Gillian Tett

But more importantly, he got the timing right in terms of getting out, which is always one of the hardest things in any kind of bubble.

But you said that then something went wrong.

Was that a case of FOMO or YOLO?

You know, you only live once or FOMO, fear of missing out.

Was it just looking at everyone else getting rich and thought, I want to be even richer?

Why did he do that?

And do we have any indication in the records of how and why he felt about all that?

And if he'd actually been provost for kings, as he had tried to be, maybe it wouldn't have happened.

He probably wouldn't be allowed to do all that.

So isn't that ironic?

Exactly.

How to not succumb to too much YOLO and FOMO.

And there's quite a wonderful passage in Andrew Ross Hawkins' book, 1929, where he talks about this and says there's a part of Winston Churchill falling in love with the go-getting, risk-taking, bold, ambitious spirit of America.

And he actually criticised the UK for a while for being so timid and passive, as opposed to being so risk tolerant, like the Americans he kept encountering on his book tour.

So he was like the worst of the meme traders or day traders, that kind of equivalent back in the 1920s.

We can call it Winston Churchill the meme trader.

So Memo, being a day trader is not always a very good idea.

So let's turn to somebody who actually did crush the market rather than Winston Churchill or Isaac Newton.

What about Charles Darwin?

He's a father of evolutionary biology, but was he actually any better at doing financial investments?