The Master Investor In Conversation

Your highness, your excellencies, a very, very warm welcome to the International Family Office Congress. My name is Tom Hudson and I'm an adviser to the director general of the Abu Dhabi Investment Office, His Excellency Bad Ala Lama. And I'm honored today to welcome Jim Melon sitting on my left. Um Jim, please can you just start by introducing yourself and telling us about your your master investor journey?

Well, thanks Tom and thank you your highness and everyone else who's here. Um the first thing I want to tell you is I'm I realized into relatively early into my career journey that I wasn't uh tinged by genius. And so I had to make up for that by reading a lot, stealing a lot of other people's ideas. I'm a very competent plagiarist and getting up at 4:00 in the morning. So that that's been the I wouldn't say the secret to my success because I'm not that successful to be quite honest.

I'm not humble bragging, but you know, you have the likes of Bill Gates here or Chris Hone and so forth. I'm not in that league, but I've acted as a bit of a sort of gorilla. not the one not the animal but the sort of fighter in the streets over the course of my career and my first boss told me uh when I started that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind that's an Ralph uh Emerson saying and it basically means that you've constantly got to be on alert for the new opportunities that come along and uh so I watch other people I read a lot and unfortunately I send a lot of my reading material to people like his highness and yourself and probably overload your inboxes but reading and the communication flow that that represents is extremely important to what I do and uh so with those occasionally I come across what I call a money fountain and that's something that is just just way better than any other investment you could have made and I've had a Few of those uh in my career and all of those ideas have come from other people. So it's as I said competent plagiarism getting up at 4:00 in the morning and having a network of brilliant people who give me occasionally morsels from their table.

Amazing. And here at the Abu Dhabi investment office we have looked at various clusters where we see is the future of investment. Um the first one that we created was called AGUA which is about the future of food and water. Um can you give us your insights into the future of food and how you look at investing in that space?

Um so here in Abu Dhabi uh there is a confluence which is at a historic moment basically of need. So 95% of food is imported into the UAE and in this region it's a very high percentage. Where I live, where I come from, which is the aisle of man, which many of you will never have heard about, we import 94% of our food. So it's quite interesting that there's that commonality. There is also a vision here which has been talked about a lot in the last couple of days but it's a genuine vision of embracing the future recognizing new trends and implementing them at speed and of course as capital.

So those three things together create an opportunity for Abu Dhabi to basically grow its own food but in a different way. So intensive agriculture which started roughly before the the second world war represents about 99% of agriculture around the world. So when you see pictures of happy cows in fields or uh chickens uh gambling around the farmyard that's not the reality. The chickens are highly confined. The cows are in feeding lots.

That's the nature of what farming is today. And those animals, and we'll start with animals, are very inefficient protein to protein converters. So a cow, for instance, takes in 25 times more protein over the course of its lifetime than it gives out. And in order to provide that protein for the cows, you've got to chop down a lot of rainforest. You've got to grow soy beans and and so forth.

So they're inefficient machines. If you can change that production process, you take the animals away, you use their stem cells and you grow meat in laboratories, which is done now, it's done and it's on sale in a variety of countries around the world, then you can change the method of production. And since approximately a quarter of all emissions, which we are all familiar with with the climate change and so forth, come from intensive farming, this is an easy win. It's also an easy win in terms of putting a lot of strain on for instance soil and on on farm systems and on the environment. That's cellular agriculture.

That's one element of clean food which I'm very interested in. The other and more uh today element is what's called precision fermentation which you're familiar with. That's a kind of brewing process. It's been around for a long long time. But with precision fermentation, you can and they are making dairy proteins which are bioididentical to what comes out of cow's milk.

Egg proteins which are bio identical to what comes out of uh chicken eggs. And most relevantly, and maybe I can describe this briefly, Tom, um valuable oils. So the valuable oils would include such things as cocoa butter used in Nutella, um palm oil, which we're all familiar with, um olive oil, which uh is very price volatile and in short supply because the Spanish drought and so forth. We can now make those oils in precision fermentation facilities and our factory in Liverpool in England uh will by the end of three years from now we own the factory. is producing now produce the equivalent of the entire UK consumption of palm oil which is about 700 million liters a year and is bioididentical and we can engineer it without using GM to take out the harmful part of palm oil which affects archeries and so forth in humans.

No deforestation in order to grow palms and Indonesia and so forth. No orangutangs hurt. perfect for the environment and more importantly it is also um at the same price point or below the price of current palm oil. So this has gone from science fiction to being a thing of today and it's going to be a very big industry over the next 10 years and with the help of investors here um we have been able to put together a portfolio of absolutely brilliant companies that are going to be bringing you cocoa, coffee, meat, fish uh all and of course palm oils and dairy and egg proteins in our factory in the United States which will open next year which cost $120 million US all produced away from what we think of as traditional intensive farming is absolutely phenomenal. I'm so glad this is the first time in my life I've ever done made investments been at the forefront of an investment that is having a tremendous human and climate impact.

Amazing. And we really look forward to bringing that company here. So yeah, round of applause. And our our second cluster that we've been working on at ADIO is the health, endurance, longevity, and medicine helm cluster. And um that sector is no uh stranger to you as well.

Please tell us about what you're looking at investing in and how you partner here within Abu Dhabi.

Well, thanks Tom. So for when I was young, I worked in um fund management and uh got my job in Hong Kong and I was then sent to San Francisco. And just as an aside, I want to tell you a quick story. So my life might be different today. um if I'd had more bravery um cuz I was on an airplane back from Palm Springs uh in California back to San Francisco uh when I was 21 years old and in the seat in front of me literally in front of me was both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and they didn't like each other apparently not then anyway and uh if I had the bravery which I definitely would have now to go up and say hello my name is Jim Milan can I carry your bags or do something for you.

My life would be different. And um I don't know in what way different, but so just be brave. Go up and talk to anyone. You know, they're just human beings. All right.

And so uh I then from far fund management went into biotech. And today companies that I've been associated with have produced drugs that are the the number one migraine drug in the world is an example and the number one prostate cancer drug in the world is another example. And so I got the idea of going into the bio food production from being in biotech but of course carried on in biotech. And so now we have a company uh called Juvenence which has partnered with M42 which everyone in this room is familiar with to develop therapies for the aging society. And I want to put this in context.

By the year 2070, it is estimated that 50% of the population of the G7, not here because you've got a better demographic than the G7, but the 50% of the population of the G7 will be over 65 years old. We're facing a demographic collapse really around the world, except for in Africa. There are less and less young people in relation to old people. The problem with old people, and I'm getting there myself, is that they um they develop diseases and even though they may live to 90, 95 to 100 and people are living longer, they're not necessarily living in better health. And so what we want to do because it's imperative given the demographics is find a way of expanding health span not lifespan necessarily but health span improving people's health as they get older.

In the United States nine out of 10 people by the age of 65 have some what they call morbidity which is a disease like cardiac disease or obesity or um you know diabetes or kidney failure or something along those lines. We need to change that. So we are trying to develop drugs that have immediate application today but which may be able to expand health span and you can do things today to expand your health span and I'll just give you if I may give a couple of examples Tom

one is that the GLP-1 agonist which we're all familiar with like WGOV and OM peak and Munjaro are probably the first truly anti-aging drugs out there and they don't just reduce weight they are probably they are cardiorotrotective um and they're probably although not certainly neuroprotective and they have other benefits as well like improving kidney function and so forth. So, everyone really should be on these drugs, low dose, but everyone should be on a GLP-1. And the second thing is, and maybe you don't know this, but if you don't, I'm I'm telling you, Shingri, which is a vaccine developed by the company GSK, which I'm not a shareholder in, um, has uh does it stops shingles. You get two vaccines. It will reduce your dementia risk by 40%.

And dementia is the one thing we should all be worried about because cardio disease um cancers and so forth are increasingly becoming curable or treatable. But dementia is the one thing for which it's it's pretty intractable. It's hard to find something to to stop it. But it is known that the herpes simplex virus virus which is related to shingles can be a trigger point. And so I would urge everyone especially above the age of 40 to get that particular vaccine.

So we're developing these drugs in partnership with M42 and I believe that in the next 10 years some blockbuster drug will come out partly using AI of course to accelerate its development and it will be coming out of labs here in Abu Dhabi. So we're very grateful for the partnership. So for anyone that wants to read more, Jim's written an amazing book called Moos Law, which is all about uh the future of food. Um he's written a book called Juvenence, which mirrors the company um that he's working in. And his third book very neatly mirrors what we're doing with our third cluster, which is um around smart and autonomous vehicles.

I should actually say he's written many more books, but the third book I wanted to discuss today was around robotics and AI. Can you just give us a little sense, a little taster of what's to come in robotics and AI?

Well, I think uh robotics is the perfect fusion of AI and modern mechanics. And uh there will be more robots on the planet by the year 2050 than there are people. And again, it's the confluence of human ingenuity, capital, and vision to confront a problem, which is aging demographics. Because you know with less young people there's less ability to find people to work in factories, warehouses, security guards and so forth. And robots can do a hell of a lot of stuff.

So one thing as an example is they can act as security guards more effectively than human beings. They can pick crops more effectively than human beings. They can move elderly people uh more effectively uh than human beings. And they will do those things. Now China is absolutely at the forefront of that.

Um, and I've written a book which we if anyone's interested in it, we copies can will be sent to you. Um, but I do think that that's going to be the transformational power of AI embodied in a format we can all understand. So robots are no longer caged. They're no long no longer performing repetitive tasks. They will be integrated into our lives in so many ways.

And it's a truly exciting moment in history. And I know that Abu Dhabi uh is thinking about this very carefully and we'll find a way of uh being at the forefront of this. So watch out next year perhaps there'll be a few robots around the side keeping an eye out for everyone here. So thank you very much Tom.

Amazing. Thank you. And I think um just with AB Yeah, massive round of applause to master investor Jim Melon. Um, if I may, I' I'd just say um, yeah, with Abu Dhabi Investment Office, I know lot of family offices are in the room. We would love to work with you in the same way that we've worked with Jim and his family office where we look at each portfolio company and match to our strategy, initiatives, clusters, and plug you into the Abu Dhabi ecosystem.

So, I just want to say everyone is welcome. Welcome to the capital of capital and a big round of applause again to Jim and thank you your highness and everyone for coming.