#293: What Stocks to Watch in 2026

0:00Emmet:A couple of strategists that I follow believe the rally can persist as a result of two forces. The first is evidently solid corporate earnings. That's what drives the market. And secondly, easing interest rates.

0:20Emmet:Emmet, how are we getting on? Happy New Year. Many happy returns, Mike. Good to see you back where we belong. All this Christmas, New Year stuff gets in the way of good podcasting, doesn't it? oh i don't know it's terrible i had two full weeks off pretty much and then the day i come back i started getting like throaty and a bit a bit husky and all the rest it's just too soft can't handle one day of work oh yeah i know i'd say your hands are very soft

0:47Emmet:i haven't worked i haven't worked a day in my life show mike a shovel he's like what is that thing it's like well mike that's that's the way work used to be done yeah a little soft computer boy oh yeah i'm good did you have a good break lovely yeah yeah it's great so i'm in ireland for a good bit now still i'm actually at home for another few days until i fly back doing the mother load of washing you brought it all the way in front every garland every garment i had came back in the big suitcase mike i actually heard an interesting concept over christmas i was chatting with my wife who told me that she and her friends had reduced their new year's resolutions to a single word so that was easy for them to recall and to reference so for example one of her friends just said declutter which speaks for itself so as you know i slacked you last evening and i said hey come up with your one word new year's resolution and my question is did the muses sing have you got a one word new year's resolution oh it's tough uh how does measure sound uh not as easy to understand as declutter like you could measure anything there's mike he got a yardstick and he's measuring everything measuring the height of that door measure like what what do you mean i just uh because that's a tough uh you know kind of uh a way to put everything into one but yes it's hyper reductive it's over reductive it's under the term what gets measured gets managed uh so if i can kind of keep on top of things in terms of what i want to do this year yeah across everything yeah and kind of like keep a doesn't have to be a journal of sorts but a log of kind of not getting distracted by stuff so measure would be mine what about yours it's good actually i like it when you explain it and once in your own mind you realize what it meant because i actually think it's a great starting point or very very very quick reference point for you throughout the year to see how am i doing with decluttering or measuring yeah i was thinking about it too and i don't know maybe mine's a pretentious i was thinking of the word rise and there's an obvious association with investments i want them to rise but a personal level i want to just be better i want to rise above noise i want to rise above panic and any angst and rise in patience and rise in generosity and if i'm always rising or at least trying to rise i think everything around me will follow very good i like that yeah yeah that's a good one good to uh i suppose it is one word but you're trying to throw everything into it yeah slim that's probably the one that most people would yeah well i was down if I'm allowed a second word.

3:35That'll fall into my measurements for sure.

3:37Emmet:Oh, yes, exactly. Exactly. Right. So what we talk about, I mean, we've got a fun packed show. Like I know what we're talking about. Tell me, what will we talk about? What are we talking about today? Well, this is very open-ended and I've kind of gone a bit of you on it in terms of being a bit liberal with our, what's the word, objective. But we kind of said like looking ahead to 2026. I'm rising right now. I'm rising above that, Mike. I'm giving a very measured response, which is looking ahead to 2026. So it can be predictions. It can be what you're watching or just in general. I think it's a good way to kick off the year in terms of kind of looking inward, looking at your own portfolio, looking at your own strategy and seeing if it will be sustainable.

4:24And with that in mind, my first kind of, it's not a prediction at all, really. I just kind of got a bit contemplative over the market in general over the last few years, you know, because it's been so incredibly resilient and it's been a great time to be in the market in general. And I think the tendency is to go towards maybe feeling like this isn't sustainable. And maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But just to give some context of kind of where I'm going with this to kick it off. So this is the last seven years of the S &P 500 since 2019. So 2019, the S &P 500 was up 31%. 2020, it was up 18%. 2021 was up 28.5%.

5:112022, it fell 18%. 2023, it was up 26%. 2024 was up 25%. And last year, 2025 was up 19%. It's also worth pointing out there that the COVID crash happened in the middle of 2020 and 2025 had the whole Liberation Day debacle as well. So contained within these incredible run of results are very severe downturns and then quick recoveries. So the market has been so incredibly resilient the last seven years, doubled kind of its long-term average performance. If you're looking at, say, between 9 % and 10%, and this is going at about 80%, 90 % on average in that timeframe. And this isn't for me, this isn't saying that 2026 is the year the gravy train stops or whatever else.

5:55what I guess my thinking was that you know it will eventually and and when it does what are you going to do because this is how people really lose money in the stock market is through panic and getting overly used to to easy investing if that makes sense so when you look at your portfolio like are you looking at a collection of businesses that you'll be happy to hold for the next 20 years irrespective of what the market does in the short term and are you are you just is that hopefully what you're doing and I think a lot of listeners this podcast is what they're doing but are you doing that or are you just buying stocks that go up and like this is a trap I fell into personally so this is probably why it's come to mind so quickly for me when I'm looking ahead to 2026 was kind of I first really started investing in 2020 up to 2021 was where I was really putting money in the market uh right around that GameStop mania and it's probably one I'm still recovering from in a sense, you know, more mentally than actually financially, you know, we've enjoyed a really great run.

6:54And I don't think that should stop anytime soon. And we've, this market itself has proven itself to be so incredibly, I keep using this term resilient, but it is just so incredibly resilient. It's a feeling of like irrelevant to what happens. And we saw at the start of this year, this week, like with the geopolitical tensions in Maduro and Venezuela and everything and the market opened up green on Monday. that's a testament to it I think is that there is a real sense of positivity you could go on exuberance in this market and look however long it lasts you know we'll be there to enjoy it but it is worth looking at kind of say the pitfalls out there too you know our valuations too stretched will the AI trade finally cool off what happens if you know what happens if Nvidia misses earnings I don't think there's one business that has ever been so important to the overall function of a market, to the other 3 ,000 businesses that are in the market.

7:47Emmet:So even Sherwin-Williams Painmaker will fall. Exactly. You know, and like there's more systemic stuff, like we have a new incoming Fed chair this year. What's going to happen there? Is he going to bring down interest rates too fast? What would that cause? Will you not bring them down enough? Will inflation stick around? You know, will AI begin to cause, you know, severe unemployment? Is this the year that that happens? Will it ever happen? I don't know. It probably will. But there are a hundred different catalysts that could end up causing some form of market hysteria. And, you know, a lot of people are of the opinion that, look, maybe something like that is necessary, that this rise in stocks can't go up and can't go on forever and ever.

8:24And the longer it does, the more painful that eventual crash would be. So this is more of a rant than a prediction, but it is a good time of year, I think, for people to just have a little reminder that something like that will eventually happen. and it's a good exercise to think about and how it might affect your investing mindset. If your portfolio fell 30 % tomorrow, would you be buying more stocks or would you go into panic mode? So as we kick off the year, I think it's a good opportunity to have like a little mini audit. Ask yourself, why do I own this stock? Is my portfolio diversified enough?

8:56Is my safety net sufficient? Could I handle the mental strife of an extended downturn? Would my strategy change in any way or would I continue on as normal? Because I know that this is a lifetime of work. It's not just kind of a little bit here and a little bit there. This is me building up something over 20, 30, 40 years to bring myself kind of security financially for the rest of my life and hopefully for the generations that come after me. So, yeah, yeah, that's not really a prediction, but it is more so a kind of it's important time of year to think along these lines of we've had a really, really good.

9:30Emmet:It's a forward looking reflection. Exactly. Well, one thing I would say, Mike, I think I'm totally in agreement with everything you've just said, but what I would add is that if you make predictions on a year that turn out to be correct, you are lucky. Like in fairness, you can read the direction of travel on any given topic and call it quite well for the 12 months that follow, but a year is really, it's nothing. it's nothing and as you said selling up for generational wealth is a multi-decade strategy um so so despite the fact that a year is nothing it is guaranteed to deliver a lot of surprises surprise after surprise and ben carlson who we've spoken about in this podcast before and who i've been meaning to ring to invite to invest con 2026 uh must write that in my diary in a moment but he wrote a very interesting uh post there on on day before yesterday 4th of January and it was called six surprises from 2025 and he opens it by saying an old boss of mine used to say it's okay to be surprised by what happens in the markets just don't be surprised that you're surprised and he lists six things that happen in the market and I'm sure he talks about it in his own podcast so tune into that one folks if you're interested but he did mention as one of the six surprises that only two of the magnificent seven beat the market and even though where we look at the magnificent seven and see it as the engine of growth for the entire of america inc or s p 500 at least that's microsoft apple amazon meta uh tesla um and who am i missing nvidia google nvidia that's the seven uh only google and nvidia outperformed the market yeah so could you imagine if we were at the start of 2025 and we would be like uh the nasdaq is going to grow 23 percent this year and amazon is going to grow three or four percent yeah it's kind of an outrageous statement but it is how it worked out yeah yeah very strange mark 2025 is a very strange year in general for the market i think yes it was oh very much a very very strange um but i think uh i think your overall kind of don't like the party will come to an end and then takes a breather and the party will resume and that is the way the market goes and counterintuitively like over the course of an investing career where you're putting money aside every month for 30 40 years yeah that that's going to be the most profitable time of your investing life unquestionably so you put 200 bucks aside every month or whatever your your frequency is that 200 bucks will go a long way when you're in the valley of disillusionment and there's been a crash or a correction or a recession or any other variation of a downturn your money will go way further but i tell you what it's going to be short on the ground as well belief you're going to be surrounded by naysayers when the market is at its lowest point telling you it's all over when it's never all over it's actually the time to get greedy and who am i paraphrasing get grizzy get greedy when blood Blood is on the streets.

12:43Blood is on the streets, Warren Buffett. Yeah.

12:45Emmet:Well, I'm going to use one of Ben Carlson's six surprises from 2025 as a segue into one of the things I'll be watching in 2026. And one of the six surprises was that self-driving cars became a reality. And specifically, he talks about Waymo scale rapidly with millions of rides in 2025. And this kind of was one of the reinforcement points about optimism around AI driven technological processes and its application to everyday life. and uh one of the two topics that i'm going to throw on the table i don't want to say predictive but certainly be watching and anticipate for the year ahead is and i dread to be original uh but i think this is going to be an extremely important year for tesla because if you want to understand Tesla in 2026 you need to hold apparently two contradictory ideas in your head like double think from 1984 oh exactly you have to double think because first of all in one corner Tesla's core car business is under real pressure it's been in the news in the last few days um how BYD have now overtaken them not by a small margin on the number of cars shift and um So its core car business is under real pressure.

14:16Emmet:And then in the other corner, the opposing thought is Tesla may still be the most ambitious applied AI company in the world and deliver more to humanity with AI than anybody else. And both of those two things can be true. And the tension between them is really what makes Tesla one of the most fascinating and divisive companies to talk about right now. But I'm going to start, if I may, with an uncomfortable truth, the bear argument. And the uncomfortable truth is that Tesla, the car company, is slowing down and its vehicle deliveries fell again last year. So that's two consecutive years of decline.

15:03Emmet:And it also lost its position as the world's largest EV seller. And the fourth quarter numbers came out there the other day. It totaled 418 ,000 vehicles, 16 % down year over year. and that squarely missed Wall Street's estimate of 426 ,000. And Europe was particularly weak. And the end of EV subsidies in the US really exposed something important, which was a chunk of recent demand was pulled forward, but not permanently created when incentives disappeared, sales slowed down. So it was apparent that incentives worked. That's no great surprise. But what we're left with is the tide went out and Tesla shorts were half down.

15:56Emmet:So it responded in the only rational way it could. It basically offered cheaper, stripped down versions of the Model 3 and Model Y. And that kind of kept volumes propped up a bit. But it also tells you that pricing power is not what it used to be. And then, as if we all didn't notice already, competition is very real. And as I said, BYD is powering ahead. China is now ahead on cost. It's ahead on scale. And margins for Tesla are under real pressure. So if Tesla was just a car company, this would be a much less interesting conversation. And undoubtedly, without any question or doubt, it would be a much, much lower valued stock.

16:41Emmet:But Tesla, as we all know, isn't a car company, or at least isn't only a car company. What's interesting is that even as it slows, legacy automakers are still struggling to replicate what they did in the first place all those years ago. So, you know, they can build competent electric vehicles, the other guys, Ford and friends. And some of them are very good, but many of them fail the expectations test. So Tesla's earliest successes came from the very simple idea, which was build the best car. Not build the best EV, just build the best car. Performance, software, range, and experience all came first.

17:24Emmet:In fact, that was electric, was almost secondary. And that's why Tesla continues to feel fundamentally different from the legacy car makers of Detroit and other places around Europe, Germany. And even as the hardware gap narrows, because it is narrowing, you get into a new Volkswagen, I don't know what they call ID or electric Volkswagen, and they look and feel great. And I'm sure they're lovely to drive. But where we're at is that the stock is no longer priced on cars. That ship for Tesla has sailed. And most of its revenue, of course, still comes from vehicle sales, but the valuation doesn't.

18:02Emmet:The market is underwriting what Tesla might become. And I'm getting to the point, what's this to do with 2026? So what might it become? It might become a business all about autonomous driving, robo-taxis, humanoid robots, energy systems, and I suppose a vertically integrated AI platform. that's why weak delivery numbers have not broken the story like those numbers the other day i was like oh heavens above that is not a nice read investors are not betting on a cyclical rebound they're betting on another transformation which brings me on to elon musk and its future teza's future is increasingly i suppose defined by set of these really audacious goals which we spoke about when they offered him the um big pay packet how much was the number again can you remember it was it was over a trillion if everything was yeah i thought that was the number half everything was mesh but that's yeah yeah which kind of means and they yeah he's to grow the company's share price by 8x and i have something like seven years i can't remember but anyway the future is set by these audacious goals and that and the aim is to turn the company from an automaker maker with an automaker into all the things that i just said all those other things and the incentives are aligned around execution not little incremental improvements which is how all the other guys behave right so musk and here's the crooks and here's i get to the point mux musk musk musk has always sold the future before it arrives like that's kind of that's his his um um you know the way he that's his swagger he's always promised a future and then it's caught up but the real question for 2026 is whether the timeline finally starts to converge with reality because i'm of the opinion that hot talk don't don't matter no more how's that for grammar i mean like if steve jobs if he is the steve jobs of the 2020s which i i think is a reasonable argument or at least he is as Steve Jobs of the mid-2020s.

20:15Emmet:We need to see something new delivered. And if I had to pick one variable that matters more than anything else for Tesla in 2026, it's autonomous driving at scale. Either Teslas deliver safe, reliable, commercially viable autonomy or it doesn't. And demos and the promises and the flashy unveils and the lovely gold-colored cab and all the rest. lovely eye candy but it ain't reality. Now I happen to think he will. A functioning robo taxi network would change Tesla's business overnight because cars effectively stop being depreciating assets and they start to become these income producing ones and software like margins suddenly get layered on top of hardware economics.

21:05Emmet:I mean cars through fancy speak are just hardware economical investments depreciating investments and evaluation framework completely gets turned on its head so this year i'm going to try to not watch flashy unveilings and and and robots dancing with musk on the stage where he talks about r2d2 being the translator for c3po um what i will be watching are regulatory approvals real world accident data which is very important in self-trial self-drive cars and actual commercial rollout and whether autonomy works outside of really tightly these tightly controlled uh pilots because that's where the truth is going to show up and then before i shut up and let you have a bit of airspace there there's also these humanoid robots i mean you can dismiss the optimus as science fiction and in the short term i think that's kind of fair like we've seen that the robot now i think anyone who follows the story has seen the optimist robot but the addressable market it is enormous in fairness and general purpose robotics don't change just one industry it completely re-engineers the concept of labor labor itself and you said there at the top of the podcast will ai start to stand or stand down jobs at scale you said words to that effect well does optimist move from concept to constrain real world world utility?

22:36Emmet:Will they be rolled out to factory floors and warehouses and doing repetitive tasks before the end of this year? I suspect not in 2026, but it would be a nice surprise. And then finally, one part of the Tesla story that gets far less attention is energy. We've spoken about on the podcast, storage of energy, grid solutions, energy management. They don't grab the headline because it's a bit of a snore fest, but unlike the robotaxis and robots, which are totally and utterly you know sexy machines but but the energy storage and solutions they generate recurring revenue and that really fits nicely in into tesla's broader ecosystem and if vehicle margins remain under pressure energy indeed could become a stabilizing force that the market really hasn't appreciated so where does that leave us for the year ahead 2026 well today tesla is a company I believe in transition.

23:29Emmet:We all have a read on what it does at the moment, and we have a few promises in the bag. But transitions are very often messy, and they're very often slow. Sales are under pressure. Competition is intense. China is leading on volume and cost. I presume margins are, well, margins of fact are no longer expanding in the motor division, and yet they have this unmatched software integration in vehicles it is still one of the most advanced autonomy stocks in the west and and it still has leadership willing to bet the firm on transformative outcomes and and that makes tesla neither a simple value play nor a straightforward growth stock so what i'm going to watch in 2026 is a checklist and my checklist is does autonomous driving move from promise to a product um i'll also consider can vehicle volume stabilize without crushing margins and do robotics and energy show real operational progress um and perhaps most importantly does tesla start to look less like a story stock and a car stock and more like a company where all those other realities are catching up with the ambition and if the answer to even just one of those is yes like the uh fleet of cars has been unleashed on a city in america and has been working out well i think it is going to be one of the most consequential companies in my lifetime and uh if not but already has been it's a 1.5 trillion dollar business it's not like we're talking about a candy shop on my local corner but um but i do think that if in this year we don't see one of those new things happening properly there's a good chance that gravity is going to win and the share price will be pulled down but either way for 2026 this is not going to be a boring company it's going to be an interesting story yeah i'm glad you brought up autonomous because did you see jensen wang's comments from this weekend no he's at that i did not css conference yeah what did he say it's like america's top tech conference um yes he said a bunch of stuff uh basically i suppose we could have a full episode on this but he said a bunch of stuff about the next kind of generation of chips beyond blackwell and all the rest and yeah the kind of next step i suppose in the infrastructure build-up but what i picked up on i thought was really interesting was he said that nvidia's autonomous driving platform is going to be ready soon it's going to be open source and it says it'll have the capability to give level three or level four driving to pretty much any kind of fairly developed uh auto manufacturer out there which and like we've always talked about tesla is doing it in a completely different way to everyone else um so i don't think it should change the picture there too much but it is really interesting i think we should get uh we should get derek reilly on to talk autonomous um at some point early in the year uh yeah for For sure.

26:33Emmet:Yeah, Derek is our local, yeah, he's our local EV guru and founder of Nevo. And it's a brilliant thing, Nevo. But Mike, just on that, I have a picture in my mind of Jensen Wang presenting Elon Musk with the latest and greatest Blackwell chip there a few months ago. And there was a little bit of mini ceremony in the office and they both said nice things about each other. So I really should know this, but I presume the Tesla Autonomous Network is built on NVIDIA chipset. Yeah, this is its own thing. This is like an open source platform. So people kind of plug and play, per se.

27:14That's good.

27:15Emmet:But we do it so. We should do one of those. You have me at open. Get a fleet of cars first. But yeah, I just think Autonomous will definitely be a team this year. and I always look at it through the eyes of Uber because I think the best thing I've read on Autonomous was actually from the Uber CEO, Dara Kurosawi. He was on Ben Thompson's Stratechery. And in terms of kind of big picture, how this will play out, I think you give a really strong argument for the kind of consolidation of the technology in a sense. Because like, you know, if Waymo becomes number one autonomous robotaxi platform by a distance and there's no real competition uber is see it like good luck but if uber turns into the aggregator and i'm not turning this conversation about uber i actually have an actual point i'm going to make um about talking about an industry or prediction but if uber becomes the aggregator in a competitive market where there are a lot of different robotaxi networks, then it's going to be a boon for the business.

28:24And this sell-off, which has kind of happened at the start of last year as well with this fear of autonomous driving and especially fear of Waymo's scaling, just seems a bit preemptive and probably a bit of scaremongering involved. I've seen a few price downgrades on Wall Street kind of selling off Uber and make it a very interesting opportunity. So that's a little bonus on Uber in this whole autonomous vehicle conversation. But yeah.

28:55Emmet:So I think as we all know, whether it's weight loss, injectables or CRISPR or quantum computing, very, very, very rarely is it a single, is there a monopoly in technology? There is no monopoly. So Waymo, we might find in five years, Waymo is the winner. And so too is Tesla. And so too is Uber. and i actually i think most you and i would probably agree yeah that's true those three will all be winners yeah yeah i think the biggest if is on tesla in case of you know if this actually plays out just because they're doing a strategy that's so unique to them but and so much cheaper so much cheaper exactly so yeah it does play out it's it's different level catherine cathy wood over at arc she's she's all in on on the tesla way if you like of course she has to be it's her whole it's her whole shtick okay but this second one it's not really a prediction again but it's just what's the point of giving out a prediction for 12 months when we want to find stocks to hold for 240 months but whatever it's an area niche that I think it's going to be set up for growth going forward and also incredibly important because so basically the opioid use disorder treatment market oh yeah so obviously this is a global global issue i'm framing this within a u.s context just because that was where it was the easiest to find kind of the most uh the most well-done research essentially and it's always going to be the most lucrative market when it comes to pharma as well so to give some kind of background the scale of the opioid crisis in america has developed to the point that it's now the number one cause of death from 18 to 44 year olds really isn't that tragic and yet it's kind of an imbalanced um it's an imbalanced situation in the sense of the size of the treatment market comes nowhere near to matching the size of the problem so the national survey on drug use and health estimates that there is about 8.9 million people who misuse opioids and this could be severely underestimating the scale of the problem as well because there was a recent study from uh rand and the university of southern california that found that 11 of adults reported illicit opioid use within the past 12 months so sorry 11 exactly now obviously that is one study so yeah it but it but what the what the point i'm trying to make is that you know there isn't really a gauge on how big this problem is could be anything from you know 0.0.3 of the population to 11%.

31:33Obviously that 11 % figure is huge, but, but you know, it's likely somewhere in the middle. Um, and so when you see a size, when you see a problem, this size, it's obviously, you know, we've talked about this with the, uh, with the cancer diagnostic conversation we had last month in terms of, you know, there is solutions out there that have to be financially viable to make it work. And what I find interesting is how small some of the businesses that are kind of in the lead in terms of bringing forward the treatment of this disease are. So obviously, like there's bipartisan support behind fighting the opioid crisis.

32:17It's detailed as a public health emergency. So this obviously facilitates expedited project support research. And then there's two recent bills, the 2024 Consolidated Appropriations Act and the Support for Patients and Communities Reauthorization Act of 2025. Both these bills, bipartisan approved, going through kind of extending substance use disorder prevention, treatment recovery programs. And then actually what's really important here as well, when we're going to talk about this industry and business, is that it made permanent requirements for Medicaid to cover all FDA approved opioid use disorder medications and counseling.

32:59So with all that in mind, you know, it's just it's an area of the kind of market, which is a bit ignored considering how significant a problem it is, how big a problem it is. and unfortunately how financially you do a problem it could be if that makes sense so like it's so complex to treat governments across the world really have to be into start seeing addiction as a disease and not a crime which is happening to some extent but from that you know you have like relapse risk mental struggles of addiction homelessness the ability to keep a job everything that makes treatment incredibly difficult so that goes a ways to explaining why the treatment market is so much smaller than the size of the problem um but yeah so it's company there's two companies really that that are that are looking at probably the most promising treatment area when it comes to opioid use disorder and that's long-acting injectables of buprenorphine buprenorphine so buprenorphine can be more effective long-term treatment than methadone which is what a lot of people will know because uh its treatment for methadone is its treatment is really unapplicable in cases of severe long-term opiate dependence.

34:13Upranorphine, on the other hand, it's got a ceiling effect when it comes to euphoria, when it comes to respiratory depression, because this is what happens when people use opioids, they kind of stop breathing, in a sense. So it's much safer for people in terms of misuse and in terms of overdose, meaning it actually can be taken home as part of a normal medicine. So it's very much seen as the more sustainable long-term option when it comes to opioid use disorder. So there are two companies that dominate this space here when it comes to long-action injectables. I think you can make a strong argument for owning both.

34:46Neither of them are above a$5 billion market cap. And in terms of kind of the projection of growth here, I think it's a very exciting area of the business. It's also doing good in the world too. One of those companies is an old favorite of the podcast, My Wall Street. It was one of the original Nexus picks. That's Cameras.

35:05Emmet:Mm-hmm. Swedish company. Yeah. And then the other is Indivior, which was just published this week as January Stock of the Month. It's actually where I got all this research from. Oh, interesting. So if you are interested in the area, you want to find out more, you can sign up for Stock of the Month. You get the Indivior write-up alongside our whole backcaddle of monthly write-ups. But I just found it to be kind of this small little niche that really was worth digging into. and the fact that there's only kind of two companies leading the space in this ultimately it's not not completely proven out treatment area but it looks to be the most promising the results are the most promising and it's the most sustainable so yeah that was kind of my area to watch I suppose for 2026.

35:50Emmet:Really I know I completely buy that and I think for a start I'm blown away by some by some of those statistics as I was when I first was involved in research of cameras and how big a problem it is one thing you said which was quite surprising to me and maybe it was just how you phrased it but how it should be seen being an addict should be seen as neither a crime sorry can it crime or disease i think were the words you used it's treating it as a disease over treating it as a crime which is a tough it's funny yeah sorry those two words neither of them fit quite well in my head as you said them because i'd argue they're neither like taking the drug is not a crime is it defined by law it's against is it against the law to take the drug and i presume the answer is no it's probably illegal to sell it or buy it and equally is it a disease well you know we need some rigorous medical debate on that subject but I would have thought, no, it's not a disease.

36:53Emmet:So what is it? And to wade into those waters and define what in fact is it could accidentally make it sound like something, the description sound accusatory for somebody who's in that situation. Certainly not a choice. I think that that's too liberal a definition. I think a disease is too tight a definition. And I think a crime is wrong but is a wrong definition it's it's a very but of all the things you told me there it's so startling that one survey we don't know of whom but that 11 percent of adults have encountered taken opioids i wonder if that even means post-surgery they took oxycontin or for sure like as in yeah it was misused it wasn't taken i see so it was recreationally taken if you like but that that's how an awful lot of people fall into addiction is post-surgery and stuff and they go home with a bottle full of yeah heavy serious drugs whether it be percocets or oxycontin or whatever else i had a surgery about um three years ago at the back of my neck i had to get something removed and I went in it was pretty gruesome and afterwards so during before the surgeon said look no two ways about this this is going to be painful and um and at the end of the and he wasn't kidding and at the end of the procedure um I was given a tray of OxyContin right and I had just watched that one of Michael Keating.

38:33Emmet:Oh yeah, Dope Sick. Dope Sick. And I flushed it. I was like, no way. I'll live with the pain. Now, and I did. It was fine. Actually, paracetamol did a trick. But I had a fear of that drug. Even having a small tray of 12 or 24 of them in my possession was something I just didn't even want. Now, I presume there's a lot of people who years prior to dope sick were absolutely completely and utterly unawares that this was uh something so addictive and that the kicks were so good yeah but um yeah it is it is a very it's a it's a very interesting subject but it's very sad to think that so many people's lives have been so horribly changed over it but i'm all on for cameras and the other one that you just mentioned yeah you want to see them win but i do agree with you if the problem is huge and it needs to be fixed and they are the two two of the leading horses in getting it fixed yeah and look there's multiple ways this is also the problem with you know talk about the complexity of treating it's it's rare that if someone has the definition it doesn't have to be a disease but if someone has an affliction and they're actively avoiding recovering from it you know how do you treat that person how do you treat that person if they you know don't have a job or don't have a house that they can like you know get the drugs delivered to or keep a job to pay for them or whatever else there's so many pitfalls to it it just explains a long way why it's it's not that profitable an area of pharma compared to other ones but i think there is somewhat a an acceptance and a an acceptance of moving forward like around treating around treating addiction from governments and everywhere else i think it's it's it's becoming i'm not sure it's becoming less stigmatized uh yeah and then the the scale of the importance of this problem is unavoidable now that they have to develop more nuanced ways of treating this affliction and and i think yeah And I think Indivior and Cameras are leading in this very promising area of it.

40:50So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. There's definitely bipartisan support in the US, which is going to be the lucrative market for it. So, yeah.