Piers Linney | Extraordinary Life Stories

0:13Piers, welcome. Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this. Tell me who is Piers Linney? that's something i've often had to ask myself um so when i was younger it didn't really matter i was whether i was day to day but then if you fast forward just to fast forward slightly when i was on tv they want to pigeonhole you so they asked me who are you like prs and you know and the media are you this sort of social mobility champion are you a small business champion um are you an entrepreneur are you a tech what are you and how to kind of think about it so i The thing that my kind of arc really is, so I came from a working class town, and I wasn't, my parents were working class, and they kind of became middle class.

0:56My mum was in the NHS, proper Windrush generation. My dad was a clever Mancunian working class lad. I did well, went to Cambridge. Mum had a BMW, right? So I didn't grow up in kind of this sort of very difficult environment. But the town I grew up in had its issues, had its difficulties. So I kind of started there. And if you kind of looked where I ended up, This is a lawyer in the city, Credit Suisse, when it was solvent, in Canary Wharf, and then an entrepreneur on TV. So my arc's been quite a long, complicated one. But for me, from my perspective, people look back at me and say, well, you were a lawyer, banker, and you did a degree in law and accounting, you did your A-levels and that.

1:36It looked like a sensible journey. But I didn't have a clue. Step by step, I didn't have a clue. I'd be standing in front of a hedge, what the hell, I'd look over and go, that's interesting, and I'd climb over it, then there'd be a higher hedge, and there were these steps all through my life. So I didn't really know, I didn't really care who I was or what I was doing, I just had the next opportunity, the next hurdle I had to overcome. But now if you ask me who I am, haven't thought about it over the years, I focus on a number of things. One is technology we can talk about the next gen the next exponential tech diversity and inclusion whether it's cool or not I don't care because that ability for everyone to have the opportunity to arrive on the starting line is really important what you then do after that is down to you to be quite frank and I'd like to say that I'm kind of a small business not always startup entrepreneur but a small business sort of champion I believe that's the engine of the economy and if you put that together with technology and artificial intelligence.

2:35That's sort of who I am now. I think AI kind of brings together anything I've ever done in this sort of neat focal point. I love that. The word that comes to me is relevant, but you have just always stayed relevant. You've just literally won an award for one of your businesses. I haven't won a startup award for a while, I can tell you. It's been a while, yeah. You're in the trenches. You're that sort of quintessential entrepreneur. I just want to piece one thing together that intrigued me. Coming from those sort of humble beginnings to then being Credit Suisse, which is a very safe, secure role with a kind of pension at the end of a long career if you wanted it.

3:10At some point you chose to be an entrepreneur. What was that moment? Well, number one, I wouldn't say being an investment banker was a safe career. Most people went to get your bonus. You either get a bonus or you get fired. You're never quite sure. You know what I mean? There was a role there for you potentially. It was a pension pot. Yeah. Yeah. So working in the city wasn't the most secure job I have to say and I transitioned from being people think I kind of I was a lawyer banker most people don't know that they think I'm some wise cracking entrepreneur on TV but I've always been in business okay so I grew up in a mill town in Lancashire and my favorite subject I believe it or not was history and why was it history because history my teacher was all about socio-economic history and he talks about the weavers cottages and he talked about the mills and the economics and the units of production and we could look out literally in my school window, you could see weaver's cottages with a big window so that lighting, you could see a mill.

4:01So the entrepreneurs of the age, you know, Stevenson, Brunel, fascinated me. And that got me really interested in entrepreneurship. And I said, I want to be an entrepreneur. Now, everyone around me, including my parents to some extent, had no real experience of that. Everyone who had a business was a quarry owner, a brickie, a joiner, that's what people in my estate had. And when I said I wanted to work in finance or be an entrepreneur, they all said to me, you should become an accountant. So that kind of stuck with me, but I didn't want to be an accountant. And because law is partly jurisprudence, partly social economic history, that's what kind of fascinated me.

4:37So my first business was a paper ad. So everyone's got these founder backstories, right? But I grew up in a mill town, Lancashire. When it snowed, it covered your car. I had five pounds a week, show my age now. If I was late once, it was four pounds fifty. I thought it's got to be six days a week, up at six thirty, six in the morning. gotta be a better way so my late father one morning as i recall this said to me i don't want to get the papers they don't deliver on sundays they asked me why just didn't and um can you go and get me the paper so i did he gave me a little tip cut a long story short i thought there's something in this so i flied all the neighborhood i built this quite a large paper around i bought the papers from the wholesaler because i had to otherwise there's no margin and that's very entrepreneurial straight away right well obviously i my dad didn't that it was the dad calling the wholesaler but I realized I can't sell it for the face value because there's no margin so I was getting a big bundle of paper like in the film delivered on Sunday morning did this paper out and I made 20 quid on a Sunday morning it was also my first exit I sold it for 200 quid so I learned everything you need to know my business from that paper but you know customers working hard graft especially in the weather um customer relationships you know building the business managing churn even because people left some came people moved house and they didn't buy papers from you and after that I was selling candles I was always fascinated with them a mail order which is I'm pre-internet people you know our age you can kind of understand that I'm with you I'm 47 I remember it talking about yeah it's like pre-fire so I'm pre-internet so I was obsessed with mail order and the internet so I was doing candles we've been like that posh candle selling adverts in magazines I was doing things at university company formations at law school um side hustles when I was a banker and a lawyer including film finance and my friend who actually was leading that he went on to run Lionsgate you know he's got a big film producer in the UK and I kind of did my thing I always had the day job and a side hustle and eventually some of those businesses became quite big some didn't work out some did and eventually in the dot-com wave came along I thought you know there's a gold rush here i need to hitch up my wagon and head west so i got my bonus in march 2000 and walked out of credits room i know how the world's changed as i left the building everybody said what are you doing i'm going to go on dot com that's what he called it then and i wasted 700 grand leaving the building because everyone got their bonuses that day it's all feeling a bit flush i didn't close it all but so i've always been in business but it took me until probably the early noughties really before they started having scale and making money I love that there's an entrepreneurial trend all the way through and I'm going to use that word relevant again because you're right to bring up the kind of mail order sort of things because you go through that journey to then Dragon's Den which we'll kind of cover in part to then you know the innovation in AI right now and you're at the heart of that how have you stayed relevant so I've always been fascinated there's a book called The New New Thing I haven't been who wrote it I always remember that book, the title at least, I've been fascinated by the next-gen technology.

7:44So look at my background. So it was internet 1.0, dot-coms doing pharmacies to kind of research, research for prescribing doctors. And then we started the company in March 2000, not the best time to start dot-com, as you can imagine. But it kind of survived in a form. I kind of left. I ended up in dance music, like going to a beat for Miami and DJs and DJ content and creating. I mean, again, it may sound crazy to most people. This is pre-MP3s and iTunes, right? Custom burn CDs we were talking about. I had the founders of Shazam, two guys sat in their satchels and down in reception waiting for me, you know, talking about music.

8:24So I was in dance music. Then I made my first money really was, I thought, well, I've got this corporate finance capability, law, banking. And one of my partners who trained me as a lawyer had a 2000 vintage, late 90s, small VC fund, which is kind of a mess, you can imagine. So I kind of tidied it up. We rebranded it, had a regulated entity. And I started doing what we call private placement of pipe finance. So pipes, not very common in the UK, is private investment in public equity. So structured debt and equity finance into small cap traded companies. And that's where I started to do. I got my money, did quite well, invested in companies, started companies, and they began to grow.

9:07That's what made the first kind of money. And eventually, there came a day where we had a company doing about 40 million a year, 3 million, 4 million EBITDA. Should have been more than that. And you sit in a meeting with management and you think, they can't show me one more slide of PowerPoint. that means nothing or tell me something that I think I can't do so there's a day came myself my business partner became operators so we stood into business 300 people never won a company that scale before and we build that business and they exit that's brilliant and where where does dragons then fit into this so when did that come did you approach them did they approach you no I don't no so you I tick boxes like so a mixed race grew up in a mill town made some money ended up in the city so through all of that I ended up on the most the list of the most influential black britons so top 100 most influential black britons my dad always joked in at 99 some well done so I was on this list and some researcher at channel four channel four channel four I think yeah said um we're looking for people to be on tv entrepreneurs who are interesting and they picked me so in 2011 I did the secret millionaire program um even my friends said he kept that a secret because you I had a 9-11, but not all the bells and whistles.

10:28So I ended up in a young offenders institution in Wolverhampton. And that was what the food was about. And a slight side story there. I met a young lad called, let's call him Ethan. That's not his name, but I'll call him Ethan. And he was in there for quite reasonably serious stuff, but you can get your head around it. He got 11 years at 19. So when he got out, I mentored him, gave him a job, made him redundant, he started some businesses. and 10 years later, stood in touch. It was his daughter's birthday the other day and he's now a cloud infrastructure architect for only 150 grand a year. What a great story.

11:00Yeah, so it just shows you that if you take some of your time, some of your social capital, even one coffee and deflect someone's life like that, today, 10 years down range, you can completely transform their life. I love that. Is there like a mentoring side to you? So to be an entrepreneur, you have to have a certain amount of selfishness. You've got to back yourself, you've got to believe in yourself, but that really seems to extend to other people with you as well. I wasn't really meant, I wasn't like a mentor. I was kind of like the uncle you never had. So somebody could ring for advice or, you know, his first rent guarantee.

11:31I was that person, didn't monocode me. But I do think that if you're in a position of security, not even wealth actually, just got a decent job and you don't understand the amount of social capital you're sitting on. So I believe that ambition is evenly distributed, access to capital, actually it's not actually. If you're from a minority, often you've got to be more entrepreneurial or more ambitious to get on in life. But let's assume ambition is evenly distributed. Access to capital, financial capital, social capital, guidance and support isn't. And if you can either create those or synthesize them, then you can give everyone a fair chance.

12:08So I was on the board of British Business Bank during COVID, the government bank. There's a lot of research on this. and the numbers show that that access to all those ingredients to help your outcomes improve over time compared to your peers this is not there do you feel there's been a positive shift in sort of the whole diversity and equality thing we're both dad to two daughters growing up so our legacy our future there's two girls growing up in a world that at the moment i think less than two percent of VC funding goes to female entrepreneurs which i can see and i can see a lot of shift towards that changing and that self-belief in girls and you've got your own story of that sort of um to push through if you like in diversity do you feel that's changing for the better it's slow so i advise sky or d and i've been in four years um and you know d e i d and i has been pushed down the priority list by lots of people which is the wrong thing to do people forget what it's really about you know i always say that diversity is about being asked the party invited in inclusion is being asked to dance i love that right and that's not my i didn't know no no okay i heard it somewhere but it works i've heard it before but i love the way so it kind of works so it's really about that what i want to do with my time and my time i have is to help people avoid all the things i had to go to go from my milltown comprehensive to university to law school to law to banking because it was a hard slog and not everybody's got my bloody mindedness and it shouldn't have to have it because I covered, so my accent, you'll hear a bit of Northern in it, but I say bah, not laugh, not laugh and bah.

13:45So I changed my accent purposely because I knew that having been mixed race from, you know, it wasn't exactly awkward with my background, let's face it, and having an accent wasn't going to help me. So I spent a lot of time covering, hoping I wouldn't get found out. Masking? Masking, covering, yeah, and that takes up time, energy and headspace. So when I was on The Secret Millionaire, I was driving around my mill town, my Porsche Cayenne in 2011, and my phone lit up when it went out on TV saying, I never knew you went to an awful school like that. I'm like, well, you never asked. And that's what inclusion is.

14:17You shouldn't have asked. That's interesting. So fast forward to now, but I'm going to bring that word up one more time, the relevant side of things. So what are you actively involved in right now as we sit here? So actively, so my day job, I'm back in startups. In my view, as a startup co-founder, I don't sit in my office. I mean, I've got a profile. I can get into events and do contra-marketing deals and people take my call, which is quite handy. But I'm staying in a premier in or premier in hubs. I'm traveling standard class, let's say I top it up. I'm doing 12, 14-hour days, probably six days a week.

14:54It's kind of all in, and I'm actually really enjoying it because quite often you're kind of away from the, sometimes you're not at the coalface. I really enjoy it. And AI is just fascinating, just learning. So that's the day job. I had a business I started five years ago, Atherton Bikes. So I quite like mountain bikers, it's downhilling. And we, so the worst nightmare as entrepreneurs is material scientists, scientists, and elite athletes, right? So I put them together. I was a jamming the sandwich. And the Atherton's an amazing family of, The UK is royalty in mountain biking. Rachel's won the World Championship six times.

15:30G's won it twice. And Dan's very well known as well. So we create these bikes using additive manufacturing. So again, it's an exponential technology. We're not making bikes in Taiwan out of carbon fiber. That's cutting edge. Or welding them together. It's 3D printed joints and carbon tubes that are bonded, glued. So we built those bikes. And we won the World Championship first and second in 2023. It's probably the most innovative mountain bike brand in the world now. And I love that. So I'm going there on Sunday to a big sort of bike race with a Red Bull, a Red Bull related bike race. And are you still active on the bike because you look fit, right?

16:07Well, my partner says to me, and she's absolutely right, actually. I'm like in my early fifties now. And she says, you know, going to the gym and working out, it's not optional anymore. It used to be optional. Now it isn't. So I need to stay on that horse. I'm there. I'm right on that. But this is where I was coming with it, because you are a high functioning, high kind of output individual. And that's clear from all you're achieving in business. But of course, you're a dad there, you're a partner. But I sort of wanted to get into the whole, what are you doing to keep fit? And how do you make time for that?

16:35What works for you? So not enough. So I should ride bikes more. I mean, my dream, my hobby, but I literally love doing is riding mountain bikes. I've got a mountain bike business in Wales and up the road, a mile. My co-founders own a mountain bike park, which is like a ski resort with uplifts on the back of Land Rovers with trailers. I should be there every weekend. I've got gravel bikes, so I don't get out. And the issue with me is that once I get into it, I'll be obsessed. I'll go to gym every day. I ride my bikes, I get into routine. If I get out of it, it takes me time to get back into things like that.

17:12So I need to look after it as you start to get older, but you've got to do it. It's not something that's optional, I think, anymore. I keep reminding myself. So I need to do it more. So I keep fit. It's really watching weight. It's easy. You can creep up. So you've got to really think about the way you look in a mirror, essentially, not what you weigh really. Is that managing the diet? Diet, what you eat, how much you eat normally. It's just easy. I'm doing what I'm doing. I spend all my time in hotels. I'm around the UK doing events and selling AI. It's easy just to sit there and eat another pizza.

17:42So you've got to think about it. and then the people around you I think need to be honest rather than dancing around you you're looking a bit heavier there you need to go and sort it out my mum's West Indian so I've got that reality check every time I meet her fair play, honest grounding so that's probably worked for you and I can only imagine what she said when you were leaving Credit Suisse and in that scenario where you've gone against the grain you've gone sort of into the current if you like a number of times but having the people around you that support you, but also challenge you, I think it's really important.

18:19It feels like you've got a good balance of that. Yes, I've got some of my people who ask me all the time, who are your kind of role models, right? And, you know, there's like Bill Gates maybe. Luckily I spent time ten years ago, Richard Branson on his private game reserve. He's actually where I ended up on Dragon's Den. I was with him, just thinking, should I go on to Dragon's Den, having a corona in Ilusava at his private game reserve? We had this conversation and he said, yeah, you should do it. And as I walked away, he got me to bring the producers and say, I mean, that's literally what happened.

18:46So there's people like Gates and Branson interested in me. But my role model is really my parents. So my dad was like a, he was like my chat GPT. He was like an encyclopedia, unless it was sports or pop culture, it was useless. But everything else, an encyclopedia. And my mum was actually the entrepreneur, but she couldn't be an entrepreneur because she was a black woman in Barbados. Even in Barbados at the time, all the jobs in finance, which you wanted to do, if you were black, you had no chance, believe it or not, getting into finance. She became a nurse in the UK, worked for all her career, and she was the one running the slimming club.

19:20She was the one doing all these extracurricular things, which were quite entrepreneurial. And when she retired, she started a business. And my dad became a gig economy driver, delivering flowers. I love that story. Thank you for sharing that. We're both dads. Your daughters love you as a dad. they also know you're an entrepreneur. I had a conversation with my two girls, funnily enough, in Barbados about a month ago, where it was like, if you thought about what you want to do, what is it you're thinking of doing as you sort of go into your later teenage years as a career? And they were asking me what I was thinking.

19:54And this whole conversation of actually, it's a whole different conversation to what it was when we were growing up. And I wonder what conversations you're having with your daughters. it's very difficult so if you think about it my grandparents were educated in exactly the same way for similar curricula curriculum to my daughters and probably their grandchildren if they don't sort things out so i was at my daughter's college about a month ago talking to me she's doing business studies funnily enough so she's doing business studies she's at rugby academy this is my eldest daughter i've got a stepson as well and i gave them a really honest my honest view of where they are the world where it's going and their place in it and I don't think anybody their parents their teachers anybody around that this generation are actually sketching out what the world which we don't even know I've got a better idea because I do it all day right what's that world going to look like and it's going to be very very different so yeah people say to me people think I'm joking when I say this I've been a banker I've got a law and accounting degree I've been a lawyer I'm a qualified lawyer I've been investment banker I've been a hedge fund partner all those careers anyone watching this are going to zero knowledge work cognitive labor within worst case a decade probably five years that's going to be quickly followed by physical labor because you put that technology into flexible capable robots I don't care if it's rumba or humanoid with dexterity suddenly physical labor starts going away so there's a world 20 years out in their lifetimes where work might not be much of a thing and then we the raw way society government politicians policy makers have got to work out how do you structure society that's when you're there what i said to them though is humans we can only be thinking three five year um sort plans so three five years out you've got to think about the world's going to go back to human experience so it's like a pyramid of labor it's been filled with technology over the various industrial revolutions and that's been filled with intelligence intelligence can use the tools so that humans doing it so we have got to migrate to the top and add value using a technology there's no point sitting somewhere down here hoping it's not going to find you i love that Because it is.

22:17So that really dovetails into the AI side of things, where the humans that understand and can work with AI are going to be the most powerful, if you like, and employable or most entrepreneurial. They're the ones that all meant. So I said to this room of Gen Zs, essentially, I said, look, who uses AI? I said, they're all kind of using it in Snap. They're not using it properly. They're messing around. Like, OK, who's ever taken a picture of a room and asked to describe the room? Nobody. Who's ever created a video? Nobody. body. So they're kind of using it but really on the edges, the edge cases, they're not really using it day to day.

22:52Now my daughter especially, they have ChatGPT Plus, they use it. So it's almost like an operating system, they refer to everything, they don't use Google anymore. In fact, they can log into my account, create an incognito chat, say hello it's called Tiger my daughter, the Tiger I'll offer you in the lecture, because hi it's Tiger, it then knows it'll say hi tygie but it knows it's tiger set up an incognito chat and talk to me and say dad i'm bored of you going on and on about x y and z and then i'll come up with a response now and then they delete it i can't see it so now it's 20 me but by the time i you know if i keep going to the gym i pop my clogs it might be 80 me so when my dad passed away my dad loves it love learning he read a book like that every week you know my dad missed ai by a year and i kind of missed in some ways capturing my dad and i think that when i disappear i want them to have be able to access me and they can do it now it's fascinating because the responses they get it's not quite me but it's not far off because my ai knows everything about me it's my it's my it's my side kick it's an it's a every patient infinitely patient term kind of mentor in a way it's got I'm an ECG, the lot.

24:07That's physical and mental. It's a whole picture of you. And I think key part of the journey that our daughters go on will be a trial and error. And ultimately, there'll be failures along the way. That, of course, extends to both of us. And particularly the serial entrepreneur journey of yours. What is your relationship with failure? You can do a whole podcast on that. So I always say to people that, you know, being an entrepreneur, a good week is five steps forward, three back. It's important to hear that though, right? Yeah, a bad week, five, four, six, seven, back. So I have a business that I've done quite well, I've exited them, some have been more sort of cash flow income generated, but quite a lot of it.

24:46Some businesses I've built where those didn't work out. There's one we started a cloud computing business. We were the leaders. I mean, I won't, well, when I say I, the business, we, we won the Microsoft Global hosting partner of the year 2010. I had lunch with Steve Ballmer. he spent two hours with us at the end he said i love you australians i mean the guy's like nuts so we had lunch with the obama we built this business got fully protein 10 million arr we listed it and we ran out of steam so we won the contracts to do the back end to some very big telcos we deployed all the infrastructure and communications for like b systems and um we were running out of money and they never quite got to market and i always think now I did a post on LinkedIn about this.

25:33So if you look back, what would you do? And I think when you're an entrepreneur, if you win a big tender, and you think it's going to grow the revenue, you probably still do it again to some extent. Today, I work with very large companies, and either I get a commitment or I walk away. So you live and learn, don't you? And there's other ones where when that business was sort of, you know, when you basically we solved it in a fire cell basically, and they put it for administration. So everyone in that business has gone on to do great things they're all very high level people now in the industry some have come back to work for me since which is amazing and i remember sitting taking this uh strategy declaration like like the death certificate almost to an independent lawyer all these big lawyers waiting this boardroom and i won roughest document to find an independent lawyer down the road and i'm sat in this office and there's this lawyer goes can i help you i'm like yeah can i can i swear this he looks at it and goes okay sorry about that and i'm watching i'm there literally in tears thinking I can't believe this.

26:31I put£1.7 million in my money into this and my business partner. I remember looking up at the screen and Sir Philip Green's in a select committee being grilled about where's that£600 million gone for those pension funds and I remember thinking to myself there's always somebody who's having a worse day. I got out, went back, I spent two weeks under a duvet, didn't want to talk to anybody and then you look back a year later it's still quite painful we can see that there's green shoots and how people are doing how it's working out and five years later it was a lesson yeah and you kept moving you kept going well I kind of went quiet I'd say probably a couple of years and then my partner said to me look people want to engage with you and talk to you and hear your story you need to get back on the horse so I ended up on kind of LinkedIn posting a few things and that's when I started to get back on the horse a little bit and then I started another business which is called the Monzo Mobile.

27:23This is what I mean about keep going. If you look at your timeline, there was a window where you, under the duvet and so on, but there was always a fire in you to go again when you were ready. Because there was always some new technology or new opportunity where I'd be thinking, so another business where we set it up and we're trying to create a sort of mobile network for SMEs with content and support, couldn't raise the money, ran out of steam again. And people think because you've been on TV, that you're some dragon, right? That you've got all the answers and you haven't. I know very well entrepreneurs that set up business, done extremely well, exited it, set up something that said, JC, they're like, can't go wrong.

28:01Cause it's quite similar. Didn't work out. And I'll say to young entrepreneurs, it's not probably not going to be the first, second, or third business that makes you. It can take longer than that. But to me, AI came along and I saw it. And I thought, there is never going to be a bigger wave ever in my lifetime, or maybe ever in the human experience to paddle into. And that's when we thought, I'm going to push myself down and get on with it. I love that. And I see about failure. And clearly there's awards coming your way, and there's a trajectory that is super exciting. And I think it's really humbling and really important that we talked about those failures, because that Insta versus reality, I think there's a lot talked about being a founder and an entrepreneur that's sort of glorified and the kind of Insta picture of working out of Dubai You know with a Lamborghini behind you, but hours the risks, you know huge, but you've had success You'll have more successes sitting here now.

28:59How do you define success? For me, it was initially when I was younger. It was stuff So I have my I never bought a Lamborghini and a Maserati it was stuff okay the houses the car and then as your sort of glass begins to sort of overflow a little bit sometimes it kind of is emptied again because something goes wrong so sometimes an entrepreneur you've got that and you've experienced i'm sure you've got the asset wealth and cash flow they're two very different things so you've got to get those right but to me it was more about the wealth was really being able to live the life you want to live right with i'd guess I don't believe in passive income but with the income that's kind of generating assets you've got.

29:40So that to me is like financial wealth. But real wealth though I think is being able to feel as though you're adding value to the people around you. It's got to be the universe of the world just the people that matter that you can touch and you're adding value to their lives. And I said that with my dad's eulogy when my dad passed away I said that we all leave ripples right? And you might not think you've left a ripple but you have. Even if it's tiny it ripples through time. There are people that have big ripples, you know, through history, but they all dissipate over time, but they all matter.

30:09So I said in my dad's eulogy that we want to leave these positive ripples. They ripple through time, your children, their children, the people you touch. And I meet people, I had a guy a couple of years ago on the M6. I've got this posh van conversion. It looks like an Amazon van, but a private jet inside. I'm on the M6, stationary, as normal on the M6 in the UK. And this guy comes behind, beside him, and he goes, you don't remember me? I can't believe it's you. I saw the branding on the van, I had a bit of branding on the van. And he goes, this is my wife. He goes, I met you six years ago, and you gave me some advice to start a business, and I did it.

30:40And now I recover high-end cars. I've got one under the cover on the back, and we're doing two million quid a year. Thank you very much. And he drove off. So even when you just touch people now and then through our lives, you may not see it or ever see the outcome. I do sometimes because of my profile, but you are changing things. And I think to me, that's real wealth. And it's not to worry about how much you're doing. sitting on social media thinking you're clever pretending that you're wealthy financially or in that in that in that way um it's a waste of time and my only mentor i've ever really had is sir can alissa who's the ball lieutenant greater london who was sat there about a month ago oh is this not released yet 100 so so ken he's only like i mean he probably didn't probably say he's a mentor but i had lunch and it's every six months and i remember when my business didn't I was in his office, feeling sorry for myself.

31:29He said to me, Piers, snap out of it, self-pity doesn't become me. I can imagine him saying that. It was like he sort of picked me up and went, slap me around a bit and get on with it. I remember that to this day. And so Ken's got a coat of arms, like we all have. His coat of arms says under it in English, do well, do good. I think that sums it up. Brilliant. him. And I was going to ask you a question about how important it is about that connectivity, because we talked about it before we started filming. And I said, the passion of mine is to connect people. And you said, same here. And thank you to Ian, who connected us, because then I get to learn and have this conversation and connection with you, which I would like to be way beyond this conversation.

32:12In the same way, I was connected to Saken, who was inspiring to talk with. If you had a kind of almost a legacy, almost, I've never asked anyone, but that kind of eulogy because you brought your father up on that whole. And I think part of your life probably seems quite chaotic to you and you're calming yourself down with a lot of stuff now and having a lot more perspective and maturity that comes with being, you know, I'm late 40s, you're early 50s. What would that legacy be? What would be that you would do? I want to make a billion quid, right? So I'll probably give away 950 of it. If I could do one thing, which I don't know if I'll get there in the end because the building's collapsing.