QAV Club Weekly Update 2024-07-23

QAV 729 Club
[00:00:00] Cameron: Hel­lo, QAVers. Wel­come back to QAV. This is episode 729. Well, it’s been a qui­et week on the news front, TK. Uh.
[00:00:11] Tony: gosh I was lying in bed on Sun­day morn­ing watch­ing the news. It got inter­rupt­ed! They broke into it. How dare they?
[00:00:17] Cameron: but they broke into the news with some news.
[00:00:20] Tony: could­n’t believe it.
[00:00:22] Cameron: Noth­ing going on. Yeah. I was watch­ing the ABC and then they, they cut to insid­ers and I was like, what are they going to talk about on insid­ers when I switched over to CBS? Wow.
[00:00:34] Tony: I was watch­ing the ABC as well and it came through live and that was prob­a­bly the best thing because you saw the whole thing. They lit­er­al­ly cut to the, because it was being tele­vised, but The ral­ly as peo­ple were mov­ing out, then they rewound it back and replayed the whole thing through. After that, they were just show­ing edit­ed high­lights, but it was much more inter­est­ing to watch it go end to end.
[00:00:56] Cameron: I think, I mean, there was a lot of things that, that sort of shocked me, uh, when watch­ing it sort of unfold live, but one was how the audi­ence did­n’t scat­ter. The audi­ence sort of ducked for a sec­ond or two. And then they all stood back up, and pulled their phones out, and were video­ing it, and there’s footage of the peo­ple right behind Trump on the bleach­ers, stand­ing up dur­ing the whole thing, video­ing it, oh look, Secret Ser­vice, uh, throw­ing Trump on the ground.
[00:01:25] Cameron: It’s like, what the? What are you doing? Why are you?
[00:01:29] Tony: love the guy. There’s a guy stand­ing in the front row, sort of right of stage. He just stands there through the whole thing. Every­one’s Even­tu­al­ly starts to duck and cov­er and he’s just stand­ing there look­ing around. Oh, this is inter­est­ing, isn’t it?
[00:01:43] Cameron: Yeah!
[00:01:43] Tony: I want to vote for, I want to vote for him for pres­i­dent.
[00:01:46] Tony: He was like the Ice­man, did­n’t care.
[00:01:50] Cameron: Yeah, well,
[00:01:51] Tony: Or, or either that or he, he was paint­ing tar­gets for the, for the shoot­er.
[00:01:58] Cameron: Maybe he had Air­Pods in and he was lis­ten­ing to music and, uh, did­n’t know what was going on. You got­ta hand it to Trump in terms of know­ing how to get a good deal. pho­to tak­en,
[00:02:09] Tony: Oh yeah,
[00:02:10] Cameron: uh, his instincts for stand­ing up and doing that. That’s, geez, man. I don’t know if I would have had that sort of, uh, uh, pres­ence of mind to stand up and do that at that par­tic­u­lar moment.
[00:02:25] Cameron: But also I’m like, like,
[00:02:28] Tony: who’d do that job? Who’d do that job? Look, that’s what, peo­ple are rag­ging on the S, on the uh, Secret Ser­vice at the moment, but like, they jumped in front of the bul­lets almost as soon as they were being fired. Mmm.
[00:02:41] Cameron: admit­ted­ly, every­thing I know about the Secret Ser­vice is from film and TV, but if this was the West Wing, like they would­n’t be allow­ing Josh Bartlett to stand up and wave his fist in the air. They would be throw­ing him down and just bundling him into a car. There’s no oppor­tu­ni­ty to grab your shoes or wave to the audi­ence if you’re get­ting shot at.
[00:03:03] Cameron: Their job is to get you to safe­ty and that’s, as I under­stand it, the Secret Ser­vice pro­to­col. is, does­n’t, you don’t do it, you don’t lis­ten to the pres­i­dent at that moment, his author­i­ty stops when he’s being attacked and your job is to throw him into a black van and get him to a secure loca­tion. The fact that he was able to stand up and do all this, I’m like, what are you doing?
[00:03:24] Cameron: Why are you let­ting him do that? You don’t know there’s one shoot­er and the shooter’s down, there could be five shoot­ers, I don’t know, I did­n’t
[00:03:31] Tony: And there’s also, I also noticed two female secret ser­vice oper­a­tors, which is nice to see, but they did­n’t shield the pres­i­dent as well as the six foot guys did. I thought, no, there’s an open­ing.
[00:03:43] Cameron: yeah.
[00:03:43] Tony: Quick reload. Aid for the girls.
[00:03:49] Cameron: Oh, Tony. Wow. Any­who, uh, par from that. I know you told me not to check the mar­ket, and I’ve been try­ing very hard not to check the mar­ket for the last week, but I did notice in the finan­cial review this morn­ing, they said it hit an all time Record high, the Aus­tralian All Ordi­nar­ies,
[00:04:11] Tony: 8, 000.
[00:04:13] Cameron: well over 8, 008, 257 or some­thing it went to.
[00:04:18] Cameron: Pulled back a bit today, but, um, yeah, record high. And that’s the, the Trump bump, I think they’re call­ing it in the
[00:04:25] Tony: Trump bump.
[00:04:27] Cameron: Hmm.
[00:04:29] Tony: But the renais­sance, the Trump renais­sance, he’s back. He’s 1. 35 in bet­ting mar­kets now. He was 1. 50 last week. Now he’s 1. 35. It does­n’t mat­ter whether Biden stands against him or they replace him. Does­n’t mat­ter now. They could put, they could put Jesus in the demo­c­ra­t­ic, you know, posi­tion and he still would­n’t beat Trump now.
[00:04:52] Cameron: Well, if you, uh, fol­low any of the con­ser­v­a­tive chan­nels on Red­dit, um, they all think Trump is Jesus. So, you know, he can’t run against him­self.
[00:05:02] Tony: Well, he did thank God, thank God for sav­ing him.
[00:05:05] Cameron: Of course he did. Yeah. Sure God’s a big, sure God’s a big fan. Rapist, fraud, crim­i­nal. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:05:16] Tony: for­giv­en. Chris­tians for­give those kind of things.
[00:05:20] Cameron: Yeah, appar­ent­ly. Uh, Port­fo­lio Update, DP’s up 2. 6 in the last sev­en days, uh, slight­ly ahead of the mar­ket. All time 15. 8 ver­sus 9 per annum, that is, CAGA for the ST, against the STW, so about 1. 8 times the, uh, bench­mark over all time, five and, uh, Some­thing years, five years com­ing up to I think.
[00:05:44] Cameron: Um, but lag­ging this year since April. Uh, we’re up three ver­sus the SCW up eight since April. I went back through my, uh, spread­sheet and tried to fig­ure out what hap­pened in April that caused us to fall behind. Uh, there was quite a few sells in April and May. I’m not exact­ly sure. Why? What was going on?
[00:06:06] Cameron: Noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar I could see. I thought, do you have any idea what hap­pened in April? Did some­thing hap­pen in April that I missed
[00:06:13] Tony: Well, April, April, I don’t know, but April would have been com­pa­ny report­ing sea­son. So per­haps we trad­ed a bit around then.
[00:06:22] Cameron: Yeah, I think there were a cou­ple of, uh, shock hits that we took around then. And of course I’m still sit­ting on ASG, uh, even though it’s, you know, It was recov­er­ing a lit­tle bit, actu­al­ly, uh, yes­ter­day, I think it pulled back today, but I, it’ll get there, it’ll get back over it, it’s just a ques­tion of how long do I have to wait for it to get back above it’s three point satel­lite, eugh.
[00:06:44] Tony: And this is your the­o­ry that it drops a lot when it goes ex div­i­dend and it will bounce back.
[00:06:49] Cameron: it’s not my the­o­ry, I have seen in it’s his­to­ry that that’s what it does every time it pulls back. Has a div­i­dend.
[00:06:56] Tony: so it’s your hypoth­e­sis that it will do it again this time.
[00:07:00] Cameron: Yes.
[00:07:01] Tony: Pre­dic­tion. Okay.
[00:07:03] Cameron: Yeah.
[00:07:04] Tony: you’re doing the right thing. It’s worth­while test­ing some­thing every now and then like this. It’s good.
[00:07:09] Cameron: yeah, I like that. You say, Oh, this is your the­o­ry. I agree and think you’re doing the right thing, but this is your pre­dic­tion.
[00:07:16] Tony: Oh, okay. It’s your the­o­ry and
[00:07:18] Cameron: I, you said, I’ve seen this movie before. You’re like, throw me under the bus and then say, but I agree. It was fun­ny cause
[00:07:27] Tony: I was­n’t throw­ing you under the bus.
[00:07:30] Cameron: Oh, this is your the­o­ry.
[00:07:31] Tony: Throw­ing you under the
[00:07:32] Cameron: You agree?
[00:07:33] Cameron: I asked you and you agreed with me. Yeah. Yeah. It’s fun­ny. Cause
[00:07:39] Tony: I just, I always agree with you that I can, I just go yeah,
[00:07:41] Cameron: Oh, that’s right.
[00:07:42] Tony: Want to do a pod­cast? Yeah, sure.
[00:07:44] Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:07:45] Tony: Five years lat­er? Yeah, sure.
[00:07:47] Cameron: Did­n’t agree with me when I said SXE’s one year EPS fore­cast was the same as Stock Doc­tor’s
[00:07:53] Tony: Fore­cast
[00:07:54] Cameron: Let’s not get, let’s, let’s, you did­n’t. Yeah. Yeah. Well be more spe­cif­ic. ABB Aus­tralian Aussie broad­band fell 17%.
[00:08:06] Tony: Yeah, throw­ing, they were throw­ing, they got thrown under the bus. That’s the real bus.
[00:08:10] Cameron: they did. And, um, you know, we’ve, there’s been a lot of issues with ABB over the last few months, um, that we’ve talked about on the show. They, they had an announce­ment yes­ter­day, Aussie Broad­band launch­es new dig­i­tal first chal­lenger brand, lever­ag­ing automa­tion and AI. I was like, wow. Dig­i­tal First, like, how have you been mar­ket­ing your­self now?
[00:08:31] Cameron: Like knock­ing on doors, like push­ing a lit­tle red trol­ley around, like, like fly­ers in the mail? Uh, I don’t know. Aussie expects to invest approx­i­mate­ly 10 mil­lion in FY25 to sup­port mar­ket­ing brand and set up slash one off relat­ed oper­at­ing expen­di­ture to sup­port the bud­dy launch. That’s what they’re call­ing it.
[00:08:50] Cameron: Bud­dy. I think they deserve to 17%. hit just for call­ing it bud­dy. The group expects Bud­dy will pro­vide pos­i­tive eBit­Dark con­tri­bu­tion from FY27 onwards. So yeah, they took a big hit and it looked ridicu­lous to me. Um, I had to I did sell it, though, and I had to tell the Light mem­bers that I was sell­ing it, because we held it in the Light port­fo­lio, and I said, Look, I think it’s going to bounce back from this, but that would be pre­dic­tion, and we don’t pre­dict, so I’m sell­ing it.
[00:09:22] Cameron: ASG on the oth­er hand, I haven’t sold yet, because I am pre­dict­ing it’s going to come back. But that’s based on its his­to­ry of doing this every time. But I look at the ABB today. It sort of did recov­er a bit yes­ter­day. It dropped as low as, you know, it was sort of 3. 57 before this announce­ment day before, dropped down to 2.
[00:09:43] Cameron: 90, got up to 3. 05 yes­ter­day, but it’s back down to 2. 95 today. I mean, what do you think? Does this, uh, am I miss­ing some­thing here? Is this just ridicu­lous?
[00:09:55] Tony: What’s ridicu­lous, is it dropped or it’s com­ing back?
[00:09:58] Cameron: Then it dropped like, you know, 17 per­cent drop because of what exact­ly? They said it was going to be a hit on their pro­jec­tions for this year, but they’re launch­ing a new busi­ness. Like, so what?
[00:10:12] Tony: Oh no, I think it’s legit­i­mate. I was­n’t sur­prised, they came out with a prof­it down­grade, essen­tial­ly. So. Yeah, I think it is a hit. Um, is it jus­ti­fied? Look, 19 per­cent was a lot, so maybe it’s a bit over­done. Um, but if you remem­ber, there’s been a lot of things going on with ABB and Super­loop this year.
[00:10:34] Tony: There was takeover attempts that had to be halt­ed, and Sin­ga­pore gov­ern­ment had to give approval and all that kind of stuff, and back­downs, and so it’s been a very volatile peri­od for it.
[00:10:47] Cameron: They actu­al­ly were doing a press con­fer­ence about this deci­sion yes­ter­day morn­ing at 11, which I found out about, about 1130, but I would have liked to have sat, I was gonna, I was gonna sit in on it and hear what they had to say. Um, but any­way, so yeah, we had to lose ABB yes­ter­day. On the oth­er hand, MLX, up 11 per­cent today, uh, Tin Min­er, Met­als X, Only announce­ment I could see on this one, on Stock Doc­tor, was from 5 days ago, the 11th of the 7th.
[00:11:19] Cameron: Met­al­sX announced the com­pa­ny is com­mit­ted to pur­chase, on mar­ket, 60 mil­lion ordi­nary shares in the Lon­don Stock Exchange list­ed first tin, LSE colon 1SN, at a price of 4 pence per share. For a total invest­ment of AU$ 4. 64 mil­lion, rep­re­sent­ing 23 per­cent of the cur­rent out­stand­ing shares in First 10, com­ple­tion will occur on a T plus 2 basis.
[00:11:45] Cameron: The com­pa­ny has also sub­scribed for AU$ 11. 5 mil­lion new First 10 shares at the same price of 4 pence per share via an accel­er­at­ed book build announced to the LSE. Fol­low­ing the issuance of the new shares, which are sub­ject to First Tin share­hold­er approval, the com­pa­ny’s hold­ing will rep­re­sent 23 per­cent of the enlarged issue share cap­i­tal of First Tin.
[00:12:09] Cameron: Now Tin itself, I checked the com­mod­i­ty, it’s a buy, but it’s dropped over the last cou­ple of days. I thought, oh, maybe Tin’s sud­den­ly gone up. No, Tin’s been going up, but it’s been com­ing back. So I’m assum­ing it’s relat­ed to this, um, First Tin acqui­si­tion, TK? What do you think?
[00:12:26] Tony: I’ve got no idea. It’s, um, yeah, it’s not real­ly trans­par­ent, is it? Uh, I had, I tried, I did the same thing you did. I had a look at their web­site and tried to find announce­ments, but, um, I, I agree. All it can be is this invest­ment in, what’s it called? Tin? Uh, First Tin, thank you. But it’s, it’s sur­pris­ing that, um, How the investor’s share price goes up, the Met­alexa share price goes up, nor­mal­ly it’s the com­pa­ny that’s being invest­ed in that goes up. So I, I real­ly don’t know. just
[00:13:03] Cameron: Yeah.
[00:13:04] Tony: check on what First Tin does.
[00:13:07] Cameron: Yeah, it’s gone up since then. It was trad­ing at uh, four some­thing. I’m not sure what cur­ren­cy. Yahoo Finance has shown me this. It was at 4.25 on the 11th, and it’s now trad­ing up at 4.9. So it’s jumped. What’s that? Uh, some­thing? I don’t know.
[00:13:27] Tony: Haha, some­thing, uh.
[00:13:30] Cameron: Yeah, it’s 10%, rough­ly.
[00:13:32] Tony: Yeah, yeah, it’s 10%, but um, no, I’m not pick­ing up any­thing.
[00:13:36] Cameron: there you go.
[00:13:37] Tony: They’ve said noth­ing.
[00:13:37] Cameron: win.
[00:13:38] Tony: They’ve said noth­ing for a cou­ple of weeks, I can see. Yeah,
[00:13:43] Cameron: sto­ries from them on Yahoo Finance any­way.
[00:13:46] Tony: yeah, okay. Or on the web­site.
[00:13:50] Cameron: Ah, it’s weird. Any­way, not com­plain­ing. It’s nice. There you go. Uh, cou­ple of sur­vey results I’ve got. Tony, um, spoke to one mem­ber yes­ter­day. Had to help him. Like, I’m not going to men­tion any names. But, uh, one of our club mem­bers had told me, he sent me an email say­ing he had­n’t been able to get his, uh, pre­mi­um sub­scrip­tion work­ing on his device for 18 months, and he’s been just lis­ten­ing to the free episode and what­ev­er, and I was like, it’s like, dude, next time reach out.
[00:14:23] Cameron: I got a, I, I did a Zoom call and got him up and run­ning in like five min­utes. Um, So any­one else out there, I’m not try­ing to make fun of that par­tic­u­lar gen­tle­man. I’m just say­ing any­one else out there, if you have any, any tech­ni­cal issues, just email me. Um, I can prob­a­bly help you. We’ll just set up a Zoom call.
[00:14:40] Cameron: Zoom’s good. Cause I was say­ing to him, hold up your phone, show me what you’re doing. And, uh, you know, I can, it’s near­ly as good as being there to do it. So just give me a call. Hap­py to help. That’s what I’m here for. You just call me bud­dy. I’m here to help. I’m your tech bud­dy.
[00:14:55] Tony: Hey, bud­dy. I had the same prob­lem for a long time. I could­n’t get the pre­mi­um link to work to Aaron’s show. I just gave up.
[00:15:02] Cameron: yeah right,
[00:15:03] Tony: I did reach out to you. I did, even­tu­al­ly. Two or three times it just kept fail­ing.
[00:15:10] Cameron: give me a call and I’ll be more than hap­py to help.
[00:15:13] Tony: The good, the good news was last time we had a Mel­bourne din­ner, which is prob­a­bly 18 months or so ago now, um, we were sit­ting around the table after­wards talk­ing about this and then, and some­one said they had trou­bles with the pre­mi­um link and are hap­py to lis­ten to the free episode. And then some­one said, oh, so you haven’t heard After Hours?
[00:15:31] Tony: And he’s like, no, what’s that? He goes, oh, it’s fan­tas­tic. It’s the best part. It’s worth the pre­mi­um, it’s worth the pre­mi­um sub­scrip­tion to get After Hours. So there you go.
[00:15:40] Cameron: I know that per­son, I think I know who that is and he sends me emails all the time say­ing, you know, long live After Hours, so I’m glad some­body enjoys After Hours. Um, Any­way, the per­son I was speak­ing to yes­ter­day said at the end, hey, so how’s your port­fo­lio going? He said it’s up 20 per­cent uh, this year.
[00:15:57] Cameron: Not sure if he meant this cal­en­dar year or finan­cial year, but he said, yeah, no, it’s going great. Um, so the sur­vey results that have come in just a few more in the last week range from one per­son just said 35%, so I don’t know, no more infor­ma­tion, like over, is that CAGR or over what peri­od, but I was like, wow, 35%, that’s great.
[00:16:19] Cameron: To some­one who said, uh, the final three weeks were good to me, 23, 24 per­for­mance was 7%. Over­all is one point neg­a­tive. 1.3% CAGR start­ing Octo­ber 22, which was a ter­ri­ble time to start. As we know, 22 was a ter­ri­ble year. 23 was a much bet­ter. So all in all, as we’ve been say­ing for the last cou­ple of weeks with the sur­vey results, some peo­ple have had great years, some peo­ple have had aver­age years, 7 per­cent I think is what my super port­fo­lio did, so, uh, and yours too I think you said around about that, so not great, not, not neg­a­tive.
[00:16:54] Cameron: Which is nice, but not great. So all over the place, even though we’re all sup­pos­ed­ly doing the same thing. Um, so just, it’s, it’s a long term, long term process, right?
[00:17:07] Tony: Yeah. No, it is. And that’s inter­est­ing in itself, isn’t it? That we can all be doing the same thing and have dif­fer­ent results. It depends a lot on what you’re bring­ing to it, what you’re screen­ing for, when you start. All those kinds of
[00:17:19] Cameron: In the short term, hope­ful­ly over the long term, we’ll all have sim­i­lar results. Like over. Five years, 10 years.
[00:17:26] Tony: Yeah.
[00:17:27] Cameron: Um, but you know, I did think of some­thing dur­ing the week, you know, when we start­ed this, um, a lot of peo­ple close to us said, a few peo­ple said to us, but, um, you know, what hap­pens when every­one’s using your sys­tem?
[00:17:43] Cameron: Isn’t that gonna like change the mar­ket if every­one’s fol­low­ing the sys­tem and every­one’s doing it? And what we’ve seen is in the last cou­ple of years, like we’ve seen peo­ple do the sys­tem and then drop off. You know, just go, Oh, I can’t do this. You know, I get emails from peo­ple say­ing, look, I love it, but you know, I just can’t, um, keep an eye on my, my alerts.
[00:18:07] Cameron: I, I, I’m, I’m miss­ing sales and I just can’t bring myself to trade that much or, you know, I can’t do this or I can’t do that. And these are peo­ple that have, you know, been mem­bers and fol­lowed it for a time and under­stand the thing and then just don’t have the, I don’t know, the per­son­al­i­ty for it or the, you know, it just does­n’t fit with what
[00:18:27] Tony: Oh, they’re
[00:18:27] Cameron: good.
[00:18:27] Cameron: I’m not hav­ing a go at them. Well, they’re busy, yeah, but I’m just, my point was that even if we taught this to every­body in the coun­try, they’re not going to do it. It’s just, you know, it’s, uh, uh, just, uh, I don’t know. It’s a, it’s a per­son­al­i­ty thing, a dis­ci­pline thing, time. Um, yeah, all sorts of, all sorts of things come into play.
[00:18:53] Cameron: Right.
[00:18:54] Tony: Yeah, I think you’re right. Dis­ci­pline’s impor­tant. I remem­ber at that same Mel­bourne din­ner with peo­ple. They were say­ing, you know, what’s the num­ber one thing you can tell us? And I said, well, the num­ber one thing I can tell you is that if you wan­na do this prop­er­ly, you are doing it every day for the rest of your life.
[00:19:08] Tony: It’s, it’s not, I’m gonna do this for a few months and then flip over and try some­thing else. It’s like, no, if you wan­na make this work, you’ve got­ta do it. It does­n’t take up much time, but you’ve got­ta do a dif­fer­ent day for the rest of your life. You can’t, you can’t just switch it off for a month and come back to it.
[00:19:23] Tony: You may have, you will have missed some­thing for sure.
[00:19:26] Cameron: And, and for most of the time, like there have been peri­ods of a lot of activ­i­ty dur­ing the volatile, um, peri­od that we had, par­tic­u­lar­ly, you know, and the crash, the COVID crash and 22, 23 inter­est rates and wars and all that kind of stuff. But then we have long stretch­es of time where, you know, if I was­n’t, if we weren’t, you Doing the pod­cast and we weren’t like doing a buy list for peo­ple and all that kind of stuff.
[00:19:53] Cameron: This is like noth­ing to do. I haven’t sold any­thing in the dum­my port­fo­lio since May.
[00:19:57] Tony: right. I’m pret­ty much the same in mine.
[00:20:00] Cameron: And with your super, right? I haven’t had to do any­thing in my super for a long time. Um, it just, so there’s lit­er­al­ly noth­ing to do for, apart from just keep an eye on the alerts for weeks at a time, you know, have a look at com­mod­i­ty prices.
[00:20:16] Cameron: You know, we have a look at that once a week, check my alerts once a week. That’s pret­ty much it. Noth­ing else to do. Like, And then there are times when there’s a lot to do, which are annoy­ing, because you have to do a buy list every day some­times, or, you
[00:20:32] Tony: Yeah. And we’re prob­a­bly com­ing,
[00:20:34] Cameron: every day.
[00:20:35] Tony: we’re com­ing into report­ing sea­son in a month or two, or a few weeks, actu­al­ly. It’s usu­al­ly in August. Um, so we could be doing that every day as com­pa­nies report as well. Be a lot more active then.
[00:20:49] Cameron: there are peri­ods of activ­i­ty, yeah, but it’s, it’s, it’s a rare thing, and it reminds me, I think, I think Buf­fett said some­thing along these lines, and I think Ben Gra­ham did too, but val­ue invest­ing like this is less about intel­li­gence and more about tem­pera­ment.
[00:21:04] Tony: Yeah, absolute­ly. Yeah, they did. Tem­pera­ment, dis­ci­pline. Um, I think Buf­fett used words like opti­mism, but, but yeah, no, def­i­nite­ly. It’s about dis­ci­pline and tem­pera­ment, for sure.
[00:21:21] Cameron: Just tak­ing a long term view.
[00:21:24] Tony: Well, if you have a good tem­pera­ment, you’re screen­ing out the noise, aren’t you? You’re not get­ting I think that’s what they’re say­ing. If you’re pret­ty even head­ed, you’re not being swayed by the lat­est fad, or what’s going on in the mar­ket, or what hap­pened in Ukraine, or what­ev­er. You’re just Apply­ing your prin­ci­ples, apply­ing the frame­work, and as I’ve said many times, that’s, I think, to me, that’s the most impor­tant thing about QAV and per­haps why peo­ple get dif­fer­ent returns from doing the same thing.
[00:21:51] Tony: It’s, it’s not that we want peo­ple to slav­ish­ly fol­low the rules, we just want them to have a frame­work to invest and a way of invest­ing that screens the noise out. You know, I don’t care if they buy what I buy or sell what I sell, it’s more about them under­stand­ing that there are some prin­ci­ples here.
[00:22:10] Tony: You screen out the noise, you have a frame­work, you’re try­ing to buy some­thing for less than what it’s worth tomor­row. Um, and you’re try­ing to pro­tect your­self from all those things in the finan­cial ser­vices indus­try which are designed to tempt you. Into doing some­thing wrong, includ­ing CEOs telling sto­ries.
[00:22:30] Tony: Um, yeah. So you just ignore all that stuff and you’ve got­ta have a frame­work. So that’s the most impor­tant thing.
[00:22:36] Cameron: Mm. Yeah, and the finan­cial media pump­ing
[00:22:42] Tony: Mm
[00:22:43] Cameron: sec­tor or that sec­tor or the Mag7 or all of that kind of stuff and telling you about Joe Blow who’s made a gajil­lion dol­lars out of Bit­coin and all of these things. I mean, that’s their job is to write sen­sa­tion­al­ist sto­ries that Get peo­ple to read and, you know, they’re, they’re get­ting adver­tis­ing dol­lars from Bit­coin ven­dors and stock­bro­kers and plat­forms and what­ev­er that, uh, you know, the more mon­ey they have from, you know, dumb mon­ey com­ing into the mar­ket to buy stuff, the more they spend on adver­tis­ing and the finan­cial media who has an incen­tive then to tell more sto­ries, to get more peo­ple to invest.
[00:23:27] Cameron: So there’s more, you know, it’s this, um, uh, what do you call it? Uh, Pos­i­tive spi­ral from their
[00:23:34] Tony: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:23:36] Cameron: of, you know, every­one with their hands up each oth­er’s, uh, pup­pet hole and hole. You know what I mean? Like a
[00:23:45] Tony: I do. I
[00:23:47] Cameron: every­one’s got their hands in, not in their pock­ets, but they’re like the indus­try’s, uh, in cahoots, kind of not, not sug­gest­ing that they all sit around in smoky rooms
[00:23:57] Tony: Well, they have aligned incen­tives, they have aligned incen­tives.
[00:24:01] Cameron: yes, aligned incen­tives.
[00:24:04] Cameron: And they prob­a­bly do go out to lunch, the CEOs of these com­pa­nies, and pat each oth­er on the back and say, you know, isn’t it a great, aren’t we hav­ing a great year? But yeah, they have aligned incen­tives, that’s, that’s beau­ti­ful­ly put, yeah,
[00:24:15] Tony: Yeah, I mean, I remem­ber once out play­ing golf with the CEO of a major bank, and then one of his com­peti­tor CEOs rings up and they have a chat on the phone, and I’m like, wow, I did­n’t think I’d ever see that. Sure­ly, you know, the reg­u­la­tors would have some­thing to say, oh no, no, he’s a mate, we just talk every now and then.
[00:24:32] Tony: It’s all good. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,
[00:24:36] Cameron: sure, noth­ing to see here,
[00:24:38] Tony: No, and stock­bro­kers are, you know, their incen­tive is to get you to trade, to buy and sell. So, you know, they, they’re always hav­ing lunch­es, lunch with CEOs and then ring­ing me up and say­ing, Oh, I’ve just heard this about that.
[00:24:49] Tony: And, uh, you know, I think you should buy some.
[00:24:53] Cameron: yeah, alright, that’s all I’ve got on my list of talk­ing points, TK, what have you got today,
[00:25:01] Tony: I had, I had, uh, I have a pulled pork, which I found very inter­est­ing this time. Um, I, I found one arti­cle in the Fin Review, which caught my eye dur­ing the week. And that was, um, about a ship­ping cri­sis. The head­ing is the Ship­ping Cri­sis, a Span­ner in the Works for Infla­tion War, and I only raise it because, uh, I thought, you know, you men­tioned that the U.
[00:25:25] Tony: S. stock­o­pe­dia buy list had lots of these ship­ping com­pa­nies on it, and you could­n’t work out why, but this arti­cle talks about the fact that even though Infla­tion is com­ing down. Ship­ping costs are still up. So, uh, the arti­cle goes, Aus­tralian con­sumers and busi­ness­es will pay more for every­thing, from choco­late and sofas to min­ing equip­ment, a ship­ping cri­sis, and the Red Sea in Asia fuel the worst freight delays since the pan­dem­ic and threat­en to stoke local infla­tion.
[00:25:56] Tony: And it goes on to talk about, because of the, um, The Houthi mil­i­tants in Yemen stop­ping ships or mak­ing it dan­ger­ous for ships to go through the Suez Canal, they’re now going around Africa, and that’s adding to time and cost, and so I did think that maybe that was a rea­son why the ship­ping com­pa­nies, which may be a nor­mal­ly val­ue buys because they’re, you know, steady income type com­pa­nies, um, are hav­ing a bit of a run at the moment and prob­a­bly more of Prof­itable than usu­al because they’re pass­ing on the cost to their cus­tomers as well.
[00:26:34] Cameron: It also said, adding to the mas­sive bot­tle­neck in Sin­ga­pore is a rush of exports from Chi­na to the Unit­ed States as com­pa­nies try to get ahead of the prospect of new tar­iffs being imposed by a re elect­ed Don­ald Trump, ship­ping experts say.
[00:26:48] Tony: the Trump. Yeah,
[00:26:51] Cameron: Anoth­er Trump bump. Aver­age ocean freight rates for 40 foot ship­ping con­tain­ers are up near­ly 300 per­cent in the past year, includ­ing a 10 per­cent jump in one week this month.
[00:27:03] Cameron: Wow. Wow. It’s fun­ny, I was talk­ing, not fun­ny, but I was talk­ing, um, a week or so ago, last week, to my mate Tony Ash­win, who I’ve talked about before on the show, um, went to pri­ma­ry school with him, and he’s a prop­er­ty devel­op­er down on the Gold Coast now, and, um, you’d love this, he actu­al­ly called me up to ask me a ques­tion about, um, Um, the, uh, block, the, the block the­o­ry of space time and how it is that all points in time co exist simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, the past, present, and future.
[00:27:43] Cameron: So I had to take him through the block the­o­ry, the cos­mo­log­i­cal block the­o­ry. Um, so any­way, we, we talked about that for a while, and then I said, so how’s busi­ness? And he was, he was
[00:27:54] Tony: before you tell me that, so he’s, when he got up in the morn­ing and thought, I should real­ly, I don’t real­ly know enough about the block the­o­ry of time. Who do I, who do I know who can help me with that? For­get Chat­G­PT, I’ll call CAV.
[00:28:09] Cameron: Well, actu­al­ly, he had called me a week ear­li­er and said, tell me about AI and where it’s at and where it’s going. And so we talked about that. And, um, and I, I said, have you used Chat­G­PT? He goes, no. I said, all right, soon as you get off this call, down­load Chat­G­PT on your phone, use it in voice mode, talk to it and see what you think.
[00:28:32] Cameron: And then down­load Super Whis­per. which is the speech to text recog­ni­tion app that I use on all my devices to write all my notes and do all that kind of stuff which is like near per­fect accu­ra­cy of any­thing I want to talk to it about. I can talk for 15 min­utes about ancient Rome or the cold war or the renais­sance and it What are you laugh­ing for?
[00:28:57] Cameron: What’s fun­ny about
[00:28:58] Tony: You could talk for a lot more than 15 min­utes on all of those things.
[00:29:02] Cameron: Yeah. And that’s my par­ty trick. When I want to clear a room. I was at Kung Fu today. I was at Kung Fu doing a thing and my Sifu came up to me and he said, I was a bull in a Chi­na shop. And I said, peo­ple have been say­ing that about me since I was five years old. And he said, I’m not sur­prised. Um, He, uh, I said, go down like that. So he was call­ing me back and he said, yeah, man, like I, he goes, it’s, it’s here, like he said, I use those things at wow.
[00:29:30] Cameron: Like, cause I was talk­ing to him about how AI might impact the real estate busi­ness, uh, you know, those sorts of things, mar­ket­ing, you know, how do you mar­ket real estate in a world where every­one has an AI agent that can do com­par­a­tive pric­ing and can read through con­tracts and can fore­cast the mar­ket and all of that kind of stuff for you.
[00:29:51] Cameron: But any­way, the point being, when he called me back and we were talk­ing about where the mar­ket’s at, he was like, you know, a cou­ple of years ago, I could get 600, 000. Prop­er­ties built a year. Now I’m flat out get­ting half of that built. Cause there’s just not enough builders. He was the guy who told me like sort of just after COVID, that builders was going broke and they were going to con­tin­ue to go broke.
[00:30:13] Cameron: And I said, how’s it going? He goes, yeah, man, it’s drop­ping like flies because they’ve, you know, as we know, we’ve talked about this on the show, they’ve locked into con­tracts. And as we just said, ship­ping rates have gone up 300%. Which is being passed on. And we were talk­ing about the, you know, there’s obvi­ous­ly this, this real estate cri­sis in Aus­tralia where peo­ple can’t afford to buy hous­es unless you’re rich because the prop­er­ty prices have gone up.
[00:30:36] Cameron: And he said, the thing is we need to put prices up fur­ther for builders to be able to build stuff. So it’s this conun­drum where, you know, unless the gov­ern­ment steps in and just says we’re going to build a mil­lion prop­er­ties and the gov­ern­men­t’s going to pay for it or sub­si­dize it, um, builders can’t afford to build and peo­ple can’t afford to buy what they’re build­ing and it’s uh, it’s a conun­drum.
[00:31:03] Tony: Yeah. A cou­ple of things to unpack there. Your point about ship­ping going up 300 per­cent and that’s dri­ving infla­tion is spot on. So tell me how rais­ing inter­est rates solves that prob­lem, stops the Houthi rebels in Yemen from blockad­ing the Suez Canal. It’s, yeah, any­way, that’s, that’s, that’s wrong, I think.
[00:31:26] Tony: It’s fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong. Um, but any­way, back to the builders. The Yeah, I read in the Fin Review recent­ly the record high insol­ven­cies for builders at the moment, so that is just get­ting worse. Um, yeah, and your builder mate’s right, they’ve got to put the price up, and that makes it hard­er for peo­ple to get into the mar­ket.
[00:31:47] Tony: But the mar­ket should cor­rect under that sit­u­a­tion, should­n’t it? And the price come back. If, if builders are, if builders can only build some­thing and then put their mar­gin on it and sell it for a mil­lion dol­lars but peo­ple can only afford to pay 800, 000, then some­thing’s got to give. And the gov­ern­ment could fund the oth­er 200, 000 or pay the builder or what­ev­er.
[00:32:11] Tony: But I just find that, I mean I under­stand what you’re say­ing, but there’s still a miss­ing piece of the puz­zle in my mind. The hous­ing mar­ket is a mar­ket and it’s still open and it’s still trad­ing, so are things. Dif­fi­cult to sell or dif­fi­cult to buy.
[00:32:28] Cameron: Well, isn’t the issue that there is a cer­tain seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion that are snap­ping up these prop­er­ties. They can afford to buy them, but there’s a huge seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion that is exclud­ed from that mar­ket. So prices are still get­ting sold and bought, but it’s by a rel­a­tive­ly small seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion, the wealthy pop­u­la­tion of the mar­ket.
[00:32:50] Cameron: The rest of the peo­ple, new home buy­ers, that kind of stuff, can’t afford to get in.
[00:32:54] Tony: Yeah, look, I under­stand, under­stand what you’re say­ing. I’m not sure it’s just the wealthy part of the pop­u­la­tion that’s buy­ing hous­es. They still are first home buy­ers. But, um, I guess what I’m try­ing to say is, yes, the gov­ern­ment could step in and try and impose a solu­tion, but I think the mar­ket will work it out for itself.
[00:33:10] Tony: Um, if there’s an unmet demand, Um, yeah, and it’s going to come out of their field, whether it’s frac­tion­al own­er­ship of hous­es or putting peo­ple togeth­er to buy prop­er­ties or turn­ing con­tain­ers into prop­er­ties or what­ev­er. And poten­tial­ly it could be turn­ing office build­ings which aren’t being ful­ly utilised into accom­mo­da­tion as well.
[00:33:30] Tony: There’ll be a solu­tion.
[00:33:32] Cameron: Well, Steve Sam­marti­no’s got a busi­ness, a start­up that does 3D print­ing of prop­er­ties. Um, yeah, unfor­tu­nate­ly, it’s not that much cheap­er right now to do that than the tra­di­tion­al method, but, um, you know, they’re hop­ing that over time it will scale up and be more cost effec­tive.
[00:33:51] Tony: yeah, but that’s a good point too, isn’t it? Per­haps the big com­pa­nies are doing well, I’m going to say, but we’ve been build­ing hous­es essen­tial­ly the same way for a long time. There’s been improve­ments, you know, they’ve, there’s, you know, what do they call it? Form­work con­crete and things like that. Bring the cost down and steal frames, etc.
[00:34:11] Tony: But they’re almost like, per­haps the way the gov­ern­ment should be expend­ing mon­ey is to go back, hire a bunch of engi­neers and, you know, put them in a fac­to­ry and say, okay, let’s build a house from scratch in a new way of doing it, whether it’s 3D print­ing or what­ev­er. Let’s just find, your mis­sion is to do some­thing at 10 per­cent of the cur­rent cost build a house.
[00:34:30] Cameron: Well, Bucky, Bucky Fuller tried that in the 50s and 60s with his, um, what­ev­er he called it. Um, what’d he call his pre built?
[00:34:42] Tony: Geo­des­ic domes.
[00:34:44] Cameron: yeah, yeah, yeah. He sort of envi­sioned pre built geo­des­ic domes that could be just dropped any­where and slot­ted togeth­er and homes would be cheap. I think he orig­i­nal­ly designed it for like dis­as­ter where there’d been a flood or a fire or some­thing like that and his vision was yeah, we’d build a dome.
[00:35:07] Cameron: Gov­ern­ments, you know, emer­gency ser­vices, those sorts of things could just quick­ly drop down, you know, a thou­sand homes for peo­ple to live in. May not be the flash­est home, but it’s a home, you
[00:35:20] Tony: yeah, and the oth­er solu­tion which is star­ing us in the face is region­al areas. I mean, you can pick up hous­es much cheap­er in Toowoom­ba, Rock­hamp­ton, um, Wag­ga Wag­ga than you can in Syd­ney or Mel­bourne. We’ve got to find a way of mak­ing it palat­able for peo­ple to go and live in those areas. that’s a role the gov­ern­ment could be play­ing. know, Rud­dy and I have often talked about this. Why isn’t every Fed­er­al or state gov­ern­ment depart­ment required to put a, um, you know, part of the tax office or part of, you know, what­ev­er, um, out in rur­al areas, and that, you know, you don’t force those employ­ees to go out there, but you make it attrac­tive for them, because the accom­mo­da­tion is cheap­er, they can work clos­er to where they live, clos­er to where they work, all that kind of stuff, and you start to grow those areas.
[00:36:11] Tony: Um, and make them attrac­tive and then much, much cheap­er to buy hous­ing. So that’s anoth­er solu­tion, but there are plen­ty of solu­tions. It’s just, we’re kind of stuck in one lane at the moment that every­one wants to buy a nice, nice ter­race house in the city, in the big cities. It’s not gonna work.
[00:36:27] Cameron: for prime min­is­ter. I’m going to start the cam­paign now.
[00:36:31] Tony: Can I work one day a week? And can I have, can you dou­ble the Secret Ser­vice guards? Oh,
[00:36:41] Cameron: Jeez man. Again, not a pro­fes­sion­al, uh, sniper, despite the rumors that go around, but you would think the top of the clos­est roof to the stage would prob­a­bly be an area that a sniper would be keep­ing an eye on. Par­tic­u­lar­ly when the cops already knew, did you hear, like there’s this, it’s come out in the last day or so, that one of the peo­ple near the snipe, the shoot­er, who saw the guy on the roof and told the cops, a cop, sup­pos­ed­ly, went up on top of the roof, Had a look at the shoot­er.
[00:37:18] Cameron: The shoot­er point­ed the gun at him. The cop went back down the lad­der and did noth­ing. And then the
[00:37:24] Tony: I had­n’t heard that.
[00:37:25] Cameron: a sec­ond lat­er.
[00:37:26] Tony: I had­n’t heard that. I heard that the peo­ple were call­ing it out, and that the Secret Ser­vice snipers had the guy on the sites. and did­n’t fire before he fired.
[00:37:35] Cameron: Well, I think that might be wise because there was a cop who got up there, who was stand­ing there, and then the cop turned around the sniper’s like, what’s going on? And then the shoot­er start­ed shoot­ing. So any­way,
[00:37:47] Tony: yeah, look, who knows? I mean,
[00:37:48] Cameron: makes very lit­tle sense.
[00:37:50] Tony: oh, that’s prob­a­bly just as right. That’s just prob­a­bly the solu­tion, isn’t it? I mean, there’s all these con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, the Secret Ser­vice did­n’t take a shot because they were under orders, and like this guy was being bun­dled by Black­rock, and this shoot­er was being, was part of Black­rock, and all this crap.
[00:38:05] Tony: It’s more, it’s more, unfor­tu­nate­ly, it’s more like­ly that, yeah, there’s this, You know, series of mishaps that got to where they were. The guy, the guy was a lon­er and his father had a gun and he snapped one day.
[00:38:19] Cameron: I’d be very sur­prised if there’s a very com­pli­cat­ed chain of com­mand that a sniper needs to go through before he takes a shot when a per­son. At a pres­i­den­tial cam­paign ral­ly, I would think it’s pret­ty much, you know, you see some­body point­ing a gun at the pres­i­dent and he’s not on your, uh, he’s not wear­ing a secret ser­vice badge, you take him out, that kind of thing.
[00:38:38] Cameron: But any­way, again, what do I know?
[00:38:41] Tony: Ha ha. But again, there’s con­spir­a­cy say­ing that the Secret Ser­vice snipers were wait­ing for a con­fir­ma­tion that they could kill.
[00:38:48] Cameron: Yeah, I, I don’t believe that. And yeah, I saw some­thing going around that I think Tay­lor sent me that, a post that one of the snipers went on social media to say that he was­n’t allowed to shoot because he was wait­ing for the order. And I’m like, Pret­ty sure your Secret Ser­vice snipers don’t have per­mis­sion to go on social media and, uh, tell their side of the sto­ry.
[00:39:11] Cameron: Pret­ty sure that’s a no no.
[00:39:13] Tony: Mmm.
[00:39:14] Cameron: Any­who, uh, you got­ta pull pork
[00:39:16] Tony: I do. Yeah, just not quite as inter­est­ing as a Trump ral­ly, but I found it, um, I found it real­ly good to go through this com­pa­ny. It’s one I’ve sort of, um, come into con­tact with a num­ber of times. It’s been on the buy list and off the buy list over the years. The com­pa­ny is Elders.
[00:39:34] Tony: E L D is the code. Um, it’s a, uh, Basi­cal­ly now an agribusi­ness, but as you’ll see, as I go through its his­to­ry, it’s, it’s pret­ty much been every­thing. It’s, um, it’s a real­ly good snap­shot for com­mer­cial his­to­ry in Aus­tralia because this com­pa­ny is a hun­dred and near­ly 90 years old. It was start­ed in, uh, 1839, um, by a Mr Elder, Alexan­der Elder, who came across from, uh, Scot­land, um, in his own fam­i­ly boat and brought some, uh, bar­rels of tar and slate tiles for roofs and agri­cul­tur­al equip­ment, plows, et cetera, uh, to Ade­laide of all places, um, and set up a shop back in 1839.
[00:40:27] Tony: So that was the foun­da­tion of Elders. It’s been going on since then in one way or anoth­er. Um, the, the com­pa­ny today, well, they, they’re, All things to, um, farm­ers, I guess, in, in rur­al areas. Peo­ple, if they’ve trav­eled to rur­al areas will have seen the brand. It’s, it’s pret­ty ubiq­ui­tous. Uh, they oper­ate, um, some­thing like, uh, over 250 affil­i­at­ed stores.
[00:40:55] Tony: So one of the arms to this busi­ness is to be a co op buy­er. So give, give, um, So the gen­er­al stores and hard­ware stores in the coun­try buy­ing pow­er to be able to offer decent prices in rur­al areas. So that’s, that’s one arm of it. also sup­ply farm­ers with a lot of their needs. So that sec­tion is called Rur­al Ser­vices and they offer seeds and fer­til­iz­ers and chem­i­cals and ani­mal health prod­ucts.
[00:41:31] Tony: Uh, and. Advice. So they have a con­sul­tan­cy arm as well. Um, they employ 144 agron­o­mists nation­wide to help do that. They have a, what’s called an agency ser­vices busi­ness. So they pro­vide, um, mar­ket­ing chan­nels and mar­ket­ing options for live­stock, wool and grain prod­ucts. So they kind of act as the, the mid­dle­man for sell­ing, uh, farm pro­duce.
[00:41:57] Tony: They now run a real estate divi­sion. Uh, so they have com­pa­ny owned and fran­chised, uh, rur­al agen­cies sell­ing homes and farms and oth­er com­mer­cial prop­er­ty around the coun­try. Uh, they have a finan­cial ser­vices divi­sion, so they have a range of bank­ing, fund­ing and insur­ance prod­ucts with, uh, I guess the focus on the rur­al areas.
[00:42:19] Tony: Um, and they have, uh, a live feed. Pro­cess­ing busi­ness. So they oper­ate a feed­lot in a place called Kalara and that’s near Tam­worth in New South Wales. They export live cat­tle over­seas. They have an inte­grat­ed feed­lot and abat­toir in Indone­sia and they dis­trib­ute, uh, dis­trib­ute meat there and also Um, into Chi­na, which is a decent mar­ket for them now.
[00:42:46] Tony: So pret­ty much any­thing you can think about that’s, um, required by farm­ers, these peo­ple have their, their fin­ger in the pie, real­ly inter­est­ing his­to­ry. So, um, mov­ing on from, uh, Alexan­der Elder, uh, by about the 1850s, the com­pa­ny was tak­en over by two broth­ers, still of the Elder fam­i­ly. And, um, They were, so Thomas and George Elder, they formed Elder Co and they became ship and wool bro­kers in Ade­laide, became one of the dom­i­nant play­ers in that busi­ness.
[00:43:21] Tony: By 1881, the wool busi­ness had tak­en off and they were trad­ing some­thing like 300, 000 bales of wool per annum. Uh, by 1917, they were in every state of Aus­tralia. Um, inter­est­ing­ly in World War II in 1939, the gov­ern­ment shut the wool mar­ket, but the UK gov­ern­ment bought the entire Aus­tralian wool clip and, uh, they paid the elders sub­stan­tial­ly for that in 41 and 42.
[00:43:50] Tony: Um, the. The source I looked at said that in equiv­a­lent terms that that was worth bil­lions of dol­lars in today’s mon­ey to our elders back then. And then when the mar­ket reopened in 1946, wool went on the bull run. And, um, uh, for about five years, but in the first two years, the price of wool was up 29 per­cent and then 64%.
[00:44:11] Tony: So it just, um, it, it real­ly boost­ed this busi­ness. Uh, then prob­a­bly the next biggest mile­stone, uh, they, they got to the eight­ies and they were, uh, part of the kind of cor­po­rate radar scene in the eight­ies and, uh, And 90s, but in, um, just try­ing to find my, where are my notes? I’ve sent this, but any­way, basi­cal­ly, John Elliott, um, took over the com­pa­ny in the ear­ly 80s, merged it with, uh, anoth­er com­pa­ny called iXL, and the com­pa­ny com­bined and became Elders iXL, so that was a rur­al prop­er­ty, well, rur­al mar­keter, com­bin­ing with a jam com­pa­ny, Uh, and, um, and then, you know, geared up and went on a buy­ing spree, includ­ing, uh, one stage own­ing Carl­ton Unit­ed Brew­eries.
[00:45:07] Tony: And Elliot went on to take Fos­ters to the world, which was good because no one drank it here. And, um, uh, I think they, they bought some­thing like a dozen busi­ness­es at the time and bolt­ed them all in. Uh, then the stock mar­ket crashed in 87. Uh, John Elliot came a bit of a crop­per. There was lots of debt issues for the com­pa­ny then.
[00:45:30] Tony: Elders, at that stage, was just a divi­sion of Fos­ter’s Brew­ing. But then, a lit­tle bit lat­er, in the late 80s, it was spun out on its own, or ear­ly 90s, it was spun out on its own. Then it came into the sights of anoth­er sort of con­glom­er­ate cor­po­rate raider called Futuras Cor­po­ra­tion. And, two years after list­ing Um, on the stock mar­ket again, uh, that was in 93.
[00:45:58] Tony: I’ve got the date here now, uh, they, and they had acquired a cou­ple of things in those two years, like Aus­tralian Agri­cul­tur­al Com­pa­ny, um, but Futur­ist Cor­po­ra­tion bought them in 95, uh, that That was anoth­er com­pa­ny which had a lot of debt and a lot of trad­ing, and then they had a rocky time buy­ing and sell­ing com­pa­nies, um, and they came across in the GFC, again because of debt, and then in, um, 2009, or about 2009, uh, after Futur­ist had almost col­lapsed dur­ing the GFC, they decid­ed to buy Futur­ist.
[00:46:33] Tony: Get rid of most of the com­pa­nies in the port­fo­lio and focus on Elders and go back to being an agri­cul­tur­al busi­ness. And then by 2013, they’d sort of imple­ment­ed their busi­ness plan of divesti­ture, and Elders again became a pure play focused on the agri­cul­tur­al indus­try. And in fact, in 2013, They sold off what was left of Futur­ist Cor­po­ra­tion, uh, looked like it was a forestry busi­ness and an auto­mo­tive divi­sion, and all they had left was their ag busi­ness.
[00:47:05] Tony: Um, on from that, it was still kind of strug­gling dur­ing those years, uh, In around that time, a guy called Mark Alli­son became involved in the com­pa­ny and put togeth­er his fair­ly famous eight point plan to restore prof­itabil­i­ty to elders. But it was­n’t until 2017 that they again paid their div­i­dend, their first div­i­dend in near­ly 10 years.
[00:47:37] Tony: So they were get­ting back on their, their feet then, focus­ing on just being a, an agri­cul­tur­al busi­ness again. and pay­ing down debt and look­ing to get into sort of asso­ci­at­ed oth­er inte­grat­ed areas, but also acquir­ing rur­al busi­ness­es along the way as well. As a side note, in Novem­ber 22, Elders announced that Mark Alli­son would retire in late 2023, and that trig­gered a 23 per­cent plunge on the share price in one day, with anoth­er 30% Plus per­cent decline con­tin­u­ing after that.
[00:48:14] Tony: So the mar­ket rec­og­nizes that this fel­low was the the rea­son why Elders had sur­vived all these years, sur­vived this near brush with death under Futur­ist Cor­po­ra­tion own­er­ship dur­ing the GFC and had been respon­si­ble for the turn­around for Elders. And then after six months, Elders back­tracked and said that they would­n’t be replac­ing Mark Alli­son, that he, they could­n’t find.
[00:48:41] Tony: Any­one as good as him after an inter­na­tion­al search and he would be stay­ing on and he’s still there today and the share price at the end, at the bot­tom was around 6. 40 and today it’s 9. 00 so the mar­ket liked the fact that he was stay­ing on and so yeah, it’s essen­tial­ly been the same com­pa­ny. in the last sort of four or five years but it’s had its ups and downs and it’s now turn­ing around and it’s come back on our buy list um just this week it’s at the very bot­tom of our buy list so it’s there’s a chance that if the price keeps improv­ing it’ll go off the list but any­one who’s can have a look quick­ly at this com­pa­ny.
[00:49:23] Tony: I guess You know, to high­light an obvi­ous risk, and that is that Mark Alli­son is 63 and had tried to retire once and will even­tu­al­ly retire. So, um, there could eas­i­ly be anoth­er 30 per­cent decline in the share price when that hap­pens, but you’d hope the board­’s learned its les­son and they’re putting the right suc­ces­sion plans in place to pre­vent that.
[00:49:44] Tony: from hap­pen­ing again. Um, so that’s Elders. That’s its his­to­ry. Uh, been around a long time, sur­vived two lots of, two brush­es with cor­po­rate raiders and, and heavy indebt­ed­ness, and mar­ket crash­es, and now it’s back to its, um, its basics and stick­ing to its knit­ting, if I can mix my metaphors, uh, to the num­bers.
[00:50:04] Tony: So, the ADT for this stock is over 3. 8 mil­lion dol­lars trad­ed per day, so it’s, it’s a very liq­uid stock that will suit most investors. Uh, the share price I’m using is 8. 86, which was the share price, uh, before the mar­ket opened on Mon­day, and it’s now, last time I looked, around 9, so it’s gone up a lit­tle bit since then.
[00:50:26] Tony: But 8. 86, and I guess 9, is, is just below con­sen­sus tar­get, so, um, we score it for that. Oh, one thing I should call out is this com­pa­ny has a March and Sep­tem­ber report­ing cal­en­dar, so don’t be sur­prised if you get to report­ing sea­son and you’re not see­ing num­bers for this com­pa­ny. They’ll hap­pen, um, three months lat­er than that.
[00:50:47] Tony: Uh, the share price of 886 is actu­al­ly pret­ty good. Way above IV1 and IV2, which is 31 respec­tive­ly, and also above Net Equi­ty Per Share and Net Equi­ty Plus 30%, Book Plus 30. Net Equi­ty Per Share is 5. 29 and, um, Book Plus 30 is 6. 88. So we’re not buy­ing this stock, um, nec­es­sar­i­ly for its val­ue, but it does have a good Prop­Caf, which is only 4.
[00:51:16] Tony: 4. 5 times. Inter­est­ing­ly enough, the PE is 19. 7 times. So all that cash is being used along the way because the PE ratios are much high­er than that, than the 4. 5 times. And 19. 7 times for the PE is the high­est in three years. So we give it a minus one for that. The com­pa­ny yields 4. 63%, which is sol­id, but it does­n’t score because it’s not above the aver­age mort­gage rate.
[00:51:46] Tony: Stock Doc­tor finan­cial health for this com­pa­ny is strong and the trend is recov­er­ing, which is some­thing I like to see, so it’s an improv­ing busi­ness and we score it for that. Although fore­cast earn­ings per share growth is minus 1%, so we score it a neg­a­tive 1 for that. Uh, as well as we don’t score. Score it for own­er founder, which makes sense because these peo­ple died 100 years ago, but direc­tors are only hold­ing 1 per­cent of the stock, so we can’t give it a score for hav­ing any­one with big skin in the game that’s on the board.
[00:52:20] Tony: It’s a recent 3 point trend­line update, so we score it for upturn, sor­ry, so we score it for that. Uh, Increas­ing equi­ty, we don’t score it for. It was­n’t too bad, but it’s not con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing, so we can’t score it for that. So all in all, this com­pa­ny has a rel­a­tive­ly low qual­i­ty score for us, 7 out of 16, or 44%, and the QAV score of 0.
[00:52:43] Tony: 1 is right at the bot­tom of our, of our buy list. So, It’s, it’s real­ly get­ting a boost because of that good cash flow, oper­at­ing cash flow it’s throw­ing off. And I’m, you know, I guess that makes sense to me because that’s prob­a­bly what the cor­po­rate rate has found attrac­tive because they like com­pa­nies with good steady oper­at­ing cash flow that can, they can gear up and then use that debt to acquire oth­er busi­ness­es.
[00:53:05] Tony: So good strong cash flow here. Um, Stock­o­pe­dia to com­pare it to our scores just to, just for com­par­i­son. Kix, uh, Stock­o­pe­dia give it a qual­i­ty score of 63. So that’s rel­a­tive­ly low, just as we scored at 44 per­cent on our check­list. And, uh, they give it a score of 79 in their rank­ing sys­tem for val­ue. Um, and it’s towards the bot­tom of our buy list and they have a total score of 89, which is up there, but not, um, not, um, at the top of their list either.
[00:53:35] Tony: So, uh, inter­est­ing. Um, yeah, so that’s Elders. I found it fas­ci­nat­ing to read about their his­to­ry. Um, In a few dif­fer­ent sources, their web­site, Wikipedia, and some bro­ker­age, some bro­kers, bro­kers that cov­er it. But, uh, yeah, look, have a look at some. It’s cer­tain­ly a com­pa­ny in turn around, and it cer­tain­ly seems to be doing a lot bet­ter than it was a cou­ple of years ago.
[00:53:56] Cameron: In, um, I looked at Elders this morn­ing as well, fun­ni­ly enough, and when I saw it, it had just appeared on the buy list. And in Stock Doc­tor’s, um, sort of sec­tor break­down, it says they’re involved in tobac­co. Which was inter­est­ing, but I searched their web­site, I could­n’t find any­thing about tobac­co. Did you come across any tobac­co inter­ests?
[00:54:18] Cameron: Okay.
[00:54:19] Tony: I did­n’t know. Unless they, Stock Doc­tor mean they’re sup­ply­ing the tobac­co indus­try, the tobac­co farms up north, maybe? I don’t think this com­pa­ny, except for the feed­lots for beef, I don’t think they actu­al­ly own any farms them­selves. I’d be sur­prised if they own tobac­co farms. Per­haps they’re involved in the indus­try in some respect.
[00:54:40] Tony: I’m not sure. It was­n’t part of my research.
[00:54:43] Cameron: cou­ple of inter­est­ing facts I’ve got about Elders. Tony, the CEO, Mark Alli­son, is a self taught gui­tarist and singer
[00:54:51] Tony: Mm
[00:54:52] Cameron: who has com­posed 144 orig­i­nal songs and has record­ed 10 albums.
[00:54:57] Tony: mm
[00:54:58] Cameron: You don’t often, I mean, I know Elders has a his­to­ry of char­ac­ters being their CEO, but, uh, you don’t often find a cor­po­rate CEO who’s also got 10 albums to his name.
[00:55:10] Cameron: I thought that was inter­est­ing.
[00:55:12] Tony: Yeah. We should reach out and say, come on our pod­cast and play a few songs for us.
[00:55:16] Cameron: play a few songs. Yeah. I was going to find one on Spo­ti­fy and play it. And then I thought I’d prob­a­bly get pinged by APRA or some­thing. Um, I’ve got a clip of, uh, John Elliott, who you men­tioned here, that I could­n’t go past this with­out play­ing this. Good evening and wel­come to Your Guess Is As Good As Mine.
[00:55:34] Cameron: Now have those buzzers ready, would you? And the first con­tes­tant tonight is PIG’S ASS! Wrong. No, I am sor­ry. The cor­rect answer is John Elliott. Oh, come on, near enough! That was from Rub­bery Fig­ures, which was a rub­ber pup­pet series for the kids out there in the 80s. That was a big show and it always had John Elliott with a huge nose and a cig­a­rette and a can of Fos­ters and his catch­phrase was pig’s ass. Not exact­ly sure where that came from but he prob­a­bly said it at some point.
[00:56:09] Cameron: I don’t know. Uh, he was a, he was a larg­er than life. Fig­ure it was­n’t he died in 2021. And accord­ing to Wikipedia in 2005, he declared him­self bank­rupt. And when he died in 2021, his net worth was less than 12, 000.
[00:56:27] Tony: I remem­ber that he, he was involved in a com­pa­ny, I think it was called Water Wheel. It was a, from mem­o­ry, it was a, a rur­al busi­ness, I think a rice grow­er, and I think it was, I, I like. Got­ta be care­ful I don’t say some­thing wrong here, Bill. I think it was charged with trad­ing insol­ven­cy. So it was trad­ing while it was insol­vent, he was a direc­tor, and I think that process may have bank­rupt­ed him, um, either defend­ing it or per­haps in fines.
[00:56:54] Tony: I could have that Ask About, Pig’s Ask About, but, um, that’s what did him in, in the end. And then, you know, famous­ly, he used to sell his, um, his auto­bi­og­ra­phy in the mar­kets to try and raise some mon­ey towards the end of his life.
[00:57:11] Cameron: Real­ly? Oh, wow. I did­n’t know about that.
[00:57:13] Tony: Had a few divorces which cleaned him out a cou­ple of times too, I think, along the way.
[00:57:17] Cameron: Yeah. Pres­i­dent of the Carl­ton Foot­ball Club for many, many years. Just a larg­er than life fig­ure, like in the 80s, 90s, 2000s. He was always in front of the tel­ly, uh, for one of those things. Um,
[00:57:35] Tony: Yeah, the face of cor­po­rate, cor­po­rate writ­ing activ­i­ty. I mean, he was involved with Holmes Accord. I think they actu­al­ly may have tus­sled to buy all this at one stage. Um,
[00:57:45] Cameron: to buy BHP
[00:57:46] Tony: to buy BHP. Yeah.
[00:57:48] Cameron: of Court tried to take over BHP and Elders blocked him. Yeah,
[00:57:53] Tony: Okay.
[00:57:54] Cameron: um, or inter­est­ing
[00:58:00] Cameron: that he sort of had that, I don’t know, sort of fall from grace towards the end of his life. Um, and his son, Tom Elliot is, I think took over from Neil Mitchell in Mel­bourne,
[00:58:12] Tony: Ah, okay. Yeah, Tom, Tom Elliott. I knew he had a media career, but he was also He also ran a fund that, um, dealt with takeover oppor­tu­ni­ties. So, he was, he was good to lis­ten to if there was a com­pa­ny being tak­en over and what he thought might hap­pen.
[00:58:29] Cameron: Yeah. He was an invest­ment banker. Um, from 97 to 2001, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Flinder’s Cap­i­tal from 2001 has been the man­ag­ing direc­tor of MM. And e Cap­i­tal and a direc­tor of Belu Ula Cap­i­tal
[00:58:44] Tony: Bueller, Bueller, any­body? Mm
[00:58:47] Cameron: Tried to show Fox that on the week­end. I, we were look­ing for a movie, kids movie night? No, a fam­i­ly movie night.
[00:58:52] Cameron: And we tried to show him that and yeah, after about 10 min­utes he was like, yeah, I’m bored with this. Let’s do some­thing else. We’re like, oh,
[00:59:00] Tony: Ah, okay.
[00:59:01] Cameron: Very good. Well, thank you, Tony. Elders. Fas­ci­nat­ing. Fas­ci­nat­ing com­pa­ny with a fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ry.
[00:59:10] Tony: ha. Yeah. Ha
[00:59:13] Cameron: I only got one ques­tion this week. This is from Dave.
[00:59:15] Cameron: Uh, it’s not real­ly a ques­tion. It’s a sug­ges­tion. Ref­er­enc­ing the cou­ple of men­tions from Tony recent­ly on share buy­backs, I’ve coin­ci­den­tal­ly just read chap­ter 12, Buy­back Yield in O’Shaugh­nessy’s What Works on Wall Street. Great book. That’s me say­ing great book. O’Shaugh­nessy back­tests top and bot­tom per­centile buy­back yield against his all stocks and large stocks ref­er­ence data.
[00:59:41] Cameron: Tony’s pulling out his dic­tio­nary here for some rea­son. What are you pulling out there, Tony? Oh, he’s got a, he’s got a, he’s got a Bible sized edi­tion of What Works on Wall Street. That’s like the mega edi­tion. Wow. Top per­centile sig­nif­i­cant­ly out­per­forms as mea­sured by CAGR. Bot­tom per­centile sig­nif­i­cant­ly under­per­forms.
[01:00:02] Cameron: O’Shaugh­nessy defines buy­back yield as the annu­al dif­fer­ence in shares on issue as a per­cent­age. Sug­ges­tions to incor­po­rate buy­back yield into the QAV check­list, one, sim­i­lar to the PE check­list item, do a man­u­al half year peri­od for six peri­ods look back of shares on issue, give a plus two score for low­est, zero for nei­ther low­est or high­est, minus one for high­est, um, Two, sim­i­lar to the Div­i­dend Yield Check­list item, cal­cu­late the buy­back yield and com­pare it to the mort­gage rate, plus one for high­er, zero for the same or low­er.
[01:00:39] Cameron: I’d offer to test into the check­list myself, but I use the week­ly pub­lished buy list and DMOR from there. Smi­ley face. Sure you do, Dave. We all believe
[01:00:48] Tony: ha ha.
[01:00:49] Cameron: A third option, he says, sim­i­lar to con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing equi­ty, use con­sis­tent­ly decreas­ing shares on issue. Um, I don’t know. Inter­est­ing. I had a look around Stock Doc­tor and tried to fig­ure out if there was a way we could down­load any of these eas­i­ly in the report.
[01:01:08] Cameron: I don’t think there is. I would need to fig­ure out how to code some­thing, I think, to get hold of that data. Um, but I thought, before I both­er with that, I’d see what you think about
[01:01:21] Tony: Ha ha ha. I like it. I mean, I’d like to do some test­ing on it because, you know, I think O’Shaugh­nessy’s results were say­ing that, if I’ve read this cor­rect­ly, the top decile of buy­back com­pa­nies over a, uh,
[01:01:35] Tony: don’t know what the peri­od is, sor­ry, I can’t see it, was, um, any­way, it yield­ed 13. 69 per­cent com­pound, um, ver­sus the bot­tom, which earned 10. 4%. So def­i­nite­ly sug­gests there’s some­thing there, they’re not, um, sort of super sized, um, Results. But, um, yeah, let me have a look and go back and reread Chap­ter 12 in O’Shaugh­nessy and see if we can add to the check­list.
[01:02:00] Tony: But it’s a, it’s a good point, Dave. Thank you. And that’s a great solu­tion. I think to try and some­how just sim­ply take the cur­rent shares on issue ver­sus the same in the last report and see if they’re less as a way of work­ing out the buy­back. I don’t know if we need to be as sci­en­tif­ic as a buy­back yield.
[01:02:20] Tony: Um, which is like, it seems to be the per­cent­age of share reduc­tion. I mean, that might be, that might be impor­tant. Again, I’d have to have a look fur­ther and test it. Um, in oth­er words, if a com­pa­ny’s bought back a lot of shares, you’d think the price would go up because it was, the EPS has spread around between less, um, share­hold­ers.
[01:02:40] Tony: But I need to research that a bit fur­ther. But I like it. I like the idea. You know, one thought I had Cam, in terms of how do we code this is, um, if it’s at all pos­si­ble, I’m not, I can’t go back and have a look at our down­load, whether we have share, the shares on issue in there, but we could prob­a­bly cal­cu­late it from the mar­ket cap divid­ed by the share price, but we’ve got five years of data any­way, it might be just a case of writ­ing some­thing to crawl through our buy lists and pull togeth­er at least a data­base of what’s hap­pened in the last five years for research pur­pos­es and then struc­ture it going for­ward that way.
[01:03:18] Cameron: So, Tony’s offi­cial ver­dict is,
[01:03:21] Tony: I like it.
[01:03:22] Cameron: like it a lot.
[01:03:26] Tony: Yeah,
[01:03:28] Cameron: well, what’s going to hap­pen if a com­pa­ny has a split or a con­sol­i­da­tion?
[01:03:35] Tony: cor­rect. I mean, all those things have to be fac­tored into account. Yeah, I mean, the sim­plest solu­tion is, if we can, is to do some kind of scroll buy­back in their annu­al reports. But, um, yeah, that’s going to be hard.
[01:03:52] Cameron: I’ve tried to auto­mate search­ing annu­al
[01:03:55] Tony: Yeah, I know.
[01:03:56] Cameron: qual­i­fied audits and it’s a night­mare of an exer­cise.
[01:04:00] Tony: Yep.
[01:04:01] Cameron: All right, but thank you Dave. Good think­ing. Well, that’s puts us into after hours, Tony. Noth­ing’s going on this week. Um, noth­ing.
[01:04:12] Tony: Nah.
[01:04:12] Cameron: you the, uh, off air
[01:04:14] Tony: I’m going to be hold­ing tar­get prac­tice cours­es though in, um, try­ing to improve the aim.
[01:04:22] Cameron: all jokes aside, peo­ple who went to school with him said that he was­n’t allowed on the, uh, shoot­ing squad because he was a bad shot. And yet, you know, if Trump had­n’t have turned, uh, in the direc­tion of the first shot, the sec­ond one, I think it was, would have, uh, gone straight through his, uh, Abdul­lah Oblon­ga­ta.
[01:04:44] Cameron: Oh, was that a police album? I think it was a police
[01:04:47] Tony: No, that’s, that’s a very small tar­get in Trump’s case though, isn’t it? Real­ly? Aim for the stom­ach!
[01:04:55] Cameron: yes. Yeah. Yeah. But then they fall to the ground and he, you know, he sur­vives. Any­way. Um, I watched Bev­er­ly Hills Cop 4.
[01:05:04] Tony: Yeah, we did too.
[01:05:06] Cameron: What did you think?
[01:05:07] Tony: It was great nos­tal­gia. I loved all the old char­ac­ters com­ing back. The um, Judge Rein­gold and, Rein­hold? Rein­hold? Rein­gold? Judge Rein­hold, um, Surge. Yeah. But I liked it. Pret­ty light, but I liked it.
[01:05:23] Cameron: I thought it was okay, but the boys saw it before me and they were like, oh yeah, real­ly great, fan­tas­tic. I watched it, I was like, like to me it was about as good as the Top Gun film was, the last Top Gun film that he made. It was okay because it was sort of a throw­back to the 80s, but as a film, was­n’t great.
[01:05:42] Cameron: I mean, and the
[01:05:44] Tony: Well, the first one was­n’t either. It’s not, was­n’t meant to be
[01:05:48] Cameron: Top Gun or Bev­er­ly Hills Cop?
[01:05:50] Tony: Bev­er­ly Hills Cop. I
[01:05:52] Cameron: Hills Cop 1 and 2 are clas­sics, Tony. I’ve watched them in the last six months. I’ve re watched them. Um, they’re fan­tas­tic. They hold up real­ly, real­ly well. But, here’s the thing, when I heard about this re this, uh, sequel they were mak­ing, I was always like, Eddie Mur­phy was 22 when he made Bev­er­ly Hills Cop. And that, that char­ac­ter, That he, he was, he was 19 when he made Trad­ing Places or 20 maybe when he made Trad­ing Places. Um, 19 when he was on SNL. There’s a great New York Times inter­view with him a cou­ple of weeks ago. They were talk­ing about this. Like he was, I think it was 19 when he end­ed up on SNL and he saved SNL.
[01:06:31] Cameron: SNL was, you know, it was those years, it was the dark years and um, they were prob­a­bly it was prob­a­bly going to get tak­en off the air and he came on and just. You know, it explod­ed again. He was 19. Just with that lev­el of con­fi­dence, and that, that, that per­son­al­i­ty. So you’re trad­ing places, I think he meant, when he was like 20, Bev­er­ly Hills COP, when he was 22.
[01:06:54] Cameron: And that kind of youth­ful, sort of cock­i­ness that he had, which is great. None of that obvi­ous­ly now that he’s. In his 60s. And the laugh, the laugh was gone. Like the, the thing I think about in those, the laugh­’s gone. Now I know peo­ple’s laughs prob­a­bly do. I don’t think I laughed the same now as I prob­a­bly did when I was 22.
[01:07:15] Cameron: But I don’t know. Is that, I missed that. I was like, where’s, where’s the. You know, Axel Foley laugh, like, uh, kind of real­ly missed that as one of the old char­ac­ters com­ing back. And the rest of it, it was kind of okay, but there was, and my boys also said, Oh, there’s a huge cameo in it. There’s a huge, there’s a huge cameo from the nineties that, um, it’s like a, uh, uh, what do you call it?
[01:07:38] Cameron: Like a mix? Uh, no, what do you call it when you blend two fran­chis­es togeth­er? A, uh, uh, crossover, huge crossover. So I was think­ing Stal­lone. Or Schwarzeneg­ger was gonna have a cameo and it was, um, uh, Shoot­er McGee from,
[01:07:57] Tony: there was too, yeah.
[01:07:59] Cameron: Shoot­er McGee’s cameo from Hap­py Gilmore. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, oh, real­ly? That, that?
[01:08:04] Cameron: I watched this whole thing for Shoot­er McGee. Like, don’t get me wrong. I love Shoot­er McGee, but real­ly?
[01:08:11] Tony: Shoot­er McGavin, isn’t it? Shoot­er McGavin I think.
[01:08:13] Cameron: Shoot­er McGavin. Thank you. Shoot­er McGavin.
[01:08:16] Tony: Appar­ent­ly they’re mak­ing a sequel to Hap­py Gilmore now too. Mm.
[01:08:21] Cameron: yeah, yeah. Which will be sim­i­lar to see if they can pull off that. Cause I don’t know how old he was, but, uh, you know, he must’ve been in his twen­ties, I think when he did that, maybe he was a bit old­er, I’m not sure.
[01:08:35] Tony: Yeah. Well he’s appar­ent­ly he got the, He’s now the high­est paid movie star in the world, Adam San­dler, because Net­flix has, Net­flix tied him up with some kind of, um, devel­op­ment deal, and, and paid him, I, I don’t know, I for­get now the amount, but it was eye water­ing, like hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars, and, um, and he’s just turned out rub­bish.
[01:08:57] Tony: Like, I, I tried to watch, ah, you got it, you got the, got the laugh.
[01:09:06] Cameron: Um,
[01:09:07] Tony: I tried to watch his lat­est movie about an astro­naut, a Pol­ish astro­naut, um, who meets a giant spi­der on the, on the, and I’m like, real­ly? This is like, what were they smok­ing when they made this?
[01:09:21] Cameron: well you see, but Uncut Gems was great, I don’t think that was
[01:09:23] Tony: This is, this is pri­or, this is after Uncut Gems. Yeah.
[01:09:27] Cameron: yeah, but that was a great film, like he can do dra­mat­ic stuff
[01:09:30] Tony: Oh yeah.
[01:09:31] Cameron: think, but, um, you know,
[01:09:35] Tony: Yeah. No, appar­ent­ly Net­flix went back through its data­base and said, well, what’s, you know, what’s our most. pop­u­lar titles and they were Adam Sankster movies and so they offered him a heap of mon­ey. Yeah.
[01:09:45] Cameron: heh, um, You know, I, I, I, what I’ve always said about San­dler’s stuff is most, a lot of, he’s got some great films like Bil­ly Madi­son and Hap­py Gilmore, Back From The Day, The Water Boy, but most of his films are crap­py, um, but, he knows his mar­ket, he knows his audi­ence, like, who are, you know, young men, I think, who would just watch those things, and they don’t, they’re not look­ing for Oscar or Acad­e­my Award win­ning stuff, they’re just look­ing for some stu­pid laughs, and he, he knows that real­ly well.
[01:10:11] Tony: So, you know, Hen­ry Win­kler was out here recent­ly, uh, pro­mot­ing his book and I saw a clip,
[01:10:16] Cameron: yeah.
[01:10:17] Tony: he was in The Water­boy, played the coach, and I saw a clip say­ing how the movie was tank­ing until the new Star Wars trail­er came out. Peo­ple were buy­ing tick­ets to the Water Boy to see the Star Wars trail­er and then leav­ing after the pre­views.
[01:10:34] Tony: And that’s why the Water Boy has been the most suc­cess­ful of Adam sts movies At the box office.
[01:10:42] Cameron: Well, you take your wins where you can get them,
[01:10:44] Tony: Yeah, exact­ly.
[01:10:45] Cameron: Some­thing else I did last week is, uh, I went into the Apple store on Fri­day, Sat­ur­day after­noon and got my Apple Vision Pro demo. They hit the coun­try on Fri­day. I went in with the boys on Sat­ur­day. Hunter got one as well. I tell you, man, I went in there. Not expect­ing much. I just thought it was a real­ly expen­sive wear­able mon­i­tor.
[01:11:09] Cameron: I spent the whole 20 minute demo going, holy shit. No eff­ing way. Oh my God. And Hunter did the same thing. Like I was, I was actu­al­ly stand­ing next to him video­ing some of his response to it. Like it is, Tay­lor had one in LA like six months ago when they first came out, he hap­pened to be there. I like, I got­ta tell ya.
[01:11:34] Cameron: It is mind blow­ing tech­nol­o­gy and I, I high­ly encour­age any­one who has­n’t had a demo, book one in at your local Apple store, go in and do the 20 minute demo. They walk you through it, they have a script­ed demo where they show you all the, the fea­tures of it. And it starts off pret­ty mun­dane, you know, they show you how to look with your eyes to acti­vate things and click things by press­ing a but­ton.
[01:11:58] Cameron: Pinch­ing and all that kind of stuff in the sky. Um, but then they get into the immer­sive stuff, the spa­tial pho­tographs and videos. So imag­ine a full field of view pho­to­graph. That is three dimen­sion­al, like it has depth, you can look around and it’s this new tech­nol­o­gy that’s in the iPhone 15 Pro and the Apple Vision, it’s called Spa­tial Pho­tog­ra­phy and Spa­tial Video.
[01:12:23] Cameron: So you have, it’s just like three dimen­sion­al video where it has depth per­cep­tion in the video that you’re watch­ing. Which is, that is mind bog­gling, but then they get, and then they have the cin­e­ma expe­ri­ence where every­thing goes black and you just have this mas­sive cin­e­ma screen in front of you. It feels like you’re sit­ting in a cin­e­ma by your­self and it’s play­ing through the speak­ers and the head­set and it’s, it’s amaz­ing.
[01:12:45] Cameron: The, the, like the ver­sion of a desk­top wall­pa­per, if you want to block every­thing out, it’s like a moun­tain with a, a lake and the water’s rip­pling on the lake. As you’ve got your apps up, that’s what you’re look­ing at. But the ful­ly immer­sive stuff. You’re sit­ting on the hoop at a bas­ket­ball game, you’re sit­ting on the goals of a, uh, soc­cer match.
[01:13:08] Cameron: Um, you’re, uh, you’re sit­ting with ele­phants that are com­ing right up to you and it’s ful­ly immer­sive. Like, All you can see, like 360 degrees, a woman on a tightrope, this is the video they start with, there’s a woman on a tightrope walk­ing over a ravine and you feel like you’re a foot away from her watch­ing her bal­anc­ing.
[01:13:28] Cameron: And it’s all this depth per­cep­tion. And, um, it’s, you feel like you want to reach out and grab her. I did. I said, I want to reach out and like put my arms around and go, no, don’t do it. Hunter said, I won­der what hap­pened if I push her off? And I go, well, see, that’s, that’s the dif­fer­ence. Between us. Um, and they had to actu­al­ly ask me before they do, do you suf­fer from a fear of heights?
[01:13:49] Cameron: And I was like, yeah, I do actu­al­ly. And they said, well, if you, if you feel anx­i­ety at any moment, look up and it’ll stop the video. Like if you just look up and I was fine, but it is. Absolute­ly insane, the expe­ri­ence. And it’s one of those things that you can’t, it’s like stand­ing on the edge of the Grand Canyon.
[01:14:09] Cameron: You can look at a mil­lion pho­tos of the Grand Canyon, but until you stand on the edge of it, you don’t real­ly know what an awe inspir­ing expe­ri­ence it is. I’m going to say it’s the same with the Apple Vision Pro, and I think their mar­ket­ing has done it a dis­ser­vice in the last six months. I don’t think they’re try­ing to.
[01:14:27] Cameron: I think it’s a devel­op­er pre­view is real­ly where it’s at right now. They’re not try­ing to sell it. I mean, you know, who’s going to pay sev­en and a half thou­sand dol­lars for a head­set, right?
[01:14:38] Tony: And they would­n’t
[01:14:39] Cameron: oth­er thing is,
[01:14:40] Tony: they would­n’t have much con­tent, I guess, devel­oped yet either for it.
[01:14:43] Cameron: not that kind of stuff, no. So that’s why they’re putting it out there is for devel­op­ers to start to think about it. But if this, um, if they con­tin­ue with it, like, and there’s been a lot of Um, fits and starts with this sort of stuff, Google Glass and that kind of thing that did­n’t real­ly get off the ground and I remem­ber inter­view­ing Jef­frey Katzen­berg on my pod­cast near­ly 20 years ago where he was say­ing 3D, every­thing’s going to be 3D, tele­vi­sion’s going to be 3D, and every­thing’s going to be 3D, and obvi­ous­ly that did­n’t come to pass either, but If they pull this off, I can ful­ly imag­ine sit­ting in the mid­dle of the God­fa­ther and being able to look around you as the scene is tak­ing place.
[01:15:22] Cameron: Or as Tay­lor said, Fast and the Furi­ous, and you’re sit­ting in the car in the Fast and the Furi­ous, because that’s what it feels like. You are ful­ly immersed, like in the, in the sport­ing events. That they have in the demo. It’s insane. Like it’s not, it’s not 3d, like a 3d movie, but it’s some­thing else going on, but they have like a bas­ket­ball play­er run­ning up and dunk­ing the ball right in front of your face.
[01:15:47] Cameron: And it feels like it’s right in front of your face. If this is the future of. The way that we, uh, inter­act with tech­nol­o­gy, it’s going to be astound­ing, uh, when the price point comes down and there’s more con­tent for it and all of that kind of stuff. Heavy, hot. I had like sweat on my brow
[01:16:09] Tony: Oh real­ly? Okay.
[01:16:10] Cameron: Yeah, it’s quite hot. And this is in an Apple store, which is in the mid­dle of win­ter. So it was quite air con­di­tioned and cool, but, um, Yeah, and a lot of the peo­ple that have bought them in the U. S. have said the same thing since day one, hot, heavy, you can’t wear it for more than an hour or two with­out your neck get­ting tired and that sort of thing.
[01:16:29] Cameron: You know, they’ve got a full com­put­er the size of an iPhone built into this screen, right? So, it’s got a, it’s a com­put­er. It’s a full Mac, um, that you can do every­thing on, um, and it’s built into the screen. Into, I said to her, where’s the CPU? She said, that’s it. It’s in the CPU. It’s attached to a bat­tery pack, but that’s not the CPU.
[01:16:52] Cameron: Like the, it’s all built into, you think about like I was say­ing to the boys, like 20 years ago, the Win­dows 95 PC that I bought, was that 20 years ago? That was
[01:17:02] Tony: 90s. Yeah.
[01:17:04] Cameron: 30 years ago, Win­dows 95 PC I bought, you know, it was this mas­sive big CRT thing. That cost me about 5, 000. Now, if you’d said to me I’d be wear­ing a com­put­er on my eyes in 30 years time, I mean, I prob­a­bly would have believed it because I believed in Moore’s Law, but still, it’s um, it’s, it’s real­ly, I can’t hype it up enough, hon­est­ly.
[01:17:26] Cameron: It’s, I, I chal­lenge every­body, even an old Cyn­i­cal bas­tard like your­self, Tony, to go and do a demo of this and, uh, see what you think.
[01:17:37] Tony: Yeah, I prob­a­bly won’t. I’ll wait until it gets cheap­er and small­er. Okay, so how dif­fer­ent is it to Ocu­lus Rift? Because that was a thing a cou­ple of years ago as well.
[01:17:46] Cameron: I haven’t played with Ocu­lus Rift, so I can’t say, yeah. Um, I, I, I can’t com­pare it to that, but for me it was mind blow­ing. And they asked me when I was book­ing it in the book­ing form, they say, do you wear glass­es? And I said, I do read­ing glass­es. What lev­el I told them is like a plus one. So when I went in there, they had inserts that they put in.
[01:18:05] Cameron: They’re like lit­tle, Things that they put into the glass­es and when you, when you’re going through the set­up process, which takes a minute or two, it’s ask­ing you to focus on things and it’s adjust­ing itself to your field of vision and all that kind of stuff.
[01:18:19] Tony: Ha,
[01:18:20] Cameron: Yeah. But any­way, it’s, it was, I thought that was going to be my big news for the week­end was my Apple Vision Pro thing until the next morn­ing.
[01:18:31] Cameron: It,
[01:18:32] Tony: Yeah, right.
[01:18:34] Cameron: what about your­self?
[01:18:35] Tony: Uh, a cou­ple of horse races, so, um, no wins. Lamar­jia had a poor run. Indu­bitably, I thought did okay, giv­en it was her first Metro start. Um, sec­ond if you count the Gold Coast. But, uh, and so she’ll, she’ll prob­a­bly have a cou­ple of weeks off and then come back, um, bet­ter for it.
[01:18:54] Tony: Lamar­jia, I’m not sure about. We might retire her to a coun­try train­er and see how that goes. But, um, no deci­sions have been made there. Uh. Books, I final­ly got a copy of The Future is Near and start­ed to read it. So I’ve only just start­ed that. It’s, it’s such a good read. I mean, he goes, Basi­cal­ly through the his­to­ry of the uni­verse and the his­to­ry of evo­lu­tion of man and the brain.
[01:19:18] Tony: It’s so, it’s a book I like to take my time over and just think about all the impli­ca­tions of what he’s say­ing. And I know he did some­thing sim­i­lar in The Future is Near, but, um, Yeah, yeah, I could­n’t, Sin­gu­lar­i­ty isn’t here, sor­ry. Um, oh, sor­ry, the Sin­gu­lar­i­ty is near­er is the title. Um, it was, the fun­ny thing was, I had it on pre order with Ama­zon and it just stuck in pre order.
[01:19:43] Tony: And then I saw you had a copy the oth­er week. So I went back onto Ama­zon. It was still, it was avail­able to buy, but it was still stuck on pre order. So I man­aged to buy a copy and get it sent. So that
[01:19:54] Cameron: sin­gu­lar­i­ty is near­er, but your copy of the book, not
[01:19:57] Tony: Here’s fur­ther, cor­rect. Well, it’s near­er, it’s near­er, it’s get­ting near­er. I just did­n’t get it.
[01:20:02] Tony: Ha ha.
[01:20:02] Cameron: Yeah, yeah,
[01:20:03] Tony: Yeah,
[01:20:04] Cameron: It’s still in the same place, which is not with you, you know, in a ware­house some­where
[01:20:07] Tony: And it was strange because I, I don’t know what the book was worth, 30 bucks as a, as a paper­back, but um, the one I had on pre order, the price had been reduced to like 17. So I could­n’t work out why. It’s almost like it was a bait and switch or it was, um, dis­con­tin­ued or some­thing, like I’d ordered the wrong prod­uct, but it was still sit­ting there in my bas­ket as the book.
[01:20:27] Tony: Any­way, did­n’t come. Uh, what else? Still watch­ing Bet­ter Call Saul, work­ing my way through sea­son three of that now,
[01:20:36] Cameron: enjoy­ing it.
[01:20:37] Tony: I am, yeah. It’s, uh, I just kind of watched an episode tonight. It’s, um, I am enjoy­ing it. I love Ermin Trout. I love that his­to­ry of that char­ac­ter and what hap­pens with him. That’s real­ly good.
[01:20:48] Tony: Um, can’t stand Chuck, the broth­er of Saul, but that’s prob­a­bly the way it’s meant to be.
[01:20:54] Cameron: But what a great per­for­mance
[01:20:56] Tony: Yeah.
[01:20:58] Cameron: from, you know, um, the GA guy I most­ly knew from Spinal Tap and
[01:21:04] Tony: Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.
[01:21:06] Cameron: those oth­er films with Christo­pher Guest, most­ly I knew him from com­e­dy, and of course, this stuff with Lav­erne and Shirley back in the day. As, uh, Zig­gy or what­ev­er his name is, Squig­gy. But yeah, what a great, like he’s such a con­temptible, arro­gant bul­ly of a char­ac­ter to, to Bob Odenkirk’s char­ac­ter.
[01:21:27] Cameron: It’s real­ly great per­for­mance, you know, I thought.
[01:21:31] Tony: Yeah. No, I agree. So I’m enjoy­ing it, but just work­ing my way slight­ly through it. And there’s been plen­ty of golf on, so British Open starts this week, which I’ll spend the week­end watch­ing. And the week before is always the Scot­tish Open, so I enjoyed watch­ing that too.
[01:21:45] Cameron: Is Trump play­ing in any of those? He’s prob­a­bly already won them.
[01:21:49] Tony: Yeah.
[01:21:49] Cameron: has­n’t told any­body yet. I won­der if he’s going to protest the results of them and say, actu­al­ly, I won those. You know, like you weren’t even play­ing in it. Nah, it’s fake news. I was and I won and you’re just mak­ing it up. It’s a con­spir­a­cy.
[01:22:04] Tony: Great book out there called Com­man­der in Cheat, which is writ­ten by a good golf writer about Trump and about how he cheats at golf and all the golf sto­ries about.
[01:22:13] Cameron: Oh, real­ly?
[01:22:13] Tony: It’s real. It’s real­ly good. It’s real­ly good. He walks into the pro shop at one of his cours­es in Mia­mi or some­where in the States and his local course that would be near Mar a Lago and uh, they’re, they’re, you know, the golf cours­es have the hon­or board where, you know, the club cham­pi­on’s name gets put in every year.
[01:22:30] Tony: The pros up there, you know, Putting in the club cham­pi­on’s name and Trump goes, what are you doing? I’ve beat­en that guy before. Take his name down. I’m the club cham­pi­on now.
[01:22:43] Cameron: Wow. It’s going to be an inter­est­ing few years with him back in the White House.
[01:22:50] Tony: Yeah. I’m going to order some pop­corn now. It’s just, it’s, yeah. Oh, look, I, I, I don’t know if I’m being cyn­i­cal or I’m over it, but, um, yeah, it’ll be inter­est­ing. Um, um, there was a lot of things in the first pres­i­den­cy I did­n’t like. And a lot of things changed, but, you know, as you know, does it real­ly amount to much?
[01:23:12] Tony: Who’s Pres­i­dent of the US?
[01:23:15] Cameron: Well, you know, I think it does for some groups of peo­ple like, uh, there was no war in Ukraine when Trump was pres­i­dent. There was no geno­cide in Gaza when Trump was pres­i­dent.
[01:23:27] Tony: Mm hmm.
[01:23:28] Cameron: You know, there was no wars. I mean, I remem­ber say­ing at the time, if Hillary was pres­i­dent, The US would prob­a­bly be involved direct­ly or indi­rect­ly in some, some war some­where right now.
[01:23:39] Cameron: I mean, they were still involved in Afghanistan and, um, he did­n’t real­ly pull them out of that as Biden did, although he had plans in place to pull them out, which Biden Fol­lowed through on. He could have pulled them out faster, but he did­n’t start it. He did­n’t encour­age it. Um, but it’s often the Democ­rats that lead them direct­ly or indi­rect­ly into wars, which, you know, mat­ters to the tens of thou­sands of peo­ple that are dead in Gaza and the tens of thou­sands of peo­ple dead in Ukraine and home­less in Ukraine.
[01:24:10] Cameron: Whether or not you, you know, you agree with whether or not The US should have sup­port­ed the Ukraini­ans or should sup­port Israel or not. Bot­tom line is 100, 000 peo­ple are dead as a result of those con­flicts. And then plus the Rus­sians, cur­rent esti­mates is some­thing like six to 700, 000 Russ­ian sol­diers dead
[01:24:33] Tony: Seri­ous­ly. 700, 000.
[01:24:38] Cameron: That’s esti­mates com­ing out of West­ern and Ukrain­ian mil­i­tary, which I take with a grain of because as you know, and Times of War, there’s pro­pa­gan­da that say all sorts of things, but I don’t, I don’t think the Rus­sians are com­ing out with their own num­bers. But yeah, the, I read some­thing yes­ter­day, some­body was say­ing that they’re hav­ing, the Rus­sians have to recruit, I think it’s a thou­sand or fif­teen hun­dred new men a week to keep their num­bers up.
[01:25:06] Cameron: Um, and they’re real­ly scrap­ing the bot­tom of the
[01:25:09] Tony: Well, it’s Stal­in­grad again, isn’t it?
[01:25:11] Cameron: on the flip side. So yes, it
[01:25:13] Tony: we were Russ­ian, we’d be sit­ting there going, oh, they’re recruit­ing 41 year olds, 42 year olds, 44 year olds.
[01:25:19] Cameron: Yeah.
[01:25:20] Tony: Yeah.
[01:25:21] Cameron: Um, and how do you feel about can­ni­bal­ism? So it’s, it’s, it’s tough. You know, that was a Stal­in­grad ref­er­ence. Lots of can­ni­bal­ism at Stal­in­grad.
[01:25:31] Tony: Yeah.
[01:25:31] Cameron: looked bemused. Or were, or were you just think­ing about can­ni­bal­ism for a sec­ond? You’re like,
[01:25:36] Tony: I don’t nor­mal­ly hear about can­ni­bal­ism on an invest­ing pod­cast. That’s all.
[01:25:46] Cameron: Well, this is after hours where we, invest­ing part of it’s gone. You know, if you stick around for after hours, you know, any­thing’s, any­thing’s game.
[01:25:58] Tony: Yeah, well, I take it back. It does mat­ter, I sup­pose, um, who’s pres­i­dent of the US, but what I meant was in the, um, I’m not sub­scrib­ing to the, it’s the end of civ­i­liza­tion as we know it if Trump gets elect­ed.
[01:26:11] Cameron: You know, I think the last time, my, my com­ments to Chris­sy and my Amer­i­can friends the last time was, yeah, it was bad, but I don’t think Trump did any­thing last time that was much worse, in terms of poli­cies, much worse than a Mitt Rom­ney or any oth­er Repub­li­can would have done in that peri­od. Like he, what he was putting into place was pret­ty stan­dard Repub­li­can stuff, you know, appoint some con­ser­v­a­tive Supreme Jus­tices, you know, low­er tax­es.
[01:26:39] Cameron: You know, Law and Order, anti immi­grant stuff, anti this, what­ev­er, tar­iffs against Chi­na, bloody, bloody, blah. It was pret­ty straight up Repub­li­can fare. This time, you know, who knows? Will he just be anoth­er Repub­li­can pres­i­dent or will he go one step fur­ther and push them fur­ther and fur­ther towards a dic­ta­tor­ship?
[01:27:02] Cameron: Who knows?
[01:27:04] Tony: Yeah, well,
[01:27:04] Cameron: I find is inter­est­ing is pret­ty much nobody from his first admin­is­tra­tion is sup­port­ing him this time around. I mean, what does that tell you,
[01:27:14] Tony: he’s not sup­port­ing them either. I know, well, I saw, uh, it was a Bolton come out against Trump, I thought, ooh, that’s inter­est­ing.
[01:27:20] Cameron: When Bolton comes out against you, like Bolton is prob­a­bly the most evil human alive on the plan­et today since Kissinger died, for Bolton to come out against you. Do you remem­ber when he walked out when they were doing the whole Venezuela thing was going on and they were try­ing to imple­ment Juan Guai­do over Maduro and he went out for a press con­fer­ence with a fold­er on his arm which said Venezuela, um, inva­sion or some­thing.
[01:27:45] Cameron: And peo­ple were like,
[01:27:49] Tony: ha ha ha ha ha
[01:27:51] Cameron: it up and it was like Venezuela over­throw plan. Yeah, when Bolton comes out against you, and we’re not talk­ing about Michael Bolton either, John Bolton, you know, you’re pret­ty far off the right wing when John Bolton even thinks you’re too crazy.
[01:28:09] Tony: Yeah, I mean, there’s two sides to Trump. There’s well, three sides. There’s the self inter­est side. So like, you’ll expect low­er tax rates. There’s the sound and blus­ter side. So you’d expect him to try and, you know, say he’s going to build a wall and be tough on immi­gra­tion. But of course not. There was no wall and there was more immi­gra­tion under Trump than the pre­vi­ous guy.
[01:28:29] Tony: Um, so there’s going to be a lot of bluff and blus­ter. Bye bye. The wild card is, you know, what hap­pens. with democ­ra­cy. Um, and it could just be that he appoints even more Supreme Court judges and he appoints his luck­ies to run the EPA and the oth­er gov­ern­ment depart­ments and makes that a whole lot worse.
[01:28:48] Tony: Uh, in terms of, um, when I say worse, it’s, it’s bet­ter in terms of less red tape, but worse for, um, the envi­ron­ment and, uh, cor­po­rate reg­u­la­tion and things like that. Um, so, yeah, it’s, uh, who knows. Um,
[01:29:05] Cameron: And the
[01:29:06] Tony: said, I’m get­ting pop­corn, just gonna sit back and watch.
[01:29:10] Cameron: had the pan­dem­ic on his watch, and there was like, what, a mil­lion Amer­i­cans who died from the pan­dem­ic, who may have died any­way, but cer­tain­ly he was­n’t encour­ag­ing them to do the respon­si­ble thing. This time, the next four years, what’s going to hap­pen with AI? is going to be huge.
[01:29:29] Cameron: Huge. It’s going to be huge.
[01:29:33] Tony: But it’ll be like, but it’ll be like, um, you know, there was that busi­ness lead­ers round table for Trump and Tim from Apple turned up and, uh, oth­er peo­ple turned up from Sil­i­con Val­ley and then they all backed out and, and like Trump did­n’t care, he was just like, you’re gonna, you’re gonna form a court and agree with what I say.
[01:29:54] Tony: Um, but he’ll change his opin­ion depend­ing on who donates mon­ey to his cause. So,
[01:30:00] Cameron: of donat­ing mon­ey to his cause, Elon is a big sup­port­er. And anoth­er thing I’ve done in the last week, um, I don’t know if you heard about this, but they had the first suc­cess­ful, um, launch of Star­ship, which went into space. And Fox and I watched the whole thing. Uh, not live, but the record­ing of it on their YouTube chan­nel, SpaceX’s YouTube chan­nel.
[01:30:23] Cameron: And it’s a stun­ning thing to see as a space nerd, this mas­sive ship went up into space with 36 Rap­tor burn­ers run­ning. Then it, it, um, the ear­ly stage burn­ers, um, dis­en­gaged. Came back down and land­ed in the water per­fect­ly. The oth­er one went up into space, its oth­er burn­ers engaged, and then it came back down and land­ed and it was, it was fab­u­lous.
[01:30:50] Cameron: It was very suc­cess­ful. Incred­i­ble to watch this. But then I watched a, like an hour long video of Elon doing a tour of the Star­ship fac­to­ry. They call it the Star Fac­to­ry, I think. And he’s explain­ing the intri­ca­cies of build­ing the Rap­tor engines and what they’re doing with the next mod­els and the next ver­sions.
[01:31:09] Cameron: And then I watched him at the Khan Lion event, the Adver­tis­ing Indus­tries event in Khan, where he talked about Twit­ter. for half an hour and what they’re doing with Twit­ter. The, the guy who host­ed the shows, the CEO of the agency WPP, his first ques­tion was, Elon, six months ago, you told our indus­try we could go fuck our­selves.
[01:31:28] Cameron: Uh, what was that all about? And then he explained, you know, why and the whole Twit­ter busi­ness mod­el and what he’s doing with Twit­ter. Then two days ago, I watched him with a pan­el of neu­ro­sci­en­tists give the lat­est Neu­ralink update. And talk­ing about what the guy with the Neu­ralink implant is doing and how they’re get­ting ready for the next set of peo­ple they’re doing the implants on and all of the improve­ments that they’re mak­ing with Neu­ralink for the next iter­a­tion of it, what their goals are.
[01:31:55] Cameron: I’m like, lis­ten, look, I don’t care what you think about Elon, but one day he’s run­ning Twit­ter. The next day he’s send­ing rock­ets into space. The next day he’s talk­ing about the lat­est ver­sions of chip Brain implants, brain com­put­er inter­faces. I mean, how the guy fits all this into his day and into his brain and man­ages to jug­gle it all.
[01:32:21] Cameron: And then you’ve got, I don’t know what’s going on with the Bor­ing Project and you know, the Tes­la,
[01:32:27] Tony: Yeah, I was going to
[01:32:27] Cameron: Tes­la. I haven’t seen any Tes­la videos and the robots that they’re build­ing and this and that and the oth­er. It’s insane what he’s doing. He’s like five Steve Job­s’s rolled into one.
[01:32:38] Tony: okay, that’s one take on it. I just see Richard Bran­son say­ing, look at this, look at this, look at this. Cause you’ve answered that. You’ve answered my ques­tion, which was what’s hap­pen­ing with Tes­la. Does­n’t talk about Tes­la. Tes­la’s shit. Like the, the stock­’s down. They’re not deliv­er­ing cars on time. No, one’s buy­ing them in the num­bers.
[01:32:56] Tony: They thought they’d be buy­ing them in. Etc, etc. Chi­na’s cut­ting their lunch price wise. All the oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers are putting it. Oh, in that case, let’s go to Khan. Let’s go. It’s the clas­sic Richard Bran­son play. Let’s talk about Vir­gin Galac­tic when my cred­it card busi­ness is falling over.
[01:33:13] Cameron: Cyn­ic. Just a synec­doche, that’s, uh, yeah.
[01:33:16] Tony: Yeah, look, you can’t I think he’s an evil genius. I think he’s the ulti­mate Bond vil­lain. So, yes, he’s very smart, but, uh, he’s prob­a­bly, he’s prob­a­bly doing both things. He’s prob­a­bly five times Steve Jobs and he’s dis­tract­ing the share­hold­ers of Tes­la away from their, their cra­ter­ing
[01:33:31] Cameron: should, they should just do a Bond movie and just get Elon. He’d be up for that, like Trump was in Home Alone 2. They should just say to Elon, Hey, you want to play your­self as the evil vil­lain in a Bond movie? I’m sure he would be total­ly down for that.
[01:33:45] Tony: Like, uh, the Bond movie that, um, had, uh, a sort of, um, Rupert Mur­doch, basi­cal­ly. A Rupert Mur­doch
[01:33:52] Cameron: Jonathan, uh, was that the one with Jonathan Price, is it? Yeah, I vague­ly recall. I don’t know which one it was, but they all blend into one anoth­er
[01:34:00] Tony: yeah, it was um, one of the Pearce Bros­nan’s.
[01:34:02] Cameron: right. Yeah, you know, just, but this can, you just have Elon play Elon, like he would just do, you just do him, see, he would­n’t have any issues with doing that.
[01:34:12] Cameron: He’d be like, yeah, as long as you can fit it in between
[01:34:14] Tony: yeah, it’s pub­lic­i­ty.
[01:34:15] Cameron: 30 and 1. 45 on a Tues­day, I’ll be there.
[01:34:19] Tony: Want me to tweet about it? Yeah, I’ll tweet it. Oh, yeah, I’ll put it on next. I’ll pro­mote, I’ll pro­mote it for you. Sure. Do you need some
[01:34:24] Cameron: yeah, yeah,
[01:34:25] Tony: Yeah. Tes­la will bankroll this film. Yeah. Oh, I saw a bunch of dri­ver Tes­la on Aston Mar­tin. Yeah. Much bet­ter car.
[01:34:34] Cameron: Oh, that’s how they do it. Yeah. Yeah. And, and the plot is Grock, his AI, um, and his, uh, Opti­mus robots are tak­ing over the world in, while he’s get­ting ready to go to Mars in his star­ship. And it could just be a, he should buy the Bond fran­chise and like Tom Cruise did with Mis­sion Impos­si­ble, just take over the fran­chise and just make every Bond film about.
[01:35:01] Cameron: a pro­mo­tion­al tool for all of his busi­ness­es.
[01:35:04] Tony: yeah, well that’s, isn’t AI the cen­ter of the lat­est Tom Cruise movie, Mis­sion Impos­si­ble Part 1, where uh,
[01:35:10] Cameron: one.
[01:35:11] Tony: yeah, where he’s um, Rus­sians have an AI that’s been released into the world, um, it was, it was being test­ed on a nuclear sub­ma­rine, but it crashed the sub­ma­rine and got free, and uh, no, no,
[01:35:25] Cameron: So you’re say­ing the first Mis­sion Impos­si­ble film or a
[01:35:27] Tony: it,
[01:35:30] Cameron: But you said it’s part one.
[01:35:32] Tony: it just stops and it says wait for Mis­sion Impos­si­ble Part 2, com­ing out,
[01:35:36] Cameron: Oh, real­ly?
[01:35:37] Tony: yeah, haha.
[01:35:39] Cameron: Wow. How does he keep churn­ing those things out? I don’t know. I did­n’t even see the last one. I haven’t seen the last four. I don’t know. Have
[01:35:46] Tony: yeah, well you haven’t missed much, same sort of thing, but I like them because I just look at it and go, that’s amaz­ing, the guy can run as fast as he does and jump off things like he does and yeah, ride motor­cy­cles off cliffs,
[01:36:00] Cameron: in our fit­ness class at Kung Fu is from time to time, the Sifu makes us do Tom Cruise
[01:36:05] Tony: he’s my
[01:36:05] Cameron: down the mats. Yeah. Yeah, I know. It’s impres­sive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But we have to do Tom Cruise run­ning, which is, you know, that sort of. Crazy Sprint, yeah that guy, yeah that Sprint, up and down, yeah, yeah,
[01:36:18] Tony: like the Ter­mi­na­tor,
[01:36:20] Cameron: yeah. Nah, you got­ta hand it to Cruise, like I’m not a fan, I mean I think he’s made a few good films, but, you know, his stuff is most­ly non­sense, but uh, you got­ta hand it to the guy, like he, he knows how to do his thing. And, um, knows how to, knows how to make a movie and pro­mote it and, you know, keep it going.
[01:36:40] Tony: have a wife for 9 years and 11 months before the 10 year divorce law cuts in, in Cal­i­for­nia.
[01:36:47] Cameron: Oh, real­ly? What’s that? What’s the 10 year divorce law?
[01:36:49] Tony: Uh, from mem­o­ry, you lose half your assets in a divorce if you, if the wife’s been around for 10 years in one day. So Nicole Kid­man was out in nine years. Who was one after her? The, uh, there’s anoth­er lady after her was out in nine years.
[01:37:05] Cameron: I think some of them did­n’t last that long, did they?
[01:37:08] Tony: no, what’s the first one? Me? Katie Holmes. That’s what I was think­ing of.
[01:37:11] Tony: She last­ed nine years.
[01:37:13] Cameron: Right.
[01:37:14] Tony: last­ed nine years. What’s the first one? Mimi, Mimi some­one, I think, I don’t know how long she
[01:37:19] Cameron: Mimi Rogers.
[01:37:20] Tony: Rogers, he prob­a­bly did­n’t have
[01:37:21] Cameron: no, he mar­ried, he mar­ried Mimi Rogers in 1987. They divorced in 1990. Then he mar­ried Nicole Kid­man in 1990. They divorced in 2001. It’s 11 years. In
[01:37:34] Tony: gets half.
[01:37:34] Cameron: and, in 2006, he mar­ried Katie Holmes. And, uh, I don’t know when that end­ed. Inter­est­ing­ly though, Tom Cruise’s mar­riage has all end­ed when his wife’s turned 33.
[01:37:51] Tony: Maybe that’s the law in Cal­i­for­nia.
[01:37:54] Cameron: Mimi Rogers was 33, Nicole Kid­man was 33, 34 by the time her divorce was finalised. Eh, Katie Holmes was 33 when she filed for divorce. Appar­ent­ly a very big num­ber in Sci­en­tol­ogy. The reli­gion found­ed by L. Ron Hub­bard in Ari­zona, which lies on the 33rd par­al­lel, a cir­cle of lat­i­tude that is 33 degrees north of the Earth­’s equa­to­r­i­al plane.
[01:38:23] Cameron: In numerol­o­gy, 33 is a mas­ter num­ber or the mas­ter teacher. So, accord­ing to the offi­cial Sci­en­tol­ogy web­site, the ulti­mate goal of Sci­en­tol­ogy is true spir­i­tu­al enlight­en­ment and free­dom for all. But they don’t say why. What it’s got to do with 33? I thought it was 42 was the
[01:38:41] Tony: Yeah, mean­ing of life.
[01:38:42] Cameron: for there.
[01:38:43] Tony: Did­n’t Niko­la Tes­la have a lot to say about, um, I think they’re called uni­ver­sal num­bers or some­thing, but the num­bers that spoke to him, that the uni­verse was run on num­bers and there were some mag­i­cal num­bers that, um, had strange mag­i­cal pow­ers.
[01:38:58] Cameron: I read his auto­bi­og­ra­phy a few years ago. Um, great read. Like the guy was bonkers, but it’s a great read.
[01:39:05] Tony: Okay.
[01:39:07] Cameron: I like the fact he was den­i­grat­ing all oth­er sci­en­tists because they had to do exper­i­ments and build stuff, build stuff in the lab. He would say that every­thing that he built, he built it one time and it worked per­fect­ly because he just fig­ured it out.
[01:39:21] Cameron: He did­n’t, he did­n’t draw any­thing down, did­n’t write any plans. He just fig­ured it out in his brain and then he built it. First time, right time, do it once, do it right, all in his head. No, no blue­prints, no work­ing it out. That just Thought it through and did it. He also lined up his peas in per­fect sym­met­ri­cal lines before he could eat them.
[01:39:44] Cameron: But, uh, so I don’t know, man.
[01:39:48] Tony: Oh, I thought you meant his urine, like, uh, Howard Hugh­es.
[01:39:53] Cameron: Yeah, well, there you go. Anoth­er genius. What was, what was Trump’s line about
[01:40:01] Tony: He’s a germa­phobe. Oh no.
[01:40:03] Cameron: No, no. Trump’s called him­self some kind of a genius when he was pres­i­dent. I can’t remem­ber what it was. I’m a very, very sta­ble genius. Very sta­ble genius. I think that was the line. All right.
[01:40:18] Tony: Alright. Okay.
[01:40:20] Cameron: Uh, QAV a good week, every­one.
[01:40:22] Tony: Yep. Hap­py ASX.