This is the money and power episode! Rupert Daniels has brokered some of the biggest commercial deals in the world, having worked for FIFA, Arsenal FC and his current role as director of services and skills for the UK's Department for Business and Trade. He is the secret driving force behind the international education strategy along with industries including creative, digital, finance and sports that total a trillion pounds in export trade targets.
He joins the TFTDL flight crew to discuss the allegations of corruption against FIFA, the joy of a cosmetic-grab bag, dealing with Saudi Arabia and what happens when your haircut is lost in translation. This is an incredible insight into carrying the economic health of a nation on your shoulders. Like it or not, education is big business and money makes the world go round.
Expect cameos from Lionel Messi, Jim Walker, Arsene Wenger, Sepp Blatter, Sir Steve Smith, Wet Leg and Liz Truss.
Final boarding call: Japan
This episode is sponsored by Duolingo. Today over 4500 institutions including Yale, Imperial and Trinity College Dublin have adopted the Duolingo English Test. If your university wants to join them then get in touch at www.englishtest.duolingo.com
Tales from the Departure Lounge is a Type Nine production for The PIE www.thepienews.com
This is the money and power episode! Rupert Daniels has brokered some of the biggest commercial deals in the world, having worked for FIFA, Arsenal FC and his current role as director of services and skills for the UK's Department for Business and Trade. He is the secret driving force behind the international education strategy along with industries including creative, digital, finance and sports that total a trillion pounds in export trade targets.
He joins the TFTDL flight crew to discuss the allegations of corruption against FIFA, the joy of a cosmetic-grab bag, dealing with Saudi Arabia and what happens when your haircut is lost in translation. This is an incredible insight into carrying the economic health of a nation on your shoulders. Like it or not, education is big business and money makes the world go round.
Expect cameos from Lionel Messi, Jim Walker, Arsene Wenger, Sepp Blatter, Sir Steve Smith, Wet Leg and Liz Truss.
Final boarding call: Japan
This episode is sponsored by Duolingo. Today over 4500 institutions including Yale, Imperial and Trinity College Dublin have adopted the Duolingo English Test. If your university wants to join them then get in touch at www.englishtest.duolingo.com
Tales from the Departure Lounge is a Type Nine production for The PIE www.thepienews.com
This is the um, comeback episode.
No more service we'll resume shortly.
Andy:Welcome back on board.
Nick:Welcome to Tales from the Departure Lounge. This is a podcast about travel for business, for pleasure, or for study. My name's Nick and I'm joined by my co-pilot, Andy. And together we're gonna be talking to some amazing guests about how travel has transformed their. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the journey. Welcome to the podcast.
Andy:Hey Nick, how's it going?
Nick:I'm so excited, we're back.
Andy:We're back after 20 episodes We've got 20 more, lined up.
Nick:This is like, producing the second album. There's a lot of pressure.
Andy:This is the money and power episode, we've got Rupert Daniels, and he is the Director of Services and Skills from the Department of Business and Trade.
Nick:I don't think people realize how involved the department for business and trade are in the international education strategy. Education forms a huge part of the export industry.
Andy:I can't remember the exact number, 24 billion? It's huge.
Nick:Playing into British soft power abroad,, he's in charge of education, but he's also in charge of pop music.
Andy:He still refused to get me Taylor Swift tickets.
Nick:get in line, Andy.
Andy:He is one of the UK's big deal makers, he's doing mega deals on behalf of the country.
He also worked at FIFA, which is fascinating, given the allegations of corruption. So we talk about that And then After that he worked at arsenal football club
Andy:he's the dealmaker who's the go between for universities, governments and global markets. For a million dollar deals in the football industry to trillion pound export deals between nations, Let's get some Tales from the Departure lounge from Rupert Daniels.
Rupert:Our export target is a trillion pounds by 2030. And we're currently at, just over 800 billion. Even though FIFA gets a bit of a bad rep. It was the best experience of my life got this extremely angry letter from the Blue House, which is the equivalent of the White House in Korea, demanding that the whole website be taken down, that we'd insulted the Korean people. dunno what that says about my vanity, but, I do have a cosmetic grab bag.
Nick:So before we get into the episode, a quick word about our sponsor. Have you noticed how tech is advancing so quickly? It's impacting all of our lives in unexpected ways. From robot vacuums to GPT recipes through to English language testing. Advances in AI now make it possible to offer secure, intelligent testing that's accessible anywhere and at a much reduced cost. Meaning everyone has access and who doesn't want that? Do you willing goes leading the way with their Duolingo English test? I personally am fascinated in how they're using generative AI to create tests that automatically adapt to a test takers abilities. Meaning tests don't need to last for hours for the sake of it. No more putting test takers through unnecessary repetitive questions. In fact, you would never get the same test item twice. It's efficient. I also allows Duolingo to eliminate the ways test takers, fake their identity or cheat on tests. And they're all counter validated by human proctors as well. But for me, it's because the test can be taken remotely and it's a third of the cost of traditional pen and paper tests. This means it removes barriers that prevent students from progressing with their education. No need to book slots that are oversubscribed or might be in a different country. Uh, pay high fees just for the privilege. Today, over 4,500 institutions like Yale, like Imperial and Trinity college, Dublin. have adopted the Duolingo English test. So if your university wants to join them, please click on the link in the episode notes and find out more and get in touch. Now let's get on with the episode
Andy:rupert, welcome to the show. Great to have you on.
Rupert:Thanks very much guys. Absolutely delighted to be here with you
Andy:The first question we always ask our guests is if you could take our listeners anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Rupert:I am gonna choose Japan. I think Japan is one of the most amazing places on Earth. It's got, its such a huge variety. Do a bit of Tokyo and then jump on a hin can center on a bullet train and get the bullet train down somewhere. Like, Kyoto's an amazing place as well.'cause that's the real juxtaposition of, what we have in our minds as classical Japan with rear cans and shrines, uh, cherry blossom. and then you got that kind of mix of, city life in, in Tokyo I worked on the World Cup in 2002, which was in between Korea and Japan. And I spent a lot of time traveling back and forth around different Japanese cities. And I just found that Kyoto and Tokyo were my two favorites because in Kyoto I stayed in a r camp, which is this traditional Japanese lodgings with the Tami mats, the futon, and you just don't have any access to the western world. There's no laptops, computers. Back in the day, I think it was blackberries, it's like they switch'em off and go off grid and you have the most amazing food, the most amazing relaxation contemplate a life, read a book, and relax. So I think that's the reasons I take, the listeners down to Japan.'cause it's just the most marvelous place.
Andy:What is going on, Nick? Lots of people we speak to seem to, say that that's where they'd like to go,
Rupert:there's lots of weirdness to it as well, which is what is part of the allure of it. Right. It's just got something for everyone. Part of my job, which is really wide in its brief, is fashion and luxury goods. So there's just this thing between Japan and the uk. They absolutely love everything about the uk. They love the music, they love the fashion, they love the attitude. They love comedy. You know, they just think that the UK is a great place. I think consequently, we think Japan's a great place as well. So we've just got this special relationship between the UK and Japan.
Nick:I've just come back from Japan and I'm in. Love with the country. I mean the Japan Korea world cup, that is the world cup that I wished that I'd been to. I've read that the japanese funds actually clean the stadium before They leave they They sweep up and tidy
The Everything up before they leave
Rupert:Yeah, they do.
Andy:You say that you, lived in Japan for six months in the runup to it. what was that like?
Rupert:It was quite extravagant actually, because it was on the like 50th floor of the Westin Hotel in esu.
Andy:I.
Rupert:Japan's never been a cheap place to be and I think my room was something like$400 a night and I was in it for six months. thankfully I wasn't picking up the tab at FIFA work, but you need an office and they basically will take the whole of the top two floors. And during the tournament itself that extended to about half the hotel and the team stayed at the hotel as well.
Andy:So was a little bit like, lost in translation.
Rupert:I went to that bar quite a lot of times that the Hyatt Hotel, with the piano bar in Austin translation, and then when I saw it in the film, it was just like, wow. I do sometimes have to, I know the show's about travel, but I didn't travel a lot as a kid with my family. A lot of our. Holidays Were quite local in England, you know, we used to go to chroma in a caravan and, that was quite far from me. my grandparents lived up in the northeast. My father was from Middlesboro, so we never really went on extensive family holidays and travel. So I've always really reflect on that and think I've been incredibly lucky to go to all these different places and, when I hear myself talking about living in Tokyo for six months, it sounds like it happened to somebody else actually. But I, I really appreciate it and I loved every second of being in Japan and also the World Cup was in Korea as well, so I used to just have to travel back and forth between Japan and Korea. And they're kind of competitive. A bit like England and Scotland in a way. And, you know, everything you did in Japan, you had to do exactly the same in Korea. Otherwise, people would get angry with you and accuse you of favoring the Japanese, which of course they never would do. But I do remember once, I made this trailer for the World Cup website, which was like a, a video Saying, coming soon, FIFA world cup.com, get ready, all the news,, all the gossip, latest interviews, that kind of stuff. And because it was in Japan and Korea, I had to translate this little promo video, which is only 30 seconds, and it was on all the Yahoo websites all over the world. So at the time it was, that was a big deal. If you bought that homepage, it cost half a million dollars a day on yahoo.com. So we had this video playing saying, save the date, FIFA World Cup dot com's coming. And I had to translate it into Korean and Japanese and four European languages. And I think we did it in Chinese as well, but. what I did to kind of cut a corner and save some time and maybe a bit of cost, is I asked someone in our Korean office to translate the Korean version, and somehow they translated it badly, even though they were Korean. and I got this extremely angry letter from the Blue House, which is the equivalent of the White House in Korea, 10 Downing Street, demanding that the whole website be taken down, that we'd insulted the Korean people. Um, and I think it was just a simple spelling mistake, which completely changed the inference of whatever phrase it was to basically say like, Korean's useless and Japan's brilliant. But what can you do? Because I can't read Korean, so I couldn't check it myself. You kind trust someone and say, yeah, that's, turns out it wasn't. But, we made that amendment very quickly.
Nick:That really was lost in translation.
Rupert:That was lost in translation. Absolutely. Right. Another thing that was lost in translation on that trip was,'cause I was there a long time, I needed to get my hair cut and I used to walk past this really cool hairdressers in Tokyo and, I went in there and I said, can I have a haircut? And nobody spoke a word of English and we didn't have Google Translate then. The only person who actually spoke any English was, the woman who swept up the hair clippings on the floor. And so she came up to me and said, oh, hello, hello, hello? I said, hello, hi. She said, you like Beckham? And I went, yeah, he's great. He's fantastic. And so she sat me down and talked to the hairdresser and, at the time, Beckon had a Mohican. So, long story short,, I, before I knew I'd been given a, a Mohican and I was, working, you know, I guess a relatively senior level and entertaining guests and going in the corporate hospitality.
So to clarify for our international listeners you're talking about david Beckam the england football captain who had a mohican HEC. at the time
Rupert:And, and then I walked out and I had a Really proper mohican, like a, a taxi driver, Beckham esque Mohican. And I remember, I thought, how am I gonna explain this to my boss? and that day I had to go to stand in the royal box and I was with some guests and I had this bloody mohican. I've got a few nice photographs of me, with a mohican in my fifa, suit and tie.
Andy:We definitely wanna see those photos.
Nick:Yeah,
Rupert:I, I dunno where they're Actually, I'll have to drag them out.
Nick:Many of our listeners will have seen the fee for uncovered documentary on netflix
When you worked at the FIFA headquarters in Zurich. what was the culture like there.
Rupert:It was really good. The thing is people look at FIFA and unfortunately, it's clouded by, allegations of corruption, et cetera. I mean, I worked there when Set Bladder was there, and it's a small company. There was like three or 400 people working there. And people have come from all over the world to work on this. And you have the situation where you've got very respectable, businesses working with fifa, the likes of Coca-Cola and Visa, global corporations with big reputations. So actually a lot of my work was, in the commercial side. And that was just like doing any regular sponsorship deal or television rights deal. I helped to create the mascot for the World Cup in 2006. I ran the official music program in 2006. I worked on the giant screen program across the whole of all of the cities and in the stadiums. So in order to do that, you need a really good working culture.'cause you've gotta get on with, massive teams, both, in Zurich and, wherever that tournament is. It's just, it's a brilliant melting pot. And I went back to Switzerland for a reunion with that group. And I think this says something about it. 90 people turned up, people came from, Malaysia, from the States. So that kind of culture is tremendously important. And I think I take that with me everywhere I go. Those kind of things don't happen by accident. So actually, even though FIFA gets a bit of a bad rep. And when I tell people I work for fifa, they're like, oh God, what about that? And it was the best, it was the best experience of my life, and, I had the autonomy to work on all these amazing projects. So Germany, those big, giant screen public viewings sometimes had a million people on the streets. And I've got lots of good German friends, and I said, that was the first time they felt proud of Germany. You know, after the second World War, they were, they were able to get a German flag out and drape it around themselves and hang it from their windows. So it was a big moment in culture, in society and, you, live and breathe those moments with your colleagues who you are working with day in, day out. The other thing that was great at the FIFA house that's a massive four g turf right outside. And every Thursday, lunchtime, we used to have a game and it was a pickup game and whoever was around would play. And if you had visiting ex pros, they were sometimes of a game as well. So, Michelle Platy used to come and play with us sometimes. Someone would lend him a pair of boots and he'd knock around on the pitch with you or, so it was again, one of those pinch yourself moments.
Andy:It's a great opportunity to sss a tackle your boss as well, isn't it?
Rupert:yeah, I ended up working within FIFA for about seven years. And I worked on the World Cup at the FIFA Centennial, all the youth tournaments. So I did a lot of travel, went to Argentina, for the World Youth Championships and that's where I saw a very young Lionel Messi.
In addition to FIFA. You also worked at arsenal football club, which is one of the biggest clubs in the UK. So how was that?
Rupert:From the outside, these kind of institutions look like these massive, huge corporations. They're actually relatively small companies. they've got big turnovers and they disproportionately have a media profile, which is way, way bigger than the actual number of people that are working there. My, first week I was there, down at k, the, the training ground, that's where all the playing staff have their base. And I didn't spend a huge amount of time there, but when you first join the club, they take the new starters. That could be anybody, it could be a match day steward or, you know, new chief executive, whomever. We went to watch the first team training. You see all the drills they're doing and you, when you see them up close, you realize what amazing athletes they're, So the trainee ended and we saw this kind of figure running around the pitches right at the end. And he was miles away and he gradually got closer and closer and closer as he ran towards it. And then you realize, oh my god, that's as and Venga. And he's running towards us. So he came up and I guess at that time when he was probably in his early sixties, but he was, fit as a whippet and he came up, he shook us all by the hand, but he already knew what we were doing. So he read his notes, he asked me.'cause I was a sponsorship, director there, you know, what, what are you looking to do? Which markets in the world are you gonna target? He said, oh, I hear you've you've worked for FIFA in the past. So, just when you've got a figure like that, who is, a leader for them to have taken the time to know you, and it wasn't just me, it was everybody on that line of five of us. He stuck around for half an hour. He didn't have to, he could've just got in his car and gone home and had an easier life. But he took the time to develop that culture. I think that's one thing that Arsenal have always been known for. they call it the the Arsenal way and they act with class in all areas.
Andy:But I think we can, all agree that the commercial side of football is obscene. So what's the largest deal that you cut? I.
Rupert:well, I was involved in some very big deals part, particularly when I was at fifa, the deal with Yahoo probably was the biggest one. We signed Yahoo for two World Cups and a lot of their services were what you would call value in kind. Just to translate the World Cup website into one additional language cost, about$1.5 million per language. So it was in seven languages. So already straight away you're at 10 million quid, and that's a cost which they incurred. Each of those deals was probably about 50 million pounds. For each World Cup. So it's about a hundred million quid, but the department I joined, there was about five of us there. We collectively did deals which were about for 2 billion pounds, with all the TV rights for the World Cup. I think that Arsenal I was involved in the Emirate Stadium naming rights and the shirt sponsorship. But I think the biggest deals I've done actually probably are now, working in government. The way that I would frame what we do here at the Department for Business and Trade is we're matchmakers and sort of key interlocutors. over the course of a year, it's lots of billions of pounds of deals for the uk.
Nick:Can you remind us what the export targets are across all of your portfolios? Just to make Andy feel inferior about his sales targets.
Rupert:It's huge. I mean it,'cause you know what I'm dealing with now, is the economy of a nation. When you're dealing with a country which folds in Cambridge, which folds in Oxford and all the other universities in the uk our export target is a trillion pounds by 2030. And we're currently at, just over 800 billion. And the portfolio that I look after in government, the services and skills director is about half of that at the moment, so it's about 400 billion. Within my portfolio, I've got things like financial services, professional business services. education alone is about 26 billion pounds because that folds in all the international students, of which there's about 600,000 at UK universities and colleges. So when you add in sports creative industries, there's about 50 billion, of exports. It's mind blowing when you think of it, that kind of scale.
Andy:the Next section of the show is called any laptops, liquids, or sharp objects.
Rupert:mm-hmm.
Andy:What do you have to take Traveling with you?
Rupert:My travel hack is have a dedicated travel wash bag filled with duplicates of everything you ever use. So instead of like always going and saying, have I got my hair gel and my razor and using what you use in your everyday life, I've just got one bag, which is always in my, bathroom cabinet, which has got everything in there including like Sun Creek.'cause you always forget something, you always forget sun cream or you always forget, that lip salve. And it makes it a lot easier.
Andy:This is like a reverse grab bag. We had somebody on who talked to us about an emergency grab bag. When things get a bit sketchy, you've got everything in it to go. You've got a cosmetic grab bag.
Rupert:I've got, dunno what that says about my vanity, but, I do have a cosmetic grab bag.
Nick:I was gonna ask, have you got any advice about how you tell your wife that you've got another trip that you need to go on and you're gonna miss that family dinner? That it's a tough one.
Rupert:it's a tough one. and then being divorced now and single actually that, that, that, uh, That's easier for me nowadays. I just go, I just disappear and just don't. But I do know nowadays it's different. I have to tell my kids, the reverse things happen to me. so my children are a bit older. and I live in the center of town and they live out in a village and they love it because, When I'm away, they just send me a text at like 3:00 AM saying, dad, is it all right if I stay at yours tonight? and I say, yeah, of course. And then the next text comes in. It's like, with some friends. Yeah. And so, you know, and of course I'm never gonna say no. So you go, yeah, okay. And I come, you know, you come home a few days later and you find a little bit of carnage and you move the sofa, and you find a couple of empty beer cans and all the spirits in the spirit, shelf of kind of drop down several measures in levels. But, I think for me, actually, that's a real pleasure. Seeing my kids get to the stage where, they can actually take advantage of my travels.
Andy:Next section of the podcast is called What's the Purpose of Your Visit? So why do you do what you do, Rupert?
Rupert:I do what I do now, is my current job is the best job I've ever had, and I do it'cause I can actually tangibly see the difference in the economy. I can actually see companies growing directly as a result of the jobs which we do here as the team at Department of Business and Trade. And I can give you one really concrete example.'cause it's not just all about sort of trade missions and traveling. sometime ago there was a dispute between Airbus and Bowie so there was a dispute effectively between the US and the uk and Germany and France. So it resulted in kind of a tip for tat tariffs being placed on things like whiskey, on salmon, cashmere, and bizarrely enough food and drink, shortbread biscuits, sweet biscuits. if you go to any duty free, you often see, just as you're at the tills, there's a box of shortbread, right? along with, Mentos and to Barone and that kind of stuff. But, the US put a tariff on shortbread of 25%. So shortbread, is a relatively lower priced item compared to whiskey or salmon, so actually that. Made the price almost inaccessible to people. So instead of being a fiver for a box of shortbread, it suddenly became 10 quid or something. one of the major shortbread manufacturers is walkers. And, it was absolutely, screw in their business. A lot of their business was exporting shortbread to the US'cause the US loved it. So every box of shortbread costs 25% more, then the distributor would add on a slice and the wholesaler wouldn't. Suddenly it was just untenable. So at the time my ex sexual state was Liz Truss. So, I worked very closely with Liz Trust and the negotiation. I just said to Liz and the team, listen, please, can you just get shortbread off this, they called it a carousel because there's a few hundred people whose jobs are a threat, in a small village in Scotland. And, say whatever you like about Liz Trust. She, obviously had a tough time with it when she became Prime Minister, but, her and the negotiation team managed to get shortbread off the carousel. So I called up Jim Walker the next day. And I said, Mr. Walker. And he was like an octogenarian and he was dressed up in a suit and tie on a Zoom call and it was beautiful tweed tie. And his hair was slicked back. I said, Mr. Walker, I can tell you we've managed to get shortbread off the tariff carousel. And he started to cry. He said, Mr. Daniels, you've no idea. You've saved 200 people's jobs. I was gonna shut the factory this week and I was gonna lay off all my workers, which means that the village shop would go out of business. The pub would go out of business because I'm the major employer in this small town. And, when I think about why I do what I do, that's why I do what I do. you can have a massive difference to people's lives up and down the country, whether that's creating new jobs and growth or protecting existing ones. We in government, in the civil service, we really do care and we really do want to make things better.
Nick:But may not only both know that working in the public sector can be really frustrating, really slow process.
Rupert:I think it can be, but I actually have been pleasantly surprised'cause I did think I'd come up against a lot of that inertia and, not being able to move things forward, but I've never seen people work as quickly as the teams that I work in. Stuff can be unpicked and unlocked very quickly. Saudi Arabia would be a good example of that. Everybody at the moment is working on a project in Saudi Arabia, whether it's in Neon or the Line or ind for example. They're building a huge, massive thing called the Sports Boulevard, and they love working with the uk with our architects, with our engineers, with our film and television companies, with our sports brand. Steven Gerard's just gone out there to become a manager out there, you've seen Ronaldo go out there. So suddenly what we've got is this huge opportunity and, if we don't move fast, we won't be in there. So we're, working in government to make, the optimum conditions so that companies have the best opportunities to succeed when contracts come up in places like Saudi.
Andy:A lot of our listeners work for UK universities. So what's the next thing that you see being unlocked for them?
Rupert:Steve Smith is our international education champion and we've got an international education strategy, which has five key markets. It doesn't mean we're only working five markets, but Saudi is one of those markets. And if you look at where we've been, I think we've probably been out in Saudi Arabia more than anywhere else in the world. And what we do is we've taken, UK institutions out to Saudi Arabia, we've taken universities, we've taken vice chancellors, international development directors, and we've probably taken about 40 or 50 universities, English language institutions, private boarding schools, ed tech companies with us. There's a trade deal being done with the G C C, which is in negotiation at the moment, but we work across Qatar, across the whole of the u a e across Bahrain, Aman, you've got a trade deal coming up in the offering with India. China's starting to open up as well. So we've got big plans for growth.
Nick:I don't think our audience appreciate how involved the department for business and trade are in the international education strategy.
Rupert:Yeah.
Nick:that true to say?
Rupert:I think it probably is true to say'cause if you're from the UK and you think about education, you think about the Department for education and we're the partners in that with the D F E. We work with, the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, home office as well.'cause it's all about kind of visas and mobility and movement of people in and out of the uk. We've got a really amazing education team here and our focus is very much on the international education element. It is One of the best kept government secrets. If you are looking for help and you want to think about expanding your business overseas, then just come and find us. My first job was as a further and higher education lecturer and and I worked for Cambridge University Press for seven years leading the marketing internationally for English language teaching. And, that never left me. I love working in education and, it's great working with people like yourselves who are just pushing that cause getting the word out there
Andy:the next section of the show is called Anything to Declare, and this is where you have a free space to talk about whatever you want to.
Rupert:My real love in life is music. Well probably sport and music and music probably trumps everything. One thing I can't believe that's actually happened to me is that I'm now responsible for international music for the United Kingdom. I still go to loads of concerts and gigs and I live in Cambridge, so I go to a small venue a lot of the time called the Portland Arms. Like 200 capacity, I think. And it's great'cause you just go and chat to the band afterwards and you buy an LP and they'll sign your lp. I like indie music and young bands who were coming through. But last year we took out Wet Legg, who ended up winning the Grammy, and number one all over the World Self-Esteem Yard Act, and the Nova Twins and those four acts were all nominated for Mercury Awards. And I think music is just the most marvelous thing, you know? I just think that music for me is what makes me tick.
Andy:You must get a lot of opportunities, within your job to see music and Rupert, I feel like we've really bonded over the last, few minutes and I just wondered if you've got any, uh, Taylor Swift tickets. Um,
Rupert:Well, you know, as a civil servant, I don't really get access to free tickets or anything. I have to kind of line up and queue with everyone else. I took my kids to see Harry Styles last summer at Old Trafford, and I think he's brilliant.
Nick:Yeah, with wet leg supporting on the latest tour.
Rupert:With wet leg supporting. Yeah. On his love on tour.
Nick:Rupert, have you heard Andy's, jingles? With your support. support we could together push for a christmas number one
Rupert:haven't heard jingles.
Nick:has got some musical ability.
Andy:I have no music credibility whatsoever. Um, we have recorded a couple of songs though. I've done some incredibly cringeworthy hip hop.
Rupert:See you've done some hip. Wow. That's impressive.
Andy:it's not, the opposite of impressive.
Nick:there are people out there who love it, who sing it when they're going through customs, apparently
Rupert:I'll be sure to check it out. Absolutely.
Andy:So, um, Rupert, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been great having you.
Rupert:Thanks so much guys. I've really enjoyed it really fun chat and, I'm looking forward to listening to those jingles as well.
Nick:You heard it here first. The uk is next big international Export tales And the departure lounge Hello everyone. Thank you so much for listening. As always. If you are a fan of the show. Please leave a review or emailers at sick bag, a tales from the departure lounge.com. Shout out as well to our sponsors, Duolingo. We've got some really good engagement ideas. So we're going to be doing those on social media over the next few weeks. Until then. Safe travels everyone. Tales from the Departure Lounge is a type nine production for the pie.