QAV 746 — King Trump

QAV Club 746

[00:00:00] TK: One, two, three.

[00:00:08] CR: Wel­come back to QAV, Tony. QAV 746, the 11th, no, it’s not the 11th, that was yes­ter­day, it’s the 12th of Novem­ber, 2024. We’re in the brave new world,

[00:00:22] CR: again, of, uh, soon to be Trump pres­i­den­cy.

[00:00:29] TK: The Democ­rats have lost two

[00:00:31] TK: unlos­able elec­tions against some­one who they think is Satan incar­nate, and they haven’t changed their strat­e­gy or poli­cies in either elec­tion. Are they going to try for, you know, third time a charm?

[00:00:47] CR: Well, I think if we’ve learned any­thing by now is that the Democ­rats are done. They need to be dis­band­ed

[00:00:55] CR: and they need a new, but not that it mat­ters. It’s all kind of moot now because I don’t think there will be anoth­er elec­tion.

[00:01:03] TK: No, I agree. The red sweep.

[00:01:06] TK: The red sweep of the Sen­ate, the House, the

[00:01:08] TK: Pres­i­den­cy, and the Supreme Court. It’s, uh, it’s set up for, um, for, uh, King Trump. Isn’t that real­ly

[00:01:17] TK: going for­ward? Well the point I’ve been Bar­ron, Bar­ron

[00:01:20] TK: Trump.

[00:01:21] CR: the point I’ve been mak­ing to peo­ple for the last week or so is, look. He tried to over­throw the results of the 2020 elec­tion. Failed. Sort of a half assed attempt at it. It failed. They spent the next four years try­ing to put him in jail and take away his entire for­tune.

[00:01:43] CR: They screwed that up. think part­ly because they thought he was a spent force and they weren’t in any hur­ry and he was old and they were just going to run him into the ground and make his life mis­er­able. If you’re Trump, you know that if you’re ever out of pow­er again, they’re going to come at you five times as hard as they did that time.

[00:02:06] CR: So he can­not afford to not be in pow­er. From now on, his life is ruined, his chil­dren’s lives, you know, any­one asso­ci­at­ed with him who isn’t already in prison. So he’s been paint­ed into a

[00:02:20] CR: cor­ner. If I’m Trump right now, I’m

[00:02:22] CR: like, that’s it. We’re done. There’s nev­er, you know, going to have to change things around here.

[00:02:28] TK: Yeah. He’s got, he’s got the Democ­rats gave him one moti­va­tion once they con­vict­ed him and he knows that the only way out is a pres­i­den­tial par­don. He was just so moti­vat­ed to be elect­ed and now he’s moti­vat­ed to stay

[00:02:41] TK: in.

[00:02:43] CR: And he can’t even pres­i­den­tial­ly par­don him­self for the things they’re going after him in New York. He does­n’t have the pow­er to. you know, legal­ly with the state based stuff, although he’ll find a way. But yeah, like it’s, like for peo­ple who don’t under­stand his­to­ry, they prob­a­bly haven’t seen this before, but as a his­to­ry nerd, I’ve seen how this plays out time and time again.

[00:03:05] CR: And I quote you, I was quot­ing you on the bull­shit field

[00:03:08] CR: on Fri­day, quot­ing Mark Twain, His­to­ry does­n’t rhyme, but it repeats. Well, you know, we’ve way around.

[00:03:16] CR: His­to­ry does­n’t repeat, but it rhymes. Yeah. that way. Yeah.

[00:03:18] CR: I hope I got it right on Fri­day. We’ve, um, we’ve seen this before. Like we said in the psy­chopath epi­dem­ic, peo­ple don’t change.

[00:03:26] CR: And there are always the psy­chopaths that want the pow­er and they always come along and, and, you know, Julius Cae­sar crossed the Rubi­con. Because he was sup­posed to give up his gov­er­nor­ship in Gaul and dis­band his army and walk back into Rome as a pri­vate cit­i­zen. And he knew as soon as he did that, he was going to be arrest­ed, tri­alled, and sent to exile and have his entire for­tune tak­en away from him.

[00:03:54] CR: And it was like, alright, well, the sys­tem is cor­rupt any­way. Why would I hand myself over to a cor­rupt bunch of oli­garchs? Peo­ple go, well, there’s tra­di­tion and we have insti­tu­tions in place, and like, he did­n’t care. Uh, as the peo­ple who came before him did­n’t care either. I mean, Sul­la and Mar­ius did­n’t care

[00:04:15] CR: and opti­mists did­n’t care.

[00:04:17] CR: And Trump does­n’t care. He does­n’t care about insti­tu­tions and tra­di­tion and all

[00:04:22] CR: that kind of stuff. He’s proven that time and time again. He does­n’t care about laws, like they’re just to be,

[00:04:28] TK: He makes the laws. Well, I think to give him his due, too, he’s a great retail politi­cian. He just focused on, are you bet­ter now than you were for over the last four years? Or four years ago. And immi­gra­tion, that’s all he did. Um, to also give him his due, he sur­vived an assas­si­na­tion attempt and made the most of that.

[00:04:49] TK: Um, so, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s one thing to say he was moti­vat­ed to be elect­ed, but he actu­al­ly still had to get elect­ed and he did that con­vinc­ing­ly. And it’s just, and that’s what sur­pris­es me, I’m not sur­prised that Trump got elect­ed, I’m not sur­prised he’s a good politi­cian, I’m sur­prised the Democ­rats let him get elect­ed.

[00:05:08] TK: I mean, if you had to pick an oppo­nent in an elec­tion, would­n’t you want to go up against a con­vict­ed felon?

[00:05:15] CR: rapist. rapist and a con­vict­ed felon. Well, to be fair, he has­n’t been

[00:05:22] TK: con­vict­ed of rape. he was found, he was found liable for rape in a civ­il tri­al against E. J. and Car­ol. Okay. in a crim­i­nal tri­al, but he was found liable to be guilty of rape in a civ­il tri­al. Same thing in my book. Found by a jury to be guilty of rape. I mean, you know, um, but, uh, yeah, any­way, it’s absolute­ly

[00:05:45] CR: shock­ing and the Democ­rats have just slip walked into this whole thing and I, you know, I’m laugh­ing Tak­en it for grant­ed.

[00:05:55] CR: like Markham and peo­ple like that They go, well, we’re just gonna have to fight and try again in four years.

[00:06:00] CR: I’m like, it’s not gonna be a four years What are you talk­ing about? Like I’ve been telling you for 10 years to take this guy seri­ous­ly. You’re still not tak­ing him seri­ous­ly. You’re still not lis­ten­ing to what he’s say­ing and tak­ing him seri­ous­ly. You

[00:06:11] CR: think it’s just, uh, I don’t know. It’s just the­atre.

[00:06:15] CR: And I’m sure a lot of it is polit­i­cal the­atre, but I also think he’s seri­ous. Any­way, let’s talk about that in I don’t know if he’s I don’t know if he’s going to set him­self

[00:06:23] TK: up to be king for life in

[00:06:25] TK: real­i­ty, but I’m sure he’s going to do

[00:06:27] TK: some­thing to entrench his abil­i­ty not to be pros­e­cut­ed going for­ward. I don’t know what shape that will take. Um, it could be that he extends elec­toral terms. It could be that, um, he, you know, abol­ish­es the right to run for more than eight years.

[00:06:41] TK: It could be that. He does some­thing else, but he’s going to hang on to pow­er. That’s for sure.

[00:06:47] CR: Well, the oth­er per­son

[00:06:48] CR: who looks like a freak­ing genius right now is, uh, your favourite Bond vil­lain, Elon Musk. You know, Oh, the min­is­ter.

[00:06:57] CR: the last cou­ple of years, he was an idiot for buy­ing Twit­ter. And I keep say­ing, you can say a lot of things about Elon Musk, but one thing he is not is an idiot.

[00:07:08] CR: And he took that lit­tle Twit­ter thing that he bought for 44 bil­lion dol­lars and used

[00:07:14] CR: it to win an elec­tion. And basi­cal­ly, he now runs, he’s the shad­ow gov­ern­ment of the US.

[00:07:22] TK: Well, he’s the smartest per­son in the shad­ow gov­ern­ment. So that effec­tive­ly, you’re right. He does run it.

[00:07:29] TK: he’s min­is­ter for gov­ern­ment, min­is­ter for gov­ern­ment effi­cien­cy, which. He’s the most qual­i­fied per­son for that role, Cam. I mean, he runs

[00:07:37] TK: X, he runs Tes­la, he runs Star­link, he runs Neu­ralink. SpaceX, um, and now he runs a gov­ern­ment depart­ment and prob­a­bly the whole admin­is­tra­tion from behind.

[00:07:49] TK: So But do you know what cer­tain­ly is

[00:07:50] TK: effi­cient.

[00:07:52] CR: full title is? It’s the Depart­ment of Gov­ern­ment Effi­cien­cy, DOGE. Because Doge­coin is one of the cryp­tos that he’s been pump­ing and dump­ing for the last few years. Right.

[00:08:05] CR: He’ll say some­thing pos­i­tive about Doge­coin on Twit­ter and the price will go up and then he’ll sell it, and then he does it again, rinse and repeat.

[00:08:11] CR: So he is call­ing it the Doge. Now, the Depart­ment of Gov­ern­ment Effi­cien­cy, and of course Tes­la’s share price, which is some­thing to do with invest­ing, was $251 before the elec­tion and is now $347 four days. So he’s made,

[00:08:30] TK: increase. yeah, he’s made like 33 bil­lion, um, in a week in terms of his net worth. Um,

[00:08:41] CR: so there you go.

[00:08:42] CR: I think Twit­ter cost him 44 bil­lion and it was­n’t all his mon­ey. So any­way,

[00:08:48] TK: I don’t.

[00:08:48] TK: think any of it was

[00:08:49] TK: his mon­ey.

[00:08:50] CR: do you think the

[00:08:50] CR: adver­tis­ers that dumped Twit­ter will be com­ing back to Twit­ter?

[00:08:54] TK: No,

[00:08:55] TK: No, I don’t. No, I think it’s still a garbage

[00:08:58] TK: dump. But, as we’ve seen, you can talk about float­ing garbage dumps and get away with it. In Amer­i­ca, it does­n’t mean much.

[00:09:05] CR: Yeah. Well, Port­fo­lio Reports, Tony, the US port­fo­lio, not sur­pris­ing­ly, um, doing all right. Uh, ha. Let’s come back a lit­tle bit from where it was the day after the elec­tion. It went over, it went up to 110 per­cent of where we start­ed from, which was, uh, let me see, what was it? Novem­ber, uh, oh, hold on, uh, Sep­tem­ber 2023.

[00:09:34] CR: It was up over 110 per­cent at one point, it’s come back now, it’s about 96 per­cent up since that time, a lit­tle bit over a year, ver­sus the bench­mark over there, I’m using it as the S& P 500, which is up about 35%. So we’re doing rough­ly three times. The index over there. Um, you know, Tes­la’s up 30 per­cent in a week, but you know, we don’t play in that sort of a space.

[00:10:00] CR: But in terms of us, slow and steady wins the race kind of approach, up 100 per­cent three times the bench­mark in the years, not bad. And I’ll talk more, I’m going to do a pulled pork on one of our US com­pa­nies, TK, at the end of this. I’m going to do TK, Which, as it turns out, has a huge oper­a­tion in Aus­tralia. So, um, for peo­ple who are inter­est­ed in learn­ing a bit more about U. S. com­pa­nies, I will be talk­ing about that lat­er on in the show. Um, the Aus­tralian port­fo­lio, the Aus­tralian, uh, Stock­o­pe­dia port­fo­lio, Which was start­ed in, I think, July 23? It’s up about 17, a lit­tle bit over 17%, ver­sus the S& P 200 in Aus­tralia, which is up about 12 per­cent over the same peri­od of time.

[00:10:57] CR: So it’s not doing triple,

[00:10:59] CR: or dou­ble. Well, is it though?

[00:11:02] CR: Is that, I don’t know if Stock­o­pe­dia reports CAGR.

[00:11:04] TK: What’s Stock­o­pe­dia report­ing then? You’re giv­ing us a cumu­la­tive increase num­ber, aren’t you? Annu­al

[00:11:10] TK: increase num­ber. Uh, well, am I? I don’t know. It’s very hard to

[00:11:16] TK: you are.

[00:11:17] CR: Is it cumu­la­tive? It’s very hard to tell. It’s time weight­ed return. Actu­al­ly, I just clicked on the lit­tle ques­tion mark.

[00:11:23] CR: Okay. Remem­ber we had that, we had a whole show on time weight­ed ver­sus

[00:11:27] TK: mon­ey weight­ed CAGRs and sim­ple CAGR.

[00:11:31] TK: And we, you and I both, both think sim­ple CAGR for a port­fo­lio like ours is the right tool to man­age, but I’m com­fort­able using what­ev­er Stock­o­pe­dia uses.

[00:11:40] CR: So time weight­ed return. Mm hmm. per

[00:11:43] CR: annum, the 16. 7%.

[00:11:46] TK: Mm hmm. And just for a recap, I mean, time weight­ed just, and mon­ey weight­ed, are just ways of chang­ing CAGR to reflect, or to be use­ful to fund man­agers. who use those two terms because they can have inflows and out­flows. So they talk about what did I make for the amount of time I was ful­ly invest­ed in the mar­ket this year, summed up, um, and aver­aged and then cumu­la­tive­ly over time.

[00:12:13] TK: Does­n’t mean much for us because we’re always, we’re almost always ful­ly invest­ed and we’re not turn­ing over as much as a fund man­ag­er would.

[00:12:19] CR: The dum­my port­fo­lio in Stock­o­pe­dia is up 16. 8%. That is CAGR over its life­time, which is five years or so. And that’s ver­sus the SPDR200, which is up 9. 15%. So not quite dou­ble the index of the stock. On that one. So that is, uh, my port­fo­lio report. By the way, for this finan­cial year, which we’re almost, near­ly halfway through, the, um, bench­mark is up 7.

[00:12:54] CR: 8 per­cent. Now we’re up 14. 54 per­cent. So near­ly dou­ble for this finan­cial year. It’s, um, been a good one so far. Not so good for RSG though. I’ll talk about that in a lit­tle bit,

[00:13:10] CR: but I want to talk about Trump in the mar­kets. Tony, we start­ed talk­ing off about Trump, uh, Trump, Trump. Um, Every econ­o­mist I saw in the US pret­ty much before the elec­tion said that Trump’s eco­nom­ic poli­cies were going to be a dis­as­ter for the US econ­o­my.

[00:13:28] CR: He gets elect­ed and the share mar­ket goes com­plete­ly bonkers

[00:13:31] CR: over Yeah.

[00:13:34] CR: Um, how do you, how do you fig­ure that? What’s, what’s going on?

[00:13:39] TK: Well, no sim­ple answer. The first, first, prob­a­bly the main

[00:13:42] TK: point is he’s, one of his poli­cies is to low­er com­pa­ny tax rates to 15%.

[00:13:48] TK: So that straight away, as it comes in, it’s going to give every com­pa­ny a, you know, a 10 to 20, 10 to 15 per­cent sort of, Prof­it boost, um, straight away. Cause I think, I think their com­pa­ny tax rate’s about 25 per­cent over there.

[00:14:04] TK: Might even be 30.

[00:14:06] CR: I think he dropped it from 33 down to 21 or some­thing last time. I’m not sure So I’m not sure what it is now, but, um, he’s drop­ping it to 15. So that’s, that’s the rea­son for the stock mar­ket tak­ing

[00:14:18] TK: off. Obvi­ous­ly the

[00:14:20] TK: com­pa­nies view

[00:14:22] TK: his admin­is­tra­tion as being light on reg­u­la­tion. So that’s anoth­er, um, reduc­tion in costs for them. Um, the, the, the econ­o­mists have tend to fight.

[00:14:33] TK: Econ­o­mists, I’ve read, haven’t focused on that, they’ve focused on things like tar­iffs and we’ve been through an admin­is­tra­tion, um, already with Trump with tar­iffs and even though he says he’s going to put 60 per­cent tar­iffs on Chi­na and what­ev­er it is on every­one else in the world, he did­n’t do it last time and I don’t think he will this time either, so the econ­o­mists maybe have tak­en him too lit­er­al­ly and, and I think You know, my take on it is, Don­ald Trump is very trans­ac­tion­al.

[00:15:05] TK: So he wants lever­age. So if he’s nego­ti­at­ing with a coun­try on some­thing, does­n’t mat­ter what it is, he will put a tar­iff on them, um, to hurt them until they come to the par­ty on the oth­er issue. And I think that’s how he’ll play tar­iffs. So I think last time the aver­age was about 15 per­cent and it’s prob­a­bly going to be some­thing like that.

[00:15:25] TK: This time going for­ward, but it’ll be lumpy. Um, he’ll real­ize and he did last time that, that tar­iffs are actu­al­ly a tax on his peo­ple, on, on US res­i­dents because they pay for them in price ris­es. Um, and he learned that les­son in the last four years. So he’s not going to make that same mis­take now. I think he’ll, I think he’ll be very trans­ac­tion­al with his tar­iffs and where they’re applied and for how long.

[00:15:49] CR: but he did do it last time.

[00:15:52] TK: Cor­rect. he put tar­iffs on and the Biden admin­is­tra­tion kept them on.

[00:15:57] TK: Yeah, .Um, but they, but they weren’t as high or as far

[00:16:02] TK: reach­ing as what he promised in his

[00:16:03] TK: poli­cies, and I think he even dropped some because about must have been about the midterm elec­tions from mem­o­ry. Uh, there was a lot of polling say­ing that peo­ple are start­ing to hurt because they’re pay­ing more for their goods.

[00:16:16] TK: And, uh, I, I can’t recall whether that meant he wound some back, but it cer­tain­ly stopped him from doing more in the sec­ond half of the admin­is­tra­tion.

[00:16:25] CR: Hmm. A May 2019 analy­sis con­duct­ed by CNBC found Trump’s tar­iffs were equiv­a­lent to one of the largest tax increas­es in the U. S. in decades. Stud­ies have found that Trump’s tar­iffs reduced real income in the Unit­ed States as well as adverse­ly affect­ing U. S. GDP.

[00:16:46] CR: That did­n’t stop peo­ple from vot­ing him in at a land­slide because he’s good for the, he’s going to be good for the econ­o­my.

[00:16:53] TK: Yeah, well, what­ev­er he did back then, it was still seen by the

[00:16:56] TK: Amer­i­can peo­ple as bet­ter eco­nom­i­cal­ly and bet­ter for their hip pock­et than what Biden was. And, you know, I have some sym­pa­thy with that. Not that Biden caused every­thing. Inter­est rate ris­es has caused a lot of the prob­lem post COVID. But, um, you know, as I’ve spo­ken about before, there’s no coor­di­na­tion between Cen­tral banks and rais­ing inter­est rates and gov­ern­ment spend­ing.

[00:17:16] TK: And when you have both, it’s a dou­ble wham­my because when this gov­ern­ment spend­ing just keeps ris­ing, keeps dri­ving up inter­est rates, which, um, or keeps dri­ving up infla­tion, which then rise, uh, rais­es inter­est rates. So, you know, it’s, it could have been bet­ter man­aged both here and over­seas in the last three or four years.

[00:17:37] CR: I think from the stud­ies I’ve read, the econ­o­my was doing well in the last cou­ple of years of the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion. He obvi­ous­ly inher­it­ed the GFC from Bush, had to spend years fix­ing the econ­o­my. It was, it was start­ing to real­ly pick up when Trump got in, Trump rode that, increased tari put tar­iffs on to destroy it, and then COVID hit, ruined the econ­o­my.

[00:18:01] CR: Biden had to clean up the mess of COVID. And, uh, yeah, got pun­ished for the econ­o­my. But, uh,

[00:18:10] CR: any­way, um, so that’s Trump in the mar­kets. I want to talk about some­body else

[00:18:14] CR: get­ting pun­ished. RSG Ed Hang on, but before

[00:18:20] CR: Oh, you’re not fin­ished you do, yeah, cou­ple of oth­er things, it’s

[00:18:24] TK: occurred to me that the whole elec­tion, the whole Trump sort of razzmatazz, it’s, have you heard of a thing called the Nash Equi­lib­ri­um?

[00:18:36] CR: Yeah. We’ve talked about it on the show before.

[00:18:38] TK: Yeah, so it’s the nat­ur­al state that things evolve to, that they, it’s their rest­ing state if you like. And for me, The U. S. Nation­al Equi­lib­ri­um is World WWE, World Cham­pi­onship Wrestling. It’s hype, it’s razzmatazz, it’s chore­o­graphed, it’s all for show. Um, but there’s no real thing, there’s no real match going on, and, and I just think that that’s where pol­i­tics have land­ed to in the US now.

[00:19:06] TK: It’s all razzmatazz, hype, for show, I don’t know if that’s a nat­ur­al rest­ing state for cap­i­tal­ism, um, or unreg­u­lat­ed cap­i­tal­ism, but it’s cer­tain­ly, you know, over my life­time Amer­i­ca’s just gone down that track more and more and more and more, um, more so than oth­er coun­tries that have more reg­u­la­tions on cap­i­tal­ism.

[00:19:26] CR: Hmm.

[00:19:27] TK: So yeah, I guess that’s my com­ment about the elec­tion cycle in Amer­i­ca. Um, and, and the Democ­rats are still try­ing to play a straight bat and do the right thing when what Amer­i­cans want is, you know, chairs over the head of the oppo­nent and being, jump­ing from the top turn­buck­le and land­ing on peo­ple as if it’s, as if it’s all real.

[00:19:50] CR: Yeah, no, I total­ly agree with you and it’s been head­ing in this direc­tion for decades. Like, I’ve been telling peo­ple for decades that this is where it was going to end up. No one lis­tens, you know. I remem­ber when Oba­ma replaced George Bush and every­one, all my Demo­c­ra­t­ic friends were cel­e­brat­ing. I remem­ber say­ing, just wait till you see what comes next.

[00:20:15] CR: You know, because it does­n’t, you know, it does­n’t get bet­ter because the Democ­rats, we’ve talked about this for years, but the Democ­rats, since Clin­ton in par­tic­u­lar, have moved fur­ther and fur­ther to the right, and so the right, in order to dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself, has to keep mov­ing fur­ther and fur­ther to the right, and so you end up with this one par­ty that’s moved so far to the right, it’s become WWE, clown cir­cus, it’s idioc­ra­cy.

[00:20:44] CR: The, um,

[00:20:45] TK: Yeah.

[00:20:46] CR: Mike Judges very prophet­ic film. Uh, it becomes Idioc­ra­cy and, and then the Democ­rats keep mov­ing fur­ther and fur­ther to the right to try and, uh, stop it. And so, and until they get to the point where they’ve become so far to the right, the GOP is now the par­ty of the work­ing class. The Repub­li­cans are now the,

[00:21:08] CR: the par­ty of the minori­ties and the work­ing class­es.

[00:21:11] CR: That’s how.

[00:21:13] CR: Top­sy turvy the places become

[00:21:16] TK: is kind of where they start­ed when they abol­ished slav­ery under Lin­coln. so yeah, so the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal sys­tem is quite fun­gi­ble. I’m not sure I agree with you that things have moved fur­ther to the right. Um, I think Democ­rats have always been fair­ly far to the right, and the Repub­li­cans have been fur­ther.

[00:21:35] TK: Prob­a­bly just, we’re prob­a­bly just argu­ing shades of grey here, but, um, I don’t think any­one’s held a pro­gres­sive or a left posi­tion in US pol­i­tics, um, in the main

[00:21:43] TK: par­ties, ever.

[00:21:45] CR: No, no, I agree with you. I keep telling peo­ple Bernie Sanders here would be, um, mod­er­ate. He’d be, he’d be Sena.

[00:21:52] CR: Yeah.

[00:21:54] CR: yeah.

[00:21:55] CR: Over there they’re con­sid­er­ing the, so far, the crazy rad­i­cal left and

[00:21:59] TK: cor­rect. Yeah.

[00:22:00] CR: you’re just catch­ing up, Bernie. Health­care? We’ve had it for 50 years. Like, what are you talk­ing about?

[00:22:08] TK: Yeah.

[00:22:09] TK: so any­way, that was my last com­ment on

[00:22:10] TK: Trump.

[00:22:10] CR: Right. So Ed called me yes­ter­day, goes, mate, have you seen R Do you hold

[00:22:16] TK: Yeah.

[00:22:17] CR: I said, yeah, I got it. My super, why you had a look at it today, ? I said, no,

[00:22:22] TK: Ooh,

[00:22:23] CR: good way to, good way to open a con­ver­sa­tion. Ed’s in his car, you know, he and his wife are off trav­el­ing. Rachel are off doing their

[00:22:29] CR: road­show thing. Um, so.

[00:22:32] CR: Res­olute Min­ing. Uh, boy. Tony’s talked a lot of

[00:22:38] CR: Sov­er­eign Risk.

[00:22:40] TK: Yes.

[00:22:42] CR: Tony’s always talk­ing to us about Sov­er­eign Risk. Well, this is what Sov­er­eign Risk looks like. Uh, they con­firmed, Res­olute Min­ing con­firmed yes­ter­day that the com­pa­ny’s CEO, Ter­ence Holo­han, and two oth­er employ­ees had been detained in Mali by gov­ern­ment offi­cials.

[00:23:00] CR: So they went to basi­cal­ly, well it sounds like they went to like basi­cal­ly the trea­sury. Um, for a meet­ing about tax­a­tion uh, weren’t allowed to leave, basi­cal­ly. It says the exec­u­tives were in Bamako to hold dis­cus­sions with the min­ing and tax author­i­ties regard­ing gen­er­al activ­i­ties relat­ed to Res­olute’s in coun­try busi­ness prac­tices and to progress open claims made against Res­olute.

[00:23:25] CR: Which the com­pa­ny main­tains are unsub­stan­ti­at­ed. Fol­low­ing the con­clu­sion of these meet­ings on Fri­day, the 8th of Novem­ber, 2024, the three employ­ees were unex­pect­ed­ly detained. The share price col­lapsed by 30 per­cent yes­ter­day, and it had been up for me. I do hold it in my super. It had been up about 30%, a lit­tle bit more, 35%.

[00:23:49] CR: They’ve been doing okay. It’s a gold min­ing com­pa­ny. Uh, gold’s been declin­ing, but it was doing okay. And then it just tanked. Ed called me and said, what do you think? Is this a, is this a red flag? And I said, well, look, I thought about it for a bit and I said, look, I’ll talk to Tony about it tomor­row. But

[00:24:07] CR: for me, a red flag is when the com­pa­ny’s obvi­ous­ly, when, when there’s a sud­den res­ig­na­tion of senior exec­u­tives and there’s bad news, seems to be com­ing, and we’re try­ing to get out ahead of the bad news.

[00:24:21] CR: Um. As far as we know, there’s no bad news asso­ci­at­ed

[00:24:26] CR: with the com­pa­ny, although they might get a big tax bill.

[00:24:29] CR: Um, the, Res, um, Mar­ley

[00:24:34] TK: well there might be bad news, to inter­rupt, there might be bad news com­ing because the new gov­ern­ment in Mali has said

[00:24:41] TK: that they would take stakes up to 35 per­cent in the min­ing com­pa­nies oper­at­ing there, so that could be com­ing.

[00:24:51] CR: so that could be com­ing, but

[00:24:55] TK: Yeah, and it’s also, as you said, it’s a form of tax, it’s a form of tax­a­tion, real­ly, they don’t want to oper­ate a mine, they want to get

[00:25:01] TK: their slice. Mm.

[00:25:02] CR: Yes. and they did this a cou­ple of months ago to a Cana­di­an, um,

[00:25:10] CR: And it all got resolved. Cana­di­an min­ing com­pa­ny had to pay him a big­ger chunk, but it was busi­ness as usu­al. And so I said, and it was­n’t a three point sell, well it was close, I said, you know what, obvi­ous­ly not advised you do what you’re going to do, but,

[00:25:26] CR: um, I, I’m prob­a­bly going to hold for anoth­er day and see what

[00:25:30] CR: hap­pens. And today it became a three point sell. Um, it fell.

[00:25:34] TK: real­ly?

[00:25:35] CR: Yeah. There’s still no news the

[00:25:39] CR: last I checked, which was a cou­ple of hours ago, I don’t know if you’ve any, seen any­thing since then, but,

[00:25:47] TK: I

[00:25:48] CR: I, um, I don’t think there’s any update, um,

[00:25:52] CR: so, yeah, no, I’m just look­ing now. There’s, there’s no

[00:25:57] TK: oth­er one to watch

[00:25:58] TK: is, sor­ry, the oth­er one to watch is West African Resources, who are also, Oper­at­ing in Mali.

[00:26:06] CR: oh god, do I hold those? WAF?

[00:26:10] TK: And they’re down as well, but they’re a long way above their sell line.

[00:26:15] CR: So, um, uh, I’ll talk a lit­tle bit about what’s going on in Mali cause I did some research on it and then I’ll get you to talk a lit­tle bit about how you would play this. But Mali has a mil­i­tary led gov­ern­ment, been in pow­er since August, 2020. There was a coup that oust­ed the pres­i­dent, uh, Ibrahim Boubacar Keï­ta, um, sup­pos­ed­ly amid wide­spread dis­sat­is­fac­tion over cor­rup­tion and jihadist insur­gen­cies and those sorts of things.

[00:26:46] CR: So there was a jun­ta led by Colonel Assi­mi Goï­ta, who ini­tial­ly promised a swift return to civil­ian rule, which sur­pris­ing­ly nev­er hap­pened. Um, and it’s still under a mil­i­tary led gov­ern­ment. In Octo­ber, 2024. Colonel Goï­ta pro­mot­ed him­self to the rank of Army Gen­er­al. Which, you

[00:27:13] CR: know, I’ve been threat­en­ing to do in my house­hold for a long time.

[00:27:17] CR: If peo­ple don’t start lis­ten­ing to me, I’m sure that’ll make all the dif­fer­ence.

[00:27:22] TK: Yeah, how’s that going for you?

[00:27:23] CR: Oh, it’s not. Um, the Fox, every time I pro­mote myself, Fox just pro­motes him­self above

[00:27:31] CR: me. He goes, Oh yeah, well, I’m a

[00:27:33] CR: five star army gen­er­al. What are you going to do now? And I’m like, ah, okay, shit.

[00:27:39] TK: Oh yeah, I tried pro­mot­ing myself and all I got was dad’s been drink­ing again.

[00:27:47] CR: So they’ve tak­en steps to sus­pend polit­i­cal activ­i­ties, restrict­ing media free­dom, sup­press­ing the oppo­si­tion, uh, all the usu­al stuff that you’d expect. Pover­ty lev­els are up around 90 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion accord­ing to the World Bank. And they’ve, they’ve received a lot of crit­i­cism from the UN and the World Bank and those sorts of things, but it has­n’t real­ly stopped them.

[00:28:11] CR: Uh, they expelled French and UN troops, uh, sought assis­tance from Rus­sia, sev­ered diplo­mat­ic ties with Ukraine, because Kiev was appar­ent­ly sup­port­ing some of the rebels there. So, um, this is all going on, and the jun­ta have basi­cal­ly said they need more mon­ey. And so for­eign com­pa­nies that are extract­ing wealth out of the ground, they’ve said, Oi, pay up.

[00:28:37] CR: And, uh, unfor­tu­nate­ly for the Res­olute exec­u­tives,

[00:28:42] CR: they’ve been swept up in that I tell you, I don’t know if in those con­di­tions, if I would have been going to a meet­ing with the tax, with the

[00:28:50] TK: Yeah, I was a bit sur­prised by that too. I’d be send­ing my lawyer. I don’t know

[00:28:55] TK: if I’d be going.

[00:28:56] CR: Oh, you like your lawyer that much, do you?

[00:29:01] TK: Yeah, but we don’t know. I mean, it’s a news­pa­per

[00:29:04] TK: head­line too, so we don’t know how dra­mat­ic they’re play­ing it up to be. Have they been detained at the local wine bar for a few coldies and, you know, or are they incar­cer­at­ed? We don’t know.

[00:29:17] CR: well, the com­pa­ny’s announce­ment said that they are in

[00:29:20] CR: con­stant con­tact with the three exec­u­tives and they’re being treat­ed very well. So it sounds like they’ve just been like, well, you just can’t leave. They’re in the

[00:29:29] TK: Doing lips in the mon­ey vault with the Hon­da.

[00:29:33] CR: they’re in the Qan­tas lounge, uh,

[00:29:35] CR: nego­ti­at­ing an extra plate of cheese and crack­ers. I look at it, no, I’m sure it’s,

[00:29:40] TK: We don’t know. We don’t know. That’s the prob­lem, isn’t it? We don’t know. And it would be scary, I

[00:29:44] TK: agree, but we don’t know.

[00:29:46] CR: if you held RSG and this hap­pened, Tony, and it dropped by 30%, but it was all unknown, how do you

[00:29:52] CR: think he’d play it?

[00:29:54] TK: Well, it sounds the same way you did. If it’s gone past that three point sell line, I’d sell. Oth­er­wise

[00:29:58] TK: I’d hold, um, cause it’s, there’s an absence of infor­ma­tion. It’s a very flu­id sit­u­a­tion. And I recall, I don’t know how long ago it was, cer­tain­ly in the last 12 months when the gov­ern­ment changed, when the coup hap­pened, those, those shares dropped quite sub­stan­tial­ly and they recov­ered.

[00:30:18] TK: Even more sub­stan­tial­ly when things set­tle down. So if there’s a nego­ti­a­tion going on, I sus­pect as soon as the out­come is known and pub­lic, um, the share price will adjust accord­ing­ly, which could be to drop fur­ther, you know, the gov­ern­ment may well nation­al­ize the mines. There’s been no talk of that. So I sus­pect it’s going to be a, Hey, pay us a bit more and we’ll go away.

[00:30:40] TK: So it’s a bit like an extor­tion rack­et real­ly, isn’t it? Hey, uh, acci­dents hap­pen. Oh, sor­ry, sor­ry, sor­ry about that, Squire. Oh, broke.

[00:30:53] TK: Yeah, so I sus­pect that’s what’s going to hap­pen. Um, you know, as I said before, when we talked about this, these com­pa­nies like Res­olute, like West African Resources, trade at half the PE of the Aus­tralian coun­ter­parts for this very rea­son that sov­er­eign risk hap­pens.

[00:31:09] TK: Um, and, uh, You know, I think that makes them more attrac­tive because you get more of the cash flow. The gold min­ing com­pa­nies in a high gold price envi­ron­ment, so they are mak­ing mon­ey hand over fist. They’re not sur­pris­ing they’ve attract­ed atten­tion from the gov­ern­ment. And, you know, quite right­ly so. I mean, if I was in the gov­ern­ment shoes and I had 90 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion under the pover­ty line and mon­ey was being tak­en over­seas by oth­er com­pa­nies, I’d be hav­ing a dis­cus­sion with them as well.

[00:31:40] TK: I think that’s, you know, we, we joke, I’m jok­ing about it, but it’s fair and rea­son­able, I think. to have that kind of dis­cus­sion with them. Um, and, and it’s always, it’s always a inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion because if the gov­ern­ment nation­al­izes the mine and they’ve got to oper­ate it and they don’t know any­thing about gold min­ing, um, unless they’ve got some­one like Rus­sia wait­ing in the wings to take it over, or Chi­na, which is prob­a­bly I would­n’t rule it out.

[00:32:05] TK: It’s high­ly unlike­ly, but I would­n’t rule it out. They’re going to need the local, the cur­rent oper­a­tors to con­tin­ue to oper­ate the gold mines. And, um, they don’t want to scare off over­seas cap­i­tal because they, um, they need it because they’ve got no cap­i­tal them­selves. So they can’t devel­op the resources unless they have peo­ple will­ing to invest to, you know, to look for gold and find it and build a mine.

[00:32:26] TK: So, again, this is a Nash equi­lib­ri­um. It’ll come down to, um, you know, a nego­ti­a­tion and a set­tle­ment, prob­a­bly an increase in tax and pay­ment and, um, then busi­ness as usu­al in a high­ly prof­itable indus­try for the Aus­tralian oper­a­tors. But yeah, I mean, look at the share price that these, these stock prices I volatile, I go up and down accord­ing to the dribs and drabs of polit­i­cal news we get in Aus­tralia from Mali.

[00:32:53] TK: I don’t recall the ABC hav­ing a reporter on the ground in Mali, so what­ev­er we hear about here is going to be sec­ond hand at best.

[00:33:05] CR: yeah, and

[00:33:08] CR: you know, I said to Ed in my lim­it­ed expe­ri­ence, mar­kets tend to over­re­act some­times to things like this.

[00:33:18] CR: Uh, the fun­da­men­tals. We dun­no how it’s gonna change the fun­da­men­tals. Peo­ple are just pan­ick­ing and dump­ing it and get­ting out. Um, but uh, yeah, it’s a rea­son­ably. Big

[00:33:29] CR: com­pa­ny. Um, I think it’s like quite, I think it was like, uh, aver­age dai­ly trade was 8 mil­lion or some­thing like that.

[00:33:37] CR: Um, big enough

[00:33:38] CR: to be in my super. It has like a mar­ket cap of a bil­lion dol­lars, I think. I’m just bring­ing up Stock Doc­tor now to check that. Let’s see. Uh, do, do, do, do 9 920 bil­lion. So it’s, uh, Not 920 mil­lion bil­lion mil­lion. So it’s a fair­ly big com­pa­ny. And, uh, I do imag­ine that if this gets all resolved, it’ll be, uh, it might bounce back, but so even though it’s past the three point trend line, I’m like,

[00:34:19] CR: it did­n’t become a three point trend line sell because they came out with some bad num­bers.

[00:34:24] CR: It’s pan­ic. Sell­ing. And I’m still reluc­tant to let it go when I think it could just, if they get let go and giv­en a pat on the head and a kiss on the

[00:34:33] CR: cheek and they’re back out tomor­row. And it’s like, yeah, okay, we’re going to pay an

[00:34:35] CR: extra, what­ev­er per­cent tax it might bounce back.

[00:34:41] TK: Yeah. Look, I, I agree. Um, I’m just look­ing at their,

[00:34:45] TK: their rev­enue by, or, uh, prof­it by divi­sion. So most of the prof­it is com­ing from Mali, but they do have a mine in Maca, in, uh, Sene­gal, and they do have one, uh, they do have, um, explo­ration in Guinea. So it’s, um, yes, it will hit them if they lose the mine and, and, Mar­ley.

[00:35:05] TK: My gut feel says they won’t lose it. They’ll just lose some of the prof­its from it and come to a set­tle­ment. But, you know, I’m no expert.

[00:35:13] CR: Hmm. Well, that’s where it’s at. Um, I’ll prob­a­bly, I’m in two minds whether or not to sell it.

[00:35:23] TK: Well, I had a look at it just then. It’s right on the sell line. So I’d be wait­ing to see if it dropped below

[00:35:29] TK: before I sold.

[00:35:31] CR: it’s, um, you know, it’s one of those things where rules is rules, but there are rules and there are rules. I mean, again,

[00:35:41] TK: You’re tempt­ed to

[00:35:42] TK: fudge it, are you?

[00:35:43] CR: I am because again, it’s not, it has­n’t dropped because of change to the fun­da­men­tals or the mar­kets. You know, think it’s busi­ness prospects

[00:35:53] CR: aren’t great. I think it’s a, it’s a pan­ic sell. Maybe they know more than I do, and maybe they know that this is it.

[00:35:59] CR: It’s done, but I don’t know it. Any­way,

[00:36:01] TK: look, I think you’re right. And if it defin­i­tive­ly drops below the three point trend line, then yeah, I think that’s the mar­ket mak­ing its mind up based on,

[00:36:10] TK: you know, cool­er heads. I mean, they’re There are oth­er peo­ple out there invest­ed in this com­pa­ny and they’re all try­ing to find out infor­ma­tion.

[00:36:17] TK: Even­tu­al­ly some­one will get access to the infor­ma­tion, to an insid­er prob­a­bly, and will make a deci­sion and that will fil­ter through the mar­ket and pro­vide an indi­ca­tion of what the hit to the com­pa­ny is going to be going for­ward. Prob­a­bly has­n’t hap­pened yet because it’s all mov­ing quick­ly.

[00:36:36] CR: it’s almost halved. It was 82 cents and it’s down to

[00:36:41] CR: 44 cents now. And yeah, the sell price is 44 cents, as you say, it’s right on it. All right, I’ll wor­ry about it

[00:36:49] TK: Which, which prob­a­bly means all the QAV lis­ten­ers are sit­ting at 44 want­i­ng to see.

[00:36:54] CR: yeah, uh, anoth­er com­pa­ny that, uh, I dis­cov­ered it was not hav­ing a prob­lem, but had gone actu­al­ly was NAMM, Nimoy Cot­ton,

[00:37:08] TK: Oh,

[00:37:08] TK: okay.

[00:37:09] CR: acquired and delist­ed a cou­ple of weeks ago. And I just found out about it, uh, which is a, yeah, well, and that’s a prob­lem that I’ve got with the light port­fo­lio stocks is I don’t get noti­fi­ca­tions.

[00:37:23] CR: About stuff like that. Um, so it does­n’t pop up in any of my alerts. So I don’t have news alerts that tell me that kind of stuff. So I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out a way of com­ing up with a sys­tem that’ll tell me those sorts of things, but they got acquired. Uh, we had it in a light port­fo­lio and, um, it got acquired.

[00:37:45] CR: We did okay out of it.

[00:37:46] CR: I think we did like sold it at a

[00:37:48] CR: 12 per­cent prof­it or some­thing like that. It was a com­pul­so­ry acqui­si­tion a cou­ple of weeks ago, but

[00:37:54] TK: So, um, you sub­scribe to List­corp or even put those codes into Yahoo Finance for the Light Port­fo­lio and

[00:38:02] TK: get those kinds of announce­ments? I know you get all the rest, which is the issue, I sup­pose.

[00:38:07] TK: All the rub­bish ones.

[00:38:08] CR: you get every­thing. I did look at try­ing to fig­ure out how I could do it in a list corp. I did­n’t want to enter them all in one by one, because there’s like 80 stocks in the port­fo­lio that I’d have to do indi­vid­u­al­ly.

[00:38:18] TK: right.

[00:38:18] TK: Okay.

[00:38:19] CR: But, um, I am try­ing to fig­ure out a solu­tion for that, but yeah, any­way, so if

[00:38:22] CR: any­one out there holds Namoi Cot­ton, you prob­a­bly already know about this, but they are no more.

[00:38:28] CR: Speak­ing, oh

[00:38:30] TK: No more, no more.

[00:38:32] CR: yeah, that’s it. Speak­ing of a com­pa­ny that’s almost no more, Lion­town Resources. Lion­town Resources. And we’ve talked about this from time to time, these were the dar­lings of the, the lithi­um boom, when lithi­um stocks were going to take over the world. Finan­cial Review says that 13 months ago, Lion­town was the sex­i­est lithi­um stock on the ASX and arguably in the world.

[00:39:02] CR: U. S. giant Aber­mal had a 6. 6 bil­lion bid on the table for the group. Aus­trali­a’s rich­est per­son, Gina Rein­hart, was build­ing a

[00:39:11] CR: stake that would even­tu­al­ly get to just under 20%.

[00:39:17] TK: hang on. I thought you, I thought you were going to say this. Sex­i­est, one of the sex­i­est min­ing exec­u­tives in the world.

[00:39:25] CR: She was at a Trump,

[00:39:27] CR: she was at the bloody Mar a Lago, cel­e­brat­ing Trump’s vic­to­ry.

[00:39:31] CR: Hey, it’s just,

[00:39:32] TK: Azeelon. Maybe she’s a, maybe she’s a Bond vil­lain.

[00:39:36] CR: maybe, yeah, oof, not a Bond girl, that’s for sure. Any­way, mov­ing along,

[00:39:44] TK: can’t help her appear­ance. Lithi­um’s

[00:39:47] CR: a, she was build­ing a stake that would even­tu­al­ly get to just under 20 per­cent. Um, but on Mon­day, Lion­town, now with a mar­ket cap of 2.

[00:39:55] CR: 1 bil­lion, unveiled a plan to help it sur­vive lithi­um’s nuclear win­ter. So basi­cal­ly the sto­ry is that, uh,

[00:40:06] CR: it’s all come down col­laps­ing on the lithi­um min­ers.

[00:40:13] TK: liq­ui­dat­ed. Liq­ui­dat­ing lithi­um. Well, we, we spoke a lot about lithi­um. Um, it was a boom bust. The one that was, the com­pa­ny that was on our buy list was Pil­bara Min­er­als and, uh, it has­n’t been as effec­tive. It’s, um, by the lithi­um price move­ments, it’s hold­ing up. I don’t know if any­one’s still a share­hold­er in that, but, um, it’s way above its sell line and it’s, it’s turned up again.

[00:40:36] TK: So, that’s bet­ter. But the, the one you’re men­tion­ing, Lion Town, was a clas­sic. Case of, you know, tulips in Ams­ter­dam in the 1800s or 1600s, when­ev­er it was. And speak­ing of Gina, she, she came in to lead the charge to keep it an Aus­tralian com­pa­ny. So that was­n’t a great invest­ment of hers, but there are a lot of oth­er peo­ple, um, in the min­ing indus­try, uh, who are try­ing to get into the lithi­um gain because they thought it was going to be good.

[00:41:05] TK: All I can say is, you know, it was the Bit­coin of the min­ing indus­try. It’s, it’s, um, it was a lithi­um and what­ev­er it’s called spo­dumene, I think is the actu­al min­er­al that’s used. Will get used in elec­tric vehi­cles, but there’s so much of it out there, you know, there’s no need to rush into it. Um, even though a cou­ple of years ago, every­one was pump­ing how the future was being elec­tric and Tes­la and all that kind of stuff.

[00:41:35] TK: And now we’re going to think Tes­la was actu­al­ly. Inter­est­ed in buy­ing a lithi­um mine and even looked at this one at one stage or one of the ones in Aus­tralia at one stage and was rebuffed by the big Pil­bara actu­al­ly. Um, yeah. So, um, again, all I can say is I’m glad we use com­mod­i­ty trend lines. I’m glad we, we look for min­ers that are throw­ing off lots of cash that are already in pro­duc­tion and we’re not specky investors fol­low­ing the lat­est tips in the, in the min­ing

[00:42:03] TK: space.

[00:42:04] CR: I remem­ber when one of my sis­ters was ask­ing me if she should invest in lithi­um stocks. Accord­ing to the Finan­cial Review­ers, Tes­la founder

[00:42:12] TK: actu­al­ly,

[00:42:13] TK: sor­ry, it’s actu­al­ly a good, it’s a good time to short them, isn’t it? When peo­ple who aren’t involved in

[00:42:17] TK: the

[00:42:18] TK: active­ly involved in the

[00:42:19] TK: mar­ket start ask­ing that kind of ques­tion. I had sim­i­lar ones as well, a cou­ple of years

[00:42:23] TK: ago.

[00:42:24] CR: should be in our check­list.

[00:42:26] TK: Yeah. A short check­list. The check­list for short­ing stocks. Yeah.

[00:42:32] CR: As Tes­la founder Elon Musk has repeat­ed­ly said, while there is no short­age of lithi­um in the world, there is a short­age of lithi­um refiner­ies. Find­ing and

[00:42:40] CR: pro­cess­ing capac­i­ty. This is where the real prof­its are like­ly to be made in this sec­tor over the com­ing decades.

[00:42:48] TK: I sus­pect he’s right. That’s what I’ve read too. And my analy­sis was that lithi­um’s abun­dant, but it’s hard to,

[00:42:53] TK: to make use­ful, to, to refine it, I guess is the cor­rect term. Mm. Mm. Mm.

[00:42:59] CR: So their share prices dropped from a high of 3. 15 in June 23 down to about 88 cents today. So yeah, it’s a big crash down to earth and again,

[00:43:11] TK: Mm.

[00:43:12] CR: Brought that up

[00:43:13] CR: just because, as you said, we have a sys­tem

[00:43:15] CR: that helps us avoid get­ting involved in train wrecks like that. Did­n’t help us

[00:43:20] TK: And it was a very emo­tion­al, while you’re still hold­ing Res­olute Min­ing, just watch the space, we’ll see.

[00:43:26] CR: but yeah.

[00:43:27] TK: Um, um, that was a very emo­tion­al time too. I remem­ber that sort of, uh, takeover offer and peo­ple like, um, our friend Stephen Mayne was say­ing that Gina Rein­hart was a patri­ot because she was step­ping in to keep it, keep that com­pa­ny Aus­tralian and how the small share­hold­ers need the pro­tec­tion from the insti­tu­tions who are will­ing to take the mon­ey and run.

[00:43:50] TK: Well, At this stage, turns out, turns out Steven Mabb was wrong. Insti­tu­tions were right, they should have tak­en the mon­ey and run.

[00:43:59] CR: Mmm.

[00:44:01] TK: when­ev­er a motion becomes part of a busi­ness deci­sion, it’s, put that on the short check­list as well.

[00:44:06] CR: Mmm. Well, speak­ing of min­ing com­pa­nies, so min­ing stocks, the oth­er Sto­ry that I saw this week that was inter­est­ing was min­ing stocks whacked as iron ore slumps towards US$ 100. The tur­bu­lence the rock com­mod­i­ty mar­kets last week spilled over to the ASX as traders digest­ed anoth­er dis­ap­point­ing round of Chi­nese stim­u­lus.

[00:44:28] CR: And the risk of a trade war under return­ing U. S. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, Chi­na’s top leg­isla­tive body, the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee of the Nation­al Peo­ple’s Con­gress, unveiled a 12 tril­lion yuan, which is a 2. 5 bil­lion pack­age, on Fri­day to help debt laden local gov­ern­ments, but refrained from announc­ing mea­sures that would direct­ly boost domes­tic demand. So, Iron ore

[00:44:55] CR: com­pa­nies, uh, strug­gling as the price con­tin­ues to decline. I was just look­ing at, um, FMG.

[00:45:04] TK: go

[00:45:04] TK: ahead.

[00:45:05] CR: Well, I was going to say, I think I sold it out of, uh, our port­fo­lios and my super port­fo­lio back when it was around 20 bucks. Um, it popped up

[00:45:18] CR: close to that, again, but, um,

[00:45:21] CR: and this was quite a while ago.

[00:45:22] CR: We sold it.

[00:45:22] CR: It’s down at 18 now. So yeah.

[00:45:27] TK: And it dropped 7 per­cent after that, um, report came out too, accord­ing to the AFR.

[00:45:34] CR: Mmm. Iron

[00:45:36] TK: Yeah, look, I mean,

[00:45:37] CR: on our thing for quite a while though, Right.

[00:45:41] TK: Has­n’t been a buy all year. Yeah.

[00:45:43] CR: Mmm.

[00:45:45] TK: Yeah. And it’s going to be iron ore and cop­per are now, I think, um, both in at least Josephine, if not sell ter­ri­to­ry, uh, which is a bit of a shame because cop­per is a bit, is usu­al­ly an indi­ca­tor for world activ­i­ty.

[00:45:59] TK: So it sug­gests that world econ­o­my might take a bit of a slow­down in the short lit­tle while any­way. Um, but I think what’s hap­pen­ing is, and I’ve read a cou­ple of arti­cles about, uh. The Chi­nese stim­u­lus sit­u­a­tion, which was received under­whelm­ing­ly by the mar­ket. Chi­na’s fac­ing a bit of dis­in­fla­tion and is still try­ing to keep its out­put, you know, its econ­o­my turn­ing over at four or five per­cent growth.

[00:46:29] TK: And so it does need some gov­ern­ment stim­u­lus to do that. They announced some last week. There was a bit of a yawn for it. But I think, you know, what the, while I’m read­ing, which I res­onates with me is that they’re going to wait and see what hap­pens when the tar­iffs start com­ing next year when Trump’s actu­al­ly in pow­er before they decide where to deploy gov­ern­ment stim­u­lus and who needs it.

[00:46:52] TK: So I think there’s prob­a­bly a hold­ing pat­tern and a side­ways move­ment at least in com­modi­ties like iron ore until then, but hey, that’s a pre­dic­tion, who knows. But cer­tain­ly uncer­tain­ty is not going to be a tail­wind for these com­modi­ties in the short term.

[00:47:10] CR: Yeah, okay. Well, it’s tough in the whole com­mod­i­ty space. Um,

[00:47:15] TK: That’s okay, just means they’ll get cheap­er and we can buy some again.

[00:47:19] CR: mmm. When they

[00:47:20] CR: turn around, they’ll be cheap. That’s good. Well, apart from doing a pulled pork on TK, that’s all I’ve got. Uh, what have you got to talk about?

[00:47:28] TK: the com­pa­ny, not me, don’t do a pull pork on me.

[00:47:30] CR: Hmm, that would be inter­est­ing. I should get my pri­vate eyes to dig into you and find out, you know, my boys and I still have a the­o­ry that real­ly you don’t know any­thing about invest­ing, that you’re just a drug deal­er who used I’m a pri­vate investor as a front and then it got, then you got called on it and you had to dou­ble down and now it’s, you’re like, The char­ac­ter in the, uh, Jean Le Carre book that I’m read­ing, you know, he’s, he’s, uh, pre­tend­ing to be a defec­tor in East Ger­many.

[00:48:03] CR: Now he’s got

[00:48:04] CR: to go with it because he’s got caught up in the whole thing, you know. That’s plot for our, our series that we’re going to do.

[00:48:12] TK: right and it’s just absolute­ly amaz­ing that our dum­my port­fo­lio is doing dou­ble

[00:48:16] TK: mar­ket for the last five years just

[00:48:18] TK: Coin­ci­dence, yeah.

[00:48:19] CR: that’s the crazy thing is the guy,

[00:48:22] TK: knowl­edge of drug deal­ing and turned it into the rules for a check­list for the stock

[00:48:26] TK: mar­ket, yeah.

[00:48:27] CR: but that’s the crazy thing You just made up all of this stuff and then you’re like, Holy shit, this actu­al­ly works. Like, Oh my God, it

[00:48:35] CR: gets, and

[00:48:36] TK: up all night, one night, read­ing Buf­fett.

[00:48:39] CR: and it gets hard­er and hard­er to get out. You get deep­er and deep­er into it.

[00:48:44] CR: know, like.

[00:48:45] CR: And all your drug deal­ing bud­dies are like, dude, what do you do?

[00:48:48] CR: He’s like, I fig­ured out this invest­ing thing. It’s

[00:48:50] CR: crazy.

[00:48:51] TK: Did I tell you I had a, I had a friend, um, and she was, From Cana­da orig­i­nal­ly was liv­ing in Mel­bourne and um, she had a boyfriend many years ago who was a cocaine deal­er who came across from Cana­da to be with her. And then, um, could­n’t find work in Aus­tralia and became a invest­ment bank for one of the big US banks.

[00:49:12] TK: And was very open in the inter­view that he was a cocaine deal­er. And they said, beau­ty, you hired, we, we like your skillset.

[00:49:19] CR: Well, just cause he had con­tacts, you get them

[00:49:22] TK: no, no con­text. Just that they liked his, you know, he was a street deal­er.

[00:49:26] CR: Okay. Same sort of per­son­al­i­ty type.

[00:49:30] TK: Mmm. Same skill set. Yeah.

[00:49:32] CR: Yeah.

[00:49:33] CR: Right. Okay. What do you got?

[00:49:35] TK: Uh, well, I just want to, don’t want to put the knife in here, but was­n’t there

[00:49:40] TK: some­thing about a 16 point check­list on the out­come of the US elec­tion? How did

[00:49:45] CR: 13, 13 keys,

[00:49:48] CR: Alan Licht­man’s 13

[00:49:49] CR: keys. And

[00:49:50] CR: on my 50K bike ride yes­ter­day, I actu­al­ly lis­tened to an inter­view with him. Sor­ry.

[00:49:58] TK: I meant to ask you about your bike ride at the start. Sor­ry, I know you’re get­ting

[00:50:01] TK: into it.

[00:50:02] CR: yeah, no, I did my bike ride and I lis­tened to an inter­view. I’d already checked out, he and his son who do a YouTube show, did a live. Five or six hour episode on the,

[00:50:13] CR: on elec­tion day. And I skipped to the end of it where you can see him just crum­bling. And then I lis­tened to an inter­view with him.

[00:50:21] TK: no he bet the, he bet.

[00:50:23] TK: the house on Carmela, did he?

[00:50:24] CR: yeah, I guess. Um, I, I

[00:50:27] TK: I got paid out from my

[00:50:28] TK: elec­tion bets

[00:50:29] CR: Oh yeah. I meant to ask you about that. Yeah. Did good.

[00:50:33] TK: no lose bet. Yeah,

[00:50:35] CR: Um, he, uh, said, yeah, well, he’s, I saw him, I heard him inter­viewed on, I don’t know, CNBC or some­thing, NBC, he said, CNN, it was, he goes, uh, look, the keys failed, he goes, and I need to sit down, and, like, he, he had said, in his defense, that The keys were based on 200 years of analy­sis of Amer­i­can elec­tions and that Trump was chang­ing the sys­tem, like the sys­tem was based on Amer­i­cans mak­ing ratio­nal deci­sions based on

[00:51:08] TK: they did.

[00:51:09] CR: of the

[00:51:11] TK: They ratio­nal­ly decid­ed that an idiot was bet­ter than a Demo­c­rat.

[00:51:15] CR: that the, that they were vot­ing, who they thought was actu­al­ly a ratio­nal choice for run­ning a good econ­o­my or what­ev­er. But he said, yeah, obvi­ous­ly. The keys did­n’t work. And also in his defense, he had told, he had said that they should­n’t have got rid of Biden. He said they were los­ing a key when they got rid of Biden.

[00:51:36] TK: Oh, you

[00:51:37] CR: They still would­n’t have won. Well, that was his thing because one of his keys

[00:51:40] CR: is hav­ing an incum­bent as the can­di­date. And then anoth­er one of the keys is like a good, strong pri­ma­ry to come up with a

[00:51:48] TK: Yeah, did­n’t have it.

[00:51:50] CR: which they failed, but he still thought she would win. And obvi­ous­ly she not only did­n’t win, it was a absolute trounc­ing.

[00:51:58] CR: So yeah, no, he’s like, Hey. I’m tak­ing it on the chin. The keys failed and I need to, but he also

[00:52:04] CR: said

[00:52:05] CR: but you know, I’m not

[00:52:07] CR: even sure if there’s any point rework­ing him cause I don’t think there’s going to be anoth­er elec­tion in four years

[00:52:12] TK: Ha, did he real­ly say that? He said that, did he? Here’s anoth­er

[00:52:16] TK: check­list. yeah.

[00:52:20] CR: What to hap­pen, what to

[00:52:22] CR: do when they come to you in the mid­dle of the night and start round­ing you up to

[00:52:26] CR: put you in the,

[00:52:28] TK: Can we go back and like, can you erase all my com­ments about Elon, please? From the archives?

[00:52:37] CR: Just don’t go to the US any­more,

[00:52:38] CR: Tony. You should be fine.

[00:52:41] CR: Did­n’t save Julian Assange, but you should be.

[00:52:43] CR: okay.

[00:52:44] TK: Yeah, good. So I’ve got a pulled pork and I’m going to revis­it

[00:52:49] TK: Qan­tas in my pulled pork camp.

[00:52:51] TK: And I’ve done one already on

[00:52:53] TK: Qan­tas.

[00:52:54] CR: Did­n’t you do like two weeks ago?

[00:52:57] TK: Oh, I think it was a cou­ple of months ago when the results came out.

[00:53:01] TK: Yeah. And the oth­er rea­son I’m doing it is because I’ve been lis­ten­ing to a lot of, um, com­men­tary this week about Qan­tas because of Joe Astin’s book,

[00:53:10] TK: which has been launched now to Chair­man’s Lounge.

[00:53:12] CR: it’s out? Yeah. It was

[00:53:15] TK: launched last week

[00:53:17] TK: by our friend Alan Koller.

[00:53:19] CR: You did a QAN last. Okay.

[00:53:22] TK: okay. Cou­ple of months ago.

[00:53:24] TK: Um, and, and what I guess piqued my curios­i­ty with, with Qan­tas was that, um, uh, the press, the press being the press, they focused on the PM and his alleged request for upgrades. and then they focused on Peter Dut­ton get­ting Pri­vate jet flights with Gina Rein­hart and var­i­ous oth­er min­is­ters, get­ting upgrades, and who’s a mem­ber of the Chair­man’s Lounge, blah, blah, blah.

[00:53:52] TK: And that’s an impor­tant issue, but the dimen­sion I want­ed to focus on was Joe Astin’s com­ment that there’s been an under­in­vest­ment in the Qan­tas fleet of air­craft. and that that was going to come home to roost at some stage. So I thought that was an inter­est­ing insight. Um, Qan­tas is actu­al­ly at its 52 week high and it’s real­ly Increase since the last time I did a pull pork and the since the results came out.

[00:54:19] TK: So it’s doing quite well. Um, so the ques­tion in my mind is this as good as it gets or is um, Or is it a buy to go high­er? That’s I guess the ques­tion fac­ing any­one look­ing at Qan­tas

[00:54:30] TK: at the moment.

[00:54:31] CR: it’s still on the buy list, right? I mean, I know I

[00:54:33] CR: added it to a light

[00:54:34] CR: port­fo­lio just yes­ter­day cause it was still on the buy list.

[00:54:38] TK: Yeah, it is. It’s and it’s had a very strong run and it’s still throw­ing off lots of cash.

[00:54:42] TK: So I guess that’s the ques­tion. Is it throw­ing off lots of cash because it’s under invest­ing or should it be invest­ing some of that cash into its fleet? But, um, I mean, I’ll kind of skip through its back­ground. I cov­ered it last time.

[00:54:56] TK: Um, most peo­ple will know it’s the Aus­tralian nation­al car­ri­er. Began life, um, In Out­back Queens­land and Win­ton and Lon­greach, Qan­tas stands for Queens­land and North­ern Ter­ri­to­ry Aer­i­al Ser­vice. That’s a good triv­ia ques­tion, that it’s aer­i­al ser­vice and not air ser­vice or air­line ser­vice.

[00:55:16] CR: hmm. Hmm.

[00:55:19] TK: There was much made of a quote from a guy called Hud­son Fish, who with Paul McGuin­ness found­ed Qan­tas. They were ex Aus­tralian fly­ing corp. So, they were World War One pilots, um, before there was an Air Force in Aus­tralia. Um, and Hud­son Fish wrote a let­ter at the end of his tenure say­ing, you know, regard­less of the pres­sure from share I’m para­phras­ing, regard­less of the pres­sure from share­hold­ers, you should always focus on the cus­tomer.

[00:55:47] TK: And uh, so Joe Astin has used that text in a lot of detail to Com­pare and con­trast pre­vi­ous man­age­ment and their shaft­ing of the, alleged shaft­ing of the cus­tomer, um, to, um, pro­duce bet­ter prof­its. Um, so Qan­tas was actu­al­ly gov­ern­ment owned fol­low­ing World War II when it, um, had a lot of eco­nom­ic prob­lems.

[00:56:10] TK: Qan­tas had a lot of eco­nom­ic prob­lems going through the war and limped into post World War II life. The gov­ern­ment bought it in 1947. Uh, and then re list­ed it back on the ASX in 1995, and it’s been list­ed there ever since. Um, it’s, from my expe­ri­ence, it kind of reach­es a high and then goes back down to a low, and when­ev­er I’ve bought and sold it, it’s been in that kind of 4 range as a buy and then, you know, sort of where it is now as a sell, which is not to say it’s not going to go on.

[00:56:46] TK: Qan­tas oper­ate the Qan­tas brand inter­na­tion­al­ly and domes­ti­cal­ly, Jet­star, they oper­ate Qan­tas Link for region­al ser­vices and I guess what’s prob­a­bly A lit­tle known part of Qan­tas, but it’s biggest and most prof­itable area is the Fre­quent Fly­er Pro­gram. And the pro­gram makes a mar­gin on points sold to sup­pli­ers, which is main­ly the banks issu­ing points on cred­it cards, as well as a mar­gin on inter­nal­ly issued points, so you earn points as you fly, but they make a mar­gin on that, and on what’s called break­age, so points that are nev­er used become free income to loy­al­ty pro­grams.

[00:57:23] TK: And so the loy­al­ty. And I think that’s an impor­tant thing to remem­ber that the inter­na­tion­al part of Qan­tas, which prob­a­bly every­one focus­es on, um, is one of the least prof­itable areas of the busi­ness. Even though it attracts a lot of the atten­tion. Uh, so to go through the num­bers, um, ADT for this stock is huge.

[00:57:47] TK: It’s 43 mil­lion. So any­one that’s lis­ten­ing to this can invest in it. Um, the stock price at the time of the analy­sis was 8. 44, which is trad­ing about 1 per­cent below con­sen­sus tar­get. So it’s the mar­ket. is so liq­uid in this stock that it’s going to trade at con­sen­sus val­ue, or usu­al­ly. But 8. 44 is above IV1 of 4.

[00:58:13] TK: 27 and below IV2 of 10. 17. So there is some upside from our IV sit­u­a­tion. They sus­pend­ed div­i­dends on the stock. So they’re not pay­ing div­i­dends, but it’s approx­i­mate­ly halfway through an on mar­ket share buy­back. So it’s one of these stocks that we’ve talked about dur­ing our What Works on Wall Street ses­sions.

[00:58:35] TK: It’s Not pay­ing a div­i­dend, but it’s under­tak­ing a buy­back. So, um, it’s, it’s, it’s sup­port­ing its own share price, I guess. Stock Doc­tor Finan­cial Health is inter­est­ing. They rate it as mar­gin­al and the trend is steady. So it’s cer­tain­ly not out of the woods finan­cial­ly. So not good, but not dia­bol­i­cal. And Stock­o­pe­dia ranks at about 67 for qual­i­ty.

[00:58:57] TK: So that’s Not very high. So both of those two invest­ment ser­vices are rank­ing it as being not great for qual­i­ty. Stock­o­pe­dia rank it 86 over­all. So again, they’re not rank­ing it very high­ly. Not as high as we do on the buy list any­way. PE is 10 times. For this com­pa­ny, not the high­est or low­est in the last three years.

[00:59:18] TK: So we can’t use that as a score for our, um, val­u­a­tion. Uh, Prop­Caf though is the real win­ner. It’s 3. 85 times. So it’s, Qan­tas is throw­ing off lots of cash and we can buy it at 3. 8 times the cash­flow, which is real­ly good. And that’s why it’s on our buy list. Net equi­ty per share is inter­est­ing. It’s only 19 cents.

[00:59:38] TK: And if we add 30 per­cent to that 24 cents. So there’s not much equi­ty in the share price of the, of the quar­ters. Busi­ness. And that’s not unusu­al for air­lines. I think I spoke about this last time. They tend to stay very high­ly geared because they’ve got their air­line fleet to look after and to refresh.

[00:59:58] TK: And they invest to do that and bor­row to do that. Equi­ty per share fore­cast is for this com­pa­ny to grow at 27%. So that’s You know, the ana­lysts who look at this are say­ing, hey, it’s a growth com­pa­ny. And fore­cast growth over PE is 2. 6 times, which is very good. So we score it a two for that. Obvi­ous­ly, no own­er founder, the founders are long gone.

[01:00:23] TK: And the board does­n’t have a mean­ing­ful, the direc­tors don’t have a mean­ing­ful stake. So we can’t say there’s a big investor with lots of expe­ri­ence to guide the board there. It’s not a new three point trend upturn. It’s become. Become an upturn back in Feb­ru­ary. So, uh, it’s been in a long term, um, upturn before the lat­est results.

[01:00:44] TK: So we’re not going to score it for being new. It does, uh, does­n’t have con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing equi­ty. So we can’t score it for that. So all in all, the qual­i­ty score on our check­list is nine out of 15 or 60%. So that kind of equates to, um, both Stock Doc­tor and Stock­o­pe­di­a’s view of the qual­i­ty of the com­pa­ny.

[01:01:03] TK: The QAV score, how­ev­er, is 0. 16, which puts it on our buy list because The price to oper­at­ing cash­flow. And that’s, I guess that’s where we come to the issue. So pros and cons of this com­pa­ny, um, man­ag­ing the debt going for­ward is crit­i­cal, but, and the cash­flow, I guess, but Qan­tas is now being run by Vanes­sa Hud­son, who is the past CFO.

[01:01:24] TK: So she’s acute­ly aware of the finan­cial tightrope she has to walk in terms of using that cash­flow to bal­ance debt and to invest in the fleet. which is Joe Astin’s com­ment, um, and they already have, uh, invest­ed mil­lions of dol­lars, tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in both cus­tomer and staffing issues, which they inher­it­ed from the last CEO.

[01:01:48] TK: Um, a few oth­er things going on. Qan­tas, uh, is oppos­ing, um, an invest­ment by Qatar Air­lines into Vir­gin Aus­tralia, which is its main com­peti­tor. So Qatar wants to buy 25 per­cent of Vir­gin Aus­tralia. Um, Qan­tas argues that, uh, that’s, that should be blocked by the gov­ern­ment because Qatar staff are paid half of what Qan­tas local staff are paid.

[01:02:14] TK: So it’s going to be bad for com­pe­ti­tion and bad for employ­ment even­tu­al­ly because Qan­tas will have to pay for it. More and more focus on reduc­ing wage costs. How­ev­er, Qan­tas already do have a part­ner­ship with Emi­rates. And when we do fly an Emi­rates air­craft as part of the Qan­tas tick­et, those staff that Emi­rates employ are on a much low­er wage than the local Qan­tas staff as well.

[01:02:42] TK: So, Qan­tas are try­ing to have their cake and eat it too there, I guess. Um, but, um, Again, I think the Inter­na­tion­al Air­line Divi­sion, whilst it’s impor­tant, it’s not the main game and I read an arti­cle which I’ll quote now. This was for an unnamed investor who asked not to be named, who said in the con­text of the route, the impact will be large.

[01:03:04] TK: He’s talk­ing about the route from Perth to Europe. Um, The investor says that the sin­gle route is not over­ly mate­r­i­al in the con­text of Qan­tas over­all 2. 5 prof­it, how­ev­er. So that was from the AFR yes­ter­day. So in oth­er words, um, it will affect some of the over­seas busi­ness for Qan­tas, but the over­seas busi­ness isn’t the big game.

[01:03:29] TK: I asked Chat­G­PT whether Joe Astin was right about whether Qan­tas was under invest­ing in its fleet. And Chat­G­PT sum­ma­rized a few arti­cles about the issue, which I’ll quote from. Qan­tas has faced crit­i­cism from var­i­ous groups and stake­hold­ers about its fleet invest­ment strat­e­gy. Some argue that Qan­tas has been too slow to mod­ern­ize.

[01:03:50] TK: With con­cerns that this aging air­craft lead to oper­a­tional and cus­tomer expe­ri­ence issues. While the air­line has announced sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments in fleet renew­al, includ­ing new Air­bus and Boe­ing jets, some crit­ics believe Qan­tas could do more, espe­cial­ly giv­en the demand for more effi­cient, envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly planes.

[01:04:09] TK: The delays in receiv­ing new air­craft, part­ly due to sup­ply chain issues, have fur­ther fuelled crit­i­cism of Qan­tas long term fleet plans. Plan­ning. So that’s a fair sum­ma­ry. Um, what’s my take? Um, my take is that Qan­tas prob­lems will be solved by the huge cash flows it gen­er­ates. It won’t be easy and it won’t hap­pen overnight, but um, Vanes­sa Hud­son is the ex finance per­son.

[01:04:34] TK: She’ll bal­ance fleet renew­al with cash flow gen­er­a­tion and oth­er require­ments like debt reduc­tion. Um, and what I’ve seen before in the air­line indus­try is that this kind of risk will become evi­dent when cus­tomers are forced to choose. Choose between old­er Qan­tas planes and brand new planes offered by oth­er car­ri­ers.

[01:04:53] TK: And then you start to ask your­self the ques­tion, okay, I’m loy­al to the Qan­tas brand, but, you know, how loy­al do I have to be to get points or chair­man’s lounge access or what­ev­er? Um, and then Qan­tas will be forced to do a lot more than what they’re doing now to upgrade their fleet and invest in their, in their fleet.

[01:05:09] TK: Um, I think it’ll reach a cri­sis point at some stage and that’ll be the cri­sis point, but I think Qan­tas has the cash­flow to solve it. So I’m not, whilst it’s an issue, I’m not over­ly con­cerned about fleet invest­ment in Qan­tas. Not as con­cerned as Joe Astin is any­way.

[01:05:26] CR: So, deserves its place on the buy list.

[01:05:31] TK: Oh absolute­ly, when you’re throw­ing off that much cash, yeah,

[01:05:35] TK: mon­ey solves every­thing. Isn’t that a Cindy Lau­per, was it Cindy Lau­per? Mon­ey solves, mon­ey solves every­thing? What­ev­er, what­ev­er the quote is, mon­ey changes every­thing. Cash flow

[01:05:46] TK: is king.

[01:05:47] CR: Girls just want to have fun and mon­ey changes every­thing.

[01:05:51] TK: Yeah,

[01:05:51] TK: two big hits.

[01:05:53] TK: Maybe Vanes­sa Hut­ton is the good old one to have

[01:05:55] TK: fun

[01:05:59] CR: All right. Thanks for that. Well, I guess, um, for those peo­ple that want to stick around, I can do my pulled pork on TK, the oth­er TK. The oily TK. Um, now we do hold them in our US port­fo­lio. They’re not doing great right now for some rea­son. Prices dropped a bit, so I thought I’d drill down into it to see if I could find out why.

[01:06:24] CR: The code is TK on the New York Stock Exchange. We bought it in Novem­ber 23, so a year ago, at 7. 03. It’s cur­rent­ly at 7. 89, so it’s up 12%. Over 14 months, but it was 9. 60 at the begin­ning of Octo­ber. So it’s come down quite a bit. Uh, TK Cor­po­ra­tion Lim­it­ed is the par­ent com­pa­ny. They’re a marine ener­gy trans­porta­tion com­pa­ny. Marine

[01:06:57] CR: ener­gy trans­porta­tion com­pa­ny. What does that mean? Eh, lots of dif­fer­ent

[01:07:05] TK: a fish­ing com­pa­ny? Fish­ing ves­sel?

[01:07:09] CR: They’re a provider of inter­na­tion­al crude oil marine trans­porta­tion. And Marine Ser­vices. They do a lot with Bor­der Force in Aus­tralia, which I’ll talk about. But the first part of it, the crude oil is inter­est­ing. So, they’re a crude oil ship­ping com­pa­ny pre­dom­i­nant­ly.

[01:07:31] CR: And crude oil has been a sell since 20th of July. But, Um, I haven’t sold these. I’m not sure if I draw a direct line between the crude oil price and crude oil

[01:07:47] CR: ship­ping com­pa­nies. What do you think? Do you think there would be a, there would be a com­mod­i­ty sell?

[01:07:56] TK: I don’t know Cam, all you can do is over­lay the graph and it’s not a

[01:07:59] TK: direct link, is it? They’re in

[01:08:01] TK: the busi­ness of mov­ing, mov­ing crude oil. So per­haps, have you, have you over­laid the graphs

[01:08:07] TK: and had a look?

[01:08:08] CR: I have. And I could­n’t real­ly see, um, a direct par­al­lel. I mean, unless there’s a real­ly big lag, but if I look at the crude oil price, if I do like a, um, five year.

[01:08:22] CR: Chart. It does­n’t seem to map their chart very

[01:08:25] TK: yeah. yeah.

[01:08:27] TK: okay.

[01:08:27] CR: Let me just take anoth­er look here. Yeah. And

[01:08:30] TK: And you said they’re also oper­at­ing in oth­er indus­tries like Bor­der Force,

[01:08:33] TK: so

[01:08:35] CR: LNG relat­ed stuff and LNG is a buy, you know, let’s see five years. Yeah. The, the charts don’t real­ly look that sim­i­lar, you know? So any­way, I haven’t sold them, but they’ve been in decline, but some of our oth­er ship­ping com­pa­nies as well. I’ll get into that in a sec. So the his­to­ry though is inter­est­ing. So.

[01:09:00] CR: TK was found­ed in 1973 by Tobin Khoi,

[01:09:06] CR: whose ini­tials were tk. He was a 31-year-old Dan­ish ship bro­ker who’d immi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States at the age of 20, and most­ly was work­ing on farms and then for some rea­son start­ed buy­ing oil tankers. There was the, um. Oil cri­sis, the OPEC cri­sis in the ear­ly 70s in the US, um, oil prices were real­ly high and he could get sec­ond hand, third hand oil tankers cheap­ly because peo­ple were going out of busi­ness for some rea­son, and he start­ed just buy­ing them up.

[01:09:48] CR: Had a head office in the Bahamas. tak­ing advan­tage of low cor­po­rate tax­es. Most of its ships were reg­is­tered in Liberia that also had low tax­es. So how this Cana­di­an farmer knew how to play all of this, uh, so, Dan­ish farmer in the Unit­ed States, I don’t know, but he got it stitched up. Any­way, by the 1980s, they had expand­ed and they were doing a lot of busi­ness off of it.

[01:10:16] CR: Uh, in the Per­sian Gulf dur­ing the Iran Iraq war and real­ly made a lot of mon­ey nav­i­gat­ing that whole affair. So they grew from a small tanker oper­a­tor into a fair­ly large con­ven­tion­al ship­ping com­pa­ny and then he passed away unex­pect­ed­ly on Octo­ber 3rd, 1992 at age 50. And then, weird sto­ry, 1995, three years lat­er, his wid­ow agreed to have his body exhumed so the DNA tests could be car­ried out to deter­mine whether he was indeed the father of their young daugh­ter.

[01:11:04] CR: So when he died, his third wife, Jung-Ja Karl­shoej was preg­nant and his first wife tried to claim that, uh, the daugh­ter was­n’t actu­al­ly his and there was this whole estate bat­tle thing that went on over it to deter­mine whether or not she was actu­al­ly his bio­log­i­cal child. All very messy. And um, I did­n’t actu­al­ly, could­n’t find out the results.

[01:11:41] CR: I searched the New York times. I searched all over the place to try and find out what the result was. Cause I was like, what hap­pens in the next

[01:11:47] CR: episode? And, uh, nobody could real­ly tell me. So that’s, that’s a shame. I assume though,

[01:11:55] TK: going to say they did a DNA test and found out he’d been poi­soned by the CIA or

[01:11:59] TK: some­thing.

[01:12:00] CR: yeah, well, or by his third wife, I don’t know. Um,

[01:12:04] TK: uh, what’s that, what was that, um, movie, Dogs of War? No, Gods of

[01:12:09] TK: War.

[01:12:11] CR: I did­n’t

[01:12:11] TK: What was the one with, um, Nick Cage played the arms

[01:12:14] TK: deal­er?

[01:12:15] CR: I did see that. Yeah.

[01:12:16] TK: Yeah, yeah. That’s what it sounds like, he’s run­ning, run­ning oil between Iran and Iraq dur­ing the war.

[01:12:24] TK: Hmm.

[01:12:24] CR: Any­way, today. TK has a fleet of 43 dou­ble hull tankers and 8 time chart­ed in tankers. For peo­ple out there who don’t know their tankers, dou­ble hull tanker is exact­ly what it sounds like. Has two hulls. Inner and Out­er Hull,

[01:12:43] TK: Which is, the stan­dard now.

[01:12:45] CR: yes, because

[01:12:47] TK: stop oil spills,

[01:12:48] CR: stops oil spills, yeah. Chem­i­cal tankers too have it. Um, and their ves­sels are usu­al­ly employed through a mix of spot tanker mar­ket trad­ing and or short or medi­um term fixed rate time char­ter con­tracts. And they also have a big oper­a­tion in Aus­tralia, which I’ll talk about. Um, So, they’ve got a divi­sion

[01:13:19] CR: called TK Aus­tralia. It’s been oper­at­ing since 1997. What are you smil­ing for?

[01:13:27] TK: Oh, I need to go and talk to them about IP. TK Aus­tralia.

[01:13:31] CR: Well, I went to buy a

[01:13:33] CR: linen shirt the oth­er day, and I went into TK Maxx, which you should also talk

[01:13:38] CR: to about a brand deal, and the first,

[01:13:42] TK: in Vegas last time I

[01:13:43] TK: was there.

[01:13:43] CR: I bet it

[01:13:44] CR: was, and the first, I

[01:13:46] TK: Oh, it was.

[01:13:48] CR: Oh, real­ly? TK Maxx? Isn’t it

[01:13:51] TK: Yeah.

[01:13:52] CR: TJ Maxx

[01:13:54] TK: I was on a golf trip. TK Maxx. Yeah. TK

[01:13:57] CR: No, it’s TJ Maxx over there? and TK Maxx here.

[01:14:00] TK: Maxx over

[01:14:01] TK: there as well.

[01:14:04] CR: All right. Any­way,

[01:14:06] TK: past it. That’s how I got my

[01:14:07] TK: nick­name.

[01:14:08] CR: I went, I went into a, um, no,

[01:14:12] CR: it’s TJ Maxx over there, man. I just looked it up. TJ Maxx, Amer­i­can dis­count depart­ment store chain.

[01:14:20] TK: Cool. Well, like signs with TK Maxx, I drove past

[01:14:23] TK: one. Dri­ve past a lot of them.

[01:14:25] TK: Yeah.

[01:14:27] CR: Um, I went into TK Maxx to buy a shirt. The first

[01:14:31] TK: would we dri­ve past T. J. Maxx and some­one go, Hey,

[01:14:35] TK: you’re close to T. K. Maxx. We’ll call you T. K.

[01:14:38] TK: Maxx

[01:14:39] CR: I don’t know the sort of peo­ple you hang out with and how obser­vant they are. Uh, can I fin­ish this bloody sto­ry or not? You’re gonna kill me here. I bought this linen sh I picked up this linen shirt and the brand was Tay­lor Hunt.

[01:14:53] TK: Oh,

[01:14:54] TK: real­ly?

[01:14:55] CR: So I called my boys, I took a pho­to and texted my boys and said, you guys start­ed a cloth­ing brand already and did­n’t tell me?

[01:15:00] CR: My boys names are Tay­lor and Hunter, by the way, my

[01:15:02] CR: twins. And they were like, oh, we’re going to sue. And I said, well, you should­n’t sue. You should approach them about a brand­ing deal and go, we’ll be the face of Tay­lor and Hunt.

[01:15:12] TK: Yeah.

[01:15:14] CR: TK Aus­tralia. Been around since 1997. They pro­vide crew man­age­ment, tech­ni­cal man­age­ment, asset man­age­ment, and pro­cure­ment, pri­mar­i­ly for the Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment.

[01:15:24] CR: They’re a lead­ing employ­er of Aus­tralian sea­far­ers. Cur­rent­ly have 11 ves­sels under man­age­ment here. So there you go, big oper­a­tion in Aus­tralia. Um,

[01:15:38] CR: pre­dom­i­nant­ly they pro­vide crew­ing ser­vices for FPSO units in West­ern Aus­tralia. And again, for the kids out there like me who don’t know what that is, float­ing pro­duc­tion stor­age and offload­ing, float­ing ves­sels used by off­shore oil and gas indus­try, pro­vides ves­sel oper­a­tion ser­vices, uh, for var­i­ous ves­sels under con­tract to the Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment, includ­ing.

[01:16:05] CR: The

[01:16:05] CR: Aus­tralian Bor­der Force Cut­ter Ocean Shield.

[01:16:10] TK: Glad we have a shield over the ocean in Aus­tralia. That’s just

[01:16:12] TK: fan­tas­tic.

[01:16:13] CR: Can Bar­ry and Stan came up with that? Oper­a­tion Shock and Awe. And the Aus­tralian Bor­der Force Cut­ter, Ocean Shield.

[01:16:24] CR: Ocean Shield?

[01:16:25] CR: is an off­shore patrol

[01:16:27] CR: ves­sel oper­at­ed by Aus­tralian Bor­der Force. It

[01:16:31] TK: How big is Ocean

[01:16:32] TK: Shield?

[01:16:33] CR: uh, it’s not that big.

[01:16:34] TK: just, get­ting a men­tal pic­ture of.

[01:16:37] CR: You know, it’s a, it’s a tin­ny. It’s a tin­ny with an out­board

[01:16:40] TK: that’s what I’m think­ing. Yeah.

[01:16:44] CR: But they paint­ed it red, so, you know, they’re seri­ous. It’s a rea­son­able size. Um.

[01:16:51] CR: It took part in the search for Malaysia Air­lines Flight 370 when it dis­ap­peared 10 years ago, by the way. Which, did you know, they

[01:16:57] CR: still haven’t found? 10

[01:16:59] TK: I know.

[01:16:59] CR: they still haven’t, you know, how do you know? You pay

[01:17:01] CR: atten­tion to these things.

[01:17:02] CR: I don’t,

[01:17:04] TK: did­n’t pay atten­tion to it, but I have heard that they haven’t found it. Still don’t know what’s hap­pened. I love, love the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries though.

[01:17:10] CR: yeah, they did find some debris, but they haven’t found the main fuse­lage. Any­who, it oper­ates mid sized tankers, includ­ing

[01:17:21] CR: Sew­ers Max, Afra Max and LR2 ves­sels.

[01:17:29] TK: So I can I can spot, I’m spot­ting a trend here. It’s a mid sized tanker, but it’s AFR and Max.

[01:17:36] TK: Oh yeah. Yeah, I got the mar­ket­ing, they got the right mar­ket­ing team.

[01:17:40] CR: Oper­a­tion Oper­a­tion Small Penis Syn­drome.

[01:17:49] CR: we have to call every­thing Max.

[01:17:52] CR: TK

[01:17:52] CR: Max. Is that why you got called TK Max? Yeah.

[01:17:56] CR: Um,

[01:17:57] TK: past a TK Maxx store, not a TJ Maxx store, a TK Maxx store.

[01:18:01] CR: Okay. Yeah, yeah. Semi pho­to­graph­ic proof.

[01:18:05] CR: So do you want to know what a

[01:18:06] CR: Sew­ers Max is? A Sew­ers Max can fit through the Sew­er’s canal when ful­ly loaded. Good.

[01:18:13] TK: hmm.

[01:18:14] CR: Were you ful­ly loaded in

[01:18:15] TK: ful­ly loaded or

[01:18:17] CR: ha ha ha ha ha

[01:18:18] TK: weight.

[01:18:21] CR: they typ­i­cal­ly can car­ry 120, between 120, 000 and 200, 000 DWT.

[01:18:30] CR: Dead Weight Tons, very good.

[01:18:33] CR: Would be bet­ter if it was Dead Weight Tons Max.

[01:18:37] TK: Max, yeah, max weight. Make a step for­ward. Yep.

[01:18:41] CR: uh,

[01:18:42] TK: imag­ine they’ve been mak­ing a bit of mon­ey because if you’re hir­ing that boat to go through the sew­ers and the sew­ers is being avoid­ed, the lease and the lease on the ship gets longer because it’s got to go around the Cape in Africa instead, which is what’s been hap­pen­ing to a lot of trans­port ves­sels since the Mid­dle East war.

[01:19:00] CR: well the share price does­n’t reflect that, so we’ll see. But I do have a good rea­son for their share price. We’ll get into it. Um, they also have afra­max, which is slight­ly small­er than the SUEZ Max

[01:19:13] CR: opti­mized for regions with draft restric­tions. Do you know what draft restric­tions are, Tony?

[01:19:19] TK: I do, yeah. Not just in terms of being able to recruit peo­ple. It’s shal­low waters,

[01:19:26] CR: Is there any­thing you don’t know? I had to, I

[01:19:28] CR: had to GPT all of this stuff. You’re just like, yeah, I know what that is. Yeah, I know what that is. Yeah, I know

[01:19:33] TK: Well, the draft on the boat is how Yeah, it’s how far it set­tles into the water is the draft of a boat.

[01:19:41] CR: you’re, you’re

[01:19:41] TK: And it’s got the plim­soll on. Plim­soll line shows how far it can set­tle.

[01:19:46] CR: me. I’ll show you my Plim­soll line in a minute if you’re not care­ful.

[01:19:50] TK: Plim­soll line max?

[01:19:53] CR: No, I’m not claim­ing that. That’d be false adver­tis­ing.

[01:19:59] TK: Shall I draft, is it? Not draft max?

[01:20:03] CR: I don’t get any com­plaints. Uh, and then LR2, Long Range 2 tankers, sim­i­lar in size to AFROMAX but clas­si­fied on their

[01:20:13] CR: car­go type and con­fig­u­ra­tion rather than just size, designed for refined oil prod­ucts like gaso­line,

[01:20:21] TK: ones where size does­n’t mat­ter.

[01:20:23] TK: Is

[01:20:25] CR: long dis­tances, gen­er­al­ly used on long haul routes that ben­e­fit from trans­port­ing large quan­ti­ties of refined prod­ucts effi­cient­ly.

[01:20:35] CR: So any­way, that’s what they do. Um, their CEO and CFO both resigned or retired kind of sud­den­ly in the begin­ning of August. Uh, August 7th, announced they’d be gone by the end of the month.

[01:20:52] TK: that a red flag?

[01:20:53] CR: Well, no, I don’t think so, because

[01:20:58] CR: A, I did­n’t notice it at the time, and B, well, it should have been, yeah. The results came out at the end of, end of Octo­ber.

[01:21:06] CR: And, it’s inter­est­ing. So, they report­ed Q3 adjust­ed earn­ings per share of 1. 84 and rev­enue of 243. 28 mil­lion. Accord­ing to Bloomberg, ana­lysts expect­ed the com­pa­ny to report Q3 adjust­ed EPS of 188 on rev­enue of 152. 8 mil­lion. So they were almost 100 mil­lion bet­ter on

[01:21:32] TK: Mmm.

[01:21:33] CR: but their earn­ings were slight­ly low­er on that.

[01:21:38] CR: Um, and their rev­enue was also rough­ly 42 mil­lion low­er than the quar­ter from the same peri­od in the pre­vi­ous year.

[01:21:47] TK: Right.

[01:21:48] TK: That’s not good.

[01:21:49] CR: Not good.

[01:21:50] CR: So I assume that’s why the CEO and the CFO

[01:21:55] CR: both left, because they knew the num­bers were going to be

[01:21:56] CR: bad. There’s been no oth­er sto­ries of them?

[01:21:59] CR: you know, from malfea­sance or what­ev­er.

[01:22:02] CR: But it was cer­tain that they were gone by the end of the

[01:22:04] CR: month.

[01:22:05] TK: was It a man­aged exit, like did they say they have some­one in place to

[01:22:08] TK: replace them?

[01:22:09] CR: It was, uh, it was like, peo­ple were moved up. The, um, Ken­neth Hvid, Who was Pres­i­dent and Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer and TK Tanker’s Chair­man. Would take on the role of TK Tanker’s Pres­i­dent and Chief Exec­u­tive. Brody Spreers, the Vice Pres­i­dent of Finance and Trea­sur­er, would take on the role of Chief

[01:22:34] CR: Finan­cial Offi­cer. And, uh, yeah, anoth­er guy got moved up as well. So they just sort of took

[01:22:40] CR: some exist­ing guys and

[01:22:42] TK: Right. Bit of a board­room coup.

[01:22:43] TK: Okay.

[01:22:44] CR: titles. Some­thing like that? I don’t know. But yeah, any­way.

[01:22:47] TK: Okay. No, there’s, I mean, the red flag is if the CFO leaves because they don’t want to sign the results or,

[01:22:53] TK: um, yeah, look

[01:22:54] TK: sus­pi­cious

[01:22:55] CR: It was just, I think, bad, bad num­bers and Yeah, a bit of a board­room coup, as you say.

[01:23:01] TK: Yeah, I don’t know if a quar­ter, one quar­ter of bad num­bers would be enough to

[01:23:04] TK: get rid of peo­ple though, it’s, um, that’s a bit harsh, I would have thought.

[01:23:08] CR: yeah, right, um, they did declare a one time spe­cial cash div­i­dend to the amount of 1

[01:23:18] CR: per out­stand­ing com­mon share, which is not bad when the shares are trad­ing at 7

[01:23:26] TK: Yeah, okay.

[01:23:28] CR: and they autho­rized new share repur­chase pro­gram of up to 40 mil­lion of the com­pa­ny’s out­stand­ing com­mon shares. They’d already been doing a bit of that and they also announced that they’re going to that TK Tankers is going to acquire TK Aus­tralia from TK.

[01:23:45] CR: So TK’s buy­ing TK from TK

[01:23:50] TK: Mm hmm.

[01:23:50] CR: they’re mov­ing, mov­ing, the decks, mov­ing the chairs around on the deck a lit­tle bit. Any­way, when I last ran a US buy list, which was on the 12th of Sep­tem­ber. So a cou­ple of months ago, cause I haven’t had to sell any­thing recent­ly. They were num­ber two on the list then. Um, even though I, we, you know, we’ve owned them for over a year and they’ve been on the list.

[01:24:14] CR: Pret­ty con­sis­tent­ly over the course of the last year, I’ve been look­ing. And so I thought I’d just, I’ll just run through the, the finan­cials as they stood at the time. And I think this would have incor­po­rat­ed, uh, not the most recent results, but the results before that. So I haven’t run it. Obvi­ous­ly since the Octo­ber results came out.

[01:24:35] CR: May have changed things.

[01:24:38] CR: Uh, Excel would stop send­ing me alerts. Damn it. Stop that. I’m get­ting that run out of resources mes­sage when I open this sheet. Um, the share price back in Sep­tem­ber was

[01:25:00] CR: 9th of Sep­tem­ber

[01:25:02] CR: it would have been around about 8. 41.

[01:25:06] TK: Okay, so it’s less than what it was then.

[01:25:08] CR: Yeah, it’s dropped a bit since

[01:25:10] CR: then.

[01:25:12] TK: It’s not a real one?

[01:25:13] CR: Uh, no, we’ve owned it. We bought it at like sev­en bucks. It’s up 12 per­cent since

[01:25:19] CR: we bought it.

[01:25:21] TK: I know you said that, sor­ry.

[01:25:22] CR: and the three point sell line on it is, uh, 46. So, long way to go. Any­way, so, I’ll run through, for what it’s worth, I’ll run through what the num­bers look like the last time I analysed them. I can find my bloody spread­sheet again. Oh, here it is. Um, so, aver­age dai­ly trade was about 5, 000, 000. The finan­cials I was work­ing on were the 30th of June finan­cials. Check this out, the Prop­Caf

[01:25:55] CR: was 1. 34.

[01:25:57] TK: Oh,

[01:25:58] TK: fan­tas­tic.

[01:25:59] CR: that’s, why it’s been on the buy list for the last year.

[01:26:03] TK: Ha, ha.

[01:26:04] CR: It, um, had a Stock­o­pe­dia qual­i­ty rank of 87.

[01:26:10] CR: The price was not low­er than TK IV one or

[01:26:17] CR: IV two. The price was low­er than Book plus 30.

[01:26:24] TK: Wow.

[01:26:24] CR: ha, did­n’t have a new three point upturn, did­n’t get a point for growth. Over PE did get a point for price under book, so it was less than book and less than book plus 30.

[01:26:35] TK: hmm.

[01:26:36] CR: book val­ue growth was pos­i­tive.

[01:26:38] CR: That’s what I use instead of con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing equi­ty, the Stock­o­pe­dia. So it’s been going up

[01:26:43] TK: Okay.

[01:26:44] CR: PE, uh, was not less than the yield. The yield was not greater than the bank rate. And, uh, what else? That was about it. Um, that’s what it scored on 10 items, got a score of eight, so an 80 per­cent qual­i­ty score and, uh, had a.

[01:27:04] CR: Oh, sor­ry, I’ve got the actu­al F score was 6 and the Zed score was 1, so not a great Zed score, but a pret­ty good F score. And, you know, we’ve sort of talked about the Zed score and the F score. Any­way, I got a QAV score of 0. 6 at the time, and it was like num­ber 2 on the buy list at the time.

[01:27:26] TK: Right. Mm

[01:27:27] CR: So Um, share prices come back and the results weren’t as good, so obvi­ous­ly this isn’t a rec­om­men­da­tion.

[01:27:34] CR: If peo­ple are think­ing about US stocks, they should run a buy

[01:27:36] CR: list. But, inter­est­ing, inter­est­ing busi­ness. Oil and,

[01:27:42] CR: uh, Bor­der Force.

[01:27:45] TK: Yeah, well, Carthage, Oil Carthage, it seems to be a fleet of ships. So, uti­liza­tion rates would be impor­tant. Um, what else would be impor­tant? Leas­ing peri­ods, uh, I guess if oil price is high, it’s going to be a run­ning cost for them. Diesel, I mean, I imag­ine all their boats are diesel. Uh, so yeah, but no, inter­est­ing busi­ness.

[01:28:08] TK: But one times cash flow, that’s incred­i­ble to buy a com­pa­ny at that kind of price.

[01:28:12] CR: It is. But I went and looked at the oth­er ship­ping com­pa­nies that I have in our US port­fo­lio. We’ve got a cou­ple of them and they all exhib­it sim­i­lar behav­iour even though they’re not, the rest of them are oil car­ri­ers. So Euroseas, E S E A, it peaked ear­ly Octo­ber as well at about 50 and it’s down to 40 now.

[01:28:38] CR: It’s been declin­ing since ear­ly Octo­ber. Stealth Gas, G A S S, Um, was it, uh, just over 7 at the begin­ning of Octo­ber? It’s down to 6, just a lit­tle bit under 6. And Glob­al Ship Lease, GSL, was about try­ing to get 26 at the begin­ning of Octo­ber. It’s down to 23. And they’re not oil relat­ed. So I’m think­ing it’s a ship­ping relat­ed thing that’s hap­pen­ing.

[01:29:13] CR: Demand for ship­ping, trans­port, I haven’t Got­ten to the bot­tom of it, but all of our ship­ping com­pa­nies have gone back­wards, um, in the last six weeks. Despite the rest of the U. S. mar­ket going absolute­ly bonkers. By the way, Willis Lease Finance Com­pa­ny is now up 340 per­cent since we bought it. You know, just

[01:29:39] CR: insan­i­ty on that one.

[01:29:41] CR: Triple bag­ger! in a year. I

[01:29:47] TK: Yeah, that’s very good.

[01:29:49] CR: think I did those guys last time. But yeah, any­way, so there you go. A lit­tle bit about one of the ship­ping com­pa­nies that, uh, your lawyers will need to talk to their lawyers about what they can get away

[01:29:59] TK: About nam­ing. About IP. Yeah.

[01:30:02] CR: Mmm. And then I think that takes us into after hours, Tony.

[01:30:08] TK: Yeah, good. It’s been a long show,

[01:30:10] TK: Cam.

[01:30:10] CR: Cup day. I went and had a look at your tips.

[01:30:16] TK: Came fourth?

[01:30:19] CR: yeah, so

[01:30:19] CR: did, so did the Greens par­ty in the elec­tion. I don’t think, uh, counts for much.

[01:30:27] TK: Yes, I agree. It does­n’t count for any­thing.

[01:30:30] TK: But I’m sneak­ing up on a win.

[01:30:35] CR: How did Poi­fect go?

[01:30:37] TK: Not well, unfor­tu­nate­ly. Um, yeah, got boxed in and did­n’t stretch out. So

[01:30:43] TK: she’ll run Sat­ur­day week or no, what­ev­er, uh, maybe the fort­night. So Novem­ber 30th, her next run, but we have dou­ble mar­ket run­ning on Sat­ur­day in a group one at Caulfield. So very excit­ed about that. Chair­man Mabb is com­ing down from Bris­bane again to watch it.

[01:31:01] TK: He’s good luck.

[01:31:03] CR: He’s good luck.

[01:31:04] TK: Yeah. So that’s excit­ing for us. And, um, Peo­ple may remem­ber we had a horse called Kast, so she’s been retired. She raced this year, she’s had knee issues, um, and the, the word from the, the train­er is that, uh, it’s just going to get worse and worse, so we’re going to look at either sell­ing her or breed­ing from her going for­ward.

[01:31:25] TK: We’re just mak­ing some deci­sions now about that. So yeah, that’s, um, a lot hap­pen­ing on the, in the horse. side of things.

[01:31:34] CR: Mmm. That’s that time of the year, isn’t

[01:31:35] CR: it?

[01:31:36] TK: yeah, it is actu­al­ly, yeah, breed­ing. We’ve had a few, a few foals and, um, yeah, some deci­sions to make about what we hold and what we sell. On the enter­tain­ment front, I’ve been over­load­ing on David Ten­nant this last week. I, uh, went back and watched Broad­church. Which I’m lov­ing. I think I’d seen like a first cou­ple of episodes but nev­er went through it from there. And it’s actu­al­ly I think bet­ter going and watch­ing it now because you get a per­spec­tive on um, Jodie Whit­tak­er and uh, uh, what’s her name?

[01:32:14] TK: The um, the female detec­tive in it.

[01:32:18] TK: Olivia Col­man.

[01:32:19] CR: Cole­man, Yeah.

[01:32:20] TK: Yeah.

[01:32:21] TK: And a

[01:32:21] CR: And I thought Jodie,

[01:32:22] TK: actors

[01:32:22] TK: who are in it.

[01:32:23] CR: and it was made by Chris Chib­nall,

[01:32:25] CR: who ran Doc­tor Who and brought in Jodie

[01:32:27] CR: Whit­tak­er And com­plete­ly screwed the pooch. But I thought Jodie Whit­tak­er was

[01:32:34] CR: great in that.

[01:32:36] TK: yeah, she was,

[01:32:36] TK: she’s very good in it.

[01:32:37] CR: I mean, they were all

[01:32:38] TK: so is David Ten­nant.

[01:32:39] CR: Yeah, it was a great show. Loved it.

[01:32:41] TK: yeah, so I’m real­ly enjoy­ing that, got a cou­ple of episodes to go, um, in the first sea­son, but also watch­ing Rivals.

[01:32:48] TK: Have you come

[01:32:48] TK: across that one?

[01:32:49] CR: I’ve seen the ad for it.

[01:32:50] CR: on Net­flix or what­ev­er. Any good?

[01:32:53] TK: uh, Dis­ney I think. Um, yeah, it’s a, it’s a light romp,

[01:32:58] TK: it’s a 80s, 80s sex romps, real­ly.

[01:33:04] CR: Oh, okay.

[01:33:05] TK: a lot of fun, good sound­track, um, very light, but yeah, well worth the watch. And David Ten­nant plays the evil char­ac­ter in that, which is good, good to see. Play­ing a car­toon

[01:33:15] CR: Right. He’s good at that.

[01:33:18] TK: Yeah,

[01:33:19] CR: done a few of those in recent years.

[01:33:22] TK: Yeah.

[01:33:23] CR: Well, we’re still going through chaos. You

[01:33:26] CR: know, maybe see­ing an

[01:33:27] CR: episode a week or some­thing, lov­ing that. But I final­ly con­vinced Chris­sy to sit down and start watch­ing Ban­shees of Inish­erin with me.

[01:33:34] TK: Oh,

[01:33:34] TK: yeah.

[01:33:35] CR: we’re still only halfway through that.

[01:33:37] CR: It’s been like,

[01:33:38] CR: you know, we get to watch and we’ll watch half an hour here and half an hour there, but lov­ing it, absolute­ly lov­ing it. Both of us. Yeah, it’s

[01:33:46] TK: One of my favourite movies from last year, yeah.

[01:33:49] TK: Inter­est­ing to see how Chris­sy, Jen­ny, uh, Chris­sy goes. Jen­ny did­n’t like it because it gets a bit vio­lent,

[01:33:54] CR: Oh, okay.

[01:33:55] TK: in places, yeah. Um, but, um, I loved it. I

[01:34:00] TK: thought it was great.

[01:34:01] CR: Well, where we fin­ished the last time we watched it was at the first real­ly gory bit.

[01:34:05] CR: Um, we’re like, Oh my God, but, um, just lov­ing

[01:34:11] CR: all of the per­for­mances, Far­rell,

[01:34:13] TK: I know.

[01:34:14] CR: in

[01:34:14] CR: it,

[01:34:14] TK: I know.

[01:34:15] TK: Yeah. Real­ly good. Yeah. Very emo­tive. I

[01:34:21] TK: loved it,

[01:34:22] CR: yeah, And as I told you off air, I’ve been read­ing The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. First time I’ve ever read a John le Car­ré book. I haven’t seen any of the

[01:34:31] CR: films. I’ve nev­er gone into that well, and, um, I’m lov­ing it. Lov­ing it. Lov­ing

[01:34:39] TK: The film’s real­ly good too, actu­al­ly, for The Spi­der Com­ing From The

[01:34:42] TK: Cold. Richard Bur­ton’s the star.

[01:34:45] CR: Yeah, I tried to find it on the stream­ing ser­vices, but it was­n’t

[01:34:49] TK: Oh, okay. Amaz­ing final scene. Oh

[01:34:54] CR: no, I’m real­ly enjoy­ing his take on Spy craft, how it’s way more

[01:35:01] CR: pes­simistic and grit­ty and, uh, kind of rough and bru­tal than an Ian Flem­ing nov­el.

[01:35:10] TK: yeah, com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. And I guess, um, you know, Slow Hors­es is in that vein when you get around to watch­ing that too. It’s fan­tas­tic. I watched sea­son three last week and just, that was, like, I binged it. It was so good.

[01:35:23] CR: Right.

[01:35:24] TK: Or sea­son four, what­ev­er the lat­er sea­son of Slow Hors­es is, it’s prob­a­bly the best.

[01:35:27] CR: Right. Yeah. so that’s good. And the new Snif­fers album is out, I’ve been lis­ten­ing to that this week.

[01:35:36] TK: Yeah. Good.

[01:35:37] CR: Oh, fan­tas­tic. If you like punk,

[01:35:41] CR: like, it’s great. I saw a clip of them on Jules, what­ev­er that British pop show is.

[01:35:48] TK: Late night with Jules Jil­l’s Hol­land?

[01:35:51] CR: live and they were great. She just goes off. She’s just a live wire of a per­former.

[01:35:58] CR: Just has that sort of young Iggy pop. Sort of

[01:36:02] TK: Mm hmm.

[01:36:03] CR: about it, which I love. I saw an inter­view too on Triple J with her and the guy who’s the lead gui­tarist

[01:36:12] CR: and sur­pris­ing­ly he looks, he’s got like a mul­let and he looks like, uh, you know, he was in ACDC in 1978, but he actu­al­ly

[01:36:20] TK: hmm.

[01:36:20] CR: very, quite soft­ly spo­ken and quite artic­u­late.

[01:36:23] CR: Um, and she is exact­ly what you’d expect. She sounds like she grew up in Broughty and, uh, you know, she’s got a very rough sort of accent, um, it seems love­ly, but very, very rough, um, West­ern sub­urbs y type girl, but, uh, yeah,

[01:36:42] CR: just, their songs are excit­ing. I just love, I love the sort of raw West­ern sub­urbs kind of

[01:36:50] CR: punk ener­gy about it, yeah. And Alex

[01:36:52] CR: again, have to thank Alex for putting me onto them, it’s been one of the big dis­cov­er­ies for me this year.

[01:36:58] TK: Oh, good. Have you seen the chats at all?

[01:37:01] TK: Yeah, a bit

[01:37:01] CR: Oh, yes.

[01:37:02] TK: Band. Yeah.

[01:37:03] CR: I’ve been aware of the chats for quite a few years. A guy I grew up with in Bund­aberg put me under the

[01:37:08] CR: chats years ago. Sim­i­lar sort of a vibe. Work­ing class Low, low rent punk. Yeah, Aussie

[01:37:15] TK: Yeah. Well, it’s amaz­ing that, uh,

[01:37:17] TK: that, um, Snif­fers made it all the way to late night with Jules. That’s a big

[01:37:24] TK: tick

[01:37:24] TK: for them, isn’t it? Real­ly?

[01:37:25] CR: Yeah, I was sur­prised. They’ve obvi­ous­ly got a lot of label sup­port and pro­mo­tion­al sup­port. They’re tour­ing non stop all around the world and doing well. So good luck to them.

[01:37:37] TK: Yeah.

[01:37:38] CR: And then the elec­tion, of course.

[01:37:40] CR: Like we should talk more about that.

[01:37:43] TK: cov­ered

[01:37:44] TK: it. Yeah.

[01:37:45] CR: Have we though?

[01:37:46] CR: I

[01:37:47] TK: Oh, okay. Well, what else do you want to say? I mean, there’ll be end­less col­umn inch­es and bar­rels of ink spilt

[01:37:54] TK: on it. And Trump will just be Trump. Trans­ac­tion­al and hang­ing on to pow­er and, yeah,

[01:38:00] TK: enrich­ing

[01:38:01] TK: him­self.

[01:38:02] CR: I have been, on my, par­tic­u­lar­ly on my Bull­shit Fil­ter show, I’ve been bang­ing on for years, um, about how the Democ­rats are just Emp­ty suit cor­po­rate shills.

[01:38:16] TK: Cor­rect.

[01:38:17] CR: Um,

[01:38:19] TK: you’re right.

[01:38:20] CR: just appalling. I remem­ber, I mean, you know, Markham and I have been debat­ing about this for 20 years, but, um, I, I remem­ber, you know, when, when Hillary was the can­di­date and it was, it was just obvi­ous that she was a, God, awful can­di­date.

[01:38:38] CR: And they sort of ush­ered her in like she was the new age of post sex­ist pol­i­tics. And she was just hor­ri­ble. I mean, and then Biden, hor­ri­ble as a can­di­date and man­aged to scrape in after the COVID thing. But when, when they, when they nom­i­nat­ed Kamala, um, I mean, first of all, I was, I was, Say­ing Biden need­ed to step down for a year.

[01:39:03] CR: And all of my friends over there and my lis­ten­ers that are Democ­rats were attack­ing me and say­ing Biden was fine. And all of the Demo­c­rat friend­ly media over there was say­ing that he was fine and that it was all Repub­li­can pro­pa­gan­da, that he was non com­pos men­tis. And now even, um,

[01:39:25] CR: Pelosi has come out since the elec­tion and basi­cal­ly blamed it all on Biden, throw­ing him under the bus for leav­ing it too late

[01:39:32] CR: before he stepped aside.

[01:39:34] CR: Did­n’t leave them enough time to do a pri­ma­ry process and find a real can­di­date. Then when Kamala was the

[01:39:39] TK: think, don’t think, sor­ry to inter­rupt. I don’t think those things are the main game. They’re not

[01:39:43] TK: the issue. You start­ed off with the

[01:39:46] TK: main issue. It does­n’t mat­ter whether it was Biden or Har­ris or any­one else or whether they ran a pri­ma­ry or not. It’s they’re a bought and sold par­ty the same way the Repub­li­cans are a bought and sold par­ty.

[01:40:01] CR: So I did a, I did an episode of the bull­shit fil­ter on Fri­day with Ray and I call it, it’s the stu­pid, stu­pid, instead of. Bill Clin­ton’s old line, it’s the econ­o­my, stu­pid. That’s the stu­pid. And I said, and I’m not just talk­ing about the peo­ple who vot­ed for Trump, although they are stu­pid. Any­one who thinks that Trump is going to make things bet­ter, you’re an absolute moron, because he’s not.

[01:40:23] CR: And if you think Elon Musk is com­ing to save you, Unless you’re talk­ing about elec­tric cars or some­thing. I mean, Elon does­n’t care. Like you think a cou­ple of bil­lion­aires are gonna come in to save the work­ing class­es? Like you’re a com­plete idiot. But I said, it’s the same is true with the Democ­rats. I mean, I’m not just point­ing at them, but the peo­ple who believe in the Democ­rats.

[01:40:45] CR: And believe that they’re the par­ty of right and good. They’re just as stu­pid. The whole sys­tem is stu­pid. The peo­ple are stu­pid. The peo­ple who are the true believ­ers. I know there are Amer­i­cans who call bull­shit on both par­ties. Half of Amer­i­ca did­n’t even turn up to vote.

[01:41:00] TK: that’s the impor­tant fac­tor,

[01:41:01] TK: isn’t it? Real­ly?

[01:41:02] CR: And when you look at the sur­veys of why, not from this elec­tion, but I looked at the sur­veys from 2020 and 2016, where again, like 48 per­cent of the peo­ple did­n’t turn up to vote. When they get asked why, the basic response is, because I think it’s all bull­shit, I think both of the par­ties are cor­rupt, I don’t think it mat­ters, I don’t think any­thing’s going to change, they’re com­plete­ly dis­en­fran­chised and dis­con­nect­ed and, you know, just fed up with the whole sys­tem, and they’re right, I mean, I find it hard to dis­agree with them, I mean, I don’t advo­cate for non par­tic­i­pa­tion in the polit­i­cal sys­tem, but, you know, get out there and vote for an inde­pen­dent, get out there and vote for some­body, you know, Bernie Sanders, write his name in, what­ev­er, do some­thing.

[01:41:48] CR: Um, but you can’t blame them for, for being dis­af­fect­ed with the whole

[01:41:54] CR: sys­tem. Um, but Yeah, it’s just, it’s just a com­plete clus­ter over there.

[01:41:59] TK: Yeah, I mean, that’s just their ver­sion of it though too, isn’t

[01:42:02] TK: it? I mean, what’s the solu­tion, Cam?

[01:42:06] TK: That’s what I always strug­gle

[01:42:07] TK: with.

[01:42:08] CR: Well, the thing I’m say­ing at the moment is, okay, so pri­or to the elec­tion, all of the major Democ­rats were basi­cal­ly say­ing Trump is Hitler. Mark Mil­ley, who’s, Was appoint­ed by Trump as the Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Came out and said Trump is fas­cist to the core and is the biggest threat to the, to democ­ra­cy.

[01:42:32] CR: Why in hell would you let that guy any­where near the White House? If he is, it’s by basi­cal­ly giv­ing Hitler the keys to the White House and say, yeah, good luck, shrug your shoul­ders and go, oh well, so be it. I’m, you should, like, what was their con­tin­gency plan for com­ing? If they tru­ly believe that he is the biggest threat to democ­ra­cy, why would you let him in?

[01:43:00] CR: Because he won. Peo­ple go, well, if we stop him, if we over­turn the elec­tion, then we’re just as bad. No, you don’t become a fas­cist by stop­ping a fas­cist. You, you, you don’t become a threat to democ­ra­cy. by inter­rupt­ing what isn’t even a democ­ra­cy any­more. It’s a plu­toc­ra­cy. When you have a hand­ful of bil­lion­aires that deter­mine the out­come of an elec­tion, you don’t have a democ­ra­cy.

[01:43:24] CR: It’s a

[01:43:24] CR: plu­toc­ra­cy. Do you know a hun­dred and nine in the 2020 elec­tion, 500 bil­lion­aires con­tributed 1. 2 bil­lion in cam­paign financ­ing through PACs.

[01:43:39] TK: not much.

[01:43:40] CR: 500, 500 bil­lion­aires con­tributed 1. 2 bil­lion. In this elec­tion, 192 bil­lion­aires con­tributed 1. 9 bil­lion.

[01:43:55] CR: And this all goes back to Cit­i­zens Unit­ed, 2010 deci­sion when Oba­ma was pres­i­dent that basi­cal­ly

[01:44:02] CR: said cor­po­ra­tions can spend unlim­it­ed amounts of mon­ey on polit­i­cal cam­paigns because cor­po­ra­tions are peo­ple too and they there­fore have free­dom of speech.

[01:44:12] TK: Mm

[01:44:13] CR: And so you watch it, you look at the cam­paign, uh, The total cam­paign spends from 2010 to 2024, they’ve just sky­rock­et­ed. They’ve gone absolute­ly to insane lev­els. So it’s not, it’s not a democ­ra­cy any­more. It’s bought and sold by bil­lion­aires. The whole thing needs to be shut down. So I’m say­ing there’s no way I’m speak­ing in my, uh, author­i­ty as the

[01:44:42] CR: rest of

[01:44:42] CR: the world.

[01:44:43] CR: There’s no way you should let

[01:44:44] CR: Don­ald Trump any­where near the White House. Do not, he should not have the nuclear

[01:44:48] CR: foot­ball.

[01:44:49] TK: You should buy a pair of horns and put a blue tat­too on your chest

[01:44:54] TK: and go to Capi­tol

[01:44:55] TK: Hill on Jan­u­ary

[01:44:57] CR: them. I’ve got the real, I’ve got the real ones. So if you ask my for­mer in laws, um, you can’t tell me on the 5th of Novem­ber or the 4th of Novem­ber that this guy is basi­cal­ly

[01:45:12] CR: a full on fas­cist and then two days lat­er say, all right, well, here you go. Here’s

[01:45:18] CR: the keys to gov­ern­ment.

[01:45:19] TK: But that’s, that’s bel­li­cose, bel­li­cos­i­ty, isn’t it? They just, I mean, do they real­ly think he’s a fas­cist?

[01:45:26] CR: I don’t know. That’s my ques­tion. Do they, if they do,

[01:45:29] CR: don’t let him take the gov­ern­ment. Declare mar­tial law, step in, stop it, if

[01:45:37] TK: imag­ine Biden declar­ing mar­tial law,

[01:45:40] CR: yes!

[01:45:42] TK: I now put Mar­shall in charge of the law. No, no, sir, mar­tial law. yes!

[01:45:48] CR: I saw SNL week­end update, um, what­ev­er his name is, Col­in Jost said, uh, This week, uh, Pres­i­dent Biden will meet with Pres­i­dent elect Don­ald Trump, where Pres­i­dent Biden

[01:46:01] CR: will fin­ish a sen­tence that he start­ed dur­ing their debate back in July.

[01:46:09] TK: Yeah.

[01:46:11] CR: Look, I’m seri­ous. If the guy is as big a dan­ger as

[01:46:15] CR: they say he is, and I believe he is,

[01:46:20] TK: Do you?

[01:46:21] CR: yeah, absolute. I

[01:46:24] TK: Do you? Okay. So let me just break

[01:46:25] TK: that down. I believe

[01:46:26] TK: he’s going to

[01:46:29] TK: do what­ev­er he needs to keep him­self out of jail, do what­ev­er he needs to do to enrich him­self and his fam­i­ly and his mates, um, and if that means fuck­ing over the Amer­i­can pub­lic or the rest of the world, he will, um. Is that dan­ger­ous?

[01:46:45] TK: Is that worth stop­ping? It does­n’t, did­n’t Biden do that? Did­n’t, what’s Oba­ma worth now? Aren’t they all, aren’t they all just var­i­ous shades of grey on the same sort of, you know, rolling train that goes past every

[01:47:00] TK: four years?

[01:47:01] CR: No, well, if he is fas­cist to the core, as the for­mer chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said,

[01:47:10] TK: Hmm?

[01:47:11] CR: by

[01:47:12] CR: Trump, fas­cist to the core, I think if he’s right

[01:47:20] TK: Well, you should assas­si­nate him. You should take him

[01:47:22] TK: out.

[01:47:23] CR: yes, there needs to be a, there needs to be

[01:47:26] TK: An assas­si­na­tion. An

[01:47:28] TK: inter­ven­tion. Yeah. Well, I just think that’s, I just think that’s pol­i­tics. That’s just for show, call­ing

[01:47:34] TK: peo­ple fas­cist. Call­ing peo­ple Hitler. I mean, that’s the,

[01:47:37] TK: what’s the evi­dence?

[01:47:40] CR: this guy knows him, and, and, well, Trump’s state­ments are the

[01:47:44] TK: I know you. So if I said you were a fas­cist, we should, we should shut you down.

[01:47:50] TK: Okay.

[01:47:51] CR: Trump, um,

[01:47:52] TK: That’s why, laws don’t work. That’s why judges don’t rule on hearsay.

[01:47:56] CR: Trump’s own state­ments. Where he says he’s going to arrest jour­nal­ists. He’s going to arrest oth­er politi­cians. Um, here we go. John Kel­ly, his for­mer chief of staff, called Trump a fas­cist and said he has author­i­tar­i­an ten­den­cies. James Mat­tis, for­mer sec­re­tary of defense, said Trump makes a mock­ery of our con­sti­tu­tion.

[01:48:18] CR: John Bolton. For­mer Nation­al Secu­ri­ty

[01:48:21] CR: Advi­sor, And pre­vi­ous­ly the worst per­son on the plan­et in my book, labelled Trump unfit to be Pres­i­dent. Mike Pence,

[01:48:29] TK: yet he still got elect­ed.

[01:48:31] CR: Mike Pence, for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent, warned against Trump’s dis­re­gard for the Con­sti­tu­tion. I it’s, uh, a long list of peo­ple who know him pret­ty well

[01:48:43] CR: Kamala Har­ris said that she thought he was a fas­cist. Um, Kel­ly. The retired Marine Gen­er­al, for­mer Chief of Staff, point­ed the New York Times to a def­i­n­i­tion of fas­cism. It’s a far right, author­i­tar­i­an, ultra nation­al­ist polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy and move­ment char­ac­ter­ized by a dic­ta­to­r­i­al leader, cen­tral­ized autoc­ra­cy, mil­i­tarism, forcible sup­pres­sion of oppo­si­tion, belief in a nat­ur­al social hier­ar­chy.

[01:49:10] CR: So cer­tain­ly in my expe­ri­ence, those are the kinds of things,

[01:49:14] CR: those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work bet­ter in terms of run­ning Amer­i­ca. He added that Trump is in the far right era and admires peo­ple who are dic­ta­tors, which in Kel­ly’s view places Trump in the gen­er­al def­i­n­i­tion of fas­cist.

[01:49:29] CR: He’s talk­ing about using the ene­my, using the mil­i­tary against an ene­my from with­in, which he said includ­ed Nan­cy Pelosi and

[01:49:37] CR: Adam Schiff from Cal­i­for­nia. Talk­ing about using the mil­i­tary

[01:49:40] CR: to dis­rupt domes­tic protests,

[01:49:44] TK: again, world cham­pi­onship wrestling is the, is the Nash equi­lib­ri­um of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics.

[01:49:50] CR: and I, look, I agree

[01:49:52] TK: called, he’s called Nan­cy Pelosi all the names in the world, but he’s not, he’s not about to arrest her. He said, lock Hillary up.

[01:49:58] TK: He nev­er did it. We’ve had four years of Trump and for all the things he said, a lot of which did­n’t make sense, by the way, like kefefe.

[01:50:08] TK: It was­n’t a fas­cist state any more than what any oth­er Amer­i­can pres­i­den­cy

[01:50:13] TK: has been.

[01:50:14] CR: And I agree with you, and I used to defend him

[01:50:16] CR: in, as much back then, by say­ing he has­n’t real­ly done any­thing worse than any oth­er Repub­li­can pres­i­dent would have done.

[01:50:23] TK: Yeah, and a lot of Democ­rats too.

[01:50:28] CR: you know, get rid of reg­u­la­tions, cli­mate reg­u­la­tions, all that kind of stuff. He just did your stan­dard Repub­li­can affair.

[01:50:34] CR: But!

[01:50:36] CR: He was sur­round­ed then by the adults in the room. That was the way they were posi­tion­ing them­selves at the time. All of those peo­ple that were the adults in the room now say he’s a fas­cist and say they, you know, they don’t

[01:50:47] CR: want to be with­in a land mile of him.

[01:50:50] CR: Um, they might all just, you know, do a 180 like Elon Musk did and, uh, Joe

[01:50:56] CR: Rogan did

[01:50:58] TK: J. D.

[01:50:58] TK: Vance,

[01:50:59] CR: Jeff Bezos and go, Oh, what?

[01:51:01] CR: I don’t know. That was just words. You know, I think he’s fan­tas­tic. I’ve got, got a cou­ple of friends. I won’t men­tion who they are or where I know them from, but they turned up on my Face­book page mak­ing pro Trump state­ments on my bull­shit fil­ter post and they’re Catholics and they believe that Trump is basi­cal­ly the Mes­si­ah and I said you real­ize that even the Pope has been call­ing Trump evil He said that the elec­tion was between the less­er of two evils, and that peo­ple should decide which was the less­er of two evils, which makes Trump evil in the Pope’s book, and they said they don’t like the Pope.

[01:51:44] CR: They think the Pope is ille­git­i­mate. So, like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You’re Catholics who think the Pope is evil and

[01:51:54] CR: Trump is the Mes­si­ah. Like, this is This is the lev­el of ratio­nal think­ing that we’re deal­ing

[01:52:01] CR: with. Um,

[01:52:09] TK: I might have to down­grade you to acquain­tance sta­tus,

[01:52:14] CR: I said, I’m not going to tell you where I know them from or how I know them, but, uh, any­way, look, it’s

[01:52:19] TK: yeah,

[01:52:19] CR: lev­els of insight. I look, I just think if all of

[01:52:21] TK: I would nev­er,

[01:52:22] CR: work.

[01:52:23] TK: sor­ry, I did­n’t mean to inter­rupt you, bit of a lag, look I’m not pro Trump, I would­n’t have vot­ed for him. Um, I prob­a­bly would have vot­ed for Har­ris as the less­er of two evils, um, as you say, to par­tic­i­pate in democ­ra­cy, not to avoid it, but, um, I, I think there’s got­ta be some big changes over there, um, in how they allow fund­ing of elec­tions, of how it is a plu­toc­ra­cy Um, they’re not, and there’s like, there’s so much that goes on that we don’t even hear about like the local ger­ry­man­ders, um, it’s dif­fer­ent over there, there’s no elec­toral com­mis­sion like we have here.

[01:52:59] TK: There’s no, there’s no police per­son for the elec­tions. No one’s, no one’s mak­ing sure peo­ple play by the rules. There basi­cal­ly are no rules over there. And that’s what you get. Free and unfet­tered cap­i­tal­ism, which means that the rich­est peo­ple buy the elec­tions. Um, Musk was giv­ing out, what was it, a mil­lion dol­lars a day for peo­ple to, um,

[01:53:20] TK: uh, who’d enrolled to vote.

[01:53:22] CR: Yeah.

[01:53:23] TK: Yeah,

[01:53:24] CR: Um, yeah, look, it’s late stage cap­i­tal­ism. This is, you know, pret­ty much what Marx and Engels pre­dict­ed would hap­pen if cap­i­tal­ism was allowed to run ram­pant, is you would end up with a sys­tem where the rich con­trol every­thing, the judi­cial sys­tem, the polit­i­cal sys­tem, the media,

[01:53:43] CR: and, uh, that’s how

[01:53:46] CR: it’s gonna play out.

[01:53:48] CR: They get that pow­er and they’re not gonna let it go.

[01:53:50] TK: when you say it’s late stage cap­i­tal­ism, I’m not famil­iar with that term, is it, does that mean that it’s not going to roll on for many more years, or

[01:53:57] TK: does it

[01:53:57] TK: mean that it’s going to roll on for­ev­er in this kind of form?

[01:54:00] TK: Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

[01:54:04] CR: there are a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent the­o­ries for what hap­pens, but late stage cap­i­tal­ism basi­cal­ly, the divi­sion, the income inequal­i­ty will get to a point where one of a hand­ful of things is usu­al­ly going to hap­pen. You’re either going to have some sort of polit­i­cal reform, or you’re going to have a civ­il war, or you’re going to have an inter­na­tion­al war.

[01:54:29] CR: Um, And in this case, I believe AI, which Elon Musk will now be run­ning. I mean, I keep, I said to Sam­marti­no, I sent Sam­marti­no a text and said, I’d hate to be Sam Alt­man right now because Elon is basi­cal­ly now the AI czar of the, come Jan­u­ary, he’s the AI czar and, and, he’s been bitch­ing about how Sam screwed him over for the last two years.

[01:54:57] CR: So. Hate to be, or any of Elon’s ene­mies over there right now, quite frankly. Um, so I think AI may play a large role in, in help­ing do some­thing about cap­i­tal­ism, although hard to see exact­ly how that plays out with Elon run­ning things. For the moment, they do. Well, because the,

[01:55:30] CR: yeah, a bit

[01:55:31] TK: We’re doing a, we’re doing a pod­cast on stock invest­ing, so I’m going to have to put my hand up and say I’m a cap­i­tal­ist.

[01:55:39] CR: oh, yeah, I’m not, I’m a, I’m a com­mu­nist, but, um, just how do we get there from here is the big ques­tion. I’m a Star Trek com­mu­nist.

[01:55:47] TK: So, sell your stocks?

[01:55:52] CR: No, that’s not how it works in a

[01:55:53] CR: cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety. You don’t get to com­mu­nism if

[01:55:55] CR: I sell my stocks. we need to engi­neer com­mu­nism

[01:55:58] CR: first. Um, but I also did an

[01:56:01] TK: We have to get, bil­lion­aire sta­tus from our stock invest­ing and then we just play, we play in the real game.

[01:56:07] CR: right? Yeah. Start buy­ing elec­tions. Um, I did an analy­sis in the bull­shit fil­ter about the 10 ways that civ­il wars start based on his­tor­i­cal exam­ples and then sift­ed through them to find the one that I think most maps to the Unit­ed States. And I think. The way I think it plays out is there is a civ­il, anoth­er

[01:56:31] CR: civ­il war over there, unless it’s not a big inter­na­tion­al war with Chi­na and Rus­sia that hap­pens first.

[01:56:38] TK: I think the Trump elec­tion kind of puts the kibosh on a civ­il

[01:56:41] TK: war

[01:56:41] TK: does­n’t it? I mean, the most like­ly igni­tion of a civ­il war was for Kamala to win, and then Trump to say it was rigged, and then he would incite vio­lence. But now all the peo­ple who vote for Trump, who are prob­a­bly the most aggres­sive, the guy in the bull­horns, they’re, um, they’re hap­py.

[01:56:58] TK: And the Democ­rats on the left coast, they’re not going to start a civ­il war. They’re hap­py too.

[01:57:04] CR: Yeah, it’s, it’s not usu­al­ly, um, lib­er­al elites that start a civ­il war.

[01:57:11] CR: No, but you know, it is, um, well, there’s this thing, as I said, there’s 10 ways that they start. Um,

[01:57:18] TK: The lib­er­al elites all just got a tax

[01:57:20] TK: cut, so they can

[01:57:22] TK: shake their fists at Trump, but they’re real­ly

[01:57:23] TK: going, phew,

[01:57:25] TK: phew,

[01:57:25] CR: until he starts round­ing them up and putting them in camps and

[01:57:29] CR: then the tax cuts don’t match much.

[01:57:32] CR: That’s what they said about Hitler.

[01:57:35] TK: Yeah, well, look, I could be wrong. I’m not going to pre­dict,

[01:57:37] TK: but I mean, do you think Trump can be both­ered doing

[01:57:40] TK: that?

[01:57:41] CR: That’s what they said about Hitler. And Fran­co. And, um, you know, Mus­soli­ni. He’s

[01:57:48] TK: Mm hmm.

[01:57:48] CR: start, he’s

[01:57:49] CR: not gonna do that. He does­n’t want to

[01:57:51] CR: ruin things. Look, we’ve got a great soci­ety, we’ve got insti­tu­tions. He’s a Catholic.

[01:57:58] TK: Oh, look, I could be wrong. I’m not going to pre­dict, but I saw noth­ing like that in the last four years we had of Trump, and I see noth­ing to think that’s going to hap­pen in the next

[01:58:06] TK: four years of Trump.

[01:58:08] CR: Do you think he’s san­er now than he was then? Do you think he’s less angry?

[01:58:13] CR: Now than he was then.

[01:58:16] TK: He’s angry, yeah.

[01:58:17] CR: just spent four years try­ing to put him in jail.

[01:58:21] TK: Yeah, but they spent the last 40 years try­ing to put him in jail. The guy’s had 4, 000

[01:58:25] TK: law­suits since he start­ed

[01:58:26] CR: Yeah, that’s just busi­ness.

[01:58:29] CR: They nev­er real­ly went after him, try­ing to put him in jail. It was just like con­tract dis­putes that he’s dealt with for his entire career. Any­way, again, Peo­ple don’t

[01:58:40] CR: take him as seri­ous­ly as I do. I think he is a gen­uine threat. I hope I’m wrong.

[01:58:45] TK: Oh, look, it’s hor­ri­ble to think about, but I’m not see­ing the

[01:58:50] TK: evi­dence for it at the moment.

[01:58:52] CR: What evi­dence would you want to

[01:58:53] CR: see? Apart from the fact that he’s been say­ing he’s gonna do

[01:58:56] CR: it for the last four years.

[01:58:59] TK: Yeah, but he said a lot of things in the last time he was pres­i­dent and none of them

[01:59:01] TK: came to pass.

[01:59:03] CR: Well, a lot of them did come to pass, but

[01:59:05] TK: All I can extrap­o­late is from the evi­dence, not from, not from what he says. He says one thing and

[01:59:11] TK: does anoth­er.

[01:59:12] CR: I agree. I agree. But this time, near­ly every per­son who worked in his first admin­is­tra­tion has said he’s a fas­cist and, uh, he wants to build a fas­cist soci­ety. If you’re not going to lis­ten to what he says and you’re not going to lis­ten to what they say,

[01:59:29] CR: then there’s no, you know, there’s no warn­ings until it actu­al­ly hap­pens.

[01:59:32] CR: You, you say, well, I won’t believe it until he actu­al­ly does it,

[01:59:36] TK: So you’re say­ing if

[01:59:37] CR: but then it’s too late.

[01:59:38] TK: some­one, if some­one espous­es fas­cist ideals and they get elect­ed, they

[01:59:42] TK: can’t take office.

[01:59:43] CR: Yes. That is what I’m say­ing. Yes.

[01:59:46] TK: it’s a thought, so it’s a thought crime.

[01:59:48] CR: Yes.

[01:59:50] TK: So okay,

[01:59:51] CR: a, in a, in a civ­i­lized

[01:59:53] TK: free speech. you can’t have democ­ra­cy, you get to decide that

[01:59:57] TK: if you, if you talk like

[01:59:59] CR: don’t have

[01:59:59] CR: free speech. We don’t have democ­ra­cy.

[02:00:05] CR: You’re sound­ing, you’re sound­ing like the, the anti vaxxers dur­ing COVID. There is no free­dom of

[02:00:10] CR: speech. You can’t run around say­ing,

[02:00:13] TK: no, just, I have to stop and think

[02:00:14] TK: about that.

[02:00:15] CR: We don’t have free­dom of

[02:00:17] TK: don’t we?

[02:00:18] CR: We have

[02:00:18] TK: Well, because we can’t.

[02:00:20] TK: Yeah. Okay.

[02:00:21] CR: we have, we have lim­its on every­thing. We, we live in a soci­ety. When you live in a soci­ety, they have to be.

[02:00:29] CR: Basi­cal­ly a soci­etal con­tract of how we all get along. Peo­ple used to say, I have com­plete free­dom. I go, okay, well, the next time you’re eat­ing in a restau­rant, I’ll come up and take my pants off and take a big dump on your

[02:00:41] TK: Yeah.

[02:00:42] CR: and say, Hey, com­plete free­dom. I can do what­ev­er I want. We don’t have free­doms.

[02:00:46] CR: We have, we have guide­lines about what is accept­able for us to all to

[02:00:51] CR: get along togeth­er. And I think, say that you’re a fas­cist

[02:00:55] CR: and that you’re going to do fas­cist things. Is cross­ing the

[02:00:59] TK: said he’s a fas­cist. He has­n’t said he’s a fas­cist.

[02:01:03] TK: Mike Bolton said he’s a fas­cist. And I would­n’t, I would­n’t cross the road to piss on Mike Bolton.

[02:01:07] TK: if he was on

[02:01:08] TK: fire. So I’m not

[02:01:09] CR: Michael

[02:01:10] TK: to

[02:01:10] CR: Bolton. That’s John Bolton, but I would­n’t piss on Michael Bolton either.

[02:01:16] CR: All the Boltons can

[02:01:18] TK: Hula Balls,

[02:01:19] TK: that’s right.

[02:01:20] CR: Apolo­gies to any­one lis­ten­ing to this. His last

[02:01:22] CR: name is Bolton. Um, no, I do like, okay. He has­n’t come out

[02:01:27] TK: But if you, but if you adopt a pol­i­cy of say­ing that if you espouse fas­cist ten­den­cies in an elec­tion cam­paign and you get elect­ed you can’t take office, all the fas­cists will do is Devel­op code words and secret sig­nals and then get

[02:01:41] TK: elect­ed.

[02:01:42] CR: Well, that’s already what they do. But he tried, he, he tried to over­turn the,

[02:01:48] TK: work.

[02:01:50] CR: he

[02:01:50] CR: tried to over­turn the

[02:01:51] CR: last elec­tion. Um, he said he’s going to arrest his polit­i­cal oppo­nents. He’s going to arrest jour­nal­ists. He’s

[02:01:57] TK: Oh, he said, look, he had whole sta­di­ums chant Lock­er Up when Hillary was around and he nev­er

[02:02:03] TK: did any­thing.

[02:02:04] CR: Tony, it’s what I’m say­ing. If you speak, like we have. In this coun­try, laws against hate speech, we have laws against vio­lent speech. What I’m say­ing is, if you run a polit­i­cal cam­paign by say­ing you’re going to do vio­lent things to peo­ple if you get elect­ed, auto­mat­i­cal­ly you should be dis­qual­i­fied. And if you win,

[02:02:27] CR: the elec­tion should be dis­qual­i­fied because you are not fit for the office.

[02:02:32] TK: well, I tend to agree with you, but it’s just dif­fer­ent soci­eties. If you did that here, you would­n’t get

[02:02:37] TK: elect­ed.

[02:02:39] CR: If you did that there, You would­n’t 10 years ago. Well, 20

[02:02:43] TK: So how come it, how come it hap­pens, I mean that’s the inter­est­ing thing, how come it

[02:02:47] TK: hap­pens there, now and does it kind of come to Aus­tralia

[02:02:49] TK: next?

[02:02:50] CR: even­tu­al­ly it always comes to Aus­tralia, right? We always fol­low the US.

[02:02:54] CR: Yeah,

[02:02:54] TK: Yeah. But, you know, when Gillard was Prime Min­is­ter and, uh, I for­get, I think it was one of the radio broad­cast­ers said she should be put in a chaff bag and thrown out to sea.

[02:03:08] CR: Alan Jones, was­n’t it?

[02:03:09] TK: I think it was, but I’m not, I’m going to hes­i­tate to say it in case it was­n’t, um, and then Tony Abbott jumped on board and said some­thing sim­i­lar and then had to retract. So you know, the guy, there are guardrails oper­at­ing in our soci­ety, which for some rea­son don’t oper­ate in the US and they love it.

[02:03:28] TK: And you know, part of the prob­lem was the Democ­rats them­selves. I mean, I’ve been fas­ci­nat­ed by the argu­ment, which says. But, you know, from our point of view, we look at Trump and call him a fas­cist. From his point of view, he’s being vil­i­fied by the oppo­si­tion and why aren’t they being stopped and, and, and why aren’t they being stopped and dis­al­lowed from vil­i­fy­ing him and his sup­port­ers?

[02:03:54] TK: Biden called him garbage, you know, um, Har­ris called him a fas­cist. So who’s right? Why aren’t, why is Har­ris not? You know, dis­al­lowed because she was vil­i­fy­ing some­one. There’s a lot of the­atre going on here, Ken. It’s all the­atre as far as

[02:04:13] TK: I’m con­cerned.

[02:04:14] CR: I agree with you that a large amount of what hap­pens over there is polit­i­cal the­atre, but again, when the polit­i­cal the­atre becomes vio­lent, I don’t think Biden or Har­ris said that. Trump or any of the con­ser­v­a­tive media out­lets should be arrest­ed. I don’t

[02:04:31] CR: think they crossed that line, um, for, for espous­ing their views, But

[02:04:40] TK: say­ing that, but you’re say­ing they should because, um, they should­n’t let Trump take pow­er.

[02:04:46] TK: So then aren’t they just as bad as Trump?

[02:04:48] CR: No, again, you don’t become a fas­cist by stop­ping fas­cists.

[02:04:52] TK: But who, But who, appoints them as the police? So the Democ­rats like go into a phone booth and come out with an S on their chest and say, phew, lucky we’re here to save the day. No, they just

[02:05:04] TK: lost.

[02:05:05] CR: are the cur­rent gov­ern­ment of the coun­try

[02:05:08] CR: that

[02:05:08] TK: Mm hmm.

[02:05:09] CR: by the

[02:05:09] CR: peo­ple to pro­tect the peo­ple and the soci­ety. That’s the job of a

[02:05:15] TK: But the peo­ple just vot­ed to over­turn that gov­ern­ment.

[02:05:19] CR: Yeah.

[02:05:20] TK: So, so that, but then they get to, they get to say, no, we’ll save the peo­ple from them­selves and we’ll stop Trump tak­ing pow­er. Right. And that’s dif­fer­ent to what Trump said four years ago on Jan­u­ary 6th.

[02:05:32] CR: Yeah, it

[02:05:33] TK: No, it’s not. It’s the same. It’s exact­ly the same.

[02:05:37] TK: Yes, it is. It’s because you’ve decid­ed you don’t like Trump and what he stands

[02:05:41] TK: for,

[02:05:43] CR: No, it’s

[02:05:44] TK: but No,

[02:05:44] TK: one vot­ed for you. Yes,

[02:05:50] CR: his rhetoric,

[02:05:51] TK: but you’ve got AI on your side.

[02:05:55] CR: his, his, rhetoric, dis­qual­i­fies

[02:05:58] TK: What­ev­er polit­i­cal can­di­date says and what­ev­er they say they will do, we all know it’s the plu­toc­ra­cy that runs Amer­i­ca and they’ll do what­ev­er they need to do to enrich them­selves. And I don’t, I don’t see lock­ing up cer­tain peo­ple, um, as, or becom­ing a fas­cist state as being any more enrich­ing than the gravy train they’re on now.

[02:06:22] TK: And Trump just gave them all a tax cut, so they’re hap­py.

[02:06:27] TK: Why would they take the extra step? Why would they want to, I mean, you know, do you real­ly think that Elon and Bezos and Rupert and all these peo­ple don’t get togeth­er as they do every year infor­mal­ly in places like Sun Val­ley and Davos and stuff like that to get togeth­er and rule for them­selves.

[02:06:49] TK: You reck­on high up on their agen­da is Lock­ing lawyers up and lock­ing jour­nal­ists up and deport­ing ille­gal immi­grants. It’s not a hype on their agen­da. It’s, it’s how do we con­trol this more? How do we find anoth­er can­di­date to replace Trump? How do we, how do we get anoth­er tax cut? How do we loosen reg­u­la­tions on the media and elec­tric vehi­cles and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what­ev­er their indus­tries are.

[02:07:14] TK: That’s what, that’s what runs Amer­i­ca. The rest is just a pup­pet show. It’s Punch and Judy.

[02:07:21] CR: I agree with you. Um, but I

[02:07:24] CR: think it’s crossed the line now. I think the plu­toc­ra­cy has

[02:07:27] CR: crossed the line, and I think if they, I think if they allow this to

[02:07:32] TK: Did­n’t across it.

[02:07:33] CR: going to be trag­ic con­se­quences.

[02:07:35] TK: Did­n’t it cross a line when the Democ­rats tried to, uh, jail Trump? Was­n’t that a line that was

[02:07:40] TK: crossed? They were try­ing to incar­cer­ate a polit­i­cal oppo­nent for entire­ly polit­i­cal rea­sons. That, so they actu­al­ly have the form of being fas­cists. They’re the ones who tried to lock up a polit­i­cal oppo­nent.

[02:07:54] TK: Did you try and stop them then?

[02:07:57] CR: Well, it was­n’t a polit­i­cal oppo­nent. He was­n’t

[02:08:00] TK: Yes, he was. Yes.

[02:08:01] CR: can­di­date for the first two years after he left office. He was a for­mer pres­i­dent, and it was­n’t for polit­i­cal rea­sons, it was for pure­ly legal rea­sons. It was finan­cial fraud, and it was, there was a rape case, it was a civ­il case.

[02:08:15] CR: There

[02:08:16] CR: was, uh, the, uh, insur­rec­tion. I mean, that’s not polit­i­cal, that’s not going after a polit­i­cal oppo­nent, they’re straight up legal

[02:08:24] TK: they were

[02:08:25] CR: Okay.

[02:08:27] TK: by Demo­c­rat judges and Demo­c­rat pros­e­cu­tors

[02:08:31] TK: and in game­play as to where it was going to take place and what the tim­ing would be and could it be done before the elec­tion. That’s the fas­cist, that’s the fas­cist ele­ment to all this. Don’t get blind­sided by a point of

[02:08:44] TK: view, Kent.

[02:08:45] CR: So you’re sid­ing,

[02:08:48] CR: you’re sid­ing with the

[02:08:48] CR: Supreme Court

[02:08:49] CR: then that any­thing that he did, he should be allowed to get away

[02:08:53] CR: with because he’s a poten­tial pres­i­dent or for­mer

[02:08:58] TK: no, no, no,

[02:08:58] TK: no,

[02:08:59] CR: he, should­n’t be

[02:08:59] TK: was, no, he should be held. I’m not sur­pris­ing. I’m not, I’m not sid­ing with the Supreme Court, but nor am I sid­ing with the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty who gamed try­ing to get him tak­en out or try­ing to, tried to incar­cer­ate him and tried to give him a rap sheet that would be the, be an attrac­tion in the elec­tion, but it was a badge of hon­our, real­ly, because it was seen for what it was.

[02:09:26] TK: One side try­ing to put the oth­er side in jail. That’s fas­cism,

[02:09:29] TK: Ken.

[02:09:30] CR: I don’t think that’s what it was. And I don’t think any­body either in the Repub­li­can Par­ty or the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, after the 2020

[02:09:38] CR: elec­tion and the

[02:09:39] CR: insur­rec­tion, Thought he was ever going to be a polit­i­cal force again. You go back and look at all of the news cov­er­age, even the

[02:09:47] TK: Until he, until he was elect­ed the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee.

[02:09:50] TK: Hydrochlo­ric

[02:09:54] CR: in 2020 were say­ing that Trump was a spent, sor­ry, 2021, ear­ly 2021 after the insur­rec­tion, say­ing that he was, uh, a spent force, he was a dis­grace, he would nev­er be able to show his face in any­where again, and bloody, bloody, blah. You know, no one, when they start­ed the whole, legal process.

[02:10:14] CR: I don’t believe any of them thought he was ever going to be a polit­i­cal oppo­nent again. He was, in their eyes, com­plete­ly destroyed. He had zero polit­i­cal cred­i­bil­i­ty. After COVID, a mil­lion peo­ple died. Well, he was telling him to inject Bloody bleach and,

[02:10:33] TK: oil, yeah.

[02:10:34] CR: and, uh, then the insur­rec­tion. Every­one thought he was spent.

[02:10:38] CR: I don’t think they had any polit­i­cal motive until, you know, he, he looked like he was­n’t done and he was com­ing back and he was still a force. And then they prob­a­bly all pan­icked and were like, shit, how can we make this hap­pen faster? Like the fact that they did­n’t get him con­vict­ed

[02:10:53] CR: or sen­tenced

[02:10:54] CR: any­way. Uh, on all these things before it all hap­pened, like his sen­tenc­ing on the,

[02:11:00] TK: They’re inept fas­cists. the, Democ­rats, if noth­ing else, are inept.

[02:11:05] CR: yeah. Alright, well, I’m sur­prised, uh, that you’re

[02:11:11] CR: sid­ing with the peo­ple who are like, Hey, just got­ta let him take office, got­ta let it hap­pen, see what hap­pens.

[02:11:19] TK: I don’t know if I’m tak­ing sides, I’m just not see­ing the evi­dence

[02:11:21] TK: yet to, to take an extra, what’s it, a supra demo­c­ra­t­ic posi­tion to try and stop him.

[02:11:29] TK: I agree with you that he’s show­ing fas­cist ten­den­cies, but, you know, I still think it’s the­atre.

[02:11:35] CR: Okay, uh, Well, I hope you’re right. I

[02:11:39] TK: Yeah, well, it does come down to hope. I don’t see, you have, I don’t think you’ve

[02:11:45] TK: Pros­e­cut­ed the case well enough to say that he will be a fas­cist in office and there­fore has to be stopped.

[02:11:55] TK: He has­n’t had to burn the Reich­stag. He has pow­er. Does­n’t, does­n’t need a Reich­stag moment. He,

[02:12:01] TK: does he real­ly?

[02:12:02] CR: he burned the Reich­stag.

[02:12:05] TK: Okay. I’ll con­cede that one.

[02:12:07] TK: I don’t see, I could be wrong. I could be wrong.

[02:12:12] CR: Look,

[02:12:13] TK: I don’t see a way to do what you want to do with­out being as bad as a

[02:12:17] TK: fas­cist.

[02:12:18] CR: When you sound like a fas­cist and all of the peo­ple that are run­ning your

[02:12:24] CR: last admin­is­tra­tion say that you are a fas­cist and you should­n’t be let any­where near pow­er again, then

[02:12:32] TK: Yeah, but when you had four years in

[02:12:33] TK: the past and you sound­ed like a fas­cist but

[02:12:35] TK: you

[02:12:35] TK: weren’t a fas­cist, I,

[02:12:37] CR: Because all of those guys were there

[02:12:38] CR: stop­ping him from being a fas­cist.

[02:12:41] TK: Oh, real­ly? John Bolton was, John Bolton was stop­ping him

[02:12:45] TK: from being

[02:12:45] TK: a fas­cist? Pom­peo was

[02:12:47] CR: to help

[02:12:48] CR: him over­throw Venezuela, but he did­n’t want Even John Bolton has a line. When even John Bolton says You’ve gone too far.

[02:12:57] CR: When even Dick Cheney says don’t let him near pow­er. When even Dick Cheney and John Bolton think that you’re too dan­ger­ous. You know

[02:13:04] TK: you know why,

[02:13:06] TK: I’ll, I’ll pose anoth­er,

[02:13:08] TK: anoth­er the­o­ry, that they, they got

[02:13:10] TK: turfed out and they know they won’t

[02:13:12] TK: get back into pow­er under a Trump admin­is­tra­tion, so they, You know, they’re say­ing he’s crazy and he’s got, he’s going to be a fas­cist and he’s a dic­ta­tor and blah, blah, blah. So it’s, it’s spoiled grapes.

[02:13:23] TK: It’s spoiled

[02:13:23] TK: milk.

[02:13:24] CR: not get­ting back into pow­er. He’s in his 80s. He’s not com­ing back.

[02:13:29] TK: But

[02:13:29] CR: No, I think,

[02:13:30] TK: won’t and his

[02:13:30] TK: asso­ciates won’t.

[02:13:32] CR: I think the Cheney, um, and Bolton and all those guys, I think they’re real issuers. They’re, they’re neo­cons like the Democ­rats. You know, they’re all about fund­ing the war in Ukraine and fund­ing Israel and fund­ing this.

[02:13:47] CR: They’re all about big Pen­ta­gon dol­lars for the mil­i­tary indus­tri­al con­tracts, keep­ing NATO going all about. Pock­et­ing, you know, fund­ing Hal­libur­ton’s and all of that kind of stuff. And

[02:13:58] TK: Cor­rect.

[02:13:59] CR: Trump, you know, uh, prob­a­bly will put an end to the Ukraine sit­u­a­tion. He’ll do the deal that was on the table in 2020, 2021, the Min­sk agree­ments.

[02:14:13] CR: Pro­vid­ing a buffer zone of the Don­bass region and stop­ping US fund­ing for Ukraine. The EU may con­tin­ue it for a while, but I doubt it. I think if Trump pulls out, they’ll pull out. Putin will get his buffer zone and that’ll be that. And the death and destruc­tion that’s hap­pened there need­less­ly for the

[02:14:32] CR: last cou­ple of years will be stopped. He won’t, he won’t do any­thing

[02:14:36] CR: about Israel and Gaza though. That geno­cide will con­tin­ue to hap­pen. Um, that’ll

[02:14:41] TK: think he won’t try with, do you think he? won’t just try and with­draw fund­ing from Israel as well?

[02:14:46] CR: No, no, he’s super pro Israel. He’s going to be build­ing Trump tow­ers in Gaza with­in a year. You

[02:14:52] CR: wait to see. yeah.

[02:14:54] CR: no, he’s, he’s the guy that agreed to make Jerusalem the cap­i­tal again, instead of Tel

[02:14:59] TK: that’s right.

[02:15:00] CR: Like

[02:15:00] TK: Was too, yeah.

[02:15:01] CR: he’s, total­ly up the Israel wazoo, uh, total­ly pro Israel. Um, so. Look, uh, and I think, you know, the, the, the neo­cons hate him because he talks about dis­band­ing NATO and pulling out of this and pulling out of that, which is their mil­i­tary indus­tri­al con­gres­sion­al com­plex bread and but­ter.

[02:15:26] CR: But

[02:15:28] CR: any­way, all right, well, that’s enough of that. I’ve said my piece. You did­n’t buy it. We’ll wait and see.

[02:15:35] TK: Yeah,

[02:15:35] TK: well, it’s an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion. It’s very thought

[02:15:37] CR: Reminds me of, reminds me of hav­ing din­ner with J. David Markham in Vegas

[02:15:44] TK: Mmh­mm. Aha­ha­ha.

[02:15:46] CR: 2016.

[02:15:48] TK: well.

[02:15:49] CR: And I said, I’m real­ly wor­ried about Trump tak­ing the Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry. He said, Trump’s not gonna win the Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry. Trump’s a joke. He’s a fool. He has no chance. And I said, I don’t know, man. I think he knows what he’s doing.

[02:16:06] CR: I think he’s got this thing, uh, he’s fig­ured out a mod­el. I’ve nev­er let Markham

[02:16:11] CR: for­get that. And he goes, ONE TIME! ONE TIME I MADE A MISTAKE! I WAS WRONG ON ONE THING!

[02:16:19] TK: Well, your pow­ers of pre­dic­tion are bet­ter than his, so I’ll have to think more about what you’re say­ing. I hon­est­ly don’t see what’s in it for Trump. As you say, he wants to build hotels on the Gaza Strip, not puri­fy the race, or

[02:16:34] CR: No,

[02:16:34] TK: try and keep pow­er for as long as he

[02:16:36] TK: can.

[02:16:37] CR: That’s what’s in it for him. He can, he can nev­er give up pow­er again with­out going to jail and,

[02:16:42] CR: or even if he dies, the entire Trump fam­i­ly for­tune being erad­i­cat­ed.

[02:16:49] TK: Yeah. But there are oth­er solu­tions to that. He may well come up with anoth­er

[02:16:52] TK: solu­tion to that.

[02:16:54] CR: None of them are good.

[02:16:55] TK: We’ll see.

[02:16:56] CR: I mean, they may not

[02:16:57] TK: No, no. No, you’re right. No, no, no. But good. Good for

[02:17:00] TK: him. Yeah.

[02:17:01] CR: extend­ing, get­ting rid of two term lim­its and chang­ing the con­sti­tu­tion and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and installing him­self as King Trump. I mean, it may not be, you know, uh, com­plete, uh, White fas­cist,

[02:17:19] CR: white pow­er fas­cist con­cen­tra­tion camps, but there’s a big spec­trum there.

[02:17:23] CR: I mean,

[02:17:23] CR: I, it’s not good. I don’t think it’s gonna be good. I don’t think the

[02:17:28] TK: it could also be, it could also be, you know, get­ting a Supreme Court to vote for him. Yeah. But

[02:17:35] TK: Or even Past Pres­i­dents Remain From Pros­e­cu­tion, not just sit­ting pres­i­dents.

[02:17:40] TK: That gets him off the

[02:17:40] TK: hook too.

[02:17:41] CR: well, they’ve already decid­ed that about a fed­er­al

[02:17:44] TK: That’s what I thought.

[02:17:45] CR: Yeah, but does­n’t help him at a state

[02:17:47] CR: lev­el. But I’m sure he’ll be able to con­vince the New York leg­is­la­ture to change the laws around that as well.

[02:17:56] TK: He’s very trans­ac­tion­al. He’s a good

[02:17:57] TK: nego­tia­tor.

[02:17:58] CR: No. Elon will just turn off all of their Star­link and Twit­ter access until they But, and the oth­er thing is,

[02:18:06] TK: And that’ll be the lev­el of fas­cism in the US. It’ll be things

[02:18:09] TK: like that.

[02:18:11] CR: but in the next four years, AI is

[02:18:13] CR: gonna go bonkers.

[02:18:16] TK: You reck­on?

[02:18:17] CR: yes.

[02:18:19] TK: I don’t think so.

[02:18:21] CR: Yeah, I

[02:18:21] TK: I might. I don’t know. I don’t pre­dict. Mate, all I know is for the last week I’ve been try­ing to nego­ti­ate with the ANZ Bank to get through their Know Your Cus­tomer regime and check­ing with the cross ref­er­ences to the ABM reg­is­ter run by the ATO and the ASIC com­pa­ny names reg­is­ter run by ASIC and try­ing to get all the IT sys­tems to work there.

[02:18:43] TK: There’s a long way to go before IT runs any­thing, let me tell you. It is shit.

[02:18:49] CR: they’re prob­a­bly not, uh, run­ning on the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy, Tony. Have you ever tried to sign up for a MyGov­ern­ment ID? That whole process?

[02:18:57] TK: Yeah, I know.

[02:18:59] CR: absolute clus­ter­fuck that is. That’s just,

[02:19:03] CR: An absolute night­mare. we’re going to have, we’re going to have AI. We’re going to have robots.

[02:19:09] CR: We’re going to have robot armies run by Elon’s AI, um, all wor­ship­ing the Dark Maga Lord.

[02:19:21] CR: You know, next time. It’ll be Elon

[02:19:26] CR: run­ning for pres­i­dent.

[02:19:28] TK: Good point.

[02:19:29] CR: They’ll go, well, he was­n’t born here. And he’ll go, uh, it does­n’t mat­ter.

[02:19:34] TK: No, Trump will have changed that by then.

[02:19:35] CR: Yeah. He’ll change that. So Elon

[02:19:37] TK: And the

[02:19:38] TK: deal, and the deal is that Elon won’t pros­e­cute Trump and allow his fam­i­ly for­tune to con­tin­ue. Yeah. So that’s, that’s the more like­ly

[02:19:45] TK: out­come

[02:19:45] CR: Or Peter Thiel. It’ll either

[02:19:47] CR: be,

[02:19:47] TK: state.

[02:19:48] CR: by the way, you know, Peter Thiel is the guy behind JD Vance. Elon’s the guy that got Trump elect­ed. The, so the Pay­Pal co founders who hate each oth­er, accord­ing to Walt

[02:19:59] CR: Isaac­son’s book, now run Amer­i­ca.

[02:20:02] CR: The guys who start­ed Pay­Pal

[02:20:05] CR: now run Amer­i­ca

[02:20:07] TK: that’s going to be called Pay­Pal Incor­po­rat­ed.

[02:20:09] CR: X

[02:20:10] TK: pay, watch

[02:20:11] CR: Elon’s gonna change the name of the coun­try to USAX?

[02:20:16] TK: Thanks. It’s got a good ring to it,

[02:20:19] TK: X

[02:20:19] CR: X Unit­ed

[02:20:20] CR: States? No, it’s just the X Unit­ed

[02:20:22] CR: States. Yeah.

[02:20:23] TK: with a big X at the end.

[02:20:29] CR: Hey, we should pitch that to them. USA max? Yeah.

[02:20:32] TK: yeah, we can make some mon­ey here,

[02:20:34] CR: Yeah.

[02:20:36] TK: X USA, that’s what it’s

[02:20:37] TK: gonna be. But that’s, I total­ly buy into that as a poten­tial future his­to­ry, rather than the fas­cist state of peo­ple being locked up.

[02:20:46] CR: cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca. we’ve been talk­ing for two and a half hours, Tony.

[02:20:52] TK: I know, and we haven’t solved a thing.

[02:20:59] CR: always, always good to debate with you.

[02:21:01] TK: Yeah, I love it too. Love your thought process and the rigour you put into it.

[02:21:06] TK: It’s good.

[02:21:06] CR: If any, if any­one’s still lis­ten­ing, have a good week.

[02:21:11] TK: Yeah, come and join the debate next week. Send us a ques­tion.

[02:21:16] CR: Ciao. Yeah. we did two and a half hours with­out any

[02:21:18] CR: ques­tions.

[02:21:19] TK: Yeah. That’s great. All right. Thank you, Cam. Have a good week.