think the rich world is going to have to start rethinking the fact that it allows people,
very, very wealthy people, to own enormous amounts of their physical wealth,
go live overseas and not pay tax.
I think that has to be revisited for sure.
Because what you're saying is, I want the benefit
of being able to sell to the US market and the UK market,
but I don't want the obligation of having to pay US
and UK taxes.
And you are correct that at the moment,
the US and UK governments allow that.
And I think that's phenomenally stupid.
The US taxes you on worldwide income.
Well, only a small amount, right?
So I think that realistically, I think that the US
and UK governments have to stop that.
But the way I see it, the US and UK governments and increasingly a lot of global governments
are being brought up by the elites.
We have Elon Musk is basically the president, and we had Rishi Sunak, who's father-in-law
was one of the richest men in the world.
If you're Rishi Sunak, who for our American viewers was our prime minister until very
recently, his father-in-law was one of the richest men in the world.
He's got 700 million pounds personal wealth.
He's going to be making 30, 40 million pounds passive income.
And you're getting paid 130 grand a year to be prime minister.
When you're making policy, do you think, maybe I'll ask my father-in-law it was.
Yeah.
You know, the fact is, what you're seeing here is if you allow the rich, I'm never
ever against entrepreneurship.
I'm not against people getting rich.
If you allow the rich to get richer and richer and richer,
they squeeze the middle class
and they squeeze the poor class out of things like housing,
of things like space and cities, of things like energy,
and of things like owning a sharing government
and owning sharing the medium.
Do you acknowledge that countries that adopt
a anti-rich, big government approach tend to collapse?
What, like this country in the 60s?
Well, we needed a US bailout.
We needed an IMF bailout in 1976.
But the US did the same thing.
The US had even higher taxes than us.
We basically, like you take all the countries that where the government
becomes big, they meddle with your life.
They're involved in every decision, right?
Half the economy.
I mean, here's one other thing.
This period is known as the golden age of capitalism.
It's the period of time when... Which period? This period now. The 50, here's one other thing. This period is known as the golden age of capitalism. It's the period of time when ordinary-
Which period? This period now.
It's the 50 years after the second world war.
Oh, it's the golden age of middle class, to be middle class.
You don't care about the middle class?
No, of course I do.
The 70 years after the World War II,
where the government sold off all of its houses
to middle class people, so we got housing wealth,
but you can only do that trick once, right? So you can only sell off all the houses to everyone once, which is why all the
baby boomers own them. Living standards collapsed after the houses were sold. There was a long
period where the houses weren't sold. Between the Second World War and the 80s, the houses weren't being sold.
When do you pinpoint living standards collapsing?
Well, I think there's a few obviously big moments. I think 2008 is a big moment. I think COVID is a big
moment. I think it's the 80s where you start to see the wealth distribution go. What matters is actually the
distribution itself. So once you change the tax system, it takes a bit of time for the wealth
distribution to change. But once you start, for me, the big thing is the loss of wealth holding.
I want ordinary families to be able to hold wealth. And once you lose that, you lose the middle
class. And you will not find me a single country in the world now,
or the history of the world, that has provided good, broad living standards
without allowing ordinary families to own assets.
Yeah, I agree.
And take Singapore, for example, where everyone's encouraged to own properties,
they've got an amazing system in Singapore.
It's a massive government, by the way. Enormous government.
25% of GDP.
But they own all the houses. They have of GDP. But they own all the houses.
They have a wealth fund.
They own all the houses.
They don't own all the houses, they have a sovereign wealth fund that circulates houses through.
They own the houses.
They've solved property.
Singapore owns the house.
The Singapore government owns an enormous share of the housing stuff.
So do you think we should own the housing stuff?
It's actually owned by pension funds.
They force, not force their citizens, but they direct their citizens into home ownership.
So you don't think the Singaporean government owns a large share of the housing stock?
I just know the Singaporean government's only 25% of the economy.
But a big share of the housing stock.
So 75% of the economy is capitalist.
I would like to say, by the way, just to be really clear, I've never ever once advocated for big government.
Never a single time.
But more taxes is a bigger government.
I want higher taxes on the wealth orders so we can tax wealth creators and working people
less.
I don't want a bigger government.
I want our viewers to have more money.
I want our viewers to have more money.
And also, I want to tax those super rich so that they stop squeezing ordinary families
out of asset ownership.
It just, yeah.
It seems like an obvious solution.
It seems like...
Yeah, it's a good solution, yeah.
It seems like, like, hey, who's got the money?
Rich people.
Not the money, the assets, the assets.
Who's got the assets?
Rich people, then let's just take them off of them and...
No, no, no, I don't want to redistribute.
I am the only person on this table anti-redistribution
because the redistribution is happening in front of our eyes.
The middle class is losing its assets.
Government is losing its assets.
Those assets are being accumulated by the rich.
I want to stop the redistribution.
Please, please, I am the most anti-redistribution person
in this game.
We need to stop the redistribution of wealth away
from ordinary British and American families.
So the difference is for me, it's very simple,
which is I really truly believe that free markets
and low governments
and less taxes creates more wealth in the middle.
Dan, freedom for the heron is death for the fishes.
If we have complete freedom, multimillionaires like you and me will get richer and richer
and richer every year and we will squeeze out and we will eat the middle class.
Can I ask you though, if wealth inequality could be solved but everyone does worse,
is that a good solution?
Obviously not.
The whole reason I do this is because I don't want ordinary people to collapse into poverty. could be solved but everyone does worse. Is that a good solution? Obviously not.
The whole reason I do this is because I don't want ordinary people to collapse into poverty.
This is about people being able to feed their kids.
So wealth inequality is not the problem.
It's collapsing living standards.
That's quite contorted.
So living standards.
Yes, it's quite a contorted logic.
The problem is, collapsing living standards.
I am somebody who has made millions of pounds by understanding the simple fact that living standards are falling because of growing wealth inequality.
So living standards, if they were to increase, but they were super rich, is that a problem?
I think you do need to be worried about extremely wealthy elites.
Yeah, I think what's interesting, you look at the founding of the United States.
These guys, the founding of the United States conceptually is really based on these ideas of distribution of power.
That's why you have the president and the house and the senate
and you have this independent judiciary.
They're like, we cannot allow power to become concentrated
because they came from a Europe which had extremely concentrated power
and extremely wealthy elites and extremely broad poverty.
So I think that allowing a small group of society
to increasingly monopolise power and wealth over time
is obviously something we should be worried about.
But primarily, the reason I worry about wealth and equality
is because I see and I bet on and I make money on
the fact that it causes living standards to fall.
By the way, I actually really agree with you
and the founding fathers of the US,
they did, especially around the 1900s,
they did want to break up monopolies and breaking up monopolies was one of the US, they did, especially around the 1900s, they did want to
break up monopolies. And breaking up monopolies was one of the big things that they did,
trust busting, where they broke up Standard Oil and all of those sorts of things. One thing I do
really see happening at the moment is that we have a stupid outdated definition of monopolies,
where we use monopolies the same way they used it when they had the oil companies that
owned all the oil.
In the technology world, a monopoly is formed through an ecosystem.
So Amazon, for example, owning AWS and Audible and this and this and this and Whole Foods,
it creates a fortress that's almost impossible to compete with.
And Google owning YouTube and Gmail and all of this, they create these fortresses through
ecosystems.
One of the things that I do think we need to look at is compulsory breakup of big tech
once you hit a certain time, because it's very difficult.
Because do you know, billionaires have two big fears, right?
Keep them up at night having nightmares.
Number two is high taxes.
Number one is that startup entrepreneur
who disrupts their business.
And they want to kill that early.
Steve Jobs at 24 years old disrupted IBM.
And Jeff Bezos disrupted Walmart.
So they are terrified of entrepreneurs in the middle.
And they want to create government regulations to say,
hey, you know what, let's cap entrepreneurs at 10 million. You they want to create government regulations to say,
hey, you know what, let's cap entrepreneurs at 10 million.
You can get to 10 million.
It's okay for us.
We're way past that point.
But Gary's our guy because he's going to cap everyone
at 10 million.
I never said cap anyone at 10 million, by the way.
I never said.
Well, because what do you think will happen?
People stop.
As soon as you have wealth taxes, people just give up.
They just don't want to go.
So you're telling me our viewers, if they said,
if they knew they could build a 20, 30 million pound company.
It sounds ridiculous. But they knew they would have to pay 20.
If you're worth 30 million, 1% above, it's 200 grand a year.
So if I said, if you can have a 30 million pound company.
The traders stop.
Just bear in mind, you make 5% a year on your wealth.
So if you've got a 300 million pound company, you're going to be making 15 million pounds
a year.
And I'm turning to you and I'm going to say, you've got to pay 200 grand a year on your
50 million pound revenue.
And they're going to say, you know what? I'm not going to start a business. I don't want to be worth 30 million quid.
This is a couple, you know this is ridiculous. You know nobody is going to say, oh my God, I don't want to be a multi-multi-millionaire because in 20 years time, I'll have to pay 1% taxes.
But most traders, most traders are earning, what most people earn in a lifetime, traders can earn in a year. Most traders don't
stop.
No, I'm here. Talk about that a lot in my book.
So most traders just keep going. Entrepreneurs are the same, that they're motivated to keep
going. But when you have wealth advisors and investors saying, do not build a company in
the UK because they're anti-wealth.
Listen, I'm not trying to make the UK anti-wealth. I'm not trying to make the UK anti-wealth. I think the UK and the US need to be looking at a situation
where you cannot allow people who own enormous businesses
that sell to your country to live in Dubai,
to live in the Cayman Islands and not pay tax.
And I don't think that's a controversial position.
I've got a question for both of you,
which is if you are a young person
and you're 18 years old now,
and that you're listening to this,
but your objective really is an individualistic one, you want to get rich and you have a great person and you're 18 years old now, and that you're listening to this, but your objective really is an individualistic one,
you want to get rich and you have a great future
for you and your family,
like all of us have been able to do,
what would your advice be to them, Gary,
at this moment in time?
This is such a hard question.
I know Dan's angry at me for what I put in my video,
how to get rich.
Somebody came around to my house and asked me this
other day, obviously I get asked it a lot because, stupidly, I'm very public about the fact that I'm rich. Somebody came around to my house and asked me this other day. Obviously I get asked it a lot because stupidly I'm very public about the fact that I'm rich. What I did is
not replicable. What I did is not replicable. It's not. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but it's not.
People always say, why don't you teach me to trade? It's hard. It's hard trading and it's
dangerous. I think a lot of young men are getting sold into trading and becoming gambling
addicts. Work know, work hard.
And I wouldn't even say don't become an entrepreneur.
I've never ever said these things.
Work hard.
You know, if you think that you have an opportunity in tech entrepreneurship, go for it.
Understand it's risky.
I think that sometimes this message, just become an entrepreneur and you'll make it,
is a bit dangerous because I think most people who try to become entrepreneurs fail and I
think it's super, super dangerous.
The reality is, and you know, maybe Dan won't like this, maybe you won't like this, I think it is very,
very difficult for a young man or a young woman from a poor family to become rich.
And I think it's increasingly hard even to just get those basics of financial security.
So listen, obviously reduce your spending if you can.
Don't buy into this Valenciaga bullshit.
Stay away from that.
But work hard, study hard, try to get a good job. But also understand we are shrinking the seats on the lifeboat.
That's what we're doing.
We used to allow 50% to be secure.
Then it's 40%, then it's 30%, then it's 20%.
You know, you've got family in Nigeria.
If a young person from Shantytown in Nigeria came to you and said,
Stephen, what could I do to get rich?
You would have to say to him, realistically, listen, you are in a difficult situation
here. You need to work really, really hard.
But if you are able to make enough money to support a family, be proud of yourself.
What I would actually say to them, so yeah, I have got family in Nigeria.
For people that don't know, I'm by blood half Nigerian.
I would say to them that knowledge is really your life raft.
So obviously there's a big tech boom happening in Nigeria,
which is liberating a lot of people from that situation.
So I would try and tell them to get on the life raft
that is like knowledge of this new revolution.
So from Nigeria, you can learn to code.
And then the great thing now is that we're high,
we literally have actually, this is quite interesting we're building a
Tech company in San Francisco called flight cast
It's live everyone can go look at a flight cost calm and the lead developer
Oh and guess radar the lead developer of guest radar is a Nigerian guy
But how many of those jobs in the Nigerian tech sector are going to kids that grew up in the shanty towns? I have no idea
Because I worked in People asked me tell me how to do what you have no idea. Because I worked in, people ask me,
tell me how to do what you did, all right?
I worked in Canary Wharf, it's in East London.
I could see the building from my house growing up.
There was not a single other kid from East London
the whole time I was there.
Do you know to Dan's point about this remote work revolution
where like work now has, you can work from anywhere.
And in our company, Third Web, San Francisco,
met some of the staff that we now have are in the Philippines
because they just have like great creatives there.
It's obviously more cost effective.
Isn't this a huge part of what's going on in our economy,
this digitalization and this remotification of work?
It is, it is, it is.
But I think for many people, you know,
I'm sure you pay your work in the
Philippines very, very well. Most of these people, they used to have a half
decent wage and office. And now they're locked in their bedrooms barely paying
the bills.
Yeah.
In the Philippines?
Not in the Philippines. The Philippines guys are balling out.
The Philippines is booming at the moment. Yeah. So you think the average person in the Philippines is Not in the Philippines. The Philippine guys are balling out of control. I'm saying the Philippines is booming at the moment.
So you think the average person in the Philippines is living a luxurious life?
What's happening at the moment...
Do you think the average person in the Philippines is living a luxurious life?
There is this thing called remote foreign workers and this is a huge boom and the economic
boom...
So the kids should move to the Philippines then.
It's great.
You get a great quality of life in the Philippines.
You know, when I look to the stumps of Manila, they should just get jobs.
I don't know why they're not getting their laptops out.
The poverty in the Philippines is horrific.
Listen, Philippines is a beautiful country.
An amazing country. I love the Philippines.
But money's flowing in there at a rate that's never been...
But what is the life like for your average Filipina?
Well, would you agree that their economy is just getting flooded with money at the moment? Like, money's flowing in there. Money is flowing in, but it is not giving a good quality of life for your average Filipina. Well, would you agree though that their economy is just getting flooded with money at the
moment? Like money's flowing in there.
Money is flowing in, but it is not giving a good quality of life for your average Filipina.
That's not true. Remote foreign workers.
Well, we can ask our Filipino viewers to tell us what life's like for the average.
Remote foreign workers can actually support their, often support their entire family.
I don't know what the average wage is in the Philippines.
Just to bring it back to this point though, so I wanted to say from Gary, he said work
hard if you're a young guy listening to this now.
I was reading this really interesting article yesterday from the, I think it was from a
major newspaper talking about the Lost Boys and it goes to show that I think it's one
in seven young men that is at a working age now are out of work.
So there's lots of talk around young men in particular and how they're struggling.
You'd say work hard, Gary.
Work hard, no Balenciaga.
But the big thing is, the big thing is, recognise the situation that you're in.
And I would encourage them to support my work and follow my channel because
the lifeboats are shrinking.
And trust me, we're going to get out kids in the lifeboats.
We all know that.
All right.
And if those lifeboats are shrinking, if you don don't if you don't stop the ship from going down
It is not you and you and me who are gonna go down will be fine
If you don't fight the political fight, I guarantee you people like Daniel will so you're saying that they should also get involved in
The political fights you have to you have to that's what our grandparents did
And if they want to become millionaires like you and me and Dan or sounds like Dan's got better advice for that than I do
Okay If they want to become millionaires like you and me and Dan. Well, it sounds like Dan's got better advice for that than I do.
Okay, well, I'm going to ask Dan as well, but I'm just wondering how your advice
ties into sort of like the young person who's trying to liberate themselves from where you came from or where I came from.
You know, I don't think I'm the guy to say that, man, because, you know,
I had this unusual gift from a young age.
I was very, very, very good at maths
and I just followed that.
And my sister, she's a poet,
and she wrote a really successful grime musical
about Dizzy Rascal's first album.
She comes from obviously the same family as me,
poor family.
She worked so hard.
She worked so, so hard.
Two degrees, she can barely pay the rent.
So I don't want to turn around to our young kids and say, well, I've got this degrees, she can barely pay the rent. All right, so I don't want to turn around
to our young kids and say,
well, I've got this talent, follow your talent.
Because it doesn't work, Stephen.
It doesn't work.
Yeah.
Wait, my sister does great work.
But financially, for young people,
following your passion, following your talent,
unless you come from a rich family,
realistically, very, very rarely works.
And I know it worked for the three of us at this table,
but let's not pretend that everyone experiences the same things that we experienced.
What would you say to that, Dianne, and what's your answer?
I think there's two economies going on at the moment.
There's a dying economy, which is the Industrial Revolution economy,
and that is all the office jobs and the factory jobs and all of that sort of stuff,
which is very much being automated away and moved to globally. And at the same time, there's this new bubbling up digital economy,
which I'd call the entrepreneur economy or the digital economy.
Both of these economies are kind of coexisting.
One's going like that, one's going like that.
And if you want to be economically successful,
you need to stand next to the biggest piles of money that you can.
You know, unfortunately, being a poet next to the biggest piles of money that you can.
You know, unfortunately, being a poet doesn't pay a lot of money.
We all know that.
That's not a surprise.
If you came from a very rich family and you were a poet, you'd probably be one of the
60% who fell out of a rich family as well.
If you want to be economically successful, you need to say, what is the thing that's
economically booming right now?
Gary saw the finance industry at that particular time, but if we actually look at the finance
industry now, it's in decline.
And trading is being replaced by AI robots.
People who worked in your career are going to be replaced by IT systems that basically
do similar jobs.
It's going to be, you know, these things happen.
We're going through a massive technological change.
But at the same time, it's never been easier to learn skills for free on YouTube.
It's never been easier to join communities where you can get mentoring and get support.
There are communities of angel investors who do invest in startups.
It's never been cheaper or easier to start a company.
There's never been more software and technology
to scale and grow, you know, in just a,
in a short space of time.
I would say do what Gary's done.
Gary publishes online, he's built a personal brand,
he's attached it to a recurring revenue model.
He's got-
I also work for three, for free for four years.
I'm not sure how replicable that is.
You know, so build a personal brand,
attach it to a business model that is where money's flowing.
These are positive things you can do.
We all have to play the cards we're dealt.
You can always find someone who's done better
with better cards or someone who's been dealt better cards
and you can always find someone
who's been dealt worse at cards.
No matter who you are on the planet,
there's someone better, there's someone worse.
You have to play the cards that you dealt. You cannot
sit around waiting for the economic system of the world to be changed. You have to say,
you know what, these are the cards that I was born at this particular time, in these
circumstances, these are my strengths, these are my weaknesses, I'm going to play the cards
that I've dealt. Personal agency is what gets people to feel good about their life,
to make progress, and as soon as you play the victim mindset,
as soon as you say, oh, you know what, the answer to all my prayers
is Gary's going to change the system.
You're in serious trouble.
Could I just say one thing back on that?
If we become a society of individuals who think only individually
and never consider broader societal problems,
we will become a society that becomes unable to fix societal problems. I'm somebody who has made
millions of pounds betting on the collapse of society, the collapse of the middle class.
I don't want to be giving stock tips on the Titanic, okay? I understand, I understand that
we live in individualized societies and
it's not popular to say, hey, you need to protect your society. If you don't protect
your society, your society is going to collapse and the British public, the American public
have a choice to make here.
What would that look like?
I need to protect these viewers.
What do you want people to do?
I want them to get involved with, watch my channel, subscribe to my channel.
So watch your content.
On YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, share it with your friends, share it with your mum. Understand. But then what?
And then push for change. Push for change like our grandparents did.
Push the politicians to tax working people less and tax extremely wealthy wealth hoarders more.
So vote for the Greens.
Vote for whoever gives you that, whoever gives you your share of the pie.
This is not football, okay? I'm not here, Gary Stevenson, member of the Green Party.
I'm here to protect the working class.
So that's their sort of, that would be their social and sort of political energy,
would be to stand up and fight.
But in their personal lives, are you telling them to start businesses,
take big risks, work really hard, go for it, because they can also make it?
I would defer to you guys on that.
You know, I'm not a businessman, I'm an economist.
That's what I am.
You know, I made my money by being an economist.
I'm a very, very good economist.
My predictions will be right.
People can go and watch my predictions.
At the beginning of COVID, I predicted the entire COVID crisis exactly correctly in May
2020.
You know, this is, you know, I'm good at this.
And listen, I'm never going to come here and say I'm a better businessman than you.
I'm pretty sure that I'm not.
I'm a very, very, very good economist. This will happen.
Is there something that I can do?
If I'm sat here listening at home,
I understand everything you said,
I believe everything you've said,
I believe that it's going to get worse for me.
Do you think I should still take responsibility
of my situation and fight to make my life
richer, better, more successful?
100%.
Okay.
100%, 100%.
Because you know, and I'm sure you know,
if you're average British or American,
if you don't do that,
you're not going to be able to turn the heating on.
You have to do it, you have to do it.
And I've never once, you know,
I think my opinions are often mischaracterized
as being anti-ambition.
You've read my book, do you think I'm anti-ambition?
No.
I work my tits off to make money
and I want every single young person in this country
to be able to make money if they want to,
if that's what they want to work towards. But we've created a society where it's almost
impossible for young... Listen, I've been there. I've been at LSE. I've been at Oxford.
I've been in the city. I've been in the media. I've been in politics. All of the guys at
the top are a bunch of rich idiots. We are not allowing these smart kids from ordinary
backgrounds to get into those spaces. Why do we pretend we're not doing that?
I disagree with that. I disagree with that. You're talking about two types of elite spaces. Elite space of
elite universities.
And you're talking about the elite space of derivatives trading. There's the real economy
where entrepreneurs do their work. Then there's the first derivative, which is the banking
system. And then there's the second derivative, which is rates traders like yourself. These
are places that normal people
don't want to end up. Most normal people who grow up in normal households don't wake up
one day and say, I want to be a rates trader on a double derivative of the economy making
bets. Most people want to start a business that employs people and they want to grow
that business and be successful.
Do you think that starting a business is a realistic, higher success probability chance
of ordinary poor people becoming rich?
I know that economies thrive when entrepreneurs are active, and it's not just the entrepreneurs,
they create opportunity.
Is that something that our viewers can do, and most of them will end up rich?
You only need 1% to improve the whole economy.
There's a really interesting stat that says globally around 65% of ultra high net worth individuals are self-made.
Approximately 19% primarily inherited their wealth and about 16% inherited wealth, but significantly grew it through their own ventures.
So 65% of the ultra high net worth individuals globally are self-made.
Does that not mean that if I want to become an ultra high net worth person, it's going to come down to?
Listen, we are just come off the back of the golden age of capitalism, when ordinary people
like my dad, you know, I grew up in Ilford, it's in East London, it's a very immigrant
area. Most of my friends I grew up with come from Pakistani Indian immigrant backgrounds.
They came over with nothing. They worked really hard. They made money. They had their own
assets. We had a period where ordinary people could make money and could make wealth. So obviously we are now in a period where there are rich people
who made money during that period. But it's over now.
I'm seeing ordinary people making money all the time.
Okay, so you're telling us they're idiots. Why are they not making money?
I'm not telling anyone they're an idiot. I'm saying that-
If it's that easy, okay, all right, fine. Go and buy Dan's book, read it and become
a millionaire because Dan thinks it's easy to become a millionaire by being an entrepreneur. But I suspect, having not been an entrepreneur, that most of the
people who've read your book are not millionaires.
Everything you've touched has turned to gold. You turned yourself to academia, you got an
amazing qualification. You turned yourself to banking, you became two million a year.
You turned yourself to being a writer, you become Sunday Times bestseller. You turned
yourself to content creating, you get 800,000 followers.
And now you sit there after all of that evidence and say,
oh no, it's all over guys.
I'm smart enough to do it, but you guys are not smart enough to do it.
If you think you can teach, you've got your book.
If you think you can teach people to do it.
You say that you're smart enough, but they're not smart enough.
I wonder if we do have a bit of an education problem at the heart of this,
because I was thinking about your sister,
and I was like, right, if I was the CEO of Gary's sister,
what would I do?
There's two things I'd do right now.
The first is, what marketplace is really valuing
an ability to write, and write in an impactful way?
I'd go, right, she needs to start an Instagram page,
because I've seen what happened with Jay Shea,
this guy's pulling in tens of millions a year,
because he took like, you know,
nice words that were motivational, poetic, put them on there. And also YouTube needs to get to YouTube because if she can talk like you, then she's going
to do exceptionally well on YouTube as well.
But the old, there's not going to be a great economy necessarily for someone who's doing
poetry in many other places other than what I'm saying is the Internet.
But in school, we don't teach this.
There's no YouTube class for YouTube.
And it's such a huge part of the economy.
I mean, me and you have seen that.
There's been this decentralization of media where the megaphone was only...
It's growing at 20% a year.
The megaphone was only...
People watching start a YouTube, become an entrepreneur.
But it's the internet, isn't it?
It's easy.
Do you think it works for most people, Stephen?
For most people, no.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
Why are we pretending it does?
But what I would say is if in school we taught young kids a couple of new things and we
stopped teaching them about Pythagoras' theorem, which by the way, ChatGBT is going to do for
you with your eyes closed, and we taught them about the new economy of the internet, about
the ability to start a shop.
It's crazy that the school system was designed
in such a way where they put me in exclusion unit
because I was so preoccupied with doing business deals
at school and my headmaster came on national TV
on what I liked and said, yeah, we unexpelled them
eventually because he made the school so much money.
But the system was punishing me for entrepreneurship
and it wasn't teaching me anything about the new economy, which is technology.
Do you think it matters if the percentage of young people who are able to achieve financial freedom and have a family is shrinking?
So do I think it matters if the percentage of young people that are able to, are you saying attain wealth and have a family?
Yeah, if I achieve financial freedom and have a family, that's shrinking.
I think that's a really big problem.
And listen, I know, listen, and I know you've got this a family. I think that's a really big problem. I think that's a really big problem.
I know, listen, and I know you've got this podcast and I know you inspire young people.
I think that's a good thing. I think it's a good thing that you inspire young people to go out and work hard and try and achieve something.
But I'm an economist and what I see is the percentage of young people who make it shrinking.
And I think if you combine those two things, you reach a really dangerous place.
Because we go and tell the young people, it's their view to start a business.
And at the same time, the number of people who make it
is 10%, 5%, 2%, 1%.
And there will always be that one person who makes it.
There will always be that Stephen Bartlett
in every country in the world who's making it through.
You know what I'm saying?
But the systematic issue matters, Stephen.
Can we not change the education system
so that when I was 16,
and they threw me in the exclusion unit,
which could so easily have made me think that when I was 16, and they threw me in the exclusion unit, which
could so easily have made me think that I was a failure.
Because my brothers, Jason went to LSE
and became very much like you, and now works in my company,
managing my investments.
He, in the education system, was rewarded.
So I sat there as a kid thinking, rich and successful,
my older brother Jason, because he can do maths.
And I thought, I'm going to be a failure
because I like this thing called entrepreneurship
and I have ADHD, so I can't pay attention in lessons.
What I'm saying is if the education system
was designed in such a way where people like me
who are entrepreneurial, who are interested in the internet
and couldn't stop playing video games,
were clapped for and said, oh my God, double down on that.
I think the net benefit,
when you think about what the backbone of the
economy is, which is entrepreneurs starting businesses, would be profound for
this country here. But I think that I believe there needs to be such a
radical overhaul of our education system if we want to stand a chance of
capitalizing on what the economy is today.
Yeah, I think you could probably change the education system in a lot of ways
that could improve it, but you're kind of changing the education system
on the Titanic.
What my perspective is, I can tell you,
with a very, very high rate of certainty,
if you don't fix this problem of the wealth
being sucked out of the middle class,
95, 98% of people will be in poverty
in this country in 70 years.
I agree with you.
This is the thing.
I agree that you can't have a group of people
at the very top that own all the assets and all the money,
or else, I mean, it's going to come from somewhere.
And I remember the day that I printed off
the job seekers allowance form when
I was stealing Chicago town pizzas 10 years ago
in my room in Moss Side in Manchester.
I remember what it feels like to not have my parents speaking
to me, to have all these CCJ letters and bailiff letters
on my desk, and really have no answer
on how to get out of the situation,
to the point that I was shoplifting.
I'd call the Just Eat driver and then try and persuade him
just to give me the food.
That was 10 years ago for me.
So I've not forgotten those years of my life.
So I understand what it is to be in that situation.
And on an individual level, I need some answers,
because I'm not going to wait for these people
in the parliament to fix my life for me.
So I need some individual answers.
And then I do also care about the bigger picture.
So I'm not like here as someone that just wants
to accrue loads of wealth myself.
Of course, listen, let's be honest.
No one like, there's not many human beings
that wouldn't like more money.
So I try and acknowledge that bias.
But what I'm, the big issue I have is how.
And from my personal experience,
as someone that now employs hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of people here in London,
up in Manchester in our offices,
there are a set of things that would make me
leave this country.
If it became increasingly less friendly to entrepreneurs,
I reckon if we come back here in five years time,
I reckon I'll employ 500 more people in the UK.
And actually, as you look around this room,
you can see the age of them.
These are young people.
Yeah, yeah.
There are things you could do to make me not do that.
I mean, it's probably worth pointing out
that we're not taxing wealth,
and you're leaving the country anyway, Stephen.
No, I haven't left the country.
OK, you're going to stay.
I'm a tax resident here.
I pay my taxes here.
I have zero intent in changing that. I'm also left the country. Okay, you're going to stay. No, I'm a tax resident here. I pay my taxes here. I have zero intent in changing that.
I'm also on drag, you know, so we're investing a lot of money in UK businesses.
But listen, I want to raise, I want to tax only high levels of wealth, only high levels
of wealth.
And listen, don't get me wrong, I understand very rich people will complain and very rich
people will say just like they did in Dickens, I'm going to throw my businesses, I'm going
to throw my taxes, my businesses and my factories into the sea.
Stephen, your viewers are here.
Listen, Stephen, your viewers are here.
You are a very wealthy person.
They are paying 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%.
You should be paying your fair share, Stephen. You should.
I think that I should pay...
more tax, especially when...
I don't think my kids should get, should benefit from my wealth.
And maybe this is a controversial opinion, but I actually don't. I don't think I should
be able to pass down my assets to my children.
You can't. It's 40% tax.
I think it should be more.
It's 40. Yeah.
Let's not pretend rich people don't successfully pass their assets to their children.
No, no. I'm just telling you now. I think I'd be robbing my children of something from
the background that I came from.
If my child gets fucking...
If my child gets tens of millions, let's say even, when I die, I don't think that should happen.
I agree. People say, when I talk about my sister, people are like, why don't you just give your sister a load of money?
Listen, my sister works hard. She's a smart person. She works hard. She produces good work.
I want to live in a society where people like my sister are able to support themselves with the work that they do,
but we're destroying that society.
Who would pay her?
The customers, you know.
So you want her to start a business?
She is a business.
Yeah, and I want people like her to be taxed less,
so that what I want is ordinary working people to be taxed less
so they have more money in their pocket.
Listen, the reason we had the thriving art scene
in the 60s is because we had a thriving middle class
that could go and buy the new fashions
and buy the new records,
and then that created this thriving art scene.
Now we have a middle class
which is struggling to pay the bills,
so they can't buy stuff.
You know, my sister makes theater shows.
The only people who go to the theater are rich people now.
But back in the day, you know,
theater was something that was more accessible.
You want the arts, I've got to make you a fashion designer, right?
Nowadays, all of the business is super fast, super cheap, super disposable fashion,
or unbelievably expensive high-end, because that's the economy we've created.
You go to Japan, which is a less unequal society,
the restaurants are good quality restaurants for ordinary people,
because a good capitalist society will produce things for the people with money.
In the case of theatre, where have the theatre consumers moved to? Where are they getting their entertainment now?
Well, what you have is a very rich group of people who will still go to theatre and they will pay a lot,
but then you have a large group of people who are relatively cash scarce and they will try to get their entertainment in cheaper ways,
of course, you know what I mean?
They're spending their time watching your YouTube channel.
Well, exactly, my YouTube channel, which is free by the way.
Yeah, but you get paid from it.
You get the YouTube ad revenue.
To be honest, it's only in the last couple of months that I've started to make any money,
because I don't do my own editing.
So, and you know, I mean, you'll know in the first few years you're paying yourself to do it.
You know what I mean?
I think people sometimes massively overestimate the amount of money.
This is entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs go through two, three, four, five years worth of struggle to do it. You know what I mean? I think people sometimes massively overestimate the amount of money.
This is entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs go through two, three, four, five years worth of struggle
to get to the point where they're successful. And it feels pretty horrific that you say,
oh, finally, when I make it, you take it. And then the advisors, two entrepreneurs-
Just wait a minute. Ten million pounds is quite a lot of money. So you can be worth
nine million pounds and not be paying anything more.
But what if I just raise one million
for investment into my company,
but that then, like I do,
if I'm raising money all the way along
and my investors are saying,
I'm sorry, I don't invest in the UK economy
because it's wealth taxes and all that sort of stuff,
it's anti-wealth,
and then I just have to move my company overseas.
I want to create a situation
where the UK consumer is so strong that you have to invest in the UK. Well, I want to create a situation where the UK consumer is so strong
that you have to invest in the UK.
You don't have to be here to sell to them.
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So, so do we all agree on this premise though, that Gary's saying, which is the
very, the ultra rich, which we can classify as being worth more than you're saying.
We say 10 million is the line that we campaign for.
Okay.
We think that they should pay a greater share of the tax.
And then if you agree with that premise, the question then becomes, yes, but how?
Yeah, well, they already do.
One percent pay 30 percent.
I want to be clear, that's the top one percent of taxpayers,
which is not the top one percent of richest people.
It does. Mind you, I'm also not necessarily saying what's fair.
I'm saying what's practically
possible, right? So like you could come up with the world's most fair on the back of
a napkin, this is what's fair, but whether you can implement it is a very difficult thing.
The problem is wealth is completely mobile now. It's really, you can look and work from
anywhere.
But it's, the houses, Dan, it's land. Is that mobile? You can't rip the country out of the sea.
There's very few.
I've never met any seriously wealthy people
who own a lot of houses.
You honestly think that the entire housing stock
of the UK is not valuable?
Yeah, no, it is.
But somebody owns it.
78% is owned by baby boomers.
They just own, they bought a house in 1992
and they own the house.
Personally, I think that that house ownership,
especially when you consider mortgages,
is relatively unequally distributed.
That is, by the way, the most equally distributed.
Young people have now had the commercial property,
the land, the natural resources.
Owned by pension funds.
So the viewers own it, do they?
No, they're owned by, if they own a pension fund,
most of those commercial properties.
And what is the distribution of pensions?
If you have a look at most...
What is the distribution of pensions?
What percentage of pensions is owned by the top 1%?
I wouldn't know off the top of my head with pensions, but I know that obviously wealth
concentrates at the top.
But here's the one thing to keep in mind.
Wealthy group are not necessarily a static group.
There was a study of the richest people in 1900, and most of those families are poor
today, or they've gone down in value today.
If the richest people in 1900 had have just simply kept their wealth, there'd be 16,000
more billionaires, but they don't.
You know, in wealth management, in banks, they have this thing called the succession
planning.
So succession planning is where they try and figure out how not to screw it up across generations,
and they're notoriously bad at it. It's very hard to keep wealth in generations.
Down in the 20th century, we had two world wars and a Holocaust.
That redistributed wealth, I would prefer not to have that again.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm with you. I want an affluent middle class. I really do.
So where's the wealth going to come from? You want to just, you're going to create your own?
Entrepreneurship.
Okay, we'll create it.
Entrepreneur.
We're going to create the whole world.
Economies that are friendly towards wealth creation and entrepreneurship.
When was the last time you had a government that wasn't, let's grow, let's grow, let's
grow?
It's not working for the people, Daniel.
The problem is that they need to step back.
They need to let shrink, let shrink, let shrink.
Our viewers should keep a close eye on Donald Trump
and Elon Musk because they're doing what you're asking for.
It'll be interesting to see what happens, right?
It's too soon to tell.
If you were trying to grow the UK economy,
would you not take America's approach?
Because they seem to be much more successful
at growing their economy.
I think, I mean, of course,
when we talk about slashing of the state,
they're going to use these examples like,
oh, there's this wasteful government building.
Everybody wants to slash government waste. Of course, I'm not going to fight against slashing of the state, they're going to use these examples like, oh, there's this wasteful government building. Everybody wants to slash government waste.
Of course, I'm not going to fight against slashing government waste.
I'm from the UK.
I saw the austerity years.
I've seen what's happened to local services.
I've seen what's happened to things like the police, like education, especially things
like youth services.
You slash the state, you fire a load of people. you know. What does the state... Okay, yeah.
If you can get rid of state corruption, yes, 100%.
If you can get rid of state waste, 100%.
You know, this is how single mums feed their kids, Stephen.
You want to stop that?
No, I'm not saying that.
Slashing the state, I don't think it's going to work.
To be honest, I think tariffs is not an uninteresting
discussion. I think, yeah, of course, tax avoidance is something you need to get rid
of. Really, I would like to take a step back, look at the country and say, what is the state
of the country? What do people need? Now, we have a country here where the housing stock
is falling apart and we're letting it fall apart because those houses are owned by ordinary
people who don't have any money. If apart because those houses are owned by ordinary people
who don't have any money.
If you want the country to work for ordinary people,
you need ordinary people to have money.
I'm always reminded of Mr. Beast.
He goes to places in Africa and he spends 500 quid
and he gives a kid eyesight
who would have been blind for the rest of their life
for 500 quid.
Why are kids in Africa blind
who could be given sight for 500 quid?
Because they don't have
any money. This is what happens when you drain your middle class. This will end up like that.
You know, I've got a friend who went to India last week. He said there were people lying
on the street outside with rotting limbs. You know, that is what happens when you disempower,
when you take the money away from your middle class. You've got to protect the middle class.
If the middle class had money, then there would be unbelievable business opportunities
for selling goods and services like your business to the middle class.
So would you tax Daniel more?
I don't know if Daniel's worth more than £10 million. It sounds like he is.
He is.
I mean, I think... I want to make it clear, right?
You make 5% on your wealth.
So if Daniel's worth £100 million, he's making 5 million pounds.
We only try and tax you 1%.
I think if you are worth 100 million,
you're making 5 million pound passive income,
you can afford to pay a million pound tax a year.
You're going to still keep getting rich.
The truth is, even if we were to tax these billionaires
1% a year, they would still squeeze the rest out.
This is not about morality.
This is just cold, hard economic analysis
that I have made a lot of money betting on so closing arguments
then chaps
I'll start with you Gary based on everything we've discussed today. What is I'm gonna ask you to give me two perspectives, which is
If I'm a young individual in this country right now
What should I do to protect myself and my family and to feed my family? What kind of behaviors?
What strategy should I drop there? But also then from a government level,
I know we have some politicians that listen
because they message me.
What should politicians be doing to fix the issue
that we're all clearly identifying,
which is the collapse of the middle class,
the collapse of sort of working class people
and the increased wealth of the rich?
I think what I would like young people to understand
is that this gets worse.
This gets much, much worse.
It will get much worse relatively quickly.
Poverty will increase relatively quickly.
It will become increasingly difficult, almost impossible to make any serious money.
Prepare yourself for that.
Prepare yourself when you consider your finances,
when you consider your plans for having a family.
This gets worse and it's going to be really, really hard. It's going to be a
big mental health problem for a lot of young people. So speak to people and understand
that. My YouTube videos are there, it carries economics for people to understand what's
happening. After that, you've got to do all the right things. Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree
with you. You've got to work hard. You've got to study the right things. I think it's a great shame we have made subjects like the arts a thing which you're not allowed. If you come from a poor
background you cannot work in the arts. I'm sorry. You can't pay the bills. You can't. So you have to
go and study AI and computing and you know maybe social media, although we have to be honest,
social media doesn't pay for most people. You have to realise the reality of your situation.
It's very, very, very, very bad.
But that doesn't mean you don't work.
That doesn't mean you don't aspire.
You work damn hard because you have to.
But if you manage to make enough money to even support a family, you should be proud
of yourself.
That's the number one thing.
But recognise this can be changed.
This can be changed.
Our grandparents, our great grandparents fought
for a bigger share of the pie and they got it.
They got healthcare, they got education,
they got housing, they got food.
Our young people can have that as well,
but they won't get it unless they fight for it.
So I would encourage people to educate themselves,
support my work, get involved politically,
but also work hard,
support your friends and family, try and make money because you'll have to.
If you don't play politics, I guarantee you the other side will play politics and that means
your kids and your grandkids live in poverty, so you have to do both.
With regards to politicians, I've got mixed feelings about a lot of politicians. The truth is, I think a lot of politicians are very rich and ultimately they don't care.
They're protected.
A crisis of inequality looks fantastic from the top.
And I think that's why the three of us can sit here and say things will be fine.
Because for us, they will be fine.
And for our kids, they will be fine.
But for our viewers' kids, they won't be fine.
The politicians are not going to try and save you.
I'm going to try and make sure they do it, but I don't think they will. Listen, my plan is not to get concessions from politicians.
My plan is to get 5 million followers on the internet
and bully the politicians
so that they have to give us what we need.
So I would support people to get behind me,
get behind my campaign, but also understand
what's happening, educate your friends and your family.
And just crucially to understand, this is going to be a long fight.
So be strong, keep your people around you, but be ready for what's to come.
I see hints in some of the things you've said recently of you going into politics yourself at some point.
Stephen, I'm in politics.
But I mean, actively...
Listen, I do not want to be an MP.
I do not want to be Chancellor. I do not want to be an MP. I do not want to be Chancellor.
I do not want to be Prime Minister.
If we get to a point where I feel that that is something that is achieved
and it is the best way to fix this problem, I will be open to it.
This is not plan A.
This is not plan...
You know, would you like to be Prime Minister?
I suspect so.
Probably not, right?
Like this is...
I'll be honest, I am quite uncomfortable with even the level of public profile that
I have at the moment, which is much less than what you have, but it stresses me out. It's
weird we spoke about it before we were shooting. I don't want to, can you imagine? I don't
want to be prime minister, I don't want to be an MP, but I'm serious about this work
that I do. And if we reach a point that I think that is the best way to do it, I will
consider it. But I would much rather be able to influence the MPs from the sideline,
to influence the politicians from the sidelines.
And for that person you just gave advice to, who should they be voting for?
Well, we don't have an election for... Listen, politics is not football.
Politics is not football, OK?
This is not about I'm Labour, I'm Conservative, I'm Republican, I'm Democrat.
You're losing your houses here.
You're losing your houses. Your kids will be in poverty.
And you're going to see both Trump and the Republicans and Kirstama and Labour,
who are supposed to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum, they will both fail
because they will not take action on growing wealth inequality. And I'll be right on that,
you know, bring me back in a few years, I'll be right on that. And that shows you, it's not about,
I think this factionalism is unbelievably damaging to our societies,
especially in the US where there's so much hatred behind it,
where suddenly, I'm on this side, you're on that side.
Look, we're going to shake hands after this. I've got nothing on... We will, you know.
There's no hatred here. But if you allow yourself to be divided from half of your country,
and you allow... We're seeing it growing, tensions, racial tensions, gender tensions.
If you allow yourself to be divided, they will win. They will win.
So you need to vote for whoever is going to protect your houses.
And if you want to know who that is,
come and check Gary's economics before the election
and I will tell you who it's going to be.
Daniel.
Nice.
Closing arguments, personal and social.
A few things.
I read Gary's book and it's brilliant.
And regardless of whether you actually like
economics, it's a brilliant story. I read it in about two or three days. And it'll
eventually be a good movie as well. I agree with a lot of what Gary's saying. There
is a collapse of the middle class. And it probably will get worse. And the traditional
middle class jobs that came out of the back of the industrial age,
mature industrial revolution system,
those are collapsing and it's globalizing.
We're seeing technology move opportunities
all over the world and wealth inequality,
it has a cause.
Wealth inequality itself is a scoreboard
and there's a cause for what led up to wealth inequality
and the cause in my mind, is technology.
Technology is moving those opportunities around and it's changing things.
We already have big governments.
We have huge amounts of taxes.
We're at record levels of taxes.
Wealth has never been more mobile.
It's not about what's fair.
It's about what you can practically get away with.
It's about what you can actually implement.
And it's going to be very, very, as Gary said,
it's gonna be very, very, very hard to tax people
who have digital businesses,
who can live and work from anywhere.
I know that firsthand that it's incredibly mobile.
With that said, at a micro level,
oh, sorry, at a macro level, big picture,
we do know that there is a correlation
between economic freedom,
where the government gets out of your way, and low poverty rates.
And we know that as soon as governments become big, high taxes, high regulations, it actually drops down a category, and we see poverty goes up from 10% to 30%, so triples.
So constricting economic freedom is never a good idea if you look at the data. At a micro level, there's never been a greater opportunity for anyone who's ambitious and
entrepreneurial to go and start a company.
It's cheaper than ever to start a company.
You can do what Gary's done, which is publish content, build a following, figure out how
to monetize it.
You can create products and services and sell them to anywhere in the world.
You're an example of someone who started with nothing and became a millionaire in your 20s
and then again in your 30s with a completely different thing.
He became a millionaire in his 20s and then again in his 30s as a best-selling author and a content creator.
I did it in my 20s, my 30s, and then my 40s, starting from scratch.
So it's not normal that three guys our age could have done that over and
over again. It's because we are living in a time where there is incredible opportunities,
but you have to be tapped into those opportunities. You never heard about it at school. You never
heard about it at university. You're going to have to learn the skills to get tapped
into those opportunities. But there are definitely ways that you can succeed in the world that
we're living in.
And on that macro point, who should we be voting for?
Because some of your thinking and policy suggestions through this conversation align more with
Trump, Elon, the American mission now, where they're welcoming millionaires, they're trying
to create a really entrepreneurship friendly environment, they're doing the doge, dismantling
a sort of government waste.
I agree with Gary.
It's not football.
You don't have a team.
You swing.
You should be a swing voter. You should vote
Every single election you should make them work hard for your vote
And is Trump gonna succeed though? You should see it's too soon to tell but what you made a prediction
So I'm inviting you to make a prediction. He said five years time. We come back here
We're gonna see that I think I think a lot of very wealthy people are gonna move move to the USA
You're gonna get a lot of people from all over the world
He's playing to win and he wants rich people and entrepreneurs and investors to come into the US and be based
there.
He's creating golden visas and open visas.
And the success metric here is the middle class get richer and more affluent.
And what I actually think will happen as a result of all of that, you will see rising
living standards in the USA.
And you'll see a detriment to the places where those people leave. It's not a
good thing to have the people who pay the majority of the
taxes, which is 1% of people paying 30% of taxes, if those
people leave, the bills get spread across everybody else.
Well, we'll have to do a part two, and we shall see. I want to
thank you both for the work that you do, because I'm a big fan of
both of you. I watch Gary's videos all the time, helps me to understand another perspective on what
I'm typically hearing out on the internet or that I hear on Twitter about what's going
on in the world.
And I think I really respect and admire people that can do what both of you have done today,
which is to exchange and listen to ideas in the pursuit of answers.
And that's why I'd highly recommend anybody, regardless of whether you agree with everything
or some things or just a little bit,
to go and follow Gary's channel on YouTube
called Gary's Economics because it's a great source
of information from someone who has done it,
from understands the world from another perspective,
but also someone who's providing a narrative,
which I actually think there's,
as we kind of talked about before you started,
there's a big gap in the market for.
There are a lot of people like me and Dan out on the internet that are talking
about entrepreneurship and finance and how to make money. But there aren't enough people
talking about wealth inequality from the perspective, as Gary sees it, and that are providing more
sort of collectivist and sort of society wide solutions and answers and sort of explanations
as to why that's ultimately happening.
I do think, I do think, because I know you Dan, I hope I know myself, I do think that we all want the UK to survive.
I think we all believe that the way that the UK survives isn't necessarily a couple of ultra rich people getting more money.
It is sort of social mobility and it's allowing people that are at the very bottom
to create opportunities and to succeed. We all agree upon that, even if we agree, disagree sorry,
on the causes and the solutions to that. I'd also highly recommend everybody to go check out
The Trading Game because everybody's talking about this this book and I think it's what four weeks at
the moment on the Sunday Times Best Seller list? Number one, four weeks number one. Which is an incredible achievement,
but it speaks to what's in this book,
the way that the story is told,
but also the timeliness of this message.
So I'd highly recommend everybody to go check it out.
I'm gonna put a link below
so that everybody can go and do it.
And if you just look at some of the testimonials
for this book, it's profound.
I hear people describe it as like,
unforgettable on one end and then sad on the other end,
because that's the nature of the reality it speaks to.
And I highly recommend everybody to go check out Daniel Priestley's Entrepreneur Revolution.
But also your website has all of your resources and tools on it.
So I'll link that on the screen.
What's the third?
At danielpreestley.com.
At danielpreestley.com.
Thank you both for your generosity.
Really, really appreciate it.
Thanks for bringing us together.
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