Finding the next Star Wars. April 24, 2026

**Scott Phillips** (0:10)
Welcome to Motley Fool Money, the podcasters get a charge of 25% on overseas listeners. I'm Scott Phillips from the Motley Fool, he is Andrew Page, the man who invented tariffs, who invented Smoot Hawley, the man who is responsible, no, not really, he just created.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
Please, how dare you?

**Scott Phillips** (0:25)
He just created.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:26)
How very dare you?

**Scott Phillips** (0:27)
Australia's premier online investment club instead. Which is far more important, far more impressive, far more valuable, has made more money than the Smoot Hawley tariffs ever did. He is of course, Andrew Ram Page. Mr. Page, how are you?

**Andrew Ram Page** (0:40)
I'm very good, sir. Although I do not like attribution towards market distorting policies, thank you, sir.

**Scott Phillips** (0:47)
You're not going to wait this, no, no, actually it was Strawman, it was like, it was the bacon scoops thing.

**Andrew Ram Page** (0:49)
Oh yeah, I was like, I save, I save.

**Scott Phillips** (0:52)
I try, I try. How's your week been?

**Andrew Ram Page** (0:56)
It's been good.
Well, can I say, leaves are falling, weather's turning, you know, there's a lot of interesting things happening in the world, but there's some good things happening too, so. Yeah, so since you're off air, it's like, it's hard like to, there's so much and there's so much negative kind of stuff. And I guess that's the model of how much of social media and news kind of works, but it overwhelms you at times, right? I think sometimes it's just like, I don't know, you just got to step back from it, not because you don't care, but because I just don't think we all have the emotional capacity to just be bombarded by, here's something else horrible and here's something else really evil and here's only like, oh, so you got to smell the roses and remember that there's a lot of good in the world too.

**Scott Phillips** (1:46)
You know what? So that's a great point. Ross Gittins wrote a great article in The Herald this morning, actually. We've got this on Wednesday the 22nd of April.
We're here a day early, because I'm going to be at the Wagga. So, I thought you'd listen to this. It'll be yesterday. I did a presentation at the Wagga Business Summit on Thursday the 23rd, so we couldn't record on a normal day. We're recording a day early. So, yeah, Ross Gittins this morning. And, mate, what was fascinating, he talked about, so he talked about the fact that people are losing faith with democracy and there's an economic impact to that or an economic driver to that, which is those who feel like they're being left behind are kind of rejecting democracy and rejecting kind of... And we've seen that with the rise of One Nation and other things. I don't want to get political. But Gittins' point was kind of... Probably will. Probably will, yeah.
No, so Gittins' point was kind of that. But he was talking about the fact that a lot of people are seeing the bad news. And he talks about the fact that the rise of social media, this is a great institute piece of research. But he talked about the fact that newspapers write bad stuff because that's what we read. But he also made mention of the fact that if that's all you do, people will get turned off.
So even the media knows there's a natural proportion of, here's the awful stuff. But also, before you never buy a paper gig because you can't confront it, here's some other stuff you might want to read. And so that was, as much as we say, if it bleeds, it leads, it's true. But even they know that that will get the headline, it will get you to grab it. But if it's just day after day after day, nothing's good, everything's bad, eventually, either you get desensitized or as you say, you just can't physically take it all in, you can't have that, you can't live in that world forever. And it's kind of a human coping thing, right? I think you're absolutely right. If you lined up all the stuff that was going wrong that we know about, and then add in the stuff that doesn't even get reported that we don't know about.
I often, I get too dark too early, I don't know how you social workers and child protection workers and stuff, it's like, I don't know how they do their jobs. I don't know how you literally spend your entire working life. I guess you have to celebrate the wins. Maybe that's the combination that we're talking about here. But you're right, there's a lot of bad happening. And maybe that's, I mean, it's kind of, there's a nice metaphor there for long term investing, right? I mean, to bring it back to that. Yeah. You know, the market creates enormous value. And not because of these bad things don't happen, because they do all the time and yet. Optimism still wins, right? In spite of exactly, we still manage to go, yeah, that'll happen. But we also did X, Y, and Z, and not even three big things, like there's iPhone or Internet or AI, you pick a big things. But it's not even that, it's just the little things that little businesses do every day to say, how can I do a slightly better job of improving how I serve my customers? How can I grab an extra customer? How can I make that more valuable for them? How can I make myself more valuable for the people I serve, or the people who buy my products? And that is kind of the story of capitalism. It's the story of innovation and progress, right?