EP 372 - Our guest, Ben Askins, is pretty convincing when he says that being green is one of, if not THE biggest commercial opportunity of the century.  Ben is a serial entrepreneur, now scaling Green-Tech start-up Gaia, so he knows his onions. 

Our chat gets stuck into culture wars, and culture warriors, and why we need to get our heads out of short term political point scoring and into the long game.  Us, the media, everybody.

He also makes a very good point that you can’t make being a politician a thankless job, with terrible pay and still expect the best and brightest to apply to run the country.

*For Apple Podcast chapters, access them from the menu in the bottom right corner of your player*

Spotify Video Chapters:

00:00 BWB with Ben Askins

02:29 Ben's Background and New Venture - Gaia

03:29 Gaia's Role in Environmental Regulation

05:57 The Importance of Biodiversity Net Gain

07:08 The Marketplace for Natural Assets

13:38 The Future of Green Tech and Energy Efficiency

23:47 Ben's Journey in Digital Marketing

25:48 Building a Personal Brand on Social Media

28:34 The Challenges of Being a Boss and Entrepreneur

32:58 The Unappealing Job Dilemma

33:56 Social Media in Politics

34:58 Engagement Groups and Media Manipulation

36:59 The Complexity of Political Debates

37:10 Monetising Hobbies and Job Satisfaction

38:02 The Need for Honest Political Communication

45:32 The Challenges of Running a Government

50:21 Climate Change and Green Technology

57:14 Quickfire - Get To Know Ben

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Green tech, I think is one of the most exciting sectors.

Along with healthcare and crypto, I think it's one of the three most exciting sectors to be in.

I think the challenge we have, and the thing I always say is you just got to take the green bit out of it.

So less about responsibility, more about look at it through commercialize of change and opportunity.

China is trashing us on the green tech, by the way.

At some point they've gone, you know, the world is going to have to buy this technology so we're going to make sure they're all buying it from us.

We talk about climate so much in the media, but I struggle on an SME basis to sort of say, well, what should I be doing?

I think we have to listen to the people who've made their careers in studying this.

If you get it, you can't unsee it.

That's the phrase I get told a lot.

Their warning is very simple.

It's like, look, because this is unprecedented, we don't know what's going to happen, but there is a strong chance we're going to see some really negative inputs about climate change and the amount of greenhouse gases we're releasing is doing it.

Hi and welcome to Business Without Bullshit.

We're here to help the founders, entrepreneurs, business owners, anyone who wrestles with the jo job of being in charge.

And if you like what we do here, please rate and review us on Spotify and Apple and come say hi on YouTube if you fancy watching us in action.

Links are in the episode description or just search for wblondon if you think things like being green, eco friendly and net zero just a bunch of woke crap nonsense.

You're wrong.

Not my words, but the words of Ben Askins, who is pretty convincing when he says that being green is one of, if not the biggest commercial opportunities of this century.

We just need to get these words out of this short term culture war and get our thinking about these subjects into the long game.

And not content with taking on culture wars, we get stuck into why society can't make being a politician a terrible job with terrible pay and somehow expect to have the best and smartest people run in the country.

Why the media with a capital M should stop putting political point scoring and culture war headlines on front pages and instead concentrate on stuff that's actually important.

Plus how social media is causing huge problems in society in general, but politics in particular.

Given that Ben is proud of his impressive 1.5 million social media followers and the content he creates, that last one is a bit Odd.

But you'll need to hear Ben explain why a lack of nuance is okay as long as you're being funny.

I love that it's near the end of the episode.

Could skip to it, but it might not make any sense out of context, which is kind of the point.

And we'll also be sharing key takeaways from Andy's chat with Ben throughout the show.

I am Andy Ory, and today we are joined by the wonderful Ben Askins.

Today, Ben is building his new venture, Gaia, a green tech company which builds environmental SaaS products that help corporations achieve their climate goals.

Ben is also one of the fastest growing social media content creators in the UK, who's amassed over 1.5 million followers across his social ch, where he talks about business, management, leadership and working life.

Ben, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, that's very good.

Lovely CV there of these things.

Obviously the most immediate one is what you're working on now.

So should we discuss that a little bit?

Tell us a little bit about Gaia.

Yeah.

So Gaia is a green tech company and basically the idea behind it is as more and more legislation around climate rules, regulations, get rolled out by governments around the world, we essentially build out SaaS, products and online solutions for companies kind of dealing with that disruption.

So we do, we feel quite powerfully that there is a necessity to this environmental regulation, but there is a huge disruption to companies and businesses.

And so we build out products that essentially kind of help companies, you know, more easily manage those disruptions as we all vaguely try and be a little bit more sensible about the climate.

It sounds like you might be or might have been in a similar place that I still am is that, you know, we talk about climate so much in the media, but I struggle on an SME basis, you know, to sort of say, well, what should I be doing?

There doesn't seem to be much clearer information.

Yeah, I mean, green tech, I think is one of the most exciting sectors, along with healthcare and crypto.

I think it's one of the three most exciting sectors to be in.

I think the challenge we have, and the thing I always say is you just gotta take the green bit out of it.

Just look at this as a Commercial opportunity because I think people get the sort of philanthropic what should I be doing mixed up with more of the commercial opportunity that green tech brings.

Oh, so less about responsibility, more about look at it through commercialize of change and opportunity.

People don't love it when I say that, but I think we have to be practical in regards to if we're going to make things a little bit better, we do need to provide some sort of commercial return on this side of things.

We can't just rely on philanthropic endeavors, basically.

So my view of green tech is we should view it as a sort of commercial opportunity that happens to have the sort of benefits.

How is regulation?

I mean regulation is opportunity for your business, but is it regulation is regulation opportunity for everyone?

Regulation is fine if it's consistent.

The challenge we have is when governments change and people start rowing back on regulation.

So it operates as any other sort of sector in the sense of providing this sort of consistency across, you know, the years.

And that's all fine.

It's when things start getting rode back on.

There's a lack of.

Let me, let's do some basics.

My current very crap understanding of the UK requirements for climate is that large companies, so that's more than 250 employees, I think they're changing their definitions, but more than 50 million euros in turnover because there's some European hangover, they are required to report on their footprint and stuff below that supply chain requirements.

If you, if you supply the NHS or big companies.

Yeah, basically.

One of the bigger ones was something called biodiversity net gain.

And this, basically this impacted the construction industry more than anything else.

Where basically the premise was if you are going to build in the country, then you have to offset and increase the biodiversity by 10%.

So a new metric was brought in called biodiversity units and the idea behind that is someone will come on a site and say, right, you're going to be doing nine units worth of damage, for example, you need to offset 10.5.

Whatever and they pay you.

I've heard about these clients doing it.

They pay you quite a lot of money.

Big, big, big up.

Chris Howard the average unit is about £28,000 but it is a 30 year commitment.

So exactly what happens is a farm or some with a piece of land will earmark part of their land to BNG and you get a certain amount of units depending on, you know, the current state of it and what you add to it.

So it's about adding to it, you can't just say.

Whereas the carbon market got a bit controversial because it was protecting.

This is actually about adding.

So I could have a wood, for example, I could then add to that wood and say, I'm not going to touch that for 30 years and that will count as a B and G unit.

So long.

Okay, so effectively, yeah, I'm going to build a big nasty block of flats other people can then bid on the.

There's no marketplace at the moment, is there?

There is actually, as of nice little segue for me there.

We've built a marketplace for natural assets.

That's.

That's one first products we launched for natural assets.

So biodiversity, well, that's units primarily, but.

We'Re rolling out to carbon credits, nutrient credits and other.

It's a huge.

And it's one of the interesting space in this loads of new assets that are slowly being developed that's just slowly becoming legitimized through regulation and sort of heavy investment, but they're proper.

Two of the newer ones I heard is an urban cooling token, which I've not come across before, and a waste credit, which is another one as well.

So all these new asset classes are slowly being developed and we thought actually some sort of marketplace which you can legitimize and trust from a buyer and selling perspective felt like a sensible build.

Urban cooling token tokens, they must be like building green stuff in cities because it cools the city.

Exactly, yes.

There's a lot of evidence suggests that actually one of the best ways to bring city temperatures down is by building trees.

Don't Londoners or any person in Britain want temperatures up?

I think this is a Mediterranean one in particular.

A lot of the Spanish cities, for example, of building down on this.

But yes, air conditioning use.

Exactly, yeah.

And also reduce.

You know, some of these cities become pretty baking actually, as climate change, you know, slowly impacts.

Raises temperatures.

It's one of the easier ways to try and lower the temperatures.

You know, as a country we're quite, you know, pro caring about, you know, the environment.

Actually I'd sort of, you know, we've always had very high food standards and everything like that.

I mean, I do chuckle every year when they're like, due to climate change, we're expected to have the hottest summer.

You can hear all Brits going like.

You know, yeah, yeah, might see some tennis at Wimbledon once.

Now let's put this.

Talk about this trust element.

So, you know, I remember back in the day, carbon credits.

I know Clive Plants doing it and it was.

I don't know really what was going on.

But there was a lot of sort of like people buying stuff from China and selling.

It was like the early days of crypto.

It's one of the biggest cons that got away.

It got really abused and the problem got.

The reason we got abused was because it was about protection.

So carbon credits, the sort of core principle was, look, we're not going to chop those trees down, we're going to leave those not be chopped down.

And in return you then get to sort of release more carbon over here.

But then you work out sort of like, you know, the Disney are protecting a natural forest in Virginia which never in a hope in hell was ever going to be chopped down, ever.

So they would sort of say, yeah, yeah, so we're not shopping that tree down.

It's like you're not allowed to chop that tree down.

So of course you're not chopping that tree down.

So you're not a lot of.

Also, you know, I don't want to blame China, but a lot of sort of other countries that no one was really checking saying, oh yeah, yeah, we're doing something good.

Yeah, yeah, a lot.

In South Africa there was a lot of controversy.

Brazil rainforests, a lot of protected rainforest which never made the cut.

So that was the big problem with.

And it says the BNG is a really strong piece of legislation.

Legislation.

It's actually more run.

You have to add to it.

Yeah, exactly.

Which is sort of a progression off that you actually have to add to it.

It's not like carbon where I say you have to leave it alone.

You actually have to prove you've added.

To it, you prove to improved it.

And is it only UK or I.

Do it Only England at the moment.

But UK but EU are looking to adopt similar schemes.

We're ahead of the game.

You can be quite proud of what.

They'Re doing in this space, but not Scotland and Wales.

Not Scotland, Wales at this point in time.

No, it's just an England only scheme.

That's funny.

Okay.

Because of the devolved government they would have to enact.

You know, I don't know the.

It could be a rolling out, TV rolling out.

But for now it.

You can only buy them in England.

And again you end up almost sounding like you're being racist or something.

But it's more about the trust element, the culture of the sort of uk.

It's easy, much easier to verify something within your own country, isn't it?

You know, you're talking about something's in England, it's An hour away, you could pop down there.

You know, a lot of the natural biodiversity of England has been sort of slashed away for whatever reason.

It's actually, if we're going to, like, there's no point us giving that benefit to other countries.

And a lot, you know, we can look at this as a global problem or we can look at it as a country problem.

And if we say, look, a lot of England has been chopped down, but don't worry, we're protecting some bits in Germany and therefore we can chop more down in England, it doesn't make much sense.

It's a national scheme to kind of reinvigorate the biodiversity in England, basically.

And I hear that I'm utterly wrong about this, but as someone who's grown up in this country, seems about as green as it always was.

Do you know what I mean?

Like the green and pleasant land.

I mean, when you get people who come from overseas, they often say, God, it's very green.

But apparently there is a.

The absolute.

What do they say?

It's a weird contrast we've built on shockingly little of England.

I think it's about 12% coverage, which is really low for, like, really low.

And so you set that.

But then you actually look at what our green is and it's all sort of like, we've got a lot of space which we're not building on and we're not doing much with.

And so actually it's kind of a.

Nice crappy old farmland.

Crappy old farmland.

Crappy old.

Just land in general.

But actually we can reinvigorate it.

So it's about saying, psychologists will come and say, right, this is what used to be a meadow, this used to be a woodland.

And so it's just about encouraging that and just letting nature have it back, basically.

Is this something we have a Brexit benefit on that?

You know, finally, can we actually not just do exactly what the European Union is doing and not being in it?

Because we can.

Because that was one of the problems.

We had to follow European policy.

Yeah.

I mean, having a policy, it wasn't.

They were banned.

It was more like they had a certain standard and we had to either match that or go above it.

But in this case, we have got above the EU and the EU were looking to kind of copy our scheme.

It's very.

Well, it's nice to hear it.

There's so many pieces of legislation, you wonder whether or not they were brilliant ideas or not.

What drives you in this?

Why are you doing it?

I find it a really interesting space because it's such an obviously good investment in the sort of technology in the green tech space.

But it's in a fascinating sort of triumvirate of sort of like politics meets commercial meets environment meets science.

So I come at this very much from a tech angle.

I have a sort of digital background so I'm quite new to the green space.

But it's fascinating how it's so brilliant in so many ways and just an absolute shit show and others when you.

Mean it's so brilliant.

So brilliant the law.

It's so brilliant as a subject, it's.

So brilliant as an opportunity.

Right.

It's so brilliant is like some of the British businesses that are being built right now in this green tech space are really cool from an energy efficiency perspective.

Like just really great commercial investments that will have genuinely great benefits for us as a country and environment.

Like it's just a definition of a win win.

But within that you've got the shit show of the sort of political football that greentech's managed to wrap itself up in.

You've got the sort of what's.

What goes stop there.

What's the green tech thing that it's managed to wrap itself up in?

The best way I can think about is energy efficiency.

It gets wrapped in the sort of Ulez panics, green tech net zero sort of political.

It's, it's short term and it's, it's short term.

So when people say green tech they think you're, you know, trying to steal their car or you know, all this, you know, we can have an argument about that but like hugging a tree.

Exactly.

And the way I always think about it is that energy efficiency is a great example.

So we added I think 474 gigawatts of renewable energy to the world last year, which is about 474 nuclear power stations.

So a good chunk, 81% of it is cheaper than fossil fuels.

So it's cheaper to produce.

Fantastic, amazing offshore offshore wind, combination of.

Solar, all the sort of renewable space.

And like if you were to come to Anoya and said look, I've got this new fossil fuel, it's 81, you know, 81% of it's going to be cheaper than this.

It's.

And it actually replenishes itself as well.

It's a win win.

You've got a product that just never ends.

They would invest to it in a heartbeat but because it's got this sort of anti tag of green net zero, it's just wasting money, all that sort of stuff, it gets wrapped up in that and so everyone goes, oh, it's, it's woke.

And you go, it's not woke.

It's just a commercial opportunity where we get cheap energy of which we have very little in the regale of sort of fossil fuel, natural resources.

So I see you get, you get tarnished with the brush, with the brush of this greenwashing and bullshit.

And just this weird, I mean culture was to my head at the best of times but this one really bugs me because I think this country is a huge opportunity, especially with Trump being, you know, fairly anti this side of things.

We've got huge opportunities to dominate this sector.

EU does get locked in and you know, it does sort of not help itself with weird things.

It does.

America's quite anti.

China is trashing us on the green tech by the way, absolutely ruining that.

Doing a really good job for all.

The, oh, they just keep holding coal power plants, all that sort of.

They are absolutely obliterating the world in.

Green tech because they're so forward looking.

They're just like, where are we going to be in 100 years?

At some point they've gone, you know, we're going to be, at some point the world is going to have to buy this technology so we're going to make sure they're all buying it from us and that.

And that's the way they sort of think about it.

And so for me I get frustrated because it's such a good commercial opportunity but because people sort of go oh, it sounds like it's to do with net zero or it sounds, and by the way, I'm pro net zero.

I think we all need to have a responsibility to the net zero target.

So it keeps moving but in regards to the sort of premise of we are clearly having a negative impact on the environment so we need to move towards vaguely being more sensible about it.

I'm all for that but I do like to separate the green technology element because I think it's such a good commercial opportunity and I think it getting.

Dragged the Americans to come and because you know what's always hard in this country is we're not very good at thinking big.

You only need to hang out in America for a little bit and you realize you're thinking small.

But it seem if Trump's got a negative agenda that possibly this is a good opportunity for us to sort of say because Where I see a really nice match, I've seen it a few times, is you take British science, very sweet, you know, British scientists, but you know, from these universities.

I saw load of them present in America recently and it moves the hell out of me because they were asking for way too little money, being terribly polite about it all and sort of didn't want to talk about money, you know.

But what the Americans have is they do spot it A, they're like, look, you speak the same language, I could do this.

But also they're like, this is big, you know, and we could put 100 million into this and change America.

And they throw money hard at it.

And I do like, you know, I've had an office in America before and it's a very different way of doing business for sure.

And I do like it in a lot of ways.

I agree.

And that, you know, heavy funding, all that sort of stuff all comes from the state.

It's, it comes with caveats and clawback equities and you know, there's a lot of ways I don't like how American VCs operate.

Yeah, it's brutal.

Yeah, I totally agree.

But I do think, you know, I, I just think if you want to start a successful business, GreenTech is a fantastic place and I think some of the biggest and most successful companies next 10 years will be in greentech.

And Guy here is doing a few things.

So it's, it's you thinking about the, the as you say, the regulatory, political, commercial angles and coming up with SaaS products to help solve these complicated problems.

Marketplace.

So Environment Law came out about B and G units.

We built a marketplace for BNG to allow biodiversity.

Oh yeah, yeah, same one.

Exactly.

So we built a marketplace to allow construction companies to easily find, not dodge it.

You know, this isn't us about saying we don't believe in the scheme.

We think it's a great scheme but it helps companies to more easily do what they need to do there.

You know, things like more and more companies requiring to submit carbon accounting ESG sort of audits at the end of the year.

So we've got a carbon accounting software that people can use.

It takes a good guess, does sort of automates data and then uses AI sort of generate proper reports and stuff.

It's really cool actually.

I'm really pleased with that one.

And then we've got a couple of other products as well.

That's in the pipework.

So.

Yeah.

So depending on what gets regulated, we then build a piece of software that helps.

Are you Raising money at the moment or what's the stick?

We're small, friends and family race, but mostly it's funded by myself, my business partner.

Okay, and your aim?

What, over the next.

Where do you want to see it to go?

Do?

I think we want to see and see how, you know, we talk about greentech being the best space to grow a company.

We want to see if we can be a part of that.

And so we're pretty ambitious of next five, 10 years.

I'm a big believer in getting it off the ground first before we raise heavy capital.

One, because you might not need it, but two, I've been around for long enough to know the value of showing the worth, getting to profitability on your own.

And then if you do want to go for a raise, you're just in a much more powerful position.

You got to do it.

Yeah.

Whenever it happens to me, now and then I meet someone who's got an idea, pre revenue, pre stop.

You know what I mean?

And they're like, yeah, yeah, but, you know, I need to raise all this money.

And they always pull up like, oh, we've done this analysis and we think if we got 1% of the market.

It'S always 100 million.

Yeah.

By year five, it's always 100 million.

Can I get this clear?

You've got no employees, no turnover, no product, no nothing.

You know, any advice for people starting business?

If you can get something off the ground, get some usage, get some revenue in and then go raise.

I would always recommend that.

I mean, I'm just thinking in my head, it would be a bit like coming along, saying, I'm a brilliant musician.

Oh, I'm going to write a brilliant song.

I've got this idea for a song.

It's going to be brilliant.

It's like, well, play it to me.

No, I'm written it yet.

But if you put money in, you.

Know, it's like, yeah, yeah, exactly.

What am I investing in here?

You know, but it's amazing.

But the other end of that scale is the one you saying, which if.

If this.

I know this is old news, but if it's a surprise to anyone to be absolutely crystal clear, it's that, like, you got to get to the million quid turnover for sass.

Isn't golden grail 10 million, you know?

Yeah.

I think people look at the wrong metrics often with companies as well.

Like, I think people get obsessed with.

I know profitability gets forgotten for a really long time.

Like, I've never understood these.

The amount of money Successful companies lose.

It does bug me a little bit.

It feels like a bit of a.

Well, you can't build businesses like that here.

You can in America with the sort of.

Uber will lose a billion a year for 20 years.

Yeah, but, but at the most insane valuations you just go how?

Just the bottomless pit of just raising funds, losing.

Those days have slightly changed.

But in America, isn't it a bit like Japan beating America with various industries.

Car industry, but they also did it to the computer games industry.

They sold Sony PlayStations at a loss on the long term view that we're going to sell games.

It's the Deliveroo models, the doordashes.

They just say, although Deliveroo is British, isn't it?

It's Australian.

But like there's this shoot.

They're all shelling money because they're all trying to win the market cap.

They're trying to win the market cap.

So they're playing, they're actually playing the long game and just we've got deeper pockets than you.

Yes, we'll beat you.

I, I was just remembering today we were talking about QuickBooks and I was like we're talking anyway, it doesn't matter.

But I was like I remember when they came to meet me and it was a dollar a month for like years and they were, because they got the money into it, huge American companies say well how do we, how do we beat zero?

We offer it for basically for free and they'll never get off it.

So I think it's that game.

I think unfortunately or fortunately in this country, you know, that's not really how it's going to work.

To your point, you should try and make it profitable from almost day one.

So there's so many businesses out there who will be doing 10, 15, 20, 25mil profit.

You will heard of.

My business partner ran a SaaS business service desk company.

Incredibly, he'll be the first to make incredibly boring company.

They're the best ones.

But they were six, they were doing like 40 million revenue and about 60, 70% profit.

Wow.

That's why people love software.

Once you get it right, sure.

But no one would ever have heard of them.

In fact they, they sponsored, you know, a Premier league sort of sleeve of one of their sponsors because they, you know there was a sort of.

But no one heard of them.

But, and, but like the ones we celebrate are that yes, they're at 400 million revenue but they're spending 600 million just to do that.

So yeah, yeah, yeah.

I find I' I've I've always had issues with that type of business.

I feel like we celebrate the wrong parts of companies sometimes.

Oh, you're reminding me of.

I think he's one of Africa's richest men and he was hilarious.

I remember him telling and watching this documentary with him in a helicopter, like, oh, how'd it all start?

And he, he's like, well, everyone wanted to be famous or a rapper or they wanted to, you know, get into all these fancy industries.

And I just noticed there was this big pile of stuff next to where our village was.

I said, what's that?

And I said it's gravel.

And he said, well, can you sell it?

And I said, oh yeah, people pay a pound or whatever, kilo for gravel and whatever.

And he was like, oh, I'll sell gr.

And that's what he's like, the richest guy in Africa.

Just like, you know, simple, isn't it?

So simple.

So what have been our key takeaways from Andy's chat with Ben so far?

Here's Andy to break them down.

Number one, sustainability is a business opportunity, not just philanthropy.

A lot of SMEs still see sustainability as a nice to have or moral duty rather than a smart business move.

But Ben makes it clear that going green isn't just good for the planet, it's good for the bottom line.

Number two, the future of business lies in natural assets.

These emerging markets are becoming part of the financial system and the smartest entrepreneurs are getting ahead of the curve.

Now Ben explains why these assets are set to explode and how the business can position themselves to win.

Number three, China is crushing the green tech race.

While other countries drag their feet, China is playing the long game, Absolutely smashing green technological production.

They're ensuring that eventually the world has no choice but to buy from them.

And Ben highlights how the UK and other nations risk falling behind by failing to see sustainability as the gold mine it truly is.

So that's cool.

I mean your last experience, I mean that was, that was pretty good going.

I think you did it in nine years or something, didn't you?

Built, built verb.

And then, and then got out.

Yeah, was done at the end of 23.

It's a nice story.

What happened before that?

Did you have a few ups or was that your first big, first business?

I was about 22, so my business partner, a guy called Chris, started at uni, just selling, building little websites basically.

And then I joined him after uni and we sort of Grew it, We changed it to a sort of digital marketing agency.

Quite hard to build a digital marketing agency.

You know, it's a bit like PR to.

It is.

But it's the only company you can build when you're 22 because it's a service based and you don't need a backstory, you just need a laptop and a little bit of a quick, you know.

Oh, and it's almost a realm of the.

Yeah.

So you win the work and then you deliver it so you don't take on too much risk, you can run it incredibly.

We are, you know, we're uni students so we're used to living on nothing.

So actually you could keep your costs really, really low and just build out your sort of baseline.

Did you know a lot about digital marketing?

No.

No.

So this was.

This is actually one of the best pieces for us I can give.

Because we couldn't do the work, we never got sucked into the trap.

Entrepreneurs fall into where they stay in the work too long as the founder, as the, you know, lead of the business.

Your job is revenue generation.

And like you see the amount.

For example, if creative directors start an agency or, you know, or something like that, they get locked into doing the work for too long and you can't scale the business.

Oh, I see.

Don't get locked in if you're the.

They spend their time saying, oh, I wouldn't quite do the advert like that.

Not sure about that.

Because we couldn't do the work.

We never had that opportunity to fall into the traps.

We had to hire people who could do the work and then our job was to bring.

Why would you get into it if you knew nothing about it?

I think he was building websites.

He was.

I mean Chris claimed he coded.

I've yet to ever see any sort of example.

Yeah, exactly.

But I've also never even seen the example of when he did that.

So we had, you know, you've always got freelancers you can lean on to the design and development work.

And then we started building them of the brand.

We went into the luxury space that was our sort of specialty that we went after.

And the thing we did very well was slowly leveraging the next level of clients.

We started off by doing free blogs for people and then we started use that to start getting the early paying blogs.

And then we started to slowly build in to get into small companies and.

Slowly build that People paid for blogs today.

Yeah, I guess they created content, all that.

You know, everyone had like a fashion blog or something.

Blog.

We used to do a lot of those gone now.

Almost completely.

They gone.

Yeah, yeah.

Social now.

Taking their own over now.

Meanwhile, you've gone and you're doing all this.

Meanwhile you've gone and built a sort of social media.

You're a social media brand, Ben.

Social media brand.

Yeah, I know.

I'm an influencer.

Personal brand.

Your personal brands go really well.

Why?

So during my own house, I wasn't.

I've always been busy, but I wasn't allowed to, like, start other businesses during my own out.

It was a little bit restrictive, so we thought we'd start doing content.

Chris and I did this together.

Chris is your business partner?

My old business partner for Verbia, but we're still friends.

We do a lot of content together.

Well done.

And essentially we.

We thought we'd do that, not least because we were Quite active on LinkedIn and we'd already started to see a little bit of an example of our LinkedIn profiles, helping us out in our sort of business capacity, just sort of opening doors, getting intros and stuff.

And so we moved into the video space and it just took off really.

I was really lucky.

It took off really, really quickly.

What were you.

This is on YouTube.

You started posting.

So I posted on TikTok and Instagram and my TikTok went first and Sunny was getting, within two, three months, was getting a huge amount of views.

And what.

What were you posting about?

What was your only.

So I started doing all the sort of wanky stuff everyone always does, which is like, here's, you know, my five pieces of advice on how to.

Yeah, yes.

That didn't do as well, but we sort of did a lot of, you know, all that stuff.

And then actually someone sent me a recruitment story that they were just sort of, you know, you get DMs and someone sent me a recruitment story.

And I read that out and everyone loved it.

A recruitment.

So it's just like an idiotic recruitment story where someone just sort of.

I can't.

I can't remember what the story was, but basically someone had gone to an interview, something insane had happened.

I just sort of thought it was such a good story.

I just read it out this sort of 45 seconds and then I reacted to it and then people absolutely loved it and got a load of views.

So I started doing more of those.

And then people started sharing, like, their worst boss stories and their worst management stories.

And so I started reading those out as well.

Just like exchange of, like, bosses sort of, you know, doing some hilarious stuff, but also doing some really quite shitty stuff.

And it just caught an absolute.

I think it was a real representation of how people are feeling about work at the moment in general.

But it caught an absolute wave.

And, you know, I.

I think I got 750 million views in the first 12 months of posting.

Wow.

Which is kind of crazy when you.

Think you were naked in a bow tie.

Exactly.

Yeah.

While you read out there, that particular video got three views.

But they were funny.

It sounds like they were funny.

They were also outrageous.

They were also relatable.

I think that was the key bit.

Like, it was interesting that some of the stories were absolutely crazy.

There was one where there's a fire in the office and the boss tried to make the work through it whilst they bring it out.

There was one where the police came.

Out and said, look, no, smoke's only in the ceiling right now.

Exactly.

Like, it's fine.

It's hot.

There was another one where that actual bomb scare and the police said, you gotta clear out the building.

The boss said, no, no, you've not hit your sales quote.

You're not allowed to get yourself, you know, all that sort of stuff.

But actually, the ones that do really well are the ones that you just go, why have you canceled my holiday without telling me?

Why have you promised me a pay rise and not given me one?

Why have you contact me on holiday?

Like all the sort of.

Sorry to interrupt.

Do you not feel a slight.

Sort of.

You're demonizing bosses.

I spent quite a lot of my time defending them because I think there's this narrative.

They're all ev.

And they're all about.

It's something across my.

I do do best bosses sometimes as well.

They don't do as well.

But I never name people.

I deliberately don't name people.

And the second thing I do is the stories I say are pretty outrageous.

Jeremy.

I don't.

And go back to one of the things we talked about earlier about context is the second.

The stories that don't work is when I go, well, this is why the boss said.

This is why the employee said that.

And as soon as you try and introduce new ones, it doesn't work on social.

It's almost like when you watch those documentaries at the end, you know, they've.

They've.

They've shown this awful boss.

And they would say sort of like 99% of bosses are not like this boss or whatever.

I'm not sure that helps.

I mean, I'm not sure.

You get to the end and they give you a stack because it's Always like, you've watched this thing about this terrible person and it'll say, well, this terrible person says they paid the money back and they were really sorry.

And it's something I wear.

Like, I did a new series called the Best Boss in Britain where I asked people to nominate for their best boss and I surprise them at work with £5,000.

And so I try and mitigate it and do a little bit of that because that's nice.

I agree, but that's not so popular.

This doesn't do as well despite, like, as ever with content.

The more effort you put in, the less views it gets.

But that's very true with content.

People say that it should be almost rugged, you know, because it's real.

Yeah.

I mean, people like negativity.

Social is so set up towards anger and hatred.

That's why news is always negative.

Right.

Because now, you know, I mean, Murdoch built a business on clocking that you could monetize hatred quite quickly.

Yeah.

And it's very sad.

I mean, bad bosses is quite a funny concept anyway, you know, because it's.

It's actually the bit that people may not know know.

Not as in, like, who are listening, as in, like the people.

You know.

If you haven't been a boss, you don't realize how difficult it is.

I mean, I always amused by people when they're like, oh, well, I wasn't trained properly or informed early enough or I was, you know, why didn't you tell me two days ago that today you were going to get me to do X?

And it's like, right, you have a go at my job.

Yeah.

You know, and it's like, you know, I still have my job to do.

I.

And I say this, I think the hardest job in the world is running your own business.

People always go, oh, Gen Z's are lazy.

I say, they're the most entrepreneur generation we've ever had.

So I would argue they're not lazy and they're not, you know, they're incredibly hardworking.

So I think running your own business is the hardest job you can have.

But I do think it's interesting.

I do think the negative bosses, I'm very careful, the stories I share where they're just so obviously wrong that people can relate to it.

But the thing that always happens, I find interesting is people start trying to guess the sector or the country it's from and see someone go, that's got to be the us.

They go, oh, no, it's definitely in construction.

Or it's that it's One of the.

Seems to be one of the few universal things we've had is everyone has had a bad boss.

But I think there's a stat the other day, so 38 of people think they're working for their worst boss ever right now.

But these stats, I mean, you know, who fills them in, you know, and who gets stopped?

It's like the old stats when they stop you in the street.

I was like the only person who's got time with grannies and students.

So we get all this data granny's.

And, you know, if we were like, oh, this office poll today says that 78 of people think that, you know, chickens are larger than houses.

And it's like, what they actually mean is, you know, know, grannies and students think this and it's like, yeah, okay, great.

What does everyone else think?

The other, you know, if I, if I go a little bit in that direction, I'm very frustrated, you know, on.

All of my entrepreneurial clients are absolutely losing their.

About this government at the moment and the budget and the, the atmosphere that's being created for entrepreneurs, that they're not workers, that they're using loopholes, that they're rich people not create, you know, and there's this real negativity amongst all this stuff and they don't have time to have a voice.

Voice, yeah, there's loads of them.

You know, it's like, why is there not more of a voice amongst of the entrepreneurs?

Every time I read the ft, they go, well, the Resolution foundation or the Institute for Fiscal Studies say this.

It's like, great.

I'm not saying they shouldn't exist, but they should be like a corner voice because they're way on the left, you know, and we should have maybe some crazy people on the right.

But then the, you know, these stats have been blowing me away.

There's no one in the cabinet who has ever run a business.

I mean, do you know that, that.

I mean, that's like how the.

Is that even legal?

I mean, I, I would argue that's because it's an incredibly unappealing position.

A cabinet.

Who would do it?

Who on earth would do it for?

You know, for the role.

You get pretty average pay.

It doesn't matter if you are the best person in the world, you'll get hated by half the population straight off the bat.

And then you'll just have people you've never met who don't understand anything, call themselves journalists.

That's one of my new pet peeves is content creators call themselves journalists, just abusing you constantly.

So you just.

And you can't.

And to those people, I was, you can't have it both ways.

You can't make it the most unappealing job in the world and then complain about it like, you can't have it both ways.

So, yeah, it's a big problem, it's impossible to fix.

But it feels like, you know, back in the day when they used to do, you know, BBC adverts about you should do X or you should do Y for me.

And I said this so many times, but I feel like we all need a bit of education to say, you're going to have to pay these people more, be more forgiving for them.

Like, I think like the Prime Minister should do like a weekly national broadcast that you can tune into or you can't, you know, and they should do an hour and they should pick one.

They pick something subject, say, look, I know it's an uncomfortable thing and you think 150, 000 pounds is a lot, but we probably need to put Prime Minister's pay up to a million.

I would love to do that.

But if you did an hour segment, they, there would be two clips of six seconds long that would then be circulated 300 million times on X.

It's the fact that no one bothers to watch.

You'd have to do 10 minutes, okay, 10 minutes a week.

No one watched the hour, no one watched 10 minutes, but everyone would watch the 10 second clip circulated on X within seconds.

Wow.

But we're assuming a level of like, honesty in regards to having that debate.

Like, politicians can't have this, you know, going back to what we said about social, right?

You can't.

The problem with social, it doesn't work.

When you want to have an honest debate and say, here are the pros, here are the cons of this thing.

You have to come out and say yay or nay, because otherwise you get clipped up and just get circulated.

And you can't, you can't dispute that because millions of people will see that clip and they'll be validating their preexisting, you know what left and right like, preexisting.

Validating their thing.

And so one of the big complaints a lot of journalists have now, as a natural journalist, not content creators, is they say, oh, you know, no politician wants to have an hour's interview anymore.

I go, yeah, I'm not surprised.

They're just, they know they're going to muck up, they're going to do a Prince Andrew.

They didn't even Necessarily have to muck up.

They just need to say something which you can clip by 5 seconds and make it sound something better.

So it's not about mucking up, it's about not saying anything that you can't isolate a few words, make it sound incredibly dishonest or crop out, out, you know, different things to make it look worse than it is.

And then bang.

And the problem is you've got these engagement groups now these are very organized.

So they'll be engagement groups of content creators, journalists who will slow down.

What's an engagement group?

So you'll have like WhatsApp groups where people say, right, here's the clip, go.

All share on your Twitter account.

And that's why the same clip shared so quickly by so many people is because they're all on these WhatsApp groups and there'll be an admin, they say, right, here's the edit, go.

And these groups are organized by who?

Whatever, whatever political, ideological, of similar minds.

You know, it depends on the platform, depends on the group, depends on the.

So we're desperate to be in tribes.

We, we hate anyone who's not in our tribe.

And previously things were simpler with only a few TV channels and sort of almost media was boring, but in a way that it was centralist and boring and quite balanced and you had to listen because there was nothing else to listen to.

I mean, it's making me sound quite.

I actually, I'm a lot of ways I'm very pro social media.

I think you get access to people you would never ever.

Incredibly amazing people with incredible knowledge about incredible things.

You get access to them in a way you never would if we still had our few TV channels.

So there's lots of pros to social media, but it's causing huge issues in politics, in particular as content creators causing huge issues in politics because it's so easy just to say whatever you want and it validates a certain opinion and it gets shared and it gets retweeted and by the time you even remote like I think Labour's comms have been terrible since they've come into power, but they've not been as bad as everyone has said they have to been.

I hate it, weirdly, I'm, I'm so sensual.

I just hate the negativity and I, I mean my left wing friends who think they should be more left wing and you know, even this conversation about you on the left or the right.

I don't even know what that means.

I have no idea.

Nobody knows what it means.

I Have no idea where I sit on the political spectrum.

I believe in market solutions, but I also believe companies shouldn't be able to do whatever the they want.

I thought Brexit was the cheapest thing we've ever done, but I still think, you know, sort of investing in creating a world where people want to build businesses.

I have no idea what my political beliefs anymore is because it's been completely ruined.

So my view is I will always vote for the party I think is most central is my wife's.

Yeah, yeah, we're on the same page.

There's such tricky problems though, aren't they?

Because you sit and listen to them.

So there's the good.

As you say that the people out there doing amazing content, amazing podcasts and monetary opportunity.

You can monetize hobbies which you could never do before.

True.

You can monetize hobby which people will.

Start loving their jobs more, which is a big thing, you know, side hustle, all that, which I'm all for.

I hadn't thought it as simple as simply as that.

You could monetize your hobby.

So because I get a bit.

I struggle a bit on Love the job because I'm like, well, you know, who works in the abattoir?

But, you know, it's.

It's.

Although someone said to me, well, some people love working the avatar.

Do they?

I mean, you know, they might not mind it, they might get used to it.

I mean, I don't know, maybe they do.

Maybe they're just nuts.

But no, sorry, abattoir workers.

You know, I said everything wrong there.

But like, there's no way of.

You know what, they were so brilliant at FDR and stuff back in the day and they get on the radio and they talk.

You saw it a bit in Covid, though, when it was like, we're going to war.

And then we all listed to Boris for a While and after 10 episodes we were just like, oh, yeah, yeah, banging on the same old crap.

But there is some.

What I'm saying is, although there'll be all the people who clip it on the fringes, there is a desperation for truth and narrative and it would be quite interesting.

You need an almost Jordan Peterson type character who was just a very clever and B, not afraid and going to consistently produce a narrative and communicate because the Prime Minister becomes a bit like a CEO.

Your job is to.

To effectively look after your team and have a strategy and a vision and communicate that vision.

You're like raising money every week and you should be.

It should be like every channel I I mean, you say people wouldn't tune in.

I'd tune in to the.

If it was 10 minutes once a week, what's going on?

If they said something, if he.

If they actually got on air, like.

A revamp of Prime Minister's questions, for example, I think that's a bit of a statement, stale way of doing things.

Maybe you could revamp that.

That's an interesting point.

I.

I actually don't think it's particularly helpful how we do PMQs, because it's why I find it too aggressive in.

The sense it's too adversarial.

Again, I think it's too much about the social.

It's all about trying to get that gotcha moment, the way you can clip that 30 seconds and then post it.

And so I think it.

It was a great format for, like, honest debate when people would, like, listen to the.

Either you listen to the whole thing or you couldn't watch it.

Whereas now, because you can watch clips, it becomes too much of a.

You know, that's what it's supposed to.

Be about, a respectful, honest debate.

I would argue people are now doing it for the clips and the views, rather necessarily.

Well, I get.

I just can't stand the political point scoring.

You know, they come in, it's like, it's your fault.

It's your fault.

You know what I really wish, and I think, you know, Kim knew my sister's stuff and apparently he's a very decent human being.

But, you know, I kind of wish when they came in, especially when I watched Rachel Reed's budget stuff, that they said that we are where we are.

Okay.

You know, and we're not.

It.

Wouldn't it.

I mean, come on.

Wouldn't it be amazing?

They said, I'm not going to get into blaming.

Whether it was your fault, our fault.

The truth is we've all run this government and we're all in this country together.

So let's try and, you know, because that's a very interesting thing for the opposition to then respond to if you're much more open and.

Because how would they respond?

They would be human, probably, and be like, well, thank you for your nice comments and I'm glad we're not going to get into whose fault is it?

Because if you were with.

If you're running a business and you get into.

You forgot a mistake spending hours on whose fault it is.

I know when you're running a business, you can fire the people who are.

Jermaine, you can fire the people who are talking shit about it.

And you could.

But at the same time, people make.

You'd say, well, it doesn't matter who did it.

We're here.

Yeah, what do we do?

But I think we're assuming a level of honesty, and that's just not the game.

Right.

I think the opposition is the opposition.

Right.

So I don't mind that they're supposed.

They're supposed to hold a company to account.

So when a government makes a decision, I'm all for them saying, you said you weren't going to raise taxes.

What would you call that?

Like, I'm all for that.

It's when they start descending into the really teeny, like, you know, just whatever.

Like the latest cultural nonsense is.

Like, you know, nothing does my head in than seeing an article about how a statue of Winston Churchill's been moved out of a room I've never been in.

Certainly won't be in anytime soon.

Do you know what I mean?

And it's like, that's the front page.

Like, seriously, do you really care whether a photo's been moved from something or other?

And you just go, this just can't be a problem to deal with.

So one of the terms I hate most is new media, mainstream media.

I find those.

What does it even mean?

I find those weird terms.

So, like, all, like, basically everyone with a Twitter account account and 10,000 followers since their new media and call themselves journalist, which I have a slight qualms.

About, because journalism is.

Is a.

Broadly speaking.

You've got to hold yourself to a journalistic stand.

If you want to call yourself journalists, you have to hold yourself.

I think they should be regulated by an institute.

Like a tax advisor.

Exactly.

And.

And there should be.

You know, and it's.

Even though I'm not saying they're great, but they do have to post, you know.

You know, they hide it, but if they make a mistake, they have to repost stuff called re.

You don't have that on social.

I mean, X is a particularly political space, so that's probably the worst.

Let's move on from it.

But let's just end on the.

The X thing.

I.

I have learned a little bit because I was just in America watching the adverts just before I was there for the election.

So not on purpose, but I mean, the election adverts, I mean, the only country in the world I like watching adverts is America.

Because they are hilarious.

Not subtle, are they?

This one, this.

This lady will get transgender people across the border from Mexico.

They were literally saying like this.

And then at the End this.

This.

This broadcast has been sponsored by Donald Trump.

And.

And you're like, that's.

And then I was asking the Americans, I was like, in our country, you can't do that.

That's slander.

That's just that way.

And it says free speech.

We believe in it so fundamentally.

And suddenly the ball dropped a little bit.

Why?

Some of my friends are so wound up about X that it's like, there's a level at which we.

We think that free.

Yeah, this.

Free speech.

And then it's just being like, awful or something.

But.

But I'm up for.

I'm up for free speech.

Free speech, but not freedom of consequence.

That's the point.

Right.

People want to be able to say something and then not suffer you.

You know, you can legally say something incredibly racist, but you can't then complain when your company fires you because it doesn't, you know, it doesn't align with their brand values.

And also, you can't just.

You can't be allowed to just lie.

That has to be.

At some point.

You have to be.

There has to be some repercussions.

Just being blatantly lying.

It's a bit strong, but that's why we were talking just before we started why I'm so wound up about the BBC and the Financial Times to keep talking about tax releases, loopholes.

Because it's a lie.

Yeah.

It's not true.

They are not loopholes.

People may misuse law, but that is illegal and they.

It's evasion and you can go to prison for it.

So, you know, I think these words, they matter so much.

Yeah.

You shouldn't be able to lie, you know.

Yeah.

I mean, that's.

That's irritating.

What's been the biggest up in all of this, then?

So you seem to have done very well, doing very well, things going well, you know, you.

You win a business.

348 to 346 is a phrase I really like.

Oh, I haven't heard that.

I think it was a Gary Vee quote.

Oh, just.

Just throw lots of against the wall and try and get more.

Just try and get slightly more wins than losses over the course of the week, rather than trying to either win it or not.

That was.

That was a really good thing.

So you make so many mistakes.

I mean, I was 22 when I started, like, it's, you know, I couldn't have.

Couldn't have known less about, you know, we ran out, like, ran out of cash.

Even though we're a profitable business, you know, that was a heavy learning about cash flow.

And Chris is down the bank trying to.

You suddenly find his giant cigar collection in his office.

You know, what's all these strippers receipts.

We just assumed people would pay invoices on time.

Credit control is hilarious.

Sometimes I say to clients, like, you see their debtors, and you're like, what are you doing about credit control?

Well, we don't have any credit control.

Yeah, yeah, you just.

You just.

But when you.

You just start off, you just think, well, yeah, cool.

Well, they owe us the money.

Of course they'll pay.

You just never assume that, you know, well, they'll kick, oh, sorry, we put the wrong invoice number, and now it'll be next month.

Don't you think about people, too?

I always think, you know, try and be 51% a good person.

You know, try to be 90.

But, you know, it's a big problem.

The left has is no one's perfect because no one's perfect.

Everyone's going to fall short, and then they just get attacked for no, you know.

Yeah, yeah, that's it.

Someone explained that the left.

Left has shot themselves in the foot because they're sort of tried.

You've got to do it.

They demand perfection, and therefore.

But everyone falls short.

And so you, you know, you can be really good in areas and weaker in others.

Well, Elon Musk, great example, isn't he?

Because he's so divisive, people hate him for what he said.

But it's like, you know, with a guest the other day, big up, Adam Pope.

But he was saying, you know, I'd be up for Elon Musk joining our government.

People would be like.

But I'm like, I get his point.

Because it's like, well, I'd certainly be up for a business person being at that cabinet table.

I don't think I want it to be Alan Sugar.

I'd quite like it to be someone else.

But if someone could be at that table going, a good CEO who's running a lot of companies saying, look, I don't want to interrupt you all, but you're talking bollocks here.

I agree.

But I also.

I also recognize that government's probably pretty cumbersome and it takes a while.

You know, the first time I.

However, my.

My companies, I'm working with the government on a Couple of things.

It's very slow.

It's incredibly slow.

Well, it's hard enough to run five people.

Yeah.

I mean, when.

When my friends who are more into the Illuminati conspiracy theories, there's these people up the top.

I'm like, it's so much more chaotic and disorganized than that.

Try running a business where I get very.

This whole sort of secret police as no one know bollocks.

There's opportunism for sure.

There's people who are brilliant opportunists who say, you know, Putin and stuff.

So let's move my chips.

I saw some Covid contracts for.

For Kit.

There's a lot of opportunism out there.

Opportunism.

Yeah.

But it's not this idea.

This is a mastermind.

It's just too chaotic, it's too cumbersome, it's too tricky to do anything.

Yeah.

It's a very, very slow moving battleship government.

Like you don't.

And so I always find it not slight naive when entrepreneurs say, ah, I could just get in and turn it.

You just couldn't.

Well, it would be like turning up at the biggest company in the world.

It's like the nhs.

Yeah.

He's like, is anyone really going to sign up to really sorting it out?

I mean, frankly, they need a couple of sergeant Majors in their kicking us and that would be helpful.

Huge.

So much reform, like from a technology perspective to everything great.

Chief executives can be amazing.

100 if you get a really talented chief executive because what they'll do is, you know, people say, well, how do you achieve that much?

It's like, well, you get one person and I'm sure this is true.

And Elon, all these people who have a team underneath them of say 10 people who are all amazing, you know what I mean?

And underneath them they have 10 people who are all pretty amazing, you know, but.

But it goes back to pay, right?

You need someone to.

You need to pay one of the best CEOs in the world serious money to run the HS.

What.

What do you reckon the news would say?

Are they too scared of bringing it up in piece?

They're going to get shitted and say, look, we need to pay everyone a million quid.

Like, I find it fascinating when like massive charities have like experienced CEOs, they pay them like 110 grand or something outrageous.

You know, it's a charity, like, you know, but like it's a hugely complicated with massive.

You need an experienced hand and those people cost money, like, so there's a real problem with, like, I agree with you that the NHS needs massive reform and the idea would be to bring in, like a gun team to do it.

But they would cost a fortune.

But it would cost nothing compared to what we're losing every day.

You could put together a budget and say, right, we've put aside 20 million quid.

What's that for?

We're going to hard 10.

Agreed.

But it comes to a carrot.

It comes from optics.

Like, for example, labor announced tomorrow we are putting a salary package together of 5 million pounds, one of the best CEOs in the world to come in and run the NHS.

What do you think the response online would be?

But we need.

They're in a position, they don't have to get voted for five years.

There's a bravery.

That's why I'm back to my light.

They need the 10 minute broadcast a week and say, look, you can just listen to your sound bites.

You can come and listen to me.

Here I am telling you, if we pay this, that will be the, you know, we have to do it.

We need someone of surreal talent.

I don't give a shit if you don't agree with me.

You know, you can vote me out in five years, but we're going to do it.

You need to be honest, for all of her faults, Thatcher had that, like, I don't give a fuck.

But she was a woman who'd never done.

No, no woman had gotten that role.

So she'd had to be tough as nails, you know, to say, oh, I don't care.

Isn't that almost what Trump does a bit.

Isn't that almost like the good bit of Trump that people buy into, you know, the business, clever business people, because there's this thing you, you know, they say, look, it's the, it was the worst of two choices, or it's the least worst of two choices.

And Kamala is going to grow the state and do all of this stuff and here is someone coming, coming in and some of the stuff he's saying, like, I'm going to put Elon in charge of growth and I'm going to put, you know, you may hate the person, but it's bold and, and people are voting for him.

That's the interesting bit.

I can't believe I'm saying this, and I'm sure it's completely the wrong thing to say, but actually, out of this conversation, some of the elements of what I'm looking for in the UK is to someone to come along and I wanted to Be a good person.

I mean Trump just seems to say some stuff which is just not.

It's not British.

It just doesn't seem like I've seen.

Have you seen many mega?

No, it was mega make England great again.

Honestly, that hurt my very British soul.

The idea that.

Well, especially it does say England.

Yes, United Kingdom.

I believe we know exactly.

But, but you know, like that's the problem.

And the second is just like that goes such a misunderstanding of how British people respond to things like mega just sounds awful.

And now a quick word from our sponsors.

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Let's end on our key question.

What is bullshit?

Then in let's do your current industry, which is the industry of green.

I mean if we answer that, what is bullshit in that industry and why?

For me the bullshit is the green element gets politicized way too much and we just need to take that out and just focus on the commercial opportunity.

Like if you took the green side out and just looked at as a genuine investment opportunity it would do a lot better.

But because it gets politicized so often, you know, like people like will do like, like a, you know, there's announcement for the international Business Summit where something like, you know, 5 billion has been announced into green, like clean energy stuff.

And I saw.

Oh, that's so woke.

And you go what?

It's 5 billion from some of the hard most hardcore financial institute.

What do you mean?

It's like what does that even mean?

What happened to COP this year was a bit.

I saw Martin Wolf's article today.

Was it a failure or a disaster?

The problem is cop.

Every like it's every like four or five years is like a big one.

Whereas this one was a bit of a joke.

I mean Azerbaijan, the idea of Azerbaijan being careful, careful.

They were so as if nobody was.

They were caught.

We have a lot of AABAN listeners.

They were doing a lot of like oil deals like so publicly it was like.

And this always happened.

I think people have misunderstand cop.

Often energy deals get struck because that's where a lot of people are.

But like it was so blatant.

They were just using COP for like oil trades.

And I also like, you know, the idea of Azerbaijan, who their only, you know, is one of their key, key, key resources in so many ways is oil.

Oil.

The idea that they're going to sort of be a proponent for what COP should stand for.

No, I mean, you know, we had Greg on, who was great, but, you know, I think we demonize oil a bit too much.

Thing is, we rely on it and almost everything in this room is made of oil, you know, and, and we get this sort of negativity.

It's a weird thing, right, because it's, it's one of the biggest reasons why we advance so far as a society.

But at the same time, it's a finite resource that is legitimately contributing, contributing to climate change.

And so that's, that's the balance we have to strike at some point.

Yeah.

And it's about 97% of climate scientists.

Now agree that going down slowly, going up, I mean, or whichever way, there's fewer and fewer that disagree.

I would argue 97% is an astonishingly high proportion in this day and age.

It's day and age when the amount of people do, you know, more people, for example, there's a high percentage of people who think the world's flat.

Yeah.

So, like, at some point we have to broadly start listening to experts again.

I don't know when we decide to stop doing that.

But like, their warning is very simple.

It's like, look, we don't.

Because this is unprecedented, we don't know what's going to happen, but there is a strong chance we're going to see some really negative inputs about climate change and the amount of greenhouse gases we're really seeing.

Do you agree with our friend of the show, Steve Keane, the rebellious economist, but his view that the government's all listening to economists who are completely trivialized in the climate crisis and they need to listen to the climate people.

I think we have to listen to the people who've made their careers in studying this.

So, yes, obviously we need to be.

I think the problem is, is like, it's so.

It sounds so bad, you can't get your head around it.

And that's the challenge people have.

Right.

You can't.

If you go full doomerism, we are so fucked.

We're screwed.

Everyone just goes, la, la, la, la.

I don't listen anymore.

So you have to make it sound bad, but, you know, do it.

Like that's.

And that's the balance.

But it's a lot.

Most clients have to say, look, we are in real trouble.

Like, we are genuinely going to have in the Next sort of 50, 60, 70 years, we are going to see astonishing change in our climate because of what we are directly doing.

And you look at that and you go, that sounds quite terrifying.

And like, you know, I'm 32, you know, I'm sort of thinking, kids, grandkids, we do have a responsibility.

And then, and then I look at the sector and go, well, okay, well, win, win.

Like, we help sort the environment out and we invest in a much cleaner, renewable, cheaper energy.

That suddenly sounds like an opportunity.

So I, I go back and forth on climate because I, I, because of my business, I talk about commercial access a lot, but I, I just, I'm not a climate scientist.

But the phrase I got taught, and I got taught this by farmers have told me this, you know, really sort of range of people.

If you get it, you can't unsee it.

That's the phrase I get told a lot.

For climate change.

For climate change.

If you get it, you can't see if you actually understand what we're talking about.

You can't not see the changes that we're having.

And farmers seeing it.

I was at a farm in Norwich and they were talking about it and, and these are not like, I think this is perception that these all sort of like woke scientists.

Also.

There's a perception that there's seasonal variations, aren't they?

It's like, oh, they had a bad crop.

But I'm going, I'm going, I'm going into Tesco's and it's still packed full of vegetables.

So everything's.

It's such a misunderstanding, like, and, and I was, you know, these are farmers who have worked the land for sort of 30, 40.

Like, they, they know what they're, they just, these are not wokey liberal scientists.

Farmers are not famous for their work.

I mean, they are in so many ways, you know, but they were just saying, yeah, this is, this is just not normal.

Like, what we're doing, what we can grow, what we can look like, it's.

Just they can grow less, just grow less.

But also, just, also you can grow different.

Like the fact that we can now grow certain things that we couldn't grow in our climates before.

Like, it shows we're having such.

And, and yet people just don't believe the science, the quality.

British wine, English wine should be a bit of a giveaway.

Again, English people are like, yeah, bloody French.

And they go.

And then, and then you just go, oh, but someone on Twitter will just go, oh, yeah, but the Romans grew wine in Britain.

You go, yep, it's not about like this, it's not about the climate's never changed, it's the rate it's changing is falling way outside the normal anticipation, directly linked to greenhouse gases.

Let's say that most people, which I think they do, accept that there is a crisis.

And as you say, most people don't make it too extreme because it's like that's just unhelpful.

We need a middle ground to tread.

And then you're saying, really look when you see green technology companies or things trying to do technology in the green space, see them as technology good businesses in an area of opportunity and strip away this sort of aspect of greenwashing.

And the problem is at the moment, climate's all been very philanthropic in the sense of we should be doing.

And that's the message I strongly believe in.

But the problem is at some point, if we want heavy investment, if we want people to really get involved, there needs to be some sort of commercial return.

And that's why I think green tech's such a great opportunity, because it will have the benefit we're talking about, but at the same time it's actually a commercial opportunity.

Is it biotech at the same way?

Andrew Craig, a good friend of the show, is very passionate about the future of biotech as being a really great investment area.

They're quite overlapping, quite overlapping, biotech, health, tech, you know, greens.

It's so much opportunity and like we've got to get, I guess going back to like what we're talking about the country being a growth, like we've got to start like legislating, regulating, all that sort of stuff, but encouraging business growth and that comes through responsible entrepreneurship, I think.

And here are our final key takeaways from Andy's chat with Ben.

Number four, running a business is the hardest job in the world.

It's fair to say that Gen Z gets a lot of slack.

But Ben pushes back, arguing that actually the most entrepreneurial generation we've seen and with 38% of workers saying they have the worst boss ever, it's no wonder so many are choosing to be their own boss.

And instead, number five, climate action is being held back by politics.

Too often the green industry is dismissed as woke when actual fact it's a massive financial opportunity.

Ben makes one thing clear.

If we take the politics out of the conversation and focus on the money, real progress will follow.

Quick far round, just going to get to know you a little better, going to ask you some quick questions you should know the answer to.

Them, they are nice and easy.

DSQing.

Some music.

What was your first job?

It was my summer job at school and I was working on a farm picking onions and potatoes.

I did that as my first one.

It's a nightmare really as you're outside.

It's a great job.

I got paper pallet though and I.

Never earned any money.

I got approached the tracks driving one summer and then dinged the harvester.

Got put back on the picker line almost instantly.

It's like yes, yes.

Yeah.

Moment of glory.

A dead tractors go a bit slow and combine harvest is a very large.

I had.

The problem is I had one of those massive trailers with sort of 12 tons of potatoes on and so you couldn't break?

Well no, I could break.

I just hadn't.

I just didn't even realize the reverse into it.

Like these things are so big you don't feel anything.

I was reversing and dinged the very expensive.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Very good.

What was your worst job?

Worst job was good swimmer, lifeguard.

I did enjoy it.

Oh, that looks like nightmare.

I ran past someone in our local pool.

It was great.

Life window in the morning and I.

Just think God, miserable.

Very.

Cuz you have to pay attention.

Yeah, it's very.

It's very.

Put a podcast on a drift off.

You have to pay attention all the time and very little.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ex.

And obviously don't drown.

But don't drown ever does happen.

Favorite subject at school.

What's your special skill?

History.

What's your special skill?

I think just talk about stuff I don't really know much about.

I've had to learn that on the job in a knowledgeable way.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I bet you're glad you have me here.

It's brilliant.

Bullshitter.

Basically professional.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Archaeologist.

Did you really grow up in Greece?

Near the ancient.

So I got very inspired.

Inspired by ancient civilization.

She's in a lot of brushing dirt.

Oh yeah, I know.

But you always have the eternal hope that you're going to find the next big find so that you sort of kid yourself for that.

Indiana Jones too.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I once dug up a hill when I was little in England trying to find Excalibur.

Oh wow.

Did you find anything?

Didn't find it.

No, sadly.

I feel like we would have heard of that.

What did your parents want you to be?

I don't.

I don't think.

Definitely not an archaeologist.

Definitely.

Definitely not a content creator for sure.

But I would say yeah I don't think they had a sort of preference in mind.

I think they were.

What do they do?

One's a lawyer, one was a nurse.

Oh, nice.

What's your go to karaoke song?

I've got a very low voice.

I'm also a terrible singer, so anything in that sort of.

Have you got a bass?

Yeah.

You've got a bass.

I don't.

I've never been tested, but yeah.

Oh, you know, being there or anything.

Low denial.

Slim of Cohen, isn't it?

Were office dogs business or business in a controlled circumstance?

What happens if everyone has a dog and wants to bring it?

Doesn't work.

Yeah, yeah.

Does it?

Yeah.

I'm a big fan of an office dog, but I do.

You do need to have a few rules in place, otherwise it's chaos.

Have you ever been fired?

No.

Well done.

Yeah, I like the way you said that too.

No, well, it's just, I guess one of advantage of not ever really having a job in the sort of traditional sense has just led.

For the tractor incident.

No, but to get relegated.

I did get demoted.

Yeah, exactly.

Put him back.

Onions back on the picket liner.

Yeah, yeah.

What's your vice?

Gaming and sport, I would say.

Yeah.

Online video gaming.

Yeah.

Online gambling or.

No, no, no, just more like.

Much better than that.

Age of Empires is one of my favorites.

Yeah, yeah.

Building empires, you know.

Is it?

I was thinking, those games, are they going to introduce the AI version?

You can just watch someone play on your behalf.

It'd be less AI.

I think it's VRs going to be the next gaming thing.

I think it's going to be some real advancements there, which would be quite exciting.

Yeah.

So I've got the Oculus at the moment, which is quite fun.

But I think it's quite fun.

I've played that with.

Have you done the Darth Vader one?

And Darth Vader comes up to you.

Oh, my God.

And you think, you know, you think, oh, that's Darth Vader.

And he comes up to you.

I'm sorry, Darth.

Some of them are so scary.

I played a zombie one and like you have a flashlight and a gun.

And then I dropped my flashlight and I'm sort of scrambling around.

I see these things sort of like.

Honestly, your brain's only getting so many information.

They have to go to fix the floor thing.

Like, I did the boxing thing with my friend in Covid with the Oculus and I really punched it.

I mean, I only.

Did I break the kitchen cabinet, but I still got a scar on my hand from it, you know, I was like.

He's like, you all right?

And I was like, they'll have moving tracks soon as stuff.

They'll be.

I saw one today with.

It's sort of like.

It looked amazing.

Yeah.

I think this will be very exciting.

Any top tips for founders, entrepreneurs?

Yeah, I mean, I think you just.

There will always be someone to tell you why it won't work, and very few people will tell you why it will.

And then when, ironically, when it does work, they'll still say, oh, that's so obvious.

Like, it was such an obvious thing.

You'll be so lucky.

So I think just trust yourself and get on with it, basically.

And don't.

Don't.

Your job is always to drive revenue and it's always focus on growth.