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Jan. 27, 2019 - David Icke
01:02:54
The Non-Binary Elephant Podcast Interviews Best Selling Author Simon Dolan
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Time Text
I'm a non-binary elephant.
Podcast. Hello everybody and welcome to the non-binary elephant podcast.
I'm Jamie Icke. Joined with me, partner in crime, Gareth.
Hello. Today our guest is British entrepreneur and businessman Simon Dolan.
As you know, the first couple of episodes we've done, reading the first line of Wikipedia as our introduction to the guest for you.
So this week, Simon's is, Simon Dolan, born 20th of May 1969, is a British businessman and entrepreneur.
I'm sure there's a lot more for Simon than that.
It's going to be a short interview if there's not.
Short and sweet though, isn't it? Simon, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you very much. How are you?
Good to be here. I'm good, thank you.
Good. Looking forward to it.
Yeah, so we are too.
I mean, this is the third one, and we've had three completely different guests.
We've had a politician, a filmmaker, and a writer, and now an entrepreneur.
It's the first time we've been in Claridge's, though.
Yeah, it's kind of appropriate when we're interviewing a businessman in Claridge's.
It's lovely, yeah. First time for a long time I've ever actually had a guy get in the lift with me to take me up to the floor.
He's a nice guy. He is, he is.
He moaned about the parking as well.
I said I've had a nightmare parking.
He said, oh yeah, your mate did too. And I was like, well, not really.
He left me in the car to sort it.
So he's done all right. So, I think a really good place for us to start would be right at the beginning, because you hear entrepreneur, I kind of said this before we started the interview, you hear entrepreneur, you think somebody that's very motivated, that wants success, and obviously usually with successful entrepreneurs comes finance and fame in many cases.
And having read your book, which we'll talk about as well, is if you go back to kind of your teenage years and growing up, you kind of got to an age, 16, 17, where you still didn't really know where you wanted to go, what you wanted to do, which for me, my kind of interpretation of Entrepreneurship is something that's in you that you have from 10 and you've got that motivation to do something.
You read some of the stories of people having businesses at 10 years old, 20 years old and building and building.
I'd be interested to see what happened to make you want to go into your own company and how that all started.
It's a funny thing, isn't it? I don't think that entrepreneurs necessarily are born I think it's a bit of a misnomer.
It's kind of a get out for other people who don't want to do it or think that they can't do it.
So I never wanted to be an entrepreneur.
It wasn't like something that I started when I was five and thought, you know, that'd be great.
I'm going to have businesses when I get older.
So the first thing I wanted to do was be a footballer.
So that was my big thing from the age of about, I don't know, seven or eight or something like that for the next few years until I discovered rugby and then I preferred rugby.
But that was what I wanted to do. When I look back now, I think it was more kind of adulation and maybe acceptance from a whole group of people, the fans, that I probably wanted more than kicking a ball around the park.
So it was probably more about the being famous bit, as I thought at the time, than it was about the football.
The reason I say that is this.
When I kind of got off that dream, because I was always told, oh, you can't do it, you can't do it, you can't do it.
Every kid's told that, in fairness.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so after that, I decided I discovered music.
I would discover David Bowie, in particular, and music.
And then I learned three chords on a guitar, like everything does.
And then I wanted to be a rock star.
So that was the next period of time, probably for about the next five or six years.
I'm terrible to about 18, 19 years.
I want to be a rock star.
And then the common thing, of course, between those two things is the adulation and the fans and the fame and this and that and the other.
And then you get to a point when you realise, no, I'm probably not cut out for this, you know.
So I never really gave up on that dream, so I still harbour some thoughts.
I don't think anyone ever gives up on it, do they?
No, you can't.
But it's parked in a balance for now.
And then it was a matter of really getting to the point of like 18, 19.
I'd always worked. I'd always had part-time jobs.
But now I had to actually go out and earn a living.
And the thing that I'd been really good at, at school and growing up, was always numbers.
Not really money, just numbers.
Numbers are easy for me. I just see things and I get it.
And not mathematics either, which is a completely different branch.
So, algebra and stuff like that, I can't do an 11-year-old's homework.
I really can't. Algebra is the most pointless thing to learn.
It doesn't make any sense. And I think that's the...
With me, I'm a practical person, not in any do-it-yourself sense.
I just have to see what the application is in real life to make it make sense to me in my head.
So, numbers are always fascinated by it.
So, I ended up...
Absolutely against my will, working in an accountancy office for like 18 months.
Still wanted to be a rock star at the time and it was very much a passing thing.
But as it happened, I was quite good at it and only worked there for maybe 18 months or so.
And then I discovered one day I'd kept along with how much I was earning, how much my work was being built out and how much I was earning.
Right. So I went in to see the boss, and at the time, I think the numbers are right, but I was billing out about £4,000 a month, and I was getting paid about £300 a month, because this was like a one.
And I went to him and showed him this apparent discrepancy, and I said, look, you need to pay me more money.
And I was just turned 20 at the time.
Um... And I said, look, you need to pay me more money.
Well, I'm not paying me more money.
Well, I'm going to walk out then. Bullshit, 20 years old.
Not expecting him to say, you know, okay, well, you can walk out.
So, but he did.
And me being me, I just, well, that's it.
So I just walked out. I literally just got my stuff and went.
And never to look back.
And then after that, I thought, well, I don't really want to do accountancy now.
So I was looking through a newspaper and there was an advert that said on target earnings £50,000 a year or something.
Me earning £300 a month was like £50,000 a year.
So I thought, OK. It didn't say what the job was, it just said on target earnings.
So I went to a hotel and I lived in Manchester at the time.
And they did some vague sort of presentation to me, which was odd.
And at the end of the presentation I must have asked one or two questions or something.
And the guy said to me, he said, well, great, can you start?
And it was like, what is it?
Doing what? Doing what?
Yeah. I got the job out by, yeah.
And it was selling Timeshare, which was why it was all very vague and stuff.
Right. So I went selling Timeshare for a while.
And that was funny in a number of different ways.
No one had any money there, but there was fights every day and stuff like that.
It was just bizarre. It was like a whole sitcom.
So I left that and then I got a job selling photocopies and fax machines which was literally going around industrial states knocking on doors asking if people wanted to buy a photocopy or a fax machine.
Did that for a while and then one fateful evening, it was Thursday, every Thursday we had a sales meeting.
And at the sales meeting, you were routinely humiliated if you'd not sold much or lauded if you were a top salesperson.
And at the end of the meeting, they would say, thank you very much, now we're going to all treat you for a drink down the pub.
So we'll go down the pub.
They treat us to a drink.
And then, of course, the next thing you know, you end up in a club.
The main office where we were was in Warrington.
So we ended up in this big nightclub called Mr.
Smith's, which we used to do every Thursday, get hammered.
So we did this quite a lot every week and then at some stage it was just my turn to get caught.
So I got in the car and started driving home, got pulled over and all the rest of it.
So really long story short, I ended up losing the driving license, ended up losing the job.
Went on the Dole for 12 months or something.
With actually the intention of going back to a sales role when I got my driving license back.
So this is all a very long way of saying I never really had any idea of being an entrepreneur.
By this time I'm probably not going to be 22.
And what prompted me to become an entrepreneur, if you like, was just simply a lack of money.
My 18 months worth of Dole money and credit cards and stuff Didn't stretch out for 18 months.
So about 9 months in, I'm now in a load of debt.
I haven't got any credit cards left.
I can't really afford to eat and this and that and the other.
I live in some horrible, two up, two down, some shitty place in Manchester.
And I've got to do something.
Two things at that point I knew how to do that I could turn into money.
One was selling. I couldn't do that because I couldn't drive.
And the second thing was doing accounts.
So I had this idea of putting an advert in a loaf of paper.
Which was the tiniest ad you can imagine.
It was the smallest one they did.
And it just said, year-end counts £99, good keeping £10 a month, and a telephone number underneath.
And that was it. So that was my last ditch effort.
And three weeks after the advert went in, there was a woman called Jenny Watts, who
was a florist, and she phoned me out.
And I just picked up the phone and said, hello?
She said, hello, is that Jenny's accountancy?
Oh, yeah, yeah, she was here.
Oh, I did my accountancy.
So we did that.
And I did the account.
She paid me £99.
And I then could afford to put another advert in the newspaper.
And a guy called Brian Miller phoned me up.
He was a builder. And he says, it's a bit complicated.
I'm in the middle of a tax investigation.
I said, that's why I specialise in tax investigations.
I said, I'll definitely do that for you.
Knowing nothing about tax investigation.
I didn't know anything about tax at the time, like zero.
So I agreed to do this thing for him.
And I went down a library because there was no internet in those days.
This is 1992. And got a book on basically tax and tax investigations and stuff.
And went to the revenue with him in my cheap Burton suit and this little briefcase and just a nice smile and completely black in the whole thing.
And we ended up winning.
So he was really happy. So I got £500 from him.
And that was where SJD Accountancy kind of started from.
So desperation, luck, you know, whatever.
So I just kept doing that and then...
In... 96. So I was going for about three or four years.
Three years. And then I decided to move back down south.
And then... The business was going quite well.
I was probably earning 30 grand a year or something.
Which was fine. I had no real money issues up there.
Came down south to Hertfordshire.
And... Thinking that I was actually going to sort of replicate what I'd done up there.
And for whatever reason, it just didn't work.
The thing that I was doing up there, the advertising, just didn't work when you did the same thing down south.
So I thought, well, I'm going to have to do something.
So it goes all the way back to the accounting practice I worked in.
At the time, they had quite a few clients who were in the IT world.
And they were one-man limited companies, these micro-businesses.
And I thought to myself, I remember that at the time.
That was pretty good. We had a few of those clients.
So I, in one morning I did a, mocked up a whole advert, got in touch with a serviced office company called Regis to make me look as though I was this massive, like, UK-wide company.
And it was me working in my bedroom, literally.
No employees, no nothing, but I had a Mayfair office, serviced office, and a telephone number which was being answered by Regis.
And this great advert that said I had offices all over the place.
And I undercut everybody else in the market by half, basically.
And of course, the phone started ringing off the hook.
And that was really where I then started.
I got the next big leap up.
And then the next, whatever that was, 15, 16 years, I just kept working away at that.
And then I sold it in 2014.
By which time we had 14,000 clients.
Six or seven offices and stuff like that.
And sold it to a private equity company for just under £100 million.
So literally from desperation and nothing, I did that.
And it was a combination, not trying to be modest, but it was a combination of luck and happenstance.
But an awful lot of hard work and opportunity and opportunities taken.
And good people.
But it all came essentially from me just having this idea and starting it and cracking on it and then recognising what was working and what wasn't working.
But none of anything I did I didn't think really was particularly entrepreneurial.
For that sort of business, it was just something that I needed to do and started and kept going until I finished it.
Perseverance is the biggest problem.
How did the expansion go?
That 15-year gap, obviously from you on your Todd, I'm assuming if you're selling it for 100 million, there's a lot of employees, offices, a lot of everything.
Yeah. Was that a gradual thing?
It's like, oh, this is making a profit.
We'll open an office here. Let's make a profit.
Sadly, it's that boring.
Right, okay. That's why you cut it out.
Yeah, there's no...
It literally is, you know, you've got one client today, you get another client tomorrow.
And at one point, we were taking on like 20, 25, 30 clients a day.
Wow. But you're still doing the same thing.
There's just more people doing it.
So the end of the 8-7 is obviously 200 star, and all the stuff that goes with it.
But it isn't, there was no big to go the trick, other than just keeping going and keeping going.
You know, no different to a tennis player or something like that.
You hit one ball, you're not going to be any good are you?
You hit a million balls, you're going to be quite good.
If you hit a million balls every year, then you're going to be really good.
It's the same thing.
You say it's the perseverance and recognising what's working and carrying on with those bits and getting rid of the stuff that isn't working.
Right. And just keep it going.
And I think probably over the course of that period, because I was making really good money and so on, and that then enabled me to invest in different businesses.
And so my sort of entrepreneurial career probably, I wouldn't say that that was a...
What I did with the accountancy, I wouldn't say that was particularly entrepreneurial, but the stuff I've done since then probably has been more difficult.
Yeah, it gave the ability to be.
Yeah. And then you, like anything else, you learn on the job and you sort of recognise deals and companies you might be able to buy or maybe not, or things that you can invest in or maybe not, and then you make some investments that don't work, some do, some I'm still waiting for them to work.
Right, right. You know, some you sell on, whatever it might be.
So it was very much a...
It was a desperation at the time, why I started.
And then a perseverance.
And now, of course, I can sit back and go, oh yeah, great entrepreneur.
But it wasn't at the time.
One thing I've kind of found fascinating, and we spoke about before, is creating a model that's repeatable.
So a business where it works and you can repeat it, repeat it, repeat it again.
I was staggered when I did some research for a That's a college project years ago.
How little an individual Starbucks store makes.
By times that, by how many there are, it's a massive business worth billions.
And it sounds like the same.
In a sense, you start with one, and then build, build, and build, up until something you sell for that kind of money.
Yeah, Starbucks, I read the same thing.
It's like 25, 30 grand a year, isn't it?
Yeah, something like that. McDonald's is quite similar as well.
They're quite low. Yeah, but if you've got 30,000 stores, you've made 30,000.
It is exactly that. And it's always the non-glamorous stuff as well.
I think these days people, especially the millennials and whatever the people are called after the millennials, I think they think that business is something different.
Business seems now, to me anyway, the stuff that I see is mainly about fundraising or how many clients you've got.
There doesn't actually seem to be much of a focus on profit anymore because people have seen what's happened with Twitter.
Amazon in the early days never made profit for a long time.
Tesla's a really great example.
Of people who are just professional fundraisers, in the hope that at some stage in the future they'll make a profit.
And something works, yeah.
And they don't. But that isn't a business, and I think we just happen to be going through a cycle at the moment, a bit like the dot-com thing was in 1999 and 2000.
And there's going to be a wholesale purging of all the rubbish.
And then we'll go back to more, not traditional businesses, but more traditional business models, i.e.
ones that deliver a profit and have customers that pay you.
Yeah, cool. Business needs to make profit.
To be sustainable, it needs to make a profit.
A lot of it is about image now, though, isn't it?
Like you're saying about millennials, it is about image and perception.
Yeah. Whereas probably making money is generally quite boring, like you say, not very glamorous.
Yeah. Kind of the nitty-gritty, the stuff that, you know, you're not going to get done.
After eight pints. No.
Well, as you know, I live in Monaco, and so I get to chat to a lot of people who've made a lot of money.
And I don't think anybody I've spoken to there has ever made money in the glamorous business.
Right. But they're all pretty wealthy.
Yeah, of course, yeah. It's real estate, it's shops, it's commodities, you know, it's mining, it's gold, it's hedge funds, it's this, it's that, the other...
But there's no internet millionaires there.
Well they're one of however many internet startups actually are these massive companies.
Venture capital. So venture capital companies is a bit like private equity except they make bets on really early startups.
So typically quite low value.
And so they can put a small amount of money and get a fair chunk of the company.
Venture capital work on the model of 19 out of 20 failing.
And this is 19 out of 20 that they invest in, so don't forget that they'll get an awful lot more pitches than that.
So, you know, it'll be, out of the pitches they get, let's say they get 10 times as many as they invest in, just one out of 200 or something that might get past the first year.
But of course, that one out of 20...
Funds. Yes. Just enough.
So, yeah, it's...
As you say, a business has to make money, and if you can't figure out how your business...
It's going to make money. You haven't got business.
No you haven't no. You're just asking somebody else to find your hobby.
We were chatting on the car on the way down in terms of We use an example of a guy that owns Derby County, a guy called Mel Morris, who was a relatively wealthy guy and then invested about £100,000 in the guy that invented Candy Crush.
He wasn't a lot of money invested, but he got a silly amount.
We were talking about the fact that having money creates more money because you have the opportunity to invest in things that you couldn't necessarily do yourself and go up.
I was reading about the nickname Twitter Dragon that he got, which was...
Came from... I saw an interview where you were saying that when you sent long business plans and proposals, you're usually bored by the end of the first page.
So, pitch me a business in 140 characters.
And I think you had a couple of actually start-ups that have actually been quite successful from that, haven't you?
Not directly from...
I'm just trying to think. Not directly from stuff that I was pitched.
I think what ended up happening was as I met...
People via Twitter.
And then when you get a dialogue going, it might be that it wasn't particularly the business that they were pitching that you thought was good.
But you just end up building a relationship and then they might end up doing something in the future that you end up investing in.
Something like that.
But I don't think there was any direct pitches there.
But the whole idea was not that I wanted people to necessarily pitch me The business that was going to make them, you know, millions of pounds or whatever.
It was all about, can you get my interest more than anything else?
Because as you said, you get sent business plans through, and basically they all look the same.
I'm fairly sure there is a free download of business plans somewhere, because I see so many of them that are almost identical.
And they're 30 pages long, and people think that the more volume that they put on, it's like a kid writing an English essay.
Ask for 300 words and they'd write 3,000 because they think it's better because there's more.
And if you can't sum up succinctly what your business is in a few words, you haven't really got that much of a business.
All businesses. What do Proctor Campbell do?
Well, we sell detergents and stuff.
Okay, well that's easy to know, isn't it?
What do gold mines do? Well, they did gold out and sell it.
What do the jewelers do?
Well, they buy jewelry and then sell it.
Yeah, they're all really, really easy.
Even internet stuff. The ones that make money tend to be quite easy.
What do Amazon do? Sell books.
And other shit. It's all really simple stuff.
If you need a 30 page plan to tell me what it is that you're doing, it's fine.
You probably don't understand it yourself.
No. And you can't articulate it to somebody either.
So the point was, I'm not interested in anything.
If you want me to invest, just say something interesting.
And get my attention. Get my attention.
Get me interested in something. And then you get them.
And then of course the email address is out there.
So I get pitches. Probably one a week or something on average like that.
So how do you filter through those?
Because looking at your business portfolio now, it's quite diverse.
I filter through them quickly.
And the more you see, the more you realise which ones are bullshit and which ones maybe have some sort of legs.
Is there like a common theme that you look for?
That you think that's something in that?
That kind of makes it stick out?
Yeah, now more so...
Because what I used to want to do was to invest in sort of startup and invest in an idea and a person actually.
Invest in people.
But what I found with that was that however good you thought the person was and however good you thought the idea was, the timeline and the cost of what the plan says and what the actuality might be is massively different.
So I've now become a bit more discerning with the stuff that I look at with any degree of seriousness.
So I only look at stuff now that's developed and has customers.
Yeah, it makes sense. It's less of a risk.
If you've got five customers, then you can probably go and get 50 or 500 or 5,000.
There's something there to build on.
If you've got a product that hasn't got any customers at the moment, You might never get a customer.
Why haven't you got one?
Why haven't you got two customers?
Even if it's your mum. Or an auntie.
Anybody. It could be anybody.
Hopefully not your mum or your auntie.
But even if it was, you could kind of lag it a bit.
But people who have got, you know, we're nearly there and we just need a bit of money for investment just to finish the product off.
Our times have heard that.
And then we're ready to go.
And they all send you the same graph.
It's the hockey stick one.
It's the same with global warming thing.
Absolutely, yeah. Everyone does that nowadays.
Why? Well, because it's three years down the line, and so therefore, you know, it's a pain there, but then, God, look at the upside.
I'm not stupid.
It's not going to happen like that.
You're not going to go from turning over 500,000 a year to, you know, 35 million the next year.
It doesn't happen. It's probably never happened.
No, it's one in however many thousands where something happened.
There's a catalyst of some description, isn't it?
How long have you lived in Monaco?
Five years. Six years this year, yeah.
Right. What made you go?
Where were you living before that? In London?
I was living in a place called Gerald's Cross, which is about two minutes outside London.
Right. What made us go was a burglary, funnily enough.
Really? We had our house broken into in 2012, late 2012.
And we'd been broken into before in a different house.
And that was when we were in the house.
So that was a bit scary. Yeah, horrible.
That was when we just had our first son.
So he was there.
Quite a funny side story on that.
We had problems before, attempted break-ins or whatever.
So I decided it would be a really good idea to have a scythe underneath my bed.
So I went and bought a scythe from B&Q or somewhere like that.
And it was there for...
I don't know, six months a year or two years or something, left it there.
My wife hated it. Anyway, I heard this noise one day downstairs, and the alarm goes off, because we always get the alarm on.
So I go hurling out of bed, start while I make it, with a side in my hand, running downstairs, like this, expecting to see someone there.
And there was no one there, and it was like, oh, what's that?
So then my wife comes creeping downstairs, and I said, there's no one there, it's all right.
She says, have you seen the kitchen window?
No, what? Well, the kitchen window's broken.
What somebody had done, they'd spent, I don't know how long, getting the putty out of the outside of the window, and then taking the window out, breaking it gently, taking the window out, the glass out, and then putting that on the side really gently on a towel or something like that, and then creeping through the window.
By which time our alarm had gone off, so he hears the alarm going, he hears commotion upstairs.
It's a lot of effort, isn't it?
To then come away with nothing?
Well, yeah, the idea is, they go and get car keys, and then they drive your car away, You don't know until the morning, by which time your car's in a pallet somewhere going out to wherever it is.
Yeah. To be fair, if it was a nice car, you could fail four times and succeed once and you'd still laugh.
Well, yeah, fair point. But it was a nice game.
So they'd get kids, the druggies, to do it, basically.
They'd give them 50 quid for the car or whatever it would be, or for doing the job, and then they would go and sell it down.
So that was the first one we had, and then a long time later we had another one.
When we were living in Gerards Cross.
And that was when we weren't in.
We were in a different place.
And I got a phone call that I'd been broken into.
I've had enough now. We've got a young family.
I don't really need to be. So where can we go?
So safety was the paramount thing.
I was racing quite a lot. So I was away a lot.
And it's horrible leaving your family to worry.
What's my wife going to do if someone breaks?
There's nothing you can do. So we started looking around.
And I knew Monaco, we'd been going there for weekends here and there, on and off.
So we decided to look, and that was what we did.
We looked, and I happened to be racing in the south of France.
I've got a track called Paul Ricard, which is only about an hour and a half from Monaco.
So my wife went looking at the school and apartments when I was racing.
She had a family apartment at our school, great apartments.
Job done. So that was it.
So maybe it took three or four months to decide and to actually be in there.
Yeah, and the weather's nicer.
Never looked back since. It's perfectly safe.
Clean. The weather's fantastic.
300 days sunny here.
Wow. And the actual geography of the place is really good.
I like training. So you have mountains up there.
You've got skiing 50 minutes away.
Europe is really accessible, so for me to come to London is a couple of hours and I'm here.
It's just the perfect place.
The preconception of Monaco is like a tax haven.
Is that actually true, that it is a tax haven, or is it not?
Well, there's no personal tax there.
Right, okay. So you'd pay corporation tax, would you?
You would pay corporation tax if you had a company in Monaco.
Right, gotcha, gotcha. It's quite high, it's 30% or something.
But if you're a private individual, then you don't pay any tax on your worldwide income.
If you live in Monaco, yeah, if you're a Monaco resident.
Gotcha. So of course it's attractive, but there will of course be people who move there because of the tax, but you can pretty much guarantee that after three or four years, if that's your motivation...
They'll leave, they won't enjoy it.
They won't go somewhere else.
Gotcha, gotcha. It isn't the right motivation to go.
So, for example, there's another place, a little place called Andorra, which is not a million miles away from Monacoat's three or four hours drive or something like that, which has got zero tax.
No one wants to live there.
It's really cheap. But they don't want to live there.
Why? Well, because of quality of life.
So it isn't really about the tax.
We could have gone to the Middle East. There's no tax there.
But the quality of life isn't what we would like there.
And so it gets a bad rap.
It's just a fantastic place to live.
In fact, you don't pay tax. It's like a really nice bonus.
Yeah. But if you're employing so many people, and obviously they're all paying tax in the country, and that's obviously giving the government an absolute fortune, then why shouldn't you enjoy that?
Exactly. You know what I mean? Yeah.
The problem that we have in politics at the moment is it's all politics of envy.
Right. You know, that person earns more than I do, so therefore I should have some of it.
Well, why? Well, because I'm entitled to it.
Again. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, those people, you know, they can't get there on their own.
What was it? Obama said something stupid.
Well, he said many stupid things, but one particularly stupid thing.
He was saying about Steve Jobs.
And he said, well, Steve Jobs couldn't have created Apple without other people.
Which is right. And he cited the example of what?
What about the people who built the roads on which he drove to go to work?
Without those roads, he wouldn't have been able to get to work.
So therefore, everybody owns a share of Apple, really.
And it was like...
But Obama wouldn't have been president without God knows how much funding from everyone else.
Exactly that.
So they all preach this sort of...
It's a socialist notion of we're all in it together and we're all able to share nicely and all that kind of stuff.
Which, if you can create some kind of utopia where everybody is equal...
You know, physically, mentally, and everything else.
And everybody has the same opportunities.
And everybody wants the same thing.
And everybody's prepared to work for everybody else.
And there isn't any crime, and, and, and, then yes, that whole thing works.
Yeah. But that's the issue with...
You've never been living in that world, yeah.
You can have equality of opportunity, which I think, to be fair, most people really nowadays have got...
It's the equality of outcome. Yeah, equality of outcome you're never going to get.
Someone's going to work harder than someone else for it.
Like, you're quite business-minded.
You like business. Me and money are like the Dead Sea.
Like, we just partied. Do you know what I mean?
And so we're different. So we would have equal opportunities, but he would do something different to me.
Yeah. Because I'll choose to go to the pub, maybe.
Or pick up a guitar and make a racket, which I know is not going to make any money, but I'm going to have a crack.
I can't then come round your house and say...
See, that's what frustrates me about the debate, especially when you come to gender and all those sorts of things.
They make the equality of outcome.
It's all about that. You're never going to have an equality of outcome.
It's impossible, unless you're going to punish other people.
Are the opportunities the same for men and women, for people from black and white in this country?
Yes, they are, to a degree, apart from in very extreme cases.
But the equality of outcome is never going to ever happen.
It's not. Firstly, people are not necessarily going to want the same things.
That's the biggest one. So, the debate does my head in.
I'd rather be a nurse. I'd rather be a male nurse than a CEO of a FTSE 100 company.
I would. And so I'm going to earn pocket change in comparison.
But that's how it is. You don't become a nurse to earn money.
No, exactly. It's quite really annoying when people say, oh, those poor nurses are doing anything.
Well, don't be a nurse then, but you never went in for the money in the first place.
You know, you are in the NHS. Yes, you are there.
You are that. But you chose your profession.
Not everybody. I get that.
You know, people say, oh, you know, you only think that money is better.
The only form of success is money.
And I really don't. And I'm probably much better positioned to make a decision on that than people who haven't got any money.
Because people who haven't got money say, well, that's not the measure of success.
How do you know you haven't got it? You know?
It's one measure of success. You haven't done it, so you can't possibly know about that.
But I have. So I can now tell you that actually it does make life more comfortable.
And you do have more opportunities.
Does it make you happy? Not really.
No. Would you say you're more happier now than you were when you were 20?
No. No. There you go.
It's just different. You know, you have more opportunity to do cool stuff.
But, you know, the stuff that I did when I was 20 that I enjoyed...
It didn't cost anything because I didn't have any money.
No. I can't say I enjoyed it any of the less than I've enjoyed experiences now.
Totally. You get used to things very quickly.
You know, so we're in Claridge, isn't it?
It's really lovely. I couldn't afford it 20 years ago or something like that.
Now I can. I still fight for it and moan about it.
It doesn't make me any happier than it did when I went on my first holiday to Tenerife, which was £200 all in or something.
Yeah. For two weeks.
But your mindset isn't money driven though, is it?
And like, it's interesting in terms of synchronicity because I was training a client yesterday and we had a conversation about, you know, what are you doing this week?
And I said I was coming down to do this.
And he was like, oh my God, and he was your engine guy for two years.
One Lamont with you. Said nothing but great things about you.
And he was saying about, because you invested heavily in the team, didn't you?
Yeah, yeah. And he was saying that a lot of guys, he'd worked for a lot of teams where people would invest.
And basically they'd invest and they'd pay for two really good drivers and they'd kind of sort her around the track.
Because you know how I paid for this, I'll have a crack.
Whereas he said you were the total opposite of that.
That you would have the great engineers and the other good drivers, but you were like, no, I want to be up there with them.
And he was saying the perseverance that you had in terms of training and coming in and talking about the engine and what could make it better and what could make it better.
He said he wasn't used to that with people that had come in and invested.
Yeah, because I think, certainly in the racing world, and I would imagine it's similar in other arenas like that, there's a lot of people that come along and just want to experience doing the Montmartre.
Yeah, yeah. With a reasonable amount of dedication and an enormous amount of money, you can go out and experience it and be a driver.
And it's a fantastic thing to do, and I wouldn't knock those guys at all, because It takes a huge amount of courage to actually go out on track and drive one of those things around that.
However slow you are, it might be.
It still takes an awful lot.
So I wouldn't knock that at all.
But personally for me, I couldn't do it unless I felt as though I was competitive.
And so I just worked hard to do it.
I'm a firm believer that we've all got two arms and two legs.
So whatever it is that you do or you do, I'm fairly sure I can do it.
I just need to practice. Because you did.
Once upon a time, you know, however good you are at guitar or whatever else it might be, you didn't know how to play it.
You just went through a series of steps and you learned how to play it.
And you got to a point where you are.
So if I knew those steps, and I always think, ah, yeah, well, I can shortcut.
I can be a bit more intelligent about it.
And maybe you can do things a bit quicker and you don't, you know, you learn from other people and then you don't make the mistakes that they do.
No, you learn from their mistakes, yeah.
Go off down the tangents and then come back.
So I'm a real firm believer in that.
And I think you can...
It's an interesting concept to see just how far you can take that and see how close to the top you can get.
Yeah. So that was what I enjoyed about it and that was why I sort of pushed myself.
I wouldn't have...
I couldn't have been there just to make up the numbers.
The numbers, yeah. Just to have the experience.
I'm going to win. Yeah. We did win the Monday.
Yeah, 2014. Amazing.
So... Yeah, that's an experience you can't find.
You earned that. That was really special.
How fast are you going in Le Monde?
Because I'm not that clued up.
Then 200 miles an hour.
So it's just 200 then?
Jeez. I hit 80 and I'm like that.
I don't do that. I go 70 tops.
Straight. Straight's an easy bit.
Because anybody can sit.
Not everybody. I mean, everybody can just put a foot to the floor and sit in a straight line and we're like that.
Yeah. It's when the corners come up.
So when you go around a corner at sort of, you know, 170, 180 miles an hour, that's when it gets a little bit...
Yeah, no, not for later. Well, it's one nervous twitch away from Goodnight Vienna, isn't it?
If you go around a corner, yeah, yeah.
But that's half the fun, isn't it?
That's the buzz. Yeah, and that's why eSports, for me, is never going to be anywhere close to what proper sport is, because if there's no consequence of failure, then why are you going?
Yeah. It doesn't make any sense to watch.
It's just no fun. But yeah, it's a different generation.
That's what I like. I like watching sport, but I'm not sure how much kids actually enjoy watching sport these days.
No, that's the thing.
For me, the big barometer of that is parks.
When I was a kid, which isn't that long ago-ish, you'd go past a park and it'd be jumpers for goalposts everywhere.
If there was no room for a game, you'd try and join another game.
You might have 23 a side or whatever.
Now, when I go back to the Isle of Wight...
Parks are empty. It came back a tiny bit during the World Cup.
A little bit. A little bit, yeah.
But there's no one there.
And you know that they're all at home playing FIFA. Yeah.
And that's how you're going to get worse.
Oh, totally, yeah. So you've got virtual reality now, which I've never used.
Because I get...
After I had a crash, friendly enough racing, I get these bad things with my head.
So I can't really focus on stuff like that.
But virtual reality now, I heard, is pretty close to...
Yeah, within five years, I reckon you won't be able to tell the difference.
That's terrifying. Isn't it?
I hate the idea of that.
It's an episode of Black Mirror, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah. Or Vanilla Sky, wasn't it?
The film that was like that. There's some stuff that they were doing in CES, the big tech conference in Las Vegas that's just been on.
And there's this virtual reality porn thing.
Of course, porn drives an awful lot of technology.
I'd love to watch someone enjoying that.
I use it on BBC or something like that, so you can see it, and you've got this kid with these big goggles strapped to his head, and he's describing what he can see, and he's laughing his head off, because he's like, oh, look, they're in my face!
And they're interviewing people, and it's this old guy, old-ish guy, probably my age.
And he said, oh, I'm just so glad I'm alive today.
You know, obviously thinking that in a couple of years' time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Won't have to leave the house.
No, Jesus.
Yeah, and then you have this vision of people who are, you know, doing all this stuff, and
probably playing some kind of game where they're a president of some huge company or a famous
footballer or rock star or something like that.
Absolutely, yeah.
And they're living in some squalid bed-sit, probably malnourished and no friends and that,
but in their virtual reality world, they're a god.
Yeah, yeah.
And you think, wow.
That's quite frightening for me.
It is. It is. Frightening, yeah.
Because it's not real, isn't it? The Matrix, yeah.
Yeah, it is. I don't know.
The good thing is, I reckon it's going to be awfully easy to make money.
Oh yeah, because they want to be in the bedsit.
Yeah, everybody else is just going to be playing it in the virtual world and it will be like that big thing.
Yeah. People who don't do that sort of stuff will be picking it all up, I reckon.
Well, that would be a nice way for us to finish, actually, is going back to, not going back to you, starting with a book, How to Make Millions Without a Degree, and the tagline I love, and How to Get By You, if you've got one, is, I mean, the amount of case studies in it, of people that have created something massive, having not gone to university, having not necessarily had any qualifications or Apparent skill in the area they've ended up creating a business in.
What would be your biggest bit of advice and encouragement to young people today that are thinking at 16 years old, 17 years old, it's uni or what else?
Uni or bust. Because for me, university degrees are so accessible now, they don't have any value anymore.
I think it's a matter of, okay, so you're 16 or 18, aren't you?
So you've done your A-levels, your IB or something.
The university question, the only value you would have in going to university is if you come out with a really good degree from a really good university.
So if your results are, you know, your four A's at A level, then you're academically I was going to say gifted, but it's not gifted.
It's because you work hard. Your brain works that way.
You're very good academically.
Really, you ought to go to uni because you're going to come out with a good degree.
If you can go to Oxford, Cambridge, or Imperial, somewhere like that, and get a first in something, then you will go on and get a cracking job somewhere working in the big corporate, doing the thing that you got your degree in, probably.
And so I think there is a value in that, and that probably would be the way to go.
That's for maybe 5% of people.
And you already know when you're 18 or even 16 whether you're academically of that persuasion.
If you're not and you've come out with a B and three C's or two B's and two C's or something, you ain't going to get a good degree.
So forget about it.
Keep money in your pocket or your parents' pocket and just go and get a job.
And you don't have to know what it is that you're going to do because I never knew what I was going to do other than being a rock star or a footballer.
They never worked out. Yeah.
Football, actually, I think he's gone now.
I'm prepared. You won Le Mans, though.
You won Le Mans, yeah. Never knew I wanted to be a racing driver.
There you go. So, you don't have to know what you're going to do, and nobody I've ever spoken to, other than sports people, knew what they were going to do when they were 18.
Business people never. I've never heard one business person ever say, yeah, 16, I knew I was going to start up this real estate company.
Yeah. It doesn't happen. So, just go get jobs.
Just go do something. And you, Recognise that you're not going to start anywhere other than at the bottom.
And you will have to figuratively or actually make the tea and do all the shitty jobs.
But you'll get there and you'll gradually move on.
And if you enjoy that job, then you'll stay in that job or stay in that field.
And who knows where that might be?
But at least then you've got some experience in doing something.
And you've earned some money.
And you'll come out, let's say, let's project that forward, say you've been working three or four years now, and you're 21, 22.
And your mate, who wasn't that bright, went to university.
He's now 60 grand in debt, which he'll be paying for the rest of his life.
And he's no further forward getting a job than he was.
And he'll probably be coming to you for an interview, because you've got four years of experience, and you've got how you know the company, you know the company, and so on and so forth.
You're in a way better position than he was.
Neither of you still know what you want to do really with the rest of your life, but at least you've got a start and you've got a three or four year head start.
You've had four years of making money.
And failing and learning from mistakes as well.
Yeah. And getting on with people.
People you don't like, people you do like.
Discovering how the workplace works, because like it is at school.
If you don't do your homework, a teacher tells you off and says you need to hand it next time.
If you don't hand it, you'll get a white sheet or a detention or whatever it is that they do.
If you don't do your work at work, you're just told to fuck off.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you can't do that.
Actually, I can. Yeah, I can. I did.
That's it. You're off. You're going to get something else.
You'll find out pretty hard, pretty quickly.
It's a bit brutal in the grown-up world.
Yeah, I think that's a very, very refreshing attitude to have.
For me, degrees only have weight if, like you say, the top 5% of people that would get those kind of degrees...
And the jobs that you need them.
If you want to go and be a lawyer, if you want to be a doctor or a teacher or a vet or something like that.
People that go and do these degrees in marketing and media studies and these theoretical things where you don't actually get any tangible experience of the job, I think it's pointless.
Well, what's happened is because successive governments have wanted kids to go to university because apparently it's a good thing to have your population go to university because it would appear as though they're better educated.
Because you're having to pay for it now, Then the universities, or they're not really universities, they're polytechnics, colleges, you know, in the old days, but they're allowed to call themselves universities now.
They're charging money for it, so it's a commercial business.
So if you've got, you know, 1% of the population are interested in lesbian dance theory or something like that, then you'll come up, not to Ben Shapiro there, but you'll come up with a degree that you can sell in lesbian dance theory or, you know, equine studies, and there is one, and stained window studies, there is one like that.
You will come up with something that will enable you to sell it.
It's a business. Their business isn't getting people jobs.
Their business is selling you tuition.
I know a fellow that did one in golf.
A guy did a degree in golf.
And he worked at KFC at the time.
And I remember it. And he did a degree in golf.
And I sort of, without trying to be rude to him, I basically worked out that from his degree, basically, once he'd completed it, the best, because he wasn't very good at golf, the best he was going to achieve was a job at American Golf, where he'd be on the same wages he was on at KFC. And what's the point?
But like you say, if someone wants to do a degree in golf, I'll sell it to them.
Because why not? Yeah, what's the point?
What do you do with that? Yeah, that's it.
I mean, my wife did a degree because she wanted to be a teacher.
That's all she ever wanted to be when she was a kid.
And she's qualified now.
I've done it, obviously. Got the debt, annoyingly.
But she goes into a job in September.
My wife's a teacher. Yeah.
When you've done something wrong, does she talk to you like you're a student?
Oh, I get that. Michael Jones is a teacher as well.
She talks to me like... And I have to say, I'm not like seven...
Not so much, but she still does have a bit of a teacher face.
I do get that sometimes. Right, right.
You know that face.
Yeah. So I do get that sometimes, yeah.
Oh, I sometimes feel like a seven-year-old boy when I've not put the toilet seat down.
Jeez. Why should you have to put the toilet seat down?
I know, it's ridiculous.
They don't put it up for us. It's basically inefficient.
Meet you up for next time.
I've enjoyed this. I was going to ask about the car accident, but I didn't think that was probably a great thing to ask about.
But you had a car accident, a motor racing accident.
You mentioned it earlier. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It wasn't a highlight, put it that way.
No. It's probably not the best thing to end on.
I've been driving for, in this particular race, I've been driving for two hours and 20 minutes or something like that.
It was quite a long time. Yeah, yeah, a long time to concentrate.
Yeah. And I was going so well.
I really had a good race.
We were in the lead. We only had a 6 second lead or something.
But basically we were going to win the race.
There was only 45 minutes, 15 minutes we left.
And I was one lap away from handing it in to my co-driver Harry.
And I was just doing this particular manoeuvre going round the outside of this Ferrari it was.
This particular part of the track.
And then he decides that rather than leaving the room he was just going to force me over onto the grass.
So he forces me onto the grass and then I Spear into the wall opposite at 140 miles an hour.
Hit on impact, straight into a concrete wall.
And that was quite brutal, absolutely.
I knew what was going to happen from where I was on the track.
There's nothing you can do about it.
The only thing you can do is get your hands off the steering wheel so you don't break your hands when it crumples up.
So I managed to do that, and it knocked me out.
And then there was a big...
I just remember kind of coming around a bit and there was all the marshes around.
And then they put a great big white tarp, put a sheet around it like I'd died.
My wife was watching it live on television all the time and she thought I did.
And then eventually they get me out of the car and go to the medical centre and I had a concussion for...
Which isn't very pleasant.
Just being sick, basically, then?
No, you've got no balance.
Right, right, okay. It's like if you're...
I was going to say it's like if you're drunk, but there's no pleasant connotation about it at all.
It's like when you're a kid and you run around in circles really quick to make yourself dizzy.
Just like that. Like that, right.
But that was the only really bad one I had.
But no broken bones then?
Seems a lot worse. That's amazing.
At that speed, yeah. That's about the car, because with the prototypes, the whole car is kind of built around you, so you sit much lower down in the car.
It's not quite a formula one, but it's not far away.
You sit much lower down in the car, and you're protected by this monocoque, so whilst everything else shatters, the monocoque that you're sat in actually is quite rigid.
Right. So there was no real...
There was actually no real danger.
If I'd been riding a GT car, I'd probably have been dead.
Jeez. But that's the risk, I suppose, that it brings part of the fun, that you know that...
Well, that's the adrenaline thing, and that's why you do it for real, rather than being in a simulator.
In a simulator, you do it in five laps later, you're bored, because there's no consequence of anything.
Whereas when you do it for real, it focuses the mind.
Yeah. Brought it down a bit there, haven't you?
Oh, I think it's amazing. If we bring it up again, you've crashed a car at 141.
And then one Le Mans the same year.
Yeah, not broken a bone and then one Le Mans.
I mean, that's positive, isn't it? Well, I was getting out and driving at...
That was about a week, 10 days after that, I was back in the car driving at Spa, which is a fantastic track.
It's a bit of a scary one as well.
It is. And people thought, what was it like the first time we got back in?
And I actually, I didn't remember what happened because you're so sort of focused on what you're doing in that particular moment and you're dreading to go in and all the rest of it that I just got in the car and never thought about it again.
If you'd have stopped and thought about it, you probably wouldn't have got in the car again.
It's one of them, isn't it? You have to get straight back on the bike sort of attitude.
Yeah, I think it's that. And then there's a lot of, I'm not particularly susceptible to it, it's not peer pressure, but there's a lot of the perception of what other people might Think, I suppose.
Right. You know, you want to prove that you're tough and brave and this and that and the other.
Yeah. But I did say to my wife, I said, if you want me to stop, then I will.
And then to her credit, she said, why would I stop you doing something you love or something like that?
Which was nice of her, because she could have just said that.
Yeah, of course, yeah. And I would have done.
I would have walked away. Which would have been a shame, because I would have missed out on everything that happened since.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was...
I look at... I had nothing but positive experiences from racing, that's for sure.
Positive people, positive experiences on track.
Even the negative stuff, you actually take a positive shot.
And there's life in it. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely. You either learn or win.
If life gives you lemons, make lemonade, Jay.
There you go. Exactly that, yeah.
I like that. It's a very trite saying, isn't it?
Yeah, but it's true though, isn't it? Yeah.
Open a lemonade store.
There you go. For the coming minute there.
We'll get shut down by government regulations.
Oh yeah, all that, yeah.
Absolutely. We've got our three questions.
Can I remember what they are? I can remember my one.
Go on then, you go first. If...
Oh, actually, no, because it's normally like a political question, but I won't do it.
So, okay. I'll ask a political question.
Go on then. So you're Prime Minister.
Yeah. And you're announced as, you know...
Ladies and gentlemen, the results are in.
The winner is, when you walk out, what song would you choose to walk out to?
Ooh! What a great question.
As a Bowie fan, I'd go Rebel Rebel.
No, no, no. Don't put ideas in, Zed.
Heroes would be another, but that's too obvious.
Good tune, though. Oh, yeah.
It'd be something heavy.
It'd be something like Stockholm Syndrome by Muse.
Oh, okay. Something like really, really heavy.
Big, avid. Changes are coming.
Yeah, that kind of thing. Or maybe a bit of a later revolt or something like that.
It'd be something cool. Yeah, something rocking.
If you could have lunch or dinner with anyone throughout history, living or dead.
David Bowie. David Bowie.
Done. Okay, do you remember what the last one is?
Oh yeah, if Aliens landed and said, take us to your leader, who would you take them to?
I remembered it.
They like. He's only saying that because we know him.
Yeah, he is. That wasn't paid for.
That's fab. It's a paid for bloodline.
It's a really good question though.
Well, Mark Miller last week said his four-year-old.
Yeah, because she rules the house, basically.
I've often thought you could put a monkey in charge.
You know, if a monkey was throwing darts at a dartboard and making the decisions that Theresa May is making, I don't think...
It wouldn't be much different, no.
In fact, someone did that in the, I think it was the New York Times, years and years and years ago, and they had a group of journos that picked stocks out by throwing darts at a dartboard, and they outperformed all the funds.
Okay. Yeah.
I wonder though, if we were speaking about this earlier, whether Theresa May is an idiot or whether, in terms of her bosses, she's actually playing an absolute blinder.
She's destroying Brexit.
She's destroying Brexit, which I think is probably the idea.
I would... I'd love to think that these people were bright enough to pull that off.
Right. But honestly, having met a few politicians...
I loathe politicians with a passion...
Having met a few, I don't know that they're that bright.
No. I think there could be almost like a subconscious bias.
So she wanted to remain equal.
Yeah, absolutely. And she sort of said, okay, if you want me to do it, I'll do it.
And the implication being, well, it won't work out very well, but if you want me to do it.
Yeah. And she's gone to Europe and said...
Well, my people have said that they really want to leave.
Obviously, you know, I don't want to leave.
So what will we need to do?
Oh, we're going to need to do this and this and this.
Is that the best you can do? Yeah.
Well, I'll see what they say.
That's basically it. Of course. That's the worst deal we've ever negotiated.
It is, yeah. What are we going to do next?
Well, I don't know. You gave me a mandate to lead, so...
Got defeated by, it only happened last night, and it ended up defeated by 236.
Yeah, that's the highest level.
The biggest defeat. Since 1922, wasn't it?
Ever, I think. Ever, I think it's ever.
And it was like, okay, what are we going to do now?
And she's going, well, I don't know.
She can't go back to the EU. She can't go back and negotiate now, not after everything.
No. She can't be now, I don't think she can, they're not allowed another leadership election, are they?
Not until December, no.
So they have a whole year of it, basically.
Shambles. And then Corbyn, I mean, if you had anybody other than Corbyn in charge of the Labour Party, then Labour would be in.
It's only Corbyn that's keeping the Labour Party where they are in my opinion.
Anybody else. I think we should have Trump.
Somebody like Trump. It's not funny.
Trump's view was, so someone said to him, well, what would you do in terms of Brexit?
What would your negotiating point be?
He said, I'd sue the EU. Wow, okay, that's a pretty tough starting point.
But when you look at Theresa May's starting point, which was, well, how much do we need to pay?
She's already conceded defeat, yeah, absolutely.
Trump goes in and says, basically, fuck you, you never delivered, I'm going to sue you.
His starting point is, I'm going to take money off you and make your life a misery.
So wherever you come back from...
It's still going to be a better point, isn't it?
It's going to be way better. I think no deal is the better idea anyway.
Get the hell out of Dodge and, you know...
Just leave it. Okay, we won't pay 39 billion then.
Yeah, fine. We'll just see what happens.
Because who's going to sort it out?
Business people. Yeah.
They'll be the people who sort it out because there'll only be paperwork that's involved.
It's simply that. Yeah. So a whole lot of bureaucrats will have to come up with new paperwork To shift goods from A to B. Absolutely.
Because businesses still exist.
And BMW and Audi are not going to want to lose this market.
You see the amount out there.
So just leave it.
Let business people get on with it, which is kind of really what Trump's doing.
Give it all back to the businesses.
Let them sort all the problems out.
And the government can just sit on top and prattle around and do whatever it is that they're supposed to do.
Eat hamburgers? Yeah, a thousand of them.
Or Krispy Kremes.
Was it Krispy Kremes? Anything, pizzas, Krispy Kremes.
Yeah, yesterday someone posted a meme which made me laugh, which was a video of a police officer with a gun walking past 10 Downing Street with two big bags of Krispy Kremes.
And the meme was, this is how they protect their doughnuts, what they're going to be like when the money, the food runs out.
It's like Jesus, yeah.
Someone said to Trump, you know, about the whole ordering burgers in because of the shutdown and stuff like that.
A, it's a brilliant publicity stunt from his point of view.
But someone said to him, oh, you know, Mr.
President, what's your favourite food?
He said, I love all of it as long as it's American.
Whatever you think about Trump.
He just says the right thing in that sense.
Wouldn't you love someone in charge of your country who had that kind of passion for your country?
Not this sort of subservient, well, we need to be nice to everybody, but our own people.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah.
No, I get that. There's some good qualities of Trump, absolutely.
Look, he's no worse. What's he done?
He's actually stuck to his campaign promises, which is what he voted in on.
Agree with them or don't agree with them, that's what he said he was going to do.
And he's actually done all of them, really, other than the war.
The war will get funded, and it will go ahead, and it will probably stop some people coming in, and there might be a reduction in crime.
If there is, well, okay, probably a good thing then and then.
Obama built a fence.
Yeah. So what's the problem with the war?
I mean, we're just building a more effective fence.
But it's the same when it comes to war.
If someone on the so-called left pushes for war, it's not a problem.
It's ignored. Someone on the right pushes for war and it's a disgrace.
Obama dropped more bombs than anyone else.
It was a war for every day of his presidency.
Yeah, but he's got a Nobel Peace Prize.
I've never dropped a bomb. I don't know where my peace prize is.
Yeah, I know. We apparently have to be a violent war criminal to get one.
All right. No one can point to why he obviously got the award.
No. But they don't even know, do they?
No. It was based on the idea of his...
Because he got it before he even became president, didn't he?
It's a great tagline, change.
Because everyone can attach themselves to it.
Never said what he was going to change at any point.
No, no. It's very clever. Spent a lot of money, though.
Yeah. Spent more money than every US president combined up to that point.
I think the debt when he came in was 8 trillion, when he left it was like 18 trillion or something.
Insane, isn't it? Jesus. And he's hailed as a hero.
And you see people all the time, I wish we could have him in charge of Britain.
You're like, Jesus. I know.
What exactly? To do money and go around and pretend to be Santa Claus or whatever it is that he does and whatever.
You just can't do anything wrong, can you?
No, it is odd. Very odd.
In the same way, the opposite side, Trump can't do anything right in the eyes of a lot of people.
Which he does do a lot wrong, but he does do if something's right.
Yeah. He's brash.
He's a New Yorker.
They're all like that to some extent.
He's an opportunist. I know two people who know him.
One loads him. One might say he was just fine.
He's quite a charming guy. One knows him from a business point of view.
The other one knows him from a personal point of view.
We'll assume the business guy loads him.
Well, yeah, because he was dealing with distressed assets.
So he ran a fund that buys distressed assets, and Trump was selling off some distressed assets.
Well, he's not going to be nice to him, is he?
You know, he's trying to get something cheap off Trump.
He came back a few years, so of course he was horrible.
But he's looking out for himself, and now he's looking out for American people.
And there's one thing is, you know, he put something the other day about Jeff Bezos.
He put some sarcastic tweet out about Bezos.
There's no other politician in the world that would insult the richest man on earth.
No, there's not. Fair point.
Because they own him. The richest man in the world, he could donate however much he wanted to Obama, for example, for his campaign.
So Obama's going to suck up to him.
Trump doesn't give himself, he doesn't need the money.
So he can insult him. So at least from that point of view, you know that actually he's independent of other people's Agendas.
Yeah. I like him.
I think he's a good guy. There's a lot to know about Bezos.
I'd be interested to know a bit more about him.
Yeah, absolutely. Where he could afford to work at such a huge loss and deficit for so many years.
Well, is he no different to Elon Musk?
Well, again, I'd like to know a lot more about him too.
Musk is the only reason...
Sorry, Bezos is the only reason that Musk has continued raising money.
This is because... Lezo's going through exactly the same thing.
He was losing money, losing money, losing money, and managed to convince people to put money in.
And then of course the jackpot paid off and he reached the critical mass where now he's...
Yeah, everything goes through him now, yeah.
However, you know, you're building cars.
It doesn't... the same thing isn't...
it doesn't apply.
No, it's not, no. Tesla will go down, 100%.
It will go down. Elon Musk will go down as one of the biggest forsters in history.
He's going to be the next Bernie Madoff.
I don't think their cars look great.
No, I don't like them. No, and I think, to be fair, when you're going to spend a lot of money on a car, it's got to look sexy, it's got to look great, and they don't.
I think you'll fail on that, yeah.
100%. 100%. You'll either be in prison or dead.
That's where I see him going. Yeah.
Or calling people paedophiles.
It's just bizarre. How does he get away with that?
He's not going to, I don't think, because the guy's going for him, isn't he?
Yeah, but was he suing him for like $40,000?
It's nothing. So he'll just pay him off and then that'll be that done.
But none of the media are after him for it.
Can you imagine Trump did the same thing?
Oh yeah, it'd be game over, yeah.
Yeah, it'd be the end. That's it, it'd be an hour.
Yeah. Hour.
Enough manning about America.
Yeah. Thanks for joining us.
It's been fun. Yeah, thanks for this.
Thanks for it. I really enjoyed it, yeah.
Pleasure. I didn't enjoy the parking in London, I have to say, but the rest of it was fab.
Absolutely. Get a tune in next time, son.
Yeah, absolutely. While he's driving, I'm getting the train home.
Yeah, on my way back to work.
Nice. Right, thanks for joining us.
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