TRIGGERnometry - How Britain is Destroying Its Economy - Daniel Priestley

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Daniel Priestley is a British entrepreneur, best-selling author, and international speaker known for helping people build influential personal brands and scalable businesses. Triggernometry is proudly independent. Thanks to the sponsors below for making that possible: - Alphacell Labs: visit https://alphacell-labs.com and use code TRIG20 for 20% off. - Protect your wealth with The Pure Gold Company. Get your free investor guide at https://pure-gold.co/trigger - Evening Being by Verso. Get 15% with code TRIGGER at http://evening.ver.so/trigger Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 06:01 People Are Leaving Even Though They Are Reluctant To 09:20 The Rich Need To Pay Their Fair Share 16:58 People Feel Like The System Is Rigged 22:11 Reaching The Point Of A Country Not Being Able To Service A Debt 26:57 The Reaction Of People Not Being Better Off To Implement Wealth Taxes 37:21 Economic Freedom And The Benefits Of It 46:12 Issues With People Getting Benefits 56:58 Is Democracy At Risk As People Vote For Government's That Give Them More Handouts? 01:08:58 How Running A Business Changes Your Views 01:18:06 What's The One Thing We're Not Talking About That We Really Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's the greatest time in history to be an entrepreneur. There's never been better time. Minus the crime, London's just an awesome city. I think Britain's lost more millionaires than any other country in the world. Why do you think that is? If you create a game where entrepreneurs can't really operate or win, you lose those entrepreneurs. 1% of people earn 14% of the income but pay 30% of the taxes.

So let's just get that because I think most people don't get this. The top 1% that we always are told are the evil, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. they pay 30% of the income tax. You know, anyone who has come from Eastern European countries, Soviet Union, you know that state-run big government just doesn't work.

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daniel welcome to trigonometry thank you very much for having me it's been a long long time it's been a long time coming, really looking forward to our conversation before we get into economics and finance and entrepreneurship and business, which we want to talk to you about. And of course, the various tax policies that are being proposed and talked about here in Britain and elsewhere. Just tell us a little bit about your background. Who are you? How do you happen to be here? Yeah, so I started my first company when I was 21 years old. I've been an entrepreneur ever since. I've had multiple startups. I've had businesses. As you can tell, I'm Australian, so I launched my first company in Australia, but 19 years ago, moved to London, and I've had multiple startups here.

Today, I have a group of software companies, a training business. I've owned some agencies. I've built companies and sold companies. I've done business in Australia, Singapore, UK, USA and Canada. And, yeah, just basically working a lot with entrepreneurs. One of the things I've been doing is running an entrepreneur accelerator, where we work with 5,500 businesses to take them through a process. program on entrepreneurship. I work with a lot of entrepreneurs because we have software for

entrepreneurs. So I hear a lot and get a lot of data. And over the last 10, 15 years, I've been writing a lot of books about entrepreneurship. So I've written six books on entrepreneurship. So I guess you could say I'm up to my elbows in all things entrepreneur-related. And you've also become quite a significant commentator on economics and government policy about certain things because I think it ties into on. entrepreneurship, which is a really important part of the economy, people who create new things, create jobs for other people. And it does feel like that's become a big part of the conversation here in Britain because it feels to me, and you're probably better informed, that we're actually

doing at a government level, at a policy level, a lot of things to discourage people, to take risk, to create companies, to generate wealth here in Britain. Is that fair to say? Yeah, it is fair to say. You know, entrepreneurs want to be positive. These are people who, myself included, love freedom, love autonomy. They're trying to change their life. They're trying to, you know, do something that improves their wealth and their circumstances. And these are people who love solving meaningful problems in the world. They're incredibly hardworking. They're, they're wired towards solving problems. They're wired towards adding value for others. But ultimately, if you create the circumstances where you just can't get ahead, where if you win, you lose it all in taxes, where if you try and raise money, you create tax problems for yourself.

If you create a game where entrepreneurs can't really operate or win, you lose those entrepreneurs. And the other thing that has really happened is that in 2020, the prime minister comes on TV and says, hey, you've all got to work at home and you've got to do lockdowns and you have to figure out. out how you're going to basically live without living the front door. And in that year, 2020, 2020, 21, most entrepreneurs discovered that they could run their businesses remotely. They were forced to figure it out. So a lot of entrepreneurs move their businesses into the cloud. They moved their teams remote. They started investing into building software and putting software in place to be able to run their businesses online. By 22, 23, a lot of successful entrepreneurs who were running offline businesses

had put everything in place to be basically living and working from anywhere. Even traditional businesses like restaurants and gyms, you now have the systems in place to essentially live remotely and run those businesses remotely. So COVID lockdowns really forced the entrepreneurial community to figure out how to be digital

and how to be anywhere and how to be in the cloud. So what we now have is that we've left that side behind us, that era has now had. hopefully passed, but we now have a situation where we're putting all these taxes on entrepreneurs, but a lot of entrepreneurs are saying, hey, wait a second, if this isn't the best place to run a business, if I don't have to necessarily be here, where would be better? So, you know, in the same way that if your local supermarket started putting all of its prices up, you might go, oh, actually, maybe I should shop somewhere else, maybe I should get a better deal. So a lot of entrepreneurs are

saying, hey, maybe I should be in Dubai, or maybe I should be in Italy, or maybe I should be in the USA or maybe I should run my business from a beach in Thailand. And all of that's actually possible. It's not hard to do now. So we now find ourselves in a really awkward situation where we do have a lot of the value-creating employers, innovators who have a lot more choice as to where they're going to run their business world. And we see that in the statistics. So I think Britain has lost more millionaires than any other country in the world except maybe China. But if you Take a per capita comparison. You can tell how bad the situation has become.

And is that because of the things you're describing or is anything else going on? Because I imagine if you're quite a wealthy person or if you've done well for yourself, actually, you're probably quite well insulated against some of the issues that most people day-to-day deal with in Britain, you know, whether it's like street crime or whatever. You're sort of protected from it. You probably live in a comfortable, nice place. and actually the upside of being in Britain is very high. You know, the infrastructure, the theatre, the restaurants, all of that stuff really is very special here.

So I know that a lot of people are quite reluctant to leave and yet they are leaving. Why do you think that is? Well, that's a really great point. London is one of the most exciting cities in the world. It's an amazing city, especially when it's well run. And if there's not crime, you know, minus the crime. London's just an awesome city. It's just such a great, especially.

London on a sunny day. It's very hard to be. But yeah, look, there's a few things that relate to very wealthy people, which is we change the non-DOM status. And it's a really misunderstood set of rules. If you have, and, you know, London was presented as a very global city, a city that you can be here and run a global business from here. So a lot of people who run global businesses like being in London, and they like running their empire, you know, that's around the world and being based in London. But if you create a system where everything that you do everywhere in the world is also going to be taxed in the UK, then it makes very little sense when other countries don't have that system. You know, if you, let's say, have, let's say you've got

a manufacturing business and it's in the family and it's in India, then you're an Indian person who's chosen to live in London. You don't want to have a situation where everything that's happening in your family business over here is also. being taxed by HMRC. If you were to die in this country, we have some of the highest death taxes, inheritance taxes. So you then find yourself in a situation where you could lose 40% of everything that you own just because of the death taxes here. Death taxes or inheritance taxes when it relates to entrepreneurship is very, very dangerous

because fire-sailing a business to pay those kind of taxes crashes the value of the business and you actually essentially destroy the business. You know, businesses are very delicate things. So, you know, if you overtax them, if you put in regulations, often they're just not competitive. We live in a global world where you have to be globally competitive. And, you know, that's what's happening. Britain has tipped this balance of being a globally competitive and desirable place to run a business to really just tipping across to being, oh, there's too many things. The crime, the taxes, the inheritance tax, the net.

non-dom status, you know, the ability to trade, all that sort of stuff. It's just kind of tipped over to where a lot of people who are from around the world have just gone, oh, actually, I can either go back to where I'm from or I can move on to the next entrepreneurial hub. A lot of people will be listening and watching this and going, well, you know, these people are super rich. Like, you know, the rich don't pay, the rich need to pay their fair share. That's a phrase that I hear a lot.

And I actually genuinely don't, I mean, to say that someone should pay their fair share without ever quantifying it is kind of a slogan that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I don't always know what people mean and therefore I don't know if I agree or not. What's your take on that idea? The rich need to pay their fair share. Well, let's kind of break it down first principles. The government spends about 18,000 pounds per person, man, woman and child. So government spending is very, very high. 45% of the UK economy is now government spending.

So we are essentially a 55% real businesses and independent businesses that could run anywhere, and then 45%, which is spending from the government. So that's very, very high. It's historically high. It's about as high as it's been since World War II. So a peacetime high for government spending. So we have this huge government, and it's £18,000 per person. So you might say that anything north of £18,000 per person,

person, you are paying your fair share, you're covering your lot, if you're paying more than 18,000 pounds per person. Now, bear in mind, if you've got a family of four, you've got 72,000 pay in taxes, right? So it's quite a lot. So you could say, oh, anyone who pays more than that is covering their fair share and then some. I don't think that's how people think about it. That's how people are thinking about. But then you could say, oh, isn't it interesting that one percent of people earn 14 percent of the income, which is high, but they pay 30 percent of the taxes. So they're earning 14% and they're paying double the equivalent in taxes because as soon as you hit a certain threshold, the taxes just go sky high. And I can imagine that for someone

who's never hit that threshold, you probably go, why are these people complaining? Because Britain actually is one of the best places in the world to have a fairly low income. So if you have a moderate income, if you're smack bang in the middle, and especially historically, since World War II, this is the best time to be earning average. You know, the tax-free threshold of £12,000, the 20% rate up to $50,000, you know, all of that is historically low. So, you know, back post-Warrier, you paid about 35% on a moderate income. So you sit there and go, why are these people complaining about taxes? But here's what the UK have done. They've basically you said as soon as you enter that top bracket, we basically double it. Everything doubles. So

if you're a dentist and you run a dental practice, you know, you might be paying reasonable taxes as you approach 100,000 a year. As soon as you get over 100,000 a year, it jumps to this weird bracket where you're paying 60% of every marginal pound. And then as soon as you get up over 150,000, you're paying 45% on this and then you're paying all these other taxes. If you try and take some money out of your business, you end up paying the corporation tax. and then you pay the 45% tax because you've now taking it into your personal name. Then you pay 20% when you spend it. So basically, as soon as you get up into this top bracket, it's just crazy levels of tax.

So what happens is, you know, if you're talking about fair share, 14% of people earn, sorry, 1% of people earn 14% of the income but pay 30% of the taxes. So let's just get that because I think most people don't get this. The top 1% that we always are told of the evil, blah, blah, blah. they pay 30% of the income tax in the country. And it's not just income tax. All tax. It's also, if you look at who's paying corporation tax,

it's also the same group of people. And if you say who's paying stamp duty, well, it's those people as well. And these people probably, I mean, I know the world's not fair, right? It sucks, the world isn't fair. But it is that group of people who are spending the most, paying the most in VAT,

paying the most in other taxes. they generate the most in corporate taxes. It's the same group of people who pay all the taxes. Right. Because when you put it like that, if 1% of people, and look, they're doing very well, right, but if they're paying 30% of all the tax intake in the country, I don't know how you can argue that's not fair.

It's historically high. Yeah. And I've been not very, I've been poor, I've been really poor, I've been wealthy at times, there's times when I've done a right. It's never really made much sense to me the attitude we have in this country to people who are successful.

And I think partly is, I think I've said this before, I think because Britain had a landed gentry and an aristocracy, a lot of people think that if you have wealth, it's because your granddad was rich and you now these have ill-gotten gains that you did nothing to do and all you do is spend your time, you know,

playing polo or whatever. Believe it or not, That category of person, globally, the UK is actually very, very low for inherited wealth. Really? Yeah, we have very high inheritance taxes. We do have a small aristocratic elite who still exist. But, no, the vast majority of people in the UK are self-made. If they're millionaires, they're self-made.

And let's just clarify what that means as well, Danny, because self-made effectively, I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but by and large, in a capitalist system, If you've made a million pounds, that means you've provided millions and millions of pounds worth of value to other people who've been willing to pay you money for it effectively, right? Yeah, well, when we say self-made, we're talking about you didn't inherit it. You weren't given large amounts of gifts or loans by parents or family. You didn't have some sort of amazing massive head start in life. You might have, you know, look, you might be from a two-family upper-middle-class household, but you still, you go off and start your own business and start your own thing. So there's different categories of self-made.

Look, I've got friends and clients who literally those started out being born in slums in Philippines or India, and they've become self-made millionaires. You know, that's the wonderful world that we live in at the moment. It is actually possible in the world that we currently live in to start with absolutely nothing and become a multi-millionaire. But self-made in this country just simply means you didn't inherit it, you didn't get any major loans or gifts in order to get onto the wealth ladder. And then if you think about entrepreneurs as a group, the only way that you can actually be successful as an entrepreneur is that you solve a valuable problem that other people want to exchange their cash for.

You know, we have a free market system where ultimately I'm going to build something or develop something and you're going to say, hey, you know, I would rather that than my hundred pounds. So I'm going to give you my hundred pounds and you're going to give me the thing that you've built the service or the product or the software, you know. So ultimately, like, you know, for example, For me, I've created software. One of the companies that I've got, scoreapp.com, we have over 8,000 businesses around the world that are paying subscribers to our software.

So they, every single month, have the choice to cancel their software or subscribe or pay even more, and they get so much value from what we deliver that they continue to pay. And we have to keep delivering more and more value every single month so that they don't want to cancel. You know, so, and yeah, so the whole system as to how I've made my money is by coming up with ways to add value to people at scale.

Daniel, do you think also part of the problem is, is that costs of living crisis, housing crisis, everything seems to be in crisis in this country. And people are quite understandably angry and frustrated about that. They feel like the system is rigged. So it's a potentially good vote winner. Yeah, of course. Yeah, absolutely. At these sorts of moments, we see populism on both sides. You might have a vote winner that is anti-migrant or you might have a vote winner that is anti-rich. Any of those highly emotional things, people want to blame somebody. There's a couple of things that are happening.

There's this term called late-stage capitalism. I don't really believe in it. I think there's late-stage government spending. And what happens is that as capitalism works, the government figures out how to capture more and more of it. It leverages up as much debt with its central bank as it possibly can. We get 100% GDP to debt ratio, and then we spiral out of control. You are then servicing, you're spending more money on debt servicing than education or military defense. So you're just paying interest payments at that point, lots and lots of interest payments. And where we are right now is late stage government spending and government debt. And they all do it. They all overspend, over debt.

45% of the economy shouldn't be government spending. That's not a healthy way to be. So we're in that zone there. There's something else that's happening at the moment, which is... Can I just stop you there? So you explain that situation really beautifully. What does that mean for the average person on the street living in that type of society or that economic system where it's 100%.

Well, what it means is if you had a house, and that house had credit card debts. And every single month you're earning money, but a lot of your money is going to the interest on the credit card. It's non-productive payments. Basically, you're paying money out, but you're not getting anything back from it because you're just paying the interest on the credit card.

So we have a system where the government is able to bring money forward from the future using a central bank, right? And they make a promise, and they basically say, we promise that if you give us this money now, we will indebt our citizens into the future, and forevermore, they will have to service that debt. And we're hoping that bringing money back from the future or from the future, we hope that we can spend it wisely so that that creates growth, and it won't matter that the citizens are indebted.

So what they're doing is they're basically just burdening future generations, little bit by little bit. And that's great. if you bring money back from the future and you spend it on something very productive, if you build highways and bridges and if you build schools and hospitals and you basically build a society that's working, that was a smart decision to bring that money back now so that we can have those things now that create productivity in the future. And sure enough, let's say you bring 10 billion back from the future, you make a promise that we will service the debt and then you spend

it wisely and then, oh, 10 billion is nothing because look at all the productivity gains we got, right? it was worth spending that money, it was worth that activity. Now, if you bring 10 billion from the future back here, and you don't spend it wisely, too bad, so sad, you have to keep servicing that debt. So roughly speaking, government debt, let's say it's 5%, right, we now have 2 trillion worth of government debt. That means we have 100 billion a year split between all of our working people

that has to be paid, and it's just interest. We never pay it down, right? We never get rid of it. It's just interest payments, every single year. We'll be back with our guest in a minute. But first, in our recent interview with Dr. Peter Ateer, we explored the science of longevity.

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and you go bankrupt, you lose your assets. What does that mean for a country? Well, countries can't die. So what happens with countries is that the difference with a household is we have to project based on the fact that you're going to get old and die. So that countries don't get old and die. countries, the way that they, if you go to the bank and you say, I want to take out a loan, they say, well, how much do you earn, right?

And they look at your income. When we go to countries, they say, how many popular, what's your population? How many people do you have? So what countries tend to do is they say, quick, get more people in, right? Let's let more people in because the central. That sounds familiar. Yeah, it would never happen in real world, right? But they basically say, when we go to the central bank, we need to show that our population's growing.

Because the central bank calculation is how many people have you got and is your population growing? And if your population grows, what they do is really simple mathematics. They go, what is your GDP per capita? Right. And then what is your population? So they basically do their calculations on that. So the government, rather than dying, they bring people in if they can't get productivity. They can sell stuff off.

They can perpetually raise taxes to the point where it becomes totally a problem. oppressive and there's no joy in the economy because we're just paying off this debt. And it really doesn't change unless there's some massive change in productivity or if the country has to refinance its debts or something along those lines. But countries can't die. So in this new type of economics, you can just keep printing money, keep printing money and hope for the best and see what happens. But surely there will come a point where it becomes unsustainable.

for instance, if you hit hyperinflation, for example. They will, yeah, so there are countries where that happens, right? We've seen that socialist countries all the time have this collapsing moment where the currency goes out of control. So we've had a number of things that have happened over the last, since World War II, we did a number of things that were a little bit interesting boosts to the economy or one-off tricks to the economy. So, for example, when the blitz happened and everything was bombed,

it was wise to then get everybody working to rebuild the country. So we had a productivity boom around rebuilding after the war. And that was good economically rebuilding activities like Dubai. They're putting buildings up, so it creates a lot of wealth. So we were doing that for a long time. Then we had a baby boom, and we had lots and lots of young people. And when you have lots and lots of young people, Beatlemania, we buy stuff, we invest in schools, we invest in infrastructure for that.

And also you can forecast forward and say, oh, these people, people are going to be taxpayers soon so we can borrow against what they're going to do. Then we did this thing of saying, okay, let's make sure women into the workforce. And that means that every household has two taxpayers. So now we can actually, because women's labor was never taxed. So therefore, it couldn't be taken into consideration for how much you could borrow. So we said, oh, no, we've come up with these ability to tax women. So what we'll do is we'll now in debt women.

So we can now double the amounts of money that we, that we do because we've got female taxpayers. And also, when it comes to buying a house, rather than saying we've got 12 paychecks per year, we've got 24 paychecks per year, so we can double the value of houses. We can leverage up the amount that it costs to buy a house. So we pulled all these levers as we went through.

We then got productivity gains through technology. So, right, there's all this technology, but we started to do this terrible thing in the 70s where we said, actually, you know what, let's just focus on this information technology, this intangible technology. All these people who do mining and production and manufacturing, we can do that really cheaply in China. Let's all go all in on moving all of that there.

These people don't have jobs anymore. So we started to erode what we actually do internally. And here we are where we find ourselves today. Well, the one thing that I think Francis, well, two things actually, I think that you made really good points, which I think we should delve deeper into is ultimately, I know you've debated Gary Stevenson, Gary's economics, and look, we can agree or disagree. He's become popular for reasons.

There's no doubt about that, right? We first wanted to turn to him when he was quite small, and in that time, he's really become quite significant commentator, and I think there is a reason for that, which is what Francis is talking about, which is ultimately for all the conversations we can have about, you know, the top 1%, pay 30% tax. A lot of people, particularly since 2008, as you well know, GDP per capita hasn't recovered. It moved, yeah. People are not better off.

The ordinary person is not better off. And in that situation, a lot of people's natural reaction is going to be, well, we've got to get the money from somewhere. Look at this guy with a massive house on three cars and four wives or whatever is that rich people do. I don't know. Let's get some money from him.

That's how we sort this out. Yeah. Right? Why isn't that a good idea? Why can't we do that? Where were you born? I was one in the Soviet Union. Soviet Union.

But look, just to steal man the argument, the Soviet Union was like, let's take everything from everybody and then redistribute everything. People are just talking, like right now, the Labour Party is discussing a wealth tax, right? Someone's got 10 million pounds and a amount of money that's inconceivably large to almost everybody who lives in this country. If someone was to pay 2% tax on that, they're going, well, he's got 10 million, he pays 2% tax on that. Is that a big deal?

Really? Well, it wouldn't even be 2% on that because they're saying a tax-free threshold of 10 million. Initially, they're saying that you'd have a 10 million wealth where it's not taxed, but it could eventually come down, and often does come down. But do you see, just before you get, do you see why to an ordinary person? They're just like, it's hard to understand what the counter-argument to that is, really. No, look, simple-sounding solutions are amazing. And they make you feel great.

They do. You know, like, it's like anything. You just go, oh, how do I lose weight? Oh, just eat right and exercise. Okay, that sounds pretty cool, right? So it's like anything that sounds... It's not of trying. Yeah, right?

Yeah, the implementation is harder than the idea. Right. With all ideas, the implementation is a little bit harder than the idea. So there's a lot to unpack here. But look, there's a few things that are going on. The first things first is that Britain is full of a lot of wealthy people who are from somewhere else, right? So they came here, they live in London, they might have a global empire, all of those sorts of things. When someone is from somewhere else, like myself, for example, you've got multiple passports.

And you tend to, if you've ever lived around wealthy people, they live very differently to most people. I've also spent a lot of time around very wealthy people and also I grew up without a lot of wealth. Most wealthy people have a very different relationship to the world than people who don't have means. They often have multiple homes around the world. They often have multiple passports that they hold. So they're dual residents. They do already have houses elsewhere. And they run their businesses digitally.

And they have teams of people around the world. So we've never had more mobility when it comes to being a wealthy person. If you run a business now, there's a chart that I had there, which basically shows that 90% of the value of your company is digital. It's all in the cloud. It's all digital, especially British companies. You know, we don't manufacture physical things. You know, people think about what is wealth and they go, oh, it's land and houses and all this for stuff. Land and houses is, but actually most land and houses and stuff is as a result of having a big family business or having a big business that's powering.

So most wealth is equity in a business. And that's the engine room of wealth. And also, we think about houses and buildings and land, but those houses, buildings, and lands are held by companies and trusts. So, for example, let's say I've got a couple of houses and I put those in a company. If I go and move to Dubai, I can essentially make that company full of debt and any surplus income I can pay it out as a director's fee. And living in Dubai, I don't have to pay income on that if I'm physically out of the country. So, yes, it would be very easy to say, oh, let's just tax the rich. The rich and entrepreneurs have a mindset of wanting to succeed, wanting to be proactive.

I'll tell you what really makes the rich move. I'll tell you what really makes entrepreneurs move. It's the mindset of tax the rich more than anything else. Because there is a mindset that in order to succeed, you have high agency, you get stuff done, you solve problems and you get rewarded for that. And then there's a mindset that in order to succeed, you play the victim, you play your weaknesses, you downplay your strengths, you hide, and ultimately you're the enemy if you're doing well. So that mindset of this is an anti-wealth country, this is an anti-entrepreneurship country, I'm seeing a lot of people even just moving to other parts of the world that have similar taxes, but they're just not anti-rich, and they're just not anti-wealth. Well, quite a lot of states in America where you might want to be able to. to live in New York, California.

I mean, they all have a bad for various reasons, but people shouldn't get confused. Like, there might be a lot of crime in New York in LA, but there's a lot of really nice places you could live in both of those states, right? And they have higher taxes than we do in Britain, but they do not have that culture. They don't have the culture of

Scratch the Ferrari versus Celebrate the Ferrari. If they see, it's actually hilarious. In the USA, they love British brands. They love Rolls-Royce's Bentley's McLaren's, all of these range rovers, all these British founded brands. They love those British brands.

And if you turn up in a Rolls-Royce somewhere in the USA, it's like, oh, that'll be me one day. I'm going to be successful. That person must have created an amazing business. I'm curious to learn how they did it. So there is that mindset in most of America. There's obviously pockets that aren't. But yeah, so plenty of people,

when a country turns to the only way to succeed here is to essentially get money out of government. See, the thing about big government is this is the other thing that's really important. A lot of people would say, oh, it's really greedy not to want to pay taxes. But a lot of wealthy people understand that big governments are just a feeding pool for companies, large companies, that figure out how to get money out of government. So it's no coincidence that our prison system is run by private equity. And a lot of our social care system is private equity backed.

And a lot of our health care system is now private equity backed. and once you work in the world of money and wealth and business, you start to see, oh, these people work in government, and then they go and get a 600 grand a year job working for a PE firm, and they figure out how to go and take all the money out of government, and then they go and make all the profit over here. And actually, that's cronyism. And what big governments create is cronyism.

They are essentially a monopoly on money, and anyone who's making any get sucked into the government and redistributed to the P.E. firms who know how to hire ex-government employees and siphon the money off. So it's not necessarily, it could be greedy to say, I don't want to pay taxes, or it could be incredibly patriotic. You could say this is not good for the country. This is not the direction. The Economic Freedom Index says that what's good for the majority of people is economic freedom. That creates low poverty, high affluence for the majority of people. what's bad for people is big governments.

Big governments create poverty. It's almost like clockwork that you can actually see big governments getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Poverty's rising, rising, rising, and then eventually the damn breaks, and they eventually cut right back and guess what? It's good times again. So the countries that you would want to live in right now,

they all have small governments. Low crime, small government. Okay, let's push back on that. People go, yeah, but what about Norway? Yeah, well, Norway, it has this amazing thing called a sovereign wealth fund. And I actually think it wouldn't be a bad idea to have sovereign wealth fund in the UK. So the sovereign wealth fund is where you say, okay, we've got some family silver called oil and gas. And actually, that belongs to the people of our country.

So what we're going to do is we're going to ring fence that oil and gas resource. And we're going to have other companies that we might charge a little, or sorry, we might allow them to earn a little bit of money through the processing and extraction, but ultimately the wealth stays with the country. So this is where you essentially build a sovereign wealth fund. The majority of why Norway works is that sovereign wealth fund. Like it literally creates such, I mean, it's something like, I mean, that sovereign wealth fund owns half of London, by the way.

I don't know if you know this, but Norway and Qatar own more than the royal families combined. So two sovereign wealth funds, the Qataris sovereign wealth fund and the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. We actually have a hundred billion worth of natural gas under Lancashire. We could create a $100 billion sovereign wealth fund out of that. We also have the different parts of the North Sea. We could create a sovereign wealth fund.

We do actually have all sorts of natural resources that the UK could access under the structure of a sovereign wealth fund. It wouldn't be a bad idea. So I guess the question is, why don't we do that then? We don't do a lot of smart things. There's a long list of really smart things that we don't do. I'm not against that. I just think...

Well, that would be net zero, I'm guessing, right? Well, a big reason why we don't do it is because apparently it's a lot greener to produce steel in China and then ship it to the UK. He's being sarcastic for our American listeners. And it's also a lot greener if you get your natural gas from another place and you bring it here on a boat as opposed to just bringing it out of your own ground. And it's also a lot better to get your natural gas from countries that don't. have any standards around how they do natural gas and to just ignore the fact that the

UK could do it way better and cleaner without British standards as opposed to, you know, accepting whatever report our natural gas partners give us. So I mean what's crazy is that somehow the green minded people, mind you, I'm a massive environment. I love the environment. You know, I would love to protect as much of the environment as possible. I just think it's absolutely insane, that we somehow think that it's better and more virtuous to do this stuff offshore and that that somehow impacts global temperatures for the better, right? So it's silly stuff. Anyway, but yeah, that's one of the main reasons why we don't do it. So you touch on economic freedom, and I find this concept quite interesting actually. So let's delve into it. First of all,

what do you mean by economic freedom and actually what are the benefits of it? So economic freedom essentially, as a big picture, you've got state, top-down control where a controlled economy is that the government is making most decisions and really dictating how money gets spent in the economy. And then you've got economic freedom, which is individuals make decisions about their own lives and they get on with making their own life. If they want to buy a car, they buy a car. If they want to start a business, they can start a business. Now, there are certain things the state should do to protect economic freedom, like rule of law, policing, fast core access to justice. All of those types of things are

associated with economic freedom and there's state-run things, right? So there's definitely a huge role for the state to protect economic freedom. But then there's this crossing the line and you say, oh, wait a second, we're going to get out of the business of like creating a good playing field. We're going to get in the business of actually telling people how to live their lives and how to spend their money and all that sort of stuff. So as you get bigger and bigger governments and more and more state control, you erode economic freedom. And then essentially you go from like one to four percent poverty rates to 25 percent poverty rates. Wow.

Right. And it's almost as predictable as clockwork, right? As you go this way, right? And you actually, and the reason I say that is there are actually countries that have become more economic free, they've pushed for economic freedom, and poverty rates have dropped and affluence has gone up. And then there's affluent countries that have gone this way and gone towards socialism, and poverty goes up.

The UK is a classic example. When I arrived here in TTIA. 2006, it was extremely high on the Economic Freedom Index, and it was one of the best places in the world. Everyone was coming here, entrepreneurs were coming here. It was just one of the best places you could possibly be, and the entrepreneur hub of the world was London. And then in the global financial crisis, we implemented all sorts of rules and regulations and higher taxes and all of these kind of things. And we brought Economic Freedom Index, I think, from like early 80s down to 70s, right? And then today we're in the 60s.

So as our economic freedom has been eroded in the last 20 years, we've just seen rising poverty, lower affluence, wider inequality. So I just blame government for that stuff. I just see it pretty, like it seems counterintuitive, but the more money you give to government, the more inequality and more poverty and all this sort of stuff, big governments, you know, anyone who has come from Eastern European countries, Soviet Union,

You know that state-run big government just doesn't work. You know, people are lining up for bread, and then in free markets there's just so much abundance. You know, you see these images of people who come from socialist countries, and then they go into a Costco. They just can't believe their eyes, like how much abundance there is. So free markets produce abundance. Top-down state control creates poverty.

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Okay, Daniel, with certain instances, I agree with you. But let's look at, for instance, the healthcare system. The NHS has got a lot of flaws, a lot of problems, but I'd rather live in the UK where there is an NHS as opposed to America where I'm just going to pluck a figure at random. It's cost 30 grand if you break your leg, for example. I tend to agree. Like, I tend to agree that there's plenty of stuff.

Like, I think there is a role of the state to try and protect the game that we're playing. like for example investing into good schools means that you have productive citizens later on it's a good investment you can see that that investment's going to go in a good direction I can also see that you know if someone is injured or they you know it's in everyone's interest to make sure that they heal and that they're back you know and all of that sort of stuff so I think there's definitely there's definitely things the government should have a monopoly on and, you know, like emergency care and ambulances and all of that so stuff. I think it's, you know, I agree.

Like the American system where calling an ambulance could wind you up bankrupt seems pretty heartless and seems like just seems unnecessarily harmful. You know, it makes sense to have ambulances. One of the issues that we have is that in order to have these systems work, you almost have to have a culture within the country that I will only draw on the system as a means of last resort. Right? Like, there has to be that.

Like, you know, you look at post-World War II Britain. Even people who had lost legs in the war felt that it was their responsibility to find a job and get to work and do something. There was this kind of like, it's the last resort to go and be on benefits. Like, you know, it's a safety net, but it's not a hammock. You can't hang out there. It's not a way of life. It's not a multi-generational family thing.

It's a, we, we use. use this as a means of last resort and nothing more than that. If you have that culture, then all of these social systems work. But if you have a culture where you go, oh, actually, it's a benefit. Oh, like, oh, that's a benefit of a citizenship. I wouldn't mind that benefit. What other benefits are you offering, right? You know, hey, actually, why would I work when I could hang out and just get paid the same anyway?

You know, we have this enormous number of people in the UK. I think it's like 25% of people under 35 are on benefits. 51% of households are on more benefits than they collect, than they earn. So we now have this situation where one way to win in this economy is to play the victim. You know, we have, there's this video that I saw, it's a video I saw on YouTube, and basically this crow had crashed into the glass, and the owner of the house had given some, milk and bread to the crow, right? So there's, and, and this crow had been given free food. And then these three other crows flew to the glass, lay on their backs, and looked like they'd

crashed into the glass, because they'd witnessed that you get free milk and bread if you play the victim. And I know it's, look, I'm not at all criticizing someone who has genuine reasons that they need state support, but we have actually gotten to the point where a lot of people have figured out, oh, easiest way to get a BMW, I'm going to play this little system over here. There are websites dedicated to telling you what to say in order to get certain benefits. And we can see this in the charts of how much benefits get paid for certain things. You can see that these schemes come in at like a billion, two billion a year, and then they're eight billion, then they're 12 billion. I think one in five new cars in the country is now

part of the mobility scheme. And I'm not saying some people, don't need state support. I'm definitely not saying that. In fact, you want to protect it because you want the people who need it to have as much as possible. You don't want to have a situation where it's being abused by people who don't really need it because then people who genuinely need it, you know, they don't have as much to access. Or there's not enough to do with, for other things that we need to do in the country as well. Well, we have that phrase Nelson on to talk about this, to talk about the issues with the benefit system. And one of the things, you know, you mentioned that people need to have a really good,

reason. But I think it's also a self-fulfilling thing as well, because let's say you've got three friends, and one of them is a bit anxious, another one's a bit depressed. And you might not have the job of your life. Your life circumstances might not be great. Well, I've been there, and I don't remember being joyous in that moment, right? Now, if you're made who are slightly anxious and slightly depressed, our own benefits because they're depressed and anxious, well, you go, well, I'm a bit depressed. I'm a bit anxious. And they're getting these things, if that's what's available, why wouldn't I claim it? Yeah, absolutely. It does happen like that. I remember when I was at university in Australia and all my friends were getting

1,500 a month on this particular student benefit. I just felt very wrong about it. I just didn't want to do it, but I was feeling like, oh, you know, I'm entitled to her. I really wrestled with it because I have this personally, at that age, I had this belief of, if I can't afford to be a university, I quit. I did quit and I couldn't afford to be there. I was working for jobs and living on a concrete floor, on a mattress on a concrete floor in a shed in a garage. So, you know, but I just didn't want to take state benefits. I didn't feel like I was entitled to it. But I certainly thought about it because all my friends were getting it. Right. And it creates this vicious cycle. And difficulties politically, it's very difficult to deal with because once people are

used to something at which they feel we now have multi we now have multi generational like literally where kids whose parents and grandparents have never worked and that just means that's game over

like how do you break that cycle right well exactly and if you talk about entrepreneurship I do think entrepreneurs I'm guessing are quite different to most people in the way their brain works the way they look at the world right is that fair to say freedom

right the desire for freedom is a big thing agency personal agency i want to make my own way um delayed gratification i want to do something that's hard now in in exchange for some sort of payoff into the future um the understanding of fair exchange i'm going to have to do something that you want to do in exchange for you to give me the money that i want right so it's that whole how do we build something fair exchange environment dictates performance I have witnessed people who, like I do a bit of work in prisons, and in particular, I do a Dragon's Den experience in prison where we get ex-offenders or offenders to come up with business ideas,

and in exchange for we don't have money, we have books, right? So we have all these business books that we take in there and we give business books to these guys. And in many cases, by the way, some of these guys have run seven-figure businesses in the past. Right, just not legitimately. amazing 24 hours a day customer service. Yeah, all sorts of things that... Quality product.

Quality product, building big teams of people who are out working all the time. So some of these guys, you know, they really naturally gravitate towards entrepreneurship. But what's interesting is that I watch the power of the environment that you can get some people who are very negative about their situation. And as soon as we just introduce the idea of what business do you want to start when you get out of prison and what, you know,

and one of them will come up with an idea, I want to do this. And then suddenly another one goes, oh, yeah, I want to do a landscape gardening business. I want to do like a Mexican food restaurant. Okay, I want to do, you know, I want to do this. I've been thinking about starting a clothing line. I've been thinking about doing that.

And then suddenly, like popcorn, it all just starts popping off. And the energy in the room just lifts. And you see it go from like a weird, like we always start out in a bit of a circle and everyone's a bit quiet and not sharing there it is. And then suddenly it's like, this vibrancy pops in. So I do really have hope that for a lot, especially young people,

show them that you actually can be successful. And there's just suddenly there's this like lift-off moment energetically. It's important to say it's the greatest time in history to be an entrepreneur. There's never been better time. There's more money available than ever before. The technology is freely available.

You can build teams remotely. All the technology that you need is lying around the house. you know, there's bigger markets than ever before. You can sell into all sorts of markets. Like, it's just this glorious time for entrepreneurship. Like, it's the best time ever. And I've been an entrepreneur for 20-something years. Like, this is the moment where, like, everyone's been, if you're even just slightly entrepreneurial,

this is the most incredible time, easier than ever. The only thing is is that entrepreneurs want to be in a country that's positive. You know, it's, I love that you say that because you hear this kind of doom and gloom narrative about country, about late stage capitalism, et cetera, et cetera. And look, conditions are never going to be optimal. But that doesn't mean that you should not chase your dream. It's always going to be tough. And whatever reason, if the economy's booming, there's loads of competition. If the economy's not doing great, it's going to be harder to raise capital.

So true. So true. There's actually hard things about good economies and there's good things about bad economies. Entrepreneurs, there's this mindset of let's play the hand that we're dealt. So you know, you've dealt me some cards. Let me play that hand. And that's a really positive mindset. You know, I've got this incredible friend of mine who's a quadruple amputee and he's gone off and built a seven-figure chain of clinics that do rehabilitation.

And he's amazing. He's literally built this incredible global desk. for amputees to come and rehabilitate. And he's a quadruple amputee. He runs an amazing business with dozens of employees, seven figure revenues in Brazil. And, you know, he literally was amputated above the elbow and above the knees on all four limbs.

But he said, okay, this is the hand I've been dealt. Can't change it. How do I play this hand? Sorry, Pedro. And the answer is you build a new hand. Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? So, you know, the thing I love about entrepreneurs is that they often turn problems into opportunities. You know, my personal first experience as an entrepreneur was my, in my house, when I was 10 years old, there was a small house fire, flames left up onto the curtains, and there was smoke damage, and fires,

fire went through a few of the cupboards and all this sort of stuff, and it was insured, but my parents were going to throw away the microwave and the fridge and a few of the things that. got damaged. And I said, hey, what if I clean these things and I sell them? I was 10 years old. I don't know where I came up with the idea, but I said, oh, what if I clean these things and I sell them? If you want to, but you've got to do it quick. So I got to work and I cleaned it up and I, following weekend, ran a garage sale. I went to the neighbours and they got stuff and they put stuff in my garage sale on a 50-50 joint venture. And at 10 years old, I had my first experience of just like turning a negative experience into a positive experience by selling stuff. And, you know, there was this magic moment where this guy comes up and he says, he says,

how much for the microwave? And I say, I was $10. And he says, I'll give you $5 for it. I'll say, oh, no, it's $10. He goes, I want to talk to your dad. Dad comes out and he says, oh, I want to bargain with you on the microwave. And he says, well, it's his business. You need to negotiate with him.

It's like, wow, right? Yeah. But imagine if my parents had have said, oh, you can clean and sell all that stuff, but we keep the money. Or we keep 50% of the money. Yeah, 60%, 70%, right? We'll keep all the money, right? We'll keep the majority of the money. I'm going to sit there and go, oh, okay, well, under that circumstance, I'll just wait to get toys at Christmas.

I'll just wait for mommy and daddy to give me the things. Right. Right. So if you take away the rewards, the entrepreneurship just doesn't happen. It's such an obvious thing because the government, it's a weird thing with tax, because people instinctively know that, the government is always trying to put a sugar tax, an excise duty on petrol. It's constantly trying to disincentivise things by making them more expensive. This is it. But they don't seem to understand that when you put a tax on work, on jobs, on employment,

you also disincentivise those things as well. So you disincentivate, you make it less appealing for people to create jobs, to do jobs, to work hard, and to create businesses. There's something called second-order consequences. And a lot of people don't understand this idea of second order consequences or unintended consequences. So if we had a tax on long hair, we said if your hair is below a certain threshold, then you have to pay more tax to have long hair. All the conservatives are applauding you right now.

I'm in favour of that for men on. So, of course, what you would see is people will alter their behaviour. The vast majority of people will make sure that their hair is not longer than that threshold so that they don't pay extra taxes. some people, small percentage people, might grow their hair out as a statement of like, look, how rich I am, I don't care, right? So you get a small bit of flaunting it. But the vast majority of people are going to in some way, it's going to have consequences.

There will be second order consequences. Now, what economists tend to do, which is so stupid, is they go, oh, how many people out there have long hair? Oh, there's five million people with long hair. Okay, well, then if we just tax all of them 10 pounds, then we end up with this much money. and they create a calculation that doesn't include second order consequences. So it's this stupid thing of like how many people times this amount, this is how much we'll collect. And then they go, oh, wait a second, what just happened?

Everyone cut their hair. Of course everyone cut their hair because you taxed it. So this idea, in Spain, they came up with a whole bunch of taxes if you, or taxes and regulations if you had long-term tenants, right? And they said any tenancy above 12 months it triggers all of these additional taxes and regulations. So guess what? Now we're kicking out their tenants, I'm guessing.

In Spain, you can only get 11-month lease, right? You can rent a place for 11 months. You can't get a 12-month lease, right? And then they have all these under-the-table things where you have to, they have two houses with two different things and you have to squab houses every 11 months, right? This is the most Spanish thing I've ever heard. Well, Daniel, the thing is you are very optimistic, naturally,

the guy, it's why you do what you do. But I read this quote, and I genuinely thought that it sounded true to me, which doesn't mean it is true, but it did worry me. I can't remember whose quarter it is, but there's basically a guy, I think he might have been part of the Scottish line, and I should really have looked this up, but it was basically the idea that democracy can never last forever, because once people work out that they can vote to be paid more money by someone else, it just, you don't come back from that. Yeah. It's sort of starting to feel like that. to me. Unfortunately, we're now, I think, 52% of households receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes. Now, what happens when you cross that threshold is that democracy

starts to be this compounding. But it's also about culture, like you said before, because look, I've spent, I probably, no, I don't think I've ever been in a position where I've taken more out of the system than I've paid in, but I've been not very wealthy from all my life, basically. until we started in well and for just quickly on that you you probably in those times the government was probably spending 18 grand per person yeah and you weren't paying 18 grand so you were getting more out of the system than theoretically but i was young and healthy not using the n hs didn't have kids i get it but let's let's even say that right i never thought that well i like we need to raise taxes on people who are doing well even more and

Partly it's because I kind of always thought that I would also do well. I think as partly true. But partly also, it doesn't, like, what I mean about culture is, if there's a culture of, like, shared responsibility, like, what we've got to do is, like, really make the right decision for the country as opposed to for me. And I think we've transitioned very much into that mentality, which is what's the right system for me only?

But I am in favor of paying, like, I'm, this might be controversial with people, especially people who do well. I am happy with the tax burden as it is in Britain now. And we're doing reasonably well. I'm happy to pay 40% tax if I felt that it was well spent, which bloody isn't. And also, if I didn't feel like it was just putting taxes further and further up was a way of solving the problems that we're actually should be talking. about which is lack of productivity, which is net zero, which is we're not generating enough of our own revenue, which, you know, mass low-skilled immigration that's not productive, all of these other things.

And my worry is that the culture is now such that people are so incentivized to only really think about what's good for them. At all ends of the spectrum. At all ends of the spectrum. Right. Because I also don't want us to be Dubai. I don't want zero percent tax. I don't think that works for a country like Britain.

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It's got all sorts of other ways of raising money through properties, through... Dubai's system is when you interact, you pay a lot. So if you rent a big house, you're paying a lot of tax on that. If you buy something, you're paying tax on that. So they tax the wealthy through interacting with their system, but there's a very low default. Like, there's, I mean, this country actually for a long time didn't have high taxes either, and we did really well. We, you know, booming, you know, one of the best countries in the world, we were able to do that

without having a lot of taxes. Same as the USA. The USA did incredibly well without a lot of taxes. So there are ways to do it. What you really want is you want great services and you want this. One thing that you may start to object to is this idea of the wealth tax, right? And the reason for that is if we take trigonometry, I bet I could get a, a team of very smart people to build a case as to why your business is worth 25 million.

And the reason we could do that... Really? Who wants to buy it? Whoever wants to buy it for 25 million that's solved, bring it on. Your point is something else, though. I see where you go. Well, the reason I can do this is I can say you've got 1.4 million subscribers on the YouTube channel, and we can extrapolate, well, Mr. Beast said that he would sell his business for a billion if this happened.

And we can find some other transactions. We could find a particular magazine that had 1.4 million subscribers and we could say, oh, well, let's extrapolate that over here. There's a lot you can do with theoretical valuations. I can also do a big forecast and say, this is what we intend to do. We're going to launch these products and we're going to sell this many to this number of people. So we do an economic forecast. I could probably get some investors if we pitched it well enough to say, okay, we'll put in $2.5 million to make that happen, right, for 10%. So they would be buying into the big few.

future direction. However, on paper, you've got a 25 million business. Now, imagine what that would do if suddenly you had to start paying 2% every single year on this theoretical valuation. So you've raised money once, you haven't raised money again, but now you've got this 25 million valuation. You've got to pay 2% of 15 million. So you've basically just every, you're, basically, you've just created this additional tax burden. So that's what, 300 grand a year? Yeah. Right, taxation is theft. So now you've got it, right? No, but that would destroy our business.

You destroy the business. The business wouldn't exist if we had to do that. And now, and now, imagine magic one scenario, all you have to do is register the business somewhere else. Which is what we would do. I'm not going to lie, if it came to that, we would either have to shut the business on somewhere else. That's just a fact.

Now, let's also imagine a real realistic scenario. You go to investors, and the investors are big-minded global people, and they say, oh, by the way, UK is not a good place to register your business. We want to invest, but we want you to set up in Delaware. We want this to be a Delaware corporation. Or we'd like you to set this up in Abu Dhabi. And you go, okay, two and a half million invested.

We just set it up in Abu Dhabi. Now, this is the problem. If trigonometry somehow, let's say, I'll give you a real-life example. This is a real-life example. Yesterday I was talking about a strategic partnership with the US company, and part of the strategic partnership was access to big distribution, and part of it was a little bit of money skin in the game. And it would have been, if we do it, it would be 500 grand of cash

at a 50 million valuation on one of my businesses and then access to the distribution gets them a little bit of extra equity if they hit certain targets. So we're saying 500 grand to get you in so that you committed and then another 500 grand for this target, another 500 grand for this target. So we're structuring a strategic partnership to grow into the USA. Now, in that situation, that little tiny 500 grand strategic capital to get them to commit to the strategic partnership triggers 50 million, right, 40 million above, right? So now we've got 2% of 40 million.

We have to now have 800,000 a year worth of taxes for that particular. That's insane. They can't do that, surely, Daniel. That's what wealth taxes is. It's a tax on unrealised gains. That's insane. But that's just going to ruin everything. Do you know in the Nordic countries, they tax musicians' music catalogs if they believe the music catalog is worth something.

So they actually say, oh, you're a famous musician, Ed Shearan. Oh, we're not just going to tax you on the 30 million you made that is real, that's actual real money. We're going to say that based on that 30 million, we value your catalog at 200 million. We want 2% of that 200 million as well. But we already did that in the 70s and all our rock stars left. left. The Beatles were out, the Rolling Stones were out. We missed out. They all went to Amsterdam, right? Netherlands. We missed out on all of that British iconic bands, all the Who and all these amazing bands, they all relocated their catalogs to the Netherlands.

And ever since the Netherlands has been getting those tax, that tax income, from some of the best iconic British bands because of those taxes. This is insane because, look, if someone has... has a high income and you take a significant chunk of that, I think there's a perfectly legitimate argument in a country with really, people won't feel like it's the truth now, but historically, geographically, comparatively speaking, good infrastructure, relatively good public services, all of that, right? That's all right. But when you're taxing people on money they don't even have for things that you've imagined in your head that are worth something

that you've made up. That's fucking insane. And you will just, and at that point, you no longer are being reasonable. At that point, you are just literally driving people. Because for us, see, people think that, like, rich people are greedy. But in the example you're giving,

it's not about greedy, it's about survival. It's just unworkable. And once people either can survive or not, they will leave. Yeah, you're not going to get investors who buy into that system. They don't want to hold British stock if they're investors. Do you know what actually ends up happening? What ends up happening is the value of

assets crash in the country that has wealth taxes. And foreign investors who are not subject to wealth taxes come in and buy through their private equity firms. So what you end up with is you have a crashing economy and then Black Rock comes in and says, oh, we'll take those farms. We'll take, like look what's happening to the farms. The farms are having to be sold really cheap. I'll tell you what's happening to the UK farms. They're buying up bits of farmland and sticking solar panels on it. And because the economic model of sticking solar panels justifies a higher price, a small sale of farmland to put solar panels on it falsely inflates the value of these farms. Right. So all these farms around where they're just simply using it as an underpinning

of the farm work, these farms are now worth not $3 million or $6 million. Oh, now they're worth $9 million. And these farmers, when they die, they have death taxes on $9 million, which is based upon, oh down the road this farm sold for this amount of money per hectare but it's sold based on solar panels right now these guys aren't doing solar panels but guess what they have to sell the farm to pay the death taxes and who buys it black rock black rock comes in and black rock has a 1.4 billion i think a farm fund for british farmland um all of these assets get brought up by private equity firms big foreign private equity form. Norway, Qatar, buying up London. Why? Because the value of the assets crashed based on terrible policy. And it's not British people who end up buying those

assets. It's foreign private equity firms. You know, and this goes back really to the start of our conversation, whereby if you disincentivise people from being entrepreneurial to set up their own company, the single biggest thing I would say that has changed my life as myself and Constantin start in this business. It changed my mindset when it came to money. It changed my politics, to be honest with you. It started out on the right. And he's moved further right. Do you see the world? No, but you used to be like old school lefty. Yeah, old school lefty. And the more you, because when you realize, when you run a business and you work in a business and you grow a business,

suddenly you connect with reality in its most brutal, unpleasant way at times. Yeah, yeah. Because with the nature of running a business, you know this better than anyone. You're the last person to get paid. Yes. You all get paid before us.

Everyone else gets paid. Why that look off your face, Jack? Right. But, you know, we joke around, right? Trigonometry, just for people who are wondering, we started in April 2018, until 2020, So for two years, we put our own money into it and never took a penny out.

And in 2020, for the first time, we paid ourselves a salary, which was £1,000 a month. I've been there. And that was the case for quite a while. I've had multiple businesses where I'm the lowest paid person on the team, building the business, making sure that everyone gets paid other than myself, taking risks. And I've had many, many, many months where if we didn't make those last few sales on Thursday afternoon before payroll, we were in serious trouble. And you're taking that risk because you hope that at the end of it there is some kind of general reward. But carry on, mate. So you've become more right way. But there's a very important point underneath all that. So I now have a far greater appreciation of money.

I have a far better understanding of how money is made, how money is created. and by doing that, that changes the way interacts with the world. But when I was a teacher, I didn't know any of those things. So the idea of just taxing the rich... Sounds totally reasonable. It's totally reasonable because you don't understand.

And I guess what I'm saying is when you disempower people from going out, starting their own business, pursuing their own dreams, what happens is they get disconnected from the way that money is made, money is created. So these ideas which I now understand are bad and will make people poorer sound better.

They sound good, but then they don't work. You shut off the engine room of the economy. You raise an important point that education is really important. That if you don't educate people about how the system works, then they fall for smart sounding things or sensible sounding things. Gary's economics comes along and says, oh, just do a 2% income tax. You know, I spoke to Gary's economics.

I was shocked that he doesn't distinguish at all between revenue, profit, wealth. He doesn't distinguish between houses and business equity. He just got a very simple sounding sound bite. I'm actually shocked that he's LLC and Oxford educated and he literally just goes with these super sound bites and then when challenged on it, gets angry. But what happens is that you get vast numbers of the population who basically fall for this stuff.

But let's be honest as well, this will sound unpleasant to people, but I also just think it's true. So we should say it because it's important. It's easier to think that way. And it's comforting to think that way because you go, it's not my fault. It's the system. It's the rich.

It's the this, it's the that. You had that same opportunity. I don't know about that. I push back on that because it's very disempowering. You hand over all your agency, when you think that way. And it's a horrible feeling. Yes, but imagine, see, you can't understand it

because you don't think like this. Imagine that you had to face the fact that you have all that agency and you haven't done anything with it. Then it's much more comforting to think that it's not your fault is someone else's fault, right? That you haven't got to where ideally you would have liked to get.

See, even in Britain, where everyone thinks being rich and wealthy is a terrible thing and it's, you know, you're disgusting if you want to do well and all the rest of it. People still want to make money. People still want to do wealth. People still want a nice house.

I really want to make sure your listeners know this is the moment in time where you can go from zero to a million in like it's, it happens fast now. We regularly get our clients launch and get a million of revenue in their first 12 months. Like this is not a hard thing to do. It's often the case because we have access to global markets, lightning fast technology, it's often the case that if you want to turn it around, let's say you're in your 50s. and you go, oh, I've discovered I've got all this agency and I've done nothing with it, great, two and a half years from now, build yourself a serious business. You really can turn it around fast. If you switch your mindset on and you go, actually, you know what?

I want to do things differently. This is not a, like it used to be that you had to spend your entire life building something of value. Things can become, especially in AI-powered world, which is going to further polarize people. There are people who can start with nothing and make seven-figure revenue in their first 12 to 18 months. It does happen all the time. And think about how much information is available,

including your work and loads of other people in a way that, like even Francis and I never really had access to. If you're interested in doing something now, the world of information is all there. Well, Chat Chb-T is literally an advisor that knows everything, and you can just talk to chat GVT and say, oh, how do I set up this? How do I do this?

How do I make this happen? Help me, help me create a marketing campaign. You can literally say, ask me questions and help me come up with a business idea. Like, it's wild. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, I always remember this moment during the pandemic

when everything locked down and had a kind of bleak moment. And I spoke to Andrew about this, a comedian Andrew Schultz, and I saw a video of his where he just did a little director of dress the camera and he's, and this actually changed my life where he went, you've always complained that you've never had time. You've never had time to write the book, write the movie script,

start a podcast, start a business, do follow your dreams. Well, now you have time. So what are you going to do with it? And not to say, look, people have kids and whatever else. No, it's not everybody has the same opportunity. But that reframe of a situation was so powerful for me. And I, I, And I think, and I really want people to take this away from this conversation is, you've got more power than you would admit to yourself. Our ancestors, your grandparents, great-grandparents, they would trade places with you in a heartbeat. I mean, if they could see what's available,

if they were sitting on the sidelines and saying, oh my goodness, you mean you've got, you can start a YouTube channel and no one, you don't even ask any permission, you just start it? Oh, you mean you can just set up a Shopify store? You mean you can just go connect with people on Instagram? You can just use chat Chibit and get every answer to every question and literally customized tailored to your circumstances. You can do all that.

Oh man, oh man. Like tap out, let me in, right? Like most people are sitting there going, oh, but I've got tennis elbow. It's like, oh, come on. You know, let's hit it. Yeah. Well, I will take credit for this. We have inspired a lot of people to start things similar to what we do

because they just look, well, if those two idiots can do it. We definitely can. And that genuinely is true. There are a lot of people like that. But I think you're totally right. And that is always worth remembering because ultimately, like you say, you can only play the cards that you've been dealt. Life's not fair. No. Life is not fair. And you know what? That's just how it is. And this idea that we're going to wait until there's some sort of fair scenario, you'll be waiting the rest of your life. You'll be waiting forever. You know, it's not fair that my friend, quadruple amputee, just totally unfair. Another friend of mine, he was riding his bike as Sun was going down, a drunk driver hits him,

he's in a coma for six weeks. He almost like just lives, just lives, but he destroys his entire, like everything in his life was completely destroyed as a result of a drunk driver. As soon as he can, he's up, he's starting a business, he's now living in Thailand, he's running his global business from Thailand and Dubai. He's basically like, yeah, I'm glad I got a second chance at life and I'm ready to go again. So totally not fair, gets on with it.

Daniel, before we head over to Substack and we ask people's questions to you, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? We must change the schooling system. We are now living in a world where we're training people for an industrial revolution system that doesn't exist. That schooling system was designed,

to create cogs in machines. We don't need cogs in machines anymore. It was designed to basically fill up local factories and local officers with people who were component labor. That system is not going to serve us. We are already living in a post-AI world and all of the jobs that the schooling system is preparing us for, they will not exist. They're going away or they're going to go mostly away. We have to prepare children for the world that is coming and it's coming in thick and fast, we've urgently got to be changing the schooling system and preparing kids for the world that's coming. Completely agree with you.

There were times when I was teaching. I'm like, I have no idea where we're teaching kids about how to use a compass, for example. And that was recent as 2020, but I don't teach kids about what APR means on a credit card. Don't worry. If the world keeps going the way his compass is going to become useful again. Anyway, he used to be a teacher. All right. Head on over to Substack, where we're going to ask Daniel your questions.

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