Andrew Craig on Biotech Investing: Why the Next Century Belongs to Biology

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[0:00] Sammie Ellard-King: My name is Sammie Ellard-King, and welcome to the Money Gains Podcast. We’re a show all about making, saving, and investing your money. And today we’re joined by Andrew Craig, author of the bestseller, How to Own the World. And if you’re new to investing, Andrew’s global perspective and long-term approach are absolute game changers, especially in today’s economy. We’re going to be talking about the overcoming of the UK’s home bias in investing, the impact of falling interest rates on your investment portfolio, and why the biotech sector is something you should be paying attention to. Andrew’s new book, Our Future is Biotech, will give us a glimpse into the exciting intersection of biotech and personal finance and how it’s going to absolutely change the world. Let’s dive in and explore how you can own the world and invest in your future on the Money Gains podcast. Let’s go.

[1:02] Sammie Ellard-King: So, Andrew, welcome to the Money Gains podcast, man. How are you? Well, yeah, really good. And as always, very honoured to be on podcasts like this. So thanks a lot for having me on. I’ve probably watched now you be on like three or four different episodes, and I always come back to them and just think, oh my god, I would absolutely love to have him on. So like for me, it’s a bit of an honour as well. And I’ve had a good holiday uh diving into your books as well. Well that that’s very good timing. I’m sorry about that. You had to endure like economics and biotech stuff whilst on holiday. And yeah, I also also preemptively apologise because if you have watched podcast interviews I’ve done already, and I I almost always say this like uh I repeat myself a lot because a lot of the core messages that I’m really passionate to get across to you know whichever audience kind of are very evergreen and and don’t change. So, with apologies to anyone who’s watched, you know, endured like an hour of me on another podcast in recent weeks or months. I might say quite a lot the same. Although I shouldn’t say that at the top of the call because then people just switch off. So I’m not gonna do that. Loads of new content today.

[2:07] Sammie Ellard-King: Well, we are we’re gonna be discussing obviously the new book, but you’re most well known for How to Own the World, which is just an incredible read. What I absolutely loved about it was your just kind of take on global investing as a whole, but I’d just kind of love for the audience to understand you. I suppose, like, what what do we need to know about Andrew to kind of understand where the conversation’s gonna go today? Us Brits uh really find that question tricky, don’t we? Like, tell me about yourself, and like we’re like, I can’t do that, I’m British. Um, well, look, I I mean, but very basically, I guess I started in a city career in the late 90s with what was then Swiss Bank, SBC Warburg. And so it’s now, what is it, how many years since 1998? Um, you can do the maths. Um, that’s how long I’ve been looking at capital markets. Um, and for most of my career, equity markets, so shares, the stock market. And for uh all of that time, really looking at smaller companies. So that that kind of means um a smaller company, which may sound crazy to a lot of people, is kind of anything that’s about less than about five billion dollars size. Um so lots of British companies are smaller companies structurally, and then in the last, well, it’s coming up 10 years now, I sort of morphed that of doing kind of all sectors and looking at all companies into focusing very specifically on biotech, life sciences, med tech companies for, as I say, nearly 10 years. Um, and I guess alongside that, um, working for kind of leading investment banks, you know, very, very privileged, very fortunate of being able to do that. Um, one of the things that I always found amazing was just how many of my kind of master of the universe colleagues, like they were amazing, you know, credit derivatives people or corporate financiers or like servicing huge hedge funds and household name, big FTSE100 companies and stuff. But you’d be amazed how many of them, when it came to their own personal finances, were like, oh yeah, I don’t I haven’t really thought about my pension. It’s like, really? Like, you know, and in that environment, I just thought that’s just mad. And I was always a bit of a personal finance geek along, you know. I always thought, because I suppose one of the insights is if you do a good enough job with your um investments, um, that should, in the fullness of time, contribute as much as your income. And obviously, that’s the whole idea of a pension, anyway, front and center, is that you get to a point in your hopefully late 50s or 60s or whatever where you can live on your capital and not on your labour. Um, and I thought, so I’ve always been very interested in that. Um, and as a quick aside, one of the theme themes I talk about a lot is you know, pen if you Google the word pensions and boring together, you get like, I can’t remember, tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of hits in like at four nanoseconds, right? Pensions are boring. And I did a video about this recently, say, like, okay, so 99% of human beings ever born in history had to work until they died, or if they’re very lucky and they lived in a community where they could get cared for if they were too old and they couldn’t anymore. But pensions, like only 1% of humanity basically since like 1909, when we invented pensions, have been able to benefit from the ability to stop working and live for many, many years, in many cases, several decades, after they’ve stopped working on their money, on their capital, not on their labor, on their work. And actually, that’s got to be one of the least boring like technological innovations ever, right? Because think of that, the amount of happiness and everything else engendered by people being able to stop working and live on their capital. So I think pensions are a great thing. And I guess, you know, that’s the the point I was making about working with folks in investment banks who weren’t particularly focused on their own personal finances, was that’s what made me want to write my first book. Because I basically thought if no, you know, if if people who work in financial services with fairly high-powered, high-paid jobs aren’t thinking about this, it’s not really surprising that the vast majority of the population they didn’t even know that this is a thing they should know about. Um, and that was kind of insight that made me write my first book, How to Own the World, about well, yeah, 10 years ago now. Um, and then there’s so yeah, and then since then, just by virtue of having spent the last 10 years of my main career looking at biotech, um, that’s why my my new book that’s coming out next week is called Our Future Is Biotech and it’s all about the biotech sector. And it’s not actually as random and tangential to kind of my core message as you’d think, because I mean we can come on to this, but but my basic position is so so you the US stock market has returned an average of more than 10% per annum, going back a century to the early 20s, right? And very few people know that and understand that. Um, and my big thesis, so why my first book’s called How to Own the World is basically, you know, human progress is the most important investment theme in history. And if you own human progress, you have a really good chance of getting a life-changing result for your own personal finances. And there are obviously sort of misgivings about, you know, is this a bubble? All the tech companies constitute such a huge component of the value of shares all over the world. And my argument in our future is biotech is if the way that we’re gonna sustain those sorts of life-changing returns into the next century is because of biology and biotech. So the the last century has been about tech and physics, if you like, and the next century is gonna be about biology and biotech. So, yeah, sorry, that was uh I was sort of trying how do I summarize the last 25 years in uh in a few minutes. But yeah, basically, a an evil uh investment banker um the the um quit my job three years ago um to go full-time on all my entrepreneurial stuff, which is books and and financial education, basically.

[7:44] Sammie Ellard-King: Incredible. One thing you said there, which I want to unpack a touch with you because I feel like you’d be a great person to talk to this. I read a stat from the SCA, it was £61,000 is the average pension pot in the UK, which you then couple with a state pension of 11,000, I think it’s 200 and something, that gives you a rough income a month of about £1,170. Yeah. Which, if we just look at basic costs of life right now, and obviously, hopefully by that point, if you have a mortgage, you’ve paid it off, you’re hopefully not renting if that’s some uh a pathway that you went down, which isn’t everyone. And as we all know, that’s getting harder as well. That position for someone, even with the average pension pot at 61,000, is extremely bad. And yeah, I just want to sort of see what you’re doing.

[8:36] Andrew Craig: Well, no, I mean that’s that’s one of the one of the first few topics in my first book is but I have this section on the bad news and the good news. And the big bad news that you know, exactly what you’ve just articulated is a big part of the bad news, which is this looming pensions crisis. And and it’s not again, it’s not a party political thing. I I like to stress that it doesn’t matter whether Labour or the Conservatives or whoever else are in power, it’s just a mathematical demographic problem whereby so we invite we invented the pension system in 1909 in this country for anybody over the age of 70, um, when life expectancy in Britain was 47. Now, obviously, that that number’s skewed by infant mortality because a lot of children died before they reached their fifth birthday. So there were a decent number of people who lived into their kind of 50s and 60s, particularly wealthier people, right? But working class people who just spent, you know, 30 years working down a mine or in a shipbuilding factory in Belfast or whatever, a lot of people died in their 40s. And so actually, it was a wonderful invention that you know, the the the this this idea of a pension that if when you got to 70 years old, the state would look after you and give you an income that you a livable income until you died. And that that was a you know, like I said a minute ago, that was a fantastic innovation, but it wasn’t that big of an ask for a very wealthy country where there were relatively few seven-year-olds. And now today, and obviously this is a big theme in my biotech book, um, the life expectancy has increased by more than 30 years since then. Um, and by some estimates, considerably more than that, plus, especially in places like Japan, right, and Switzerland and Austria, like the wealthiest, most developed countries in the world. Um it’s forecast to carry on going another 10, 20, 30 years because of all this innovation in biotech and other stuff we can come on to. Um, and so this exactly what you just mentioned here is to me, it’s one of the biggest unfolding slow motion car crash crises that we have in the world, that nobody, everybody’s just kicking the can down the road and kind of you know, doing the old see, no evil, here, no evil, la la la la la, putting their fingers in their ears. Um and part of the reason for that, this fairly intractable reason for that is that the electoral cycle is only five years. So it’s not in the interest of any government, and and this is borne out by the behaviour of every government for the last you know many decades, to honestly kind of stand up and go, guys, you like most people are going to be seriously poor from the age of 60 to the age of whenever they die, right? Grindingly poor, and this is getting worse and worse and worse. And the act and if anything, anybody who’s really financially literate and really understands capital markets and the bond market and inflation and how all these things are linked knows that the actions taken by most governments in the world in the last 30 or 40 years have been effectively 180 degrees the reverse of what we needed to do to give everybody a good to you know to sustain that wonderful thing that is a pension, your ability to live a good life with a livable income from you know when you want to they can stop working and and you know have a have a lovely 20 or 30 years focusing on your grandchildren or you know, travel or whatever else you might want to do. And so that’s so that’s the bad news, right? And the and the allied bad news is so the bad news is we have a massive pensions crisis cut, and it’s just a demographic, irrefutable fact of the maths and what’s happening to populations and life expectancy. The other bad news is that financial literacy is absolutely terrible. Like, you know, more more than 60% of British adults don’t understand the mathematics of compounding. And I would argue that com- I do argue that compounding is probably the most important thing you will ever earn learn in your life, above everything else, right? And not just compounding financially, but compounding in life, like the the the effects of little and often and compounding, you know, health and exercise and reading and knowledge and skills and whatever else. And so, but but you know, I think if you work in financial markets and you understand compounding, you have a very really, really deep and visceral understanding of just how powerful compounding can be over time. Um so that’s the bad news. We’re very financially illiterate, it’s a massive societal problem, and as a result, successive governments have been able to just kind of ignore this pensions crisis because most people don’t really emotionally connect with just how bad it’s gonna get. And and the stats you just came up with are very, very you know illustrative of that reality. Um, but the good news, which is what I then you know move on to and want to dwell on and dwell on in how to own the world in a big way, and then in an even bigger way in my new book, because it’s a fundamentally very positive, optimistic book, is that is that the power of compounding and capital markets and technological development and human progress give us half a chance if we take the right steps, but but both as private individuals and also hopefully in the fullness of time at the level of the government to sort to sort the situation out, right? And you know, real wealth. So if you look at, okay, you can talk about the fact that the the tech stocks might be in a bubble right now, you know, Nvidia’s up so crazily, and Apple and Microsoft, you know, the top seven, the magnificent seven stocks are a hugely disproportionate component of global equity value and American equity value. And maybe that’s wrong, maybe it’s right. But one thing I will say is without question, that is at least in some part a function of just how much real wealth these businesses have made, right? Like how many hundreds of millions of iPhones has Apple sold and iMacs and iPads and you know, um, Microsoft is embedded into almost everything we do in every industry, right? And and so it’s a bit different to the last dot-com boom where you know businesses were just trading on hot air, and pets.com was losing like hundreds of dollars with every bag of dog food they sold. Literally, these were rubbish businesses, and it was a mad time. I was actually on the coal face at Swiss Bank, you know, float we floated lastminute.com. I was right there when the madness was going on. And I think, you know, I think there’s a chance of a stock market correction because maybe things are a bit toppy and frothy. Um, but what I would say is that the the the real the ability of mankind, if you like, without wanting sound too hyperbolic, of us as a species to create real wealth and for that real wealth to then percolate out in some shape or form into the general population and therefore deal with this horrendous pensions crisis is definitely there because the technology is so amazing, because what we’re doing technology and biotech, I think, is going to be a huge part of that, but it we could do with a lot of help because you know, I always go back to every private individual that takes that good news on board, that understands companies and that’s you know sorts out a regular savings and investments habit is much more likely to have a much better life. You know, it is genuinely life-changing, right? And so if if enough millions of people do that, that’s really good for them as individuals and for their families and for their communities and you know, for the economy more broadly, because wealthier people with bigger pots of money consume goods and services and make the economy go around again, right? And pay tax and everything else. But as a result of all of that, it’s really, really good for our society. And I think, I mean, we can come onto this perhaps as a part of my new book in particular, is a big part of Britain’s problem in the last 30 or 40 years is because we’ve totally destroyed our investment culture, right? Um, and you and it’s very easy to evidence that and illustrate it. I’ll give you one stat which is not very well known, is so in 2007, the London Stock Exchange had 3,250 companies listed on it. Today it has fewer than 1,900. And they’re they’re literally dropping like flies. And it again, because most people don’t think about the stock market, they’re like, Oh, the city, that’s just all those, you know, dodgy banker people running around. It’s absolutely front and center relevant to the wealth of our country. Like to the, you know, smaller companies employ like more than half of people, smaller companies um contribute a massive amount of tax to the to the to you know to the exchequer, um, you know, disproportionately high amount. Everybody thinks about Shell or Tesco or Glaxo or Astra, but actually the engine room of any economy is smaller companies. And we have now, for approaching 20 years, had a London stock market that can no longer that has stopped being able to raise capital for smaller companies. And that, I would argue, is a huge part of why we have a cost of living crisis, cost of living crisis, because we’ve stopped, we can’t generate real wealth, nobody’s investing. So the only solution is to invent money out of thin air, and we’ve invented half a trillion quids worth of money out of thin air in the last few years, partly because of COVID, but partly just because of very poor policy decisions for 30 or 40 years. And and that is, you know, it makes the it makes the world, it makes Britain less fair, it makes Britain less wealthy. We we’ve lagged, America has become twice as wealthy in the last 30 years as we have. So so Americans, people in Singapore, people in America, like GDP per capita is nearly twice what it is here now. Whereas go back 30 years and we were pretty much level ranking with them, and that’s largely because of bad policy decisions. So that was that was a very long answer.

[17:59] Sammie Ellard-King: So no, absolutely, that’s incredible. I think one of the things I’d love to discuss with you based on what you were just saying there is we’re obviously about to see interest rates plummet over the next 18 months, I would say. That’s obviously good for mortgage rates. But in terms of assets, there’s quite a lot of argument that it’s uh extremely good for assets as well. So simply because of the amount of money that has been pumped into the system that has been sitting back on the sidelines, essentially because you know the the wealthy individuals could get 5% from their banks, where why take out expensive debt or invest into assets in a lot of occasions when they could just make that safe play with their money. But as that sort of comes down, interest rates come back to sort of inflationary, you know, coupled back with that kind of inflationary level. Assets tend to explode based on previous happenings with uh post-2008. Do you feel like that’s going to happen again?

[19:45] Andrew Craig: Yeah, look, uh one thing I don’t go in for is sort of short to medium-term predictions about what financial markets can do, because one thing they do all the time is completely confound. Like the I did a video the other day about how, you know, for example, a lot of people, including a lot of financial professionals who seem to kind of forget reality, think that there is a fairly clear correlation between things like recession and a stock market crash. Or like, you know, if the if GDP rates are going really well, the stock market will grow. Or, you know, if interest rates do this, this will happen with the stock market or with the bond market. And actually, you know, the re the record of actual experience in the real world in history is there’s almost no, or there’s there’s at best a long-lagging correlation between like Wall Street and Main Street, um, between the real economy and and you know, the financial economy. And the example I used in that recent video was so in 2000, if you’d gone to the average person in 2020 when COVID was just kicking off, lockdowns, you know, serious global panic, television every night with pictures of people dying in hospitals on ventilators, I mean, like really, like it was almost like living through a horror film, right? You know, sort of futuristic horror film. We all remember it, and being stuck in our gardens at home or, you know, whatever, and not allowed to go anywhere. And if you’d said to the average person, what do you think the US stock market’s going to do over the next two years? Like, I I know for a fact that most people do you think the stock market right now is a good investment in like March 2020, right? What do you think 90% of people you would, or 99% of people you’d ask that question of, would have said, Well, no way, like I wouldn’t touch that, you’d be mad to invest in the stock market. The stock market in 2020 and 2021 had two of its best years in the last century.

[21:26] Sammie Ellard-King: So, you know, that kind of but to but to your point, I mean what I suppose that was going back to my point, that’s injection of capital allowed for that partly to happen. Yeah, yeah. Look, I I guess that’s fair because the one of the arguments is obviously everyone in America got a generous kind of check from the government and stuff. But but I think it’s you know, the the much bigger themes about why the US stock market, well, it goes into your point. Like at when interest rates are low, everybody, you basically have to buy equities because you know, if you but go back to the mid-80s, if you were lucky enough to have a million quid when you retired, interest rates were let’s say 8%, right? You could just sit there with your million quid getting paid 80,000 quid a year with no risk of losing that was just like an interest rate. That’s what you actually got. I remember I did a paper around in my like when I was 11 or 12 years old, and I remember putting my 15 quid a week. I was quite a well-paid paperboy in Southwest London. My northern cousins were very jealous they got there. They didn’t get being a paper round in Nottingham wasn’t as good as doing it in Southwest London. Uh he said smugly. But I, you know, I put my 15 quid a week into um the post office uh like savings account, and I think I was getting like 12% interest at one point, you know, which over over a couple of years of doing that, I had a few great. Brand, you know, when I was like 14. Um, it’s very different when interest rates are 2%. And so, you know, you so that does force people to buy equities. And that was obviously a big part of you know why the why the US stock markets perform so well, because baby boomers, there are millions and millions of baby boomers who are out of retirement, cannot live on the on the interest on an interest rate or a bond product. So they have to have an equity product with a dividend and everything else. Um, and then that’s been that this has been a whole circular and self-reinforcing sort of spiral upward spiral, is that you know what I said earlier about a lot of these companies actually making a hell of a lot of money, so that’s good. You know, NVIDIA is doing something fairly revolutionary, it’s on a P65, but it’s still selling billions of dollars worth of very innovative chips. But if anything, the most important phenomenon is is the rise of ETFs. And you know, you know who John Bogle was, the guy who founded Vanguard. So he was the father of ETFs. So like you just own an exchange traded fund, it’s just a very simple financial product where you with one fund very cheaply you can own 500 US companies by owning the S&P 500. And I know you know that we we both talk about this stuff a fair bit. Um and you can do that inexpensively, and that’s a great product. And John Bogle argued when he was alive, because he died a few years ago, sadly, but um, that the the you know, passive investment, just owning the market was a fabulous thing for the sort of man in the streets to do the non-professional investor. But he argued it should never constitute more than 15% of the stock market, because it’s basically a monkey on the back of the stock market, right? Because there’s no price discovery, there’s nobody, you’re just unthinkingly just buying all these shares. Well, it’s now significantly more than 50% of the stock market. And and for if you’re running a pension, a Fortune 500 company’s pension uh uh um provision in the States, you are it’s almost more than job your job’s worth now to do anything other than put all your sort of younger staff into an S&P 500 ETF. And that almost more than anything else has been what’s because what then happens is that these are market cap weighted products, which means if billion if a billion dollars goes into the S&P 500, it’s not equally allocated to the 500 companies, like you know, 400 million dollars of that goes into the top seven stocks, which then is this huge upward spiral. So that that could be a bubble, and and lower interest rates will drive that still further. Um, but I guess that you know my way of dealing with all of this stuff, which I’ve made videos on quite recently, is all of this stuff is so complicated, right? And so hard to predict. What is not complicated, what is not hard to predict, is the fact that over many, many decades, humanity will get better, and you know, our our science and our population growth, I mean, a century ago, very, very few people ever flew on an aeroplane. We didn’t even have shipping containers of technology. That was a technology from the 50s and 60s, which revolutionized the world, by the way. You couldn’t have had globalization without the simple adventure of the 20-ton shipping container that you see on ships and trucks and you know, railway carriages, um, and smartphones, and now AI and machine learning and everything else. And I think the best thing to do as an investor, not a trader, but as an investor, is to just step back and say, all of this interest rates and inflation and government policy and ETFs and should ETFs be for like the antidote to all of that complexity and confusion is just to step back and say, I’m gonna invest in human progress every month for the next like two, three, or four decades, and just then do the old ignore the news. And and you know, the record of over a century is that that is the best thing to do, and that will be life-changing. So that’s why I think with a sort of preemptive apologies, because you know, when when you’re invited to be a talking head, people are like, What’s your view on this? And what’s your view? My view is like it’s always the same, no matter what is happening. Um, but uh, but I you know I say that because I think it’s that’s the best way to actually get a result.

[26:54] Sammie Ellard-King: Um I completely agree. No, I I literally completely agree. It’s it’s just I’ve been reading a lot, as you know, uh, we both read a lot about capital markets, and uh I just found that very interesting. And I think from an overall perspective, looking at say the UK housing market uh attached to that, where people are saying, Oh my god, house prices are so decoupled from affordability, yeah, and actually these things tend to influence each other, i.e., assets and house prices continue will rise once money is then flooded back into the system. So yeah, it’s it’s a just an interesting and I was more interested in your point, but you out-articulated exactly uh what I’ll tell you what, what but while whilst we’re on house prices, I mean I find I find them very I I’m a big fan of like thinking about and looking at UK house prices. I’m you know, I’m British, right? Um uh but um partly because I as I said to you before you click record, I’m a renter, and I’m I’m only I’m partly a renter because I think that British house prices are just structurally too high, and I kind of don’t agree with the current zeitgeist for all sorts of big picture reasons. More prosaically, though, I’m a renter because I’m an entrepreneur and you know I accrued a certain amount of capital after 20 years in the city, and I need that capital to invest in my company to pay for all the egregious costs involved in running an FCA-authorised um company and and trying to do everything I’m trying to do. And so I I I I’m funding myself largely for a few years whilst I build my business, right? Which is a very unusual thing. And you know, so you know, my me being a renter shouldn’t be taken as me saying everyone should rent categorically, it’s just that for my own personal circumstances, that’s important at the moment. But what I will say about um British house prices is firstly that I genuinely think that very few people in the UK have a sufficiently kind of detailed and nuanced understanding of real house prices versus nominal house prices. So if you adjust for currency, if you adjust for real inflation, because it’s like the point I always make is okay, so you bought a house for £100,000 20 years ago and it’s now a million-pound house. I’m 10 times wealthier. Okay, but hang on, let’s take a step back. If you were to sell that house and buy another house on the same street, it all of them have gone up as much, right? So it’s as much about the depreciation of the value of the pound as it is about the real there has, of course, been real appreciation. But the other point I I think about a lot at the moment in terms of Britain in the next few years, interest rates are obviously very important, but so are demographics. And so if you look at the 2001, I think it’s 2000, they do the census in 2001, 2011, yeah, I think it was 2001. Yeah. So there were like 150,000 people over the age of 90 in Britain in 2001. Today there are 650,000, and people over the age of eight, by the way, this is front and center why the NHS is in the has seven and a half million people on a waiting list. You could throw hundreds of billions of pounds at the NHS, and just the mere fact that we have so many millions of old people who need billions of pounds worth of healthcare, you know, and Labour are going to find that out. And that’s also a big part of my my new, you know, what I’ve the message in Our Future Is Biotech is um how do we address these intractable demographic problems? But there are you know, there are several million more 80-somethings than there were 20 years ago, and 500,000 more 90-somethings than there were uh 20 years ago. And the biggest sellers of property are people who die, like structurally, right? Because, you know, especially now with the rubber band so tight, is that you know, if an elderly couple with three adult children have a property that’s valid at you know three million quid in like the home counties, and they’re they’ve got three kids, let’s say, or two kids, it’s a very, very rare kid of theirs that can buy out their brother or sister and go, that’s all right, I’ll just buy the three million quid house off mum and dad, you know, for obvious reasons, right? So I think it’s gonna be very interesting in the next few years, as literally hundreds of thousands of properties come onto the market and they can’t be just passed down to the kids. Well, when they’re passed down to the kids, the kids basically become forced sellers of them, right? Because they need to split the money. And I think that’s gonna be really impactful for British property, kind of almost regardless of what happens with interest rates. Um and you know, that’s just my view.

[31:28] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s really interesting. Well, because obviously we’ve got probably worst housing shortage since World War II, looking at the figures, yeah. And then you’ve got Labour policy saying 1.5 million a pound homes if they get there. Yeah. Let’s be honest. That’s extremely well, they the reason they can’t they can’t, right? Because that’s exactly right. That’s the big countervailing theme, is this the shortage of stock. Although there’s an estimate that says like eight. That’s what I mean. Because you have an aging population, does that and then but markets, particularly a market as illiquid as the housing market, right? They there are always these Mexican standoffs where like basically people have uh money illusion and the endowment effect, which are these cognitive biases. Like, you know, I bought my house for a million pounds. The best offer I’ve received for it right now is 750 grand or 800 grand or whatever, but it’s worth a million pounds. There’s no way I’m selling it for less than a million pounds. So what happens is they sit there, they know they they carry on living there, they wait until the kind of you know magic unicorn person who comes on and wants to pay a million pounds or more. And then that what then happens obviously is that transaction volumes fall off a cliff and no houses change hands, which there’s that’s a huge feature of the British housing market in recent years, and transactions are taking many months to complete and everything else. And then the market moves a long way. And and you’re right, like I mean, if it’s gonna be really interesting. I don’t think Labour can build one and a half million houses for the simple reason that there aren’t enough uh uh skilled workers to deliver that. There aren’t enough plasterers, bricklayers, crane operators. That’s the biggest, ironically, that’s the biggest intractable problem, even if they’ve got the will to do it. Um, but it’s it is I think it’s great that they’re at least aspiring to do that because well one because one of the points I’ve made in the past is that in this country, you know, a big part of the reason British house prices are so high is we’re so you know obsessed with property compared to lots of other places in the world where lots of people rent, um, because interest rates have been so low, and because for both parties, actually, it’s electorally untenable to actually do anything that smashes house prices to smithereens, particularly the Tories, right? If you think about the average age and uh property ownership status of a Tory voter, like they are, you know, at the older end of the age spectrum, and they probably own a home, and that home is probably worth in inverted commas in nominal pounds, in depreciated pounds, far more than it was. And if if any government did something really proactive to make property available to the younger generation, they get voted out because young people don’t vote, old people do vote, and that’s their electoral base. But I think part of the reason Labour’s finally been able to, you know, take the bull by the horns is because of the change in the composition of the electorate, which goes again back to my demographic points. There are a lot of awful lot of old people that are passing away now, and a lot of young people are actually gonna vote because they’re so annoyed with these sorts of things. And so, yeah, I’m relatively bullish that um you know, I don’t know whether there’ll be a high house price crash, but I think it will it will it will generally ease and it will get better for young for the younger generation because it’s a you know house prices being 10 times average salaries, yeah. The long run average over the last two hundred years is between three and four times.

[34:45] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, it’s 8.6, I think, at the moment, which is the average UK salary, which is just absolutely nuts. If you look at 1980, even when they had you know 13, 14% interest rates, I think it was 2.6. Yeah, so it’s right, and that housing is one of those markets where you really do need to look at like decades of data to really get you can’t look at the last two years and go, oh, you know, house prices, they always go up. It’s like, no, from 1900 to 1965, they didn’t do anything, you know, and that is when the when America came off the gold stand in the early 70s. If you look at the chart of every single property market in the world, that’s when prices really started going up. And then obviously, the other big demographic point is that in 1984, um, there were when my that’s when my dad bought a house in southwest London, by the way. Um that’s why I’m benchmarking to that. Um, there were four billion people in the world. And today there are eight billion people in the world, and in 1984, in London, you know, where I’m from, there were no Chinese or Russian buyers at all, because they were properly communist countries and closed regimes, and so it was only embassy staff in London that were actually going to buy property in London. You know, contrast that with well, up until the Ukraine crisis, but you know, how many billions of dollars of Russian money’s come into London property, which then cascades out into the regions because if you’re a sort of middle-class British couple and you sell your nice house in South Kent for 20 million quid to a Russian oligarch, which has happened a lot, you know, your three adult children all get six million quid bunged at them and they go, Oh, great, now I’ll go and buy a house in Kent or you know, Hampshire or whatever. And that that that cascade effect has been massive for sure. Um, but uh, but I, you know, the uh exogenous shocks like that can only run so far. But anyway, yeah, I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of talking too much about property specifically. I just think it’d be very interesting to see what happens in the United States.

[36:36] Sammie Ellard-King: Oh, is I very interested. Well, I think a lot of it’s coupled together with like this country’s wealth as such and the wealth of an everyday person. Yeah, because we are so obsessed about property, and often when people come to Save and Invest, their first port of call is how do I get onto the housing market? Yeah, and then they look at investing, which is usually like what I see with most people that I speak to. It’s like that’s their priority. I want to, I’m doing the lifetime ISA, I’m doing the lifetime ISA, um, which is great, don’t get me wrong. Um, but for me, I try to open their eyes to a more like nuanced approach with their finances. I think I agree with that completely. I think what I think that does make uh people’s financial affairs over a lifetime, right? From like let’s say 25 to 65. If you’re obsessed with property and you only basically do property and cash, you’ve got to you are penalising yourself massively and shooting yourself in the foot. And you know, the other thing, uh like I I genuinely believe that nobody should be allowed to take a mortgage out unless until they’ve looked at the 50-year US 10-year treasury chart or the 50-year British interest rate, because the number, you know, the number of like good middle-class, intelligent, well-educated people who just didn’t realise that interest rates at sort of you know 2% or whatever were completely historically unprecedented, and now their mortgage their monthly payments are like thousands of pounds more than what they calibrated the life for. That is a tragedy. We shouldn’t let that happen. We you know, there’s a problem with the system that people are far too short term when they consider what interest rates could do. Because I mean, you you said interest rates might plummet um in the in the I don’t know, in the next 18 to 24 months, or I don’t know. I’m not sure that I’m not sure they’ll plummet. I think they’ll come back a bit, but come back a bit, yeah.

[39:33] Sammie Ellard-King: I think yeah, one one to one point five percent would probably look at, I would say. A reduction from where they are, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like if nothing happens from here, yeah, which is a significant boost to someone who needs to remortgage and was at 2% and now is at 5%, which is a big difference. Yeah, but I suppose going back to that kind of short-term mentality, something you said there, and it’s something you speak about a lot in the book, is about having a long-term perspective, especially with investing. I think I’d love to ask you like how that influences your own approach to to personal finances. Like, how do we actually apply that to our own day-to-day saving and investing strategy? Yeah. Well, I think that so in my second book, which I’m about sorry, my because the the the I’ll brandish. This, this, the biotech one’s my third book. Um, and my second one is called Live on Less Invest the Rest, which is a workbook aimed at British people. It’s like, you know, I think part of the reason my books have been well received in the UK is because they’re very British focused. Um but so in Live On Less, I basically talk about the if you like the most famous kind of big picture uh investment approaches that you can take. And the first of those is what somebody like Warren Buffett would describe as the market purest approach, which is basically if you start young enough and do it for long enough, all you need to do is own the stock market. Like you don’t need to complicate things by understanding like bonds, or you know, you don’t need to have any more cash than what you need for like, let’s say the next few months, you just invest in the stock market every month. And if you do that from your 20s, there’s always volatility in the stock market, there’s always risk of a stock market crash. But if you’re buying every month, you smooth that out. And then if you do it for long enough with enough money, by the time you’re you know peting on the brink of retirement, you actually have such a large amount of money, you know, that even if the because I well use it like if you’ve got a million quid when you hit 60 and you want to retire and you have all your money in the stock market and there’s a 50% crash like there was in 99, 2000, 07, 08, 09, which happens every 10 or so years, right? You are now you’ve gone from a million quid to half a million quid, like that’s actually catastrophic, right, for your retirement, or at least it’s immensely emotionally, you know, psycho-emotionally challenging. But if you’re worth 10 million quid and you’re very financially literate, and it goes from 10 million quid to 5 million quid, you can still pay your mortgage and the rent and travel and food. You know, it’s not really going to change your life much. And the point about that example, while it may seem very out of reach for you know most people quite rightly, is it shows that very wealthy people can ride out equity market volatility because it doesn’t actually really affect their actual life. Whereas fairly wealthy people can’t, and mere mortals really can’t. And so the so that’s the so the market purist approach is if you’re quite wealthy or you start early or you’re a very high earner, you can be a market purist, and a lot of very wealthy people just own the market for that reason because you do make higher returns through over time. But the the the other what the next there are only three, by the way, I won’t go on to too long, but the other one is the 6040 portfolio, which was made famous by a couple of Nobel Prize-winning economists in the 60s. Um, and that’s basically 60% the stock market, 40% bonds. And if you just do that, um, and that is specifically that in the US, that’s basically like the S&P 500 and the US 10-year treasury. Um, and if you have that allocation, it just in the past, before we had this crazy low interest rate world of the last few years, when the stock market crashed, your bonds went up because they were negatively correlated. And so that that actually that portfolio performed did about 9.3% from the 60s until uh the early noughties, which is pretty good. I mean, 9.3% will do a great job for you, but with a lower risk than just owning the stock market, because then you the big crashes don’t affect you because of the bonds. But I think the kind of holy grail approach, because that’s stopped working because bonds and stocks are not as correlated, uh negatively correlated anymore because of people’s expertise. I mean, this is where it all gets really complicated, and you want to rem, you know, this stuff’s like you needed a degree in economics to like, oh, uh expectations about interest rates and how’s that gonna affect inflation? How’s that gonna affect the bond price and the bond yield? And most people don’t want to know about any of this stuff, right? Going quite up, neither do I really, to be honest. But um, but but but so the 60-40 was a good thing for like 40 or 50 years, like so many things, and it probably isn’t now, and it probably won’t be for the next 15, 20 years. So the the approach that I talk about um is what we call a hundred minus your age, and it’s actually it’s not our idea, it’s been around since the 40s or 50s, and that is very simply that you think about so you the what you allocate to riskier higher return stuff should be 100 minus your age. So a 30-year-old should so 100 minus 30, they should have about 70% of what they’re investing each month in risky stuff, so that’s basically the stock market, and about 30% in defensive stuff, so that could be cash, bonds, I think gold, but some people disagree. I think gold is defensive personally, but that’s just my view. Um, and if you and then when you you know when that 30-year-old turns 40, they go 60% aggressive, 40% defensive. And obviously, when you’re 70, you go 70% defensive, 30% aggressive. And to me, to me, that’s a really nice, elegant, kind of simple way of thinking about this stuff. And then you only really need you need an aggressive thing and a defensive thing. And if you if you spend enough time learning all this stuff, like you know, what what is a sh what is the stock market, what is the bond market, how do you invest, what is cash as an investment, not just you know, tenors in your wallet, what are commodities in the special case of gold? Um, and then real estate we’ve already talked about. My belief is most people shouldn’t do any more real estate investment because they already have a really big real estate exposure through their own property if they own a property, right? So that shouldn’t come into their investment thoughts. So then it’s really simple. It’s like, you know, basically gold, bonds, and the stock market, and then you just allocate using that hundred minus your age sort of thought process. The only change to that, and I’m this is literally my next video, which has been published this week, um little plug for my YouTube channel, obviously, but is um that a hundred minus your age was invented like in the 40s or 50s when interest rates were higher, and also when life expectancy and retirement age was lower. And so to counteract that, um so basically if interest rates are six percent and the bond bit, the defensive bit of your portfolio is owning six percent, it works. You know, the stock market bit might be doing 10%, the bonds bit’s doing six percent, you’ve got 50-50 allocation or a 40-60 allocation. But with interest rates at 1% or 2%, it you’re that’s a massive drag on your ability to become wealthy, which it goes back to what we were saying earlier, is why so many people have a big propor a disproportionate amount in equities now, particularly like baby boomers. Um, so the way to get around that is just to go 120 minus your age. So because if you’re also if you’re gonna retire at like a lot of knowledge workers, one of my board directors is in his late 70s and he’s still loving it, and he’s still doing all sorts of stuff. You know, there are lots of knowledge workers nowadays who, if you’re lucky enough, carry on working and carry on earning into their 70s or even 80s, um, you know, and lots of rock stars who still seem to be touring and making vast amounts of money. So somebody like that um could should use 120 minus your age, because whilst you’re still earning, you can afford to have more aggressive, more risk on assets. But yeah, so I mean I think the first thing to think about to your point, once you’ve sort of thought about property and everything else, when you get to a point where you can save and invest each month, I think the stock market’s the first thing to think about. Um because over long term, it’s very simply because you know, over decades, it you got the highest chance of making the highest return. Um, and again, caveat it with the fact that you need to do it every month. Because if you do it every month, when there’s a crash, you’re buying cheap every month, obviously. And that’s how you get the the more if you do it for the very long run, and if you do it every month without thinking, don’t look at the news, don’t worry about that stuff. Your returns will get very close to market returns. Oh, sorry about my notifications going off. I thought I’d switch them all off. Um, and market returns are enough, you know, to change people’s lives. And and sadly, you know, like 90% also of British adults don’t have a stocks and shares ISA. So they’re not knowingly or proactively investing in the stock market. They have some stock market exposure in their pension, hopefully, but they don’t know what that is. They’re not thinking about this stuff.

[48:30] Sammie Ellard-King: So did you say 90%? Yeah, something like 90%. Depends on which stats you look at, but that was from Finder. So if not so 90% of people it have no chance at all of making 10% returns because they’re not doing it, they’re not investing, right? And it’s like I said to you earlier so six more than 60% of British adults don’t understand compounding. And that’s why around the same percentage of British adults don’t save and invest, because they don’t understand the life-changing impact that compounding can have, because compounding will turn a few hundred quid over many, many, many years into a seven, a big six-figure or seven-figure sum. And and you know, only the other week I did a podcast interview, which has been viewed like 70,000 times by now, happily, and the number of trolley comments on there going, oh, that’s snake oil, it’s just this guy’s just a liar, you know, it’s like because and it’s just maddening because people just don’t mathematically they don’t understand compounding. And so, you know, I would say, as I said earlier, I think understanding compounding is probably the most important thing to do before everything else when it comes to investing, to get a really visceral idea about just how much potential there is, but but you have to do it for many, many years is the other point to benefit from compounding.

[49:49] Sammie Ellard-King: I completely agree, like that’s my mantra, basically. Trying to get someone to understand that. Every single person that I’ve ever whipped out the compound interest calculator, watching their jaw drop is like my little uh and actually I can’t remember the note. There’s a website called thecompoundcalculator.com or something like that. If you just Google compound, yeah, and it’s like exactly that. You can play with it, you know. I would encourage people to do that. Like go and put in a hundred quid a month at nine percent for force years and see what comes out because it’s tragic, you know, it is. I mean, it would be. That’s where you have a nine percent year and you could uh earn more from that than your entire salary would ever pay you in the 40th year, which is just mind-blowing.

[50:40] Andrew Craig: Yeah, but that but that’s exactly right. And that that’s why you know it goes to my point earlier. I said where everybody should be thinking in terms of you know, the holy grail of investment, which I think sometimes gets lost, is to get to a point where you can live on your money, not on your work, right? That’s the front and and that is called a pension, like in most of the developed world. Um, and we all think pensions are really boring, but you know, a pension is just one of the vehicles you can use to get that outcome. And actually, the best outcome, you know, most people, to your point earlier, by having 60 grand, they’re gonna have to eke that out and rely on their children to help them out or whatever else, or the government, which cannot afford to do it, no matter whether it’s Labour or the Tories, for demographic reasons we talked about earlier. The real holy grail, though, is to be able to get into a position where the yield on your capital is what you can live on. Like I said earlier, when if you’ve got a million quid and interest rates at 8%, you’re gonna make 80, 80 grand a year and without touching the million quid. But at the end of the year, it’s still a million quid. Now, that’s obviously much harder today than it was in the past because interest rates are much lower. Um, but it’s still, you know, there are ways and means to get to a point where you know that optimal outcome is what you want. Um and you’re right.

[52:02] Sammie Ellard-King: And then you’re you’re then getting 5%, and a million quid is 50 grand, and uh still a substantial amount of money. Well, and that’s my that’s my point about the market purist approach, right? Is that so the the SP’s averaged more than 10% for a century, but obviously along the way it’s had minus 30% years and minus 50% 18 month periods like 07, 08, 09, and um 99, 2000.com and 987, right? If you are if your pot is really big and you really understand this stuff and you’re really sort of psychoemotionally robust, you that doesn’t matter because you’re like, well, oh yeah, you know, my my two million is now one and a half million, but you know, I know that the average for the will be around 10%, and I just and I’m only gonna use 80 grand of that this year, and then it will go up back up again. And yeah, that that’s but that does require real of your money.

[52:58] Sammie Ellard-King: You’re not gonna just go and say, Oh, I’m gonna take their 1.5 million out tomorrow and just sit there and go, ha ha ha, look at me, and you know, it’s not the way this works. You know, you leave it in there to do the thing, you draw down the right amount so it continually goes up or doesn’t diminish at such a large scale over a long longer period of time. But but the but the key point about all of this stuff is that people really need to understand these things. And we have, you know, it’s such a small percentage of the population really understand. And I know I always get in trouble for saying this, it’s a slightly controversial thing to say, but I really do believe it that the richest 1% of people in the world nowadays are the most financially literate 1% of people in the world, generally, you know, with exceptions, but go back 500 years, the richest 1% of people in the world were the most violent 1% of people, right? They were the knights who cut the heads off, so or you know, the kings, or you know, and you became, I mean, it kind of makes me laugh. The aristocracy, the whole idea of the aristocracy is like aristocrats are basically people whose ancestors were the most nasty violent people. That’s how they got their land, right? Um, whereas today it’s much, much more meritocratic. You know, there are still bad actors, there are still um dishonest people, whatever, but broad, you know, it’s pretty hard. Like in the city, for example, everyone thinks everybody in the city’s insider trading, and it’s nonsense. Like it in the city, your reputation, you know, if you lose your reputation or you or you get censured by the FCA or you do something illegal and get caught, you’re done. Like you, and and nobody wants to risk that. You’ve got a well-paid job, you’ve got a career. You know, go back 30 years and it was a gentleman’s club, and it was much more like that, and people were inside of trading, but the rules are so strict and the IT systems are so aggressive, monitoring your emails and your phone calls, and you know, and so I think the world is much more meritocratic today, and the missing link is that so few people are taking advantage of that to learn about capital markets.

[54:53] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, but I think that’s changing. Uh yeah, it is, but I mean, we can maybe come on to this, but uh one of the one of the tragedies that I perceive in in you know recent years whilst I’ve been doing this stuff is like right, and I’m not about to be super bearish on crypto. I’m not saying oh crypto’s rubbish, but what I do want to say is that people are getting more interested in finance, and you and I are beneficiaries of that, right? And part of that whole process. But an awful lot of them heed the siren song of supernormal returns, and they go straight past boring old men like me talking about pensions and ISAs and stuff. So, no, no, no, to like sexy crypto um altcoins that are going to make me 2,000% this month, and you know, and that that so that I think is hugely damaging for a lot of people who because I think it’s fine to do all that sort of stuff only after you’ve sorted out the nuts and bolts stuff of the fundamentals of investing in human progress and the real economy, um, which has worked for you know two centuries since we invented this stuff. I like I massively believe that because really volatile assets, you’re just so because of human psychology, you’re just much more likely to lose money in really volatile assets. Um, you know, and you only sing when you’re winning and you don’t actually talk about your losses, and there’s a huge amount of that in crypto, and we all know there is. And crypto is not regulated, so any anybody can stand up and go, you should do this, and I can make you millions of pounds, and without any kind of risk or censure of going to prison or being fined, like those of us in the regulated space have to deal with. So they have a massive competitive advantage of attracting the attention of young people. But more important than than that, actually at a societal level, is the re part of the reason that the London Stock Exchange has lost nearly half of its companies, that I said, you know, at the top of the call, is because 15 billion or whatever, you know, billions of pounds of British investment money has gone into crypto coins in the last you know 10 years that in my my parents’ generation or my grandparents’ generation would have gone into real companies doing real things. And that’s actually really that that’s another the rise of crypto has been massively prejudicial to the real economy, actually, aside from the lucky few who are sitting on a beach in Thailand on their laptops having made, you know, having bought Bitcoin at 400. Well done them, right? But the the negative impact on like 15 billion quid, let’s say, doesn’t sound like very much, but in the context of all the smaller companies, the small software companies, the healthcare companies, the restaurant groups, the so you know, I’ve been at the coal face of small stock market capitalism for 20 plus years, and I can I can tell you from first-hand experience, raising money for smaller companies in the UK in the last sort of 10, 15 years has been is getting harder and harder and harder, and IPOs have ground to a hole. And that’s because of the inexorable rise rise of paths of investment. You know, everybody’s just buying ETFs, nobody wants to buy like smaller company funds, and because of crypto. And that that’s really, really bad for our high streets and not because if you can’t, you know, if you’re an entrepreneur and you want to open a chain of restaurants, like I floated Carluccio’s and LaTasca in a in a job, you know, back in 2005-06. Wonderful businesses, like really exciting to be part of that. Front page of the FT, you know, Antonio Carluccio is you know, it’s become a very kind of it was slightly more exciting back then than than it is now. But anyway, I used to love it. Yeah, well, there you go. It’s just a nice simple sort of plate of past order, but yeah, it’s so much harder today for entrepreneurs to do that because there’s no risk capital because it’s all gone on to crypto and stuff. So sorry, yeah, I’m getting on my soapbox a bit. I’ll be quiet now.

[58:35] Sammie Ellard-King: No, that’s really interesting. You’re the first person I’ve heard say that, to be honest, in terms of it affecting markets as a well, I you know why? It comes back to the biotech. So because I’ve been at the coal face of raising money for biotech companies, you’re seeing it. So they they are the riskiest and smallest, you know. If you’ve got a couple of scientists coming out of Oxford or Cambridge who want to try and cure breast cancer, and they’ve got an idea, go back 20 years and they could potentially raise money in Bitcoin. That’s it. But that and that it’s so they’ve been hardest hitting it. I let me tell you, it it which is why I was, you know, enough of an angry young man to spend three years writing this book, right? Because I this is how much I care about it. We we have retarded scientific progress in the UK and wealth creation in the UK by many years and hundreds of billions of pounds because of all of this stuff. Because basically, British companies they’re dying. Like companies that could be really, really good science. I mean, I’ve got some hair-raising stories about, you know, there was there was a British company that was put into receivership by uh by um Liverpool County Council, which was a very controversial decision. And um they ended up coming out of out of administration. They were, I think they’re the only company to they were quote on the London stock market, they went into administration because this loan that was called that shouldn’t have been called. It was actually just a vindictive individual that did that. Um and then the and then so the the administrators went in and they didn’t have the first idea of how to value a biotech company. They’re like, what is this? And that company managed to sell one of its assets to an American company for $40 million, like whilst they were in the process of administration. And the administrator went, Oh, okay, you’re now solvent and you can go back on the stock market and you’re not going bust because you’ve just made 40 million. Well, wait for this. That asset that they sold for $40 million under duress in a fire sale with people involved who didn’t know anything about biotech basically, that $40 million asset today is valued at about $3 billion, and that’s six or seven years later. Yeah. So the British economy, through abject stupidity and ignorance, lost billions of dollars. And we’ve done it time and time and time again. And we we really, really need to sort this out for because like if you have a couple of trillion dollar companies in this country, that’s like tens of thousands of people being involved, being employed on big fat salaries and paying lots of tax and bit and taking up lab space. And you know, we have we have the best science in the world, we have the NHS, which is an amazing resource for like clinical trials and stuff, and we have a stock market that’s ceased to function, which which is just a huge tragedy. And that that’s a big part of my the theme of my new book, actually. And it’s not just in the UK, by the way.

[61:21] Sammie Ellard-King: I want to I want to get into the book um because I had a lot of fun uh sitting around the pool reading the manuscript. Thank you for that. That was uh uh an absolute pleasure. I would love to know. Kind to read it, mate. Uh you’re allowed because I I was about to say because it’s really boring and it’s a scientific thing, it’s just totally the wrong thing to say when you try to get a people buy your book. It is not at all, it’s plain English, right? That’s the whole point. So, yeah, exactly. Uh it’s extremely well written, uh, we’ll say that. And I I I loved it. And because I’m actually very interested in the space, but I didn’t understand it’s actually how enormous it is, and its role in future society is just absolutely mind-blowing. Where I first got my head into biotech was I came across um it was uh oh god’s the name of the company, Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, seminar about it, and uh the gentleman’s name escapes me while it’s typically James Anderson and Tom Slater. Thank you, thank you. There you go. Talking about food in in Dubai and the creation of meats in a lab, which were like unbelievable wagyu level steaks, but created for the cost of a pint of milk, essentially. Yeah, uh, and some cases they were trying to get that even lower, and that would absolutely revolutionize the food market. Yeah, my ears pricked up, and I was like, Well, I’m going through a like trying not to eat processed food. That sounds incredible. Where does this go? And it led me down this rabbit hole. And so to read the book and then find out that actually biology is going to play probably one of the most pivotal roles in our entire lifetime for the next, I would say, 50 to 100 years.

[63:08] Andrew Craig: Yeah, exactly. I’d love to know where you’ve got to this. Why did you write the book? And could you explain biotechnology perhaps in the simplest of terms for someone who is hearing this for the first time? Yeah, sure. Well, look, and thank you very much. Because um, you know, when you’ve just spent three years slaving away to write a book, it’s nice to be able to talk about it finally rather than just being sort of on your own in your pants in your office trying to you know struggle through the next thousand words. But so look, that’s exactly right. So, what I said earlier on the call is my genuine belief, having spent 10 years focused on the industry and meeting loads of investors and CEOs and you know, investment bankers and everything else. And the last century was about physics and tech, right? You know, like shipping, aviation, automotive, um, silicon, um, mobile phones, internet, blah, blah, blah, right? Transistors, whatever. Um, and that’s created about 10% per annum of equity return for you know in the SP in America and not far off that and a lot of other parts of the world. And the next century will be about biology and biotech. And there’s a very simple reason for that, which is that you create human beings, big picture. We create real wealth by solving actual problems. So, you know, like building, construction, and architecture developed and became multi-multi-billion dollar industries because we needed shelter. It’s something sounds like really obvious, right? Well, you know, the food industry, food retail evolved, agriculture evolved because we need food. Um, you know, so every every single real human need creates a massive market and real wealth as we develop technologically, and whether that’s aeroplanes or sports stadiums or whatever it is, right? Um, and and then the remaining, the most intractable, valuable problems that are left for us to solve are all about biology. So the most obvious ones are those, which you know, with most people, you say the word biotech, this is what they this is where their brain goes, right? Is is therapeutic drugs, is like curing cancer or obesity. You know, everybody knows about Wegovy and Ozempic right now, right? This huge, you know, by the way, Novo Nordisk has gone from a, I don’t know, $40 billion to $400 billion market cap or whatever it is, something like that, you know, in 10 in 10 years. And there’s another great example of real wealth being created by human progress. But um, but so basically, what are the biological problems? Well, curing cancer, actually retarding aging. So we all have, we, you know, today, as a 60-year-old today is as fit and healthy as a 40-year-old was 100 years ago already, like a lot of 60-year-olds, right? Um, goes to my point about you know, people dying at 47, right? Um, you know, even even I remember my grandmother, she seemed much older in her sort of mid-60s than most of the people I know today who are in their mid-60s.

[65:48] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah. The thesis here, which is the second to last chapter of the book, is that health span, not lifespan. So the period of your life where you remain healthy and you can still run and you know, you’re vibrant and agile and you’re not infirm or whatever. We realistically now are looking at that being a but you know, 80 being the new 40, right? Because of all these technologies. So that’s going to create a lot of valuable, you know, that’s a hugely valuable thing, right? So curing cancer, whatever else. But the other problems of biology are environmental degradation. You know, the so all the heavy metals that have leached into our soils, all the microplastics have gone into the marine environment. You know, think of any and every problem that is a front page news right now around the environment and global warming and everything else. The the key to to rolling that back and improving it is all about biotech, right? And and the things the biotech industry are going to be able to do with all of these problems is immensely exciting. And very few people know about that. And then one of the the other one is clean power generation, like, you know, biological technologies to do things like biocote. Uh we might be able to we might be able to grow in culture um photovoltaic cells that to produce solar power, which you can then just slap on like everything, houses, cars, whatever. You know, no, by the way, this is a lot of this stuff is fairly cutting edge and it’s not gonna be here next year, but it probably will be here within 10 to 20 years, right? To your point about cultured meat, environments like revolutionizing agriculture, so that you know, if it then this there’s already a lot of stuff being written about Franken meat. Like, oh, I don’t, you know, I don’t want some steak that’s grown in a lab. But when people really understand that these technologies, that what you’re gonna be eating is not synthetic meat, it is genetically exactly the same as what you would get from slaughtering a pig or a chicken or a cow or whatever else. So but but crucial that’s actually better as well, but with that and it and it could have been grown half a mile up the road. You could have blue fin tuna that’s made in a In a lab, you know, two miles away. And you know, I’m really conscious because I’ve had so much pushback on this before. Oh, that sounds disgusting, but it’s not anywhere near as disgusting as go and look at an industrial-sized, you know, pig farm in the States right now, or you know, Brazilian cattle farming, whatever else. And assuming we achieve this, which I think will happen in between between 10 and 20 years, like really basically agriculture and agriculture. So we will revolutionize the fishing industry so that we’re not just totally destroying our oceans and everything else, and we’ll revolutionize the livestock industry, and you’ll be able to re-wild 90% of the Amazon, which will go a long way to completely revolutionising emissions and global warming, right? Because you get the green lungs of the earth back and the biodiversity and everything else. So there’s that. And then the really crazy science fiction one is um so anybody who knows anything about like computer chips, right? Basically, it’s it’s billions of zeros and ones, little gates on a on a wafer and on a chip, right? And there is a there is a sort of, we’re bumping up against the limits of physics in terms of our ability to so Moore’s law is the fact that processing power per pound or dollar spent doubles every 18 to 24 months, and it’s been going since the steam age. And that’s one of the most important underlying drivers of human progress and wealth creation. We’re beginning to get to a point where we can’t sustain that anymore, which is very worrying for global growth. But biological computers, using, using I mean it sounds completely Star Trek, and it kind of is, but there are already billions of dollars being thrown at this and people work on it. So if you use DNA-based computers, DNA has four bases, not two. So it’s potentially exponentially more powerful. And it this is they could take the torch of Moore’s Law on from transistors and silicon into biology. And if you think about this, an awful lot of the power. I don’t, yeah, sorry, I’m rambling away. You can tell I’ve just spent three years on this stuff, right?

[69:50] Sammie Ellard-King: But so that so the power it’s mind-blowing. Please, please continue. Well, it’s I look, I think it is, which is why I wrote a book about it. But so imagine this like so right now, a huge amount of power in the world is is used for servers, you know, big rooms, blade servers, Amazon um web centers, and everything else. And obviously, one of the big crypto arguments is just how much um power crypto mining uses up. Everybody knows about that stuff, right? Um, and we as human beings, our consumption of electricity is going up, and we all know that that’s problematic, and we’ve got to find renewable sources. Imagine if you could replace all storage technology with a thing, uh basically a biological storage medium, a DNA-based storage medium that’s grown in culture and doesn’t need any power. Because all you’re doing is reconfiguring the cellular structure of the medium to represent data and like exabytes of data, like you know, vast amount, like the whole assembled knowledge of humanity thus far in history, in like something the size of a sugar cube that doesn’t need power and could sit there for a thousand years and be completely stable. Like the yeah, these now this is this is the real cutting-edge stuff, and this is still a few years away, but these are the you know, or or to go back to the more kind of perhaps slightly more more accessible, less science fiction madness, a uh a really cheap oral pill for cancer that cures cancer with no systemic side effects.

[71:20] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah. And these the thing is, these things are definitely you know a few years away still, but conceptually, we’re already kind of have an idea of how we can navigate towards them. And you know, that’s because of the you know, Moore’s Law, the the rapid progress in processing power, a Nobel Prize-winning technology called CRISPR, which is a gene editing. So we can now so that won the Nobel Prize in 2020. Yeah, we can basically edit the stuff of life, and actually, the first CRISPR-derived miracle cure was approved, drug was approved in um October of last year. Actually, the Brits, the MHRA, we approved it first, and the Americans and Europeans approved it at the beginning of this year. They’re using that tech for uh regrowing the first woolly mammoth in some. That’s exactly that’s exactly right.

[72:10] Andrew Craig: Yeah, but it it’s it’s literally Jurassic Park. It’s like the whole thesis of Jurassic Park. We can now, and even you know, when they found was it Richard III that they found in like a car park in Leicester or whatever. Yeah. Um so ver verifying that it was Richard III used these technologies, right? Um, so yeah, so the book covers all of this, and it, you know, it’s basically the sort of three things that I want people to get out of the book. First, that this is the biggest investment opportunity of the next century. Yes. And actually, you don’t you don’t have to become a biotech investor to benefit from that, because just as tech has been the fundamental driver of kind of economic growth in stock market performance in the last century, you can just own the S&P 500 or the MSCI World or like the IBB because all of this stuff’s gonna revolutionize every industry, just like tech revolutionized every industry. You know, food retail uses computers, mining companies use computers, shipping companies use computers, and communications technology, right? So the tech industry lifted all boats, and biotech’s gonna do the same. So, you know, people don’t need to be scared of like, oh, how do I invest in biotech? That sounds really dangerous and risky.

[73:20] Sammie Ellard-King: Um, and they just need a it has been it has been quite risky to pick on. It has, although the the Nasdaq biotech index, which is the main US biotech index, has done, I think I’m right in saying still now, because these figures were correct as of about a month ago when I last looked at it, it was like 14.76% annualised for the last 15 years in sterling terms. Um so there’s lots of volatility along the way, like it’s up, it’s down, but but it’s still spat out like nearly 15% um annualised average. So if you’ve just been buying it for you know 15 years, now I think there’s gonna be a lot more of that. I think biotechs, you know, if you if you do want to think about biotech investments specifically, you know, just be aware that shouldn’t be all of your money. But if you just if you don’t want to go down that rabbit hole, um it it will lift all it will be a tie that lifts all boats across the piece for all the reasons I’m talking about. Um so that’s the first thing. The second thing the book tries to do is to explain how this stuff can benefit you like now in terms of your health and mental health. Because a lot of the a lot of, you know, basically without wanting to be rude about clinicians in any shape or form because it’s super important, doctors and everything else, but they’re so busy being doctors. I don’t think a lot of in a lot of parts of the world, and certainly in the developing world, right, the the habits and behaviours of healthcare systems are quite a few years behind what best practice is. And there’s a section in the book about why that happens, like you know, the new technology discovered in Osaka, Japan, it will take 30 years before that operation is in Newcastle or Glasgow. I mean, like it’s not two or three years, it’s 30 years. And I explain why that is. But if you’re if you’re able to be more knowledgeable about this stuff, it can be really helpful for your health and mental health and getting best outcomes for your own personal health. And then the third thing I want people to get out of the book is I say nothing less than a sunnier disposition. It’s like one of the best things about this stuff is it just makes you think the world is so much better than most people think it is at the moment. Because the news just tells us the 0.1% of terrible things that happen every day. And it’s, you know, I it’s funny, uh, one of my mates is a BBC newsreader, and I sometimes I slightly cheekily text him when I’ve heard him just read the news. And I go, I go, death, war, disease, war, war, rape, prison. And I just like take that’s what you just talked about for the last 20 minutes, and then he goes, ha ha and sends me a smiley face. But it it really isn’t, you know, miracle cure. I mean, like childhood leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, LL, right? Is the great Ormond Street poster child, you know, poor little girl with a shaved head and an oxygen thing up her nose. You know, and we all most of us know people who’ve lost, you know, family members or whatever to things like leukemia, right? There’s a drug that now has more than an 85% remission rate, i.e., it’s but almost an effective cure for pediatric leukemia, for childhood leukemia. It’s a Novartis drug called Kymriah. It was approved in 2017. Nobody knows this stuff. Like we actually have now the the problem is Well, you don’t, but in particular in Britain, so that drug, its original list price was $475,000 a dose, but it had to be because the original ingredients for it cost a couple of million dollars a dose. So Novartis was hemorrhaging money by making the drug available for every dose it sold until actually a British company managed to get the cost of manufacture down 10x, and actually they reckon they’ll get it down another 10x. So that’s the other thing. You know, people are very cynical about like bad pharma and you know, evil pharmaceutical companies. And there are bad actors in any walk of life, you know. I don’t think evil pharmaceutical companies are as bad an actor as like they want something to blame, don’t they? Quite at the end of the day. But but you know, when aeroplanes were first invented, they were so expensive that basically only royalty and the aristocracy or Hollywood movie stars could go anywhere on an airplane. When TVs were first invented in the 50s, only very wealthy people could afford them. They were like a year’s salary.

[77:32] Sammie Ellard-King: Um yeah, absolutely. And that that’s because all of the you know, innovation is really expensive. Um, but this is a big part of the thesis in the book is that a lot of these miracle cures they exist, and we don’t know about them because they’re not available on the NHS because they’re too expensive. But given another five to ten years, and you know, they’re not gonna be as common as like paracetamol, but they’ll be moving in that direction. And I and I think more people need to know about this stuff and be excited about it and be supportive of these companies, you know? Well, that was what my main takeaway was from the book. I felt kind of um lease of life is re-injected back in, and I think that’s really important for people to have right now because we’re being sold this, you know, race riots, these things happening over here, war, world war three, Ukraine, global warming, all of these types of things, but then we forget about all of the good that people are doing to cure it on the other side of it.

[78:33] Andrew Craig: It’s a well-known human cognitive bias, an imperfection in our psychology and how our brains work, right? Which is a thing called the hedonic treadmill, which is basically humans who actually it it serves us quite well because basically we adjust emotionally and take for granted both good and bad things. So, you know, classic examples is like Viktor Frankl wrote this amazing book, Man’s Search for Meaning. He was in Auschwitz in the prison camp, um, and he was a top psychologist. And he talks about how basically the strongest people could just adjust, like they’re the worst possible human experience, probably in history, you know, apart from people, you know, being flayed and tribal tribal warfare, going back a thousand years or whatever, but being in a concentration camp, and they actually adjusted to it, but but that but so that’s why it serves us as a psychological bias in the way our brains work. But we do it the other way, which is that we adjust to incredibly positive developments very quickly and then take them totally for granted. And so the the prism, and so you know, there’s some survey, um, you know, Hans Rosling wrote this book called Factfulness: 10 Reasons Why You’re Wrong About the World. And one of the opening bits of that is talks about how um basically, like when surveyed, 4% of British people think the world’s getting better, 3% of Swedish people, and like 6% of American people. Ironically, 60% of Nigerians and 60% of Kenyans think the world’s getting better, even though our material circumstances are somewhat and it’s and it’s because of this hedonic adjustment thing. First, because we watched the news, which is factually a completely distorted, you know, Elon Musk, a great Elon Musk quote. I’m not I’m no Elon Musk fanboy, but I think this is a really good quote. He says, the news tries to answer the question, what is the worst thing that happened on Earth today? And that’s what we consume, and that’s what we think. The world that so but but it’s that’s actually not the reality. That’s a tiny little sliver of the worst stuff. But so so we all think the world’s much worse than it is, and because of the hedonic adjustment, we have all adjusted to the fact that most of us have abundant food, the fact that we can go and watch a sports team in a massive stadium at the weekend, the fact that we met most of us go on, or many of us go on foreign holidays that our grandparents couldn’t have dreamt about, you know, all of this stuff. We the fact that you’ve got an iPhone, I can call my mate in Australia for free and have a video call with him. If you said to somebody in the 1960s that that would be, they’d be like, that’s like something out of Star Trek, that’s never gonna happen. Yeah, gonna write a letter, yeah. Yeah, but we all but we all take all of this exceptional and the the antidote to that, by the way, is which I try to do a lot is if you’re a student of history, is to really, really contemplate how terrible the human experience was from about I mean, you even go back to 1900, obviously, Second World War, First World War, that was pretty awful for a lot of people. But 18, you know, 1800, 90% of people lived in poverty and didn’t know where they’re gonna get their next 90% of people, 90% of people are illiterate, some huge percentage of children died before their fifth birthday. So we shouldn’t compare, we shouldn’t go, oh, you know, everybody’s like the world’s the worst it’s ever been. But it’s actually not if you compare it to every other age of man. And so, yeah, that was sorry, that’s you know, I obviously feel quite passionate about this because it because it’s a big part of the mental health epidemic we have, which by the way, biotech businesses are really well placed to sort out, um, which is another theme in the book. Um, it not with drugs, by the way, with with apps and uh longer run changes to our habits and diet and nutrition and everything else. But um, you know, the the the a big part of that is because of this these psychological biases, you know. We have the best material circumstances of any age of man and we’re the least happy. Like there’s you know, that’s but that’s kind of a theme in the book. Why is that and what can we do about it, right? Wow, so it’s not I think I’ve literally just shouted at you for like 20 minutes.

[82:36] Sammie Ellard-King: I it honestly, Andrew, it blows my mind, and so that’s why I think it’s really important people read this book because it’s just like one of those idea like people need to know this stuff, they just need to know it. It’s need to know one, it’s that is even possible because there’s some of the things in there, it’s like, oh, like wow, they’re even thinking about that. That is Star Trek, you know, or they’re doing it, or they or they’re already like they basically could childhood leukemia. We have just yeah, sickle cell anemia is this awful disease that you know African and African um American folks are pre genetically predisposed to getting. It’s horrendous. If you read the personal accounts of people who’ve suffered from sickle cell anemia, the first CRISPR gene editing approved drug that the I was talking about earlier, the British approved, is basically an almost total, it’s a once and done, one injection or one treatment, I should say, and then you’re cured for life of this horrendous genetic disease. And it’s one of there are 10, there are roughly 10,000 diseases that we suffer from as a species that are caused by the uh one single genetic default, like a single gene that has a problem. And we now have a technology where theoretically we can cure all 10,000 of those diseases. And when the first cab off the rank was sickle cell anemia, actually, the second was beta thalassemia. Those are those technologies that’s done, it exists. So it’s like, but it’s not, I mean, I don’t know. If you Google it, you’ll find a couple of articles about it. But it wasn’t like top of the news bulletin, was it? It wasn’t like most people don’t know this stuff, it doesn’t make it into the news.

[84:09] Sammie Ellard-King: What do you feel like the role of AI has in conjunction with biotech? Is it a massive driver of this? It it is, and the reason for that is the sheer complexity. So one of the bits I talk about in the book is you couldn’t do any of the stuff we’re doing right now without a really, really advanced diagnostic technology called called NGS, next generation sequencing. Okay. Is that is that similar to quantum computing in a way? No, so so NGS basically reads down to the genetic code, the genome. Oh I mean, it’s so so the so the so in in about what was in it was it was 2000, 2001, we first read the genetic code of a human being. It was the human genome project, and it’s estimated it cost between three and five billion dollars, and it took 13 years, right? We now there are companies that can read the human genome in an hour for $200. That that is how that’s and they’re like I get sold the adverts all the time.

[85:11] Sammie Ellard-King: We’d say we’ll sell what you have. Yeah, 23andMe and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean but the point is that so basically you’ve got six billion data points when you read a human genome, or th between three and six billion, depending on what you’re talking about. And um, so it’s through to call it three billion, right? So every time you do a next generation sequence, you do a you do a genetic you read a genome, you’ve got three billion bytes of data, basically. So that that is now so we everybody knows what a um a megabyte is, a gigabyte, a terabyte, you know, a petabyte, a exabyte, a yotabyte. So the amount of data we have now from all these genomic analyses is insane. And and I also make the point like in the if you think about the second world war, when there was all this advance that’s being made in rocket technology, and you know, actually an amazing amount of technological scientific advances were made in the Second World War because the warring nations had all these crack teams like you know the bouncing bombs and Alan Turing and and whatever else. But what they weren’t doing was collaborating. Like Japanese and German and British and American scientists were not collaborating, they were like, you know, in a big bunker with the SAS trying to, you know, whatever else. But so I don’t think the SAS existed then, did they? But anyway, I’m slightly ahead of myself. But they were on the verge of existing.

[86:35] Sammie Ellard-King: They were doing uh in the north of Africa, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, what a great show that is. But yeah, that’s a good show. Yeah. Sorry, I’m losing my voice by virtue of babbling away. But um, but the point is now you’ve got scientists all over the world making genomic um academic papers public domain. Because there’s because if you read a genetic code of an animal or a human being or a plant or a fungus, unless you can then compare it to all the studies that say, okay, well, see the see the 2 billion, 300,000th letter there is that, that means that this person’s gonna get sickle cell anemia. That that one genetic change, so that’s incredibly complicated. And so the only way that these NGS machines can actually work is by crawling and gathering in data from tens of thousands of academic papers. That every so if somebody’s like, okay, triple negative breast cancer has the following genetic makeup and is caused by this, only once that those scientists in Osaka or Munich or Stockholm or whatever have uploaded that data. So the point is that AI, sorry, I’ve it’s taken me 10 minutes to answer your question as usual, but AI, we need AI to give us and machine learning and algorithmic stuff to be able to go into these data sets of like billions upon billions upon billions of data points from these scans, and then go, okay, we can compare that to the piece written in uh 2007 from Nashville University about such and such a disease, and now we know that that genetic. So that’s why it it’s basically we we this the it the reason it’s so exciting is because all these convergent technologies all happening in parallel at the same time, and if any one of them, they’re all legs of a stool, and if we didn’t have any one of them, if we didn’t have big data and amazing high broad, you know, super high-speed broadband, like you couldn’t Jennifer Doudna, sorry, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, who won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for that CRISPR technology, talk about how they were using like Skype, WhatsApp, email to share massive files across nine time zones, you know, with uh somebody in Barcelona and somebody in Stockholm. Like compare that to like even 20 years ago. You couldn’t you couldn’t share a massive file from a mobile phone to your colleague in another country to give them so they could give you their input for free on a Skype call the following morning, right? Like so it’s all these things in parallel that are creating this like amazingly fertile ground for big leaps forward technologically. And that’s what I wanted to capture in the book.

[89:20] Sammie Ellard-King: Oh, I think you’ve done a fantastic job. And I think I suppose my kind of the last question really is is someone listening to this and going, you know, how can I get more involved in this biotech revolution? Like, whether that’s through an investment opportunity or a career opportunity or from other means, like what’s your kind of viewpoint on like younger generations getting more more active with biotech? Yeah, well, it’s it’s a great question. I mean, so actually, um my chairman’s son’s mate, which sounds a bit nepotistic, but I don’t really care. He’s just done his A levels and he’s already written a scientific paper on uh fungus and how it affects cancer. I mean, just amazing, right? Really bright guy. And you know, I was really delighted because he he is he wants to get his PhD and blah blah blah and so I’d encourage more young people need to be studying sciences. I mean I it’s funny, my dad would laugh at me because I did economics and he wanted me to study sciences, and I was like, oh I don’t I don’t really like chemistry and whatever else. Um so so I’m not I’m I’m not eating my own cooking, as they say. But I you know the biotech industry like is going to create a lot of millionaires, right? So if you you know it it’s probably a really good place to think about if you’re a young person, you’ll be deep, you know, if you combine a little bit of knowledge of financial markets and a lot of knowledge about science, you’re probably going to be have a very, very well paid and successful career because there’s gonna be trillions of pounds and dollars going after this sector and into this sector. So that’s the first thing. And then what can we all do about it? Well, as you know, I I’m a big believer in simplifying things as much as possible when it comes to helping people with their finances. So I always just say, like, just buy you know the MSCI world, like you know, so I understand stock market investment, buy a big global equity index, you have that exposure. But one of the things I’m gonna be writing about in the next few weeks and months and doing videos about is if you’re a bit older and you have a bit more money and you’re British, and dare I say you care about Britain, like you’re quite proud of Britain and you want to help the British economy, you like if you’ve squared away a big S&P 500 or an MSCI World and you’ve got that all and you’ve now got quite a big pot and you’re quite wealthy and you’re maybe a high earner, invest in some biotech funds and some smaller company funds to support this country’s economy. Don’t invest in crypto, and don’t you know, or at least, but at least have because not many people know this. So um professors um Elroy Dimson and Paul Marsh at the London Business School have been studying the smallest companies in the London Stock Exchange going back to 1955, and the average annualised return in that time is about fit between 15 and 16% per annum on average of the UK small cap scene. It’s been absolutely disastrous for the last two or three years because of all the things I’ve just said, the demise of the London Stock Exchange companies can’t float, all the money’s gone into crypto and S&P 500 ETFs. But it’s like the dark, you know, the the what’s that, the last mile of the marathon’s the hardest, the darkest hours before the hour before the dawn. You know, if the record of history rhymes, right? So I I think that you know, biotech’s got a huge structural opportunity ahead of it and could be like a low to mid-teens kind of opportunity, whereas big stock markets are kind of nine, 10% if you’re lucky, um, with volatility. So you can’t just buy some today and expect to sell it next year and guarantee that you make 15%. Let’s be clear. Andrew said, Yeah, exactly. It’s not financial advice, but um but I think on a you know, any equity investment should be at least for 10 years, right? And ideally every month. So but I people want to, you know, I I think from the vantage point of 10 years from now, I’ll be amazed if smaller companies and biotech funds haven’t averaged supernormal returns for all the reasons I set out in my book. Like that’s just my belief. Um, and I could very well be wrong, but you know, I’m that that’s there are a lot everything we’ve just talked about is gonna create quite a lot of value, right?

[93:18] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, 100%, 100%. Uh it can’t not, can it? Let’s be honest. There’s like unless that someone royally F something up, or usually it’s just delayed by some sort of clinical trial, and there’s the right thing. But bigger, I mean bigger picture, the I think the biggest sort of structural challenge to what I’m saying, which is why my first port of call is to say, look, just own a big global index, is yeah, might it be Google, Apple, Microsoft, and those breakthroughs. They are, you know, it’s those massive tech companies that could well dominate biotech as well, because they’ve got such impressive people and so much money. But then again, the record of history is actually that’s not what happens at the coal face of innovation. It’s ironically, in 20 years, we might be looking at those companies going, wow, they turned into like Nokia. You know, Nokia was the best mobile phone company in the world, valued at 200 billion euros, and now it’s valued at like 90% less than that, and Apple ate their lunch, right? Yeah, and it’ll be very interesting because I I think that realistically there’s gonna be three or four or five trillion dollar biotech companies 10 years from now that we’ve never heard of right now. And I hope that one or two of them are British because our science is so good, and if we can just sort our, you know, sort what’s the expression, sort our arse from our elbow. That’s not the wrong one, but if we can just get our shit together, if I’ll if you’ll allow me to say that. Um, as a country, um, actually, a bunch of um really well-known city biotech analysts um wrote a letter to the government yesterday that was they published on LinkedIn, which maybe I could share for the show notes, which is like these are the problems, this is what’s going on. Um, but but you know, yeah, it would be by rights. We you AstraZeneca is like a 200 billion dollar company. I can’t remember what the market cap of Glaxo is, it’s probably 100 billion or thereabouts, haven’t looked for a while because I look at smaller companies, but um we should have a $1 trillion or pound biotech company in in the London Stock Exchange in 10 years or so. And if we don’t, it we’ve only got ourselves to blame. That’s my view.

[95:24] Sammie Ellard-King: Well, fingers crossed we get there, and honestly, I can’t recommend the book enough. Um can’t wait to finish it. I’ve got a few chapters left. And uh honestly, if you haven’t read How to Own the World as well, like that’s a really great place to start. I kind of liken it to the first book I ever read about investing, which is like a simple path to wealth with J.L. Collins. It’s just very simple to understand and read and follow, and and action, which is really, really important. And the new book is fantastic as well. All of those writing in the show notes. I really appreciate that, mate. Obviously, it’s some you there’s some dark times writing a book, I can tell you. It’s it’s like oh you get stuck. Yeah, I I have been thinking about it myself. I’d love to, um, but it’s like, how long do I want to sit in a room for?

[96:10] Andrew Craig: Really? I don’t know yet. So well, it’s you know, some some days you literally 3,000 words just flows out of you by lunchtime, and other days you you literally spend like two hours and you’re just tearing your hair out because where do I go next? And anyway. Well, uh the thing is I’ve got I’ve probably got it all because we’ve got about 400 free guides on the website, and some of them are like four or five thousand worders, and it’s so it’s all there, it’s just like putting it all together and actually making it fun to read rather than uh well I look I very much look for I will re I will read your book as soon as you get ready. Yeah, we’ll see. It’s the least I can do. Yeah, lit yeah, uh watch this space, as we say. But um, yeah, all those links to Andrew’s books will be in the show notes below. Um but Andrew, is there anywhere where else you want to send anybody as well? Well, I mean uh yeah, the webs our website is plainenglishfinance.com or plaenenglishfinance.co.uk, they both work, and then our YouTube channel is if you search Andrew Craig or Plain English Finance, uh you should find our YouTube channel. We only started it a few months ago. Um, but I’m you know putting up something up there every fortnight and it’s it’s growing very nicely, and people seem to like the stuff. And you know, I I know that a lot of people prefer video to um to the written words, so you know it’s kind of you can you can have it any it’s like the Henry Ford or you know you can have it anywhere. Oh no, he received it on it. I’ll shut up because he was exactly opposite. He was like, you can have any colour you want as long as it’s black. I’m the opposite of that. You can have it as video or prose. God, I fumbled the ball there, didn’t I?

[97:34] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s right. We we we got uh one out of you know 90 minutes of goodness out of you. So uh thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure. Just about apart from my well, I think you’re gonna cut it, but um my four-year-old uh screaming daddy in the background. But I obviously mate, I’ve loved this, and uh I’ll I feel like I could just talk and listen to you talk about this for ages. I’m just so passionate about it, and it’s just uh it’s incredible to see in the work you’re doing and helping other people learn about this type of stuff and and from investing to biotech is is is you know amazing, mate. So that’s thank you very much. I really appreciate it, Sammie. Thank you.