Full transcript: Simon Woodroffe on London Real
0:48 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose, my guest today. So it’s Brian Rose from London Real. I am on this beautiful houseboat in Chelsea Harbor with Simon Woodroffe, who is an entrepreneur who’s pretty much been there and done that. 30 years in the entertainment business.
1:40 He also was the founder of Yo Sushi, an iconic British brand, one of the first dragons on Dragon’s Den. And now he’s taken that Yo brand into hospitality all around the world. And I’m super excited to sit down with him today and maybe answer some questions that have been burning inside me lately, which is how do we get London back to work and how do we figure out how to jumpstart the economy? And I thought, who else better to speak to than Simon since you’re an entrepreneur and you know so many entrepreneurs.
2:11 Brian Rose: So I might just start off and ask you, what do you think are the big challenges right now for entrepreneurs in London or just people in London to get this city back to work?
2:24 Simon Woodroffe: Well, you know, the devil’s in the detail of every single business. And I’ve never been a pundit to say that there are any general solutions to anything. I can tell you about what happens in my businesses. And right now, I mean, this COVID-19, obviously it’s been a setback, but you know, the world progresses.
2:48 Just what we were a very, very lucky generation, we didn’t go to war, it ain’t that big a deal. And it actually throws up, and has for me, throws up lots and lots of opportunities. So when the world changes, when the landscape changes, there’s opportunities, if you are of an entrepreneurial spirit. So to go back to your question, is there a general sort of panacea of what people can do. The truth is, you’ve got to keep going. You’ve got to put the detail in and make things do. And I don’t think there is. I mean, I think what’s interesting is that we all criticize government. I mean, it seems like a national sport to criticize whatever they’re doing.
3:30 Actually, it doesn’t do us any good because we’d be much better off to support what people do because they don’t know what we’re doing. If we were leading the government, the thing we probably wouldn’t. There is no simple answer. What is good is that the experience we get in government from going through all of this. When the next pandemic comes along, which is quite likely that something else will happen, you know, it’s just that’s how the world unfolds, we’ll know an awful lot to do what works and what doesn’t work. In fact, we’re doing it better now than we did at the beginning. So things progress. Yeah.
4:02 Brian Rose: You talked about this entrepreneur mindset, which is really important. You know, a lot of people with small and medium sized businesses, they’ve done the same thing pretty much for the last 10 years, expecting the same circumstances, they haven’t had to innovate and be creative, which is uncomfortable for many people, and to look at this landscape and say, wow, as opposed to complaining or crying and saying, wow, there’s actually all these new opportunities, there’s digital opportunities, I can do this with my business.
4:29 Brian Rose: For someone who’s not used to doing that, can you teach an entrepreneurial mindset, or can they go through some thought processes to maybe find a way to salvage their business or find new business?
4:41 Simon Woodroffe: It’s quite interesting that you say that for a lot of people it’s very difficult to innovate and do new things. It’s not for me, that’s what I do, is that I’m only happy when I’m innovating and doing something new. Because I only feel safe if I’m doing something so in my sort of sixties vernacular that blows people’s minds and people go, oh, boy, you’ve got to go and have a look at that.
5:05 I always tell the people in our businesses that we’re actually not that clever. it’s just that everybody else isn’t sometimes terribly clever. So don’t get above yourself. But I don’t know if you can teach creativity. I mean, I left school when I was 16 with two English O-levels, which is the exams you take when you’re about 16. And that’s very few.
5:31 Most people have seven, eight or ten. I’ve got a helicopter going overhead here. And, You know, so I left school with, and I always think that the reason I’m creative, if you like, I’m a creative businessman as well as being a businessy businessman, is that I never had the imagination educated out of me because I think that what we do a lot of times in schools is we put the fear of God into these kids unless they get these, especially from parents, unless they get this exam or that exam, they’re never gonna be safe in their life and you’ve got to do this, that, and the other.
6:07 And actually, I’m living proof that it’s better not to be too educated because you can go off and do things. So I think the big thing that we can do is not over a sort of three or four year period, over the next 20 or 30 years period, and we’re on the right track, is change education. So we’re educating much more rounded people to be good at relationships, to be good at getting up and doing things, To be organized, to keep good lists, all the things that we know in business make things happen.
6:43 To be enthusiastic, to get excited, to do more daydreaming, not less. You know, I mean, I think we are naturally changing actually and I think education is changing and I heard somebody saying, one of the Google guys saying that education in the 21st century will be more about self-education, so in a 50 minute lesson you’ll get five 10 minutes, the guy standing up at the front of the classroom like we and you used to have to put up with, and more just doing research and doing things that you’re interested in and finding out on the internet what you’re interested in.
7:15 Brian Rose: You know this is really timely for me because I’ve just sent my four-year-old son for his first week of school and this is the first time I’ve given him over to you know the education industrial complex and I’m part of me knows he needs to socialize and be around kids but part of me is really worried that he’s going to be taught a a framework that was invented in the Industrial Revolution in order to create factory workers.
7:39 And again, not have that creativity, that sense of risk-taking is okay. It’s okay to fail. As an entrepreneur, you have to, I try to fail every year in order to progress. How do you teach that?
7:52 Simon Woodroffe: Well, you’ve got a problem.
7:54 Simon Woodroffe: Yeah. But probably he’s not the problem. Probably you’re the problem because I haven’t known you very long, but I suspect that you’re a real control freak. You like things very neat and tidy, including your son. And your challenge, and I think a lot of us with kids, is to let go and let them form as their own characters and just watch them and watch them and be there to help, to catch.
8:18 But let them be themselves, not like you. Because we learn all this stuff in our life and we want to pass it on to our kids. But actually, it’s not of much use. You don’t learn anything unless you get up there and make a mistake. When I was doing a dragon’s den, I always said, you know, I was much more interested in somebody who’s had a failed business than I have of somebody who’s had multiple successes because somebody with a failed business knows what can go wrong.
8:44 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah. And you’ve seen that. Tell me more about this idea of failure and risk. And like you said, you can’t necessarily teach creativity or teach entrepreneurship.
8:55 But if someone is out there who doesn’t know what to do next and there’s a lot of potential, how could they look at their business from a different angle? Is there a way to try to reset themselves, to write off what they were doing before and think, how can I come and find solutions?
9:09 Simon Woodroffe: Well, when you get a knockdown, the thing is that life’s a long process. And when you get a lockdown, you’ve got to learn something. Just because you’ve had a knockdown, it doesn’t mean you have to be on the ground for 10 years.
9:20 You hear people going through divorces, 10 years it takes out of their life. Let go, let the other person go off and do what they were doing. The same in business. You’ve got to get up and dust yourself off and get on and do the next thing. What was the question again?
9:35 Brian Rose: Just how people can start that process of innovation or looking at their business differently.
9:40 Simon Woodroffe: Yeah, exactly. How do you start things? You know, I mean, going right back to kids coming out of school and thinking, what am I going to do? Which is the first time that you and I sort of thought, I expect, sort of thought, oh God, what are we going to do now?
9:53 I certainly did. You know, I was completely lost. I remember my girlfriends from Tahiti And I remember some kid had been smoking too much gander or whatever and he didn’t know what to do and he was saying to me, oh, you were an entrepreneur, what can I do? I said, go outside, your street’s in a mess, there’s rubbish, get a plastic bag and go out and spend an hour every morning picking up the litter. And when somebody asks you what you’re doing, saying, I’m helping look after the neighborhood, you’re going to meet a lot of people and I bet you anything you like, but one of them’s going to say, there’s a talented guy, we’re going to do it.
10:26 I mean, I’m just talking about doing things very small level and then in business I think you know you have to have the creativity to reinvent the future I mean certainly you know there’s all sorts of different businesses but the area I’m in which is hospitality and retail and all of that you know most people out there want to know what’s going to happen in the future you can’t market research a market that doesn’t exist so if you go out and and sort of say well what does my customer want I say the customer’s got no idea what they want. When somebody like me comes along and says, this is what we’re doing, you know, they say, oh, that’s amazing. That’s what the future is going to look like. That’s what I wanted all the time. I always say it’s the magic words. If I’d done market research when I started Yo Sushi, which is, would you like to eat raw fish off conveyor belts with robots serving the drinks? Then people aren’t going to hold their hands up and say, yeah, that’s for me.
11:20 When I open the hotels, would you like to sleep in a 70 square foot natural room with no natural light or a hundred square foot of luxury rooms. No, they’re not going to, but when they walked into those rooms, they said what I call are the magic words. And the magic words are, this is so obvious, why didn’t somebody do this before? And I didn’t do that through market research. I think in the early stages of developing ideas, you know, don’t do market research.
11:48 Preferably, it’s just me on my own or me and one other person, and we’ve got an idea and we and we develop it because new ideas, as soon as you put them up on a whiteboard and invite 10 people to comment on them, there’s going to be a million reasons why it’s not going to work. You’ve got to get much further on and that’s why entrepreneurs can start businesses and do new things and Tesla send people into space, Apple invent this, that and the other because they’re obsessed with doing what they want to do and they’re not going to listen to any reason. It’s not a modicum of unreasonableness and work obsession.
12:22 In the first few years of a business is absolutely a great thing to do. Work-life balance, forget it. It’s no fun.
12:30 Brian Rose: A lot of people aren’t used to that. A lot of people aren’t used to work-life balance being completely 90-10, and a lot of people aren’t used to taking risks like that.
12:41 Simon Woodroffe: You know, even- Thank God for that.
12:43 Brian Rose: I know, that’s true. It leaves room for people like you and me.
12:45 Simon Woodroffe: It does, it does. But you have to have vision, you have to be willing to stick it out there and take the heat.
12:50 If you want to go off and be in the front line. But if you’re going to go off and be entrepreneurial, which I mean, in a sense, I’ve got to say, I think whether you work for a large corporation or whether you’re starting a startup business at the age of 17, they’re much the same thing because there’s no security in any of them. So we’re all entrepreneurial at some level. But to actually go out and start a business and put your life savings or borrow money and put other people’s life savings on the line, you’re going to have an awful lot of sleepless nights.
13:20 It’s not going to be comfortable being you. It’s going to be uncomfortable being you. And then people go, oh, I don’t feel comfortable. That is normal. If you’re not feeling comfortable, that is good, I always talk about the comfort zone.
13:32 You’ve got to step outside the comfort zone. You know, it’s like a sort of, you know, when you step outside the comfort zone, you feel uncomfortable. And if you stay there for long enough, your comfort zone gets bigger. It’s like the pebble dropped into the water. The rings go out, you get more and more comfortable.
13:45 You can handle more difficult things. That’s what generals do in war. You know, so yes, you’ve got to step outside, and you’re going to have some sleepless nights. And it might go wrong, and you might have to get up and dust yourself off and start all over again. But that’s what business is really about, right?
14:02 There’s lots of different sorts of business. You know, there’s big corporate businesses. You know, we’ve seen in this country, you know, the likes of Woolworths, who we thought would last forever, going bust. You know, I can’t think of all the examples, but big businesses do go bust these days, you know, So things that have been around for years and years, that’s big business run often by people with cufflinks and suits in big boardrooms from the top. But modern business is fleet of foot, young.
14:33 This new generation who are starting businesses are doing it with people with each other. They’re a great generation. They’re people they trust. They’ve got a massive work ethic to get things done. And they’re having fun doing it.
14:46 And I think that plays right the way through to customers wanting to be associated with companies who have got that kind of zest for life.
14:55 Brian Rose: Yeah, they always say the customer experience is a lagging indicator of company culture, right? The customer feels the culture.
15:03 Simon Woodroffe: Not a bad, not a bad analysis, but you don’t design that, that happens through a natural thing. Right.
15:09 I never designed any of our businesses, though they got strong brand identities now with Yo, I never designed it that way. I allowed it to grow from the people within it and that became the culture. So it had some integrity to it.
15:23 Brian Rose: Right, it wasn’t just dictated by you. It was organic.
15:26 Simon Woodroffe: It wasn’t planned in an advertising agency, that’s for sure. It wasn’t cynical in that sense.
15:31 Brian Rose: Okay, can I ask you about retail and hospitality? Sure. Because these are things you know a lot about and yet we’ve seen some of those businesses go to zero during parts of the lockdown and now it’s slowly coming back.
15:42 Brian Rose: If people are in those businesses or even the future of those businesses. I know you don’t predict the future, but what can you say about how to do those businesses in the new COVID reality?
15:53 Simon Woodroffe: Well, I think the COVID reality is all COVID has done is speeded up the progress into the robotic world, if you like. We’re living in a very, very high tech world and it’s gonna get more and more so. And we’ve had 10 years of software.
16:07 I think robots will be the new software, if you like. I don’t know where I was going with this. are we talking about? Oh as far as future of retail. Future of retail yeah and so you know you what it throws up is it it it it speeds up that process you know the people working not working in offices people not working at home a lot of things are going to have to change or but would have changed naturally in the course of time it’s probably covid’s helped it on by 10 years and and bought everything in much, much quicker.
16:41 And I think we’re much more fleet of foot. Lawmakers are willing to make laws quickly to change. Look at electric scooters in this country, for example, which probably, for all the little problems they have along the way, they will probably be the future of transport. It’s crazy to have these enormous vehicles driving around these tiny streets built for Victorian and pre-Victorian horse and carts. So we will change.
17:06 But people, most people, luckily, are extremely slow to change, both in business and as consumers. Unfortunately, for people like myself, we can see it. We can see that that’s going to be the world of the future. So you can change. But the other thing is that in the hospitality area, for example, certainly in restaurants and food supply, is a, and certainly in the fast casual area, but all over it.
17:35 There’s a vast oversupply. Everybody and their mom, including myself, if I surrender, you know, started a restaurant because they couldn’t think of anything else to do at the time. For me, pure desperation. I’ve been in lots of different businesses all at restaurants. I know about that.
17:49 I’ll do one of those. I was lucky, you know, mine worked hard, but I was lucky. So there’s far too many. So there’s a culling, which would have happened anyway. And those people who are culled and find themselves in difficult situations will, if they’re the right people in this world, will dust themselves up, get up and learn from their experience, and there will be another opportunity. You can keep going in your 60s, you can reinvent yourself in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. There’s lots of time. There’s a lot of people who started businesses in their 70s, even in the 80s. One of those guys in a Canadian guy started one of the big newspapers in these 80s. I mean, look at that. What a great world That we live in that we can do stuff like that.
18:34 Brian Rose: Yeah, and you’re still innovating.
18:36 Simon Woodroffe: I’m still doing stuff You know you got you know my daughter on her Facebook page. She’s got a thing at the front She says I’ve got something to do I’ve got somebody to love and I’ve got something to look forward to and I always have a few mantras going my life But that’s the one I need something to do. You know I can be a bit still and not do stuff as well I’ve learned that in later life That’s a very difficult one, but I need something to do. I’m happiest when I’ve got a piece of paper and I’m sketching or drawing. I draw and designing and getting people enticed into my layer of new ideas and enthusiasm. I’m lucky enough I got somebody to love. I’ve got a few
19:15 People to love in my life and I’ve got things to look forward to. So if you’ve got those simple things. Just follow that.
19:23 Brian Rose: Yeah. Tell me about London. I mean, the reason I guess we both love this city is because of the feel of it, the vibe, the culture, the people. But if everybody works from home, can London still exist? And so my question is, is do we need to try to get this city back to where it was? Do we need people here? Or does it cease to become a real city?
19:46 Simon Woodroffe: No, you see, I don’t believe any of this. I think, you know, the one we had before the COVID was the high streets dying, shopping malls are dying, let them die, it’s a natural culling, all we’re doing, we are incredibly inventive people, the British people first of all, particularly so, and the Americans of course, but we are very, very inventive, we’re not going to let things die, we love a social world, but working from home, fantastic, it means that real estate is completely going to change, it will throw out vast new opportunities for those who want to go out and take them.
20:25 And, no, I don’t think trying to get people to go back to work is the way. Let them work from home. They’re going to reinvent social events that happen around their area. If I owned a hundred food stores like Prédemangé or one of those ones that supplies offices, you’ve got to move them. You’ve got to move them to something else or deliver stuff to people’s homes, but we’ll have social life. People want to mingle and be part. We’ll have restaurants, we’ll have all these things, but they’ll be different. That’s exciting.
20:54 Brian Rose: Right, okay. But not forcing people to, you know, falsely go back and recreate a high street, falsely going back and recreate offices just because you’ve got to keep those businesses. Allow it to change. It’s a sort of, you hear it in just general conversation, this idea that as human beings we need to let go and and allow things to happen.
21:15 Simon Woodroffe: And it’s a funny old thing that I’ve learned in life.
21:18 When you have problems in business, in life, and everything, I reckon that 80, 90%, if you do nothing, they work out. 10, 20%, you’ve got to have a medium, it’s a massive action to make them happen. But most people take a medium, a massive action in order to control everything, oh, 100%. What a waste of time.
21:38 Brian Rose: Right, that’s well said.
21:40 Brian Rose: It’s just hard to know which of the 10%.
21:42 Simon Woodroffe: Well, that is a very good point. But most of us do that to 70% of our problems, and that’s what makes us crazy. I call it educated instinct. You’ve got to follow your gut feelings on these things.
21:53 There’s a lot of different types of people. I’m very much a gut feeling people, and then I know a lot of people like Robin Rowlands who ran Yo Sushi for many years, who was an absolutely process driven person. He always said I could never have started a restaurant like this, but if I have a a load of problems. I write them all on a piece of paper, I’ll prioritize them and I’ll work through them one at a time. I don’t do that. I say, look at wire. Boobie will ever come back. We’ve got to do something about it now. You know, I mean, it’s different sorts of people. But for me, that is the thing. You follow your instinct, but you educate your instinct. You know, it’s an educated instinct. So you find out more and more about stuff as you learn and get experience and then you follow your instinct.
22:36 Brian Rose: What should the government do when it comes to business and entrepreneurs? I know you said we shouldn’t necessarily criticize them, but if there was an ideal world, should they just let them get to it? As meaning like tax them as little as possible, try to keep the red tape to a minimum. What do you think the government can do to make pro-business and pro-innovation in this time?
22:56 Simon Woodroffe: I don’t know really.
22:57 What I do think about government is that for the most part, I think, well I was going to say, for the most part, I was going to say, in senior government, we have pretty good people. But even that’s not really true, as we know. But in middle governments and lower governments, you know, the average Senator MP, they’re not very good. Honestly, I wouldn’t employ them as middle management, most of them, you know, self-interest. And why? Because nobody like myself, you know, I’m interested in politics, I’d love to get in and change things and make things happen. I’m not going to go into politics because we have a culture at the moment that wants to kick everybody up the bum. If you’re in politics, egged on by the press. And while that culture exists, honestly, we the people get what we deserve.
23:49 It’s not that the politicians are bad, it’s just that we’ll never get really, really great politicians because we’re trying to trip them up the entire time. And actually, The press have a great deal to answer for, you know, I mean the press, the press sell newspapers and the idea that they’re constantly looking at bad news and trying to trip people up and make people wrong. And actually, if you get, you know, it’s corny to say it, that the Second World War atmosphere is where behind you, we’re in this together, we’re all in this together.
24:19 You know, the planet is rocking through culture and space and everything’s okay, but that the worse it gets in respect to what I’m talking about, the closer we get to something changing, because it will change eventually, but it has gone on for a long time.
24:33 Brian Rose: So I think, you know, government will do what it does, and entrepreneurs, I think one thing that’s interesting is you’re getting so many more young entrepreneurs now who are making a great deal of money when they’re very young. What are they gonna do with the rest of their lives when they make that much money when they’re 30, and what are they gonna do with their money?
24:53 Simon Woodroffe: Now, some of your viewers will say, Bill Gates is a good example, obviously Bill and Melinda Gates have done really, really good things. But some of your viewers will conspiracy theory and say, no, they’re all four people. I’m telling you they’re not.
25:07 Brian Rose: You met them.
25:07 Simon Woodroffe: Yeah, I have.
25:08 I don’t know them very well. I sat next to Bill Gates at dinner once and we had a short conversation, somebody said, what was your conversation? I said, he leaned forward to me, look, you straighten the eyes and say, pass the salt, would you? That’s about as close as I’ve got to Bill Gates. You know, I think he’s a good guy, and, you know, I mean, what will these young people do because the rest of their life, for the most part, I reckon they’re good people.
25:33 And they’re not just going, after a while, you’re just making more and more money. You wanna do something with this life. That’s what gives you really real happiness. As I get older, doing something, helping other people, making a difference, you know, still I’ve got my ego and I love doing stuff like this, But doing that gives you real happiness. So that’s what we want is happiness.
25:56 Brian Rose: It’s a selfish motive. Tell me about fear. This country has seen moments of real darkness and come together, the Blitz in 1940, for example. And I remember when this started happening in March, I had a young team. And I said, look, I’ve seen things like this before.
26:12 I’ve seen economic crashes. I remember the AIDS scare when I was in New York City. And I said, you’re going to feel all this fear. But if you breathe through it, it’s never going to be as as you think it is, but a lot of people have processed fear really maybe poorly or in a difficult way with all this COVID. How would you give advice to how to deal with the fear and the unknown? Because it’s not just some word of business.
26:36 Simon Woodroffe: Well look, here we are sitting in a serious business conversation and we’re talking about fear. I mean the world has changed and absolutely right. I mean fear is one of the most common human emotions that we all suffer all of the time. And actually, it’s very useful. A bit like anger can be very useful as well.
26:54 It gets you up and gets you off your bum and gets you doing things. Stress is not so good because it sort of de-abilitates you and stops you doing things. So, you know, there’s a balance but I think, you know, we’re going through a period where we’re learning and I think it’ll be taught in schools eventually how to deal with these emotions that we get as human beings as opposed to just learning about history and geography and math, you know, and we will get much better and more rounded human beings ready to work together. But I think, you know, I’ve seen during this whole pandemic crisis, a bit of a wartime spirit, a sense of us being in it together. And I hope that will, as I’d say, go through to government so that we’ll get better politicians in time, because we the people will give them a bit more will realize that you can’t if you kick them as soon as they come in and try to catch them out. Look, look at your life. Look at my life.
27:49 There’s a million things I could get caught out on. There’s a few some naughty things that I’ve done along the way. So does everybody who’s criticized them. So does every single journalist do. So it’s a terrible hypocrisy really. And we should allow people to be human and have their flaws. You know, the flawed people let the cracks in, you know, let alight in and we’re all flawed people just give people some some some strength to go out and for the most part try and help yourself and actually leaders generally need to have ego and ambition and want things to themselves that doesn’t mean they can’t be I think fundamentally people are good and I think we’ve got an attitude that fundamentally people especially you want power and leadership and a capable people who generally those people are are flawed because they want that, they’re not.
28:39 They’re human beings, they’re decent people. So I try to look, even when somebody does me over, I try to look for the good side in them because if you look for the good side, you bring it out and that flowers. And then the secret of this whole world is never take anything personally, ever, in your personal life or your business life. never personal.
29:02 Brian Rose: How do you do that, Simon?
29:04 Simon Woodroffe: You follow that mantra. Never take anything personally, ever. So if somebody says something, you know, the thing that we all don’t like is when people disrespect us or this, that, or the other, if you let go of that and say, oh, it’s just the other person’s having a bad day, get on with it. Keep on smiling, keep on bringing out the best in other people. And, you know, it’s a lot of business I find these days. It’s not, yes, you have to to have contracts to protect yourself, but I don’t like ending up in court.
29:38 So I, for the most part, rely on decent relationships with people. And in contract negotiations and deals, I try to give the other person what they want as much as possible, not just take for me, me, me. And I find that things work out better that way.
29:51 Brian Rose: Right, builds that long-term relationship better.
29:53 Simon Woodroffe: Yeah, yeah.
29:54 Brian Rose: I love the thing about being personal. I mean, it could never be personal because they don’t know who you are anyways. Often, yeah, exactly. This is stuff that’s going on in their head. Or you probably make it up anyway, that it’s personal, they respect you.
30:05 In Japan, they have a thing called Memawashi. When they have a meeting, if it’s an hour meeting, they spend the first 30 or 40 minutes talking about, how’s your family? What’s the thing like? And they build a rapport. And then from that rapport comes the ability to make the decision quite easily because you have a connection.
30:26 Whereas, as we know in America, they go, okay, what’s the deal, boys? You know, what’s the deal? You know, it’s straight into it. And in Britain, we don’t really say what we’re thinking. You know, we just say, oh, OK, OK.
30:38 You mentioned, like, the criticism from the media. I mean, with the internet and mobile devices, it seems to be going the other way. It seems to be getting worse, where there’s more sources making real-time criticism of everything that’s going on. Is there any way we can stop that? Plus, conspiracy theories and all of that.
30:54 And who do we turn? Where do you turn to when the rain sets in? You know, what is the truth? Yeah, what is the truth? What is the truth?
31:00 Simon Woodroffe: I mean, I think an interesting thing is that, I don’t know if you’re doing this in America, I’ve been in America recently, but it’s this idea of fact checking. It’s the idea that the journalist’s job is to do fact checking. And I heard somebody talking about a Swedish professor actually talking about eventually having Google facts. And okay, we’re not gonna give the power to Google to have it, but to have something that’s some reference that you have some body that really, We learn to trust over a period of time, I think that will eventually happen, so that you, stuff does become more factual and it’s properly, properly researched.
31:37 You know, at the moment we have a press that’s driven by selling newspapers. Journalists aren’t necessarily driven by selling newspapers, a lot of journalists are driven by getting to the bottom of something and really taking the truth. But you know, what is the truth? Lawyers will tell you generally that there is no such thing as the truth. So, to have some place where you can have some veracity or some truth, I think that’s needed in this very complicated world.
32:03 You know, when you and I were born, there’s double the number of people on the planet now, more than double the number of people. And obviously, the next bit we’re moving into, very, very exciting, is the exploration of space, which is what we’re gonna need to do in order to look after the people who live on this planet that are longer in our space. And that is a very, so we’ve always been explorers, We’ve explored every square inch of the world now. So the next generation, I mean, just it’s going to be go faster than you would ever believe.
32:32 My favorite headline of the future is Tesco, or you could say Walmart in America. Walmart bankrupts after the cost of teleportation falls below one rupee. Now, you think that may sound like a crazy headline, but that’s as possible as it is to say to Captain Cook 300 ago that we’d be speaking on mobile devices and boats would be going that sort of speed.
33:00 Brian Rose: Yeah, do you think we’re gonna live on Mars one day?
33:04 Simon Woodroffe: I don’t know about Mars but I certainly think that we are going to be mining on other planets and once you start mining outside of our own planetary system then you can build ships, air spaceships, I think that we’ll discover science, we’ll discover of things beyond our belief and probably will eventually discover God in whatever way that exists.
33:32 Brian Rose: Really? Haven’t we already discovered God?
33:35 Simon Woodroffe: Well, I don’t know. I mean, it depends how you see it, but I think the way we’re moving, I certainly, my personal belief is that ultimately that spiritual sense of the world, which we all want to feel, got some logic to it, and marries quite closely to science, and the two eventually will become one in hundreds of years’ time. So I think that that whole area is interesting. But certainly, this, I always used to say that the revolution will come after a technological revolution, will be a sort of, I used to say quasi-spiritual revolution, because it’s more palatable to the cynic. But actually you’re already seeing it now in ways that which we have relationships, men have relationships with each other, how we behave to each other and how we look at ourselves and look at our behavior and you know addictive things or whatever they are. And you know I think that’s a very very good sign for mankind. I think we’re doing okay. You know we are dealing with the fundamentals, which is poverty on Earth and not enough food for people. I used to say in a hundred years’ time people look back on us and say, how could they do that?
34:47 How could they live in this abject, in absolute luxury while people starve on Earth? I think people will say that, but we’re getting there. We’re slowly getting there.
34:57 Brian Rose: You mentioned mental health. I know you’ve meditated for a long time and the practice has really helped me. What would you say to people that are not involved in taking care of their consciousness or their health? And what is that important even from an entrepreneur standpoint because I find it’s
35:16 Simon Woodroffe: I don’t know really I don’t know I mean Luke Johnson who writes in the Sunday Times who I’m a big admirer of Luke Johnson. Luke comes to the old school that goes entrepreneurs don’t meditate you know they get on and make things happen and I agree with that at one level, absolutely.
35:33 But you know, I think anything that gives you some, that de-stresses you actually, any practice, I’m very fit, I climb, I do yoga, I do meditates every day, I mean, I’m not the big meditator, I do do 10 minutes every morning. And I’ve got various techniques when I get stressed for relieving that stress, and I have, so I suppose I am a modern man in that sense, probably ahead of my time. But anything that keeps you in a comfortable place and knowing another of the magic words is that everything always works out, always.
36:12 It’s amazing, the number of things I’ve worried about and I’ve built into enormous things and when I look back a year or two later, I think, what was I worried about? They’ve all worked out. And you know, and ultimately, and I’m getting older now, so you know, I start to think about my days are numbered. And ultimately, when I eventually go, that’s okay as well because we’re all gonna go. It’s just a question of how well you do it.
36:33 So everything always works out, always. Once you really know that, you stop worrying and life becomes a bit easier and you get more done.
36:42 Brian Rose: This is great expression. Everything will be okay in the end and if it’s not okay, then it’s not the end.
36:49 Simon Woodroffe: Exactly, that’s the whole way, that’s exactly right.
36:52 Brian Rose: What’s next for you? What’s on your horizon? You said everyone needs something to look forward to. What’s your next five years look like?
37:00 Simon Woodroffe: God, I don’t know.
37:01 I’m off to Tahiti on next week, and we’re going sailing up. Actually, I was gonna go sailing down to the Austral Islands, which are a very, very remote group of islands. They won’t let anybody in, so we’re going up somewhere else. And that’s an adventure I sailed across Pacific a few years ago. So that’s a good adventure to go there for a month, but you know, and every morning I have to get up early or go to take, I’m on my phone, I’m just everything carries on just as it normally did And I’ve got a I’ve got a sailboat out in the Bahamas And I’ve got this island that I’ve been developing up in the Bahamas and that’s really really good fun No, because I’m gonna make super amounts of money although I might But because it’s very enjoyable process to go through trying to do something different so that I thought what we’re gonna call the island You see yo island isn’t that great name is it so I thought I’d call it. Yotopia I saw that one. So one day I’ll be able to say I’ll make a film and I’ll say you stayed at you ate in your sushi, you stayed in your hotel, you live in your home, now come and visit us on Yotopia. I don’t know I mean I get up every day and I’ve got stuff going on and try and develop new things and get people involved and I like to work with people I like these days and I’ve got stuff going on.
38:21 Brian Rose: Is that the goal to work with people you enjoy and to do work that’s going to serve others?
38:26 Simon Woodroffe: I think more and more. I mean, the stuff that serves others, I mean, there’s always a selfish element to it. But yeah, I mean, I think probably the thing that I’m lacking is I’ve been looking around for doing, I’d like to do something before I die, that really, really does help people. You know, I was going to do, I was going to do a business, I was going to do either bread baking or laundry services using only people who’ve been in prison and you can only work for us for three months and then you have to move on and you have those charming guys you know, baking and selling the bread.
39:03 There’s no files inside that loaf, my darling. You know, and you go, okay. But I’d like to do something like that. Very, very practical. Use my business skills to help people who are struggling.
39:15 You know, young men getting lost at a young age. You know, I feel very sorry for a lot of young people growing up in difficult social circumstances. Camilla MacMonchero, he ran kids’ company here who dealt with those kids off the rails, always said, turning to a life of crime, absolutely logical thing to do given the background that they came in. So trying to change education, you know, all of these sorts of things. not change education by sitting on a committee and saying we should be doing this or that, by starting a school or an academy and then making it work and people go, oh, look at that, look what Simon’s doing now, we’re gonna copy him.
39:59 Brian Rose: Story of your life. Simon, I appreciate the time. Final thoughts for people out there, maybe to business people who are struggling, sometimes they have great ideas, but you know, still looking for a word of advice from someone who’s been there and done that, and also done massive innovations, which they probably are thinking they need to do.
40:21 Simon Woodroffe: You know, you’ve got to follow your dreams, but first of all, you’ve got to dream, and you’ve got to think, what would I do if anything that I did was massively and enormously successful?
40:33 And then take the risk to try to follow that, but never be late to quit and cut bait. It’s a great poem, actually. pecked it for you, you may use it or you may not, but it’s by Felix Dennis who is a big entrepreneur in this country and it’s called How to Get Rich and he says, ideas we’ve had them since Eve first met Adam but take it from me, execution’s the key. And I can’t remember it now but good fortune, the truth is the harder you work the more that you sweat, the luckier you get. The money, go find a likely investor to get what you need, you toadies to greed. The talent, go find it, the first wine and dine it. It’s tedious work with a talented jerk. To win it, you’ve got to be in it, but never be late to quit and cut bait, like I was saying. The first step, just do it and bluff your way through it. Remember to duck, Godspeed and good luck.
40:58 Brian Rose: On that note thank you very much Simon that was epic great words of advice hopefully you can take them and thanks for your time thanks for the hospitality
