On the Couch with Igor Pejic: New Rules for Investing in the Tech Age

In this episode of On the Couch, Henry Jennings speaks with Igor Pejic, author of Tech Money – a new book on the rules of investing in the technology age.

They cover why tech investing requires a different playbook, the AI bubble debate, which industries face the biggest disruption, and what quantum computing could mean for the decade ahead.

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Transcript

Welcome And Ground Rules

Jennings 0:03

Well, welcome to another episode of On the Couch with myself Henry Jennings from Marcus Today. And today I'm absolutely delighted to be talking to uh an internationally recognized expert, as the blurb says, on the intersection of technology and finance. And uh he's got a new book out called uh Tech Money. And uh Igor Paiich uh is joining us today, uh very well renowned author. And uh Igor has got an MBA from WA Executive Academy, and he is based at the moment in Vienna. So uh he's sweltering away in 38 degrees of heat in Vienna with no air conditioning. So hopefully we're gonna make this uh this chat a nice, easy, cool chat for him to uh talk about his new book, talk about what's happening in finance and technology and the intersection, I guess, of investing in technology during this age. So uh Igor, uh really happy to be uh interviewing today. It's great to have you on the show. Thanks for coming. Hello, thanks for having me. Uh now, just before we kick off, as always, of course, it's general advice only, so please do your own research, contact your own financial advisor regarding any of the thoughts, ideas, or insights in this podcast. Um

Why Tech Money Exists

Jennings 1:20

I guess the first thing is uh timing, as with most things is everything, and you you timed the release of this book absolutely brilliantly with uh SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI coming out. Um technology is on the on the tip of everyone's tongue at the moment, and we've seen some big moves in some of the technology stocks. Um tell us a little bit more about this book that you've uh written and released in the last week or so.

Pejic 1:45

Yeah, so the book is called uh Tech Money, uh, and what it does, it's basically it looks at the new rules of investing. Because what happened in the technology age, really starting around the year 2000 uh and really accelerating up to today is that technology has taken over stock markets, uh, it has taken over uh large parts of uh the our lives, uh, and it has also changed many industries, and including investing, right? So investing today is not the same as it was 20, 30 years ago. Uh the way we're making decisions, the way we're uh making returns, um, it's not the way it used to be, right? So people like Warren Buffett, all of those great value investors that have dominated the 20th century, have basically uh, you know, now met the new world. Uh, and uh now it's not anymore this uh primacy of value investing, but we have reached a tech age in which things like P2E ratios or total addressable markets are not anymore the gold standard, uh, but we're really looking at different things, and most of the returns, the outside returns, is driven by tech companies. So it's a completely new age, and what I was trying or I'm trying to do in the book is basically to define those rules and show investors um how best to ride technological waves in order uh to benefit uh from this new tech age rather than to stick to old metrics and old methodologies uh that might apply to the traditional stocks, but not anymore to uh, let's say, big tech or even um young uh upstarts, uh technological upstarts that are trying to append multiple industries.

Is This Time Really Different

Jennings 3:23

It's fair to say though, every kind of generation there's always that, well, this time it's different kind of maxim that goes around the market. And we you know, everyone says, you know, I I remember back in the dot-com boom, this time it's different. We've got different different metrics to measure things by. We're looking at eyeballs and clicks and all which turned out to be absolute rubbish in the end. Um, and it's still all about cash flow and profits and um being able to have money to invest. Is is this a danger that we're saying that, or you're saying and others are saying that you know, this time it is different when in actual fact it's not really that different to previous cycles that we've seen, just maybe amplified, I guess, to some extent.

Pejic 4:04

Yeah, you're you you're you're referring to to this infamous or famous words of uh John Templeton, uh the famous investor who said, you know, that the four last words of any great investor is this time it's different. Uh and it's it's often it's often quoted as a warning uh not to ignore the lessons of history because history repeats itself. Now, what Templeton himself said, however, in this very same letter uh which which hardly ever gets quoted, and 20% of the time, things indeed are different. Uh, and um I think that we have seen a fundamental shift starting with the dot-com era. Um, I agree with you that uh you still need cash flows, you still need revenues and so on. Um, however, uh though and and I'm not the one claiming that valuations uh and and uh you know price to sales ratios and stuff like that are uh is is not important anymore. Uh but it's become much more uh complex. You have many more metrics to consider because what you're trying to do as a tech investor is that you're trying to catch this exponential growth curve, right? So and when I say tech investor, I don't mean people uh have their entire portfolio in tech and are looking for this, but usually the way it works, you have your portfolio, you have an ambitious part uh where you have a lot of tech in there. So what you want to do is really to catch this growth curve. And if you want to do that, it's not enough to look at those traditional metrics, um, you know, like uh what's the book value of a company and these kind of things uh that don't necessarily apply anymore to a softer company, for example. Um so I think in in some way things are really different today, and we can see this, especially when we compare the returns of value stocks to growth stocks uh on average. If you look at the 20th century, it usually used to be value stocks outperforming growth stocks in not all, but most of the years. But then again, uh in 2000, uh gross stocks started dominating and the ratio just kept getting kept uh uh getting bigger and bigger. So the gap today is uh four times what it was today. So with every new technological layer, like the internet, smartphones, now AI, uh it the dominance of gross stocks, i.e. tech stocks, is becoming uh more impressive.

Big Tech Dominance And AI Spend

Jennings 6:16

It is it does seem crazy that we've just got this massive um domination of a few stocks. Um that that can't be healthy, can it, in the long run? Or is or is that just a symptom of what we're seeing that the strong are going to survive and the strong have got the money to spend on the new AI boom and they're gonna leverage that to a hilt to remain the dominant companies in the world?

Pejic 6:41

Yeah, it it is it is indeed um a characteristic of today's age um that big companies actually uh have a huge strategic advantage. Um, because if you look at history in terms of returns, um it used to be a disadvantage if you're too big, right? If you look at the market cap of the of the largest 10 companies and companies joining those top 10, uh the three years leading up to them joining the top 10, they were outperforming everything by massive differences. And then as soon as they joined the big guys, uh they are uh underperforming, they're performing very poorly. Uh, but this has not been the case with with those big tech companies who have just continued this impressive winning streak. And part of that is because new technologies require ever more uh capex, right? Especially in the AI race, we know that uh that's the logic today of the race. It might change the I race, but today um the narrative is whoever spends more on uh high performance GPUs and whoever can stack more chips in their data centers will provide the best models and win the race. Now, if that's sustainable, uh that's another question. Uh, but that's the logic by which we're we're working on today, and that's why you see this exponential increases.

Jennings 7:56

Some of the money that these guys are throwing is is just staggering, isn't it? You know, it's 750, 800 billion US dollars being invested um this year by by these big behemoths. And and and now they tend to be doing it with other people's money because they've kind of run out of their own money to some extent. All those big cash piles have been dwindling. Is is there a danger that that really and truly that the arms race is just escalating beyond um what is what is actually going to produce the end result these guys are after?

Pejic 8:28

It's definitely a concerning trend. Um I get asked a lot also if we are in in an AI bubble comparable to the dot-com uh bubble uh the late 1990s. Um I think we're not there yet, but this is this is a sign that's uh worrying because if you look at the dot-com bubble, uh everything was basically financed of credit. Uh and as you said it earlier, you know, you had metrics like eyeballs, there is no real revenue. Uh companies didn't really generate cash. Now, this is uh still completely different here in this case. You have a Google or Amazon or Microsoft or whoever who have huge profit machines. Most of it was financed by their free cash flows. Uh, but now they're starting to engage in lending. Plus, uh, you get all those circular financing agreements which are kind of worrying, where in which uh let's say a chip producer buys a big stake in uh in a model provider, uh, but that model provider in return has to buy the chips, which is obviously a lot of uh uh you know, it's obfuscating the real demand, it's inflating the real demand. So this is where it gets a little bit tricky. But overall, if we look at the the theoretical aspect uh of technological progress, what we can see is that every technoeconomic paradigm, as it says, that lasts about on average 50, 60 years, and we're now in the in the information age, is set up of two parts. One where you have the installation period, then there's a big crash, which in our case was the dot-combust, and then you have something that that's called the golden age, in which uh all of this infrastructure that was built up in the first half of the paradigm is monetized. And you might still have smaller crashes, you know, but overall uh we are already living in this new IT economy. Um so so we're now just taking uh out all of the returns of our investments earlier on that we had in the 70s, 80s, 90s, all in the build-up of this basic infrastructure. So, yes, there might be parallels, uh, but I think we're we're not there yet in in such dangerous territory, but there are some worrying trends like this, like the circular financing and like the financing outside of what's left uh in the bottom line.

Jennings 10:42

It's it's weird. I uh you're you're not old enough. You certainly don't look old enough to have uh lived through the dot-com um age. Um but um you know I I was uh around in those times and it was I think significantly different to what it is now. Significantly different. Then, you know, you only had to mention, you know, that you were in on the internet and suddenly you were worth you know half a billion dollars. Now I think we've all grown a lot more cynical and there's a lot more substance behind it, and the companies that are leading at the forefront of this are you know are real companies generating massive amounts of cash flow. It is it is significantly different, I think, this time round, I have to say. Um we haven't, as you rightly point out, I don't think we've got to the bubble stage yet. I'm sure there are some bubble stocks out there. But um, Igor, when you when you look at technology now and the advances that uh we're making, is there a couple of themes that stand out?

Who Gets Disrupted Next

Pejic 11:39

Obviously AI, but within that, is there some industries that you think, wow, that's that's gonna go the way of the um the dodo? Um you know, they're gonna be disrupted so badly. Are we really gonna get Sass Mageddon, I guess? Yeah, yeah, I I know what you mean. So uh I think that that a lot of industries are up for disruption at the moment because AI is uh what we call a general purpose technology, right? So it doesn't just um disrupt a certain industry or a host uh a host of industries, but basically every industry can apply it, uh, which has also triggered a lot of revivals of other tech segments. Just to give you an example, biotech, it was hyped up a couple of years ago. Uh then it went out of favor, you know, they were underperforming, people realized, you know, despite having CRISPR and all of these amazing gene technologies, uh, you still were constrained by what you could try out and by the uh speed of the clinical trials and so on. Whereas now with AI, you can speedrun all of those things. So I expect, for example, there to be a lot of um new new um amazing breakthroughs. Space is definitely another one, which we've seen now with the SpaceX IPO, uh, is just just one idea of it, uh, you know, because it fuels this race towards data centers in space. Um, then you have uh other other um areas like energy. Energy will be the biggest bottleneck of AI, so we'll see a lot of um advances in things like nuclear technologies in particular, um, and also things like uh cybersecurity, right? These are the second-order effects. Uh obviously AI is, and we've seen this again with Anthropic and their uh their recent models where they're limiting it to just a host of companies because it can basically break every uh every every cybersecurity loophole. Uh so there will be another arms race in terms of these kind of things. But then AI is changing battleground economics. Uh, we have a couple of wars going on at the moment, and what we're seeing there is uh, you know, um our drones becoming more autonomous, we have autonomous submarines, uh, stuff like that. So there's there's basically no industry that's uh really immune to the changes. Uh and I would say also very few jobs that can, you know, uh where we can say this is definitely going to survive this this coming in AI age. You may you mention software programming, but there's also other other um uh experts like translators, um graphic designers. There's many people whose jobs are now uh on the line, so to say.

Jennings 14:11

It it's funny, we we hear a lot from the uh the tech bros, the you know, the the the Mark Zuckermanns, etc., um Jensen Wong on what AI is gonna do for jobs,

Jobs AI Fear And AGI

Jennings 14:25

for instance. And there's a lot of people out there that are predicting you know the end of humanity, the end of the world, uh, the humans uh we even had the standard chartered uh CEO a few weeks ago talking about low-value human capital being replaced, which uh got him into a little bit of trouble to say the least. Um I'm not really that keen to be described that way. But uh is this gonna be such a colossal change in the way society is structured if if this AI technology does take all these jobs away from people? Are we are we just uh not prepared for what could happen, or is this you know, people just being chicken diddle and running around saying the end of the world's coming and you know, jobs are gonna disappear and never come back? What do you think?

Pejic 15:09

I I think it's a little bit of both. So I think there's two possible scenarios. Uh one scenario, which I think is what we're seeing today, is that AI is uh just like previous big technologies, uh, that it's it's leading to a big shift uh in terms of workforce. Um, just like, for example, in the agrarian society, you know, most people were working on the fields. Today it's just a handful of farmers that can feed the whole world because we have tractors and all this kind of machinery. Um but uh and and this could be similar with AI, right? You could just employ uh quite significantly fewer people to do the same tasks because you can do much, much faster coding, for example, you just check it and you just tell the eye what to do. Uh so I think that's that's kind of the scenario we're kind of moving there right now, which is not that depressive. Uh also we have um we have uh the possibility to create new jobs, which we're seeing uh with working with AI. The other scenario uh which you described, and which which a lot of uh Silicon Valley um uh leaders are working towards is this uh era of HGI, artificial general intelligence, where AI really uh starts to reason like a human, really starts to make decisions autonomously, and we will need that in order for real autonomy, right? As long as we have hallucinating chat GPTs, uh I wouldn't feel comfortable flying in a plane. Uh that's that's just uh being uh being um uh flown by by an AI, for example. So so uh a lot of those autonomy, those real autonomy is is is coming only once we reach this HGI stage. And it's very questionable if we will ever get there uh in the near future, because this would require a couple of more leaps, uh not just uh you know stacking more GPUs uh into data centers. So we we really need uh more breakthroughs, and this is a like a scenario that could happen, but at the moment, uh you know, we're still lacking the technological um breakthroughs to get

Magnificent Seven Apple And Winners

Pejic 17:09

there.

Jennings 17:09

So if you look at the the current sort of uh winners, I guess, that we're we've been seeing in the market, the Magnificent 7, for instance, is is there a is there a still a really good business case to invest in them, or is there a a second tier coming up and the and the and the big guys are gonna go the way I think you talk about um Kodak or Nokia uh in this respect, you know, that they they they s they fail to see what's coming and and as a result uh go the way of um the dodo. Is there a second tier coming up that you think, oh, this is this is gonna be really interesting?

Pejic 17:46

Yeah. So it's it's two parts of the question. The first one, I don't think so. Big tech, uh, I think you have to really distinguish. There's some which I think are really challenged. Uh I don't see that that how they will survive, you know, uh in their spot there in uh for another couple of years. So I think, for example, social media is under a lot of pressure. I mean, you're you're from Australia, you you know what's what's going on with the bands, and in the US, they have certainly a lot of lawsuits, landmark lawsuits. Uh and uh quite frankly, I do welcome this development. Um so social media will will be uh an issue. Um but overall, those big tech companies they have become very adept and riding new technological waves. If you look at Kodak or Nokia, uh Kodak even had the first digital camera patented, right? So they had it in their office, but they were just too focused, it was just too big of a disruption to change the entire company. Like they were they were a Goliath themselves. And people were uh, you know, those were the experts who could, you know, edit uh film and and these kinds of things. They couldn't just produce uh, you know, uh a digital camera with with chips, memory chips, and stuff like that. So uh they saw it coming, but they couldn't change. With big tech today, it's it's quite different because they have really learned how to jump and leap onto new technologies uh very easily. Uh and um so I don't think that they will be many of them will be going any any any any uh time out of business anytime soon uh or or even um get less relevant. So I still think uh those uh companies will be around for quite some time. That being said, what we're seeing in the in the AI race is that we're moving away from pure infrastructure play to uh to more on the application layer. Uh however, that being said, for for a regular investor, just purely mathematically, it's much, much more difficult to choose the winner in the application layer where you have thousands of companies competing uh versus going with with uh five or six hyperscalers.

Jennings 19:47

Interestingly, what when when you look at a company like Apple, which I I think is fair to say has been slow out of the blocks in terms of AI. Um, you know, Siri is still completely hopeless. And uh they they've tried to make uh an awful lot of changes, etc., to to try and get it up to speed, but we're still not really there yet with that sort of thing. Do you worry about a company like Apple, which is kind of I wouldn't say losing the race, but it's it's certainly you know it's it's a long way behind uh some of the uh the leaders in the space, I'd say.

Pejic 20:22

Um I would say no, because um Apple is a bit uh odd in terms of of uh corporate setup. So they still make most of their money uh with hardware, right? And they have a very strong um uh base. Um I think now in the US, it's about 50% of the market or more, so they've caught up significantly um with um Android and all of the uh Android and all of the manufacturers. So they are very strong, they have very locked-in customers. And what we've seen with Apple is, I mean, they're perceived as this uh hyper-innovative company, which I don't think they are, to be honest, right? So they, of course, they had the iPhone and so on, but they have never um in all of those breakthrough technologies, they've never been uh you know um there with extreme investments, right? So they've never invested a lot in AI or or blockchain or all these other waves. Uh but what Apple is extremely good at is monetizing their base. Um and we've seen this, for example, with their push into financial services, where they just uh had a credit card, it's just a simple credit card that they announced, uh a savings account, and all of a sudden within four days they have more than a billion dollars in deposits because they have such this uh market power and they can basically charge um uh uh everybody else to use their the gatekeepers. Uh and Apple has been very um you know, very good also recently in diversifying their revenue streams, uh which made it also much more profitable, right? So the the App Store, for example, these days accounts for uh I think a third of their revenues or so. Um so Apple is doing a lot of things, right? But there's certainly not a cutting edge um uh tech company which also makes them less vulnerable to being um you know to overinvesting uh uh and to investing in the wrong things so apple is a bit uh a bit different than the other tech giants but i think they're they're quite well positioned to to to stay around now uh we we I guess we briefly touched on this when talking about the the bubble side of things valuations i mean it it does appear that valuations in places have got uh a little bit extended shall we say uh you know when i looked at the spacex uh valuation and the and when they talked about the total addressable market uh it just seemed crackers but you know it's it's it's trading at a big premium to where it was listed so that that's all good do you think valuations are getting a little bit stretched in places uh I know it's not a bubble but just it's are we seeing just too much

Valuations SpaceX And Hype Checks

Pejic 22:55

uh hype around some of these stocks yeah it's uh so so with with tech stocks uh the tricky thing is that often so usually the traditional metrics the gold standard would be the price to earnings ratio yeah but with with tech stocks it's a bit uh tricky because their earnings oftentimes are negative so you can't calculate them so what you look at is price to sales ratio uh and I like SpaceX that you mentioned that uh it is just crazy price to sales ratios of I think 94. Just just to give give give listeners some uh you know some comparison I think Airbnb uh no Spotify when they went public in 2018 uh I think they had a ratio of 16 right uh and everybody was saying this is too too overvalued because it's a software company and they're pricing a lot of hypotheticals. Now we have 94. So these are tremendously big valuations and um the problem here I think uh is really if you have such a big valuation uh what's the growth potential? And with SpaceX I think the the best illustration can be found in the compensation package that the company uh basically set up for Elon Musk they said you will get um uh extra shares but you have to reach two goals one is to uh establish a permanent colony on Mars with a million inhabitants and the other thing is uh you have to reach a corporate valuation of 7.5 trillion and then I was kind of doing the math that's that would be like a four times increase right yeah uh for something as unlikely as establishing a Mars colony which is I think not an ideal you know risk reward ratio so I think that's the that's kind of the limiting potential and that's how to think in terms of valuation right so what must be achieved to really get to this valuation.

Jennings 24:37

I listen to people talking about data centers on the moon and I I just I you know I'm I I I'm old enough that I probably won't ever see it. So um it's uh it's irrelevant what I think but um it just seems crazy really that uh this is being contemplated I but I I guess this is the future isn't it I hope so I certainly would love to see them um I just uh I'm just waiting for a better investment case yeah that's very true now now you're you're based in Vienna um and obviously you're looking at US tech it's a kind of a big question why is Europe um not in the box seat here what what what's wrong with Europe that it and how can it change that I guess and try and play catch up or is it just have to accept you know what we've lost this race we're completely out of it um we're gonna have to accept US technology whether we like it or not and I know there's lots of um moves to uh tax US tech etc and of course Donald Trump pushing back against that but is it just you know you know what we've lost it we're just gonna have to play to our strengths and and just have nice castles and nice lakes and um nice beaches that people can come and visit.

Why Europe Missed The Tech Race

Pejic 25:49

Yeah I think uh I think it's uh Europe definitely must join uh the AI race uh I say join because I mean of course there's some smaller European AI companies but uh nothing in terms of significance I think there's there's two two major problems with with Europe and tech in general so one is that we traditionally never had a defense industry uh or never one of scale because if you look at where those breakthrough innovations come from they come from DARPA you know the United States uh defense research and development uh um uh budget spending right so that's where we got GPS from the internet robotics drones uh uh uh cybersecurity encryption all of those big breakthroughs have been coming from the military now given that Europe to a large extent outsourced its um its its its defense uh to the United States we have also outsourced our innovation um capabilities and I think that's that's the root cause now this is changing now um because of the uh the invasion uh russia's invasion in Ukraine and Europe is rearming which I hope will trickle down in innovation as well uh so that's one problem and the second problem is that Europe lacks the deep capital markets to to scale this technology especially for things like uh AI and uh I think this is the easier part to handle right you would just have to uh tweak uh certain things uh in terms of you know how you tax capital gains how you uh uh you know get uh all those institutional investors invested in European stock markets so I think those are the two issues um that have precluded Europe so far from from joining or or being part of this AI or tech race more broadly but I think that's coming I think there have been significant progress is made uh there's still a lot of things to do uh but it's it's not too late to to to get in there and after AI there will be other tech races so there is no alternative.

Quantum Computing And Cybersecurity

Jennings 27:40

Yes it's interesting isn't it uh the whole rearmament the defence in Europe etc drones and the way they've um changed the um the battlefield to such a massive degree um if you look a decade in advance if if we sort of cast our minds to the future is is there one technology trend out there that you think this is the one whether it you know it's quantum is it going to be AI cyber security robot even space is there is there one theme that you think okay in a decade's time this is gonna be you know AI could be yesterday's hero we've got a whole new thing in town is is there something that you think could um dominate?

Pejic 28:22

Yeah so I think the biggest potential of those that you mentioned is certainly quantum computing uh I think if we really get to a stage where quantum computers cannot just theoretically do tasks because today they can so today we have this this today the status is that quantum computing exists in a theoretical environment you can solve theoretical uh puzzles but it's simply not stable enough to compete in any uh you know commercially interesting task uh so that's a big technological challenge that's a big if so we don't know if it will happen in five years ten years fifty years that's the problem with quantum but if it ever materializes I think that this could really be the biggest um biggest change that we've seen in a long time because they're just not slightly better those are supercomputers um and uh they would again turbocharge everything else if you want to colonize space I think you will need quantum computers for that because uh we'll just require this kind of massive computing power and speed to to to build uh all of the things that Elon and some others uh need to to establish humans as an interplanetary species so um in the more near term um cyber is definitely going to be a big thing it is already uh and if you look at the evaluations of some of those leading companies um then there they also appear overvalued but I think cybersecurity has the big advantage that it's not overhyped right so people don't care about it as much as they care about uh AI when when you look at quantum computing is um and I'm I'm a bit perhaps I'm a little vague on on quantum computing um is it just the speed that is the important thing about a quantum computer I know it's not one or zero there's an in-betweeny kind of uh mode or is it just it just thinks so differently to a to a normal computer that it just opens up endless possibilities. Yeah it it opens up uh endless possibilities on the one hand uh because uh you know this speed and this capacity um it's so it's not just the speed uh it's also that we can solve puzzles that we cannot not possibly solve today because we just don't have the computing capacity. Also some problems like you know all the the the the more more more uh sci-fi stuff that Silicon Valley talks about about uploading or human consciousness to the to silicon or whatever uh those things would definitely require um this kind of processing power if you want to create real consciousness if you want to create an AI that can reason like a human uh I believe that eventually we will need quantum computing to get there because it's just a completely different dimension than than what

The Core Tech Investing Playbook

Pejic 31:04

a traditional computer can do. So so going back to to your book um if if people out there are interested in the book what what what are the sort of um key takeaways that you would say uh again give people insights into uh into how you're thinking what what would you like people to come away with at the end of reading your book so yeah as as as I think I mentioned in in the introduction so technology uh I'm deeply convinced and that's the major thesis of the book is the biggest driver of long-term uh returns so if you want to beat the market and again I'm not saying for the entire portfolio but if you have a smaller location uh I believe that the best way to do this is by uh investing in in tech stocks right so it's not as it used to be stocks that are necessarily cheap or underpriced but technology stocks uh of those companies that will benefit from upcoming technological revolutions so the tricky the tricky thing here is really to catch a technology uh right at the beginning of its steep growth curve where you can create multiple times the return um to your investment and I think that the best way to achieve this uh is technology that's that's what I have been convinced in in doing this research in the last two and a half years well um and this isn't your first book is it um you you've you've written many books in the past correct it's the third one yeah third one so yeah so um yes um interesting now um if if uh a couple of other little questions here that I sort of had down uh if if a 25 year old investor read your book and could remember only one lesson 20 years from now what would you hope it was apart from just basically investing technology stocks is there another kind of lesson out there that you think well this this is um this has got your money's worth from the book yeah so so one of the uh thesis is uh one one of the things to remember is that technology is very excessive in many ways right so especially those things that we know around cognitive biases and psychological factors especially if you're a young person right you're you're perhaps having investment horizons of uh 30 40 more years so uh you will go through some very rough times and some very exuberant times where greed and fear might kick in uh but it's very important with technology much much more important than with other stocks just to to stick with your initial initial assessment with your thesis uh and stick with your game plan basically that you set up at the beginning because it is a marathon it's a long-term game especially with tech and if you just look at the charts of the performance of of tech uh in the last couple of years uh you will see that it's a lot of up and down and a lot of psychological pressures so just stick to the game plan that you initially designed.

Jennings 33:54

Good advice one thing that uh crosses well people ask me from time to time is in this ever changing world uh you know young people 18 19 years old thinking about going to university and they think you know what what the hell do I study? What what what should I be studying for the future? It just seems that everything is going to be I mean even university I mean God so much of that I guess at the moment is being um done by AI it's a bit scary but it you know if you were talking to your um 18 year old self what would what would you advise them in terms of a career path and and qualifications and what to do at uni?

Pejic 34:36

That's a great question. You know when I was 18 you everybody was saying do do coding do programming and this there will never ever be a time where we will we will have too many programmers um now within the last three four years that messaging has changed a bit uh but yeah my my advice is basically to do uh not

Study Choices For An AI Future

Pejic 34:55

exactly what what you love doing because that's the traditional advice you know do whatever you you you you like but uh do something that you're good at and that's also useful right so obviously I'm I'm a big fan of those rather broader subjects like business and so on not not being too focused too narrow because I think in a world in which uh the machines can do um a lot of specific tasks one day they will be able to do it better um it's not a good advice to be hyper specialized right so the generalists are usually those that succeed most and there's a another great book um it's called Range where where you know the the author shows that all of the exceptionally successful people whether that's athletes painters scientists they have all been exposed to a very broad range of inputs in a very broad range of fields and the the the true true human genius is you know to take what you learn in one field and combine it uh with another one uh and I think that's the number one advice right be curious um do as many courses as diverse as possible I think that's the best best uh that you can do to to get the most out of your uni times I think that's very good advice actually I you know when I was growing up or certainly when my kids were contemplating uni everyone was being doctors and lawyers and um accountants and that sort of thing but now you're looking at lawyers and you're thinking I think your days are numbered guys you know you might have a few even even doctors now you know the technology is advancing so fast that um you know robotics in terms of uh surgery a friend of mine just just had his um uh uh his hip done and it was all done by robotics with um with the doctor you know moving the moving the the the mouse effectively so everything is changed I mean that there always be there always be supervisory roles the the problem is if the pipeline dries up right you you first need to do those uh primary jobs those graduate uh jobs otherwise how how will you be able to supervise a robot you know doing surgery if you have never done it yourself so that's kind of the the conundrum that we're we're in today so that's that's one of the big problems that the eye uh age is causing so so Igor you're you're in Vienna at the moment a little bit hot and and sweaty there I'd imagine in enjoying the summer is that your permanent base yes yes it is it is it's a beautiful city it definitely is uh constantly tops all of the the most livable cities rankings and I can just confirm it for good future now now if um if listeners are interested in your book where where

Where To Buy The Book And Bonus

Pejic 37:30

can they get it and uh and uh what's the best way to uh to get it sent to them yeah so uh it's basically available at every retailer it published last uh tuesday so um I'm pretty sure pretty sure your your listeners can find it very easily one more thing I am running a launch campaign since it was it was uh published very recently uh if anybody who who wants can send uh a screenshot of the order to info at igorpage.net that's ig-o-r p e-j-i c dot net and uh yeah I will I will grant them a free tech investing fundamentals course that's complementary to the book um so yeah cool that sounds fantastic well thank you for that that's um that's a really great offer um Igor it's been an absolute delight talking to you today thank you so much for um for coming on the show just just one last question are you following the World Cup and if so who do you support definitely well I am Croatian and that's why I really hope we're gonna win this time we have been second and third in the last two World Cups so I think now is the time to to win gold.

Jennings 38:29

Well that that would be nice I've I've been to Croatia a couple of times and my daughter used to work there and it is a beautiful country I have to say nice I've enjoyed it many times it's um it's it's a great place to visit so well thank you and good luck with the book it's uh it's an absolute pleasure to chat to you and uh thank you so much for that um that special offer it's really um really generous of you so thank you thank you so much it was really a pleasure to speak to you thanks to