Latest / Merryn Talks Money / Live from Fringe: How to Prevent AI From Causing an Economic Catastrophe
Transcript
- 0:02Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
- 0:09Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Maren's Somerset Web.
- 0:21Speaker 1: Hello, Maren Talks Money Listeners, It's Meren Sunset Web. Before
- 0:25Speaker 1: we get back to our regular programming in early September,
- 0:27Speaker 1: we are bringing you something very special, recordings of the
- 0:30Speaker 1: conversations I had at Pania House for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Now,
- 0:34Speaker 1: for those of you who don't know, the Fringe is
- 0:36Speaker 1: a three week arts and culture festival that began in
- 0:38Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven and it takes place in Edinburgh and
- 0:40Speaker 1: Scotland every August. For the past few years I have
- 0:44Speaker 1: been hosting conversations about markets, economics and investing from one
- 0:48Speaker 1: of the most special locations in Edinburgh as part of
- 0:52Speaker 1: this festival. I do it from Panmia House, which is
- 0:55Speaker 1: the last home of Adam Smith, philosopher and father of
- 0:57Speaker 1: modern economics, is where he completed the last editions of
- 1:01Speaker 1: his best sellers, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The
- 1:03Speaker 1: Wealth of Nations. This year we did a three day
- 1:06Speaker 1: run to was the end of August, and we are
- 1:08Speaker 1: bringing you the slightly edited conversations from those three days.
- 1:12Speaker 1: The panel I hosted on the second day, featured again
- 1:15Speaker 1: Bloomberg senior reporter John Steppek, also Richard Wilson, CEO of
- 1:19Speaker 1: the UK second largest investment platform, Interactive Investor, and Dominic Frisbee,
- 1:23Speaker 1: author of the Flying Frisbee investment newsletter and also author
- 1:28Speaker 1: of a new book just out.
- 1:29Speaker 3: Called The Secret History of Gold.
- 1:33Speaker 1: I think we will probably go straight into the show
- 1:36Speaker 1: because you all know my jokes from last year already.
- 1:38Speaker 3: There was no point in going through them again.
- 1:40Speaker 1: I have three excellent guests, and what we're going to
- 1:43Speaker 1: do is keep the format exactly as it has.
- 1:45Speaker 3: Been in the past.
- 1:46Speaker 1: Everyone's going to tell me their favorite Adam Smith quote.
- 1:49Speaker 1: Well it's not quite their favoritecause everyone's got quite a
- 1:50Speaker 1: lot of favorites. John, how many favorites have you got
- 1:53Speaker 1: at least haven? And then we're going to talk around
- 1:57Speaker 1: their quote. So we're going to The idea is to
- 1:59Speaker 1: make it a very open conversation between the panel.
- 2:02Speaker 3: So my guests on my right, I've got John Stappek.
- 2:04Speaker 1: Who lots of you probably know already. John writes the
- 2:06Speaker 1: Money Just Sold newsletter for Bloomberg. On my left of
- 2:09Speaker 1: Dominic Frisbee, who has just written a brilliant new book,
- 2:12Speaker 1: The Secret History of Gold, and you will know I
- 2:15Speaker 1: think it's brilliant because I say so on the back
- 2:17Speaker 1: of the book.
- 2:18Speaker 2: You do say, you say it is possibly the best
- 2:20Speaker 2: timed book ever. What a lovely endorsement.
- 2:23Speaker 1: Thank you, my pleasure. Dominic also writes the frying, Frying,
- 2:27Speaker 1: Flying Frisbee newsletter.
- 2:30Speaker 3: And on my.
- 2:31Speaker 1: Far left we have Richard Wilson, who is the CEO
- 2:33Speaker 1: of Interactive Investor and the COO of Aberdeen Asset Management,
- 2:37Speaker 1: right right, the first quote is going to come from Richard.
- 2:42Speaker 4: And thank you very much for having me today, and
- 2:45Speaker 4: hello everybody.
- 2:46Speaker 5: So my quote was.
- 2:50Speaker 4: Labor was the first price, the original purchase money that
- 2:54Speaker 4: was paid for all things. It was not by gold
- 2:57Speaker 4: or by silver, but by labor that all wealth of
- 3:00Speaker 4: the world was originally purchased. And I'll sit in there
- 3:05Speaker 4: obviously mulling over that and thinking about our current reflections
- 3:10Speaker 4: on technology and AI, and you've kind of have to
- 3:14Speaker 4: and there's I think there are two different views of
- 3:16Speaker 4: this story. There's a view of AI that it's a
- 3:18Speaker 4: life enriching thing that everyone will have, you know, their
- 3:22Speaker 4: roles will be enhanced and there will be time to
- 3:26Speaker 4: invest in the things that you enjoy.
- 3:29Speaker 5: And then there's the sharp end that I work in, where.
- 3:34Speaker 4: I have about a thousand people in I are working
- 3:37Speaker 4: very hard to make you fabulously wealthy and happy, and
- 3:43Speaker 4: every day we're trying to improve our efficiencies so we
- 3:46Speaker 4: can improve our experience and ultimately improve our price position.
- 3:51Speaker 4: But the raality is is that we have in our
- 3:56Speaker 4: company every year currently now we see you're probably twenty
- 3:59Speaker 4: five percent and improvement in productivity.
- 4:03Speaker 5: This year as an.
- 4:03Speaker 4: Example, year to date this year versus last year, we're
- 4:07Speaker 4: twenty percent bigger than we were last year, thank you
- 4:10Speaker 4: very much.
- 4:10Speaker 5: But we have ten percent less calls.
- 4:13Speaker 4: That come into our contact center, and those calls are
- 4:16Speaker 4: handled about fifteen percent faster because of the tools that
- 4:20Speaker 4: are available.
- 4:21Speaker 1: Can I interrupt quickly to ask you when you say
- 4:24Speaker 1: there are fewer calls coming in?
- 4:25Speaker 3: Why are their fewer calls coming in?
- 4:26Speaker 1: Because people are finding the answer to their questions why
- 4:28Speaker 1: are the chabbot or something like that.
- 4:30Speaker 4: So it's a great question, and we look at that
- 4:32Speaker 4: as if we're kind of we master all of our information.
- 4:37Speaker 4: And I think there are several factors, but one of
- 4:41Speaker 4: them is the experience is just better because you don't. Obviously,
- 4:45Speaker 4: customers call in to tell me how wonderful they think
- 4:48Speaker 4: I am. See if that's never happened.
- 4:51Speaker 3: It will now.
- 4:52Speaker 5: So they call in because they're.
- 4:54Speaker 4: Struggling to find the answer to a problem or a decision,
- 4:58Speaker 4: or they're not happy with something, and if your experience
- 5:01Speaker 4: is better, you have less reason to call. And theres
- 5:04Speaker 4: an example last year in terms of basic coding, nearly
- 5:09Speaker 4: two million lines of code was written by AI for us,
- 5:12Speaker 4: and we wouldn't put ourselves out to be particularly special,
- 5:16Speaker 4: so part of that is just the experience being learning
- 5:20Speaker 4: faster to help more people. So we've about half a
- 5:23Speaker 4: million customers, different age, demographic, behavior norms, context. The experience
- 5:28Speaker 4: needs to be something that works for each of those individuals,
- 5:31Speaker 4: and they don't. One person's simple is not the same
- 5:34Speaker 4: as somebody else's, so it needs to be adaptive and smart.
- 5:37Speaker 5: So you've got that picture and a look more broadly.
- 5:40Speaker 4: In the UK today we have about one point three
- 5:44Speaker 4: million people work in contact centers, ne hundred thousand people
- 5:49Speaker 4: are work in software development, four hundred thousand people are
- 5:52Speaker 4: taxi drivers, four hundred thousand people are in HGV or delivery,
- 5:57Speaker 4: and another six or one thousand in.
- 5:59Speaker 5: Other those roles.
- 6:02Speaker 4: As I look at what's happening to us, you can
- 6:05Speaker 4: see quite rapidly some of those roles simply disappearing because
- 6:11Speaker 4: the machine just does it fast.
- 6:13Speaker 5: And my worry for us.
- 6:15Speaker 4: Is that I think today we've got some like thirty
- 6:17Speaker 4: three million people in employment in the UK that we're
- 6:22Speaker 4: going to see us in the next three four five
- 6:24Speaker 4: years a material shift which is going to challenge some
- 6:28Speaker 4: of the basic premise about what the price of the
- 6:31Speaker 4: value of labor is and the ability to reskill is
- 6:34Speaker 4: going to be very, very difficult. And it wouldn't surprise
- 6:38Speaker 4: me if we're talking about structure on employment which is
- 6:43Speaker 4: one two three million over the next three to five years,
- 6:46Speaker 4: which is very hard to deal with.
- 6:48Speaker 1: But on the other hand, the very thing that you're
- 6:52Speaker 1: talking about is the great productivity revolution that we've been
- 6:55Speaker 1: waiting for for so long that could transform the way
- 6:57Speaker 1: that the economy works in general.
- 7:00Speaker 5: But that's okay, there's that thesis.
- 7:03Speaker 4: Now you look at somewhere, if you're looking at somewhere
- 7:05Speaker 4: in the Midlands where the only employer in the town
- 7:08Speaker 4: is the contact center, and they have more than one
- 7:11Speaker 4: generation in the contact center, and the people who run
- 7:15Speaker 4: the local shop run because people of the contact center
- 7:19Speaker 4: spend their money there. The notion that skills are fungible
- 7:23Speaker 4: and or mobile and the ability to learn new skills
- 7:26Speaker 4: is a single generational thing. I think it's just made
- 7:28Speaker 4: up where I come from. When they close the opencast
- 7:31Speaker 4: minds and the textile mills, those jobs, that was a
- 7:36Speaker 4: two generation issue. If you took massive action to try
- 7:39Speaker 4: and fix it it, otherwise you created significant social and dislocation.
- 7:44Speaker 4: And I think my sense is that that's without massive action,
- 7:47Speaker 4: that's where we'll be. What kind of action you need
- 7:50Speaker 4: to have forced forestry skilling. You've got to have enormous
- 7:54Speaker 4: incentives to learn new skills, which have to be sponsored
- 7:57Speaker 4: at a state level, or you'll you'll end up with
- 8:01Speaker 4: the case in Dundee. We know that post the timeclosure,
- 8:05Speaker 4: thirty years of a structural social whole because you haven't
- 8:10Speaker 4: forced the community to move into new skills.
- 8:13Speaker 3: Okay, what are these new skills?
- 8:15Speaker 1: Because this is a question that I mean, we're talking
- 8:17Speaker 1: about questions right now, but you're all thinking when it
- 8:19Speaker 1: comes to question time, you're going to ask what are
- 8:21Speaker 1: my children learned?
- 8:22Speaker 3: What skills are my children gap? What do they study.
- 8:24Speaker 3: What's going to be left?
- 8:25Speaker 4: Well, certainly, I mean from when I look at what
- 8:28Speaker 4: we're I mean, the health care is an enormous thing.
- 8:31Speaker 4: Data is an enormous thing. And data it's not going
- 8:33Speaker 4: to be simple data analysis because the machine will do
- 8:37Speaker 4: all that. This is data from a kind of a
- 8:39Speaker 4: neuroscience perspective, where you're learning how people's brains function, the
- 8:44Speaker 4: response to data so you can improve outcomes for them,
- 8:47Speaker 4: the ability to understand the structure of information. So data
- 8:51Speaker 4: health education they will be. And obviously today defense there
- 8:56Speaker 4: will be big things tomorrow, all these mechanical skills, coding, answering, phones,
- 9:02Speaker 4: doing accounting. Most accounting work is collating information or gone,
- 9:08Speaker 4: and god help us the self driving cars that shall
- 9:11Speaker 4: be emerging fairly soon.
- 9:13Speaker 1: You're saying that it sounds like all the lower end
- 9:16Speaker 1: jobs will be gone and only higher end jobs will remain.
- 9:19Speaker 4: Yep, So you have a situation where you have and
- 9:21Speaker 4: you have a real situation because that gives you social unrest.
- 9:23Speaker 1: Yeah, gives you again as if income disparities, wealth disparities
- 9:27Speaker 1: and no end of problems, which might bring us back
- 9:29Speaker 1: to universal basic income, so we can return to in
- 9:31Speaker 1: a minute, except rhin. Now Dominic is desperate to say something.
- 9:33Speaker 2: Well, I just wanted to ask a question. Is like,
- 9:37Speaker 2: I can just see, you know a lot of people
- 9:40Speaker 2: just sinking into the welfare trap, the same welfare trap
- 9:43Speaker 2: that all the miners fell into in the in the eighties.
- 9:47Speaker 2: And you know, is welfare the answer?
- 9:50Speaker 4: Well, it can't be the answer because it's unproductive. I mean,
- 9:53Speaker 4: where I came from, you had more than one generation
- 9:55Speaker 4: on welfare, so that was that became normalized, and that
- 10:00Speaker 4: that creates all sorts of side effects that we'll read
- 10:02Speaker 4: the stats about and drug abuse and various olids. So
- 10:06Speaker 4: you can't let that happen. You've got to You've got
- 10:09Speaker 4: to fire hose the skill set and force it out,
- 10:11Speaker 4: create incentives, push people to actually do things that choose
- 10:15Speaker 4: not to do because humans are pretty I am pretty lazy.
- 10:19Speaker 4: If you don't force it and force that people to
- 10:22Speaker 4: take those risks, you will end up with a welfare
- 10:24Speaker 4: trap which you can't get out of.
- 10:26Speaker 1: Now you're talking about massive changes to the welfare system
- 10:28Speaker 1: and changing the incentives built.
- 10:29Speaker 3: Into the world.
- 10:30Speaker 5: You actually have to do that is.
- 10:31Speaker 3: The kind of thing that won't happen for a long time.
- 10:34Speaker 4: For those who don't take those actions and welfare you
- 10:36Speaker 4: have to frankly provide penalties if they don't take those actions.
- 10:41Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, that's that's extraordinarily definitely cult a suppose
- 10:46Speaker 6: and then that is the whole point of it. Well,
- 10:48Speaker 6: and then what are the actually landin if the reate
- 10:53Speaker 6: at which EA is starting to suck the jobs out
- 10:56Speaker 6: of the market is that high? I mean, what was
- 11:00Speaker 6: the thing? Because I guess I always kind of go
- 11:02Speaker 6: back to the thing of but every time we say
- 11:05Speaker 6: technology is going to replace jobs and actually we do
- 11:08Speaker 6: end up being fine or having new ones. And you're right,
- 11:11Speaker 6: the local communities that are screwed over by these things
- 11:16Speaker 6: aren't fine, and we should find a solution to that.
- 11:18Speaker 6: But in terms of things like mass unemployment that robots
- 11:22Speaker 6: were going to cause, like twenty years ago, that kind
- 11:25Speaker 6: of thing hasn't happened to you. I mean, do you
- 11:27Speaker 6: think that AI really is the game changer on that
- 11:29Speaker 6: front or well?
- 11:31Speaker 4: The answer of course is who knows. But I look
- 11:33Speaker 4: at what we're doing today, which is accelerating and it
- 11:38Speaker 4: I mean, the power of this stuff is extraordinary. It's
- 11:42Speaker 4: just extraordinary, and it moves not just what it does,
- 11:46Speaker 4: but the right it's learning is extraordinary. So we have
- 11:49Speaker 4: now you have a context where we'll receive ten thousand
- 11:54Speaker 4: bits of correspondence a day, and we have a bunch
- 11:57Speaker 4: of people whose job it is to ee all that,
- 12:01Speaker 4: put it in a file and send it to the
- 12:02Speaker 4: right person. The machine within sixty days had learned how
- 12:07Speaker 4: to do all that kind of ninety nine point four
- 12:09Speaker 4: percent accuracy and.
- 12:12Speaker 5: Just did it. And you're thinking, again, Okay, that's a
- 12:15Speaker 5: bit uncomfortable, but.
- 12:17Speaker 1: It also feels like in a world of falling fertility
- 12:21Speaker 1: and falling population growth, etc. This seems like a wonderful
- 12:24Speaker 1: thing in that we have fewer workers. We're going to
- 12:26Speaker 1: have many fewer workers going forward, and at the moment
- 12:28Speaker 1: we try and solve what turns out to be a
- 12:30Speaker 1: non existent problem with immigration, but possibly the.
- 12:35Speaker 3: Problem doesn't exist.
- 12:36Speaker 1: We don't need a rising workforce, and so yours a
- 12:40Speaker 1: it seems like the solution to all the problems that
- 12:42Speaker 1: are running through air.
- 12:43Speaker 4: Right, although you have an aging population as well and
- 12:47Speaker 4: a pay as you go social system, so you bankrupt
- 12:52Speaker 4: yourself in the meantime because you can't who's going to
- 12:55Speaker 4: pay my bills in my eighties?
- 12:57Speaker 1: Because it's making it very difficult to make this conversation
- 13:01Speaker 1: go in an optimistic direction, really.
- 13:03Speaker 5: Doing the opportunity. But you have to skill up. This
- 13:06Speaker 5: is a thing. You can't sit back and when.
- 13:08Speaker 2: Wait, I'll say something, I sort of take up on
- 13:13Speaker 2: John's point that that I mean, I am absolutely captivated
- 13:17Speaker 2: by everything you say, but I sort of take up
- 13:19Speaker 2: on John's point that a lot of these things we
- 13:21Speaker 2: say it's going to happen, and then we find a
- 13:23Speaker 2: way of muddling through that said, I mean, having sat
- 13:26Speaker 2: in a self driving Tesla in Florida earlier in the
- 13:29Speaker 2: year and gone, this is a far better driver than
- 13:32Speaker 2: I am. And you know I'm an okay driver, and
- 13:37Speaker 2: but but you know, I just think I just think
- 13:40Speaker 2: driver's cars are pretty much inevitable. And the main barrier
- 13:43Speaker 2: is regulatory and so you know that's the government's choice
- 13:46Speaker 2: when they want to allow it, and you know they
- 13:49Speaker 2: can stop it happening, but you know, it just means
- 13:52Speaker 2: we'll lose because we'll be less productive. But in any case,
- 13:55Speaker 2: so that's you know, a million jobs, is it We're
- 13:58Speaker 2: going to lose a driver.
- 13:58Speaker 4: Or the tax hit drivers there are four hundred thousand,
- 14:01Speaker 4: and then there are three hundred thousand HTV drivers another
- 14:05Speaker 4: six hundred thousand delivery drivers.
- 14:08Speaker 2: Okay, so according to Lama for so maybe so one
- 14:11Speaker 2: point three million driving jobs, it's going to go to
- 14:13Speaker 2: We're going to lose between half a million and a
- 14:15Speaker 2: million jobs, aren't we.
- 14:16Speaker 6: That is a superb thing. I mean self driving cars
- 14:19Speaker 6: would be late.
- 14:22Speaker 4: But the question is is not whether it's a wonderful
- 14:24Speaker 4: thing for the consumer. It's a great experience, and the
- 14:26Speaker 4: question is between that point and the next opportunity for
- 14:30Speaker 4: that community, how do you get there? And how much
- 14:33Speaker 4: is there is a is it a shock versus a transition?
- 14:37Speaker 1: To ask you a question of you dominic that again,
- 14:39Speaker 1: I'm trying to I'm taking all your conscience in. I
- 14:42Speaker 1: know what you're thinking about, and you're thinking exactly what
- 14:44Speaker 1: I'm thinking, which is that when the roads are full
- 14:47Speaker 1: of self driving cars, surely nothing will ever move because
- 14:51Speaker 1: every teenager, I know, every teenager in Scotland will amuse
- 14:54Speaker 1: themselves by running up and down the road so that
- 14:55Speaker 1: all the cars constantly stop.
- 14:57Speaker 3: So that's what self driving cars do.
- 14:58Speaker 1: Every time there's anything front of them, they immediately have
- 15:01Speaker 1: to stop because they must preserve life.
- 15:03Speaker 3: And if I was a.
- 15:03Speaker 1: Fifteen year old boy. I mean, I can already see myself. Yeah,
- 15:06Speaker 1: my life is spent.
- 15:07Speaker 4: No, but because all trucks fill between nine pm and
- 15:11Speaker 4: three am, you won't see them anymore because they'll optimize
- 15:14Speaker 4: their their their No, they because they don't need to sleep.
- 15:20Speaker 4: They just manage and they don't need to be far apart.
- 15:22Speaker 4: You'll have convoys of aerodynamic vehicles three feet apart between
- 15:27Speaker 4: ten pm and three o'clock in the morning.
- 15:29Speaker 3: Doesn't really answer my question, but I'll agree to move on.
- 15:32Speaker 2: You said Merin that it was a low end job
- 15:34Speaker 2: thing like as those of you that know me, I
- 15:38Speaker 2: do about seventy three different jobs, and one of them
- 15:41Speaker 2: that I've done ever since I left drama school when
- 15:44Speaker 2: i was you know, fifty five, So this is a
- 15:46Speaker 2: long time ago. Very good, Thank you.
- 15:50Speaker 1: Dominics does health tips, by the way, in his certain newsletters.
- 15:54Speaker 2: But one of the ways i'n't my living is doing
- 15:57Speaker 2: voice shows. Now that has been kind of annihilated by AI,
- 16:02Speaker 2: and so that industry is thirty percent of what it was.
- 16:07Speaker 2: I write my finite flying Frisbee substack, but I use
- 16:10Speaker 2: AI all the time to get air to proof edit it.
- 16:14Speaker 2: For me. So what you used to do John at
- 16:17Speaker 2: a time you're out of a hand job, I get it.
- 16:21Speaker 2: It writes really good titles. It writes much better titles
- 16:23Speaker 2: than I do I use. I get the picture at
- 16:26Speaker 2: the top of the article designed by AI. So I'm
- 16:29Speaker 2: reducing work for graphic designers. But then at the same
- 16:33Speaker 2: time I would never have used a graphic designer. So
- 16:35Speaker 2: it's created something that I make my unacceptable music videos,
- 16:40Speaker 2: and the guy who I make the unacceptable music videos,
- 16:43Speaker 2: we both use AI like absolutely mad. So at the
- 16:46Speaker 2: same time as losing me work, it's also made me
- 16:50Speaker 2: more productive. And if you go back to Choices Canterbury Tales,
- 16:56Speaker 2: when however, any many people, each of varying walk to
- 17:00Speaker 2: Canterbury in whenever it was thirteen and eighty something. Of
- 17:05Speaker 2: those twenty nine or thirty jobs, I think twenty six
- 17:09Speaker 2: of those jobs still exist today. Now, obviously the nature
- 17:13Speaker 2: of those jobs has changed, but the job still exists.
- 17:17Speaker 2: And that's been through industrial revolutions, digital revolutions. Goodness knows what.
- 17:21Speaker 2: So I put it to you that while work will change,
- 17:26Speaker 2: there will still be most jobs, just the nature of
- 17:29Speaker 2: those jobs will change.
- 17:30Speaker 1: I think that's very fair every time there is a
- 17:33Speaker 1: big revolution, we assume that everyone will end up unemployed
- 17:35Speaker 1: and new jobs just sort of come out of the woodwork.
- 17:37Speaker 1: There's always something And if you think about the jobs
- 17:39Speaker 1: that many of our children do today, we can have
- 17:41Speaker 1: imagined them thirty years ago.
- 17:42Speaker 3: So that's a fair point.
- 17:43Speaker 5: I think that's valid.
- 17:44Speaker 4: But this is all about the transition speed because the
- 17:47Speaker 4: humans in evate will always be kind of learning new tricks.
- 17:51Speaker 5: But it's how fast you can move which is the customer.
- 17:53Speaker 1: Before we leave AI, because we do like to all
- 17:57Speaker 1: well investments, John, should we be investing in AI related shocks?
- 18:02Speaker 2: Oh?
- 18:02Speaker 6: I mean, honestly, I think the problem the only problem
- 18:05Speaker 6: with AI is the is the valuations, isn't it. And
- 18:08Speaker 6: I mean in the last couple of days even we've
- 18:10Speaker 6: had a bit of a drop and the big AI
- 18:14Speaker 6: stocks again now, I mean they've got the momentum behind them.
- 18:19Speaker 6: Everyone's spending an awful lot of money. My feeling is
- 18:23Speaker 6: that it's probably you know, a Capex bubble and it'll
- 18:26Speaker 6: pop and it's probably a wee bit late to start
- 18:29Speaker 6: buying in the video now. But at the same time,
- 18:32Speaker 6: you know it's you can't it's probably what's having a
- 18:35Speaker 6: bit of exposure and your way.
- 18:37Speaker 1: To what Richard has said, then every stock is in
- 18:41Speaker 1: AI stock.
- 18:43Speaker 6: Well except for the ones that go busts.
- 18:46Speaker 1: If every company is going to massively enhance its productivity, yeah,
- 18:49Speaker 1: then we're gonna see profit imagines go up across the board.
- 18:51Speaker 3: And doesn't matter what you invest.
- 18:52Speaker 4: In, don't that's not yeah, and I certainly these are
- 18:59Speaker 4: mass the valuable companies, but it's the valuations now which
- 19:03Speaker 4: for some they're they're so enormous. I mean, I want
- 19:07Speaker 4: you look at Palanteer as an example. The valuations are
- 19:10Speaker 4: so high that you're using that as a bubble trigger,
- 19:13Speaker 4: which says, Okay, I'll wait for that to come off
- 19:16Speaker 4: and I'll sell, but because you're expecting a shock.
- 19:19Speaker 6: The US is currently about seventy percent of the MASCI wordldendix,
- 19:23Speaker 6: which is why you know, personally speaking, I think that's
- 19:26Speaker 6: too much. And it's not always been like that. I mean,
- 19:29Speaker 6: Japan at one point was something iculous but not quite
- 19:33Speaker 6: seventy bits high. And I think the MASCI seventy percent
- 19:37Speaker 6: of the US. And then the next one is Japan
- 19:39Speaker 6: we are about five, and the next one is the
- 19:41Speaker 6: UK We're about three and a half, So yeah, okay,
- 19:43Speaker 6: well that's interesting.
- 19:44Speaker 4: And about of our customers, so we've got about half
- 19:48Speaker 4: a million and in terms of single stocks about twenty
- 19:52Speaker 4: percent are non UK, eight UK and twenty percent are international,
- 19:57Speaker 4: of which ninety percent is US.
- 20:00Speaker 1: Okay, I say, we're gonna have to move on to
- 20:02Speaker 1: do another quote where we're already running out of quote time, John.
- 20:07Speaker 6: I mean, this is sort of downstream you're talking about, Richard,
- 20:11Speaker 6: but this is Adam Smith talking about the state of
- 20:15Speaker 6: the public finances. And this is back and obviously when
- 20:17Speaker 6: malt Nations published seventeen seventy six in Great Britain, from
- 20:22Speaker 6: the time that we had first recourse to the ruin,
- 20:24Speaker 6: this expedient of perpetual funding, the reduction of the public
- 20:28Speaker 6: debt and time of peace has never borne any proportion
- 20:31Speaker 6: to its accumulation in time of war. So nothing's really nothing.
- 20:36Speaker 3: To be changed, obviously.
- 20:39Speaker 6: And I mean when you go back to the seventeen seventies,
- 20:42Speaker 6: so Adam Smith was talking about a time but you know,
- 20:44Speaker 6: there was a lot of war obviously, because you know
- 20:47Speaker 6: it was there's always a lot of war. When I
- 20:49Speaker 6: think about it, can hardly talk about you know, the
- 20:51Speaker 6: seventeen hundreds and not thinking well, the nineteen hundreds were
- 20:54Speaker 6: pretty bad as well. But so but over this period
- 20:57Speaker 6: of time, from about say the sixteen nineties onwards, we'd
- 21:01Speaker 6: gradually been working out different ways to fund the war
- 21:04Speaker 6: and raise new debt. So the Bank of England was
- 21:07Speaker 6: founded in sixteen ninety four, for example, which was all
- 21:10Speaker 6: about the kind of various wars that were going on
- 21:12Speaker 6: in Europe at the time. So it was like in
- 21:14Speaker 6: the Nine Years War, which was basically everyone against France,
- 21:17Speaker 6: and then there was a War of the Spanish Succession
- 21:19Speaker 6: which was basically everyone against France, and all of these
- 21:22Speaker 6: things kind of like led to various kind of the
- 21:26Speaker 6: evolution of various ways to kind of raise money for war.
- 21:29Speaker 6: And as Adam Smith says, the problem is that after that,
- 21:33Speaker 6: because I mean it's the same problem we faced just now.
- 21:35Speaker 6: You build up the debt during the time of crisis,
- 21:37Speaker 6: and during the time of crisis like COVID, the reason
- 21:41Speaker 6: for building up the debt is because there's an emergency.
- 21:44Speaker 6: The mergency is either war or nowadays it is a
- 21:47Speaker 6: thing like either two thousand and eight or COVID. But
- 21:49Speaker 6: the problem is that afterwards you don't I raised taxes
- 21:53Speaker 6: sufficiently because people objected paying taxes. I mean they objected
- 21:57Speaker 6: to paying taxes then too, and you so as a result,
- 22:02Speaker 6: by the time the next crisis comes around, you've built up.
- 22:05Speaker 6: You're building debt on top of debt. So COVID hit
- 22:08Speaker 6: when we were just starting to get over the hump
- 22:10Speaker 6: of the amount of mine we'd spent in two thousand
- 22:12Speaker 6: and eight. And so the question now, obviously is what
- 22:16Speaker 6: does Rachel Reeves do at the next budget, because really
- 22:22Speaker 6: she's kind of boxed herself in because the thing that
- 22:24Speaker 6: she actually needs to do is increase the tax base
- 22:28Speaker 6: across the board. But the Labor government has specifically said
- 22:31Speaker 6: that that is not what it's going to do. It's
- 22:33Speaker 6: not going to raise taxes on working people, which means
- 22:37Speaker 6: people at the lower end of the income.
- 22:39Speaker 3: Scale, the lower and the median worker.
- 22:42Speaker 6: Watually the median worker. Yeah, Actually, that's an interesting because
- 22:44Speaker 6: the median worker actually pays less as a proportion of
- 22:47Speaker 6: their income than they did I think it's even fifty
- 22:50Speaker 6: years ago.
- 22:53Speaker 1: The medium work worker in the UK has been fooling
- 22:56Speaker 1: for thirty fourty years, and the percentage being compaired by
- 22:58Speaker 1: the high end by the higher there has been rising
- 23:01Speaker 1: and rising and rising, and we pay the medium worker
- 23:03Speaker 1: in the UK pays significantly lower rate of income TAXT
- 23:06Speaker 1: than the medium worker across Europe.
- 23:08Speaker 3: The funny dynamic.
- 23:09Speaker 1: So if you want to now making you, if you
- 23:12Speaker 1: want to write a lot of money in the UK,
- 23:14Speaker 1: just lap beautiful points on income tax.
- 23:17Speaker 6: Income tax is what you would need to raise I
- 23:20Speaker 6: make from because their tax base is very narrow. And
- 23:23Speaker 6: again that sort of means that the lay, you're vulnerable
- 23:25Speaker 6: to people at the top going somewhere else, But you're
- 23:28Speaker 6: also whacking productivity because obviously the higher, the higher up
- 23:34Speaker 6: the income ladder you go, the more your marginal pound
- 23:38Speaker 6: is tax. Now a lot of people have today graduates
- 23:40Speaker 6: in the room who have managed to you know, get
- 23:43Speaker 6: any well paid jobs. Then you know there's a point
- 23:46Speaker 6: at which for every once you earn over one hundred
- 23:48Speaker 6: thousand pounds, every extra pound g am, you're getting to
- 23:51Speaker 6: keep less than thirty pence of it actually if you're
- 23:54Speaker 6: paying the kind of graduate debt back as well. So
- 23:57Speaker 6: that's very much a kind of barrier to aspiration basically.
- 24:03Speaker 6: And then the top of that, because something I hadn't
- 24:05Speaker 6: really considered until actually read Adam Smith talking about the
- 24:08Speaker 6: tax side of things, just kind of very quickly, is
- 24:10Speaker 6: that we also have a very large number of people
- 24:12Speaker 6: on benefits who aren't paying any tax at all, and
- 24:16Speaker 6: you can sort of see that as actually, that's that's
- 24:19Speaker 6: the base of the untaxed pyramid. So you know, you
- 24:22Speaker 6: kind of need to somehow, you know, one way he
- 24:25Speaker 6: kind of reduced the amount of spending would be to
- 24:27Speaker 6: trim that bit. And at the you know, all the
- 24:32Speaker 6: things like the motibility payments and the personal independence payments
- 24:37Speaker 6: which are not necessarily actually going to the people who
- 24:39Speaker 6: need them, do need to be looked at. Now. Of course,
- 24:42Speaker 6: we don't have the time.
- 24:43Speaker 2: You know.
- 24:44Speaker 1: One of my favorite stidoetics during the during the arguments
- 24:46Speaker 1: paut Pep was that there was something in the newspaper
- 24:49Speaker 1: about how if pips were if pips were bought down
- 24:52Speaker 1: to the level that that the government wanted to in
- 24:55Speaker 1: the last round, thirty percent of people and more than
- 24:59Speaker 1: that the but let's sake, woman, say, fifty percent of
- 25:01Speaker 1: people woul suffer financially, which maybe go, we'll hang on
- 25:04Speaker 1: the other fifty percent didn't need it in the first place, and.
- 25:07Speaker 3: So we have a lot of that going on.
- 25:08Speaker 1: But Let's assume let's play the tax game. Let's assume
- 25:11Speaker 1: that spending will not be cut, because it's not going
- 25:14Speaker 1: to be cut. We all know that, right, So new
- 25:16Speaker 1: taxes are required. Anyone got a really great idea for
- 25:18Speaker 1: a new tax?
- 25:20Speaker 3: Thank you?
- 25:21Speaker 1: Come on, That's not how it works.
- 25:28Speaker 3: That's not how it works.
- 25:29Speaker 1: Anyone in a favorite of CDT on primary homes. I
- 25:33Speaker 1: am actually, yeah, idea you have to pay, won't any others?
- 25:46Speaker 3: Yeah? And what.
- 25:56Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, I don't think that's going to fly either,
- 25:59Speaker 1: And it's it's really all of this anything else for huh,
- 26:03Speaker 1: tax them, tax them already down all the substas of
- 26:07Speaker 1: falling anyway, yeah, sub season of falling electric cars, aren't they?
- 26:11Speaker 6: I don't think you have to be a very low
- 26:13Speaker 6: road tax, be right. They are looking at reforming it
- 26:15Speaker 6: because which there was a country recently that's just changed it.
- 26:18Speaker 6: I think maybe in Norway because and it's now because
- 26:21Speaker 6: they went from saying, oh, yeah, we're not getting tax
- 26:24Speaker 6: road tax on kind of electric cars as much so
- 26:26Speaker 6: that you can all buy electric cars and that's so
- 26:27Speaker 6: good for the environment, and now they're sort of like
- 26:29Speaker 6: making the argument because there's so many more electric cars.
- 26:32Speaker 6: Oh no, I mean it's unfair when people who don't
- 26:34Speaker 6: use the car very often that they're not getting taxed.
- 26:37Speaker 1: So but all these things imaginal, this is now a
- 26:40Speaker 1: lot of money. There is no way, no way to
- 26:42Speaker 1: raise large amount of money with that income tax.
- 26:45Speaker 6: You need to raise one of the big four, you know,
- 26:46Speaker 6: you raise vat income tax NI or corporation tax and
- 26:50Speaker 6: all those four corporation tax raises the least and the
- 26:53Speaker 6: kind of the best thing to do would be either
- 26:55Speaker 6: expand vat just blanket make vat twenty percent on everything.
- 27:00Speaker 6: Then as opposed the older might dre exclusions. I mean,
- 27:02Speaker 6: think about them court team that's taking it complaining a bit,
- 27:05Speaker 6: but working it with a jaffa cakes or a cake
- 27:07Speaker 6: and a biscuit. I mean that kind of really, you know,
- 27:10Speaker 6: these some of these cases been going for years and
- 27:12Speaker 6: you're the same thing with complaining. We don't have enough
- 27:14Speaker 6: court capacity. So no, there's a lot of speeds to
- 27:17Speaker 6: simplify it. It's justically it's when I was and loser.
- 27:19Speaker 1: The one thing we should probably worry about is pensions, right,
- 27:23Speaker 1: That's where that's where the money is.
- 27:24Speaker 3: There's a lot of money there, right, Richard.
- 27:26Speaker 2: Thirteen trillion in property or trillion in pensions.
- 27:30Speaker 1: They want it, they want it, but probably it's hard
- 27:32Speaker 1: to attacks everyone gets niggas in the West. You know
- 27:34Speaker 1: that the houses, But pensions is easier because most people
- 27:36Speaker 1: don't understand their pensions, so they don't know how much
- 27:38Speaker 1: money is being taken.
- 27:39Speaker 3: So you can change the rules there very easily. You
- 27:41Speaker 3: nerverouspout that, Richard.
- 27:42Speaker 4: It's not hard to go for the biggest pool. Yeah,
- 27:45Speaker 4: pensions number one income tax. So if you don't go
- 27:47Speaker 4: up the King of Come tax, you can't really make
- 27:49Speaker 4: it work. And they've just made a promise they shouldn't
- 27:51Speaker 4: have made.
- 27:52Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 27:52Speaker 2: One about of Smith's canons of taxation is that the
- 27:55Speaker 2: tax should be easy to levy. Yes, and well, which
- 28:01Speaker 2: so well, that's the that's the problem that ragel Reeves has.
- 28:04Speaker 2: The other factor in all of this is that fifty
- 28:07Speaker 2: percent of government revenue comes from income tax and national
- 28:10Speaker 2: insurance roughly. But if we get Richard's mass unemployment scenario,
- 28:15Speaker 2: that a.
- 28:15Speaker 3: Lot of trouble.
- 28:16Speaker 1: Yeah, but your AI should make the public sector so
- 28:20Speaker 1: much more productive.
- 28:21Speaker 4: That opportunities for wealth creation. And I'm only talking about
- 28:27Speaker 4: a couple of million unemployed people long.
- 28:32Speaker 3: Work, and their workforce is not as big as it was.
- 28:35Speaker 5: Right.
- 28:36Speaker 2: Third quote, So my quote which I use in in
- 28:41Speaker 2: the book, in the new book, all money is a
- 28:44Speaker 2: matter of belief. And in the course of writing the book,
- 28:48Speaker 2: when I had somebody come in and fact check the
- 28:51Speaker 2: book at one point, and we discovered that Adam Smith
- 28:54Speaker 2: did not, in fact say all money is a matter
- 28:57Speaker 2: of belief, but it sort of goes along with much
- 29:01Speaker 2: of what he believed and much of what he's argued.
- 29:03Speaker 2: It's one of those attributed quotes. Now, the word belief
- 29:08Speaker 2: and the word credit, of course, have precisely the same roots.
- 29:12Speaker 5: And if you look.
- 29:14Speaker 2: At, you know, a pound note or a twenty pound note,
- 29:19Speaker 2: nobody uses hardly a something like ninety nine percent of
- 29:24Speaker 2: money is now digital and only one percent is cash.
- 29:27Speaker 2: But even that one percent that is cash, it says,
- 29:29Speaker 2: I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum
- 29:32Speaker 2: of twenty pounds. So even the cash notes that we
- 29:35Speaker 2: use are a promise, and as it turns out, they're
- 29:37Speaker 2: a promise of nothing, because once you would get your
- 29:40Speaker 2: pound of sterling silver, but now we don't even get that.
- 29:45Speaker 2: And the JP Morgan quote is credit is everything, and
- 29:49Speaker 2: everything is credit. Credit is an evidence of banking, but
- 29:55Speaker 2: it is not the money itself. Money is gold and
- 29:59Speaker 2: nothing thing else. And if we think about you know,
- 30:05Speaker 2: we've sort of gradually left gold since nineteen fourteen. We've
- 30:08Speaker 2: been leaving, leaving and leaving leaving gold, but gold and silver.
- 30:13Speaker 2: I have a gold I actually have a silver coin
- 30:16Speaker 2: in my pocket. I was going to carry a gold coin,
- 30:19Speaker 2: but because we live in a low trust society, I
- 30:22Speaker 2: felt it was stape.
- 30:24Speaker 5: But here we haven't.
- 30:27Speaker 2: Here we have an old US dollar which was just
- 30:29Speaker 2: under an ounce of solid silver. And if I, you know,
- 30:32Speaker 2: pass that to one of you, which I'm not going
- 30:34Speaker 2: to do, the.
- 30:35Speaker 3: Value trust me if you trust me.
- 30:37Speaker 2: Of course, but the value of that money has now
- 30:40Speaker 2: immediately transferred to Merin because tells the silver and now
- 30:45Speaker 2: John and so it's a bear asset. Whoever holds the
- 30:50Speaker 2: money itself has the has the value. And that is
- 30:54Speaker 2: what money used to be. It is nobody else's liability.
- 30:57Speaker 2: But now today we live in the world now meren's
- 31:00Speaker 2: very reluctant to hand it back.
- 31:01Speaker 5: It's nice.
- 31:03Speaker 1: I was going to prove to you that we're a
- 31:04Speaker 1: high trust society by passing it around the audience and
- 31:06Speaker 1: sing if it came back.
- 31:09Speaker 2: Unfortunately your listenership, meren is not representative. But in any case,
- 31:15Speaker 2: the the we live in this system where obviously central
- 31:21Speaker 2: banks now still hold gold, and we have the role
- 31:24Speaker 2: of bitcoin, which is a digital bearer asset. In other words,
- 31:28Speaker 2: whoever has the bitcoin has the value. But everything else
- 31:32Speaker 2: in the world is somebody else's liability. It is credit,
- 31:36Speaker 2: it is belief. And when you suddenly look at the
- 31:39Speaker 2: money and the way that the financial world is built,
- 31:43Speaker 2: we just realize just how flimsy the whole thing is.
- 31:47Speaker 2: And that is what I'd like to highlight in my
- 31:50Speaker 2: little discourse.
- 31:51Speaker 1: Okay, so we all agree entirely with everything you have said. Right,
- 31:56Speaker 1: So if we are going to hold gold, how should
- 32:00Speaker 1: we hold it? And how much did we hold as
- 32:02Speaker 1: the centers of let's say our total wealth.
- 32:05Speaker 2: Well, I have a thing in the Flying Frisbee where
- 32:08Speaker 2: we have a thing called the doultch Fadniente portfolio, which
- 32:12Speaker 2: stands for the sweetness of doing nothing. And it's a
- 32:15Speaker 2: portfolio that you would put your money in and you
- 32:18Speaker 2: don't need to look at it every day, you don't
- 32:20Speaker 2: need to think about it. You reallocate maybe once or
- 32:22Speaker 2: twice a year, and we start off with a fifteen
- 32:25Speaker 2: percent allocation to gold and five percent to bitcoin. But
- 32:29Speaker 2: obviously you know this is many years ago, and so
- 32:32Speaker 2: those positions have grown outs, and you would say, and
- 32:37Speaker 2: a sensible portfolio manager would reallocate. But at the moment,
- 32:42Speaker 2: I just think all roads lead to gold and bitcoin.
- 32:44Speaker 2: So we're not reallocating, and we're just oversized. We have
- 32:47Speaker 2: a large section to to equities, but of which the
- 32:52Speaker 2: largest is the US equities, and we have twenty percent
- 32:55Speaker 2: in wealth preservation in bonds as a starting point, but
- 32:58Speaker 2: that's probably now maybe five percent or something because they
- 33:01Speaker 2: will be so rubbish. So but yes, I thought this
- 33:09Speaker 2: was an old Wall Street saying and I've used it
- 33:12Speaker 2: in my writing many many times, but it turns out
- 33:14Speaker 2: when you google it the person who said it is me. So,
- 33:20Speaker 2: but the saying is put five percent of your net
- 33:22Speaker 2: worth in gold and hope it doesn't go up. But
- 33:26Speaker 2: I think in this times you want to be you
- 33:27Speaker 2: want to be overweight gold and overweight bitcoin.
- 33:29Speaker 1: And we do still hold more gold than bitcoin in
- 33:32Speaker 1: percentage terms.
- 33:33Speaker 2: I don't, but it's they.
- 33:35Speaker 3: Still hold you hold more bitcoin than gold. Yeah, in
- 33:38Speaker 3: percentage term.
- 33:39Speaker 2: But the I find with bitcoin you tend to think
- 33:42Speaker 2: there's a sort of it's generational, and there are two
- 33:45Speaker 2: different things. One's a digital asset, one's an analog asset,
- 33:49Speaker 2: a physical asset, And you tend to five nineteen seventy
- 33:52Speaker 2: is about the dividing point, and anyone born after nineteen
- 33:56Speaker 2: seventy tends to be a bit more pro bitcoin. And
- 33:58Speaker 2: the further you go, and every time anyone born before
- 34:01Speaker 2: nineteen seventy tends to be less and more pro gold.
- 34:04Speaker 3: Okay, let's stick with from it. What about gold mining stocks?
- 34:07Speaker 2: I would recommend everyone to have zero percent of their
- 34:11Speaker 2: portfolio in gold mining stocks.
- 34:14Speaker 5: They've got much trouble than they're worth.
- 34:17Speaker 4: Why would why would you even hold gold as opposed
- 34:20Speaker 4: to a gold ETN? Why hold the underline?
- 34:24Speaker 2: Well, because I mean, even though you can retrieve the
- 34:28Speaker 2: goal from the ETN, the point of holding gold is
- 34:30Speaker 2: the bearer asset, and so as soon as you add
- 34:33Speaker 2: an ETN to it becomes somebody else's liability.
- 34:35Speaker 5: So if you're a purist, I mean.
- 34:37Speaker 1: Also isn't it it's the ultimate insurance and it's your
- 34:41Speaker 1: last resort asset. So if you are a gold believer,
- 34:45Speaker 1: Dominic and then I'm a gold believer. To if you're
- 34:46Speaker 1: a god believer, it makes surely logical sense to have
- 34:49Speaker 1: at least a small part of your gold held physically.
- 34:52Speaker 1: Not a new house, by the way, not in my house,
- 34:54Speaker 1: not buried in my garden. And you don't know where
- 34:55Speaker 1: I lived or where Dominic lives, but it makes sense
- 34:57Speaker 1: to hold some physical gold surely.
- 34:59Speaker 5: Yeah, where it is? What about gold isn't the anti currency?
- 35:08Speaker 2: It is an anti currency to say, yeah.
- 35:13Speaker 6: I suppose the thing is the physical thing is about
- 35:18Speaker 6: you know, if you have to get out of dodge quickly,
- 35:21Speaker 6: and that's the same bitcoin because the main although I've
- 35:23Speaker 6: always been not skeptical, just kind of agnostic, and bitcoin,
- 35:26Speaker 6: one of the things I can see it's useful for,
- 35:28Speaker 6: and actually better than gold for in some ways, is
- 35:32Speaker 6: if you are in an unstable regime like Venezuela, say,
- 35:35Speaker 6: and this happened, you can ship your mind. Well you
- 35:38Speaker 6: don't even need to ship, but you just need to
- 35:40Speaker 6: leave the country and then collect your bitcoin wherever you
- 35:42Speaker 6: end up. And if you've got gold coins, I mean,
- 35:46Speaker 6: my dad knew a guy who had to move out
- 35:48Speaker 6: of South Africa in a hurry, kind of like about
- 35:51Speaker 6: forty odd years ago, and he smuggled his wealth out
- 35:55Speaker 6: in gold coins, hitting down the back of the washing machine.
- 35:58Speaker 5: Yeah, that is.
- 36:01Speaker 6: Washing machines was anyway.
- 36:03Speaker 2: So I don't think the reason to old own gold
- 36:06Speaker 2: is apocalypse. I just think if we just look at
- 36:08Speaker 2: what we were talking about tax and you know how
- 36:11Speaker 2: the government going to pay for everything, you can be
- 36:14Speaker 2: sure that one of the reasons whey is going to
- 36:16Speaker 2: pay for its currency debasement, and and so that's why
- 36:19Speaker 2: you own gold and.
- 36:20Speaker 5: The Trump the anti currency.
- 36:22Speaker 2: Well, precisely, the US authorities have said we are going
- 36:26Speaker 2: to devalue the dollar. We need a cheaper dollar. The
- 36:28Speaker 2: dollar is not going to be the reserve currency of
- 36:30Speaker 2: the world in the way that it was because that
- 36:32Speaker 2: we need to get our balance of payments, we need
- 36:34Speaker 2: to reshore manufacturing, we go. The dollar is going to weaken,
- 36:38Speaker 2: the pound is going to weaken. All roads lead to
- 36:40Speaker 2: golden bitcoin. You need to own them. And it's it's
- 36:42Speaker 2: not just an apocalypse thing. It's it's a it's a
- 36:44Speaker 2: just a everyday practical thing.
- 36:46Speaker 3: Okay, all right, I tell you what we'll do.
- 36:48Speaker 1: Well end very quickly with asking O three panelers what
- 36:50Speaker 1: they would invest in. Now I didn't warm them know
- 36:52Speaker 1: about this, don.
- 36:54Speaker 6: Okay, Well, as soon as I said, gorget, I can
- 36:56Speaker 6: take it up from dormantic. I think, yeah, UK stocks
- 36:59Speaker 6: because there among the cheapest ones in the developed market,
- 37:05Speaker 6: and I think that people the Americans organize on them.
- 37:09Speaker 6: That is we which at least is you know, slightly optimistic.
- 37:14Speaker 3: Thanks John.
- 37:15Speaker 2: So, Dolly do you want? Do you want a general
- 37:17Speaker 2: thing or a racy stock on a racy stock tip? Okay,
- 37:21Speaker 2: my racy stock tip for you is a company called
- 37:24Speaker 2: comstock Load, which, oh my god, that's just the reaction
- 37:31Speaker 2: I want, which is doing two things. It has a
- 37:36Speaker 2: it's going to be America's largest recycler of solar panels
- 37:42Speaker 2: there is, and it's it's building various plants in Nevada
- 37:46Speaker 2: and in California. You can't put solar panels into landfill,
- 37:50Speaker 2: so they have to export them out of the state.
- 37:53Speaker 2: And it's building all these solar panel recycling sites on
- 37:56Speaker 2: the border with California next to the freeway, and and
- 38:01Speaker 2: extracting silver and aluminium. And it's a very cash generative business.
- 38:04Speaker 2: And it also has a business in sustainable aviation fuels
- 38:10Speaker 2: is one of its subsidiaries that is raising money for
- 38:13Speaker 2: at a billion pounds while it currently a billion dollars
- 38:16Speaker 2: while it currently only has a market cap of a
- 38:18Speaker 2: one hundred million dollars.
- 38:21Speaker 1: That was racy and exciting, but it was not investment advice.
- 38:25Speaker 1: That was investment information.
- 38:27Speaker 2: I saw you waggling your finger at me as I spoke,
- 38:29Speaker 2: and I was whitsterering.
- 38:30Speaker 1: On too because you're whispering, and I figured they can
- 38:34Speaker 1: all go and look up the details later.
- 38:36Speaker 3: But thank you for thatstic.
- 38:40Speaker 5: I'm going for armaments and defense tech.
- 38:42Speaker 1: Okay, it's coming, which is effectively a social good exactly, sustainabilityability,
- 38:50Speaker 1: sustainability of life.
- 38:53Speaker 3: We have to end it there.
- 38:54Speaker 1: Sorry, we've gone on a bit long, but thank you
- 38:55Speaker 1: so much for coming today. We really appreciate it, and
- 38:58Speaker 1: thank you to my brilliant panels today.
- 39:00Speaker 3: Thank you everyone, Thanks.
- 39:13Speaker 1: For listening to this week's Marrin Dog's Money. If you
- 39:15Speaker 1: like our show, rate review, and subscribe wherever you listen
- 39:17Speaker 1: to podcasts. I keep sending questions or comments to Marrior
- 39:20Speaker 1: Money at Bloomberg dot net. You can also follow me
- 39:23Speaker 1: in John on Twitter or x I'm at Mariness w
- 39:26Speaker 1: and Johnny's John Underscore Stepec.
- 39:28Speaker 3: This episode was.
- 39:29Speaker 1: Hosted by me Marin zumset Web. It's produced by Summersadi
- 39:32Speaker 1: Sound designed by Blake Maple's special thanks to my guests,
- 39:35Speaker 1: Blair Barrows and all the rest of the team at
- 39:37Speaker 1: Pamia House