helps guide us, but how do you sift through that and what made your information kind of sift through that noise and bubble up there?

So I think, you know, again, all of us can relate to this just being bombarded by noise, right? And trying to understand what is the signal within that noise.

And for us, that was the role that we played.

It wasn't necessarily that we had more or less information.

It was the process that we went through, that sort of the mental rubrics that we used.

And again, all of that stress testing, that collaboration piece, that making both sort of our best judgments based on the information available and then also sense checking that against the ground truth of part of the reason that I was there also physically in Afghanistan was so I could sense check what our intelligence was saying and say, well, actually that doesn't really fit with what I'm seeing on the ground.

So it was taking what we called all source intelligence, right? It's every single piece of information that you can that's relevant to this And then over that, again, that various like analytical process, distilling it into your best analysis.

What is enough? And how do we come to terms with what is enough? And how do we decide that we're good? You know, can you share a little bit more about, you know, I think if you're comfortable, like, where you sit today from both an asset allocation strategy and from a net worth perspective, how you can go and how you're investing today?

there's like different colours, isn't there? So there's like the white, the yellow, the orange.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I'll talk through the extremes because there's lots of fine sort of distinctions in between.

But sort of red is like, you know, where you're on super high alert, you're constantly scanning for threats and you're trying, you know, you're sort of all of your senses are really, really sort of tuned up.

And thankfully, in most cases, day-to-day or even professional even extreme professional context you don't really need to be that on high alert right this is what i'm talking about like if the only few times that i've ever had to do this was in training exercises where the job was to sort of spot threats ahead of time and then also you know being deployed into active war zones where you do have to be constantly looking on the road does that look suspicious does that person look like they're friendly or you know etc where you are just it's it's almost like sensory overload right you have to just take in as much both physical observation and also just that thing of like your spidey sense, right? Like, does something just feel a bit off? So that's like being, you know, sort of the most alert.

And then at the opposite extreme is where you're white, where you're just totally like, ignorant to everything happening.

You know, these are those people that you see, and no judgment here, but those who've got their headphones on, and like, you could be having a, you know, there could be like, I don't know, a nuclear alert going on in the background, and they are just totally just in their own world, not paying attention to anything.

It's like, what does that do to you? When you were in the CIA, did you see that happening? Or were you warned about that happening of like being on red alert for too long?

Rupal, what is a stable coin?

It's similar to kind of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoins, but they're more stable, as the name for it suggests.

They're usually backed by assets.

So unlike Bitcoin, which isn't sort of backed by anything, really the trust is all in the kind of code itself.

This is the trust is in physical assets.

They can be backed by government bonds, gold, other currencies, which means that if a dollar appreciates, so does the value of your stable coin.

And if it falls, then so does your stable coin.

The Bank of England has been playing with this idea, haven't they, RuPaul? The idea of the digital pound.

Yeah

... trust in your currency and get currency crises as well.

Um, so in our book, we talk about all of these.

One of the, uh, the ways that people can lose the trust in, um, how safe their money is in their bank account, right? So we saw this during the financial crisis, uh, where a lot of people, uh, queued up outside branches, uh, such as Northern Rock to get their money out because they just didn't think it was safe there.

Um, and what happened in the end is the government ended up bailing out, uh, some of these banks, not Northern Rock, but some others, um, and used a lot of taxpayer money to do that, which I'm sure, you know, many of you have heard about.

Um, but what's happened more recently is, uh, we had a bank run on Silicon Valley Bank, uh, which is a bank based in the US catering to sort of small tech company startups.

Um, and it has a US, um, UK subsidiary here.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

I can talk about the opposite.

So hyperinflation, which is when there's too much money and it's really, it happens because governments, well in the past it's happened because governments have printed too much money and basically inflation has absolutely skyrocketed and you see prices going up exponentially very, very quickly.

You know, you mentioned some of the classic examples.

Some of the ones that people don't really talk about is Hungary, which sort of happened similar time after the World War, but actually they had the highest hyperinflation rate, you know, ever.

And they ended up printing the highest denomination banknotes ever as well, which was the one quintillion, which is one with 20 zeros after it, just because they couldn't keep up with how fast prices were increasing.

But the other thing is that governments have handled hyperinflation in very different ways.

So how unusual is that historically? How worried should people be that we're just fundamentally in a new world of high inflation?

Um, uh-Uh, Brian, I think this says, says, "Can you explain the difference between Scottish notes and English notes?" You were just touching on that.

Yeah.

So, uh, the English notes or kind of the Bank of England sterling notes are issued by the Bank of England.

Um, but there are three banks in Scotland that are allowed to issue their own banknotes, and they look completely different to the ones that you've, you know, you might be familiar with.

They've got different patterns, different designs, different people on them.

They don't have any monarchy on them actually at all.

They have, uh, kind of famous people.

Where, where is the money?