TRIGGERnometry - Mike Driver on the Entrepreneurial Mindset and the Futility of Predictions

Episode Date: May 5, 2019

Mike Driver (@mdvex) is a serial entrepreneur. He grew a two-person print management business from 2 to 250 staff before selling a minority stake to ECI Private Equity in a £50m deal within 14 years. Mike is now the Chairman of Convex Capital and has helped to sell over £1.5bn worth of owner managed businesses. He is also heavily involved in, and is a regular contributor to, Kilkenomics, the Festival of Comedy and Economics which takes place in Kilkenny in Ireland every year.  In this episode, we discuss: Psychopathy and the Entrepreneurial Mindset  Forecasting, Brexit and Tax Avoidance Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod 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 (@failinghuman) 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at USAA.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kiss. And this is a show for you if you're bored of watching people on the internet having arguments over subjects they know nothing about.

At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. we asked the experts. Our brilliant guest this week is a serial entrepreneur, Mike Driver. Welcome to Trigonometry. Good morning, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's good to have you here. You've given away the time of the day

that we record the show at so now people know how to chase us down. Good. No problem. Yeah, well, we opened you the joke. It's like your set, mate. All over again. Yep, yeah, it's exactly the experience I have every night.

Now, we obviously know and love you, but tell everybody who hasn't seen you before, who are you, what you do, what's your background, what's your story, how are you in the seat that you find yourself in now? Shall I start the beginning? Yeah. So I'll start, I'll go back. I went to university, came out of university in 1991. I made the mistake of studying economics, and I made the further mistake of taking up a PhD in game theory.

It's unfinished. and if anybody want to pop back up to Manchester and have a go in it, then you welcome to it. So I came out of, I was persuaded to drop that game theory. Well, I was actually approached by my supervisor who told me there were only a few people in the world who understood game theory, and I wasn't one of them.

What is game theory, just so? Well, a lot of people relate game theory to the film of Beautiful Mind, Russell Crow, John Nash, but actually, what got my interest in game theory was John Bun Nure. Newman formulated game theory to try and solve poker. He failed, and he was a terrible poker bay, and he lost a lot of money at it, which basically

summarises my experience in the field. The very latest version of game theory, which you might be aware of, was Janice Verifakis, who we both know. Well, Janice felt it was a good idea to try and use game theory to negotiate with the European Commission, the European Union. I think that he was particularly unsuccessful and I think he could probably ascribe most of that the fact that game theory doesn't work in negotiation

which somewhat undermines its uses I think at all so I left there I was persuaded out of that by a friend of mine who'd come back from the Caribbean where he'd been selling timeshare and he said we should start a business so I said oh good what are we going to do

and he said we'll sell photocopiers now I didn't need to be even know what a photocopier looked like at this time. I'd never seen one. I knew they existed in concept, but I didn't really know what it was, but, you know, anything was better than an academic career. And so we started selling photocopiers. We would, we had a tiny little room about the size of your studio.

I've given away the size of the studio. Don't give the location. Because then we're truly screwed. We had, we had one desk, one phone, and a rented brown high undie pony. I don't know if you've ever seen a brown high undie pony. I don't advise it. But they were eight quid a day.

We had two grand. We had the serviced office. This is how we started off. We literally used to collect 50 complement slips from office buildings in the morning. And we would call those compliment slips in the afternoon. We didn't have a reseller agreement to sell any photocopiers. If we were lucky enough to sell a photocopier, we had to go to somebody who was far more experienced in us, who had a reseller agreement and who would extract the maximum profit from us.

And that's how we started off. Somehow, by hook or by crook, we grew that business over the next 14 years. We're in for just the two of us to 300 people, covering the whole UK, largest independent in the UK. We really ended up being a technology company, end-to-end, document management, scan archive, retrieval, print, all of this stuff. And we sold that. We sold part of that to private equity in 2006. So I had then what the Americans call a liquidity moment. Which when you're from a background, which wasn't particularly wealthy, is quite nice.

I stayed in the private equity world for a little while. The best description I can give you lovely, lovely gentlemen. I mean, these are lovely human beings. basically he went to very, very expensive schools and weren't quite intelligent enough to get a job at Goldman Sachs. And the best description I can give you... Sounds like me.

The best description I could give you a private equity is they couldn't find a coconut on coconut island. So lovely human beings, no idea about business. So I eventually left that business and I decided that it would be a good idea because it was something, again, that I knew absolutely nothing about to go into investment banking or corporate finance. When I'd been selling my business,

quite often your options for who can help you sell a business, the advice people give you to sell a business is someone for PWC, KPMG, Deloitte, or EY. Maybe I shouldn't have said all four of those things. What I would do is I would sit opposite those guys and I would think, two questions really. What have you ever done and can I trust you? And the answer is, would you normally be not very much, and probably not. Yeah. So I had the idea is could we start a business that was providing unconflicted advice to entrepreneurs? So that's essentially what I do now, started that business and over the last eight years or so, we have helped

probably 77 businesses either sell or raise funds. So we've sold over two billion pounds worth of our entrepreneur-only owned businesses. So a little niche, providing unconflicted and honest advice to entrepreneurs. So I probably met with more entrepreneurs, I imagine, than most people who are saying. So I meet 70, 80 entrepreneurs every year.

For the last eight years, there'll be 70, 80 businesses, two or three directors. So I've met literally thousands of entrepreneurs. And let's start with that, because one of the most fascinating things I ever heard you talk about was the entrepreneurial mindset. A lot of people kind of look at videos on the internet and go, oh, how can I become an entrepreneur?

And you have a totally different take on what makes an entrepreneur. Well, I do. And yeah, I'm going to sort of invalidate an entire industry here, I think. But I don't think you can actually decide to become an entrepreneur. I think the only way you could decide to become an entrepreneur,

if you could invest in a time machine, I'll explain why. So in all of the conversations I've had with entrepreneurs, I always ask the same question. I've been very suspicious of where entrepreneurialism comes from. I think it might be epigenetics.

So I always ask the same question, is what did you do when you were a kid for work? And did you have any challenges or problems when you were younger? And invariably, entrepreneurs will have had difficulties and challenges in their younger years. And the one thing you can guarantee they would have hustled like crazy when they were kids.

They would have, for instance, when I, there's the guy who does the paper round, I was the guy who marked up the papers before you got in to do the paper round because of an extra fibre to be had for marking the papers up. I used to sell porn mags at school. New or? Yeah, we used to buy him cheap. And then because we went to a school and this was in the days of the internet,

we used to sell them off from massive markups to... Well, you obviously have some entrepreneur. Well, you managed to combine both things, the trauma and the entrepreneurial thing at the same time, which is quite nice. Sorry, just sparked something we'd carry on. Yeah, well, you learn something new every day about your business partner. The closest thing I would relate entrepreneurialism to

is actually anorexia. Okay, so the latest thinking about anorexia is epigenetic. And epigenetic means that circumstances of the environment cause certain genes to be expressed that wouldn't otherwise or over expressive genes. In anorexia, obviously, it's the suppression of appetite, which the environment and the circumstances cause.

And we're seeing a rapid increase in incidence of anorexia at the same time, we've seen a rapid increase in the prevalence of social media, social media bullying and so on and so forth, being the adversity perhaps that causes the expression of the gene. And I suspect that something very similar happens to the entrepreneur. It would make sense for entrepreneurialism to be epigenetic.

You only want some people to be entrepreneurial. if everybody was entrepreneurial, it would be chaos. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I think in terms of the industry itself, the industry of, you know, self-help books, how I made it, you know. I basically summarized the how I made it books is I went to this newsagent to buy my lottery ticket.

That is about a similar amount of information that you will get from a story about how somebody made it. The only real way to become an entrepreneur would be to invent a time machine, travel back in time and traumatise yourself at the age of 11. And then I think you've got. So I don't think it's something you can learn. I think it's something that is inherent. And that sounds a little bit unusual, but it does explain quite a lot of behaviours of entrepreneurial people.

It feels more like a compunction. It feels like you haven't got any choice. It explains why people carry on. even though they've made fantastical amounts of money, which you often... They've had the liquidity moment. They had the liquidity moment, and they're stupid enough to start another business and do it all over again. But it also, more subtly and more importantly, explains a mode of behaviour, which is essential in entrepreneurialism and does not really manifest in other walks of life. And this is essentially a way to...

to deal with an unknown future. So the future isn't predictable because we lack sufficient information. The future is not predictable because it is unimaginable. So how do you learn to deal with a future that you cannot predict? Now what most people do is they try and narrow it down to forecast some models and all of those kinds of things, which you you know, the future's waiting around the corner with a baseball bat for those guys who are carrying the model. You need to find a way to adapt to the unknown.

What entrepreneurs do is something I call serial redundancy. So, Syria redundancy is a mode of behaviour where a way of looking, it would be little bit poker. So you don't bet all of your money on one good idea. You trial and error, trial and error, trial and error, never bet your whole stack. Never risk all of your capital. So that when your opportunity comes along, the product that works, whatever it is, you get after it. You know, you've tested the market. The market says yes, and then you take the risk.

So it's controlled risk. It's not. It's risk management more than is risk-taking. And that mode of behaviour is common across pretty much all of the entrepreneurs that I've met. And I think it's unusual that a cross-section of people. from every background, from every race, from every different part of the country and every different part of the world,

would all follow a very similar pattern, would all follow a very similar mode of behavior. And I think that traces back to them being faced with challenges. The challenges in youth might have been positive challenges, by the way, but usually it will have been stress. And that's very Darwinian, if you think about it. You need stress in a system for a system to progress. It's interesting you say that.

interesting you say that. I remember I'm a big fan of basketball, and I remember watching a few coaches in America discussing how they scout players, and one of them said, I never picked a player from a house with two cars. In other words, if the parents were wealthy, the child isn't going to have the drive that it takes to really be so determined to fight through the injuries, to compete at that level, to not get comfortable once they get to a certain stage, just to keep going. And I think a lot of what you're talking about actually applies to sport quite a lot as well.

A lot of the people who make it to the very top in sport seem to be coming from that kind of place. Well, I think the other comparison I'd make with sport is the thing that you need to be very comfortable with as an entrepreneur is the word no. As comedians, we hear that a lot, both from promoters and audience. I was looking before I came today,

and I was looking back at, last 25 years and I reckon I've probably done 6,000 face-to-face meetings in the last 20, 25 years, selling something at the service or products or or solution or business or whatever it might be. And my hit rate in those 6,000 meetings is probably about 20%. But that sounds okay, four knows for one yes. But actually to set those 6,000 meetings in the first place probably took 600,000. contacts. Wow.

That makes your success rate, or my success rate, not yours, I'm sure, more than 0.2% of people laugh at your jokes when you're in a... Not on this podcast, anyway. So that leaves you with a success rate of about 0.2%. What's even more interesting, if you kind of take it to the next level, if you think about negotiation, which is an interesting topic at the moment, If you actually look at those 0.2% of times that I have been successful, within the negotiations, I mostly lose. You mostly lose until someone says yes.

So you lose the little battles along the way and eventually someone says yes. So if you actually look at the actual times, the actual conversations where you have come out on top, there are a tiny fraction of the 600,000 times that you attempted to speak to somebody. So you're hearing no at almost pathological level. And I always say that winning is easy. Yeah, I know how to lose. Yeah. And that's one of the ways I would define that entrepreneur.

The entrepreneur isn't somebody. And we see survivorship bias. We see the winners and we see them being very good at winning. Actually, most of us we get here because we're very good at losing. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase.

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Go to avocado greenmatress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. It's fascinating that you say that and you're talking about the mindset because the average person wouldn't be able to hear no that many times without thinking, do you know what? this isn't for me. I just don't have it in me. Whereas the entrepreneur or somebody who is truly dedicated

to what they want to do will push through. It's like the story of Mark Ruffalo, who went years when he started out without getting an audition, you know, living in his car, all the rest of it. But it's that design and determination to push through that really sets the successful people apart in many ways. And also in a way, Mark Ruffalo probably had some contemporaries.

Yeah. Yeah, people who never made it. and the entrepreneurial world has thousands and thousands and thousands of people who never make it. Actually, we all owe them a debt of gratitude. They're the people that we should be thanking, really, because we are statistical anomalies. That's what we are, really. We're not something that can be constructed. We're something that emerges from continued interactions in the economy.

Most people fail, and we've got those people to thank. We can never be sure. One of the most interesting subjects I think, you really don't want to think about it because most entrepreneurs think, let me give you three categories of entrepreneur. Those that make it by dint of being, you know, fantastic business people,

huge amount of empathy, a huge amount of understanding of their market, remarkable in every way, fantastic human beings, okay? So that's the first category. The second category would be, those that make it by dint of having an awkward personality. And the third category would be the lucky.

We all think we're in the first category. The reality is we're in some combination of the above. What's difficult for both entrepreneurs to reconcile is separating the look and the skill, which is difficult, I think, in all walks of life. And you see very often where people have been very, very successful in one business and they're not very successful in the next. Now they just might be unlucky in the second business

but they might have been lucky in the first business. But we all think we're in category one. That thing about... I'm in category one. First of all, can I just say, I love the way Mike was talking about we as if you and I have had our liquidity moment is a couple of years off, Mike, with this show. We're almost not having to pay for ourselves anymore.

I know. I know. I know. We're progressing. Advertisers will be flocking after this. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think PWC and EY want to get on the moment. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They want a trigonometry sponsorship. Let me ask this, because on the no thing, it's interesting because I remember doing some research on this.

I was doing kind of like a personal development course at one point, and they were talking about this Eastern European guy. I can't remember which country is from. Who was helped, he was a psychologist who was brought in to deal with people at the time when call centers are just, emerged like cold calling people on the phone and what they were they were having literally approach anxiety to the phone because it was very uncommon in those days for someone to just call you out of the blue and start selling you something so these people would pick up the phone call someone up and the reaction would be get fucked yeah it's pretty much straight away right so he was

having to deal with him what he did is he got them to go out and make ridiculous requests of other people to like go to McDonald's and order a pizza or or go to a Chinese restaurant and order a burger or something like that. And he managed to train them out of having that negative reaction by just continually exposing them to that. And I think that resilience, it can be learned in terms of being able to kind of take a know so many times. Whether people necessarily want to put themselves in that position is obviously a different

story, right? Can it be learned? I think what he's taught them something slightly different to what the call center is asking them to achieve. So what they've done is they've learned to get over the initial embarrassment of speaking to a complete stranger. He probably helps to be doing that in a group of other people who are getting over the initial embarrassment of speaking to a complete stranger. I don't think what he is able to teach them, and this probably goes back to what was talking about before, he's not able to teach him to have the necessary empathy to convert that person that they've got over the embarrassment of talking to,

to convert them into whatever the call to action is for the phone call. I guarantee no matter how many psychologists or how successfully he was about getting him over the initial hurdle of the embarrassment, there will have been 20% of people who, or smaller even, but 20% of people, the usual number, who would have been able, who had the sufficient empathy, if you like, to convert that phone call into a sale or whatever the course of action is. So I don't think he was necessarily teaching them an entrepreneurial skill. teaching them a useful life skill. Yeah. Don't be embarrassed when you ask somebody

a really annoying and stupid question. You too soon to. We've got it now. We keep getting slumped. I know, I know, I know. Mike, you were talking about the mindset of an entrepreneur and you related it to trauma. How much of it do you think an entrepreneur has a desire for control?

And how much of it do you think stems from control? Because you were compared it to anorexia. I used to work in a girls school. My girlfriend's a psychologist, and she used to work in a centre for teenagers with eating disorders. And I remember her, explained to me about anorecta that's about control. It's about controlling your portion size. It's feeling in a world where you're surrounded by chaos,

but you can control this one thing, yet that makes you feel more secure in yourself. Do you think entrepreneurs, being an entrepreneur, comes from that, in that I have my business, I can control this, I can control that, I can control these elements of it? I think it could be that, okay? That is definitely one possibility. I think that will possibly be for a number of entrepreneurs.

What I think it more likely to be is that people are uncontrollable. So I think, I go back to what I said before about it not feeling like a choice. That most people who become entrepreneurs who go on to do this sort of thing, they've had jobs along the way. And the moment that they are told to do something, they feel a slight deep-seated desire not to do it. Yes. I'm like that.

Because because, because so I probably go the other way. But I take your point on the control side that we tend to be control freaks. You know, we do tend to, we do tend to, you have to. A really interesting example of somebody who isn't an entrepreneur, in my opinion, because literally because he is displayed not having any. control-free career is Luke Johnson. I don't know if you've seen recently the Pertiserie Valerie situation where they've discovered a 94 million pound hole in the accounts. Now a true control freak entrepreneur will be able to tell you the

margin in every chocolate cake that he sells, let alone how much money's got in the bank account to the nearest 94 million. So it's interesting. Luke Johnson wrote the entrepreneur column in the back of the Sunday Times. Going to be in trouble now, aren't I? Which is very interesting because, and then, and this goes to what I'm saying about the future being unimaginable. You know, when he was sat comfortably writing his missives about entrepreneurialism in the Sunday Times, he had no way of forecasting that next year the accountants would find a 94 million pound hole in the accounts of his business. So I think the control is a necessary element of entrepreneurial behavior,

but I think the thing that shoves you into it is actually the inability to submit to control, if that makes sense. So it's in the same. And how much of that is distrust in systems? Because I remember that my dad was a solicitor, and he went into local government because he believed it was safe and it was stable, and that it would provide him with regular employment. And my father, for no fault of his own, lost his job.

And I always remember him coming to pick me up when I was 15 and him saying, I've lost my job. And we were going back and there was no way of paying for things. And my mum ended up going back to Venezuela for a bit and being in this episode of chaos. And me realizing at age of 15, oh, there is no safety. There is no safety net. It's all illusory in many ways. Do you think entrepreneurs have a distrust of,

those particular systems as well where they feel, you know what, no one's going to have my back, I've got to do it for myself. Yeah, well, I think what most people's sub-performance is a delusion of control. It doesn't really exist. I think what most entrepreneurs, and they might not even be able to elucidate it,

but what they instinctively feel, and we've evolved over millennia instinct and humility as a way of dealing with a lack of control, as a way of dealing without being able to control the future. And I think what pretty much all entrepreneurs do is they instinctively realize is that they cannot control the future. So to take your unfortunate situation, if you like, you had the opposite of redundancy. Your father had all his eggs in one basket, in a job

that ultimately he had no control of the destiny of, if you like. He had everything on red. the ball lands in black and here you are in the situation you're at. I think what entrepreneurs instinctively realize is there's always a chance that it can go to shit. I remember we first got, we first did deal with private equity

and my first, I was forced then to produce a budget and a forecast is something that I'd always avoided previously and I was asked by the guy for PWC you know what's this cost line here 50,000 pound per month and I said well it's for the shit what shit well I said the shit that we don't know what it is yet yeah take it out you know take it out so so what you were what your situation was is you were strangely you were optimised yeah yeah optimization is really bad you know nature doesn't optimise evolution

doesn't optimise the only way we evolution progress is is by mutation. Optimation is it, optimisation is an evolution that we call this act. So you read everything on red, it came up in black, and what an entrepreneur instinctively realized is is never to put everything on red. Yeah.

And that goes back to what before I was talking about, Syria redundancy, and how you give yourself multiple points of failure. And the way I describe it is what an entrepreneur does actually isn't even necessarily coming up with a great idea. What they do is they fall over opportunities, So I say stay alive to fall over opportunity.

It's a really good examples of this. So take Amazon, for instance. Amazon's online retail business is debatable whether that's even profitable. I would say that if you were to factor in the way they pay the staff, so stock-based remuneration, it possibly isn't even profitable, which will be a surprise to most people. Wow. What they do have is a very, very profitable web-hosting business called AWS.

Now, AWS, they fell over. They built the web hosting facility, the Amazon Web Services for their own business in order to sell you shit that they can't make any money on the internet. And one day they wake up and go, Christ, we could sell this to other people. Now that is a hugely profitable business that Bezos never came up with it. He never thought to himself, I'm going to go. He said, I'm going to go and be the everything store. He never said, I'm going to go and have this cloud business that's going to be the most successful. The cloud didn't even exist when he started off.

So I think that what entrepreneurs do is they stay alive long enough to fall over opportunity. And again, what we do afterwards is we meet normal human beings, and normal human beings want rational explanations for things. So rather than say, well, it just fell on me. And it was there. And I thought, oh, wow, you know, let's do it. well I started off with this strategy I wrote this business plan

it's all hindsight bias and post hoc nationalisation it's such an interesting point why because a mutual friend of us actually tells the story about Jack D the famous comedian here in the UK who has this very sour, dour personality and apparently he was struggling as a comedian

he really wasn't having much head not getting very far and with the kind of normal character like a normal comedian and then one day he got so fed up with the whole comedy world and with comedy and how he was doing, that he turned up at this gig and he was like, you know what, fuck it, I'm just going to, one last time, I'm just going to do this last gig.

And he was really angry and kind of frustrated. And that frustration is what he brought to the stage. And suddenly he found himself doing really well. Like he stumbled onto this thing. And it's fascinating because I think what you're talking about really is, in some ways, the power of resilience as well, which is you keep going until something falls in your lap. It's interesting.

There's a book called Antifragile by Anasim Teleb, who we both met at Kilkenomics. He actually goes one step beyond resilience. So he talks about things that exhibit convexity, and things that exhibit convexity are things that benefit from stress. So it's not just been able to withstand stress. It's the stress actually, the stress in the system actually improves your performance. And I would go as far as to say that all of the nose that you get as an entrepreneur is, convex to nose, for what a better way of putting it, is you actually get better. You don't think to yourself, oh my God, I'm a terrible human being, everyone hates me,

you think, I just need to be a little bit better. What did I get wrong in that conversation? What could I have said differently? What didn't I understand about that person? And so you are benefiting from what other people would see, well certainly the majority of humans would see is stresses, but you're getting better as a result of interacting with those stressful situations you're improving every day. But you can't continue to improve, interestingly, if you don't survive. So the most important thing is to avoid ruin. If no one had laughed

at Jack D when he became a sourfaced guy, that's it. He's done. He's gone. He's not in the game anymore. And who knows, if he hadn't said, this is the last time, if he said this is the second to last time, and sourfaced hadn't worked, maybe a different personality would have made the next time. And I think that he hadn't said, he hadn't said, he would have made the next time. And I think that's also what defines an entrepreneurial mindset. We're almost congenitously incapable of saying, this is it, I'm not doing it again. It's something like comedians.

Yeah, yeah, it's very much like comedian, except entrepreneurs don't pretend to be left wing. I think I might be the only one that ever has. Mike, at what point does resilience and all these amazing qualities in getting through it and working hard, At what point does that tip into self-delusion? Because we've all met that person who talks a great game and I'm using a metaphor of comedy

then gets up on that stage and you're like, oh my God, mate, you need to cut it now. Look, I think I'd probably go back, the answer to that question, I'd go back to the people who don't make it. You know, and it's probably the same in comedy is the same as entrepreneurialism. You're actually riding off the backs of the people

who never made it, you know, you need all the, if everybody who stood up on stage who decided they were funny was funny, it would be a very crowded stage, wouldn't it? So we're all kind of right. So I think you get two things of the people who try and make it as an entrepreneur. You get the people who just try,

and it doesn't work out, and they go back to doing a normal job and all that kind of thing, and that's great. But what you get at the other end, which is probably, I think, sort of where you're aiming at is something they call acquired psychopathy. And I was asked,

I think I was asked a question recently at a show, a Kilkenomics show, where somebody said, why do people in the UK or people in Europe sell their businesses and people in the United States just keep going? My answer was, we're not psychopaths. You know, so you get an English guy, a German guy or whatever. And, you know, he can pay the kids' school fees. He can buy a nice house in Spain and drive a decent car and put enough money away. I'll take that. He probably starts again, but he's relatively balanced

in the way he thinks. In America, no, they want to take over the world. Not only that is they want to remake the world into something that they recognize. And I think we see that with, there's a controversial point for you, with somebody like Bill Gates and what the Gates Foundation is doing in Africa at the moment.

Is that really helpful? Many, many scholars, there's a book called The Tyranny of Experts. If you want to sort of, it's kind of currentness with the kind of controversy around comic relief lately. But if you want to research this a little bit more, there's a really interesting book by William Easterly called the Tyranny of experts. Really what we should be giving to people in developing countries is freedom. And what we shouldn't be doing is imposing Western solutions from Western companies, companies, pretty much other solutions that you'll find that Mr. Gates recommends will be coming from people like Monsanto.

You have to have certain pesticides, certain crops, and you become beholden to the West. You might make some initial progress, but you become beholden to the West. And what we really need to do is far more difficult to do, because the conduit of, if you like, of aid is much easier when you've got a despot. Yeah. Yeah. Now, what we really should be doing, and we proved to be spectacular bad at, is formulating freedoms where people can start their own businesses and make their own way in a society. And that's obviously much harder. So I think you get this thing at the very top end where people are, you know, become literally trying to remake the world in a way that they perceive it to be right. And that may or may not be helpful to the rest of us. Well, we can wrap up the entrepreneurial section by saying, if you're not already an entrepreneur, don't even try it.

And if you are an entrepreneur, you're probably a fucking psychopath. So we can just leave it there. We started just there talking about some stuff that's a bit different. And I've always really enjoyed listening to you talk about different ideas because you have a very counterintuitive set of ways of thinking about stuff. So you've mentioned in the past that the way we think about everything is wrong, or maybe misguided or what is it that we kind of don't get about how the world is or to be in your world? Well, let's take politics which is an interesting example at the moment.

So people think or have thoughts for many, many years, that the battleground is this left v right, which you see to sort of greater or lesser degree across the world. See, I don't agree with that at all. I think the real battleground that we face now is between command and control technocrats on one side and adapt and survive emergence on the other. So I think we might be the least perceptive and most dangerous people who ever lived. I mentioned before about the educational institutionalisation of hubris above humility. We believe, if we think rationally, that we can understand and therefore control and predict everything.

This is a delusion. We live life forwards into mystery, saying I said before about the future being unpredictable. It's unpredictable, not because we can't understand enough about what's going to happen, and it's unpredictable because what's going to happen is literally unimaginable. A good example, shall I do an example of that? Yeah, of course, yeah, absolutely. Is quite sure how old you guys are?

Acting age 28 to 30. So is this what you're part in your Tinder account? Or do we have a Tinder account? I want to talk about internet dating is being a good example of something which has changed the world, which has been completely unimaginable. So when I first started looking to date people of the opposite sex, one would go to a public house and drink.

And that will be the circumstances whereby you would overcome your fears without the help of an Eastern European psychiatrist. I walk up to people for the members of the opposite sex. When you said the word Eastern European, I thought you were going to take it. In a wholly different direction, Mike. This was the 80s. I would have loved it if here in every Weatherspoon says, and he's in European psychiatry,

going, now you must approach woman. She is open to receive. You don't need alcohol. So you've got a set of circumstances, if you like, where you meet people. And the advent of Tinder, at that point, it's not like you were unable to predict it. You didn't have, it's outside the realm of possibilities.

The internet didn't exist. Berners Lee, hadn't done the first HTML page or whatever he did. And I don't know if he had dating in mind. He probably had porn in mind when he invented the internet. To me, as the pre-internet person, the concept of Tinder would be completely alieners to be impossible to predict. Whereas the thing is, apparently now the internet is where the majority of people meet. So they are meeting for and basing their initial contact on a completely different set of criteria

to the drunken criteria that we based it on in the 80s, which were definitely helpful to certain people. That's very diplomatic. But if you look at the way people meet now, they meet through a different set of criteria. But what's actually the outcome of that? The outcome of that is new relationships. the outcome of new relationships is a whole different and new set of human beings who couldn't possibly have existed prior to the internet. And that is going to create an entirely different society that couldn't have existed

because these people will be the people who make the progress in medicine or turning sunlight into effective, whatever they do into effective power. they will take us forward or backwards the future dictators of the world will be in this population of people who could not have existed without Tinder and that is completely and utterly unpredictable.

Sorry. No, no, because I was going to say, it just sparked something in me because I was reading about how the nightclub industry said that their business model has been really badly affected by Tinder because the only like in our generation, the only reason you really went to a nightclub was to try and get laid.

But now you just go online. So why go to a nightclub? Bars and bouncing... I read... I read... I read... I read an article where the stats... Someone argued that the stats in the NBA

on away wins in the basketball had steadily increased. So the stats for scoring away from home had increased. And they put down to the fact that the players didn't go to nightclubs anymore because they didn't need to. Really? So they wouldn't go to a nightclub before the game. They wouldn't drink a load of...

know, champagne or whatever they get down them in the nightclub, and then they were better the next day. So there may be some, there may be some. So why do we feel the need to predict then? If predictions don't actually work, as you say, and they're essentially a fallacy, why do we feel the need to predict? Why do people get paid so much to predict? Fear. Okay, so so the delusion that somehow and this, this, this, this, comes down to what we're trying to do is we're trying to classify, we're trying to categorize, we're trying to model the future. So we put things in categories, we classifies things, and then we model in order to be able to predict what happens in the future. And we do that

because we're afraid, because people don't like to think that they don't know what's coming around the corner. I mean, in this country, that could be described as a middle-class malaise. So you see it really in the way middle class parents want to educate their kids with an inch of their lives. I had sold the business a few years ago. One of the guys who's in the investment company that bossed the business was explaining to me that his nanny needed to speak Mandarin because his wife would be speaking French and he would possibly speak English, but he was. sure whether he's going to speak English at home yet, because the children would obviously get the English at school yet.

So he was considering whether to learn another language. And speak to children in a non-native language. You can't bollock your kid in a non-native language. My mom's a fluent, my mom's native tongue is Spanish. When she was angry at me, it was always Spanish that she went to. And so you're familiar with many, many Spanish swear words? Yes, I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the first words I ever learned,

what what the vagina do you think you're doing? you think you're doing? Don't think it's a work over here? No, no, it doesn't work grammatically. In fact, this podcast will probably not be broadcast now you said that. Oh, no, mate. This podcast, what we've said so far is entirely acceptable within the remits of what we do here. But we do need to be able to make decisions though, Mike, right?

About the future. Like, we need to be able to make electoral decisions. We need to be able to make negotiating decisions. we need to be able to try and have some idea of the future, paths that are available to us so that we can choose between them, right? So how do we do that in a world where we recognize if what you're saying is true? There's no such thing as certainty.

And I think that's where you start from. You start from a position where, I mean, a really good example of this is the current debate that we're having at the moment or not having at the moment in this country, which is between remain and leave. One of the things that I think is, I've been fairly ambivalent on this, I'm probably probably the only person who initially sat on the fence. One of the things I've noticed with Remain, the Remain argument,

is that nearly half the population seem to have become experts in economics, business, negotiation. That is so true. And they are absolutely certain. And there is certainly, and there can be no argument that we do not know the path that will be followed if we stay. There is uncertainty in staying. Whether there is more uncertainty in staying or more uncertainty in leaving is a matter for debate. But it is completely remiss to imagine that there is some certainty in a European Union.

And look, you know, we're not allowed to have a debate where those people who want to leave are able to elucidate a leave argument on the basis of economics or on the basis of some flaws that they perceive in the European Union. They've all been tarred with a certain brush, you know, which is really disappointing. But I think it's a really good example where you have nearly half the population, and I'm probably doing most of them a discern. but certainly the vocal elements of the Remain campaign, who are absolutely certain of something. And I think if both sides were a little bit more open to the uncertainty of either course of action, it might have been a little bit less divisive.

It's interesting you say that because Francis and I both voted Remain. Because we're good people. There we go. That's a recurring joke on the show that pisses off most of our viewers. But now people have started to demand it. Yeah, yeah. We get comments. We get Twitter comments.

saying, when are you going to start selling T-shirts? We'll say, I voted Remain because I'm a good person. Well, no, no. Well, the sell of Remain is you're immediately imbued with moral superiority to leave people. So, you know, I understand why that's a popular... Yeah. So we both voted Remain, but we are both increasingly uncomfortable at just how polarizing this issue has been and how certain people are.

What they're saying is like, like I'm at the point where I voted Remain in the first referendum, but I feel like, given that we're sliding away from what the people actually voted for, if there was a second referendum, I may well vote to leave and to support that decision. And what you've said is giving me so much kind of understanding of my own view

because I've always felt that it's an issue that's not clear. It's an issue on which there are no guaranteed outcomes. And the idea that, you know, I voted Remain, but the idea that I knew what was going to happen and I know what's going to happen if we don't leave, and I know what's going to happen if we leave. It's ridiculous. I have no idea what's going to happen.

I think there's incredible cognitive dissidents on the Remain side. There is, without a doubt, the euro is an incredibly flawed mechanism. You can't have a single currency without fiscal union. You can't have fiscal union without political union, and is political union even something that... could ever happen. I very, very much doubt it. So you've got a currency which has benefited Germany at the core, impoverished the southern states and led to incredible unemployment

and the complete annihilation of the Greek economy, although it is coming back now, which is a testament to the resilience of the Greeks who are absolutely fantastic. But there is a flaw right at the heart of the European project. And yet nobody, you know, very rarely will anyone accept, yes, well, okay, we want to stay, but we realise that we're only safe because we've still got the pound. So maybe if someone on the remainder side say, we want to stay, but we can guarantee we'll never give up the pound and we'll always be slightly addended to the European project, that might have been a little bit of a better promotory tool

than to say if you don't wrote to remain, then you're a racist, which I think hasn't helped at all. So I exactly agree with you. It is not clear either way. And anyone who is aware of history that goes back further than 1939 probably isn't that optimistic about a union of countries lasting forever, because they never do. They always break up. And how much of it is do you think people just want to buy into an easy narrative? And then go, I do this, I vote remain, therefore this means this, this, and this. Whereas it takes time and it takes the ability to sit and reflect, which is what you've done.

But also, the more you reflect, the more complicated the issue becomes, like the more you try and learn about a subject, the harder it becomes almost to be certain. And that's, I think, the issue, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I think the European Union contains some great opportunities, you know, the ability to go and work in other countries, you know, for young people in the UK is a great thing. But it contains an awful lot of flaws. I mean, I go back to cognitive dissonance. You look at, say, Mr. Juncker, who is president of the European Commission.

So Mr. Juncker, previously, Prime Minister of Luxembourg, previously Finance Minister of Luxembourg. So I saw a lovely graph and you look at the amount of tax avoiding businesses and the amount of tax avoiding business who's registered in Luxembourg and the amount of tax that's funneled through Luxembourg at a low tax in a low tax environment. And it's nothing when Mr. Juncker started as finance minister and by the time we get to today Luxembourg is one of the biggest facilitators of tax avoidance in the world. So it's quite difficult. Obviously, the Remain argument has sold moral superiority to those people who bought that side of the argument. The reality is there's some pretty unsavory details

within the European Union itself. And certainly, if you look at the way Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Ireland, have benefited from having, shall we say, useful tax regimes for multinationals. It does make you wonder, I often say about tax avoidance, it's best envisaged as a massive pile

of premature baby monitors. So you know when a baby is born premature and they put him in this, they put the baby in this lovely thing, and it keeps them alive. So every time one of the big four facilitates a tax avoidance scheme in Luxembourg, we've got less of them.

So I try to imagine a beach on the Caribbean that's a hole on the beach in the Caribbean that's been filled with essential medical equipment. And that's what tax avoidance. Notice I'm not saying evasion, that's what tax avoidance facilitates. Now, Jean-Claude Younger at the top, there is an incredible amount of circumstantial evidence,

although he denies it, to say that in some way he facilitated the removal of essential medical equipment from our hospitals and our society. And it passed through Luxembourg was never taxed. And the corporates concerned have now have large cash piles in the Cayman Islands or where they have them, instead of us spending that money on essential services in the UK. So it's not straightforward. I think that's such an important issue as well. I think 10 or 15 or 20 years from now,

we're going to look back on the tax structures around the world that allow these things to happen. And we're going to go, how is that even possible? You know what I mean? Like this idea that people can just put billions of pounds away into these places and not pay any tax at all on it. The Russian oligarchs can just stash all their money in this place without paying any tax on it.

We're going to look back on that and go, how was that even possible? Well, we might look back even more credulously because what we then hear is, how do we pay for it? If somebody wants a particular project or somebody wants to do something useful in society, all we hear from politicians is, oh, well, you know, there's priorities, how do we pay for it? I meant a there is enough money. If we just collected the taxes that are on the statute, if we collected the taxes on products and services that are sold in this country,

in the correct manner. We don't need any new laws. There is enough money for us to do all the things that we'd love to do to help people less fortunate. But I think it's even more, I think it's even more important than that. So human beings, I think, human beings are, classical economists would have as neoclassical maximizers. That's bullshit. What we are with Darwinian competitors. Yeah. A lot of explanation in the Brexit vote here. So what Remainers tend to think is if these people get richer, who are very rich, get richer, but these people come up a little bit with them,

then everybody should be happy. Or what the Darwinian competitor theory says, actually, I want you down here. I'm competing with you. I'm not looking at my nominal. There's a lot of evidence for this, actually, that inequality essentially makes people at the top and at the bottom feel less good about themselves,

be more unsafe, more mental health problems, et cetera, because we're competing with each other. What that Darwinian competitiveness that we have does is it pushes money, profits, up the pyramid to the people at the top. That's just how it is. We compete with each other, and those people at the top, you know,

what they want to do and what they are doing is they pull a ladder up. When they get out of the puddle adrop and they want to keep other people, the people at the bottom from getting up to the top of, where they are. And the history of man, since we, you know,

walked out the bush or climbed down for the tree, is, you know, more feudalism than it is democracy. So there is a serious side to it. The whole point of taxing the people at the top is to get the money going the other way. And you want to get this circular motion. So it's not that you don't want inequality or in some way that you're going to stamp inequality out.

What you want is the people at the top, not to stay at the top, and if they do stay at the top, they have to work very hard to stay there, and you want this opportunity and this circularity, this circular flow. And if you don't tax the people at the top, what will they do? They will do, what people have done,

is they will pull a ladder up and establish their feudal empire. So it's actually, it goes to much more than just having money to buy shit. It goes to getting that hedonic treadmill going, where we have a society, where we have that movement, opportunity of movement for everybody.

If we don't tax people, the people at the top will stay. If we tax people too much, they'll stop working. So you have this, what you have, going right back to the beginning, if you like, and where I said the battle isn't really between the right and the left. The right and the left both hold untenable views about the economy.

So the right say that by all of us acting in our selfish interest, the perfect solution will somehow pop out of a benevolent society. Well, that's clearly unlikely, and we end up with the feudal situation. What the left say is that somehow they will change us into our human nature, into becoming benevolent. That's not going to happen either. No, no. So we have to accept both. We have to get both things working.

So, look, competing with each other, profit is going to go up to the top. Government taxes correctly, not too much, not too little. and it injects that money into the base of the pyramid to give opportunities to people to get up to the top of the pyramid. And if you stop doing that, I don't think we need new taxes. I think we have sufficient taxes, we just need to collect them. So which ones are we not collecting then? Well, what we have, interestingly, is we have in the revenue,

we have tax inspectors, tax collectors, and so on and so forth. All we need to do is we need to fund the difficult cases. So the difficult cases So we need to look at everything That was done in Luxembourg So there's a recent leak of all the tax Of audience that was done We need to unpick that

Is it legal? I'm going to say much of it isn't legal You know because it has a barrister's opinion Because it was approved by a big four account It doesn't mean it's legal So we just need to fund The revenue to chase the difficult people What the revenue tends to do As we all would

Is go after easy wins So we need to go after the talk and the tough stuff. So we need to go after Apple, we need to go after Google, we need to go after the Starbucks, we need to go after the big conglomerates and say, okay, well, you know, this is your tax arrangement, is it legal? And we need to tax people, we need tax businesses for the sales of the products and services they make in this country, and that doesn't happen at the moment. Do you think there's ever going to be an inclination to do that, though? Because, I mean, there's a part of me who is incredibly suspicious, how much of the government is taught

hide into these big corporations. I'll give you an example. It always seems to be that a person who's in government, they're a minister, they then retire, and then they take a cushy job as an advisor at one of these big companies earning a lot of money. And you think, well, that's not direct corruption,

but is it indirect? Well, the revolving door is very pernicious. And there's some ideas. People had some ideas around how you do this. One of the ideas I heard recently was anything that you weren't above a service. certain amount five years after you leave government is paid back to the Treasury. So I absolutely agree with you.

But I think it's not in the discourse. You know, we're not particularly in the public discourse, is it? We seem to have had our discourse guided towards looking at something else. And you guys have had some experience with this lately with looking at what they call rights. So we're focused more on rights. and I just think that humans want a lot more than just to be consumers

with rights. We need much sort of we're creative, we're nurturing people, we need some more connection to each other, we need more ownership, we need businesses, we need a patch of land,

we need community, we need faith, we need many, many things which seem to have been substituted by, and I'm not, this isn't, having the argument about whether these rights should or shouldn't exist.

But it just seems to me that they seem to have taken a primacy in a discourse, whereas the things that have nourished us as humans for millennia seem to have almost disappeared from the discourse. But what these things require is ownership. And I think where we seem to be going is that we have a society which is being pushed towards consumerism. So you become a consumer rather than an owner. And I think it's very interesting when you talk about the discourse, we talk about what your distrust, if you like, of politicians is

everybody thinks it, but nothing is being done about it. We don't read about it so much. We don't see it in too many places. Why is that? Why are we focused on one certain set of considerations are not these at least equally important considerations. That's why we started the show, is we're trying to have conversations about things

that a lot of people think but aren't able to express. And we're going to try to bring down the government from the inside. I don't think they need your help. I don't think they need your help. Fantastic job all over the range. But listen, Mike, it's been absolutely pleasure to speak with you entirely expectantly, I should say. The last question we always ask is,

what's the one thing that no one's talking about that we ought to be talking about? Well, I think I'll probably, I'll probably hit the nail on the head, duh. Very modest and humble there. Yeah, I think I've smashed that out of the project. Yeah.

Oops, can you edit? Antoni, you get that out, aren't you? No, just basically that we're losing the things that give us a sense of belonging, that gives us a sense of meaning. And does anyone talk about meaning anymore? Everything's valued, isn't it? Yeah, Jordan Peterson talks about meaning quite long, would you?

Yeah. Not a fan. No. Look at your face, though. Look at that. He does talk about meaning, though. Say what you like. Yeah, I think in a, I think in not in a way that I particularly relate to.

He's obviously got an audience, but I think, yeah, no, he's not for me. Well, on that triggering note. This is going to be terrible, the comments on it, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Follow Mike on Twitter. He always tweets and retweets interesting stuff. As always, follow us at TriggerPod on all the social media. Give us an iTunes review.

Most important of all, subscribe to the YouTube channel and click that bell button next to the subscribe button so that you know when the video is released. Thank you very much for watching and we will see you in a week from now. Absolutely. And also as well, YouTube have a lovely little habit of unsubscribing people. If you could please check that you're subscribed. And if you have been unsubscribe, give us a tweet and we will complain to YouTube and they will ignore us.

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