TRIGGERnometry - Will We Have a Rapid Recovery?

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Mike Driver (@mdvex) is a serial entrepreneur and now the Chairman of Convex Capital, helping to sell over £1.5bn worth of owner-managed businesses. He is also a regular contributor to Kilkenomics, a Festival of Comedy and Economics which takes place in Kilkenny in Ireland every year.  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

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant and returning guests this week is Mike Driver. You may remember we did an interview with him some time ago. He's a serial entrepreneur, all-round good guy and someone who has a lot of very counterintuitive ideas. So Mike Driver, welcome back to Trigonometry. I'm delighted to be back. Thanks for having me again. It caught him in too bad the first time. No, it was great. It was great the first time and it's good to have you back.

One of the reasons we wanted to have you back actually is you and I were chanting on the phone the other day. And you were just talking about the situation that we're in now with the lockdown, the government's response to it. And you were saying there's lots of things that we're not doing. There's lots of things that we are doing that we ought not to be doing. So what is your kind of outside the take on everything? What stands out for you in the current situation?

Well, I mean, I think in terms of good news, some of the stats that are coming through at the moment, things are starting to get better. The rate of infection and the rate of fatality as horrible as it is, does seem to be starting to decline around the world. So I think it's perhaps less bad than it was, a ringing endorsement of the current situation. But so I guess, I guess, you know, we're in lockdown and the debate about that is largely irrelevant, I think. You know, we are where we are.

I guess... But do you think it was the right decision to go into lockdown? I mean, I'm glad I didn't have to make it. I think as the captain on the bridge, it's very easy for commentators to... to criticize when they don't have the responsibility for the consequences of their actions. I think as the captain on the bridge, you all kinds of conflict information coming through, dynamic moving situation, different statistics, different experts opinions, and really it's very, very difficult and you've got to live with the consequences of the decisions.

And I think very much that's the difference between I think the sort of we had the sort of panic brigade, didn't we, you know, shut down closed borders. Well, I think, you know, my first point, I guess, is that is that panic tends to breed chaos and calm breeds calm. So I wasn't so keen perhaps on some of the more, you know, sort of, those people who came along and sort of screamed, but we didn't really consider the consequences of or what we were doing and I think in some ways we're still paying for not having thought through the consequences of a lockdown whether or not you agree with the lockdown or you don't agree with a lockdown the consequences seem to be or not to have been thought through as well as they might have

been yeah and you've talked about the consequences of the lockdown and we've just seen i think it's literally today uh virgin atlantic atlantic australia have gone into administration we're talking about Primark looking as if they're in real difficulties. Oh, is this going to precipitate the end of the High Street as we know it? Because the High Street was already struggling and now this has just been a further body blow to them. Well, I think you have to look at sort of each business in it in its own previous performance. I mean if you take Virgin, for example, I mean it's been in, it's heavily in debt, the latest accounts, the last published accounts, it's heavily in debt in the first place, at leases or it's error place. or its airplanes. It basically survives as a business, you know, it runs this business

out of advanced ticket sales. COVID was probably a convenient problem for Mr. Branson. I think he was in trouble anyway. So it's, that kind of leads into some of the things I think that we're getting wrong or that we need to really think about what we're doing in terms of the way we are supporting businesses because there's a very good argument to say, well, if that business was in trouble in the first place, which, you know, it was hanging on, is it the obligation of the government to prop it up? I mean, I see he's put his island up as collateral. I mean, that's a liability. How much does it cost to run it? You know, it's a tourist destination probably cost a couple of million to run it. You've got to admire the Chutzpah

haven't you when he says, okay, well, I'll let you take the cost of my island as collateral because there won't be any tourists visiting it for a while. So in that respect, I think there's some businesses that were that are naturally or were naturally going to fail. And the danger, of course, is bailing those businesses out without obtaining inequity. for the taxpayer. So what you're really, I think, saying is we shouldn't be bailing out businesses that we're about to fail anyway. And COVID's just push them over the edge.

Well, I mean, I don't think necessarily we shouldn't bail them out because there are other considerations to the economy for, yeah, I think that leaves one airline in Australia, for instance, or, you know, which is a whole different problem. Yeah, but Australia's great, mate. Who wants to leave? It's brilliant. Well, you're not allowed to go from one state to another anyway at the moment. So they don't really need an ale.

Just stay home, save lives, enjoy the good weather. Have a Barbie. Come on, but I guess you've got to think about the jobs. So it's not necessarily, it's difficult without sort of looking in context to decide whether or not, you know, we should save this business or that business. But we should certainly considering what sort of state was the business in before. And therefore, what kind of a deal can we as the taxpayers get for whatever we decide to do in order to maintain that business trading? And isn't it, I mean, you would know far more about this, obviously, Mike, because you're an entrepreneur, but isn't it the state of a small business that you survive month to month, really?

A lot of businesses depend purely on their cash flow. And if that suddenly dries up, then after a couple of weeks, you're in serious problems, aren't you? Well, I think some do. But I actually think is certainly cash is king. The only thing you really need to worry about in most businesses up to significant. turnovers is cash flow. Cash flow will make a break your business. I absolutely agree with that. I don't think that once you get past a certain level that the majority of businesses live hand to mouth. I actually think we've got a slightly different dynamic going on. And I think

this exposes one of the big issues in the government's response to the crisis with the COVID business interruption loan. I've ever got that right, COVID business interruption scheme, which is delivered in the form of a loan to entrepreneurial businesses. And I think that's a major, major issue. And I think it continues what we've seen, which I would describe as a breaking, almost a shattering of the covenant between some citizens and society. And I think that started with student debt. So it's a little bit like, I always think with student debt,

It's a little bit like the Catholic original sin. You know, if you want to go to, you're not born with sin. You're born with original debt if you want to educate yourself. And similarly, if you think about what entrepreneurs do in the economy and the way they actually do work is entrepreneurs will run their businesses with an element of redundancy in it. You know, they're looking to survive. and they will only take debt on for investment in productive equipment or people in

order to generate a return. And what we're asking entrepreneurs to do now is to take debt on for survival. That changes the whole raise-on-depthure of entrepreneurialism and what it actually has I think quite severe repercussions going into the rest of the economy. So I think entrepreneurial people are the shock absorbers for the economy and that's what this redundancy is. Entrepreneurably run businesses tend not to carry debt in most instances. They tend to carry very manageable debt and they tend to be able to survive normal shit. Unfortunately, nobody can survive the daily use of shit that we've got now,

but they tend to be able to survive that normal day today. But what entrepreneurs says, and I think I said this previously, is they say, I don't know what shit's coming down the road, but I know it's coming. So I'll have some redundancy in my business. I won't be too leveraged. I'll have some cash in the bank and I'll be able to survive those unexpected and yet moderately shit event. But what the government is suggesting is the effect of the exchange of that redundancy for debt, which changes the way entrepreneurs behave, but it also takes away that shock of

which protects millions of employees in the country from medium-level shit. So when we get the other side of this, and I have to say if they ever facilitate these loans into the businesses, which seems to be another issue for the government at the moment, I think I've kind of been through three of those sort of authors that everyone quotes as to which three books or authors if you like of which what mess are we in you know is it brave new world is it COVID 1984 but I'm actually starting to think we might be in Kafka so we've got this sort of bureaucratic labyrinthine nightmare where where businesses have you know you're basically Joseph K trying to work out how you can obtain this money and I heard recently I mean this is

cathc if there ever was one that one of the things that's prevented people getting out getting access to the loans was European regulation. I mean we've left the EU. What is going on? You know you just end up going around around this labyrinth and then you die and you don't know how it happened. So this is one of those consequences of the lockdown. Businesses did not, government shut the economy down, businesses didn't shut the economy down. So for me, a much better way to support the entrepreneurial world as opposed to the corporate world is helicopter money. So it's direct grants. What loans are going to do is they're going to fragilize a very, very important part

of the economy for many years to come. And also completely change the bargain, if you like, between society and business owners. Business owners that, you know, they have to make the payroll. they have to do your job plus all the stress of looking after you're doing your job, making payroll and doing all other things that business owners have to do. And now what we do is we have a layer, another layer of uncertainty and fragility into their businesses. And I think this is the terrible mistake.

Mike, and speaking of changing the social contract and the social dynamics more generally, do you think that one of the changes that will happen as a result of everything we're dealing with now is a whole set of transformations, some of which are entire. unpredictable at this point but you know that up until now and probably it's got worse now you know there was the fact that you know half of people in America I think couldn't absorb an extra cost over 100 dollars right so half of the country essentially living with no savings whatsoever a lot of the same kind of patterns and businesses where there was very little resilience

particularly you know as you make the distinction between corporate and entrepreneurial we've been living very much as if the good times will last forever, and winter has come. So what do you see as going to be the big transformations that happen out of this in the way that we live our lives? 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. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers. You're spending a third of your life on the thing,

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not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. 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. Well, I actually think there will be what looks like a fairly rapid recovery. But in terms of you think of markets, for instance. I think it'll look because most of the money, most of the stimulus is being funneled to the corporate sector. And I think you're going to have post the lockdowns, and once we start to wind the lockdowns,

I think you'll have that initial rush of deferred spending that people haven't done for the last few weeks or few months. I think you're going to have a little bit of that carpe diem um where where you know people perhaps have been somewhat restricted and I guess the potential for this ever happening again might might fuel that but I think what you what you're going to have that's going to make the biggest difference to people's lives is is I mean I you know I'm not an economist I certainly deny all economic background, but it's something that is monetized debt spending.

So that's essentially where governments spend more in the economy than they remove from it in taxation. And that spending is funded by either direct funding from a central bank or the central bank buying more government treasuries. So, I mean, this is the, I think we've spoken about it before, this is the political victory of modern monetary theory. So, MMT. So this MMT is permanent government deficit spending

up until a point that it causes inflation. So I think that's like crack to politicians because it basically means a politician can promise anything without, they used to promise things and not deliver them. Now they can promise things and not worry about. not worry about how much they cost. So whether or not, whichever side of the argument you might fall economically on MMT, I think the argument's been lost and the politicians have run away with that. So that's got some interesting implications. I think in the short term, pragmatically,

we have to embrace it because without it, we would end up in sort of a 1930 style. depression. What happens after that I think is is definitely going to be interesting because my view is that is that when governments have no discipline they get less value for money for their spending. That's a really nice way of saying people start to rip them off and what MMT needs is it doesn't need any wastage in the economy and I think anybody who's ever operated in an economy knows that when there's free money around deception is Darwinian humans will find an incredible amount of ways. So I think that's essentially, in economic terms, they call that a debasements of money.

So I think you will see initial, and who knows this goes on, how long this goes on for, but certainly some initial economic growth after all this is over, fueled by government deficit spending fueled by this carbideum and perhaps this deferred spending. But I think that once you take that discipline away from government, we might have some interesting times. Well, just before Francis, I'm sure he's got a question for you, just to put it into simple language for people who may not be economist, just to translate what you've said. What you're really saying is the government is going to create, i.e. print,

endless loads of money and then a lot of that is going to be wasted and stolen and we're going to be creating growth by printing money so when you talk about the interesting times I mean that is one of my kind of looming foreboding senses at this point is that I'm having a great time as we've discussed many times yeah yeah but there will be held to pay at some point down the line for all of us and I just don't see how they weren't Well, I mean, there's some interesting dynamics going at the moment that might protect us for a bit longer.

So you do have quite a lot of deflationary or disinflation pressure in the economy at the moment. So while that's going on, currently you're going to be able to get away with this type of spending. I mean, obviously at the moment the ball price went negative yesterday, basically on the basis that a lot of people didn't realize if they took delivery they would actually have to store it somewhere. The oil is actually a real thing, not a thing on the screen. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think when you've got those kind of pressures in the economy, and again, you'll have people better qualified than me in this particular area. At the moment, as I said, pragmatically we have no choice. To avoid a 1930s depression, we have to do this. I think that in that sense, the first thing. that we do have a lot of deflationary pressures at the moment in, you know, the central banks think they controlled inflation over the, by using interest rates over the last few years.

That's bullshit. Basically, offshoring everything to China and reducing the price of everything or subsidizing the price of your taxi rides by Uber. I long thought that ceasing quantitative easing would lead to inflation because everything would have to be priced normally but so but I think going off subject that I think that we do have a window to to perform this type of these type of operations where I think we've got a problem is that it's crack the politicians never be able to let it go because politicians want to promise things to voters in order to the voters to I mean I

think am I going to say this out loud in a in somewhere I can never delete I think is a very possible that Trump will cancel student debt in America. Really? Well, he'll do anything to get the second term. If the polls aren't where he wants them to be, why not? We're writing checks for everything else. He's writing checks for the oil patch today.

Airline industry yesterday. Who knows? But I think that the scope, It's almost like left or right doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. The scope to curry favor means that we are, we are now in a MMT world. Yeah.

And to quote Top Gun is, and I never thought I'd do it on this podcast, but I'm going to, is Donald Trump. Come on, that's why you've got the... Yeah, exactly. They're not actually doing anything, though, as well. Yeah, no, they're not. I just do it because it makes me think

that I'm a fighter pilot. But it's true, is therefore, What you're saying is that politicians are writing checks their body can't catch, basically. Well, well, no, actually, if you think about it, it goes back to the consequences argument. Trump's only got a four-year term after this election. Will he bear the consequences of the, you know, whatever the denouement, to steal a French phrase, the only French word I know don't ask me what it means but it sounds good of it is he's

probably not going to be around he's certainly not going to be or unlikely to be president when it happens so so i think i think that's actually that's actually one of the big issues here is the consequences of this won't be borne by the the people who make the decision so you're saying that essentially it's a short-termism that we're sort of breeding now well we're we're we're We're giving people who's raised on Deptra to be alive is power, a lever to get themselves power. I don't think they think past that. I don't think whether they're short term, long term or medium term, they just want the power. The means justify the ends.

I think you're being very unfair. Jeremy Corbyn is a saint and would have done wonders. But anyway. Since we are in the political realm now, you and I were chatting about the fact that you know, the journalists haven't covered themselves in glory during this time. And you were saying you felt like, you know, Dominic Cummings and the team behind number 10 had played it very cleverly to the point even where, you know, young members of your family were starting to feel sorry for Boris Johnson.

Well, don't you think it's the most amazing thing that most people are sat at home and they're looking at the TV and every night at 4.30 or whenever the update show is, and they're turning to each other on their sofas and they're saying, why are these nasty journalists being horrible to these nice politicians? How has this happened? I mean, I presume it's Cummings. It could be anybody, I guess, but they set the trap, didn't they? They've been like ultra considerate plight and at the same time and I think this goes back to what I was saying before about how easy it is to be critical when you're not responsible for the consequences of action and I think that that's really the thing that people have sat in the soapers and

anybody who has to make decisions and everybody has to make key decisions in their lives where they balance pros and cons where there are conflicting interests compromises where they make sacrifices and they know that nothing is black and white and yet we seem to have the press who who everything is a gotcha or everything is is is seen in black and white terms and I think people just have have found that very difficult and yet I mean when my 17-year-old daughter says Boris Johnson is cute. You know the press are getting it wrong, don't you? Wow. And Mike, we're talking about public perception here and public perception of Boris Johnson.

I want to move a little bit towards China. Has this fundamentally changed the way we perceive China, the way we perceive cheap goods that they're producing, or do you think once we get back to normality, it'll be business as normal? Well, I mean, globalisation has been, I've, I've been, I've, I've, I'd say probably the most important force in our lives. And I mean, there's the arguments at a moment, certainly around medical, around protective equipment and so on and so forth.

And should we, could we see some of this onsharing back into the UK or the Western countries? My gut feeling is not that we have tremendously short memories, money talks it's a it's a big subject when you when you think about what what we actually lost because we lost a lot more than the ability to produce medicines and we lost a lot more than the ability to produce protective equipment just to take those two examples those two jobs were jobs that people had a tremendous amount of pride in so while economically you may say well you you've earned the

same money in a call center as you weren't producing antibiotics. Well, actually, you know, when I went to my factory and produced antibiotics and I came home in the evening, I felt good about what I contributed to society. And perhaps there was much more for me as the employee in what I did than the actual pay. And maybe I'd go to a factory making antibiotics and be happy to earn less than I would in the new economy. whatever's that is so I think we lost a lot more and it would be great if if we did see some of those activities coming back it would potentially be inflationary I guess

so to go with the the monetized spending debt expenditure that the governments were doing we'd have another inflationary contributor to the economy my suspicion is I I'm not sure I think well we'll we'll see how much which they want to get into it with China on this. Because surely the US in particular Trump, who's notoriously skeptical about China, won't he see this as an opportunity to actually really attack them and try and make some wholesale changes to the trade deal that they have?

I think he will want to look like he is. But that's different to actually changing the terms of trade, if you like. And I think that the corporates, the corporates that we're talking about before the corporates that I think are going to do very well from this recovery, I think they will resist that.

I mean, Apple's supply chain is a good case in point, isn't it? How do you, I don't know, reshore Foxconn't into the US? How do you tell people that their iPhone that cost $1,100 now cost $2,000? I think these are very, very difficult things to imagine happening in any more than a superficial way. Maybe for some things around sort of critical supplies, I think that it's possible, but I don't see it happening on a large scale. I think it also depends a lot on what happens and what we find out about how the virus started and how it was spread. So if it, you know, there's a lot of talk now that this may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan. And there's a lot of talk about China suppressing information from getting out in order to hoard ventilators and PPE, right?

They were not allowing American companies that make PPE to export that PPE in January and February before we were all aware of it. So how we respond to China, I think, will depend to a large extent on what the public perception is. is about you know is China a good faith actor or not and I think increasingly we're starting to see that they're not and you know when we talk about antibiotics and stuff I mean that is an issue of national security really at its core right if if one country can switch off your supplies of antibiotics and PPE and whatever else that you know that's a problem that's a problem it is but I wonder I wonder how significant it is even if that did come back in

some shape or form how significant it would be and I guess going back to the you've heard the start of your point there constant in is is there isn't it an implicit assumption in there that we ever know what the truth is that we ever get to the truth I mean that that seems to be one of the characteristics of the of the world we live in at the moment is there's just too much information yeah and so how do how do you ever know which which the true or what the true information is I agree that it should happen, I just answer it will.

And I was talking to a friend of mine who's actually an entrepreneur, and he was saying to me that he thinks that what we're going to see is very much like the AIDS pandemic. There was a world before the AIDS pandemic, and then there's a world post-AIDS pandemic. Do you sort of buy into that worldview, might, that we're going to have a world which is pre-COVID and now post-COVID, where everything has been changed as a result of the experience that we've gone through? Or is it too early to say, do you think? I mean, from our last podcast, when I say that, I think I said in the last podcast, that the problem with predicting the future isn't that we don't have enough information today,

it's that the future is unimaginable. And if you, you know, I think we last spoke a year or so back. And in some ways that statement is, yeah. All right, Mike. the credit all right fine well done you were right well done other example of you know shit's coming but you don't know what color is isn't it right and again it's it applies again here my instinct is things aren't will possibly change as much as as people think you have that kind of

immediacy that bias don't you that the things that happen to your day today become far more significant in and you you imbue them with far more significance. I certainly think you would have got long odds on the thing that every single person in the world's talking about being a virus. It's a bit disappointing. If you said to me what is the one event that could stop the world and get every talking, I would have said a visiting alien, which would have been much more fun. As long as they were friendly aliens. So that's a good point, actually, you know, the fact that we can't imagine what

is going to happen. But let's say you have a business. How would you deal with this particular situation. If you could give advice to the entrepreneurs out there, what would you do in order to limit the damage of this kind of event? Or is there anything that you can do? Well, that's what I have, that's what I have been doing over the last few weeks. And it's very, it's very case specific and the government, you know, I think it's interesting, you know when Mr. Sunak turned up in his skinny tie and his nice suit he really looked like he was he was going to deliver didn't he and and then when you sort of

scratch the service of what he said it got it got more and more complicated and I think it's it's interesting and I'd like to take that question as slightly different direction so I I have been advising businesses specifically we moved a business that has 130 odd stores in the UK. We managed to move a significant proportion of their sales online at a higher margin, which we think ultimately will save the business and will save somewhere in the region of 700 jobs.

So it's a very specific piece of advice for that business. And that will be repeated. What can we do? How can we think differently? How can we think in the box? And that'll be very, very case specific. You know, but I think the problem we've got at a macro level is what I would call the Goldman Sachs problem.

So everybody who's involved in the delivery of this from the government is Goldman Sachs hedge fund. You know, and they might as well be from another planet when it comes to entrepreneur, run businesses, you know, when you get the train from Houston to Manchester for the Conservative Conference and you've worked at Goldman or you've worked at a hedge fund and you're now a newly minted MP or a newly minted advisor, those industrial estates you go past on the way up, they're in another galaxy, they're on the outer rim, you know,

you've no experience of the stresses and strains. So why? This is again another question. Why have we not got somebody from the small and medium-sized business arena involved in the delivery of health? Because while those of us who do give advice to businesses are able to look in the micro, there doesn't seem to be anybody with experience in this area advising the government on the macro. And this goes back to where we need to, how we need to deliver the money in the way we can deliver the money. And I think that what they should have done and if anyone listens to this with any influence is they really easy and quick way and relatively fair way to help businesses now would

have been able would have been to reverse last year's P-A-Y-E and N-I contributions in business up to a certain size so that would have been immediate cash injection into into every company in the UK and it would have had elements of fairness about it because it will be very right it will be on a per head basis P-A-Y-E and I, businesses that employ more, people would have received more support. And that would have been a really quick, easy way to helicopter money into businesses that most need it without changing their debt profile, without changing their risk profile, without changing the way that they do business.

And then to give them the cushion to then think about how can we, can we deliver our service during this period and how do we come out of this period at the moment we we've got a as I mentioned this this Kafkaesque labyrinthine trying to deliver a loan scheme through the banks banks asking for personal guarantees you know about 250,000 pounds they they want a personal guarantee all these things are changing that covenant between entrepreneurs and the wider society and And is it because they don't understand the difference between the corporate world and the entrepreneurial world?

So the corporate world, corporates are much more able to access aid, much more adapted to trading with a heavy leverage, heavy debt, whereas entrepreneurial people don't, that's not the way, that's not the way they do business. yet we've got people who are from that corporate world, that Goldman Sachs world, I wonder if they just don't understand the dynamic, the difference in the dynamic between the two sectors. That is what it would appear, unless you, of course, you considered this. It's something that I think, I don't really tweet very often these days, but I think I've tweeted right at the beginning of this, that the measures that the Chancellor as enacted will represent

the biggest transfer of business from small and mid-sized companies to corporates in history. history and I still stand by that now unless they change the way they're going to deliver this aid we will end up with and then this goes to what sort of world we were living we will live in a world with less companies and do you think that is a fundamental failure of the Conservative Party the way they've done it I wonder if it's a bug or a feature yeah that's an interesting point all puns intended yeah no absolutely that That makes a lot of sense.

Mike, one of the questions that somebody asked us when we were doing our last live stream, which is actually the question, if you remember, that we always ask at the end of our interviews, was what's the one thing that we're not talking about, that we ought to be talking about? And my instinctive response was some of the winners and the positives out of this. Now, obviously, it sounds like one of the winners, in your opinion, will be the transnational corporations, which I would say is a negative outcome. But what do you see who are going to be some of the other people that do well out of this and some of the positives that come out of this? Because no matter how bad a situation, there will always be people who do well out of it and there will always be new industries, new creativity, new technology that comes out of it, new ways of doing things.

You know, are we going to commute less? Are we going to pollute less? Are we, you know, what are going to be some of the positives that you see coming out of this? Well, I think we were headed in very quickly in the wrong direction as a species. I think I think Darwin said that the you know that we we need it's the checks on our expansion that stop us using up all of our resources and and becoming extinct and and I think And I think in a way we had become too adapted or over adapted to our environment, which means that we were basically going to deplete all the resources until we were gone. I mean...

Like you haven't gone vegan on us, have you? He's got his yoga mat behind there. I always look at things in terms of micro and macro. And in the macro, I don't think we were going in a very good direction. So you could almost say that anything... anything, any change, anything that causes us to pause in the direction that we're headed, has the potential to be good. And I think, I don't know, it's difficult because for most people now, they'll be very, very worried about, you know, their jobs, about money and all of the

things and their families and the opportunities going forward. So I don't want to exaggerate the possibility for personal development from this, but I suspect that hopefully there's enough people and I think that's the potential maybe for what you're looking for is that people have had time to pause and think about what's important. That may be a for the human species,

but I guess that's the hope. And Mike, can you, see a time where actually, because we're going through this experience now and it's making us re-evaluate a lot of our lives, like things that you never questioned, we suddenly re-evaluate, like commuting, going 40 minutes to a place and coming and then going to an office and 40 minutes back. Running your own business, surely there's going to be a lot of people going to look and think to themselves, hang on, why am I paying for office space? This is a complete waste of money when actually the vast majority of people can work remotely, they

will be more effective, they'll be happier, and that means that I will save a whole ton of money. Well, I think, again, I think maybe it's a little bit even deeper than that. So I agree with you that people don't want to commute, and I think 40 minutes is a generous estimation of most people's, you know, in and out of London, people are doing two, three, four hour, hour commutes and and I think that's that's you know fundamentally destructive in so many ways but I don't think people want to work at home either I mean I don't know about anybody else but you know I'm surviving here we all feel for you Mike your life must be terrible but I think I think people would like to live

in environments where where they worked and where they lived where within walking distance you know I think you sort of get under the skin of how we've designed, designed our cities and designed our lives and the basic architecture of the way we conduct, conduct ourselves. And that, I think what the exposes, that isn't working. So it would be great, wouldn't it, is if you could, you know, walk 15 or 20 minutes to your place of work, go home at lunchtime, leave work when you needed to do something urgent, go back to work. And that kind of dynamic, somewhere in the middle, if you like, of your commute, but perhaps not, you know, it's good, it's good to get.

I don't think there's going to be something positive gains. I mean, somebody said to me, somebody asked me the other day, what, what do you think the future look like? And I was, I was bastardizing the, the All World quote from 1984. And I said, it's a laptop screen smashing you in the face forever. I'm not sure that sitting in our offices glued to this screen is necessarily that healthy either. So somewhere in the middle, but I'm not quite sure how we get there. No, because, I'm sorry, Constantine.

No, go ahead, mate. No, because it just seems to me that this way that we're living, it doesn't seem sustainable if you go back to, you know, the nine to five. And it didn't seem looking back on it, that it was particularly effective either. But, you know, people had done it for generations, therefore we carried on. Surely the next generation of innovators and people coming out of it are going, well, we've actually managed to break that now. We've seen that it doesn't work.

Therefore, let's try this new way. Well, I think we'll definitely have, I think one of the economic effects of this situation will be the relative growth of the virtual. over the real if you like so the virtual economy over the real economy so so so you'll see more cloud-based activity more remote activity and and certainly if you think about contingency planning for businesses now where they used to have warehouses full of desk that everyone could go to that's that's gone now hasn't it so there's going to be a whole different whole different way of thinking about how you how you plan for this kind of

emergency or this kind of this kind of interruption, business interruption going forward. So I think that I think there will be changes and people will work from home. Well, I'm just not sure we'll get to that fundamental change that that is necessary, which is more holistic. It's the context of our lives. You know, it is the big thing that I think is even underlined even more is that technology. Technology is not saving you any time.

It's not making you any happier. You are constantly available. I mean, the whole world's on shut down, and yet everybody's cooped up in a room somewhere, you know, talking into a team's call. It's not improving our lives. It hasn't given us any more free time. So is it, do we need a much more fundamental

fundamental reset. I don't know. 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 usa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. Something more for another more fundamental virus to show us down even more. That's what we need is what Mike is exactly what he's saying. But Mike, what is it that we're not seeing?

What is it that we're not talking about? What do you with a kind of totally different mindset to most people that I know? What is out of our field of vision that's coming? Well, I think one of the consequences, I mean, I think people are talking about this, but that my biggest fear, and it's not my biggest fear for the economy or the country, maybe the biggest fear for the country, is the civil liberties implication of what will come. after this. Rushing a vaccine through, that's a frightening prospect in many ways. Vaccinating many young people who don't necessarily need a vaccine is concerning. Thinking about how you're going to be monitored, how you're going to be tagged,

how your movements are going to be big-brothered. I think all of these things, I think is it Jeremy Bentham and the concept of the people's behaviour changed, the panopticon if they're watched all the time, the behavior changes. And I think that's quite dynamic amongst populations as well. I think for some people, for many people, and it kind of goes back to the Huxley and the brave new world view of where we are, is they may embrace that. They may embrace that sort of... monitoring that herding to use the phrase in a different way well there's many

many other people and they're the people that affect change who are going to find that intolerable so it took breaking the law to change many of the things that we now take for granted be it's the suffragettes or homosexuality or many of those things it took people who who who are prepared to step outside the boundaries And similarly the way most entrepreneurial people think is to be, is to be outside of the mainstream. And I think if we limit that,

and I think that is perhaps the thing that worries me most, we will limit the ability of those people who affect change to do so. And so where will that leave us in a very homogenous world? That's not a world I particularly want to live in. Mike, well let me push back on that a little bit Because as you know, if there was anyone who was concerned about the erosion of our civil liberties, restrictions of free speech, that's me.

I've been pretty outspoken about this for a long time. But I've got to be honest with you, I don't, I look around. I mean, yes, in Australia, they're talking about some kind of app to track your immunity status. And that would be a hill that I'm prepared to die on. I'm not signing up to any fucking app that tracks me around the country. No way. But if you can't travel, would you? Right.

Right, but this is, yeah, I mean, yeah. This is exactly my point. If someone said to you, your passport is dependent on you carrying your contact tracing app, then most of us would, and it's erodes, doesn't it? So it starts with a contract tracing app. Where does it go after that? Right. But my broader point, I mean, I take your point on that, and that is a step way too far, in my opinion.

But more broadly speaking, I do see the, you know, a lot of the people we've had on the show, who we like and respect kind of in my opinion going way off the deep end on this stuff and talking about how we're all under house arrest and all this cut which i i think is a massive exaggeration i think a temporary and necessary lockdown is not the same as house arrest i personally don't feel like western governments have been overly restrictive about this in in proportion to the threat that we're facing you know it is a war like time you accept a little bit more imposition on your freedom during that time provided their time limited provided their specific provided we can go back to you know having a free society afterwards I do you

see signs that that's not going to happen is what what what's the reason for your concern I never trust people in power to give the keys back once once once once they get this similar to the the MMT conversation that we had earlier once you give people in power power and consider that their reasons for living or to obtain power. They really don't like giving it back. So I do, while I might not be at the further end of the spectrum of the previous guests you've had, we as a country, as a, as a, as a, as a, as feces have fought and lost millions of lives to maintain freedoms and I don't think that should be lost there are consequences there's serious consequences to

giving up giving up the things that that enable us to change and I think that's that that's what scares me most is when you have a contact tracing app that that you need to have you have given the political order a lever in with which to dictate or with which to demand your your obedience and anything that does that anything that does that more i think that that's that would be very very worrying and you say you'd die on a hill for it but the reality is most people won't and then when most people won't you'll be you'll be in the minority and then your wife will want to take a nice holiday somewhere and and your kids will be saying dad's an idiot what difference does it make and

and compliance will become the norm and that that worries me I like the fact that we're talking about this but for China it's just business as normal isn't I mean that's basically what they do over there so you know mate that just don't don't say stuff like that in your accent please it's just what they do over there We're going to be banned off YouTube forever now. Mike, listen, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it and your kind of counterintuitive ideas and a slightly different

look at things is always brilliant. So we really appreciate you coming on. I would tell people to follow you on Twitter, but you don't tweet very much anymore. They can still follow. All right, so remind everybody your Twitter handle before we let you go. Oh, go. I haven't been on for so long. completely forgotten it.

What is my Twitter? At MDVex. Yeah, at MDVex. So we'll make sure we get that right in the video description. Thanks for coming on, Mike. It's a pleasure as always. And we'll see the rest of you with another live stream tomorrow.