Well, that example, I mean, China has a very clear mandate to further its own agenda in terms of like... what its outcome is, is what's best for the Chinese people.

Exactly.

So the idea there's a sort of world, you know, cabal of lizard people, you know, that are all going to come out like V, you know, to the old 80s movie.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That actually the queen was a lizard and, you know, the Illuminati.

I think it's basically bollocks.

And I think that...

think

So we've contracted to 3.5. We're now in a position where also we are the only country going in the direction of investing less into our own,

Yeah, so there are structural reasons why there are fewer stock market listed companies in the world, one of which is the rise in companies that aren't listed on the stock market, which is venture capital and private equity.

And we'll perhaps come back to that.

So all over the world, more and more of the world's money is allocated to private equity and venture capital, which means that you could...

Well, this is a subtle thing.

You could argue that that's one of the fundamental drivers of there being fewer companies.

One of the other drivers is that very, very big companies, and these things are all related...

then also on top of that, now you've got more and more of these decisions with these ETFs being made algorithmically.

[laughs]

... an- angry man, I'm not...

I probably can't say that anymore, but, you know, politics has, has been something that sort of crept into a lot of work I've done recently.

And the reason for that is 'cause my mission is to improve the financial affairs of as many people as possible, and I've restated that time and time again.

It's hard to improve somebody's finances if they can't get a job, right? And so I've become rather exercised about the state of the UK and the state of the London Stock Exchange and all this stuff.

But to your point, I think it's important that I recapture that mission, which is ultimately to park all of that, 'cause really, realistically, there's not much I can do about it, ultimately.

Um, you can sort of be an angry man and rant about it.

[laughs]

Whose

solutions absolutely, categorically, factually are throwing fuel on the fire of what the problem is.

I agree.

Making it immeasurably worse.

And it just does my head in.

It does my head in that we can have leading politicians who just don't, they've not taken account of two centuries of evidence in dozens of countries.

And they genuinely think that these ideas, I mean, including the current Labour government on all of, you know, pretty much every policy they've announced since they came to power is just a total disaster.

the point about these markets is that

Let's face it, people aren't looking at US, but should we also be looking at the US?

I get this all the time in the pushback.

Oh, why would I ever invest in British shares? British shares are rubbish.

There are so many things to say about that.

I mean, firstly, through our own insanely incompetent and stupid policies, like imposed, by the way, under Labour and the Tories, it's not party political.

So basically for 30 plus years, The British political class and regulatory class have been doing everything in their power to destroy the London Stock Exchange.

I mean, I don't want to bore on about that.

I know what you're going to say, but let's say it.