0:00:02 (upbeat music)
0:00:07 Guy, how many people have you interviewed in your life?
0:00:12 – I would say over 20,000.
0:00:14 – And you started a smash hit iconic show
0:00:16 called How I Built This.
0:00:18 Why?
0:00:21 What’s the mission behind that show?
0:00:25 – I wanted to give people access
0:00:30 to the greatest entrepreneurs I could find
0:00:33 in ways that they might not have access to them.
0:00:37 And I wanted that wisdom and those stories
0:00:42 to be available to anyone at any time for free, forever.
0:00:47 – Give me an idea of the kinds and caliber of people
0:00:50 that you’ve interviewed over those 20,000 interviews.
0:00:53 – Everything, everybody from, you know,
0:00:57 rural sheepers in Afghanistan
0:01:00 to soccer players in Europe,
0:01:03 to celebrities in the United States,
0:01:08 world leaders, entrepreneurs and founders, businesses,
0:01:13 to ordinary man-on-the-street conversations.
0:01:14 – I’m really curious.
0:01:15 You know, when we talk about building something,
0:01:17 the seemingly impossible,
0:01:19 most difficult part of building anything
0:01:22 seems to be going from zero to one.
0:01:24 And you’ve sat with people who have gone from
0:01:27 having an idea to putting that idea in motion.
0:01:29 And it’s not a huge journey to travel,
0:01:32 but it seems like the hardest journey to travel
0:01:35 because it requires so much of a shift in mindset.
0:01:37 It requires the confrontation of fear
0:01:41 and apparent danger.
0:01:43 And there’s something about these people
0:01:47 that makes them decide that it’s better than not starting.
0:01:50 Taking the action is better than not taking the action.
0:01:53 Have you been able to figure out what that is in people
0:01:55 and how we can cultivate it?
0:01:58 – There’s several sort of the Venn diagram of founders
0:02:01 coalesces around a few common traits that,
0:02:03 by the way, many of us have,
0:02:06 intuitively, naturally, or can develop, right?
0:02:09 So curiosity is an obvious one.
0:02:12 Just this desire to grow and to learn
0:02:14 and to look around you
0:02:18 and to try and absorb the lessons around you.
0:02:21 But the other ones are a little bit more hard-edged,
0:02:25 like a fear of regret, of not trying something.
0:02:27 So many years ago, I interviewed a guy named Jim Cook.
0:02:30 I’ve actually interviewed him recently again.
0:02:32 He really kind of revolutionized
0:02:34 the beer industry in the United States.
0:02:38 Like, the reason why Europeans drink American beer today
0:02:39 is because of Jim Cook.
0:02:41 Like, in the ’80s, it was a joke, right?
0:02:44 There’s actually a famous Monty Python sketch
0:02:47 where it’s something about, you know,
0:02:49 rather drink piss than American beer, something like that.
0:02:53 Well, in the ’80s, he kind of revived the beer industry
0:02:55 in the U.S. with a beer named Samuel Adams.
0:02:57 And he really kind of supercharged
0:03:01 what became this, you know, craft brewing industry in the U.S.
0:03:04 IPAs and all these really interesting beers
0:03:05 that to this day are, you know,
0:03:06 some of the greatest in the world.
0:03:10 He started his business, Sam Adams, in his 30s.
0:03:15 He was a consultant for a Boston Consultant Group.
0:03:17 He was making a good salary.
0:03:18 He had a family.
0:03:23 But there was something about his life that felt unfulfilled.
0:03:26 And part of that was he wanted to build something on his own.
0:03:28 He wanted it to be his.
0:03:31 He didn’t want to work for somebody else.
0:03:34 And he felt that if he didn’t try,
0:03:37 if he just continued on at BCS, he would make a lot of money.
0:03:39 He would make millions of dollars
0:03:42 and he could have a very stable, good life.
0:03:44 But he felt like he would be unfulfilled
0:03:48 if it wasn’t his own thing that he had to try.
0:03:50 So he took a risk. He left.
0:03:54 But he felt that if he didn’t take the risk,
0:03:56 it would be dangerous.
0:04:00 And he actually uses this paradigm, dangerous versus scary.
0:04:04 It was really scary to leave his job at BCS.
0:04:06 But it would be dangerous if he stayed
0:04:10 because the danger would be that one day he’d get out of bed
0:04:14 and he’d be 60 and he would regret not having tried.
0:04:17 And I think that’s a big factor for a lot of founders,
0:04:23 this idea that they don’t want to feel intense regret.
0:04:25 And so they’re willing to take the risk,
0:04:28 even though it might be catastrophic.
0:04:32 The idea of building something, of owning something,
0:04:37 of creating something yourself, that is yours,
0:04:41 is a hugely powerful pull.
0:04:48 And it’s like, you know, that’s that magnetic field
0:04:50 that they’re all attracted to.
0:04:52 They’re all kind of moving in that direction.
0:04:55 I think many of us who are entrepreneurs
0:04:59 or aspire to be entrepreneurs feel that magnetic pull.
0:05:01 What role does self-belief play and what is that?
0:05:04 Because in your book, you talk about how it’s not always
0:05:08 the case that they have huge amount of confidence and knowledge.
0:05:11 Is self-belief essential to get going?
0:05:12 And from all the people you’ve interviewed
0:05:15 that are widely successful, did they have that self-belief
0:05:17 or did they have something else that got them
0:05:19 over that first hurdle?
0:05:20 You know, it’s interesting.
0:05:26 Sometimes there are people who are born sort of–
0:05:29 they have this kind of–
0:05:31 this natural confidence.
0:05:32 And you know people like that.
0:05:34 You’ve met them, right?
0:05:40 People that just seem to exude confidence and self-assurance.
0:05:43 And I think those people are rare in general.
0:05:47 Most healthy entrepreneurs experience self-doubt.
0:05:53 It is a really natural and I think important and necessary
0:05:59 trait to be able to sort of, in your mind, say,
0:06:00 am I doing the right thing?
0:06:01 Is this the right thing?
0:06:04 Am I making a mistake?
0:06:07 The difference is that while it’s
0:06:10 healthy to ask yourself those questions
0:06:12 and to interrogate your decisions–
0:06:16 because it’s going to inevitably lead to better decisions–
0:06:20 and force you to justify things to yourself,
0:06:24 you have to have a willingness to power through.
0:06:27 That I think some people have instinctively.
0:06:29 But there are other entrepreneurs
0:06:32 who develop that skill over time.
0:06:33 I’ll give you an example.
0:06:37 One of my favorite stories that I’ve told on the show,
0:06:41 it just happens to be the case that out of the 500 interviews
0:06:45 or so, I don’t know how many, but we’ve had quite a few founders
0:06:49 who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
0:06:52 Saints, better known as the Mormon Church.
0:06:53 It’s not a term used anymore.
0:06:57 The Church prefers to use the previous term I used.
0:07:02 And there is a very strong tradition of entrepreneurship
0:07:03 in that community.
0:07:06 We just interviewed Jason Worslund, the founder of Therabody.
0:07:11 You know, the Theragun, he’s also grew up in the Church.
0:07:16 And I always wondered, what is it about these members
0:07:18 of the Church and the connection to entrepreneurship?
0:07:23 Well, virtually every young Mormon member of the Church
0:07:25 at 18 goes on a mission.
0:07:29 There’s sent some around the world with books of Mormon,
0:07:32 with a suit, bicycles, and they go door to door to door
0:07:35 to door in every country around the world preaching
0:07:36 the Book of Mormon.
0:07:42 Now, 99 out of 100 houses that you knock your door on,
0:07:45 you knock on their door, slam in your face.
0:07:47 But one door will open.
0:07:51 And after two years of having 99% of the door
0:07:54 slammed in your face, you understand
0:07:55 that it doesn’t matter.
0:07:58 You’re just going for that one door.
0:08:00 And they come back to the United States
0:08:03 and they’ve developed this incredibly thick skin.
0:08:09 They have withstood all of these “no’s” for two years.
0:08:11 And so when they go to start a business,
0:08:15 whether it’s Cotopaxi, Davis Smith, or Jet Blue, David
0:08:22 Neelamon, or Joel Clark, Kodiak Cakes, or Jason Worslund,
0:08:26 Therabody, Theragun, they’ve heard “no” for so long
0:08:30 on these missions that starting a business
0:08:31 seems like a piece of cake.
0:08:35 Because now they know that all they need to do
0:08:37 is withstand those “no’s.”
0:08:43 And “no” happens to be the most important word
0:08:46 that an entrepreneur will ever hear.
0:08:49 And I guess they also know how “yes” happens.
0:08:50 Yeah.
0:08:52 And I think that’s like, as you were saying,
0:08:55 I was thinking about a lot of young people will say to me,
0:08:57 Steve, I’ve tried to get the job.
0:08:58 I’ve tried to start the business.
0:09:00 I sent 10 emails.
0:09:02 And they think they assumed that the 10 emails or the five
0:09:05 emails to the job they wanted would be enough to get it.
0:09:09 But in that case, with the members of the Church
0:09:12 of Latter-day Saints, they know that “no” comes anywhere
0:09:14 between one and 100.
0:09:15 No is the default.
0:09:15 Yeah.
0:09:16 You expect “no.”
0:09:18 So they know that “yes” comes anywhere
0:09:19 between one and 100.
0:09:21 Yes, exactly.
0:09:27 There’s a great story that I came across recently.
0:09:31 It was an interview I did with a guy named Isaac Larryon.
0:09:35 Isaac is the owner of the largest privately owned toy
0:09:38 company in North America called MGA.
0:09:41 In the year 2000, he launched a doll called the Bratz doll,
0:09:43 BRATZZ.
0:09:47 And that doll was the first doll to challenge Barbie.
0:09:50 Barbie had like 90% market share in 2000.
0:09:52 And within three years, Barbie’s market share
0:09:54 went down like 30%.
0:09:58 BRATZZ became a $3 billion a year brand.
0:09:59 It’s an amazing story.
0:10:02 Now, Rewind, back to the early ’70s,
0:10:04 he comes to the United States from Iran,
0:10:08 penniless, $200, $300 in his pocket, no English, to Los
0:10:08 Angeles.
0:10:11 He came here to Los Angeles, where we’re talking.
0:10:14 And he worked as a waiter.
0:10:18 Eventually, he started to import cheap consumer electronics
0:10:21 from Japan in the early ’80s and sell them
0:10:23 to independent electronics stores.
0:10:26 So what he would do is he’d go to Japan with a suitcase.
0:10:30 He’d buy Sony Walkman, stuff his suitcase with Sony Walkman,
0:10:32 come back to LA, and sell them for a 40% markup
0:10:34 to consumer electronics stores.
0:10:35 Eventually, he got successful enough
0:10:38 that he could bring in shipping containers full
0:10:39 of these Walkman, right?
0:10:44 By 1985, ’86, he was doing $4 or $5 million a year in revenue.
0:10:48 So he had a significant business importing Japanese consumer
0:10:52 electronics and selling them locally in the US.
0:10:55 He’s on a trip to Japan in 1986.
0:10:58 And he sees children playing these things called game and watch.
0:11:03 It was a rectangular game with an LED screen and two buttons,
0:11:05 and it was a craze all over Japan.
0:11:09 And he said to himself, I got to sell these in the US.
0:11:10 So he gets on train to Kyoto.
0:11:11 He takes a bullet train to Kyoto,
0:11:14 which is where Nintendo’s headquarters are.
0:11:16 He goes to Nintendo headquarters,
0:11:20 and he asks the receptionist to meet with the head of export.
0:11:23 And she looks at him and she says, I’m sorry.
0:11:24 I think his name is Mr. Kobayashi.
0:11:27 I don’t remember the exact name, but she said, he’s not available.
0:11:30 You have to book an appointment with him three, four months
0:11:31 in advance.
0:11:34 Isaac says, look, I’m here in Kyoto just for the day.
0:11:36 Can I just five minutes, have five minutes with him?
0:11:38 She said, impossible.
0:11:41 So he says, now remember, he’s got a successful business,
0:11:43 $5, $6 million business.
0:11:46 He says, I will wait here in the reception.
0:11:48 When he comes out for lunch, can you point him out?
0:11:49 She says, I’m sorry, I can’t do that.
0:11:54 He sits down in the reception, and he waits,
0:11:57 and he waits, and he waits.
0:12:02 And at 5 PM, a man walks out of the elevator.
0:12:04 He whispers something to the receptionist.
0:12:07 He’s been there for six hours, Isaac.
0:12:10 The man walks up to Isaac and says, may I help you, sir?
0:12:13 He says, my name is Isaac Larion.
0:12:15 I understand you’re in charge of export.
0:12:16 He says, I am.
0:12:18 He said, I would like to get the license
0:12:19 to export the Game and Watch.
0:12:20 He says, impossible.
0:12:21 We’re not interested.
0:12:23 And who are you?
0:12:27 And you need to make an appointment months in advance.
0:12:29 He said, well, can we just have a quick chat?
0:12:30 And he said, no.
0:12:33 He said, can I get your business card, at least?
0:12:34 He hands him his business card.
0:12:35 Isaac goes back to the United States
0:12:37 with this guy’s business card.
0:12:40 He goes to his bank, and he asks for a million dollar line
0:12:42 of credit in the name of this guy.
0:12:45 We’ll call him Kobayashi.
0:12:49 Sends him a telex, because there’s no email back then,
0:12:50 with a million dollar line of credit.
0:12:53 And he calls him up as his business card.
0:12:55 He says, did you receive my line of credit letter?
0:12:57 And the man says, yes, I told you, Mr. Larion,
0:13:00 we’re not interested in working with you.
0:13:03 We’re not interested in exporting these toys.
0:13:05 Not interested.
0:13:06 He said, what if I pay all cash?
0:13:09 He said, we’re not interested.
0:13:11 He calls him again a few days later.
0:13:14 He says, I want to order a million dollars worth of these.
0:13:16 He said, we’re not interested.
0:13:20 He said, please, the guy in Japan says,
0:13:24 we’re not going to change these into English for you.
0:13:24 He says, don’t worry.
0:13:26 Send them to me in Japanese with the instructions.
0:13:28 I’ll repackage them.
0:13:32 Exhausted, the guy finally says, fine, one off.
0:13:34 In year one, they sell $25 million
0:13:36 worth of these game watches in the US.
0:13:40 Year 250 million, year 375 million dollars.
0:13:46 I said to Isaac Larion, you walked into Nintendo.
0:13:48 You sat there.
0:13:50 Your dignity was challenged.
0:13:54 Your self-worth was challenged.
0:13:56 Your ego was challenged.
0:13:57 They said, no, do you repeatedly?
0:14:02 And he said, ego, dignity, self-worth, all that stuff
0:14:04 is nonsense, pride.
0:14:08 If that’s what you care about, you will never succeed.
0:14:11 The minute somebody says no to you
0:14:14 is the minute the negotiation begins.
0:14:15 And that’s how I run my business,
0:14:18 and that’s how I have become the entrepreneur I’ve become.
0:14:21 He’s a multi-billionaire today.
0:14:27 And an amazing example of why that word no is so powerful.
0:14:30 Some people naturally can withstand it.
0:14:33 Some people have to develop the skill
0:14:35 that it takes, like those Mormon missionaries,
0:14:38 to hear no hundreds, thousands of times
0:14:42 before they have that thick skin and they can break through.
0:14:43 So interesting, so powerful.
0:14:44 And a wonderful reframing of what
0:14:47 that moment of rejection means that everyone will go through.
0:14:49 And when I think about these other entrepreneurs
0:14:52 I’ve sat and spoken to who end up getting to where he got to,
0:14:55 some of them have to take what I call no man’s land,
0:14:57 where they start something.
0:14:59 It appears that no one cares.
0:15:02 They do that thing for five years, sometimes 10 years.
0:15:04 It doesn’t appear that anybody cares.
0:15:06 And then, I don’t know, the world conspires,
0:15:10 or luck shows up, or timing happens,
0:15:13 and that person has lift off.
0:15:15 That’s also a sort of similar path.
0:15:16 Have you seen that in any of the people
0:15:18 you’ve interviewed in the stories you’ve seen?
0:15:21 And what is the driving force that pushes someone
0:15:23 through no man’s land for a couple of years,
0:15:26 three, four, five, six, seven years, when it’s not working,
0:15:30 but they have the something to persist regardless?
0:15:32 It’s amazing because it does happen.
0:15:37 I mean, again, going back to this example of Theragun,
0:15:40 this guy, Jason Worceland, came to Los Angeles
0:15:41 to become a chiropractor.
0:15:43 And it was a difficult time in his life.
0:15:45 He had his marriage broken up.
0:15:46 He had two small children.
0:15:50 It was very painful for him to leave Salt Lake City, Utah
0:15:54 to come to Los Angeles to study, to become a chiropractor.
0:15:57 Eventually, he got in a very, very bad motorcycle accident
0:16:00 and was badly injured.
0:16:01 And he was a chiropractor.
0:16:06 So he knew and understood what was going on inside his body.
0:16:09 And one night, the pain was so severe
0:16:11 that he decided to take a jigsaw.
0:16:15 It’s a saw that you use to carve wood.
0:16:18 He took the blade, and he bent it,
0:16:21 and he taped it up with duct tape.
0:16:23 And he thought, what if I just try this on my muscles?
0:16:25 And he put it on his muscle.
0:16:28 And he started to pulse on his muscle.
0:16:30 And it actually felt pretty good.
0:16:36 Actually, that percussive feeling started to give him relief.
0:16:38 And over the next several months,
0:16:43 he started to experiment with this on his patients
0:16:45 until it got to a point where people said, hey,
0:16:47 you’re onto something here.
0:16:49 It would be another seven and a half years
0:16:53 before Theragun was actually marketed as a product.
0:16:56 And during that entire time, he worked.
0:16:58 He talked to everybody he could about it.
0:17:01 But all they saw was a jigsaw with duct tape on it.
0:17:06 They saw this weird product that just didn’t seem
0:17:08 like it was anything useful.
0:17:11 But people were feeling real benefits from it.
0:17:14 So he had, on the one hand, he had people saying to him,
0:17:18 this is weird, and I don’t see a home for it.
0:17:20 On the other hand, he had patients, people
0:17:24 he was working on, who were feeling real benefits from it,
0:17:24 real relief.
0:17:26 And that was driving him.
0:17:29 He knew that if he could figure out
0:17:31 how to find a partner, how to get the money,
0:17:33 he needed the money to launch this thing.
0:17:36 Today, it’s a multi-billion dollar business.
0:17:37 But it took seven years.
0:17:40 And during that seven-year period at any given time,
0:17:44 because he was broke, he could have just walked away
0:17:46 and given up.
0:17:49 But he had this feeling and he had this feedback.
0:17:53 But convinced him, there was something there.
0:17:56 One thing you were known for is asking people about luck.
0:17:59 And the role that luck has played in their lives.
0:18:03 Do you think these successful people believe in luck?
0:18:05 What role do you think luck has played
0:18:07 in making them who they are?
0:18:08 And what sort of trend have you seen?
0:18:11 Because I believe you ask pretty much all of your guests
0:18:13 this question about luck at the very end of the interview.
0:18:15 Yep.
0:18:19 So you must have a big data set to think about.
0:18:21 Luck plays a really important role.
0:18:24 Luck is a weird word, because it’s an intangible.
0:18:26 And it’s like a superstitious word.
0:18:30 It’s like, you know, fate, right?
0:18:32 It’s one of those words that I think
0:18:34 in our modern age of science, a lot of people
0:18:36 are resistant to that word.
0:18:41 Because we believe that we can engineer outcomes.
0:18:44 That humans through the sheer force of will
0:18:46 can engineer an outcome.
0:18:49 And that might be true in some cases.
0:18:56 But you can’t discount this notion of chance, or fortune,
0:18:57 or luck.
0:19:01 You know, you like Canada, the US or Canada, the UK
0:19:03 when you were two or three years old, single mom,
0:19:07 built a business, what are the chances of that happening?
0:19:09 What are the chances of that happening?
0:19:13 The chances of you being in a different circumstance
0:19:19 are greater simply because of the statistical realities
0:19:21 of that circumstance.
0:19:26 But through sheer force of will and some luck, here you are.
0:19:28 You can’t discount it.
0:19:29 So how do you think about luck?
0:19:30 Because I’ve often pondered this.
0:19:34 I thought, the luck in my life, where should I–
0:19:36 where do I find it?
0:19:39 Is it in me meeting my girlfriend
0:19:41 through some sort of chance encounter?
0:19:44 Or is luck much more of a fundamental thing
0:19:46 in the case that you’ve described with me coming to the UK?
0:19:48 Because it’s true, if I hadn’t come to the UK
0:19:50 when I was two years old, then–
0:19:53 and I was still in Botswana, everything’s different.
0:19:54 My education’s different.
0:19:55 It might be very successful there too,
0:19:56 but you just don’t know.
0:20:01 It’s probable that I wouldn’t have had the freedoms in my life
0:20:03 and the opportunities I’ve had if I was still in Ramoswa,
0:20:05 in Botswana.
0:20:08 So as something that I didn’t have any control over,
0:20:10 because I was two, I look at that and go,
0:20:12 that’s really fundamental luck.
0:20:14 That I had parents that loved me.
0:20:16 They moved me to this country where you have health care
0:20:18 and all these amazing things.
0:20:20 That is lucky.
0:20:23 Like, that is just huge fortune that I had no involvement in.
0:20:27 Another kid could be moved to the UK at two years old
0:20:29 and they might be in prison now.
0:20:30 And I’m trying to understand, you know,
0:20:33 because it’s funny, because when I think really deeply about it,
0:20:36 I go, maybe I’m responsible for nothing in my life,
0:20:38 because it’s all nature and nurture.
0:20:40 It’s my DNA and it’s the circumstances
0:20:41 that that DNA would put in.
0:20:43 It’s the environment that DNA was put in.
0:20:44 So if you really think about it,
0:20:46 maybe I’m responsible for nothing.
0:20:48 You’re responsible for a lot
0:20:51 and then you’re not responsible for some as well.
0:20:52 And here’s the thing.
0:20:57 You didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge,
0:21:00 but you know a lot of kids who did go to Oxford or Cambridge
0:21:04 and they won’t be a fraction as financially successful
0:21:07 as you might be or me or anyone else that they know.
0:21:10 And that’s not because you’re better than them
0:21:13 or they’re worse than you, it’s not that at all.
0:21:18 There are factors that we all, there are traits,
0:21:23 there are circumstances that give everybody different powers.
0:21:30 And having the right kind of personality is also luck.
0:21:33 I mean, you might be the smartest,
0:21:36 most educated person on the planet,
0:21:40 but if you cannot withstand hearing no again and again
0:21:41 and you’re trying to run a business,
0:21:43 you’re not gonna make it.
0:21:47 If your ego is so enormous that it gets in the way,
0:21:52 if your sense of dignity and pride is so important to you
0:21:56 that it’s an immovable object and you can’t see past it,
0:22:01 then it doesn’t matter how intelligent you are.
0:22:06 You can be a horrible student, a failing student,
0:22:09 but have those traits, a personality
0:22:14 that enables you to talk to anybody, open mind, kindness,
0:22:19 friendliness, and you will be 100 times more successful
0:22:24 because the role of the dice handed you those traits.
0:22:25 You might not be book smart,
0:22:27 but you got those other things.
0:22:32 So there are all these factors that are intangible
0:22:36 and we all have bits and pieces of these things.
0:22:38 It’s just a matter of how we use them.
0:22:40 – You’ve interviewed Richard Branson, right?
0:22:41 – So have I.
0:22:44 And one of the big things I took away from Richard
0:22:47 was this sounds like a crazy thing to say,
0:22:50 but he admitted how many things he’s really not good at
0:22:52 and he admitted that he’s only really good at
0:22:54 a couple of things.
0:22:55 And this kind of bucks the trend
0:22:57 of what you think when you think of successful people
0:23:00 ’cause you assume that especially CEOs and entrepreneurs
0:23:03 are these sort of Swiss, amazing Swiss army knives
0:23:04 that are just good at everything.
0:23:06 Everything they touch turns to gold.
0:23:08 Richard taught me that you don’t actually have to be good
0:23:11 at that many things to be wildly successful.
0:23:14 You just need to be good at a very narrow thing
0:23:18 and then mitigate your downsides through delegation.
0:23:20 – But that’s what he’s good at.
0:23:22 That’s his talent.
0:23:26 Richard Branson’s talent is in spotting talent in others
0:23:31 and empowering them to go out and build and trusting them.
0:23:35 I did a show for many years called wisdom from the top.
0:23:35 You can still hear it.
0:23:40 It’s available on podcasts and that show was a CEO show.
0:23:45 I interviewed CEOs and one of the CEOs I interviewed
0:23:50 was a guy named Mark King who for years ran
0:23:54 Adidas is North American operations.
0:23:57 He ran TaylorMade, which is a golf brand
0:24:01 and then Taco Bell, he was the CEO of Taco Bell.
0:24:03 And Mark King made this exact point.
0:24:07 He said, you know, I’m not the smartest guy in the room.
0:24:10 I’m not the most intellectual.
0:24:13 I’m not, you know, the most capable and competent
0:24:16 when it comes to, you know,
0:24:20 but I’m really good at finding the people with the answers.
0:24:23 I don’t have the answers most of the time,
0:24:25 but I’m really good at finding the people
0:24:26 who can get the answers.
0:24:30 And that’s, that is what a great leader can do.
0:24:32 CEO or founder or entrepreneur.
0:24:36 It’s figuring out who can find the answers
0:24:39 and inspiring them together around you.
0:24:40 – This is one of the things I’ve learned really late
0:24:41 in my business career.
0:24:45 I say really late, but I mean, I learned it probably at 28.
0:24:48 And then for the last three years,
0:24:50 it’s been front of mind is that the game I’m playing
0:24:54 as a founder and entrepreneur isn’t how smart am I
0:24:55 and how hard do I work?
0:24:58 It’s about realizing that I’m a recruitment company.
0:25:01 Every business I start is a recruitment company.
0:25:03 And I have this like really crazy analogy
0:25:05 I sometimes use where I say to people,
0:25:08 if you had hired Elon Musk and got the best out of him,
0:25:11 right, so hired him and got the best out of him,
0:25:15 you would be worth trillions.
0:25:16 Theoretically, you would be.
0:25:20 If you’d hired Steve Jobs and got the best out of him,
0:25:22 you would have created an Apple
0:25:24 or something else or a Pixar.
0:25:25 And if you think through that,
0:25:28 though it’s an extreme largely impossible lens
0:25:30 to think through, it illuminates the fact
0:25:32 that much of the job of a founder
0:25:34 is to find these exceptional people
0:25:35 and get the best out of them.
0:25:37 That is like the easiest path to value creation
0:25:40 versus hoping that you can become the best at design
0:25:43 and computer programming and all of these kinds of things.
0:25:44 And honestly, in my life,
0:25:47 it’s been like this really big fundamental reframe
0:25:50 which has caused me to reallocate my time
0:25:54 where now I’d say I spend 20 hours a week on recruitment.
0:25:57 Whereas before I might have spent half an hour.
0:26:00 – And this is why I asked you earlier
0:26:02 about like people talent and how important that is
0:26:04 to the game of building a company,
0:26:06 which by definition is a group of people.
0:26:10 And what you’ve seen in great founders there.
0:26:12 Have you ever spoken to Walter Isaacson?
0:26:14 – No.
0:26:15 – The guy that used to follow Steve Jobs.
0:26:16 – Yes, of course I know.
0:26:17 I know he’s a brilliant writer.
0:26:18 Yeah, I haven’t.
0:26:20 – Yeah, he talks a lot
0:26:22 about how Steve Jobs was exceptional at that.
0:26:25 And I remember him saying that before Steve Jobs died,
0:26:26 he asked him in his backyard,
0:26:28 what is the thing in your life that you’ve built?
0:26:30 What is the product that you’re most proud of
0:26:32 and Walter responded to team?
0:26:33 – Yeah.
0:26:35 – And I see that now in great entrepreneurs.
0:26:38 I see how obsessed they are with culture and people.
0:26:40 – Yes.
0:26:41 I mean, as Peter Lynch says,
0:26:46 culture beats strategy for breakfast, right?
0:26:49 – What is culture in your view?
0:26:53 – I think culture is, it’s many things.
0:26:57 It’s a common mission.
0:27:02 It’s a belief in a way of doing things,
0:27:08 not in the way that there’s only one way,
0:27:13 but a way, which could mean innovation, risk taking,
0:27:18 but a shared belief in a common mission, right?
0:27:20 And now a lot of people will say,
0:27:23 well, all right, well, you know, what about Coca-Cola?
0:27:25 What’s the common mission there?
0:27:27 You know, making a sugary soft drink,
0:27:28 you know, a sugary beverage?
0:27:31 And I would venture to say that if you talk to somebody
0:27:34 who worked for a company like Coca-Cola,
0:27:39 they would have probably a generally a common vision
0:27:43 or a common view of why they do what they do.
0:27:46 And it’s not about a sugary soft drink or blah, blah, blah.
0:27:51 It’s about being part of something bigger that has impact.
0:27:58 Strong cultures are places where people feel
0:28:02 like they’re working towards a common goal.
0:28:04 – We talked earlier on about failure
0:28:06 and people’s relationship with failure.
0:28:09 What about quitting?
0:28:12 So failure is kind of like involuntary quitting.
0:28:14 But quitting is like when you make the decision
0:28:17 at some point in the journey that you need to pivot,
0:28:18 this is not working.
0:28:21 And it seems to me like in all the stories of the people
0:28:23 that I’ve interviewed that have become successful,
0:28:25 there has been several moments
0:28:27 where they’ve made a decision to quit something
0:28:32 which was either objectively not smart or terrifying.
0:28:36 But I’ve almost come to learn
0:28:38 that I think quitting is actually a skill
0:28:42 that winners have managed to really sharpen.
0:28:44 And obviously there’s that phrase,
0:28:46 isn’t there, like quitting is for losers.
0:28:47 But the more people I’ve interviewed,
0:28:48 the more I’ve come to learn
0:28:51 that quitting is a bit of a skill.
0:28:54 And I think recognizing when to quit as well.
0:28:57 In my 20s, there were periods of time
0:29:00 where I was a reporter at NPR at the time
0:29:01 and there were periods of time
0:29:03 where I was frustrated and I want to quit.
0:29:07 But I didn’t, but really got close at times
0:29:11 because I was covering the Iraq war in Afghanistan.
0:29:12 I was in and out of war zones.
0:29:13 I was scared.
0:29:16 And had I quit at that time,
0:29:19 my life and career would have been totally different.
0:29:21 I don’t think it would have been as interesting.
0:29:23 I think it’s important that I waited
0:29:26 to the right moment when I did quit
0:29:30 and stopped working for a big organization
0:29:32 and started my own business.
0:29:35 I needed to have that experience in my back pocket.
0:29:37 I needed to feel like I was ready.
0:29:39 Was it scary when I did it,
0:29:43 when I left the safety of a big organization
0:29:46 with insurance and a retirement plan
0:29:47 and a guaranteed income?
0:29:50 It was really scary, I had two kids.
0:29:52 My wife had a small salary.
0:29:56 But I felt like I could take that risk
0:29:58 because it was the right moment.
0:30:01 There was something that told me it was the right moment.
0:30:06 So I think it has to be a thought through process.
0:30:09 And a lot of times people say to me,
0:30:10 should I quit and start my own business?
0:30:15 And I almost always say no, start your business slowly.
0:30:18 So 99% with your job, 1% are business.
0:30:21 Then 5% are business, 95% are job.
0:30:23 Then 10% are business and 90% are job
0:30:28 until you get to a point where maybe your entire evening
0:30:32 and weekend is spent on your side project.
0:30:34 And then it’s time.
0:30:37 Yeah, I followed a similar path in my life
0:30:42 and I’ve been quite an aggressive prolific quitter
0:30:44 at the same time at like really key moments
0:30:48 and I don’t think I’ve ever really thought it through
0:30:51 to a fault sometimes.
0:30:54 But sometimes it’s just been a, it’s like a feeling you have.
0:30:55 When you feel like you’ve reached the end
0:30:57 of a flow chart of options.
0:31:00 And for me, it’s like when I can’t change it
0:31:02 and it sucks, I have to quit.
0:31:04 Or when the effort it would take to change it
0:31:07 isn’t worth the reward on offer, so I have to quit.
0:31:09 So it’s like this flow chart I have in my head.
0:31:12 And it’s funny ’cause throughout your story,
0:31:14 you’ve, throughout this conversation,
0:31:17 you’ve cited these moments where someone was unfulfilled.
0:31:20 You said that three or four times like they were unfulfilled.
0:31:21 They knew they could do something.
0:31:22 They knew to change.
0:31:25 I’ve wondered what the role is in reaching rock bottom
0:31:27 in your life as a catalyst for change.
0:31:29 And I’ve actually asked a few people
0:31:34 whether sometimes we just need a bit more pain.
0:31:35 Yeah.
0:31:38 And it doesn’t sound like a nice thing, but.
0:31:42 I think that rock bottom or version of that
0:31:45 is often a catalyst for change, right?
0:31:46 It goes back to this idea of framing.
0:31:47 It’s very hard.
0:31:52 Failure or setbacks that are intense and severe
0:31:54 are really hard, you know, but.
0:32:00 But they are often necessary to trigger
0:32:02 the change that needs to happen.
0:32:06 I mean, I can tell you, I’ll never forget the day.
0:32:11 It was 2011 when I found I was still working
0:32:15 as an employee at National Public Radio.
0:32:19 And I was told that I would not become
0:32:21 the weekday host of all things considered.
0:32:22 That was my dream.
0:32:26 I’d started there as a 22 year old kid,
0:32:29 hoping that one day I’d be the main anchor.
0:32:32 It’s like the Today program on BBC, except in the evening.
0:32:34 And that’s all I want.
0:32:36 I was a foreign correspondent and I covered 50 countries.
0:32:38 I ticked all the boxes.
0:32:40 I covered the Pentagon.
0:32:42 I was the weekend anchor of the show.
0:32:45 I did everything right by the book,
0:32:48 everything I thought I had to do.
0:32:52 But when it came down to making a decision,
0:32:55 I was not the person that they wanted.
0:32:58 And that was a low point.
0:33:01 I really believed my career was over.
0:33:07 And during that time, while I was looking and searching
0:33:11 for a way to leave the news world
0:33:13 because I was convinced I was finished,
0:33:17 I had heard of an opportunity to create a show
0:33:19 with the people who do TED Talks.
0:33:23 And I jumped at that opportunity
0:33:26 and that changed everything.
0:33:28 That prompted me eventually to leave,
0:33:31 to start my own business, to start creating podcasts.
0:33:34 I would never have been in the podcast world
0:33:36 had I done that.
0:33:40 I would have been on the radio doing news today.
0:33:42 And without that low point,
0:33:46 I wouldn’t have had the trigger to force me
0:33:49 to find the next thing, to find something different and new.
0:33:53 And that failure changed my life.
0:33:57 – Partners, co-founders, people, talent.
0:33:59 What have you come to learn about the importance
0:34:01 of finding a co-founder,
0:34:03 finding people to go into business with
0:34:06 as it relates to where you’ll end up?
0:34:10 – A lot of, I’ll be 50 this year.
0:34:13 And a lot of young people ask me, younger people ask me,
0:34:17 what’s the best piece of advice you can give me in life?
0:34:22 And my advice is always the same.
0:34:23 Find a partner in life.
0:34:25 Now, different from a business partner,
0:34:26 which I’ll get to in a moment,
0:34:28 but I want to talk about a life partner.
0:34:32 I believe that there is a partner for everybody,
0:34:36 whether it’s through Tinder or Hinge or Bumble
0:34:40 or at a church or at a bar or wherever.
0:34:42 I believe there’s a partner for everybody.
0:34:44 And I believe that you are much more likely,
0:34:48 not just that I believe, but statistically it’s true,
0:34:51 you’re much more likely to be successful
0:34:55 if you have a partner to share and build a life with.
0:34:59 That is the single most important thing you can do
0:35:01 as you build a life.
0:35:05 Now, in a business, I give the same advice.
0:35:07 You can build a business as a solo entrepreneur
0:35:10 and it’s happened and we have had many solo entrepreneurs
0:35:13 on the show who’ve built businesses by themselves.
0:35:15 Well, with others helping of course,
0:35:18 but as the only founder.
0:35:24 It’s harder, not because it’s technically harder,
0:35:26 it’s emotionally harder.
0:35:29 Because there’s always gonna be a point along the journey
0:35:32 and you’ve experienced it and I’ve experienced it
0:35:36 where you say to yourself, I suck, I’m a fucking failure.
0:35:40 And there’s no one else to say to you,
0:35:43 you’re just feeling that today,
0:35:45 you’re just feeling that now,
0:35:48 but tomorrow you’re not gonna feel that.
0:35:50 And I as your co-founder might feel that
0:35:52 and you’re gonna need to tell me that I don’t suck.
0:35:56 That’s the beauty and importance of having a co-founder
0:35:58 because they are there on the journey with you.
0:36:01 You are going to go into a crucible of fire
0:36:02 when you start a business.
0:36:06 You are gonna hit moments of incredible stress,
0:36:10 near failure and you’re gonna need somebody
0:36:12 to be there in the trenches with you.
0:36:13 Now, can you do it alone?
0:36:14 Yes, you can.
0:36:18 It’s just harder and the success rates
0:36:21 of co-founder businesses tends to be higher.
0:36:24 It’s why, and I mentioned this in my book,
0:36:25 they came out a few years ago,
0:36:27 the legendary investor, Paul Graham,
0:36:30 one of his criteria for investing in companies
0:36:32 is co-founders.
0:36:34 You have to have a co-founder
0:36:39 because that is a stronger guarantor of success
0:36:43 than a solo entrepreneur.
0:36:45 – What do you think people should be looking for
0:36:47 when they’re seeking a co-founder?
0:36:49 You know, is it a personality thing?
0:36:51 Is it a skill crossover?
0:36:54 Are they looking for someone similar than themselves?
0:36:56 And where do these co-founders come about?
0:36:57 Where do they, where do you find them?
0:36:58 So the question I always get,
0:36:59 where do I find a co-founder?
0:37:01 – Yeah, I mean, I think it’s like dating, you know,
0:37:03 and oftentimes co-founders fight each other.
0:37:05 Sometimes they know each other in college
0:37:09 or university or at school or they meet at a company.
0:37:12 Sometimes they are looking for a co-founder.
0:37:14 Sometimes they are looking for somebody
0:37:15 to start a business with.
0:37:22 And there’s no sort of formula
0:37:24 that you can just kind of take every box.
0:37:26 I think a lot of it is instinct.
0:37:27 A lot of it is luck.
0:37:30 You know, you might have two people
0:37:33 with totally disparate skills.
0:37:35 A technical co-founder and a marketing
0:37:37 or operational co-founder, you know,
0:37:40 or a fundraiser co-founder visionary
0:37:44 and then, you know, sort of the operational side.
0:37:46 And that might be perfect,
0:37:49 but they might have a personality conflict.
0:37:50 There might be some, there might be a point
0:37:54 where they have very diverging views.
0:37:59 And so so much of it is about compatible personalities.
0:38:01 It’s like a marriage, by the way.
0:38:03 You can marry somebody, you can love somebody,
0:38:06 fall in love with somebody and decide to marry somebody
0:38:09 who is gonna be more of a nurturer
0:38:11 and you’re maybe even more of a disciplinarian
0:38:14 when it comes to building a family or vice versa.
0:38:19 Really compatible sort of family building skills.
0:38:21 But if your personalities aren’t compatible,
0:38:24 over time, that marriage won’t last
0:38:26 if you can’t grow together.
0:38:30 Oftentimes, co-founders, when they start a business,
0:38:33 the most successful co-founders grow together too.
0:38:36 You know, they start a business
0:38:39 and then they grow it together
0:38:40 and it becomes stronger over time
0:38:42 because they also grow together.
0:38:45 They also learn mistakes together
0:38:49 and figure out how to recover from those mistakes together.
0:38:51 And in some cases, had a failed business before,
0:38:54 we just had an episode of our show
0:38:58 with the founders of a breakfast cereal called Magic Spoon.
0:39:03 These guys met at university, Greg and Gabby,
0:39:07 and they decided to start a company together,
0:39:11 a protein bar company.
0:39:13 Protein bars made out of crickets.
0:39:16 It’s called XO bars, EXO.
0:39:18 And it was an amazing idea
0:39:21 because crickets are very nutritionally dense,
0:39:23 high protein, really good for the environment
0:39:25 don’t require a lot of water,
0:39:27 you can turn them into a tasteless powder.
0:39:29 And they really pursued this business
0:39:31 for seven, eight years together.
0:39:34 And the business failed for obvious reasons,
0:39:38 which is in our society in the United States, in the West,
0:39:42 we’re not yet ready to consume insects.
0:39:44 There’s a psychological barrier.
0:39:49 So that could have been the end of their partnership.
0:39:53 But they decided that they wanted to continue
0:39:54 building something together
0:39:57 because they believed in each other.
0:40:00 And they moved on to a completely different product,
0:40:04 also high in protein, but breakfast cereal,
0:40:08 high protein, no sugar, low in carbohydrates.
0:40:11 So a keto kind of brand of breakfast cereal,
0:40:15 which is now in 20,000 grocery stores in the United States
0:40:17 and may even be in the UK.
0:40:21 But that’s an example of this partnership
0:40:22 where they failed together,
0:40:25 but which allowed them to then build something
0:40:28 that saw success.
0:40:30 – One of the other sort of central questions I get
0:40:32 as it relates to that starting phase
0:40:36 is people are currently working in a full-time job.
0:40:38 They have an idea,
0:40:40 but they’re not sure how to pivot
0:40:42 from the full-time job to the idea.
0:40:44 Do they quit their job and then pursue the idea?
0:40:47 Do they stay in their job and do it part?
0:40:51 That sort of conundrum of how I go from idea to execution
0:40:54 while I’m in a full-time job that I need
0:40:55 to keep the lights on.
0:40:57 You talk a little bit about this in your book as well,
0:41:00 this idea of how you leave your comfort zone safely.
0:41:02 – Yeah, I mean, of course it depends on the company.
0:41:04 If you’re coming up with a technology
0:41:06 and you’re working at Google,
0:41:08 it’s probably a better idea to quit first
0:41:10 because otherwise Google is gonna claim ownership
0:41:12 over that idea.
0:41:14 And many companies operate that way,
0:41:16 where they’ll argue that,
0:41:20 “Well, if you work for the company and you have an idea,
0:41:20 “we own it.”
0:41:24 So there are examples where you wanna leave the company,
0:41:28 but we have had so many examples on how I built this
0:41:31 of founders who have kept their day job
0:41:34 while pursuing this other idea.
0:41:37 Because they had to pay their bills,
0:41:39 they had to feed their families.
0:41:40 We did a story a couple years ago.
0:41:43 This is actually a UK-based company.
0:41:44 And it’s an amazing story.
0:41:49 It’s a story of a guy named Christian Tapaniinaho,
0:41:50 who is from Finland,
0:41:53 and his wife Darina, who’s Scottish.
0:41:58 And they were both sort of educational consultants in the UK.
0:42:02 They met at college and they had an educational consultancy
0:42:04 and they had various jobs.
0:42:07 But Christian was a tinkerer
0:42:11 and he dreamed of building something.
0:42:13 He wasn’t sure what it was.
0:42:17 It happens that he was a home cook
0:42:18 and he had a problem.
0:42:20 ‘Cause this is where all great businesses start.
0:42:24 I have a problem and maybe other people have that problem.
0:42:25 And if lots of people have that problem,
0:42:26 maybe I can solve it.
0:42:30 Well, his problem was he couldn’t cook a pizza at home.
0:42:32 Why couldn’t you cook a pizza at home?
0:42:33 It has to be really hot.
0:42:35 That’s how you get those beautiful,
0:42:38 crusty Neapolitan pizzas with the blackened crust
0:42:41 because they cook for a minute at very high heat.
0:42:42 Home ovens don’t go that hot.
0:42:43 What did he do?
0:42:45 He started to pound some metal together
0:42:50 and he built his own pizza oven that was wood-fired.
0:42:53 Well, today that pizza oven is uni pizza ovens.
0:42:56 One of the best-selling pizza ovens,
0:42:57 home pizza ovens in the world.
0:43:00 They’re five, between three and 500 bucks.
0:43:02 You know, they’re pretty affordable.
0:43:04 You can, they’ve got wood versions.
0:43:05 They’ve got gas, propane gas.
0:43:07 They’ve got an electric version.
0:43:09 These guys kept their day jobs
0:43:12 years into building this company
0:43:15 because they didn’t know if it was gonna work or not.
0:43:17 That’s a billion dollar company.
0:43:21 An example of somebody who really didn’t,
0:43:23 you know, had one foot in one place
0:43:24 and one foot in the other place.
0:43:27 And once this other thing was real,
0:43:29 they felt that they could take the leap and go for it.
0:43:30 So here’s the thing.
0:43:36 A lot of people assume that entrepreneurs
0:43:37 are these kamikazes.
0:43:41 You know, YOLO, I’m gonna jump out of an airplane,
0:43:44 no parachute and go for it.
0:43:45 And that’s a myth, actually.
0:43:48 There are some who are like that, you know.
0:43:53 But in general, most entrepreneurs calculate the risk.
0:43:57 So they do take risks, but we all take risks every day.
0:44:02 It’s that they mitigate those risks by, in different ways.
0:44:05 So in the case of uni, yes, I’m gonna keep my day job
0:44:07 for a little while and build this thing.
0:44:11 And then it is a risk to jump out of my day job
0:44:12 and to pursue this full time.
0:44:16 But it seems now I can see where this is heading.
0:44:20 And that’s the moment where you can take that leap.
0:44:21 – It’s interesting as well,
0:44:25 because that story doesn’t fit the mold
0:44:27 because there was a lot of patience.
0:44:29 And the patience seemed to come from someone
0:44:32 that was really focused on actually solving a problem
0:44:34 versus getting rich.
0:44:36 And someone that’s focused on getting rich
0:44:38 would have taken a much more kamikazi approach, I think,
0:44:41 than someone who was really just focused on a problem
0:44:42 they genuinely wanted to solve.
0:44:47 And you said, oh, it ended up being the best pizza oven.
0:44:50 And it’s probably because he was so focused on,
0:44:52 as I said, that he was so focused on solving the problem
0:44:55 that he spent, I know, five, six, seven years
0:44:57 making the best pizza oven and worried later
0:44:59 about whether people would want it
0:45:01 or whether they would make him rich from creating it.
0:45:03 But typically it’s the other way around.
0:45:04 With entrepreneurs that come up to me
0:45:06 when I’m in the gym or in the street,
0:45:10 the focus and the priority is clearly, how do I get rich?
0:45:11 I’m thinking of selling this
0:45:13 or I’m thinking of selling this.
0:45:14 And I guess this brings up the question like,
0:45:18 the role of passion and genuine curiosity
0:45:21 in creating truly valuable things
0:45:24 that the world then makes you rich or remunerates you for.
0:45:28 – So there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be rich.
0:45:32 There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make lots of money.
0:45:34 This is, it’s an engine that powers innovation, right?
0:45:38 I mean, incentives breed innovation.
0:45:40 And so there’s a reason why, you know,
0:45:44 the United States, for example, is one of the most,
0:45:48 if not the most entrepreneurial society in modern history
0:45:51 because there are incentives to grow your business.
0:45:57 That being said, I would say about 95% of the people
0:46:00 that I’ve interviewed, founders of businesses,
0:46:01 in virtually every case,
0:46:03 are not primarily motivated by money.
0:46:04 Of course money is important.
0:46:07 We all wanna have financial security.
0:46:10 But what they’re motivated by
0:46:12 is solving a problem they have
0:46:14 or looking for an opportunity in the marketplace
0:46:17 to solve a problem that lots of other people have.
0:46:20 In virtually every case,
0:46:22 ’cause what I do on how I built this
0:46:25 is I mainly interview founders of consumer products,
0:46:29 products that are either American sort of cultural icons
0:46:30 or global brands.
0:46:35 And in virtually every case,
0:46:37 it is somebody who’s trying to solve their own problem.
0:46:39 We did a, I did a story last year,
0:46:43 a bad and amazing entrepreneur named Monique Rodriguez.
0:46:46 Her mom worked as an administrator at a hospital
0:46:47 in the South Side of Chicago.
0:46:50 She grew up, single mom, her dad was, you know,
0:46:53 in and out of jail on drugs.
0:46:57 And she managed to go to nursing school.
0:47:00 So Monique became a nurse, which was a huge achievement,
0:47:01 you know, raised by a single mom
0:47:04 in a tough neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago,
0:47:05 becomes a nurse.
0:47:09 And, you know, within a couple of years of doing that job
0:47:11 was feeling unfulfilled,
0:47:14 but she was always dreaming of something.
0:47:17 And Monique had a problem,
0:47:21 which was she could not find hair care products for her hair.
0:47:23 She was a black woman.
0:47:24 She didn’t, she wasn’t able to find
0:47:27 really good consumer products on the shelves.
0:47:31 So she started to experiment with essential oils.
0:47:34 And eventually she started to mix essential oils
0:47:37 and play around with her hair, avocado, and, you know,
0:47:38 Jojo butt, all of these different things
0:47:41 were ho ho, I can’t remember, no, no, that’s pronounced.
0:47:43 And she started to make Instagram videos.
0:47:46 You know, this is like early Instagram.
0:47:47 And she had it, you know, at the beginning,
0:47:49 10 followers and then 20 followers.
0:47:52 And she would show people what she was doing with the oils
0:47:54 and use it on her hair
0:47:57 and show how it was improving her hair
0:47:59 over time, people were writing in the comments,
0:48:01 hey, where can I buy this stuff?
0:48:06 Well, after a couple of years of people saying that to her,
0:48:08 she still was a nurse.
0:48:09 She asked herself the same question,
0:48:11 well, how can I, how can I do this?
0:48:14 So with almost no money,
0:48:16 she launched a brand called Myel Organics,
0:48:19 which was hair care products for women with textured hair.
0:48:23 Fast forward to 2023,
0:48:27 she sold that business to Proctor and Gamble
0:48:29 for reportedly for half a billion dollars.
0:48:34 This is a woman who started a hair care products company
0:48:37 in her apartment in Indiana,
0:48:39 she was living in Indiana at the time,
0:48:42 with no experience in the industry,
0:48:43 with no connections,
0:48:47 but just a passion to solve a problem she had.
0:48:50 And that was the beginning of an empire.
0:48:53 And that’s a story that I see again and again.
0:48:56 You can never, ever substitute passion
0:48:58 with a desire for money.
0:49:01 Passion is always gonna trump a desire for money.
0:49:04 It eats desire from money to paraphrase Peter Lynch,
0:49:08 passion eats desire for money for lunch or breakfast.
0:49:12 – What is passion doing that just a desire for money
0:49:14 wouldn’t do for, along that journey?
0:49:16 So if we think about her in that apartment,
0:49:19 if we take her and we drive her with passion,
0:49:21 and we see where she ends up, $500 million,
0:49:22 and then we take her and we drive her
0:49:25 with a desire for money, and we see where she ends up.
0:49:27 Why would she end up in different places?
0:49:28 What are the steps?
0:49:31 – Yeah, I’m not sure she would end up in different places.
0:49:33 There’s no question that money can be an engine
0:49:38 and a motivator, but with passion and a belief
0:49:43 in the thing that you’re building,
0:49:45 having the ability to solve the problem
0:49:47 for many, many people,
0:49:49 if you’re building something that just solves your problem,
0:49:52 it’s not enough, that’s not a business, that’s a hobby.
0:49:54 But if you build a product that solves a problem
0:49:56 for millions of people,
0:49:59 or could potentially solve a problem for millions of people,
0:50:00 and you have a passion to build it
0:50:02 because it’s solving your problem,
0:50:06 that is going to drive you,
0:50:09 that’s gonna motivate you to keep moving forward.
0:50:12 Whereas if it’s simply a profit motive
0:50:14 and it doesn’t land quickly,
0:50:16 you’re unlikely to keep with it.
0:50:18 You’re unlikely to have the patience.
0:50:19 You’re gonna move on and try something else,
0:50:21 which is fine too, which is fine too.
0:50:22 But there’s something in there
0:50:23 and also the case of the pizza guy
0:50:24 who made the pizza ovens,
0:50:27 where because they’re so passionate about it,
0:50:30 they understand the problem so deeply
0:50:33 that they’re able to truly innovate.
0:50:36 Whereas if I was trying to start a pizza oven business now,
0:50:38 frankly, I’ve never experienced pizza ovens before,
0:50:40 never used one, never failed at using one,
0:50:41 never succeeded at using one.
0:50:44 So my information would have to come from Google.
0:50:47 It’s one of the things that I see a lot in entrepreneurs
0:50:50 is how they manage to think for themselves,
0:50:52 the force that makes them think for themselves
0:50:55 and not just accept the conventional way of doing things.
0:50:57 Like someone like Elon Musk is a prime example
0:50:59 of a real first principle,
0:51:03 start from zero, sort of a blank sheet of paper.
0:51:04 Very hard to do,
0:51:07 ’cause conventions like filling all of our brains,
0:51:10 so very, very difficult to do.
0:51:12 I wish there was some way of teaching that.
0:51:15 – Yeah, I mean, it is hard to do.
0:51:20 But I also think that part of the process
0:51:26 and part of building something is a willingness,
0:51:33 not a desire, not a hope, not the enjoyment of,
0:51:38 but a willingness to experience failure.
0:51:40 That’s really hard.
0:51:42 Elon Musk has experienced a lot of failure.
0:51:46 I mean, put aside his quirks
0:51:51 and his, I think, challenging parts to him,
0:51:56 there’s no single person on the planet
0:51:59 who I believe who’s had a bigger impact
0:52:01 on reducing climate emissions.
0:52:03 I mean, say what you want to about him,
0:52:08 but between solar power and cars that are emissions free,
0:52:12 he has had a bigger impact on global climate emissions
0:52:15 than virtually any other individual on Earth,
0:52:18 which is quite a remarkable thing if you think about it.
0:52:20 ‘Cause a lot of people really hate him,
0:52:22 but at the same time,
0:52:24 he’s had a huge impact on the climate.
0:52:27 He’s also had a lot of failure.
0:52:30 We did the story of PayPal on the show many years ago
0:52:33 and told it in great detail.
0:52:36 Max Levchin really was the creator of PayPal.
0:52:37 He’s now the founder of a firm.
0:52:41 And Max Levchin and Peter Thiel started PayPal,
0:52:42 Elon Musk at x.com.
0:52:44 They merged into PayPal
0:52:47 and they actually kicked Elon Musk out of the company.
0:52:51 And Max Levchin tells the story
0:52:52 about the day the board kicked him out
0:52:56 as the head of the company and Elon was crushed, you know?
0:53:01 Tesla, for the first, what, 16 years of its life
0:53:03 was a money-losing business.
0:53:05 Nobody believed in it.
0:53:08 And I think part of his, you know,
0:53:10 part of his bravado and part of his, I think,
0:53:15 maybe part of who he is today
0:53:20 comes from those scars of people not believing in him.
0:53:26 I think that he, but he also was
0:53:29 and still is prepared for failure.
0:53:33 I mean, when a rocket launches and fails,
0:53:36 he doesn’t like it, but he moves on and he, you know,
0:53:37 he goes, he continues.
0:53:42 I did an interview not that long ago with Hillary Swank.
0:53:45 She was 17 or 16 when she came to Los Angeles
0:53:48 with her mother from Washington state to become an actor.
0:53:51 Penny, I mean, literally penniless.
0:53:54 They literally slept in her mom’s car for weeks at a time
0:53:58 while she went to high school and then auditions.
0:54:00 I mean, they were, they had no money.
0:54:02 She went to audition after audition
0:54:04 and would get bit parts here and there.
0:54:07 Only at the age of 25 did she get a breakthrough role
0:54:09 on Barely Hills 90210.
0:54:10 It was in the 90s.
0:54:12 It was the height of that show’s popularity
0:54:15 and she finally gets a recurring role on a television show.
0:54:17 It’s a massive breakthrough.
0:54:18 What happens?
0:54:22 16 episodes in, they kill her character.
0:54:25 Her contract is done.
0:54:27 She’s out of work.
0:54:30 Her entire career blows up and she’s finished.
0:54:32 And she was devastated at the time.
0:54:34 She thought her career was over
0:54:38 because that was the ticket to cruising altitude in Hollywood.
0:54:41 A couple weeks later, her agent calls her and says,
0:54:44 “Hey, there’s an indie film.
0:54:45 “They’re doing an open audition.
0:54:47 “It’s not a lot of money, but it’s something.
0:54:51 “You know, why don’t you go do it for an audition?”
0:54:52 So it’s a small indie crew.
0:54:56 She auditions for the role and she gets it.
0:54:59 She gets offered the role and it’s gonna pay her nothing.
0:55:02 She’s gonna make like three to five grand on this film.
0:55:05 But she has no other options.
0:55:06 And she had the time
0:55:08 because she wasn’t doing nine or two or no anymore.
0:55:11 So she could actually do this role.
0:55:12 Well, the role was as Brandon Tina.
0:55:14 The film was Boys Don’t Cry.
0:55:16 She was nominated for the Academy Award.
0:55:18 Became one of the youngest nominees
0:55:22 and then winners of the Academy Award that year
0:55:25 and was catapulted into global stardom.
0:55:26 And then a few years later,
0:55:29 when her second Academy Award is batched to actress,
0:55:31 you know, in the company of Meryl Streep
0:55:33 and Sally Field and a few others.
0:55:35 I mean, an amazing story.
0:55:40 Had she not had that failure on nine or two or no,
0:55:43 or what felt like a failure at a time, at the time,
0:55:44 she would never have had the opportunity
0:55:46 to audition for this film.
0:55:50 What can we learn from these stories and these people?
0:55:54 We can learn that failure is a, can be a blessing
0:55:57 and it’s all about how we frame it.
0:55:59 Now, I’m not saying I am perfect at this.
0:56:01 I hate failing.
0:56:03 When I fail, it’s painful.
0:56:06 When I have failed in my life and career,
0:56:08 it’s been really hard.
0:56:13 The hardest part about it is reframing it.
0:56:17 And that’s what takes all of my strength, energy,
0:56:19 I think for anybody, to reframe it
0:56:21 and to try and convince yourself
0:56:23 that there’s a reason, there’s a plan.
0:56:28 Whether it’s God or a force or karma or something,
0:56:32 there’s a reason why it’s happening.
0:56:37 And in my life, in every case of failure, every case,
0:56:42 it’s happened for the right reasons.
0:56:44 That an opportunity came about
0:56:48 because that failure moved an obstacle aside.
0:56:50 – Because of how you framed the failure,
0:56:52 because of what you did after the failure,
0:56:55 because it’s conceivable that if you take any of one,
0:56:57 one of your big failures in your life
0:56:59 and you had down tools,
0:57:01 you’d let the failure get the best of you,
0:57:02 then it wouldn’t have turned.
0:57:03 And this is kind of what I was thinking
0:57:06 as you were saying about the force or the God or whatever,
0:57:10 it’s maybe we are the force and we are the God.
0:57:12 I don’t know.
0:57:14 I’m not meant to sound like narcissistic or anything,
0:57:16 but it’s just thinking there’s probably a couple of stories
0:57:19 of people that had their character killed in a movie
0:57:22 that decided, “Forget this.”
0:57:23 And we don’t tell those stories now
0:57:24 because they said, “Forget this.”
0:57:26 So they didn’t get the Academy Awards.
0:57:30 But in that story, she sounds like she was her own force.
0:57:31 She made the decision that,
0:57:32 and it’s interesting because in that moment
0:57:34 when you find out your character’s killed
0:57:35 and you come home and tell your friends
0:57:37 your character’s killed and you feel the shame,
0:57:40 there’s no apparent light at the end of the tunnel.
0:57:41 So it can’t be that.
0:57:42 It can’t be that that drives you on.
0:57:44 It’s got to be something else.
0:57:45 – It’s got to be something else.
0:57:47 And it is, but it is a force.
0:57:52 I mean, this is not a show about faith or religion,
0:57:54 so it depends on what anyone believes in.
0:57:58 But I, I’m a believer in faith.
0:57:59 I believe in it.
0:58:01 I don’t think that it happens
0:58:04 without intervention on our behalf.
0:58:09 Like on our, you know, that we put effort into it.
0:58:11 But, you know, whether you believe or not,
0:58:13 whether you believe in a higher power or not,
0:58:18 I believe in a force.
0:58:20 And it doesn’t happen automatically.
0:58:23 We also have to engineer it.
0:58:28 But I believe that there is some kind of guiding force.
0:58:33 One interview I did about a year and a half ago
0:58:34 is with Tom Hanks.
0:58:38 And Tom Hanks is probably the greatest living actor,
0:58:40 maybe in the English language.
0:58:43 He is the Spencer Tracy of his generation.
0:58:45 He’s been in so many films.
0:58:46 He’s won so many Academy Awards.
0:58:50 When he was ready to start his career, his acting career,
0:58:53 he desperately wanted to be in a very prestigious
0:58:56 Shakespeare Festival in Sacramento, California.
0:58:58 And that was gonna launch his career.
0:59:00 And he didn’t get any roles.
0:59:02 He didn’t get a single part.
0:59:06 And so he had to find other acting roles.
0:59:08 One day, he finds out about an open audition
0:59:13 for a new sitcom that ABC was gonna possibly produce.
0:59:16 A pilot show based on two guys
0:59:18 living in an apartment together in New York.
0:59:20 This show is called “Buzzing Buddies.”
0:59:22 He auditions for the part.
0:59:23 Hundreds of people are auditioning.
0:59:24 Tom Hanks is a nobody.
0:59:27 He gets the part.
0:59:31 But now they’re just gonna make a pilot.
0:59:32 They make the pilot.
0:59:35 And the show actually gets launched.
0:59:39 But even then, there was no guarantee
0:59:43 that after that show ended, his career would continue.
0:59:45 His co-star, Peter Scolari,
0:59:49 didn’t not have as successful a career as Tom Hanks did.
0:59:52 Tom Hanks was on that show, “Buzzing Buddies,”
0:59:52 for a few years.
0:59:55 It was moderately successful.
0:59:57 But he became the superstar.
1:00:01 And his career began as a series of failures.
1:00:05 And so part of it is his own will,
1:00:10 is the sheer will of just keeping on, keeping on.
1:00:11 Part of it is fate.
1:00:12 Part of it is luck.
1:00:15 Part of it is God or whatever you wanna call it.
1:00:20 There’s something there that said to him,
1:00:22 these failures are gonna be important for you.
1:00:26 You’re gonna need them in order to get to the next place.
1:00:28 – What are you thinking about
1:00:30 the subject of work-life balance?
1:00:32 You’ve interviewed a lot of very successful people,
1:00:35 billionaires, they apparently have it all
1:00:38 as it relates to sort of material success.
1:00:40 But it must have sort of illuminated the sacrifices
1:00:42 they’ve made in other areas of their life.
1:00:45 What have you come to learn is most important
1:00:49 and what is the warning that you might pass down
1:00:51 the ladder to other people that are looking up
1:00:53 and thinking, I wanna be a billionaire
1:00:55 like Richard Branson or someone else
1:00:56 that’s wildly successful?
1:01:00 – I mean, there’s always the perception
1:01:03 that we have or outsiders have of the founder
1:01:08 and the internal perception that within the family, right?
1:01:11 And so we saw Steve Jobs differently
1:01:13 than Steve Jobs’ family saw him.
1:01:16 I think he was loving father and partner
1:01:19 and was seen not as Steve Jobs’ founder
1:01:20 but Steve Jobs’ dad.
1:01:25 There’s no question that in many examples
1:01:27 and many interviews I’ve done,
1:01:29 the sacrifices that the founders have made
1:01:32 to build their businesses have meant
1:01:35 that their personal lives have been challenging.
1:01:37 Their marriages have collapsed,
1:01:39 they’ve had difficult relationships with their children.
1:01:41 It’s happened for sure.
1:01:42 – Is this a big regret you see
1:01:44 in the people that you’ve spoken to?
1:01:48 – Sometimes, I think sometimes there are some cases
1:01:52 where there’s a bit of regret around that,
1:01:56 around missing big chunks of their kids’ lives.
1:02:01 Isaac Larian, who’s a wonderful man
1:02:02 and very close to his kids,
1:02:07 he, because of the success of the Bratz dolls
1:02:10 and the threat that it posed to Mattel,
1:02:13 he became the subject of endless lawsuits
1:02:15 and then counter lawsuits with Mattel.
1:02:18 So he was wrapped up and tied up in court cases
1:02:21 with Mattel, the maker of Barbie,
1:02:22 for virtually a decade.
1:02:28 When he finally won on appeal, the last judgment,
1:02:32 he won about $300 million in judgment against Mattel,
1:02:36 his son was asked by a reporter,
1:02:39 “Aren’t you so happy that your dad won?”
1:02:42 And he said, “I’m sad because I didn’t have my dad around
1:02:45 “for 10 years ’cause he was wrapped up in this trial.”
1:02:49 And of course, Isaac was there for his family,
1:02:54 but the point is that there are massive sacrifices.
1:02:59 And in my case, in a much smaller version
1:03:03 of a business I run, I have always wanted to be,
1:03:05 and I’ve always tried to be there for every sports game,
1:03:09 for every school event, for every parent-teacher conference.
1:03:14 We as a family have dinner together every night.
1:03:18 We run a family meeting every Sunday night.
1:03:23 My kids don’t love it, but we sit down
1:03:26 and we talk about the week ahead.
1:03:30 We talk about our goals for the week.
1:03:32 We go over, it’s just gonna sound a little earnest,
1:03:37 but we have a codified list of family,
1:03:39 our family values that we wrote down.
1:03:41 We all, four of us wrote them down
1:03:45 and decided what our family is.
1:03:47 What kind of things were on that?
1:03:51 Gratitude, generosity, forgiveness.
1:03:54 So if, which just happened the other day with my son,
1:03:56 he got really mad at me ’cause I yelled at him
1:03:57 and I apologized.
1:04:00 And I said, “I’m sorry, I had a stressful day.”
1:04:01 And he was still mad.
1:04:04 And I said, “Hey, honor family values is forgiveness.”
1:04:06 Remember, it says forgiveness,
1:04:08 accept an apology and move on.
1:04:14 Curiosity, respect, taking responsibility.
1:04:20 There’s value in reminding yourself
1:04:23 about the things that you aspire to be.
1:04:27 And I think in the case of a family,
1:04:31 it’s to build a strong family,
1:04:38 it takes work and commitment and time.
1:04:40 And that means that you’re gonna sacrifice
1:04:43 other things in order to achieve that.
1:04:46 Why are you still doing what you’re doing?
1:04:50 ‘Cause you’re 15, almost 15 years in, right?
1:04:52 Into how I built this were eight.
1:04:56 Been podcasting, yeah, yeah, 2012 started, yeah.
1:05:01 Yeah, I mean, I am really privileged
1:05:05 because I get to learn every day, you know?
1:05:11 I get to learn from people that I talk to
1:05:14 and exchange ideas with people.
1:05:19 And I’m essentially have created a life for myself
1:05:25 where I earn a living from,
1:05:28 I earn a living from learning,
1:05:32 which is an amazing place to be.
1:05:35 Every day is different.
1:05:40 And what motivates what I do is,
1:05:42 going back to the beginning of our conversation,
1:05:47 is knowing that I can create something
1:05:50 of value for people, for free.
1:05:54 You know, when I, the impetus for how I built this
1:05:59 came from an experience I had now 15 years ago
1:06:04 when I was on, I had a sabbatical year.
1:06:06 And I took a business school class
1:06:11 and on the first day, they handed us a case study part A
1:06:14 and it was about Starbucks and Howard Schultz.
1:06:17 And I devoured it, it was fascinating.
1:06:21 And then the story ended, but you had to wait four days
1:06:23 for the class to come back to get part B.
1:06:24 And it was fascinating.
1:06:26 I didn’t know about the case study method.
1:06:28 I didn’t know that’s how they taught business school.
1:06:32 What I realized soon after was two problems.
1:06:36 The first is the case studies were thin.
1:06:38 They weren’t comprehensive.
1:06:41 And the second problem is they were only accessible
1:06:42 to students at Harvard Business School
1:06:44 or to other business schools
1:06:46 who were paying $120,000 a year.
1:06:49 And I knew then at that moment
1:06:53 that I could do the same thing as a storyteller
1:06:57 for free, make these case studies even better
1:07:00 and make them available for free.
1:07:03 And that was the genesis of how I built this.
1:07:07 It was never a show for entrepreneurs
1:07:08 or budding entrepreneurs.
1:07:10 It was always a show for people
1:07:12 who were interested in building a creative life.
1:07:13 It’s always what it’s been about.
1:07:17 And that’s what motivated me then
1:07:18 and that’s what motivates me now.
1:07:20 When I hear from somebody who says,
1:07:22 and I hear this all the time,
1:07:24 I started a business.
1:07:28 We started to hit a really rocky patch.
1:07:31 We didn’t think we would make it.
1:07:35 And that week I listened to Tom Rinks of Sunbomb
1:07:38 or I listened to Ariel Kay of Parachute.
1:07:40 I listened to whatever episode I listened to
1:07:42 and I listened to it
1:07:45 and I felt exactly what she felt at that moment
1:07:48 when her business was collapsing, was crumbling.
1:07:51 And I thought, okay, we can keep going.
1:07:53 And I hear that all the time.
1:07:57 Because the show is not about heroes.
1:07:59 It’s not about superheroes.
1:08:02 It’s about ordinary people
1:08:07 who built incredible brands and how they did it.
1:08:09 And they didn’t do it ’cause they’re superheroes.
1:08:11 They did it ’cause they’re human.
1:08:14 And I want everybody who listens to the show
1:08:16 to be able to relate to anybody on the show,
1:08:18 whether it’s Richard Branson or Howard Schultz
1:08:21 or Sarah Blake, whoever we have on the show.
1:08:26 They’re humans that are just like the people listening.
1:08:28 – Who’s been your…
1:08:30 And I get asked this all the time
1:08:31 and it’s a bloody awful question,
1:08:33 but I’m gonna ask you because I get it so often.
1:08:36 What has been the interview
1:08:39 that has stayed with you in the most profound way?
1:08:42 Or the first interview that stayed with you
1:08:43 in a profound way?
1:08:45 – I have to qualify the answer
1:08:49 because there are elements of every interview I do
1:08:52 that stick with me, that are powerful.
1:08:54 The story told you about Isaac Larry and in the know
1:08:57 or his childhood in Iran or whatever it might be.
1:09:02 Elements of Gary Erickson’s story,
1:09:03 the founder of Cliff Bar,
1:09:05 I mean, Howard Schultz’s story,
1:09:09 growing up in a housing project in Brooklyn.
1:09:12 So it’s impossible to tell you
1:09:14 what’s the one interview at a 500
1:09:16 that stuck with me the most.
1:09:17 ‘Cause there are elements,
1:09:19 there are things that I remember
1:09:22 and connect with about,
1:09:24 connect to with every interview.
1:09:25 And I keep in touch with many of the founders
1:09:26 who have been on the show.
1:09:32 But I think recently,
1:09:36 one of the most powerful interviews we’ve done
1:09:40 in terms of the scope and the creativity
1:09:42 has been the story of Sunbomb,
1:09:43 which is a suntan lotion.
1:09:46 It was started by a guy named Tom Rinks.
1:09:50 And Tom wanted to create a suntan lotion brand
1:09:53 that could be disruptive in the marketplace.
1:09:58 And he drew elements from all of these disparate influences,
1:10:04 Japanese street wear and surfboard culture.
1:10:07 And even though he was in Holland, Michigan,
1:10:10 he got a mailbox in Cocoa Beach, Florida
1:10:13 because he wanted to put Cocoa Beach, Florida
1:10:15 as the address in the back of the bottle.
1:10:18 He was influenced by all these different things
1:10:20 and put them all together to build
1:10:24 a brand that eventually sold to Essie Johnson
1:10:26 for hundreds of millions of dollars, you know.
1:10:28 It’s stories like that.
1:10:29 And there’s so much more to his story,
1:10:31 but there’s stories like that
1:10:34 where you begin to understand
1:10:38 how people took all of their life experiences
1:10:40 and put them together,
1:10:43 start to put the puzzle pieces together
1:10:45 to build something enduring.
1:10:46 How many kids have you got?
1:10:47 Two.
1:10:48 How old are they?
1:10:49 12 and 14.
1:10:52 From all the interviews you’ve done with hundreds of people,
1:10:55 you know, 500 extremely successful people,
1:10:56 tens of thousands of others,
1:11:00 if there was just one message that you think
1:11:03 would be most useful for those two young kids
1:11:05 as they go off into their lives,
1:11:07 if they are to listen to this in 10 years time,
1:11:09 20 years time, what would that message be?
1:11:14 Find a partner to build your life with.
1:11:17 It doesn’t have to be a romantic partner or a lover
1:11:21 or it can be a sibling or a close friend,
1:11:26 but if you can find a partner to build a life with,
1:11:29 somebody you can support and who can support you,
1:11:36 you are infinitely more likely to build a happy life.
1:11:39 – Guy, thank you.
1:11:40 Thank you so much for so many things.
1:11:41 Thank you so much for the inspiration.
1:11:43 You’ve been a huge inspiration to our show
1:11:44 since the very, very beginning.
1:11:47 In fact, my producer and the co-founder of this show,
1:11:49 Jack, who I started this with,
1:11:52 he from day one has been talking about your show,
1:11:55 not just in a sense of learning from a great podcaster
1:12:00 who makes content in a really value-loaded way,
1:12:02 but from the stories you’ve told,
1:12:04 because the stories you’ve told on your show as well
1:12:08 have been, I mean, Jack and myself have continually cited
1:12:12 as, have left breadcrumbs for people like us
1:12:14 that are building things, kind of like what you said.
1:12:17 They’ve given us key insights and nuggets at certain moments
1:12:20 when we face certain challenges on how to navigate
1:12:23 and you’ll never get to see the value
1:12:24 that that’s given to so many people,
1:12:26 but I just want you to know that I’m one of them,
1:12:27 that Jack is one of them,
1:12:28 and that we’re very appreciative for that
1:12:29 and also for your time today.
1:12:30 So thank you so much, Guy.
1:12:31 – Thank you.
1:12:34 (upbeat music)
1:12:37 (upbeat music)
1:12:47 [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00:03 Do you really think I was deliberately party and breaking the rule?
0:00:05 But it’s all about leading by example.
0:00:08 But to say it was a party is a complete travesty.
0:00:14 Seeing that photo when one of my friends can go to their grandmother’s funeral is the most enraging thing.
0:00:17 I think all gatherings should have been banned at number 10 because I think…
0:00:18 What do you mean gatherings?
0:00:21 Gatherings with alcohol and music and cake.
0:00:24 You should never have allowed that to happen.
0:00:25 Right. Apologize for that.
0:00:26 Boris Gomsak!
0:00:31 The former prime minister of the UK, whose reign included Brexit, Covid and the Ukraine war.
0:00:34 He’s one of the world’s most famous politicians.
0:00:38 On this point of Brexit, how did David Cameron react when you said you’re going to vote Leave?
0:00:41 He said if you come out and support Leave, I will f*ck you up forever.
0:00:45 Because if you support Remain, you can have a top five job in the cabinet.
0:00:46 But is that all a bit corrupt?
0:00:49 And is that how the jobs are dished out in the government at the moment?
0:00:53 Look, I’m sad to say that this has probably been the way politics has been since the dawn of time.
0:00:58 And then this letter you wrote about the decision to leave will stay within the EU, which was unpublished.
0:00:59 You seemed torn.
0:01:02 So do you regret Brexit?
0:01:05 Well, the next big thing was the pandemic.
0:01:07 There was a lot of stuff we didn’t know.
0:01:10 And I think it almost certainly was a lab accident.
0:01:14 They were looking at engineering viruses and the ways that they could manipulate it.
0:01:16 Sadly, something went wrong.
0:01:18 When you talk about lockdowns, you refer to them as bonkers.
0:01:21 Which is strange hearing it from the guy that put the rules in place.
0:01:28 Well, did the benefits of lockdown outweigh the very, very severe damage done to kids?
0:01:29 What do you think the answer to that question is?
0:01:30 Honestly, I think…
0:01:32 Boris, I just wanted to ask a few more things.
0:01:34 Trump or Kamala, who’s the best for international relations?
0:01:36 How many kids do you have?
0:01:39 Charlotte Owen, you’re not related to her, and then you have quite a distinct persona.
0:01:41 People describe you as being a buffoon.
0:01:44 When I first saw you, I thought you were a parody from Bo Selectum.
0:01:45 Is it calculated?
0:01:48 Well, to get people interested in politics, you’ve got to sugar the pill.
0:01:51 But also, your mother said you had certain mechanisms to cope with pain.
0:01:56 Because your mother is sent to a psychiatric facility when you attend.
0:01:57 I read there was physical violence in the house.
0:02:00 And then 14, your parents get divorced.
0:02:02 Yes, we were in Sunset.
0:02:03 My father told us.
0:02:09 And I was, look, I was cross and said, you know, so why did you have us then?
0:02:11 Yeah.
0:02:12 Um…
0:02:25 [Music]
0:02:27 Boris.
0:02:28 Steve.
0:02:35 What do I need to understand about your earliest years to understand the man that you are today?
0:02:53 I think the key thing is my wonderful, happy, very kind of perigranating childhood in the company of my siblings.
0:03:02 The key fact was that after 18 months of existence, my sister Rachel was born.
0:03:14 And ever after, it was just a constant struggle to keep the pretense of primacy with my siblings.
0:03:31 But I think it is probably true to say that healthy, incessant sibling interaction, competition, whatever you want to call it, rivalry,
0:03:33 definitely played a part in my formation.
0:03:35 And we used to make fun of it too.
0:03:38 We used to think it was rather pathetic.
0:03:42 We all knew that there was a culture of trying to win.
0:03:45 So we used to say, oh, a little baby wants to win.
0:03:54 And so we were kind of, we competed, but we also deprecated the competition.
0:03:59 At that age, say before the age of 10, how does that manifest in terms of a feeling?
0:04:03 Because you can in hindsight say, okay, I was competitive, but how did it feel?
0:04:05 You know, because you felt like fun.
0:04:10 But this idea that Rachel came along and then you were vying for attention and competition with her.
0:04:12 How does that feel when you’re under the age of 10?
0:04:16 Because your father at least was very, very busy as a man.
0:04:20 So I’m presuming he wasn’t necessarily so present.
0:04:25 I was reading you moved house 32 times in 14 years.
0:04:32 Okay, I mean, he was, but really, I think I speak for all of my siblings.
0:04:38 Now, when I say that you really couldn’t have had a more loving, caring, you know, they, they both of them.
0:04:42 I mean, they’re both very busy, both my mother and father.
0:04:44 Mother was painter.
0:04:51 My father, yeah, writer did a huge number of things, but they did invest a lot of time in us.
0:04:53 I mean, really a lot.
0:04:56 It sounded like you had a rough sort of first 10 years of life
0:04:59 because you also had gluia, which is, which made you deaf.
0:05:04 Yes, well, I think we need to look very carefully at the.
0:05:12 I definitely had adenoids and I had tonsillitis and I spent a lot of time in St.
0:05:16 Bart’s and had my adenoids out, my tonsillitis and everything like that.
0:05:22 And I did have gluia, but it, but my, my, my deafness, there’s no trace of it.
0:05:33 Now, particularly, I kind of wonder whether it was in fact a, a, a coming means to avoid my mother’s questions.
0:05:38 And I, I think, look, I mean, I don’t know, it may be that I wasn’t as deaf as, as all that.
0:05:39 You know what I mean?
0:05:42 Would you ever do that if your mother was asking you something you didn’t actually want to engage?
0:05:44 And I don’t think I’m that coming.
0:05:45 Do you know what I mean?
0:05:48 Not at eight years old.
0:05:50 Your mother, Charlotte, she had four children.
0:05:54 You were the oldest of those four.
0:05:56 She seems to be a really important character in your life.
0:06:02 In fact, when I opened up the first couple of pages of the book, you, you dedicate the book in memory of Charlotte, your mother.
0:06:03 I do.
0:06:04 She was an artist.
0:06:07 She had made paintings, paintings of, of her children, but also other things.
0:06:08 I saw some of those paintings.
0:06:11 I did some research on those paintings.
0:06:16 But one of the sort of really pivotal moments in her early upbringing is that she suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder.
0:06:18 She did, yeah.
0:06:29 You’re what, 10 years old when your mother is put as an impatient in a psychiatric hospital and you’re a part for eight months.
0:06:30 Something like that.
0:06:31 Yes.
0:06:40 What, what impact does that have on you in terms of shaping, shaping the Boris that we know today, if any?
0:06:43 I mean, I remember it all very, very well.
0:06:48 And it’s hard to say exactly what impact it, it had on me.
0:07:06 But I think what certainly happened was that all four of us, all four of the children that my mother had, we definitely kind of coagulated as a, as a group, because it was a tough time.
0:07:13 There were aspects that were tough because, you know, she, she wasn’t always there.
0:07:18 And so I think it did breed a certain kind of group solidarity.
0:07:29 And she always kind of blamed herself for not being there for the eight months, whatever period it was.
0:07:38 And I, I remember feeling very strongly that that was unfair and on, and that she actually, you know, did an amazing job.
0:07:42 And, you know, you couldn’t, you couldn’t have asked for more.
0:07:46 Did you notice her anything unusual about her behavior before she was sent?
0:07:48 Yes, so the OCD thing is absolutely right.
0:07:49 She did have that.
0:07:51 And, you know, it was very difficult.
0:07:56 And I’m sure people who are watching this know exactly what it is.
0:07:59 But she had lots of different patterns of behavior.
0:08:02 One of the, one of them was, was about cleanliness.
0:08:13 So, so, so the, so she, she washed her hands and then she, she realized in order to turn the tap off,
0:08:16 she’d have to touch the, the, the faucet, the spigot.
0:08:20 And, and she didn’t want to do that because that would make her hands dirty again.
0:08:24 She thought that, you know, this is a very well known symptom.
0:08:26 And she, and she totally got over it.
0:08:26 She got through it.
0:08:31 Why was she sent to a psychiatric facility?
0:08:42 Um, well, I guess because she’s, I think that’s a jolly good question.
0:08:44 I don’t know really, I don’t know the answer.
0:08:54 I think, I think she probably said that she thought she could benefit from therapy.
0:09:02 And that’s what she and my father decided to was the best way forward.
0:09:04 But I, I honestly don’t know the answer to that.
0:09:10 And who looked after you while she was in that facility at 10 years old?
0:09:18 Well, my father was there and we had a wonderful series of au pair girls and nannies and so on and so forth.
0:09:19 And at 14 years old.
0:09:21 And they were, they were all great too.
0:09:36 But, you know, I don’t, I don’t, you know, I don’t want to give the impression, which would not be fair that my mother kind of was absent for long periods or wasn’t a presence in our lives because she really was.
0:09:37 It was more her words.
0:09:47 I saw her doing an interview where she was talking about her belief that you had certain mechanisms to cope with the pain of her going to the facility for eight months.
0:10:00 But then also the divorce when you were 14, I thought those ages, that sort of puberty age where you’re figuring yourself out to get such a jolt of bad news is, you know,
0:10:04 I think that’s, I mean, classically, yes.
0:10:08 And look, I’m not going to, I think you’re onto it.
0:10:20 You’re, you know, there’s, there’s, there was an element of self-defense that then, you know, many kids in my position, then develop.
0:10:27 But I do insist that they both remained remarkable parents.
0:10:31 We know it wasn’t like we were suddenly cut adrift, but by either of them, on the contrary.
0:10:32 Self-defense.
0:10:37 Well, yeah, I don’t know.
0:10:39 I mean, I’m quoting her on me, by the way.
0:10:41 So I’m quoting, I’m quoting you, quoting her.
0:10:43 You were there.
0:10:44 So you understand.
0:10:47 Yeah, but I mean, it didn’t, it didn’t occur to me at the time.
0:10:49 Yeah, I don’t think it can for a 14 year old.
0:10:53 But in hindsight, as a man, you go, okay, that was creating a pattern.
0:10:54 I don’t know.
0:10:59 But I mean, but maybe I got nothing else to compare it to, right?
0:11:01 You know, you’re growing up anyway.
0:11:03 You’re becoming more self-reliant.
0:11:05 You’re going to do things to yourself.
0:11:11 Um, so I think so you go back to where it was with my, my brothers and sisters.
0:11:17 I think certainly, you know, it was another thing that drove us all together.
0:11:19 Why self-defense?
0:11:22 And how did that self-defense manifest in terms of behavior?
0:11:24 I just, I can’t.
0:11:31 I’d be the worst type of, um, when I mean, think, well, how did I, how did I,
0:11:34 how did my self-defense manifest?
0:11:40 I suppose I became, yes, unquestionably, it was painful.
0:11:43 So how did I protect myself against that?
0:11:47 Well, one obvious thing to do.
0:11:55 Should I suppose we all do, I think I find the best therapy for every type of pain,
0:12:02 emotional pain is to try to lose yourself in your work.
0:12:08 Emotional pain is, is about a lot about, it’s about self-esteem.
0:12:15 So, so like with when, when parents split up, um, you know, the, the shock is,
0:12:19 well, you, you can’t love us that much, but if you’re doing this, right?
0:12:23 That’s the, that’s the, what it’s all about, which is not true, of course,
0:12:24 but that’s what the children, that’s what children feel.
0:12:27 They feel it’s their failure.
0:12:28 There’s something wrong with them.
0:12:32 And that’s not true, but that’s how kids feel.
0:12:40 I suppose to protect myself against that, like I had a natural avenue for,
0:12:49 to build up my self-esteem and that was academic work, um, that kind of thing.
0:12:53 But again, and you know, another, I suppose another type of, of competition.
0:12:57 And it, and it is a good therapy.
0:13:01 Work is a, work is a, is a great reliever.
0:13:02 Or distraction.
0:13:11 Well, depends on your sort of theory of psychology, but, um, I think it both.
0:13:13 Both.
0:13:15 Why did they divorce?
0:13:15 Do you know?
0:13:22 I think formally speaking, what had happened was that, um, you know, my mother
0:13:26 simply decided she wanted to make another life and she, you know, she, she’d found
0:13:29 someone wonderful and, and, and, and all the rest of it.
0:13:44 Um, but I think that my father, um, and, and mother, the weird thing about
0:13:50 their divorce was that they both continued to be very strongly affectionate
0:13:57 towards each other and you know, I’m, I’m again, I’m not trying to minimize
0:14:04 the psychological importance of any of this stuff for us as kids.
0:14:10 But that was immensely fortifying because it was so obvious that it wasn’t like
0:14:11 they were at war.
0:14:18 I mean, you know, they, they had a big bust ups, but it was, we felt that there
0:14:23 was a real residue of, of love and affection between, even if, even if it
0:14:27 was, I mean, I think the way, the way we explained it to ourselves was that
0:14:32 there was still a residue of love and affection, but that it was just practically
0:14:35 impossible for them to, to continue.
0:14:38 And so that was, that was how we rationalized it.
0:14:42 And, um, they both found other people and, and, and we’re very happy.
0:14:47 You say bust ups that from everything that I’ve read, there was physical
0:14:49 violence in the household when you’re younger.
0:14:50 Yeah.
0:14:56 Well, this is, this is something that has been alleged by, sadly, by one of my
0:15:01 biographers, some sort of pompous thing to say, one of my biographers.
0:15:07 Well, some guy wrote a book and put that stuff in, you know, what I can tell
0:15:10 you is I have no direct knowledge of, of what he said.
0:15:16 I don’t want to get into it because I don’t want to be disrespectful to my
0:15:17 mother’s memory.
0:15:23 And I, I suddenly don’t want to say anything that I would cause pain or
0:15:24 embarrassment to my father.
0:15:29 So, but I can, what I can say is I had as a child, no direct knowledge of it myself.
0:15:33 What did their relationship teach you that marriage and love was?
0:15:39 They, they, they, so they met at university.
0:15:42 Um, they clearly loved each other.
0:15:47 I think if you ask my siblings, they’ll, they’ll, they’ll tell you that.
0:15:52 So that, you know, it was upsetting when, when they split up because
0:15:54 Do you remember the day they told you?
0:15:54 Yeah, yeah, I do.
0:15:55 I do, I do.
0:15:56 I do.
0:16:02 It was, it was, uh, we were, we were in, we were in San Jose and my father said
0:16:08 that we all had to go and, and up by the, the gate towards the engine shed.
0:16:12 So you went and stood by the gate towards the engine shed and, and we
0:16:14 told this, you know, sad news.
0:16:15 What did he say?
0:16:17 I don’t remember exactly.
0:16:23 I don’t remember exactly, but I was, look, I was cross and, and, and said,
0:16:25 you know, so what, so why did you have us then?
0:16:29 Because I thought, well, yeah, um,
0:16:48 as, as you know, I think it is upsetting and kids do take, you know, kids
0:16:49 take it upon themselves, right?
0:16:54 And so they do, they do think that there must be some fault or mistake
0:16:55 in that in themselves.
0:16:58 And that isn’t, that isn’t true.
0:17:04 I mean, it’s, you know, you, it’s very important for kids not to play themselves
0:17:05 for these things.
0:17:09 So I think that it’s, you know, back to the point I was making earlier
0:17:10 on with you.
0:17:25 Um, I think, you know, you do need to feed the, the, your self-esteem and
0:17:28 you need to get yourself back up again.
0:17:31 And so work was my, was my way of doing it.
0:17:35 I, I could see the, um, the emotion in your face when you talk
0:17:37 about that moment as if you were teleported back to that moment.
0:17:39 For a second.
0:17:39 Yeah.
0:17:41 Yeah.
0:17:45 Well, I mean, it may be, I mean, the, the, the actual, the truth is I’m,
0:17:48 I’m now told in retrospect that that is what I said.
0:17:49 I don’t personally remember it.
0:17:51 The human part feels.
0:17:52 Yeah.
0:17:53 But look, I mean.
0:17:54 Yes.
0:18:01 But I really wouldn’t want to over egg it because my parents were incredibly
0:18:04 kind to each other after that.
0:18:07 You know, when you do this and you throw the, the coal in the air,
0:18:10 I’m just stoking the furnace of my, of my self-esteem.
0:18:11 Yeah.
0:18:11 Yeah.
0:18:11 Yeah.
0:18:13 You, um, you have quite a distinct persona.
0:18:17 You’re, I mean, much of where you sort of first came to public
0:18:18 knowledge was on the TV show.
0:18:19 Have I got news for you?
0:18:19 Yeah, I know.
0:18:22 I think the BBC are very, they, they, they live in permanent state of
0:18:24 horror about what they did that because, you know, I think that’s
0:18:27 one of the reasons that they, I think they, they have a terrible sense of
0:18:30 corporate guilt that they unleashed this thing.
0:18:36 Is, is there a link between your persona, comedic, kind of, you know,
0:18:38 people often describe you as being a bit of a buffoon?
0:18:41 I actually thought you were a, this is just being honest.
0:18:44 Cause I feel like it’s important to be honest with, to someone,
0:18:46 if you’ve said it behind their back, but I, when I first saw you on
0:18:47 the screen, I was a very young man.
0:18:50 I must have been, I don’t know, 14.
0:18:53 And I thought you were a parody from Beau selector.
0:18:58 Like I thought that I thought you were a parody, but then I came to
0:19:01 learn, you know, when you did the man thing, et cetera, that you were a
0:19:03 politician and who you were and where you’d come from.
0:19:07 But the out the out external persona is very atypical of a politician.
0:19:07 Right.
0:19:11 And your general comedic sense that shows up in the book a lot.
0:19:16 You were very comedic on how I got news, how I, how I got news for you.
0:19:19 Is that at all linked?
0:19:21 When, when did that behavior show up?
0:19:24 Because there was two points of reference that I was mulling.
0:19:28 One is things your sister said about where you sort of learned that
0:19:29 comedy was a useful device.
0:19:32 Um, and the second one is something Jimmy Carr actually said to me.
0:19:36 He said to me that, um, he goes, if you ever meet anyone, comedic or a
0:19:39 comedian, don’t ask them if they’re depressed, ask them, which one of their
0:19:42 parents they were trying to cheer up or win favor from.
0:19:46 I, I wondered if all I think, I don’t know.
0:19:52 I think that, um, one of the things I’ve tried to do in politics is to
0:19:53 get people interested.
0:19:57 And one of the things I’m trying to do unleashed, which is unquestionably
0:20:03 a, a mixture of, there’s a, a lot of serious argument in it, but also I’m
0:20:06 trying to tell the story in as readable a way as possible.
0:20:10 And you have to, you have to use.
0:20:13 You’ve got to sugar the pill.
0:20:16 You’ve got to, it’s like, it’s like, it’s like a, it’s like a packet
0:20:18 of, uh, of, of digestive biscuits.
0:20:23 Um, if you, you’ve got to have, so each of the chapters, uh, has
0:20:28 a, uh, some solid, you know, wheat germ, pabulum, but it’s covered
0:20:30 with some, a little layer of chocolate.
0:20:36 Did you say you can go down, you go down the packet compulsively and each
0:20:40 of those 60 chapters, I think there are 60 chapters in that book is designed
0:20:42 to give you a bit of both.
0:20:45 So you, the pill that was sugared, you should get yourself.
0:20:51 No, I, it’s, well, I’d know that there are, it’s the fact of the great
0:20:52 things that I think that we did.
0:20:54 You know, we took that control of our, of our country.
0:20:59 We, we had a, we, we went for a type of independence that people thought
0:21:00 was impossible.
0:21:08 So complicated arguments about, um, at least about you, you know, as a, as
0:21:14 a, as a guide to the last 15 years in, in politics, I think it’s, it’s pretty
0:21:14 useful.
0:21:17 But I mean, I worked in marketing for about 15 years.
0:21:20 So I find it quite fascinating that right now in the world, it seems that
0:21:23 there’s a certain type of atypical personality that’s breaking through and
0:21:24 being resonant.
0:21:32 Is your persona a carefully constructed marketing strategy?
0:21:36 Or is, because someone, someone that knows you referred to as a bit of a
0:21:38 loner and private and a quiet, quiet person.
0:21:41 Yeah, no, no, I live, I, so I’m very, I have a wonderful life.
0:21:47 Um, I, I spend my time, I, I do a lot of painting.
0:21:51 Um, I, I do a lot of reading, uh, uh, writing.
0:21:54 Um, I muck around, muck around with my kids.
0:21:59 It doesn’t take much to, you know, my cup to run over with, with, with happiness.
0:22:05 But you know, all this stuff like that, I’ve got, I’ve always had a lot of
0:22:10 energy, but, but you understand that that’s part of your persona.
0:22:10 Right.
0:22:13 But I’m trying to understand, is it calculated?
0:22:16 Is it something that you’ve, you’ve thought about and you understand
0:22:20 is effective because they describe you as being one of the best sort of
0:22:24 election winners of our, of our time.
0:22:26 I think what people will, I don’t know.
0:22:32 I mean, what people will also say is that, um, I haven’t really changed.
0:22:36 I mean, you know, going back to your earlier, earlier line of question,
0:22:37 I can see where you’re going with this.
0:22:42 We were, you’re saying as part of the strategy for defense, do we adopt
0:22:45 a comedic persona or, or whatever.
0:22:50 Um, I don’t think that was, I think it was just with my brothers and sisters
0:22:55 in our family, there was a kind of horror of, of, you know, being dull
0:22:56 or not saying anything.
0:22:59 You know, we, we had to, you know, we had to amuse each other.
0:23:00 Why?
0:23:03 I was only, only polite.
0:23:07 You know, because it was more fun.
0:23:10 Your brothers and sisters are less amusing than you are.
0:23:11 I wouldn’t say that.
0:23:14 That’s a very controversial thing to say.
0:23:15 You would say that.
0:23:15 I would know.
0:23:17 I would not say that.
0:23:17 You would say that.
0:23:19 Who I would say that.
0:23:19 Yeah.
0:23:22 You think you’re, you’re, you know, you’ve met my brother Leo.
0:23:23 No, I’ve not met him.
0:23:24 Well, then you’ve got to get Leo on this show.
0:23:25 But your sister.
0:23:26 You’re going to get my brother, Jeff.
0:23:26 Yes.
0:23:28 You, you, you’ve met my brother, Jeff.
0:23:33 Honestly, this is, you know, look, honestly, there’s a serious risk of,
0:23:39 of, uh, we had a wonderful childhood because, and they wouldn’t deny this
0:23:44 because we all, you know, we had a lot of fun trying to
0:23:48 interest and amuse each other and, and, and, and your, to your point,
0:23:50 probably our parents as well.
0:23:51 Cause your sister.
0:23:53 That’s all to say that we were, we were, you know, we didn’t,
0:23:58 we didn’t do kind of charades and, and Christmas masks and, and plays
0:24:01 and, and God knows what Jeremy Corbyn said.
0:24:03 Boris is a calculator intelligent who lives in a persona,
0:24:04 which is the opposite.
0:24:07 Is that true at all?
0:24:11 Um, no.
0:24:16 I mean, I, I think that, I wish you were true in some ways, but I don’t.
0:24:21 I, cause most of your most viewed videos on YouTube, but you’re
0:24:23 tackling a small child while they’re rugby.
0:24:26 And by the way, that, by the way, he might, he, he, I reckon he could
0:24:27 be much older than he looked.
0:24:28 Yeah.
0:24:30 That, that, that, that in Japan.
0:24:31 The kids you tackled.
0:24:32 The kids in Japan.
0:24:34 The one I sent in October in Japan.
0:24:35 They’re all comedy videos.
0:24:35 Yeah.
0:24:36 He, but he can anyway.
0:24:38 Eaton.
0:24:41 It’s pretty crazy to be, so you went to eaton at 13 years old.
0:24:45 It’s the crazy thing for me is that approximately 20 of the 57
0:24:48 individuals who have served as prime minister went to eaton,
0:24:52 which is roughly 35% of the UK prime ministers were educated at
0:24:52 eaton roughly.
0:24:53 Yeah.
0:24:56 This for me, when I read that, I go, something’s broken here.
0:25:00 Because for one school to contribute so many of the most powerful
0:25:04 people in, in the land feels like a little bit of like someone’s
0:25:06 got their hands on the scale or there’s some kind of,
0:25:10 that’s why you need to read the book because the book contains
0:25:13 this is the whole fit theme of the book, right?
0:25:14 Not the whole theme of the book.
0:25:16 It’s one of the major themes of the book.
0:25:16 It’s about levelling up.
0:25:17 Yeah.
0:25:22 And if you remember what I say about, I don’t really, you got
0:25:25 through that bit, but I, so I went there on a scholarship.
0:25:26 It was fantastic.
0:25:27 I was very lucky.
0:25:31 I was, I was paid for by the, by Henry the sixth or the legacy of Henry
0:25:32 the safe.
0:25:43 And I remember feeling this incredible sense of amazement that
0:25:48 there were kids from some of the most famous illustrious families
0:25:57 in, in Britain who plainly didn’t have, you know, much intellectual
0:26:03 interest, academic, you know, spark in them and kids who’d come
0:26:08 from backgrounds all over the country who were incredible.
0:26:11 And I, and I, my, my insight at school, very, very, very young
0:26:15 was there’s, there’s a fundamental problem, which is that
0:26:21 there is ambition and energy and genius and talent, probably
0:26:24 completely evenly distributed throughout the UK population.
0:26:28 And opportunity is not.
0:26:30 Yeah.
0:26:31 And that is the problem.
0:26:34 And that is the basic problem with our country.
0:26:39 And this country has more potential arguably than any other major
0:26:43 European economy, because it’s so imbalanced.
0:26:48 And if you look at the, the, the schools like my province in
0:26:52 London and the Southeast in the UK economy, it’s actually
0:26:55 unlike France, Germany, Italy, Holland.
0:26:57 It’s also totally unlike the United States.
0:27:06 And so I, I decided very early on that the, that there was
0:27:09 massive, massive wasted potential.
0:27:15 And so one of the things, so when I became mayor of London, one
0:27:18 of my biggest projects was really, the biggest thing we did
0:27:23 was really all about trying to lift the, the burrows that people
0:27:27 said were, were locked in a permanent cycle of disadvantage
0:27:31 and, and you know, you know what I mean?
0:27:34 The inner, the inner donut of London had me where, you know,
0:27:38 all that, and it was total rubbish, total rubbish.
0:27:43 And you can, you can change people’s aspirations, but you can
0:27:46 then also change the culture of achievement.
0:27:51 And, and I saw it happen in London and I was only mayor for
0:27:55 eight years, but in that period, you really did see the city
0:27:59 change in, in, you know, quite a significant way.
0:28:06 And I believe very, very strongly that that is fundamentally
0:28:07 what needs to happen in the whole of the UK.
0:28:10 And, and I think that this is the job of policy.
0:28:12 I don’t care whether they’re Labour or Conservative or whoever.
0:28:16 I think that that is, that is what we need to be doing.
0:28:18 And I think there are very simple ingredients.
0:28:22 There’s not, there’s limits to what politicians can do, but
0:28:23 there are some simple things that politicians need to be
0:28:25 doing to, to make that happen.
0:28:28 Has the Conservative government done well enough at levelling
0:28:31 up the, the whole of the UK over the last decade?
0:28:36 Yes, obviously not, because it’s not happening far.
0:28:38 It is happening, I mean, it is happening, levelling up is happening.
0:28:40 But if you look at, but it’s nothing like fast enough.
0:28:41 Yeah.
0:28:46 And, you know, so, you know, I was proud of doing things
0:28:51 like running out a gigabit broadband from, you know,
0:28:56 seven to 70% almost 69, 70% of households in, in three years,
0:28:57 which is not, not bad going out.
0:29:01 It’s proud of all the infrastructure stuff we were, we were doing.
0:29:04 I think it’s a mistake to, to stop that.
0:29:11 Infrastructure is crucial for levelling up.
0:29:15 Transport infrastructure is a great, is a great equalizer of opportunity.
0:29:20 So things like HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail, we should be going
0:29:22 on with those in, in my view.
0:29:28 And, you know, whatever my, my defects as a politician, I think
0:29:31 one thing I was good at was getting a lot of stuff done fast
0:29:35 and get, and, and driving, and driving project, projects.
0:29:37 But the problem is.
0:29:39 Ethan, Ethan was back to your question.
0:29:48 That youthful experience was, because I was also at primary
0:29:55 school in, in London, and I really, really decided that this
0:29:58 was, because I think our country has this problem.
0:30:02 Worse than most other countries, most comparable countries.
0:30:05 But if you think, if you think of how strong the UK economy already
0:30:11 is, and imagine what we could achieve if we leveled up, right?
0:30:14 Do you know this, this stat around Ethan, that 20 out of the 57
0:30:16 individuals who served as prime minister came from there?
0:30:20 Isn’t that just the clearest example of the fact that?
0:30:21 It is.
0:30:21 Yeah.
0:30:24 The people that are coming into politics, but also generally the
0:30:28 people that are getting to the top in society are starting
0:30:30 with a unfair advantage to some degree.
0:30:37 I’ve, well, I think what it shows is that, I mean, you could
0:30:43 probably point to cultures like France or wherever where, you
0:30:48 know, a lot of the, the country is run by the, the, the people
0:30:50 from the, the, the great schools.
0:30:55 But yeah, I mean, fundamentally, yes.
0:30:59 So I think that the, so the great, the great choice for, for
0:31:03 anybody who’s interested in public policy is, well, okay,
0:31:06 this is a, this is clearly, clearly a problem.
0:31:07 It’s clearly wrong.
0:31:09 It’s clearly imbalanced.
0:31:11 What do you do?
0:31:15 Do you set out to launch a kind of cultural assault?
0:31:21 Paul Potts style on the successful institutions?
0:31:27 Or do you say actually what we’re going to do is try to spread
0:31:27 opportunities?
0:31:29 So it’s more like America.
0:31:35 And, and if you look at America is growth rates are spectacularly
0:31:37 outperformed European growth rates.
0:31:38 There’s a different sense.
0:31:40 People have a different sense of what they can do.
0:31:45 And we need to have a, we need to have a, a culture in the
0:31:50 UK where people don’t feel prisoners of their geography of
0:31:51 their background.
0:31:53 But that certainly is the case, isn’t it?
0:31:53 At the moment in the UK.
0:31:54 Too much the case.
0:31:56 I mean, it’s less than, it’s less than it was.
0:31:59 I went undercover in a, I went undercover in a school in Liverpool.
0:32:03 That’s, uh, was very poorly ranked on the Ofsted rankings.
0:32:06 And I remember being in that school and just thinking how on
0:32:08 earth are these kids going to have a chance?
0:32:10 Well, they’re not going to have a chance if their teachers
0:32:12 tell them that they’re never going to get into a Russell group
0:32:13 university.
0:32:15 And they, and they, well, what I observed when I was there was
0:32:19 I observed one teacher running from one classroom to the next
0:32:20 classroom.
0:32:23 This was under a Tory government trying to teach two classes at
0:32:23 the same time.
0:32:26 And I remember sitting down with her because I, because I got
0:32:27 like that a school, then I was unexpeled from school.
0:32:29 So I had a bit of mind prejudices about school.
0:32:31 I thought teachers were the problem.
0:32:33 And what I came to learn from speaking to the headmaster of
0:32:36 the school was that this is effectively run like a business
0:32:38 and the amount of students that choose that school every year
0:32:41 determines how much money the school is given by the conservative
0:32:45 government and the amount of the parents choose schools based
0:32:47 on the league table and the league table is determined by
0:32:48 grades.
0:32:52 So really, if you think about the, the structure here, um, the
0:32:54 reason why they’re driving kids like me to do subjects,
0:32:57 which I absolutely hated when I was really interested in business
0:33:00 was because if they don’t get me to get, well, they used to
0:33:03 seize or whatever the nonsense is in certain subjects, less.
0:33:05 They, they rank poorly in the league table.
0:33:06 That’s right.
0:33:07 Less parents choose the school.
0:33:09 They get less money from the government and it sits down with
0:33:11 spiral and because the school would say, so people are, people
0:33:14 are naturally skewed to doing subjects that perhaps.
0:33:18 They had me pushing some plastic baby around the school in health
0:33:21 and social care when I was running businesses in the school
0:33:24 and I was, I was spending so much time in my, in exclusion
0:33:26 unit because I was falling asleep in classrooms.
0:33:28 Turns out I had ADHD.
0:33:30 I wasn’t interested in these things, but I was obsessed in
0:33:30 these things.
0:33:34 The system is that is designed to just, to just sort of spread
0:33:36 about you across multiple subjects and you’re a failure.
0:33:38 If you’re not good at that, but going back to the sort of the,
0:33:43 the, the, um, economics of the school, I watched this teacher
0:33:45 run from one classroom to the other teaching two classrooms
0:33:48 at the same time and she told me that because less students
0:33:51 had chosen that school this year, she was having to pay for
0:33:54 the footballs and the, the pencils in her classroom.
0:33:58 This school, I observed the quality of education with all
0:33:58 due respect.
0:34:02 They did the best with, with what they had, but oh my God,
0:34:04 it doesn’t compare, doesn’t compare to a lot of the other
0:34:08 schools that I’ve observed and I thought, God, these children
0:34:11 in this school are starting out life with a significant
0:34:14 disadvantage and much of that is just down to the funding
0:34:15 situation.
0:34:17 They don’t have the teachers.
0:34:19 The teachers are dropping like flies because they’re getting
0:34:23 sick because they’re understaffed and I just thought that’s
0:34:25 such a, if we think about, you know, what’s the furthest
0:34:29 upstream thing we can do to give people a fair shake in life
0:34:32 so that they can become a prime minister or a CEO or whatever
0:34:33 they want to be.
0:34:34 It starts there.
0:34:36 It starts with education and just giving everyone the same
0:34:38 sort of a quality of opportunity, but right now and especially
0:34:42 under the, the sort of last 10, 15 years of government, well,
0:34:47 I think I probably ought to, to, to, um, resist some of that
0:34:50 because, um, yeah, I mean, I think teaching is incredible.
0:34:52 I tried to be a teacher myself.
0:34:55 It’s, it’s, it’s unbelievably difficult and, and demanding
0:34:59 job and I usually admire teachers.
0:35:04 Um, when I came in in 2019, we put a lot of money into, into
0:35:09 the education budgets and, um, major teachers were going to
0:35:13 be paid new, new teachers starting to out of at least 30,000
0:35:18 pounds and, uh, put a lot of money into, into further
0:35:18 education.
0:35:23 Um, and it actually, if you look at that period of the
0:35:27 conservative administration, I think most fair-minded people
0:35:33 will say, look, UK went up the PISA rankings, uh, for literacy
0:35:34 and numeracy.
0:35:37 Most people actually would say that education was one of the
0:35:40 things where things did get better.
0:35:45 And, uh, I think the driving out of the whole Academy program,
0:35:52 I mean, not remotely denying what you say about, um, the
0:35:54 teacher, you, you know, the teacher, you saw being, being
0:35:55 totally run, run ragged.
0:36:02 Um, and you know, they need the maximum possible support,
0:36:09 but if you look at the data, schools did get appreciably
0:36:11 better in this country during that period.
0:36:18 Now, what I wanted to do was really turbo charge that and
0:36:23 give not just school children, but also kids who’d left school
0:36:26 at, uh, at 16, the types of skills that they were going
0:36:33 to need to compete and to make sure that business felt that
0:36:37 they had in the schools, in the FE colleges, in wherever it
0:36:40 was, they had the talent that they needed to invest in that
0:36:42 area, because that’s ultimately what it’s all about.
0:36:50 It’s about having the, um, the confidence that the, the state
0:36:55 is doing enough to deliver private sector investment.
0:37:01 That is, that is ultimately what will transform the, the
0:37:04 neighborhood and, and you get, instead of getting the vicious
0:37:06 circle of decline that you talked about, you’ll get a, you’ll
0:37:08 get a, uh, a positive feedback loop.
0:37:12 And, uh, parents want to move that.
0:37:14 I want to send their kids to the, to the school at school.
0:37:18 We get a good rep, a good reputation and, and so things
0:37:20 will, things will turn around as they did in London.
0:37:22 Look at London schools.
0:37:26 Um, you know, I can’t, I can’t comment on the school you, you
0:37:28 mentioned in Liverpool, but London schools really, really
0:37:29 change a lot.
0:37:31 I think with, even with the leveling up thing, one of the
0:37:34 easiest ways to level up without building the train
0:37:36 line, would just be to improve the quality of education in
0:37:37 these, in these areas.
0:37:40 I think if you look at what conservatives did, they really
0:37:43 focused on that and they focused on the curriculum.
0:37:44 They focused on standards.
0:37:45 They focused on quality.
0:37:49 And I think that was very important because, you know,
0:37:56 I mean, it’s also, it’s very, very important to, to, to fund
0:37:57 schools properly.
0:38:02 Um, but, you know, you, you shouldn’t underestimate what,
0:38:05 what a great teacher can achieve and the difference that
0:38:06 they can make.
0:38:11 And you know, if you, if you emphasize quality and you, you
0:38:15 emphasize attainment and you, and you focus on that.
0:38:18 That’s why I think it’s, I’m slightly worried about what’s
0:38:20 happening now with, with Ofsted.
0:38:23 I mean, I, I, I can understand why people don’t like one word
0:38:29 Ofsted gradings, but parents need to know whether a school
0:38:30 is going to deliver.
0:38:31 You went to Oxford University.
0:38:33 Then you had a jobs and management consultant, which
0:38:34 lasted only a week on here.
0:38:37 Yeah, I wasn’t, I wasn’t really cut out for that, you know,
0:38:38 you then become a journalist.
0:38:39 Yes.
0:38:41 Become a journalist for the next couple of years.
0:38:43 You then appear on Have I Got News For You?
0:38:46 Is it, is it now, is it now faded from the memory?
0:38:47 It’s slightly, it’s slightly faded.
0:38:49 It’s not a great show, but it’s still slightly fading.
0:38:51 Um, you were then editor.
0:38:53 You mustn’t tell what Ian Hizlop is.
0:38:57 And, and, uh, you were an MP at the house of comms.
0:39:00 Um, then eventually you, you run for London mayor.
0:39:03 Were you, did you expect to win the London mayorship?
0:39:07 I, well, you, you see, this is the way you, I hadn’t got the
0:39:07 faintest idea.
0:39:10 I mean, it seemed, the thing was that I’d actually been quite
0:39:12 an admirer of Ken Livingston in the old days.
0:39:17 And I thought that he had some, some bold and original ideas
0:39:18 for London.
0:39:20 I mean, I thought he was good on the environment.
0:39:21 He’s got on air quality.
0:39:22 He was good on, on that.
0:39:24 I thought there was some, there was some, some good things
0:39:25 that he, that he did.
0:39:30 Um, but it was clear that after eight years, you know, you
0:39:31 started to get a bit ragged.
0:39:32 Did you, did you think you would win?
0:39:35 I suppose I must have done.
0:39:36 I suppose I must have thought it was a good chance.
0:39:39 It was, it was, it was a pretty exhausting campaign.
0:39:42 Yeah, but if you asked me if I thought I would win something,
0:39:44 I can tell you in hindsight whether I thought I’d win.
0:39:47 I did soccer last year, this year, and I can tell you if
0:39:47 I thought I was going to win.
0:39:50 Did you think you were going to win when you ran?
0:39:56 I thought there was a good-ish chance, but it wasn’t obvious.
0:40:00 I mean, I think the bookies didn’t really have me as the,
0:40:04 as the favorite, uh, for, for a long time.
0:40:05 I think it then changed.
0:40:11 I can’t remember exactly, but, um, you know, you see, you,
0:40:12 you make your own luck, right?
0:40:15 I mean, I had to, I had to go in there and make the arguments.
0:40:18 I mean, I think that one of the things that Ken didn’t pay
0:40:19 enough attention to was crime.
0:40:26 And I thought there was a real issue that needed to be addressed
0:40:30 and that was the, the numbers of teenage kids being murdered.
0:40:34 And we really, really went at that hard.
0:40:38 And again, it was one of those things where, when I, together
0:40:41 with a lot of other people, Kit Malt, House Deputy Mayor,
0:40:45 and Stephen Greenhouse, uh, Paul Stephenson, the, the commissioner,
0:40:50 Bernard Hogan Howe, uh, who, who followed him, we really, really
0:40:54 tried to fix knife crime and gang crime.
0:40:58 I used to literally lie awake at night worrying about it because
0:41:04 it was so on me, you know, every, every single casualty, having
0:41:07 to talk to the parents, the, the, you know, the misery, the misery
0:41:08 of, of their suffering.
0:41:11 We really felt it.
0:41:13 And we, and it was, it was a good example of democracy
0:41:15 because we’d pledged to fix it.
0:41:20 And if we didn’t, we had nowhere to go.
0:41:23 One of the things I proud of is we, we cut the murder rate in
0:41:25 London during my time by 50%.
0:41:29 In 2016 at 52 years old, you become co-leader alongside Michael
0:41:32 Gove of the campaign to take Britain out of the EU.
0:41:35 When I, when I look at your Premiership is a Prime Minister of
0:41:38 the UK, there’s three really significant moments, isn’t there?
0:41:44 That typically don’t fall all in one person’s role as a Prime
0:41:46 Minister. You had the Brexit issues.
0:41:49 You had Covid and you had the Ukraine war.
0:41:49 Yeah.
0:41:54 Um, before, before I talk about those particular issues in hindsight
0:41:58 now, how do you feel about the fact that you had to contend
0:42:04 with three generational crises and issues, but you know, that’s
0:42:06 the job of being Prime Minister, but most Prime Ministers
0:42:09 don’t get sure, but, but, you know, pandemic, but leaving the
0:42:15 EU, some Prime Ministers have had wars, some Prime Ministers
0:42:19 have had, uh, terrible crises, uh, sterling crises, terrible.
0:42:20 Do you wish you got a different hand?
0:42:23 No, I, I, I, I think actually.
0:42:26 Do you think you’d still be in politics now and as Prime
0:42:27 Minister, if you, if you got a different hand?
0:42:31 No, I think there are, I think honestly, I think there were
0:42:33 other reasons for, for, for that.
0:42:37 I mean, I’m, so I’m, I’m proud of, of the things that we did
0:42:39 with, with the country.
0:42:43 I think that it was very, you know, people now say, um, uh,
0:42:44 Brexit war.
0:42:47 Actually, you know, one of the points I make in, in Unleashed
0:42:51 is that if you look at it, the model of national independence
0:42:53 that we got was crucial.
0:42:56 So full, full freedom to do what we wanted in legislation
0:42:57 and regulation.
0:42:59 That was actually crucial when it came to that pandemic
0:43:03 because we were able to vaccinate faster than any other European
0:43:05 country, a much faster.
0:43:08 I mean, did you think you were going to win the Brexit vote?
0:43:14 Um, I honestly, when I was outside London, yes, when I was
0:43:15 inside London, no.
0:43:18 So whenever I traveled around the country, I thought, my God,
0:43:19 people are going to vote there.
0:43:24 But when I got back into the metropolis, um, it felt very
0:43:24 different.
0:43:27 So if you had to put your house on it, remain or leave in terms
0:43:30 of the probability of the outcome, what you, your predicted
0:43:33 outcome, which one would you have voted on?
0:43:41 Well, I suppose we’re basically more for remain and for leave.
0:43:48 Um, but I sort of thought that our voters were more motivated.
0:43:51 So I hoped that they would come out.
0:43:53 I hoped that they would.
0:43:57 That I was shot.
0:44:00 And it, but it did go on a scale that no one had foreseen.
0:44:02 I mean, because we had 17.4 million people voted leave,
0:44:05 which was the biggest number of voted for any proposition in
0:44:05 history.
0:44:11 And, um, but, you know, there were plenty of times when I,
0:44:17 you know, you could be in a, I was at St Andrews University
0:44:21 in Scotland of my daughter’s graduation day.
0:44:23 And you really wouldn’t have thought that we were going to
0:44:24 leave talking to those people there.
0:44:27 So, you know, it depended.
0:44:29 You know, it’s interesting when I was reading your book,
0:44:32 but also when I was reading some of your previous writings,
0:44:37 you seemed really conflicted on which way to go leave or
0:44:40 remain right up until you wrote your sort of first announcement
0:44:42 piece that you were supporting leave.
0:44:44 You seem to be really, really conflicted.
0:44:52 The reasons for, for, for not leaving where it seemed to me
0:44:58 to be more to do with Britain’s duty to the rest of Europe.
0:45:00 I need to be good partners.
0:45:05 I need not to be negative to be friendly.
0:45:07 I, that was those were things that worried me.
0:45:10 People, the positive reasons for people point at this letter,
0:45:11 which was unpublished.
0:45:14 You know the letter I’m, I’m referring to the unpublished
0:45:16 letter you wrote about the decision to leave or stay
0:45:17 within the EU.
0:45:19 Is this a, no, you mean the article?
0:45:20 The unpublished article.
0:45:20 Yeah.
0:45:21 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:45:23 Well, you said, here’s some of the phrases from that piece.
0:45:24 Think of Britain.
0:45:25 Think of the rest of the EU.
0:45:26 Think of the future.
0:45:29 Think of the desire of our children and our grandchildren
0:45:32 to live and work in other European countries, to sell things
0:45:34 there, to make friends, perhaps to find partners there.
0:45:35 I like the sound of freedom.
0:45:38 I like the sound of restoring democracy, but what are the
0:45:38 downsides?
0:45:40 And here we must be honest.
0:45:43 There is the worry about Scotland, about the possibility
0:45:45 that the English only leave vote could lead to the breakup
0:45:46 of the union.
0:45:47 There is the Putin factor.
0:45:49 We don’t want to do anything to encourage more shirtless
0:45:52 wagering from the Russian leader, not the Middle East, not
0:45:52 anywhere.
0:45:55 And then there is the whole geo-strategic anxiety.
0:45:57 Britain is a great nation, a global force for good.
0:46:01 It is surely a boon for the world and for Europe that she
0:46:03 should be intimately engaged in the EU.
0:46:06 Lastly, this is a market on our doorstep, ready for future
0:46:08 exploitation by British firms.
0:46:12 The membership fee seems rather small for all that access.
0:46:14 Why are we so determined to turn our back on it?
0:46:17 Shouldn’t our policy be like our policy on cake, pro-having
0:46:19 it and pro-eating it, pro-Europe and pro-rest of the world?
0:46:24 So when I read that, but then I also, I read the very vivid
0:46:26 description you gave of that night when you’re trying to make
0:46:30 your decision in your book, Unleashed, and you seemed torn.
0:46:34 But the guy that went out and campaigned didn’t seem torn.
0:46:38 There was a real lack of nuance in the campaign, but there’s
0:46:41 such a huge amount of nuance in both the moment you were making
0:46:43 the decision and the articles you wrote about that decision.
0:46:51 There are arguments both ways and I say it in the book and it’s
0:46:56 certainly true that, as I said just now, the case for staying
0:47:02 is, I think, one about not seeming to be hostile, not seeming
0:47:03 to be detached.
0:47:09 But I had to decide because being in the EU isn’t like just
0:47:12 being in a club where the rules don’t change.
0:47:19 It’s a project to create a United States of Europe with a single
0:47:22 currency, with a single parliament, and so on.
0:47:27 And I thought that we weren’t ever going to get the choice
0:47:31 again, a chance again to have national democratic independence.
0:47:35 And as I said, so I wrote, the other article you just quoted
0:47:40 was a sort of pastiche of a counterargument, which I wrote
0:47:44 for myself as an exercise after I’d already written the piece
0:47:52 to come out and I wanted to set them side by side and to think.
0:47:55 That’s nuanced, but the campaign wasn’t nuanced.
0:47:59 But if you read the other article, you’ll see the points
0:48:07 that I came down in favour of and that was about having full
0:48:10 national independence and be able to do things your own way.
0:48:16 And the trouble with staying in the EU was that it meant that
0:48:19 we were going to become less and less democratic.
0:48:24 And in the end, you’ve got to be able to, as a politician,
0:48:29 you’ve got to be able to answer the question.
0:48:34 Who puts you in authority over me?
0:48:37 And how can I remove you from office?
0:48:41 And the problem with the EU is there’s no way they can answer
0:48:44 that question, but they’re not democratically.
0:48:46 Is there not a way you can reform the relationship with the
0:48:47 EU while being in the EU?
0:48:50 You know, it’s interesting because I think I was thinking
0:48:52 of a football analogy as you’re talking there and right now
0:48:54 Manchester United my team are having a bit of struggle, right?
0:48:58 And my friends in the group chat are saying, do you think
0:48:59 that we should get rid of the manager?
0:49:01 And I’m saying, when you think about making a decision
0:49:07 like that, you also have to factor in what you do after
0:49:08 i.e. who replaces the manager.
0:49:11 So many fans will just say, sack the manager, but then
0:49:13 the question becomes, but then what?
0:49:15 And it was quite clear in your book that although you
0:49:21 wanted to leave the EU, you had no idea what the plan would
0:49:22 be thereafter.
0:49:26 And in fact, what we need to do is take back control.
0:49:28 And so that’s like fire the manager.
0:49:29 I’m saying but then it wasn’t.
0:49:34 I was just wanting to win an argument with the public about
0:49:37 their democracy and whether they should control it or not.
0:49:41 And I thought that ultimately we had to do that.
0:49:45 And I think that if you look at so going back to the points
0:49:48 that we were talking about earlier to growth rates in
0:49:51 America and Europe, you couldn’t say that the EU model has
0:49:53 been economically successful.
0:49:55 Not at all.
0:50:02 It’s got chronically bad growth rates very low innovation
0:50:04 by comparison with the United States.
0:50:07 Something is not working.
0:50:10 So whatever that whatever they’re doing in Brussels to
0:50:13 provide this this great body of regulation, it’s not actually
0:50:16 delivering results for the people of Europe.
0:50:19 And if you go back to the other clip when compared to
0:50:25 America, well, so it’s from 2008 on 15, take the 15 years
0:50:30 2008, 2020 to whatever to a 23, 23.
0:50:33 But does that mean that the EU is doing something wrong or
0:50:35 that the Americans are doing something right?
0:50:37 Because when I think of America, I think of insane
0:50:38 innovation.
0:50:39 A bit of both.
0:50:41 A bit of both.
0:50:42 A lot of both.
0:50:48 So the Americans, by the way, would never dream of trading
0:50:50 away national sovereignty ever anything.
0:50:51 They just don’t.
0:50:56 They never they never they never in any way NATO is a
0:50:59 bit of a packed where they’ve Americans have completely
0:51:00 hegemony in NATO.
0:51:02 I mean, you know, that’s the only but they joined forces to
0:51:04 make the some greater than the parts.
0:51:10 Yeah, but you know, there’s no the the EU provides a body of
0:51:15 new and a continuously evolving body of new law, which British
0:51:17 the British Parliament can’t change.
0:51:21 And so to get back to so why I mean, I’m not pretending it
0:51:22 wasn’t an easy it wasn’t a difficult decision.
0:51:25 It was a difficult decision for the you know, for the reasons
0:51:31 that you that we’ve gone into, but I wanted the country our
0:51:36 country to be legislatively free again.
0:51:39 And at the heart of the book, you know, you talk about the
0:51:41 pandemic being the most difficult thing that it was
0:51:42 very, very difficult.
0:51:46 But and it was very difficult to persuade the British public
0:51:49 to have very different ways of stopping the spread of the
0:51:49 disease.
0:51:53 But one thing we did better than any other European country
0:51:55 was vaccinate.
0:51:59 And one reason we were able to vaccinate so fast is because
0:52:05 we had regulatory freedom of exactly the kind I mean, there’s
0:52:09 complete flu, but exactly the kind we’ll talk about that that
0:52:10 I that I had advocated.
0:52:11 We’ll talk about that.
0:52:14 And so and so that for me was absolutely crucial and then
0:52:17 they’re talking about I just want to make sure I’m clear
0:52:19 because if I’m not clear moving forward, then my audience
0:52:20 I’m going to be clear.
0:52:25 Um, this idea of like freedom, if we take the analogy of like
0:52:30 her of a parachute, if I cut the cords, I’m free, but I’m
0:52:33 also in danger unless I have a paraglider waiting to catch me.
0:52:37 And my point here is I understand the head all the like the big
0:52:40 emotional words that freedom and take back control, etc.
0:52:41 It sounds compelling to me.
0:52:44 But as I said with the football analogy, what’s the plan
0:52:45 thereafter?
0:52:47 And I think I actually don’t want it.
0:52:51 So you’re talking about the parachute, right?
0:52:54 And cutting the cords of the of the parachute.
0:52:57 Um, actually it was the other way around.
0:53:01 It was because we’d come out of the EU that we were able to
0:53:04 equip ourselves with a parachute faster than anybody else.
0:53:10 And we were able to to get out of the burning plane faster
0:53:15 and to get to ground safely faster because we’d taken back
0:53:19 control of our of our regulatory freedom.
0:53:24 And that meant that by March, 2021, we vaccinated 45% of
0:53:27 the adult population and of the older people.
0:53:30 I think we done almost 80 over the over 80.
0:53:31 We done almost 100%.
0:53:32 And that was incredible.
0:53:34 If you remember, we had, we had, we’ll talk about the vaccines
0:53:37 in a second early in those early days, but the two things
0:53:38 are connected in those early days.
0:53:42 We had thousands up to a thousand people dying every day.
0:53:47 And so it was incredibly important that we were able to
0:53:51 give elderly and vulnerable people in the UK a protection
0:53:53 from a lethal disease.
0:53:57 On this point of Brexit, though, in your book, you say
0:54:00 you almost sort of disconnect yourself from the fact that
0:54:03 you, there had to be a plan associated with the decision
0:54:06 because you seem almost angry that people would expect you
0:54:08 to have the plan, even though you led the campaign.
0:54:08 Yeah.
0:54:13 So, I mean, I’m trying to make the connection between Brexit
0:54:15 and the real world and why Brexit delivers value.
0:54:17 Was there a plan for leaving?
0:54:21 So, so, but on the, in 2016, and I think what you’re really
0:54:27 saying is, what was our plan for the, the referendum outcome?
0:54:31 So everybody who campaigned to, to leave, were we expecting
0:54:33 to win, were we expecting to form the next government?
0:54:34 Let me quote your book.
0:54:35 This is a different promotion for your book.
0:54:36 So you’re like this.
0:54:40 Never at any point in that campaign did we, Boris and Michael
0:54:43 gave, discuss a future leave-based government because
0:54:46 we did not imagine that there would be, would have, we would
0:54:48 have to be in charge of government.
0:54:51 The government stated policy was to implement the referendum
0:54:52 result.
0:54:53 It was a result.
0:54:55 It was a referendum, not an election.
0:54:58 We had no plans for government, no plans for negotiations
0:55:00 because it was not our job.
0:55:04 And in so far as the next few days were chaotic, which they
0:55:08 were, it is utterly infuriating that we should be blamed.
0:55:10 It was up to the government to announce the plan to withdraw.
0:55:12 It was up to the government to begin negotiations.
0:55:16 So this is, I mean, this is, this is a huge issue because in
0:55:17 the context of business.
0:55:19 Because we’re, because we’re not, because why?
0:55:22 Yeah, because, because I think it’s fundamental misconception.
0:55:24 When you went out, when you, when a government decides to put
0:55:27 something to the people in the referendum, the government is
0:55:32 not saying, oh, you know, if the, if it goes against our,
0:55:36 you know, the, any particular position will, will disappear.
0:55:38 But the government, so they wanted to remain?
0:55:44 In France, for instance, Francois Mitterrand had a referendum
0:55:46 on, I think, I can’t remember which, I think it was the
0:55:51 Maastricht Treaty, or one of the treaties that he, he lost
0:55:54 the vote and he didn’t resign.
0:55:55 He didn’t disappear.
0:56:00 Plenty of European leaders have had referendums on, on, on
0:56:04 the EU and, and they’ve gone against them, but they haven’t
0:56:06 vanished from the scene.
0:56:10 And so, you know, let me put this the other way around.
0:56:15 Imagine, imagine that Gove and I, or the whole of the leave
0:56:20 team had been specifically campaigning to, in the leave vote
0:56:25 to form the next government and to install ourselves as the
0:56:26 rulers of the country.
0:56:32 People would have said, this is not about, this is, you’re
0:56:35 plainly, you’re talking, all your arguments are designed to
0:56:36 advance your political careers.
0:56:39 You’re not, you’re not talking about the issue of leave or
0:56:39 remain.
0:56:41 You’re talking about a plan to take over the government.
0:56:41 I know.
0:56:43 And so we’ve taken, we didn’t take leave?
0:56:44 I’m not a politician.
0:56:45 I’m just, I’m just a member of the public.
0:56:48 So I’m just trying to explain why that, that was not possible.
0:56:49 I get it.
0:56:51 But as a member of the public, I think if you’re leading the
0:56:55 charge for an outcome, you must have looked a couple of steps
0:56:59 further to think about the implications and the reality of
0:57:03 this outcome, like you must have had, okay, we can do it like
0:57:04 this, we can negotiate like this.
0:57:06 I assume that the government would have, would have a white
0:57:10 paper that set, that brought, they, they, they were going to
0:57:12 bring forward the options for the country and the plan to
0:57:17 negotiate and a plan to, and a plan to, to do what they said
0:57:17 they were going to do.
0:57:19 But the government, including your friend, David Cameron,
0:57:21 said this is a really bad idea.
0:57:25 So one would, one would take from that, that the plan is not
0:57:28 a good one, that they’ve looked at all the available options
0:57:31 post-leaving and there’s no good options here.
0:57:34 So if the people in charge were saying, we should not leave,
0:57:37 there is no good plan, shouldn’t we have listened to them?
0:57:40 Well, no, because I think they were wrong.
0:57:43 Well, I said, as a member of public is I see two, like two
0:57:46 people stood at a cliff edge and you got one guy called David,
0:57:49 one guy called Boris and David has said, listen, I’m taking
0:57:51 you to the cliff edge because it’s your right to, to make
0:57:54 this decision, but do not jump.
0:57:56 And this other guy called Boris is going jump.
0:58:00 I would assume that Boris knows something about how we
0:58:01 survive once we start falling.
0:58:04 But to find out that Boris had no plan and thought David was
0:58:08 going to pull out the parachute for me is like, well, David,
0:58:11 David Cameron, the problem, the problem was that I then,
0:58:15 we then had to, we then found ourselves because David,
0:58:18 Prime Minister Cameron, then disappeared from the scene.
0:58:24 Immediately, as I described in the book, we then, we then had
0:58:26 a chaotic period where we had to work out what the hell we
0:58:31 were going to do because it was clear that we were going to
0:58:34 somebody was going to have to take over and, and lead us
0:58:35 through it.
0:58:38 Did David Cameron react badly when you told him, when he
0:58:41 thought that you might be voting to leave?
0:58:43 Because you talk about in the book, he’s, yes, I did.
0:58:48 I used to, but I mean, but I describe it in the, in the book.
0:58:55 He said, he said, he said, he said, I, well, I said, look,
0:58:58 I have, I was really struggling with this because I didn’t
0:59:00 see how I could consistently, because he’d offered me.
0:59:04 He said, if you come out and support remain, you can have
0:59:05 a top five job in the cabinet.
0:59:07 I couldn’t work out what a top five job was.
0:59:12 And then he, and then he said, and I, he, he, I said, well,
0:59:13 look, I was finding it very, because I’ve written lots,
0:59:17 lots of articles pointing out the democratic problems of
0:59:19 the, of the EU.
0:59:22 And, you know, finally, we had a chance to, to resolve this.
0:59:24 And I was thinking of, of coming out for leave.
0:59:26 And I, you know, didn’t know how to put it to him.
0:59:27 That was the, the truth.
0:59:29 And he, he said, this isn’t about articles.
0:59:30 This is about the future of the country.
0:59:32 And I said, well, I agree with the future of the country,
0:59:33 but I was still thinking come out for leave.
0:59:37 And he said, well, if you, if you, if you come out for
0:59:42 leave, he said, I will, and I, you know, I apologize for using
0:59:42 his name.
0:59:44 He said, I will, I will fuck you up forever.
0:59:48 And I thought it was quite a big, big, you know, sort of promise
0:59:48 to make.
0:59:50 He said he was going to fuck you up forever.
0:59:50 Forever.
0:59:55 And so I immediately went back home after, I went back home
1:00:00 after that evening and, and cycled back from my office in,
1:00:04 in, in city hall and talked to my, my family, my kids and one
1:00:08 of my kids said immediately, well, you know, he got no
1:00:09 choice and you’ll have to come out for leave.
1:00:15 So, I mean, I put that in to, to, I put all that in really
1:00:21 to, just to show you that there were very good arguments
1:00:24 for having a quiet life.
1:00:27 Do you know what’s interesting in that is when I read that part
1:00:29 in your book, there was two things that I thought the first
1:00:34 was him offering you a top five job if you followed his opinion.
1:00:36 Is that not bribery?
1:00:39 And is that how the jobs are dished out in the government
1:00:40 at the moment?
1:00:42 If, if you, if you do what I say, I’ll give you a top five.
1:00:45 Like, if you do, I’ll make you health secretary or defense
1:00:49 secretary seems like a, but it seems like from as a, someone
1:00:51 who’s not in government, it seems like a really corrupt
1:00:52 way to dish out jobs.
1:00:55 Like if you, if you go in with, it wasn’t clear.
1:00:55 It wasn’t clear.
1:00:56 You’ve got to be fair to Dave.
1:00:57 It wasn’t clear what jobs he was offering.
1:01:00 But top five is what defense secretary, health secretary.
1:01:03 Well, I mean, I, you know, PMs were top five jobs.
1:01:06 So there’s what before remaining is probably, you thought in
1:01:07 the book, you talk about potentially defense secretary.
1:01:08 I don’t know.
1:01:08 But yes.
1:01:11 But yeah, I mean, look, but is that not a bit corrupt?
1:01:13 Is that not like the definition of corruption?
1:01:18 Cause if I was to my view, I think it’s a, it’s a huge mistake
1:01:23 to do that kind of thing because there are always far more
1:01:28 people that, you know, you end up, you know, thinking that
1:01:30 you should be making a promise to them.
1:01:31 There are jobs you can possibly give.
1:01:33 So you’re the best thing there is to say nothing.
1:01:36 I’ve always wondered this about government and I’ve never
1:01:39 understood it is how does someone become the head of a
1:01:43 department when they have no prior experience in it?
1:01:46 Like you made Matt Hancock health secretary.
1:01:49 How did, how did Margaret Thatcher become prime minister
1:01:52 or secretary of education, which had no previous experience?
1:01:54 You tell me how did Tony Blair become prime minister?
1:01:55 No, the prime minister thing I understand.
1:02:00 But how did Tony Blair become, you know, a shadow minister
1:02:02 when he had no experience.
1:02:04 You tell me, do you think this is a good system?
1:02:09 Well, because this is a really, really important point because
1:02:17 I think that there is a, I don’t know, I do worry that
1:02:22 it’s quite hard to persuade, you know, really good administrative
1:02:25 types to go into politics.
1:02:29 And, you know, you see it the whole time in what is called
1:02:30 diary of a CEO, right?
1:02:33 And you see it the whole time.
1:02:39 You see loads and loads of, I got plenty of examples of top
1:02:42 business people who tried to get it, who tried to become
1:02:45 politicians and it just doesn’t seem to work.
1:02:47 And I don’t know.
1:02:48 I mean, could I, can I have a guess?
1:02:50 Go on.
1:02:54 Well, if I look at the data, I go if 35% of them come from
1:02:57 one school eaten and then there’s jobs being dished out
1:03:00 based on if you take my opinion, I’ll give you a top five job.
1:03:02 I go, I understand why I could never get in.
1:03:04 Even if I was the best candidate because it’s not being done
1:03:07 based on who’s the best candidate, it’s being done
1:03:09 based on like the old boys club.
1:03:10 I’ll do your favor, I’ll if you.
1:03:13 Well, not under the Labour Party, presumably, or you know,
1:03:17 or any other party and not under the, I mean, most conservative
1:03:18 cabinets.
1:03:19 So just under the Tory party?
1:03:25 No, under any party, I think that business people do, for
1:03:29 three reasons I find hard to put my finger on, they don’t
1:03:32 necessarily flourish in that environment.
1:03:34 And who flourishes?
1:03:38 What I, what I worry about is that the only people who are
1:03:41 really going to start doing it are people who are willing to
1:03:47 go through a lot of, you know, public attack.
1:03:47 I think I say.
1:03:48 So should pass.
1:03:51 Well, I mean, well, the fact.
1:03:54 So look, one of the interesting things that’s happened recently
1:03:58 is that social media has become very, very virulent.
1:04:05 And I mean, I don’t read it myself, but I think it becomes
1:04:09 very oppressive for politicians and also for journalists.
1:04:16 And I think journalists, you know, they get a lot of
1:04:20 shellacking and a lot of abuse if they’re not thought to be
1:04:25 taking one line or the other or, you know, going easy on someone.
1:04:28 I mean, there’s somebody who’s going to interview me for this,
1:04:29 this book.
1:04:31 Laura.
1:04:35 Yeah, and you look at, and she’s a very, very good journalist,
1:04:40 but you look at the stuff that she gets online about, you
1:04:44 know, you know, her being an inquisitor of mine or whatever.
1:04:45 It’s appalling.
1:04:47 It’s really appalling.
1:04:51 And I think, so I think that, and I think that it’s also the
1:04:52 same for MPs.
1:04:58 I think that they get very, they think that if it’s a choice
1:05:02 between having a life where I can, you know, avoid this sort
1:05:08 of stuff and, you know, having a wonderful existence, doing
1:05:10 something else or putting myself through this.
1:05:13 On the point that I said, thinking about it’s related to the
1:05:14 fact that people have got their hands on the scales.
1:05:15 They’re pulling their friends up.
1:05:16 It’s a bit of a boys club.
1:05:18 Is there any truth in that?
1:05:21 I think, but I think, look, I’m sad to say, Steve, I think
1:05:24 there is probably been the way politics has been since the
1:05:25 dawn of time.
1:05:29 I think that politicians, I think politics has tended to be
1:05:33 factional since the dawn of time.
1:05:36 I think it’s tended to be just sad, but I think true.
1:05:42 The good thing is that in the end, the people who are really
1:05:48 successful are the people who get things done that the people
1:05:48 want done.
1:05:50 Do you think it’s a magnet?
1:05:59 And so it’s a magnet for very determined characters who are
1:06:02 willing to put themselves through a lot to get things done.
1:06:04 Well, I don’t see you as well.
1:06:07 I mean, have I used those words before?
1:06:09 No, no, but that’s the kind of person.
1:06:09 You’re making me worry.
1:06:10 It sounds like you’re quoting me.
1:06:13 No, no, maybe you are.
1:06:19 But yeah, the kind of person I think would be compelled and
1:06:21 succeed in such an environment.
1:06:25 I think I think you have to have a pretty thick skin.
1:06:26 Okay.
1:06:32 But the but because of the because of the way it works, the
1:06:37 people who actually succeed are the people who really can try
1:06:39 something forward and deliver it.
1:06:43 Closing off on Brexit, 62% of British people view Brexit as
1:06:47 more of a failure, according to YouGov and 9% consider it more
1:06:48 of a success.
1:06:51 According to YouGov as well, 46% of British people say they
1:06:54 should there should be a second EU referendum in 10 years
1:06:57 compared to just 36% that say it shouldn’t be.
1:07:00 According to, okay, let me just finish the stats that you
1:07:01 can’t respond to.
1:07:05 According to the UK’s real gross added value, the GVA, a measure
1:07:06 of the size of the economy.
1:07:11 They say there’s approximately 140 billion less in 2023 in the
1:07:14 UK economy compared to if the UK had stayed in the single EU
1:07:18 market. According to the same thing, they say that 300 billion
1:07:23 has been wiped off the value of the UK’s economy by 2035.
1:07:27 And my last stat here is report from the centre of European
1:07:33 reform in 2020 estimates UK GDP was 5.5% smaller by mid 2023
1:07:36 compared to a scenario where the UK had remained in the EU.
1:07:40 This equates to an economic loss of about 40 billion annually.
1:07:43 And just as a business owner myself, I was looking at some
1:07:46 stats around what business owners think about 33% of small
1:07:48 businesses reported that Brexit has made it harder for them to
1:07:50 trade with the EU due to increased paperwork and things
1:07:53 like this and the London School of Economics said that Brexit
1:07:57 added 6% to food prices between 2020 and 2023.
1:08:01 With all of this in mind, do you regret Brexit?
1:08:02 Not at all.
1:08:03 Not at all.
1:08:04 I mean, honestly.
1:08:12 So we’ve outgrown Germany, France for 2016 onwards.
1:08:16 Sorry, certainly outgrown Italy since 2016 onwards.
1:08:19 Last time I looked Germany and Italy were both members of the
1:08:24 of the EU and the statistics that you give, I mean, they are
1:08:28 dwarfed, for instance, by Covid.
1:08:34 You know, even if you accept that, which I don’t necessarily,
1:08:41 that Brexit has caused problems, it’s also caused massive
1:08:44 opportunities because we because we were able to come out of
1:08:47 the lockdown earlier than any other country.
1:08:55 Remember, we came out of lockdown in July 2021.
1:09:01 We ended we ended all restrictions and that meant that
1:09:06 we had the fastest economic rebound of any G7 country and
1:09:10 that would not have happened in my view without the assistance
1:09:12 of Brexit freedoms.
1:09:14 Do you know the OECD?
1:09:15 Do you know what that body is?
1:09:16 Yes, yes.
1:09:19 They say the UK is the only major rich economy that remains
1:09:23 smaller poorer than prior to the pandemic and Brexit may be a
1:09:25 factor in that and the government’s independent watchdog,
1:09:27 which I know, you know, the office for budget responsibility
1:09:30 thinks the UK will ultimately be 4% worse off than it would
1:09:33 have been had it not voted for Brexit.
1:09:36 When I, you know, in business, everything is a tradeoff.
1:09:37 Everything is a tradeoff.
1:09:42 So you must be able to identify the tradeoff that the UK has
1:09:45 made for all of the upsides that you claim Brexit is delivered.
1:09:50 So I think it’s intellectually honest of anyone to be able to
1:09:51 identify both sides of the argument here.
1:09:52 So what is the tradeoff?
1:09:54 What has Brexit cost us?
1:09:56 I’ll just give, I’ll see what it costs us.
1:09:56 Yeah.
1:10:04 I think that it’s certainly true that the way that some of it
1:10:09 is being managed by some of our, by our European friends is
1:10:10 unnecessary bureaucratic at the moment.
1:10:11 I think that will get better.
1:10:15 I accept that criticism.
1:10:17 I don’t think it’s the end of the, the end of the world.
1:10:22 But I do think ultimately the advantage of being free to do
1:10:27 your own thing, free to run your own country to control.
1:10:27 You didn’t tell me a tradeoff.
1:10:29 No, I have.
1:10:33 I think the impact for us in the UK for me as an average
1:10:35 citizen, what’s the, what’s the, what’s the tradeoff side?
1:10:36 Yeah.
1:10:39 Well, I think, you know, I think it’s certainly true that some,
1:10:43 some businesses are finding it harder to, there, there, there
1:10:45 is paperwork that I don’t think there needs to be.
1:10:47 And we need to fix that.
1:10:51 But I think that we have technological solutions to that.
1:10:55 I don’t think that we need to be part of a European empire of
1:11:00 law could get an ever denser and more detailed empire of law
1:11:03 controlling our freedom and stopping us.
1:11:05 Is there an economic tradeoff?
1:11:09 I don’t think, I think that ultimately we will be richer as
1:11:09 a result.
1:11:11 But in the near term, we’re going to be poorer.
1:11:14 Well, I, you know, again, people were very emotional about
1:11:15 this.
1:11:19 And look, can I just remind you where before the referendum,
1:11:23 people said that and no one ever holds these people to account.
1:11:26 People said that there would be millions more unemployed,
1:11:26 right?
1:11:27 Do you remember that?
1:11:29 People said there would have to be an emergency tax-raising
1:11:32 budget if the people voted to leave the EU.
1:11:37 Actually, when I ceased to be Prime Minister, unemployment
1:11:43 was at a 50-year low and we had 620,000 more people in paid
1:11:45 employment than before the pandemic began.
1:11:47 The economic…
1:11:50 I’m just saying that people, people make all sorts of
1:11:52 prognostications about Brexit.
1:11:55 The stats that I read, you do believe them, that there’s an
1:11:57 economic struggle in the short, in the near term.
1:12:01 People said that we would be, we would have a million people
1:12:02 on the dole queue for the Brexit.
1:12:02 Fine.
1:12:04 But do you believe that there’s a…
1:12:05 In the near term…
1:12:08 But then I was saying, because then I was saying, it’s
1:12:10 confirmation bias, right?
1:12:13 But you said we will be richer eventually.
1:12:13 So I’m saying…
1:12:14 I hope that we will.
1:12:15 If we do the right thing.
1:12:16 Sure.
1:12:18 So in the near term, do you think there’s a little bit of
1:12:21 struggle to get through economically as a result of Brexit?
1:12:24 I think that that’s certainly the case.
1:12:29 If we make the mistake of staying, I mean, which is
1:12:32 what Keir Starman, the Labour Party, you know, wants to do,
1:12:37 is staying in alignment with the EU.
1:12:40 They basically want us to be rules takers.
1:12:40 Okay.
1:12:42 I think that’s a huge, huge mistake.
1:12:43 We should go for freedom.
1:12:46 I don’t know how to say this in a way that you’re going to
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1:12:50 I’m an investor in the company.
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1:12:53 The whole team drinks Perfected every day.
1:12:54 We have a Perfected fridge in the office.
1:12:55 Here’s why I like Perfected.
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1:13:43 Steve, you were right.
1:13:44 It’s banging.
1:13:48 The next big thing was the pandemic.
1:13:51 This was once you become the Prime Minister of the United
1:13:56 Kingdom and you have this pandemic begin to roll in.
1:14:00 I was looking at your, the way you described that situation
1:14:08 in late 2019, early 2020 in your book and it appears that you
1:14:11 had no idea of the severity of this virus that was rolling
1:14:12 into the shorts.
1:14:14 When was the first time you heard that there was a virus
1:14:15 that had come in from China?
1:14:21 Whatever the date was, I think it was either end of 2019 beginning
1:14:22 of 2020.
1:14:27 I can’t remember exactly when, but there’s a day when I’m
1:14:29 walking through the lobby of the House of Commons with the
1:14:32 Health Secretary and he says, you know, I’m worried about this
1:14:35 this Chinese virus.
1:14:37 Was that Hancock the right person to be handling that?
1:14:41 Because that is a generational once-in-a-lifetime health issue.
1:14:44 Look, I think he did a very good job.
1:14:46 Yes, I think he was, he was very energetic.
1:14:48 Was he the best person to be handling it?
1:14:55 I think it’s, I think he did a very good job and I think that
1:14:57 Was he the best person to be handling it?
1:14:59 In hindsight.
1:15:05 Well, I certainly think that he, well, yes, because I think yes,
1:15:12 I think that he had the right mixture of energy and realism.
1:15:19 Don’t forget, we didn’t know about the disease.
1:15:21 We didn’t know how lethal it was.
1:15:23 We didn’t know how contagious it was.
1:15:27 And we didn’t know exactly how it was transmitted.
1:15:29 There was a lot of stuff we didn’t know.
1:15:31 Some quotes from your book here.
1:15:36 You said, the problem wasn’t that I was ignorant to zoonotic diseases.
1:15:38 The problem was that I felt I knew all about them.
1:15:45 After more than 30 years of writing about or dealing with new zoonotic diseases,
1:15:49 I felt I knew my SARS and my Ebola, so to speak.
1:15:50 And I concluded two things.
1:15:54 First, that these novel zoonotic plagues tend to sort themselves out.
1:15:59 And second, that the greater risk of destruction from these, from
1:16:03 attempts to stop them by politicians was their sort of attempts
1:16:07 to contain the diseases that the prevention would probably be worse
1:16:09 than the cause in some respects.
1:16:13 So when that Hancock started talking about a new coronavirus,
1:16:15 possibly from bats and the risk that it would sweep the country,
1:16:18 it was hardly surprising that I felt I’d heard this all before.
1:16:24 Little did we know.
1:16:29 Yes, I mean, so I think that’s, I guess I’m being very honest there about,
1:16:35 about, as I am throughout Unleashed, about the, my state of mind,
1:16:40 because, you know, I’d, I’d covered in great detail the
1:16:48 salmonella and eggs panic when millions of chickens were slaughtered.
1:16:52 Needlessly, I’d covered the, the boba and sponge for men’s apopathy.
1:16:59 Panic, mad car disease when vast proportion of the UK dairy cattle herd
1:17:02 were slaughtered, probably needlessly.
1:17:06 The livelihoods of farmers were destroyed.
1:17:12 I’d been mayor of London when we were threatened with the, with a bird flu.
1:17:14 So you didn’t think it was a big deal.
1:17:20 And we’d laid on stocks of tamiflu, which turned out not to be, to be necessary.
1:17:27 So I’d seen SARS come and go, Ebola and so on.
1:17:32 And so each of these cases, what seemed to have happened was that there’d been
1:17:39 a rational anxiety about the risk of a zoonotic disease,
1:17:44 often from Asia or wherever.
1:17:48 We would get in a real, we’d do our best to get ready.
1:17:54 And then it mysteriously would leave us almost completely unaffected.
1:17:56 I remember the swine flu.
1:17:58 Is that what you thought was going to happen in this case?
1:17:59 And I didn’t know.
1:18:00 Yeah.
1:18:03 I didn’t know, but I was, what I was trying to do was to give you.
1:18:04 Context.
1:18:10 The context and the state of mind that I think a lot of people were in when
1:18:13 they, they heard about, about COVID.
1:18:15 When did you call China?
1:18:17 February, I had it as February 2020.
1:18:19 That was a call you made to the leader of China.
1:18:20 To Xi Jinping.
1:18:21 Yeah.
1:18:22 Yeah.
1:18:23 I mean, I would have called him.
1:18:24 He’ll be, he’ll be in the book.
1:18:25 And you were sending supplies.
1:18:26 Yeah.
1:18:31 At that stage, we were, we were still sending supplies to help them.
1:18:34 We were sending, what did he say about the virus?
1:18:43 Well, I said, I look, I remember the conversation is hazy now.
1:18:45 I think I, you know,
1:18:53 actually what seemed to be his efforts to control the disease, but said I was,
1:18:57 I was anxious about the, what was happening in these wet markets.
1:19:01 Because at that stage we were given to understand that these, the disease
1:19:07 had occurred spontaneously in a, in a market in Wuhan.
1:19:08 What did he say?
1:19:11 And I can’t remember what he said to, to that.
1:19:12 I don’t know.
1:19:16 I said, look, I mean, he’s a, he was a president of China.
1:19:20 I don’t think he wanted to, particularly the implication that China was in any way
1:19:21 at fault.
1:19:24 And I can’t take, understand that.
1:19:27 But I now think that probably wasn’t right.
1:19:33 And I think there were, certainly it was a, a lab accident or it was a result of
1:19:35 something that went wrong in that lab.
1:19:36 Can I ask about this?
1:19:40 Cause this started as a conspiracy theory that is now widely accepted as put the
1:19:42 probable likely outcome.
1:19:45 Why were they messing around with a virus in a lab in Wuhan?
1:19:47 Well, you may well ask.
1:19:49 I mean, I think, I think they were.
1:19:50 Why do you think they were?
1:19:53 Someone that is so far away from why people do these such, such a thing.
1:19:59 I genuinely don’t know, but I think that they were, they were, you know,
1:20:03 science, the point of science is to keep pushing back the frontiers of human
1:20:06 knowledge everywhere and to see what you, see what they could do.
1:20:08 Do you think it was a weapon?
1:20:11 I don’t, I didn’t have any reason to think so.
1:20:12 I don’t have any reason to think so.
1:20:13 I think it was a terrible accident.
1:20:16 I think the thing escaped from the lab.
1:20:22 I think they, you know, they were looking at engineering these viruses,
1:20:27 just looking at function gain of the, of the, of the virus and, and ways that
1:20:29 they could manipulate it.
1:20:33 And sadly, something went wrong.
1:20:35 That’s, that’s my best guess.
1:20:37 And a lot of people not seem to think that.
1:20:39 You called Trump around this time as well to speak to me about it.
1:20:40 I did.
1:20:41 Yes.
1:20:42 What did he think?
1:20:50 Well, I, yeah, I mean, he took the, the firm view that, you know, China had a
1:20:53 case to answer, but it said a lot of people.
1:20:56 And in the book, you talk about the World Health Organization’s response being
1:21:02 seemingly hesitant because they are wanting to keep Beijing in favour.
1:21:03 Yes.
1:21:09 I think a lot of scientists were anxious about cheesing off the Chinese.
1:21:13 And I think a lot of scientists, you know, because China is very heavily
1:21:19 involved in the support and sponsorship for a lot of academic research and so
1:21:20 on.
1:21:22 So there was a sort of hesitant, I felt, I mean, I might have been wrong about
1:21:23 this.
1:21:28 My impression was there was a sort of gingerliness about seeming to finger the
1:21:31 Chinese too much on lockdowns.
1:21:34 It’s interesting that I was reading in your book that around the eighth of
1:21:36 March, you start to see what’s going on in Italy.
1:21:39 And I think we can all vividly remember those scenes from those Italian
1:21:43 hospitals where there was patients in the corridor was being pushed around on
1:21:45 trolleys and there was not enough beds.
1:21:48 And I think for me as well, that was one of the big moments where I realised
1:21:53 watching it actually play out on Twitter, that this was an incredibly serious
1:21:57 situation, something that I’d never seen in my lifetime before.
1:22:01 Was that the penny drop moment for you that this wasn’t just another bird flu
1:22:02 or?
1:22:05 I was very anxious about it because I knew the Italian healthcare system.
1:22:07 I thought it was broadly excellent.
1:22:14 And I remember when one of our kids had fell into a swimming pool in Italy
1:22:15 once.
1:22:19 We know when everybody was having a lie and it’s the most shattering thing that
1:22:21 could ever happen to you.
1:22:26 And the Italian pronto so came and they were unbelievably good.
1:22:27 They were so fast.
1:22:28 They were so…
1:22:32 And I thought, you know, if the Italians are having problems with this thing,
1:22:37 and, you know, frankly, our population is by as elderly as theirs, then this
1:22:39 could be very, very serious.
1:22:42 So I think that did really register with me.
1:22:44 And so if you look at the…
1:22:49 Obviously, I defer completely to the inquiry into all this under Dame Heather
1:22:50 Hallett.
1:22:54 But if you look at what happened from then on in, you see a series through
1:23:00 March up to the 23rd of March, you see a series of intensifying steps to try to
1:23:03 get people to take precautions.
1:23:06 What I observed, I saw that in the book and you kind of have the stages that
1:23:09 you break down that you went through from that moment onwards.
1:23:14 What I observed, though, and I think this is probably a fair estimation or a fair
1:23:19 description of what happened, was there was indecision.
1:23:23 Because it seemed like there was facts coming from one ear, facts coming from
1:23:26 the other ear, and there was almost a bit of paralysis.
1:23:29 And when you look at the rest of the European numbers, which I was looking
1:23:33 through yesterday about when different sort of European markets made that
1:23:38 decision, the UK appears to make the decision to lock down much slower than
1:23:44 all the other European nations, slower to close the schools, that the shops and
1:23:48 events seem to be later than our European counterparts.
1:23:50 And Matt Hancock went on to say that…
1:23:54 They were ahead of us in the epica of any way.
1:23:59 So you mentioned the Italian situation.
1:24:03 And they were already ahead of us.
1:24:08 And we could see that we were going to have to bring in measures.
1:24:14 But again, this would be for the inquiry to comment upon.
1:24:20 But it’s pretty clear to me that we couldn’t reasonably have instituted
1:24:26 these measures in the UK, which would novel and draconian,
1:24:29 in advance of the scientific advice or opinion.
1:24:32 And that’s what it would have been.
1:24:36 Then being ahead of us isn’t relevant, because the chart I have here shows
1:24:41 how many days it took us to take decisive action after the third death.
1:24:43 And it shows that for all of the European nations.
1:24:46 And when I was reading about the information you were getting from
1:24:50 scientists on this end and from other people in politics,
1:24:55 it was so contradictory that I think I was guessing that
1:24:57 that’s what caused the indecision.
1:25:00 And also your own sort of philosophy towards shutting down society.
1:25:03 We had this group called the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies, right?
1:25:05 The Sage.
1:25:07 And they were…
1:25:11 So we were going to be led by the science.
1:25:15 And we basically had to…
1:25:19 I decided that we had to follow what Sage advised.
1:25:24 And for a long time, to your point,
1:25:30 they hesitated about schools because of all the disbenefits.
1:25:36 And if you remember, the argument was that if you went too early,
1:25:40 then there was a risk that you’d have to keep doing it.
1:25:46 Because, you know, the public would lose patience with the lockdown.
1:25:51 And there was a second argument, which was there would then be bounce back.
1:25:55 If you went too early and you kept on to…
1:26:00 You’d then take the measures off and the virus would flare up again.
1:26:06 Which indeed did happen throughout the course of the pandemic.
1:26:13 So the scientific advice was…
1:26:17 I mean, it wasn’t… I wouldn’t say it was particularly confused at that stage.
1:26:22 I think there was struggling to assess exactly what to do.
1:26:27 And there were different views within the scientists about certain things like…
1:26:31 Matt Hancock said that we could have saved 30,000 lives.
1:26:33 Masks and so on.
1:26:38 Matt Hancock said, you know, if we’d locked down earlier…
1:26:41 I can’t say that for sure.
1:26:44 I’ve no way of knowing that.
1:26:50 But what I can say is that the…
1:26:58 To have locked down earlier would have been to have gone beyond
1:27:02 to have anticipated scientific advice.
1:27:07 I’m not a epidemiologist. I’m not a scientist.
1:27:10 I was being asked to…
1:27:14 What was on the agenda was imprisoning the whole UK population.
1:27:18 It wasn’t something the scientists were yet recommending.
1:27:22 In the book, you seem to question whether those lockdowns really even worked.
1:27:24 So I’m not saying that. Well, I’m saying…
1:27:26 So it’s been working me by work.
1:27:31 I think that they certainly did…
1:27:38 have a role in stopping the spread of the disease.
1:27:45 And they helped probably to turn down the curve of the disease.
1:27:48 Probably. You know, almost certainly.
1:27:53 What I find very difficult to gauge now, and again, this is for Heather Hallett,
1:27:59 is to what extent was it the lockdowns, what did it?
1:28:03 And to what extent was this going to happen naturally
1:28:06 in result of the natural parabola?
1:28:08 And you suspect it was going to happen anyway.
1:28:12 What I’m saying is that to some extent, or to a large extent,
1:28:16 it was perhaps going to happen anyway. Perhaps.
1:28:20 And given that it was perhaps…
1:28:23 To a large extent, perhaps going to happen anyway.
1:28:28 The question is, did the benefits of lockdown
1:28:34 outweigh the very, very severe damage done to kids?
1:28:36 Life chances at school, which we talked about earlier.
1:28:38 What do you think the answer to that question is?
1:28:40 I think that we did the right thing.
1:28:41 You think we did the right thing?
1:28:42 I think we did the right thing.
1:28:47 But I’m conscious that there are lots of people who disagree.
1:28:51 And what I hope is that the COVID inquiry will say that,
1:28:52 yes, we did do the right thing.
1:28:55 In your book, when you talk about those measures,
1:28:57 you refer to them as bonkers.
1:28:59 The sort of different areas…
1:29:01 Yeah, I think that’s a bit later.
1:29:03 That’s when we got to the tiering system.
1:29:05 The tiering system, you talked to it as bonkers.
1:29:08 And you seem surprised that people would follow this stuff
1:29:12 and that they wanted to follow this stuff,
1:29:15 which is strange hearing it from the guy that put the rules in place.
1:29:17 You think it’s the tiering system was bonkers
1:29:18 and you’re surprised that anyone…
1:29:19 I’m talking about the hindsight, right?
1:29:20 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:29:22 So at the time, at the time, it seemed…
1:29:24 So we had a situation.
1:29:31 It was part of the first lockdown.
1:29:34 So in the summer of 2020,
1:29:36 and going into the autumn
1:29:39 and things start to get more difficult again,
1:29:42 we have a situation where in some parts of the country,
1:29:50 in places like Leicester or West Midlands or wherever,
1:29:52 Northwest…
1:29:53 You have the tiers.
1:29:56 You’ve got a problem, which is that some areas
1:29:58 haven’t really seen, you know,
1:30:02 that Covid really go down anything like as much as it went down,
1:30:04 say, West Country, Cornwall.
1:30:06 Was that a bad idea in hindsight?
1:30:09 And so you had people saying,
1:30:12 you know, why the hell should parts be closed in Cornwall
1:30:14 when there’s no Covid?
1:30:19 And just because there’s transmission in Baltimore or wherever.
1:30:21 So was that a bad idea in hindsight?
1:30:25 It was a good idea in principle, because after all,
1:30:28 it was crazy, it seemed.
1:30:31 But the problem was that it was very, very difficult
1:30:33 to draw the boundaries.
1:30:36 And as soon as you said, you know,
1:30:40 well, this bit of Leicester’s in tier, whatever, or…
1:30:42 Yeah, it was possible.
1:30:44 People went crazy.
1:30:46 Because it was very invidious.
1:30:49 On a human level, when you’re leading the country
1:30:52 in a pandemic, and you’re getting these numbers every day
1:30:54 that people are dying and that people are sick,
1:30:56 and then, you know, I know you’ve got sick yourself.
1:31:00 Is there a mental toll on you throughout that period?
1:31:03 Well, I think it was…
1:31:05 So, do you…
1:31:07 Do you discover, you know, unleashed?
1:31:09 I like it when I can go forward
1:31:11 and when I have things that positive projects to do.
1:31:13 So it was very, very difficult
1:31:17 when I was constantly having to shut the country down,
1:31:20 trying to stop the transmission of the disease
1:31:23 by these very, very crude methods.
1:31:29 But once, by the end of 2020,
1:31:32 we had the prospect of vaccination,
1:31:34 then my mood changed.
1:31:37 My question was about you as a human being.
1:31:40 When you’re dealing with tragic news
1:31:44 and this escalating pandemic, what’s the human toll?
1:31:47 If I’d been a fly on the wall in your hardest moments
1:31:49 throughout that pandemic, what would I have seen?
1:31:51 Well, I think it was certainly pretty tough.
1:31:53 I had a bad bout of COVID.
1:31:56 What was the hardest day outside of getting the illness yourself?
1:32:00 What was the hardest day for you throughout that period?
1:32:03 I think that…
1:32:06 Ah, boy, I think it was…
1:32:10 There was a lot of tough times, but I think having to…
1:32:15 I mean, to go back into lockdown in the end of 2020
1:32:17 was pretty awful.
1:32:22 Because we’d really, really hope that the cheering would work.
1:32:26 And some people still think it could have worked,
1:32:31 but I couldn’t take the risk.
1:32:33 The quote from your book that I pulled out, which really shocked me,
1:32:35 was, “The real question, I suppose,
1:32:38 is why are the public so avidly craved these roles
1:32:40 and why they were so willing to have their doings
1:32:44 circumscribed in such a rabbinical detail?”
1:32:46 In their complexity,
1:32:48 they were also like a kind of religion,
1:32:51 detailed rituals you just obey Leviticus-like
1:32:52 in the hope of salvation,
1:32:55 because science was slow to help us.
1:32:58 On the 13th of September 2021,
1:33:01 your mother Charlotte passes away,
1:33:04 while at the same time you’re dealing with all of this,
1:33:07 fall out in the recovery from the pandemic.
1:33:10 That’s a tough moment.
1:33:13 Yeah, but that’s the same for any person
1:33:15 in any walk of life.
1:33:19 That’s always a very tough moment.
1:33:24 I think that…
1:33:29 to your point about why do people obey the rules so much,
1:33:32 and my feelings about that, I think…
1:33:34 No, I’m asking about your mother here.
1:33:37 Your mother passed away in September 2021,
1:33:40 and you don’t touch on it so heavily in the book,
1:33:42 the circumstances of that,
1:33:44 but that must be a particularly tough moment for a person
1:33:47 that’s dealing with all of these other social issues
1:33:49 and political issues at the same time.
1:33:52 Yes, I know, but I suppose the point I would make there
1:33:56 is that is our common human lot, isn’t it?
1:34:02 And yes, it was tough for me and my brothers and sisters,
1:34:07 my family, very tough.
1:34:10 We miss her to this day, all of us,
1:34:15 but a lot of people were suffering a lot
1:34:17 throughout that pandemic,
1:34:20 and a lot of people lost loved ones.
1:34:27 And I had to be very, very mindful of what was happening
1:34:30 every day in households across the country,
1:34:32 and I had to try to…
1:34:34 And I had a desperately difficult…
1:34:36 Because one of the interesting things about being Prime Minister
1:34:42 is the way it works now is how much of it is just funneled upwards.
1:34:46 And, you know, you have to take those decisions.
1:34:48 There’s nobody else who can do it for you.
1:34:50 Do you remember where you were when you found out
1:34:53 that Charlotte had passed away?
1:34:55 Oh, God, I think it was in…
1:34:57 I was driving to London.
1:34:59 I’d been out on a visit.
1:35:02 And was it unexpected?
1:35:06 Well, I mean, you know, she’d had…
1:35:10 She’d been out for a long time with Parkinson’s
1:35:17 and she had various complications associated with Parkinson’s.
1:35:20 And she’d had a bad scare about a year previously.
1:35:26 So, no, I couldn’t say it was, you know, medically…
1:35:29 I could not say it was medically totally unexpected, no.
1:35:33 Did you have a chance to grieve her passing?
1:35:37 I certainly did grieve her passing.
1:35:42 But…
1:35:45 If you mean did I sort of…
1:35:47 Process it, mourn it?
1:35:51 I, you know, to the best of my ability, yes.
1:35:53 Are you a natural, that sort of thing,
1:36:01 that sort of emotional, I guess, connection with yourself?
1:36:04 (SIGHS)
1:36:08 God, I don’t know.
1:36:10 I think you’d probably go back
1:36:12 to some of the earlier things we were saying.
1:36:15 I mean, I did grieve and, you know, I do miss her.
1:36:18 All my brothers and sisters, I do miss her today.
1:36:22 But, you know, I also had a huge amount
1:36:25 to think about and to get done.
1:36:29 And we just had to, you know, we had to do it.
1:36:32 Many members of the UK population
1:36:34 were also mourning and grieving at the same time.
1:36:37 And I think that’s why the party gate scenario,
1:36:39 which you talk about in the book,
1:36:42 was so enraging for many people.
1:36:44 Because as someone who, again,
1:36:46 is not very close to politics like myself,
1:36:49 it’s optics here, you know?
1:36:51 And I think that’s really the issue
1:36:54 with people who are unable to see their loved ones
1:36:57 because of the situation with funerals and the pandemic.
1:37:01 Even the suggestion that there was a rave going on in number 10
1:37:04 is the most enraging thing that I think anyone could say.
1:37:06 But there wasn’t a rave going on.
1:37:08 I mean, you’ll find it all that. You’ll find it all unleashed.
1:37:10 And I feel desperate about it.
1:37:12 I really do. And I understand, you know,
1:37:14 completely why people got so enraged.
1:37:16 I really do understand that.
1:37:19 And I did my best to try and, you know,
1:37:21 I think I mishandled the whole thing.
1:37:25 The revelations, as such as they were.
1:37:27 But also reality.
1:37:29 Because at the end of the book,
1:37:33 you do seem to highlight that you could have done things to…
1:37:36 Well, what I could have done was what I could have done, I think.
1:37:40 So I wonder why commissioned Sue Gray
1:37:43 to conduct an investigation into it.
1:37:47 I mean, I was informed that she was, you know,
1:37:50 politically impartial and a model of sort of, you know,
1:37:52 obsessed with, with probability.
1:37:57 And neither of those things now seemed to me to be true.
1:37:59 I’ve got a picture here.
1:38:02 There was 17 parties that were alleged during the,
1:38:06 the sort of party gate time frame.
1:38:09 And one of the pictures that leaked to the public was this picture
1:38:12 of you enjoying some cheese and some wine, I believe.
1:38:14 At 10 Downing Street.
1:38:16 Now, as again, a member of the public, I look at this,
1:38:18 I look at some of these key dates.
1:38:20 I know you were fined for one particular date, which was your birthday,
1:38:22 I think, where you were raising the glass of wine with some colleagues.
1:38:24 No, I wasn’t.
1:38:28 You see, again, you see, people say this kind of thing.
1:38:31 Was it an AIDS leaving drink that you were fined for?
1:38:33 No, I wasn’t fined for that.
1:38:34 What were you fined for?
1:38:39 I was fined for my, for going into a stand at my desk in the cabinet room,
1:38:41 between meetings.
1:38:42 With the glass of wine?
1:38:44 No, not with the glass of wine.
1:38:49 And several members of staff were also there.
1:38:53 But there were people I saw throughout the working day anyway.
1:38:54 But this picture.
1:38:57 And just, just because people think that I had a cake.
1:38:58 Yeah.
1:39:00 And that we, we didn’t have, I didn’t have a cake.
1:39:02 I didn’t even see a cake.
1:39:09 To say it was a party is a complete travesty.
1:39:14 It was about the most lugubrious event in the,
1:39:18 it was consisted of people who were part of my normal working life.
1:39:23 That, that picture that you’re pointing to there.
1:39:26 Was this the Metropolitan Police did look at that.
1:39:29 They decided there was no offense committed because what you’ve got is people sitting
1:39:34 outside as, as people tried to do during those times,
1:39:38 because there was much less risk of infection.
1:39:39 Let me just read some of this stuff.
1:39:42 So 15th of May, 2020, cheese and wine at Downing Street.
1:39:46 Approximately 349 people had died from COVID that day in the UK.
1:39:48 Mr. Johnson was photographed sitting with his wife,
1:39:52 Carrie and some staff at a table with white and cheese and the number 10 garden.
1:39:55 At this time, COVID restrictions so that people could not be at home.
1:39:56 I’ve just, I’ve just,
1:39:57 reasonable excuse.
1:39:58 Let me just read this and then I’ll.
1:39:59 But we were, I was at that.
1:40:00 That’s my, that is my home.
1:40:01 I know, I know.
1:40:03 That’s the garden I was supposed to be using.
1:40:07 May 20th, there was a bring your own booze party on the same day that
1:40:10 three and eight people died from the, from the pandemic.
1:40:11 And you attended for about 30 minutes.
1:40:13 You say it was 25 minutes.
1:40:16 And then the 19th of June was your, your birthday.
1:40:17 Okay.
1:40:18 Let’s go back over there.
1:40:21 I mean, you know, none of this washes with the public because they all think that
1:40:25 we were, you know, having dancing around and, and getting around.
1:40:29 12th of April, Johnson announces that he’s been fined 50 pounds by the police.
1:40:31 Do you know what it is though?
1:40:36 It like, it’s all about, it’s all, it’s all about leading by example,
1:40:37 isn’t it?
1:40:43 And you know this year, I think my opinion is that whatever’s going on at number
1:40:47 10 needs to be the extreme demonstration of the perfect example,
1:40:51 the extreme demonstration, because you’re, of course, you’re going to be attacked.
1:40:52 You know that.
1:40:53 Yeah.
1:40:54 Of course, if you sneeze, you’ll be attacked.
1:40:55 And I say that.
1:40:56 And I say that.
1:40:57 That’s what I’m saying.
1:40:59 So, so what we should have done.
1:41:04 And I, what I say is we should have, I should have said to everybody, look,
1:41:08 people are going to say in a manner, because it was in fact, as I tried to
1:41:14 explain, impossible to maintain perfect social distancing in the, the office
1:41:16 environment that we were in.
1:41:19 People were working around the clock.
1:41:27 And I think that I should have said something to the staff, like people are
1:41:29 going to be out to get us.
1:41:35 For God’s sake, you know, not only obey the rules, but be seen to obey the
1:41:36 rules.
1:41:41 Now we had, you know, all the signs in the corridors and stuff like that.
1:41:46 I think that there were a lot of people by that stage who were perhaps not all
1:41:50 together friendly to me, who wanted to stitch me up.
1:41:51 That’s, that’s fine.
1:41:54 But honestly, I can’t help but believe, because I try and remain
1:41:55 pre impartial in these things.
1:41:57 So I try to play common sense as like a business person.
1:42:01 But do you really think I was deliberately partying and breaking the rules?
1:42:05 For me, for me, seeing that photo when one of my friends couldn’t go to their
1:42:08 grandmother’s funeral and seeing that there’s people drinking and have,
1:42:11 appearing to have a whale of a time just in this photo, but also the other
1:42:13 photos where you’re chasing with wine.
1:42:17 I go, you should never have allowed that to happen.
1:42:20 Do you know, and I think you agree with me, agree with me because you said at the
1:42:25 end of the book, you said, I should have said to my whole team, don’t even let
1:42:28 them appear to be breaking the rules.
1:42:36 In the course of almost two years of people working around the clock in
1:42:45 number 10, in conditions of great proximity to each other, there were going
1:42:49 to be moments when, of course, when colleagues are saying, are going away,
1:42:52 when you raise a glass to them, unless you’re going to ban that.
1:42:53 I think you should have.
1:42:54 Well, that’s a point of view.
1:42:55 No, because I just think.
1:42:57 You banned alcohol in 1940.
1:43:01 I think prime minister during a panel, I think you just have to be the most
1:43:02 extreme example.
1:43:06 Sorry, but we got a ban on alcohol in this country?
1:43:08 No, I think genuinely.
1:43:13 If we banned alcohol in number 10 in 1940.
1:43:16 I think all gatherings should have been banned at number 10 because I think.
1:43:17 Sorry, but we would gather.
1:43:19 That means banning meetings.
1:43:21 What do you mean gatherings?
1:43:24 Gatherings with alcohol and music and cake.
1:43:26 I think should have been banned.
1:43:29 I’ve tried to explain to you there was no cake or I saw no cake.
1:43:34 I was at no event where there was music or dancing at total nonsense.
1:43:39 Now, maybe those things took place, but they certainly didn’t take place
1:43:40 when I was there.
1:43:45 I think one of the problems, one of the mistakes I made was beginning the
1:43:49 whole thing by issuing this general apology.
1:43:53 And so what happened was so that people think that there was.
1:43:55 Do you still apologize?
1:43:56 There was.
1:43:57 Do you still apologize?
1:44:00 I don’t apologize for allegations of vomiting or fistfights.
1:44:02 Because they turned out not to be true.
1:44:03 What do you apologize for?
1:44:07 And well, I in so far as people broke the rules on my watch and so I was
1:44:08 I’m responsible.
1:44:09 Of course I apologize for that.
1:44:17 But what I was what I’m saying in unleashed is that the problem with
1:44:21 leading with a blanket apology was that it then meant that absolutely
1:44:25 any allegation that was, you know, you’ve said you’ve just made a couple of yourself.
1:44:31 Any allegation that was then made about and in Sue Gray’s initial report
1:44:33 that she had to change it.
1:44:39 She said there were there was a violent altercation and vomiting and
1:44:42 both of those things turned out not to be true.
1:44:44 You said you made the mistake in your book.
1:44:47 You said you made the mistake of issuing pathetic and groveling apologies
1:44:50 over the scandal, which made it look as though we were far more culpable
1:44:52 than we were, which is just the point I’ve just made.
1:44:55 So because I think because because it may it looked as though.
1:45:02 But by issuing a sort of universal apology, it meant that any subsequent
1:45:07 allegation.
1:45:09 People assume, well, that must be what happened.
1:45:11 And you and you to be fair to that.
1:45:13 I kind of get the feeling that’s what you think.
1:45:16 And no, no, no, no.
1:45:21 For me, it’s largely my fault because I seem to be.
1:45:23 It’s not really validating.
1:45:25 The apology is not.
1:45:30 I seem to be validating everything that people said about what was going on.
1:45:34 And what was actually going on was that people were working unbelievably
1:45:38 hard around the clock to get a lot of very difficult things done.
1:45:44 And for me and and actually what the things that they were successful
1:45:46 in are very creditable.
1:45:53 And I and so I feel badly about them on page 705 of your book.
1:45:55 You say in retrospect, I should have done more to protect myself
1:45:57 and the rest of white hole against part of your allegations.
1:46:00 I should have said to the entire staff, perhaps in the letter about the vital
1:46:05 importance of not only obeying the rules, but also to be seen to be obeying
1:46:07 them and reminding.
1:46:10 And I think that that is actually my point, which is apologies.
1:46:11 I think are good things.
1:46:12 I think people should apologize.
1:46:19 But if you apologize in advance, the problem was that a lot of things were
1:46:23 said about staff in the other 10 that weren’t true and weren’t fair to them.
1:46:29 And my blanket apology looked as though I was validating and accepting
1:46:34 all those criticisms, which I think was in retrospect, I think I should have
1:46:42 waited to see exactly what people said and what was established to be true.
1:46:45 And then I should have apologized for what what actually happened.
1:46:46 You see what I’m saying?
1:46:47 I understand.
1:46:51 And also I want to stick up again for those officials who were working
1:46:56 around the clock to sort out the government’s and the country’s
1:46:57 response to COVID.
1:47:01 And when it came to it, did an absolutely outstanding job.
1:47:02 And I don’t know.
1:47:03 I understand.
1:47:06 I know you’ve been very patient with me.
1:47:09 You know, you’ve allowed me to talk for almost two and a half hours.
1:47:12 And what I thought was going to be an hour’s show.
1:47:14 So you’ve been heroic in putting up with.
1:47:15 We’re wrapping up now.
1:47:17 But I just wanted to ask a few more things.
1:47:18 These are personal questions that I have.
1:47:23 So one of the things that no one knows about you is how many kids you have.
1:47:27 Why is this such a widely debated subject?
1:47:30 I’ve never sat with a guest on my show where I don’t know why they were
1:47:31 widely debated.
1:47:32 It’s a matter of matter of part.
1:47:33 I’ve eight children.
1:47:34 You have eight children.
1:47:35 It’s a matter of public record.
1:47:36 Okay.
1:47:37 I don’t know why people.
1:47:38 Why is everyone so obsessed with it with the kids you have?
1:47:39 Search me girl.
1:47:40 Charlotte Owen.
1:47:41 You’re not related to her, are you?
1:47:42 No.
1:47:43 She’s not a former level?
1:47:44 No.
1:47:45 Okay.
1:47:46 I asked my friends some of the things they want to know about you.
1:47:47 No, she said, she said, but it’s in the book.
1:47:48 Sure.
1:47:49 Read a, read a ball about it in the book.
1:47:52 She is a, she is a very capable advisor.
1:47:54 And what happens next for Boris Johnson?
1:47:55 Are you going back into politics?
1:47:57 I live a life of blameless, frosty obscurity.
1:47:59 Do you want to get back into politics?
1:48:04 I think that the chance of the Fritz be decapitated.
1:48:10 You should only do things if you genuinely think you can be useful at the moment.
1:48:12 I think the most, I’m loving, I do a lot of painting.
1:48:18 I have a great time living in, you know, in the countryside.
1:48:20 I got my hands full doing all sorts of things.
1:48:21 Next question.
1:48:22 Big fire.
1:48:23 Yeah.
1:48:26 Trump or Kamala and you can’t sit on the fence.
1:48:31 All British prime ministers, including ex-prime ministers, are constitutionally obliged to
1:48:32 be friendly with whoever.
1:48:35 Who’s the best for international relations?
1:48:39 Whoever the American people decide.
1:48:40 And that is the right thing.
1:48:44 And your dwindling audience would not expect.
1:48:46 Who’s best for stopping the wars?
1:48:48 Who’s better for stopping the wars, Kamala or Trump?
1:48:50 I mean, you know, if you read Unleashed.
1:48:51 I did read it.
1:48:52 Okay.
1:48:55 And I saw your interview on GB News and you seemed to think that Trump would be a better…
1:49:02 What I’m saying is that you should be aware of some of the kind of anti-Trump prejudice
1:49:04 about his handling of foreign policy.
1:49:07 And they’re a very good, you know, they’re very…
1:49:15 When he was president, he took some tough decisions and, you know, projected a sense
1:49:16 of American strength and purpose.
1:49:20 And that’s, you know, but I make no further comment than that.
1:49:22 We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for
1:49:24 the next guest, not knowing who they’re going to leave it for.
1:49:25 Oh, right.
1:49:26 Okay.
1:49:31 And the question that’s been left for you is success often comes at a price.
1:49:35 And one of those is the relationships we lose along the way.
1:49:39 Which relationship or person did you lose in the pursuit of your success?
1:49:44 Let me…
1:49:45 You seem to…
1:49:51 Well, the longer you live, the more you rise, you know, you can have what seems to be a
1:50:00 complete, terrible, sundering, and then learn, behold, things cheer up and earn your friends
1:50:01 again.
1:50:07 And so, I mean, look at Michael Gove.
1:50:09 You got to answer the question.
1:50:11 Which relationship or person did you lose?
1:50:17 The answer, Michael, the answer to your question is I don’t regard any of the termination, any
1:50:18 rupture.
1:50:19 I don’t regard any rupture as fine.
1:50:21 No one’s ever swerved this question, so you’re not going to be the first.
1:50:23 I don’t regard any rupture as fine.
1:50:25 Which relationship or person did you lose in the pursuit of your success?
1:50:27 They are not lost.
1:50:30 Give me a person, give me a name.
1:50:31 We’ve never had it.
1:50:32 This is a long-standing tradition.
1:50:34 No one’s ever swerved this question.
1:50:42 Clearly, I had a rupture with Michael Gove, but then, in 2016, but then, with heretic
1:50:48 optimism, I put him back in the cabinet and, you know, there you go.
1:50:49 Boris, thank you.
1:50:50 Thank you for your time.
1:50:51 Thank you.
1:50:56 I’m going to link this book below so anyone that wants to read can get the book.
1:50:58 It will be linked below.
1:51:02 Your writing style is exceptionally engaging.
1:51:07 I think everyone that’s interviewed you from the ITV to GB News has said the same thing.
1:51:08 The book is linked below.
1:51:09 Thank you.
1:51:12 If you’re interested in the subject matters we’ve talked about, but many more, it’s an
1:51:13 exceptionally long book.
1:51:14 Some 700…
1:51:15 I don’t know.
1:51:16 I got it right.
1:51:20 I think it’s over 171 pages, 172 pages.
1:51:23 With the index and the thanks.
1:51:27 An incredibly detailed book into all of the key issues that have happened over the last
1:51:34 five, six, seven years, and some touches of what happened in your life before.
1:51:35 Link down below.
1:51:36 Boris Johnson unleashed.
1:51:37 Thank you so much, Boris.
1:51:38 Thank you very much, Steve.
1:51:39 It’s been an honor.
1:51:40 I think…
1:51:41 Do I get a prize for…
1:51:42 I think that must be…
1:51:43 How long was that interview supposed to be?
1:51:44 I don’t know.
1:51:45 It was two…
1:51:46 Usually they’re four hours.
1:51:47 Sometimes they’re four hours.
1:51:48 Oh, I see.
1:51:49 Yeah.
1:51:53 Isn’t this cool?
1:51:56 Every single conversation I have here on The Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it,
1:52:02 you’ll know I asked the guest to leave a question in The Diary of a CEO.
1:52:06 And what we’ve done is we’ve turned every single question written in The Diary of a
1:52:11 CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home.
1:52:14 So you’ve got every guest we’ve ever had.
1:52:20 Their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the
1:52:23 person who answered that question.
1:52:29 We’re finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question.
1:52:37 The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at TheConversationCards.com.
1:52:40 They’ve sold out twice instantaneously, so if you are interested in getting hold of some
1:53:03 limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.
1:53:08 Thank you.