The hidden crisis in the UK economy

32:13If you're a business that needs to prove security and compliance, visit Vanta.com forward slash making money to sign up for a completely free demo today. That's Vanta.com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description, though, so you can just click that. i just want to come back to the active passive bit because if i don't mind the audience will like they'll lynch one of us yeah yeah do you think you said there that obviously there's uh i know a lot of capital flows through financial advisors so that will be directed into passive but do you also think that a large reason for the rise in passive is poor performance of active and the fees but it again it's chicken and egg right if if we still had the same regulatory position so So if, and it's this point I made about Simon French, the economist, showing, you know, Britain is now 50 % underweight.

33:01Its pension funds are 50 % underweight British equities, right? And everywhere else in the world is like 6 ,000 % overweight, you know. And if we hadn't had this liability-driven investment sort of egregiously draconian rules that pushed pension funds into bonds, sorry, from equities for the last 30 years, it wouldn't have been poor performance you know and actually a lot of the um up until a couple of years ago when things really started you know getting terrible like we're out or near the nadir and everybody's all these companies like six small uk biotech companies have gone off the lund stock exchange this year like gone private because they just can't there's no point in being there there's no liquidity um but the long-run performance of smaller company funds is remarkable And I think we spoke about this before, but so Elroy Dimson and Paul, Marsh and Dimson, Paul Dimson, Paul, I can't remember.

33:55But anyway, two professors from the London Business School, Dimson and Marsh, have been doing this piece on smaller companies for years, British smaller companies. And from 1955 to 2021, smaller companies, UK smaller companies, the smallest companies in the stock market, delivered an average annual performance of somewhere between 15 and 16%. average annual performance now there's loads of volatility along the way but if so if you've been investing in smaller companies for a decade or two as a sort of relatively sophisticated slightly wealthier middle class person who got that you'd be a millionaire in like 15 years uh sort of just investing your maxing your isa every year this stuff like this is all dead you know and by the way what did that mean well easyjet wouldn't exist without that reality you know all the restaurants we love that are now evaporating you know that why is the british high street so challenged but you know because of this like and and as i say i feel it really really acutely because i've been at the coalface of arguably the hardest bit of uk smaller companies which is loss making bleeding edge you know biotech companies that are trying to cure cancer and the trouble with biotech is a structurally difficult area because basically a lot you know if you open a restaurant you can make money next week when your first customers come through the door if you open a if you're a fashion retailer right if you're a biotech company trying to cure cancer you know it takes 10 years and three billion dollars to go from an idea in a lab to a on-market product if you get there you make ridiculous amounts of money which but it does mean that reminded me of oil exploration when i was listening to you describe it it was kind of like we've got an idea we might find it and loads die so who's putting money into that or mining right Like, you know, because who was it?

35:38Was it Tom Sawyer? Who wrote Tom Sawyer? I described miners as a liar standing next to a hole in the ground. And so we used to joke about it. So, yeah, like biotech investing has a similar profile to some of the oil and gas explosion mining. The difference is it's incredibly regulated. So in some ways it's kind of better because it's not a liar standing next to a hole in the ground. It's real science saying these patients got better or they didn't get better. And then that's massively kind of signed off on rubber stamp by, you know, the FDA in America or the MHRA in the UK. But, yeah, so it's super depressing.

36:14And actually, Max King, who's a brilliant financial journalist and ex-fund manager, writing in Money Week two weeks ago, said, you know, we've lost Arm Holdings, CRH, BHP Billiton, British. If you're the CEO of a British company and you're trading at a 40 or 50 percent discount, to what he could be because those companies are now not trading if they've got you know crh is up 65 in the year arms up a hell of a lot more than that from from moving to new york it's your fiduciary duty as the ceo of a business like that to do the best you can for your shareholders and stakeholders and grow the business you list abroad so if you it's now the point where a lot of these ceos like the ceo of shell or rio tinto or hsbc or like our very biggest companies right now AstraZeneca, Glaxo, right?

36:57There will be noises off from American hedge funds or big European institutional investors or Singapore-based investors or whatever from their shareholders saying, what are you doing on London? You'd have a 50 % up to your share price. Astra would become a £300 billion company very quickly and then have much more capital, be able to raise more money and do all sorts of things like to cure cancer and all the things it wants to do. And so we really have to turn this supertaker around so i guess that's you know so i just spent three three years writing the book is so in terms of the uk specifically in the role of biotech um there's a great um welsh entrepreneurs called sir chris evans who's sometimes called the welsh wizard who's a bit of a maverick kind of biotech investor and he's he's on record saying the uk only need needs one genentech so genentech was basically the first big biotech company in the late 80s in California and it was eventually acquired by Roche, the big Swiss farmer.

37:54So it's now Roche Genentech was part of Roche. But the point being is that Genentech delivered so much kind of economic value and wealth so quickly just from amazing science, it became a multi hundred billion dollar company and, you know, that employment and blah, blah. And it goes to my point about Nvidia, you know, or Nova Nordisk, you know, the Danish economy, the whole of the Danish economy, the Danish GDP is being completely affected by Nova Nordisk. Like the whole country is being dragged along and a few other companies. But it's remarkable. And so the good news is the sort of countervailing potential to all of this is exponential science and commercial delivery, right?

38:32And if we had a handful of, you know, sometimes there are companies that are so good and create so much value that it almost doesn't matter what the economic backdrop is within reason, notwithstanding. But, you know, so like Nova Nordisk has gone from being capitalized at$20 billion, dollars i don't know 12 years ago it's been capitalized at 400 ish billion dollars i haven't looked today maybe it's 450 i can't remember but it's roughly 400 billion dollars from diabetes and weight loss what is a company going to be worth that has a functional cure for cancer that's an oral pill with no side effects yeah like three or four trillion dollars right in my considered or probably more yeah you know how many it's taken out the large part of the world population council one in two people are getting it right and and there are so many i mean this is why in the book Actually, if I may, let's take a step back and talk big picture about why biotech is so exciting.

39:23Can you very quickly explain to our listeners what biotech is? Because I know your definition is like agriculture. It's like all sorts of things. It is. So the slightly, well, literally cheesy answer that I have for that is, you know, the original biotech is cheese and yogurt and brewing, right? Because all biotech is, is using... Fermentation, almost. Yeah, biotech is just definitionally using living systems, living things to create products and nowadays services too, right? So that's the big catch-all definition. When most people think about biotech, their brain immediately goes to therapeutic drugs, like curing cancer or obesity or diabetes or whatever.

40:03And that's definitely a massive focus for the industry. So the first really successful kind of biotech drug, in my opinion, was human insulin back in the 80s. so before that insulin came out of cows and pigs like slaughtered animals it's pretty grim lots of resistance and then people put it into humans yeah yeah that's how when when you had a burger for breakfast mate so it's not that it's slightly different to having like insulin that's been extracted from a cow's pancreas injected into your blood i mean that's pretty so you know but but you know that diabetes was a death sentence until the 20s right just a outright you know type 2 diabetes or type 1 diabetes um and then um the so the next event was the extraction isolation of insulin from you know animals that was used until like the 80s when we figured out how to do human insulin so um you know therapeutics are huge and sorry my point being that's by the way that's a big reason why nova nordisk was originally 200 billion dollars because that was its business before weight loss but actually the what i do in the book right at the beginning is explain that what's so exciting about biotech is it's it's about so much more than that it's about you know what are our biggest problems environmental degradation agricultural productivity feeding the world the biotech industry so if you like the last century has been about tech and physics so you know obviously that's like automotive aviation uh silicon ai laterally machine learning smartphones the internet you know we can all if i if you said to a 10 year old what are the biggest kind of technological developments to the last century, they could tell you.

41:38And then you'd say, well, that's basically all physics, chemistry, physics, tech, right? And that, Moore's law, the fact that the processing power per pound or dollar spent doubles every 18 to 24 months, has been the underlying driver of all that incredible wealth creation and it's lifted billions of us out of poverty. You know, we wouldn't be able to build football stadiums or fly aeroplanes or have smartphones. We wouldn't be doing this. We wouldn't be doing this. All these cameras around. Yeah, exactly right. And I think we massively take for granted just how, you know, in 1800, everyone was incredibly poor, died in their 40s, and most children died before their fifth birthday, right?

42:14We had the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, technological revolution, capital markets. Without financial markets, none of that would have happened because you wouldn't be able to fund it. So that's the last century. It's been pretty magnificent that we can fly and we can do whatever. The next... We can fly.

42:34flying is good i don't get to do it anymore because i've got two small children so i'm not going on holiday for a few years but anyway um but basically so the last century to tech and physics and and actually just in terms of wealth creation that's the fundamental underlying driver of why us equities have done 10 plus returns for a century another fact that nobody knows i i make that statement on podcast interviews and people go snake oil you know this guy's a liar it's like oh just google you know us equity performance for 100 years please you know don't accuse me of being some dishonest peddler of snake oil to give you the factual return of the us equities for a century right um but anyway i digress but the next century in my considered opinion having been looking at this for well i've been looking at stock markets for 25 plus years and i've been focused on biotech for the last 10 years the next century is going to be about biology and biotech and there are a number of kind of what makes you so certain of that sorry to interrupt well that's fine well that's what i was about you know it's the big first inherent structural reasons and so there are things like the way humanity creates real wealth all the stuff we're just talking about is by solving problems and delivering wants and needs so you know architecture and construction arose because we needed places to live and places to work and food retail and agriculture arose because we need to eat you know it's fairly obvious right the aviation industry or shipping industry arose because or whatever the reason that structurally biotech is about to like take the torch on from tech is because pretty much all of our remaining challenges as a species are about biological systems so most obviously that's curing cancer diseases in general yeah but yeah but this is the point it's so much more than disease because it's like aging age well aging that's part of disease but going to environmental degradation yeah like so the biotech holds out the promise of completely revolutionizing agriculture.

44:22So if you can revolutionize agriculture, you could rewild the Amazon. Imagine if the Amazon was rewilded over a period of like 20 years, then you've had a massive impact on environmental degradation and global warming. And it's fairly clear when you consider the challenges that confront us as a species and the technologies that can solve them that they're mainly biotechnologies. And just sort of crack on, but a really good example of that, for example. And again, this is just inherent and structural, the nature of the thing, right? So everybody understands basically how silicon works, right? Zeros and ones, transistors.

45:02And Moore's law, in my lifetime from 1975 to today, we have a billion time. We've a billion folded the power per dollar of processors, right? and you know nvidia that's why it's such a big company taiwan semiconductor all these you know asml and holland the semiconductor industry has delivered the chips and everything and the processing power for this to happen right we're now bumping up against the limits of physics like literally just at the level of how much silicon we can go exactly so moore's law is going to grind to a halt and they've already been working this for years like things will overheat you know you'll need much more like blade servers will need more cooling and more power and everything else basically one of the most exciting things that biotech can deliver biological computer biological computing i thought that was really cool that's right because very simply at a very simple level by the way it's probably 10 years away but people are putting billions into it already right biological processing which we're already working on could completely step change our processing power and here's a really ridiculously exciting complete gunk works cutting edge thing we could use we could grow things in culture effectively a living thing a cellular thing and culture it's slightly difficult how you define living but bear with me and or it would be a storage medium whereby the way that you configure it at the cellular level that were at the level of the gene of the genetic level of the thing is a storage medium so however it's configured stores the data right in the way at the moment um you know hard drives are zeros and ones and zeros and billions of zeros and ones which are a movie or a you know book or whatever so scientists are already working on doing that with the crucial difference with that technology that biological technology and our current standard technology of blade servers and you know hard drives and stuff you wouldn't need to power it so you can literally have all of the information that humanity has accrued in history that you can now fit in a, you know, I mean, basically, I don't know, a one exabyte hard drive or whatever it might be.

47:11That's not quite true. I'm digressing because we're now creating so many exabytes of new data from genomic analysis. But anyway, like all of the assembled literature of human history and music and whatever can basically be put on a fairly small hard drive, right? But imagine we can do that and all the other data that's coming down the pipe from all this R &D, and we can put them in these little things the size of a sugar cube which don't need any power, instead of blade servers, which are hoovering up power left, right and centre. Do you ever think it gets a bit Jetson-y and we predict this mad future and then what actually happens is we're all just stuck on our phones?

47:46100%. And I obviously treat that in the book a fair bit because I think even in the first chapter I say much of what follows will seem like naivety or wishful thinking. You say it could be Mad Max, it could be... Yeah, it's a race between Mad Max and Star Trek. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, a sort of dystopian future of an apocalypse or everybody's wealthy and friendly. We're fighting Klingons. Yeah, and the only existential threats come from alien species. Exactly right. In my considered belief, having just spent three years researching this and 10 years working in this sector, not all of this stuff's going to arrive next year, but there is what, and to be clear, it's convergence, right?

48:26It's tech and biotech converging because all of the really exciting technologies. Computer processing power. Exactly. Did we have to get to the top of Moore's law before we could do the... Maybe just because people won't put enough capex into the change until we really need to. But like if you think about, so there's things, sort of genuine things that we're able to do at the moment that are super exciting. So firstly, we've only had what's called next generation sequencing for. So we first tried to read the genetic code of a human being from the late 80s until they finally announced it in like 2001.

49:02I keep saying 2001. I'm slightly worried it might have been 2002 or 2008. Who cares? Someone in the comments will get you. Yeah, exactly. You don't know what you're talking about. The Human Genome Project. And it's estimated it cost between three and five billion dollars and took 13 years to do that. to go, right, this is the genetic code of human beings, the level of DNA. Today, it takes an hour and costs 200 bucks. And that trajectory has absolutely left Moore's law in the dust. It's like the most amazing, impressive, exponential probably in the history of human science, right? Now, why does that matter?

49:38Because now we can accurately read genetic code. We can say, well, there's a mutation in the in you know this bit of the genetic code and that causes sickle cell anemia or epilepsy or whatever there are 10 000 diseases that we suffer from as as a human organism that are basically one genetic defect then there are loads more that are multiple genetic defects that are much more complicated to disaggregate our ability to diagnose that and analyze that is only because of a technology called next generation sequencing that's only been around for like 20 years that it was it was being developed when we first read the genome now they're fairly ubiquitous machines that are expensive but most big labs in the world could have one so that's completely transformational because you can read a bacteria or a virus or a fungus or a plant or a human or a mammal or whatever you know a sheep for livestock stuff or whatever that's like a sheep moving swiftly on um but you but but you know that's super exciting But the even more exciting thing is, and this sounds a bit weird, but so go back to 1945 and the best scientists in the world in Germany work in rocket technology to bomb London, right?

50:48And the best scientists in the world were in Japan, were doing whatever they were doing for the war effort in Japan. And the best scientists in the world in America working on the bomb. And they were all working in complete isolation and secrecy for their respective warring nation states. This is as recently as when our grandparents were around, two generations ago, right? Or at least mine. today every scientist in the world working on this stuff like if you've just identified this genetic mutation will cause this disease and you've written a paper on it with all your evidence you upload it to the cloud and it's available to every other scientist in the world so now that rests on good storage um you know processing power high-speed internet like we need ubiquitous high-speed broadband because you're sharing sharing huge these files are big files right that's only been around for what 10 years like being able to share a file that has billions of bytes in it and it's you know many gigabytes of data just for one thing we've got tens of thousands of academic papers and this is all in the public domain it's all emily searchable and the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle is so we can read the genetic code of any organism we can interrogate the extant knowledge of the whole of humanity which is developing rapidly every day and say well that actually means this so you know we can actually do something with that rather than just going it's a load of meaningless numbers and the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle in 2020 the nobel prize was awarded for crisper this gene editing technology where we can actually then go okay this gene causes sickle cell anemia which is a horrible disease so we've we can read the genetic code with the academics have figured out what causes sickle cell anemia and now we've got a technology called CRISPR, we can go in and snip it and change it and cure it.

52:29And that was the first CRISPR-based. So theoretically, you can do that for any of those 10 ,000 diseases. So it's sort of like, why is biology and biotech going to be the investment theme in the next century? Because this, you know, think about all the most valuable problems, like curing all 10 ,000 genetically inherited diseases. That's a hugely valuable thing. Or using fungi and bacteria and everything else to deal with microplastics in our oceans and rivers and seas and lakes or soils that have been leached full of heavy metals for the last since the industrial revolution basically that are now you know why does america have such a food problem because actually it's evidence is increasingly clear because of the damage done to the sort of natural balance of soil fertility and microplastics getting into the food chain and and there are various other reasons to do with how egregious their big industrial agricultural firms can be.

53:25But lots of illness and chronic illness, all these diseases and modernity that are massively on the rise, we can address and sort out because we can bioremediate those soils using these sorts of technologies. So it's super exciting. Two questions on that then. How does the UK economy benefit from it and how does the UK public benefit from it? Let's start with the economy. So, well... Why us? not America. Yeah, well, okay. So the first answer to that question is we have some structural advantages because we have amazing science. And there's no question that notwithstanding everything we started this discussion with, you know, I'll go back to again, Cambridge and Oxford between them and actually plenty of other British units like, you know, Bath and Dundee and Edinburgh.

54:09And, you know, it's not just Oxford and Cambridge, but, you know, they've won so many Nobel Prizes. Britain has been at the vanguard of so many of these developments. I mean, basically gene and cell therapy, a load of that human insulin, all of this stuff, a lot of it originally came out of British science. And then other countries made money out of it. Other countries made money out of it. And that's because our political class is so completely financially illiterate and hopeless, like demonstrably, in my view. Because basically, what have we had now, like 20 or 30 years now, where most politicians come straight out of university and become special purpose advisor or whatever.

54:42It's got SPAD or whatever. In my view, you shouldn't be allowed to be a government minister unless you've had like 20 years of experience at the coalface of industry in the relevant thing. And that's our political system. What can we do about that? Makes sense, but it doesn't. So yeah, why do you think they're positioned to benefit? Because of our natural edge in science. And actually the NHS, whatever your views on the NHS, it's a massive patient population and we're leveraging it right now. There's a thing called the 100 ,000 Genomes Project, which is kind of using the fact that the NHS has access to such a huge patient population.

55:15we can use that to feed into scientific development. It's like training data. Yeah, exactly. That sounds a bit kind of science fiction, doesn't it? I think it makes sense to people now. They understand that you need large sets of data to train things on. Well, particularly now, and this stuff's also complicated. But whether or not we can parlay that into creating a few, well, it would be great if we created a few£10 billion companies, let alone£500 billion companies, remains to be seen. But what we have to pray happens is that there are a handful of technologies that are so good that they create a load of value.

55:54And because there's a potential perfect storm, a virtuous circle in the right direction, away from the sort of perfect storm of negativity we've had in the last 30 years, whereby let's say a British company develops an oral pill that cures cancer with no side effects. Like in all seriousness. Now, I'm not saying that's going to happen next year, but it will probably happen in the next decade or, you know, another company somewhere else might. But there are a few British companies that are inching in that direction. One of the biggest challenge to biotech companies, small British biotech companies in particular, is they get no press coverage.

56:27So, like, you're struggling to raise money. There's no institutional interest. There's no investors left. Everyone's investing in crypto. Like, I need$100 million to cure cancer. Please, will somebody give me$100 million? Nope, there's no money. like that is exactly what we've been dealing with 30 years but if they can soldier through and I've you know first-hand experience working with those these companies on fumes like so hard so challenging so frustrating ceos spending all their time trying to raise capital from wherever they can from like a millionaire who's got cancer in Saudi Arabia or what you know wherever you might be able to get the the cash together one of the two of them might deliver something really amazing and then it's front page news and then it's like a household name and then it's a multi-billion pound company and then the other companies get the funding because people want the next and it's and that's the point about it being a virtuous circle is you know my actual my genuine belief slash hope is that in five or six years from now maybe through three to seven years from now let's say there'll be half a dozen to a dozen footsie 250 sized british life sciences companies so that's like 800 million-ish upwards, sort of between 800 million and 4 billion value-sized companies.

57:34I think I'm right in saying roughly around there. If that happens, all the big investment banks will have an analyst that covers UK mid-cap life sciences. If they have products that are changing people's lives or stripping billions of cost out of the NHS, they will be front-page news. Their CEOs might become as famous as Richard Branson or whatever, right? They will finally come out of this horrendous like nadir of the last few years and actually have some the oxygen of some attention on them um and that will just pay dividends in all sorts of ways basically you know you said that there isn't much investment for biotech and um it's yeah it's hard i work in venture capital and in the first two quarters of this year it's been growing like it was down last year like declining all year but now the first two quarters it's up five percent um and the main things that people are investing in are ai health care and financial services crypto has gone away a bit hasn't it oh dude they've we our company got banned we got banned from taking for investing in crypto projects because they said it's too risky and they wanted to just focus on like ai which is apparently not risky it's not a bubble no i mean it's a cool meme isn't it at the moment like all the sort of vc commentators on twitter or whatever are like just posting these memes about how here's a vc that was really enthusiastic about bitcoin and crypto who's now just massively into ai you should just cross it out so do you think like um biotech will just be the next because they're doing ai they're doing health care that's kind of quite close to transferring into biotech so that's can that not be where the funding comes from yes um but vcs naturally fund early stage small businesses so that so you know britain is really good at um i mean generally right yeah britain is really good at angel investment britain's really good at like two really clever scientists at a british university having an idea about how to cure cancer or you know you have a blood test for cancer that's like really inexpensive and so my point is that basically the missing link, I think at the moment goes to a discussion we had at the beginning of this chat, which is we're really good at, so that company, early, relatively early stage, we're pretty good at funding companies that are spinning out these sorts of technologies from uni or whatever.

59:38And, you know, Britain has a lot of sort of government institutions like the British Business Bank and British Growth Fund and, you know, whatever. A lot of focus on small private companies where we're really really bad is taking them from like two three hundred million up to being 20 30 billion companies we almost never do that and that and and it kind of i find it really galling that so much of this sort of focus of politicians and you know there's loads of lobbying of the new labor government and we need to support life sciences and there's all this chat about how they support relatively early stage stuff and private stuff but no one's saying like well we've already got like dozens of companies listed on the london stock market who for all sorts of structural reasons that i do explain in the book can't raise money and can't make any progress and they either go bust or leave the stock market or give up or get acquired for you know a 50th of what they could have been valued at how does someone go and i want to ride that way so ironically given everything we were saying earlier it's so funny we'll come back to this so uh one of the big points i'm making the book right at the end is so biotech investment per se is super specialist and risky, right?

1:00:45So the answer actually is buy a passive fund. Yeah. And it really... I don't know how they just benefit from the chain. If you're a multimillionaire and you're really interested in finance, I think every multimillionaire in this country is their duty to support UK small cap equities. Like, that's my genuine belief. Don't take the fuck off. Yeah, correct. My duty is to live my life. But it's chicken and egg, right? Because if they do, they'll go back to doing 15 % a year and everything will be brilliant. They'll make amazing returns. Companies will get funded. the UK economy will be brilliant, right?

1:01:15Let's say you're in your 20s and you're starting off an investment, you can do 50 quid a month or whatever. And, you know, we talked about this last time we did the interview. Yeah, put that all in the S &P 500 or the MSCI world or, you know, standard practice. What I'm saying is that as people get older and wealthier and more financially sophisticated and have more money, then a great deal more of them should be doing things like putting 10 % in a UK small cap active fund or 10 % in a life sciences fund. And, you know, it's about it's about getting the right balance right yes of course like a 26 year old is just starting out investment don't be investing in biotech and don't you know maybe not being doing smaller companies unless you're a very high earner or you're particularly particularly into equities and finance and you know what you're doing but we've just again it's the point about the pendulum like the pendulum has swung so far away that you know uk equity funds have had 37 consecutive months of outflows up until a month ago.

1:02:09That's killing the UK economy. Like it's killing our ability to innovate and make money and, you know, generate wealth and pay tax and fund the government and fund the NHS. And, you know, I'm not saying that somebody in their 20s or their 30s who hasn't got that much money, who's just starting off an investment should just immediately go to small caps. But there's a, you know, there are far more people in the UK that should be doing that. And And actually, I genuinely believe, based on a century's worth of performance data, that they shouldn't just do it as a sort of help the UK PLC, you know, charitable thing.

1:02:45They should do it because the record of history is that they'll make supernormal returns from doing it. And look, biotech's done 14.7 % in sterling terms. Sorry, US Nasdaq biotech index for the last 15 years, 14.7 % annualized, right? like what what can and u.s biotech was already more expensive what can uk biotech do from the absolute nadir of being on its knees so hang on reading back what was the um how did joe public yeah yeah yeah so um just like tech we're appointment so tech basically is the reason why the s &p 500 has done 10.35 percent annualized since 1923 right directly because the magnificent and seven stocks are like 30 % of the value of the index, and you've made tons of money in Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, blah, blah, blah.

1:03:36But indirectly, because Visa and MasterCard rest on tech, all the investment banks use tech, all the mining companies use tech, all the oil and gas companies use tech. Tech as an underpinning theme has created all this wealth, right? And if you just owned the world, I'm sorry to slightly get in my first book again there, but that's the whole thesis. If you just have exposure to lots of equities, a big thing like tech, you'll capture it. And biotech is going to be exactly the same because, you know, biotech is going to revolutionize health care. It's going to revolutionize agriculture. It's going to revolutionize food retail.

1:04:09I mean, in my view, right, not tomorrow, but in our lifetimes. So I think from the vantage point of 20 or 30 years from now, the reason that big global equities will keep delivering, you know, high single digit, low double digit returns and hopefully, you know, seven, eight percent returns, real returns after inflation, which is enough to make a normal person wealthy, as we've discussed a lot before, is going to be because of the continuation of tech and biotech creating even more value, like in computing and all the stuff we've been talking about. So if you just own Vanguard All World or FTSE All World or MSCI World, or I shouldn't say Vanguard, should I?

1:04:51You're not allowed to mention it. You can say Vanguard. You say what you want. I'm not sure I can because I'm FDA regulated. I can't recommend a specific product. Okay. There are lots of Vanguard products. There are lots of Vanguard global products as well. Yeah, exactly. But the point being is the indices are foot to all world is like X thousand shares and captures a huge percentage of global market cap. The MSCI world is developed world and then S &P 500. If you think America is going to carry on delivering all the big companies, then do the S &P 500. But if you have any of those sorts of investments and you invest in them regularly over a lifetime, you're going to capture that upside from biotech.

1:05:26I want to finish on something because we're running out of time. So you've been on the biotech drum, you've been beating that drum for about 10 years now, and it hasn't happened yet, and you say you think you're two to three years away. Are you early? Are you wrong? Always two to three years away. Some of it has happened. You know, there are British companies that have gone up a fair bit, and most of them have been acquired, right? but yeah look with all these sorts of big new sort of visionary things without being too pretentious you can't time them right I genuinely believe that from the vantage point of three to seven years from now because everybody I speak to in the city who's involved with this stuff is just sitting there wringing their hands going it's just insane where these companies are like there are companies that have got two phase three ready assets which in America would be like a billion dollars worth of intellectual property which are literally capitalized at like two million quid it's just like so and frankly if you buy 20 of those and hold on for a few years then you only need two of them to go up 100x or 50x or 30x or whatever to have a pretty interesting return across the portfolio of those and that's that very very rare kind of once in a generation opportunity is only thrown up because of all the rubbish we talked about at the beginning of how ridiculously we've destroyed like british stock market capitalism basically and like all of that is a matter of record please remember this is not financial advice like we say a lot on the podcast investments can fall and rise in fact it's pretty much a guarantee past performance is no guarantee of future results so your money is at risk with investing and other fees may apply as with everything financial please do your own research we really encourage that because no one cares more about your money than you.

1:07:14I'm Damo. I'm T. This was an episode of Making Money from our company Most. It was filmed and edited by the team at Flow Spire, Jack and Ben. It was produced by Ruth Edwards and brought together by Will Stollerman. What about Ruth and Toothless a Dog? Yeah, shout out them too.