Andrew Craig: How to Actually Fix the UK Economy (And Position Your Money For It)

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

[00:00] Andrew Craig: They’re increasingly shown that money doesn’t make you happy is bullshit, by the way. Being fucking poor makes you very unhappy, right? And so and the solution to that is knowing a little bit about finance. Learning how to drive your finances effectively and change your life is no harder than learning how to drive a car. I actually want to talk about biotech. Biotech’s revolutionising agriculture and dairy and cheese and it’s not just drugs, right? There’s a cancer drug that basically has cured childhood leukemia. Fact. Yeah, but it’s ridiculously expensive. It’s $475,000 a dose. But the but they’ve gone from like X millions of dollars a dose for this thing to tens of thousands of dollars a dose. Stands to the reason ten years from now it’ll be like two or three grand a dose, and then children in Nigeria or India or Pakistan will be able to have a treatment for leukemia. Yeah. And the only way these companies can achieve that, just as with the TV becoming cheap or airplanes become cheap, it’s technology and crucially making a friggin’ profit. Let’s talk about just quickly the difference between investing and trading. They’re completely different things. Trading’s really tough. It’s uh you’re much more likely to lose money, it’s far more time consuming.

[00:59] Sammie Ellard-King: I just say think in decades. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And if the market goes down, carry on fucking buying because that’s what’s gonna make you wealthy. Totally. Welcome back to the Money Gains podcast. This week, back on the show, we have one of our most loved guests, and that is best-selling personal finance author Andrew Craig, who is joining us to discuss all things the UK economy. After the recent budget from Rachel Reeves, there has been, shall we say, some fire in the streets, and we are going to be putting the world to rights in this conversation. We also discussed the future of the stock market as well and what is going to change the world in biotechnology with his new book, Our Future is Biotech. I absolutely love talking to Andrew, and this is a proper deep dive into the UK economy, but also the global economy as well. You guys are gonna love it. So stay tuned and let’s get started on the Money Gains Podcast.

[01:52] Sammie Ellard-King: The Money Gains Podcast! So, Andrew, welcome back to the Money Gains Podcast. It’s been amazing to be back, really good. And I can’t believe it’s what literally what two months since we did your episode, it was a hit. Like people were clamouring for more. I had multiple messages. Well, mate, I’m very honoured because every time I get invited back quite quickly after the first one, I always feel a bit self-conscious that you know you shouldn’t have me on again yet. What are we going to talk about today? Well, yeah, and there’s that as well. So all my nonsense came out last time. And what the thing is, when I meet people like you, I know that I can talk to you for hours. And it’s like we get geeky over the same sort of thing. We do get very geeky. Whether it’s whether it’s any good or not is obviously the question, but fingers crossed. Well, it’s having getting multiple views and lots of lots of people liking it, so obviously it means one good thing. But um, I wanted to steer this conversation, I want to get straight into it. And obviously, if anybody wants to go back and listen to that episode, it’s about 10 episodes back. Um, it’s called This One Investment Will Change the World. And it was very much about your your book as well, Our Future is Biotech that we’ll get onto as of course today. But I think the way I’d love to steer this conversation is something that you’ve been talking about quite a lot recently, and that’s kind of very much on the UK.

[03:01] Andrew Craig: The bad news. So Our Future is Biotech. Like the world’s gonna be amazing, we’re all gonna be really wealthy and healthy and live for years. But the bad news is Britain is awful. Yeah, yeah. And how do you feel things have been going at the moment? Well, it’s so uh uh sorry, it sounds slightly pretentious thing to say, but I was honored to contribute my first guest article to the Telegraph last week. Nice, congrats. Which is yeah, thank you. It was really cool, actually. It’s gone super viral, it’s had like 800 and something comments in three days. So it’s yeah, um, it it’s been a hit, and hopefully I’ll that means I’ll get to do a few more articles. But uh it was it was a pretty punchy um title to the article, which was something along the lines of Rachel Reeves’s economic um incompetence is mind-blowing, or something, which to be fair to me, the Telegraph chose, um, and then they toned it down a bit. I can’t remember what it is now, but but on that point, I mean, I did a specific piece about you know, it just I find it absolutely bewildering that we have politicians, and to be clear, this isn’t party political. I mean, it kind of is de facto because they’re the Labour Party, but the Tories have been j awful as well, like just dreadful. The lack of economic literacy and the damage that’s wreaking in our country. But on that, specifically, because obviously catalyzed by the budget at the end of October, is like, how is it possible for anybody who’s been a student of economics in different countries and nation states for the last frankly century, but let’s just dwell on the last few decades, to think that what she’s just done with national insurance contributions is going to do anything. The only growth that that’s gonna engender will be in unemployment, insolvencies, and welfare costs, you know, higher unemployment, bigger welfare costs. And the proof’s already in the pudding in that, you know, like last month was the second highest borrowing month ever in history since record began from the government with 17.2 billion quid or whatever. September was not far below that. So, you know, already now the the the Labour Party is running, their borrowing levels are running way, way ahead of all the nonsense forecasts that they spew out, or whoever, you know, whichever organization you’re talking about. And it’s just like, you know, in the 60s, JFK reduced income tax and tax receipts, like the amount of tax they got from people, went up massive. Yep. In the 80s, Ronald Reagan did the same thing. George Osborne um put so Labour put the income tax rate up to 50% in the whatever it was, early noughties, late 90s, tax revenues fell, and then George Osborne put it back from 50% to 45%. Tax revenues went up. Corporation tax went from 28% to 19% over 10 years from sort of 2010 onwards. We made billions more tax. And this whole like it’s really nuts to me that you can have a chancellor of the exchequer who doesn’t understand the difference between tax rate and tax take. Because actually, what I always come back to with all of this stuff, genuinely, is what is the best possible outcome for the biggest number of people, right? When you’re making policy, what you want is as many people as possible, live the best life possible. You know, you want your NHS, you want everything paid for. And if there’s like decades of evidence that what you’re doing is just completely wrong, and it’s going to engender a terrible outcome, like whatever your political persuasion, like don’t do it. And that’s actually I finished the article with saying that the biggest irony about this, these, you know, what the government’s doing at the moment is that the people who will be harmed most, without you know, factually, like you might look at me and think I’m a Tory, I’m not at all. Like I’ve I’ve taken, you know, I’m given up on all politicians in this country because they’re all so incompetent. But you know, it’s the it’s the least fortunate in society that bear the brunt of a cost of living crisis, right? Because if you know, if eggs and bread and milk and pasta and everything go through the roof and energy costs go through the roof, rich people, it’s annoying, but it’s not that big a deal. Exactly.

[06:43] Sammie Ellard-King: They’re not going to stop shopping at weight trades. Yeah, exactly. Um, and or or or they can downsize to Aldi, you know, if it’s getting if it’s getting bad, exactly. You can do that in Fleet, where we both live. But um, but in all seriousness, it’s you know, that’s how I signed off that article. It’s like what I find so unbelievable is that the Labour Party was founded to represent working people and the least fortunate in our society. And it’s nuts that you’ve got a situation where anybody who’s vaguely economically literate will tell you that what they’ve just done is gonna be ruinous to millions of people. It’s gonna like 80% of pubs in Britain are now loss making. Yeah, I know. 80% of but like restaurant, every single hotel group in the country is coming out up in arms saying we’re screwed, you know, like the whole hospitality. But we raised beer tax by lost beer tax by one pence.

[07:28] Andrew Craig: But how they can’t see that the net result of that is gonna be hundreds of thousands more people out work, high streets, you know, tumbleweed high streets up and down the country, right? Of basically like because if you think about it, like in a really small uh high street, pubs are quite an important part of the community and the economy, right? You know, you’ve got a betting shop nowadays, you’ve got loads of charity shops and a betting shop and some hair hair barber shops or whatever, but the pub was the kind of epicentre of a lot of communities, particularly in rural communities. Definitely. So if a pub goes and your post office is gone and the bus routes not going, you know, this this stuff, I mean, and yeah, I don’t want to go on. You’ve got me straight onto my high horse, but I just I find it so depressing at the moment because it’s like it’s just a no-brainer. All these decisions have been taken are so bad for Britain, and it’s just made you know, I can’t remember if we talked about this last time, but you know, the the most and by the way, this is the Tories for because the Tories have been cocking it up for you know the previous 14 years anyway. But the but the for me, the most important metric that we you know, if you want to acknowledge there is a problem rather than this self-serving, am I allowed to swear on this one? Please do self-serving bullshit that no, it’s great and Britain’s really great, and we’re a tech superpower, it’s just complete bullshit, right? No, agreed. And the evidence, the the biggest evidentiary point is GDB per capita in Britain today is is about 45,000, 46,000 US dollars per capita, right? Sort of average incomes, which is roughly the same as what it was 30 years ago. Yeah, right.

[08:57] Sammie Ellard-King: We’ve been slowly creeping down that. Well, in real, and actually, if you take the richest 1% out, all the people who are leaving at the moment, by the way, which we can come back to perhaps, which does matter, no matter if you want to hate the rich and vilify the rich, you know, if if people who pay hundreds of billions of dollars and create all the the jobs leave to go to Dubai or whatever, that’s a serious problem for people who are left. But the point I wanted to make is that, you know, again, this is not I’m not like pulling these figures out of the um out of my proverbial, but like Ireland is twice as rich as us per capita now, depending on how how you account for purchasing power power parity. America’s just way wealthy, you know, like $75,000, $80,000 per capita instead of our 45. Yeah. Singapore, Australia, South Korea, like Poland is going to be richer than us soon. The Czech Republic is going to be richer than us soon. It’s absolutely nuts, right? And Winston Churchill and the great founders of Empire must be turning their graves to see what we’re doing. And it’s and the real frustration to me is that it is and it’s funny because I’ve never held myself out as as a as somebody who speaks about politics. That’s not my that’s not my thing, right? Maybe you speak about financial matters, which is and it does bleed over to politics because it’s sort of like like I guess my mission more than anything else, as I went back to, you know, the reason I’ve been so mission-driven about trying to improve the financial affairs and the financial literacy of as many people as possible is because I see it as a silver bullet for a better society. Absolutely. I mean, I yeah, we resonate with that, but like you know, you if you had a few million more people in Britain understand what’s in my book, you know, all available on Amazon, etc. etc. nonsense. But you know, in all seriousness, if you have like there there’s there’s a stat um that was from a survey about a year ago that said something like 14.6 million British adults are really challenged economically, which is all part and part of parcel of this, and it creates a long road back. And it’s and and we’re doing 180 degrees the wrong, the opposite of what we should be doing if we want to sort that out. Completely agree. And that number’s gonna get worse, but but and I and uh the point I wanted to make is I think for a lot of those people, you know, there’s gonna have to be a really, really big sea change over 10 plus years to for for for that for them to be helped back into kind of being abundant and affluent and having a better life. Yeah. But that doesn’t change. So my mission then is focused on let’s say there’s like five million fairly rich people in the country, you know, 50 million British adults, say 10% of them are actually pretty, you know, not doing too badly and pretty well set up and fairly financially literate. And that corresponds roughly to the number of people who have stocks and shares ISA, which I always go back to. It’s actually a bit less than five million, but just call it that. My focus is the millions of people in the middle, because there are there are there are literally tens of millions of people in this country.

[11:35] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, how do we slip start them slipping? Well, no, but if they just have basic financial literacy and took a set of relatively simple steps that we have obviously talked about, and you’re an expert on, and you talk about and everything you do, stuff that’s kind of obvious to you, and it’s obvious to me, and I’ve written books about it and stuff, but it’s still not obvious to, you know, it’s still information that most people aren’t conversant with. But but if if a few tens of millions more people understood this stuff and took it on board, the outcome for those people is life-changing. Yeah. And I and I can see that it takes years. It does not you can’t just do something and the next year your life will be better. This is something that is a real slow burn, which is part of the problem, why it’s hard for people, you know, a lot of people can’t take that on board. But bigger picture, and I came looking at the wrong way around, but my broad point was going to be if you have many millions of people who do that, British society is much better. You know, why is Singapore so rich? Because they’ve all got massive pension funds. Why is Australia so rich? Why is Norway so rich? Because they’ve done an incredibly good job with their financial affairs and their capital markets for like since the 80s, and in Singapore’s case, since the 60s. The people in Singapore are more than twice as wealthy as we are. And by the way, Singapore was as poor as a sub-Saharan African country at the end of the Second World War. So was South Korea, so was Taiwan. Today they’re much, much richer than us. Now, is that some strange is that aliens from out of space just gifting them loads of no, it’s policy, yeah, it’s good policy, right? And that’s what makes me so angry, is we now have a political class going back to being political again. And as I say, I’m not party political. The Tories were an unmitigated disaster. I think Blair and Brown were an unmitigated disaster.

[13:09] Sammie Ellard-King: I think probably John Major, I now sound like I’m a Tory, but Well, he’s possibly the last stable prime minister, right? The last true state I saw him present actually at an event in Whopping a few weeks ago, and he was unbelievably impressive. And just I still find him extremely impressive. And I think he got about because I don’t know if you you might this sounds really patronising thing to say, but maybe you’re too young for spitting image. Do you remember spitting image? No. No, there you go. I was I was right. So it was this crazy comedy show with sort of rubber puppets. That was a huge hit in like the 80s, and they basically had a really, really they really had it in for um John Major and they made him into this that he was all painted grey and he’s like this. All right. And so I think that kind of slightly torpedoed his screen. It’s a bit like um, do you ever watch Bo Selector? Oh yeah. So um to what they’ve done to Craig David. Craig David, uh yeah, Craig David was not allowing Bo Steve, nor um Chris Martin, it’s a run-around running around with clocks going on, but yeah, go wow, it’s slightly going off piece there.

[14:03] Sammie Ellard-King: But no, but it like I think what you’re trying to say is that like essentially they had a chance to in this budget, I think, to like rectify it, right? And that what they didn’t do is they went completely. I think for me it was like a PR-lauded win. Yeah, yeah, there was a big so everybody I know in the city, like senior city professionals are basically expecting what they thought was happening, which companies do a lot. So like when companies announce their results, that they kind of have all the financial analysts that write about them sort of bring their numbers down and so they can do a positive surprise, and then the share price reacts positively. And it’s this idea that you should always kind of underpromise and over-deliver, and then you get a disproportionately positive result from doing that, right? Um, because it’s all kind of you know, momentum and everything feel good and everything, and that sort of those animal spirits play into how the economy can function at the level of the economy rather than say a company. And and so the sense was that you know, there was all this nervousness about capital gains and inheritance tax, and blah, blah, blah. What was she gonna do? And it’s labor and it’s gonna be a disaster, it’s gonna destroy the economy. Yeah.

[15:08] Sammie Ellard-King: I mean some of the WhatsApp chats were incredible. 100%. And but everybody kind of expected, now what’s actually gonna happen is she’s gonna stand up and it’s gonna be really quite sensible, and everyone’s going, okay, awesome. And there’ll be a big big relief rally, you know, billi the pound will go up, um, gilts will be steady, and like billions of pounds will flow into UK equities, and off we go, and everything’s better again. And it wasn’t that, it was a complete catastrophe. And it’s like it’s just mind-blowing. That’s why I had to write such a cheeky article for the telegraph last week. What’s astounded me most about it was that I saw to the average GP practice was an extra £50,000 a year in cost, yeah. Which is directly.

[16:28] Andrew Craig: Well, so I literally wrote in that article, and I forget the name of the guy, he’s the chairman of the British Medical Association, because I said something like, When uh Rachel Reeves stood up in Parliament, it seemed to me, because she was challenged by, I guess, the Tories, it must have been, they said, Do you realise that these national insurance rises are gonna like be incredibly problematic and destructive for GPs, dentists, charities, hospices, care homes all over the city? Did you intend that, Chancellor? And she literally looked like she hadn’t figured that out. She I’m not kidding. If you watch it, if you manage to see that on YouTube or I watched the whole thing. Right. She literally was like like doing a really good impression of a fish, you know. And and and the point I made is that the guy, the BMI chairman, basically said that it was uh clear to them that the government had not understood the impact on GPs. Totally.

[17:17] Sammie Ellard-King: And that’s just like Well, it doesn’t surprise me if you think about the actual cabinet itself. There is not one person who’s ever run average. Yeah, but no. So you want an entire cabinet that is then not understanding how UK business works, making decisions for CEOs who know how to run businesses. And not listening to them. Because that was the other thing. So I’ve been I wrote a piece, we might have talked about this last time. I wrote a piece last year at the request of a FTSE management team, basically, which was on challenges to the London Stock Exchange, why it’s been so challenged, why we’ve lost half of our companies and you know, one and a half trillion quid of it. I mean, like, yeah, I think I can’t remember if we talked about this last time, but you know, the the the London Stock Exchange has been a slow-motion car crash since like 2007, basically, for a generation. And so I and I had this, I had the chairman and the CEO of a of a big um UK PLC just say, Look, we know you’re writing this book, we know you’ve you you kind of don’t, you know, you don’t have a day job, we’ve got a day job. Can you do this work for us? And so I pulled it all together. And they had lunch with Iain Duncan Smith, and then that piece of work, and it wasn’t just me, it was like they’d canvassed opinions from lots of people and pulled all this stuff together, but it went into the Tory cabinet, and I definitely got a sense that you know, in my own little way, I’d had managed to get some kind of information into them. And as I say, they’d canvassed lots of different views. And what the the reason I mentioned it is because when um it started looking like Labour were very likely to win, it also became clear that all it seems that Reeves and Starmer were basically um they were there there was a lot of lip service and they were engaging with the city and they were listening to people like these people I wrote that piece for. And a lot of folks I know in the in the city and in you know investment management and stuff were were quite excited and thinking, wow, you know, there’s yeah, she’s listening, she’s hearing what the problems are, she’s making quite a lot of sensible noises. And you know, the whole I know it’s one of the questions you wanted to come on to, the whole uh m 80 billion pounds super fund, big pensions, yeah. We speak about that. Yeah, let’s talk about that. Well, I mean, so so it was it was those kind of it was at least it was acknowledging there’s a problem because one of the one of the really tragic things about all of this is like whether it’s well I don’t want to sort of name names, but you know, whether it’s the political class or the regulatory class or certain bodies that are tasked with making sure the British economy is in good shape. And I guess it’s natural, it’s like you know, you criticize anyone in every walk of life saying that that’s a bit shit, you know, they’re gonna defend themselves, right? But it’s really, really noticeable just how many of these bodies just say, nope, there’s nothing to see here, there’s no problem, you know. Like AIM, the alternative investment market, the the bit smallest bit of the London Stock Exchange, is a car crash. It’s hemorrhaging companies, nobody can raise any money. Yeah, it’s how it’s a complete car crash, and it’s just embarrassing. And all the people tasked with talking about AIM are constantly say, Oh, it’s one of the world’s leading growth equity markets, it’s like what numbers are you looking at, and how disingenuous can you be? And so, but then Rachel Reeves came along and it was kind of like at least they’re acknowledging there’s this problem, and so these sorts of things like that mega, you know, pension 80 billion pound mega. Yeah, but I think that she’s got the completely the wrong end of the stick because again, it so basically that whole a big focus of the announcement, the Mansion House speech the other week was um that costs in pension funds are too high. And so if we bash all these assets together and consolidate it in the hands of you know bigger funds with more billions of pounds, that’ll bring costs down, that will be better for your pension. That is like abject stupidity, right because you know whether you bring costs, I mean because costs in these funds are already pretty low, she’s listening to the big the big boys who benefit most from this, right? That because these guys they go and see Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, they don’t go and see the dozens of smaller businesses that are actually where the lifeblood of the British economy is, right? And so my thinking on this is it’s good that they’re thinking about how to remedy this tragic, you know, catastrophe that is the London Stock Exchange. Because just to take a step back, this stuff matters for the real economy and for real people. That’s what I always find. Like, yes, people look at me, oh, you’re a city guy and stuff. It’s like, yeah, you’ve got to understand that you know, 50% of employment and 50% or whatever, it’s 60% of employment, 50% of revenues in the economy come from smaller companies. And and so, and by the way, future larger companies come from smaller companies. Is it that big? Yeah, yeah. I mean, and and and without so so I always go back to this example if you’re a bit self-conscious, but so I was in the team that floated EasyJet 20 years ago, whenever that was, and you know, raised a whatever it was, I can’t remember, like 200 million bucks or whatever to buy a load of 737s for Stelios. Nice, and you know, now fast forward how many years, and it’s been a volatile, right? Because airline companies are tricky ones, but it’s a much bigger company serving, you know, and it’s kind of a an unsung British success story in many ways, right? The fact that uh millions more people can go to that hundreds more cities. I mean you think about again, sorry, I’m being patronizing because I’m such an old bastard, but you know, I I remember trying to fly to like second-tier places in Europe in like the late 90s, it was much more difficult and more expensive.

[22:15] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah. So Ryanair, EasyJet, Wizz Air, whatever, that’s a cool kind of function of the real economy. Yeah. Um, but now I’ve lost my thread because I was I was going, I wanted to basically say that um, you know, smaller company equities are super important for the economy. Um, and we’ve got a problem. But yeah, this is it to come back to Rachel Reeves’s solution. By concentrating much more power and money in the hands of the really big ones, really big funds have to invest in really big companies, just kind of logistically. So, what you’re all you’re Doing there is you’re engendering an even more winner takes all outcome, in my considered opinion. And the cost benefit, the marginal cost benefit of bigger funds having slightly lower costs than that, and for however that affects your put it this way: if your pension returns are 2% a year for 40 years and you pay 0.4% or 0.2% instead of 0.4% of your pension, the much bigger issue is that you’ve made 2% for 40 years, right? Yeah. What she should be focusing on is how do we make 9%, 10% or 11 or 12%? Yes. Because UK small caps did 15.5% from 1955 to 2021, which we’ve completely yeah, correct. The smallest more than 15%, four times property performance, right? Wow. Very that’s from Dimson and Marsh. So that’s um a well-known study, Professors Dimson and Marsh at the London Business School, and they’ve they’ve updated that every year. That all just fell over in the last three or four years because of all this problem. But but basically why? Because think about games, I just said EasyJet, right? Think about Games Workshop, yeah. Spotty little geeky boys like I used to be when I was 12, you know, painting little goblins.

[23:47] Sammie Ellard-King: I used to have a little goblins and dragons action. Absolutely. But but you know, doing that, um, there were relatively few of those sorts of characters in 1985 or whenever that business was founded. It’s now like a I haven’t checked recently, but it certainly was high as three and a half billion pound company, right? And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of companies like that. And my point is what we need to be doing is is supporting British small caps because they’re they’re dying. Because I mean this sounds a bit serious, but I think I’m right in saying that Amazon, uh not Amazon, Apple was was less than five billion dollars market cap in the late 90s, and it’s now what three and a bit trillion or whatever it is, right? Yeah. And and you know, I’ve made I’ve sort of made this through away comment before, but like, you know, it wasn’t that long ago that Apple was a sort of slightly weird computer company that your grand would you’d get your grand one of those pink computers, you know.

[24:42] Sammie Ellard-King: I’m listening to the Steve Jobs uh Walter Isaacson. Oh amazing. It’s amazing, but like hearing the actual birth of it wasn’t really, they weren’t actually a real proper company. Well they went and they won they went wrong loads of times. 100%. But but my point is, you know, we we can’t we’ve demonstrably failed to get even close to building a British Apple or even something a thirtieth of the size. So ARM Holdings, I was just gonna say, ARM is probably the closest. It’s the biggest most successful company in a generation, and it’s listed in New York. And all the economic value and loads of the employment and loads of the institutional ownership goes there. Yeah. And this is and this is again, this is why I find it so absolutely maddening that our political class just like nothing’s see here, everything’s great, London stock exchanges. No, it’s not, it’s a complete disaster.

[25:29] Sammie Ellard-King: And that is because they can get better valuations, right? They can get better valuations. And this is the point. So but it’s chicken and egg, because I get a lot of kickback on this. It’s like, well, don’t tell me that I should invest in British companies as a kind of nationalistic thing, because if I get shit returns, why would I do that? I should be owning Apple, Microsoft, whatever, and the Magnificent 7. But it’s chicken and egg. And it’s because we’ve allowed all these terrible decisions we’ve made over 30 years, this slow-motion car crash from Brown and Blair onwards, is the reason that British shares are now they trade at between 40 to 60 percent discount to uh well, 60% discount to American shares and 40 to 60 percent to different markets like Australia or Singapore or whatever. Yeah, it’s wild. But that but that means this what most like you know, the the normal person who’s not a student of capital markets doesn’t understand what that actually means. What that means is so firstly, if you’re Shell and you want to acquire an an oil company in Malaysia or, you know, that’s actually not a great example because there’s been a lot of consolidation already. But if you’re if you’re a British company and you want to buy another company, you’re you’re half as powerful as your American competitor or your Singaporean competitor. So it’s not a fair, it’s not like a fair competition anymore. You’re massively disadvantaged. But the really insidious thing, which I think could play out in the next few years and could be really even worse for Britain, and we could go even further south, is that so if you are Shell, so right now Shell, HSBC, you know, all AstraZeneca, Glaxo, all our biggest best companies, all of the big institutional shareholders of those businesses, particularly if they’re overseas, if they’re in Asia or the States, will be saying to the management team in meetings, if you were val if you were on the US stock exchange, you’d be valued, you know, let’s say that your share price is two quid right now. If you move to the US stock exchange, you’d be valued at three quid and you’d be at tens of billions of dollars more valuable business, you’d be you’d be able to raise far more money from the debt markets, you’d be able to acquire more companies, you’d be able to have a much more successful trajectory. Why the hell are you still on the London Stock Exchange? And it’s getting increasingly hard for these companies to defend being on the London Stock Exchange. So if we lose, we’ve already lost BHP Billiton, you know, Flutter, we’ve already lost all these leviathans of of British industry and arm, but arguably the most painful one. There’s half a chance we’re going to enrhage another half dozen really, really big British British companies, they’ll be gone. And it’s like, meanwhile, Rachel Reeves is increasing national insurance. It’s like I know, I know.

[27:44] Sammie Ellard-King: Uh yeah. You’re totally right. Or they get bought, right? And that’s another thing. That’s a threat. Well, uh as you I think I saw you comment on this the other day. Like um, I think it’s like 22 4250 companies that are currently in the process of being or being looked at, right? By US equity. Yeah. Yeah. By equity or or call and it’s like I think there was you I saw you say that there was two last week. Yeah, there were two now two new ones announced that they were in the pro. But but but the and this, you know, for the whole of my adult life, having been a student of economics and cap involved in capital markets, my view is that it should be a free market. Like if a if a bigger, better, badder, better funded company wants to come over the hill and buy a British company, like Cadbury’s was bought, or you know, whoever it might aspect. Oh no, I don’t think that’s the is the pure basis of the fact that they are so cheap.

[28:31] Andrew Craig: Well, yeah, but but but this but what I was gonna say is like you theoretically it should you should like capital markets, you should there shouldn’t be government invention saying you can’t buy that because it’s British and we’re gonna keep in Britain. That’s that’s the road to ruin, but but set against that the it’s the government and the regulatory decisions in the last 30 years that have got to the point where our stock market is on its knees, so all these vultures can come from over because like if we had a thriving stock market with capital debt, and let’s let’s just unpack that a bit more because um so in in 30 years ago, 50% of UK pension assets were in UK companies. Today it’s less than four percent, and so and that and that’s like if you if it’s like one picture to you know that’s the money shot, that’s the main reason, and that is entirely because of regulation and bad political decisions, or largely because of. And so just to if uh um like elaborate on that a bit more to just show how hair-raising this is. So Australia, the Australian stock market is one and a half percent of the global stock market by value, right? It’s quite a lot of good companies, Australia, so and it’s a small country, but that’s actually quite impressive, right? Yeah, so Australia is one and a half percent of global equities by value, 40% of Australian pension assets are in Australian companies. Wow. So we’re 4%, and 2.7% of our pension assets are in British companies, right? And obviously, these numbers move around a lot because the market moves around a lot. These are numbers from a few weeks or months ago. In America, it’s something like uh America’s 45% of global equities, and it’s like 60% of American pension assets are in American equities, right? We’re the only country in the modern developed world that is massively underway our own domestic equity market, which is why all our companies are on their knees, we’re going abroad, we’re going bust, our economy’s shot to pieces, you know, um, people are really struggling. It’s also something to do, it’s it’s a fair bit to do with the cost of living crisis. Because if you you if you have to invent money out of thing that, you know, our interest rate bill now is 90 billion quid a year.

[30:31] Sammie Ellard-King: No, it’s nuts. It’s like twice what we spend on defence and nearly as much as what we spend on education. Yeah. How have we allowed that to happen? This is a country we’ve got we’ve got more Nobel Prize winners. You know, we are a country of amazing. And they bang on about the black hole, and I’m just like, you’re you’re tinking around the edges. And and actually it’s worse because I think you know, there uh to where we started, the recent budget is 180 degrees, the opposite of what we’re doing if you want British people to have a better life and be wealthier, right? Yeah, and then this plan to try and sort of repair the state of like it’s as I say, it’s good that they’re recognising there’s a problem. The just the choices they’re making though are like they’re not listening to to because I I think the engine room of our economy should be smaller companies, like based on a century’s worth of evidence. Yeah, yeah. And not just giving more money to the biggest companies in London and them consolidating even more assets and getting paid even more and investing in only the biggest companies.

[31:25] Sammie Ellard-King: To bring it back to that, like a friend of a friend of ours, like we were chatting, his business, 110 people in the UK, his uh bill next year is close to 200,000 pounds. Now they were potentially You mean the his the increase as a result of national insurance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like that was like a best case estimate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He said he’s got two choices either prices get pushed on to the consumer, yeah, or he has to cut probably 10% of stuff. Yeah. Or move or move abroad or hire people in wherever. Exactly. All things he doesn’t want to do because he prides himself on being a British company that hires British people. Yeah. And like he’s very patriotic, and but he’s like what like my hands are literally tied because my board will turn around to me and go, We don’t care, you’ve got £200,000 to find. We’re supposed to be able to do that.

[32:14] Andrew Craig: But that’s the that’s the thing that you know, again, to your point about members of the cabinet never having been involved with business, they don’t understand terms like fiduciary duty. Like your fiduciary duty as a director. Yeah, part of the reason directors get paid a lot and people are, oh directors, they work like two days a month and get paid 80 grand a year, only in a very big company, by the way. But like a director at a small company might get paid 20 or 30 grand a year for doing like a couple of days’ work a month. A lot of people find it really hard to get their heads around that. The reason for that is they have a massive legal liability. Like if they’re involved in a chemicals company and it poisons people, they can go to prison, you know, and so it’s kind of like a comp it’s that’s why it’s actually called compensation, right? Because you have to be, you have to take a lot of risk and you have to be on top of your game. And you’re right. So your friend has a fiduciary duty to his shareholders and his board and his other stakeholders to do the best he can do. The government’s just made that much harder. So, what’s he supposed to do? And uh just to unpack another point that you raised there from that example, what does that mean for inflation? It’s like, oh yeah, you know, we’re gonna go for growth and and try and reduce inflation. Like, no, what you’ve just done is gonna result in tons of inflation.

[34:24] Sammie Ellard-King: Sainsbury’s was £230 million. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, and where does that cost go? That goes on the eggs, it goes on the bread. There’s n they’re not gonna like they’re not gonna smaller, like, get the team smaller because they’re already understaffed in a lot of these locations as it is. Yeah, so who’s gonna happen on products? And they’re also gonna screw um down margins on people like farmers and food producers. Exactly, exactly. And then the hospitality thing is just mental. Well, it’s it’s so I saw a piece the other day about um basically the demise of the nightlife industry in the UK. It’s been declining for ex for 30 years, exactly. When we had it, our margin was uh was at one of our locations was 3.5%. Exactly. Well, and that that’s just being toasted by this. Completely done. Like, and I know having spoken to my old friends who we used to run the business with, like, they had to get rid of tons of stuff, they’ve had to cut right back on all of the Yeah, it’s like like how many hundreds, if not thousands, of people are us having these conversations. This is zero-hour contract thing, and like, oh yeah, it’s just nuts. And exactly, like, and how have they not seen that? Well, no, and then that’s so obvious.

[35:27] Andrew Craig: So that telegraph article, you know, I had 800 and or whatever when I left the house today, it was 803 comments, and like loads of them are just like massively agreeing because they’re obviously like full on Tory Graph, you know, red meat for the for the people who hate labour. But you know, a lot of them were making the point that this is actually like people like Starmer and Reeves, that they have an eye they have a dogmatic ideological desire to basically just it it they don’t care if everyone’s worse off if there’s less um um inequality. So if the rich get poorer but the poor get poorer too, that’s a good outcome for them. And there was a great article a few years ago. There’s a so be careful what you wish for when it comes to inequality and equality, because I’m a big believer in equality of opportunity, so everybody should get the same chances, doesn’t matter where you’re from, what your background, your ethnicity, everybody should get the equality of opportunity as best we can, which is why, by the way, you you know, university should be free. That’s something we should spend money on, right? Because that everybody then gets into university. You what you shouldn’t aspire, certainly not through a political regime, is equality of outcome. Because, i.e., that you force everyone to have the same outcome. Because that’s not natural, it’s not natural in sports, it’s not natural in music, it’s not natural in anything, right? Semi-communist approach, it is common, and that and and so the point the sort of if you follow that to on to like the evidence of the last two centuries, looking at dozens of countries, because you can measure like using regression mathematics, you can measure like countries that have more equality in terms of you know the genie coefficient, like what the income disparity is, and uh consistently come countries that are closer to equality have much, much worse lives. Yeah, like they’re much, much like I mean, the the really extreme examples are North Korea compared to Switzerland, or you know, the two extremes. But not only that, they have higher rates of crime, homicide, like unhappiness, depression. And it’s just like because actually, so America’s a clear I mean, America’s got its own problems with unhappiness and crime and depression, all that stuff. But it one of the things that it I mean is But they have the American dreamist. Well, it’s the American dream because actually people want to be aspirational.

[37:31] Sammie Ellard-King: 100%. Most people want to believe that they can improve their life and get better and be wealthier when a few years from now. They don’t just think this changes my life and agency. Most people want to have agency of their life because agency makes you feel empowered. And the record of psychology is that that is is good for your mental health, you know. And if we all just sink into a morass of, well, nothing I do matters anyway, because the government’s gonna tax it all and blow my company up and give it to you know, whoever. Well, that that’s a lot of the conversations we’ve been having recently. Well, the other, by the way, just because I love getting this one in there, um, because the other pushback you often get from people is, well, because if you if you basically look at that distribution, say Switzerland’s good, Singapore’s good, the states is imperfect, but it’s good, you know, which are the good countries, these ones they have lower tax rates, the blah blah blah, and everybody’s wealthier and better off, right? And then really crap countries are, you know, I mean, North Korea is the obvious, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then you get what you get back is what about Scandinavia? Because they have really high tax rates and like basically very socialistic left-wing countries.

[38:30] Sammie Ellard-King: But the infrastructure is incredibly well, exactly. There are there are a couple of points to make about that. And that it’s like the most fala, there are actually three points. The most fallacious thing, and that is such a bad example, which fails to understand a century of evidence and how economics works. So there are a couple of things. Firstly, their per capita resource endowment is massive. So Norway basically gets What does that mean? So so if you divide the number of millions of people in Norway or Sweden or Finland into the natural resources they have. Okay, right. Zinc, copper, uranium, uh, timber, freshwater, fish, like everything, right? In Norway, they basically have free electricity for everyone. But I mean, it’s not free, but the bit the production of it is because it’s it’s all hydroelectric power. So when Norway got the North Sea, there’s like eight million of them, they’ve got loads of electricity, they’ve got timber coming out their ears, they’ve got all this these metal deposits, everything else. They took that oil and they built a multi-trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund, which is why everybody in Norway is extremely wealthy. So point one is that like lots of other countries in the world. Singapore has no per capita resource endowment, neither does Taiwan. They’re like they basically have to import everything, neither does Japan, right? So you have to like disaggregate their natural benefit, their their natural advantages versus um stuff that they achieved themselves. Like Japan’s a miracle, right? Because they’ve got no oil, they’ve got nothing, they’ve got fish, basically. Yeah, and they’ve still achieved this economic miracle by being technologically very advanced and you know working really hard in whatever else in the last fifth since the second world war. The other point is Sweden was neutral in the Second World War. So actually, it had many, many it have if you have several years where the whole of the rest of Europe is rubble and London and Birmingham and Manchester, and you have no capital destruction, you continue with the capital formation, all your money’s in a Swiss bank. You know, basically Sweden had a nearly about seven or eight year advantage and not having to spend anything like as much on you know armaments, and so so Sweden came out of the end of the Second World War with like a 20-plus year advantage over everyone else, yeah, right, that was involved in the world.

[40:29] Sammie Ellard-King: Which is pretty hard to mess up if you’re trying to catch up, right? And so they’ve got this huge per capita resource, they have this massive advantage in the Second World War. And then the final bit is what’s called the counterfactual, which is that if you actually think about what how much wealthier would would Scandinavia have been if it had had similar policies to Singapore and Switzerland from the 1950s until now, pretty likely to be way, way, way. And if you I used to work for a Swedish investment bank, and most of my nor my Scandy friends from each of the four countries will say will agree with that and say, Yeah, we’ve been massively held back and we could have done much better, but we started off way, way wealthier than everyone else. Yeah. And so that’s the you know, I I and I hate to get on my high horse about that, but uh you know, as a student of these things, I think there’s so much nonsense talks. I think people don’t understand these nuanced things around what and because it’s really important because then we make really bad policy decisions like Rachel Reeves has just made, which ruins people’s lives and makes us all poorer. So anyway, that’s all I’m sort of ranting away.

[41:28] Sammie Ellard-King: I’m I’m it’s do you know what it’s it’s it’s so frustrating, but it gets to the point where it’s like, well, like it’s constant. It seems like what can you do? Yeah, yeah. But it it does seem like every two years we just set ourselves up for like we’re basically just constantly just smashing ourselves with a hammer in the foot. Well, exactly. And we’ve got an opportunity to not, and we just do it anyway. And it just feels like that. Liz Truss, Brexit, all of these things, it’s just like it’s like a car comical car crash of just events that just keep happening. And it sort of feels like I think a big part of the I mean, if you know, how do you solve that, right? Because I think one of the biggest problems in Britain is that we have a really unprofessional political class. I completely agree.

[42:13] Andrew Craig: Like there were like So your point about the cabinet, don’t have any Well, yeah, but even like the how power is stored in London and it’s not devolved, and Switzerland’s like unbelievably wealthy per capita and it’s cantonal, you know, everyone’s regional, every everybody cares about what their local city’s doing because they’re involved in their tax revenues are directly attributable. And if you took London out of like the wealth conversation, actually the UK is an extremely poor country. Yeah, 100%, massively, really depressingly. So, and certainly poorer than places like Poland and the Czech Republic. Totally. And look at the different experience of the last 30 years. But you know, because the other thing I go back to, and this is where people really don’t like this idea. But so we’ve got 650 MPs and like I can’t remember, 1100 lords or something.

[42:58] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s wild. So my first job, I was an intern on the hill in Washington, DC. Okay. Yeah, that was amazing. It was it was good fun, Pentagon clearance and all that. That’s cool. But um very minor I could get in the door. Wasn’t I looking at all CIO files about JFK or whatever? Exactly. But um the reason I mentioned that is because I always reflect on the fact that I think the number of congressmen is either 435 or 465. So so the basically the US equivalent of the House of Parliament, the MPs is the co Congress, and then the equivalent of the House of Lords is the Senate, and there’s a hundred senators. So the US population 350 million or whatever it is now has got 465 or 400, I think it’s 465 congressmen and 100 senators. Yeah. And we’ve got 650 MPs and over a thousand lords.

[43:50] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, and landmass that just gave it twenty. And our and our the number of MPs is calibrated for an era where we rode on horseback and didn’t have things like phones and the internet and email, right? We need to get a note over to Yeah, correct. So you had constituencies that are basically small enough for politicians to stand up and be able to talk to in a big town hall and wherever, right? And it’s just nonsensical that we still have that system because, and this is my belief, and this is where it does get a bit uh controversial, right? Is that we should have we should have one-sixth the number of MPs, we should have a hundred sort of British senators, right? Or whatever, with much bigger constituencies, and pay them all two or three million quid a year. Okay.

[44:35] Andrew Craig: Because then you would get really, really smart, good people going into politics. It’s the people as well. And people hate that. It’s like, oh, you know, they were like relative, I mean, it’s ridiculous. So the classic example, um, I think we did we talk about this before, but the the like there was an advert um for the head of cybersecurity for the UK. Yeah. And cybersecurity is like it’s really scary. So for as a little aside, sadly I lost my mother to breast cancer a few years ago, right? And I only mentioned that, yeah, it was 2017, but I only mentioned that because there was a Russian hack of the NHS. You might remember it was in the news. Yeah. Of like the NHS um, you know, various different systems, and it all went down for whatever. And her scans were caught in that, so they didn’t catch her brain brain met for several weeks because of that. And that was part of what, you know, she probably lost a year or two of life because of that, thanks to some Russian hackers, right? That is just a little vignette, you know, obviously one that’s personal to me of just how intrusive these people can be. 100%. There was I think I was listening to the radio only today about how um, you know, there’s one of the biggest risks perceived by the Pentagon right now and you know, MI6 and whatever it is, cyber warfare. We’ve just put an advert out for UK head of cybersecurity on sixty five grand a year.

[45:51] Andrew Craig: Yeah. It blows my mind. You know, the head of cybersecurity at Apple’s probably on tens of millions. Yeah. And it matters because if you’re competing with like Russians who aren’t making millions, and Putin’s giving them bung in the middle, you know, we lose. And and and you know, somebody’s got whole like departments, hundreds of thousands of people employed in them. 100%. And it’s, you know, it all sounds a bit right-wing and sort of red and tooth and claw and stuff, but it’s a justification of like how wrong we’ve perceived to be the right thing. And where value is, but so because they in the in all this stuff, somebody made the point that um well, you know, the uh a a sort of accessible analogy is a top premiership footballer gets paid X and a sort of have-a-go hero on a Saturday afternoon doesn’t, right? And the difference is, you know, I don’t know much about football, but Lionel Messi or Ronaldo, they are that much better to justify that money to a certain extent, right? And it’s true in every walk of life. Well, like you get one Beethoven, you get nine uh magnificent symphonies, yeah, you can get a hundred average music graduates and you’ll get none. It is that bifurcated. And so I think one of our biggest problems, writ large, with what’s going on with you know the recent budget and every and and and to your point about Britain being a slow-motion car crash is if you have really mediocre people in Westminster who don’t, you know, who don’t have 30 years of experience in an i I don’t think any MP should be or cabinet minister should be empowered to run something unless they’ve had at least 20, preferably 30 years of experience. And the other problem with our system is they move around.

[47:28] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah. You get you get these imbeciles who have like they get two years in health and two years in what and it’s like there’s no opportunity to build networks or deep expertise and stuff. But this is this is really a political one. Can we talk about how good the world’s gonna be anyway? It’s still gonna be good. No, I’m gonna get on to you lead the third, yeah, yeah. There’s a fix there, yeah. Hopefully. Of course. Um but I agree, I agree. Like there’s a lot to sort out, and it just seems like there’s too much to sort out, yeah. And it was just frustrating, I think, just to round off that budget conversation. Well, I mean, then philosophically, I c I think I said this the other day, like, um, which I try to do is think of a a Buddhist monk with an orange robe and a begging bowl, right? Economically, they have nothing. So literally that’s the that’s the whole culture. Like in in Buddhist, in villages that are Buddhist in Tibet or whatever, and they the community supports them and gives them rice and food, and they have nothing. They’re not supposed to have any possessions. And if you asked a hundred people, like, are Buddhist monks happy, fulfilled, content? The answer’s probably yes. There’s probably a few quite fancy, like moving to California and having Ferrari or whatever. But you know, I mean, the and so my the reason I mention that sounds a bit random, is that what I go back to when I try to get really depressed about the state of the UK is actually as long as I’ve got food, shelter, and the love of my loved ones, you know, the Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, everything else. I think this is really helpful for you sort of psychologically and emotionally. Everything else over and above that is is a bonus. 100%. And if you can think like that, you can kind of endure this very depressing, tricky, economically challenging time that we’re going through.

[49:02] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, or mate. Or move somewhere that’s got some sun. Yeah, I know. There is that. Which is that other part of it. But I think it’d be interesting to see. Obviously, we’ve just sort of went quite deep into well, finances, British economy, political narrative, etc. But like there is a fix you in your eyes as well, right? Well, yeah okay, so yeah, and it is basically technology, right? And and obviously, brandish my next book, Our Future is Biotech. I mean, I’ve just read about the biotech sector, and throughout history, that has kind of been what’s come to the rescue. Um, and if you have technology that’s so advanced and delivers so much wealth, it can cater to pensions crisis because it ultimately, I mean, I’ve you I think you know I’ve used this before, we’re in a race between Mad Max and Star Trek, right? You know, sort of dystopian apocalyptic future where there’s competition for resources and everybody’s at war and it’s horrible and violent and scary and depressing, and maybe a kind of halcyon utopian future where everybody’s actually really wealthy. Although, ironically, I just want to take a step back. So, one of the things I always find really intellectually interesting is so if we got a time machine and went to 1800 right now and walked out the door, it would be unbelievable squalor. Like dying in the streets, open sewers, nobody had any teeth. The world was awful. Human experience was awful, even for the even for royalty, they didn’t have flushing toilets or hot water, right?

[50:25] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, exactly. Or not you bit not every day, and they didn’t have coffee. Even 30, 40 years ago. Yeah, well, it’s a good idea. The difference is wild. Exactly. And although the well, so what I was gonna say, the irony is like if you look at the unbelievable increase in living standards, I mean, and the the stuff we take for granted, like being able to watch a sports team at the weekend on TV or you know, in a massive stadium that costs tens of millions of pounds to build, right? Nobody in the whole of human history did that until like a hundred years ago, let’s say. Being able to fly on an airplane to a foreign country, being able to we take this if you walk into a boots or an Aldi or a Liddle and stop and look around you, like that’s what capital markets and capitalism have given you, and it’s absolutely remarkable. And we take 99.9% of it for granted, right? Including, you know, I can get my iPhone and call my mate on the other side of the world on a radio call for free. Yeah. We take that for granted. We take all this incredible stuff for granted. And the point I was going to make is if you actually quantify like the uplift in our economic standard living, we’re unbelievably wealthy compared to every other mate, like 99.9% of human beings ever lived, right? Yeah.

[51:31] Sammie Ellard-King: Well, you just have to compare us to like an African nation which is just a good thing. Today, but the two plus billion people have gone from being grindingly poor and on less than a dollar a day and starving. Yeah. I mean, look, there are still obviously lots of places in the world that are problematic, but it’s nothing like what it was in the 60s, 70s, 80s, it’s getting better all the time in a big way. Because our press never talks about good news. Nobody really takes that on board. No. But the point, the broader point I was going to make, which is I guess to come back to you, what’s the fix? Because there’s a caveat to the fix. What I worry about is so let’s say that our material circumstances today are they’re literally dozens of times better than your average person in 1800, right? Or 1900. But depression and rates of mental illness and unhappiness and dissatisfaction are the highest they’ve ever been. So it’s so we need to actually really think deeply about why that is and what to do about it. Because kind of in many ways we’ve only got ourselves to blame because it’s the way we look at the world, goes back to my Buddhist monk point. And we need to do a far better job of educating people about all the things that you know, like people aren’t students of what actually makes them happy. They a lot of the things people think make them happy don’t make them happy because nobody actually studies the stuff. We should be teaching people this stuff. And I think financial markets are a big part of that because if you know about financial markets, you’re more likely to be wealthy, which despite the nonsensical money doesn’t make you they’re increasingly showing that money doesn’t make you happy is bullshit, by the way. Yeah.

[52:48] Sammie Ellard-King: I know basically covering that uh 67,000 pounds or something, 67,000 bots. Being fucking poor makes you very unhappy, right? And so and the solution to that is knowing a little bit about finance, a lot less than most people. I mean, you’ve heard me say it before. Learning how to drive your finances effectively and change your life is no harder than learning how to drive a car. Everybody learns how to drive a car. No, if you go, oh, I know a little bit about the stock market, like, fucking hell, you must be a genius. Yeah, it’s like exactly it’s crazy, right? It’s a huge societal blind spot. But the point I wanted to make about the fix is I genuinely think we’re on a trajectory to, you know, standards of living in my lifetime in the developed world, and there’ll be a lot more countries that are in the developed world, unless there’s new nuclear Armageddon or whatever, but if we just carry on the trajectory of the last two centuries, most people will be on $200,000 or $250,000 a year of income in real terms, in terms of their access to holidays and health and clothes and iPhones and food and whatever, truly. Like if you benchmark it to today’s $50,000 or $45,000, whatever, and we’ll probably be even less happy. That’s and I think that we what we need to do is have a kind of thought process around how we how we achieve the the $250,000 per head per person, and in places like Kenya and Nigeria and you know Indonesia and Pakistan and wherever else, but we’re also happy, and I think that’s a challenge for political systems all over the world.

[54:10] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, completely you’re right. And I I think obviously biotechnology plays a massive role in changing that outcome. I I think that’s right, and that’s what I wanted to cover in the book because the whole middle section biotech and you, because first it’s like it’s gonna deliver all this incredible wealth because you know, prosaically, if a company cures cancer, it’s gonna be worth five trillion dollars. It’s gonna, you know, a company that develops ubiquitous robots for elderly care that means that we have a huge top-heavy demo demographic problem where we’ve got loads of really old people and we’re gonna really struggle to afford to look after them. But if you have really good robots that can help, that you know, sounds a bit like dodge and weird. It does because when we’re gonna need it, yeah, it’s the only thing that’s gonna make it not awful. It’s not far away either. Well, exactly. Um, yeah, when you look at what Tesla and folks are doing, Boston Robotics or whatever they’re called. But but but uh to the point I was gonna make is I think what it’s also gonna do, which I think is where you were driving, is um it’s gonna teach us so much about the merits of nutrition and exercise and you know, hab like cold exposure and breathing and all all the stuff that’s kind of the one I got the example I go back to is always like the debate between vegetarians and vegans and carnivores and paleos, and it’s like this sometimes like Catholics and Protestants, right? You know, it’s like the new school. Yeah, well, even it’s like people get so it’s like if you’re not vegan, you’re really unhealthy and you’re an idiot. And then like the carnivore people are like, if you don’t eat loads of red meat and avocados and fat, and you’re an idiot. And they’re both completely wrong because what they fail to account for is yeah, but it’s also it’s the microbiome because it’s your genome, your your biome, and your virome is it’s within, we’re all completely different, and that’s a function of your genetics and also where you grow up and the microbiome around you and in you. And like if you grow up in the Arctic, you have a different biome to if you grew up in Manhattan.

[55:54] Sammie Ellard-King: Right, yeah, of course. But that’s the point is that the biotech industry only literally in the last probably five years is finally giving us a granular understanding of the detail of that, so we can finally say, no, like you shouldn’t be, you should not be a vegan because you’re northern European and you’re genetically predisposed, and you have these that you’re you have these 2,000 different strains of bacteria in your gut and on you that mean you should eat this. Really interesting you say this, right? Because I’ve just done uh bionic. Right. Have you seen bionic? No, I know is that like Zoe, kind of similar to 23andMe. They took my bloods, yeah, um, took gut stool, yeah, and basically developed me custom-made supplements which are only for me in a lab, and then they’ve given me a nutrition plan which is directly related to the issues that I have with with my guts and the things that I’m deficient in for me, and then they track it every three months.

[56:45] Andrew Craig: Well, so you know, so that’s a much more sophisticated, you know from the book, right? That so I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in like 2008, and I had like six or seven horrendous years, which is why one of the reasons I got really personally interested in this involvement and understood it, and I was also working in the biotech industry, which helped. And I haven’t had a symptom for like six years. And and my mine is a really blunt tool, which is just learning about probiotics and like sleep and cold exposure and breathing and all of it together. All that stuff. But this is but I think the the last few decades with respect to all this stuff, like what you just articulated, what was it called? Bionic, yeah. So that’s a that’s moving the direction I think we’re gonna go. But you’re an early adopter and you’re quite wealthy relative, you know, somebody on a minimum wage in Brazil. Exactly. I have like gut problem health. You need to get a Symprove, by the way.

[57:33] Andrew Craig: We should talk about that for later. Let’s do it offline now. Um because that yeah, that’s I think the best probiotic on the internet. And also, I’m like doing all of this, right? Regulating sleep, exercising, cold exposure, health and wealth, doing all of it, right? So then the last thing of that was like the supplementation wasn’t right. And so the broader point I want to make about that is at with the sort of gift that Biotok can give us is yeah, which is the last few decades have been characterized by great confusion and debate, and like whether it’s diet or whatever it is, you know, the classic front cover of the Daily Mail or the Express, like sausages increase your risk of cancer by 100%, and just such bullshit science. Because it’s like you know, it’ll be some animal study, and the other classic one I always come back to is so the number of times journalists will say something has increased by 100% when the chance has gone from one in a hundred million to one in fifty million. Yeah, yeah. So people read and go, Oh my god, like I’ve got a hundred percent more risk of getting cancer from doing whatever the thing is.

[58:32] Andrew Craig: Yeah, one in fifty million. Now you’ve got a one in fifty million chance. And by the way, you can’t rely on any of these numbers, it’s all bullshit anyway, for all of this stuff. So it’s a bit like when um I think what you were saying to say is basically like what the uncertainty’s going to be 10 years ago, for me to be able to have done that would have probably cost me 50, 60,000 just for one off. Correct. And then now that was a you know 150 quid one bag in 10 years it’ll be a tenner in boots or a quid. Right. And and also Which is gonna change everything an enormous amount of fluff. That’s right, because like you know, mental health is massively related to nutrition. It sounds really trite, but you know, if you if you’re if you’re suffering for mental health, eat a banana every day. Like I know that sounds completely ridiculous, no medical advice being given in it. But you know, and obviously that’s not completely curative, but there are all these you know component pieces that can move you back in the right direction. Totally. And and yeah, I just want to make sure because it is the the point is is we’re on the cusp of basically because of a bunch of really advanced technologies, uh, analytical diagnostics stuff that looks at you know at the gen the level of the genome, and not just your own the genome of your human genome, because you’re like half a percent of the you’re you’re basically we’re we are two enormous piles of bacteria and viruses talking to each other right now, and a very small amount of the genetic makeup in us is actually human genetic makeup, most of it’s bacterial or viral. Um, and that is what dictates mental health, health, longevity, energy levels, everything. And it’s been such a dark art that we just haven’t really understood. And we and still we’re only just emerging now out of that uncertainty. But I I yeah, in 10, 15, 20 years with AI and machine learning and really advanced, inexpensive diagnostics, and to your point, you’ll be able to walk into boots and go, What’s wrong with me? Can you sort me out? And you’ll be sorted out within like a few days, you know. But also, because the other um trend there is is apps, you know, Whoop and stuff like that, you know, the what whoops, the wearable watch that does got it on. Oh, there you go. Yeah, I’m getting one of the like a Chris Williams and Tim Ferriss, uh the quantified self. But that stuff’s gonna be, you know, we’re in the foothills of this stuff, yeah. And it’s only like technical adopters.

[60:44] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s really interesting. But but I think it’ll be in the same way that you know, paracetamol, how much does paracetamol cost? It’s like 50p. That’s a remark because that’s another thing, just because one of the things a lot of people hear the title of a book and they’re like, biotech’s bullshit, drug companies, arseholes, you know, but exactly. Okay, firstly, you’re talking about a tiny, tiny sliver of a five and a half trillion dollar value industry, right? Biotech’s revolutionising agriculture and dairy and cheese, and it’s not just drugs, right? But on the drug point, when flying was first like commercially available in let’s say the 1920s, realistically, literally royalty and presidents could afford to fly. Exactly. It was like the equivalent, it was like 200,000 quid to fly from London to New York, equivalent in today’s money, or whatever it was. Yeah. When TVs were first introduced in the 50s, it was a it was a year’s salary, like for on for like it was a lawyer’s year’s salary, you know, not a factory worker’s. And the point I’m trying to make is that X, you know, the reason you can now buy a massive flat flat screen TV in Argos for like 250 quid is because of the which is a wonderful, wonderful thing for all of us. Because if you apply these exponential trajectories to all the stuff we’re talking about, you know, that’s why TVs are accessible to everyone. And of course, now we all take it for granted and watch too much TV and challenges our mental health. But the point I wanted to make is so all these people pillaring arsehole bad pharma companies because their drugs are like a million dollars a day for the most cutting. There’s a there’s a cancer drug that basically has cured childhood leukemia. Fact. Yeah, hardly anybody knows it. It’s called Kymriah, Novartis, a Swiss company. It’s been around for about six years, and the post-um approval data is really good. It’s like 86% remission rates in kids with cancer with leukemia.

[62:26] Andrew Craig: But it’s ridiculously expensive. It’s $475,000 a dose. But the but the but the people who developed, one of my clients actually did what’s called the lentiviral vector, the viral vector that carries the therapeutic payload into the patient. Yeah. So the numbers are actually confidential, as they often are in these in in industry, because otherwise these companies go bust, right? But they there was a few million dollars a dose in the when they were doing the clinical trials. So they were hemorrhaging money, like losing money, billions of dollars. They got they managed through like loads of RD and applying lots of work to get it down to like a low hundreds of thousands of dollars a dose, which made it profitable, not recouping the three billion dollars they invested, but at least profitable for each dose you sell. If you sell a dose for $475 and the costs in that are less than $475, you make a little bit of profit, right? And then they’ve said publicly they they’ve brought it down another five to ten X since then. So in like it’s since 2014, so it’s what’s that, 10, yeah, 10 years, they’ve gone from like X millions of dollars a dose for this thing to tens of thousands of dollars a dose. Stands to reason 10 years from now it’ll be like two or three grand a dose, and then children in Nigeria or India or Pakistan will be able to have a treatment for leukemia. Yeah. And the only way these companies can achieve that, just as with the TV coming cheap or airplanes becoming cheap. It’s technology and crucially making a friggin’ profit. Because if you don’t make a profit, you don’t survive and you don’t have billions of dollars to reinvest in RD. That’s why the whole I made a really controversial statement of the day. I’m gonna make it again. I’m gonna get pilloried for this. I’ve yet to meet an anti-capitalist who understands capitalism, by which I mean everything I’ve just said, how the bond market works in terms of funding government, how the sh how the stock market works, how many tens of thousands of companies there are in the world right now working on rolling back environmental degradation, you know, uh improving our soil product, all the all the stuff that we’re worried about, the way we’ve dispored the environment, all the environmental stuff, there are thousands and thousands of companies working on that stuff in the it as capitalistic entities. They need support. We don’t need to tear up the whole system because if we do, we’ll get to the right outcome far slower. And and m the challenge I find is that so few people understand so few people know that any of that’s going on. Yeah.

[64:36] Sammie Ellard-King: Well, they well, they are like addicted to the news, they’re addicted to their phone screens, daily mail conversation. Yeah, the Elon Musk quote, right? I love that Elon Musk quote, which is um, well, I’m not like some sort of big fanboy, but I think it’s a good quote, which is um the news seeks to answer the question, what is the worst thing that happened in the world today? Yeah. And it’s actually completely insane. So basically, if you if you think the news is probably empirically 99% negative, but it’s uh there’s a study done 99.7%. Okay, but uh but and crucially, so you get half an hour bulletin where it’s like I’m in a dark soon, I’m now gonna tell you only the really shit things that happened in the world today. Yeah. The problem is that’s that’s another reason for this whole disconnect between our levels of affluence and our levels of mental health and feeling good about the world. Because actually, that doesn’t people think they’re informed by consuming that. They’re not, they’re fundamentally misinformed because most of what happened in the world yesterday was kind of neutral to good, like today, or people going to the park. And but the the news makes us think that 99% of what’s happening is really shit. Because I in like in most towns, cities, villages, whatever in the world right now, people are doing fairly normal pedestrian or you know, kissing their kids, you know, before they put them to bed or whatever.

[65:51] Sammie Ellard-King: Doing a bit of charity work or whatever that might well be, too. Or just normal just going to work, like having you know, people in this building downstairs, just having a coffee and talking about or whatever it is. Exactly. And we have because we’re all focused on Yemen and Gaza and you know, COVID and Putin and what like everybody has a really, really warped sense of the reality. And that and the you know, that’s a big personal mission of mine, and part of why I wanted to write that book, because the what one of the really negative ramifications of that, apart from us all having shit mental health outcomes, is it sh it retards progress because it makes it because nobody journalists don’t write about like you never see the news going today. There’s been a really interesting breakthrough in a lab in Cambridge, which might cure cancer. You don’t see that it’s in the back pages of new scientists.

[66:36] Sammie Ellard-King: Oh, it’s like packed, or it’s like packed into like page 22. Correct, but that makes it really hard for these catalytic entities that could be changing the world to raise money, which means we’re moving far more slowly than we might otherwise move. Totally agree, totally agree. And I think like on the positive side, we’ve got three out of the ten best universities in the planet, yeah, located here, with actually possibly the best scientific labs ever. Yeah. And but then when you look at it, it’s like Well yeah, I mean, it’s it’s oh sorry, I’m like cutting across the city. No, not at all. Like I think there’s but then we have like the least opportunity for them to create these small research businesses.

[67:21] Andrew Craig: The stat that drives me absolutely nuts on that front, right? So Cambridge University has won more Nobel Prizes for physiology or medicine than pretty much every other country in the world, just Cambridge University. I think it’s 37, it’s it’s 37 for uh medicine and chemistry off the top of my head. But anyway, it you know, America’s one more. Um, Germany’s probably one more, but you know, that’s remarkable. And Oxford’s like 20 or something. Yeah, exactly. But on a per capita basis, it’s like the punching heavier than anyone else in the world, pretty much. But Britain lags America in terms of company formation and value creation by trillions of dollars. Not billions, trillions. How the fuck have we let that happen? And like so an example of that is one of the most valuable drugs of all time is called Humira. It was developed by a company called Cambridge Antibody Technology in like the late 90s, early noughties. Right. It was then bought by another company, which was then bought by AbbVie, and it’s done $240 billion of revenues since then. Yeah. All of which went to American shareholders. Yeah.

[68:24] Andrew Craig: Yeah. And all the tax went to, and it’s like this just goes back to my whole point. We’re just and we’re making it worse through having ridiculous policy. And it’s I know I guess that uh it was Cambridge University, 9% of alumni start a business, 10% from Oxford, versus that to Harvard, it’s 30 something percent. That’s interesting. Well, um the other but the other tragic stat is that of that 9% and 10%, like 95% of them move to early stage. Yeah, they all go. Yeah, exactly. They do, and it’s like and I don’t, you know, it’s because the other thing, right? The other point I made about all of this chat we’re having that drives me nuts is everything we’re talking about. Like the reason Britain is in such a mess and people’s lives are you know, what why does that matter? Because people’s lives are harder and shitter, right? And and you know, and we’re gonna lose high streets up and down the land are gonna be tumbleweed ghost town horribleness, right?

[69:14] Sammie Ellard-King: And it’s gonna be already there, it’s gonna get worse there, isn’t it? Exactly. But um what really, really drives me nuts about this is it none of this was an electoral issue. Seriously, think about we had a general election this year. 99% of what we’ve just talked about didn’t make it onto any news bulletin or any dis or any question time. It’s like Angela Rayner might have lied on a tax affairs with a second home, or you know, the Tories want to send people to Rwanda, but it was like, meanwhile, there’s this great big fucking elephant in the room right next to you going, Yeah, we’ve lost half of our stock market listed companies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like and I don’t I don’t know what the solution is. Like people idiots like you and me chatting bollocks and trying to get a few hundred thousand poor people to care about this stuff. I guess that’s why I do you know, I must have done 10 podcast interviews in the last four months, and you know, I I I know I’m pretty marmite. Lots of people think I’m full of shit and I get trolled a lot, but um, you know, I believe in what I’m saying, and I think more people need to I genuinely just think you know, very few people are students of capital markets or any of the things I’ve talked about. Very, very few people, and I think we need to do a better job spreading that message.

[70:26] Sammie Ellard-King: So, someone who’s sitting here today then thinking, bloody hell, like we’ve just gone pretty, you know, deep into the this economy. Yeah, what can they do? What can like the everyday person actually do today that could really make a difference to them? Well, I mean, like I always go back to this, you know, the number one vector. The trouble is it requires patience, which I think we talked about last time, but like you know, becoming f truly financially literate. And as I say, it’s not that hard. It’s not like everyone thinks it’s like it’s a fucking PhD. No, it’s just like a few hours. Yeah, exactly. Engage with some resources, and you know, my book is a book, which is UK focused, it’s not the only book. It’s a brilliant book. Well, thank you very much. And but there’s a great book called The Psychology of Money, which I know you know, Morgan House, which is a that’s a really good one as well. Although it’s you know, mine’s British focused, it’s American focused. But I just think equip yourself to drive your finances, and over it’s not you know, that’s not gonna make you rich in a month or six months or a year, but a little, it’s like the old cheesy thing about the trajectory of an aeroplane, right? You know, if you change the trajectory, a airplane takes off from Heathrow, if you change his trajectory by two degrees, it’ll end up in Buenos Aires instead of Sydney or whatever you know, whatever the cheesy example is that’s along the low lines. And it’s like it’s exactly the same with becoming financially literate. You make you make these because I always get pillaried, it’s like if you can afford to invest 25 quid a month in the stock market, do it. Because what happens is you build this habit, and then within a few, you know, you it you’ll see stuff happening, and then you’ve built a habit, and then you make it 50 quid, then you make 100 quid. And if you set that one life change 30 years later will make the difference between whether you have like a fat six-figure or even seven-figure sum to your name, and you’re right, or you never did, and you never sort it out. And you know, one of the one of the things I really do struggle with is um I get you know, I get a lot of inbound emails and messages on social and stuff, and the tragic thing is always when somebody emails me and says, like, I’m you know 72 and I’ve just read your book and I wish I’d have heard it. Correct. And it’s just like, and I’ve got no pension and you know, I’m really freaking out, and what do I do? And can you help? And it’s like no. Not really. Like and other than you know, I mean it’s never too late to do something and to improve. Um of course, yeah, yeah, there’s some things, but yeah, but then you know, you’re gonna have like if you’re 72 and you’re still fit and healthy, and you can do a job and maybe uh ideally something white collar, you know, because you’re 72, you’re not gonna be a miner and preferably not a farmer or anything that requires a lot of physical, you know, activity. Um, but you’re gonna have to try and earn money and you’re gonna have to do the best you can with that money from now on. But you mean this is what I I think you know, I’m I’m in the process, I’m delivering it by the 31st of December, but but come hook up by crook or whatever the expression is the is the um basically doing a young adult’s version of that book. Brilliant. Because, as I’ve been bleating on about at the beginning of the book, it’s like if you sort this out in your early 20s, you’ve got such a high chance of being in a really good place. Um, and you’ve and you know, people are like, Well, why am I gonna sacrifice 10% of my salary in my 20s just because I’ll be rich when I’m 6’5? It’s like, no, don’t think about it like that. Think about it like this. If you don’t do it, you’re gonna be fucking poor. Life’s gonna be really bad. And that’s why you ricause carrot and stick, right? The good news is you’ve got a chance of being quite wealthy. Bad news is if you don’t do it, you are gonna be really poor because the government is not gonna be able to pay for you.

[73:50] Sammie Ellard-King: No, exactly. Whether or not we even get a state pension by the time we get there. But it’s already, you know It’s already on the table. Yeah, exactly. But even now, if you have a max what’s the state pension now? 10 grand a year? Yeah, well, £221.50 a week. Yeah, that’s give or take. Ish, right? So how does that wash if you, you know, how’s that gonna cover how much of your whatever expenses you have right now? No, it doesn’t. Even the average pension pot retirement, including state pension, ends up about £1,200 a month. So yeah, because I always go, it it’s like really depressingly, the average British person has about £50,000 at retirement and it’s like £70,000 quid for men and much less for women. Exactly. There’s a gender, gender investment, gender pension gap that’s enormous. But yeah, like that’s not a lifestyle you want to live. So but you can go like to even get to like an even base level of like £100 a month over a long period of time. Three, four times the average pension pot. So like, you know, just well isn’t it’s like why wouldn’t you do it?

[74:53] Andrew Craig: Because um, I mean, yeah, this is possibly for another I sense we’ve been talking for ages and so um, you know, and this is a deep dive. But but the the because the thing I always go back to is let’s talk about just quickly the difference between investing and trading. Because one thing I find all the time is like particularly young people, particularly with exposure and crypto, is like people conflate those two things. They think investing and trading are the same thing, they’re completely different things. No, requires a basic clear PhD. Yeah, and trading’s really tough. It’s uh you’re much more likely to lose money, it’s far more time consuming. If you don’t have tons of capital, the likelihood that you make any kind of tangible return in absolute terms, like in you know, if you’ve got a hundred grand, you can make two percent a month. That’s two grand. It’s really hard to make two percent a month. If you’ve got a grand, it’s not fucking worth it. Like it’s you could you should spend your time getting better at your job or you know, whatever else you might be doing. Um, but and the main thing is like investing is something you learn to do and do forever with whatever you earn every month forever, and it will give you an amazing outcome. Um, but it’s really important because what a lot of people this whole trading versus investing thing, the reason I mention it is because a lot of people stumble over this stuff and then they’re like, Well, I’ve been investing for like three months, and nothing’s happened, and it’s like you’ve totally not understood the whole yeah.

[76:10] Sammie Ellard-King: I just say think in decades. Yeah, yeah, 100%. As it is, think in decades rather than years, not months, definitely not days. And if the market goes down, carry on fucking buying because that’s what’s gonna make you wealthy. Totally, yeah. But that yeah, because it’s um again, I can’t remember if we said this before, but um the one of the real problems with that is that uh psychologists tell us is that when you or I conceptualize of ourselves age like 70, if you if I mentally think about that person, that person is as much a stranger to me that I’m not at all interested in as a seven-year-old bloke in the pub over the road right now. Totally. So I’m gonna like I’m gonna sacrifice, I’m gonna have a not as nice car, one fewer holiday a year, or you know, fewer trips to the pub, or whatever, all the things I’m gonna sacrifice in order to square away 10% of my income every month without fail for 30 years to give some random stranger a much better life. Why don’t I want to do that? And it’s like you have to be aware of that reality so that you can bust through it, because if you don’t do it, you’re gonna be really poor, to the point we made earlier.

[77:14] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, totally. Uh all right, to to round that off then I think that we’ve like the reason why people should take that into consideration is because biotechnology is gonna make you live longer. Well, that yeah, I mean that’s exactly that’s another um So you’re gonna live longer. Yeah. Well we already So they’re already saying, but you know, life expectancy It’s going up. Yeah, it was it was 47 in 1909 when we invented the pension. 47. I mean it’s insane, right? And now it’s like 84 or whatever it is, depends on the many women. So the actual chances of you making it there and not being able to work and look after yourself. And it is, yeah, and that’s right, and it is really important to stress because again, people think this is a party political thing. It’s like we’ll have labor in power and it’ll be fine, everybody will have a really generous pension.

[78:01] Sammie Ellard-King: Forget about that. Correct. It’s a mathematical inevitability based on demographics, and it’s like and it’s so everybody has to take responsibility for that. Because that’s the bad that is bad news. By the way, like I to my point about Star Trek and everything, like set against that. You know, if AI and robotics and biotech and efficient agriculture because it’s basically this idea of refashioning the periodic table, right? If we become really, really genius at creating energy and refashioning the periodic table to make all the stuff like the chairs we’re sitting on and shelter and warmth and electricity, and we have like limitless, you know, imagine a scenario where we have high ultimate power. Yeah, well, we have but we have high it’s very science fiction, but it’s also really exciting because it could actually happen in our lifetimes. But you know, if you imagine that every sort of desert in the world that’s just dead, there are no animals there apart from a few little, you know, comedy little rodents running around you see on David Attenborough programs. But broadly, like, you know, the middle of the Sahara, there’s like, I don’t know, it’s millions of square kilometres, it’s probably a million, it’s but it’s hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of just useless, dead, sandy, stony bullshit land that you’re never gonna be able to grow any crops on. And if we can carpet that with fairly non-invasive biologically coated photovoltaic cells that generate electricity, and then plumb that to a terminal in you know Tunisia or Morocco or whatever, and then it goes under the sea into Europe, that honestly, there’s a there is a scenario whereby we have like massively abundant electricity, we have all the power we need for industry, we have all the power to build robots and and you know, spaceships, and as nuts as it sounds, that’s really because reality. If we do that, then the government might be able to afford for us all to and if if a lot of elderly care is done by robots, or if we’re there’s another big theme in the book, if health span, you know, if 85 is the new 45, and actually at 85 because you’ve done you’ve done the bionic stuff and you know you’ve you’ve longevity, yeah, you you know, you’re still really spry, and then then I don’t know whether you know, because it’s like the um the optimal in terms of death, slightly morbid, is that you basically live a really, really healthy, fit life and you can do everything you want to do until like you just die. And it’s kind of like how do we engender that? Yeah, like that’s uh it’s unlikely to happen. But anyway, anyway, good. I’ve sense that we’re I feel a bit self-conscious. I mean, swearing my arse off and just sort of bollocking on about 25 different topics. No, it’s been really good fun.

[80:27] Sammie Ellard-King: And I I I just love chatting to you about this type of stuff because you know, I think like the thing is for me, I’ll stumble across one study, then I’ll see you post something different which is connected to it, and then I’m down some rabbit hole with this person. I’ve ruined your day. No, I’m like, that’s me gone. Well, technically, yeah, probably because I was supposed to be doing something else, and now I’m reading about GDP per capita and resources of Norway. Yeah, exactly. It’s like, oh thanks, Andrew. But like it the reason why is just like I just love talking about this stuff properly and with people that actually like really care about the outcome of people, which is like what it all comes back to. That’s exactly right, and it’s um it’s also like the the joys of having a podcast, right? Is that if you called up if you well, if you called up a mate and said, Can we go to the pub and spend an hour and a half talking about like politics and economics and capital? They go, Fuck off. Yeah, but like happily the joy of a podcast is you can. And I’m really up for that as well. So that’s why I do shitloads of podcasts.

[81:25] Sammie Ellard-King: Basically, total losers, both of us. Yeah, no, well, yeah, we’ll see about that. Yeah, the books are out now on Amazon. And how can people is that is that is that where you want to send people, or is that a better place to go? You can get them from Waterstones and stuff. I think they’re I think even that one was in Waterstones for a while. I think I don’t know whether that one’s made in or not, because there’s only like 2,000 books in a Waterstones, right? So if you’re like the top 2,000 books, so it’s pretty tricky. But um, no, Amazon, that it’s all over, you know, both of them are on Amazon. I’ve read them both, they’re great, man. They’re great reads. Thank you very much. Well, if I may, the one thing I do want to just say is anybody who’s got a Spotify subscription, they’re both on Spotify. Oh, cool. So you can just, yeah, exactly. So if you’re already paying for Spotify, you effectively get them for free or no additional costs. I shouldn’t say that because I think I make a lot less money if they do that. Buy the bloody hard copy, yeah, exactly. Give me money. I’m gonna invest it in the world to improve things. But but yeah, it’s um it’s it’s kind of cool that it’s on Spotify because it just makes it less of a, you know, if people want to check it out.

[82:22] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s such a new hack from them. I think it’s brilliant. Okay, I’ve been really going through. Well, I was really annoyed with my publisher because like the that one was on Spotify for like a year before they told me. Oh well, they actually they didn’t tell me. A mate of mine said, Your book’s on Spotify. It’s like, no, it’s not. So it’s like a whole year where I could have been like tweeting about it or whatever and saying, check out my book. Well, we’ll leave links, of course, to the books in the show notes below. I definitely recommend starting with How to Own the World, though, because I think it’s like a very good like introductory way into like actually making a difference to your life, and then definitely then go on to our futures by the state. Well, and also, so my second one’s called Live On Less Invest the Rest, which is kind of like a workbook. So that’s like the theory, Live On Less is in fact the practice. And we’re just about to publish the new version of that, hopefully, literally like in December, failing that in early in January. So, and actually, if anybody’s ever bought a copy of the last edition of that, uh, we’re gonna give people free e electronic like PDF and EPUB versions of it for anybody who like emails us and goes, I bought your first copy, and now you’ve added 60 new pages. Can I please have the new one? And we’ll say, Yes, here it is. Oh, cool. But we can’t afford to send everybody a hard like a print.

[83:25] Sammie Ellard-King: How do they do they go to plain English Finance? Yeah, exactly. And also, like if anybody following us on our YouTube channel, which is just Andrew Craig, Plain English Finance, or you know, any ping me on LinkedIn or I don’t do Instagram or TikTok because I can’t do them all. I don’t well, I don’t do short form you know me, mate. I talk very long form bollocks. Um, but uh the YouTube channel’s great as well. Like we’ll link link all to it all. Yeah, exactly. And then then people will see when this stuff happens and they can get a free copy of my workbook. Cool. Well, mate, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, mate, to see you again again. Yeah, well, let’s do it again in three months’ time. We have to do a residency when it all kicks off again. I’ll probably say all the same shit again, but fingers crossed. Thanks a lot, mate. Wow, I absolutely love that conversation with Andrew Craig, and it’s always a pleasure to have him on the sofa because it’s just so nice having a conversation with someone who cares about this as much as we do on this podcast. Honestly, his book absolutely blew me away. If you’ve not read it, definitely get it, How to Own the World. And then in his next one, Our Future is Biotech, both absolute bangers. And we will 110% have Andrew back on the show very soon because I just love talking to him about this stuff. But if you are not subscribed on YouTube, please whack that subscribe button. And if you are on Spotify or Apple, give us a follow. Give us a little five star review. It really does help the show grow. But for now, we’ll see you guys next week. And it’s been a real pleasure. Peace.