Category: Webinars Collection

There is literally no example on planet earth of a high functioning society without big government. That’s not true. Big government is sucking the life out of small businesses. And I spent countless hours with businesses and they’re like you can’t succeed in the UK. As soon as you earn anything, they’ll just tax it off you. So pop off to Dubai, run the business virtually and pay no tax. It’s idiotic. I don’t know how you can look at that and think this is a good system. No. No. I’m saying what needs to happen is reduce the taxes and the pressure on the small businesses cuz everyone in this economy needs to own stuff. We need to own a house, own a business, and own shares. But not everybody can be an entrepreneur. Correct. Look, it would be wonderful if everybody owned something. But ownership starts with earning enough money so that you can save money so that you can begin to own something. So the problem is wages because most people want to be able to go to work and be treated decently. I want to earn enough money so that I can feel secure. I just want to be married. These have kids, own a house. All that. That’s what you most people want. And I want that for everyone. That’s gone away. Houses are unaffordable. Local jobs don’t exist. Technology has cut out all the middlemen. No one’s paying healthy wages. We have the most unhappy population. And if you want to fix that, you have to enact this. Well, I’ve seen Nick’s policies implemented, and I don’t feel it’s enough. You haven’t seen all of the policies. But we need people to know that the rules that we grew up with have changed and people have to learn the rules of this new economy. Yes. Yes. Yes. I totally agree. And if you want to get the economy back on track, the starting point is Nick, I want to start with your background and your context so I can understand your perspective and who you are. You sold a company for almost $7 billion. Correct. And what’s so fascinating about you is you typically billionaires have a certain narrative and perspective on the world. You seem to have a very different one. I do. Who are you? Where have you come from? And what is your perspective on the world as it relates to the subjects that you know we’re going to discuss today? I was raised in a civic family, I should say. What does that mean? It means a family that takes uh civic responsibility seriously. Uh but we were middle class people and my father started to work for this tiny uh family business that uh his his father had started manufacturing bed pillows and down comforters which is how I got my start in business. And to make an incredibly long story short, I had a very early intuition uh about the internet u and uh the role that it would play in commerce. And as luck would have it, I had a friend who agreed with that proposition and his name was Jeff Bezos. And so he wanted to start an e- retailer. He was working in New York uh uh for a hedge fund uh dating one of my closest friends. And for a variety of reasons, he ended up sending his stuff from New York to Seattle to my house and we started Amazon.com together. But from that started starting other tech companies. you know, I’ve helped run, you know, manufacturing businesses, e-commerce businesses. my friends and I own a bank, you know, like that, you know, and I think that that very broad perspective on markets began to inform an intuition that everything that people are taught about economics today that sort of the conventional view is a pack of lies and that if you take it seriously and enact policy on the basis of it, the only thing that can happen is that the rich will get richer and everyone else will get poorer. And uh you know a signal piece of that evidence for me you sort of a thing that really sort of galvanized my interest was that I got a look at the IRS tax tables in 2007 2008 which showed American income shares in the history of that and in 1980 the top 1% of Americans shared about 8 12% of national income. uh by 2007 that 8% had grown to 22% as I recall. So triple largely as a share of national income. While the bottom 50% of Americans their share fell from about 18% in 1980 to 12% in about 2007. And what I did is I took those numbers and I stuck them in a spreadsheet and said, “What happens if this trend continues for another 30 years?” And the answer is revolution. You know, it’s just it’s just arithmetic because you cannot sustain a capitalist democracy if the top 1% controls 45 or 50% of income and the bottom 50% shares five. This is not a deep political insight. This is just math. And I and I freaked out and decided that I needed to devote myself to trying to figure out why this happened and how you could how you could fix it. And so I have been writing about this and working on it since then. Why did this feel so important to you? I’ve heard you talk about pitchforks. Even a cursory reading of history will tell you that when societies get as unequal as the societies we now live in, uh, terrible things start to happen. This leads to either a police state or a revolution. And I believe that the pitchforks are here. I think the Trump administration is the is the, you know, one of the canonical examples of a society beginning beginning to tear itself apart. And I just think it’s the responsibility of people with power and resources to do the right thing. Dan, same question for you. Yeah, I grew up in Australia and um as a teenager, I discovered entrepreneurship. I got an entrepreneurial mentor uh very early on and I did two years in a startup and it was really exciting and I loved it. Um and I felt like I discovered a cheat code in life which was entrepreneurship and starting businesses and small businesses and then at 21 I went off and started my own company which was my first agency and it grew really rapidly. Uh went from zero to a million in its first year and then 10 million in year three and it was like this exciting young company with all these cool young people working there and living there. We actually kind of did. Yeah, we actually were in a big house and we kind of spent a lot of time together. Yeah, I just fell in love with entrepreneurship and small business and family business and all of those kind of things. And I also 15 years ago started an entrepreneur accelerator where people who want to get together and talk about entrepreneurship and figure out how to run their businesses can get together and and figure out how to do that. Um so for the last 15 years I’ve spent uh countless hours with uh 5 a half thousand businesses all over the world who are getting together talking about how entrepreneurship works. And over the years I’ve also come to a similar conclusion that the technological revolution that we’ve seen in the last 25 years has hollowed out the middle class. And I basically said I can’t play by the rules that I grew up in. I have to learn the rules of this new economy, this digital economy pretty quickly or else I’m going to be displaced and disrupted. Um and I don’t have a fallback position. I I didn’t come from any form of wealth or money. Um I also didn’t take on any venture capital. I self-funded, bootstrapped uh my own businesses by cobbling together credit cards and things like that. And yeah, I I think one of the things that I really truly believe is that we are in a very big danger at the moment that if more people can’t participate in the benefits of capitalism, they’re going to do crazy things and vote in socialism. uh and the pitchforks will come and inequality is going to be a toxic corrosive force uh in the economy. So like I’m a capitalist who wants lots of people to benefit from capitalism. That’s been my whole shtick for forever. Um and I just want to include more people in the benefits of capitalism before we do do dumb things. And I guess the question therefore is how how do we do that? The prevailing narrative and I think one of the most dominant narratives is we tax people like us a lot more. What’s your view of that Daniel? So, it’s very easy to have a bad guy of a rich person. Uh, so you could imagine this billionaire rich person, right? Nick maybe could be a bad guy. Uh, and you could sort of do that. When I look at the economy and what’s draining it out, um, it’s it’s harder to conceptualize, but we have these mega corporations and we have these mega funds. So, here in the UK, all the houses are being bought up by Black Rockck, a massive private equity fund that wants the entire population to be a rental class forever. And you know, our prime minister has walked down Downing Street handinhand with the CEO of this big fund saying, “Yeah, come in and and buy up stuff um and financialized houses and that is causing a lot of trouble.” And then you’ve got big companies like Microsoft, like Amazon, and they say, “Hey, we want to do business in your country, but we don’t want to pay tax there. We want to pretend that we’re in Luxembourg or we want to pretend that we’re in Ireland and we’re going to send something from our British warehouse to our British consumer but we’re not really in Britain at that time so we don’t pay tax. And then you got Starbucks that says, you know, we we want to do business and sell coffee next to mom and dad family business coffee shop, but we have to pay this license fee for the Starbucks logo and that has to go to Bermuda and you know, so so when I look at who’s hollowing out the middle class, you’ve got massive mega corp businesses uh that are the absolutely bigger than we could have ever conceived them to be. They’re as big as nations now. Um and you’ve got mega corp funds which are also trillion dollar funds. And one thing I’m worried about is that a lot of people think that a guy like me who’s basically a dynamic entrepreneurial person uh or even a billionaire like Nick is the enemy. And you know when you get a a James Dyson who invents a cool vacuum cleaner and sells a lot of them, that’s not the enemy. When you get Paul McCartney who writes a bunch of songs and becomes a famous beetle and makes a billion dollars, that’s not the enemy. The enemy is the financialization of our homes. The enemy is big mega corpse that don’t want to pay tax. And that’s where we need to we need to be a little bit more nuanced and clear who’s hollowing out the middle class and how do we make policy choices to make sure that doesn’t happen. So you’re saying taxing the rich isn’t the answer. Taxing the rich is like a headline that creates enemies who aren’t actually the enemies. But so let’s just say in the UK then if you were prime minister, would you increase the tax rate on the top 1%. You could do that for political reasons because it would make people feel good, but it won’t change the economy. What needs to happen is we need a thriving entrepreneurial class. Small businesses are the answer. The biggest mistake the the UK government is making is they don’t see that the 5.7 million small businesses are their biggest asset. That we could get those going, that we could create an entrepreneurial uplift that would create jobs and it would create better opportunities. I would definitely curb the issue that we’re having with these uh mega funds and I would definitely stop pretending that Amazon is in Luxembourg and Google’s in Ireland. Right. So those sorts of things I would definitely do. What about yourself, Nick? Would you do you want the top 1% to pay more taxes? Is that important? So, it is not true that the richest people in the United States pay a lot of tax because the the American tax system is riddled with loopholes that allow the richest citizens to pay taxes at a rate of 1/ half of what ordinary people pay. I absolutely believe that in a high functioning democracy, the wealthiest citizens will pay taxes equal to or greater than the typical citizen. And that is just objectively not the case in the United States as a percentage as a percentage. And I think that that is you know sort of table stakes in making an economy function and a democracy go but it is not the biggest problem. The problem is wages. So here’s the most important socioeconomic fact in the United States that the median full-time worker today earns in the range of $60,000 a year. If that person had maintained their same share of the economy since 1975, instead of earning $60,000 a year, they’d earn close to $120,000 a year. That effect, by the way, goes up to the 90th percentile. If you earned $180,000 in 2018, 2020, if you had maintained your same share of GDP, instead of earning 180, you’d earn like a $250,000 a year. So in the United States over 50 years, the only people who benefited directly from economic growth and productivity gains were the people in the top 10% and the majority of benefit went to the top 1%. And that is the problem and that is trillions of dollars a year that used to be wages for ordinary Americans and now ends up in the pockets of the richest people. By the way, utilizing precisely the mechanisms that Dan just outlined. And what we have done is we have massively tilted the economic playing field uh uh which once favored small and medium-sized businesses and local companies towards these giant corporations. We used to have an economy that actively encouraged small businesses and entrepreneurship. I mean basically what we call neoliberalism this set of ideas around economic cause and effect that came into force in the 70s and 80s. Reganomics, Thatcherism, all this stuff, cut taxes for rich people, deregulate powerful people, and suppress the wages for working people, basically trickle down economics. Those policies went in went into effect in the 70s, ‘8s, and ’90s. And what happened is a huge shift in concentration from smaller businesses to bigger businesses and a huge uh shift in income from ordinary Americans to the very rich. And that’s the core of the problem. And of course, I think rich people should pay their fair share. We should. It is ridiculous for somebody who make half a billion dollars a year and to pay 15% tax rate. Uh somebody who makes $200,000 a year pays 40. I just think that’s stupid and wrong, which is which is the case in the United States. May not be the case here in the UK. But the bigger problem is wages. And if you want to get the economy back on track, you have to address that problem. Dan, you say that optionality in entrepreneurship will do more to raise wages than any government policy. Yeah. So, I believe that optionality is the is the most important thing. Uh when someone has lots of options, then they don’t accept terrible conditions. So, give me give me some color on that. Well, if I have 10 companies that are wanting to hire me, I’m going to choose the best option, right? But if I live in a town where there’s only one employer, like let’s say there’s one massive company that employs people and you either work for that company or you’re unemployed, then I have to accept whatever they’re dishing out. So the most important thing in creating better quality of life is optionality. We we need lots of optionality. One of the options that I want people to have is I want us to teach entrepreneurship in schools so that people have the option to start a family business as one of their options. They may not take that option, but at least it’s not a mysterious black box that they that they just don’t understand that that would actually be one of their uh one of their options. Also, let’s say you had no minimum wage, but if you had 10 employers and a limited pool of people who are available to work at those companies, they’re going to have to bid against each other to create better and better working conditions and better and better pay. Um, so you kind of only need to have minimum wages when there’s not enough optionality. If there’s enough optionality, it pushes everything up. Is that your view as well? I agree with the spirit of that. It just turns out that is never the case. So there’s a lot of economic theory that sounds a lot like that, but it but exists in a in a in an imaginary world where people have um power and optionality and and in the real world that actually doesn’t ever exist. So can by way of example there’s a there’s a principle of economics the theory of marginal productivity. Have you heard of that? No. So that’s a theory that is embedded in the the center of econ of economics which says that because markets are efficient the amount of money you earn reflects precisely the contribution that you make to it. If I $15,000 a year that’s because I’m giving $15,000 of value of value in the world. Okay. Correct. And if I earn $500 million a year rubbing money together to make more money, that is a that is an accurate reflection of the value I’m creating in the world, which is really central to capitalism, isn’t it? It is absolutely central to capitalism and is central to economic policym. But here’s the thing. If you understand where that came from, it gives you pause. So in 1879, a guy named Henry George writes a book called Progress and Poverty in the United States. And basically it’s the first book about the rich stealing from the poor. And this book isn’t just a bestseller. It is the best seller in the history of the United States. And the powers that be freak out. And JP Morgan brings this guy John Bates Clark to Columbia University which is sort of the home of like Wall Street and stuff like that New York and says fix this. And so Henry George writes a book called the distribution of wealth in which he invents this idea called theory of marginal productivity which asserts this idea. But he says the quiet part out loud in the book. He says look we have to prove to working people that no matter how much they make whether it’s a little or a lot it reflects their value because if they conclude that their work is worth more than they are paid they will revolt and kill us all and that would be bad. And that idea, it will not surprise you to learn, was very attractive to a bunch of rich people and got swept up into economics and today is a core idea in economic theory. And it would be true potentially if markets were perfectly efficient and all this optionality existed. But there has never been a case where that was been true. It has materially harmed the welfare of most people because as Dan says, your ability to earn is related to your power to negotiate, not some magical number that the market decides. And it’s how easy you are to replace because if I run an ad for a job and 400 people apply for the job, right, which which really does happen, I know this happens for you, Stephen. Uh that that essentially you run an ad and 400 people. So you don’t think about raising the wage uh because 400 people applied and they’re all good. Like they’re all really like super qualified people. And this happens all the time in the UK right now. Happens everywhere. Yeah. I mean, and there are almost zero circumstances where where workers have more power than owners. And you know, even Eden Adam Smith in the in in the Wealth of Nations outlined this asymmetry of power. And and the thing is is that if you persuade people that what they earn is all they’re worth, then you’ve created this narrative that makes rich people richer and everybody else poor. So what’s the solution here? or is it to put a a higher minimum wage on society? Well, that’s a policy solution. But if you if you really want to solve the problem, the starting point is getting people to understand economics in a way that actually reflects how how the economy actually works. not this stylized invention dating back to 1787 that if you take seriously and enact policy on the basis of it the only thing that can happen is that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poor which is a story of the last 50 years. So what is the policy solution? A policy solution is most definitely to apply a standard which requires companies to pay people uh you know a living wage. So the minimum wage is a perfect example of a great policy. Another policy in the United States which is really really important is the overtime threshold which I don’t know whether you have here in the UK we do but it’s the salary threshold below which you automatically get paid overtime which is time and a half here too. Yeah. 48 hours here. 48 48 hours is an upper limit of a week a working week. Okay. So in the United States it’s 40 hours. So if you work more than that you get paid overtime. And so one of the things so that that standard used to apply to virtually every worker in America in 1970 1965 today that standard applies to less than 10% of workers. Now why does that matter? Because people like me at the scale of tens of millions have turned three 40hour a week jobs into two 60-hour a week jobs and pocketed the difference. You may be doing that here, right? You put gummy bears in the lunchroom in a in a ping-pong table and you force people to work 60 hours a week and then you can have two employees instead of three. If you do that 30 million times, you’ve taken 10 million jobs out of the workforce. So, do you agree with this, Daniel? This approach, not as much. Well, here’s here’s the issue. I agree with it at one level, but um almost every solution that Nick has recommended, the UK’s had for the last 20 years. So, we have a minimum wage that is pegged 2/3 of the median, and it ratchets up. We’ve got 28 days worth of paid si uh holiday every year. We’ve got sick leave. We’ve got maternity and paternity leave. Uh we’ve got uh the ability uh very very difficult to h fire someone if they’ve been with you for more than 6 months. So we have this unbelievable set of workers rights and all of these recommendations from minimum wage right through to how how to handle employment. We have the most unhappy population. Our economy is not growing. We have a million young people out of work. Uh we have no one’s hiring at the moment. Um so it hasn’t created those conditions have not created runaway prosperity. And that gives me pause to think something deeper is going on. And the reason that I think this is that I think we need to make more participation in capitalism. Capitalism is about ownership. You have to own an asset. And if you don’t own anything, if you’re just selling labor in the current economy with digital and AI and robots and all this sort of stuff, the real reason that the wages, cuz what Nick’s saying is that the amount of money people would should be earning right now is like in the hundreds of thousands. And what I think is happening as another major part of this is that the e- the rules of the economy have shifted. Technology has cut out all the middlemen. Technology has hollowed out the middle class. Uh we used to go to the video store and the video rental store used to have 12 people working there and now we just go to Netflix. Uh and we used to go to our little local retailer and buy a CD and now we just go to Spotify and we just go to Amazon. So it’s hollowed out all of those supply chains that used to create amazing jobs. The value of the labor has been eroded because it’s very easy to outsource labor to another country. It’s very easy to simplify a job down to automated parts uh using technology. So the fundamental value of actual labor has diminished because of technology. Technology has reduced the actual utility of this thing that we call labor uh for for 90% of people and it’s only going to get worse with AI and with AI and with robots. It’s going to go down. So the if you just simply say oh this is about lifting work standards you’re going to miss the point that we can’t compete with technology. Technology is better at this stuff than we are. And the answer, the solution is ownership. We have to everyone in this economy needs to own stuff. We need to own a house. We need to own a family business. We need to own shares in the companies that are growing. So, it’s you cannot outrun this. This is like trying to run against someone who’s in a car and they say, “Oh, you just need nicer shoes.” No, you the shoes won’t change things. We’ve already tried nicer shoes in the UK economy and it’s made no difference. Everyone’s miserable. So that’s one of the things that I that’s where you and I would disagree. I mean, both things can be true. The minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 an hour or $2.13 plus tips. It’s half. It’s a third of what it is here in the UK. Okay. But you have twice the disposable income that we have. Your median wage is 1 and a half to two times what our medium wage is. We’re now a poor country relative to the US. And even though your minimum wage is terrible and horrific and inhuman, Yeah. However, it’s magically done it. Your your country and your citizens are so much richer than ours. Yeah. Except if you consider that out of that median wage, you have to take $20,000 a year to pay for healthcare, right? Like I think adjusted it’s still you’re 30% better even adjusted. I I think if you look at the AIC OECD uh uh it would be interesting. We might be able to look it up. I can’t remember. But I I bet you it’s about 10% different. Mhm. Even when you subtract out of pocket healthare costs and insurance premiums, the average American worker still takes home significantly more money than the average UK worker. Yeah. The average US salary is around $74,000. The average UK salary is around roughly $50,000. Americans pay heavily for healthare. The average employee in America pays about $6 to $8,000 a year in premiums and out-of- pocket costs. Brits do not pay for healthare because of the NHS. If a US worker makes $74,000 and spends 8 care on healthcare, they are they are at $66,000 before relatively low taxes. The UK worker starts at 52,000 before relatively high taxes. The bottom line is the gap in base salaries and tax rates is simply too large for UK free healthcare to close. The US wins on pure disposable income per person. Yeah, there there’s no doubt the US has had a much more successful economy than the UK. Brexit being, you know, a catastrophe. Can I push back on one thing though with the minimum wage or or this the companies that hollowed out the middle class are big tech companies, big finance companies, those mega corporations, and I agree with you, they can afford to pay their workers more money. Yeah. Yeah. One of the issues that I feel and this is what I’m concerned about is that in the UK the majority of businesses that do pay minimum wage like a friend of mine owns a pub and that pub has razor thin margins. It’s losing money. He’s not taking any money out of it. He’s massively impacted by taxes and minimum wage. So the companies that I see that are the ones who have to pay minimum wage workers and give people the on-ramp into the economy, pubs, little retailers, mom and dad businesses, these are the ones that really do get squeezed out of the economy. They have razor thin margins and you put more pressure on them. You say you’ve got more government regulations, you got more taxes, and now you’ve got more minimum wages and they just go, I’ve had enough. I can’t do it. And the companies that hollowed out the middle class, the Microsofts, the Googles, the, you know, Amazons, they go Starbucks. Yeah, the Starbucks, they go, “Yeah, we can, we can absorb it.” Um, and also, we’re not paying tax anyway, so we’ll just kind of like do that. So, one of the things that you could do, one of the things that we recommend is that you impose these standards progressively that the biggest companies have to pay the highest minimum wage, medium-sized companies pay slightly less, and small businesses pay less. But even within that context, ensuring that everyone pays enough for people to have enough money to continue to buy stuff. I mean, it’s fine and good to say, “Look, I don’t want to pay high wages in my pub.” Uh, but surely the people working in the pub should make enough money so that they can go to the pub themselves and buy a beer, right? You have to I mean, you know, the National Restaurant Association in America is, you know, famous for this. It’s like they want everybody in America to be able to go to a restaurant and eat except for the people who work in the restaurants, right? Can I just say something with your friend that owns the pub as well? So, say you own Starbucks. Yeah. You own a pub. Yeah. I’m a worker. Yeah. If you’re going to pay me more because you have this progressive minimum wage and you’re going to pay less. I’m sorry, Daniel. I’m not going to apply for the job. I’m going to want to go work at Starbucks. So, is there not an issue where you’re not going to be able to attract talent because you’re not going to be able to pay them as much? There are there are many reasons why you would work for a small business as opposed to a mega corp. But I’m saying you’re paying me £4 minimum wage. He’s paying me eight. So, do not does he not end up getting all the the best talent? He might get the best talent. And also for my pub, I might be able to have to I might ma match eight, right? So, maybe it works that I just pay eight, but I’m not necessarily legislated to pay eight. So, here’s the thing. Look, as a small business owner, you can treat there’s all sorts of techniques that you can use to retain people. So, you’re going to have more optionality as a big company. Yeah. Because you can you are going to definitely pay me more. Well, being bigger is always better. It is absolutely true that that high standard will put pressure on throughout the economy. But the small pub owner is also going to benefit from the fact that all I mean, are we using Starbucks? whatever whatever whatever example we’re using, all these people now own now earn so much more that they can afford to go to the pub and buy stuff. So, one of the interventions that I was part of in the United States was the $15 minimum wage, but we cook that up in Seattle, Washington. And so, I spoke to many, many, many, many, many small business owners who are absolutely terrified by this because, you know, look, we are all business owners, right? And so you can do a calculation in seconds about the risks and the expenses of higher wages. Correct? But what you cannot calculate is the benefit of living in of operating your company in a regime where everyone earns more, right? And the benefits that occur to you from that. Look, a ham sandwich in, I don’t know, Somalia cost 25. It cost $25 in Switzerland. What kind of economy do you want to live in? Right. You know, yeah. So, what were you going to say about your friend? Well, the friend who owns the pub, his pub is actually full most nights of the week. They have lots of people going there. The issue is taxes and costs. He’s got a big government in the UK. We have all of these things. Like everything that you’ve mentioned, we have it and we’ve had it for 25 years. We don’t have an affluent middle class that’s been created. We have an eroded middle class. So the actual numbers here is that my friends, he took no money himself and the pub lost £180,000 last year and it’s because of VAT and he feels like he’s carrying the weight of training people in their first job. He’s creating jobs as one of the only employers in his little town. Um and and also he didn’t create this mess. Amazon and Microsoft and Google and Facebook and big funds, they are sucking money out of the economy. We’re in violent agreement about this. So, so I just feel like the the issue is like I really want to make sure that we’re super super clear that small businesses are currently squeezed here in the UK. I don’t know what it’s like in the US. It’s the same in the US. like they are so squeezed and they are squeezed by big tech and now AI has come along they feel like they have to learn this new thing and they have to start posting on LinkedIn 45 times a day using AI posts or else they’ll get drowned out and they have to you know edit videos and become a Tik Tocker as well right so it’s all of this constant pressure caused by this tech sector and these big funds like one of the biggest threats to my friend’s pub is that a big American private equity fund wants to buy the pub uh and turn it into a block of flats, right? So, like they want to financialize this this community asset and he’s trying to fight to keep his pup, right? So, what I what I don’t want to have is I don’t want to have big government create a new framework that that basically squeezes small family businesses even harder. They all start going, we’re losing two pubs a day here, right? They’re closing down. um they they go out of business and then we end up with big corpse, big funds who can’t afford to absorb it and they own everything. And I also want to be clear that the reason people are struggling is they don’t own anything. It’s not because of working conditions. They don’t own anything. And if they don’t own anything, no, it would be wonderful if everybody owned something. Um but but ownership starts with earning enough money so that you can save money so that you can begin to own something, right? Like one of the lessons that we learned was that trying to give stock options to everyone in a company often doesn’t work. Yeah. It’s a catastrophe because for 90% of the workers in a company that their concerns are immediate and they don’t value stock options and if you give them the choice between cash or stock options it’s not even close right and so again I agree with the sentiment it’s just that I have never seen and I do not believe there is an existence proof for it working on planet earth. What certainly worked great in the United States for 40 or 50 years was a set of standards that required companies to fairly split the value they create with their employees uh through a variety of mechanisms, unions, which can be problematic for sure, but labor standards like the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and so on and so forth coupled with a set of policies to discourage consolidation and discourage encourage the kind of exploitation that you have I think very smartly articulated um so that we can have a dynamic economy. The only difference that happened back in the in the time that you’re describing where workers had to be included is that it was nearly impossible for a company to outsource their customer success team to the Philippines. And it was nearly impossible for a company to come up with a piece of software that would do 80% of the heavy lifting of a job. And one of the issues that we have right now is that when you put a lot of pressure on on all sorts of companies, we’re living in the age of AI and robotics where you essentially, you know, one of the options that companies have is just the option, well, we’ll just outsource the labor to another country. We’ll automate it. We’ll simplify it. Okay? But those the rules that enable people to do that were written by the same people who are consolidating industries and and taking advantage. I mean, you don’t have to live in a world like that. There are other ways to organize the world. The neoliberals promised that free trade was going to make all of us richer. And what it did is it flooded our markets with cheap stuff from China, but it is absolutely not clear that it made people’s lives better. Chinese people’s lives, it made Chinese people’s lives better, but it certainly didn’t make people in the UK’s life better. And it certainly didn’t make people in the United States’s life better. And so you could have imagined approaching that in a fundamentally different way. I guarantee you that if the United States could go back and do it again, we would have reought it. We would have rethought it. There’s a few ownership models that I think are important that could be looked at. Number one is a sovereign wealth fund. So the countries like Norway, uh Singapore, these countries they own natural assets uh in a sovereign wealth fund and essentially every citizen therefore owns a piece of some asset. There is an asset that is owned through a sovereign wealth fund. It’s a very successful model. It seems to work so incredibly well that it’s dangerously well. Um half of London is now owned by the Qatari self sovereign wealth fund, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. We’re literally losing all of our property to the sovereign wealth funds of the world. So the sovereign wealth fund model is incredibly powerful. Yes. Um so just for someone that doesn’t know what that is, you you have natural assets within the company own owned in part by the state. So the UK did a stupid thing. We discovered the North Sea back in the 80s I think it was and Norway had half and we had half of this Norwegian uh this North Sea oil. And the Norwegians said, “Hey, we’ll just own this in a fund that all of our citizens will benefit from, and that will be a state-owned fund, and then we’ll take the profits of that, we’ll reinvest it into assets, and every citizen will benefit from those assets.” And the UK said, “We’ll just sell a license to British Petroleum.” Yes. Right. We’ll make the rich people richer. Yeah. And Australia is so stupid. We have all this incredible natural resource, no sovereign wealth fund. uh Britain when we took over the whole world or 25% of the world we operated sovereign wealth funds called the East India Trading Company and all this sort of stuff and basically our business model was sovereign wealth funds for many many years so sovereign wealth funds number one so that would be one the other one is to put shares into baby’s names so when a baby’s born uh you have a piece of the stock market like $1,000 worth of shares u baby bond idea and Trump’s doing both of these things isn’t he sovereign wealth fund and the baby bond he’s calling it the Trump fund or something yeah well they’re They’re experimenting with some version of this right now. Yeah. Yeah. So, if if an a baby by the time they hit 18 has had 18 years of compounding of owning that asset, then by the time they hit 18, they’re literally getting an asset that they can then turn into another asset if they want to. Um, that’s pretty powerful. And then the the biggest issue is the financialization of houses. So if you take a value of a house, about half the value of the house is what you might call the utility value of the house, which is it’s a house to live in and I want to live in it. And then the other half the value is the financial speculation value of the house, which is how much value does a fund have if we can rent this out to people for the rest of their lives. I looked at the Black Rockck thing and it said the idea that Black Rockck is buying up UK homes is a is a myth. They are a financeier, not a landlord. They provide loans and debt facilities to property developers, but they do not directly own or manage residential housing stock. Lloyd’s Bank is buying 70,000 UK homes to rent forever. The number of single family homes Black Rockck directly owns and manages in the UK, zero. Okay. But he’s right. Yeah. Um I I don’t know what the details are, but this is a private equity thing that’s going on in this country and in the United States right now. Yeah. In the United States, I’ve heard a lot about Black Rockck buying up and I’m not sure what the entities are. It may be true. I again I don’t know what they come up they come up with structures to do it at arms length. Yeah. But um like I guess you kind of own it if you’re financing it is well or you loaned it to a subsidiary or somebody else whatever it is. But the but the meta point here is that homes used to be owned by people. Yeah. And they bought them to live in. And they bought them to live in. And one of the nefarious things that’s going on in the west driven by this neoliberal consensus that the only purpose of the of of the economy is to make rich people richer is this idea that private equity should buy all these homes and turn the turn ordinary people into this rental class. Just to confirm, yeah, Lloyd’s Bank are doing that through something called Citra Living. They’re buying up thousands of new built homes and apartments to act as a direct private corporate landlord. Um they view the structural shift away from home ownership towards long-term renting as a major profit opportunity for them. Yes, that’s it. They want to have a permanent rental class that people never you’ll own nothing and be happy is the idea. And people are not like that. People love to own stuff. I want to go back to the central point we were talking about which is like how do you how do you solve this cuz you’ve got two different views on how you solve this inequality. What I find interesting is the UK has better worker rights but it is but you also have much less inequality here. I mean, just to be clear, that is true. So, the US is significantly more unequal. The US top 1% holds over 30% of the nation’s wealth compared to roughly 20% in the UK. Um, and the US consistently ranks as the most unequal of the G7 nations. Correct. However, the US is growing much much faster. If you look at 209 to 2026, the US is growing over 100% faster than the UK. Yes. Um, and the UK is vastly more protective of workers. We have the things Daniel said like paid vacation, paid maternity leave. The UK mandates up to 39 weeks of statutory pay. The US mandates zero. Correct. Which is unbelievably horrific. But I mean one of the things that’s happened in the UK, Steve, is is Brexit. When did that happen? 2016 that’s taken what has that taken eight or 10% out of UK growth rates. It has affected unemployment by 4%, productivity gains by 4%. I mean the list goes on. So that own I mean part of part of why people in the UK are feeling down is this unbelievable mistake that the country made. But it’s the same in Germany. It’s the same in Australia. Germany has unbelievable workers rights. Australia unbelievable workers rights. In fact the USA is the outlier of all the modern capitalist economies. Absolutely. But we’re confusing things. People are pissed off everywhere in the world. Yeah. in the world. I don’t I want the pitchforks to go away as well, but these workers rights are not putting the pitchforks away. Like all of this stuff, we’ve given this stuff to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, uh all of Western Europe, all the English speaking democracies other than the USA. USA is the only one that has virtually no safety nets and no safeguards. Everywhere else has health care systems that are much more generous and welfare systems that are more generous and like maternity leave. I mean, it’s just inhumane that USA doesn’t have maternity leave. So, all of that stuff, but we’ve got all of that, but we’ve got the pitchforks here, too. Yes. Um, and this is why I’m saying I’m really zoning in on the idea that people need to own a house, they need to own a business, and they need to own shares. And it’s like if they own could not agree more and I don’t know how to get them there unless they are paid well enough to to do that. Let me tell you an anecdote. During the George Floyd riots, people were burning stuff down in the United States. And there was this fantastic interview with this woman and the reporter said, you know, I just I cannot believe that you don’t have respect for property rights. And the woman said, “We have no property.” You know, why should I respect property rights? No one I know owns anything. Yeah. You know, like, so I am 100% with you. But I think at the core of it, the core of it is that inequality is way more than an economic inconvenience for the people that it affects. What it does is it shreds the reciprocity norms that make social cohesion and democracy possible. Yeah. It’s this dog eat dog. You’re all on your own. Grab what you can. I mean, obviously the Trump people and burn the place down. That’s right. And burn the place down. Obviously, Donald Trump has created a permission structure for the worst kind of behavior, right? The worst kind of corruption. Uh, basically stealing has come back into style, right? And you know, there’s all sorts of reasons that are generating this malaise, this this sense of unfairness and lack of control, right? And and and the thing is I I just I agree 100% with your sentiments. I really do about entrepreneurship and ownership and you know at the end of the day the cool thing about entrepreneurship is you’re in charge. Yeah. Like you’re in charge here and not everybody can be an entrepreneur. Correct. Correct. And so I do think that that’s a little bit unrealistic. The the issue is is that like 70% of all jobs that get created are created by small businesses and not governments, not big companies. They’re, you know, they don’t create jobs. Small businesses create jobs. And if we just not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but if we had a 100,000 entrepreneurs who were all hiring 10 people, we’d we’d have a million jobs and we’d have 100,000 options for people with jobs. So like I I don’t think that we discount the whole idea that entrepreneurship is a big part of the solution. Can I take us briefly back in time? This is not the first time this has happened. The K-shaped economy has happened in the Engles pause. Yeah. So the the what do you mean by K-shaped economy? So the K-shaped economy is where so a normal economy is one where everyone agrees it’s going up or down or sideways. Everyone can sort of say, “Oh yeah, roughly speaking, it’s a good economy. It’s a bad economy. It’s it’s rising and falling like a tide.” A K-shaped economy is where it’s really good for some and really bad for others. It’s a disrupted economy. Yeah. Right. So the top percentage are going up and the bottom percentage going down. Now the headlines that we run today are the exact same headlines that were run in the early 1800s in Britain. And it was essentially record profits for industrialists and workers haven’t had any improvements. They all like you could almost take every grievance that we have today and you could just overlay it in the early 1800s and you get the exact same words. Um the solutions uh one of the big solutions in the early 1800s was we need to export people. We need to get rid of people. And what they did is they sent everyone to Australia. So they they sent they sent they picked up people and they put them in in Australia. Right? So they same sort of thing mass mass immigration or whatever you call it remigration. So they got rid of people out of the country. So it was very similar and we call this the Engles pause but we understand what caused it 1790 to 1840. Yeah. So what caused it was technology and it was this new it was the industrial revolution. Yeah. So it’s the new technology where we introduced a steam engine, we introduced a spinning loom, we introduced uh tractors, we introduced all of this sort of new technology and the owners of that new technology and the people associated with that new technology went like that. They leveled up because of tech and the people who were not part of that technology went down. Very simple picture you might want to have in your mind is a farm that had a 100 workers farming versus one farm that had a tractor. The tractor farm went like that and they all the workers went like that. It’s because of technology. The interesting thing about the angles paws is that for approximately two generations 50 75 years with the exception of the owners of capital basically everybody else on planet earth went backwards. It was hell. It was hell. Um and what and what happened is that over time the political consensus changed and working people clawed back some of that value through unions through labor standards so on and so forth. So one I guess the essence of what I want to get to is I mean something you’ve always talked about Dan as well is that if you start applying pressures on these companies or entrepreneurs they can just now get up and leave. And that was quite different from that era where we weren’t dealing with technological businesses. is we weren’t dealing with IP and those things. So if you start imposing some of these measures, will these companies get up and leave and go somewhere else where market conditions are preferable? A lot of UK entrepreneurs are, as we’ve seen from some of the numbers recently, choosing to go work elsewhere. Okay. Yeah. I think one of the things that just needs to be acknowledged and put on the table is one of the challenges you have here is you have the the Europe or the world has built this incredibly stupid system where you can operate a business here, take advantage of the UK’s market, take advantage of the UK’s rule of law, take advantage of the UK’s uh infrastructure, put your stuff in a box, move to Dubai, and pay no tax. Right? It’s idiotic. It’s just it’s just idiotic and suboptimizing as an American. I pay tax wherever I go, right? So I cannot come to a place and take advantage of it and then skirt the laws. So this is such a profound disincentive to do the right thing. Well, yeah. Yes. But the real culprit is what companies can do because US companies can do it. You you can’t do it as an individual, but you can set up an office in Ireland in Luxembourg, which is even worse. and and it’s the corporations that are the bad guys, which is but you have both problems be you have you have UK based entrepreneurs who are like well I can stay here and pay 40% tax or whatever it is right just pop off to Dubai run the business virtually and pay nothing. So what are you saying should be done with those people that do that? I think that UK citizens should pay UK UK tax wherever they go and German citizens should pay German tax wherever they go. You agree? I don’t think that will solve it because it’s not citizens, it’s corporations that are the bad guys. Well, it will solve one problem. It will not. This other problem needs to be handled. Yeah. The the the giant vampire squids of the world are companies that are pumping money out of the economies and they’re faceless corporations that have figured out how to play this game. So, for example, let’s take YouTube for example. YouTube is serving up a ton of videos to people all over this country and they’re running ads, but that is pretending to be in some distant place. It’s not pretend. It’s not being in the UK. And what we used to do in the UK is we used to have a broadcast license. If you want to broadcast in the country, you pay a flat fee and you can broadcast. Why is YouTube not playing paying a broadcast license? If they are a broadcaster effectively uh and running ads, they sit there and say, “Oh, but there’s this and we shift our profit through here and oh, we have to I’m so sorry, but we have to buy our licensing, you know, from this company over in this other vanuatu or whatever.” It’s like, “No, no, no. We don’t care about that.” It’s like, look at how you do business in the UK. You should pay taxes. It’s just as simple as you you’re you’ve got this many views and the broadcast license for you is this much. Okay. So do you agree on both points then that you should tax corporations based on where their customers are consuming and you should tax individuals irrespective of where they decide to fly off to? Look, I think in a globalized world that we live in an individual should be allowed to make a new life for themsel if they want to, right? Like so for example, if I genuin I I I make a new life for myself in the UK 20 years ago. I came here from Australia and I don’t want to pay tax in Australia because I was born in Australia. I paid a million dollars worth of tax in Australia, but I now live here. Like my I’ve got three kids here and I’ve got a house here and my whole life is here. I don’t like the idea that just because I was born in Australia, it’s it’s not possible for me to make it. But we have a tax treaty. Yeah. Like there are ways of handling this. But this ridiculous Look, every rich person I know in Europe is playing this ridiculous game of trying to avoid taxes, right? I don’t know how you can look at that and think this is a good system. But the issue is you and I both know it’s so easy to just turn this into a company game. So like for example, if we have to appropriately close the loopholes like Yeah. But like I just I’m seeing so many people demonize people like Nick, right? They go, “Oh, this guy, he’s, you know, he’s a rich guy and he’s like, you know, he shouldn’t be so rich.” Honestly, he’s not the problem. I’m sure you pay a bunch of taxes and also you you create economic activity around you. These mega corporations do trillions of dollars out of economy. If we take a mega corporation, you know, think of one in your head, and we decide to tax them where their customers are. I was looking at some of the research and it says corporations rarely just absorb the tax. When countries like the UK or France introduce taxes based on local users, tech giants like the like the biggest in the world immediately raised fees and prices for the consumer and small businesses inside those specific countries to offset the cost. If we had a global tax system that prevented this, then they wouldn’t do it. They couldn’t do it. If the compliance cost of tracking user locations and paying to local taxes outweighs the profit from the region, companies also tend to simply block users in those countries or pull their products entirely. Great. Great. And that opens up a possibility of a local company to do it. Worse, huh? Worse, maybe better. I was thinking here about the large language models and I was thinking about that as an example. If you know if the UK tried to take on Gemini or Chat GBT etc we would be using a significantly worse technology. The truth is that those those mega corps that’s accurate. Those mega corpse they don’t do this. They they want to own the world and they want to dominate the world. They’re not interested in cutting countries out. Right. None of them actually cut countries out. When do you think you think Facebook is just going to leave the UK? Yeah. Like they’re not going to do that. So and the other way is how you do it. So if you simply judge, how do you do that in Australia though with the news publishing business? They might do it very briefly as a way to punish political uh disscent. But ultimately they operate globally. They have a global business model and they uh essentially too we just need to say I’m sorry you’ve had your 20 30 years of not paying taxes anywhere but we’re not doing that anymore. And you know we we are very good at coordinating when we want to coordinate and we need to say the bad guy here. I mean it is really just pulling money out of our economies and taking it to other other places. And one of the reasons that the USA has become so wealthy with its stock market is because it is the end valuation where all of these vampire squids end up with their balance. If I look at what happened, it was um Australia I was thinking about um but it also happened in Canada where they passed a law called the online news act requiring tech giants to pay local publishers whenever Canadian users shared or viewed news links. And immediately instead of paying uh the user location tax, Meta simply blocked all news content from every user in Canada because the cost of compliance just wasn’t worth the hassle for one particular market. And you have the same thing happen with Amazon where several US states like California tried to force Amazon to collect local sales tax simply because Amazon had independent affiliates like bloggers etc um living in those states and rather than dealing with the complex local tax collection Amazon instantly terminate thousands of affiliate accounts. If every state required Amazon to collect local sales tax then obviously they couldn’t do any of that. they would have to deal with it, right? It it’s just these big corporations have a massive advantage over the jurisdictions that they’re operating in because they have so much more power and so much more flexibility. So what is the what is your solution then Daniel to solve for this inequality problem that we’re experiencing because you know you seem to be less interested in the sort of workers rights piece because that seems to we’ve tried it. We try you’re saying we tried it. Yeah. What I would like personally is I want to see way more small businesses and I want the government to favor small businesses and essentially say we’re going to reduce the taxes and the pressure on the small businesses. We’re going to advantage local small businesses that are here and paying tax. Um we’re going to create special economic trading zones if your business is based here uh and is of a smaller size. We’re going to basically make ourselves highly competitive for small businesses to show up and do their aame. And what about big businesses? punish punish big businesses that that uh I wouldn’t punish them. I would just tilt the pl I’m 100% with him. Tilt the playing field towards smaller businesses and startups. You know, I I’m not sure if you’ve heard about this thing that uh I just joined the board of called Enterprise Britain that that um Brent Herman who does Founders Forum Y and Steve Fitzpatrick who founded OO just started. It’s called Enterprise Britain. It’s a group of us who have gotten together uh with the express purpose of doing exactly pretty much what you what you describe, which is to try to make Britain an even better environment for business, mostly small and medium-sized businesses. And one of the great challenges here is to f try to find capitalist structures that allow small companies to turn into larger companies while remaining here and not fleeing to a better place. But I’m I am 100% in agreement with this. And you can have an incredibly dynamic, fast growing economy where all of the benefits flow to the people at the very top and everybody else gets screwed. And you have to do both. You have to do both. I mean, one of the most important subjects at the moment in society is artificial intelligence. And we you probably saw recently Eric Schmidt did a commencement speech in front of thousands of students and every time he said the word stage every time he said the word AI um one of the things that Anthropic or one of the leading AI companies said recently is that entry- level jobs are at risk and I’ve got this graph here showing the decline of entrylevel job postings. I believe it was on LinkedIn um pull from somewhere and it shows that they’re consistently dropping and dropping and dropping. AI is I think about it so often. I was up late last night trying to think through some of this stuff because Anthropic released a report yesterday showing that AI models will be able to improve themselves theoretically in the future and what this might mean. How disruptive do you think AI is going to be as it relates to job losses? You know, I don’t think Bernie Sanders latest idea is terrible. US will own 50% of all the air companies. It is absolutely true that AI has monetizing for free humanity’s intellectual property and a few people are going to directly benefit from that. And I think that um in the same way that Norway created a sovereign wealth fund with this enormous asset that they had uh creating a sovereign wealth fund with 50% of the value created by AI and recycling that into uh I think it’s unclear exactly how those benefits should be should be recycled, but trying to find a way to make some of that value a cushion for the disruption that it will inevitably cause. I don’t think that’s a crazy idea. It’s a good idea for China and the US. Yes. Yes. But not for anywhere else necessarily. It’s not going to help Senagal or Southampton much. No. In fact, it’ll damage a lot of those places. You know, like the Philippines has benefited enormously by being the outsourced back office uh for a lot of small businesses that AI can now do a lot of those those uh those jobs. Um, one of the things that I always come back to is the idea that say the UK has 5.7 million businesses. We have a million unemployed people. We need 1/5if of the businesses to employ one person. AI does actually make your business better. Like AI is really good at helping you with your marketing. AI is great at helping you do legal contracts. There are 100 ways that AI could actually make 5.7 million businesses a little bit better to the point where they want to hire someone. And if we can incentivize those things to happen, businesses are trained on how to use AI to their advantage and tax breaks for small businesses that are hiring and we will, you know, there’s actually 5.7 million businesses and a million unemployed people. That’s a good there’s a good match there. Uh, you know, um, a lot of people have been talking about AI agents and, uh, what an AI agent can do for anyone that doesn’t know is it can go on your computer and it can get any task you want done on the computer. um whether that’s you know editing tasks or whether it’s you know manual data entry tasks or whatever it is it can click around on a computer and do things a lot of the entry level roles were often given are that kind of work I think my entry- level entry- level job job after I dropped out of university was kind of doing that kind of thing there was also a little bit of a sales component where I’d cold call people and AI can now do the cold calls too and increasingly if we just play the rate of development forward we’ll be able to do those things so if these businesses get more and more efficient um again it comes back to at an entry- level point is what what role will entry-level team members have in these kind of companies. So what’s interesting for me I have a group of companies small businesses uh dynamic small businesses we’ve implemented AI in all of them and as a result we’ve hired people who have you hired entry-le people we’ve hired some entry- level people who are augmented by AI so they become more valuable because of AI but like things like appointment setting we’ve ended up hiring more sales people because we get more appointments we we use it with our marketing and we end up hiring people who can actually have those final conversations with people at the very core of my organiz organizations, we have an AI layer and the AI layer has context and skills and models and security layer, right? All all in there and it spits out amazing information and data and reports and tells us who to talk to and why to talk to them and what to talk to them about. All these things are happening because of AI. But it doesn’t get around the point that like if you think about Uber, uh DAR has been pretty clear that the 9 million drivers they have, I think it is, are going to lose their jobs in the future. If you think about the the other sort of white collar professions we’ve described, they those roles won’t won’t exist in the future. Well, I should say those roles will be will be will be changed. Correct. If I put on my more optimistic hat, the thing is is that all businesses operate in a competitive environment and there are two ways to compete. One is to be cheaper, the other is to be better. Right. And the thing about AI is that yeah, there are tasks that you can automate away, but one person with good AI tools may be able to do the job of five, right? And yeah, you could eliminate that job or you could keep that person, give them the right tools and out compete your competitors. The right tools. The right tools. I think there’s an assumption that I mean this is of course what happened with computers, right? I mean I’m I am older than you guys. So I reme I remember when calculators hit. You had to be there to realize how freaked out people were about calculators, right? Like people were talking about like what are the accountants going to do and and and will kids learn math anymore? I mean it was it was like extremely controversial to bring a calculator to to to school and then along came computers and the truth is that computers didn’t reduce the amount of work that people did they increased the amount of work that people did and I do believe that there are ways in which AI is probably going to do that and so the job loss may not be as apocalyptic as it now feels like it may be because again at the end of the day you have two ways ways to choose to compete. If you I, you know, you can get rid of somebody and do X, but you could keep that person and have them do 5X and out compete, you know, your competitors in another dimension. I think that that will be something that people are likely to do. Doctors are just going to be better doctors. I think I I definitely agree that there’s going to be this sort of augmentation of certain individuals. I think maybe the difference between like calculators or computers versus this is AI is coming into a technological economy and it is coming in with instant scale in a way that when Anthropic shipped their new model last week it went to all of us at once everywhere in the world. We were all boom step changed with computers. I remember the day that like my dad ordered the first computer for our house and we waited for weeks and weeks and weeks and then we got it. It was super expensive to get one. We unboxed it. I remember us all stood around it looking at and it was like this Windows 95 machine that had like no memory on it. Um so the distribution the sort of disruption was much slower. The p the pace the pace was much slower. Right. And I understand that like with my with our team there’s no intent we have no intention at all to let anybody go because of AI. We’re reskilling people, training people. However, would we end up hiring less people, especially in the near term, than we would have otherwise. I think that’s maybe conceivable. Yeah. Um, and a lot of companies I think are in that position where I actually was speaking to someone yesterday and they said we’re just letting the natural attrition in our call center take care of the shift, which means they they have they lose 25% of people from their call center naturally. They’re just not hiring other people back in. And actually client CEO said the same thing. He said we’re just letting the attrition take care of it. I’ll give you another example though just to counter that. Um I work with a husband and wife couple in the north of England who they had a little video production agency and like one or two people who did a little bit of contracting with them. Uh they used AI to create a piece of software and that piece of software uh helps automate script writing and a few of the things that they do. Um they launched a waiting list for this. They got 5 a half thousand people to join the waiting list. They then signed up their first 1500 clients to a piece of software that cost almost nothing for them to build in 4 months. Um, and now they’re hiring a team of 10 people. And this is a husband and wife who had a small constrained business who are now uh building out a bigger business. And this is something that could never have happened. They haven’t had to raise billion millions of dollars. They haven’t had to hire 30 40 people. So this this tiny little SAS opportunity is suddenly possible because of AI and take take that AI away and that fast growth dynamic little businesses is yeah I think anecdotally I could come up with lots of examples as well where particular people are highly entrepreneurial they come across opportunity but there’s this broad if you just zoom out on the way that people generate value in the economy at the moment so much of that is going to change and it’s going to be quite quick it feels like oh totally and I don’t know what you do about like what do you do about that sudden shift all this this happened in the Jevans paradox The person who had a tractor displaced a hundred people who were in the field and those hundred people went into the city looking for work all at once. And it was Charles Dickens wrote the tale of two cities. He wrote u uh Oliver Twist. Uh guess who else came out of the Jevans paradox? Our good friend KL Marx who came up with the most toxic ideas ever created and written down, right? He came off the back of the Jevans paradox. So what you do about it? Uh UBI. I’m not a big fan of UBI at the moment. Isn’t that kind of what this 50% Bernie Sanders thing would do? Well, it’s it’s sovereign wealth fund basically, but you have to find a way to help manage through this transition and you have to I think depend on the value create. Look, the the whole the the whole valuation that AI is predicated on is job disruption, right? You can’t you can’t get to those numbers unless you’re displacing lots of jobs. Exactly. And and if that’s true, then we should grab some of that value that is created and recycle it into the economy to try to cushion the disruption that it creates. This is a bit of a socialist idea, right? I don’t call that socialism. What do you call that? I don’t know. Just common sense. But wouldn’t that broadly apply to all all companies and rich people? If there’s if they are disrupting the economy and taking an unfair share of that disruption, should we not just grab and recycle back in? But that’s the b that is the basis upon which every high functioning democracy in the in the world operates. I mean every high functioning democracy in the world has progressive taxation labor standards. There’s a difference between seizing private property uh which would be a socialist way of doing things and a communist way of doing things and owning strategic assets which which are private property. So, for example, the the Dubai government owns the uh physical hotel buildings that uh that run Dubai and it leases those out to hotel operators, but it keeps money in its sovereign wealth fund because it says basically a big part of Dubai is that we own these kind of land assets. So, do you think we should go and take a a portion of these companies? Well, the difference was the Dubai government actually developed those assets, right? But we’re we’re already too far down the line with within a capitalist society like we might say we might say that data is the new oil and data is a common good and it is a common asset that has been um sequestered illegitimately by these companies. So therefore you’re not seizing what they created. You’re you’re basically saying I’m sorry but you need to pay a license back to this sovereign wealth fund because you’re using a common asset that you were able to essentially seize. But you stole it you stole it from Africans and British people. You saw it from people in Australia. You stole it from people in Canada. The biggest issue that we’re having is that we’re actually the nature of the entire economy is changing. So this happened 250 years ago where the nature of the economy was land and we had an economic system called feudalism and colonialism. And then the nature of the economy was industrialization and we had a economic system called socialism and capitalism. And now the nature of the economy is actually fundamentally changing. So in economics there’s four factors of production. in land, labor, capital, enterprise. We’re now swinging like a pendulum from land through capital, labor, and now we’re actually in an enterprise economy. And we need some sort of economic system that reflects the reality of how money and wealth is made. Is that is that go to OpenAI, take 50% of their company and then pay out the profits of that 50% to the people. I’m always skeptical of any socialist ideas. If it comes from Bernie Sanders, I’m skeptical. Okay. But Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. Like let’s be socialist. He he says he’s a socialist. Socialism is social no socialism is you know the government owning all the means of production right look there are a million forms of capitalism right we every country operates slightly differently and there I don’t think that Bernie Sanders is saying that we should abandon markets. What he is saying is we should manage markets for the public benefit, not exclusively for the benefit of the owners of capital. And I think that’s really different. You know, with like an Amazon, they’re using the roads. Yeah. And the infrastructure, correct? So would you go take 50% of those companies as well for public benefit and then pay it out to No, but the citizens, we effectively do take part of them in the form of taxes. Right. Now, now, now the taxes that we impose on those companies, I would argue, and Dan may may agree, are insufficient. They do not accurately reflect the value that we give them. They don’t return equal value that So, you’re saying increase the taxes on companies like Amazon? You both agree. Well, Amazon is very successfully avoiding taxes. Um, so, so would you agree to increase? I think we need to have we need to close tax loopholes. taxes like all other companies that operate within the econom

competition with Amazon. Look, one of the biggest issues that we have is we have widespread incompetence in governments. And I’ll give you a quick stat on this. In the UK government, you are 10 times more likely to die than to be fired for poor performance. And the UK government fires people at 1600th the rate as normal businesses for incompetence. So we have an accumulation of massive incompetence in government. So the idea you can come up we can come up with all the best ideas under the sun at this table. We have a fundamentally incompetent set of people who have misaligned incentives. uh we have basically a revolving door between financial industrial complex, technology industrial complex. Well, the Singaporean government, they basically said that we’re going to have a very high degree of meritocracy in government that essentially we promote and fire based on outcomes and merit merit. Singapore is a miracle of governance. Amazing governance. It’s it’s a it’s a miracle of governance, but it is a very small place. Totally. and perhaps the only place in the history of planet Earth that has benefited from uh a well-meaning dictator, right? Dubai. It’s an astonishing story of capability, competence, for foresight. Um so what is the solution with this AI revolution? It’s I think we all agree that there’s going to be job disruption and there’s going to be a new type of job. There’s going to be probably a delta of people transitioning to those new types of jobs. Um, I I’ve said this before, but I even noticed that within our recruitment processes now, we are really looking for people that have a certain set of skills. We always ask, and it’s harder and harder and harder to find those people. Um, well, that’s training. That’s education and training. It is. The school system needs to produce people that you would want to hire. Yeah. And that takes a lot of time. In my hiring, I ask the question, how deep are you in the AI rabbit hole? And anyone who says, oh, a lot, I’m like, okay, join the team. And and also if you think about humanoid robots, Elon Musk’s pay packet mandates him to deliver millions of humanoid robots or else he doesn’t get his big pay packet. If we think about robotics and humanoid robots coming through, we watched the other day Figure AI released this video showing a humanoid robot sorting packages on a production line for 8 days straight, beating a human sorting those packages on the production line. My car in Los Angeles now drives itself and as do the taxis and there’s a huge race to make autonomous vehicles. Um I’m sure there’s new jobs created and I understand in foresight it’s hard to understand what those will be. I assume there’ll be more human jobs, more sales jobs. I My only thing that I can say is that the future is small businesses. It’s it’s small teams of 10 people making YouTube channels. It’s small teams of 10 people making software. It’s like the the when you have millions and millions of little small businesses, everyone’s happier. But if you read what Anthropic released yesterday, they’re making the claim that actually we’re getting to a point where it will be an individual with a team of agents who can now make a trillion dollar company without hiring a single person. And actually, when you said about making software making that they would they might argue that that’ll be agents making that software. Anthropic said that the amount of code each individual’s producing on their own is eight times. And this one particular quote which I actually screenshot on my phone last night comes from an engineer at Anthropic who was saying they feel useless because now they they say they haven’t written a line of code in months and months and months. This anthropic engineer was basically saying like I come to work this agent writes the code for me and I kind of sit and watch and I feel useless. Um so all those examples you gave what I’m okay but what would happen in that situation is you would have a massive deflationary effect the cost of if if there was one person doing all sorts of things in the economy then the cost of that would go to the cost of the electricity to run it right so massive deflationary and then the question becomes well what does everyone do right what do we all do we do human things right humans always come up with things to do with each other uh like if I was to tell my grandfather that there is a job called a personal trainer who takes you to the gym and counts your reps, right? My grandfather would go, “That’s insane.” And I say, “Oh, there’s 50,000 personal trainers in gyms all over the country.” So, there are always these crazy new jobs that get created. I look at what trust fund kids do, right? Cuz a lot of trust fund kids, they go, they don’t have to worry about money and they don’t have to worry about resources and they go find something to do. And it’s always weird. We’re going to traverse through, you know, potentially the jobs we have now involuntarily go through this transition moment where I think history is quite clear on what happens in these transition moments. It gets ugly. It gets ugly. Yeah. And then we’ll come to, you know, what I’m hearing is that you’re saying we will come to some kind of utopia on the other end of this. No. No. No. I don’t think I don’t think there’s going to be utopia. What do you think? Uh, look, I I don’t think utopias exist. I do think that markets are the greatest social technology ever invented for creating prosperity and for enobbling the human spirit. That is not because markets are efficient allocators of scarce resources which is the conventional view. Markets are an evolutionary system that enables groups of people to come together and solve complex problems and solutions to human problems is what prosperity actually is. It isn’t GDP or money. And the best world that you can build, I think, on earth is a market economy governed by a robust democracy that robustly includes all citizens in that economy. And your your answer is small business. And I I’m 100% behind you and I I wish you all the success. My answer is that a lot of people are going to end up working for large companies and or medium companies and that we have to ensure or my part of the answer is that we have to have standards in place to ensure that those companies treat people well enough so that they can be dignified participants in both the society and the economy. And that will require innovation in laws and rules and all sorts of mechanisms to enable that. But that there is no alternative if you want to live in a decent society. And and the but the high order bit for me and the reason I work on economics is that the existing economic paradigm basically says markets are perfectly efficient. We should just let them run and you know what comes will come. So you’re really focused on increasing the workers lives and pay. So if you understand the economy from the conventional point of view, including people in the economy is a liberal luxury that you can afford if and when you have growth. And I think everything the new economics says is that including more people in the economy more robustly is actually the tech technical mechanism that makes both economies grow and democracies function. So to simplify that what does that mean if you from a policy perspective it is very hard to answer in an uncertain future in an AI if you don’t know what what’s going to happen with the economy. I mean we have no idea how much job loss there will be. We have we are we are I think Dan says quite rightly going through a transition where the shape of the economy will change. So do we do nothing through the No. No. We aggressively experiment with ways to include more people in the economy. Bernie Sanders idea is an experiment. What’s the worst that can happen? Like just think about it. What is the worst that can happen? The worst would be is that you give government more money and they leverage more debt. And as soon as the government has the the economy of the United States does not need assets to leverage more debt. We just created we just created a we didn’t need that is not true. That is just not true. We have $37 trillion of debt. All of which was basically given away in wars or tax cuts for rich people. So but they they can print more money. Absolutely. But these two things they are not connected. But the truth is that the worst that could happen by running that experiment is that there will be a few dozen guys who are worth a hundred billion and not 200 billion. Like that is the worst that that can do. Is that going to be the end all beall? Will it work perfectly? I have no idea. But what I do know is that democracies need to move aggressively to try to make sure that these technological innovations benefit the society broadly, not just a few people narrowly. If I think about the UK, if you implemented something like that here, would would people leave? So if you implemented, say we had an AI company here and you said, well, the UK is going to own half of it. Would that company just restructure somewhere else because it’s digital? They they probably would. But now you’re back to this old problem. We’ve been seeing this with the data centers. People are going I read a report that said the reason Open AI didn’t open their data center in the UK, which they said they were going to, is because energy costs four times more here. So they said, “Well, go somewhere where it’s cheap.” Yeah. And would that not be the case here where you’d get the sort of brain drain where And the risk that you run with this Bernie Sanders model is that we leverage the the government’s balance sheet or non-balance sheet to take out huge debt in the name of our kids and our grandkids that they have to repay. They buy up all these intangible assets and then they’re left holding those assets that may or may not perform and may and will have debt regardless. And then the super clever little anthropic guys say, “Oh, actually we’re just going to restructure to Vanuatu now. Leave you guys holding all of that toxic debt and we’re going to go run this from somewhere else.” That could happen. The other thing that could happen is if let’s say OpenAI as one example are making $100 profit at the moment, $100 profit at the moment and Bernie Sanders says we want $50 of that profit. China are going to have an additional theoretically an additional $50 to invest in their frontier models and getting ahead. Isn’t saying I I’ll take $50 your 50% of your profit. What is he saying? I’ll take 50% of your stock which means that then the US would have a equal voting. Yeah. Well then you’re going to get gridlock in terms of voting right. So if the US own 50% of the company and Sam Alman let’s say owns 50% they’re going to have to vote on decisions. Well you could put some directors from the from the public on that board. And what happens when to a company when you have the government on the on the voting board I mean you effectively have this in lots of countries where labor has a seat at the table right with one of your companies if half of your board were a government do you think you’d be able to be as innovative move as fast I mean we talked about the bureaucracy of of the government yeah I I’m not suggesting that half the should be on the government yeah mind you that’s what China has as well China has got essentially the the CCP on the board of all of those companies as well and they work and they move pretty Yeah, there slightly different government, isn’t it? Yeah, it is. And there’s different levels of competence and and meritocracy hierarchy. I I I worry about all of these solutions that empower government cuz I don’t trust government. My entire life has been one thing after the next made worse by government, right? That’s that’s my reality. Born in 81 1981, I’ve never had a good experience with government. Okay, but dude, you you grew up in Australia and you live in the UK. If you hate government so much, move to the Congo. Seriously, you are look I mean it is just no one likes to be constrained. Everyone wants other people held to a high standard. And it it just seriously there is no libertarian paradise in the world where nobody follows any rules, nobody pays any taxes and everybody lives like a king. If you hate government, there are plenty. There are 220 countries in the world. 150 of them effectively have no government. Why do you not move your base of operations to those places? Because you would instantly be somebody’s, you know, I’m not I’m not an anarch I’m not an anarchist. when a government doesn’t fire incompetent people. Okay, but everybody agrees the previous governments, everybody agrees democracy is the worst econcept except all the others, right? Like of course it is easy to to to point to these things and say they’re incompetent, but it is it is just not honest to say that government doesn’t improve our lives. There is literally no example on planet earth of a high functioning society without big government. I’m not saying well without big government. That’s not true. Give me an example. Singapore. Singapore is insanely big government. 22% of GDP. Okay. But they are involved in every element of people’s lives. High competence. They fire incompetent people. And and again, we’re in violent agreement that we should have governments that do that. Yeah, you should work hard on the politics in the UK to to bring in reforms that would increase the velocity of competence. That’s the answer. That is the answer is to is to work hard to build a government that is as high functioning as they can be. But here’s the thing and I think you would agree. Look, Microsoft I big companies are equally incompetent. Microsoft bought my company Aquana for $6.4 billion. This is a company that was growing at 40% year-over-year. It’s been so long. 30 40% year-over-year, $750 million in sales, $200 million at EBA or something like that. 3,000 4,000 of the best internet advertising people on planet Earth. And in one year, it was gone. Wow. Gone. And they wrote the entire $6 billion off 5 years later. Incompetence lives everywhere. And and I I just don’t think it is realistic to say, “Oh, pucks and them, you know, they suck.” I I just Dan, there is no place on earth without government cocreating prosperity for for sure. Here’s where I put my hope in this post AI world. I want to stack the favor I want to stack the economy in the favor of the small family business and the small business. You I’m 100% with you. I agree. I agree. The question is how do we get there? And you are completely aligned in some ways. We need to aggressively tilt the balance of power in the economy from the biggest most exploitive companies to small and medium-sized businesses. So I see big government and big corporate uh sucking the life out of little people and little businesses. And I think you are ab no doubt correct in some cases. But the only thing in human societies that has the power to confront big business is big government. Right? There’s ne in the history of the world, there has never been another force that what that had the power to to address this problem. And the reason I care so much about this economic paradigm is that all of the problems you were describing Yeah. are a consequence of an economic paradigm that was designed to create those problems. That’s why we are in the box we’re in is because neoliberalism literally said the bigger is better and that we should afford no protection to small businesses that we should actively advantage the largest players that that free trade is good for everyone. all of these things that weren’t true and dis and ended up advantaging in this room me effectively and you know a few thousand people from around the world and disadvantaged everyone else. And I think the starting point for for change is is addressing the fact that we just understood economic cause and effect in inadequately that the things that we thought would lead to growth led to concentration. Right? And the things that we thought were bad for the economy, in many cases, those were good for the economy. Because look, again, you know the UK so much better than me, and I I hate to argue with you about it, but the truth is that you cannot sustain a capitalist system unless most people are paid enough to buy the stuff that that the system produces. And there has to be a balance. And there and again in the history of the world there is no example of a thriving economy that did not impose those standards or or create through some mechanism the counterveiling power that enabled the the the the owners of capital and everybody else to work together to benefit everyone in the long term. You are you and I are in so much agreement on on most on most of like an inch apart. What is that inch? So, I’ve seen Nick’s policies implemented and I don’t feel it’s enough. And the reason I don’t feel it’s enough is I think people are more than consumers. They’re more than wallets. Okay. You’ve only heard me talk about the minimum wage and something else. You haven’t seen all of the policies. But the missing piece for me is ownership. When people had houses, they felt really good about communities. When people had small businesses that they owned, they felt really good about their communities. And when people own some shares in the overall economy of the fastest growing companies in the economy, then they feel like they’re participating. So for me, the non-negotiables of fixing this problem is that people can easily own a house, own a business, and own shares in the fastest growing economy. Yes. Yes. Yes. And how do we get there? Yes. Yes. Yes. I totally agree. And I think I I just think that Dan and I have a slightly different view on the path. I think capitalism is ownership. It’s ownership. That’s what capitalism is. Otherwise you if you don’t own anything you’re not a capitalist. If we your agree on the path but the the sorry you agree on the outcome but the path. Yes. But how did Nick get rich? Like Nick started companies. He owned he owned a family business. He leveraged the family business into an investment into Amazon. It’s it’s own but it’s ownership. Ownership. Ownership. And did a lot with it. Right. But but I’m saying let’s be fair. But how is that applicable? You’re saying other people should do what Nick did. Yeah. But it’s hard to get born into a family that owns a small business. And well, if there’s more people who own small businesses, then there are more than there it is easier, right? I I just want I I do want more people. What do you mean by this? Well, it it’s all about how how you get there, right? That you overlook the fact being born on third base. We should aim for more people to be born on third base. If more people the third base is coming from a family that owns a small business with ex or whose parents earn enough income to enable all of that, right? And and and and look, not everybody who is affluent, in fact, a tiny minority of people who are affluent uh uh uh are are small business owners, right? that they are mostly doctors and lawyers and professionals of a variety of kinds who work in med in big companies in middle management roles and they I’m not saying everyone should be a small business. Yeah. So anyway, I just think that I I think the high order bit here, I mean, for me, and and this may sound like too squishy for you, is that is that societies have both the right and the responsibility to organize their economies in ways that benefit everyone. Is socialism the answer? No. Socialism is most definitely not the answer because socialism, again, we we need to operationally define that term. Yeah. If socialism means, look it up in the dictionary, the state ownership of the means of production, that is a catastrophe, right? And it’s a catastrophe because all socialism can do is split up existing prosperity in a fairer way. It can do that. The problem is is that socialism does not know how to create more prosperity. Okay? So for one minute you can make everybody better off but 10 years later everyone is poor because once because this is the power of markets is what markets do as evolutionary systems is they generate increasing prosperity. They that that’s what solutions to human problems is, right? Going from aspirin to antibiotics is economic progress, right? And the beauty of markets is that they’re evolutionary systems where every business effectively is an organism competing to fill a niche which is the perfect product for whatever market segment they’re creating. You are you’re a canonical example of this, right? What you have done here and thank goodness for it, right? Because in a world where there wasn’t capitalism, there’s no way you you you have effectively independently created what was a television network. It’s miraculous. Like you have more reach than MSNBC, dude. That is the power of markets, but you know, they have to be harnessed to benefit people broadly. This does not mean that the profit mo motive shouldn’t exist, but and and how though this is what I’m trying to get to. And there sounds a little bit like there’s this middle ground we’re like playing with where socialism on one end is okay you know short-term whatever you said then on the other end you’ve got this like extreme capitalist approach and I was yeah those are the the less a fair capitalism right and this socialist status control both of those things are terrible ideas am I right we want something in the middle on on the left side then on the socialism side you get lower growth in your economy over the long term correct okay and then in a capitalist economy you might have higher growth both but then you have more inequality. Correct. And the sweet spot and this is this is the one of the most important this is the important matter one of the most important points I would like to make is that all of the evidence suggests that when you come to the middle and you have a market economy that is actually actively managed to include people that is the growth sweet spot. You have more growth. So more growth absolutely GDP growth rates in the United States were 4 4 1/2% for decades 40 50 60s and then as soon as the neoliberals took over in 1975 GDP growth rates fell first to 3% and now to 2% when they did what? Cut taxes for rich people deregulated powerful people and suppressed wages for everybody else. So, the most important socioeconomic fact, as I’ve said many times before, in the United States is that the median full-time worker earns about $60,000 a year today, if they had maintained their same share of GDP since 1975, instead of earning 60, they would earn $120,000 a year. So, there’s you’re saying there’s no trade-off in the middle because there’s trade-offs on both ends, right? We just described the trade-offs. You’re saying that in the middle there’s this that’s the sweet spot where there’s where there’s maximum amounts of growth, maximum amounts of participation, maximum amounts of political stability. This is what Darren Oasamuglu and James Robinson call the narrow corridor. This perfect balance between less afair capitalism and socialism. I mean socialism is stupid because because it kills markets but this impulse to more fairly share let’s call that where socialism comes from this impulse to have a society which is more egalitarian but what all the data suggests is that when you build a market economy that basically tries to make sure that everyone participates where workers get a fair share of the wages where as the company as the economy grows as it did for years. And you’ve got another you have a you you have a you have a a great graph in here. So for decades as productivity grew everybody benefited and then in the 70s it decoupled and as soon as it decoupled GDP growth rates fell right if we had and and all of this all of this was a consequence of policy of policy. So here’s another thing the new economics teaches is that there’s this idea that a middle class, a thriving middle class is the consequence of economic growth. That if we just let the economy grow, we’ll get this great middle class. And that is because economists assume the e the economy is something called ergotic. Now erotic means, let me show you the difference between two games. One is erotic, one is non-orgotic. Rock, paper, scissors is an ergotic game. And what that means is the outcome of the next game has nothing to do with the game before. Yeah. Right. Monopoly is a non-orgotic game. And in Monopoly, no matter how much how many times you go to Monopoly school, if you play a game of Monopoly long enough, one person will own everything and everybody else will have nothing. And that is what a market economy is. It is characterized by luck, path dependence, and compounding. The past. The p. Well, it’s the past, right? Where you start. Yeah. Right. Some of us started on third base. Some of us, like you, as I recall, started on actually first base or home plate or something like that. Well, I think Yeah, probably second base. Okay. Maybe second base, but whatever. But we have parents that love me electricity at your house. Yeah. Okay, fair point, right? And you’re very capable and good-looking and all the rest of it, right? It could it No, I mean, just if we’re just being honest, right? We’re just being honest. you had some natural advantages, but you know, in Monopoly, you land on Park Place, the first roll, you’re rolling. You get four good rolls in Monopoly, you’re going to win the game, right? And compounding, the better you do, the better you do. And the thing about in a in an honor Godic system is that both advantages and disadvantages compound. Surely you know people in your life who have had a couple of things of bad luck, right? And then they spiral into oblivion, right? And so what that means is that a a middle class and thus a high functioning society with social cohesion is always always a a deliberate construction. It is always created by policy. Always. And all of these things that we are pushing back against him and his way, me and my way are a consequence of basically an economic theory that said to policymakers, do it that way. And it was a mistake. And we should recognize that mistake and try to heal these mistakes, which we can. We can have a great society. We can have an ownership society. We can have anything we want. We just have to decide to do it and not let a small group of incredibly rich people dictate the terms of the economy. This is within our grasp. What are your thoughts then? I agree in principle with all of that, especially the last bit. A small group of very, very powerful people dictating the economy, meeting up in Davos, coming up with our how our lives should live. Um, there’s there’s more to the story here. In the early ‘7s, they decoupled uh the the dollar from uh gold and they created the Fiat system, which meant they could print money that inflated assets that financialized it financialized assets, including the family home, which meant that as soon as we could print money, we could inflate the value of family homes and make it out of reach of most people. Well, and then finance took over and became 20% of the economy. Yeah. We ended up with these two massive institutions which is the technology industrial complex and the finance industrial complex and those two institutions have driven a wedge in society. My only difference with Nick and it’s a small difference is that I don’t believe raising the floor is going to be enough. I I really do I I I didn’t say it’s enough. I I it’s table stakes. Yeah. It is and and I my experience with that is it’s a minimum is because it’s because I’ve seen the minimum and and the pitchforks are out here in the UK where we have that minimum. My my worry here is that where we are the technology economy and the finance economy is racing as if it’s in a car and then all of the workers who are selling time for money, labor for money, it’s as if they’re running and we’re saying ah you guys just needs better sho comfier shoes. If we give you a pair of Nikes, will you guys be happy? And it’s like this is not going to close that gap. Um we we have to acknowledge that technology and finance are the two like big funds and big tech are the comp are basically hollowing out the middle class. And if we don’t acknowledge who the real bad guys are, when I say bad guys, I’m not sure they’re real bad guys, but essentially systemically they’re systemically they’re the bad guys. We need to essentially say, “Hey, big finance, big tech, you can’t financialize our houses. That’s for us to live in and for us to own.” Um, and you also can’t just eradicate all of our little to small businesses. We we need to tip the scales back in the favor of those small businesses because little towns, you go into any town in England, little like little towns in England, the thriving towns that everyone wants to live in, they have lots of small businesses. They have a butcher, baker, candlestick, maker type like stuff is going on. By the way, the best high street in London is the one I live on. Maran High Street. So, you agree? 100%. Yeah. One thing I find interesting is you’re saying that there’s this sweet spot in the middle. Yes. Where you you still get the the upside dynamism. You think there’s a sweet spot in the middle and decency. It’s a very narrow sweet spot and it’s very hard to achieve because Germany has really tried so hard and they’ve like their economy is collapsing. Their economy is going so badly at the moment. Um and they’ve tried everything. They’ve got workers have to be on the board. For example, of every company you’ve got to have a worker on the board. So they’re like doing as much as they can to do inclusion and the German economy. Okay, but so where is it? What? Okay, but here here’s the thing is it’s it is simply not fair to say the German economy is collapsing. Like have you been to Germany? Like come on. Like have you been to Stockholm? Like these places are incredibly functioning. Yeah, there’s definitely a Ford momentum but the German car industry is getting hollowed out right now. China, right? China’s doing that. Okay. But just because workers are on the board of German companies that and German people are unhappy the you you can’t necessarily connect these things. I just want to acknowledge though that like there are places like Dubai which are very close to lay fair capitalism with a sovereign wealth fund. And just just hold on. If you talk to someone who lives in Dubai, they freaking love Dubai. Like they they are so they’re the happiest people like and they talk they talk millionaires entrepreneurial people. Yeah. The rich people not the not the poor brown people who are well I mean because they b Indians and don’t know who well they they Yes. And also when I talk to a lot of the Uber drivers there and I talk to people who work in cafes there and all that sort of they’re all quite pro Dubai as well. But that’s because their other options are horrific. Yeah. That is it’s probably more extreme inequality isn’t it? It it’s more extreme inequality. quality because the place is growing until recently obviously with right but because the place is growing it feels like there’s a rising tide for everybody there’s something about economic growth that makes people very very happy and there’s something about a lack of economic growth that makes people miserable here in the UK for example okay but but just again Dubai is a place the UAE has been powered by the most extraordinary gusher of free cash probably the planet has ever seen I mean you Look up on your iPad there. The like the tailwind that economy gets from the unlimited resources. I wouldn’t say that’s why people love to buy it. They love it because of the entrepreneurial vibe. Like who like ambitious people? Yeah. So this is the rich excitement. Well, no. I see people. No, I see young people who want to have a crack and they’re because they’re they’re rich relative to the people doing the work. Well, they what they’re looking for is a place where their work will be rewarded. Let’s imagine the UK where your ability to get onto capitalism, your first million or your first 2 million is very easily low taxed in order to get things going for you economically. I I just want to see a situation where ambitious. Yeah. Like your ambitious people like what I hate is that I see these young people who are really super smart. I wish they were here building and they’re like you can’t succeed in the UK. they’ll just tax it off you as soon as you earn anything they take it. What if you’re not am and they leave? I think you’re benefited by a lot of the ambitious people. So when when you get one in if you get one in 10 people who are entrepreneurial or one in 100 people who are entrepreneurial, they’re creating optionality. They’re creating companies. The US is this the US is sort of set up for you the American dream. This is more of a US approach, isn’t it? What we have there is higher inequality. I’ll give you two to to to one extreme. the US, you hit the top rate of income tax when you hit $700,000. In the UK, it’s h 100,000 and and it immediately goes to 60% tax, 62% tax, and then it drops to 45% after that. Like, but there’s this kind of like Does it really? Yeah. It’s this it’s this it’s this weird. No, it’s this insane thing where you basically pay 20% 40% 60% 45% and it’s this kind of but to the point that people prefer the US the US approach sounds more leaving to the US like a lot of Brits are actually going to and the US has an inequality has higher inequality which means it’s probably more likely that the pitchforks will come out well for an ambitious person they don’t care about inequality right inequality is the opportunity to get ahead yeah they might not but from a social perspective the pitch folks are probably going to come out sooner in the US because of that inequality than in somewhere else. They seem to be coming out here in a big way. Like they’re coming out here, but they’re also coming out in the United States. Look at look at Zack Palanski uh is is gaining a huge political movement. Mandani in the UK, sorry, in New York is we’re seeing a rise of socialism in the United States. Okay. Zoran Mandami calls himself a socialist because he does not have another word for what he is doing. He has said seize the means of production. He said it and he said take houses off landlords like he is a he’s a card carrying socialist. Yeah. But he hasn’t done any really socialist things. I I just think that there there’s a bit of a confusion. But asking wealthy people to pay a little bit more tax is not socialism. uh standing up grocery stores in food deserts because no grocery store will will will will do it because it’s not profitable enough is not socialism. This is the government provisioning benefits to citizens, fixing potholes, making bike ramps, whatever the stuff he’s doing. These are not socialist things. What they are is not strictly neoliberal things, which is just like letting rich people run roughshod over everybody else. The thing that I see with say a food desert and a a store is that the tax system is so punitive that a small opportunity like setting up a grocery store with all the taxes and all the regulations and all the stuff the government puts on you, it’s just not worth doing it. There are better opportunities out there. Like I’m not talking about remove it for rich people. I’m saying for startups, for small businesses, for businesses that employ less than 200 people. If you basically create very positive exper very very positive conditions for small businesses to get started, they will set up a grocery store in a in a bad neighborhood because they go, “Yeah, you know what? I can figure out how it works in this.” Do do you think there’s a chance that we have a a bit of a bias as entrepreneurs? Everyone at this table is an entrepreneur. And for whatever reason, I think a lot of mine might be some like I don’t know trauma or whatever. I had a bias towards setting up a business and taking that risk. Whereas like my other three siblings, they didn’t do that. And I don’t know what I did to have that bias within me. Like if you really think about it, I it’s it was probably something my parents didn’t intend to do, which meant that at 18 when my four three siblings went to university and sort of followed that more one could say safer path. Well, yeah. Safer path. I dropped out. How angry were your parents when you Oh, they didn’t speak to them. My mom was Yeah. My mom’s Nigerian as well, so she didn’t she school when she was a child. Didn’t get an education. Can’t read. must have in a tough a tough understatement of what happened. But for whatever reason, that’s the path that I took and I’m I I can acknowledge that I’m in a bit of a minority. Yeah. And I think I sometimes consider like maybe I don’t realize that through privilege or through some genetic privilege or whatever. I had this particular orientation towards like entrepreneurialism that maybe other people don’t always have. And that means that they start the grocery store. I get crucified in the comments. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, right? I’m not saying everyone can be an entrepreneur. I’ve never said that. But the grocery store analogy there is someone would start that grocery store if it was easier. Well, not everybody would work. There’s always a risk-to-reward ratio and government brings in all sorts of regulations and government only really thinks about big businesses. If you talk to anyone in government, small businesses don’t exist and they just simply think, why hasn’t Tesco done it or why hasn’t like Walmart done it? Yeah, I I’ve never started a business in the UK, but I can tell you that in the United States, the the barrier to setting up a grocery store in a food desert is not the regulation. It’s Safeway. It’s the supply chain. It’s the It’s all the stuff that you’ve described, which makes it incredibly difficult for for for somebody to operate a single location grocery store. Yeah. So, what would you do about that? Uh so what I would do I is I would I would and again in the United States we used to have lots of laws that pointed the economy towards small businesses. So if I was in charge I would impose a much higher minimum wage but I would do it progressively. All the labor standards all the all of the regulations would be imposed progressively. And in terms of regulation I would make it far like for a big company there’s a lot of rags right? You have to follow every rule to the tea. For a small business, you have a lot more flexibility. It’s imp because because we need the standards, but it turns out to be really hard as a single proprietor even to even to read the manual, right? To know what you’re supposed to do. So to me, it would all be progressive. So it would be easy to get capital, easy to start a business, relatively unencumbered by by regulation, although constrained to a certain extent. There are terrible things that small business people do, too. Wait, how’d you make it easier to get capital? Oh, you could have government programs that were designed to help small businesses get off the ground. We have the British Bank that uh underwrites for the first 25,000 of loans. Yeah. We had the small business administration in the United States that did a lot of that work. Yeah. So, we we have a lending institution here that is uh 75% underwritten by government for £25,000 startup loan. Right. So, there is some some schemes that can can work. I started all my companies on a on a credit card. The key thing is is this. There’s a difference between entrepreneurials and startups that are intending to scale and just small businesses that want to exist as a small business. I’m really big on the idea that we want to we want communities that have lots of small businesses even if they have no intention to scale and exit and any of those sorts of things that they that old fashioned thing, right, where you just had a grocery store. Yeah. And and it’s a good and you weren’t trying to create Walmart. Yeah. You just wanted to run a grocery store. It’s hard though, isn’t it? cuz you you want to be CVS or you you want to you want to be a network. But with a grocery store idea, if you’ve got mom and pop grocery store here, then next to it you have let’s say I don’t know in the UK it’s called Spa which is a grocery store 7-Eleven. The problem is if those are next to each other and one has um economies of scale I 7-Eleven can buy the cucumber for 20% of the cost of the mom and pop shop. Then if you’re on that street the 7-Eleven is going to survive. That’s why that’s why we tilt towards the United States used to have laws that expressly prohibited that. And why did they get rid of them? Neoliberalism. So they got rid of the restrictions on Yeah. There there used to be express laws to make sure that big companies could not buy raw materials cheaper than than small companies. Like when I was young, when I was your age, if you wanted to buy a competitor, you were sweating bullets because you had that had to be reviewed by a body and if they thought that you were consolidating too much, they would just say no. But if you think I think about all my friends that have opened retail stores through their companies and they they only do that when they get really big because their ecom business is supporting it. So if you think about I know the gym sharks, the represents other actors. So you can’t okay with respect to retail you are largely correct it depends on what kind of retail like you could have a gym you can’t e-commerce a gym or you know there are all kinds of retail some of which is somewhat immune from e-commerce and some of which is getting destroyed by e-commerce doesn’t it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about retail they were regional manufacturing companies regional everything sure and it all went away and you have never experienced a world in which that used to exist Like your your entire business experience is this sort of neoliberal world of giant companies. True. And the world I grew up in, we young, I’m old, right? But I I remember what it was like to go to the video store and select videos from the video store. I remember what it was like. Yeah. Like I remember going to the CD store and listening to music and talking to the retail employees when I was growing up. The cool kids worked at the CD store, the geeky kids worked at the bookstore, and everybody worked at the everyone else worked at the grocery store. Yeah. And all of those business models are gone. And this is what I mean. We need to kind of tip back towards small business experimentation being protected and all of that. The other thing, too, and I should should raise this about minimum wage and giving people more money. The bottom half of taxpayers in the UK pay 9.5% of all the uh income taxes. The government could remove taxes off of 50% of workers in one move and it would cost 33 billion and you just get rid of that and then every single person in the bottom half of income earners gets a 10% pay rise to 15% pay rise. Right. I love it. So where do we get the 32 billion from? Just just keep in mind their budget is 1.4 trillion. I know. I know. I know. But we’re going to have to if we trillion this 15 million people. Yeah. I agree. I’m just saying where does the money cuz I know what’s going to happen. Karma is saying they found this 20 million billion20 billion black hole in the finances and they and that’s the reason why they’re saying they’ve had to cut back on pensions and these kinds of things. So if we add another 30 billion to that where where do we where do we get the money from? You’re talking about reduce the the amount of administrative burden to tax 15 million people and keep on top of the tax on 15 million people. Just the sheer volume of people who have to work at HMRC all of this insanity. No, but I’m saying where does the money come from? Yeah. So, out of 1.4 trillion, I’m pretty sure we could find half of 1% 1% of it or whatever to to get these number of people out of tax. Um, I think we could tax big corporations who are taking the piss. Uh, and I also think the economic spending rounds of getting those people, those poor, the poorer half of people should not be paying tax. If you give them more money, they’ll spend more money, right? They’re not Okay, I agree with you. So you’re saying tax big corporations more in the UK at point of consumption. Personally, I would make it a like very similar to a broadcast license that it’s a fixed fee that’s very hard to wiggle out of. So if I’m a let’s say I’m an open AI, yeah, you might have a broadcast license to pay uh to to access this market. So you’re going to charge say you say I’m going to charge Open AI 4 billion, 5 billion to access our market. Well, for example, Facebook is very much broadcasting videos and content all the time. So is YouTube. So is Google. All that sort of stuff. So you just simply say, “Guys, the cost of doing business in this country if you want access to this market is a fixed broadcast license fee of 500 million a year or whatever it is.” And you just say based on the number of views that you guys get and how much attention you suck out of our economy, we just essentially tax the attention. You’re literally if people are spending an hour a day on their phone doom scrolling, we’re that that is a broadcast. you’re broadcasting to our people, so therefore we’ve got a broadcast license. Um, so those are the types of things that I would look at because they’re very hard to wiggle out of. Do you think then these these companies like an open eye would would then as we said earlier just increase the subscription fee in this market and you see this sometimes where in certain countries something is cheaper. I remember going to the United I I used to go to the United States to buy my Apple products cuz it was cheaper there. Yeah. And then in the UK it cost me like not even not even a little bit. It was like hundreds of dollars more to buy a laptop here. the same laptop in this market versus this one cost different amounts of money. They they may choose to try and pass on that consumption tax to to consumers. Maybe they do do that. Uh maybe we could try and avoid maybe we could try and legislate against that that they have to essentially be on par with where they are in other markets that they they have to charge par. Um if we don’t if we don’t do anything, we essentially have nurses and uh you know like teachers and all the people who are in the normal 50% of the economy whose job is now to hold up the economy while Starbucks doesn’t pay taxes while Amazon doesn’t pay taxes while Google doesn’t pay taxes. And and Steve, I think all your questions are really really good, but they all point to the same thing, which it which is that, you know, the economy is a collective action problem, right? And you know, it’s a global action problem. It’s a global it’s a global collective action problem. And if we want if we want robust solutions to these problems, we’re going to have to robustly coordinate activity across the world. And you know like for during the Biden administration they tried really hard to do this global profit tax where where uh but that collapsed under the weight of pressure. But all you know again all of your questions I think are really good but they all point to the same fundamental weakness of of of governance and Nick you you you need to talk to your billionaire mates and also say if we don’t start investing in the economies that we do business with which you are saying right of course right it’s a lonely business I’ll just tell you but it’s like it’s like it’s like with those CEOs of those companies you know you drain this you drain the whole economy out and and and then where then what next I think on this pass through problem I was thinking I was looking at different ways that this ends up being applied. So if you think about the Big Mac, the Big Mac costs different things in different states depending on how much tax the that that state charges. So in Oregon the Big Mac is $8 whereas in Chicago it’s almost $9. Um if you think about like bookstores, you can buy one book on the high street for $20, the same book online is $10 because they’re passing through the cost. So it’s conceivable that if we we say to big corporations right you guys are going to pay a bigger tax to sell into the UK than the UK consumer that they’ll they might pass that on to the UK consumer and they might look at different markets and because you know they might say as a company we want to make 30% margin to make 30% margins in the UK is to bump the cost UK consumer could say I’m going to use a VPN and pretend that I’m going to be in a different market and pay a lower price and doesn’t matter you still have to pay the broadcast license if you want to be available in our in our country. These are hard problems and we need to know who is the person that we’re targeting. It’s it’s the black rocks of the world. It’s the it’s the big banks of the world. It’s the big mortgage. Like I had um say I had a private conversation with the CTO of a very large company technology business. And he was saying to me, he goes, “I don’t think the UK understands the situation it’s putting itself in and the EU with all this regulation.” He said to me, um, that we sell this particular product It’s a physical product and because the UK and I think EU have put this new law in where you have to have removable batteries. Interestingly, the unintended consequence of that is we have to stock more lithium batteries. More of them go into landfill and also your devices break because they’re no longer waterproof. So you’re going actually it’s harming the environment. And also he said the thing you guys don’t realize is that you’re actually not a big market anymore for us. And because South America’s coming online, we actually don’t have to sell the product here. And you think about this in terms of some of the regulations around AI as well. When a new product launches on a track, yeah, it goes in the US first because of regulations and then maybe No, it goes in the US first because it’s the biggest market. Biggest market. But also we have we’re our regulations around some software and GDPR and all these kinds of things means that sometimes we just don’t get the features. And sometimes in my history in our history of building the previous business I was in as creators we would sometimes have to wait 12 or 18 months to get the same tools that my competitors I know in the United States could use monetization tools. They they have the monetization tools first then we’d have to wait 18 months. The economy is a set of trade-offs. Like that is the problem. Like economics is called a set of tra the actual definition of economics is making trade-offs um and picking picking your trade-offs. I totally get it. Like regulation does actually suck for consumers and for businesses. Um and like the the EU is now overregulated to the extent that you can’t even take a a lid off of a bottle without, you know, the government being involved with how the lid comes off the bottle. And it’s killing it’s killing our dynamism. We are really just like and the US is underregulated and if you buy chicken in a in a store and and don’t cook it could be anything. One in three chances you’ll you’ll you’ll you’ll get uh either E.coli or salmonilla and your life expectancy is lower. Exactly. Everyone who eats in the US trade-offs comes back from the US and goes, “Oh my goodness, I hate I hate eating food in the US. It’s all terrible. It’s all trade-offs.” Does this not then mean our ultimate conclusion of this conversation is around morals and ethics around the trade-offs that we think are the right ones to make? Yes. And so it’s a question really of morals and ethics. Yes. Human flourishing. Yes. 100%. The the purpose of the economy is is to improve human human lives. The way to do this is to massively maximize small business power because when people get more complicated when when pe when people have to when I have to work shoulderto-shoulder with my workers, I treat people well, right? When I’m a mega corporation who have faceless workers down on the factory floor that I will never meet. I will never sit next to on a plane. I will never come in contact with my workers. I can treat them however I like. Why do you think that’s reductive, Nick? Uh, well, I think that what Dan is saying is true and massively insufficient. Of course, I mean, we’re in violent agreement about the small business point. Like, I don’t want to be naive and think we should go back to the 60s or something like that. Like, I don’t think that’s true. But again, here’s what the new economics shows. that corporate consolidation increases prices, lowers wages, decreases consumer choice, and decreases the rate of innovation. Right? And I 100% agree because innovation again that the conventional view of innovation, the conventional economic view of in innovation is this sort of great man theory is you have this smart rich guy who’s sitting somewhere and he he or she has this amazing idea and that’s innovation. That is not what innovation is. Innovation is always combinatorial in technology makes itself out of itself. You you start with a rock. The the rock was our first technology. And you did a lot of stuff with rocks. And we also had sticks. Actually, sticks were our first technology. But you tie a rock to a stick, you have a hammer, a spear, an arrow, an axe, a shovel. It goes on and on and on. And what that means in terms of policy is that because innovation is combinatorial, the more diverse people in a network who come together with different ideas and different sets of experiences, that is what drives the rate of innovation. And this is mathematically demonstrated that a diverse group of people working on a problem will absolutely consistently outperform a a a homogeneous group of high performers. And then when they when they become really successful, which will happen eventually if you let that system play out, you have this inequality unless you intervene at some point and recycle it. And then when you go to recycle it, you go get back to this issue of us having needing global cohesion. Yes. Because some people won’t want the recycling. Correct. And they’ll say, well, I’m just going to go to Ireland or I’m going to go to Dubai or I’m going to go somewhere else. And this is maybe a function of the new economy where people can just get up and leave and take their value with them. Yes. And this is the conundrum. This is the conundrum. But the meta issue above the conundrum is recognizing that citizens have both the right and the responsibility to want to address that problem. And we and you grew up in a world where it was illegitimate to address that problem that that that economics told you don’t worry about those problems. The market will sort it out. Is there like a radical idea of how to solve this? So, do we need like all the the very very rich people in the world to come together collectively and say we’re going to create a new model? Like how do how do you I don’t know. Is there any radical ways to solve this stuff or is it just all trade-offs once again democracy? One of the big radical ways is breaking up companies and it’s unthinkable. You know Jeff Bezos, right? Yes, I do. So, it was in my wedding. I wonder if he would lose more sleep about higher taxes or having his company broken up. Oh, for sure. Broken up. Cuz if you broke up uh Google from YouTube, if you broke up AWS, Amazon Prime and Amazon, if you like the biggest thing that scares the billionaires is backing competition with the market. And it’s like, oh my goodness, I don’t want to have to compete. I’ve got this amazing monopoly that just works. Right. So, but is is that a perfect solution? Cuz I was thinking it’s not a perfect solution. Pretty good solution. It’s the least worst solution available. It’s pretty it’s pretty good. It’s pretty effective. I mean, this is what Teddy Roosevelt did. These companies aren’t making any any money though. They’re like being subsidized by the mothership. So like in an let’s say Amazon Prime that’s competing against Netflix and dude these companies make money where they want to make money for for tax optimization and strategic reasons. Look, I mean you know like when we started Amazon.com and I’m not sure if you guys remember the whole hit on it was it’s not profitable, right? The secret to Amazon.com success is the negative cash conversion cycle. Right? For virtually every business on planet Earth, to grow requires capital, right? For all of your businesses, growth requires capital. But for Amazon.com, we took an order, we put up the website, you take an order, you instantaneously transmit that order to a book warehouse, which has all of the titles in stock. It’s shipped the next day, it’s received the next day. you ship it out, hit the hit the person hit the person’s credit card, but then you don’t have to pay the book seller for 90 days, right? And what that means is the bigger the company gets, the better cash flow gets whether you’re making money or not. So, we didn’t have to make money because we had most companies have to make money because if they don’t, they don’t have the cash flow to continue like Amazon Prime businesses and Yeah. And so there are things available that we could have made money in one minute just by increasing our prices by 3 or 4%. Yeah, these companies are also not worth trillions of dollars because they’re not profitable. They’re they’re worth trillions of dollars because they are making money. But the issue is is they have strategic monopolies. And if you really want to make them lose sleep, you need to break up strategic monopolies. You need to say there’s an actual limit to how big a fund can be. There’s an actual limit as to how big a strategic monopoly can be. uh you can’t have things that hedge naturally against each other and prevent real competition. So like these things are ways of and also ties up their attention. So while they’re thinking about not getting broken up, they’re also not competing with all the other guys out there. So like it’s it’s basically capitalism runs on competition. And this is the one thing that we’ve missed that the less competition. Yeah. Like when Adam Smith said capitalism works, he said it only works when there’s competition. If there’s one bakery in town, any bread at any quality, at any price is what you have to pay. As soon as there’s two bakeries in town, it has to be the best quality at the best price. Although with two, you can collude. But if you have five, it’s very hard. So, so Amazon has a monopoly over strategic monopoly. A strategic monopoly. So, what does one do with Amazon? You break it up. Yeah. Into what? AWS, Amazon Prime, Amazon retail. Fine. But they’ve still got a monopoly in online e-commerce theoretically. Yeah. Well, it’s just harder. it’s easier for someone to come along and compete. Right now, it’s very, very hard for me to compete with Amazon because they are pulling in cash from AWS. They’re pulling in cash from all these other subscriptions. There’s so Amazon basics. You could break up the retail. You could say you can have a bookstore, you can have an electronic store, you can have this. You can only you can’t be the everything store, right? So, you could there’s all sorts of ways that you but you have to acknowledge when someone has achieved a strategic think that’s a good idea. Do you still own shows on Amazon? No, sadly. Okay. I wouldn’t be here talking to you guys if I No, no, no, no. That’s true. Jeff won’t come. Uh, no. I sadly I sold my shares. But, uh, you know, I I am open to all of these ideas because I know I mean I am completely with Dan. I know that the world would be a better place if these companies were smaller and we had more competition. And again there is not there are no silver bullets to these complex problems the world faces. We are not at this table going to come up with this algorithmic idea that is just going to make the world a better place. It it none of these solutions are perfect. They are always going to be the least worst thing that we can come up with. But I think at at the at the level of principle um living in a world where we try actively to limit concentrated power in all its forms. Where we try actively to include people in whatever way whether as entrepreneurs or just workers as robustly as possible. Where we try to make sure that people are engaged enough in the economy so that they will be supportive of the democracy. not want to burn it down. These are high-level principles that I think reasonable people can agree with and they come into conflict with people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg who do not want to live in that world, who want to live in an oligarchical world and I just think that we should have that fight and win. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they’re leaving it for and I think it’s quite a relevant question. Um, I’ll ask you first, Dan. The question is, in a world with so many challenges, what can we do to restore hope and trigger engagement?

Uh getting back to what we were talking about, we need we need people to know that the game the rules of the game have changed and that the rules that we grew up with where we grew up in a particular industrialized late stage industrialized world that had those rules and we now live in an early stage digital revolution world. And the thing that gives me hope is I know how the rules of that world work, right? Someone explained it to me. They actually explained this is how you start a business. This is how you grow a business. This is how you make a million. This is how you hire some people. This is how you get a great team working side by side. That gave me an enormous amount of hope. I have a pathway out of where I was born and the wealth I was born with and where I am now. Someone explained to me the pathway. Here’s how the rules work and here’s how you make make success. One of the things that makes people feel hopeless is that they’re stuck in a game where no one explains the rules. So explaining the rules. So I would say we need a schooling system. The thing we don’t talk about enough is that the schooling system has to explain to kids the relevant information as to how to function in the current economy. So I played that forward in my head and I was thinking, okay, you get a million kids and you explain all of the rules to them. At some point, if you just give it a year or two, say they all knew the rules, um there’s still an edge and some of them would figure out the edge. Totally. And then you’ve got this pocket that know everyone knows the rules but then others know this particular way to beat the system and that could be with I don’t know they learn about AI they learn about whatever and then you’re kind of back into the same place and you were one such person who got the edge someone came to you and went you know they’re saying the rules are this actually there’s a way to get an edge and you had it within you for whatever reason to capitalize on that edge and now you’re a multi-millionaire that edge so so there’s always going to be the rule and then the rules Yeah, there’s no every single day after you explain a rules to someone there’s a new set of rules. The only consistent is change. And at the moment, most people I encounter who have never had any explanation going on about how the world works. Now, they are hopeless. They feel completely hopeless. As in like I see kids who are sending out um CVS to Microsoft or to like some major company. They don’t realize that those companies are getting 3,500 I get it. The day after you explain the rules to them, the rules are one day less relevant. And so it’s true. You’d have to go to school every single day. Well, yeah. You lifelong learning. You do have to do lifelong learning. Like there is this lifelong part of the rules is lifelong learning. That is actually one of the rules which is the only consistent is change. It sounds like you’re saying though that if we teach people the rules of business, then people will have more hope. And but but there’s so many people that I know like my my fianceé who she doesn’t she cares about something else much more than she cares about business. She cares about like she just started she set up Bali breath work and she was able right she was able to create barley breath work because well I said it not you she was able to figure out how to turn her passion into something that is commercially sustainable. But I’m just using her as an example cuz we did get that from the school system fundamentally. She maybe she got it in part because she has a dad who’s an entrepreneur. She has a explain the rules to her. Um she has the support network like she supports me, I support her. She knows how to enroll people into her success. All of that is called pitching, publishing content, creating a product offering. I only know one thing that I’ve seen work again and again and again and again, which is I teach people the people who learn the entrepreneurial method suddenly feel agency and hope. I I agree and I saying that’s for everyone. Yeah, but this is the it’s not for everyone. It’s for people like that had whatever mean you had in terms of like the upbringing, the luck, the whatever, the fortune. I’m not saying everyone’s going to be an entrepreneur. My answer to that question is entrepreneurial is the entrepreneurial tool set gives people a lot of hope. I get that and that one of the things that we have to acknowledge is that’s a certain type of person who has a certain type of goals. There are some people who actually just want to go outside and they don’t they want to work. Maybe they want to work one day a week or two days a week. Sure, I don’t want to do push-ups and I don’t want to do sit-ups and I don’t want to go to the gym. But if you ask a fitness professional, how do you improve your body? How do you feel good? Right? The fitness professional says, “Hey, these are all the things that I’ve seen working for a lot of people about going out and getting fit.” And you might not want to do them initially, but actually the people who do these things, the hope the people that do those things might have an inherent privilege, right? Wait, the world’s not fair. Like the world’s not fair. Some people are born on I just know your answer to the same question. I think we we need to have vital democracies that manage economies in ways that are optimized around human flourishing and not capital efficiency, not capital accumul accumulation. That we live in a world, you completely grew up in a world where the highest good was capital efficiency. the capital efficiency and godliness were the same and we have organized society in this way. We in the United States it we literally have a norm and a set of regulations around maximizing shareholder value for corporations. Right? This was invented out of whole cloth in the 1970s. This whole idea that the purpose of the corporation should be merely to enrich shareholders. And the evil of that idea isn’t what they weren’t saying was screw the poor. What they said was if you maximize value for shareholders, it will be good for everybody. And that was the lie because it wasn’t good for everybody. It was good for a tiny minority of people. And the lie was that when you do that, growth rates will go up, GDP will go up. We’ll have a rising tide. And the tide didn’t rise, it fell. And what modern economics says is that we can have a different construct. We can have a different society that purposefully includes people in a robust way, whether they’re a worker, whether they’re a small business. And if we do that, everyone will benefit. The economy will grow faster. People will be paid better. Prices will be lower. We will have more innovation. This is within our grasp. We just have to decide to do it. You should go into politics. I am in politics. Well, I I hear that. One thing I don’t like is waiting for the world to change. And I like I like personal agency. And at Nick’s level that he’s playing at, I love the fact that he’s in politics and he’s he’s using his wealth and his power and his influence to change the system. For most people, waiting for the world to change does not feel empowering. And and I guess what where I’m coming from is like yes, tilt towards this because that’s the political movement that’s required to make sure the world includes more people in capitalism. And I love that. Um, and while that’s happening, take personal accountability, personal agency, figure out what is your next move. Watch all the episodes of Diary of a CEO, learn from people and, you know, and and figure out Yeah, subscribe. Right. Do me a favor, subscribe to the channel. But if if that if that is done, like people people who do that end up feeling hopeful because hope comes from having personal agency. And personal agency is knowing your next move that’s going to benefit you and move you forward. I agree. I agree. And I real I’ you know, the older I’ve gotten, the more I realize my own privilege. And my privilege isn’t necessarily that I built a business and that I have money now and all those things. My privilege is something happened when I was young from the point of maybe where my parents feel guilty about it. I don’t feel guilty about it, but it just has allowed me to see my own bias and to realize that I have this unknown unknown. Unfortunately, that’s growing by the day because I’m getting more entrenched in my own privilege. And what I mean by this is like I play out the scenario theoretically. My dad left my mom and my mom um still struggles to read and write and she would have had like four kids, can’t read or write, can’t really get employment. She worked at St. League hospice as a volunteer and I go, “God, if that one thing had happened, how different would my of life have been and and so that’s like a privilege that I I’ve never even acknowledged because I it’s kind of inherent. It was like built into my life.” And then would I be sat here now? Would I be be the person I am today if that one little thing had happened? No. Would I be ambitious and optimistic about the world? Or would I be theoretically could I be resentful? Could I be like some of my other friends who came from the same city where I came from who didn’t have a father who may I’ve said to some of my friends I said to one of my particular friends back home if you would just get a job for a couple of months I will pay your rent for years didn’t happen can’t get a job at his subway for for 3 months so that I would pay his rent for years I ended up helping him anyway but I it just I remember saying that 10 years ago it just highlighted to me that there’s a real deep inherent privilege that I have that I’m like not even aware that I it sometimes it’s trauma my DNA my brothers are all very smart naturally um and what if I didn’t what if like I didn’t have those two parents and what if I didn’t have the whatever genetic composition I had like then would the advice apply that then would the advice I give to the world would it apply so I I I I mle that and go it’s got to pass that lens for it to be broadly applicable and therefore I think effective advice I I love your level of compassion and empathy for people and the fact that you’re having that self explo exploration means you’re an incredible type of person with each individual. Each person wants to do the most with what they’ve got. I’m saying that if I was to visit a small town that had a thriving 10, 15, 20 businesses in there, there were enough entrepreneurs to create optionality for people. That would be a good town to go to, right? And if I go to a town where there are no entrepreneurs and there are like everyone feels downtrodden and there’s one big Costco and that’s the only employer in town, that’s going to be a [ __ ] town. So all I’m saying is you need a critical mass of people who have uh agency and that lifts up the like having a few do you know in in Japan they call it the Shogun family, right? and the Shogun family lifts up that that little community and that around that Shogun family you end up with lots of other businesses and lots of other like it it it flows out. But when you have one monolith in the world that is the only company in town and it is the only place that ships stuff to your door and it’s the there’s only one place to get your CDs and there’s only one place to get your Netflix then pretty much everyone else is just reduced to being a consumer. What do you think, Nick? I again I’ve said it before I I I agree with this sentiment 100%. I am an entrepreneur myself, but I expect that operating in empowerment applies to it will no doubt apply to a high percentage of the people who watch your show, right? Lots and lots of people who watch this show are entrepreneurial, want to be entrepreneurial, so on and so forth. But I suspect you’re talking about less than 5% of people on planet Earth that fit that paradigm. And I want to create a paradigm that works for everybody. And you’re saying if you hit those 5%. Well, even in the UK it’s 6 million self-employed people out of 30 million workers. It’s not it’s not tiny. It’s a pretty decent percent, right? It it is a major opportunity that more people than ever could take part in. If you asked a health professional, how do you get hope? Go to the gym, go for a run, all that stuff. You’re asking an entrepreneur how do you get hope through personal agency? I’m going to tell you what’s worked what’s worked for me is the entrepreneurial method. Yeah. So maybe we need to ask a broad group of people. Yeah. But I suspect that what they will come back to you with is the quiet miracle of a normal life. If you want that, that’s great. I I want that and I want that for everyone. That’s gone away. It’s gone. Houses are unaffordable. Sorry. Local jobs don’t exist. No one’s paying healthy wages. Like all of that stuff that I want as well. It’s great to sit there and want it, right? But that doesn’t give me hope. That gives me disappointment that it used to exist, right? My the family home that most people would love to raise a family in, it’s 1.2 million now, right? And if you want to fix that, you have to enact this. Yeah. You have to do that. Most people What is People are going to wonder what’s in that piece of paper. So th this is, you know, I mean, the the the main body of my work is coming up with a different economic paradigm, a way of understanding economic cause and effect that leads to the world that Dan prefers, that I prefer. I think I don’t know, but I sense it’s the world that you prefer. And what you have to do is you have to rip down the existing economic framework and replace it with a 21st century thing that inclines policymakers to make good decisions not bad ones. And the booklet itself that that can can you show the booklet? Yeah. So this booklet is 21st century economics. Now this is aimed at policy makers and professionals but but if you go to uh marketsbuilt forhumans.org org. You can download this for free and that is merely an expression of the paradigm itself. Going from believing that uh we should just increase uh capital efficiency to human flourishing. Going from understanding human beings as homoeconomicist to homo sapiens. Going from understanding the economy as a parto optimal equilibrium to a complex to an ecology all this stuff. But when you understand it in a new way, you come to very different conclusions about how you should organize the world. And that is the starting point for global transformation. I love it. He’s already a billionaire. He’s got time on his hands and he’s got money to fly around the world doing it. Do it. And while he’s doing it, all I need is for people like you to help me explain it. Yeah. And and like I I love it. I’m not against it. I’m just saying what will give most people hope is taking agency over their life where they can do something this week to improve their life. So, next time I see you, there will be a test and and download download it, give it to your law makers. Well, so what I’ll do then, I mean, we’ve got different reading materials people that are listening can uh can pursue here. Um, we’ve got Dan’s books here, which I’ll link below. Dan, is there a particular best book to start with in your opinion? Um, the most recent one is called the lifestyle business playbook and it’s basically how to get started with a small business and a business that will give you more fun, freedom, and flexibility. And I like the idea of supporting anyone who’s trying to create a better economy. Some of the most miserable people I know are waiting for the system to change. And I don’t want you to be that person. I want you to be doing something in your own life. And then over here, I mean, I’m going to link all of your books below as well, better. Yeah. I mean, I I just think that um a starting point for global transformation is under look, economics is the operating system of the world. If it’s the wrong operating system, you end up with a very bad circumstance. I and in economics is invisible to most people. They don’t even understand it’s the it’s the water they’re swimming in. They don’t understand that policymakers are making decisions that affect their lives based on a particular understanding of how the economy works. And if that’s wrong, then you’re going to make some terrible decisions. If you believe that prosperity trickles down from the top, you’re going to enact a certain set of policies. If you believe that growth is built from the middle out, you will make an entirely different set of uh uh uh policies. If you believe that the middle class is a consequence of economic growth, you will go one way. If you believe that the thriving middle class is the cause of growth, you will do a completely different set of things in terms of policy. All of them aligned with what Dan wants. But but that’s where you have to start. That’s that’s the meta those are the meta questions that you have to answer and then you and then you deduce logically to all of the things that Dan prefers. But you have to start up here. You have to start with the set of ideas that govern how people see economic cause and effect. And that is what this is.

I shall link it below. Thank you so much. We’re done. Thank you. You aren fantastic.

This could be the last time that I speak about myself, my work, because there’s a chance that I might not make it off the operating table this month. And a journalist who has very bad blood towards me has been trying to publish a story on me for more than 2 years now, and it will come out in the next month or two. And I didn’t want that to be the last word of my life. What do you want the last word of your life to be? I’m here to communicate about the possibility of a major forgotten episode in Human Story. I’m talking about a lost civilization. So, most people think civilization started 6,000 years ago. Yes. But you believe there’s strong evidence that there could have been a previous civilization 20,000 years ago. And I’m going to present the evidence for that here, Stephen. And it suggests a golden age where there was no violence, no cruelty, where great healers and sages were at work. They’re extremely sophisticated. However, if you follow the myths further, as I’ve done, you find something odd happens. We find that they stepped away from the original purity and become a culture that begins to impose its power on others around the world. And then sewn into those myths is scientific information which record a gigantic cataclysm all but wiping out the human race. If what you’re saying is true, what does that mean for our lives? I guess also our future. Well, there’s always this feeling in the myths that we brought this upon ourselves. And when I look at our civilization today, I see a civilization that ticks all the mythological boxes for the next lost civilization. And that we are most likely to be the cause of that cataclysm ourselves. Unless we wake up, Graeme Hanok, what will you care about on your last day?

Most of all, Graeme Hanok, I guess the first question I wanted to ask you is, what is it you’ve committed the last more than 30 years of your life to understanding? What it is is a a puzzle. I’m puzzled by aspects of the human past. There could be, and I think there’s a lot to suggest there was, a major forgotten episode in the human story. That’s why I refer to us as a species with amnesia. When I use that phrase, I need to give credit to Emanuel Velikovski who wrote a book called Mankind in Amnesia. I think we are a species with amnesia. I think we have forgotten something very important in our own past. And when I turn to the experts, I find much of what they say very interesting and very useful, but some of what they say extremely unsatisfactory and and not responding to the problems that that I have in the past. And that’s led me to to take my own approach to the past to look at that and and to offer uh readers because I’m mainly an author occasionally make TV shows to offer them an alternative point of view which is rational and and and solidly based but which is contrary to key aspects of the mainstream narrative. We only have decipherable written scripts from the last 5 a half thousand years maximum. Before that, we don’t have any any writing that we can at any rate read, go back 10, 12, 15, 20,000 years. All you can base it on from an archaeological point of view is what they can dig out of the ground. And I think what they’re missing, the ancients did leave us memories of what they went through. We have myths and traditions and scriptures from all around the world which record a gigantic cataclysm affecting the human race and all but wiping out the human race. Everybody knows the story of the flood of Noah. Of course, the flood of Noah is just an one example of hundreds like that of stories from around the world. Uh archaeologists pour scorn on Plato’s story of Atlantis. Uh but Atlantis is another of those stories that remembers a global flood that wiped out a former era of existence, leaving only a few survivors. And the archaeological response to them is there was a local river flood. They exaggerated it. It was a big deal for them. So they said it happened to the whole world. And I’m sick of archaeologists saying that. This is the memory banks of our species. This is the record, the only record we have of a period before 6,000 years ago. And we shouldn’t despise it and scorn it as primitive superstition. We should say, what can we find in here that we can coordinate with scientific facts that we’re aware of? Let’s see if there’s something to this rather than just dismissing it. Many of these myths contain imagery and a series of numbers. A very important academic study published in the 1960s, a book called Hamlet’s Mill by Giorgio Dantilana, professor of the history of science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hera Vondesin, professor of history of science. This is not me speaking. This is major major historians of science in the 1960s. They found encoded in those myths numbers and imagery that could only relate to one thing and that’s an obscure astronomical phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes. I’m not going to go into the technical details, but to observe it and to record it and to predict it, to predict its effects in the future involves very precise astronomical observations maintained over a very long period of time, hundreds and hundreds of years at least. So here we have myths of a global cataclysm. There is just so much else. There are ancient maps that show the world as it looked during the ice age, again dismissed as just total coincidence and not significant by archaeology. I feel that archaeology has failed miserably in providing a nurturing satisfying answer to the questions we all have. So when you say global cataclysm what does that mean? Means that some something hit the planet there was we were wiped out. Yeah there there there are a number of options and again I need to stress this because because there’s so much propaganda in this business I’ll be immediately accused of lunatic fringe. The solid science that’s been done on this uh is twofold. One aspect of it, the one that I think I find most persuasive is called the younger drius impact hypothesis. And this is a mainstream hypothesis, but it is severely criticized within academia. The hypothesis is that about 20,000 years ago, a very large comet came in from deep space and went into orbit around the sun. This would be a comet of a diameter of 100 kilometers, maybe 200. Comes in, gets captured by the sun’s gravity, goes into an orbit. That orbit crosses the orbit of the Earth. While you’re dealing with one large object, the chances of getting hit are extremely low. It would be very bad if you did, but very low. Trouble is, nobody disputes this. Once comets are caught by the gravitational field of a very large planet or of a sun, they start to break up into multiple parts. And this is what happened to the younger dryass comet. Instead of being a single bullet, it became a shotgun blast. It became thousands and thousands of objects of which we’ve cataloged quite a lot. Numbers of them, comet Enki is the best known bit of that former comet. Many of the academics who look at this think that comet Enki which is about 6 km in diameter and which does cross the orbit of the earth they think that that was the source comet but whereas the other team are saying no that’s a bit of the source comet there were many other bits as well and 12,800 years ago 12,860 approximately the earth went into a storm of these fragments none of them big enough to compare with the object that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago but all over the world. The earth is turning. This stuff comes in. They found it in the west coast of North America. They found it in Belgium. And they found it as far east as Syria. So, it’s like the earth turns and this stuff is just coming in. Most of it is blowing up in the air. It isn’t even hitting the ground. But an air burst from an object that might be 100 m in diameter is equivalent to a very substantial nuclear blast. So, their argument is the Earth was hit by a comet storm. And this they then argue, and I think they’re right, uh, explains what happened then because 12,800 years ago, we were still in the ice age. Uh, but the earth was coming out of the ice age. In fact, for about a,000 maybe 2,000 years before that, the earth had been getting warmer, getting quite nice. And you would normally expect that to continue. But then suddenly, 12,800 years ago, give or take 60 years, there’s a huge interruption. There’s a radical change. The earth instead of warming, it suddenly goes back into a massive deep freeze. And this is the time when all the famous big animals of the ice age, the megaporna are wiped out. The the woolly mammoths, the mastadons, the giant sloths, these things like 14 ft tall, you know, they’re all they’re all wiped out in that window around about 12,800 years ago. And most important of all, there’s a very mysterious sea level rise that occurs then. This you would not expect when the earth is entering a cold phase. Normally when earth enters a cold phase, ice accumulates on the existing ice caps. It doesn’t melt and go into the sea. So the next thing is how do we explain this sudden rise in sea levels at the beginning of younger dries. It shouldn’t have happened. The comet theory explains it perfectly. the the the mass, the impact, the heat, the air bursts, that would have been enough to send the ice sheets into meltdown and to cause this pulse of melt water. Then the freeze sets in, you have about 1,200 years of freezing, desperately cold conditions. And then again, 11,600 years ago, womph, it suddenly warms up. I mean, these are radical climate changes. They’re beyond anything that’s happening now. And uh I I think explanations are needed for them. because 12,800 years ago may sound a long time ago, but it’s really yesterday in the human story. Uh, so something very big happened to the Earth and happened to our ancestors 12,800 years ago. If it wasn’t a comet, another theory that’s been put forward is a radical change in solar activity. This might have been involved with it as well. I don’t find that as persuasive as the younger drius impact hypothesis. And you know maybe some other explanation will come up but what nobody disputes is that the younger dus was a catastrophe. Uh it was global uh and and it had huge effects. You um you chose intentionally to come and have this conversation today. Why today? Well I’ve been quite unwell really noticeably unwell since uh January February uh this year particularly very very short of breath. It’s it’s because the one of the failed valves in my my heart is um causing blood to regurgitate inside the heart rather than pumping it through the body. And that means that oxygenated blood is not getting to my lungs. I probably would live another 2 or 3 years without the surgery, maybe maybe even five, but the quality of life would be very low. I I can’t even walk up three stairs without being being exhausted at the moment. So, I’ve definitely decided to to have the surgery. Why am I doing this interview now rather than postponing it until after the surgery and I’ve recovered? Well, there’s a tiny chance, absolutely minuscule chance that I might not make it off the operating table this month. Yeah, this month. And if that were the case, uh this would be the last time I’ve spoken about myself, my work, my life, challenges I faced, uh in an open forum like this. And and and I I I choose to do that. And I’m going to say specifically why without giving without mentioning names. I choose to do that because a journalist uh who has very bad blood towards me has been trying to publish a story on me for more than 2 years now. Uh and it will come out in the next in the next month or two. And I didn’t want that to be the last word of my life. That’s why I’m here. Stephen, what do you want the last word of your life to be? I would I would hope that people will come to understand that I’m not the person that a very small minority of archaeologists have mobilized social media to present me as. I’m not a grifter. I’m not a hoaxer. I’m not a con man. I’m deeply committed to this. I’ve devoted my life to it for more than for more than 30 years. I’m passionate about it. It matters to me. And I think again I’ll be laughed at for saying this, but I feel called to do this. I feel I I feel it’s my obligation and my responsibility to do this. How is that disputed? Cuz I I guess I need to understand human history to understand why the the the fundamental belief that you have that there was a civilization that we aren’t talking about. I’d like to be clear. It’s not a belief. Um this is another is a mistake that my that my critics of often make. They they think that I’m dealing with some sort of belief system or some sort of cult here. No, I’m not. I’m I’m just puzzled. I’m just puzzled by the past and I’m puzzled by the memories that have been passed down to us. And I’m puzzled that those memories concur all around the world on a serious cataclysmic event. What is it that the your people that aren’t puzzled and are certain belief? Yeah. They think that glacial lakes in North America gradually grew in size and overspilled the ice dams that held them in place and that the um water from those lakes, some of it went into the Atlantic Ocean and cut the Gulf Stream. I don’t dispute that glacial lakes were involved, but those lakes were filled up at a massive speed. Nobody disputes that the Younger Dryus was a cataclysmic event. It’s just the the degree of the cataclysm that’s disputed and what caused it that’s disputed. But everyone agrees that humans are 300 15,000 years. I mean at present when I started on this quest back back in the late 80s early 90s it was felt that anatomically modern human beings had not existed for more than 50,000 years. Very recent really. But this turned out to be complete rubbish because anatomically modern humans are much older than 50,000 years ago. We have 196,000y old anatomically modern human remains from Ethiopia. And then finally 315,000 years ago, a recent find in um Gimlier Hood in Morocco. Uh again anatomically modern humans. So we can say that if we define ourselves by our anatomy, uh, brain size, capacity of the skull, if we define ourselves in those ways, we’ve been around for at least 315,000 years and probably much longer. That’s that’s just an accident of discovery. And that’s one of the things that puzzles me. If we’re anatomically modern, if we’ve got all the modern kit, if we got the same brains, we got the same neurology, everything is there. Why do we wait more than 300,000 years to establish something recognizable as a human civilization? Why do we wait so long? We got all the kit. There’s evidence that that our ancestors were aware of agriculture, just chose not to use it much, much much earlier than that. the complex of events that leads to a city-based civilization, which is the kind of civilization we have now all over the world, that you can only really trace that back to 6,000 years ago. Yes, you can say that before 6,000 years ago, there was buildup to what became the high civilizations. But my question is why not much earlier? Why why did we wait until that moment? And and I don’t find a satisfactory answer to that question, except perhaps we didn’t wait. Perhaps we’re missing part of our story. And when I say a lost civilization, I do not mean a civilization like ours. I do not mean an industrial civilization. I don’t mean they had cell phones or flew to the moon or any of that [ __ ] I think they were very different civilization from ours. But they had conquered a number of peaks and one of those peaks was navigation and ocean seafaring. Hence the survival of maps which show the world as it looked during the ice age. And another was astronomy. Uh and another really important breakthrough evidenced by by the ancient maps particularly a category of maps called the portalos um is accurate relative longitudes. This is the Arantius Phineas map. It shows Antarctica uh right there. Uh and and um this is interesting because this map was drawn in 1531. Uh the problem is that our civilization didn’t discover Antarctica until 1820. So its appearance on a map drawn in 1521, particularly when we know that the map was based on older source maps. And the map maker tells us in his own legend that he has uncovered material previously hidden in darkness. When we find that uh we have to begin to wonder what is what is going on here. Had somebody found Antarctica long before long before we did uh and mapped it with extremely accurate relative longitudes. And that’s important because our civilization didn’t crack the longitude problem until the mid- 18th century. What that meant was that if you’re on a vessel sailing west or east, uh you might be 300 miles closer to a coastline than you think you are and suddenly you’re on it in the night and you’re dead. Once you’ve got longitude work out, you know exactly where you are. We didn’t get that until 1750, 1760s, thereabouts with Harrison’s chronometer. So finding good longitudes on very ancient maps is another puzzle that I don’t think archaeology solved. So, you think there could have been a civilization 20,000 years ago which was before this young dryest moment where um I mean I’ve got this photo here which I’ll throw up on the screen. Yeah. I think you say is evidence that something took place. It is that that’s that’s the younger dry boundary. Uh and I’m with Alan West who’s one of the scientists from the from the comet research group who are working on the younger dry hypothesis. And our hands are on that black stripe running through the middle of the drawer. And that is soot. That is evidence of wildfires burning. Uh it’s full of nano diamonds, tiny little diamonds, microscopic size, which are a classic product of comet impacts. Uh microspherules, some platinum, some iridium, all signatures of a cometry impact. And there it is. It’s about 5 in thick. That layer is the younger driest boundary layer. It dates to 12,800 years ago. So for anyone that can’t see, it’s just like a slice of earth. And there’s this black line going through through the earth. We’re in a draw here where a river has cut a channel and it’s exposed the sides of the channel and on the sides of the channel we can see this black stripe running through and that is precisely the younger driest boundary and the current hypothesis is from a lot of archaeologists is there wasn’t a human civilization before this point 12,000 years ago but you believe there’s strong evidence that there could have been. Yes. So civilization then in your definition of the word how do you define that? A group of people gathering and working together. Fundamentally, it involves it involves the willing organization or the unwilling organization of labor. If you look at a site like Gobeklite in Turkey, we have it on our timeline here somewhere. It’s 11,600 years old. Uh this is really an extraordinary site. It’s a it’s a very sophisticated site. It’s very large. It consists of large T-shaped megaliths that can weigh up to 20 tons. There are precise astronomical alignments in it. Uh this was not done by two or three people working together. This was well that’s the GBCI today covered by a a modern canopy to keep uh fair enough to keep the the weather off it because it was previously deliberately buried by its builders. Um but of course there’s much more around. Hundreds and hundreds more pillars are still underground. We know they’re there because of ground penetrating radar but they’ve not been excavated yet. So so this was a major project. And interestingly the people who built Gobeclet at that at the time Gobeclet began there was no agriculture happening there they were all hunter gatherers. Mhm. Nevertheless they did something that archaeologists used to say hunter gatherers couldn’t do. They organized themselves. They made a huge project. They implemented it and they delivered it. And Gobeclet is not alone. It’s one of dozens of sites like that all over Anatolia in in in Turkey. This was a highly organized, sophisticated huntergatherer civilization that was involved in making this place. I’m I’m a little bit confused. So, if the Ice Age ended 11,700 years ago, Yeah. and Gabbeck is 11,600 years ago, that means there’s a 100redyear gap between the end of the ice age and something as sophisticated as Gabbecki. Not exactly. Because because dates in this frame, they’re not spot-on accurate dates. Some will say the ice age ended 11,600. Some will say it ended 11,700 years ago. But the fact is that in this window, the world was warming up again. It was getting better. And that’s when this project was was created. And the mystery is mystery for for archaeologists anyway is that it was hunter gatherers. And archaeologists are now having to come to terms with that. You see the idea was you had to have an agricultural community first in order to create projects like this because that allows people to become specialists. What if you generate a food surplus that you can rely on then you can take people with certain skills and say focus on that become an astronomer become an architect become an engineer and we’ll support you in doing that. That was the idea and that was why it was felt that something like Gobeclet couldn’t be built until about 6,000 years ago when there was widespread agriculture. But that turned out not to be true. Uh it was built by hunter gatherers but within a thousand years of it being built, agriculture becomes present in that whole area. Origins of agriculture are definitely earlier than we’ve than we’ve been taught. So it’s funny cuz I don’t know a lot about the ice age, but humans survived the ice age. Oh god, yes, we we we did. It’s just it’s just um where do you want to be during an ice age? That’s the question. What are my options? If you were a rational being, which most human beings are, you would immediately exclude Northern Europe. Absolutely no point in being in that frozen, miserable wilderness. You’d immediately exclude the northern part of North America, too. No point in being there. It’s just horrible at that time. Siberia, pretty rough. No, you’d look for the tropics. You’d go you’d go down close to the equator. you’d go to the places that weren’t affected by the ice age, that were actually the best real estate on Earth. That’s where you’d go. That’s why uh if we are looking for a missing episode in the human story, we’re wasting our time looking for it in Northern Europe or North America. Uh we should be looking for it in Mexico. We should be looking for it in India. We should be looking for it in Indonesia. we should be looking for it uh around Papu Nu Guini. All of these areas that were that were really great places to live during the ice age. That’s that’s the kind of place that the sort of civilization I’m talking about could have thrived. What is the difference? You know, cuz on here it says the earliest known humans were 300,000 odd years ago. Yeah. What is the difference between these humans 300,000 years ago and the civilization you’re describing 20,000 years ago that you believe existed? Apart from what is perhaps wrongly described as a slight refinement in human features, natural selection operating on what humans perceive as beauty, I don’t know, but otherwise the same. The same the same. Yeah. Yeah. And again, that’s not that not disputed. Nobody’s saying that jibblehood human beings were somehow different from us. They’re anatomically modern humans. But how did they live um versus your definition of ai civilization? They lived a simple hunter gatherer life. Okay. in small groups. Yeah. But somehow around 11,600 years ago, people started accumulating monuments that can only be made with large groups and organized organized labor. You’ve got to you you have to have a system. You have to can’t build something like Gobeci without planning out in advance. You got to draw it out somehow. There has to be a plan. It’s not something you just wing. Uh so so there has to there’s a missing background to all of that which bothers me. And again, so most people think civilization started what 6,000 years ago. Yes. That that would be when civilizations become archaeologically visible. So you have uh ancient Sumer, Mesopotamia, uh which roughly 3,500 I’m going to use BC because everybody’s familiar with that. roughly 3,500 BC, which is 5,500 years ago approximately, we start seeing cities being built. We start seeing the beginnings of writing taking place around about the same time. The same thing is happening in Egypt. Maybe a couple of hundred years later, but the new work that’s being done in Egypt is pushing Egypt much closer to to Sumer, narrowing that that window. Effectively, you can say that these two civilizations become archaeologically visible at the same time. And uh they’re not alone because on the other side of the world in Peru uh there’s a civilization now recognized called the Karal Sup civilization which built pyramids uh which also goes back 5,500 years. Uh and and this is one of the mysteries I’m I’m looking at now is is why we have these apparently coincidental emergence of high civilizations in the same window uh all around the world. Indisparali civilization roughly the same 5,000 years old. Yeah. We’re looking at Carral here I think. Yeah. Yeah. These classic these the feature is these circular plazas in front of them and then the pyramid with a and and uh you know these were not and not expected in Peru. When archaeologists think of Peru they tend to think of Machu Picchu the Inca civilization. That’s what gets all the coverage. And that’s 600 years ago. That’s 600 years ago. as yesterday. Whereas these Karal Sup pyramids, Karal, Asparero, Bandura, Peniko, these ones are much older, thousands of years older. They’re extremely sophisticated. They built with an earthquake proof technology. They instead of using blocks, they put small stones in in textile bags and those allow a certain amount of shifting so the thing doesn’t collapse in an earthquake. And this is 5,500 years old getting on. So again, not an agricultural civilization at that at that time. They’re a hunter gatherer civilization. So So archaeologists are having to confront a reversal of their model at the moment. Then I think there’s room in that reversal of the model for a forgotten episode in the human story. Tell me about this forgotten episode in the human story. Yeah, it’s uh it’s remembered it’s remembered all around the world as a golden age where there was no violence, no cruelty. um where great healers and sages were at work where powers that are scorned in our society today such as telepathy and telekinesis which are regarded as completely non-existent by our scientists uh were regarded as a matter of fact of life in in in this ancient world. That’s uh a civilization that emerged out of shamanism uh and made something good. But then if you follow the myths further as I’ve done, you find something odd happens. You find that they’ve stepped away from the original purity. That they’ve become a culture that begins to impose its power on others around the world. And that’s always given as the reason for the cataclysm in the myths that that we angered the gods. It might have been with our noise. It might have been with our irreverence. We angered the gods and they sent a flood. They weren’t happy with their creation. They wanted to start again, wipe the slate clean. And so there’s this there’s always this feeling in the myths and it’s and I can’t explain it. I don’t know what what it comes from, but it’s always there is that in some way we ourselves brought this upon ourselves. Is this those people not understanding the forces of mother nature and trying to sort of justify it as or perhaps a deeper understanding of the forces of mother nature? Maybe perhaps the way that human beings are operating in the world today um should be included amongst the forces of nature. We we are a geological force. Uh, and worse than that, we’re a psychic force which is full of anger and hatred and suspicion and and and mutual destruction. That’s not going to be good for nature. That’s that’s going to be disturbing. We’re an integrated system in my view. We we’re not separate. Human beings are part of all of this and what we do affects all of that. And that’s what the ancient myths seem to testify to. So, if I may finish on that, when I look at our civilization today, I I don’t want to go off on a rant, but when I look at our civilization today, I see a civilization that ticks all the mythological boxes, every single one, for the next lost civilization. And I envision a situation 10 or 15,000 years from now when we will be a myth, a fantasy that our our ancestors actually could speak to one another on opposite sides of the planet, that our ancestors they could fly to the moon. Uh you know, they could go to the depths of the ocean. The archaeologists of that time will say complete fantasy, just made up, never happened. But it did. We’re that lost civilization. And we don’t need a comet and we don’t need solar activity because if we’re so psychically messed up as a species, we’ll probably end up doing it to ourselves. That’s what nuclear weapons are about. Mass species suicide

and the mental processes that drive that very dangerous very effective of the world we live in. Hatred is a psychic force and uh the way it’s being generated around the world at the moment and mobilized and focused is um it’s got to be bad for all of us especially when we have such powers to self-destruct. It’s terrible. This this is what drives me nuts is is looking at the low consciousness level of the so-called leaders on this planet. When I look around the whole bunch of them, I just see very low consciousness individuals who define everything in material terms. Uh who who are who are who are focused on this also gets me into trouble, but I I think nationalism is something that humanity needs to grow out of. We need to grow out of nationalism. It’s just an extension of tribalism. We need to grow out of it soon. And let me be clear, I am not talking about world government. I don’t want anything like I don’t want any government. I’m an anarchist basically. And that’s what anarchy means. It means without government. I don’t want any government at all. But we have to get past this notion that by accident I was born with this particular skin. You know, the notion is that this these accidents of birth define us. that we must somehow massively respect and love people who look like us and and and kind of hate and fear people who don’t look like us. We have to get past that. We have to get past that as a species. It’s really important. All human beings everywhere, all the same fundamentally. Of course, we’re vastly diverse. We have we have incredible different gifts. I value and appreciate the differences in different cultures all around the world. This is wonderful. But it doesn’t have to come with and we are better than you. Uh and we’re going to kill you because you don’t share our ideas. This is insane. It’s crazy. We’re not a mature species. We’re we’re a childish species. And leading our species are leaders who have the mentality of um deranged teenagers. We elected them. Yeah, we did very unfortunately. which shows how easy it is to manipulate uh the narrative in the world today. Today, who wins in elections isn’t the best person, isn’t the good person, isn’t the person who’s going to do good, it’s the best communicator who wins. So, this um ancient civilization that we could have theoretically forgotten. You were somewhat implying that maybe they were right that their own actions caused the great flood as they say they they talk about in mythology. I floated that notion. Yeah. Yeah. They might they might have been, but it’s enough to say that that’s what they believed because that’s what all the myths say. The Noah story is prefigured in ancient Sumer um with um an almost identical flood myth. The gods are angry. A great flood is going to be sent. The intention is to wipe out humanity, but this this god who’s called Enki says to Atraasis, “I’m going to save you. Build a boat. Build it now. A big one. put into it the seeds of all things that you will need. Bring each animal of every kind into your boat. This is this is a kind of survival arc which is exactly the same as Noah. Noah’s arc is just copied on that. It’s just borrowed from that. And to people that say, “Well, these are just stories. These are fictions that someone wrote and then they passed them down and there’s no truth in these things at all.” They’re welcome to say that. Uh I I I just happen to think they’re not. And and my job has been to make that case. I do not claim that I have proved there was a lost civilization. Any archaeologist who says Hanok claims he’s proved that is lying. I don’t claim that. I claim I’m puzzled and mystified. And I’m going to I’m going to complete that journey as long as I can. I’m going to carry on investigating and looking into all aspects of this because that’s what I’m here to do. And that lost civilization, you said they were seabbearing potentially. Seafaring. Yeah. Yeah. Which means they had boats. Yeah. Yeah. We know for example that anatomically modern uh human beings reached Australia 60,000 years ago. That those involve significant sea journeys. They reached Cyprus in the Mediterranean 14,000 years ago. Again, they involved sea journeys, not engine boats, not metal boats. You can do it on quite simple craft. Look at look at the Polynesians. Look at the vast distances that they explored on outrigger canoes. Uh so yeah, boats, but not our kind of boats. Hm. I just don’t understand how if they’re traveling the seas and boats, how they’re they aren’t classified as a civilization. Well, because according to the mainstream model, which I am trying to provide an alternative to, they never existed. There was no such people. They never did these things. The maps are just coincidences, irrelevance, just odd. They put Antarctica, they put a a land mass in Antarctica because they felt it would balance the world. That’s the theory that’s given. And it’s just to me it’s not it’s not satisfactory doesn’t it just doesn’t add up. These things need to be explained. And it’s why it’s why in every society which wishes to make progress uh mavericks people who go against the grain no matter how much [  ] they have to take are needed. They’re needed in our society to provide a balance to this overwhelming mass that science now occupies. Science has now come to occupy the space that religion occupied in many people’s minds. And again, I need to emphasize I’m not against science. Science. Science is about to save my life. I have major heart surgery coming up in two weeks time. I’m not against it at all. But I think it should be one weapon in our armory, not the only weapon. One of the um things I was super curious about because I was actually there last last week is this place, Giza. Pyramids of Giza. The great pyramid of Giza. Here we look at it attributed to the pharaoh Kufu who was a pharaoh of the fourth dynasty. What is the mystery here? So again, pyramids are this big stack of like concrete blocks in Egypt. What is the Why is it so mysterious? Well, first of all, they’re not concrete. They’re they’re hu limestone um and granite. Uh first of all, it’s mysterious for the sheer size of it. Look, so you got roughly 750 ft along each side. Okay? And they vary in length by only fractions of an inch. They’ve got it just about spot-on exact on the side length. And you want that in a pyramid because if you get it wrong, you’re going to end up with a corkcrew rather than a pyramid. If you get it wrong at the bottom, those errors are going to magnify and they’re going to get worse and worse and it’s not going to be a pyramid at the end of the day. Secondly, weight calculated at about 6 million tons, more than 2 million individual blocks of stone. I’ve climbed the pyramid five times. Once I climbed it, when there was an event taking place on the Giza Plateau, picnics basically and and a lot of Kyne just decided to climb the pyramid. As I say, I’ve climbed it four other times without other people there, but this time there were hundreds of people on the pyramid. That’s when I realized how difficult this thing is to make because the biggest danger was the other people. Once you’re up two or three courses, you fall, you’re dead. It’s uh it’s a 52° slope. There’s no way you’re going to stop. You’re going to come down and still every year people die on the Great Pyramid. That’s why they’ve made it illegal to climb it now. So, there’s that. Then there’s the almost perfect alignment of the Great Pyramid to true north. Not to compass North, which is about 10 or 11° off true north, but to astronomical north, real north. The Great Pyramid is aligned within 3 60ths of a single degree. I put it that way because degrees are divided into 60 minutes. So, 3 minutes of arc. The Great Pyramid is aligned to that level of precision, 360ths of a single degree to true north. And they’ve done that on a 6 million ton monument, which is 481 ft high if you take account of its original height, which has a 52° slope, which is filled with internal corridors and spaces, Grand Gallery, the ascending, the descending corridors. All of this is extremely difficult to do. It is it’s not impossible to do because we see it there. Uh could our civilization do it? Yeah, I think we could. Uh but would we do it? No, I don’t think we would. Uh the motive wouldn’t be there. People say, “What the why? I mean, why do you want to align it perfectly to true north? It’s enough to ask me to build a 6 million ton monument, but you want it aligned to true north as well. Come on. I mean, that’s a really difficult specification. We’d find that hard.” um a kind of artistry was put to work on the Great Pyramid as well as skill. Let’s get rid of any notion that slaves were involved. They were not. There there wasn’t slavery in the Old Kingdom anyway. But this is a work of love from the first to the last stone. It’s a work done with great skill and care. It’s a beautiful and extraordinary thing both inside and out. It sits almost exactly on latitude 30 which is 1/ird of the way between the north pole and the equator. And uh it incorporates the dimensions of the earth on a scale of 1 to 43,200 in its own dimensions. So if you take the height of the great pyramid and multiply it by 43,200. I’ll explain why that number matters. Multiply it by that number, you get the polar radius of the earth. Measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid. multiply it by the same factor, 43,200, and you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth. Archaeologists know this. They say it’s a coincidence, total coincidence, just by chance. However, I could agree with them actually if the scale was not 1 to 43,200. But the fact that it’s 1 to 43,200 changes everything because that belongs to a sequence of numbers that is found in ancient mythology all around the world. And those numbers are all multiples of the number 72. And I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion the book by the great historian of science deant professor of the history of science at MIT. He was the first to identify that these numbers and the imagery that go with them derive from a phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes. I better explain that a little bit. The procession of the equinoxes. Everybody’s heard the song we live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. I’m sure you’ve heard that. Uh no comment. We live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. That’s astrology at the moment. And for the last 2,000 years on the spring equinox, the sun has risen against the background of the constellation of Pisces. That’s the age of Pisces. We live in the age of Pisces. It’s not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol. The next constellation on the zodiac when you go backwards around it is Aquarius. And the procession is actually caused by a wobble on the axis of the Earth. I’m going to pretend that this is the Earth. Okay. And instead of just doing this, while it’s doing that, it’s also doing that. It’s wobbling. Mhm. And that affects the rising time and season at which particular stars rise. It affects two things noticeably. One thing it affects is the pole star. At the moment, the pole star is Polaris. The pole star, this is astron astronomical north. It’s the star towards which the extended north pole pole of the earth points most directly. Okay. At present, it’s Polaris. It hasn’t always been Polaris. 4,000 years ago, it was Thuban in the constellation of Draco. That’s because the Earth’s axis is doing this. At the horizon, it does the same thing with the zodiacal constellations. We shift gradually through each constellation lasts about 2,000 years in each constellation. The great year where we come back to square one is just under 26,000 years. 25,920 years is the convention that’s applied in ancient mythology. So, the fact that one of those numbers is the scale used to encode the dimensions of the earth in the Great Pyramid cannot be accidental in my view. It’s a deliberate choice. If it was 1 to 57,000, I wouldn’t pay attention to it. If it was 1 to 21,000, I wouldn’t pay attention to it. But 1 to 43,200, that’s the number of syllables in the Rigveda, for example. You find this all over the world, everywhere. So, what does that imply or suggest? Uh what it suggests is that incorporated into the building of the great pyramid was knowledge that was not supposed to have existed 4 and a half thousand years ago. In fact, knowledge that was not supposed to have existed until 2,000 years ago. Hypocus of Alexandria is the Greek who was supposed to have discovered procession. Uh but the incorporation of procession in the structure of the Great Pyramid says to me that that knowledge is much older. It was already old then. I really want to make sure I’m clear on this procession thing because I’m not not super clear. Um, what does it what does it mean procession? It means that there’s a certain star pattern that we see once every 20,000 years. It it it it precesses. It goes backwards. The direction through the through the zodiac is is forwards in the normal year, but in the long term year because of the wobble, the sun rise against the background of the spring equinox. The sun rises perfectly due east. It always does. It also rises perfectly due east on the autumn equinox. On the summer solstice, the sun rises in the northern hemisphere north of east and south of east on the on the winter solstice. The key moment for the ancients was the equinox. It was considered to define the character of the year and what defined it was the constellation that housed the sun that was the house of the sun. Okay. So the star pattern. Yeah. a zodiacal constellation. These the constellations of the zodiac lie along what is called the ecliptic, the path of the sun. Okay. Okay. The earth, the moon, we’re all on the ecliptic within a few degrees above or below it. And and therefore, these are constellations that we can see the sun against the background of. Constellation like Orion, you’ll never see the sun against the background of it. You’re only going to see it against the background of the zodiacal constellations that lie on the so-called path of the sun. And those are the 12 familiar constellations of the zodiac. And as I say, we’re living in the age of Pisces right now. And uh according to ancient astrology, we’re going to be making the transition into Aquarius within about the next 150 years. The sun will have left Pisces and will be rising in Aquarius. So actually the song is true. We do live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius. The only question is whether that means anything or not. The ancients thought it did. Uh we think it doesn’t. Uh I’m not sure who’s right. So I’m going to repeat this back to you to check if I’m I’ve got it correctly, but I suspect I might not have. Within the design of the pyramids, there was a number which you said was 43,000. It’s a scale. It’s a scale. It’s a scale that’s used for the height and the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid. Base perimeter, measure four sides, add it together. height, the actual height of the Great Pyramid, its true original height, it lost about 30 feet in an earthquake in 131, but you can calculate the true original height from the angle of the of the sides. Oh, yeah. Right. Um, and when you take that height and multiply it by 43,200, you get the polar radius of the Earth. You get the radius of the Earth. That’s from the center of the Earth to the edge of the Earth. It’s not the diameter of the Earth. The diameter is twice the radius. Mhm. It’s the it’s the polar radius. Okay. A key dimension of the Earth. Measure the sides and you get on the same scale 1 to 43,200, you get the equatorial circumference of the Earth, what the Earth measures at its equator, its largest its largest measure. Um, and and that uh is either a coincidence or it’s deliberate. And because of the number chosen and because that number is all over ancient mythology, I think it’s deliberate. That means that they must have known the circumference of the earth. Yeah. It means that they knew the circumference of the earth and it means they chose a place to put the great pyramid which also was relevant. Uh this isn’t latitude 23 or latitude 37. This is just a fraction off latitude 30° north. So therefore 1/3 of the way between the equator and the north pole. It’s a it’s a re it’s a significant relevant. What it’s telling us is this monument speaks to the earth. This monument is locked into the true north of this planet. This monument gives you the dimensions of this planet. This monument is speaking to this planet. How could they possibly know the circumference of the earth 4,500 years ago? Because they’re a lost civilization. Because the the knowledge comes down from a former time. I don’t think the Egyptians knew it. I think it came down I think it was inherited knowledge from what I’m here to advocate for and to speak for the possibility of a major forgotten episode in the human story which could be 20,000 years ago. And they’ve passed it down in in myths and stories. Yes. Passed it down. But not only in myths and stories. Um, this is something else that I will I’ll just hint at here that I intend to get into in the new book is that there appear to have been organizations in each of these civilizations. In Egypt, they were called the followers of Horus. In Sumer, they were called the Akcaloo. They served as advisers to kings. They were called sages. There’s a reference to them. Many cultures refer to them as the seven sages. They provided advice to kings in the historical period. And I’m wondering whether we’re looking at some kind of longived organization here which is carrying down information looking for the right time to switch the engine of civilization back on again. I know it’s sounds extreme but uh that’s what I do. I explore I explore extreme ideas and see whether and see whether they fit or not. And I’m beginning to find this idea does fit it. It fit it fits with a whole range of information which will be in the next book. A sage that reports to the king and totally reports to the king that advises the king on what? On everything on what to do. Oh okay. Yeah. The Akcaloo in the ancient traditions of Sumer they existed in the pre-duvian world. They were there in the world before the flood. Then there and and they taught mankind knowledge then. But the flood came, the cataclysm came, they were wiped out. But some of the abcalu survived and they appear after the flood as advisers to the earliest historical kings of Sumer. And I’m just wondering whether you know there are there are religions in the world which have maintained traditions and maintained offices priesthoods for example for thousands of years. I don’t see why the same shouldn’t be true here. Why there shouldn’t have been some driving motive at the end of the ice age to preserve in a way what they knew and to find mechanisms to pass it down. One mechanism is to embed it in wonderful stories that will go on being told. And another mechanism is to set up some kind of secret society which is operating behind the scenes to guide and steer society. I’m not going to present the evidence for that here, but it’s an avenue I’m pursuing. If I if I don’t find it a satisfactory avenue, I’ll abandon it. But at the moment, it’s looking very interesting. Then where did all this information go? You know, because if the people who built the pyramids of Giza had this information, where did the sages go and with their information? Yeah, it’s very it’s very odd actually what what happens after Giza is fascinating. Um because once you once you leave the fourth dynasty period, get into the fifth and sixth dynasties, pyramid building collapses. The stuff they’re making in the fifth dynasty, like the pyramid of Unas, fifth dynasty pyramid in Sakara. Inside it’s stunningly beautiful. Beautiful tomb chamber, stars on the ceiling, incredible hieroglyphs on the side. It’s magical. But outside it’s just a pile of dust. It’s a mess. It doesn’t even you could hardly recognize it as a pyramid. And it’s true of all those. So this is odd in itself. Normally when human cultures create something they continue to work on it and it tends to get better and better not worse and worse. So it’s odd what happens to the pyramids that they get worse and worse in Egypt. It’s like job done that move on. And that’s there and that’s going to speak to human beings not just for a generation, not just for a hundred years. It’s going to be there speaking to us for thousands of years. It’s going to be sitting there on the Giza plateau like an enormous question mark calling towards it those who don’t see it just as a heap of stones but actually see it as something wonderful and magnificent and mysterious calling them to and saying learn about me figure me out and in the process of learning about me you’re going to learn so much else well in learning about the great pyramid I find that it is encoded with astronomical information that should not be there if the current model of the history of science is correct. I think the current model of the history of science is wrong. I think this information was known much earlier and it’s encoded in the Great Pyramid. Once I know that, then I have to start thinking what else does that mean? And what else it means to me is a big forgotten episode in our story again. Why? Because they had intelligence that they’re not credited with having at that time. Yes. Because it’s there. because there should not be a monument of this scale which incorporates into it information that was not supposed to be available to human beings for another 2 and a half thousand years. So they must have got it from somewhere. Yes, they must have got it from somewhere. And and uh the fact that it’s there is is just a fact. All that’s left for us to say is either it’s a coincidence, complete coincidence, or it’s the result of a deliberate decision. And if it’s the result of a deliberate decision, that weighs much more towards a deliberate decision because of the scale chosen because the scale is part of a system that is found all over the ancient world. It’s not a random number. It’s a very specific number. uh and it’s a number that is derived from a motion of the earth itself from the precession of the earth’s axis. It is derived from that. So I’m situated at a significant latitude. I’m oriented to true north and I incorporate the measurements of your planet on a scale derived from your planet itself. That’s what the Great Pyramid is saying to us. And it’s saying figure that out. Do you think there’s something underneath it? Oh, there’s definitely something underneath it. Cuz we think of it as a sort of like building with the with tunnels inside it. But yeah, when you go into the Great Pyramid now, you go in through what is what is called the robber’s tunnel or Mammoon’s hole. The Khalifa Mammoon had a notion that there would be a entrance to the Great Pyramid in its northern face. Other pyramids had been found with entrances in their northern face, but at that time the Great Pyramid was completely covered with perfectly smooth limestone facing stones and nobody could see the entrance. They came off later in that earthquake in 131, but when he broke in in the 9th century, they didn’t know where the door was. Apparently, there was a place you could almost literally press a switch and open that door, but they couldn’t find it. So, they broke in with sledgehammers and chisels and they smashed their way into the Great Pyramid. And then at a certain moment when they’re about 60 or 70 ft into the Great Pyramid, they hear something dropping in a hollow space. A big something has fallen in a hollow space. They head towards that sound. And then they enter the original corridor system of the Great Pyramid. And that’s the way we all go in now. We go in through that robber’s tunnel and then we go up the Grand Gallery, but we can also go down. We can go down to the subterranean chamber which is 100 ft vertically beneath the base of the great pyramid deep in the bedrock. I actually think that was the original sacred site on that monument is that subterranean chamber. I don’t advise anybody with claustrophobia to go down there. You’re very conscious that you got a 6 million ton monument sitting right above you and it place that has earthquakes. um it can be quite oppressive, but that’s just a hint of what’s under the Giza Plateau. That’s just that’s an accessible bit. Uh but it’s it’s it’s already obvious that there that there is so much more. Some of it’s been picked up with ground penetrating radar. And I’ll take this opportunity to say that the hysterical reaction of mainstream scientists to the announcement by Filippo Byondi, uh what is he saying? He’s saying that there are enormous structures under the second pyramid that not the great pyramid under the pyramid attributed to Kafrey Kufu’s successor. The the structures that go hundreds of feet deep under there structures that involve spiral kind of stairways. The reaction has been overwhelmingly dismissing this. Archaeologists have not they won’t look further. They say it’s impossible and they won’t look at it. And I think that’s shameful for people who imagine they’re scientists. They should be looking further. I’d like to see the technology trial in Turkey. There are underground cities in Turkey. Kyaki for example. We know every room in those underground cities. Run this technology on them. If they accurately reproduce what we already know is there, then we can be pretty sure they’re accurately reproducing what’s under the Giza pyramids. We need to do a lot more work before dismissing this. So I’m I remain open to the notion that a huge underworld awaits discovery under Giza. And the ancient Egyptians themselves felt that way. They felt the Giza the ancient name for it was Rosttow. It was an entrance to the underworld. They saw it as an entrance to the afterlife realm. It makes sense that there would be much much underground structures there. And you’ve been alone in the pyramids. Being with large groups in the pyramid is difficult in the sense that the pyramid to me feels like a personality. When I’m in there with a large group, I I feel the pyramid withdrawing. It it it’s like it doesn’t want to speak to you anymore. It’s the place becomes a dead space. But but if you can be in there with a very small group or be there alone and just be still, let the silence descend. Sit in that silence in the very low lighting that’s in there. just pause and remind yourself that you’re in the last surviving wonder of the ancient world and it’s an incredible privilege to be there and just let it speak to you. And it does. This is of course my critics will say another proof that Hanok’s a lunatic. Uh but uh I’m just telling you what what what what happens to me. It’s a I I think it’s a monument that communicates. What did it say to you? It said to me go further. very much so. I I I I feel in a weird way validated by the Great Pyramid. I think it’s um not only me, others as well, who’ve devoted big chunks of their lives to the Great Pyramid, like Robert Poval, who is a great man by the way. The Orion correlation, the recognition that the three pyramids on the ground are laid out in the pattern of the belt stars of the constellation of Orion makes radical and important changes to our understanding of ancient Egypt. Again, that’s another thing that’s been leapt upon by the archaeological mafia uh because they want to destroy every new idea uh rather than spend a bit of time thinking about it. If what you’re saying is true around the, you know, the first civilizations being 20 plus thousand years ago, what does that mean for us, for our lives? Oh, it’s really important meaning for us because because it will finally remind us and tell us once and for all that we’re not what it’s all about. It’s not all about us. The whole human story is not about us. It’s not inevitable that it comes to this and that we are temporary like every other civilization. We are so filled with arrogance and pride right now in our technological achievements, our great abilities, our great powers and uh the arrogance that comes with that. The Greeks used to call that hubris. It’s ultimately ends in nemesis. Ultimately brings you down. Arrogance arrogance is not a good thing. It’s not a good thing in an individual and it’s a terrible thing in a civilization. It also means that a lot of the things that we’ve dismissed as you know conspiracy or you know hocus pocus whatever might not be. I mean you talk a lot about like astrology and stuff like that and yeah I think we should keep open to to systems that the ancients used which we’ve dismissed like which might be very astrology is one of them. What does astrology ultimately say? It ultimately says that we these beings, these humans aren’t isolated but are connected to the universe and are affected by everything that happens in the universe. And it’s and it’s recognizing that there may be patterns in that and instead of instead of just rubbishing that or doing a few investigations, I think it be maybe worth looking further into that, worth looking further into telepathy too. My friend Rupert Sheldre, a serious scientist, one of the very few who’s doing serious scientific work on issues like telepathy and like telekinesis, being able to move things with your mind. Mainstream scientists, most of them will just laugh at that. Absolute rubbish. Yeah, go away. You’re a lunatic. But why are we lunatics to look into those things? It’s really interesting and it’s really worth investigating. We re should realize that we have a heritage of hundreds of thousands of years and I believe it’s even older than 315,000 years. We do not have a heritage of a hundred years which is the heritage of modern science. Well, let’s let’s be generous. Let’s put modern science even back to the Greeks in a way. But it doesn’t become what we would recognize as science until the 19th century really. So it’s a very young thing on if you take the human being as the as the heart of this and and and you were to find a little pimple on the nose of that human being that would be science. It’s a pimple on the nose of hundreds of thousands of years of human experience. Why should we be so arrogant to dismiss those hundreds of thousands of years of human experience in the favor of 150 years maximum of so-called science? I mean, one of the interesting things is uh I actually did go to the Amazon rainforest in Peru. Um, and they’ve discovered these like big square things underground. I’ve been involved in that. What is What is that? Well, the the name that’s being given to them is uh is geoglyphs. Geoglyphs? I think I know this one. Nobody knew they existed at all until about 40 years ago, really. and uh because the Amazon rainforest is a rainforest and and densely covered with uh canopy. However, it’s constantly being settled. This is a problem in itself. It’s constantly being settled. The Amazon is being cleared and it’s being turned into farms. It’s the clearance of bits of the Amazon initially that exposed these huge geometric structures. Mhm. Under the rainforest, no longer under because they cleared the rainforest. Now with LiDAR, I’ve been involved with Marty Parsonan. In fact, he was on my Netflix show. He’s a archaeologist from Finland and and with Alteo Ramanzi, a Brazilian geographer. Um, what they’re doing is a dense lidar survey of the whole of Array Province in Brazil. This is in Array Province as well, the areas that are still under canopy rainforest. And LAR can see through the canopy and it can see raised objects underneath and it can actually give you the shape of that object. Then they can go in low u you know low impact just a few of them go in check it out see what’s there and then begin the archaeology on the site. I mean this is a prime example. I’ve got um I’ve got a list here of things that we used to believe and things that how those beliefs have changed. And one of them was that we used to believe that the Amazon was an untouched wilderness. That’s right. But in the 1970s, we discovered what, a thousand of these structures at least. They’re confident now from the LAR work that they’re talking of thousands, 3, five, 6,000. There are also roadways that run for 100 km plus. Uh there’s absolutely no doubt that the Amazon once supported a population of millions with um extraordinary clever management of rainforest soils by creating a man-made soil that they call teropa. It’s still used in Brazil today. We are having to completely reconceive the Amazon. It was thought of as a pristine rainforest which a few human beings wandered around aimlessly in hunting whatever. Now, we know that it was the homeland of a very large population who lived in city-sized communities um who joined those communities with long straight roadways. It’s it’s as though the veil is being pulled back and we’re beginning to see a completely untold story in the Amazon. And these geoglyphs very precise rectangles, triangles, circles, squares, all of these. It’s geometry. It’s geometry. What what’s it what’s it doing there in the Amazon? And and when I when I talked to a local shaman about this, and I did on on camera in the in the in the Netflix show, um he talked to me about how important these places still are to him, that these places were made by their ancestors, that they’re places for shamanic gatherings, places for shamans to use specifically to contact the world beyond. Let’s be clear about this. All civilizations, including ours, although we may deny it, all of them emerged from shamanism. Shamanism is the essence uh of the human adventure uh and and all civilizations emerge from shamanism. And this one was shamanism. Yes. Shamanism being the system of using altered states of consciousness to gain direct access to other levels of reality like psychedelics. Yeah, psychedelics or you can fast for a month. Uh that will give you some visions too. Uh there there are there are other ways but but psychedelics are the most efficient way to enter the altered state of consciousness and shamans are masters of the use of plant medicines everywhere in the world but particularly in the Amazon rainforest. This is this is where you you see it most strongly and DMT the active ingredient of awasa is very fast acting in the way that it’s normally consumed. Okay. It’s normally vaped or smoked. Uh it produces a 10-minute journey literally to the other side of reality. Uh and there’s not much you can do about it once you’re in there. But then you’re out again. Iaska is a very clever technology. The Iaska brew contains DMT. DMT is not orally active. So you can drink a tea made of with loads of DMT in it and it’s not going to do anything to you because there’s an enzyme in the gut that destroys it. The iawaska vine contains a chemical that shuts that enzyme down and allows the DMT to be absorbed orally, producing an experience that can last for hours. They can be physically very uncomfortable. Um, what they’re doing at Imperial College is they’re giving them DMT by intravenous infusion using basically anesthesia technology to constantly top up the dose to keep the individual in the peak state. And unlike other psychedelics, there’s no tolerance with DMT. So you can keep on dosing people. When you you’ve taken OAS 80 times, something like that. Something like that. Um it’s not just it’s important to be clear about a number of things. First of all, all psychedelics are extremely serious matters. They are not to be taken trivially. They are extremely serious with uh experienced use of Iawaska. One of the very common reports is this moral dimension that you are presented with your own life with what you’ve done with your own life with the pain that you may have caused to others and suddenly that pain that you caused to another person which you dismissed as they just deserved that they just deserve those words. You suddenly get it from their point of view. You feel the agony that your words caused that person. and you and you find yourself, did I do that? Did I say that? You suddenly see what you are. You can’t go back into your own past and change negative and useless and pointless things that you did. You can’t do that. But you can avoid repeating them in the future. And it’s that teaching of a moral lesson uh that I find most valuable in Iawaska. It’s helped me to come to terms with my tendency to swift anger. I’m I’m very aware that that’s a problem I have and it’s something I need to do something about. And I IO’s helped me with that. I’ve become gentler and and softer. Not gentle enough maybe. It’s a journey. It’s not a it’s not an overnight transformation. Not a magic pill. Uh the main work with Iawaska comes after the medicine. The main work comes with what you do with the experience. How you integrate it into your life. That’s where the work begins. People say, “Oh, it’s so easy to take a a brew.” Well, it’s actually not that easy cuz you’re going to vomit and have diarrhea, but but easy. Um, but that’s where the work begins, not where it ends. And that emotion is that does that stem back to your relationship with your parents? Because I was reading about your early your Look, we’re all frail human beings. We’re all messed about in lots of ways. We all have we all have issues in our lives. Um, you said regret. Regret. Yes, I I do regret saying hurtful and unkind things to a number of people uh over the years. I do I do regret that very much. I do regret very much that I wasn’t I wasn’t mature enough to realize why my parents were so difficult. Uh that I never really forgave them for that. I never really forgave them for the stranges of my childhood and and uh the various things that that that that happened. I never really saw it from their point of view. My mother lost three children aside from me. I’m an only child, but her first child was carried to term before me and born dead. Then I was born. I lived and then the next two both died at the age of a year. Well, I know now as a father I know I know what what quite a catastrophe that is for a person for a for a mother to to lose three children like that. You said weird childhood. Yeah. So this is me. This is little Graham here with my mother and my father. I was it was 1954 that we landed in India which my father was a s consultant surgeon and so he went as a missionary surgeon to India to a place called the Christian medical college in Velour in South India. Um and we lived in a tin hut but he was following his faith. He was doing what was what was right for him. He was giving his skills to help to help people. I I I realize that now and a lot of resentment I have towards him I probably you know shouldn’t have. Um he was an odd guy. He was very eccentric. He used to take me in to watch dissections. Um there were still hangings in India at that time and he would dissect the prisoners after the hangings. He had me in there watching it. Um he took me later on. What age? Uh uh five. You were watching bodies being cut up at five. I was. Yeah. Absolutely. very strange. See, it was presented to me as completely normal. Um, but but it was it it it was strange. Fundamentally, he was a good man, I believe. But I think allowing a four to 5-year-old child be to see those things is deeply traumatic in a way that you probably don’t recognize until later. I I agree. It’s it’s come home to me more and more as the years have gone by that what happened to me in those years in India scarred me deeply. It wasn’t just the operating theaters and the dissections the dissections. It was the gloom and the misery and the despair that settled over my family at that time and I don’t think I ever really recovered from that. Did you have nightmares? Yeah. And what were those nightmares? Um, usually nightmares of loss. Usually nightmares of suddenly I’m alone. I’m in a I’m in a I’m completely isolated, lost, alone. The reason I ask these questions is there’s only ever been one other guest who I sat here with a couple of years ago who I believe’s dad was a surgeon. Mhm. And his dad brought him in to watch operations and dissections when he was young. Yeah. And it scarred him in a way that he didn’t realize until later. And he told me about the nightmares of waking up in the night and seeing those bodies of those people around his bed on a predictable basis. And told me he he’s actually the guy that um coached Michael Jordan and then um Kobe before Kobe Bryant um passed away. And he told me still as an adult those bodies join him at night time. So he’ll wake up at night time and he’ll see them around around his bed. Well, thank you, universe. That didn’t happen to me. I I I do not have I don’t remember having gruesome nightmares. I remember a feeling of loneliness and abandonment. That’s what I remember. Loneliness and abandonment. Mhm. I’ve always felt that way. I was always an outsider at school. Uh everywhere I’ve been all my life. That’s what I’m for. I’m here to be an outsider. I’ve come to that conclusion. and and uh I need to do that well. I need to provide an alternative point of view on the past. There’s a real cost to being an outsider. Oh yeah. But there are also some benefits. You know, we are what we are. And and for me, I was always strange. I had this childhood in in in India. I didn’t fit into the British school system. I was a total failure at school. I could not connect. I could not connect with any of it. It seemed I just didn’t get it. What was this about? and and and the cruelty, the viciousness. My my dad went to a boarding school and had a good experience. So, he sent me to a boarding school in Durham in the north of England. It was the crulest place. Beatings going on. I I was repeatedly beaten about the bare buttocks by a sadistic headmaster with a cane. I couldn’t fit in with the other kids at school. And uh I don’t feel victimized for being an outsider. I feel I feel it’s a privilege. I feel I’ve been given I’ve been given an opportunity to take a different view of things as a result of being an outsider. Are there words unsaid here with these two people in your life? Yes, there are there are so many words unsaid. I’d like to go back to my mom and say, you know, I understand why you were so obsessed with keeping me alive and making sure that I did something with my life. And I’d like to say to my dad, look, you you were pretty crazy, but you you did at least inspire me to be eccentric. It’s a funny thing getting older. I’m 75, 76 in August. One of the things it does is it you realize how collapsed life actually is. I remember being a teenager and I remember being a young man and and I remember being middle-aged. And the feeling is you’re immortal. It’s going to go on forever. Everything’s going to go on forever. And it’s long. It’s long. Lots of time to do the things you want to do. I have a message. No, it’s not long. There is not lots of time. If there’s things you want to do with your life, start now. Start right away. Don’t wait. Otherwise, you’ll not have the opportunity. Life is very short. It’s a beautiful, beautiful gift that the universe has given to us. We are responsible for returning that gift by as far as possible within the circumstances that the universe has given us, living a full life and contributing something worthwhile to that life. Not being a robot, not being commanded what to do, not We we need to learn to think for ourselves. This is something that is so easily forgotten. It’s a miracle that you and I are sitting here at all that I’m here, that you’re here, that we’re here together. It’s absolute miracle. It’s a result of billions and billions of years of processes in the universe which had nothing to do with us randomly bring us together at this at this point. It’s it’s really quite a miraculous situation. To be alive, to be born at all is a miracle. Um I think it was Voltater who talking about reincarnation uh who said um it’s no more extraordinary to be born twice than to be born once. Uh and I think there’s a point in that. Are you religious? You believe in a god or I would say that I am um that I pay attention close attention to what I would regard as the spiritual non-physical side of life. Um but I do not belong to any organized religion. One of the things I don’t like about organized religion is that your relationship to the divine, whatever you call the divine spirit world, whatever you want to call it, your relationship is mediated in some way. Some priest or rabbi or müller teaches you how to mediate that relationship. And I I think what’s important in for me anyway in in the spiritual inquiry is a direct relationship, a direct experience. Rather than being taught something, I want to experience it for myself. And that’s why I found Iawaska very very valuable. Um because it has enabled me to experience something that is absolutely impossible to experience in normal everyday life. We’re so plugged in. We’re so plugged in to the physical world and we have to be we’ve got to be we’ve got to obey the laws of physics. We got to deal with the economics of our circumstances. You know, we have to make our way through life. All of those things we’ve got to do. Um, but if they become our total focus, we become shut off from everything and anything else that may exist. And what the big psychedelics can do if they’re taken into right circumstances with the right advice with sincere intention, what they can do is get you out of your own way and allow you to connect to that wider realm that normally you cannot connect to. And yes, I do believe that a wider realm exists. uh just in the same way that uh you you know before the invention of the microscope we had no idea that there were bacteria I think I’m right about that we start seeing these tiny little things swimming around gosh major discovery well they were always there we just didn’t have the kit to see them and I’m suggesting that what psychedelics can be and certainly what they used as shamans by for is a technology a device uh for getting you out of your own way and allowing you to connect with other levels of reality that in daily life it doesn’t serve you to be connected with. The interesting thing about DMT in particular is when you speak to people who have done DMT, you know, I spent about a year working in a quite a big psychedelics company just to I got really fascinated. I’d left my company. I didn’t have anything to do with my time. So I started this podcast and I also uh on YouTube and I also started working at a psychedelics business cuz I found the studies on mental health and psychedelics really interesting. So I have quite a deep understanding I guess higher than average of IV gain and Iawaska and DMT and my partner um is very very spiritual and has done all these things as well. So one of the fascinating things is how similar people’s experiences are on something like DMT. the funnily enough your description of these creatures saying you’re you belong to us now is almost verbatim what what one of my friends described two weeks ago that they were teleported into this like 4K realm where these creatures that are like slightly animal in their anatomical structure maybe slightly a little bit human as well basically was like had had taken hold of him and they were very curious and inspecting him very colorful realm and then they kind of sent him back or at least you know after that and and it does make one wonder. I think one of my conclusions was if if inhaling a small chemical can completely take me to another place then and and if you from a reasoning perspective it’s just a it was an in one inhale of a chemical then it goes to say that my current perception of reality is just is as fragile as an inhale of a chemical like me thinking that I’m here with you now is as fragile as inhaling one chemical So to think that this is base reality when the difference between this and being with some grasshopper people in 4K exactly is literally in it just that for me I was like oh wow okay it’s an extraordinary realization when that comes and it causes us to question the nature of reality itself and this is um this is what’s really important about these medicines first and foremost you’re right the these um psychedelic medicines are proving incredibly effective as therapy therapeutic tools and that’s great. I I I really think that’s incredibly valuable, but there’s another level to go which is to the inquiry into the nature of reality and the inquiry into what consciousness is. These medicines are very effective means to conduct that inquiry and that’s why I applaud what they’re doing at Imperial College in London. They’re also going to be doing trials at the University of California, San Diego. Um they’re going to be doing trials in Costa Rica. Uh a whole range of places now are looking into this cuz it’s really interesting. People coming back and reporting the same experience when they haven’t compared notes yet. How do we explain that? Because it’s in a vision and people say that at the moment the default mode is to dismiss it and say that’s just rubbish. Don’t waste time on it. Our preconceptions about the nature of reality should not limit our inquiry into the nature of reality. And at the moment still unfortunately there are preconceptions about the nature of reality which is that it’s materialbased that there’s nothing else to it really. Everything is reduced to matter. Even consciousness is reduced to matter. It’s reduced to the physical matter of the brain. We don’t know that for sure. We don’t know what’s going on. consciousness is absolutely not understood. And so when we have mysteries like people who are injected a small dose of a chemical like DMT and go off into a completely other reality, that’s really interesting. And it’s it’s it’s it’s at least as interesting, if not more interesting than exploring other planets right now. I think we need to I think we need to explore ourselves first. We need to We’re not in shape as a species to start exploring the universe. We don’t want to export our toxicity to other parts of the universe until we’ve overcome it, until we’ve grown up as a species, which we haven’t done yet. We need to know ourselves. Psychedelics are one way to do that. Not used irresponsibly, but used responsibly in a structured, careful, thoughtful way. They can be very helpful in knowing ourselves. That’s the journey we need to do first. Go to Mars by all means, you know, go to the moon. We’re going to go even further, but do this first. Know who you are first before you start doing those bigger and wider investigations. Get all that sorted out because we’re hardly sorted out anything on this planet. And we’re talking about exploring other planets. Well, I’m all in favor of exploring other planets, but I’d like to sort out things on this planet first. That’s where the resources should be going. And we should stop kidding ourselves that we can just escape this planet and make a complete [  ] hole of it, leave it, and go and live somewhere else. No, we can fix this. We are capable of fixing this. We’re capable of fixing everything. Human beings have enormous potential. We’re just using a fraction of 1% of it at the moment. The question I, you know, I mean, the obvious question that comes to mind is how see, you know, maybe I don’t know, maybe some kind of leader comes along. Could be. Um, I think we need to need to move past leaders. I just don’t know how else humans would change without some kind of leadership. It’s very difficult to see. I agree with you. It’s very it’s very difficult to see how it happens one person at a time um slowly through through word of mouth, through experience. But look, everything in the garden is not all flowers either. There’s a lot of very wrong behavior going on there. People are exploiting that medicine. Basically, drug dealers are exploiting that medicine and offering it irresponsibly to people in groups of hundred or even more. that that that’s that’s actually really really stupid to do that. I Iaska is an intimate experience and it needs to be done in a very small group, not a very large group. So it’s not it’s not all roses. I’m not, you know, I’m not trying to paint these medicines in a in in a false light. They have their downsides. They have their problems. They are extremely serious. We should always research and investigate before any experience with psychedelics, but they have a part to play and it’s an important part and thank God we’re seeing its effects. Psilocybin effect on long-term depression, very important. Post-traumatic stress disorder, very important. These therapeutic breakthroughs hopefully will open the door to further inquiries into the kind of work that’s being done at Imperial College. What does this really tell us about the mystery of consciousness? What does this really tell us about what we think is real? Through your journey through um ancient civilizations, what have you come to learn about what this consciousness thing is, if anything at all, or at least what people believed? Yeah. Um and how those mythologies were similar? Yes. I’ve partly I’ve partly come to this through the ancient texts. There’s a very specific uh scene in a number of the ancient Egyptianerary texts. It’s called the judgment scene. And what you see is you see the deceased entering into a hall into a room at the end of which sits the god Osiris enthroned. And uh the deceased is led into the hall by the goddess Mart. She’s recognized by a feather that she wears in her headdress. She’s the goddess of truth, justice, and cosmic harmony. He enters the hall. There’s a scale in the hall. In one pan of the scale is an object that represents his heart, oblique, his soul. Heart and soul were the same thing for the Egyptians in that sense. And in the other pan is the feather of mart, the feather of truth, harmony, and cosmic justice. You do not want your heart to outweigh the feather at that moment. You want at the very least to be in balance. And in order to be in balance then comes into question the whole way that you’ve lived your life. Up on the wall of the hall, there are 42 little figures. They’re called the 42 negative assessors. Each one of them is going to ask you a question. Did you steal? Did you kill? Well, actually the ten commandments are all in there and a lot more as well. Ideally, you should be able to answer no to all of those questions. But the ancient Egyptians always understood how frail human beings are and that we can always make mistakes. The question is, what do we do when we make a mistake? Do we learn from it or do we keep on repeating it? And what I read into that is you were given, you deceased, you were given an incredible opportunity. We allowed you to be born in a human body. You could have a range of experiences that no other physical form on your planet could have. You you you had this huge brain. You had this enormous capacity. We gave it this to you. What did you do with it? Did you use it well or did you squander it and waste it? And at that moment, you’d better be there with some answers about how you used it well. So, as I come towards the end of my life, I look very carefully at my life. I and um I try to undo wrongs that I have done in the past if I can and I try to make sure I don’t do any more in the future. I want to be a nurturing and positive and useful person to the people around me. The the health situation you’ve gone through has clearly made you quite introspective, probably more so than you you might have been 10 years ago, I’m guessing. Oh yeah, absolutely. I was still immortal 10 years ago. M listen each and every one of us, every single human being on this planet could die in the next minute. Life is that fragile. It’s that sudden. You can never predict you you how long you’re going to live. But what something like this does, it focuses the mind and it does make me wish more and more that I can leave this life with as few regrets as possible and that I can feel that I played a useful and positive role in the life of others and that I even played in some way a useful and positive role in the life of the species to which I belong. Are you happy? I am very happy in a lot of ways. I’m blessed to have lived the life I’ve lived, to have traveled the world, to have the adventures that I have had. I’m blessed with a beautiful and wonderful wife and companion, my wife Sam. You got this wonderful picture of her. Yeah. Glazed. That’s me and Samantha. We met when we were about 40 years old. And um I don’t think we’ve been apart more than 4 days in the entire 30 plus years uh since then. Wow. Uh we do everything together. We travel together. Samantha’s a photographer. Brilliant photographer. And and and uh I do not have a great visual eye. So we work together. I do the words. Sa does the pictures. We have the adventures together. We did the scuba diving together. Samantha nearly lost her life twice in intense currents scuba diving. She’s brave. She’s an adventurer. Well, she’s a wonderful mother. This is so important. Samantha and I have six children between us. Samantha brought two from her previous marriage. I brought two from my first marriage and two from my second marriage. So, six children from three broken marriages is a potential disaster. Santa brought them all together into a group of loving, deeply committed siblings who care for one another, who are constantly in each other’s lives, who are there to support one another. Sala did that by just being a brilliant loving person. So I’m very happy to have such a great partner who’s stood by me through thick and thin and who’s brought out these wonderful characters in in in our children and now our grandchildren. You know, nine grandchildren, six grandkids, all of it’s down to Santa. It’s remarkable that through all the wonders of human history and all the things we talked about that love like this kind of romantic love is so central, so important, so central to our happiness. I just thought, oh, it’s it’s just a wonderful reminder of um how easy it is to get caught up in the material and and all the toxic whereas, you know, so much of it comes from just the simplicity of falling in love with someone. Love is what it’s all about and and love is love is giving. It’s giving yourself for somebody else. It’s putting the other person. Sorry, I’m going to end up crying. This This is what my wife does all the time with everybody. She puts other people first. And uh others benefit enormously from that. I’m very fortunate. I think I think if I hadn’t met Samantha when I did and we hadn’t formed this joint life, I think I would have made nothing of my life. Nothing at all really. I think it would have just gone down the tubes. I needed a loving steering hand at that point. Anyway, very lucky. I I I am happy. There are things that make me unhappy, of course, just like every every every other human being. I I don’t understand why those who are bitterly opposed to my work want to try and present me as some kind of fraud or grifter. But I suppose it’s a easy way to lazily dismiss somebody else. Uh another thing that has been used is because I’ve considered the possibility of a lost civilization having an influence on other known historical civilization. Uh I’ve been accused of racism as well that I’ve been I’ve been accused of taking away the authenticity of indigenous achievements. Um and and that again has been without without any receipts. It’s not been it’s just thrown out there as an accusation. Now for me with with a multithnic family uh that racism abuse that has been thrown at me constantly uh is extremely hurtful and extremely painful. It’s one of the few things that have been thrown at me that I actually cannot forgive. It’s unforgivable to use that lazy easy dismissal in a society where a lot of people don’t read anymore. You can pretty much guarantee people who hear that on the internet, they’re not going to go and read the books and actually find out what I said. They’re just going to take it as face value. So, that does hurt and it does make me sad. But generally, I’m blessed. I’m lucky. I’ve lived a fantastic privileged life. I’ve explored the world. I’m surrounded by love and onwards and upwards as far as I’m concerned. Well, you know, Graeme, I think at the end of the day, the thing that endures is the impact, the curiosity that you’ve you’ve provoked in people, allowed them to wander beyond the narrowness of our lives, which is quite miserable. A narrow life is feels quite like a miserable life where you can’t be open-minded and explore. And and that’s why I love these conversations. It’s not to say that I that I always accept when I have these kind of conversations everything to be 100% true, but the net benefit for me is just expanding my mind to possibility. Absolutely. And like please don’t rob me of the opportunity to expand my mind to possibility. What would my life become without possibility or hope or all these things? And and actually when I look at graphs like this that show how our beliefs uh and scientific understanding has changed even in recent times as as recent as 2017 on this particular graph. I go well I have some arrogance to assume that I know it all today. Totally things things are constantly changing. You know every turn of the spade in an archaeological dig can change the whole story. Change the whole story. This is not limited to archaeology. This is found in all fields where there are specialists that they they tend to get locked into a particular reference frame and actually defend it in a territorial way. It becomes like a war and they they they feel absolutely responsible to defend that territory against all covers and will use any dirty tricks that are needed to be used in order to defeat the enemy. So you asked me a straightforward question. Am I happy? Yes, I am happy. And I honestly argued you that there are certain things, particularly the racism assaults on me, that do make me extremely unhappy. What else do I need to know about the the possibility of an ancient civilization that might inform how I think about myself, my life, and I guess also our future. What I found so fascinating is especially we’re in a moment of this AI revolution where you’ve got these sort of big forces of you’ve got nuclear weapons over here. You’ve now got this advanced intelligence. There’s humanoid robots on the horizon. And if there was ever a moment where the word, you know, existential is being used in a in a way that is probably appropriate for me, it feels like now. Yeah, feels like now to me, too. Uh this is uh no doubt uh our species is poised on the edge of an abyss right now. Uh our technology has outgrown our mentality. Uh and we are not uh we’re not in good shape to deal with the challenges that lie ahead. I I un unfortunately the chances of a nuclear exchange are just higher and higher. That’s just a realistic assessment of the way the world is with these maniacal leaders. So what could we learn from the past? We can I I I believe we can learn that there’s another way to live that we don’t have to do it this way. I I that’s that’s something I believe. Okay. Believe that’s something I don’t know. Okay. I guess I’m optimistic that human beings have made it through all these centuries, all these thousands of years, all these hundreds of thousands of years that we’ve made it through. We’ve made terrible mistakes, done terrible things. I mean, look at the Second World War. God know how many people were killed there. I mean, 20 million Russians alone, if I remember correctly. It’s just horrific. Absolute horror. It’s only when I was born in 1950, the Second World War was only 5 years away and at the end of it and it hung over us. You know, you our our generation were aware of that. But it seems to me people today aren’t aware of the horror of global war in the way that they were and and and uh that adds to the to the danger that we will emulate ourselves. I think a new approach to the nature of reality is really vital. I think we we need to begin to understand consciousness better. Uh and what I would wish for the human species is that we understand we are actually all one. Incredibly diverse, full of creativity and differences, but but all one and a mother in the middle of subsahara and Africa and a mother in New York City. They love their kids in exactly the same way. They hope for their kids in exactly the same way. There’s no difference between them at all as long as we’re as long as we’re indoctrinated into this notion of divisive differences. I’m all in favor of differences between human beings. That’s part of our creativity as our species, but divisive differences. That’s what’s going to kill us off. Uh and that’s I think the message that comes down from the past. Whether it’s a correct message or not, the message is we a former civilization made a terrible mistake and it resulted in a cataclysm that brought us down. I think we need to realize that can happen again. Uh and that we are most likely to be the cause of that cataclysm ourselves. Uh there may there may be a danger of further comet impacts. the younger drius comet fragments. It’s called the torid meteor stream. The earth passes through it twice a year in June and in October, November. Uh there are hundreds of deadly objects in the torid meteor stream. It could happen, but I think a much more likely way that we’re going to bring our civilization back almost to the stone age is nuclear war. We’re going to do it to ourselves unless we wake up, unless we become more conscious of what it is to be a human being, of the privilege and the gift of being a human being and how that privilege of gift belongs to every human being, not just to us. But I don’t know how that’s going to be done. I I I do think psychedelics can play a role. I’ve said many times and I’ll say it again. If I if I had the power to do so, I would insist that every world leader has at least at least a dozen sessions of Iawaska before they even apply for the job because you believe that would give them the same feeling of oneness that I think most of them wouldn’t apply for the job at all. Oh, really? And those who did would would probably do a much better job because they’d understand themselves better. Graeme, what is the most important thing we haven’t discussed as it relates to our past and what it might teach us or you know how it might inform how we choose to live our lives today um that we haven’t discussed? Look, the most important thing as far as far as I’m concerned is independent inquiry. We need to start thinking for ourselves and that’s true of the past and it’s true of everything else. uh to the to the extent that I that I do get positive feedback from young people and I do a lot that feedback is thank you for being an example to question everything. It happens that what I’m questioning is the past but that can be a model for questioning everything. I I feel that that very poor journalism being used to smear my name because I asked questions and because I asked them vigorously and because most important of all I reached a large audience. That’s it really. They won’t sneer your name if you don’t reach a large audience. You’re not worth their trouble. I know the feeling. Yeah. But I think you do. But you know for me my thing has always been that um all it’s done has made me clearer like you know you have a bigger platform more people um watching you etc and talking about you all it’s done for me is made me clearer on my principles and what I believe and I’m actually really thankful for that in a weird way. Yeah, because you’re forced to, you know, when you hear so many things said about you, written about you, whatever, it does focus one minds on like who am I and what matters? What am I where am I uncompromising in terms of the conversations I want to have the way I want to do it? And that’s given me a huge amount of clarity and one of the things that I’m really I really want to make sure is that it doesn’t make me um bitter or resentful in any way. Very important. And you can see how it happens. Yeah, I can I can absolutely see how it happens because you you have to live with a sort of um injustice potentially or being mischaracterized or whatever. So, it’s easy to see how one can slip off into bitterness and resentment into that’s a that’s a big part of the work I’m doing on myself at the moment. I I’m confident that I am doing the right thing with my life. I’m doing no harm to anyone and I’m putting ideas out there that are worth thinking about. I’m confident of that. I have no I have no doubts about that. And what will you care about on your on your last day? Most of all, the love of my family. That’s the most important thing to me. And um I don’t know, the feeling that

I did my best. I did the best I could to carry out the task that uh fell upon me quite by accident. I didn’t I was a current affairs journalist in the 1980s. I had no idea I was going to go down this rabbit hole into the ancient world. It was a series of accidents that led to it. But having gone down it, I feel very, very, very committed to it. It’s interesting cuz one of the ways that I um I’ve always chosen to conduct my interviews is just to um judge people as I find them. I remember once upon a time I had Brian Johnson coming on my podcast and you know, he’s quite a he’s a he has some radical beliefs about living forever, etc. He’s the longevity guy. And I remember one of my team members walking up to me beforehand and saying before he had arrived and saying, “What do you think of him?” And I remember saying, “I have no idea. I’ve not met him yet.” Yeah. And then I sat down with him, had this interview, and he said this thing to me at the end of the interview where he goes, “Thank you.” And I go, “What do you mean?” He goes, “Thank you. This is the first time I’ve done an interview in my life where the interviewer had like no preconceptions of me.” And he goes, “It meant that I was relaxed and able to be myself and blah blah blah.” And I and I say that because my opinion of you is someone who is really curious about about humanity and has this interesting idea that is really expansive for one’s mind about what could have happened. And um again the net benefit for me of that is just expanding my mind in a way that makes me empathetic to other people. Yeah. Makes me feel like me and you aren’t different. Yeah. like I’ve met you today, but we’re probably, you know, we we we go back a long way. Maybe consciously we’re the same, but in our history and our lineage, we are we are one of the same. And um it also gives me a huge amount of respect for other living things, including my ancestors, in a way that you kind of think of your ancestors as these like monkeys that lived in trees potentially. But actually hearing some of these stories makes me go, “Oh my gosh.” And actually, it gives me a huge sense of responsibility to leave this planet and this earth in a way that’s going to be good for, you know, the future the future kids that will live 20,000 years from now in the future and that will probably look at our um fossil records and wonder. I I think I think those of us who have a a platform do have a responsibility very very very definitely. I mean, we’re living in this strange new world. This this world was inconceivable even in the beginning of the 1990s. this this this world of communication that we live in now. And there’s no doubt that that um this is where influence can be applied and and if that influence is encouraging all that’s good in the human race, then that’s really great and it’s a wonderful thing. And if it’s encouraging all that’s dark and negative and cruel and unkind and vicious in the human race, because that’s also out there on the internet, then it’s not so good. Graeme, we have a um closing tradition on the show where the last guest leaves the question for the next not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you is, is there a danger of us sleepwalking into worshiping a machine god? You want me to answer that question? Yes. We’re already worshiping a machine god. As I said earlier in our discussion, uh in the minds of many, science has already been elevated to occupy the space that was once occupied by religions. That is a belief in a machine fundamentally that’s taking place there. Science should be seen as a tool, one amongst many tools that we as human beings have at our disposal. It should never be the only tool and it should never be woripped. I don’t ever want to hear the words trust the science. The words for me are investigate the science. See whether it’s right for you or not. See what else is available in the in the in the situation. Don’t just routinely without thought, without question, trust the science. Don’t do that. That’s that’s betraying science as well. One of the fundamental ethics of science is not to trust the science, is to question and challenge the science. That’s what we should be doing with the science. And yes, we are in danger of creating a kind of multi-dimensional machine which reaches into all aspects of human consciousness and and controls us. Yeah. We got to stop worshiping science. That’s for sure. We got to put it in its rightful place as an incredibly valuable tool which which can do great things for human beings but which can also do terrible harm and damage. Because when we trust science, there’s something we stop listening to. Well, when you put your trust in anything, you better have good reason to put your trust in it. If I if I’m going to trust another human being with my life, I I really want to know that I can trust that person. I’m not just going to say, “Oh, you’re a doctor, so I trust you.” No, it’s not that’s not enough. I want to know more about that doctor and uh in in indeed I have pursued that just recently. Science is great. Science is really useful, but we’re not we’re not being what we should be. We’re not living up to the potential that the universe gave us if we just go around trusting everything all the time. We’re here to ask questions. That’s what we got these enormous brains for. for and this incredible connectivity is to ask questions. Anybody who says don’t ask questions is doing a great deal of harm. Well, I hope my audience are very curious. Um, and I think they must be by now if they’re still hanging around uh on this platform because we’ve had lots of very curious conversations and hopefully expansive. I this acronym DOAC obviously stands for Draio, but also we think of it as like being for dreamers and open-minded people, which is the O, and the A being about expanding awareness and the C really being about feeling more connected. Brilliant. like hearing your story and about your partner and your journey and your parents all makes me all, you know, I think there it makes us look spiritually connected in a way that’s increasingly rare. If people want to learn and read more from you, Graeme, where do they go? I mean, you’ve written so many wonderful books. You’ve got another one on the way. I’ll link all of these books you’ve written and the others that aren’t here below. Okay. Um, very briefly, the the the book that put me on the map was Fingerprints of the Gods. Yeah. And that’s the book where I really investigate begin to investigate the possibility of a lost civilization. Before that came the sign and the seal which was which was about Ethiopia’s claim to possess the lost ark of the covenant. It happened that as a reporter in the 1980s I spent a lot of time in Ethiopia and I came across this tradition which is fundamental to all religious life in Ethiopia. uh and and um ended up writing a book about it that put me on the track of a lost civilization led to fingerprints of the gods. Then after fingerprints of the gods, there’s a book that’s not here, which is keeper of genesis that I wrote with Robert Baval underworld. This was 7 years of scuba diving that Santa and I did all around the world following up tips from local fishermen, local divers. they’d seen something interesting, something that looked man-made at a depth of 30 m just offshore there and they would take us and we would find it. Uh so underworld is about all those flooded continental shelves. 27 million km of continental shelf were flooded at the end of the ice age. That’s 27 million square kilm. That’s Europe and China and a bit more combined. Uh were the best real estate on earth uh 20,000 years ago and are all underwater today. And and there’s signs that there was life there. Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Civilizations then. Yeah. Well, we found very large structures underwater. Um so that’s that’s uh underworld. Then after underworld, I wrote supernatural, which is that one there, which has been reissued in America under the title visionary. And that’s where I went deep into the shamanistic medicines, the the iawaska, psilocybin, and and and the whole notion that cave art, the art that we see in the painted caves is an art of visions, that this is shamans who had entered deeply altered states of consciousness. They’d remembered what they’d seen, and when they came back to the everyday state of consciousness, they painted their visions in caves. is the best explanation for cave arts and why cave art is so similar all around the world and so similar to the visions of Iawaska shamans to this day. Grant thank you so much for all that you do. I won’t repeat every all the reasons why, but you’ve you’ve blown my mind open in a way that’s just driven curiosity. And um I think that’s maybe the start of all inquiry is deep curiosity. And that’s what you’ve done for not just myself, but the hundreds of millions of people that have watched you over the years um all over the world. And I hope long may it continue and good luck with your heart operation. And hopefully we’ll be back again to continue this conversation soon. Absolutely. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Really good to meet you. Thank you so much. That was pretty.