Cutting through the noise: Alec Hogg's five signals on South Africa

By BizNews editor Alec Hogg's count, South Africans have bolted nine gigawatts of solar onto their roofs, more than three times what the state's own renewables programme has delivered. There are more than three private security guards for every police officer. And on the road past Richards Bay, he and his wife clocked five kilometres of trucks waiting to get into the harbour. In the opening keynote of the 19th International Business Conference at Arabella, Alec told around 300 business academics that the noise around South Africa hides a clear signal: the collapse of an ideology driven by people who were passionate but, in his words, economically ignorant. He set out five signals, from privatisation by stealth and regulators under strain to coalition politics, the collapsing cost of intelligence and a fragmenting world order, and explained why they leave him more excited about the country, not less. He closed with what Socrates, Warren Buffett and the late Bill Lynch taught him about acting when you will never have the full picture..Listen here.Edited transcript of the keynote address.(00:00) Alec Hogg: Koos asked me to talk about, well, he suggested a subject. He actually said, you know, talk about anything you really want to. But I really liked the subject you gave me, "From noise to signal", because the work I do is all about trying to differentiate between the noise and what it really signals. I'm going to share with you today a little bit of what I understand, and a bit about the work that I do, to try and find five signals about South Africa which continue to make me incredibly excited about our country.(00:29) If you listen to the noise, you wouldn't be excited about South Africa. If you listen to the noise, you think, my goodness, how did God punish me to live in this crazy place? But if you look at the signals, you realise that it's all part of transition. It's all part of a journey. It's all part of understanding that life doesn't happen at my speed; life happens at God's speed.(01:00) We have a tree in our garden, a coral tree. Hermanus is where we live now. And this coral tree has got a seven-and-a-half-metre circumference. You go on the internet and you say, well, seven and a half metres, how old is the tree? And it says, well, 200 years plus. Well, we don't know. But we do know it's at least 100 years. It could be a thousand years, but the arborists say about 100 years.(01:26) I look at that tree every morning because it's right there. And of course today it's magnificent. I don't know if you know coral trees, but they have these incredible orange flowers. It's like this burst of colour; it's an extraordinary tree. And every day when I look at that tree, let's be conservative and say a hundred years, I think, you know, it's taken a long time for the tree to grow to where it is. But a man like Sol Kerzner would put up a couple of palms that he'd found somewhere and make Sun City look like an old place overnight.(01:55) And I think that's something that we as mankind often forget, especially in the industry that I'm in. Media is all about instant gratification for your audiences. Well, that's the way it always was. It's certainly changing. It's all about noise.(02:25) I started in newspapers. I went into television first, then radio. I started the first independent internet publishing company, called Moneyweb. Started it in my garage. Moneyweb was kind of wobbly. We listed the company on the stock market because in 1999 it was a very exciting time, and anyone who was around then will remember something called the dot-com boom.(02:53) There was a chap from down the road here called Mark Shuttleworth. He had a little company called Thawte. It really was a little company. VeriSign was in the United States, and they would not export their security products. So Shuttleworth was very clever, and he said, well, let me reverse-engineer this and start something that I can give to the rest of the world for free, which he did. And then the American government said, okay, well, maybe it's not that strategically important; the rest of the world can also have these security products for their computers.(03:21) Shuttleworth was the market leader because he'd given it all away for free. VeriSign bought out Mark Shuttleworth's company for 4.4 million of its shares. And the good news for Mark was that the shares had gone from like $2 to $200. So he got the 4.4 million, cashed them in, and ended up with $400 million. And then, like a month later, they were back to, you know, what would have been $20.(03:50) But his genius was that he sold the shares right at the top of the market. And if you go back and have a look at the stock market at the time, there was noise, noise, noise, but he saw the signal. So he got out at the top, and he's done very well with the funds that he got. But that's what markets are about. That's what the world is about. Things work in rhythms and cycles.(04:19) And we're often confused by the screaming and shouting and nastiness that goes on in social media, because you can. Now, you guys are paid to be thoughtful. You are the living, breathing examples of what Socrates taught us thousands of years ago: that the beginning of wisdom is to know that I know nothing.(04:47) And if I don't start from that basis every day in the work that I do, then I really am doing a disservice to those that I serve. And as you said earlier, we serve a million people a month now. More than a million people consume our videos, primarily, and we're very big on video now, or listen to our podcasts, or read our website. And we have newsletters as well.When you look at noise to signal, what is noise and what is signal? The best idea I could think of: we're in Hermanus, or near Hermanus anyway. When you go down to the cliff path, hopefully you will hear a chap making a vuvuzela-type noise. But it's not noise, it's actually a signal. That's the whale crier, very famous here in our parts.(05:24) The whale crier's responsibility is to differentiate between waves and whales. This is one of the best whale-watching areas from the shore. Sometimes it looks like a whale, but it's actually a wave breaking on a rock. And sometimes it looks like there's a whale in a wave, but it's actually just a wave. So the whale crier is determining what's a whale and what's a wave. What's signal and what's noise.(06:23) And when you start with these five signals that I'm going to leave you with, which I hope will also give you room to start interrogating and analysing and questioning, you'll find that there's a golden thread through all of them. And the golden thread is the collapse of an ideological philosophy in our country which has really hurt us.(06:51) The ideological philosophy in our country has been driven by people who were very passionate, who gave up a lot, but who were economically ignorant. And now, 30 years into our democracy, the cost of that ignorance is becoming incredibly obvious, even to those who still hold on to those old stories.Signal one: privatisation by stealth(07:21) The first of these is privatisation by stealth. In South Africa you can't say "privatisation", because it doesn't go down well with a lot of people, for good reason. But if you have a look at what's happening in reality, we have had no load shedding, as Eskom told us yesterday, for 504 days. Isn't that wonderful? And the likelihood is that that will continue. But the reason it's continuing is because we've had privatisation by stealth.(07:51) Somebody somewhere in Pretoria said, let's enlist the private sector, eventually. And this was after all else had failed. And so we were given tax incentives. You remember that? Well, let me give you the numbers on the consequence of those tax incentives, because they kind of tell you the whole story. Peak demand at the moment, right now, is 23 gigawatts. We use the big numbers.(08:19) Eskom issues a statement every day, which is also a good thing. The one good thing about load shedding is that we have great transparency now. We consume 23 gigawatts at peak, and Eskom is producing between 26 and 27 gigawatts at the moment. Isn't that cool? So we've got a nice little cushion. But it goes further than that. If there was no rooftop solar, we would not be looking at 23 gigawatts. We'd be looking at 32 gigawatts. Why? Because nine gigawatts of solar panels exist in South Africa. That's privatisation by stealth.(08:49) On top of that, the government had its own attempt to address load shedding and to bring us into the new world by reducing our carbon footprint. But the amount that the whole government renewables programme has generated is 2.8 gigawatts. So think that one through for a moment. All the taxpayer incentives that we put in, and it's not a bad thing, by the way, it's a very good thing that we are doing a little bit on global warming, but all of that is 2.8 gigawatts. Rooftop solar: nine, in four years.(09:50) That kind of opens your eyes. So what happens is that suddenly Pretoria realises that Pretoria cannot provide. Clem Sunter wrote about this 20 years ago: Pretoria cannot provide in this highly complex world that we now live in. You have to enlist the power of the private sector. And here we have an example. No more load shedding, thanks to everybody who's got a solar panel on their roof.(10:20) The other big issue on privatisation by stealth is probably the most important part of our own existence, and that's our security. Remember, the state's number one priority, as the historians here, the economic historians as well, will tell you, is security. We have in South Africa, and I pulled the numbers out yesterday to make sure I was right up to date, 185,000 policemen.(10:49) That works out to one policeman for every 414 members of our society. That is half as good as what the United Nations says we should have. We should be one to 200, the UN says. We're one to 414. The problem with this is that it's very hard for the police to make it an interesting place, or a place where policemen stay.(11:15) Every year SAPS loses 6,000 people and enlists five and a half thousand. So we're going down by 500 every year. To say that the Madlanga Commission is overdue is an understatement. But the Madlanga Commission is here, and we had the Zondo Commission. That's not a society that doesn't want to fix itself. That's a sign of a society that really does want to fix itself and is prepared to look at itself.(11:45) So why isn't crime completely out of control? Well, the reason for that is that there are 650,000 active security guards. So for each policeman you've got more than three private security guards. Privatisation by stealth.But the bigger part is what's happening right now with logistics. We have family out at the moment from Australia, and we met them in Hluhluwe, which by the way is a hidden secret, a hidden gem. South African prices, great guides, clean accommodation.(12:14) But on the way there, you drive from Durban North past Richards Bay, and your eyes will be out on stalks, or mine certainly were, when you see the trucks that are queued up every day, 24/7, 365, to get into Richards Bay harbour. Jeanette actually timed it, we looked back at the odometer: five kilometres of trucks, stopped, waiting to go in. Five kilometres of trucks.(13:10) Now, that is an indictment [of] the other big thing. Because in our society we thought, well, we can run electricity well, and we can run transport logistics well. Well, we know electricity didn't work that well. And now we've got a nice balance; things are going well.By the way, another reason why we don't have load shedding is that demand for Eskom electricity is down 16% in the last 10 years. 16% by volume. And that's because we've got smarter. Ten years ago electricity was too cheap, and we just spent it. You guys are business academics, you know that. If you make something too cheap, people waste it. Well, we don't waste electricity any more. And so our demand, despite the population going up significantly, is down by 16% in that period of time.(13:40) But driving along that road got me to actually ask, well, what the hell's going on here? We all know that our roads aren't in great nick, and there's a pretty good reason why our roads aren't in great nick, and that's because there's a hell of a lot of freight going on the roads. All you have to do to understand the economy is open your eyes, I think, sometimes. Why are there so many trucks on the road? Because of what's happened at Transnet.(14:08) But the good news is there's privatisation by stealth there as well. At the beginning of this year, ICTSI from the Philippines, one of the top port operators in the world, took over Pier 2 in Durban. In anticipation, it seems, the guys at Transnet who were working there got the award for the most improved port in the world last year. And no bets on how much better it's going to get in the future. They're putting billions into it. I think they spent 10 billion to get the licence in the first place, the Filipinos, and they've got a 25-year contract.(15:06) So you can be quite comfortable that they are going to put a lot more volume through that port, which will then take more of the traffic off the roads. I think the day I'm going to celebrate most is when I once again drive towards Hluhluwe and see no trucks queued up to get into Richards Bay harbour or the Richards Bay Coal Terminal.We have 11 private rail operators who have applied for 41 routes in South Africa, across six corridors. In the past, the rail system was all state-owned. It's not going to be long before they will be driving through volumes. Because remember, the problem we've had in South Africa, those of you who follow commodity cycles, is that we've actually missed out on two of them.(16:05) Because we haven't had the ability to take our minerals and get them out to China, which seems to have a voracious and never-ending appetite for minerals. Yay. But we can't get it to them. But with the privatisation of rail, just think for a minute what that means for our country's bottom line, that we can export. Because exports are the lifeblood of any society, especially this one. It's an open economy: 50% is either imports or exports.(16:34) So the more we can export, the more we can get those minerals through the ports, because the ports are more efficient and the rail is more efficient, the better. Big signal.Signal two: institutions under stress(17:01) Second signal, and this is quite a hectic one that you've got to look at through the noise, again overlaid by the collapse of an ideology that just hasn't worked: institutions are under stress. And you're seeing it. When people are under stress, they lash out. We're seeing lashing out by institutions, and it's happening increasingly.(17:11) Two weeks ago, the FSCA, which is an organisation that I've always thought is pretty well run, decided that they would give a 20-year ban to a guy, his wife and his CFO, because they made three trades in a stock on the Cape Town Stock Exchange, which pretty much trades nothing, to try and test the system on the Cape Town Stock Exchange.(17:40) The FSCA interpreted it as manipulating the share price of a company. You cannot manipulate the share price of a company on the Cape Town Stock Exchange, believe me, because you've got to have volumes to manipulate it. They took that decision. They have banned this guy and his wife, who is a former Miss South Africa, just to add on top of it, and their CFO, two chartered accountants, because of these three trades, to maybe prove a point. I say that it shows the incompetence of the organisation.(18:09) We had another instance, very similar, with the Competition Commission. It decided about 10 years ago that banks had been manipulating the rand. Fair enough, you're welcome to do that; take them to court. They lost quite badly, by the way, because it wasn't true. But among the submissions was that a guy called Bryan Brownrigg had been the arch man in the middle who had manipulated the rand.(18:38) Bryan Brownrigg is a salesman at Standard Bank. He does not trade. But for nine years he was the arch-enemy. Sim Tshabalala said, please, man, this guy doesn't even get close to the trading room. Leave him alone. Uh-uh, we know. Unfortunately, they didn't know.(19:06) And what concerns me is that when you have incompetence in your regulatory authorities, that's one thing; you can go to court. But when you have malevolence, and when you have this kind of antagonism towards business and the private sector, it causes untold damage to human beings. And look at the damage that it's caused to Warren Wheatley and his wife and the CFO of their company, Africa Bitcoin Corporation, go and look it up, and to the Brownriggs of the world.(19:35) We've got a similar thing going on at the moment with Mark Burke. Mark Burke is a politician who really pissed off the ANC. He pissed off the guys in Pretoria. Why? Because they wanted a two-percentage-point increase in VAT. Remember, last year? It was a done deal. And he said, no, not so fast. He started fighting it, and he got other people to support him, other political parties came in, and eventually we didn't get that two-percentage-point increase. That made a lot of people really cross.(20:04) So this chap, Mark Burke, and you guys will appreciate this, given the average intellect of our politicians, has got a doctorate from Cambridge. A doctorate from Cambridge. He came back to South Africa, works in crypto. He had started a company, and left the company to go into politics, to do his bit. I think he's only just turned 30. Those are the kind of people I think we want more of in our politics: young, smart people who can see the future.(20:33) Somebody somewhere decided, we're going to teach you a lesson. They froze the bank accounts of his company, this crypto company. Look, it's complex, and I can go into it, but I have tested it, rather. And what they were doing was just a normal import-export transaction. They weren't taking money out of the country or taking capital offshore. It was arbitrage between crypto overseas and crypto in South Africa: exporting, importing, exporting, importing, and so on. Arbitrage has been going on throughout history, forever.(21:02) But this was an opportunity for the politicians to get their teeth into a guy they didn't like so much any more. And Mark Burke was put under enormous pressure until his lawyers said, oh, it's okay, you can talk. We had a conversation, and things quietened down after that.(21:31) By the way, just as a little tip as an aside: if you get into a place where you are being attacked in the media, please don't listen only to the lawyers, because your lawyers are saying, fight this in the court of law. But by the time you get to the court of law, the court of opinion has already put you away. The court of public opinion. You've got to fight it there as well. And he had the brains to actually do that.(22:01) And then we have General Mkhwanazi, probably our biggest example, with overreach in certain areas, of one man who stood up and said, no more. No more. Boy, hasn't that done us a favour? We seem to find the Mkhwanazis in our country, don't we? Mogoeng Mogoeng, you remember? "Oh yeah, no, he's just Zuma's man." Oh no, he's just, yeah, right. Remember Mogoeng Mogoeng, how he stood up at a time when we really needed him? Mkhwanazi is doing the same thing. We've got this amazing thing in South Africa: we seem to find these guys every now and then.(22:29) Institutions are under stress, but we have a society that is continuously asking questions. And those institutions will remain under stress for obvious reasons, in that the world is at warp speed now, and it's very, very hard to keep up if you're sitting there working nine to five and worrying most about your pension. That is another big signal.Signal three: coalition politics is the new normal(23:17) Signal three: coalition politics is the new normal. We saw this in the 2024 election. Jeanette and I went to London, and we took a couple of people from South Africa. GG Alcock, actually, is a guy you must pay attention to. He's a wonderful voice on the informal economy. We took him over to London, and people's eyes were just popping to hear what was going on.(23:45) We did that just before the election. I remember at the time, the feedback I was getting was that it was coming undone in this election. It wasn't necessarily going to be business as usual. For the most part, though, the feeling in South Africa was, well, you know, we'll have an election, we'll go back and just carry on as we did before. And of course we know that wasn't the case after 2024. There were lots of surprises.Suddenly people have had to start learning that it's negotiation, not forcing. Boy, isn't that a good thing? Isn't that just the most wonderful, wonderful change for our country, that we can talk to each other across different ideologies, different philosophies, different ways of looking at a problem? You guys do it all the time. That's what academics surely are about. Over coffee you're going to talk about the differences, because nobody's clever enough. Every time I think I've got it, God shows me the next day: you know nothing. It is just the reality of life.(24:45) And now the information is just so much more available. Those guys that you're teaching, they've also got access to Claude, Gemini, they might even have the paid version, ChatGPT: all of the world's knowledge. If you remember, when I started Moneyweb, in the early days we used to use something called AltaVista. Terrible. And then Google came along, and Google's idea was, we will gather the whole world's information together. And it sounded ridiculous. Well, we know that it wasn't ridiculous, and that's what Google's done. Now we've got artificial intelligence, which gets the whole world's information, but it interprets it for us. Amazing. Anyway, I'll get on to that in a moment.(25:15) Getting back to coalition politics: because we have a big platform at BizNews, we get people coming to our studio here in Hermanus, and we have interesting conversations with political leaders. I don't talk to all of them, because quite a few of them, you know what, just want to get more votes and talk more nonsense. But the people who do have some common sense can give you some very useful insights. And with all of them, there's one theme that goes through their conversation, and that is: we need to talk to each other. We need to listen to each other.(26:10) Now, you've still got these boxing matches going on: Gayton McKenzie and Helen Zille, Herman Mashaba. They posture, and we've had them all at our conferences. We don't know how that's all going to end up. But what I can tell you is that when you go down a few layers, there's a realisation that we as a nation will be so much better served by engaging rather than instructing.It's like us in the media as well. At BizNews, we try to provide a platform for all people to have their say. During Covid, you remember, during Covid we were told what to think. At BizNews we said, no, we don't. We're not going to tell you what to think. Here's what the other guys think. Here's what the crazy people supposedly think. We were taken to the Press Council by seven academics from UCT. I hope none of them are in the room. I haven't had a bit of an apology from them yet.(27:08) But surely that's what it's about in future: question things, give people a platform, give them a voice, for heaven's sake. We're seeing that very much in our politics, and I think that's an incredibly positive thing.Signal four: the cost of intelligence has collapsed(27:25) I mentioned artificial intelligence. That's your fourth signal: the cost of intelligence has collapsed. Now, you all know that, but I would just say one thing about this. Don't think that because you can use Claude, there aren't another 7.9999 billion people on the planet who can use Claude as well. Everybody can use it. In fact, when you're sitting in a conversation with somebody and they look down at their phone, often they're [checking] what you had to say. Just be aware of that.(28:00) I got a book this week. The guy sent me a book, about 330 pages. He said, please, you know, read this, I spent a lot of time on this book. Now, I've got a bench of 30 books that I'm waiting to read, because I don't interview an author until I've read the book. And the reason for that is, first of all, you've got to do justice to the person who's written the book. Secondly, if it's a bad book, I throw it away and don't interview the author. Why would I waste your time?(28:41) I asked Claude, just have a look at this book, out of interest's sake. It said 95% of it is AI-generated or directed. 95%. So here we had a guy who wrote a book, then had the chutzpah to send it to an editor and say, review my book, or read my book. That editor was going to spend 5% of their working month reading it, and it would be 95% generated by AI.(29:17) You guys have got a tough job determining it, but I think a good place to start is just doing that kind of exercise, because the cost of intelligence, the cost of writing books, has really, really fallen. And there are going to be changes.You know, when I started Moneyweb in 1996, the internet was in its fledgling era. My colleagues in media said, are you mad? What are you going to start? What's this interweb thing? Well, because of my experience, it looked to me like this was going to be a big thing. It's a similar thing with artificial intelligence. We're now at the point where the internet was around 1999, according to Mustafa Suleyman, in The Coming Wave. I don't know if you've read that. To me, that's probably the best book on AI.And if you go back to that point in time, people said the internet, if it takes off the way you think, is going to wipe out jobs; we're going to have huge amounts of unemployment. With every single new wave, you can go back. There's a wonderful book called Engines That Move Markets, written by Alasdair Nairn, a big, fat book like this, an investment book. And what he did was take every single major change, from telegraphs to railroads to the telephone and so on. And every single time, the media of the time would say, woe is us, electricity is going to put so many people out of work, and so on. But what it did was create more jobs. And I think that's the way artificial intelligence is going: it's basically giving each of us a 30-point increase in our IQs. Isn't that cool?Signal five: the fragmentation of the old order(31:10) The final signal that I'd like to wave a flag for is the fragmentation of the old order. And it's a fragmentation of the old order in so many ways. In our own society, because we are a frontier society, we are seeing things happen quicker here, ahead of the curve. In the 1960s, the global motor vehicle companies used to come to South Africa and launch vehicles here, because it gave them an understanding of how the world might perceive that vehicle. It was like a test tube. And we've never lost that test-tube status.(31:39) As the world has moved from the dominance of first-world, developed countries to a much more, I suppose you could call it, equal world, South Africa has done the same. It's interesting having a look at that. And we remain this test tube. So lots of what's happening in our country, our coalition politics, our changes in the economy, our realisation that ideology, and amen, I love ideology, but shit, it doesn't actually put bread on the table, all of those issues are part of what the rest of the world is going through.(32:32) My only conclusion from all of that, and I'd love for you guys to really reflect on this and think about it, in this new world order, in this new fragmentation, my conclusion is that we just need a massive upgrade in our leadership, in the quality of our leadership globally. And have a look globally. I mean, okay, you can make a point for some of the guys in those authoritarian states, you know, but don't forget, we in South Africa are big freedom lovers. We love freedom. We wouldn't do too well in China and Russia. We wouldn't. I certainly wouldn't.(33:13) To tell you a real story: a colleague of ours went to China with her husband. Adrian Hadland was a professor at, they still call it Peking University, not Beijing, Peking University, a journalism professor. And Jackie Cameron, who worked for us, was going to write for us, and she wasn't allowed to. She applied, and she was told, no, you may not. And we then discovered that if we wanted to establish a unit in China, we would have to ask for permission and have a censor 24/7. And then we discovered that all media companies have got a censor in their newsroom.(33:43) And we take this stuff for granted here, that any of us can go on to social media and say what we like after having 14 brandy and Cokes. Extraordinary, the value of freedom.What to take from the five signals(34:08) So, just to close off: what do you take from all of this, these five signals? Well, I would suggest that you look for probabilities rather than projections. This is not deterministic. This is not, that's where we're going, you know, the Empire Strikes Back, and off you go, and that's your destination. You don't know how that destination is going to look. None of us know. And the best way to play that is to look at the probabilities. Keep an open mind. Remember Socrates.(34:39) The second point is to take the long view. Take the long view. We are in such an attention-deficit world, because we're encouraged to be. I sometimes think that media consumption has become like my media consumption when we were in Joburg. We had an office, in the old Moneyweb days, at President Place on Jan Smuts Avenue. And I would drive from Parkview, where I lived, about a 10-minute drive, and on the way to President Place there were billboards alongside, on the trees.(35:12) And each of the newspaper companies, and there were a lot, was trying to get you to buy their newspaper because of the billboard. So you'd have The Citizen telling you something salacious, usually, the Sowetan saying something on this side, then you'd have Beeld and The Star as you drove along there. And I sometimes feel that media consumption in our country has become a bit like my drive in to the office, where I'd pick up the headlines and think, well, that was the news of the day. Of course it isn't. There's so much more to it.(35:42) But if you take the long view, and you read a book for a change. The CEO of Exclusive Books tells me there are 100,000 people in South Africa who read books. How scary is that? 100,000 people. That's it. That's his market.(36:12) Maybe if you want to have an advantage in this new world that we're going into, and I can tell you what, you're not the only person who's scared. If you aren't scared about the new world we're going into, then, ooh, I don't know, maybe you're asleep. It is a scary place. But a very good way to get an advantage is to do things that other people don't.You mentioned Warren Buffett. I went to the Berkshire Hathaway AGMs on numerous occasions, in the middle of America, in a place called Omaha. It's like Klerksdorp. That's about all that it's got. It really is like Klerksdorp: flat, not a lot going on there, except once a year, when 40,000 people would go to the Berkshire Hathaway AGM to listen to these really smart guys, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.I got an invitation into the press conference. The press conference was on a Sunday, after the annual general meeting with the 40,000 people, where people would line up for hours to ask questions of these two old chaps, literally queueing from 4am to get to the lectern to be able to ask a question, depending on how close you were in line. At the press conference there were 30 of us, and we each got to ask a question.(37:31) And so I often used to try and find questions that had something to do with South Africa, which he didn't care much about, or didn't know much about. But one time I went up afterwards. After the press conference was over, they would sit there and you could go up to their desk. He'd just turned 80. And I said to Mr Buffett, how many books do you read? He said, oh, no, I've slowed down a lot, you know. I used to read two a day; now I'm down to one a day.(38:06) He often said at those press conferences, when people asked what they should do with their lives: read, read some more, and then when you're tired, just pick it up and carry on reading.(38:19) Another thing that I would suggest, and it works for me, I can't say for you, but it works for me, is be willing to change your mind. In this society that we're living in, things change so quickly. You know that lovely story about Winston Churchill? A lady had come to him and asked him a question, and he'd given her an answer, and she said, but you said something very different a month ago. And he said, well, madam, when the facts change, I change my mind. And that's something that we can all remember as well.(38:49) Finally, be nimble. Be light on your feet. Don't embed your feet in an ideology or an idea or a thing, because the world has rapidly changed and is going to continue to rapidly change. Today China might be our best friend; next year they might not be. Today America might be our big enemy; in two years' time they might not be.(39:18) Be prepared to act on incomplete information as well. I know you guys are researchers, I know that your business is all about exactitude, but you can't wait until you have everything, because it's going to take forever to get everything now. There's just so much complexity. So be prepared to act.I want to give my last little point to the late Bill Lynch, the man who built Imperial [as spoken: "who started Imperial"; see flags]. I've had a fantastic career, I really have seen interesting things. And one of the things at Moneyweb was that we were sponsored by EY, Ernst & Young, for the World Entrepreneur of the Year award. I used to go there on their sponsorship, in Monaco. You know, someone had to do it.(40:17) And in 2006, Bill Lynch won the World Entrepreneur of the Year award. The world. The whole world. And this is an award that the Google guys have won. It was just an extraordinary achievement for a little country. Remember, we're about a third of 1% of global GDP. And I asked him, Bill, what was the secret of your success? And he said, too often people get analysis paralysis. He said, with me, my advice to anyone is: just do it.(40:46) And in this environment that we're living in, I would suggest that's not a bad idea. Once you've done your research, go ahead and follow Bill Lynch's advice. Thanks. It's been fun this morning, and I hope you have a fabulous conference over the next few days. Thank you.

Cutting through the noise: Alec Hogg's five signals on South Africa

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