John Man.
It's been two years, two years fourteen. Interest rate rises felt like it's never going to stop. But it has stopped, hasn't it? Yes? Hooray, hooray? And is it over? Is it over? Are the interest rate rises over? Is it now going to I know what's going to happen now, first quarter of next year. First cuts, They're just going to keep cutting. It's going to go back down to near zero. House prices are going to go up thirty percent,
Our portfolios are going to go up thirty percent. Everything's going to be fine.
It's going to be marvelous. I'd say, you really believe that. I don't think it's going to go back to zero, but it is weird. The Bank of England obviously has held interest rate. It's at five and the quarter percent, and it's sitting there saying, oh, yeah, but this might not be it. We still really worried about inflation, but still really worries about wage rises. But of course the night before the fads has come along, and never minute
thought that they would do the same thing. Everyone had thought that the Federal Reserves, the US Central Bank would say, Okay, we're holding interest rates, but don't get too excited because we're still worried about inflation. And instead what they said was, okay, we're holding interest rates and actually next year we're probably going to cut by three quarters of a percentage point, so three interest rate cuts, and immediately the market just
exploded higher. Because it's kind of that thing about the the central bank boss adding whiskey to the punch bowl. That's basically what happened. So the FEDS can open the floodgates for everyone to get all excited about rate cuts in the Bank England is kind of somewhat futilely trying to pretend that it's not going to end up having to followed suit.
But why do you think the feed has done this? Because you know, obviously they look really stupid, having been just like the Bank of England, having been so late to come to trying to deal with inflation, and we've been rather assuming that they would want to look like they'd really knocked it on the head. They'd want to be a bit macho, and so the odds of a policy mistake too far in the rate rising direction it's
more likely than cutting too early, right. But now suddenly they seem to be backing off from you know, the last bit is the hardest. We're going to take it all the way and you know, inflation is never going to get past us again, et cetera.
Yeah, I quite be honestly, I have no idea this. You know, the market reaction is a demonstration that it did take people by surprise that they basically said, yeah, no, it's fine, well done there. And all I can think of is that they genuinely do think that inflation has been overcome and that they're not worried about it coming back, which takes me is that would be very kind of you know, that'd be quite a silly thing to think.
Well, it's it's very nineteen seventies, isn't it very nineteen seventy? You know, there are quite a few cycles in the nineteen seventies when we got to a position like this, Inflation had fallen quite a lot. Central banks right, oh look see on week clever, we did that it's all over and started muttering back cutting rates, did cut right, and then then you know, inflation would turn around and
split up again. It just seems like a very interesting take in a geopolitically complicated world when we increasingly understand that that nasty geopolitics lead to inflation where there's lots of moving parts, lots of odd stuff happening, it just seems bizarrely complacent to me.
I would definitely disclaim it's fool hardly. Kevin's in the market had already you know, loosing financial conditions, because it's not as if, you know, bind deals were going down and then into you know, stocks were going up. It's not as if the fair is pushing back against an overly what it sees as an overly tape mask. And only you can justify this, I think, is by if you know, we're getting trying to get into the head of the policy maker and thinking, right, well, actually, I
don't think inflation is going to go much higher. The fact think it's going to go lower, and that means that real interest rates are going to be higher, and so that means that current conditions are restrictive. But I mean, it's one of those ones where I do find it somewhat hard to explain why they've just decided, because it's kind of it is very much like throwing the market at Christmas present, and if you know, if it wasn't for the fact that I don't think the FED in
the States is especially party politicized. You would have to think the fact that we're coming up to twenty twenty four election year would seem it seems like an It's just it seems like an odd time to be encouraging markets higher because the S and P five hundred is already okay, sorry, the Magnificent seven stocks are already very expensive.
Yeah, However, obviously the market reacts, and we do know that the best time to buy equize is when importuated to falling.
Oh, it's yeah. And you know, on that front, UK stocks are still cheap, well not quite as cheap as they were, you know, kind of three or four months ago, but they're still cheap. I was looking at the house builders again this morning, and I'm so glad that my ethics would stop me from buying them anyway. That might be kind of like kicking myself, because you know, they have they've kind of gone up a lot in the
last kind of like six months or so. But you know that that can I imagine that for the foot SAE two fifty particularly, there's probably more to come, because I suppose the other point here is that everyone's still really gloomy about the UK economy.
Yes, gloomy, you know, well gloomy about the UK economy. I know, but I've just got an email through from one of the one of the platforms asking people where they expect to invest next week, when next year, or where they intend to invest next year. And the UK is really popular with retail investors at the moment, and
one of sensible that's be their sense. Well well done, retail investors one in four expect the forty one hundred to twenty twenty four over eight thousand, eight and ten planning to put up their exposure to equities, particularly UK equities, most popular market globally for UK investors. So while you know, our our institutional investors and our pension funds, et cetera couldn't be getting out faster, our retail investors are thinking, well, actually,
you know, okay, cheap is cheap. That's nice.
Yeah, but I suppose it's all sort of thing is like Andrew Bailey going on a bit who he supposed to wash through without look that he's ever seen, and you know, sort of but I just don't. I don't see this. So next year, the cost of leving is not going to be as drastic because real wages are going up. All the people who are terrified of what the mortgage was going to be, say six months ago, are now going to be refinancing at a lower rate than they expected. It's going to be higher than this.
There's not a time to expect it.
Yeah, it's expectations that are the people if it's time to prepare for all this stuff. And a lot of the debt doesn't the corporate debt doesn't roll over till twenty twenty five. So I am struggling to see from that kind of attempting to be objective point of view, why two losing in twenty four should be such a bad year when all of the kind of headwinds that we faced in twenty twenty three are diminishing, if not turning into tailwinds.
Great optimists that you are, now, John, what is that? What does that mean? Fulling interest rates, particularly in the US economy is not as bad as other people think. Does that mean that? I know we say this all the time, but it's really time to think about the ukn investment trust sector and enjoy that double discount. You still think that about you? Yeah?
I and you know, having been early all year if you like. It's that's the whole point of being a retail investor. You can be patient. It's about the only advantage you've got over an institutional investor. But yeah, I think that investment trusts me be a good idea. I was reading actually an interesting piece from Stifle, one of the brokers, kind of earlier this week that was suggesting that even like Scottish mortgage might be a good one, because I know that's the obviously it's been. It was
the hot kind of growth one for ages. It's still trading on a discounty about nine percent. When I look at what UP is doing in the States, and it's
the kind of very growthy one. You can see that it's about to burst higher from you know, it's a year ago high, and I can just see the kind of growth stuff and you know, anything that's kind of attuned to interest rates kind of boat and I had almost an a kneedjate basis so that maybe want to look at but you know what, lots of the other stuff is cheap doing putting all the value kind of stuff. So yeah, we just get the speed and the hard time and god digging, and we.
Should remind everybody, by the way, that ARC's bottom was pretty much around when Kathy Words came on our show, wasn't it.
Yeah, Yeah, we are.
We are a signal. We are a signal.
Not going to see which wine I'm going to say which one.
We are all sorts of signals, which reminds me, which reminds me. I don't want to make this interesting no for too long, But I did a poll on on Twitter asking our readers about bitter about bitcoin, gold or cash, so that they would have the opportunity to answer in the same way as our guests, and it was hijacked, hijacked by the bitcoiners, and so it ended up being I can't remember what the final result was, but nearly seventy percent bitcoin and under thirty percent gold, which I
thought was absolutely fascinating because is a complete lesson in liquidity, right. It is not It is not the case. It is not the case that sixty or seventy percent of the people who follow me on Twitter, who listen to us on this show would take bitcoin over gold. But it is the case that if you can create a liquidity rush, you can force something up. So I just thought that absolutely bring is the story of bitcoin in a Twitter poll hate mail to be easily addressed, thank you very much.
Right now, we are moving into December. This is exciting Christmas coming, and that means that for the rest of this month we are going to do something slightly different. We're going to bring you conversations that are slightly off the investment track holiday listening that's going to make you think about something other than investment trust though of course John will continue to think about investment trusts and nothing else all the way through until we go back to
marketing stuff in January. So this week, with all that in mind about challenging you to think about things in a slightly different way, we've got Pipper Malgram, who's been on the show before, talking about geopolitics and all this kind of things. She's absolutely fascinating, so listen to her
in this one. And then next week we've got a really interesting guest and we're talking about the future of farming, which again is slightly off propic for us, but very very interesting and the kind of thing that you'll absolutely want to talk about over Christmas lunch. Welcome to Marrin Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the markets. I'm Marry in Sunset Web. This week we're bringing a conversation with Piper Malgram, economist, author,
and former advisor to US President George W. Bush. Now, as we promise, this is a wide ranging conversation. We're going to talk about all sorts of things, the conflict's growing across the globe, some reported on, some not so reported on, about what's going on in space, and about her expectations for their next president. Pipper, thank you so much for coming in today. What a delighted us. Ever, Oh,
it's been a while. It's our last conversation, and last time we talked about how it rather looked like World War three was kicking off, and you said, people aren't noticing yet, but all the signs of there. There are hot wars, there are cold wars, there are underwater wars, there are space wars. There's all kinds of stuff going on, and it's time everyone took notice of that. And people are they're beginning to notice, aren't they.
They are now. But it's amazing how they missed all the signals that this was coming. I mean, there have been so many incidents. I guess the issue is there's no overarching narrative, so instead the media focuses principally on the things they can photograph. It's the old rule. If it bleeds, it leads, so there has to be a human interest story. So Ukraine, that's an event, but it's seen as a localized war. Now we have Gaza and Israel and that's it seems like another localized war, and
both produced these incredible photo ops. But in the background we've had events like even before the Russians rolled the tanks into Ukraine, we had this extraordinary incident where someone cut the fastest internet cable in the world, which is up in the Arctic Circle in a part of Norway called Spalbard. And you ask why is the fastest internet connection in the world in this incredibly obscure place, and the answer is because virtually every major satellite connects to
Earth at that spot. And so it was literally an effort to eliminate the ability to have missile guidance or frankly GPS.
And that really felt like an active wood didn't.
Well, and the British Chief of the Defense Forces, Sir Tony radikin the next day came out and said, this is an active war and then he went completely quiet because everyone in NATO and the United States went, Holy moly, we don't want to say we are actually were directly with Russia. It's a very different thing to be involved in proxy conflicts in third party locations than a direct confrontation. And same with China.
And also, how do you prove who cut that cable?
Well, exactly, and they're still investigating that whole thing. But since then, there's no question we have had lots of Internet cable cuts, particularly the subsea cables all over the world, the what do they call it, the Marseille cable that connects the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
Evenly keeping told, these are sort of mistakes by fishermen.
Well, like look at the most recent one, the Baltic Connector, where the allegation is that it's a Chinese vessel called the New New Polar Bear, and it is apparently it dragged its anchor across it, and the fact that an anchor is missing off the New New Polar Bear is
kind of a giveaway. But of course no one wants to come out and say the Chinese have deliberately done this or look at that as a real possibility, but I think that within strategic security circles, everyone understands there's an underwater war going on, and it is about the communications infrastructure of the superpowers. But it's not only those I've also described that we're in, well, a hot warn cold place is meaning space where we have lots of
incidents with satellites, space events. But look, there are no journalists there and it's mostly classified. So every once in a while you'll read about the Russians destroy their own satellite and you're like, well, who cares then, Well, because it creates this massive debris field that is described as razor blades in a washing machine.
That creates a space that other countries call go into correct, So.
It's a denial of access strategy. There are lots of those types of incidents, and we're in a proper space race now between especially the United States in China as to who gets the first physical foothold and military base on the Moon, which is its own story by itself. But we also see this sort of hot war and
cold places in the High North and the Arctic. We're certainly seeing it in the Baltic and then we're in a cold war in hot places, especially Africa, where we've seen the West facing off with the Wagner Group of Russia in many locations, the whole Sahel conflict arguably, which
is you know, North Africa across the Sahara. And then in the Pacific we have what General Millie, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has said is an underreported massive military build up in the Pacific, which is true, and that is very much about establishing footholds on strategic Pacific islands. And it's the US and China again jockeying for a position. So I don't see how you can look at the map and say we're not in a global conflict.
But it's scars. It's hot to see who's on what side, and who the goodies are and who the bodies.
Well, and this is an open question too. This is about superpowers being in conflict over their different objectives, and the world lines up differently behind each of those superpowers and changes their minds. I mean, the events in Gaza and Israel are changing a lot of people's minds, and that may be part of the strategy is to create an incident that actually divides the West. If that's the case, it certainly is doing that. But I think this is what they call the gray zone in warfare. It's not
the traditional tank meets tank on a battlefield. This is about using information as warfare. It's about cutting off communications capability. It's a whole different kind of what they call hybrid warfare. And I think it's taken amazingly long, especially for the financial markets, to really comprehend the global nature of this phenomena.
And if you look at it, I just want to go back to hots and cold places and space, etc. A lot of that is that getting a foothold on the Moon for example. It's communications, but is it also access two minerals, Because we're hearing a lot about mining asteroids, for example, and we're hearing a lot about being able to put solar stations in space and that being the greatest way for us to get easy, straightforward and something
that is refer renewables, reliable energy. So there's a lot going on in space that is not just about communications. It's about energy.
Minerals, yeah, and command and control. So yeah, I think people really have a hard time understanding the implications of two new energy technologies. One is space based solar power, which has been proven by both cal Tech with the Jet Propulsion Lab and by Airbus, So it's no longer hypothetical.
I'm put simply, you literally put special mirrors on satellites, catch the Sun's rays, convert them into radio waves, safely transmit them to Earth, and now you have unlimited, clean green electricity and any power grid anywhere at any time.
That still doesn't take away our problems of storage and transmission. We still have to overcome. Well those barriers before.
You don't have to worry about as much.
If you because it just keeps coming.
Just turn the button on it goes. The distribution piece also less relevant because you can just pump it to whichever power grids you want, so the distribution side becomes less of a problem.
But then you have to pump it via a grid.
Well, you still need a grid.
Yeah, So what I'm saying, I don't have to get it to grade, yeah, exactly.
Nonetheless, this is a such a game change or that the Saudis are backing the British in one of the first prototypes, which will be done over the North Sea, because they can see their hydrocarbons are going to be worth a whole lot less once this goes live. So imagine if you could have access to cheap, unlimited energy. That is such a game changer for any economy on our So whoever gets their first is way ahead of
the other. The second one is nuclear fusion. And the thing about nuclear fusion is, yes, we're making advances very quickly, but we still don't have anything operational. We're not that close to a prototype. But what everyone understands is the Moon is full of helium three, and you need helium three for the nuclear fusion process. And our expectation is we're not going to the Moon to step on it. We're going to the Moon to stay and to build
and to launch from it. That means you need both space based solar power and nuclear fusion on the lunar surface. So this is one reason we're in an outright race, and there's a genuine geopolitical competition to prevent other superpowers from getting their first.
Okay, hence flowing up your own satellites.
Yeah, And the great story I love about, because I've always been in robotics, is that only the Americans and the Chinese have satellites with robotic arms, and the Chinese have now demonstrated they can go up to a satellite, grab it and literally hurl it into outer space, which has got the Americans going, Holy moly, what do we do if they grab one of ours.
Which they easily could, which they easily could.
And this is one of the reasons why the US and everybody else is moving so fast in the direction of these tiny shoe box satellites that are so small you can't really target them. Space is so vast it's very difficult to target them all. But look when Elon Musk he was using Starlink to assist the Ukrainians, the Chinese came out and said, hey, you're a military company and he said, no, no, no, I'm not. And they said, well, yeah, because the Ukrainians are using your satellites to do offensive
military operations. He said no, no, no, no, We're just doing humanitarian But the Chinese said, well, look, if you keep doing this, then we're going to build our own mega constellation and ours will be armed and we will be able to take out your satellites. And notice interesting sidebar story, Rwanda has applied for permissions to have the largest satellite network of all And you're like Rwanda now that country has emerged as a Tech Center in Africa. But the
real issue is they're working with the Chinese. So the idea that we're so far ahead in satellite communications tech that nobody can catch up is not correct.
And she kind of interrupt with a little question, ignorant question. You say, RWANDO is applied, who do you apply to you?
It said, it's the International Telecommunications Union and the licenses for doing these things in space. But you're right to ask the question because the more we reach into space, the more clearer it will be that there are virtually no rules or rules that anybody will adhere to.
Yeah, and we have an increasing number of what we have these new space stations in the UK. Right, we've took before about the one in Shetland which I visited a ven the summer, coming along very well, expecting to launch launching next year, and they'll be launching exactly what you're talking about, these small shoe book satellites, and suddenly everyone will have a satellite.
Everyone will have a satellite. Yeah, So you're right. And noticed that we had a cable cut off of the Shetland Islands between the Shetland and the Pharoe Islands, and people are like, well, who cares there's just a bunch of sheep up there. But actually that sable is critical for both those satellite launches and also for the monitoring of Russian vessels because.
That's called activity.
Because of course there's a ton of activity at a time when nuclear weapons are being outright threatened. Russia's just removing itself from the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty, and within hours of the Duma making that decision that they would withdraw, they did a huge simulated nuclear test on all surfaces at once. So this is all hardcore, old fashioned geopolitics.
And what does it all mean If we have all these simultaneous wars, hot, cold, underwaters, based, etcetera. All running at the same time. It's a very different geopolitical environment to the one we've been used to, a very peaceful or seemingly peaceful world with low interest rates and low inflation and expanding geographical cooperation, etc. What does what you're talking about mean for a global economy.
Well, I think there are lots of implications. I think this is very different from World War One and World War Two. And I know it scares people when I've said it is a World War three, but they assume that means the kind of parnage that we had in the previous wars. I don't think this is the case, although we we are seeing that on the ground obviously
in Ukraine and Gaza right now. But this is much more a technological confrontation, so a lot of it occurs in ways that again the public never sees, isn't really aware of. And what that's doing is spurring all the superpowers to invest much more money in technological advantages, including for example, what I said about GPS is vulnerable in this war that I'm describing, and so innovations are happening where a new form of GPS is being created that
doesn't depend on space. I can't tell you lots more about that, but I know that, you know, the big defense innovation arms, they're all doing that. So suddenly we're seeing e merging of defense requirements and technology innovation, and that isn't what we saw before this all started, So that's new I think as well. The breakdown of the relationship between the super powers has actually caused supply chains to initially break but now totally reconfigure and spontaneously emerge
in all sorts of new places. So It's true that in the US we are now manufacturing again. After decades and decades of private equity saying we wouldn't touch anything physical with a barge pole. Now they're like, we need to be making physical things. And this is why, for example, silicon ship production has really moved from Taiwan to Texas and Arizona, and frankly, the next location for chip production is going to be space because you can make these
things it's a natural, clean space. It's actually cheaper because of that, and we have all this new lace lithography that is cheaper, smaller machines that can do much more efficient job. So bottom line, we are innovating in the chip space, both with the supply chain and the location.
Sounds positive.
It will. I'm just saying people adapt, right, And I'm not saying it's great. We're having a war, it's not. But when you have this kind of conflict return to the landscape, then people start to adapt and those adaptations are where the value is now being created. And by the way, on this point, I think it is really important because look, I grew up in you know, mutual assured destruction when the Soviets and the Americans were aiming, you know, multiple nuclear weapons at each other all day long,
every day. People who are a lot younger, they're like, oh my god, what the heck is happening. They've never seen anything like this before. It's important to remember that normally in history, we are usually having these kinds of conflicts somewhere.
Yeah, we've been through an incredibly unusual period.
Yeah, we had this strange and wonderful period after the end of after the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, where everybody was moving in the same direction, which was how do we lift the GDP. Now we're in conflict again. But honestly, my read is all of the superpowers are looking at this going. It's just getting too expensive. And I think there's pressure on Jijimpang to knock off this very Beelikhos warlike baiting
of the United States. There's pressure on every US president to stop. I mean, both left and right want their presidential candidates to lean in a direction of let's not spend all this money on wars in Ukraine and Israel. Let's focus on issues at home and even Russia. I mean, I think the support for what President Putin is doing is diminishing every day, and he keeps eliminating all the members of his own inner circle, so eventually there is
no inner circle. And I think we're going to end up with an all change of all of the leaders of these superpowers. And when that happens, which may not be so far off, and after all, we're in a presidential race, we can talk about whether Biden's going to be the next present, but I don't think he's going to be.
Okay, that it was not going to be him.
Who is it getting well, whether we can get into that, Okay, we'll get into it. Is here's the punchline of the whole thing, and it sounds so crazy, but when you get into real confrontation between nuclear superpowers and they are threatening to use nuclear weapons, at the end of the day, everyone loses their nerve. No one wants to destroy the earth.
They don't want to live in a world that they can't see their loved ones, and they always end up going the complete opposite direction, which is they have a hug. Everybody's like, what, they have a hug? But I'm like, yeah, google it, Like you see the picture of brush Nevin Nixon having this huge bear hug, and then the picture
of Reagan and Gorbach hop big hug. This is literally the it's what you get to the minute you start reaching for that nuclear button, everybody goes, we just can't do this, And the next thing you get what I call the bear hug. And I think, I mean, I'm not saying that President Biden and President Putin are going to have a hug. I'm definitely not, but I could
easily see their successors doing this. And my question to people in the markets is, given all the time and energy you've spent preparing for all of the downside risks, how much time and energy have you given to thinking about what you will do when that bear hug comes? Because that piece dividend is valuable, and acid values will rise and innovation will accelerate even faster.
So I just.
Spend a tiny bit of time on that possibility, especially because that's how I always.
All the talk at the moment in markets is about the disappearance of the piece to dividend, How expensive that the effect that it has on the fiscal situation. So pretty much every country globally is spending on defense goes from one to two percent of GDP at food five percent of GDP, and the fact, the fact, that obvious effect that has in our deficits and on inflation over the medium term. And that's where the expectation to a large degree of inflation staying at a higher level, interest
rate staying at a high level comes from. Was a big part of it anyway. So what your describing sounds inflationary to begin with, and then really verat deflationary.
Well, if I'm right about what's coming from space, that's massively deflationary. I mean, look at the Psyche mission alone, which just launched NASA's mission to the asteroid called Psyche, and we've already brought back samples from another asteroid called Benu. So this is no longer again imaginary or hypothetical, like we are bringing back the samples, which means asteroid mining can begin. So Psyche is said to be worth seven hundred times the value of the entire world economy annually.
And if you were to distribute the value of the assets, the lithium, the collbaal, the gold, iron ore, every human would be a billionaire that you would do that. But imagine what happens to validation.
That would come from everyone being a billionaire. Well, but think of.
The deflation that comes from all these things becoming almost we're practically free.
Under that, having to dig valash holes in the as absolutely.
So you know. So here's the thing, though, I have to say, you've known me a long time as a person who does macro strategy. One of the hardest things is when you call something but you were early. So I started writing about the conditions for what we're seeing now in my book Signals in twenty sixteen, saying for inflation because of a bunch of choices we've made, inflation will come back, and geopolitics will come back. And then
it slowly did, and then it suddenly speeded up. What I wrote again in October twenty twenty one, saying we're there, We're now in World War three. People just don't see it yet. Okay, now they're seeing it. So I'm just saying, I'm already seeing over the edge of the thing, and I can see the reconciliation coming because this is just getting too expensive for all these societies, and our capacity
for true destruction is so enormous now. It's It's not like when my dad was an advisor to Kennedy on the Cuban missile crisis, where you had days and hours. Right now we're living in a world with hypersonic weapons where you don't even have fifteen minutes. So I think everyone will literally just lose.
That back of ultimately, okay, all right, then who will be the next president? Who's going to be the hugging who's it going to be?
Okay, I have a way out of the market view at the moment about the presidential race. It's so fascinating. So you know, we're on the six party system in the United States, meaning six times we have had part that came to an end and then we created new ones. I think we're maybe on the brink of the seventh party system. That the country is so divided and technological change is so vast that actually we need new structures. So the person that I'm watching most closely is Robert F. Kennedy,
And everyone goes, what that's crazy. He's not even in this race. He's an independent. I'm like, watch his following. It is increasing at an extraordinary rate. And what he's done is first of all, to go down the middle. So he's a Clinton Democrat. So he says, let's not tax the entrepreneur because they're building the future. A lot of Republicans go, yeah, I like the sound of that. A lot of Democrats go, I like the sound of that. He says, but big corporates are not paying anything, and
that's not right, so let's fix that. And again everyone left and right nods their head, Yeah, we should look at that. Then he talks about the corporate capture of the system in politics in America, and interestingly, there is a grassroots feeling in the country about that. So here's the key to all this. Trump now still has a fifty percent approval rating with his voters, even facing something like five hundred and sixty one years in prison on
the current prosecution trajectory. And he had been very favorable about Kennedy, who is a populist on the Democrat side, and he has roughly twenty five percent. So you had fifty and twenty five and now we had seventy five percent. Of the country has already told us they want a populist and they want an outsider. And let's face it, let's look at the past elections. Every single time, we love to elect somebody you never heard of. Three years before,
you never heard of Bill Clinton. Nobody thought George W. Would win. It was supposed to be his brother Jeb. Nobody ever heard of Obama. I can tell you no one thought Trump was going to win, and I wrote he was, he had a real chance. In twenty fifteen. People were like, you're insane. And it wasn't a preference. It was just I can see how the forces are moving. Well today they're like, don't be ridiculous, Robert Kennedy. But I'm telling you watch this space and notice Kennedy's already
said that he will pardon both Assannge and Snowden. Who's going to need a presidential pardon? I would say it might be President Trump, And Kennedy will say, look, if we try to incarcerate a super popular former president United States, we may end up in a real war.
A civil war, like a realistic war.
And we don't want to tear the country apart. So actually pardoning that president, which only works at the federal level, it doesn't help him at the state level. But nonetheless, the signal that it sends this kind of conciliation approach, this moderate middle let's have a cabinet with people on both sides of the It is resonating, and so I think, watch that space because it's changing the whole terms of this election. So we're it's going to surprise us.
What about the Swami.
I don't know it. No, And I've just been all over the States. I'm talking to people everywhere. Even the California tech community is not not behind. I think for me, he lost me when he said we need to arm every Taiwanese family with handguns. I was like, have you ever been to this place or understood the history? Like you know? I just and people are fundamentally not interested in foreign policy in the United States until this Gaza event, and now it's splitting the country. So it's becoming a
really tricky issue. I think a lot of pologists are going to try to avoid it for that reason.
Okay, well, now we know he's going to be president.
Well I'm not saying, but I am saying he is going to to totally change what's said in this election.
Yes, even if it's not him, he can change the conversation.
He can change the conversation. Oh and by the way, the huge one is he's an environmentalist and the only one with real street cred on that issue. And I think Politico is right. They wrote he's the most trusted white man in Black America, and that is true because the Kennedy legacy and a bunch of other things. But I just think we keep picking the long shot, and so we can't expect this to be a normal one. I have actually one last thing I'll say on this,
because we're doing a podcast. Every presidency is driven by a technology. So Trump won on Twitter, Obama one on YouTube. Clinton and Bush were still television presidents. This is a podcast presidency. It is being fought on the podcast airwaves, where you get three hours long form, no more hostile interviewer, and people are listening at great length. So if you think that this race is happening at the presidential debates on mainstream media, you are totally going to miss it.
It's happening in this other technology space.
Making me feel guilty, We've only got forty minutes.
I know, well, people do go for three or four hours these days.
I can listen to anything everything. I could listen to you for three or four hours. I'm not reul listen to anybody else. Okay, let's talk about if we can shifting away from the president that it's relevant let's talk about AI. I know that you know everything there is to know about how all the technologies are digging themselves into our lives, but where's the future of that.
So AI is so fascinating because even the people who are at the cutting edge of this are saying to me, six months and I won't know what's happening, Like it moving so fast that even the experts can't keep up. But a few key things. One, we are optimizing. We're using AI to optimize for only two things right now,
cost and efficiency. And humans are not very cost effective or efficient, and so we're not optimizing for human connection or things that we don't value in the markets, but actually value for human have value for human flourishing like love, beauty, joy, And I think there's an increasing recognition that humanity can't be shoehorned into being more efficient and shouldn't be because our great skill is lateral thinking and creative creative thinking,
we're incredibly good at producing novelty, and so the AI community is beginning to clock this. So that's one thing. Second thing is add in robotics on automation, which is the field that I've been in. So imagine self replicating three D printers, self assembling and self replicating, three D printers driven by artificial intelligence that can now build and create on an extraordinary scale, not only here on Earth,
but off Earth. And that is very much where the planning is for space right All the building on the lunar surface, the construction of the first oxygen grid, the first power grid, the human habitats are all about the application of three D printing. And so this is causing some people who are really expert in this field to make some fascinating comments. So Lord Reese, who's the Astronomer Royal of Britain, which is you know, the position that
Newton had advising the Queen on astronomy. He's talked about this is an intelligence that's secular that we have created that's now growing of its own accord. And Craig Mundy, who was the head chief technology officer at Microsoft for decades, super expert on the subject. He says, look, AI now allows us to create an entity, as let's say we put it inside a robotic but an entity that can learn to the level of a fifteen year old in two weeks, not in one subject, but in every subject.
So now combine these things and I think this is where the discussion of is it sentient, is it not sentient? It's getting awfully blurry out there. So I think mainly AI is going to give us great things.
Right.
We can diagnose cancers before they even start to manifest with any symptoms. We can prepare fractures, we can manage the traffic, all sorts of things that need doing. But this business of building and creating physicality that has its own set of instructions which may or may not be in alignment with human flourishing. That's where the discussion is about what the heck what do we do?
That's where it gets a little bit frightening. Yeah, okay, so let's try and pull all this together and ask what it means for because this is our core subject here, what it means for markets as a whole, and what that might mean for investors.
Yes, well, I think it's so many different things. On the one hand, this idea that defense spending is now driving economies is true, and so drone and robotic technology start to be national priorities, so you can think in those terms. You can also begin to understand that with the breaking of supply chains and their recreation locally. I've been calling it glocalization, the relocalization of supply chains. Suddenly you want to be buying manufacturing firms in the West,
not just any East as we were before. I think this is a world where you either believe the technologlogical innovation can create dramatically different outcomes. I believe it can, so I'm really interested in food production becomes much easier, managing water supplies much easier. I mean against This is all against the backdrop as well of an extraordinary advance
and computational power. You know, as we move supercomputers, which you know, only five years ago a supercomputer could solve a problem in ten thousand years and that was considered historic and incredible. And that same problem can now be solved by a supercomputer in two hundred seconds. So our problem solving capabilities have exploded so far beyond our imagination. And I guess that for me is the main thing. I don't think we can live in a world anymore
where all armchair investors using the old metrics. This is a world that requires you to use your imagination.
So we can't just go out and buy a passive index fund and sit back. Is not gonna work. I just don't real off index it is.
It really is, And there's a question of I mean, for retail investors, they don't want to get involved in anything that's too risky to tricky. But on the other hand, everything now is some small startup doing a risky, tricky thing that then gets acquired and is suddenly part of a Google. And only the private equity crowd are catching that, and private investor and retail investors don't even get access to that anymore.
So is that.
Really where we want to be? Anyway? I think imagination is a crucial part of this, and that means getting out in the world and really looking at what's working and what's not working. What are the kids playing with that is going to be tomorrow's big technology.
Yeah, the kids are still playing with crypto, aren't they?
And they are oh yeah yeah. And the tokenization of finance and look, governments are moving further in that direction of fractionalizing money and making digital money itself. That is also in motion, and one has to think what are the implications of that for the economy.
Yeah, you're making all the things that British investors traditionally invest in sound older investors coming up to Retoment et cetera. They're invested in old style listed companies in the UK, energy consu miss Staples, etc. Collecting dividends.
Well, I totally get that. Look with interest rates where they are, bonds are paying well, so you know, everybody's shifted in the bonds. This is a huge problem for the tech sector because they have to outperform the bond market. I think a lot of people in tech don't understand this. They're like, so, my technolology is so amazing, my product is incredible. I'm tempted to write a book called you know my product is incredible because they all believe this.
But I'm like, babe, you don't outperform holding a thirty year bond.
Well, this is interesting, isn't it. Because for the last half many years, during the tech bubble or the growth bubble, whatever you like to call it, you've been able to say my technology is incredible and still get money. And now you have to say my technology is incredible, and look at the money I'm going to make for the
next eighteen months or I'm making already. Otherwise, no one's going to attribute any value to your incredible product and that's been the most extraordinary change for the technology industry. And even if you do that, not necessarily a bad way, by the way, I agree, I'm a bad totally agree.
I think it's all much healthier than it was. But even if you do that, you now have to reinvent or keep pace with the technological innovation in your field permanently. Permanently. You can never rest, you can never rest, right, So this is Olympics on a whole new level. And there's actually there's one other subject that which I wanted to get into with you, and it's it's it's the most fascinating, super tricky, bizarre subject I've come across in my entire career.
Okay, I'm ready, you're you're ready in case, it's.
Like buckle your seatbelts stuff. But it is at the nexus of what this what we're talking about, which is a level of technological innovation that may blow away everything we know about physics itself.
Idea. Yeah, so what seems.
To be happening since the Nobel Prize was awarded last year for quantum physics, which gave credibility to this idea that quantum entanglement is real. So it's almost as if our new computational power and our new capacity with sensors to gather information is punching holes in the Einstein standard model of physics. And on the other side is this quantum base model of physics that is not yet established
or explained. And in that space, this is where my attention was drawn by a number of people from my days in government when I worked in the White House who called me up and said, you have to watch what Congress is doing on this whole what they're calling anomalist phenomena non human intelligence issue. And I was like, what are you kidding? So I started looking at it,
and I'm like, holy moly. We have Congress holding five years of private hearings on this subject, and then one year of public hearings, and now we have not just one, but ten people coming forward from the highest levels of the intelligence community as whistleblowers, and apparently another thirty behind them. And what they're really talking about is that we have this kind of new technology from new physics. It's all in Pentagon black basudget programs that are not visible even
to the leaders of the Pentagon itself. And this is one reason why the Pentagon hasn't been able to conduct the audit that Congress requires of them for the last five years.
Because the spending remains secret.
It remains totally secret, totally compartmentalized. But it appears to be about these kinds of technologies that don't fit our conception of the way the world physics. Yeah, now this of course attracts It is all merging with the whole old story about UFOs and UAPs and are there non human beings and all this stuff that people write off
because of course that must be crazy. But as Senator Rubio said, if you have the most senior people from the Geospatial Intelligence Agency in the National Reconnaissance Office saying actually, this is real, then either we have our top people losing their minds or we are at an extraordinary moment in history. And I at this point am inclined to go with let's do the it's an extraordinary moment in history.
Let's suspend the disbelief for just long enough to gather the information and then we can see what we bring science to to understand it. And I'm seeing some of the world's top scientists working on all of these elements, and I just think it's a thing from.
What would that mean, Well, if.
It does mean that we're going to have new technologies that revolutionize how we do things that you can't afford not to pay attention.
Okay, So what that means right now is pay attention.
It only means keep an eye. It's it's not the inclination will be to just say, oh, well that's nuts, but watch this space. Something important and historic is happening here, and I just think it's worth paying a little attention to on the side.
Okay, Well, we're definitely going to watch that and we'll come back to talk about it again in a year or so. Pepper, Before we finish, I have to work you something that is also a relatively historic question and important, and I think I know your answer is going to be but we'll we'll find out. We're keeping we keep
them track of people's answers. Yeah, if I were to say to you, over the next ten years, you can have one asset class and one asset class only, and you have to choose between the following three things, and the first one is gold, and the second one is bitcoin okay, and the third one is a UK based deposit.
Account the cash cash option.
Would you take the cash option even over a teni period.
So even though inflation seems high to people now, it's of course nothing compared to like you know, when I was a kid growing up. But I think all of the things I've described mean inflation is going to come down, and have in cash at your disposal is important so that when these opportunities come, you can enter them. The awful thing is when opportunities come and you're already stuck, you're already committed, or your cash is gone. For some I just think the optionality of cash.
You're not allowed to use it for a decade.
Yeah, I know we can, but most of your listeners won't be able to get in on the technologies I'm describing for a decade.
Okay, so they need to hold it. They need to hold.
If they were a private equity outfit, I would say you can't wait ten years. But if you're the general public, you won't even have the opportunity because these firms won't go public that fast. So in that sense, it's a kind of it's a period to study, to work really really hard so that when you deploy that cash it will do amazing things as opposed to mediocre things.
What if I take cash out of the equation, you're the fulest you to choose between gold and bitcoin.
So I have not been a bitcoiner directly, I haven't, but I do understand the digitization of money and the tokenization of money, and I think governments, particularly the US, the UK and the EU, they are about to say we're going to have national central bank currency that's digitized and you can own bitcoin. You just can't hold it
anonymously and you have to declare it for tax. When that announcement comes, the value of bitcoin, in my opinion, actually will go up, and dramatically will go will go up because regular people will start to understand that they can be in it. It's no longer you know, for rogues and renegades.
Okay, it's probably regulated. It's real money, that's right.
So in that sense, I would take that bitcoin bet. But that's a very different bitcoin bet than the bitcoiners are taking. Their whole thing is I'm taking it to get out of the reach of government. And I'm like, guys, you know, in electronic world, you really think that what you write on a keyboard can't be tracked. Seriously, you can't escape. We are in this world, there are sovereigns you can't get out from underneath that. So I actually
think bitcoin and here's a funny thing. I think the US is going to end up as the largest sovereign holder of bitcoin through confiscation. Yes, literally, because every time they arrest somebody. The stash is huge. It's like four billion, and of course that's like more than the annual budget of the whole Justice Department. So do they want it to have a value so they can.
You can't really stop trading in it right now, you can't do anything with it, wait with it.
But if you make it legal, you will, and then they will be very wealthy themselves.
Okay, so there we go. Pivot is bitcoin is boin advisors? Yeah, big owners, beware you'll you'll big will only be worth something if the thing you don't want to happen happens. That's right, really interesting.
It's fascinating.
Pepper, Thank you so much, Thank you, John. What do you think of Peppers? Great?
Yeah, I mean obviously that's not the first time she's been in the show, but share always it's always something new into.
The next and she's always early, you know, she's always early. She has been right so often. You know, she's been right on all this geopolitical stuff. She was right on Trump, She's write on lots of the dynamics around last the last couple of years or so. And in our conversation when she talks about watching Robert F. Kennedy, when she said that to us a week or two ago, nobody else was saying. And now you look around and has lots of chat about Robert F. Kennedy, not necessarily winning,
but certainly changing the conversation. And space. You know, she has been talking about these issues in space for a very very long time now. I remember the first time she talked to me some time ago about the Russians blowing up their own satellites and creating these kind of razor clouds in space that would prevent anybody else using that space, and talking about this is a geographical land grab.
You know, this sounded completely bizarre, but now this is a mainstream conversation and even I don't know if you've read it, but by the way, anybody listening, fantastic Christmas present for all the teens and indeed the adults in your life. Tim Marshall's knew that the future of geography have power and politics, and space will change our world. Lots of the stuff is in there, and you know, Tim's great, but this is a he's a mainstream author.
And the stuff that Pepper was saying a couple of years back and everyone was going, yeah, she's nuts, now is out there in no Pepper. Nobody said you were nuts. Nobody said you were nuts. Just a little out there, Peper, just a little out there. And now everyone is happily saying, you know, geography is not about not just about the Earth,
geography is about space. Everybody is talking about the possibility of maybe being able to beam solar energy down to Earth and not having to bother with all those ski fossil fuels and all the horrible wind turbines and all that stuff, and just beam it right down. Build a better grib grid Bobs, your uncle. Everybody's talking about space for everyone's talking about Lane Grab. Everybody's talking about getting
minerals off the moon. You know, highly mainstream conversation, and the idea that China, Russia and America are in some kind of competition to have habitable zones on the Moon within the next decade. This is no longer even remotely weird. The only thing that's still a little bit out there is UFOs.
Yeah, this was the bit that I so only read this in the transcript as far as I could. Wotko, So what she's seeing is that is Cana Lake. They can of black ops tape, military secret stuff. Is that that experiment? And we quantum computing or whatever this is, it's all been behind a paywall for you and those coming out. Is that the idea I couldn't quit walking?
I think that's basically it. I mean, from what she was saying. And you know, we'd have to ask Pepper if we wanted more detail on this. But isn't it perfectly normal for defense, particularly in the US, to be doing all sorts of stuff that sounds completely bonkers to the ordinary person.
Yeah, absolutely no, that's I mean, I agree with that. It's just the sort of v Kent parallel universities and things like that that got me.
Why why do you think they don't? When did you turn into such a pedestrian thinker? John?
It's true, I'm getting very very cool titty.
I mean, you honestly think that you know, here we are, what's what's what's the phrase a motive? Dust suspended on a sunbeam. Here we are in our tiny little universe with all the millions and millions of other universes, et cetera, and you think it's we might be alone, very off topic bearing off topic topic.
The other thing I thought was interesting is the and again i'd accused if any of our readers listeners are know more about this, But the asteroid mining. The one thing that gets me about that is that, yes, it's cool, but.
How it's so.
Expensive relative to other ways they getting this stuff. And none of this stuff is particularly scarce or not scarce enough yet that you would want to be flying in a space to you know, get it off an asteroid or even off the moon.
Yeah, but you know we have satellites with arms that can grab stuff now, right. I mean that's why people was saying we're going for very small satellites now so it's less easy for them to be captured by other people satellites. And if you've got around, just grab a little astroid and bring it an.
Isn't that going to blow the world up? What you do not deflect.
But the only thing I would say, you know, you say, oh mining on the moon, it's so expensive, We can't do that. We've got loads of loads of stuff here. And you're right, you know, we talk about rare earth metals and everybody knows they're not remotely rare. There's loads of them around. But you know, if you could go up and get them off the south pole of the Moon, then you don't have to worry about planning permission. And I would.
Say, maybe we can build affordable hosing for London.
Well, I would say that getting planning permission to, for example, open a Lissier mining cornwall be significantly more expensive than inventing and building a mining rocket to go to the south pole of the Moon and bring it back from there. And you know, my only experience with planning permission is trying to build a garage in the garden. At this point cheaper to part the car on the moon.
Have they seen more of a regulation than else?
Yeah.
And the other thing, Robert F. Kennedy like this is John.
Trying to get He's trying to get off the subject of space because he's uncomfortable with the idea of UFOs.
Right, Oh, No, comfortable with the idea UFO was.
Just anyway, I've had too many I'm interested in the whole thing. And I love the way that Pepper talks about and one of the things I do think she talked about that was really interesting and important for us all to think about a lot is about satellites and how they've become part of our critical infrastructure, you know,
the same as water or anything like that. So satellites they provide all of the digital infrastructure that we have on Earth, and people forget that that is created by the satellites up above, and that creates huge national geographical
vulnerabilities outside our own borders. And that seems to me to be one of the most important takeaways from what people was talking about that we need to be aware of that, and we need to be aware that this is what we've got up here is effectively a privatized part of infrastructure because most of these satellites are private, but there is huge national interest in them. And one of the things that back to Tim Marshall, he talks
about it in terms of the East India Company. You know, think about private interests that are so huge that they have national defense and national interest characteristics that means that they can't really be left to be private. So I think there's a lot to watch there. That's the interesting we had. Right Now we can move away from UFOs and you can talk about presidential candidates, which is what you were trying to deflect me onto. I'll tell you what I do know what's going on here? Can I
tell you what's going on here? Everybody? John is from Galasgow, which is one of the UFO spotting places globally. It's Bonnie Brigg in the central Belt. Right, Bonnie Brigg is not that far from Glasgow. I bet that as a kid. As a kid, John was out every night drinking strong boe watching for UFOs. My right job. Fuite a little sensitive about it?
Now, well I may have been bog fast and look that team I was taking up. I am not going to I can't tell you any vote it I was. I've sworn the Official Defense Secrets Act. Other than that, thanks for bringing up my childhood well with fun?
Yes?
So please? This is this guy, Robert F.
Kennedy, This guy, this guy?
What is the mechanism by which he changes everything? Is it just like being a third candidate who everyone's votes go to?
Or have you been on his website?
I hate to see it, but I haven't.
Okay, can I strongly recommend, Can I strongly recommend? So we declare your independence. We will end the forever wars, clean up government, increase wealth for all, and tell Americans the truth. I'd go for that, you know. He's very clear on ending corporate chron is, dealing with a state, state institutions that don't behave democratically, coping with the cost of living. Not sure how you do that. He's an environmentalist. He's very keen on honest government, aren't we all? You know?
A democratic government, he says, is supposed to be of, by and for the people. But government institutions have portrayed or trust. The intelligence agencies spy on our own people. Government and tech platforms conspire to survey and censor the public. Regulatory agents who being captured by those they are supposed to regulate. Wall Street controls the SEC. Polluters and extractive industries dominate the EPA. In the BLM, I don't know all the two agencies are other people. Well. Farmer controls
the CDC, NIH and FDA. Big agriculture controls the USDA. Big tech has captured the FTC. No wonder trusting government is at an all time low. It's time to earn it back. Christ I'd looked for that. I didn't have to do anything else. Am I'd vote for that.
Yeah, he certainly seems to be hitting the aid bidens.
And you know, when you look at when you look at the options Trump Biden, these are unbelievably appalling options. How did the greatest country on us get to this point? The conversation around every dinner table this Christmas, how did the greatest country on us get to the point where it's asking people or looks like it's going to ask people to choose between Trump and Biden. And it looks like it is impossible. It should be impossible for either
of these people to become president. Again, So when we say, you know, if something is impossible, then what is possible? And somebody like Kennedy looks possible conceivable.
No, that's a really good point, because you're right. One thing that people have consistently forgotten whenever they go on about surprise election results is that the alternatives in the last kind of like you know, ten years have not been very appealing either. So, you know, Boris Johnson Versus generally Calledbyn Trump. Everyone forgets it was Hillary Clinton on the other side, of that who figured as well. So
that's a really good point. Actually, so Biden Trump or an annoys guy who talks a good game.
Literally anybody else, literally anybody else. Yeah, I mean there are a couple of candidates who look like they could break through the mechanism of it is difficult. But as Pepper says, well he may not necessarily win, fairly unlikely to win. There is something interesting hearing that he could change the conversation. People look at somebody like that and say, actually, hang on, guys like this exist. Why do we have to put up with these decrepids?
So the other thing I like to but it is it kind of please and whole thing about the cold wars being followed by a big hug, which would be nice, that would be I thought that was actually the kind of best bit of your conversation. We are because hopefully she'd be as right about that as she was about cold wars and hot plics and hot wars and cold polices.
Well, we really don't need any more hot waves, do we. And the truth is that you know, pretty much all the big powers are financially stretched at the moment, and this is her point. You know, this is too expensive, and wars cold or hot, and when people can't afford them anymore. And the US is very financially stretched. We are extremely financially stretched. I whichh we have time to talk about Scotland, which appears to be about to go bankrupt. By the way, have you been watching this?
It's about not being watching any political stuff. Have been too central bank absorbed?
Well, things are so bad here. Literally the money is gone. It's been spent on ferries that don't work, and you know, pointless foreign politics and giving grandstanding amounts of aid all over the place, etc. And now we literally don't have any money left at all. So the answer apparently had to put up tax rates on the middle classes, which I think will go really, really badly. We don't have much in the way of middle classes already. Anyway. Off topic,
off topic, off topic, bring me back, bring me back. Wars. Scotland does not involved. Gotland is not involved in World War three, as much as some of them I think would like to be a golden World War three. Gotland is not of old in World War three. So yes, it gets too expensive. And when wars get too expensive, they do tend to end. And it's very difficult to search to see exactly how that happens to see the mechanics.
All we have is the historical information that when you can't afford it anymore, you tend to stop, and then you have.
Yeah, yeah, and that's a good point because Russia's skin, Chinas skin and real skin. So yeah, that's that's probably a good bear. I mean, as far as I can see, all this is basically seeing that next year will probably be again what aging back towards the rule in twenties argument, Well.
Yes, the Roaring twenties, which we will talk about. We're going to do a round here at the beginning of next year on this podcast and we'll talk about the possibility of the Roaring twenties then. But I am noticing Eddie Ardini, who we both read Eddi idina research going on and on and on about the Roaring twenties, and he has he has a pretty good record. Me called
this year very well. And if we look back at people were saying about space and about the technological gains that come with this kind of space race, and if that really is a game changing energy, I don't even know how to describe beinging solar energy back to Earth from the sunny. You don't know how to describe it, but you know, some of these things begin to come true. Solar laser, some of these things beginning to begin to
come true. And there are shift forward in healthcare and in digitalization, and AI really does make a big difference all these things that we've been talking about prages. If next year is the year, which it could be, then the Roaring Twenties come back. And the notebook that I got from Bailly Gifford at a conference a couple of years ago that has Roaring Twenties written on the front, I'll finally be able to use that without being mildly embarrassed.
Happy days. That's the main thing. It is the main thing. It is the main thing. And now I'm thinking, no, I'm just thinking about John and UFOs again. But I'm I'm not going to tease him. I'm not going to tease him anymore. I'm going to finish up. Thanks for listening to this week's Marin Talks Money. We'll be back next week. Don't forget to leave us a review. It helps people find the show, and of course you can also tell people in personal about the show to help
them find the show. This episode was hosted by me Maren Sunset Web. It was produced by Samasadi, additional editing by Blake Maple. Special thanks to Pipper Malcolm and to John Steppek. And of course it'd be sure to sign up to John's daily newsletter, Manager Stilled. The link is in the show notes, and you can know a lots more about John's obsession with investment trusts