 Hi everyone, it's MJ, the fellow actor, and welcome to the January vlog for my actuarial career. So the idea is that this is the first one of hopefully a monthly vlog where I kind of just, you know, talk about my actuarial career. What am I doing on my day to day basis? You know, why am I not uploading videos as frequently as I was when I was studying? Of course, you know, I would study and part of my study process was to make videos that would help me learn. And of course, I was then uploading to YouTube, so, you know, the other time I was uploading multiple videos a day. And now it's kind of like I've kind of almost abandoned this per channel. It's like, you know, gets a video just every now and then. And I thought, you know what, maybe let's use the channel to still update people with, okay, once you've studied actuarial science, how does your career actually look? So hopefully it's going to be beneficial for those of you who want to just see, like, okay, what do actuaries end up doing, especially someone like me who's gone more into what we refer to as the wider fields rather than the more conventional actuarial role. So conventional actuarial science is, you know, studying mortality, life insurance, and that kind of stuff. And then wider fields is essentially everything else. The big ones being, you know, banking and credit. And I'm a little different. I've gone into crypto, which is it's weird because, you know, traditional finance or as they call us stratify, and then there's DeFi, which is decentralized finance, but you realize crypto kind of creates its own little bit of jargon, which can be alienating for a lot of people who aren't in the known as kind of creating its own little subculture. So hopefully I can also just explain a little bit of crypto and how actuaries can can get involved because it's one of those things where in 2022, we saw a lot of risks manifest and just to give you a little, I guess a quick little breakdown of what happened in 2022 in the industry that I was working in, you know, we had a massive hack, I think, like right in the beginning of the year around March, the Ronan network was hacked for like 600 million. That's where the biggest play to earn, what's that game called? Axie infinities was kind of created on. So that kind of shook the market. Then you had the whole Lunar Terror crash happen where one of the biggest stable coins, they call them stable coins. They more pegged coins because, you know, they pegged to another currency, a fiat currency that destabilized that got wiped out. I remember I even try to make a little investment in it as it was falling, hoping it would bounce back. It didn't lost a lot of money, learned some lessons. But that happened. Then we had, you know, some more hacks. Then we had it was kind of like, yeah, it was just it was a comedy of, of, you know, errors and disasters, various governments banning. Then we had, of course, the whole FTX debacle where this exchange had a liquidity crisis, couldn't meet withdrawals. Then there was all those other management firms as well that kind of got affected by the Lunar Terror crash. And they halted withdrawals and they were going down and people were losing money left, right and center. And then the whole faith in crypto got lost. And at the same time, at the same time, the world is experiencing, you know, inflation due to the whole Russia-Ukraine war and the, you know, the aftermath of COVID. And so interest rates are going up and cryptos kind of seem like a bit of like a growth stock. So when interest rates grow up, not only do your growth stocks, you know, die, but also, you know, your crypto, your crypto as well gets, gets smashed because if you use the discounted cash flow model, you know, where I or the interest rate, it's, it's a very big factor. In fact, it's, you know, you have your cash flows divided by I minus G with G being the growth rate. So if I is increased, it is going to decrease the present value of all future cash flows and gives you a much smaller valuation, which causes investors to, to withdraw. I'm going to get a little technical and I guess these kind of videos because the, the audience is an actuarial audience as well as I guess my future self when I may be watching this in like 10 years or listening to it in like 10 years time. So that's why hopefully I'm not speaking too quickly or throwing too many complex jogging, you know, or financial terms out there. I am anticipating this audience to be a bit more actuarial. But if there's anything that you don't understand or like, hey, what is that, feel free to post it in the comment section and I'll do my best to, you know, to, to address it. But essentially crypto faced a perfect storm with, you know, the macroeconomic conditions as well as the microeconomic conditions. And we saw two trillion dollars, basically two thirds of the market cap get wiped off. And at the time I was working for a company called, called Polygon and I was, I was telling, you know, some of the co-founders that, you know, Polygon's in a great position to implement some, some risk management, you know, some, maybe some put out some best practices, you know, just for other DeFi apps to kind of follow. And, you know, we can maybe just tamper some of the storm. And I got a lot of pushback from the leaderships being told we're an infrastructure company, you know, the last thing we want to do is be seen as a centralized figure in this ecosystem, you know, telling other firms what to do, even though it was kind of like, but, you know, it's better for the greater good. I guess it was this, this fight of the philosophies, philosophies where crypto leans very much on this decentralized idea that power should not be concentrated compared to, say, traditional finance, where we've sometimes found by centralizing things, we can unlock a lot of efficiencies. And that kind of was developed or, or kind of made up where you see Alexander Hamilton, I don't know if you guys ever listen to that musical, but you'll see like in the rap battles that he has in the musicals with Thomas Jefferson, you know, he puts forward this idea for a centralized financial system. And Thomas Jefferson is very much a gaseous because he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're going to get a lot of power. And he's like, yes, the Fed might get a lot of power, but it's going to, you know, unlock a lot of efficiencies. And we can see how America went from, you know, a little colony to the superpower that it is today. So centralization, you know, we mustn't just throw it out and be like, oh, it's completely rubbish and bash it. It is very, very efficient, especially when it comes to, say, capitalism and the moving of capital, but it can get abused. And that's where this decentralized system is coming in. However, sometimes the weaknesses of decentralization is a lack of risk management, which, like I say, we saw kind of unfold in in 2022, because one of the big things with crypto is to say no to regulation because regulation is a centralized supervisory body that makes sure various checks and balances are in place to avoid, you know, this ruin risk manifesting, which we did see in crypto. And that has been fascinating as an act tree, someone who's been schooled in the centralized traditional financial route to now come into crypto, where it's a completely different philosophy. And that's why, you know, what I'm doing with these vlogs is there's the actuarial career vlog, there's the the carting vlog. And I also want to make a philosophical vlog because I think philosophy is such an important thing for for actors to have, especially in today's world, where we are competing with multiple different philosophies, multiple different worldviews, you know, competing frameworks, competing assumptions that all feed back into our mathematical models. And depending on, you know, your worldview, your assumptions and your framework, you can have the exact same math as somebody else, but you having different inputs, different parameters and you're going to get completely different results. And, you know, one of the things that we actually saw that manifest was with COVID here in South Africa. We had this situation where COVID was happening and South Africa had determined, do we lock down like the majority of the world? Or do we stay open, you know, like, like Sweden, Sweden kind of stayed open. And what we eventually did is, you know, South Africa, we tend to follow what the rest of the world does. But there was this model that was put forward that showed that lockdown was the wrong thing for South Africa to do if we assumed that the thing that we wanted to minimize was years of life lost. And by making that assumption, you know, younger people, especially children who maybe weren't that exposed to, you know, the or didn't have such high mortality spikes regarding COVID, they would suffer the most from lockdown due to malnutrition and all those other things. You know, South Africa being a third world developing nation, weren't, you know, that would really, really impact them. Whereas having a lockdown made a lot more sense for the demographics of a, you know, a first world developed European style nation. But South Africa, you know, we decided to follow that just because I guess we kind of, you know, tend to follow the rest of the world rather than make our own decisions at times. But this model kind of put forward that said, hey, we should rather stay open. Of course, another model was kind of created that said, you know, number of lives are lost. And here, you know, making a discrepancy between an old person and a young person. And by not making that, you therefore place higher emphasis on the old people. So you had these two mathematical models. You know, maths is the is the same if we're all using the same mathematical system, which these two models were. The one was designed to try and prevent number of years from being lost. So if a child died, that counted as 70 years lost. Whereas if an old person died, it counts as like, you know, three years lost. So that model philosophically favored young people with the other model just counting number of years, number of lives, you know, inadvertently started favoring old people. And it was this whole idea of the implicit assumption, you know, they weren't saying, oh, I assume young people are more important than all people. And the other model didn't say I assume, sorry, that is the GoPro turning off for the cartoon vlog. We can have some videos for the cutting blocks. Make sure you take that one out. It's just turning off there. But sorry, coming back before the interruption, you know, the implicit assumptions from these things was that, hey, the one model saying young lives are more important than older lives. And the other model was saying, you know, the exact opposite. They were implicit assumptions on how the thing had been designed. And that's why it's very important for actress to be aware of different philosophies, different frameworks, because only by being conscious of that could you rectify the fact that two different models that were built to try and answer the same question came to different, different answers. So philosophy, very important for for actress when it comes to modeling. And it's also, like I said, very important now in this financial systems that we find ourselves in. There's the big centralized one, which we've kind of been schooled under, and there's this new decentralized one that is kind of coming, coming about. So I guess maybe what I can spend this video doing is speaking about how I got into crypto and maybe end off where I'm currently working. And then in next month's vlog, you know, maybe talk more about, you know, the work I've been doing in the past, the past couple of months for that company specifically, can actually get into some of the the actuarial principles, some of the actuarial things that I've been looking at. Also, just when you run past the boss and be like, hey, can I can I chat about this? So this video will be about how I got to where I am now. It's an interesting one because it kind of starts, you know, I was studying actuarial science simply because I did well at school and I wanted a bit of a challenge, see a big dose of arrogance per behind me, choosing actuarial science. Anyway, while I was studying actuarial science towards the end of 2011, my home got invaded, armed gods came in, guns, everything. And not only did they steal basically everything I owned at the time, but they also stole my very audacious dream of wanting to become filthy rich because I kind of thought after that whole encounter, what's the point of making so much money if it can simply be taken away? And I kind of realized that wealth is overvalued and there's other things in life like family, experiences, religion, philosophy, carting, as you'll hear in the other the other vlog, you know, are more important things than purely acquiring wealth. And it was weird because one of the reasons I started to study actuarial science was because at that time they were getting the highest salary. I think if you got mathematical statistics and programming, you're probably going to get a higher salary now than you will get as an actuary. And also actuaries, which I don't know at the time was very was very localized. Like actuaries in the British, you know, the former British colonies are well respected, we're kind of embedded in the regulations and needed to sign off on the reserves of various insurance companies. But this isn't a universal thing. And I kind of figured that out because there's a lot of traveling last year. I mean, it was Malta, Denver, New York, Seoul and Istanbul. Realizing some of these cities, people don't really know what what actuaries are. They all know what a data scientist is, but actuaries, they're like, what exactly do you guys do? But the reason I bring that up is because I studied actuarial science to make lots of money, had this criminal encounter where I saw that money was now overvalued. This happened towards the end of 2011. And as a family, because we all kind of suffered the same, the same home invasion, we decided to leave the city of Johannesburg and move to Cape Town, which was kind of like, I always had this mindset that Johannesburg was the city where you worked, Cape Town was the city where you relaxed, you know, it was the holiday city. And I thought, you know what, let me rather just live in the city of Cape Town, beautiful mountains, beautiful beach. Just it's a much better life than that of Johannesburg. Of course, salaries at that time were a lot higher in Johannesburg. We always used to joke that Cape Town has the the mountain tax, you know, you get paid less and the rent is more because, you know, you are competing like a lot of Europeans come to Cape Town to chill. Very few tourists ever go to Johannesburg. So it was one of these things where as a family, we decided to move to Cape Town. And I remember telling my lecturer at the time that, hey, you know, because what happens in the honest year is they try to find you, they place you a job, kind of act as like the lecturers act like job recruiters or job agency in placing you in various roles. And I remember telling my lecturing is very upset with me. I'm like, you know, don't you don't have to worry about me. I'm going to Cape Town or, you know, do you have any contacts in Cape Town? Maybe you can get me in at Old Neutral or Sunlam. Those are two of the big insurance companies are based in Cape Town. But of course, the University of Cape Town sends all of their students that don't come to Joburg, you know, they fill those spots first. And then the rest, the surplus comes to Johannesburg. And my lecturer was like, you do know it's it's career suicide to to move to Cape Town. And it was one of these things where I was just like, you know what, I don't care. I don't care if it's career suicide. I'm moving to Cape Town. So at the end of 2013, I drive down to Cape Town. I remember it was so early that I moved to Cape Town that I'd fly back to Joburg for my my graduation early 2014. But I kind of get there and I'm like, OK, cool. Let me let me find a job on my own. I'm actually going to go out there and find my very own job. You know, I don't need my lecturer, you know, career suicide. I can I can do this. And I remember seeing this first job ad and it was about gaming. So I was like, oh, gaming, you know, looking for the CEO is looking for a status statistical assistant or something to assist them. And that, you know, these are the various degrees that they are looking at. And a chair of science was one of the ones listed below. So I was like, OK, this is awesome. Let me go and and do this. I remember applying chatting to the HR lady. She's like, this is great. Your marks are good. You've got the degree. You've got the mindset. But she said, look, I just want to just confirm with you, you know, we're when we say gaming, we mean gambling. You know, this is a casino business. And I was like, oh, OK. She's like, are you all right with that? And I was like, I guess so, you know, kind of. I'm one of those people who, you know, I value liberty. If you want to gamble, go ahead and do it. Do I gamble very rarely because I know the house tends to be stacked against you, you know, especially in the casino. They've got rent, salaries, a whole bunch of things to pay, as well as, you know, they have to make money for for their shareholders. So I know in the casino, the odds are always stacked against you. Sports, I might I might try my luck on one or two of those. In fact, before I even started my my YouTube channel, I had another YouTube channel called Odd Actories, where we try to calculate the odds on various soccer matches for the World Cup in in Brazil. Anyway, coming back to this whole thing, I met this this interview and she says, well, you know what? I think your CV is perfect. I think you're grateful this role. In fact, here comes the CEO now. He's just come out of like a, I don't know if it was a board room meeting, but with a whole bunch of people. So she signals to him to say, hey, I think I found the perfect candidate for you. So the CEO says, well, OK, well, why doesn't he meet the whole team, the whole leadership team at the same time? So they all come in all these, you know, seeing your people sit around the table and the big boss like, let me see, let me see the CV. You know, if you're happy with him, I'll just ask one or two questions and then, yeah, maybe you can even you even joke. He's like, maybe you can even start working today. So he grabs my CV. He's paging through it. And one of the things about me is that I'm a very religious person. Absolutely love religion. And I had created a little app on the the USSD, you know, that's like the feature phone technology where it was called Talk to God. It was called Talk to God. Basically, you give it some inputs and it takes a Bible verse and sends it back to you. You know, something something very, very silly. But, you know, I designed what I wanted to do was to show, hey, look, you know, I'm interested in it. I can do some programming, you know, I understand how how these things work. And this is an example of of something that I've made. So I remember the CEO looks at this and he's like, talk, talk to God. He's like, you don't believe in that nonsense, do you? I remember like the whole room's getting quite awkward. Because here I am, the CEO, his leadership team and an HR. So I'm like, no, I, you know, I'm a I try to be a good Christian boy. And I believe in that whole kind of thing. And I remember him saying to me, he's like, OK, I'm going to try this thing out. So he website his phone and he dials the little short code. And, you know, he gets the menu because it's not an app. It's not for for smartphones. It was like the one of the first things I made was like the feature phones, we dial in the short code, you know, it's like text messages as the input and output and all that. So he says, oh, talk to God. And then the question, the first thing is the menu, what you need, what you want, what you I don't even remember. But he clicks the one want. He's like, oh, want. And then a whole bunch of things come up. You know, do you want love? Do you want, I think, protection? There was a whole bunch of nice things. But the one thing was money. He goes, oh, money, money, money, money. That's what we're all here for. You we're all here to make lots of money. So he's like, I'm going to I'm going to click this one. Now, you know, there's some famous Bible verses on money, you know, the root, the love of money is the root of all evil. And, you know, there's those kind of ones. And probably find a guy who's got such an obsession with money, had probably heard of all of those things before and probably would have come back with a bit of a woody remark to to undermine the the whole thing. But how the app worked is that it randomly chooses a verse that has got money as tagged. And it just so happened that he's little answer that comes back comes from Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is known as the dark wisdom of the Bible. It's it's got a little bit of a depressing nihilistic even taint to it. And it's it's written by King Solomon, who, you know, when God asked him as a child, what do you want? Instead of saying, oh, I want to play station or I want to be the king of everyone or have the greatest army. He says, Lord, give me wisdom so that I can rule your people, you know, the right way. And God then gives him an immense amount of wisdom. And through this wisdom, he writes this book. And this guy, the CEO, had now tagged money and a verse from this guy's book now comes forward. And this guy reads this thing out loud and snarky thing. And the verse that comes back, it says, whoever loves money will never have enough. And I remember he said that and the whole the whole room just went cold. It was like this awkward silence as this realization just smashed this guy. Here he had, he had said this huge gaming company to make money. He just told me that money is basically he's God. He's making fun of mine. And then boom, this Bible verse says, whoever loves money will never have enough. And you know when they say the truth hurts? Well, this guy was was feeling a lot of pain. And it was I remember feeling incredibly embarrassed for him. You know, he has his whole senior leadership team, all of that. And remember him just quietly closing my CV and looking at me and says, we will get back to you and concludes the meeting. Remember driving off. But the problem with that was that that was my job opportunity. You know, the lecturer told me that, you know, it's career suicide to come to Cape Town. And you know, the very first job I'd kind of, you know, blown the interview. Anyway, for I guess for like most of 2014, I was doing a little bit of entrepreneurial work, a little bit here, a little bit there, did a little bit of work for a natural company based in the States. It was a guy who had actually told me about natural science in the first place did something like there for three months, got paid absolutely nothing. In fact, the guy was like, why am I even paying you? You know, you're getting experience here. And I remember getting paid. I think I paid 2000 round a month for like three months of work there. So I could have 6000 around in total 2000 round, which is which is scary. That's that's, you know, I'm more than that in an hour now. So it's amazing how the the progression has, you know, changes when you get a little bit older. But it was, you know, this whole idea that I was really struggling to to find a good paying job. And then, and this is why I was talking about the religion and everything because I go to church, you go to church and, you know, you tell people, oh, I'm an actuary or, you know, what was an actuary back then. I was still, you know, so I had the board exams right. I was like, I'm studying actuarial science. And everyone I met at the church was like, oh, if you're studying actuarial science, you should check out Thought Express. Check out Thought Express. There's a lot of act trees in the church and they also work at Thought Express. And it also turns out as like, well, I've heard of Thought Express before because the guy who I was making odd act trees and the models for, you know, the soccer World Cup, I'd met him at GCT because I'd gone to one of the lecture presentations just because, you know, I was unemployed and bored, thought, you know, what's happening at GCT? Met this guy there. And he told me that he had worked at Thought Express. In fact, we had even been presented with a little bit of seed capital to develop that model. And he ended up saying no, because, you know, of this whole job opportunity that was a little bit of the a little bit of the work that, you know, I was doing a little bit of entrepreneurial designing cricket games. And I don't know, I was messing around in like programming and stuff. So when I hear Thought Express and I see that they're a development, well, basically they built back in systems for insurance companies. I was like, you know what, let me let me go in and check this out. And I remember honing these people for a job because you send the email, no reply, you then do the first interview. And then you don't hear back and kept, you know, just hammering, hammering, hammering until they said, OK, fine, come in for for another interview. Oh, it was for the first interview. I don't know, it was one of I should remember it was it took a long time to try to get this this job and walked in and in the job interview, they asked me this question, you know, what what is Bitcoin? So this was towards the end of 2014. They asked me what is Bitcoin? Of course, my whole life had been focusing on actuarial science. You know, when you have varsity, you don't have time for anything else other than actuarial science. So even though this would have been something that would really, really have interest me, I didn't really have enough time to really look into it. So when you ask me what is Bitcoin, my answer was, oh, isn't that that internet pirate gold? You know, because that's all I knew. I knew Bitcoin was used on the Silk Road for the purchasing of drugs. And that's where my knowledge ended. I didn't know anything about blockchain, about hashes, about mining, about any any of that kind of stuff. But fortunately, at this company, I would end up learning a lot about about crypto. In fact, I would go and buy everyone coffee and then they would repay me in little bits of of Bitcoin. I've stopped going to Bitcoin events. In fact, it was before the company Luno, which is the biggest exchange in South Africa, before they had even formed, they were called they were called something before Bit, BitX or BitZar or BitSomething. And, you know, they were and I remember thinking, oh, I missed the boat because Bitcoin was trading at six hundred dollars. I was like, oh, I've missed the boat. And remember taking my you guys will love this. I remember taking a little bit of Bitcoin I had and I changed it for for Dogecoin and I did take it like a sizeable amount, like, you know, like a salary amount and put it into Litecoin at three dollars that would then go on to do quite well. But this was I take my Bitcoin, I put it into Dogecoin and I had I had a stupid amount of Dogecoin. I think my transaction volume for Dogecoin was over 10 million. And at one time I had I had a million Doge. I had a million Doge when it was worth absolutely nothing. Remember, you'd go and read it and you'd some guy was like, oh, I'm raising money to buy a whale. And I was like, here you go, have some have some Doge. I even did my own little fundraising. And remember, someone sent me like five Doge for it. I was like, I'm going to put Doge on a Formula One car. And if you want to know more about, wait, Michael, how did how are you going to put Doge on a Formula One car? Check out my my carting vlog. I'm going to be releasing at the same time here, where I talk a little bit about the A1 GP cars that we ended up buying and not really racing there. But there's there's even a video. I made an NFT even on it of the little Doge on this Formula One car. Anyway, that's that's that's a story for for another day. But that was kind of how I got into got into crypto. I would then leave this company in January 2016 just because I kind of felt like this was more of a programming role than an actuarial role. And I still wanted to finish my tutorial exams. And though I love programming and love all of these kind of things, I wanted to stay in the actuarial profession or at least get back on that track. So I left in 2016, although, gosh, in 2016, the first thing I did after that was made a little artificial intelligence. I was very chuffed because it got published in the South African Journal of Science and it played rock, paper, scissors by looking at the patterns of the opponent, you know, how they change their gestures, whether they won or lost, you know, the result and all that kind of stuff. Again, you could do we could do another whole vlog. In fact, in fact, I was aiming to have these vlogs be 30 minutes long, but you can see I've already I've already exhausted the time limit that I've had on this. So in fact, what we will do what we will do is we're going to pick it up at the end of February. So at the end of February, I know I was going to tell you about how I got into crypto, how I got into Polygon, now how I'm basically building a start up now on Algorand to do insurance for smart contract risk. And, you know, the interesting things that are happening there. We will get to all of that, hopefully, in the February edition. Also, because my voice is it's dying. I've also just recorded the carting one. So I've been speaking for an hour, an entire hour. So, yeah, check out the carting one. If you want to hear just fun, silly stories of my my crazy hobby. Otherwise, end of February, we're going to re pick up the story where, yeah, basically, we'll start from where I was in 2016. Show how I get from 2016 to 2023. My whole crypto journey, covid, NFTs, Polygon, East Denver will reveal all of that, hopefully in the February one. Well, if we ran out of time there, we'll what comes off the February March and we'll finally get there. We'll finally catch up. We'll finally catch up to to what I'm doing now and, yeah, how actually can work in the wider fields. But for now, we've passed 30 minutes, so I'm going to say good night. Hope you guys enjoyed this. Feel free to let me know your comments down below and I'll continue the actuarial career vlog in February. So look out for it. Cheers.