Our Future is Biotech - Jericho Conversations with Andrew Craig

In case you missed it, we recently interviewed Andrew Craig, as part of our Jericho Conversations series.

Andrew Craig, the founder of Plain English Finance, has been featured in numerous national and specialist financial publications including The Mail on Sunday, The Mirror, CityAM, The Spectator, Shares and MoneyWeek magazines, YourMoney, This Is Money, and Money Observer. The third edition of his book, “How to Own the World”, was the best-selling new finance book in the UK for much of 2019.

 Andrew's latest book, "Our Future is Biotech," delves into why biotech is the next frontier. Our most significant challenges as a species concern biological systems. For over a century, technology has driven human progress, shaping the way we live, work, and connect. Now, as we face some of the most pressing challenges of our time, biotech emerges as a beacon of hope. From combating formidable diseases like cancer, dementia, obesity, and diabetes, to addressing critical issues in elderly care and mental health, biotech is poised to revolutionise our world.

 Thank you for joining us (if you did), and sorry you missed it (if you didn’t!). It was a great conversation. Below, we’ve captured some of the best bits from the webinar and you can... 

You’re a Tech-optimist – where do you derive that optimism from?

If you consider the trajectory of the last two centuries, human beings take amazing progress for granted rather too quickly. Big picture, the book is informed by the belief that the last century has been defined by tech and physics and the next century will be about biotech and biology because most of our remaining intractable problems concern biology, disease and the environment.

We need progress to continue, and bio-based computers could take up the torch. Having worked at the coalface I speak as I find, and in terms of elections and standard bearings, talk about tech tends to reduce to conversations about bad pharma. But set against this is the sheer improvement in life expectancy brought about over the last century.

Big tech these days brings the Silicon Valley companies to mind. How happy do you feel with the amount of power they wield?

I think I may come across as very naive, but I prefer these organisations' leaders amassing this power rather than some political leaders. I believe there is a negative bias in the press generally, and we have a strange habit of watching people in dark suits telling us all the terrible things that have happened today. My view is this gives us all a horribly distorted view of how the world is.

If you go out there and look at what businesses are doing, Jeff Bezos has given the world the best distribution infrastructure, and the net contribution of these people to mankind is immeasurably better than most politicians.

Is it all a matter of competency?

I think we get the politicians we deserve, which is a depressing thought. Government is increasingly incompetent because it's staffed by people who have had very little real-world experience.

The demise of the London Stock Exchange has been a slow-motion car crash, and it’s not even being discussed in this election. My view is that in the space left outside of politics, we need to do the best we can to make the world a better place as corporate entities and individuals.

Is Britain failing to fund innovation?

Outside of the US, there are numerous challenges to the structure of science. Britain is incredibly good at science, (fairly good at early-stage stuff and the VC world). The focus of my book is where we lack in taking one million pound companies to one billion pound companies. Regulatory and tax decisions have eviscerated small companies.

The media isn’t talking about this. I lay the blame at the foot of both Labour and Conservative governments of the past 30 years. We also have a big advantage in the NHS in terms of data, but we are woeful because we have challenged the ability of the London Stock Market to turn these businesses into what they should be.

What would you do about regulation and tax?

We need a national marketing campaign to encourage investment. 90% of people in the UK are not investing in the stock market.

If someone invests regularly every month in the stock markets from age 25 to 65, they stand a good chance of being set for life.

But we need to regulate crypto. Anyone under the age of 40 tends to invest in crypto, and that’s low tens of billions. It matters because people promoting crypto are not regulated by the FCA. In the context of funding all the upcoming companies, it is mission-critical capital that has been missed entirely.

There is also a need to regulate the growth of passive funds via ETFs. It's challenging tens of thousands of companies who need that funding, and this change would challenge the power of the big Silicon Valley companies.

What about food and agriculture?

Humans have been using living things to their benefit for thousands of years. Holland exports flowers, a high-margin crop, and is the second biggest exporter in the world after the US. It’s a superpower. India, Indonesia, etc., waste 50% of their crop yearly. Using biotechnologies to address this issue is crucial; we’d need half the crop and half the land to produce it.

Bad research lingers in the psyche for a long time. The link between MMR and autism is a good example. With new CRISPR gene technology, we are getting close to being able to genetically engineer protein from substrates that is genetically identical to meats. The impact this will have on the environment will be enormous; we could rewild 90% of the land currently used for livestock farming.

The wealth creation and value will massively exceed the jobs misplaced by this technology. Innovative young farmers can get on the right side of this and take advantage of the new opportunities it presents.

What can we expect from the state in terms of our later years of life?

I think it will get a lot worse before it gets better. In the UK, there is a huge demographic bulge. As a society, we are not productive enough and not creating enough wealth. It will be brutal, but longer term, robotics could help. But real wealth creation will be key.

Health span will extend to 90 or 100 in the future, and we won’t need to have the level of care in our later years.

Community and a sense of having that connection is so important for good health outcomes. The explosion of these technologies should support this. There is hope in terms of habit-forming apps to support health functions. Better sleep, better diet, and lower stress would all help this.

It is comical when you talk about snake oil and the old adverts for the products that were available. In the centuries since then, regulation has improved this beyond expectation.

Do people in biotech get a good ethical grounding?

From personal experience, I see people who are mission-driven, and the volume of work and challenges faced is immense. The distribution of good and bad actors tends to be aligned to the rest of the population, but with the Hippocratic Oath... so perhaps it skews to the good even more.

The only stuff you ever hear about is the terrible stuff and the terrible people when it comes to media. 

About #JerichoConversations

Jericho Conversations is one of a number of initiatives that spontaneously emerged during the first COVID lockdown – part of a determination to use moments of crisis to pivot towards a better, fairer, more equitable and sustainable future for all. By popular demand, we have reignited the series to help find surprising and refreshing solutions and insights into a world in constant flux. Each conversation – led by an expert speaker – is designed to keep Jericho communities engaged and thinking about “what comes next?” for business and society.