How To Own The World: An Interview with Andrew Craig Part 1 DWI-EP34

You can download your FREE report on how you can avoid financial mistakes as a dentist using the link just here >>>  dentistswhoinvest.com/podcastreport

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Ever pondered how understanding inflation can help you save and invest more effectively? Join us as we uncover the secrets of the world of finance with Andrew Craig, author of the enlightening book, "How to Own the World". Andrew not only shares his inspiration behind penning this valuable resource, but also explains how it can serve as a straightforward introduction to finance for beginners. 

Our conversation with Andrew Craig dives into the often-overlooked power of starting an investment journey early. We discuss the power of compounding and its role in ensuring a comfortable retirement. We also examine the challenge of sacrificing short-term pleasures for long-term wealth, referencing popular books like 'The Millionaire Next Door' and 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' for better understanding. Andrew also talks about his experience of shifting from a biotech investment bank to becoming a full-time finance enthusiast. 

As we progress through our dialog, we touch on the influence of technological advancements and human progress on financial investments. Andrew shares his positive outlook on the future and the potential of investing in the stock market. Finally, we discuss the impact of population growth on the environment and how capitalistic companies can address these issues. So gear up for an insightful journey as we unravel the complexities of finance and investment with Andrew Craig.

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Disclaimer: All content on this channel is for education purposes only and does not constitute an investment recommendation or individual financial advice. For that, you should speak to a regulated, independent professional. The value of investments and the income from them can go down as well as up, so you may get back less than you invest. The views expressed on this channel may no longer be current. The information provided is not a personal recommendation for any particular investment. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and all tax rules may change in the future. If you are unsure about the suitability of an investment, you should speak to a regulated, independent professional.

Transcript

Dr James: 0:41

Fans of the Dennis who Invest podcast. If you feel like there was one particular episode in the back catalog in the anthology of Dennis who Invest podcast episodes that really, really, really was massively valuable to you, feel free to share that with a fellow dental colleague who's in a similar position, so their understanding of finance can be elevated and they can hit the next level of financial success in their life. Also, as well as that, if you could take two seconds to rate and review this podcast, it would mean the world. To me, what that would mean is that it drives this podcast further in terms of reach so that more dentists across the world can be able to benefit from the knowledge contained therein. Welcome, Welcome to the Dennis who Invest podcast. Welcome back everyone to another episode of Dennis who Invest official podcast, A very, very, very special episode. Every episode is special, but this one especially so. The chat we're interviewing today. I'm sure you've heard of them a little-known book written a while ago called how to Own the World, a book that has inspired many of us to begin our journey into finance and begin learning. It's a book that's written in such a simple fashion, yet it contains so much complex information. It's an amazing gateway to learning about the world of finance and it was certainly the gateway book for me that got me into finance, and I'm sat opposite someone just now via Zoom that. When I started the podcast, I thought to myself wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get this guy on someday? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get the chat we wrote this book on someday? Now I'm sat here and today is that day. I'm pinching myself a little bit. Andrew Craig. Welcome to the show, Andrew.

Andrew: 2:24

Thank you very much. Goodness me, that's a tough act to follow. I hope I live a little bit. Hey look, and it's still. I've obviously become aware of your group in the last few months and we're delighted to. I'm in it and I've observed the fantastic work you're doing, so I'm super honoured to be here. Likewise, and goodness me, you could have had me on two years ago. Buddy, don't you worry about that.

Dr James: 2:46

No, I'm chuffed, honestly. Believe it or not, the podcast started about eight months ago and it kind of went well. Actually, I think the group started about eight months ago and then the podcast came. It spawned the podcast and maybe the group. The podcast has maybe only been around about six months, but no, it's an absolute privilege. Andrew, I'm not sure. Maybe you get this all the time, but I'm unsure. You know just how many people you did inspire in that group. And when someone asks me, what, how do I begin learning and where do I start, I almost always recommend your book because it's written in a way that it presumes no prior knowledge and it's a plain English guide. It's a plain English guide and maybe there's been other books that have been released that explain it from the bottom up, but it's the fact that it's a UK based one as well. I don't know if there's many other like that.

Andrew: 3:40

Yeah, well, it's one of the. It struck me years ago as a sort of angry young man when basically I was a stockbroker, I was living in New York and I was, and I just I think I was on holiday in Miami and this would be November 07, I was on holiday in Miami and I met this fantastic, really cool Swedish couple with my then girlfriend in a bar in Miami and you know, as you do, when you're out and you're having drinks and you're, what do you do? What do you do? All that nonsense, you know. And I suddenly had this sort of out of body experience. I thought this is like the I don't know 50th or even 100th person I've spoken to. He's kind of my age, in stage. He was a really successful photographer, very cool guy and he was. He was very highly paid and he said all I have is cash and property. Because I just don't, I don't understand shares or bonds or I mean forget about commodities or, and this was obviously it wasn't quite pre-crypto, it was pre-crypto actually 07, I guess. But and I just thought this is insane because not only are sort of highly paid photographers or, you know, people in other industries saying this to me, but people in investment banking are saying this to me, right, some of my colleagues who are in their late 20s or early 30s have never bought a share and they've. They like they go to work every day to be to work in investment banking, but they actually have never sort of taken a step back and gone. You know, if you're British, what is a nicer or big picture, what's the stock market all about? And so I just, I think, on a very hungover morning in Miami over brunt, I thought I'm gonna write a book about this. You know, I'm gonna start a business that basically tells people about this stuff from a from a bottom, exactly like you say, from a bottom up nuts and bolts way, and that that was kind of the genesis of originally started a long time ago.

Dr James: 5:14

Yeah, amazing. Yeah, I mean my personal anecdote or story. I had even less than property at one point. I just had cash and to me it was just about having the biggest number in my bank account that I could, and then I would save up and buy a house and I never really thought about anything beyond that. And I knew inflation was a thing, but I thought it was nominal, I thought it was one or two percent and I thought, if I just earn enough, if I just brute force my way to earning enough money, I'll be all right. And it really demystified the whole realm of money, of finance, of, and it revealed to me why it's actually not a very clever way to think to keep all your money in cash and there's some really powerful lessons in there. The thing about inflation actually being seven percent, that's just mind blowing. You know, I mean seven percent of your money. We all know how effective compounding is. Imagine the opposite of compounding but happening to your money every single year. That was the nicest way that someone's to simply explain it to me once.

Andrew: 6:17

Inflation. I mean inflation is also very personal, right, because it depends on what you're buying. But you know, whenever somebody tells me inflation is low, I ask them to then explain to me why most stock markets in the world are wide, as everything run from bottom left to top right, right. Yeah yeah, property in London, you know leads, I'm sure, is similar, right, but you know Singapore, zurich, stockholm, new York, boston, every single major city or Melbourne, sydney, they're all basically all time highs, and so are stock markets and obviously Bitcoin, which I know we're going to come on to, is telling us an inflation story. And then you know, yes, the way that government statistical agencies calculate such things, so the BLS in the States Bureau of Labor Statistics and the ONS in the UK leaves a lot to be desired. And it sounds a very conspiracy theory-esque to say that inflation is 7%, because actually we all know that. You know iPhones and computers and there are t-shirts and you know lots of products have got cheaper, but actually the most important products, I would contend, for most people's monthly, what you actually need to live on, so healthcare, insurance, food, all this sort of stuff you know, and, most pertinently, property, because that ultimately is the biggest expense for all of us. We've only done one thing in the last 20 years. So how can inflation be 1% or 2%? And you know, as you point out, that's obviously a case I make in the book, but it's nuanced.

Dr James: 7:41

Well, yeah, you're quite right, If you zoom, if you have any long-term stable asset, if you just zoom out far enough, you'll see just what you were saying. There the price only seems to increase. And yeah, it just. It makes you think when you learn that, doesn't it Very important to?

Andrew: 7:56

understand the difference between nominal and real. So the point being is the difference between what I mean. If we agree that everything goes from bottom left to top right, if you zoom out long enough, exactly as you've just said, which is correct, I mean it's insane. I've seen over a thousand companies in my career and every single one of them shows a chart which goes bottom left to top right. Now, to be fair, I work in smaller companies which find it easier to do that than a massive company that might have backwards years, but you know how much of that is monetary inflation. So the fact that the money, the currency units, whether they're dollars or pounds or whatever they might be, is depreciating value versus the real growth of you know the fact that Apple are selling out many hundreds of millions of these now, and that's real growth, right so, but it's one of the key failures of our education system when it comes to thinking about all things financial is that most people don't stop for a minute to think about the difference between nominal and real growth, and that's obviously. That's a key thing with the board.

Dr James: 8:54

Again not to go off on too much of a tangent about conspiracy theories, but it makes you wonder why it's not taught in schools as well. I wonder why. I wonder why such useful information.

Andrew: 9:03

Well, it is. I mean it is, it's a national. I tend to think with such things that it's through incompetence and inertia. You know the Rothschild family being puppet masters in the back and I think that's true of an awful lot of things that whenever I see people on Facebook rail against they or them, you know they want us to they. It's just nonsense because they're just. You know that you can't get a FTSE 100 board to agree on a strategy, right. So how are you going to get the Rothschilds or royal families of Europe? Or you know these evil bankers in New York. How are they going to coordinate across 20 time zones and thousands and thousands? I mean, we talk about Davos and you know the Bilderberg group and all these sorts of people that people think are controlling the world, but actually I think it's a much more sort of it's much more boring.

Dr James: 9:51

Yeah, it is chaotic.

Andrew: 9:52

But you know why is. You know it's very hard for, for example, school teachers to impart the sort of knowledge from I keep pointing up here, because three versions of my book are up there and I'll get them out in a moment to show you how rubbish it was when we did the first professional version of the third edition. But you know it's very hard for school teachers in even in let alone in army schools, but in secondary schools and even university. Most of my economics lecturers in all seriousness, at a good Redbrick University when I studied economics they had no nuts and bolts grasp of shares or both. Seriously, they're teaching you about really esoteric academic stuff production possibility, frontiers and demand curves and supply curves and econometrics and stuff. Very, very few of the faculty at Birmingham University who were teaching economics truly would were investing in shares or could tell you anything practical about pensions or ices or, as it was back then, peps. So they're used to be cool, but so you know. So that's the insight. I guess that made me this angry young man who wanted to quit my job and write this book and set up his website called plainenglishfinancecom. You know it does. What it says on the tin was that you know, it's one of those weird blind spots in society where this incredibly important information which is, if there's any, there are a couple of things in life that are most likely to be truly life changing right. One is health and fitness, you know, like eating, well, going to the gym, running, that will be life changing because your life will be better if you're a healthy and fit and you don't get cancer or whatever because you are. And the other one is finance, because it makes everything so much easier. It makes everything else so much easier and sadly, both of those things are incredibly taught, incredibly poorly taught, in schools and, I would contend, in universities, you know.

Dr James: 11:46

Real quick guys. I've put together a special report for Dentist entitled the Seven Costs in Potentially Disasters and Mistakes that Dentists make whenever it comes to their finances. Most of the time, dentists are going through these issues and they don't even necessarily realise that they're happening until they have their eyes opened, and that is the purpose of this report. You can go ahead and receive your free report by heading on over to wwwDentistInvestcom or, alternatively, you can download it using the link in the description. This report details these seven most common issues. However, most importantly, it also shows you how to fix them. I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts. I think going through the treadmill of academia does shatter, maybe demystifies, the illusion that everyone is incredibly competent, because at dental school, some of the stuff we were taught is just stuff that they haven't done in actual dentistry since the 80s and things that have been disproven a long time ago. Yet that is on the syllabus at some dentists.

Andrew: 12:54

I had this the other day, so I think I'm right. I'm not sure what the situation is in Britain anymore you might know better than I do but certainly in the States I believe it is still possible to become qualified as an MD, as a fully fledged medical doctor, in America without studying nutrition at any point in your life. That's the fundamental building blocks of our organism. We all know that our cells replace themselves every few months and if you're eating good stuff, the result will be incredibly different in terms of cancer and dementia and everything. I'm not talking about crazy fact. I mean no matter if I'm. Misinformation about food is just insane. But you can become a qualified doctor in America and try and help sick patients without actually thinking about what the patient is putting in their mouth.

Dr James: 13:44

I mean, maybe we're getting into a deeper commentary of just what American views in general there with regards to diet. It's hard to say, but yeah, that is quite stunning, even just the basics. You know what I mean, because how many conditions and diseases have an element or a component of diet? And they're pretty much all of them. But we digress. But that is very interesting. I didn't know that actually.

Andrew: 14:11

The thing is, it's an analogy for finance, right.

Dr James: 14:14

Yeah, totally.

Andrew: 14:15

It's a mysterious thing that we've gone off down a tangent. Thanks to me. Sorry about that, but the same is true in finance. You know, as I said to you earlier, one of the most eye-opening things for me was working for a major. I started my career with Swiss Bank, sbc, in the late 90s and you know, looking around at all these incredibly smart like Oxford, cambridge, harvard, yale, my peers, who were all extremely good at a very narrow if they're a credit derivative salesperson or trader, or an equity trader, or they're a corporate financier working with big companies to try and optimise their balance sheets, to actually know how much debt should we raise, which currency should we act in? Should we acquire this business? You know, you're a big oil company. Should we acquire this oil company in Venezuela? Blah, blah, all this sort of stuff. But what they actually didn't do at all maybe because they were working 18 hours a day and all weekend for them, which is the sad reality for, you know, 25 year old investment bankers is they never, you know, you never bear with them. And I did a slightly different role, which happily, was slightly less demanding, you know, which we can perhaps come on to, but you know, and I had this enormous interest in reading, which I think is the bibliography of my book, is the one thing that, if you ask me how was I able to write it, it's all about the 300 plus books that I was lucky enough to have the time to read and many of my smartest peers and colleagues were absolutely brilliant at their role, but they had no big picture. They never took a step back and thought, okay, what is the stock market? What is the bond market? What am I actually doing? What you know down here it's for a company and they therefore and also like so many other people and we know this is more obvious in other walks of life but they sort of don't think about investment until they wake up one day and they're 40s and go you know, I've just better figure out my pension, or an awful lot of them don't which means you've lost 20 years of compounding, which is tragic. It makes, even as a highly paid investment banker you, I mean and I was going to say this earlier, but we moved on but the main insight about investment is that investment should reasonably soon in your life, if you start earlier now, start contributing about as much as what you earn in your job contributes to your finance, for your financial situation, and that is a secret that's understood by every rich person in history but is not taught. People don't think that we all know what a pension is. What is a pension? A pension is to get to a point in your life where you can live on your capital and the income that comes from your capital, rather than on the income that you have to accrue working. What is a rich person? Rich person, somebody doesn't have to work because they've got money coming in from other assets or you know, if they're in the old days, because they inherited it from mum and dad. But increasingly nowadays we're a much more egalitarian world of your own efforts. But the not teach teenagers and people in their early 20s about that reality that it's actually eminently possible to achieve that and you might. You might achieve it by 45, you might achieve by 55. Most people seek to achieve it by 65 or 60 when they retire and sadly very, very few people do, which is in another another theme I covered in the book. You know that one of the biggest problems with our pension system is even with that pension system. Most people are confronting an old age lived in real poverty because they're not taking any steps until they're too old and I was free form discussion, but I'll try. I'll try and be quiet now and let you go back to the structure that you wanted to inject no, this is brilliant.

Dr James: 17:35

I'm more than happy. I'm more than happy with this, and I was just going to add to that by saying that I, I was one of those people you know before. I picked up your book not that long ago and I just thought investing was the, the, the world. I just thought it was boring, you know, I just thought I didn't really think it mattered to me and I thought maybe I'd start thinking about it when I was 30 and 40 and I had, you know, a wife and 2.5 kids, or 2.2 kids, whatever the national average is and maybe, yeah, I'm really glad that I did start learning, because I would have that. You've almost, you haven't. You haven't. You haven't missed the boat. You've never missed the boat. It's never too late to start, of course, but the sooner the better. Of course, because of the power of compound and we were talking about your book a minute ago I just wanted to know a little bit more about your, your journey to creating the book and then how life changed for you afterwards, because surely, that book, you kind of expected it to blow up as much as it did.

Andrew: 18:34

No, well, that's very true, but before, just to go to a point, just before we come on side, of course. So what comes across as quite a right wing kind of evil capitalist investment banker point to make but it comes from what you just said is the other thing about finance that is really fallacious and really annoys me is this idea that it's for the rich, like the stock market is something for the rich, you know, investment, come up whatever, gold, whatever that's something for rich people, right. And that gets the causality of the relationship between rich people and the stock market the wrong way around 180 degrees. The only rare right. It's not that rich people are interested in the stock market and it's so rich, it's that if you become interested in the stock market you have a much, much higher.

Dr James: 19:16

I see, yeah, chicken and the egg and that's true.

Andrew: 19:19

That's true for 200 years, right, and and it's a tragedy that this, you know there's a very especially in Britain, which has a very kind of you know, eat the rich, like you know, because we come from this sort of aristocratic culture where the rich were horrendously bad, bad actors for hundreds of years when they just enclosed all the land and the only place in the world that was worse than Britain in that respect was kind of Russia and and France before they started chopping the heads off aristocrats, right, but you know, incredibly unequal society where aristocrats used to live like they'd like we see in Downton Abbey and the rest of the world when yes sir, no sir, and so there's a deeply ingrained sort of cynicism about such things. But the world completely changed. And you know there's a brilliant book called the millionaire next door which explains that. You know, a very significant percentage of millionaires in America are people from ordinary backgrounds and normal walks of life who've just learned this stuff young and because maybe they had a you know, a parent that was like. You know, robert Kiyosaki's rich dad, poor dad, makes a similar point and it's like, rather than railing against the sort of politics of envy and jealousy, oh, bloody rich people that you know. Stop, margaret, that's for them. No, no, no, no. Roll up your sleeves, get to know about equities and finance and compounding and all this stuff that obviously I talk about in the book, and and, and then your probability of a good look. You can't do it in three years, but but you know, most rich people are also old people, because that's just. Warren Buffett made 94% or even 99%, I can't remember the stat, but it's like 90% of Warren Buffett's wealth was created after his 60th birthday. Right now, we'd all like to be wealthy young enough so that we can enjoy it, right, but you know it's. I'd still contend that you know a lot of millennials. Look at me I'm 45, right, and I'm an old man, you know, basically, but I don't feel like an old man. And I tell you what? 20 years has gone past incredibly quickly. So you know, if you start, if you sort of think about your future. So one of the other things psychologists say about finances the problem with saving money today to make sure your future self is wealthy, right is that your future self to you, psychologically, is as much a stranger as some random person walking past on the street that is so interesting.

Dr James: 21:29

I've never thought of that.

Andrew: 21:30

That's really true if you say to somebody who's just moved, you know, just left university and they've got their first job and the money is really tight, and you say to them, look just fine, 25 a month or 100 or whatever, even if you work in a bar, trust me, just do it, get it into a stock market, get into some sorts of investments, get into that habit and then, if you can bump up to 30 quit a month and 35, then 50 over the next, you know, and then in your 30s it becomes 100, 150, whatever. You will wake up as a 45 year old, or certainly as a 50 year old, with, you know, many tens of thousand pounds, if not hundreds of thousand pounds, if not, if you're very lucky, maybe even seven figures. Certainly by the time you're 55, right, and the reason that people don't do that is because if it's a choice between going to Nando's or, you know, having a nice afternoon to the pub or whatever it is, and sacrifice in the 25 pounds, why are you going to do that? For this stranger? That's the 55 year old you and that is. It's a well known psych psychologists talk about. It's the behavioural bias that we need to bust through, and you know the way you bust through that is by reading a lot and understanding stuff and thinking how awesome will it be to be to have a million quid of liquid capital when I'm 55, even if I have a pretty ordinary job, because that's the other insight in the book is that you don't need to be, you don't need to be making a massive income. I mean, the example I use which you'll know, but it's worth repeating, is that I use when I'm doing a lot of speaking events is. So imagine a child is born and a wealthy relative can put 5000 pounds in a junior ISA for that child the day they were maybe the grandparent or Aunt Agatha or whatever great Aunt Agatha, at 10% per annum. And we're just using 10% because it keeps the math easy. Right, with no further investment, none, never. Just five grand on day or the day the child is born. So obviously, after a year you've got 5500 pounds right. After two years you've got 6150 or whatever. It is the 10% on 10% On their 55th birthday, the day they can first legally retire that pot. If it compounds 10% for 55 years will be 945 grand. Wow, a five-grand investment. That's the advantage of starting at zero. Why do we have a pensions crisis when that is a reality. Now, of course, we can come onto this. The push back there is don't be ridiculous. You can never make 10% per annum Interest. Cash eyes are paying me one or whatever. Then the American stock market has achieved 9% annualized, going back to 1872. This is the stuff. Why aren't we telling people about the stock market? The stock market is, and again, god. I'm rambling now and I'll come onto the genesis of the book. The other problem we have is the press, which is why I talk about ignoring the news. The press inherently focuses 99% of its attention on the 1% of bad things that happen. What that means is the only time the press ever talks about the stock market on the front page of the Daily Mail or the Sun or the Times or the Telegram is when there is a stock market crash. There is never a headline that says last month the FTSE went up 1.7%, or in the last 10 years the FTSE has created over a trillion pounds of real value, or the S&P has created 50 trillion, or whatever it is. It's not that much, but 10 trillion, whatever. There is never a headline that says that there is no mileage for journalists to say look, slow and steady investment could potentially bang out high single digit, low double digit annual returns, which, by the way, will make you a millionaire. There is only ever a headline that says the FTSE has crashed, the S&P has crashed, bitcoins crashed, because that's what sells papers and sells clicks. Anyway, I've chucked out quite a lot of stuff there.

Dr James: 25:02

Gold dust, all gold dust, all gold dust. That, no, I'm glad that you said that, because you're quite right. There's a recurring theme amongst the press that we never really hear the good side of investing. Actually, I must say that that was the reason why I didn't get into it as well, because I thought that the stock market had hovered around the same. Occasionally there was these massive downturns. I thought, oh, that's not for me.

Andrew: 25:26

Somebody asked the day because the FTSE today is at roughly the same level it was 10 years ago. They said surely that's crap. Investment's crap, right, but actually in real terms, once you account for dividends being reinvested in the equity yield, not the capital return, you would have doubled your money. Wow, just the dividends, yeah, but I would be surprised if 1% of the population understands what I just said. Truly so of course they look at it and go, oh, it's crap, properties are better or whatever. But that's why you need to have a much more nuanced understanding of such things. And of course, in the meantime, the S&P has gone from 666, where at bottom, the number of the beasts from the Bible, I can bottom it at 666 in March 2001, and it's now over 4,000. Who's telling that story in the mainstream British press? Not enough people.

Dr James: 26:14

Yeah, true, yeah, true. And that was all of that. Stuff was stuff that you put in the book. Was that? That was stuff that you realised, that was what inspired you and then your life.

Andrew: 26:27

Shall I get? Let me get the three, with apologies for my informal genes here.

Dr James: 26:32

Oh, it's fine.

Andrew: 26:33

Yeah, I don't think you're the problem, that's just because you're right. So that was the first version of the book.

Dr James: 26:43

Oh wow, that's a different cover. It looks totally different. It's unrecognisable.

Andrew: 26:46

Self-published. That was the second version, where we hired somebody who used to be at Penguin to do things like simple stuff, like putting in an alphabetised index in the back.

Dr James: 26:58

Yes, I now recognise that cover. Yeah, a bit of an upgrade.

Andrew: 27:01

we can say and then the third, and then we you know the same publisher as Charles Darwin, jane Austen, john Grisham, whatever came along in March 18 and said look, we've watched. We've watched the success of these ones. Do you want to do a proper one with a proper publisher? Nice, yeah, and I mean I think the point I wanted to make is how did it come about? Like, like all the best things. I mean, we talked about compounding minigo five grand becomes 945 grand. But I did a presentation recently for an outfit called Knightsbridge Schools in London for a bunch of secondary school kids and the presentation was called the power of compounding in finance and in life and then basically made the point. You know all the like, the easiest way to achieve stuff like this I mean, obviously there's a fair amount of luck, but is step by step, not Hail Mary's or hitting a six, or, you know, throwing a touchdown pass right Is little and often and gradual and steady, and just like 1% a month becomes. You know a story. That is why we're now talking today, right, and so the reason for my saying is I was angry on man in November 2007 in Miami thinking, oh, I've got a right about this. It really annoys me how poor financial literacy is, and then I quit my job. I worked for another I think three bonuses, basically like a terrible investment banker, but until I had enough accrued to support me, taking some time out of work, which I then quit that job in June 2010 and actually went to live with a mate of mine. He'd just moved to Tokyo, he was a lawyer and he had this massive apartment in Tokyo. I was like that's, that'll be quite fun. So I moved over there and I started just writing about this stuff, like and it was really just a series of essays like what, what, what is the stock market, what is compound interest, what is inflation, all this nuts and bolts, stuff that have become really clear to me. People don't know. They just don't like you know, you, by your own admission, you're a dentist or a very well educated dude, and you didn't know, and we know that very few people know it, but including investment bankers, as I said earlier, right, and I just sat there. I actually sat there on my laptop in Tokyo just with all this stuff pouring out of me, and then I started this website, plainenglishfinancecom, and I put all of the essays up on the website, on my rubbish website that we the first version in 2010. I mean, like anything, you know, you look at that and you're like what was I doing? But and my cousin, actually my lovely cousin Mary, said, well, this is all very interesting, but you do realize you've got like 100,000 words on a website Nobody wants to read Very flasian. Click here, like nobody's going to sit there reading like, and then happily, at the same time, my, my brother's best man is this wonderful guy called Tim Peacock. He's an old family friend, obviously, and he's head of digital at FTSE 100 company and he's also the CEO, the chief operating officer, of plainenglish finance. And he knew how to take all that, all my nonsense, and self publish it on Amazon's platform, right, so we published it as an ebook ourselves in September 12. And then, and then Amazon has this create space platform which is print on demand of a print version which you just you just upload it and as long as it's not defamatory or pornographic or whatever else they'll, they'll print it. And so they printed it in Jan, jan 13. And then, yeah, like you said, I mean I, you know, I don't think my mom I had like 55 star reviews within like I don't know two months and it was like wow, we've sold like 220 copies this month. Like no, and it was just crap. And so then the rest, and then again it's just been an incremental journey and I would say through luck rather than judgment. You know it was to man pull through and people just found it. Everything we've talked about, the ideas in it, resonated with people. You know, people found it really interesting and helpful and what I would say, without any sounds, you know, two OTT is one of the truly one of the greatest things about this journey, to use a Terrible Americanized phrase. But you know it is a journey. It has been 10 years now. Madly enough, it's gone by in a flash. But one of the greatest things is people who, like only the other week, somebody got in touch with me and said I wanted to get in touch with you to let you know that I've been following your output for like many, many, like seven or eight years and I've just paid off 15% of my mortgage Thanks to the investments that I made and some of the things that you've been recommending, and my wife and I Know. You know I'm sorry, I'm gonna, it's a bit cheesy I was, I went to tear up, but it's a but I get. I get messes like that all the time and more and more and more, and it's like this stuff works. No, it really. It's like it's just the money secret the rich understand is get rich slow, right, and we can obviously come on to Bitcoin and stuff, but this is this really simple nuts and bolts Understanding the fundamental financial products that have existed for two centuries. You know they are a great technology that was invented by the British and the Dutch in, like the, the coffee houses of London in the 17th century. Shares and bonds actually, bonds are invented by the Medici's in Italy, basically, but or, you could argue, the Samarians, going back many thousands more years. But anyway, people need to know about these things, they need to implement basics, they need to not be afraid of it. Then that they get comfortable with the understanding they do. Simple stuff like direct debit saves the money every month and it has. It pays dividends.

Dr James: 32:26

So well, I'm okay. So no, like, like I say, all interest and stuff and the book, when you started blowing up, that's when you started getting a lot more exposure and, presumably, people got in touch with you regarding PR opportunities and things of that nature. How did life shift for you when that happened?

Andrew: 32:44

Well, it's been. To be honest, it's only just really shifted 10 years instead, and what I mean by that is so thought pretty much. I took a couple of years out of investment banking to write the first edition of the book and to get playing which finance up in lines. And then I got offered a job in January 13, work for a Swedish investment bank, and I'd been out for a couple of years and I your risk for all assessment I was like the way I didn't back myself enough to build to actually make like livable amounts of money back then. You know, remember, online advertising was much more nascent 10 years ago, I mean it. So I said, and it was a really good job offer for a great company and so I took the job offer. The point it being is that since then, so from Jan 13 until two weeks ago, I've had a full-time job in the city still. Then, jan 15, I left that Swedish investment bank to go to. I was offered a partnership at a biotech specialist investment bank and I just worked with them for six and a half years, or whatever it is, and I just quit to go full-time playing finance, actually two weeks ago.

Dr James: 33:44

Oh, wow, congratulations. I didn't know that.

Andrew: 33:46

Thank you very much. And so you know the answer to that is that yes, there's been. There's been a ton of opportunity. There's been loads of interest off, met loads of journalists. I've done London, loads of speaking events, those are these sorts of podcasts and the book sells really well. Now We've also launched our own investment fund, which you know, a lot of your guys know, which again, was I was approached by two professors Who'd read the book. Basically, I mean it's a long, lovely story as to how that happened, but but it's taken until now, you know, to sort of take the plunge. And the problem with that, with having a full-time job, is, you know, it's a really demanding full-time job at an investment bank in biotech which requires quite a lot of Quite, a few hours of my week, and so I wasn't. I've never really been able to fully Engage with that, that PR, that press. But it's just got to the point now where the you know We've got ten and a half million quid in the fund, we've got 12,000 email subscribers and they're, you know Quite, a few hundred more every month without doing any, without being able to work on the business full-time. That's happening right in the book, selling whatever it's selling. So I've just taken the decision to go full-time and drive the fun forward and drive Our community forward and all the stuff that we're trying to do, so hopefully it's going to blow up even more now.

Dr James: 34:57

Awesome. Well, it's a parallel with your investment, really, isn't it? It's the seeds you planted ten years ago and now they're coming to fruition, so it's another example of what you're talking about, in a way.

Andrew: 35:09

So I know how many units the book we've sold in total, right, and the word of mouth impact. You know if one percent of people tell a mate, oh, I read this book and I like it, and then that may buys the word of mouth, right? Well, the number of books we've sold today is obviously like ten times the number of books We'd sold four or five years ago, right in the aggregate number of how many thousand books that are out there in the UK. And so that means that, by implication, the aggregate power of our word of mouth on sales is ten times what it was. So you know that, like that, exactly my example about the five thousand nine forty five thousand it's the same of my book sales, right, you know, five thousand becomes five thousand, five hundred becomes seven thousand, becomes twelve thousand. You know that. You know that's the trajectory one. And now all I need to deal with is the dozens and dozens and dozens of messages I get every day, which is, to be honest, is quite tricky like, or every week, at least some days, I get dozens, but it's it's another reason that to leave. So I just couldn't, I was fed up with not being able to reply to people. I just couldn't, you know, leaving people hanging for weeks on end, send you lovely music. My wife and I you know I really loved your book Just wanted to ask you about gold or Bitcoin or whatever, and I'm like I'm so sorry I haven't got back to you in three and a half weeks, but I just couldn't you know. Now, hopefully I can.

Dr James: 36:26

I Totally empathize with your position through running my page and I'm just not quite to the same size as yours. But people send me messages and I do. I do respond to every single one because I just think it's so nice that someone's taking the time.

Andrew: 36:39

Your pay. Your Facebook page is much bigger than our Facebook page, but the reason for that is because I charge five a month for Facebook phase. Yeah, age and and. And I will do that because I couldn't if it if it was because you're 4,000 or 5,000 on you yeah, we're like 620 or whatever and I can't. I couldn't do that for 4,000 people and run the fund and hopefully eventually because I'll be able to hire staff and stuff. But that's why we have to. I think a point the equivalent of a point a month to have somebody hopefully help you very significantly with your finances and maybe make a six or seven-figure difference to your life is quite good value.

Dr James: 37:19

But I'll stop it Seems reasonable to me. No, guys, I do love every single one of you. I really do, and I will get back to you all eventually. I just need some time on occasion. So keep the messages coming. And the number of friends I've met over the last six months has been absolutely unparalleled to any other period in my life. So, no, I love it really. I'm very much a fan. The interesting thing. Go on, suai.

Andrew: 37:45

To that point, I mean, lockdown has been. I've wanted a live event in London. My plan is to do one live event a year in London and one live event somewhere else, whether that's Belfast or Edinburgh or Leeds or Bristol or whatever, and have our members invite our members and have loads of beers and a DJ and, exactly to your point, have a face to the fact that I do a presentation and try not to bore everyone too much, but fire everyone up, get them excited about finance, hear people's stories of successes and challenges, and we'll be one of those events where everybody has to wear a name badge because there's 200 people in a big room and hotel or whatever, and then you know some decent music and lots of beers, and I've wanted to do that but I haven't been able to do that because of lockdown. So that's the other thing we're going to be doing in the next few years and perhaps we should collaborate Absolutely and I'd love to come to Leeds and talk to your group whenever you like. Really.

Dr James: 38:40

That's awesome. That's awesome. I would love to take you up on that offer one day, and I absolutely will. And coronavirus hopefully we're on the back nine. Now we're on the back nine with coronavirus. We're coming out the other end. I really hope so. We shall see. That's all pending, of course, but things are looking good at this point. I don't want to speak too soon, because there's been times where I spoke too soon before. Now I know better, andrew, the interesting thing about a book is it's very much a snapshot into someone's psychology and thinking at a precise time at an era. How was your thinking evolved since then, if in any way?

Andrew: 39:16

So that's a very, very good question and one of the headaches the last few years when I got the offer from Hovellar and Spoten to do the third edition I actually write this in the intro here For a while there were not Leeds because I had a full-time job, so I was doing it all very early in the morning, on the weekend or whatever, like taking the last edition and top-entailing it and trying to do some new content, and I made the point in here that actually I thought perhaps I wasn't the first author in history to think that producing a third edition of an existing book was actually harder in many ways than just writing a new book with a blank sheet of paper, because it's just such a deep like oh, you know that section in there on you know what? Have I got to change what I'm saying on property or gold or shares or whatever. And you're right. I mean finance is a very dynamic thing and so, for example, this has about 8000 words on crypto and Bitcoin, right, which I didn't have. I mean, I thought about putting it in 2015. It's actually a red Dominic Frisbee's book on Bitcoin in 14 or 15. So we thought about it. But, yeah, there were things that needed to be changed, and treating crypto and talking about Trump but you know, trump was obviously a big thing at the time, whatever else. But that having been said, what I did try to do and actually the introduction of this book says everything I'm saying right now is an idiot. But what I did try to do was 90% plus of the information in this book is timeless. Seriously like or at least it's 200 years old. Like what is a share? What are interest rates? What's the relationship between interest rates and the bond market? What is a bond? How do governments raise money? How does that impact you? How does that impact inflation? You know why. Why does shares? You know why is our whole modern way of life completely based on the existence of these products? Like there'd be no toilet roll in boots, there'd be no beautiful buildings, there'd be no cars, there'd be no Teslas, there'd be no iPhones without capital markets. Right, and it's one of the biggest failings. It is that important to our lives, to health care, to education, to travel to hotels, to, you know, beach bars. You know all this stuff. All this pooling capital is, and none of that has changed. You know that is, and I also a lot of the presentations I've given in recent months, I want to I talk about the most important investment theme in human history which will remain unchanged forever, in my opinion, is human progress, moore's Law, the fact that processing power, her pound dollar euro spent doubles every 18 months and has been doing that since the steam age. It's completely nuts. And that exponential development is why this iPhone, you know, is more powerful than a computer. Put Batman and the Moon in 1969, right, and we can run businesses. I can video call my friends in Australia or whatever, for free. I mean, if he said to me when I was at university in Birmingham in 1995, you know, not long in the future, when you're in your career, you'll be able to like video call, with a thing in your hand, your friends in Australia for free, I said well, what the hell are you? What a load of bollocks. There's no way. That will ever happen. What do we do? We'll take it completely forgotten, but the existence of these products and the, the idea, the march of human progress being the reason why can you make 9, 10, 11% per annum of real return in your life? Because humanity is progressing at 9% per annum. The S&P 500 is telling you that right and and we, and with lots of volatility along the way, like coronavirus and whatever else. But if you just, as you say, zoom out and see the big picture theme, so, so yes, it's a static. A book is necessarily a static source of information from a point of time, but I, but most of what's in there, I think, will remain. I mean, I'd like to think that 20 years from now, most of the content will be as relevant or very nearly as relevant then as it is now. And, of course, the thing I'll say I mean a bit of a plug, but I have a free email. You know, people just need to go to plainlensfinancecom, plainlensfinancecouk, and they chop their name and their email address are the bottom of the landing page and I send stuff out every only every two to six weeks. It's not one of those really annoying daily spams. You sign up and you just have to delete it every day. It really pisses you off. It's like I write something you know. My next ones are going to be on ESG, you know, environmental, basically green but good corporate investing, crypto ETFs and a few others in my next few. Each of them is like anywhere between two and six thousand words and sometimes I go bonkers on a Sunday and write a university dissertation and people actually people read it. People love long form content. I mean, look at the success of something like Tim Ferriss. He's an unashamed, unashamed to write long, useful pieces rather than all this. You know his 200 words email. That I find all anyway. God, I'm sound like a proumage in the old man now, but anyway. So people who won updated thinking, you know, sign up to the email address and there are something like 79 of my legacy pieces on the opinion section of our website on gold and whatever, like whatever. Lots and lots of bits and pieces. Anyway, there you go. Yeah, another very energetic, rambling answer to your question.

Dr James: 44:31

Keep them coming, they're great. I remember watching iRobot when I was oh, I don't know when. Irobot, you know, with Will Smith, have you seen that movie? Eight Poss, that sounds about right. I remember yeah, I can't have been, maybe I was about 15 and I remember there's a part in it where he talks to a speaker Okay, he talks to the speaker in the room or the hi-fi system in the room and he says play that, stop, stop playing music. And I remember in the movie they, they made it this. Really, they focused on that part because they wanted to illustrate how advanced technology was in this era that he was dwelling in, whatever it was, and there was robots and things. And I remember thinking to myself whoa, the day I can talk to my hi-fi system, that is the day we officially live in the future. Okay, and now we're in 2021, right, we've got Alexa, we've got Google, we've got all of those things. And it just shows you that your frame of reference, when it never really moves beyond a certain point, when you have these seminal formative years, when maybe you're a teenager or maybe you're in your early twenties and that is forever your little frit, your bubble as such, and anything else beyond. That is just mind blowing to you and I can feel that happening to me. And now we're in that, this, this era where we've got iPhones. I mean, if you think about an iPhone, the power that you have in your hand, how many things you can do, that I remember having a Nokia 3310, which is black and white, playing snake on it, okay, I remember that, yeah, and I remember thinking that was what a phone is and in my head that's still what a phone is, okay. And now we've got iPhones and they're just, it's just mesmerizing. And as well as that, what you were saying, andrew MERS law, you know, another thing about MERS law is because it doubles every 18 months, it's compounding as well, so it's, it's four times in 36 months, it's, it's in 54 months, it's eight times and it continues.

Andrew: 46:21

And 1632, 64128, 256, not 1234567, is geometric, not linear arithmetic. Geometric, not arithmetic, but exponential. That's right. By the way, I wrote what was 2004. I just looked it up on my iPhone 2004.

Dr James: 46:41

Wow Okay.

Andrew: 46:42

You're right, and I mean God. That blows my mind, that's. That's slightly worrying, actually, for me, to me, to that.

Dr James: 46:49

I thought I could have sworn it was more recent than that.

Andrew: 46:52

But there's a very well known. So one of the things about studying finance generally is studying psychological biases, which is sort of how human, how our brains work and how that affects your ability to invest, and there are over 100 of them. If you Google cognitive biases, this is a huge area of economics now. Behavioral, behavioral finance, basically. How do we, why do humans make stupid decisions about all sorts of things? By the way, your camera's got, oh yeah sorry about that.

Dr James: 47:18

I just got knocked a little bit.

Andrew: 47:19

I'm back, that's all right, and one of them is one called a hedonic hedonic treadmill, which is basically the human beings we're very well adapted to, adapting to the point. So we become used to stuff very quickly, so the minute so. So all the things you just said that were miraculous would have been miraculous to us 15 years ago. Well, certainly somebody in the eight, I mean I, went to Epcot Center in Florida in 19,.

Dr James: 47:47

I've been there. I've been there. My dad said we'll go to Epcot Center instead of Disneyland, and they are not one in the same. Disneyland is a lot more excited than the Epcot Center. Cool, did he not take Disneyland when you got there? I still haven't forgiven him. I still haven't forgiven him.

Andrew: 48:05

We went to both, so you know small mercies.

Dr James: 48:10

No, it's okay. I'm very grateful for the holiday. Dad, if you're listening, you probably is going to listen to us. No, I'm very grateful that he took me to Florida. It was great.

Andrew: 48:17

But anyway, the point is it's an analysis to what you said a minute ago about IROBA. I remember what I remember. You know, there was a sort of space age future in the big dome thing and it was these people in spacesuits talked with video calls and the video calls from these TV that were like the size of a car and you know, in the year 2100, we'll be able to do video calls with the massive cathode ray televisions that weigh half a ton and look, within my lifetime we've got an iPhone. It's just this tiny little thing. It's my blame, but the hedonic adjustment is the fact that we become we become a new to these things very, very quickly and we've taken for granted because that's how humans survived, right, we adaptation, and. But it's a real shame because it means that people are always more pessimistic and take for granted the amazing fruits of human progress than they should be, and that's another thing that I write about. A lot is actually explicitly trying to take a step back and and realize. There's this great quote from a Victorian historian called Thomas Bavington. Macaulay says by what methodology, by what reason do we see only progress behind us and expect nothing but deterioration in front of us? And we've got to stop doing it. And it's, like you know, one of the other themes I return to, which again, because it's this this sounds a bit serious, but it's to do with finance. Because if you believe this stuff and there's so much evidence that you should believe it, then what does that mean for financial assets? It means they're going to go from bottom left to top right and you will make real wealth right. And the problem is that we are in the hedonic treadmill means we take everything for granted. We're inherently pessimistic. We think that the future is always going to be shit. The catastrophe has been wrong for 500 years. The world's again. The world's going to end. The world's going to end global warming, blah. The reality is they've all been wrong for 500 years and all that's happened is we've become more peaceful, longer lived, more leisure, better traveled. You know, I mean in the 1940s my grandparents had to fight the Germans and the Japanese. Like I am now friends with lots of German and Japanese people, you know, and I wouldn't dream of ever going to war with them. I mean that is that is far more important. This, these long run themes, are far more important for your sort of future health, wealth and happiness than Brexit or Coronavirus or the fact that Trump was, or any of these things that everybody are press spends its life looking at, but it takes it. It's a very rare person who takes a step back and tries to think, tries to proactively think like this and, by the way, I would consent, it's a far happier and wealthier person who does you know? And this is why I write so frequently about ignoring the news. But anyway, again, slightly tangential, but I feel this stuff is really important.

Dr James: 50:58

You mentioned. I believe it was your book that I read. You were you were thinking about Lloyd in the book or you were hypothesizing that someone might conceivably argue with you that they might say why would I invest in the stock market? What if there is a world catastrophe? What if there is a nuclear war or any of those things? But the trouble is, if you go through life with that attitude, then you're never going to be able to take advantage of any investing, basically, and you can never take advantage of these wonderful things. And you also said in the book that if there is God forbid a nuclear war, anything of this nature, you've got bigger fish to fry. You've got more things to worry about.

Andrew: 51:36

And, by the way, if you invest in assets and become wealthy, then you're more likely to be able to afford to buy a boat, a ranch in Argentina with 100 head of cattle and some fresh water with a lake full of fish, and bugger off there and hide behind a big electric fence with loads of guns and ammo. I mean, which I'm not supposed to. People do that, but it's the multi-millionaires who have accrued wealth who will actually be able to do that in that horrendous nightmare scenario. But you can't live your life based on a 0.001% possible outcome. And again, that sort of tinn hat thinking coronavirus. Coronavirus has affected less than 1% of the world's population. Sorry, not affected, but actually had been really, really conspicuous. It's not the Spanish influenza and we're probably on slightly thin ice here. I don't want to belittle the fact that lots of people have suffered and lots of people have died, but ultimately it's again the media spends. I mean, every single day I go downstairs to have breakfast and my wife has good morning Britain on in the background and all it's talking about every day is coronavirus, this coronavirus, that coronavirus, this. You go out on the street, you're going to walk past 10,000 houses, statistically, before there's one where somebody died of coronavirus Like it's the law of big numbers, right, it's 0.1% of whatever it is, but anyway, the one thing I did want to come back on, though, is because you're going to be open to criticism of this is the environment is a concern, we are depleting fish stocks, but my answer to that is there are two answers to that, and again, I think we worry massively overly about this problem. I genuinely believe that, and why do I believe that? Because I've been working biotech for the last six and a half years. Some of the cold face of human scientific effort right, and I believe that it's overdone for two reasons. Firstly, the population of mankind is likely to go massively in reverse in the next 20 or 30 years, like we're going to probably peak at 9 or 10 billion, and then we're going to go right back the other way, and the reason for that is there's a brilliant futurologist called Kevin Kelly who basically predicted the internet. He found a wider magazine and it's really worth yeah he's a brilliant, brilliant guy and it's worth reading his stuff and listening to what he has to say. But basically, the mathematical imperative here is that every single country that democratizes, has education and becomes wealthy sees its birth rate plummet. You know, like Germany, switzerland, japan, everywhere, the only reason that population of places like Britain and America keep going up is because of immigration, because in developing world countries whether you know, whether it's people coming from Turkey or India or whatever that this hasn't happened to them, that they're still having lots of lots more children than the replacement rate for children. But, as every African you know, all these countries advance and have better education, more female participation in the labor force. What happens is the population rate falls. So they're actually weirdly enough. We're going to have to start thinking about an economic system that can't rely on human population growth for growth. So, which is going to be a pretty interesting challenge to the way our whole economic systems work for the last 200 or 300 years, but I think it's a challenge we can surmount, because all it means is that the per capita wealth of everyone will go up, because if the wealth is fixed by a population of half, everybody actually is going to be twice as wealthy. And that's actually what's already happening. I mean, I did a trip around China for two weeks in December 19. It is absolutely mind blowing what's going on out there Now. Again, like so many cultures before them, they've overinvested. They have all these empty cities and thousands of miles of freeway that aren't used. So I've just a bit of a shame. And fish stocks are being depleted because there are 1.3 billion Chinese people who now can afford to eat fish and all this stuff. But I think that the great sweep of history will be that, which is a very encouraging thing. And again, it goes back to why I think investment is really important, because who is going to solve these intractable problems? It's companies, it's capitalistic companies. Who is going to blanket the Sahara Desert with solar power so that we can then have free electricity pumped into Europe and hopefully the rest of Africa, just from the solar power sitting in the most useless land in the world, in the Sahara and other deserts throughout the world? That is a vision that actually there are companies working on those problems. None of it makes it a threat. Tidal generation you have masses of tidal power generation sitting in the middle of the Pacific, the middle of the Indian Ocean, the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, with plumb line into the States and to Latin America and so wherever which gives us all unlimited free electricity, and imagine what we can do with that. We can do desalinization, we can do better healthcare, we can power robots that care for the elderly and I often talk about. We are basically in a race between Mad Max and Star Trek. I think, based on the evidence, that the last 500 years of human progress that Star Trek is going to win. We're going to be very wealthy, we're going to have unlimited power, we're going to have phenomenal healthcare, we're going to have robots to help us with everything and not Mad Max, where it's going to be coronavirus, brexit, trump, end of the world, run out, fish, all the animals die, and I spend my life proactively looking for evidence that it's going to be Star Trek, not Mad Max. So one of the things I give, one of my charitable donations I make every month, is I fund half a dozen big cats for the world. World. I fund right for my little nephews, so I used to get them a present. They get a cuddly toy and other things. It's a few quid a month and you get a little letter from the tiger in where and tiger populations have doubled in the last 10 years since I started doing that. You know, and okay, that's one small example. Wolves have been reintroduced to the American Wilderness in places like Wyoming and Idaho for the first time in a century, right, and they're thriving. None of this stuff gets like the work. Our mainstream pest is Mony about Brett, about coronavirus, every single day, and they're not picking up these hundreds and hundreds of the little data points. They're actually really encouraging and positive and I mean again, I've gone right off on a tangent a bit of a rant, but I really care about this stuff and I think this stuff is ultimately, when you come right back down to it, it is this reality that makes investment succeed, because it's all the companies problems that are gonna make you money. You need to look through the nonsense and the negativity to this stuff and get on board, basically.

Dr James: 57:51

I think the passion is great, andrew, and I think that it's important because, as you say, it's not something that we hear every day and we have this overarching, overbearing, a stream of negative information which is not not representative in any way. Andre's.

Andrew: 58:09

Clicks, but it's no good for us.

Dr James: 58:15

Yeah, I must admit, I actually don't really read any newspapers anymore, because I just I think there came a time where I read. I Just thought to myself am I actually gaining anything from reading this? Is this something that I didn't know before? And is this something that's gonna help me? And as soon as you start looking at things through that lens, rather than just the drip feed of negative information which only makes you feel negative as well, it's another interesting way of looking at it. You just have to think to yourself what am I if you go out with the mindset that you want positive, positivity and you want positive feedback? It's a self-fulfilling thing past a certain point, and that works the same way for negativity to, and I just don't feel like I'm gaining anything by reading that sort of material.

Andrew: 58:56

I think right now you can curate your own news. I mean, I subscribe to think all future crunch dot CH, which basically is a good news website. It goes out in the world looking for good news, positive stories about developing world, about medicine, about energy, power generation, about the you know, conservation, marine consulate, all it goes looking for positive stories and they do they every year. They do 99 good news stories you didn't hear about this year in December Towards any, and it's magic. None of it makes it into the Sun, the Daily Mail, the, you know and so. But the great thing is now we've never been more empowered to curate our own you know, ultimately you make your own reality and people might say that's really callous because you don't care about people are suffering. I would argue the exact reverse. You know, what is more, what a more powerful impact can I have that that many, many thousands of people read this book and Get in touch with me and say, actually, you know, you've made a real difference to my life and we're wealthy and happier. Or to vote, but, boris Johnson, I mean I'm completely disengaged from politics because I think it's, it's a valing us nothing, it's an anachronism. I think we could potentially live in nation states in the future without any political. I mean this is we're really going off-peast here now. But but you know I can make a much bigger difference the world by that one, by voting, and you know that's my own particular view, but I think the more people take that view. Do you know if you heard of a kicker boy and slat?

Dr James: 1:00:20

No, I can't say I have.

Andrew: 1:00:22

You have heard of Greta Thunberg, right? Yes, so Greta Thunberg and I call it a race between boy and slat and Greta Thunberg, greta Thunberg, tons and tons of press, massive, global superstar. You know, standing outside a school in Stockholm bemoaning the fact that we're us horrible catalysts are destroying the world. Boy and slat, same age, from Amsterdam or somewhere in Holland, has a business called the ocean cleanuporg or the ocean cleanupcom has Gone out and raised money from venture catalysts to develop a machine that is going to go out into the middle of the Pacific and clean up all the plastic. But you know, I think we need more boy and slats and fewer Greta Thunberg. Yeah well, just everything shit, everything, shit, everything, shit. Well, okay, get out and do something about it. You know, and there are lots of people are and they get no press. You've never heard a boy and slat. You've heard of Greta Thunberg. I reckon the same is true pretty much everyone watching this show. The show.

Dr James: 1:01:21

That concludes the first episode of this two-part podcast with myself and Andrew Craig. If you enjoyed this episode, please tune into part two, where Andrew and I will discuss investing in further detail. If you enjoyed this podcast, please hit, follow or subscribe so you can stay up to date with information on new podcasts which are released weekly. Please also feel free to leave a positive review so others can learn about this podcast and benefit from it. I would also encourage any fans of the podcast to sign up to the free Facebook community from which the podcast originated. Please search dentists who invest on Facebook and hit join to become part of a community of thousands of other dentists Interested in improving their finances, well-being and investing knowledge. Looking forward to seeing you on there.