Exposing A BILLION Dollar Scam

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I’ve written a new book to teach you the most valuable skill in life. How to tell a story.

The university system has scammed millions and I'm taking it down.

For the past six months I've been running an investigation into what's happening to kids the second they leave school. What I found was worse than I expected.

700,000 graduates in this country are unemployed right now, tens of thousands of pounds in debt, many of them on benefits. All of them sold the same lie from the moment they could walk: go to university and you'll get a good job.

That sentence cost them everything.

Not one student I sat down with for the documentary actually understood what they'd signed. They'd been handed a £40,000 loan at 18, told it wasn't "really debt", told it would all work out. None of that's true. The interest starts the day the loan is drawn, and compounds. It’s MUCH more than the system makes out.

Let me put it in numbers you can actually feel.

A takeaway pizza costs you £20. But for a student who buys that exact same pizza with their student loan, it could cost £130. See what I mean? By the time they've finished paying it back with compound interest, the same pizza costs six times the price.

Multiply that by every meal, every textbook, every train home for Christmas, every rent payment. That's how a £40,000 loan becomes a £100,000 lifetime hole.

And the worst part. After all that, the job they were promised doesn't exist anymore.

We are letting 18-year-olds sign a contract that lasts longer than a marriage, for an outcome that no longer arrives.

If any business in this country pulled that off, hid the true cost AND failed to deliver the product, they'd be sued before lunch and shut down by Friday. Universities do it at scale, year after year, with a government stamp on the door.

It's a scam. Just say it. Stop calling it anything else.

And it gets worse, because the system doesn't just take their money. It takes their twenties.

Three years they could have been earning. Three years they could have been building a business. Three years they could have been building a network. Three years they could have been compounding any of it into something real.

Instead, they got a debt and a piece of paper the job market has already devalued.

So I'm not just exposing it anymore.

I'm pledging 10% of every penny my companies make, for the rest of my life, to fund people's dreams instead. Money and research they never have to pay back. An alternative to university that doesn't end with a debt that outlives the dream.

If you're a parent reading this and your kid is 14, 15, 16. Please. Watch the documentary before they fill out a single UCAS form. Not because university is wrong for everyone. It isn't. But because the version that got sold to you in the 90s and 2000s doesn't exist anymore, and the price has gone up by an order of magnitude.

If you're a kid reading this and the deadline is looming and everyone's telling you to just sign the form. Pause. Look at the number. Ask what you're actually paying for. Then ask what you'd build with the same money and the same three years if you went and built instead.

The whole scam works because the government hands you tens of thousands of pounds for one thing only. University. Walk away from that and you walk away with £0. Most kids assume £0 means stuck. It doesn't. The internet has flattened the cost of starting almost everything.

Here's what an 18-year-old with nothing in the bank actually does instead.

Step 1. Learn a skill AI gives you a shortcut to, and sell it as a service from week one. This is the cheat code 18-year-olds have right now that nobody before them ever had. Anyone can learn to build a website in a week using AI. Anyone can learn copywriting, email marketing, video editing, AI automation builds. You don't need to be world-class on day one. You need to be useful enough to charge £200 for your first job. Then £400 for your third. Then £800 for your tenth. You're earning while you're learning, and the work IS the training. By the time your school friends are halfway through their degree, you've delivered fifty jobs and you're charging more than most graduates' starting salary.

Want to learn AI? → CLICK HERE

Step 2. Build something from your bedroom for under £20 a month. A Shopify store costs £25 a month. A TikTok account is free. A service business (cleaning, tutoring, dog walking, video editing, social media for local businesses) needs zero capital. Pick one thing and find ten customers. Charge them what you think is fair, then double it. Most 18-year-olds who try this for six months learn more about real business than a three-year degree teaches.

Step 3. Apprentice yourself to someone already doing it. Find someone three to five steps ahead of where you want to be. DM them. Don't pitch. Offer to do the unsexy tasks for cheap, for a year, in exchange for being in the room. Most people who've built something remember exactly what it felt like to be the one asking. A good chunk will say yes. You'll learn more in twelve months than any MBA teaches, and you'll have a person in your corner for the next twenty years.

Step 4. Stay home if you can. Live small for two years. The graduate's borrowing £9,000 a year just to live in a city they don't need to be in, drinking pints with people they won't speak to in three years. You're not. You're at home, costs near zero, banking every pound, learning every evening. Boring, unsexy, and it works.

This is a far more valuable path than university and doesn’t require lifetime debt to get there.