EMERGENCY DEBATE: They Lied About The Economy Recovering! Is A Financial Apocalypse Coming?

Is the economy on the brink of collapse? Gary Stevenson and Daniel Priestley break down the emergency financial crisis no one is talking about The Diary Of A CEO’s economics debate is joined by 2 experts: Gary Stevenson and Daniel Priestley. Gary Stevenson is a British economist, former financial trader, and author of The Trading Game. Daniel Priestly is an award-winning serial entrepreneur who has written 5 books on starting and scaling businesses. In this conversation, Gary, Daniel, and Steven discuss topics such as, whether there is a financial apocalypse looming, if both the US and the UK are running out of money, how the next financial crash could be worse than 2008, and why millionaires are fleeing the UK. 00:00 Intro 02:10 Who Is Gary Stevenson? 07:30 Who Is Daniel Priestly? 10:04 The Importance of Economic Freedom 11:56 Who Are We Blaming for the Economic Situation? 13:32 The UK & US Debt We're Carrying From COVID 17:44 Is There Financial Security for Most of Us in 2025? 26:13 What Does Gary Think of Daniel's Views? 28:58 The Current Homeownership Situation 34:21 US vs UK Market With Building Technology 36:38 Taxing Billionaires 41:03 Do You Tax Their Value or the Countries Where They Trade? 45:36 Why Are Millionaires Leaving the UK? 48:49 Stopping Profit Shifting of Companies 52:40 How $10M+ Companies Avoid Taxes 58:01 Where Is the Biggest Amount of Money Going? 01:00:06 How to Bring Big Tech Companies and Entrepreneurs to the UK 01:04:45 Are Tax Evasions Causing Issues With NHS, Education, and Higher Crime? 01:10:31 Why Poor People Are Struggling to Build Wealth 01:19:49 Ads 01:20:53 How to Create Wealth in the Economy 01:37:17 Monopolies 01:40:18 Advice to Younger People 01:45:02 What to Do as a Young Person 01:47:12 Take Action: Play the Cards You Are Dealt 01:51:45 Do We Have Personal Responsibility to Change This? 01:54:05 Is the Current Education System Failing Us? 02:00:56 Inheritance Taxes 02:04:50 Ads 02:10:05 America's Approach to Building Wealth Research Document: https://stevenbartlett.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/DOAC-debate-Gary-Daniel-Independent-research.pdf Follow Gary: YouTube - https://g2ul0.app.link/xdrUsPgERRb Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/OoThWmfERRb Follow Daniel: X - https://g2ul0.app.link/3ui4EJjERRb Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/Wa2RfsaHRRb Website - https://g2ul0.app.link/jUbxNu8GRRb Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Fiverr - https://fiverr.com/diary with code DIARY for 10% off your first order WHOOP - https://JOIN. WHOOP. COM/CEO Perfect Ted - https://www.perfectted.com with code DIARY40 for 40% off Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm sick of multimillionaires telling kids who can't afford to turn the heating on, "You just need to be more entrepreneurial." It's sick, Dan, it's sick.

• 0:07Daniel Priestley?

  Well, your video where you talk about if you don't have a rich dad, you're screwed. Well, to me, if I had have come across your content at 19, 20 years old, I would have been screwed.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  My friends can't feed their kids, okay? If it was that easy, why is everybody not doing it?

• 0:20Daniel Priestley?

  I'll tell you why people aren't doing it. It's because...

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Do you like to say one thing back on that?

• 0:26Steven Bartlett?

  Today's debate is fiery, to say the least, but important nonetheless, as I sat down with two leading experts in wealth and entrepreneurship and the economy to discuss the state of the US, the state of the UK, and the Western world.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  Do you think the reason the average Brit or American are getting poorer is because they don't know how to create wealth?

• 0:44Daniel Priestley?

  No, the reason people are getting poorer is because of big governments, record levels of taxes, an outdated schooling system, technology, and remote working.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  You sure about that?

• 0:53Steven Bartlett?

  How do you disagree with those opinions?

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Living standards are falling because of growing wealth inequality. If you allow the rich to get richer, they squeeze the middle class and the poor plus out of things like housing. Let's cut taxes on people who are working hard, and let's raise tax on the richest and most powerful people in the world.

• 1:06Daniel Priestley?

  That's an overly simplified view of things. We now have 1,000 millionaires a month leaving, which means every ordinary person who pays 10 grand a year in tax will now have to pay 20 grand a year in tax. You end up cutting off your nose to spite your face.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  If we are a country that don't try and do things which are necessary because they are hard, then our kids will live in poverty.

• 1:25Daniel Priestley?

  What do you want people to do?

• 1:26Speaker 00

  There's a lot of different ways.

• 1:27Steven Bartlett?

  Buckle up. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see, and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.

• 2:11Steven Bartlett?

  Gary.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Daniel.

• 2:14Steven Bartlett?

  Daniel, you've been on the show a few times before, so I want to start with Gary and understand a little bit about your backstory and who you are. And having been through the trading game and read and watched many, many of your videos over time, I have a sort of deep understanding of that. But for anyone that doesn't know you, can you give me a picture of the context that has brought you to where you are today, writing about the things you're writing about today and running the YouTube channel and speaking to the subject matter that you're speaking about today? Take me right back and give me as much as you possibly can.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Okay, so my name's Gary Stevenson. I was born in a place called Ilford, which is in outer east London. Quite a poor family, a little terrace house by the railway, you know, playing football in the streets kind of stuff. Always very good at maths since I was a kid, very talented maths student. Eventually able to get into the London School of Economics, which is an extremely elite university, economics university in the centre of London, which is basically a kind of investment banking bootcamp. Got a job as a trader, started working full time as a short term interest rates trader at Citibank in London in June 2008, when I was 21. Obviously, exactly, that's just before the big credit crash,

• 3:26Speaker 00

  the big Lehman crisis. And I watched the Lehman crisis happen in front of my eyes. I was, short term interest rate trading is basically like short term loans. And during the credit crisis, what a credit crisis is, is nobody can borrow any money. So like short term loans become really, really important. My desk, which was like historically an unfashionable area of trading, became like the centre of the crisis, or one of the centres of the crisis. People started making tons of money. I was working with all these crazy people. And you can imagine me, I turn up 21 years old, and then like within three months, like everyone around me is making a ton of money during the credit crisis. But what really interested me was what happened after the crisis itself, which was, so we're betting on interest rates.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Long story short, interest rates come down when the economy is weak. And they go up when the economy is strong, or when the economy is overheating from an inflation perspective. In two thousand and eight, all the interest rates go to zero. So suddenly, our job is basically predicting and betting on when will those interest rates go back up? Which is, when will the economy recover? And this is super interesting, right? In two thousand and eight, because all the interest rates went to zero so quickly. Like before two thousand and eight, it's important to remember, rates would move from like five and a half to five and a quarter. And then here in two thousand and eight, everywhere in the world slashing to zero.

• 4:43Daniel Priestley?

  Boom, half a percent.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Exactly, and everybody, all the economists were like, wow, this is going to cause a massive recovery. Because they thought that interest rates were powerful. And everybody predicted that rates would come back up in two thousand and nine, which of course we now know they didn't. Then everybody predicted that rates would go up in two thousand and ten, which we now know they didn't. And then at the beginning of two thousand and eleven, everybody was predicting rates would definitely go up this year. And this to me was so interesting, so interesting. Because, you know, I studied maths and economics at one of the best economics universities in the world. And now I'm working with these traders who are getting paid millions of pounds a year, million pounds a year to predict the economy, to predict the interest rates. And everybody is wrong, year after year after year.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  And this was, I was, it's so amazing to me for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's like, wow, like, this is a big thing that we as a society should understand, and like, we're getting it wrong. But secondly, if all of the best guys in the world are getting this wrong, then if I can figure this out, I can make a ton of money here.

• 5:47Steven Bartlett?

  Gary, how much money did you make for Citibank at the age of twenty four years old?

• 5:52Speaker 00

  That year, so that year, two thousand and eleven, I put this big bet on that it would get worse forever. And I was Citibank's most profitable trader in the world that year, and I made them just over thirty five million dollars.

• 6:04Steven Bartlett?

  You made them thirty five million dollars. You eventually decide to leave Citibank.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:08Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 6:10Speaker 00

  I mean, I think that's an interesting question, right? You know, in the sense that, I'll just explain to you what happened, which is, I made a ton of money by betting on the collapse of Western society. Uh, I did it in two thousand and eleven, I did it again in two thousand and twelve, um.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  I would prefer for it not to collapse, Stephen. And I'm trying to stop it from collapsing.

• 6:38Steven Bartlett?

  When you say it collapsing, what exactly are you referring to? That you you don't want to collapse?

• 6:44Speaker 00

  So you you born in Botswana, right?

• 6:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  You still have family there?

• 6:47Steven Bartlett?

  Um, I've got family in Nigeria, which is where my my family are from. I was born in Botswana because we were visiting there, but.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:53Steven Bartlett?

  Got family in Africa.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Do you go to Nigeria much?

• 6:55Steven Bartlett?

  No, I've got home in Cape Town in South Africa, so I see.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:58Steven Bartlett?

  It's a great place if you want to see inequality.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  I think there is.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  A naivety in in in this country, in places like the US, that the kind of inequality, the kind of broad poverty that you see in places like South Africa, in places like Nigeria, in places like India, can't happen here.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  It will happen here. That is the future of this country. That is the future of the US. And I'm not just saying that, I'm betting on it. And I've been betting on it for fifteen years, and I've been right for fifteen years. That is what I'm trying to avoid.

• 7:30Steven Bartlett?

  Daniel.

• 7:32Steven Bartlett?

  Where'd you come from?

• 7:33Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, so I grew up in Australia. Um, I was born to low income family. I grew up in a place that had twenty four percent unemployment. Uh, pretty much the only jobs or opportunities around me were things like uh, the trades, building, construction, pest control, um, hospitality and tourism. Um, so uh, at fourteen, I got a job at McDonald's and then I'm I got a job in a bar and Pizza Hut delivery driving. And I discover entrepreneurship. So I discover books about entrepreneurship and I discover that some people make millions, similar to yourself. You saw Canary Wharf, I read a book about business ownership.

• 8:10Steven Bartlett?

  And as we sit here today, can you give me the overview of your business success since then?

• 8:15Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, so I now have a group of companies that I've either started or bought. Um, there's I've just sold a company, so there's seven companies in the group. Um, I've started a couple of software companies. One of our companies is now the fastest growing, one of the fastest growing companies in the UK. Um, we, you know, we're a software business. Uh, I've got a couple of agencies, I've got a education and training business.

• 8:36Steven Bartlett?

  And when you think about the UK and broadly the Western world today, what is your assessment of where we're at as a country and what's concerning you? Because Gary expressed quite articulately that his big concern is that because of wealth inequality, we're going to end up in a similar position to the likes of India. What are you concerned about?

• 8:52Daniel Priestley?

  I agree that it wasn't that long ago that we had real, serious wealth inequality in this country. There are amazing photos from like a hundred years ago of kids working in mines and kids doing oyster shucking and all this horrible work. And you know, there's a book Charles Dickens wrote called The Tale of Two Cities. And the opening line of the book is, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. And I think we've actually gotten to that point here where some people in the UK, it's the best of times. If you, like in your situation, you're booming, you're a globally successful business. I've got a globally successful business. And then there are a lot of people who completely cannot relate to this. They're, you know, energy prices are now the most expensive in the Western world.

• 9:35Daniel Priestley?

  House prices are completely unaffordable. It used to be, it used to take three years to save for a deposit. It's now 20 years, theoretically 20 years if you can save for a deposit. Food prices are through the roof. So we're in a really difficult, like for anyone who is not tapped into digital economy, fast growth and all of that sort of stuff, life is getting harder and worse and things are collapsing, if you would go with that. There is a predictable path countries go on and there's this thing called the Economic Freedom Index. And the Economic Freedom Index basically says, how economically free are you? How much access do you have to free markets? Can you start a business? Can you scale a business? Does anything inhibit your ability to run your own life?

• 10:20Daniel Priestley?

  Countries that have high degrees of economic freedom have very low poverty. They have widespread affluence. And countries that have low economic freedoms have high poverty. And it can be the difference between less than 10%, right up to 70% poverty rates. And when countries go on a path towards economic freedom, poverty just drops. So India, for example, has been on that path and they announced today that they've almost eradicated abject poverty or extreme poverty. The UK went on that path of low economic freedom to high economic freedom and we saw poverty rates come right down. But in two thousand and eight, when the global financial crisis happened, one of the things that happened is the government said, we need to step in and we need to take charge. And everyone said, please do.

• 11:03Daniel Priestley?

  So they came in and they said, all right, we're going to ramp up debt, ramp up taxes to pay for the debt, and we're also going to put all regulations in. And unfortunately, that starts to reduce economic freedom. Then the pandemic happens and they say, oh, we're going to spend more money again through debt, we're going to have more taxes, more regulations, less economic freedom. So the UK, we went from an eighty-two, when I arrived in two thousand and six, we went from eighty-two out of a hundred down to sixty-eight out of a hundred. So we're less economically free. And predictably, what we will always see happen, if you lower people's economic freedom, more poverty, less affluence, the millionaires and the wealth creators leave, the people

• 11:46Daniel Priestley?

  who are stuck in dead-end jobs or no jobs get incredibly frustrated. Everyone starts looking for someone to blame. People are angry and they're like, who do we blame?

• 11:56Steven Bartlett?

  And who do they blame?

• 11:58Daniel Priestley?

  It's very different because in the US, we blame, US blame someone different to the UK. So we have a historical cultural memory. In the UK, we have a cultural memory that the people to blame are the rich. So we have landlords and aristocracy and the landed gentry, those guys are to blame, right? So blame the rich is what we say in the UK. In the US, they have a very different view. Their cultural memory is that they're anti-government, they want limited government. In two thousand and twenty-three, there was this song that came out called Rich Men North of Richmond, and it was the number one song in America. And the lyrics of the song basically says, people in Washington do not care about working people, they are taxing everything we touch, you can't earn money, they depreciate the

• 12:43Daniel Priestley?

  dollar, they tax, tax, tax, tax, tax, and they want to control our lives. Those are the lyrics of the songs, controlling our lives and taxing us. So the American reaction to this is who's to blame? Government. So we want smaller government. We want a Department of Government Efficiency to come in. We want someone as a wrecking ball who will come in and smash government. The British instinct is hate the rich. It must be the rich's fault. So when we look for, like, all of the Western countries that implemented lower economic freedoms, created more poverty, less affluence and more disruption to their economies. So both US and UK, for example, and Australia as well, but both sides of the pond want someone to blame.

• 13:28Daniel Priestley?

  It's just that the Americans blame government and we blame the rich.

• 13:32Steven Bartlett?

  Gary, I'm sure you have a lot to say there. I know you both use the word collapsing, so you agree that there's a problem here. But I think you, from studying both of your sort of perspectives, you think that the solution and the cause of the problem is different.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  I mean, I put bets on, I put bets on, I put bet, that's what I do, I put bets on. At the beginning of Covid, we knew the government's going to give enormous amount of money out. Total amount of money now, UK government deficit since the beginning of Covid is one trillion pounds. US number is fourteen trillion dollars. That's, you know, twenty thousand pounds per UK adult. My background is I understand that when the distribution gets worse, when inequality gets worse, living standards fall. So when, when the UK government was going to give a trillion pounds out, all I wanted to know was who's going to end up with that money? That's all I wanted to know. And I mean, the US number thirteen trillion, fourteen trillion is just outlandish.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  But I think the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my whole life was that at the beginning of Covid, the very beginning of Covid, we knew governments across the world were going to be giving out tens of trillions of pounds, dollars, euros. Nobody even thought to ask who's going to get tens of trillions richer. Nobody in the Conservatives, nobody in Labour, nobody in the Republicans, nobody in Democrats, nobody in academia, nobody in academia, nobody in the central banks, nobody asked this. It's, it's. It's almost beautiful. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. So I sat down and I did the analysis at the beginning. Because lockdown is essentially banning the spending of the rich and replacing that spending of the rich with printed money from government.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  What happens is the government gives workers money, they use that money to pay their bills, to pay their rent, to pay their mortgage. It goes to the rich. The rich can't spend it because they're locked indoors. And what you get is essentially an enormous amount of money from the government to the poor, to the rich. And this massive, massive transfer of wealth, that was so obviously going to happen at the beginning of Covid. Nobody discussed it, which I think is itself amazing. Let me ask you a question, right? If we were now to pause the economy for two years and during that pause massively increase wealth inequality. What do you think would happen to broad living conditions when we unpause?

• 15:52Daniel Priestley?

  See, one of the things that I think happened during the pandemic is everything went digital. And entrepreneurs and investors did actually think about what would happen. The investors immediately boomed stocks like Zoom and Microsoft. And we ended up with the magnificent seven. I don't know if you, you know, there's seven big tech companies in the USA market. And those big seven companies have gone from five trillion valuation to seventeen trillion valuation in the time of the pandemic. And if you think about what did the pandemic do?

• 16:29Daniel Priestley?

  Everyone had to work from home, so we all had to have Microsoft subscriptions. Everyone went on to websites, so we all went to AWS, Amazon. We all started buying and learning how to buy from Amazon rather than buying from our local high streets. Every business in the world figured out how to run their business remotely. We had this massive transformation. It was like, it's actually a wholesale transformation of society that we all learnt how to live and work differently. I saw a boom in entrepreneurship. So what I saw as an entrepreneur accelerator, someone who runs an entrepreneur accelerator, is just there was this sudden boom in people launching businesses, setting up Shopify accounts, setting up YouTube businesses.

• 17:08Daniel Priestley?

  So the money really has moved from the traditional economy, the 2019 high street economy, over to the digital economy.

• 17:17Daniel Priestley?

  And what we see is that the investors know what's going on and they just invest in this magnificent seven company. I think fifty percent of the gains of the S and P five hundred is tech companies. So all the money just goes flooding into the the technology companies. My my belief is that technology is really dividing people, that essentially if you take anyone from any background, if they work in technology, if they're in media, tech, finance, any of that stuff that operates online, they tend to actually do pretty, pretty well after the pandemic.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Can I ask you a question?

• 17:45Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Do you think the average Brit, American, Australian, wherever the person out there is watching, if they quit their job and go work in tech, do you think they'll be able to get financial security relatively easily?

• 17:59Daniel Priestley?

  Depends when you define define financial security. The issue with house prices.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  The ability to raise a family, have a home.

• 18:05Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah. So having a home is a big issue, right? So here's, here's what I, here's what I see with houses, because houses annoy me as well. My dad bought a house for eighteen thousand dollars, which is about ten thousand pounds or less than ten thousand pounds, and it's probably worth over a million dollars today. So something went on. And this, by the way, is not UK specific. The socialist countries had house prices go through the roof. If you go to Norway or Sweden, their house prices grew by six hundred percent in the.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  It's happening everywhere.

• 18:34Daniel Priestley?

  It's everywhere.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  It's not specific to anywhere. It's happening everywhere.

• 18:36Daniel Priestley?

  But but what happened, what has had, it definitely happened in the UK, is we actually have a housing traffic jam. So in this country, in the UK, we have nine point five million homes that have two or more spare bedrooms. Big family homes have two or more spare bedrooms. And when you look into who owns those houses, seventy eight percent of housing wealth is baby boomers. And now, anecdotally, I take my kids trick or treating at Halloween, and we go down a street that is big family homes, and you go knock on the doors, and it's all people over sixty five, right? And they're living in a big family home with empty spare bedrooms.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  You think the average American over sixty five is living luxuriously?

• 19:15Daniel Priestley?

  The average American over sixty five, so more than half of the US economy is in the hands of baby boomers, right? So they own all the houses. The the houses got bought up cheap. Baby boomers still own those houses to this day. The big family homes with multiple spare bedrooms are empty. And now that creates this traffic jam where people my age.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  My grandparents.

• 19:37Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  They all own property.

• 19:39Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  All four of them died with nothing. Um. Because that wealth which they had in in property was was used in equity release schemes. They they it was used in paying through their retirement. It was used in end of life care. Um. Do you think when those old people die, young people today will be rich?

• 20:02Daniel Priestley?

  There is half the economy held by baby boomers. It's either going to be passed down or passed into the aged care industry or passed into the the but the issue of why we can't get homes. Two things. Government massively inflated the value of homes through debt. So they just in injected like low interest rates that you're involved in.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Who who is the debt to?

• 20:23Daniel Priestley?

  Well, the debt is to anyone who can take out a loan, because if zero percent interest rates or two percent interest.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  Do you think it's the debt is to ordinary families? Do you think ordinary families are the creditors?

• 20:31Daniel Priestley?

  When you say ordinary families, you mean bottom third?

• 20:34Speaker 00

  So if your average British or American family now has half a million pounds of debt.

• 20:38Daniel Priestley?

  It's anyone.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Who has the credit?

• 20:39Daniel Priestley?

  It's anyone who could get their at that particular time, anyone who could get their hands on a loan to buy a house.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  But who has the credit? Who has? Who is on the other side of the debt? So if the average British family.

• 20:49Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, the banking law. Well, banking license.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Does the average British family have half a million pound of credit?

• 20:53Daniel Priestley?

  Well, a lot of people have got a lot of equity in their home now.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  You think the average British family is sitting on half a million pound cash?

• 20:58Daniel Priestley?

  I'd love to look at the what the actual number is, but it's a couple of hundred thousand worth of equity.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  But what about the credit on the loan? The credit on the loan? Who owns the credit on the loan?

• 21:06Daniel Priestley?

  Bear in mind, it's disproportionately older people. So seventy eight percent.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Average British old person is sitting on million millions of pounds of cash?

• 21:12Daniel Priestley?

  Not millions of cash, no, equity.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Well, someone is on the other side of those mortgages.

• 21:15Daniel Priestley?

  Just want to say the difference. The difference is if you inflate the value of a house, you don't have cash. You have a house that's worth a lot of money. So seventy eight percent of homeownership wealth is in the hands of people over sixty five now. It's baby boomer generation. And they got a great gift from the government, which is the government said, we're going to just give free loans away. If someone previously could have only afforded to take out a two hundred grand loan with low interest rates, they can afford a three hundred grand loan.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  Do you think it's okay? That the average British or American young person will never own any wealth.

• 21:46Daniel Priestley?

  The issue is not whether it's okay or not. The issue is what do you do about it?

• 21:49Speaker 00

  Do you own wealth?

• 21:50Daniel Priestley?

  I've got wealth, yeah.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Do you own wealth?

• 21:52Daniel Priestley?

  But it depends what you call wealth.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  I do. So do we, three multimillionaires, do we think it's okay that the average Brit or American young person will never own any wealth?

• 22:01Daniel Priestley?

  But to me, that's

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Because I don't think that's okay.

• 22:02Daniel Priestley?

  To me, that's not the debate.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  But is it okay?

• 22:05Daniel Priestley?

  It's not. Well, it's not okay. No, we want widespread affluence.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  Would you rather that the people who currently are multimillionaires, would you rather that all of the wealth was owned by their kids?

• 22:14Daniel Priestley?

  I think that the way you see the world as a trader is that the world is a zero-sum game. And that there's, basically, the pie is a fixed pie and it gets sliced up.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  How fast is the pie growing now?

• 22:26Daniel Priestley?

  There's something like this.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  What's the UK GDP growth at the moment?

• 22:29Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, it's not, it's not high, right?

• 22:31Speaker 00

  One percent. How much did your wealth grow in the last year?

• 22:33Daniel Priestley?

  Uh, exponentially.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Okay, so if our wealth, my wealth probably grew about twenty percent in the last year, maybe thirty, okay? If our wealth is growing thirty percent and the economy is growing at one percent, where's it coming from if it's not coming from our viewers?

• 22:46Daniel Priestley?

  So I'll tell you where my wealth comes from. My wealth comes from building technology companies. And the way it works is pretty weird, which is that I invent something out of my head. And I go to investors and I say to the investors, here's what we're gonna create. And I give them a spreadsheet. And then they say, we'll give you a couple of hundred grand to get started, which is called seed capital. But that on paper makes me worth a couple of million.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:12Daniel Priestley?

  But there's, there's nothing has been taken from anyone at this point. Uh, the investors have said, okay, we'll invest some money. Then as the business succeeds, some more investors come along and they say, we'll give you a little bit more money to keep growing it. Um, and I'm innovating something new. And let's say investors come in and give me a million pounds and for ten percent of the company, and the rest of the company is worth nine million pounds, or nine million dollars, right? So I'm not stealing something from the existing economy. I'm bringing something from outside of the economy into the economy. Um, and my quote unquote net worth is growing exponentially. Because investors say, we'll give you a little bit of money that values the rest of the pie at a lot of money.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  So everyone's getting richer.

• 23:56Daniel Priestley?

  In the, in the wealth create, there's, where there's wealth extraction, which is what traders do. They extract from the existing economy and they bet on the economy. And then there's wealth creation, which what entrepreneurs do. They come up with new ideas, better ways of doing things and they build wealth.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  So do you think the reason our viewers, the average Brit or American are getting poorer is because they don't know how to create wealth?

• 24:19Daniel Priestley?

  No, the reason people are getting poorer is because economic freedoms are being eroded. When we have high economic freedom.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  And you associate that with taxes?

• 24:26Daniel Priestley?

  Well, anything that, it could be anything that impacts economic freedom. So taxes and regulations are big.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Was economic freedom higher in the fifties?

• 24:35Daniel Priestley?

  Fifties was, okay, so fifties was a interesting time. We were in food rations in this country till nineteen fifty six. So we had ten years of food rations after the war. We had a labour shortage because only really men worked. Women hadn't entered the workforce en masse. There had been three or four hundred thousand men killed in war. So we actually had this big labour shortage. The whole country needed to rebuild because of the Blitz had bombed it. So we had this huge need for economic activity and not enough people to do it. We only had two percent unemployment. People who had had their legs blown off were put to work at that particular time. So we had this boom, this post-war boom, and we also had the post-war baby boom, which drove consumption.

• 25:17Daniel Priestley?

  And then when we got to the sixties, we had the roaring sixties or the, the swinging sixties, right? Pretty amazing time in Britain. And along comes high taxes. And they put up the taxes massively at the end of the sixties. And it pretty much crashed the economy. One of the things that happened.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  So what were the tax rates in the fifties?

• 25:35Daniel Priestley?

  Well, they went up as high as eighty to ninety percent for the top, for the top earners. I think it was in the sixties.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  You sure about that?

• 25:42Daniel Priestley?

  Well, I think the fifties are unique.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  What is, what is the answer, Gary? I feel like you know. They went up after the war. They went up after the war. Well, in the US, actually, tax rates started to go before the war.

• 25:50Daniel Priestley?

  But also the size of government as a percentage of GDP was like thirty percent. It was a tiny, like, we, we are now forty-five percent of the UK economy is government spending. We have got a massive government. Debt. The Bank of England allows them to print endless amounts of debt, which just deflates.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  No taxes. Gary, I want to get your opinion here, because you're asking a lot of questions, but I actually don't know your opinion. I just want to know what Daniel thinks, and I want our viewers to be able to research Daniel's opinions. But how do you disagree with those opinions? Listen, Daniel's a businessman. He's obviously a very successful businessman. You know, I've not been here. I'm not a businessman. I'm not going to pretend to be a businessman. I'm an economist. I make money by being right in the economy. Daniel's a good businessman, and I'm right on the economy. You know, it's simple as that, basically. You know, I'm not a good businessman, but I've got 15 years of being right on this, on the economy. And look, I know you're probably a wealthy man, you probably don't want to pay high taxes, you probably don't want your kids to pay high taxes. But we exist in an economy where wealth is being extracted out of the middle class, out of the working class, very, very rapidly.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  It's benefiting people like the three of us at this table. It will benefit our kids. You know, our kids will be rich, their kids will be poor. And I just think we should be honest with them. Capitalism's finished. We won. Well done, Stephen. Well done, Daniel. Well done, Gary. It's over now. Our kids will be rich, their kids will be poor. They'll pay the taxes. We won't pay the taxes. We'll avoid it. I'll make money betting on it year after year. Why are we lying to them? Why are we lying to them?

• 27:17Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, I think that's an overly simplified view of things.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  It's an overly simplified view of things that has made me a multimillionaire.

• 27:22Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, well, look, entrepreneurs take bets on the economy as well. We take bets differently. When we start a company, we're betting on how the economy will be.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Do you think the average British and American worker at the 50th percentile, do you think their kids will be richer than they are?

• 27:36Daniel Priestley?

  It depends if we have economic freedom or not, right? We're going to have a split test on this, right? We're going to have a split test. We're going to have, the UK seems like we're going to have more taxes, more regulations. And it seems like the US is going to have less taxes and less regulations. Here's what I've noticed. I've noticed that places like Singapore, that have small governments, have got widespread affluence. There's not a lot of poverty in Singapore.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, except for the cleaners living in the closets, yeah.

• 28:01Daniel Priestley?

  You know, uh, look.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  But we don't count them in the statistics, just like we don't count our viewers.

• 28:06Daniel Priestley?

  That's not widespread in Singapore.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Well, there's a lot of people, wow. I've seen them in the closets. I've seen them in the closets.

• 28:12Daniel Priestley?

  There are, there are some.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  But they're not Singaporeans.

• 28:16Daniel Priestley?

  Well, also.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  We only count the rich ones.

• 28:18Daniel Priestley?

  Look, the also the issue is is that they've come from even worse conditions in many cases. People moved to Singapore for an increase in lifestyle, right? The um you could take Ireland or Switzerland, right? Economically free places. Ireland was economically in a disaster.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  Do you think the average Irish person lives well?

• 28:38Daniel Priestley?

  Well, their economy almost.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Irish person lives well.

• 28:42Daniel Priestley?

  Their economy almost collapsed in twenty eleven. And they went down the road of lower taxes, lower regulations, and they attracted all sorts of businesses into the economy.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  And do you think that works well for the average Irishman who doesn't own a home in Dublin?

• 28:55Daniel Priestley?

  The if you measure everything by home ownership.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  I'm measuring people by the average. I wanna know what the average man or woman in Dublin today lives like.

• 29:03Daniel Priestley?

  By the way, I I'm also furious about the home ownership thing. Everyone is um. I think it's utterly ridiculous the way like the idea that homes are now worth ten times the average wage, all of that. Difference is, I blame government for that. Uh I blame high taxes where they've because of high taxes, they can take out more debt. They can then inflate the economy.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  So do you think if we shrink the government, if we start to slash government spending, do you think that will improve living conditions?

• 29:29Daniel Priestley?

  Well, the UK government is forty five percent of the economy. Like, that's a huge government.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  So do you think US living conditions will increase in the next few years because we have a US government now that is planning to slash the US government?

• 29:41Daniel Priestley?

  Well, that's what the US voters have asked for.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Do you think it will improve living conditions?

• 29:45Daniel Priestley?

  Uh do I think it'll improve?

• 29:48Speaker 00

  For the average American.

• 29:49Daniel Priestley?

  If they're smaller government, uh yeah, I trust markets.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  So you think the average US American will be richer in three years than they are now?

• 29:54Daniel Priestley?

  Here's what I trust. I trust economic freedom. If people have freedom, they create better decisions for their own life. There's two ways to make decisions, right?

• 30:01Speaker 00

  Do you have freedom?

• 30:02Daniel Priestley?

  I've got less freedom than I did when I arrived, just.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Because my sister can't pay the rent. Is that freedom?

• 30:07Daniel Priestley?

  The if you're living in a country.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  She can't afford to live in the city that she was born in.

• 30:12Daniel Priestley?

  I I agree. The you and I agree on the problem. You keep bringing back to the problem.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  I keep bringing it back to people because the people who watch, we're millionaires, okay? The people who watch us are mostly not millionaires. Is life gonna get better for them?

• 30:24Daniel Priestley?

  The life will get better. If you are connected to the most productive parts of the economy. If you pretend that it's nineteen fifty five and you recreate the post-war era conditions, if you try to go back to nineteen fifty five, I don't think that's gonna work.

• 30:39Steven Bartlett?

  So so let me ask on that then, the point about if you're connected to the most productive parts of the economy. I was quite um quite surprised when I was doing some research on this to find that there's quite big differences between the UK and the US in terms of GDP growth. In Q four twenty twenty four, the US economy grew by point six percent while the UK growth was point one percent. So they're doing significantly better in that regard. US GDP per head stands at eighty two thousand dollars per head, whereas the UK stands at forty nine thousand dollars per head. And stock market performance, which is an indication of, I guess, whatever, rose by three hundred percent in the US, whereas the FTSE one hundred declined by twenty percent, which is the UK stock market. Productivity growth since two thousand and eighteen, productivity increased by thirty percent in the United

• 31:20Steven Bartlett?

  States, which has outpaced the the UK. And lastly, income growth. Since two thousand and seven, American income per head has increased by seventy two percent, while it has decreased by two percent in the UK in dollar terms. So they seem to be doing better from it if you just look at the economy. Um. Why is that? Is that because they lean more into technology and to innovation and entrepreneurship? And is it because of the things you were saying earlier about their attitude towards the government, like reduced government spending versus tax the rich? Why? I I'm keen to hear Gary's view on this because I understand yours because you've just said it.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think this is great statistics. Um. And of course, the US has a strong reputation for being very free markets and being very small states. In the last five years, ten years, fifteen years, we've had a UK government that has been aggressively slashing the state. And

• 32:12Daniel Priestley?

  The state's bigger than ever. It's forty five percent of the economy.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  And the US, we had a government in the last four years, which has been running a massive, massive deficit. So in that period of time, it appears the government which has been aggressively increasing its deficit has massively overperformed the government which has been aggressively slashing the state.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  That's what it looks to be from the last. I mean, Joe Biden enormously increased the deficit, enormously. And the Conservatives were austerity government for fourteen years. Which one seems to have given the better numbers?

• 32:46Daniel Priestley?

  Well, I mean, austerity in name only. They went from thirty percent, the state was thirty percent of GDP to forty-five percent of GDP.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Government services have been funding out?

• 32:56Daniel Priestley?

  The government is terrible at doing most things. That's the problem. You don't want government.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  You don't think that spending on government services has been slashed?

• 33:04Daniel Priestley?

  Let me zoom out a little.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Do you think the police spending's been slashed?

• 33:06Daniel Priestley?

  Oh, police spending is definitely.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Do you think education spending's been slashed?

• 33:09Daniel Priestley?

  Do you know where it ends up? It ends up with like big corporates, big consulting, who get paid fifty million dollars to produce a report to tell government some thing. All of these big, I won't name names, but all the big consulting firms, they're all bloodsuckers to government. They know that the money's in the government and they set up business models to extract that money from government. And it also is in the financial trading side of things. One of the issues that we've got, right, and this is a big issue as well, because you care about wealth inequality. One of the biggest issues I see is that during the pandemic, we all learned to work remotely. And remote work became the norm. And what I see at the moment is huge amounts of what would have been normal British jobs

• 33:51Daniel Priestley?

  are going to the Philippines, going to India, going to Vietnam, people who work remotely now. We now have a thousand millionaires a month leaving to go to Dubai. We have a hundred and twenty thousand British people living in Dubai in that economy. The world's become incredibly mobile. And one of the things that's happening is that what would have previously been good British jobs are getting moved overseas to lower cost countries. And that's technology that drives that wedge. The US is very smart in that they've built a technology powerhouse and the UK has completely lost our technology industry. Our tech industry is in decline, same across Europe.

• 34:30Daniel Priestley?

  China and the US know that the game is tech and they're basically pulling all the tech company into their borders. And what's happening a lot is the erosion of good jobs and the erosion of just normal. More well paying uh jobs because they're going. And it's a bit of a self fulfilling loop that the more we lose millionaires, the tax burden falls on everyone else. So they put the taxes up and then the millionaires say, oh, the taxes are too high, so they leave. Um I've watched some of the most incredible entrepreneurs that you would want here that would employ your sister at a high rate. Um and they've picked up and left because the taxes are too high.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  So are you saying we should tax working people less?

• 35:12Daniel Priestley?

  Uh well, the the the overall government has to be smaller. Uh you can't, whoever's.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  So what what do you wanna cut in the government?

• 35:19Daniel Priestley?

  If you uh, yeah, well, I mean, you'd have to.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Child services?

• 35:22Daniel Priestley?

  We'd have to, no.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  Police?

• 35:24Daniel Priestley?

  No, well, no.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  NHS?

• 35:26Daniel Priestley?

  All I know is this.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Pensions?

• 35:28Daniel Priestley?

  You go to Switzerland, they spend twenty.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Welfare for single mothers?

• 35:30Daniel Priestley?

  Twenty five percent.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  Disabled benefits? What do you wanna cut?

• 35:33Daniel Priestley?

  Hold up. All I know is in Switzerland.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  I'll tell you what I wanna do.

• 35:35Daniel Priestley?

  The the government is twenty five percent.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  I wanna cut the taxes on those entrepreneurs and raise the taxes on the billionaires.

• 35:40Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Because I worked my tits off.

• 35:43Daniel Priestley?

  How many billionaires are in the UK?

• 35:45Speaker 00

  There's a lot of billionaires in the UK.

• 35:46Daniel Priestley?

  It's a hundred and fifty.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, so tax them all. What do they pay?

• 35:48Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Listen, I worked my tits off and I paid, it was fifty percent top rate tax, fifty percent top rate tax plus national insurance, sixty percent.

• 35:55Daniel Priestley?

  So a million a year.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  To bring my family out of poverty.

• 35:57Daniel Priestley?

  Hmm.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  At the same time, the Duke of Westminster inherited ten billion pounds and paid nothing. Do you think that's fair?

• 36:03Daniel Priestley?

  That's not true.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Okay, why is it not true?

• 36:05Daniel Priestley?

  Because the Duke of Westminster is one of the highest taxpayers in the country.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  What does he pay?

• 36:10Daniel Priestley?

  Well, on the trust, the Grosvenor estate, uh they don't pay inheritance tax because trusts can't die. They pay something called periodic taxes, which.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Which is how much?

• 36:18Daniel Priestley?

  Six percent every ten years.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  Six percent, so they pay naught point six percent a year. So I paid sixty percent and this guy pays naught point six percent.

• 36:24Daniel Priestley?

  Apples with apples, inheritance tax is forty percent across the course of your life. If a trust is uh, if a person lives who owns a trust for seventy years, then six percent times seven would be forty two. So they actually pay more.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  So he pays naught point six percent a year.

• 36:41Daniel Priestley?

  Pro rata.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  You're telling me naught point six percent a year.

• 36:43Daniel Priestley?

  But that would be the same as.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  What percent did I pay per year?

• 36:45Daniel Priestley?

  No, no, no, but that's.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  Sixty percent.

• 36:46Daniel Priestley?

  Hold up.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  So you're saying I pay, what sixty over naught point six?

• 36:49Daniel Priestley?

  No, no, no, no.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  One hundred times the tax rate.

• 36:51Daniel Priestley?

  You're not comparing apples with apples.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Why is it not apples with apples? This guy pays naught point six percent a year, I paid sixty percent a year.

• 36:57Daniel Priestley?

  That's inheritance tax.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  I paid that sixty percent every year, Daniel. Every year I paid it.

• 37:01Daniel Priestley?

  You're paying income tax.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  So why have I paid?

• 37:04Daniel Priestley?

  The Duke of Westminster pays income tax. The Duke of Westminster pays income tax. He probably, he probably makes your bill blush.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Duke pays income tax.

• 37:11Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, well, if he's gonna live, he has to withdraw money to have his income. He also, let me give you a list of all the taxes he would pay. He'd pay income tax, corporate tax, he'd pay stamp duty when he buys a building. He pays uh, any of the other taxes, VAT when he spends money. All the same taxes apply to a duke as they apply to anybody else.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  So you think he pays income tax on the income on that?

• 37:32Daniel Priestley?

  Any income he draws.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Okay, well, I'll use your search whether he pays income tax on his income. Because I don't think he does.

• 37:37Daniel Priestley?

  I mean, how could he not?

• 37:38Speaker 00

  It's in a trust.

• 37:39Daniel Priestley?

  But the only difference with a trust.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:42Daniel Priestley?

  Versus income is that the trust pays periodic tax versus inheritance tax.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  At naught point six percent?

• 37:48Daniel Priestley?

  But we're only talking inherit, that, that's just one type of tax.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  So you think he's paying sixty percent on his income?

• 37:54Daniel Priestley?

  He's one of the highest taxpayers in the UK. I'm not like his big fan club, but the truth is, he's one of the highest taxpayers in the UK. Um, he's one of the biggest employers in the UK. He's one of the, like.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  One of the biggest landowners in the UK.

• 38:04Daniel Priestley?

  Landowners in the UK, right? Uh, so uh, the, the issue is, is does he pay tax? All the same taxes that apply to you apply to him. Uh, and if you wanna set up a trust, you can also pay periodic taxes as well. Um, which would be on top of all the other taxes.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  So what would you say?

• 38:19Daniel Priestley?

  But it's just not true that he doesn't pay tax.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  No, what would you say? This guy, he's inherited ten billion pounds. So he's worth ten billion pounds. What would you say will be the total amount of tax he will pay in his lifetime?

• 38:29Daniel Priestley?

  Well, I know that just the smallest.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  If I make ten billion pounds, I pay sixty percent.

• 38:34Daniel Priestley?

  Just one second. You're not, you're talking about income versus the transfer of uh, an estate.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  So why, why is it that the Duke of Westminster can be worth ten billion pounds?

• 38:43Daniel Priestley?

  You're just, you're comparing your income.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:45Daniel Priestley?

  Versus the amount he inherited, which is not a fair thing. That's not income.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Because that's his income.

• 38:50Daniel Priestley?

  Inheritance is not income.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So if I get given ten billion pounds, I don't pay any tax. But if I work for ten billion pounds, I pay sixty percent.

• 38:59Daniel Priestley?

  Well, if you inherit it.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  If this is the tax system that you want, you will end up in a system where the kids of the rich are on everything.

• 39:05Daniel Priestley?

  I'm just saying you're.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. And that's fine, because that's our kids.

• 39:08Daniel Priestley?

  You're not telling the truth about his situation.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  Let's have a tax system where your kids and my kids and Stephen's kids are multimillionaires. And these guys out there can't afford to feed their kids and put the heat in.

• 39:18Daniel Priestley?

  That's not what I'm saying.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  But that's what you will get.

• 39:20Daniel Priestley?

  That's not what I'm saying.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  That is what you will get. Listen, that's what I'm betting on. That's fine, because I'll make money in the markets. It's fine. And you'll make money, and you'll make money. It's our viewers who will be poor, and that's fine. That's fine. It's fine for us.

• 39:30Daniel Priestley?

  Let's explore the other alternative, right? So let's say tax the rich, right? So let's play the game of tax the rich.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  Tax the owners, not the workers.

• 39:36Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  The owners, the owners.

• 39:38Daniel Priestley?

  So the issue that we have with the rich is that the number one most valuable assets in the economy now are intangible assets. So there's this chart called the S and P five hundred of the five hundred richest countries in the country, uh, in the world, in the U S, sorry. Um, in nineteen seventies, seventy-five percent of the value of the S and P five hundred was physical assets like property. Um, and today it's less than ten percent. Uh, it's closer to five percent.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  So you think that housing is not particularly important?

• 40:07Daniel Priestley?

  Just, just let's stick with what I'm saying.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:10Daniel Priestley?

  The, the, the powerhouse, the engine room of the economy is digital assets. And that's reflected in, uh, the S and P five hundred, for example, which is ninety-five percent intangible assets. One of the issues that we have is that the richest people are completely mobile now. So they can be absolutely anywhere in the world. So if you come up with this idea of let's tax richest people one percent, if a tiny proportion of them leave, we're all in trouble. So.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  These really rich guys.

• 40:38Daniel Priestley?

  Hmm.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  What do they own?

• 40:41Daniel Priestley?

  Companies.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  And why are those companies worth money?

• 40:44Daniel Priestley?

  Because investors say they are.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  And where do the revenues come from?

• 40:47Daniel Priestley?

  Globally.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:49Daniel Priestley?

  The issue is, is that these companies operate globally now.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  So if I'm a billionaire.

• 40:52Daniel Priestley?

  Take my company, for example.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:54Daniel Priestley?

  My company has eight thousand customers in a hundred and fifty countries.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:57Daniel Priestley?

  We could be anywhere. If you push a button.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  What country is your biggest single revenue source?

• 41:01Daniel Priestley?

  Probably the U S now.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Let's say you move to Cayman Islands. And the U S says, we're going to tax your revenue at point of sale.

• 41:11Daniel Priestley?

  Hmm.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  What can you do?

• 41:13Daniel Priestley?

  Well, that's different, right? Because that's not taxing billionaires, that's taxing companies.

• 41:19Daniel Priestley?

  See, when you say tax the rich on their wealth.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:21Daniel Priestley?

  That's different to saying tax companies a consumption tax.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Oh, but you just said the rich own companies. You said that's what they own.

• 41:26Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, but you're saying, how do you tax them, right? So do they tax, do you tax their wealth, which is what they own? Or do you tax the companies where they trade? Typically, consumption taxes get passed on to consumers.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  Oh, it's not a consumption tax. It's a tax on the ownership.

• 41:41Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, but if you simply say, when you're doing revenues, then that's a consumption tax.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  If we start to tax, if we start to tax the profits of companies.

• 41:48Daniel Priestley?

  By the way, I'm not exactly against you on, on companies. I think it's disgusting that a British company can, can take out a Facebook ad to sell to a British consumer, a British product, and Facebook pretends to be in Ireland on that transaction. And Amazon, you can buy something on Amazon in Britain from a British supplier, from a British warehouse, and Amazon pretends to be in Luxembourg in that situation. And that sucks, right? Like, that, that does not seem fair. And it strikes me as very strange that the government is okay with that. Right now, the government is chasing down mums and dads who sell a few things on eBay and chasing them for taxes, but they don't talk to eBay. They're, they're paranoid about someone doing a little bit of a side hustle on Facebook,

• 42:32Daniel Priestley?

  but Facebook's fine to pretend to be in Ireland. So I don't agree with all of, all of that, right? Like, I think we're, we're missing some serious tricks here. But the idea with taxing billionaires at wealth, billionaires will just leave. They just get up and leave. And, and not just billionaires.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  But what, what do billionaires own? What do billionaires own?

• 42:50Daniel Priestley?

  Companies.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  And where do companies get their money from?

• 42:52Daniel Priestley?

  Revenues.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  And where do the revenues come from?

• 42:55Daniel Priestley?

  Purchasing. People purchasing stuff.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  And where do those people live?

• 42:59Daniel Priestley?

  All over the world.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  We can tax them at that point.

• 43:01Daniel Priestley?

  Well, that's a consumption tax.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  This is the thing.

• 43:02Daniel Priestley?

  That's a consumption tax.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  No, it's not. It's a tax on profits.

• 43:05Daniel Priestley?

  VAT is a tax on revenues.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  You can tax these guys on profits based on where the revenues come from.

• 43:09Daniel Priestley?

  So it's very easy to move profits internationally. See, Stephen had a Starbucks cup. When he buys that Starbucks.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:16Daniel Priestley?

  It's bought from a British company.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:18Daniel Priestley?

  Who licenses the Starbucks logo.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:21Daniel Priestley?

  From Luxembourg or somewhere like that. So fifteen percent. So here we are saying, oh, we're going to tax their profits. And they say, oh, I wish we were profitable. Sorry. Unfortunately, we had to do that licensing deal with that international corporation.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  I know how profit shifting works. Okay, so are you, are you telling me? A company is selling to the UK, the US, enormous amount of profit in the US. And they turn around and say, actually, our profit's not in the US. You think the US is incapable of going and looking at that, seeing where the really where the profit is.

• 43:50Daniel Priestley?

  I'm not saying that you can't do this. I'm saying that the benefits of doing it, it's so hard to tax wealth, for example, or it's so hard to tax millionaires and billionaires. That you end up cutting off your nose to spite your face. For every, like, if we create Britain, for example, and we build a brand which is that we're anti-wealth. We don't want you to ever have more than 10 million. If you've got more than 10 million, we punish you. Every young entrepreneur who comes to me and says, Dan, do you think I should start a company here in this country? I'm going to say, well, if you do, they'll take it, as soon as you start to make it, they'll take it. As soon as, if you're successful, if you get investment, they're going to tax you your wealth. If you sell the company, they're going to take it off you.

• 44:33Daniel Priestley?

  I'm going to basically say to that young entrepreneur, don't build your business in Britain. Go start at somewhere that they're more proactive and positive towards entrepreneurs.

• 44:41Steven Bartlett?

  Are we seeing that now with this, they call it the millionaire exodus? Which is, for people that don't know, the UK is set to lose the greatest proportion of millionaires in the world. This parliament, I'll put a graph on the screen, which is this one here, this one here. And that little red line here is us losing all of our millionaires at the moment. And in 2024, it's estimated that 10,800 high net worth individuals left the UK, which is a 157% increase from the previous year. Which means that one millionaire is departing every 45 minutes. The UK millionaire exodus is equal to losing 530,000 average taxpayers. And another stat, the top 10% of earners in the US account for nearly half of all consumer spending.

• 45:25Steven Bartlett?

  The top 1% of income taxpayers in the UK are projected to contribute about 30% of total income tax from 2024 to 2025. Why are all these millionaires running away?

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Well, it's not because they're taxing their wealth, because we don't have any wealth taxes.

• 45:39Steven Bartlett?

  Why do you think they're leaving?

• 45:41Speaker 00

  I think the reason they're leaving is because the UK economy is really, really weak. Because the UK consumer is really, really weak. Because you've absolutely crushed the spending power of your average British family.

• 45:50Steven Bartlett?

  And where are they going?

• 45:51Speaker 00

  Your average British family can barely afford to feed the kids and turn the heating on. So why are you going to start a business here when the customers are absolutely impoverished?

• 45:57Daniel Priestley?

  Look, it corresponds with a new tax that we brought in, which was, um, we ended the non-dom scheme. So the non-dom scheme basically said, if you're living in the UK, but you've got businesses all over the world, then we only tax you on what you've got in the UK. And if you die in the UK, we'll only tax you on your UK assets for inheritance tax if you're a non-dom. But if you die in the UK and you've got wealth in India, once that non-dom scheme ended, they basically said, we will tax you on everything globally. If you're an economic, uh, if you're a tax resident in the UK, everything you've got globally, we want 40% of it. So unfortunately, every wealth manager contacted their clients and said, you can't stay here. You're going to have to get out. It's, it's gotten really bad. A thousand people a month are leaving.

• 46:42Daniel Priestley?

  And in the UK, 1% of people pay 30% of the taxes, 10% of people pay 60% of the taxes. And you imagine if we're sitting out at dinner and there's 10 of us out for dinner, and one person says, hey, I've got this, I'll get 60% of the bill tonight. We say to them, no, it should be 70%, should be 80%. And they say, you know what, I'll get up and leave. So they leave, everyone else's bill just doubled. So what's going to happen is if we drive the millionaires out of this country, everyone, every ordinary, normal person who pays 10 grand a year in tax will now have to pay 20 grand a year in taxes.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  So the reason they left is because we used to allow them to not pay tax?

• 47:18Daniel Priestley?

  On their global incomes, on their global.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  So isn't it a bit more like if we were a teletext at dinner and there was one guy who came on to dinner on the condition he wouldn't pay, then leaves? Because you guys weren't paying tax anyway. The reason they left is because they weren't paying tax.

• 47:31Daniel Priestley?

  It's like saying, um, it's like saying, hey, I'll pay 60% of this table. And they say at the table, hey, wait a second, we also want you to pay for everything that's happening at other restaurants as well.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Isn't it a bit more like? These guys were here on a condition, you yourself said.

• 47:48Daniel Priestley?

  No, you're a hundred percent.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  The reason why they left is because we let them live here on the condition that they didn't have to pay taxes.

• 47:53Daniel Priestley?

  On their global, yeah, taxes matter, right? So why is everyone going to Dubai? Dubai, they're going there because there's no tax.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  These guys, they live in Dubai, their money comes from the West. They are making money from the West while your average Western, ordinary person watching this show now cannot afford to buy a house, cannot afford to have a family. We can tax those revenues at the point of sale. Why do we allow these guys?

• 48:16Daniel Priestley?

  It's called a consumption tax.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  No, it's not. It's a tax on profit. It's not a tax on consumption.

• 48:21Daniel Priestley?

  You just said at point of sale, which means it's a consumption tax.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, based on the profits. You look at how much profit they have and then you work out where the profits go. Exactly, it's not a consumption tax, like I'm saying.

• 48:29Daniel Priestley?

  No, so if you tax profits, right? Then those profits have to accumulate in that country. And because of the digital ecosystem that we now have, the world we now live in, I can lease the database off of my company in Luxembourg. I can license the, I can license my logo from a company.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  I understand how profit shifting works. Okay, so listen, these guys are not Gandalf. You just say, we don't accept profit shifting. We don't need to accept profit shifting. China does not accept profit shifting. We did not accept profit shifting 50 years ago. We do not have to accept profit shifting. But you have a government class who are extremely wealthy and a media class who are extremely wealthy saying it's impossible to tax rich people. And I would like to say, I will agree 100%. It is difficult to tax rich people. It is very, very, very difficult to tax rich people. I don't, I don't come here saying I want to tax rich people because it's easy. I know it's hard. I know probably I'm gonna lose. I know our viewers' kids will live in desperate poverty. I know that. I do this because it is hard.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  If we are a country which says to ourselves, we don't try and do things which are necessary to keep our kids out of poverty because they are hard, then our kids will live in poverty. I don't need to be here. I'm a multimillionaire, just like you. I could be in the Philippines drinking pina coladas. I come in here because I come from a poor background and it's ordinary families like my family, like the kids I grew up with, whose kids are gonna be in poverty. It's difficult, but it is necessary. Sometimes we have to do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. That is what makes a rich country rich, and that is what protects ordinary people. Listen, our grandparents lived in poverty.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Did they say, let's not change it because it's hard? No, they didn't. They fought and they demanded, they demanded healthcare, education, housing, food, and they got it. They got it. That's why my parents could live a good quality life. They got those things. They got those things and they were aware that in order to do that, you could not allow the super rich who have been living lives of luxury for hundreds and hundreds of years to eat everything while ordinary families couldn't afford to feed their kids. I know it's difficult. I know it's difficult and I know I'm probably gonna lose. I know that. I know I'm probably gonna lose and that means our viewers will be poor, but I do it anyway because I do not want this country that I grew up in to fall into desperate poverty.

• 50:44Daniel Priestley?

  I agree with you on the passion and I agree with you on the problem. I don't agree with you on the solution because in twenty nineteen.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  We'll all be rich and our kids will be rich.

• 50:53Daniel Priestley?

  In twenty twenty, and that's not what I'm saying. In twenty twenty, we made a decision globally to shut down the economy and we taught everyone that they can live and work from anywhere. The biggest threat to everything you're saying is remote working. The fact that we can live and work from anywhere. Our grandparents, their boss, if their boss owned a company, that company had to physically be in the country and the boss had to physically be in the country. If we look at today, there are plenty of fitness trainers who work for a gym and the owner of that gym is somewhere overseas. Plenty of people work in, live in, work in a restaurant and the owner of the restaurant lives overseas. You can live in, you can run a business from anywhere in the world right now. So the problem that we face is that you're describing, on one hand, you say we need to tax it at the point of sale, which is a consumption tax.

• 51:39Speaker 00

  It's not a tax on profits.

• 51:40Daniel Priestley?

  Okay, and then you say tax on profit and then you say, oh, but then we'll stop profit shifting. By the way, I'm also actually all for this idea of stopping profits. I've already said, I think it's utterly ridiculous the way that many of these global companies are treated. And if we don't stop that, then all the money just flows out to the tech companies. Um, so I'm, I'm with you on that. But when you say tax the rich, the actual people who own the companies, those people can just be anywhere right now. So.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  But their, but their revenues can't. Their customers, their customers are where their customers are. Their customers are where their customers are. Listen, Amazon doesn't pay any UK tax, doesn't pay any US tax. Where are the customers? In the UK and the US?

• 52:19Daniel Priestley?

  In the UK, yeah, US.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  Do you really think it's impossible for us to tax that?

• 52:22Daniel Priestley?

  Well, you're talking about taxing people at 10 million plus, right? So this is a lot of startup entrepreneurs.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Jeff Bezos is a lot more than 10 million.

• 52:29Daniel Priestley?

  No, I'm not.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Jeff Bezos is worth a lot more than 10 million.

• 52:31Daniel Priestley?

  But you talk about anyone above 10 million is on your radar.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  You don't want people worth 11 million pounds to be paying more taxes?

• 52:38Daniel Priestley?

  I'm not just talking, it's not that.

• 52:40Steven Bartlett?

  Dan, if you, you're worth more than 10 million pounds. So if we tax people on, as Gary says, that have more than 10 million, what are your options to avoid? Say if your objective was to avoid that, what options do you have?

• 52:52Daniel Priestley?

  Look, if my objective was to avoid it, I pass a board resolution that we're moving the head office somewhere else.

• 52:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 52:58Daniel Priestley?

  Um, we've moved the intellectual property somewhere else. I pick up and move my family somewhere else. And within about a week or two, we've got a WeWork office somewhere else. I've got a new house on Airbnb somewhere else. And I cut ties with the UK and I'm non-tax resident here. And I can, I have a digital business. I can literally make my head office anywhere in the world. If there was a particular country that turned hostile towards our operations, then I'd have to withdraw service from that thing, you know? So that's possible, but it's unlikely that that would actually happen. But ultimately, if I choose to get up and leave, then I get up and leave. Now, the, the, the bigger issue is would I have even come here in the first place? And then there's another issue. And here's the other issue, Gary, for you.

• 53:42Daniel Priestley?

  You've just had 750,000 subscribers to your YouTube channel.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  It's 820, buddy.

• 53:47Daniel Priestley?

  It's 820, right? So it's going up fast. I could have one of my analysts at a consulting company do a valuation of your brand and do a valuation of your YouTube channel. We could say this is a fast-growth media company and it's worth 11 million, right? So we could come up with a forecast and a projection. And we say Gary's Economics is actually a new fast-growth media brand. It's worth 11 million. Now, your channel, now you have to pay a hundred grand a year in extra taxes because you're a millionaire.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  Sorry, one percent on wealth above ten million, on eleven million, is going to be ten grand in taxes.

• 54:21Daniel Priestley?

  Oh, you're saying only on the part above?

• 54:22Speaker 00

  That's how taxes work.

• 54:24Daniel Priestley?

  So it's not on everything, it's, okay, so it's a marginal tax.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  That's how taxes work.

• 54:27Daniel Priestley?

  It's above, so, okay, so, but is it fair that, like, who gets to decide what wealth is wealth and what it's worth? Because wealth, let's just, hear me out, wealth is a technical term for unrealized gains, right? It's not real, you know, someone buys a house for twenty grand and it's worth two hundred grand. They've still got the same house, but now they've got wealth. If someone starts a business and a tiny little seed investor puts in a little angel investment, now they've got wealth on paper, but who gets to say what is wealth? Like, for example, if you introduce wealth taxes, theoretically, that will actually reduce the value of wealth of things anyway,

• 55:08Daniel Priestley?

  because things inside that economy are now subject to a disadvantage. So therefore, investors will be unlikely to invest in them to a certain point. And also, people start cutting and dodging and weaving and ducking and weaving. So they say, oh, our UK operation's worth ten million, so we're now going to start a second company over in some other country and make sure that's where the wealth accumulates. So it's incredibly difficult because it is just unrealized gains.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  I know, I know it's difficult.

• 55:35Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  I know, I know these guys have the best accountants, I know it's difficult.

• 55:38Daniel Priestley?

  So what if there was an easier solution?

• 55:41Speaker 00

  If there was an easier solution, I would support that, you know what I mean?

• 55:43Daniel Priestley?

  It's called economic freedom, the economic freedom index.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Okay, well, this totally gives that, give them more economic freedom and then they'll be rich.

• 55:50Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, so this diagram here basically says the most free countries have less than ten percent poverty, in fact, less than seven percent poverty. As soon as you reduce economic freedom, it jumps to thirty percent poverty. You reduce economic freedom again and it jumps up to huge, huge amounts of poverty. So these countries here are the least economically free and these countries are the most economically free. The countries that get in the way of your economic freedom have more poverty and the countries that let people make decisions for their own life have less.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  What you're saying is, if the governments of our countries cut taxes on us, the three multimillionaires sitting at this table, that will improve the lives of? The ordinary British and American worker.

• 56:29Daniel Priestley?

  I'll give you a real life example. I'll give you a real life example. Uh, I know of a company that was going to give pay rises to its employees and then national insurance went up. And instead of.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  But national insurance is a tax on employment.

• 56:39Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  I'm saying to reduce that, I'm saying to reduce tax on, I want your viewers, the viewers here to be paying less tax.

• 56:45Daniel Priestley?

  Okay.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Whilst multimillionaires pay more tax.

• 56:47Daniel Priestley?

  It's good in theory, but of, if you could tax rich people 1% of their wealth above 10 million. Uh, I did a back of a napkin cap, uh, calculation, you might be able to get 20 billion.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:59Daniel Priestley?

  Right. That's if they don't leave. That's if they don't respond to it. If they just happily pay it, you get 20 billion. That's less than a week worth of current government spending. So the government's out of control. 1.2 trillion a year of government spending is now what they spend.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  Okay, so let's cut that, get that 20 billion and cut the taxes for the viewers. Cut their income taxes.

• 57:19Daniel Priestley?

  So that works out about 250 a year.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  Okay, so let's do more. Let's make it 60 billion.

• 57:24Daniel Priestley?

  So then you tax 3% above wealth.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, do that.

• 57:27Daniel Priestley?

  Right. And then you also bring it down to.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Bear in mind.

• 57:29Daniel Priestley?

  This is what governments do.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  We make five or six, yeah, and then, and that's what they did.

• 57:32Daniel Priestley?

  You know what they do?

• 57:33Speaker 00

  That's what they did in the Second World War, and that's why my dad could afford a house.

• 57:36Daniel Priestley?

  What they actually, that's not why he could afford a house.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  Okay, all right, well, who's buying, if ordinary people are losing their houses and the wealth, which they are.

• 57:42Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  And we're getting richer.

• 57:44Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Who is it who is now owning the houses if it is not us?

• 57:47Daniel Priestley?

  The government used to own the houses and then they sold.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Government wealth is collapsing. Government wealth is collapsing.

• 57:52Daniel Priestley?

  But what they did is they sold the houses to the people.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Okay, but, but ordinary middle class wealth is also collapsing.

• 57:57Daniel Priestley?

  You can only do that once and they did it for the baby business.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  So you think it's our viewers who have got my houses now? Who, where is the wealth going, Daniel? Where is the wealth going? Who has the wealth now? Who's getting richer? Who's getting the wealth that is lost by our viewers?

• 58:09Daniel Priestley?

  I'll tell you where the biggest amounts of money are going. The biggest amounts of money, uh, since the pandemic. Uh, 11 trillion went just to the value of seven companies that own tech, technology. So the biggest seven companies in the USA, 11 trillion has got.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  And you don't want their billionaire owners to pay more tax?

• 58:26Daniel Priestley?

  Well, would that help the UK?

• 58:28Speaker 00

  Well, if you use that money to reduce tax on working people, then it would it would help, yeah.

• 58:32Daniel Priestley?

  They own shares in the USA, they're US citizens, so that doesn't help us here.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  No, but it will help the American consumer, and then we can export the American consumer, and it will mean the American consumer has money. And then it will show British people how much you can achieve by taxing super rich, then we can tax raise tax on our super rich here. And then what I want is these guys to be taxed so much that they start to sell assets. And then ordinary British people can buy assets again, because what I want is our viewers to be able to own things, to be able to own their own homes.

• 58:59Steven Bartlett?

  I I when I hear this, I admittedly don't know as much about these issues as you guys do, but when I hear that there's these seven tech companies in the US, my brain goes, can't we have one here?

• 59:10Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:12Steven Bartlett?

  Can't we start and then so my brain goes, how what conditions do we have to create?

• 59:16Daniel Priestley?

  Ones that we had, yeah.

• 59:17Steven Bartlett?

  What conditions do we have to create to have one of those seven tech companies here, especially in this sort of AI world we're heading towards where? When I was reading through the stats, most of the investment in AI, which is going to be hugely destabilizing across every industry from driving to to any form of knowledge work, even podcasting, I can play your podcast now.

• 59:35Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 59:35Steven Bartlett?

  Which sounds exactly like me, which has a four point six star rating on Apple, which was written by AI in my voice, published by AI.

• 59:42Daniel Priestley?

  Wow.

• 59:43Steven Bartlett?

  And and who's accruing the value there? Well, it's a company in America called Eleven Labs and it's bloody OpenAI. And I go, why why can't we have those companies here?

• 59:52Daniel Priestley?

  We need them here.

• 59:53Steven Bartlett?

  Because China and the US are dominating this next revolution. And I I worry as a bystander that if we don't create entrepreneurship friendly environments here, we're gonna we are gonna become India.

• 1:00:06Daniel Priestley?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  So you if you want businesses to to thrive, you don't need just a good environment for entrepreneurs. You also need people to have money that they can spend.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  And we are in a country where increasingly, most of the people out there have almost nothing left over at the end of the month. They can barely pay the bills.

• 1:00:27Steven Bartlett?

  Those companies are selling globally, right? So they don't need any particular company to do well. They just, they sell to anywhere. So like OpenAI, ChatGPT, we're all using that bloody product and paying our twenty, thirty dollars a month.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, where do they actually get their money from? They get their money from selling data to, to, to the rich, right?

• 1:00:41Steven Bartlett?

  Uh, my point was making the environment more friendly for entrepreneurs, because when I start a company, I am at a, I can't explain the disadvantage I'm at at the moment if I start that kind of company here. There's no investors and then all the talent seems to flock over to San Francisco. So the, the guys that built, the, the British guys that built an AI company called Fixer, which I was going to invest in, all British lads from London, they went over to San Francisco, they're like twenty five year olds, they've just raised at a sixty million valuation, they're in this room, this building in San Francisco, full of entrepreneurs, and they're pumping knowledge and capital into this room.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  With all due respect, Stephen, you're not a great example for the fact that it's impossible to start a, a successful online brand in the UK.

• 1:01:21Steven Bartlett?

  Facts. But I also realised that.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  The problem of, of.

• 1:01:24Daniel Priestley?

  But he started when things were different.

• 1:01:26Steven Bartlett?

  But I, I also realised, I don't like using personal examples because there's a huge amount of privilege and.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  Okay, is there a ChatGPT in Germany?

• 1:01:34Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  Is there a ChatGPT in, in France?

• 1:01:37Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  Is there a ChatGPT in Australia?

• 1:01:39Daniel Priestley?

  No.

• 1:01:39Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  Is there a ChatGPT in China?

• 1:01:41Daniel Priestley?

  It's China and.

• 1:01:42Steven Bartlett?

  One sec, one sec.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. What you have here is an extremely low labour, extremely high capital model, which employs extremely few people across the entire world, that is focused in basically two cities.

• 1:01:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  Good luck competing with that.

• 1:01:55Steven Bartlett?

  How, how do we create an environment where the UK can start to build some of these companies, which are going to capitalise on this next technological revolution? How, if you were Prime Minister, what would you do?

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  I think you need to look realistically about what companies do we have a chance of growing? You know, I'm not an expert in AI, but I think trying to compete with San Francisco and London would, would, would probably not work.

• 1:02:15Daniel Priestley?

  Why?

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  Try and, try and do it, you know, try and do it. And listen, I know that you can get a lot of likes saying, let's just invest in AI, let's just invest in. Only one city in the world outside of China has managed it. China has managed it by basically state capitalism. You know, this is very similar in a sense to what we had with microelectronics in Japan in the eighties, right? When you have a new industry, especially these industries which are very capital intense and don't employ many people. You get a first move advantage, they tend to win. Eventually, often they get undercut by cheaper rivals and that does happen. You know, that does happen and you you might say in AI. I don't think AI is going to become a massive, massive employer. Of course, you know, a lot of countries are going to be like, because basically it it sounds good. We're going to invest in AI, we're going to invest in AI. Personally, I think we should be looking at what does the British person need? You know, we we live in a country where the housing stock is falling apart.

• 1:03:01Steven Bartlett?

  If we say AI, when we talk about AI, I think we're actually talking about technology. Because even a podcast, like a podcast like this, you don't think this of this as an AI company. But actually now the editing process, the scripting process, the transcription process, even YouTube itself is an AI company. So it's it's really technology we're speaking about here. And I'm wondering why we can't create a better environment in the UK to start launching and building some of these technology companies. We've even seen.

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  No, but I think we should and I think we should be looking.

• 1:03:28Steven Bartlett?

  How?

• 1:03:28Speaker 00

  We should be looking at reducing taxes on people who who work and make money. This is what I've been saying for the whole time.

• 1:03:33Daniel Priestley?

  What about people, what about people who start companies?

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, we should reduce their taxes on the income that they make. But then if they start owning a fifty million pound company, are you telling me? If you come to me and I say, all right, you want to start a company? We we've taxed you very, very little on a company that you start. If that company becomes worth twenty, thirty, forty million quid, then we're going to start taxing you. You're going to come and say to me, oh, no, sorry, fifty million is not enough for me.

• 1:03:54Steven Bartlett?

  So can I ask a question on that? So my company was was valued at fifty, whatever, hundred millions.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  Congratulations.

• 1:04:02Steven Bartlett?

  I still had, because I hadn't had an exit event.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:06Steven Bartlett?

  I still had ten, ten thousand pounds, twenty thousand pounds in my bank account. Are you saying at the point when I sell the company? Or are you saying just because I have shares in the company?

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  I think you can structure it a number of ways. You can structure it a number of ways. My preferred way is to stop people from hoarding enormous amounts of wealth for enormous amounts of time. That's my, that's basically my preferred method. There's also the wealth tax method. There's also capital gains as a method. There's a lot of different ways here. There's a lot of different ways here, but you have to deal with the problem of if you do not do not tax very wealthy individuals and very wealthy families, their share of the pie will obviously grow over time and they will, and they are, as we are watching, squeezing out ordinary families. You have to deal with that.

• 1:04:45Steven Bartlett?

  My friend saw this. Company in the UK, it's a company everybody knows. And he, I remember him saying to me at the time, it was in the middle of the pandemic. He'd got this big exit event, I think he'd made three hundred million. And he goes, I'm off. I go, where are you going? And he goes, I'm gonna go to Dubai and Monaco and live between the two. And I said to him, explain to me why. He goes, well, the amount of tax I'd have to pay in the UK is equivalent to me paying twenty million rent in the UK for the next six or seven years, which you'd have to stay here for. So he, he went and he pops back in every now and then. But it meant that he could keep that hundred and fifty million, whatever tax he would pay. Never had to pay it to the UK, is living this high-flying life now in Dubai. Drops into Monaco every now and then. And I remember him saying to me, well, Steve, I'd have to pay twenty million rent a year to live here.

• 1:05:28Steven Bartlett?

  And he went on to say, the UK product just isn't worth it. He goes, crime, I'm gonna get my Rolex robbed off me. He goes, the healthcare system isn't the best, the education system isn't necessarily the best. And the particular one was crime, which is I'll get, I'll get, I'll get mugged walking through.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Steven Bartlett?

  London streets.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  Stephen, if you allow British people who own three hundred million pounds of British assets to technically live in Monaco and not pay tax, then you will get crime. And you will have dirty streets and you will have a bad healthcare system and you will have education. Because if you give all of the wealth to a group of people who do not tax, there'll be nothing left to provide things like healthcare and education for ordinary people. It's not unconnected.

• 1:06:07Daniel Priestley?

  These people are not technically living there, they're moving out. My friends have moved out of the country, they don't come back to the UK. They've left and they leave with their company.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  They built a company here.

• 1:06:16Daniel Priestley?

  No, they typically build globally.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  And pay no tax.

• 1:06:18Daniel Priestley?

  They typically build globally business. It's not that they pay.

• 1:06:21Steven Bartlett?

  It was a global business.

• 1:06:22Daniel Priestley?

  They don't pay no tax, they pay extortionate amounts of tax, right? Anyone who's here is paying extraordinary taxes, more than they've ever paid before. One percent pays thirty percent, ten percent pays sixty percent of one point two trillion a year worth of government spending.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  Three hundred million, how much tax check he's paid in his life?

• 1:06:40Steven Bartlett?

  I have no idea. I have no idea. His business was global, but his biggest customer was the US.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Cause I pay sixty percent and our viewers will pay thirty, forty, fifty percent. Do you think it's fair that your three hundred million guy pays his two or three?

• 1:06:52Steven Bartlett?

  I have no idea what he pays.

• 1:06:54Speaker 00

  Well, it sounds like he didn't pay fifty percent.

• 1:06:56Steven Bartlett?

  Well, he dashed, went before he got the tax bill.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  But why do we allow it? Why do we allow it? I'm not allowed to not pay my tax.

• 1:07:02Steven Bartlett?

  What could you have done to?

• 1:07:03Daniel Priestley?

  You are allowed to. When you were in Japan, you wouldn't have paid UK taxes.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I was working in Japan and then I paid Japanese taxes.

• 1:07:09Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, because you were living in Japan. This is the thing. People can live wherever they want now. So.

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  But we're talking about, this is, I think we should stop obfuscating tax on people's work from tax on the assets that they own.

• 1:07:22Daniel Priestley?

  So I'm talking about entrepreneurs' work generates wealth. So when entrepreneurs often don't pay.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  If I earn a billion pounds of British houses.

• 1:07:28Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  And then I say I live in Dubai.

• 1:07:31Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  And I'm getting the rent on a billion pounds of houses, which should probably be something like, that's gonna be something like fifty million pounds a year. So I'm getting sixty, fifty, sixty million pounds a year of rent from British people.

• 1:07:43Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  And that gets paid to me from British people.

• 1:07:45Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  And I pay, and I don't pay tax, I live in Dubai. Do you think that's fair? Alright, so let's change that. Let's make people pay tax on their wealth, regardless of where they live.

• 1:07:55Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, the question would be though, how would you tax people, right? And how would you actually structure it? Because regardless of what you feel like is fair, this is the thing, it's not about fairness, it's about what you can pragmatically and practically do in the modern economy. You might say, oh, I actually, like for example, if we said what's fair, a lot of people would say a flat tax is fair. You make one pound, you pay twenty percent. You make a million pounds, you pay twenty percent. Make a hundred million pounds, you pay twenty percent. So a lot of people would say the fairest tax system would just be a flat tax on everything, right? That would be a fair thing. It's pragmatically, can you do it? Is it actually good for society? Should people be excluded from that? So it's not about fairness, it's about pragmatically, what can you get away with?

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  Alright, well pragmatically, what we can get away with is desperate poverty for our viewers' kids.

• 1:08:36Daniel Priestley?

  If you want to have, can we zoom out just a minute, right? I wanna zoom out.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  Let's zoom away from our viewers' kids. Forget about them. They're not there for us.

• 1:08:43Daniel Priestley?

  I'm a dad, right? I've got three kids.

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  You are a multimillionaire dad. And you probably don't have the same problems as our viewers.

• 1:08:49Daniel Priestley?

  Do you know that? Do you know that kids born into the top have a sixty percent chance of dropping out of the top? Right, sixty percent, that's the number, it's called persistence, you can Google it. Um, the persistence rates is actually only forty percent for the richest, so, which means sixty percent drop out in the second.

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  Do you think your kids have a sixty percent chance of living in poverty?

• 1:09:07Daniel Priestley?

  Also, not poverty.

• 1:09:08Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know what's interesting, we're all trying to aim at the same goal, I think, here.

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  I'm not sure we are, boss.

• 1:09:13Steven Bartlett?

  Well, that's fair, that's fair, maybe we're not.

• 1:09:15Speaker 00

  I suspect some of us are maybe trying to protect our kids' wealth position.

• 1:09:18Daniel Priestley?

  No, I want widespread affluence through the technological revolution that's happening, and I don't want the people who create that to wanna go somewhere else.

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  So you agree with me that we should cut tax on wealth creators and raise tax on wealth hoarders?

• 1:09:31Daniel Priestley?

  Uh, well, broadly.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  Okay, so let's do it. Let's cut tax on people who are making income, let's cut tax on people who are working hard, creating a good product, making a good income, and let's raise tax on people who are sitting there on twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred million pounds of assets that they're gonna give to their kids and they're gonna use to dominate society and squeeze out the middle class.

• 1:09:50Daniel Priestley?

  Who's an example of someone who's hoarding wealth?

• 1:09:52Speaker 00

  Rishi Sunak.

• 1:09:53Daniel Priestley?

  So his family owns a tech company.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  His wife's dad owns a tech company, which he will inherit and his kids will inherit.

• 1:10:01Daniel Priestley?

  His net worth that is quoted is based upon his wife's.

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that company already exists, it's created now.

• 1:10:08Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  It's worth billions.

• 1:10:10Daniel Priestley?

  But they, they have to reinvent that business every two years, like it's a company.

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  So you, you think that the reason, you think that if Rishi Sunak's father-in-law stopped managing the company, it would be valueless?

• 1:10:20Daniel Priestley?

  No, I think it, it, it hires hundreds of thousands of people and it's, you know, it's a big company. I don't know a lot about that particular company, but I know it's a tech company.

• 1:10:27Speaker 00

  Look, Steve Jobs died, okay? Is Apple valueless?

• 1:10:31Daniel Priestley?

  No.

• 1:10:31Speaker 00

  Let's not pretend that these creators are the sole reason these companies are valuable.

• 1:10:36Daniel Priestley?

  Sure.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  You know, and what we're talking about in many cases, you know, I was a trader, okay? And I'm worth millions of quid and, you know, now that is just assets, I just own the assets, I own the assets. And that will grow and it will grow and it will grow and it will grow. And that will squeeze out and squeeze out and squeeze out and squeeze out our viewers. And I'll give that to my kids, they don't even need to work, they wouldn't even have, even have to work, they could just live on, I could live on, off the wealth. Is that what you want?

• 1:11:00Daniel Priestley?

  Do you think there are any opportunities for people today? Like, if you're born into a poor family.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Daniel Priestley?

  Do you think it's possible that housing being shit, and we can both agree on that. But do you think there are new opportunities that didn't exist for our parents or grandparents, but they do exist for people today?

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  I think the reality is, for kids from poor backgrounds, it is almost impossible to realistically get even financial security, never mind wealth.

• 1:11:28Daniel Priestley?

  But why do you think you could do it, I could do it, he could do it, but you don't think other people could do it?

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  Well, the first thing is, I'm thirty eight now, so I'm not a kid nowadays. Listen, I won every maths competition I've ever been in, you know what I mean? Since I was a little kid, I didn't even have a desk in my house, you know? I was one of the top students at LSE. And I still had to win my job by cheating in the card game. You know, that's the world that we live in. I don't think that's a very replicable strategy. And it's very easy for people like us who've made money to say, oh, we did it, aren't we great? Go out and, you know, you've said that you think if young people go and work in tech business, they can get financial security. If it was that easy, they'd all be doing it, you know? They're not idiots, our viewers are not idiots, they're trying, they're trying. They wanna find the good opportunities and they work, listen, they're working so hard.

• 1:12:11Daniel Priestley?

  Saying they're idiots, you're the one who says that they can't do it anymore. I see people do it all the time, like, I'm working in entrepreneur.

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  People from poor backgrounds. So then, but then why are our viewers, you think all of our viewers, if it was that easy, why is everybody not doing it?

• 1:12:24Daniel Priestley?

  I'll tell you why people aren't doing it. We went through a schooling system that taught us how to get an office job.

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:12:29Daniel Priestley?

  Right, went through a schooling system to prepare us for a world that doesn't really exist anymore, which is the industrial revolution world. And you have to go through a process of figuring out how it really works. So what I see is that most often the people who do really well financially, who are young, they dropped out of school, they dropped out of university, they started learning how to do things by doing their own research. They start their own business or co-founder business, they take a very alternative path. None of that was taught to us at school, none of it's taught to us in normal society. We have a school system that manufactures people for a set of skills that are not particularly valuable anymore. And we also get them in debt for those skills.

• 1:13:10Daniel Priestley?

  When people sidestep that and say, okay, I'm not gonna get into university debt, I'm just gonna go off and actually figure out how the world works, there's actually loads of opportunities.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  Okay, so. I guess we've sorted it then. All of our viewers need to do is go and buy Dan's book. Become an entrepreneur and become a millionaire. It's that easy. Why weren't you guys doing it to begin with? They're idiots. The viewers are idiots. They should be just being more entrepreneurial. It's as simple as that. More entrepreneurial, start a business. Listen, I come from East London, okay? My friends can't feed their kids, okay? And if it was as simple as going out and being an entrepreneur, I can bet you they would do it. I can bet you they would do it. Let us, I'm sick of multimillionaires telling kids who can't afford to turn the heating on, you just need to be more entrepreneurial. It's sick, Dan, it's sick. But I speak, this gives people mental illness. It gives people mental illness. Tell them the truth, okay?

• 1:14:01Speaker 00

  We, your older generation, we took the opportunities and now it's almost impossible to get out of poverty. And don't just, don't just stand up there and wave, you know, your millions of pounds in front of them and say, if you are entrepreneurial like me, you could do it, you could have it. Because it's sick, because they can't. They can't feed their kids, Dan. They can't turn the heating on. Don't tell them to be more entrepreneurial. Fix the system that drives more and more and more of them into poverty every generation.

• 1:14:24Daniel Priestley?

  I find it very strange that you think it would be easier to fix the entire global economic system than to start a business and fix your own personal economics. The, the thing that, the thing that I know that gives people mental health issues is feeling that they have no agency in their life, that they can't do anything. Your video where you talk about if you don't have a rich dad, you're screwed. There's no such thing as meritocracy. You're never going to be successful. To me, if I had have come across your content at nineteen, twenty years old, I would have been screwed. I was so, I'm so glad that I came across people who said, Daniel, you weren't born into a, a rich family. You don't have any bank of mum and dad, but it's cheap and easier than ever to start a business. Start by working for someone who's got a business, then figure out what's your opportunity.

• 1:15:08Daniel Priestley?

  And there's a way, there is a way. Um, I, I've actually worked with a lot of teenagers from poor backgrounds. And one of the things we do is we tell them if it's possible for someone else, it is possible for you. Um, I also worked in rural Uganda, um, with a charity that did, uh, work with the poorest of the poor. Um, one of the most incredible things I ever saw was a woman who started out. Literally picking food out of a trash pile. And she was, basically, they shared with her how to start a chicken business, which then ended up as a pig business, which then ended up as a cattle business. And she ended up making, hiring fifteen, sixteen people in her local community. The power of entrepreneurship is that, starting with nothing, you can actually

• 1:15:55Daniel Priestley?

  make improvements. I'm not saying everyone ends up as a millionaire, and I'm not saying everyone ends up equal, but I'm saying you can make improvements in your life. And the thing that causes mental health issues is the feeling of having no agency or no control over your circumstances until the world changes the whole economic system.

• 1:16:12Speaker 00

  I never told people don't work hard. I never once said that. Never once said that.

• 1:16:15Daniel Priestley?

  You said if your dad wasn't rich, you'll never be rich.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  Which is true in ninety-nine point nine percent of cases. I've never told people don't work hard.

• 1:16:22Daniel Priestley?

  That's actually not true in ninety-nine percent of cases.

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  I've never told people don't work hard, okay? And listen, if you think that Ugandans should be more entrepreneurial, I've never been to Uganda. Maybe that's the problem out there. Maybe that's the problem in Nigeria. Maybe that's the problem in India. Listen, I've never said don't work hard, okay? When I brought my book out last year, The Hardback, I was at some event and I come out, I was drinking London Bridge, and I come out late, it was like, it was like one AM. And some guy come up to me when I was unlocking my bike.

• 1:16:49Speaker 00

  Some guy from Newcastle, which is the northeast of England, it's this quite poor town, there's a lot of working class people there. And he said, I've been watching you on YouTube, and I love your stuff. And this guy started crying. This guy started crying on the street, right, in front of me. He's like, I work so hard, Gary, I work two jobs. My mum's sick, and I'm trying to help, I'm trying to support, and I don't understand why. And I'm sorry that I'm crying.

• 1:17:20Speaker 00

  But nobody ever told me that it wasn't my fault before. That's what he said to me, okay? And listen, listen, I believe one hundred percent aspiration, ambition, entrepreneurial spirit. I would never say, see a kid that has that and say, turn it off, okay? But the flip side of your, if you just work hard enough, you can make it, is if you didn't make it, it's because you didn't work hard enough, and it's your fault. And I would like to sit and think very hard before you send that message to young men and young women in our society.

• 1:17:48Daniel Priestley?

  Meritocracy doesn't mean that everyone uh ends up with the same result. What I'm trying to, here's what I'm trying to achieve. I'm trying to achieve the people who have ambition, who can go for it, are incentivized to do it and incentivized to build jobs and build companies.

• 1:18:03Speaker 00

  And what about the ones that just wanna work hard and have a good family and take care of them and have a home and be able to turn the heating on and be able to have financial security?

• 1:18:09Daniel Priestley?

  They need to work for a business, don't they?

• 1:18:11Speaker 00

  They need to work for you?

• 1:18:12Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, pardon?

• 1:18:13Speaker 00

  They need to work for you?

• 1:18:13Daniel Priestley?

  They would need to work for a business, some business, right? If someone doesn't create that business, then where do they work for? We now have, by the way, we now have eleven percent of, eleven percent of working age people are now declared too sick to work, right? We have a huge problem in the UK. We also have twenty-five percent of people who are working age don't work. It's one in seven men don't work at all.

• 1:18:35Speaker 00

  Do you think they're lazy, Dan?

• 1:18:37Daniel Priestley?

  I think the system is collapsing.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  Do you think, do you think the average British Americans that work is lazy?

• 1:18:42Daniel Priestley?

  What I think is happening is that the technology companies are totally transforming and disrupting everything. And what happened is around the post-war era, we had good jobs. We had, you could work in a local thing. What's happening now is that jobs are going to the Philippines, they're going to uh, techno, technology does three things. It makes jobs more simple, which makes them replaceable. It makes jobs global, where you can move them to anywhere else. And then ultimately, it automates the job altogether and gets rid of it uh through code and software. And what's really going on in the last, especially five years since the pandemic, is technology has decimated the existing systems uh that we all relied upon when we grew up.

• 1:19:25Daniel Priestley?

  And when I say the education system isn't really working, it's still pretending that there are office jobs available for people when they graduate. And it's still pretending that there's like nineteen fifty's scenarios available, when actually, my kids are gonna be disrupted by AI. Everyone's kids are gonna be disrupted by AI. You know, these sorts of things are the, are the things that really we should, we also need to be talking about.

• 1:19:48Steven Bartlett?

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• 1:20:32Steven Bartlett?

  tweaks, the original talent is on hand for fine tuning. Fiverr Go is already available across 60 categories and that number is growing rapidly. If it's something you'd like to tap into, head to fiverr.com/diary now and explore Fiverr Go. Use code DAILY for 10% off your first order. This is the moment where AI superpower meets human talent. I want to take this back to a point you were talking about earlier, which is about personal agency, because I would like you, Daniel, to give the counter to your own argument. Because I want to make sure, when we're talking about solutions to this problem, start a business, be entrepreneurial, you can also understand how that might, that works for people with our brains and our mindset and whatever we had that made us do that, our

• 1:21:16Steven Bartlett?

  risk appetite, our trauma, whatever it might be. But not everybody is wired in such a way. So that's not necessarily the best solution for, and also, we sit here with a bit of hindsight bias, where we were lucky and it worked out for us. But when you look at the stats around businesses succeeding, what, you know, the stats, it's like 90% of businesses fail.

• 1:21:33Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:33Steven Bartlett?

  So most of them are failing. The ones that emerge from that, people like me, then we have a bias where we go, well, it worked for us. And you can go too. I don't come from money, so I have the same bias. Like I watched.

• 1:21:43Daniel Priestley?

  Well, I've built, I've built from scratch several times because I got disrupted several times. So I've had to start with nothing several times and build.

• 1:21:50Steven Bartlett?

  But you start.

• 1:21:50Daniel Priestley?

  But I'm a certain type of person, right?

• 1:21:51Steven Bartlett?

  And when we say start from nothing, you actually started with a wealth of information and the whole game in big building, building business.

• 1:21:57Daniel Priestley?

  Intellectual capital.

• 1:21:57Steven Bartlett?

  Intellectual capital, having been through it before, being around that mentor that gave you the information.

• 1:22:01Daniel Priestley?

  And also having access to a great market, like having access to a free market is a big thing. I was born in Australia and I moved to London at the peak of London's economic freedom.

• 1:22:09Steven Bartlett?

  So this can't be broadly applicable advice. Cut it.

• 1:22:12Daniel Priestley?

  Uh, well, I think personal agency is broadly applicable.

• 1:22:16Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, I agree.

• 1:22:17Daniel Priestley?

  I got this friend of mine who woke up one day, he went out clubbing, went out to a nightclub, felt sick, collapsed, woke up and they had chopped off all four limbs, right? So uh he had quadruple amputee. Um, he was nineteen years old. So he wakes up in bed and he basically says, I'm a quadruple amputee. I was I was fine forty eight hours ago and now I'm a quadruple amputee. And he decides to make this decision in the in the hospital room, um, that this is gonna be the best thing that ever happened to him. And he makes that decision.

• 1:22:45Steven Bartlett?

  Even that is a consequence of his him and his wiring. What I'm trying to understand is.

• 1:22:51Daniel Priestley?

  But he ended up, he ended up starting a clinic and it's a multimillion dollar clinic.

• 1:22:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54Daniel Priestley?

  I mean, it's incredible what people can do.

• 1:22:56Steven Bartlett?

  Not the rule.

• 1:22:57Daniel Priestley?

  It's incredible what people, but you only need a few people to succeed and the whole economy starts to improve. We we actually, in this UK, we only, at the peak of our entrepreneurial, like blitzing it, where we're doing so well, there was only forty thousand scale ups. Forty thousand companies were creating jobs growth, higher wages, um, investment into the company, into the country. You know, it's only one percent of people who pay thirty percent of the taxes and ten percent of people who pay sixty percent of the taxes. So you only need one in a hundred to actually create something that's valuable and you get an extra thirty percent of taxes.

• 1:23:32Steven Bartlett?

  But so that, so that again is, we need this one, that's advice for the what, the people that end up getting into that one percent.

• 1:23:37Daniel Priestley?

  But who does everyone else work for? Like, all jobs growth comes from entrepreneurs.

• 1:23:41Steven Bartlett?

  So what are you saying to those, the ninety nine percent there? Are you saying, go get a job?

• 1:23:44Daniel Priestley?

  Well, you you need wealth creators in the economy who are building something. Like, you take um Jim Shark, people who work at Jim Shark, they're super glad that this guy started the company. They're really happy that there's a company. Otherwise, where would they go? What would they work, where would they work? So if Ben decides that he doesn't wanna start that company in the UK, um, or if he gets to ten million and stops. Then all of those additional jobs are toast, they're all gone.

• 1:24:13Steven Bartlett?

  So you encouraging the entrepreneurial, you're not encouraging everyone to become an entrepreneur. You're saying those that have those, that bias or that.

• 1:24:21Daniel Priestley?

  I'm saying we need a system that encourages the people who can to do.

• 1:24:25Steven Bartlett?

  And what about everybody else?

• 1:24:27Daniel Priestley?

  Well, ever, the flow on effect is that that creates jobs, that creates wealth in the economy. And free markets lift everybody up. Free markets just means that everyone's trading with everyone. You know, it starts to like the whole thing, I mean, it's, it's just a tale as old as time. As soon as economies are free and there are entrepreneurs starting things and growing things, everyone's life improves, everyone's life get better.

• 1:24:51Steven Bartlett?

  And what's your, what part of that do you disagree with, Gary?

• 1:24:55Speaker 00

  I think it's, it doesn't work, it doesn't work. The only period, listen, the last 70 years are not normal, Stephen. The last 70 years are not normal. The last 70 years in Europe and the US, where ordinary people like my dad could work for the post office on less than average wage and buy a house and support a family, it's not normal. It's not normal in the world and it's not normal in history. Most countries in the world are not like that. Most countries have a small, super rich elite and a very large group of extremely poor people. That's most of the country and it's most of history in this country and it's most of history in the US. You know, we talk about Charles Dickens, I read Hard Times. I read Hard Times and this is written in the 19th century when Britain was like the industrial superpower of the whole world. And at the time, the government was talking about, should we tax these industrialists?

• 1:25:39Speaker 00

  And the industrialists were saying, if you tax us, we'll throw our factories into the sea. And it just reminds me, you know, the only time we've ever really been able to provide decent living conditions for ordinary working people was the period after the war where we massively redistributed wealth. And, and now we're losing that, that holding of wealth in, of the middle class.

• 1:25:59Steven Bartlett?

  Can you acknowledge though that that was a completely different time as it relates to being able to?

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

  It was a different time, but you know, I could, you know.

• 1:26:05Steven Bartlett?

  Because of technology.

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  Nigeria today, Brazil today, the UK 300 years ago, France 200 years ago. There is only one specific time that we have ever successfully provided broad living standards for ordinary people. And it was a period of time where we protected. A broadly equal wealth distribution and tax the rich at very high rates.

• 1:26:24Steven Bartlett?

  And you can acknowledge that that's extremely hard to do because the nature of the economy.

• 1:26:27Speaker 00

  Hundred percent, a hundred percent, a hundred. That's the reason why all of our grandparents and our great grandparents and our great great grandparents lived in poverty. And that's why I know I'm probably gonna lose. And that's why I bet on the economy getting worse. And that's why I know poverty is gonna increase because it was extremely difficult to get that unusually fair share for ordinary working people. And I know we're losing the argument and I know that Farage will win and I know that Trump will win and I know that and I know that things will get worse. I don't think I'm gonna win.

• 1:26:52Steven Bartlett?

  So if you if you know you're promoting a a strategy that is not gonna work and it sounds like you think is incredibly almost impossible, then why would you not be more practical in your solution?

• 1:27:05Speaker 00

  Stephen, if it was impossible, I wouldn't be here.

• 1:27:08Steven Bartlett?

  So you think it's possible?

• 1:27:09Speaker 00

  Of course it's possible, of course it's possible.

• 1:27:10Steven Bartlett?

  But you believe you're not gonna win?

• 1:27:12Speaker 00

  I'm a betting man, Steve. I'm a betting man. I put my bets on, you know, I am. If if I guess, okay, look, okay, so my YouTube channel is growing really, really quickly. And, you know, I'm obviously starting a bit of a movement and there's a lot of political support. And if it keeps growing, we'll get more political support. At the end of the day, I'm trying to tax the richest and most powerful people in the world. And most of these people will come out and attack me and they'll try and stop me. And I do not have billions of pounds, hundreds of millions of pounds to use to support my YouTube channel. I'm counting on ordinary people like your viewers to support and share my message. Now, listen, for most of history, that has not worked. And for most of history, ordinary families live in poverty. I don't think it's impossible that we ordinary people can win and get a fair share. But I think it's worth fighting for, Steve, so I fight for it anyway.

• 1:27:54Daniel Priestley?

  He's he's right that for most of history, you've had the super elite and then everyone else is down here. And it's massive wealth inequality is almost the normal for the last 5,000 years. And almost everywhere, you've got kings, queens, dukes and peasants and serfs down there. There have been economic situations that have been different. Dubai is a really strange situation. It's a desert. It's inhospitable to live in. It's the last place in the world most people would think or choose that they would wanna be. And yet it's one of the most economically rich places in the world right now. They actually didn't start with oil wealth. They were able to borrow money to build Dubai. But the low tax environment has now attracted some of the world's most talented people to go and build

• 1:28:36Daniel Priestley?

  technology companies there. And if you, I don't know, have you been there recently?

• 1:28:40Speaker 00

  I've been to Dubai years, years growing up, I've been there.

• 1:28:42Daniel Priestley?

  At the moment, it is the most thriving entrepreneurial community on earth outside of the US, but probably even rivaling the US, that there are investors, there's entrepreneurs, and the wealth is going through the roof. I've got two friends who are personal trainers, fitness trainers. One fitness trainer has decided to stop working more hours because he's hit fifty grand a year and he now gets taxed at forty percent. So he's basically decided he's gonna earn right up to fifty thousand and then stop working. And then the other fitness trainer went to Dubai, launched an online fitness community and has just bought a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar Ferrari. And one entrepreneur is super pumped and super excited about building a business because he's not overtaxed.

• 1:29:25Daniel Priestley?

  The other entrepreneur has literally said, I'm not willing to do this because of how much I have to pay.

• 1:29:29Speaker 00

  Just wanna be clear, I've always campaigned for lower taxes on rich people, on working people, always, always, so.

• 1:29:33Daniel Priestley?

  But here's the, but here's the thing, right? If I was to ask you, you've just become one of the bestselling authors in the country. If your publisher came to you and said, because you're in the top one percent of our authors, we're gonna halve your royalties if you sign a second book with us. You wouldn't sign a second book with them. You'd go to another publisher who says, we'll pay you more royalties because you're so successful.

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  I would have written this book for free then. I would have written this book for free. In fact, the first time I got offered a deal, I said, I said, don't pay me in advance.

• 1:30:00Daniel Priestley?

  Then give your royalties away.

• 1:30:01Speaker 00

  Why?

• 1:30:02Daniel Priestley?

  Well, because if, well, what I'm saying.

• 1:30:04Speaker 00

  All right, fine, I'll give my royalties away. I'll shut my YouTube channel down. I'll stop working.

• 1:30:08Daniel Priestley?

  I'm saying we respond to incentives, that if your publisher, if Penguin came to you and said, book number two, you get half royalties because you're in the top one percent. Would you sign with Penguin or would you go with someone else?

• 1:30:19Speaker 00

  I walked away from a two million pound job a year to run a YouTube channel. Do you think I do the work that I do for money?

• 1:30:25Daniel Priestley?

  I'm not talking about that you do it for money. I'm just saying, if you had the option to sign between two publishing contracts,

• 1:30:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:30Daniel Priestley?

  right, and all things being equal, one's gonna penalize you for being in the top one percent and the other one's gonna reward you for being in the top one percent. Would you, you would, of course, you would go with the normal, like, if all things being equal, you wanna write a second book anyway. It's the same for entrepreneurs. When entrepreneurs start companies, we can either start them in high tax economies or with a stroke of a pen, start them in low tax economies.

• 1:30:51Speaker 00

  I think the rich world is gonna have to start rethinking the fact that it allows. People to very, very wealthy people to own enormous amounts of their physical wealth, go live overseas and not pay tax. I think that has to be revisited for sure. Because what you're saying is, I want the benefit of being able to sell to the US market and the UK market, but I don't want the obligation of having to pay US and UK taxes. And you are correct that at the moment, the US and UK governments allow that. And I think that's phenomenally stupid.

• 1:31:16Daniel Priestley?

  The US taxes you on worldwide income.

• 1:31:18Speaker 00

  Well, only a small amount, right? So I think that realistically, I think that the US and UK governments have to stop that. But the way I see it, the US and UK governments and increasingly a lot of global governments are kind of being brought up by the elites. And, you know, we have Elon Musk is basically the president, right? And we had Rishi Sunak, whose father-in-law was one of the richest men in the world. Like, if you're Rishi Sunak, who for our American viewers was our prime minister until very recently, his father-in-law was one of the richest men in the world. He's got 700 million pounds personal wealth. He's going to be making 30, 40 million pounds passive income. And you're getting paid 130 grand a year to be prime minister. When you're making policy, do you think, maybe I'll ask my father-in-law it once? Yeah. You know, the fact is, what you're seeing here is, if you allow the rich, I'm never, ever against entrepreneurship. I'm not against people getting rich.

• 1:32:03Speaker 00

  If you allow the rich to get richer and richer and richer, they squeeze the middle class and they squeeze the poor class out of things like housing, of things like space in cities, of things like energy and of things like owning, sharing government and only sharing the media.

• 1:32:16Daniel Priestley?

  Do you acknowledge that countries that adopt an anti-rich, big government approach tend to collapse?

• 1:32:22Speaker 00

  What, like this country in the 60s?

• 1:32:24Daniel Priestley?

  Well, we needed a US bailout. We needed an IMF bailout in 1976.

• 1:32:29Speaker 00

  But the US did the same thing. The US had even higher taxes than us.

• 1:32:31Daniel Priestley?

  We, we basically, like, you take, you take all the countries that where the government becomes big, they meddle with your life, they're involved in every decision, right? Half the economy. I mean, here's one other thing.

• 1:32:41Speaker 00

  This period is known as the golden age of capitalism. It's the period of time when ordinary-

• 1:32:46Daniel Priestley?

  Which period? This period now?

• 1:32:47Speaker 00

  The 50 years after the Second World War.

• 1:32:49Daniel Priestley?

  Oh, it's the golden age of middle class, to be middle class.

• 1:32:52Speaker 00

  You don't care about the middle class?

• 1:32:53Daniel Priestley?

  No, of course I do. The 70 years after the World War II.

• 1:32:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:58Daniel Priestley?

  Where the government sold off all of its houses to middle-class people. So we got housing wealth, but you can only do that trick once, right? So you can only sell off all the houses to everyone once, which is why all the baby boomers owned them.

• 1:33:09Speaker 00

  Well, the- Living standards collapsed after the houses were sold. There was a long period where the houses weren't sold. Between the Second World War and the eighties.

• 1:33:16Daniel Priestley?

  When do you pinpoint living standards collapsing?

• 1:33:19Speaker 00

  Well, I think there's a few obviously big moments. I think two thousand eight is a big moment. I think COVID is a big moment. I think it's the eighties where you start to see the wealth distribution go. What matters is actually the distribution itself. So, once you change the tax system, it takes a bit of time for the wealth distribution to change. But, once you start, for me, the big thing is the loss of wealthholding. I want ordinary families to be able to hold wealth. And, once you lose that, you lose the middle class. And you will not find me a single country in the world now or the history of the world that has provided good broad living standards without allowing ordinary families to own assets.

• 1:33:53Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, I agree. And take Singapore, for example, where everyone's encouraged to own properties. They've got an amazing system in Singapore.

• 1:33:59Speaker 00

  Which is a massive government, by the way. Enormous government.

• 1:34:02Daniel Priestley?

  It's twenty five percent of GDP.

• 1:34:03Speaker 00

  They, but they own all that, they own the houses.

• 1:34:05Daniel Priestley?

  They have a wealth fund.

• 1:34:06Speaker 00

  They own all the houses.

• 1:34:07Daniel Priestley?

  They don't own all the houses. They have a sovereign wealth fund that circulates houses through. They've, they've solved, they've solved property.

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  Singapore owns the house. They own, the Singapore government owns an enormous share of the housing stock. So, do you think we should own the housing stock?

• 1:34:19Daniel Priestley?

  It's actually owned by pension, pension funds. People, they force, not force their citizens, but they direct their citizens into home ownership.

• 1:34:27Speaker 00

  So, you don't think the Singaporean government owns a large share of the housing stock?

• 1:34:29Daniel Priestley?

  I just know the Singaporean government's only twenty five percent of the economy.

• 1:34:32Speaker 00

  But a big share of the housing stock.

• 1:34:33Daniel Priestley?

  So, seventy five percent of the economy is capitalist.

• 1:34:35Speaker 00

  I would like to say, by the way, just to be really clear, I've never, ever once advocated for big government. Never, a single time, never a single time.

• 1:34:41Daniel Priestley?

  But more taxes is bigger government.

• 1:34:42Speaker 00

  I want higher taxes on the wealth orders so we can tax wealth creators and working people less. I don't want a bigger government. I want our viewers to have more money. I want our viewers to have more money. And also, I want to tax those super rich so that they stop squeezing ordinary families out of asset ownership.

• 1:34:58Daniel Priestley?

  It just, yeah, it seems like an obvious solution. It seems like.

• 1:35:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good solution.

• 1:35:04Daniel Priestley?

  It seems like. Like, hey, who's got the money? Rich people.

• 1:35:07Speaker 00

  Not the money, the assets, the assets.

• 1:35:09Daniel Priestley?

  Who's got the assets? Rich people, then let's just take them off them and.

• 1:35:12Speaker 00

  No, no, no, I don't wanna, I don't wanna redistribute. I'm, I'm, I am the only person on this table anti redistribution. Because the redistribution is happening in front of our eyes. The middle class is losing its assets, government is losing its assets. Those assets are being accumulated by the rich. I want to stop the redistribution, please, please. I'm, I am the most anti redistribution person in this game. We need to stop the redistribution of wealth away from ordinary British and American families.

• 1:35:37Daniel Priestley?

  So the difference is for me, it's very simple, which is I really truly believe that free markets and low governments and less taxes creates more wealth in the middle.

• 1:35:47Speaker 00

  Dan, freedom for the heron is death for the fishes. If we have complete freedom, multimillionaires like you and me will get richer and richer and richer every year. And we will squeeze out and we will eat the middle class.

• 1:35:57Daniel Priestley?

  Can I ask you though, if wealth inequality could be solved, but everyone does worse? Is that a good solution?

• 1:36:04Speaker 00

  Obviously not. The whole reason I do this is because I don't want ordinary people to collapse into poverty. This is about people being able to feed their kids.

• 1:36:10Daniel Priestley?

  So wealth inequality is not the problem, it's collapsing living standards.

• 1:36:14Speaker 00

  That's quite contorted, yeah, I mean, yes, it's quite a contorted logic. The problem is collapsing living standards. I am somebody who has made millions of pounds by understanding the simple fact that living standards are falling because of growing wealth inequality.

• 1:36:26Daniel Priestley?

  So living standards, if they were to increase, but they were super rich.

• 1:36:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:31Daniel Priestley?

  Is that a problem?

• 1:36:33Speaker 00

  I think you do need to be worried about extremely wealthy elites. Yeah, I think what's interesting, you look at the, the founding of the United States. These guys, the founding of the United States conceptually is really based on these ideas of distribution of power. That's why you have the president and the house and the senate and you have this independent judiciary. They're like, we cannot allow power to become concentrated. Because they came from a Europe which had extremely concentrated power and extremely wealthy elites and extremely broad poverty. So I think that allowing a small group of society to increasingly monopolize power and wealth over time is obviously something we should be worried about. But primarily, the reason that I worry about wealth inequality is because I see and I bet on and I make money on the fact that it causes living standards to fall.

• 1:37:18Daniel Priestley?

  By the way, I I actually really agree with you and the founding fathers of the US, they did. Especially around the nineteen hundreds, they did wanna break up monopolies and breaking up monopolies was one of the big things that they did trust busting. Where they broke up Standard Oil and all of those sorts of things. One thing I do really see happening at the moment. Is that we have a stupid outdated definition of monopolies. Where we use monopolies the same way they used it when they had the oil. Companies that owned all the oil. In the technology world, a monopoly is formed through an ecosystem. So Amazon, for example, owning AWS. And Audible and this and this and this and Whole Foods. It creates a fortress that's almost impossible to to compete with.

• 1:38:04Daniel Priestley?

  And Google owning YouTube and Gmail and all of this, they create these fortresses through ecosystems. One of the things that I do think we need to look at is. Compulsory breakup of big tech once you hit a certain time because it's very difficult because, do you know billionaires have two big fears, right? Keep them up at night, having nightmares. Number two is high taxes. Number one is that startup entrepreneur who disrupts their business. And they wanna kill that early. You know, Steve Jobs at twenty four years old disrupted IBM. And Jeff Bezos disrupted Walmart. So they are terrified of entrepreneurs in the middle. And they wanna create government regulations to say, hey, you know what? Let's cap entrepreneurs at ten million. You can get to ten million.

• 1:38:49Daniel Priestley?

  It's okay for us. We're way past that point, but Gary's our guy because he's gonna cap everyone.

• 1:38:53Speaker 00

  I never said cap anyone at ten million, by the way.

• 1:38:55Daniel Priestley?

  Well, because what do you think will happen? People stop. As soon as you have wealth taxes, people just give up. They just don't wanna do it.

• 1:39:00Speaker 00

  Our viewers, if they said, if they knew they could build a twenty thirty million pound company.

• 1:39:04Daniel Priestley?

  It sounds ridiculous.

• 1:39:04Speaker 00

  They would have to pay twenty. If you if you're what if you're thirty million, one percent above is two hundred grand a year. So if I said, if you you can have a thirty million pound company.

• 1:39:12Daniel Priestley?

  Do traders stop?

• 1:39:13Speaker 00

  Just bear in mind, right? You make five percent a year on your wealth, right? So if you've got three hundred million pound company, you're gonna be making fifteen million pound a year. And I'm turning to you and I'm gonna say, you know, you've got to pay two hundred grand a year on your fifty million pound revenue. And they're gonna say, you know what? I'm not gonna start a business. I don't wanna be worth thirty million quid. This is, you know, this is ridiculous. You know, nobody is gonna say, oh, my god, I don't wanna be a multimillionaire because in twenty years' time, I'll have to pay one percent taxes.

• 1:39:37Daniel Priestley?

  But most traders, most traders are earning what most people earn in a lifetime, traders can earn in a year. Most traders don't stop.

• 1:39:45Speaker 00

  No, I'm here. Talk about that a lot in my book.

• 1:39:47Daniel Priestley?

  Right? So most traders just keep going. Entrepreneurs are the same, that they're motivated to keep going. But when you have wealth advisors and investors saying, do not build a company in the UK because they're anti-wealth.

• 1:40:00Speaker 00

  I'm not trying to make the UK anti-wealth. I'm not trying to make the UK anti-wealth. I think the UK and the US need to be looking at a situation where you cannot allow people who own enormous businesses that sell to your country to live in Dubai, to live in the Cayman Islands and not pay tax. And I don't think that's a controversial position.

• 1:40:18Steven Bartlett?

  I've got a question for both of you, which is if you are a young person and you're eighteen years old now and that you're listening to this, but your objective really is an individualistic one. You wanna get rich and you have a great future for you and your family, like all of us have been able to do. What would your advice be to them, Gary, at this moment in time?

• 1:40:35Speaker 00

  This is such a hard question. I know Dan's angry at me for what I put in my video, How to Get Rich. Somebody came around to my house and asked me this the other day. Obviously, I get asked it a lot because stupidly, I'm very public about the fact that I'm rich. What I did is not replicable. What I did is not replicable. It's not. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but it's not. People always say, why don't you teach me to trade? Like, it's hard. It's hard trading and it's dangerous. And I think a lot of young men are getting sort of sold into trading and becoming gambling addicts.

• 1:41:04Speaker 00

  You know, work hard. And I wouldn't even say, don't become an entrepreneur. I've never, ever said these things. Work hard. You know, if you think that you have an opportunity in tech entrepreneurship, go for it. Understand it's risky. I think that sometimes this message, just become an entrepreneur and you'll make it, is a bit dangerous because I think most people who try to become entrepreneurs fail, and I think it's super, super dangerous. The reality is, and you know, maybe Dan won't like this, maybe you won't like this. I think it is very, very difficult for a young man or a young woman from a poor family to become rich. And I think it's increasingly hard even to just get those basics of financial security. So, listen, obviously, reduce your spending if you can. Don't buy into this like Balenciaga bullshit. Stay away from that. But...

• 1:41:47Speaker 00

  Work hard, study hard, try to get a good job, but also understand we are shrinking the seats on the lifeboat. That's what we're doing. We used to allow 50% to be secure. Then it's 40%, then it's 30%, then it's 20%. You know, you've got family in Nigeria. If a young person from like shanty town in Nigeria came to you and said, Stephen, what could I do to get rich?

• 1:42:06Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:07Speaker 00

  You would have to say to them realistically, listen, you are in a difficult situation here. You need to work really, really hard, but if you are able to make enough money to support a family, be proud of yourself.

• 1:42:18Steven Bartlett?

  What I would actually say to them, so yeah, I have got family in Nigeria. For people that don't know, I'm by blood, half Nigerian. I would say to them that knowledge is really your life raft. So obviously there's a big tech boom happening in Nigeria, which is liberating a lot of people from that situation. So I would try and tell them to get on the life raft that is like knowledge of this new revolution. So from Nigeria, you can learn to code. And then the great thing now is that we're, we literally have, actually, this is quite interesting. We're building a tech company in San Francisco called Flightcast. It's live. Everyone can go look at it, flightcast.com. And the lead developer, oh, and Guessradar, the lead developer of Guessradar is a Nigerian guy.

• 1:42:55Speaker 00

  But how many of those jobs in the Nigerian tech sector are going to kids that grew up in the shanty towns?

• 1:43:01Steven Bartlett?

  I have no idea.

• 1:43:03Speaker 00

  Because I worked in, people ask me, tell me how to do what you did, all right? I worked in Canary Wharf. It's in East London. I could see the building from my house growing up. There was not a single other kid from East London the whole time I was there.

• 1:43:17Steven Bartlett?

  Do you agree to Dan's point about this remote work revolution where like work now has, you can work from anywhere. And in our company, Third Web, San Francisco, some of the staff that we now have are in the Philippines because they just have like great creatives there. It's obviously more cost effective. Isn't this a huge part of what's going on in our economy? This, this digitalization and this remotification of work?

• 1:43:39Speaker 00

  It is, it is, it is. But I think for many people, you know, I'm sure you bet your workers in the Philippines very, very well.

• 1:43:50Speaker 00

  Most of these people, they used to have a half decent wage in office. And now they're locked in their bedrooms, barely paying the bills.

• 1:43:59Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:59Daniel Priestley?

  In the Philippines?

• 1:44:01Steven Bartlett?

  Not in the Philippine, the Philippine guys are balling out of control.

• 1:44:04Daniel Priestley?

  No, I'm saying the Philippines is booming at the moment.

• 1:44:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:06Speaker 00

  So you think the average person in the Philippines is living a luxurious life?

• 1:44:09Daniel Priestley?

  Have you, if you, what's happening at the moment.

• 1:44:11Speaker 00

  Do you think the average person in the Philippines is living a luxurious life?

• 1:44:14Daniel Priestley?

  There is, there is this thing called remote foreign workers and this is a huge boom. And the economic boom.

• 1:44:21Speaker 00

  So the kids should move to the Philippines then. It's great. You get a great quality of life in the Philippines. You know, when I look to the thumbs of Manila, they should just get job, they, I don't know why they're not getting the laptops out.

• 1:44:30Daniel Priestley?

  The.

• 1:44:31Speaker 00

  The poverty in the Philippines is horrific. Um, listen, Philippines is a beautiful country, an amazing country. I love the Philippines. I've been a number of times.

• 1:44:37Daniel Priestley?

  Flowing in there at a, at a rate that's never been.

• 1:44:39Speaker 00

  What is the life like for your average Filipino?

• 1:44:41Daniel Priestley?

  Well, would you agree though, that their economy is just getting flooded with money at the moment? Like money's flowing in there.

• 1:44:46Speaker 00

  Money is flowing in, but it is not giving a good quality of life for your average Filipino.

• 1:44:50Daniel Priestley?

  That's not true. Remote foreign workers.

• 1:44:52Speaker 00

  Well, we can.

• 1:44:53Daniel Priestley?

  Remote, remote foreign workers.

• 1:44:54Speaker 00

  Filipino viewers to tell us what's like life's like for the average.

• 1:44:57Daniel Priestley?

  Can actually support their, often support their entire family.

• 1:45:00Speaker 00

  I don't know what the average wage is in the Philippines.

• 1:45:01Steven Bartlett?

  Just to bring it back to this point though. So I wanted to, today from Gary, he said, work hard. If you're a young guy listening to this now. Um, I was reading this really interesting article yesterday from the, I think it was from major newspaper talking about the lost boys. And it goes to show that I think it's one in seven young men that is at a working age now are out of work. So there's lots of talk around young men in particular and how they're struggling. You'd say work hard, Gary. You'd say.

• 1:45:24Speaker 00

  Work hard. No Balenciaga. But the, the big thing is, the big thing is recognise the situation that you're in. And I would encourage them to support my work and follow my channel because the lifeboats are shrinking. And trust me, we're going to get our kids in the lifeboats. And we all know that. All right? And if those lifeboats are shrinking, if you don't, if you don't stop the ship from going down, it is not you and you and me who are going to go down. We'll be fine. If you don't fight the political fight, I guarantee you, people like Daniel will.

• 1:45:53Steven Bartlett?

  So you're saying that they should also get involved in the political fight?

• 1:45:56Speaker 00

  You have to, you have to. That's what our grandparents did. That's what our grandparents.

• 1:46:00Steven Bartlett?

  If they want to become millionaires like you and me and Dan.

• 1:46:02Speaker 00

  Oh, it sounds like Dan's got better advice for that than I do.

• 1:46:05Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. Well, I'm going to ask Dan as well, but I'm just wondering, I'm wondering how your, your advice ties into sort of like.

• 1:46:12Steven Bartlett?

  The young person who's trying to liberate themselves from where you came from or where I came from.

• 1:46:18Speaker 00

  You know, I don't think I'm the guy to say that, man, because, you know, I had this unusual gift from a young age. I was very, very, very good at maths and I just followed that. And you know, my sister, she's a poet and she wrote a really successful grime musical about Dizzy Rascal's first album, all right? She comes from obviously the same family as me, poor family. She works so hard. She works so, so hard. Two degrees, she can barely pay the rent, all right? So I don't want to turn around to our young kids and say, well, I've got this talent, follow your talent. Because it doesn't work, Stephen.

• 1:46:51Steven Bartlett?

  It's true.

• 1:46:51Speaker 00

  It doesn't work.

• 1:46:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:53Speaker 00

  Wait, my sister does great work, but financially, for young people, following your passion, following your talent, unless you come from a rich family, realistically, very, very rarely works. And I know it worked for the three of us at this table, but let's not pretend that everyone experiences the same things that we experienced.

• 1:47:10Steven Bartlett?

  What would you say to that, Dan, and what's your answer?

• 1:47:12Daniel Priestley?

  I think there's two economies going on at the moment. There's a dying economy, which is the industrial revolution economy. And that is all the office jobs and the factory jobs and all of that sort of stuff, which is very much being automated away and moved globally. And at the same time, there's this new bubbling up digital economy, which I'd call the entrepreneur economy or the digital economy. Both of these economies are kind of coexisting. One's going like that, one's going like that.

• 1:47:38Daniel Priestley?

  And if you want to be economically successful, you need to stand next to the biggest piles of monies that you can. You know, unfortunately, being a poet doesn't pay a lot of money and we all know that. That's not a surprise. If you came from a very rich family and you were a poet, you'd probably be one of the 60% who fell out of a rich family as well. If you want to be economically successful, you need to say, what is the thing that's economically booming right now? Gary saw the finance industry at that particular time, but if we actually look at the finance industry now, it's in decline. And trading is being replaced by AI robots. People who worked in your career are going to be replaced by

• 1:48:20Daniel Priestley?

  IT systems that basically do similar jobs. It's going to be, you know, these things happen. We're going through a massive technological change. But at the same time, it's never been easier. To learn skills for free on YouTube. It's never been easier to join communities where you can get mentoring and get support. There are communities of angel investors who do invest in startups. It's never been cheaper or easier to start a company. There's never been more software and technology to scale and grow. You know, in just in a short space of time, I would say do what Gary's done. Gary publishes online, he's built a personal brand, he's attached it to a recurring revenue model.

• 1:48:58Speaker 00

  Now, I also worked for three for free for four years. I'm not sure how replicable that is.

• 1:49:03Daniel Priestley?

  You know, so build a personal brand, attach it to a business model that is that is where money's flowing. These are these are positive things you can do. We all have to play the cards we're dealt. You can always find someone who's done better with better cards or someone who's been dealt better cards. And you can always find someone who's been dealt worse cards. No matter who you are on the planet, there's someone better, there's someone worse. You have to play the cards that you're dealt. You cannot sit around waiting for the economic system of the world to be changed. You have to say, you know what? These are the cards I was born at this particular time in this these circumstances. These are my strengths, these are my weaknesses, I'm going to play the cards that I've dealt. Personal agency is what gets people to feel good about their life, to make progress.

• 1:49:47Daniel Priestley?

  And as soon as you play the victim mindset, as soon as you say, oh, you know what? The answer to all my prayers is Gary's going to change the system. You're in serious trouble.

• 1:49:55Speaker 00

  Could I just say one thing back on that? If we become a society of individuals who think only individually and never consider broader societal problems. We will become a society that becomes unable to fix societal problems.

• 1:50:12Speaker 00

  I'm somebody who has made millions of pounds betting on the collapse of society, the collapse of the middle class. I don't want to be giving stock tips on the Titanic, okay? I understand, I understand that we live in individualized societies and it's not popular to say, hey, you need to protect your society. If you don't protect your society, your society's going to collapse and the British public, the American public have a choice to make here. What would that look like? What do you want people to do? I want them to get involved with, watch my channel, subscribe to my channel. So what's your content? On YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, share it with your friends, share it with your mum. But then what? And then push for change. Push for change like our grandparents did. But what? Push the politicians to tax working people less and tax extremely wealthy, wealth-holders more. So vote for the Greens?

• 1:50:57Speaker 00

  Vote for whoever gives you that, whoever gives you your share of the pie. So basically... This is not football, okay? I'm not here Gary Stevenson, member of the Green Party. I'm here to protect the working class.

• 1:51:05Steven Bartlett?

  So that's their sort of, that would be their social and sort of political energy would be to stand up and fight. But in their, in their personal lives, are you telling them to start businesses, take big risks, work really hard, go for it? Because they can also make...

• 1:51:19Speaker 00

  You know, I'll defer to you guys on that. You know, I'm not a businessman, I'm an economist. That's what I am. You know, I made my money by being an economist. I'm a very, very good economist. My predictions will be right. People can go and watch my predictions. At the beginning of Covid, I predicted the entire Covid crisis exactly correctly in May 2020. You know, this is, you know, I'm good at this. And listen, I'm never going to come here and say I'm a better businessman than you. And I don't, I'm pretty sure that I'm not. I'm a very, very, very good economist. This will happen.

• 1:51:45Steven Bartlett?

  Is there something that I can do? If I'm sat here listening at home, I understand everything you said. I believe everything you've said. I believe that it's going to get worse for me. Do you think I should still take responsibility of my situation and fight to make my life richer, better, more...

• 1:52:00Speaker 00

  100%, 100, 100%. Because you, you know, and I'm sure you know, for your average British or American, if you don't do that, you're not going to be able to turn the heating on. You have to do it, you have to do it. And I've never once, you know, I think my opinions are often mischaracterized, being anti-ambition. You've read my book. Do you think I'm anti ambition?

• 1:52:17Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:52:18Speaker 00

  I work my tits off to make money and I want every single young person in this country to be able to make money if they want to, if that's what they wanna work towards. But we've created a society where it's almost impossible for young, listen, I've been there, I've been at LSE, I've been at Oxford, I've been in the city, I've been in the media, I've been in politics. All of the guys at the top are a bunch of rich idiots. We are not allowing these smart kids from ordinary backgrounds to get into those spaces. Why, why do we pretend we're not doing that?

• 1:52:42Daniel Priestley?

  I disagree with that. You're talking about two types of elite spaces. Elite space of elite universities.

• 1:52:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:49Daniel Priestley?

  And you're talking about the elite space of derivatives trading. There's the real economy.

• 1:52:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:54Daniel Priestley?

  Where entrepreneurs do their work. Then there's the first derivative, which is the banking system. And then there's the second derivative, which is rates traders like yourself, right? These are, these, these are places that normal people don't wanna end up. Most normal people who grow up in normal households don't uh wake up one day and say, I wanna be a rates trader on a double derivative of the economy making bets. Most people wanna start a business that employs people and they wanna grow that business and be successful.

• 1:53:21Speaker 00

  Do you think that starting a business is a realistic, high success probability chance of ordinary poor people becoming rich?

• 1:53:29Daniel Priestley?

  I, I know that economies thrive when entrepreneurs are active and it's not just the entrepreneurs, they create.

• 1:53:36Speaker 00

  Is that thing that our viewers can do and most of them will end up rich?

• 1:53:39Daniel Priestley?

  You only need one percent to improve the whole economy.

• 1:53:41Steven Bartlett?

  There's a really interesting stat that says globally around sixty five percent of ultra high net worth individuals are self-made. Approximately nineteen percent primarily, primarily inherited their wealth and about sixteen percent inherited wealth, but significantly grew it through their own ventures. So sixty five percent of the ultra high net worth individuals globally are self-made. Does that not mean that if I wanna become an ultra high net worth person, it's gonna come down to?

• 1:54:05Speaker 00

  Listen, we are just come off the back of the golden age of capitalism. When ordinary people like my dad, you know, I grew up in Ilford, it's in East London, it's a very immigrant area. Most of my friends I grew up with come from Pakistani Indian immigrant backgrounds. They came over with nothing, they worked really hard, they made money, they had their own assets. We had a period where ordinary people could make money and could make wealth. So obviously, we are now in a period where there are rich people who made money during that period.

• 1:54:29Daniel Priestley?

  I'm seeing.

• 1:54:30Speaker 00

  But it's over now.

• 1:54:30Daniel Priestley?

  I'm seeing ordinary people making money all the time.

• 1:54:32Speaker 00

  Okay, so you're telling our viewers they're idiots. Why are they not making money?

• 1:54:35Daniel Priestley?

  I'm not telling anyone they're an idiot. I'm saying.

• 1:54:37Speaker 00

  If it's that easy, okay, all right, fine. Go and buy Dan's book, read it and become a millionaire. Because Dan thinks it's easy to become a millionaire by being an entrepreneur. But I suspect, having not been an entrepreneur, that most of the people who've read your book are not millionaires.

• 1:54:50Daniel Priestley?

  Everything you've touched has turned to gold. You turned yourself to academia, you got an amazing qualification. You turned yourself to banking, you became two million a year. You turned yourself to being a writer, you become Sunday Times bestseller. You turn yourself to content creating, you get eight hundred thousand followers. And you, and now you sit there after all of that evidence and say, oh no, it's all over, guys. It's all, I'm smart enough to do it, but you guys are not smart enough to do it.

• 1:55:14Speaker 00

  If you, if you think you can teach, you've got your book. If you think you can teach people to do it.

• 1:55:18Daniel Priestley?

  You're smart enough, but they're not smart enough.

• 1:55:20Steven Bartlett?

  I, I wonder if we do have a bit of an education problem at the, at the heart of this. Because I was thinking about your sister and I was like, right, if I was the CEO of Gary's sister, what would I do?

• 1:55:29Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:29Steven Bartlett?

  There's two things I do right now. The first is, I go, where's, where, what, what marketplace is really valuing an ability to write? And write in an impactful way, I go, right, she needs to start an Instagram page. Because I've seen what happened with Jay Shae, this guy's pulling in tens of millions a year.

• 1:55:42Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:42Steven Bartlett?

  Because he took like, you know, nice words that were motivational, poetic, put them on there. And I go, also YouTube, needs to get to YouTube because if she can talk like you, then she's going to do exceptionally well on YouTube as well. But the old, there's not going to be a great economy necessarily for someone who's doing poetry in many of the places other than what I'm saying is the internet. But in school, we don't teach this. There's no YouTube class for YouTube. And, and it's such a huge part of the economy. I mean, I mean, you, you have seen that. It's, there's been this decentralization of media where the megaphone was.

• 1:56:15Daniel Priestley?

  It's growing at twenty percent a year.

• 1:56:16Speaker 00

  All right, fine.

• 1:56:17Steven Bartlett?

  The megaphone was.

• 1:56:17Speaker 00

  People watching, start a YouTube, become an entrepreneur.

• 1:56:20Steven Bartlett?

  But it's the internet, isn't it?

• 1:56:21Speaker 00

  It's easy, it's easy.

• 1:56:22Steven Bartlett?

  I'm not saying it's easy.

• 1:56:22Speaker 00

  Do you think it works for most people, Stephen?

• 1:56:24Steven Bartlett?

  For most people, no, it doesn't work.

• 1:56:26Speaker 00

  But there's an education gap. Why are we pretending it does?

• 1:56:28Steven Bartlett?

  But I, what I, what I would say is if in school, we taught young kids a couple of new things and we stopped teaching them about Pythagoras' theorem, which by the way, ChatGPT is going to do for you with your eyes closed.

• 1:56:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:56:38Steven Bartlett?

  And we taught them about the new economy of the internet, about the ability to start a shop. And I. It's crazy that I, the school system was designed in such a way where they put me in exclusion unit because I was so preoccupied with doing business deals at school. And my headmaster came on T, uh, national TV on What I Liked You and said, yeah, we unexpelled them eventually because he made the school so much money. But the system was punishing me for entrepreneurship and it wasn't teaching me anything about the new economy, which is, which is technology.

• 1:57:07Speaker 00

  Do you think it matters if the percentage of young people who are able to achieve financial freedom and have a family is shrinking?

• 1:57:13Steven Bartlett?

  So do I think it matters if the percentage of young people that are able to, uh, you're saying attain wealth and have a family?

• 1:57:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, if I achieve financial freedom and have a family.

• 1:57:22Steven Bartlett?

  I think that's, I think that's a really big problem.

• 1:57:23Speaker 00

  I mean, I listen.

• 1:57:25Steven Bartlett?

  I think that's a really big problem.

• 1:57:26Speaker 00

  I agree, I know, listen, and I know you've got this podcast and I know you inspire young people and I think that's a good thing. I think it's a good thing that you inspire young people to go out and work hard and try and achieve something. But I'm an economist and what I see is the percentage of young people who make it shrinking. And I think if you combine those two things, you reach a really dangerous place because we go and tell the young people, it's there for you to start a business. And at the same time, the number of people who make it is 10%, 5%, 2%, 1%. And there will always be that one person who makes it. There will always be that Steven Bartlett in every country in the world who's making it through. You know what I'm saying? But the systematic issue matters, Stephen.

• 1:57:58Steven Bartlett?

  Can we, can we not change the education system so that when I was 16 and they threw me in the exclusion unit, which made me, which could so easily have made me think that I was a failure. Because my brothers who went, Jason went to LSE and became very much like you and now works in my company, um, managing my investments. He, in that education system, was rewarded. So I sat there as a kid thinking, rich and successful, my older brother Jason, because he can do maths. And I thought, I'm going to be a failure because I like this thing called entrepreneurship and I have ADHD, so I can't pay attention in lessons. What I'm saying is if the education system was designed in such a way where people like me who are entrepreneurial, who were interested in the internet and couldn't stop playing video games were clapped for and said, oh my God, double down on that.

• 1:58:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:41Steven Bartlett?

  I think. The net benefit, when you think about what the backbone of the economy is, which is entrepreneurs starting businesses, would be profound for this country here.

• 1:58:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:51Steven Bartlett?

  But I think that I believe there needs to be such a radical overhaul of our education system if we want to stand a chance of capitalizing on what the economy is today.

• 1:58:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I think you could probably change the education system in a lot of ways that could improve it. But you're kind of changing the education system on the Titanic. What my perspective is, I can tell you with a very, very high rate of certainty, if you don't fix this problem of the wealth being sucked out of the middle class, ninety five, ninety eight percent of people will be in poverty in this country in seventy years.

• 1:59:18Steven Bartlett?

  I agree with you. This is the thing. I agree that you can't have a group of people at the very top that own all the assets and all the money, or else, I mean, it's going to come from somewhere.

• 1:59:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:28Steven Bartlett?

  And I remember the day that I printed off the job seeker's allowance form when I was stealing Chicago town pizzas ten years ago in my room in Moss Side in Manchester. I remember what it feels like to not have my parents speaking to me, to have all these CCJ letters and bailiff letters on my desk, and really have no answer on how to get out of this situation, to the point that I was like shoplifting. I'd call the Just Eat driver and then try and persuade him just to give me the food. That was that was that was ten years ago for me. So I it's not, I've not forgotten the those years of my life. So I understand what it is to be in that situation. And on an individual level, I need some answers because I'm not going to wait for these people in fucking the parliament to fix my life for me. So I need some individual answers. And then I do also care about the bigger picture.

• 2:00:11Steven Bartlett?

  So I'm not like here as someone that just wants to accrue loads of wealth myself. Of course, listen, let's be honest, no one like, there's not many human beings that wouldn't like more money. So I try and acknowledge that bias. But what I'm, the the the big issue I have is, is is how. And from my personal experience, as someone that now employs hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people here in London, up in Manchester, in our offices, I, there are a set of things that would make me leave this country. If it became increasingly less friendly to entrepreneurs, I reckon if we come back here in five years' time, I reckon I'll employ five hundred more people in the UK. And actually, as you look around this room, you can see the age of them. These are young people.

• 2:00:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:54Steven Bartlett?

  There are things you could do to make me not do that.

• 2:00:56Speaker 00

  I mean, it's probably worth pointing out that we're not taxing wealth and you're leaving the country anyway, Stephen.

• 2:01:00Steven Bartlett?

  No, I haven't left the country.

• 2:01:01Speaker 00

  Okay, you're gonna stay.

• 2:01:02Steven Bartlett?

  No, I'm a I'm a tax resident here. I pay my taxes here and I have zero intent in changing that. I'm also on track, you know, so we're investing a lot of money in UK businesses.

• 2:01:10Speaker 00

  But listen. I wanna raise, I wanna tax only high levels of wealth, only high levels of wealth. And listen, don't get me wrong, I understand, very rich people will complain and very rich people will say, just like they did in Dickens, I'm gonna throw my businesses, I'm gonna throw my taxes, my, my businesses and my factories into the sea.

• 2:01:27Speaker 00

  Stephen, your viewers are here. Listen, Stephen, your viewers are here, you are a very wealthy person. They are paying twenty, thirty, forty, fifty percent. You should be paying your fair share, Stephen. You should.

• 2:01:37Steven Bartlett?

  I think that I should pay more tax, especially when, um, I don't think my kids should get, should, should benefit from my wealth. And maybe this is a controversial opinion, but I actually don't. I don't think I should be able to pass down my assets to my children.

• 2:01:53Daniel Priestley?

  You can't. It's forty percent tax.

• 2:01:55Steven Bartlett?

  I think it should be more.

• 2:01:56Daniel Priestley?

  It's forty, yeah.

• 2:01:57Speaker 00

  Let's not pretend rich people don't successfully pass their assets to their children.

• 2:02:00Steven Bartlett?

  I'm just telling you now, I do, I think I'd be robbing my children of something from the background that I came from. If my, my child gets fucking, if my child has, gets tens of millions, let's say even, when I die, I don't think that should happen.

• 2:02:12Speaker 00

  I agree. People say, when I talk about my sister, people are like, why don't you just give your sister a load of money? Listen, my sister works hard. She's a smart person. She works hard. She produces good work. I wanna live in a society where people like my sister are able to support themselves with the work that they do, but we're, we're destroying that society.

• 2:02:28Daniel Priestley?

  Who would pay her?

• 2:02:30Speaker 00

  The customers, you know.

• 2:02:32Daniel Priestley?

  So you want her to start a business?

• 2:02:34Speaker 00

  She is a business.

• 2:02:35Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I, I want people like her to be, to be taxed less, so that what I want is ordinary working people to be taxed less, so they have more money in their pocket. Listen, the reason we had the thriving art scene in the sixties is because we had a thriving middle class that could go and buy the new fashions and buy the new records. And then that created this thriving art scene. Now we have a middle class which is struggling to pay the bills, so they can't, they can't buy stuff. They, you know, my sister makes theatre shows. The only people who go to theatre are, are rich people now. But back in the day, you know, theatre was something that was more accessible. You want, you want the arts. I've got a mate who's a fashion designer, right? Nowadays, there's all of the business is super fast, super cheap, super disposable fashion, or unbelievably expensive, high end, because that's the economy we've created.

• 2:03:16Speaker 00

  I want, you go to Japan, which is a less unequal society, the restaurants are good quality restaurants for ordinary people, because a, a good capitalist society will produce things for the people with money.

• 2:03:27Steven Bartlett?

  In the case of theatre, where have the theatre consumers moved to? Where are they getting their entertainment now?

• 2:03:33Speaker 00

  Well, what you have is a very rich group of people who will still go to theatre and they will pay a lot, but then you have a large group of people who are relatively cash scarce and they will try to get their entertainment in cheaper ways, of course, you know what I mean?

• 2:03:45Steven Bartlett?

  They're spending their time watching your YouTube channel.

• 2:03:47Speaker 00

  Well, exactly, my YouTube channel, which is free, by the way.

• 2:03:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, but you get paid from it. You get the YouTube ad revenue.

• 2:03:52Speaker 00

  To be honest, it's only in the last couple of months that I've started to make any money because I don't do my own editing. So, and you know, I mean, you'll know in the first few years, you're paying yourself to do it, you know what I mean? Like, I think people sometimes massively overestimate the amount of money.

• 2:04:04Daniel Priestley?

  This is entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs go through two, three, four, five years' worth of struggle to get to the point where they're successful. And it feels pretty horrific that you say, oh, finally, when I make it, you take it. And then the advisors to entrepreneurs.

• 2:04:18Speaker 00

  Just ten million pounds is quite a lot of money. So, you know, you can be worth nine million pounds and not be paying anything more.

• 2:04:25Daniel Priestley?

  But what if I just raise one million for investment into my company?

• 2:04:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:28Daniel Priestley?

  But that then, like I do, if I'm, if I'm raising money all the way along and my investors are saying, I'm sorry, I don't invest in the UK economy because it's wealth taxes and all that sort of stuff, it's anti-wealth, and then I just have to move my company overseas.

• 2:04:42Speaker 00

  Well, I want to create a situation where the UK consumer is so strong that you have to invest in the UK.

• 2:04:46Daniel Priestley?

  You don't have to be here to sell to them.

• 2:04:49Steven Bartlett?

  Quick one, I want to talk to you about our sponsor, Whoop, a business I'm also an investor in. And if you follow me on Instagram, you've probably noticed that recently I've picked up running, which I'm very much enjoying. And it started out as a challenge, but it's now evolved into something I do almost daily. It is one of those things that's pushing me to be better every single day. But here's the thing, to me, progress isn't just about pushing harder, it's also about training in a smarter way, which is where my Whoop comes in. Whoop doesn't just track my workouts, it tells me how ready my body is to take them on before I've even started the workout. A few years ago, we ran a study called Project PR, and it found that runners who adjusted their training based on their recovery scores improved their 5K times by an average of

• 2:05:31Steven Bartlett?

  two minutes and 40 seconds while reducing injury risk by over 30%. And they did it while training less. So if you're looking for this type of guidance when it comes to your training, head over to join.whoop.com/CEO and get a 30-day trial with zero commitment. That's join.whoop.com/CEO. Let me know how you get on. So do we all agree on this premise, though, that Gary's saying, which is the very, the ultra-rich, which we can classify as being worth more than you're saying?

• 2:06:00Speaker 00

  We say 10 million is the line that we campaigned for.

• 2:06:02Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, we think that they should pay a greater share of the tax. And then if you agree with that premise, the question then becomes, yes, but how?

• 2:06:11Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, well, they already do. 1% pay 30%.

• 2:06:15Speaker 00

  I want to be clear, that's the top 1% of taxpayers, which is not the top 1% of richest people.

• 2:06:20Daniel Priestley?

  But mind you, I'm also not necessarily saying what's fair. I'm saying what's practically possible, right? So like, you could, you could come up with the world's most fair on the back of a napkin. This is what's fair, but whether you can implement it is a very difficult thing. The problem is, wealth is completely mobile now. It's really, you can live and work from anywhere.

• 2:06:40Speaker 00

  The houses, Dan.

• 2:06:42Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:42Speaker 00

  It's land. Is that mobile? You can't rip the country out of the sea.

• 2:06:46Daniel Priestley?

  There's very few, I've never met any seriously wealthy people who own a lot of houses.

• 2:06:51Speaker 00

  You honestly think that the entire housing stock of the UK is not valuable?

• 2:06:55Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, no, it is, but 78% is owned by baby boomers. They just own, they've bought a house in 1992 and they own the house.

• 2:07:03Speaker 00

  Personally, I think that that house ownership, especially when you consider mortgages, is relatively unequally distributed. That is, by the way, the most equally distributed.

• 2:07:10Daniel Priestley?

  Young people have now had...

• 2:07:11Speaker 00

  The commercial property, the land, the natural resources.

• 2:07:13Daniel Priestley?

  Owned by pension funds.

• 2:07:15Speaker 00

  So the viewers own it, do they?

• 2:07:16Daniel Priestley?

  They're owned by, if they own a pension fund, most of those commercial properties.

• 2:07:19Speaker 00

  And what is the distribution of pensions? Dan, what is the distribution of pensions? What percentage of pensions is owned by the top 1%?

• 2:07:25Daniel Priestley?

  The, I wouldn't know, off the top of my head, with pensions. But I know, I know that obviously, wealth concentrates at the top. But here's the one thing to keep in mind, wealthy group are not necessarily a static group. There was a study of the richest people in 1900, and most of those families are poor today, or they've gone down in value today. If the richest people in 1900 had have just simply kept their wealth, there'd be 16,000 more billionaires. But, but they don't. You know, in wealth management, in banks?

• 2:07:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:07:56Daniel Priestley?

  They have this thing called the succession planning. So succession planning is where they try and figure out how not to screw it up across generations. And they're notoriously bad at it. It's very hard to keep wealth in generations.

• 2:08:08Speaker 00

  Dan, in the 20th century, we had two world wars and a Holocaust.

• 2:08:14Speaker 00

  That redistributed wealth.

• 2:08:17Speaker 00

  I would prefer not to have that again.

• 2:08:18Daniel Priestley?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm with you. I want affluent middle class. I really do.

• 2:08:23Speaker 00

  So where's the wealth gonna come from? You wanna just, you're gonna create it?

• 2:08:25Daniel Priestley?

  Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, sorry. Entrepreneur, economies that are friendly towards wealth creation and entrepreneurship.

• 2:08:32Speaker 00

  When was the last time you had a government that wasn't, let's grow, let's grow, let's grow? It's not working for the people, Daniel.

• 2:08:39Daniel Priestley?

  No, the problem is, is that they need to step back. They need to let shrink, let shrink, let shrink.

• 2:08:44Speaker 00

  Our view is to keep a close sight on Donald Trump and Elon Musk because they're doing what you're asking.

• 2:08:48Daniel Priestley?

  It'll be interesting to see what happens, right? It's too soon to tell.

• 2:08:51Steven Bartlett?

  If you were trying to grow the UK economy, would you not take America's approach? Because they seem to be much more successful at growing their economy.

• 2:08:58Speaker 00

  I think, I mean, of course, when we talk about slashing of the state, they're gonna use these examples like, oh, there's this wasteful government building. Everybody wants to slash government waste. Of course, I'm not gonna fight against slashing government waste. I'm from the UK, you know, I saw the austerity years. I've seen what's happened to local services. I've seen what's happened to things like the police, like education, you know, especially things like youth services. You slash the state, you fire a load of people, you know. What does the state, okay, yeah, if you can get rid of state corruption, yes, hundred percent. If you can get rid of state waste, one hundred percent, you know. This is how single mums feed their kids, Stephen. You wanna stop that?

• 2:09:37Daniel Priestley?

  No, I'm saying no.

• 2:09:39Speaker 00

  Slashing the state, I don't think it's gonna work. To be honest, I think tariffs is not an uninteresting discussion. I think, yeah, of course, tax avoidance is something you need to get rid of. Really, I would like to take a step back, look at the country and say, what is the state of the country? What do people need? You know, we have a country here where the housing stock is falling apart and we're letting it fall apart because those houses are owned by ordinary people who don't have any money. If you want the country to work for ordinary people, you need ordinary people to have money. I'm always reminded of Mr. Beast. He goes to places in Africa and he spends five hundred quid and he gives a kid eyesight who would have been blind for the rest of their life. For five hundred quid. Why are kids in Africa blind who could be given sight for five hundred?

• 2:10:23Speaker 00

  Because they don't have any money. This is what happens when you drain your middle class. This will end up like that, you know, you know. I've got a friend who went to India last week. He said there were people lying on the street outside with rotting limbs. You know, that is what happens when you when you disempower. When you take the money away from the middle class, you've got to protect the middle class. If the middle class had money. Then there would be unbelievable business opportunities for selling goods and services like your business to the middle class.

• 2:10:53Steven Bartlett?

  So would you tax Daniel more?

• 2:10:55Speaker 00

  I don't know if Daniel's worth more than ten million pounds. It sounds like he is.

• 2:10:57Steven Bartlett?

  He is.

• 2:10:58Speaker 00

  I mean, I think I want to make it clear, right? You people, you make five percent on your wealth. So if Daniel's worth a hundred million, he's making five million pounds. We're only trying to tax you one percent. I think if you are worth a hundred million, you're making five million pound passive income. You can afford to pay a million pound tax a year. You're gonna still keep getting rich. The truth is, even if we were to tax these billionaires one percent a year, they would still squeeze the rest out. This is not, this is not about morality. This is just cold, hard economic analysis that I have made a lot of money betting on.

• 2:11:25Steven Bartlett?

  So closing arguments then, chaps. Um, I'll start with you, Gary. Based on everything we've discussed today, um, what is? I'm gonna ask you to to give me two perspectives, which is. If I'm a young individual in this country right now. What should I do to protect myself and my family and to feed my family? What kind of behaviors, what strategy should I adopt there? But also then from a government level, I know we have some politicians that listen because they message me. What should politicians be doing to to fix? The issue that we're all clearly identifying, which is the collapse of the middle class, the collapse of sort of working class people and the the the increased wealth of the rich.

• 2:12:00Speaker 00

  I think what I would like young people to understand is that this gets worse. This gets much, much worse. It will get much worse um relatively quickly. Uh, poverty will increase relatively quickly. It will become increasingly.

• 2:12:15Speaker 00

  Difficult, almost impossible to make any serious money. Prepare yourself for that. Prepare yourself when you consider your finances, when you consider your plans for having a family. This gets worse and it's gonna be really, really hard. It's gonna be a big mental health problem for a lot of young people. So speak to people and understand that. My YouTube videos are there, it carries economics for people to understand what is happening. After that, you've got to do all the right things. Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree with you. You've got to work hard, you've got to study the right things. I think it's a great shame, we have made subjects like the arts, a thing which you're not allowed. If you come from a poor background, you cannot work in the arts. I'm sorry, you can't pay the bills, you can't. So you have to go and study AI and computing and, you know, maybe social media.

• 2:12:59Speaker 00

  Although we have to be honest, social media doesn't pay for most people. You have to realise the reality of your situation. It's very, very, very, very bad. But that doesn't mean you don't work, that doesn't mean you don't aspire. You work damn hard because you have to. But if you manage to make enough money to even support a family, you should be proud of yourself. That's the number one thing. But recognise, this can be changed, this can be changed. Our grandparents, our great-grandparents fought for a bigger share of the pie and they got it. They got healthcare, they got education, they got housing, they got food. Our young people can have that as well, but they won't get it unless they fight for it. So I would encourage people to educate themselves, support my work, get involved politically,

• 2:13:43Speaker 00

  but also work hard, support your friends and family, try and make money because you'll have to. If you don't play politics, I guarantee you the other side will play politics. And that means your kids and your grandkids live in poverty. So you have to do both. With regards to politicians, I've got mixed feelings about a lot of politicians. The truth is, I think a lot of politicians are very rich and ultimately they don't care, they're protected. A crisis of inequality looks fantastic from the top. And I think that's why the three of us can sit here and say things will be fine. Because for us, they will be fine, and for our kids, they will be fine. But for our viewers' kids, they won't be fine. The politicians are not gonna try and save you. I'm gonna try and make sure they do it, but I don't think they will. Listen, my plan is not to get concessions from politicians.

• 2:14:28Speaker 00

  My plan is to get five million followers on the internet and bully the politicians so that they have to give us what we need. So I would support people to get behind me, get behind my campaign, but also understand what's happening. Educate your friends and your family and just crucially to understand this is going to be a long fight. So be strong, keep your people around you, but be ready for what's to come.

• 2:14:52Steven Bartlett?

  I am, I see hints in some of the things you've said recently of you going into politics yourself at some point.

• 2:14:58Speaker 00

  Stephen, I'm in politics.

• 2:14:59Steven Bartlett?

  But I mean actively.

• 2:15:01Speaker 00

  Listen, I, I do not want to be an MP. I do not want to be Chancellor. I do not want to be Prime Minister. If we get to a point where I feel that that is something that is achievable and it is the best way to fix this problem, I will be open to it. This is not Plan A. This is not, you know, would you like to be Prime Minister?

• 2:15:18Steven Bartlett?

  No fucking chance.

• 2:15:19Speaker 00

  Probably not, right? Like this is, I'll be honest, I, I, I am quite uncomfortable with even the level of public profile that I have at the moment, which is, you know, it's much less than what you have, but it stresses me out and it's weird. We spoke about it before we were shooting. I don't want to, can you imagine? I, I don't want to be Prime Minister. I don't want to be an MP. But I'm serious about this work that I do and if we reach a point that I think that is the best way to do it, I will consider it. But I would much rather be able to influence the MPs from the sidelines, to influence the politicians from the sidelines.

• 2:15:49Steven Bartlett?

  And for that person you just gave advice to, who should they be voting for?

• 2:15:52Speaker 00

  Well, we don't have an election for, listen, politics is not football. Politics is not football. Okay? This is not about I'm Labour, I'm Conservative, I'm Republican, I'm Democrat. You're losing your houses here. You're losing your houses, your kids will be in poverty and you're going to see both Trump and the Republicans and Keir Starmer and Labour, who are supposed to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum, they will both fail because they will not take action on growing wealth inequality. And I'll be right on that, you know, bring me back in a few years, I'll be right on that. And that shows you it's not about, I think this factionalism is unbelievably damaging to our societies, especially in the US where there's so much hatred behind it, where suddenly I'm on this side, you're on that side. Look, we're gonna shake hands after this. I've got nothing, we will, you know, there's no hatred here.

• 2:16:33Speaker 00

  But if you allow yourself to be divided from half of your country and you allow, we're seeing it growing tensions, racial tensions, gender tensions. If you allow yourself to be divided. They will win, they will win. So you need to vote for whoever is going to protect your houses. And if you want to know who that is, come and check Gary's economics before the election and I will tell you who it's going to be.

• 2:16:54Steven Bartlett?

  Daniel.

• 2:16:55Daniel Priestley?

  Nice.

• 2:16:55Steven Bartlett?

  Closing arguments, personal and social.

• 2:16:58Daniel Priestley?

  A few things. I read Gary's book and it's brilliant. And regardless of, regardless of whether you actually like economics, it's a brilliant story. It's a really good. I read it in about two or three days and it'll, it'll eventually be a good movie as well. I agree with a lot of what Gary's saying. There is a collapse of the middle class and it probably will get worse. And the traditional middle class jobs that came out of the back of the industrial age, mature industrial revolution system. Those are collapsing and it's globalizing. We're seeing technology move opportunities all over the world.

• 2:17:35Daniel Priestley?

  And wealth inequality, it has a cause. Wealth inequality itself is a scoreboard. And there's a cause for what led up to wealth inequality. And the cause in my mind is technology. Technology is moving those opportunities around and it's changing things. We already have big governments. We have huge amounts of taxes. We're at record levels of taxes.

• 2:17:56Daniel Priestley?

  Wealth has never been more mobile. It's not about what's fair. It's about what you can practically get away with. It's about what you can actually implement. And it's going to be very, very, as Gary said, it's going to be very, very, very hard to tax people who have digital businesses, who can live and work from anywhere. I know that firsthand, that it's incredibly mobile. With that said, at a micro level, oh sorry, at a macro level, big picture. We do know that there is a correlation between economic freedom, where the government gets out of your way, and low poverty rates. And we know that as soon as governments become big, high taxes, high regulations, it actually drops down a category and we see poverty goes up from 10% to 30%. So it triples.

• 2:18:39Daniel Priestley?

  Constricting economic freedom is never a good idea if you look at the data. At a micro level, there's never been a greater opportunity for anyone who's ambitious and entrepreneurial to go and start a company. It's cheaper than ever to start a company. You can do what Gary's done, which is publish content, build a following, figure out how to monetize it. You can create products and services and sell them to anywhere in the world. You're an example of someone who started with nothing and became a millionaire in your twenties and then again in your thirties with a completely different thing. He became a millionaire in his twenties and then again in his thirties. He's a bestselling author and a content creator. I did it in my twenties, my thirties and now my forties, starting from scratch.

• 2:19:20Daniel Priestley?

  So it's it's not normal that three guys our age could have done that over and over again. It's because we are living in a time where there is incredible opportunities, but you have to be tapped into those opportunities. You never heard about it at school. You never heard about it at university. You're gonna have to learn the skills to get tapped into those opportunities. But there are definitely ways that you can succeed in the world that we're living in.

• 2:19:43Steven Bartlett?

  And on that macro point, who should we be voting for? Because some of your thinking and policy suggestions through this conversation align more with Trump, Elon, the American mission now where they're welcoming millionaires. They're trying to create a really entrepreneurship friendly environment. They're doing the Doge, dismantling of sort of government waste.

• 2:19:59Daniel Priestley?

  I I agree with Gary. It's not football. You don't have a team. You swing. You should be a swing voter. You should vote every single election. You should make them work hard for your vote.

• 2:20:09Steven Bartlett?

  Is Trump gonna succeed though?

• 2:20:11Daniel Priestley?

  You should see. It's too soon to tell.

• 2:20:12Steven Bartlett?

  But you made a prediction, so I'm inviting you to make a prediction. He said five years time, we come back here, we're gonna see that Trump.

• 2:20:17Daniel Priestley?

  I think I think a lot of very wealthy people are gonna move move to the USA. You're gonna get a lot of people from all over the world. He's playing to win and he wants rich people and entrepreneurs and investors to come into the US and be based there. He's creating golden visas and open visas.

• 2:20:31Steven Bartlett?

  And the success metric here is the middle class get richer and more affluent.

• 2:20:36Daniel Priestley?

  And what I what I actually think will happen as a result of all of that, you will see rising living standards in the USA and you'll see a detriment to the places where those people leave. It's not a good thing to have the people who pay the majority of the taxes, which is 1% of people paying 30% of taxes. If those people leave, the bills get spread across everybody else.

• 2:20:57Steven Bartlett?

  Well, we'll have to do a part two and we shall see. I want to thank you both for the work that you do because I'm a big fan of both of you. I watch Gary's videos all the time, helps me to understand another perspective on what I'm typically hearing out on the internet or that I hear on Twitter about what's going on in the world. And I think I really respect and admire people that can do what both of you have done today, which is to exchange and listen to ideas in the pursuit of answers. And that's why I'd highly recommend anybody, regardless of whether you agree with everything or some things or just a little bit, to go and follow Gary's channel on YouTube called Gary's Economics, because it's a great source of information from someone who has done it, understands the world from another perspective, but also someone who's providing a narrative, which I actually think

• 2:21:40Steven Bartlett?

  there's, as we kind of talked about before you started, there's a big gap in the market for. There are a lot of people like me and Dan out on the internet that are talking about entrepreneurship and finance and how to make money, but there aren't enough people talking about wealth inequality from the perspective as Gary sees it, and that are providing more sort of collectivist and sort of society-wide solutions and answers and sort of explanations as to why that's ultimately happening. I do think, because I know you, Dan, and I hope I know myself, I do think that we all want the UK to survive, and I think we all believe that the way that the UK survives isn't necessarily a couple of ultra-rich people getting more money, it is sort of social mobility and it's allowing

• 2:22:24Steven Bartlett?

  people that are at the very bottom to create opportunities and to succeed. We all agree upon that, even if we agree, disagree, sorry, on the causes and the solutions to that. I'd also highly recommend everybody to go check out The Trading Game, because everybody's talking about this book, and I think it's what, four weeks at the moment on the Sunday Times Bestseller List? Four weeks, number one. Number one, four weeks, number one, which is an incredible achievement, but it speaks to what's in this book, the way that this story is told, but also the timeliness of this message. So I'd highly recommend everybody go check it out. I'm going to put a link below so that everybody can go and do it. And if you just look at some of the testimonials for this book, it's profound. I hear people describe it as like unforgettable on one end and then sad on the other end, because that's the nature of the reality it speaks to.

• 2:23:06Steven Bartlett?

  And I highly recommend everybody go check out Dan Priestley's Entrepreneur Revolution, but also your website has all of your resources and tools on it, so I'll link that on the screen. What's the? At Daniel Priestley dot com. At Daniel Priestley dot com. Thank you both for your generosity, really, really appreciate it. Thanks for bringing us together. No matter where I am in the world, it seems like everyone is drinking matcha. And there's a good chance that that matcha you're drinking is made by a company that I've invested more than seven figures in, who are a sponsor of this podcast called Perfect Ted. Because they're the brand used globally by cafes like Blank Street Coffee and Joe and the Juice and many, many more. Not only can you get Perfect Ted matcha in cafes, but you can now also make it at home. Much cheaper. In seconds, using our flavoured matcha powders that I have here in front of me.

• 2:23:50Steven Bartlett?

  Perfect Ted matcha is ceremonial grade and sourced from Japan. It is smooth, it is naturally sweet, not like those bitter grassy matches that I tried before Perfect Ted. And if you are one of those people that have told yourself you don't like matcha, it's probably because you haven't tried our Perfect Ted matcha. And you can find Perfect Ted matcha in the UK in Tesco, Sainsbury's, Holland and Barrett and in Waitrose, or Albert Heine if you're in the Netherlands, and on Amazon in the USA. Or get the full range online at perfectted.com. You can get 40% off your first order using code DARI40. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the

• 2:24:34Steven Bartlett?

  follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favour and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make this show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favour and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favour I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.