QAV 747 — Zombies, Accruals and Fascists

QAV Club 747

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

[00:00:13] TK: Is that what you meant? Is that how you said

[00:00:15] TK: it?

[00:00:17] CR: Nev­er bor­ing. Nev­er bor­ing with you, Kynas­ton.

[00:00:20] TK: I know, life’s got­ta be like

[00:00:23] TK: that, right? I

[00:00:25] CR: episode 747 brought to you by Qan­tas. I actu­al­ly bought some Qan­tas today. Um, Mark, it’s had a good week. Tony, you’re back in, uh, Syd­ney. You’ve gone up to sup­port Alan Jones, I believe, in his, uh, dif­fi­cult times. You want­ed to be close, because you’re good per­son­al friends with Alan Jones. You were telling me off air you met him at a rac­ing to do once upon a time, and, um,

[00:00:53] TK: did, yeah, many years

[00:00:55] CR: He kept his

[00:00:55] TK: was wear­ing a, he was one of the few peo­ple back then who was wear­ing a pink. What do you call it when they have a hand­ker­chief pok­ing out

[00:01:05] TK: of the top left hand pock­et of their suit jack­et?

[00:01:07] CR: Is that when the inves­ti­ga­tors pulled him aside and said, uh, Alan Come in for ques­tion­ing?

[00:01:16] TK: No, no, no, no. It was a social func­tion. No, no. I, I, every time I see Ellen Jones, I just think back to those Raw and HG shows when they talked about the

[00:01:25] TK: par­rot. That was their nick­name for

[00:01:27] CR: Oh, real­ly? I don’t remem­ber

[00:01:28] CR: that.

[00:01:29] TK: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a run­ning gag about coach­ing the Aus­tralian rug­by union side with a par­rot on his shoul­der.

[00:01:36] TK: He used to call him the

[00:01:37] CR: Because he’s a pirate?

[00:01:39] TK: I don’t know. It was just like a run­ning joke, but like it was so lost in time. He nev­er knew why,

[00:01:45] TK: what it

[00:01:46] CR: Right, yeah, right. Well, unlike Alan Jones, the mar­ket’s had a good week. It dipped a lit­tle bit after the Trump bump, but then it’s come back. Who has­n’t had a good week, though? Real­ly, the CEO and oth­er guys at RSG. Or me, along with them. So, RSG, we men­tioned, I think. Yeah. Last week, or maybe it hap­pened after last week, did we?

[00:02:10] CR: They went into a trad­ing

[00:02:11] TK: No, we men­tioned that, we talked about it last week,

[00:02:13] CR: Oh, and I held it. Then They went into a trad­ing halt. They came out of the trad­ing halt yes­ter­day morn­ing when the com­pa­ny announced that they had agreed to pay 160 US mil­lion dol­lars to the Malian gov­ern­ment, about 250 mil­lion Aus­tralian. CEO still had­n’t been released.

[00:02:36] CR: They were pay­ing it in two tranch­es, 80 mil­lion US dol­lars. from exist­ing cash reserves with future pay­ments of approx­i­mate­ly 80 mil­lion to be made in the com­ing months from exist­ing liq­uid­i­ty sources. I had a look at how much cash they had on hand, which was about 250 mil­lion. And, uh, I went, ah, this does­n’t look good.

[00:02:57] CR: So I final­ly sold my hold­ing in my super yes­ter­day. And of course, what did it do today? Up 10%. First thing this morn­ing. Yeah. So thanks a lot, Mar­ley.

[00:03:08] TK: You reck­on there’s a, you reck­on there’s like this lit­tle, it’s like almost like a Ger­man CFO sit­ting in the Malian gov­ern­ment, lit­tle spec­ta­cles and a green eye shade going, they have 450 mil­lion cash.

[00:03:25] CR: Why Ger­man?

[00:03:27] TK: I don’t know. I don’t know why I thought

[00:03:28] CR: asper­sions on all Ger­mans? Char­ac­ter out of a Spiel­berg, Indi­ana

[00:03:34] TK: yeah, you’re right. And I’m cast­ing asper­sions on the Mali­nese gov­ern­ment too, because I’m kind of equat­ing them with the oth­er Ger­mans in World War II.

[00:03:42] CR: Can you move your micro­phone a lit­tle bit clos­er to your mouth? You’re

[00:03:45] CR: echoey there. Sounds like you’re still in Cape Shake.

[00:03:51] TK: Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I don’t even know if the CEO has been released. There was an arti­cle in today’s AFR sug­gest­ing he was­n’t,

[00:04:01] CR: Well yes­ter­day,

[00:04:01] TK: I imag­ine that’s not

[00:04:02] CR: com­pa­ny’s press release said they remain safe and well and con­tin­ue to receive sup­port on the ground from the UK and inter­na­tion­al embassies and con­sulates, um, yeah, I guess they’re being held until the mon­ey is paid, I don’t know,

[00:04:20] TK: Yeah, there’s a cou­ple of inter­est­ing things there. I think it was the chair of the com­pa­ny who was­n’t in Mar­ley, because it’s also list­ed on the Lon­don Stock Exchange. That’s the oth­er, that’s anoth­er inter­est­ing thing too, we, it went into a trad­ing halt in Aus­tralia, but it did­n’t go into a trad­ing halt in the UK, and the UK share price kept going down.

[00:04:38] TK: So when it came out of a trad­ing halt in Aus­tralia, there was a bit of arbi­trage going on to try and equal­ize the prices. But once that went through, I think that’s one of the rea­sons why it’s gone up today, per­haps.

[00:04:50] CR: any­way.

[00:04:52] TK: Um, but, uh, I did read in the Fin, I think it was today, that, uh, a whole bunch of Cana­di­an gold min­ing stocks, uh, caved in straight away and, and paid.

[00:05:05] TK: So Bar­rick Gold paid 85 mil­lion US to secure the release of four of its exec­u­tives.

[00:05:11] CR: back in Sep­tem­ber, I think. We talked about that one last week.

[00:05:15] TK: okay. Uh, yeah. So. Thanks a lot.

[00:05:17] CR: Same thing hap­pened to

[00:05:18] TK: Mali was after 350 mil­lion dol­lars in back tax­es from Bar­rick and they got 85. But yeah, it’s not a bad, bad day’s work. And um, Allied Gold, B2 Gold and Robex Resources have all recent­ly rene­go­ti­at­ed their agree­ments with the Mali­nese gov­ern­ment.

[00:05:36] TK: So the Cana­di­ans Cave straight away, jumped in, yeah, like the French in World War 2, just sur­ren­dered straight away. And, uh, just con­tin­u­ing my World War 2 theme

[00:05:48] CR: Yeah.

[00:05:49] TK: and, ah, ha, ha,

[00:05:50] CR: In ret­ro­spect,

[00:05:51] CR: what the

[00:05:53] CR: Ukraini­ans maybe should have done two and a half years ago, because it looks like it’s going to hap­pen in a cou­ple of months any­way, if not soon­er.

[00:06:02] TK: Yeah, well, that’s anoth­er issue, isn’t it? Like, uh, what did Biden say today? He’s, he was elect­ed pres­i­dent for four years, not three, three and a half, and was fine for the, for the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment to use long range mis­siles against Rus­sia. Rus­sia, of course, came out and said, yeah, if you want to start World War III, go ahead.

[00:06:19] CR: Yeah. But like, imag­ine you’re Zelen­sky, you got a pret­ty good sense that as soon as Trump takes office, if not before. Uh, all of the fund­ing from the US any­way is going to dry up, maybe some fund­ing will still come from the EU for a while, but it’s going to dry up, which means you’re going to have to nego­ti­ate a set­tle­ment with Rus­sia any­way.

[00:06:41] CR: You real­ly want to be shoot­ing mis­siles into Moscow, uh, when you’re about to have to sit down at a nego­ti­at­ing table with them? Um, I think that would be

[00:06:50] TK: them up your sleeve.

[00:06:51] CR: I just think now is the time to cut your loss­es and do what they were ready to do by all reports out of Ukraine in April of 2022 until Bojo flew over there and told them not to do it.

[00:07:09] CR: And some­how con­vinced them that not doing it was a good idea. Any­way.

[00:07:12] TK: Yeah. Bojo’s Win­ston Churchill

[00:07:14] CR: Will be inter­est­ing to

[00:07:16] CR: see how the mar­kets react to that when it hap­pens. Uh, we know how the mar­kets

[00:07:24] TK: love it.

[00:07:25] CR: Yeah, well when the war start­ed, the mar­kets crashed. That was just after we start­ed the light port­fo­lios, and my first light port­fo­lio is still try­ing to recov­er from that, because it It tanked with­in like the first 60 days and still try­ing to get back to where, uh, back to, I think it’s back in the black, but not by much.

[00:07:44] CR: Um, So hope­ful­ly there’s a bump in the mar­kets, uh, when that all gets resolved. And then I, then it’ll be inter­est­ing to see what hap­pens with all of the US sanc­tions against Rus­sia, whether or not Trump just gets rid of all of those and then all of the EU sanc­tions dis­ap­pear, then the EU can start to buy Russ­ian gas and oil again.

[00:08:08] CR: Um, it, it could have a real­ly inter­est­ing impact on the mar­kets ear­li­er in the new year.

[00:08:15] TK: Yeah. It could invert all the things that hap­pened, as you say before, in, I’m not just talk­ing about the mar­ket, but, um, com­modi­ties mar­kets, cause it affect­ed the oil price. It affect­ed the grain price, which we’ll talk about lat­er on. Yeah. Um, get­ting back to RSG though, I mean, it’s, I think it’s still actu­al­ly about a cent below its sell price when I looked at the share price ear­li­er this morn­ing.

[00:08:39] TK: So you prob­a­bly haven’t done the

[00:08:42] TK: wrong thing. Um,

[00:08:44] CR: Well, I could have

[00:08:45] TK: it’s like one of those, it’s one of those

[00:08:46] CR: 10 per­cent more this morn­ing.

[00:08:48] TK: if, yeah, if I was out play­ing golf yes­ter­day and did­n’t see you come out of a trad­ing halt, you would,

[00:08:52] TK: you make more mon­ey today.

[00:08:53] CR: Yeah. And you know, as we talked about last week, I, even yes­ter­day, I was like, Oh, like they’re prob­a­bly going to trade through this. It’s prob­a­bly going to be okay. They’re prob­a­bly going to be back up, but real­ly how, how long do I want to wait to test that the­o­ry?

[00:09:09] CR: I’m going to be sit­ting and watch­ing it every day. Do I real­ly want the stress of, you know? Wor­ry­ing about it every time it drops back down again. I don’t know, I’ll just cut my loss­es and get out, you know, as we always say, like you’re tak­ing a loss on one stock out of a port­fo­lio of 15 or 20. I don’t think I have that many in my super port­fo­lio, but yeah, it’s like 12 or some­thing at the moment.

[00:09:31] TK: And can you find some­thing else which will

[00:09:34] TK: return more than wait­ing for this one to turn

[00:09:36] CR: Well, I bought Qan­tas and, hope­ful­ly.

[00:09:39] TK: Oh,

[00:09:40] CR: Qan­tas and, um, and Par­en­ti, actu­al­ly. Um,

[00:09:46] TK: yeah, I haven’t print­ed.

[00:09:47] CR: we’ll see what hap­pens with those. I want to talk about MWY, Tony, um, Mid­way. They’re on our, been on our buy list for a cou­ple of months and I was look­ing at them yes­ter­day, uh, as a light pur­chase. Um, very low ADT though, like a 15, 000 ADT, so not big enough, real­ly.

[00:10:12] CR: But, um, inter­est­ing, I don’t know if we’ve talked about this recent­ly, but their share price was up like 60%, 67 per­cent on the 14th of Novem­ber. So that was less than a week ago, we prob­a­bly haven’t talked about it.

[00:10:28] TK: We haven’t. No.

[00:10:29] CR: Because of, uh, news about an acqui­si­tion, Scheme Imple­men­ta­tion Deed with Riv­er

[00:10:38] CR: Cap­i­tal, Yeah,

[00:10:39] TK: A takeover offer, as it’s

[00:10:41] TK: oth­er­wise called.

[00:10:42] CR: that one. Has entered, Mid­way has entered into a buy­ing scheme imple­men­ta­tion deed with RCM Bid­Co, Pro­pri­etary Lim­it­ed, an enti­ty owned and con­trolled by funds man­aged and advised by Riv­er Cap­i­tal for the acqui­si­tion of all the shares in Mid­way by way of scheme of arrange­ment. So prob­a­bly a bit late to buy into them any­way.

[00:11:02] TK: Yeah, I think the share price is trad­ing at about

[00:11:05] TK: the big price or there­abouts.

[00:11:07] CR: So I don’t know if any of our mem­bers would have been on that, but as I said, they’ve been on the buy list for a cou­ple of months, pret­ty small, but some­body, if you did have them, you just got a nice, nice exit. Out of

[00:11:18] TK: Yeah. Tim­ber Com­pa­ny, if I recall, and Tim­ber Prod­ucts. It’s actu­al­ly, it was one of the first stocks on our buy list, I think, many years

[00:11:25] CR: Real­ly?

[00:11:26] TK: And it went off and it came back. Yeah. I did a pulled pork on Mid­way in the very ear­ly days, I’m sure.

[00:11:32] CR: Hmm.

[00:11:34] TK: That’s how I know about it.

[00:11:35] CR: Aus­tralian forestry com­pa­ny based in Gee­long. Yeah. Nice one. Wood Fiber. Was that when we were try­ing to find a wood fiber com­mod­i­ty price?

[00:11:43] TK: We did. We used lum­ber as the com­mod­i­ty for

[00:11:46] CR: There you go. I remem­ber that. Yeah.

[00:11:47] TK: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:49] CR: Jamie sent me an email say­ing your chat about Lion Town is com­plete­ly back­wards. It’s actu­al­ly an amaz­ing suc­cess sto­ry. This is get­ting back to, um, the dis­cus­sion last week about, uh, what’s, what’s the Lithi­um, right? Lithi­um. It’s actu­al­ly an amaz­ing suc­cess sto­ry of ini­tial explo­ration suc­cess and sub­se­quent­ly com­pa­ny growth. Pre dis­cov­ery LTR was a 20 mil­lion mar­ket cap min­now, now over 2 bil­lion mar­ket cap.

[00:12:20] CR: Many ear­ly share­hold­ers have been reward­ed in spades, not exact­ly gone down the gur­gler as you guys ani­mat­ed. Just a bit of colour for you on that. Inti­mat­ed. Yeah.

[00:12:31] TK: Inter­mat­ed,

[00:12:32] CR: out all the big words, Jamie. It cer­tain­ly would nev­er have been a QAV stock, but you’ll nev­er see a hun­dred times return in a QAV stock.

[00:12:40] CR: The lithi­um mar­ket is.

[00:12:41] TK: to talk about one that’s get­ting

[00:12:44] TK: there a bit lat­er on.

[00:12:46] CR: Oh, okay. The lithi­um mar­ket is cycli­cal, just like any oth­er com­mod­i­ty. It ebbs and flows on sup­ply and demand. How­ev­er, its rel­a­tive imma­tu­ri­ty caus­es the recent volatil­i­ty, and it’s a rel­a­tive­ly opaque and imma­ture mar­ket dom­i­nat­ed by Chi­nese con­vert­ers, so it’s still find­ing its feet on the world scale.

[00:13:06] CR: I sent, um, Jamie a very pleas­ant­ly word­ed reply, uh, because that’s how my moth­er raised me, and

[00:13:17] TK: Two

[00:13:17] TK: word reply.

[00:13:19] CR: No, I said, look, you’re right, and if you’d got into it five years ago, you’re a lit­tle bit hap­py. If you’d got into it a lot ear­li­er than that, prob­a­bly very, very hap­py. But, uh, if you got into it when lithi­um was all the rage and the buzz, two or three years ago when it was trad­ing at 1. 90 or 2. 70 and now it’s down at 82 cents.

[00:13:44] CR: Uh, maybe not so hap­py. So I think that was our point that lithi­um, not that it’s has­n’t, you know, has­n’t had a lot of suc­cess and has­n’t come from being a min­now and turned into a large com­pa­ny, but that, um, we stay away from hype if they don’t, you know, Meet all of our oth­er met­rics, and lithi­um com­pa­nies were being hyped a cou­ple of years ago, it was going to be the biggest thing, it was tulips, and, uh, it would have been a bad time to buy into the hype, at least when it comes to Lion­town, I don’t know about oth­er lithi­um stocks, but,

[00:14:19] TK: Yeah, I mean, Jamie’s right. It’s been an explor­er that’s, I think it has got to pro­duc­tion. It may not even be in pro­duc­tion. Get­ting close to pro­duc­tion, maybe. How­ev­er. Oh, how­ev­er, Jamie, go and have a look at how much they’ve raised along the way. So, even though you may have bought, um, Lion­stown or what­ev­er it was, 20 cents or what­ev­er he said at the start, I’m just look­ing at, in Stock Doc­tor, at, um, a line in their cash flows called pro­ceeds from issues, which is where mon­ey goes if it gets raised.

[00:14:56] TK: This is going back to Decem­ber 2006, which would have been their ini­tial IPO, I guess. Uh, There’s been one, two, three, four halves. in near­ly 20 years, five halves in near­ly 20 years where they haven’t raised mon­ey. So your 20 cent stake­hold­er, if they did­n’t par­tic­i­pate, has been dilut­ed hor­ri­bly since then.

[00:15:24] TK: But if they did par­tic­i­pate, it eats into that hun­dred times return quite sub­stan­tial­ly. I haven’t done the maths, but that’s typ­i­cal­ly the way these things work is that, um, yes, you get growth in the top line share price, but you’ve either been dilut­ed a very small hold­ing or you’ve had to pay for that

[00:15:42] TK: growth along the way your­self.

[00:15:44] CR: and it looks like, going into Stock Doc­tor, it looks like they float­ed around 2006, around about 17 cents, Maybe they opened at 0. 12 and went up to 0. 18, so it might have float­ed around 0. 12. Then they dropped down to 0. 01 by 2008 09 and stayed down at 0. 01 or 0. 02. Until 2019 they start­ed to pick up and then they had a great thing.

[00:16:16] CR: But imag­ine sit­ting on it. You got in at 12 cents, it dropped down to 1 cent and stayed there for 12, 13 years. I mean, brave a man than me Gun­gadin, if you were hold­ing on for that amount of time. But, uh, yeah.

[00:16:32] TK: yeah, but the point we were talk­ing about last week was that they took Lion­stown turned down a takeover offer and the share­hold­ers would have been much more enriched if they’d tak­en it. And, um, it was a very emo­tion­al time. Gina Rein­hart bought into the com­pa­ny as a block­ing stake for it to be able to stay Aus­tralian owned and not go over­seas and blah, blah, blah.

[00:16:52] TK: So, uh, and then the share price has dropped from 3 down to where it is now, 86 cents or some­thing like it is today. Um, so yeah, it’s, it’s, It’s been a wild ride for sure. It’s not the kind of wild ride I would like to take on though, and cer­tain­ly could­n’t pre­dict going for­ward. And you know, as you say, I mean, I think what’s emerged in the think­ing in the last 12 months to sort of clar­i­fy things is that com­pa­nies like BHP have said, we’re not touch­ing lithi­um, it’s too hard.

[00:17:22] TK: To refine, and I know noth­ing about lithi­um or the refin­ing process, but it seems like what hap­pens is they pump a whole heap of salt water into the lithi­um in the ground, and then when it bub­bles up, they, uh, they, um, they let it evap­o­rate in big open sort of dams or pans. And what’s left is lithi­um con­cen­trate, but it takes months, if not years for that to hap­pen.

[00:17:52] TK: process to occur. So, um, it’s a very slow process to get lithi­um out of the ground and into a use­ful form.

[00:17:58] TK: It’s one of the rea­sons why, uh, lithi­um mines have dropped a lot this year.

[00:18:04] CR: Lithi­um refin­ing involves extract­ing lithi­um from its ores, typ­i­cal­ly spo­dumene or brine. For spo­dumene, the ore is heat­ed to high tem­per­a­tures to change its crys­talline struc­ture, mak­ing lithi­um eas­i­er to extract. The mate­r­i­al is then crushed. Mixed with chem­i­cals, like sul­fu­ric acid, and processed to pro­duce lithi­um car­bon­ate or lithi­um hydrox­ide.

[00:18:27] CR: For brine, lithi­um rich water from under­ground reser­voirs is pumped to the sur­face and evap­o­rat­ed in large ponds over months, con­cen­trat­ing the lithi­um. The con­cen­trat­ed brine is treat­ed with chem­i­cals to iso­late lithi­um com­pounds, which are fur­ther puri­fied. Both meth­ods require sig­nif­i­cant ener­gy and water, con­tribut­ing to envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns. Unlike,

[00:18:50] TK: Yeah, but they go into EVs though, which is great for the

[00:18:52] TK: envi­ron­ment. Yeah,

[00:18:59] CR: involved in that. I just, I,

[00:19:01] TK: yeah.

[00:19:02] CR: I just used the Pacif­ic Ocean’s sup­ply of water to pro­duce that result. Hmm.

[00:19:09] TK: And so that’s the oth­er thing. I mean, one of the rea­sons why lithi­um took off in the first place was because of this EV, you know, because of the attrac­tive­ness of, you know, Elec­tric vehi­cles to peo­ple who have that kind of ESG mind­ed focus on invest­ing. Um, but yeah, as I’ve said on many occa­sions before, it’s a great focus to have, but does­n’t always gen­er­ate good returns.

[00:19:31] TK: And it has­n’t in this case, unless you were in on the ground floor at 12 cents and threw the bread lat­er away and did­n’t sell it when it went down to 1 cent and then par­tic­i­pat­ed and had had the deep pock­ets to par­tic­i­pate in the cap­i­tal rais­ings

[00:19:47] TK: and not get dilut­ed. So you stayed at 1 cent.

[00:19:49] CR: And I sus­pect Jamie’s one of those peo­ple and that’s why he’s defend­ing

[00:19:52] TK: I hope so.

[00:19:52] TK: Well done.

[00:19:53] CR: going to pick us up in

[00:19:54] CR: his, uh, pri­vate jet lat­er on and, um, flies to

[00:19:58] TK: no, great

[00:19:59] CR: where he owns

[00:20:00] CR: a palace. Uh, Jor­dan wrote in too.

[00:20:03] TK: with, does it have big ponds out­side? Wait­ing for the lithi­um to float to the sur­face.

[00:20:09] CR: Jor­dan. Hi Cam. Tony was talk­ing about accru­als on last week’s show and con­sid­er­ing incor­po­rat­ing them into the check­list if he can find the data.

[00:20:17] CR: I found that Stock Doc­tor have a met­ric called accru­al per­cent­age, which you can include in the down­load on the stock fil­ter data. Stock Doc­tor’s help pages don’t give an indi­ca­tion of what the accru­al is actu­al­ly a per­cent­age of, but I have email sup­port, emailed sup­port, to see if they’ll explain how they cal­cu­late the accru­al per­cent­age met­ric.

[00:20:37] CR: The below page on the Stock Doc­tor Help sec­tion explains that the Earn­ings Qual­i­ty Met­ric mea­sures how close­ly report­ed earn­ings match­es cash flows. The Earn­ings Qual­i­ty Met­ric is avail­able for down­load or for pre­vi­ous halves under Finan­cial State­ments, Arrow, Finan­cial Met­rics on Stock Doc­tor. So depend­ing on what data you have in the regres­sion tool, you might be able to check this as a proxy for WWOS Account­ing Met­rics.

[00:21:04] CR: WWOS, WWO, WWO, WWO, WWO. Wub­ba wub­ba wub­ba, wub­ba’s.

[00:21:10] TK: Well,

[00:21:10] TK: wows

[00:21:11] CR: Um, uh, la la la, On this week’s buy list, only two stocks report­ed weak earn­ings qual­i­ty, ATP and CCV. Oh, don’t talk to me about ATP. Hope this is help­ful.

[00:21:23] TK: gone up again.

[00:21:24] CR: Of course it

[00:21:25] TK: sell that one too?

[00:21:27] TK: Did you, did you sell

[00:21:28] CR: After the last time with ATP, it’s in my, uh, you know, red flash­ing light list. Don’t go near it.

[00:21:36] CR: Hope this is help­ful. Well, yeah,

[00:21:38] TK: Now that we, now that we both own Par­en­ti, can you just let me know when you’re gonna sell it so I

[00:21:43] CR: yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:21:44] TK: buy some more. I’ll buy it off you. If you wan­na sell it, just gimme a call.

[00:21:49] CR: Wow. Wow. It’s gen­er­ous of you. Hope this is help­ful. And I’ll let you know if Stock Doc­tor responds to my query regard­ing accru­al per­cent­age. Thank you, Jor­dan.

[00:22:01] TK: Oh, that’s cru­el. That’s great. That’s real­ly help­ful, Jor­dan. I had­n’t picked up on that. Um, yeah, I had a look because Jor­dan nom­i­nat­ed Atlas Pearls, but also Cash Con­vert­ers as two com­pa­nies with um, accru­als, um, in their sales. That’s actu­al­ly a real­ly good way of find­ing it out too, because I can’t think of anoth­er rea­son why the rev­enue and the cash­flow state­ment would be dif­fer­ent to the rev­enue in the P& L.

[00:22:28] TK: It’s got to be accru­als, I would think. So it’s a good way of. Work­ing it out. Yeah. And now I just had a quick look at it, um, before when I was prep­ping for the show, uh, to see what we can do with that. Um, of course my mind straight away said, Oh, I should test that. But, um, real­ly what works on Wall Street’s test­ed it with much more rig­or and, and far greater uni­verse of stocks and what I would do.

[00:22:52] TK: So as soon as I can, I guess I’ll put it into the, um,

[00:22:55] TK: into pro­duc­tion. I think it’s a good one.

[00:22:57] CR: So for peo­ple who did­n’t hear last week’s show, or like me, can’t remem­ber what we talked about, uh, give it, give us the quick sum­ma­ry of what accru­al is and how this works.

[00:23:09] TK: Yeah, so what’s, what works on Wall Street, um, gave over a lot of time and effort to not just look­ing at whether high div­i­dends pay­ing stocks did bet­ter than low div­i­dend pay­ing stocks, but account­ing ratios, and one of them was accru­als. And so an accru­al is where, uh, I’ve sold some­thing, and per­haps even deliv­ered it to a cus­tomer, but I haven’t been paid yet.

[00:23:36] TK: But the account­ing rules allow me to bring the pay­ment from next year into this year’s books. You know, it’s designed to bal­ance up the stock and the move­ments and all that kind of thing. You know, because you can, there’s two types of account­ing, cash or accru­al. Cash is very sim­ple, it’s, As things get paid, they get booked and accru­al is now going to try and match the, the, what’s the cost of what’s been sold with the rev­enues from what’s been sold.

[00:24:04] TK: So you can bring them for­ward as the inven­to­ry leaves. Any­time you’ll ask the man­ag­er to, to fid­dle with the num­bers, guess what? They fid­dle like there’s no tomor­row. They fid­dle like they’re Nero,

[00:24:18] TK: Rome’s burn­ing.

[00:24:19] CR: glad you did­n’t say they fid­dle, they fid­dle like Alan

[00:24:21] CR: Jones. I’m glad you did­n’t go there. I mean, because that’s only alle­ga­tions and we would­n’t, we

[00:24:26] TK: I did­n’t know he played the vio­lin

[00:24:27] CR: Yeah,

[00:24:31] TK: and um, so there’s been cas­es of com­pa­nies, uh, get­ting, get­ting so stuck into the fid­dle. I got the whole, the whole, uh, what is it? The wood, not the wood­wind, the whole string

[00:24:44] TK: sec­tion of the, of the orches­tra

[00:24:46] CR: look, I’ve just

[00:24:47] TK: they bring, they

[00:24:49] TK: bring,

[00:24:49] CR: I can­not allow, I can­not allow the besmirch­ing of Nero’s name like this to go on in one of my shows. There is absolute­ly no evi­dence that Nero,

[00:25:02] TK: let Alan, you let Alan

[00:25:03] TK: Jones be the besmirched, but not Nero.

[00:25:06] CR: no evi­dence that Nero, Was any­thing but shocked and hor­ri­fied when Rome burnt. It’s all spu­ri­ous pro­pa­gan­da spread by his ene­mies, the Fla­vians that came after him to make him look bad and jus­ti­fy their, uh, tak­ing the Roman empire. Any­way, con­tin­ue.

[00:25:28] TK: Yeah, it’s a good sto­ry. That’s why it’s stuck for 2000 years. But um, no, so there have been cas­es of com­pa­nies who got, uh, on the cru­el tread­mill and they kept hav­ing to, because, you know, if you do it once, right, if you bring sales from Jan­u­ary into Decem­ber, That helps your P& L. Then next year, you’ve only got 11 months sales, right?

[00:25:49] TK: Cause you put the 12th into the year before. So then you have to bring, you have to keep doing that. And you know, if then it’s, yeah, it becomes an, it becomes oppor­tunis­tic. If, if a Feb­ru­ary looks real­ly good too, can I bring those for­ward? So yeah, it just becomes a prob­lem and it has led to the demise of some com­pa­nies, par­tic­u­lar­ly

[00:26:07] TK: retail­ers or whole­salers who are sell­ing to retail­ers.

[00:26:10] CR: So accru­als is bad.

[00:26:13] TK: not nec­es­sar­i­ly if it’s done prop­er­ly,

[00:26:15] CR: I’m talk­ing about from

[00:26:16] TK: I’m bring­ing you a day’s

[00:26:17] CR: from a wow’s

[00:26:18] TK: invest­ing point of view, yeah, it’s bad. Yeah.

[00:26:21] CR: So we want to,

[00:26:22] TK: A cross is bad. So we want to try and give a neg­a­tive one or some­thing in the check­list for, uh, for that.

[00:26:29] CR: um, he calls out ATV and CCV with weak earn­ings qual­i­ty. So he said before that, I skipped a bit, he said accru­als greater than 10 per­cent is report­ed as weak. Right. 10 per­cent to 5 per­cent accru­als is report­ed as weak or neu­tral. 5 per­cent down to greater than 0 per­cent is neu­tral, less than 0 per­cent is report­ed as strong.

[00:26:51] CR: So weak earn­ings qual­i­ty means a high per­cent­age of accru­als and there­fore you want to pun­ish them in the scor­ing some­how. Neg­a­tive one, as she said,

[00:27:02] TK: Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it could even be a red flag. I don’t know. I’ve got

[00:27:06] TK: to have a look into it a bit fur­ther.

[00:27:08] CR: with my expe­ri­ence with ATP, I’d def­i­nite­ly encour­age a red flag on

[00:27:13] TK: well, I’ve got to say off the bat, both of these com­pa­nies are buys and they’re on, they’re going up. There’s stock prices going up and they’re on the, they’re going up with the bread loader. So, you know. That’s what I’m say­ing. It’s, it, it, it may be that we don’t want to make it a com­plete red flag as in

[00:27:31] TK: just elim­i­nate them, but we might want to knock them

[00:27:33] CR: Oh my God. I just looked at ATP.

[00:27:37] TK: I was wait­ing for

[00:27:38] CR: They’ve gone from like 8 cents to 16 cents. They’ve dou­bled in the last three months. Oh

[00:27:45] TK: been anoth­er pearl sale,

[00:27:46] CR: Oh, you bas­tards.

[00:27:48] CR: You com­plete and utter bas­tards. Oh, I know that you nev­er go and check your old girl­friend’s Face­book page, but, uh, I am, I am. I am gonna check this to see, uh, when did I, what did I sell a TP at? Oh,

[00:28:09] TK: It’s got­ta be.

[00:28:10] CR: it at 11 cents

[00:28:13] CR: in com­plete bas­tards.

[00:28:15] CR: Um,

[00:28:15] TK: But what did you buy? What did you buy that?

[00:28:17] CR: thir 13. I bought it at 13.

[00:28:21] CR: Sold it.

[00:28:21] TK: What did you buy with the pro­ceeds?

[00:28:23] CR: Oh, I don’t know. How the hell do I know? I don’t know. But it was, um, yeah, it was a light port­fo­lio. Bought it at 13 cents in Decem­ber 23. Sold it in April after their auc­tion went bad at 11 cents. So I lost 13 per­cent on it. Any­way, so it’s up to

[00:28:41] TK: It’s got­ta, it,

[00:28:42] CR: much.

[00:28:43] TK: it does strike me that, remem­ber we could­n’t find a com­mod­i­ty for pearls ’cause the mar­ket’s so illiq­uid and small. But it does strike me as an oppor­tu­ni­ty for an enter­pris­ing lis­ten­er to buy some to arbi­trage between the share price of a TP and buy­ing the pearls, like influ­enc­ing the auc­tion, push the price up on the auc­tion and make the mon­ey back on the, on the share price.

[00:29:05] TK: Or vice ver­sa, I guess if you were short­er.

[00:29:07] CR: Right, there you go. Alright, so, um, look for an accru­als score in the buy list mov­ing for­wards. I just fin­ished cod­ing the buy list too over the week­end, so

[00:29:21] TK: I know.

[00:29:22] CR: of course you’ll have to add some­thing to

[00:29:23] CR: it next year, five years.

[00:29:25] TK: Come on. You know my timetable. It’ll be next year before it gets done.

[00:29:28] CR: Writ­ing with a sug­ges­tion on

[00:29:32] TK: Yeah.

[00:29:36] CR: zom­bie com­pa­nies for the show with a link below to an arti­cle on LiveWire I found inter­est­ing. The inter­est­ing aspect was that some of these com­pa­nies are in the ASX 300, which blew my mind as I thought zom­bie com­pa­nies would be pen­ny dread­fuls or at least small, small caps He’s also ask­ing for a pulled pork on QBE, which is on the buy list and has tak­en off recent­ly, and he even owns some, so he thinks you’re

[00:30:01] TK: So do I.

[00:30:02] CR: thinks you’re doing a pulled pork on it, it’s going to be good for it appar­ent­ly.

[00:30:04] TK: help. Well, Tom, if you want to send mon­ey through, I pre­pared the pulled pork when I saw your

[00:30:13] TK: request, but I can leave it till next week if you like.

[00:30:15] CR: Tony’s, uh, bank account details are fol­low­ing. Um, the zom­bie com­pa­ny’s arti­cle is inter­est­ing. It says, while every­one’s atten­tion is focused on min­er­al resources and WiseTech, there are oth­er com­pa­nies on the ASX that are flash­ing red. The media has been cir­cling WiseTech Glob­al’s Richard Wyatt and Min­er­al Resources Chris Elli­son in recent months.

[00:30:35] CR: Why to step down? Well, Elli­son plans to step down from his post with­in 18 months, both with the result of inves­ti­ga­tions and intense scruti­ny. Although there are red flags sur­round­ing both these com­pa­nies, Pla­to Invest­ment Man­age­men­t’s Dr. David Allen sug­gests that these are not the only com­pa­nies in the ASX 300 that investors should be tak­ing notes on.

[00:30:57] CR: Zom­bie com­pa­nies are defined as busi­ness­es where their inter­est Costs or debt repay­ments exceed their cash flows over long peri­ods of time, say three years or more. Usu­al­ly they trade at high mul­ti­ples and have a cap­ti­vat­ing sto­ry that sees investors take a punt on these prof­it­less or hard­ly rev­enue gen­er­at­ing com­pa­nies like a junior min­ing busi­ness sit­ting on a very large pot of gold or a biotech with plans to rev­o­lu­tion­ize health­care.

[00:31:31] CR: If a com­pa­ny’s got,

[00:31:32] TK: lithi­um min­er.

[00:31:33] CR: if a com­pa­ny’s got neg­a­tive oper­at­ing cash flow, and it can’t even cov­er its assets. Inter­est costs, they’re going to have to keep tap­ping the mar­ket to get financ­ing just to stay afloat. Their core oper­a­tions are val­ue destroy­ing, Alan says. When you look at that as a red flag, a com­pa­ny that is a zom­bie, they per­form hor­ri­bly on aver­age.

[00:31:52] CR: It’s often the case that they’re com­pa­nies that have a bit of a lot­tery pro­file, where they could be ten bag­gers. So which sev­en busi­ness­es are zom­bies on the ASX in this wire? You’ll find out. Would you like to know more? Press

[00:32:07] TK: click­bait. Take this

[00:32:08] CR: right, yeah, yeah. Um, so, uh, Min­er­al Resources, WiseTech Glob­al, the oth­ers are NextGen Ener­gy, ASX NXG, mar­ket cap 5.

[00:32:21] CR: 5 bil­lion Cana­di­an dol­lars, rev­enues zero, sta­tus 5, 7 and 10 years, 12 month share price per­for­mance 20. 11%, Anoth­er one is Mesoblast, ASX, MSB, mar­ket cap 1. 52 bil­lion, rev­enues 5. 9 mil­lion, zom­bie sta­tus 5 in 7 years, 12 month share price per­for­mance 259 per­cent I like this note,

[00:32:53] TK: Miso Blast is, is par­tic­u­lar­ly, sor­ry to inter­rupt, Miso Blast is par­tic­u­lar­ly per­ti­nent to the sto­ry

[00:33:00] TK: cat­e­go­ry of this, uh, of zom­bie com­pa­nies. Yeah,

[00:33:03] CR: its cell ther­a­py has been reject­ed by the FDA twice, they also had to set­tle a class action law­suit over a COVID treat­ment, where they report­ed­ly mis­rep­re­sent­ed the ben­e­fits of the treat­ment. Num­ber 3 is Immutep.

[00:33:18] TK: is kind of an aster­isk. It does­n’t cure COVID.

[00:33:24] CR: MUTEP, uh, share code is IMM, mar­ket cap 422 mil­lion, rev­enue zero. Can you be an ASX 300 with a mar­ket cap of 422 mil­lion? That seems small.

[00:33:36] TK: It’ll be at

[00:33:36] TK: the bot­tom end, yeah, but you could. Ha ha ha ha ha

[00:33:40] CR: Novonix, NVX, 353 mil­lion mar­ket cap, rev­enues of 8. 1 mil­lion, zom­bie sta­tus, five years. It’s share price is down 9 per­cent over the last 12 months. By the way, Immutep is down 3. 33%. Ioneer, INR, did Bar­ry and Stan come up with all these names? Immu, Mesoblast, Immutep, Novonix, Ioneer.

[00:34:09] CR: Give me

[00:34:10] TK: Mm hmm.

[00:34:11] TK: It’s a theme, isn’t it?

[00:34:12] CR: Yeah, that should be the side of

[00:34:14] TK: If you’re gonna, have a best sell­ing sto­ry, you got­ta put a good

[00:34:17] CR: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:34:18] TK: Ha ha ha ha!

[00:34:20] CR: Don’t need to look at any of the fun­da­men­tals to pick the zom­bie com­pa­nies, just look at the stu­pid names. Um, INR. We can talk with QAV as their name. Uh, mar­ket cap 538 mil­lion. Rev­enue zero. 12 month share price per­for­mance 35%. Guess what? They’re a lithi­um devel­op­er.

[00:34:38] CR: Um, Adri­at­ic Met­als, ADT, 846, well not Aver­age Dai­ly Trade, uh, the code is ADT, mar­ket cap 846 mil­lion, rev­enue 0, 12 month share price per­for­mance 17. 3%. Boss Ener­gy, BOE, 1. 32 bil­lion mar­ket cap, rev­enues 5. 5 mil­lion, zom­bie sta­tus 5 years. Share price per­for­mance last 12 months, neg­a­tive 26%. Well, That’s

[00:35:06] TK: anoth­er inter­est­ing one. Was­n’t it called Boss Resources? That changed its name to Boss Ener­gy. That’s Yeah, no, but that’s anoth­er tell­tale sign of that kind of com­pa­ny.

[00:35:16] TK: It’s like, we’re in the resource game, now we’re in the ener­gy

[00:35:19] CR: Yeah. Ener­gy is much more fun­gi­ble.

[00:35:22] TK: Ha Ha ha ha. ha ha Ha ha

[00:35:25] CR: So like these,

[00:35:27] TK: were hold­ing us back,

[00:35:27] CR: they’re a ura­ni­um pro­duc­er, Aus­trali­a’s next ura­ni­um pro­duc­er, accord­ing to their web­site. Um,

[00:35:35] TK: Only got about five,

[00:35:37] TK: fif­teen or some­thing list­ed. Ha

[00:35:39] CR: these com­pa­nies aren’t going to be on our buy list, are they?

[00:35:44] TK: No! And for good rea­son! I mean, this is the lot­tery end of the share mar­ket. This is like being a par­ent with a teenag­er who keeps start­ing up busi­ness­es and then they fail and you go, Oh, it’s a good learn­ing expe­ri­ence. Have some more mon­ey, have some more mon­ey. So they, they exist. And look, you know, the one I’ve, I’ve focused in on there before, MesoBlast, it’s been around for almost as long as my, I’ve been invest­ing.

[00:36:09] TK: Um, for, and, what’s his name, uh, Sil­viu Ites­cu, I think his name is, pro­fes­sor, so smart guy, is a con­sum­mate pre­sen­ter, con­sum­mate, um, has­n’t pro­duced any­thing that I can think of. Um, but has had such fan­tas­tic world chang­ing sto­ries about how he’s going to rev­o­lu­tion­ize med­i­cine and can cure this and that, uh, 20 years lat­er, or near­ly 20 years lat­er, has­n’t hap­pened yet.

[00:36:41] CR: Well, it takes time.

[00:36:42] TK: but what has hap­pened is, uh, every cou­ple of years or even soon­er, he goes back to the mar­ket and asks, he does anoth­er great road­show and, you know, comes up with anoth­er world beat­ing cure for What­ev­er. Can­cer. Um, and rais­es mon­ey from retail share­hold­ers who are entranced by, um, his, his pre­sen­ta­tion.

[00:37:04] TK: And you know what? Yeah, he, he may well cure can­cer. Um, he’s had enough goes at it, so, um, if any­one’s gonna do it, it’s prob­a­bly him.

[00:37:14] CR: And as the arti­cle

[00:37:15] TK: uh, but that’s,

[00:37:16] CR: sor­ry,

[00:37:16] TK: that’s just not, that’s not how I want to fund my retire­ment from tak­ing those kinds of punts.

[00:37:22] CR: the share

[00:37:22] TK: And to be fair, the ASXs exist to, to raise mon­ey for spec­u­la­tive invest­ments.

[00:37:27] TK: So, you know, I’m not say­ing, um, shut these down or over reg­u­late them, but if you’re going to invest in them, be aware, you’re prob­a­bly going to, you may lose your mon­ey and you’re def­i­nite­ly going to be asked for more. Um, and then, I don’t know, 1 in 20, 1 in 100 might actu­al­ly shoot the lights out and cure can­cer and then you, you can call us from the Bahamas, but, uh, if you don’t own that

[00:37:53] TK: one, you’re stuffed.

[00:37:54] CR: or you’d be, you’d die of can­cer

[00:37:55] CR: before it hap­pens. Um, the share price is up 259 per­cent this year. It’s gone from, I don’t know, say, uh, 26 cents rough­ly a year ago, up to 1. 60, which is great.

[00:38:11] TK: Yeah, but

[00:38:14] CR: July, 2011, it was trad­ing at $8 50

[00:38:21] TK: And have a look in Stock Doc­tor and see how

[00:38:23] TK: much mon­ey it’s raised between those two peri­ods

[00:38:25] CR: August, 2020. It was trad­ing at five bucks. had, it had fall­en from $8 50 down to a buck, then it went up to five bucks, and then it dropped down to 30 cents.

[00:38:39] TK: Yeah. So it’s a trad­ing stock real­ly, isn’t it? If you, if you’ve got a way of trad­ing that stock, it’s great, but don’t get caught in it and

[00:38:46] TK: don’t, don’t keep tip­ping into it.

[00:38:49] CR: Don’t believe the sto­ry.

[00:38:50] TK: bad. Yeah.

[00:38:52] TK: Yeah.

[00:38:54] CR: Uh,

[00:38:54] TK: And look, I’m, I’m pick­ing on him. There’s, uh, um, he’s a pro­fes­sor, so he’s a smart guy and he prob­a­bly does want to cure can­cer gen­uine­ly and thinks this is the best way to go about doing it.

[00:39:06] TK: But as investors, this is a bit like, you know, being, being caught up in the lithi­um boom because it’s going to, um, pow­er elec­tric vehi­cles, you know, to eter­ni­ty, from here to eter­ni­ty, and it’s going to solve glob­al warm­ing.

[00:39:23] CR: mm,

[00:39:24] TK: No, it’s not. And it’s also, you’ve got to have some num­bers to back up that invest­ment the­sis too.

[00:39:30] CR: mm. Well, uh, thanks for that arti­cle shar­ing that with us, Tom. Very inter­est­ing. Um,

[00:39:38] TK: Some good, good cor­re­spon­dence this week.

[00:39:41] CR: yeah, it’s nice. Peo­ple are wak­ing up out of their slum­ber. Um, I just want­ed to give peo­ple, uh, mem­bers a cou­ple of, uh, notices. Uh, the buy list when I uploaded it yes­ter­day was balked. Um, there was some balk­ing of the. Fig­ures. A num­ber of peo­ple alert­ed me to that, includ­ing you, Tony. I apol­o­gize for that. I fixed it late last night, so if you haven’t already down­loaded the fixed ver­sion, down­load, go to the same link I post­ed in Face­book and down­load the fixed ver­sion, which I think is right.

[00:40:15] CR: Um, and also the AF ver­sion of the check­list for those of you using that, when I was doing some cod­ing of it yes­ter­day or over the week­end, I noticed that there was a prob­lem in col­umn AD, which Pre­sent­ed the score for the ques­tion, is the fore­cast IV or the IV2 greater than twice the share price? Um, it was actu­al­ly being cal­cu­lat­ed in col­umn AR, and if the cal­cu­la­tion in col­umn AR was a zero, AD was actu­al­ly show­ing it as a blank, not as a zero. There’s just a for­mat­ting issue as it turned out, um, the for­mat­ting of that col­umn was set to cus­tom instead of to gen­er­al and it just did­n’t copy it over. Does­n’t look like it changed it, I, I, I went back­wards and for­wards, um, look­ing if it changed any of the QAV scores, I don’t think it did. So, I don’t think it’s made a dif­fer­ence to any­thing, but there is a new ver­sion, um, up, uh, you can get via the mem­ber resources page if you want to change it, or just change it in your own ver­sion from, um, Cus­tom to Gen­er­al and Bob’s Your Uncle.

[00:41:26] CR: Don’t think it’s going to change any­thing though, just to be per­fect. Um, ASG. I did some sell­ing from the DP, final­ly. Tony, I had to sell some­thing and I sold ASG, final­ly.

[00:41:41] TK: What’s hap­pened to it? What’s the share price

[00:41:43] CR: well, you’ll remem­ber that back in May they had a div­i­dend. Div­i­dend went X, share price dropped, then it was paid, div­i­dend, the price did­n’t recov­er.

[00:41:53] CR: And I looked at its chart and I said to you, well, it always does this. Like they always have a big dip and then they recov­er after the div­i­dend. It takes usu­al­ly a few weeks or a month and then they recov­er and they go to a new high and then there’s a div­i­dend and it drops a lot of div­i­dend trad­ing. It took for­ev­er to took like months to recov­er from the May div­i­dend.

[00:42:14] CR: final­ly, it final­ly did. And then it had anoth­er div­i­dend.

[00:42:20] TK: A dou­ble

[00:42:20] CR: An Octo­ber, ear­ly Novem­ber div­i­dend, which has been paid, and it’s still not recov­er­ing, and it’s below where it was in May, and I was like, you know what? Screw you, and the horse you rode in on. Um, I’m done. And so I had to sell that from, My, I think my Super sold it from the, no, no, it’s just the dum­my port­fo­lio, I think.

[00:42:42] CR: Maybe Super too, I don’t know. Um, Light Port­fo­lios. I had to sell it from every­where. Um, so that’s final­ly gone. But it’s the first thing I’ve sold in the dum­my port­fo­lio since August, I think.

[00:42:55] TK: just going to email Alex Hay and ask him to buy some ASG for me.

[00:43:06] CR: I want­ed to also talk about one more stock, SWM. It’s on the buy list. I near­ly bought this. It’s just sev­en words.

[00:43:15] TK: think it’s a sell

[00:43:16] TK: though, isn’t it? It’s been going down for ages.

[00:43:18] CR: No, it’s on the buy list. Um,

[00:43:21] TK: yeah, but I’m pret­ty sure it’s a, if you look at the graph, it’s

[00:43:23] TK: a sell. Any­way, go on.

[00:43:25] CR: well it was above its 2BL. It’s been a falling knife for ages, but it’s above its 2BL. It was

[00:43:33] TK: Oh, okay. Yep.

[00:43:34] TK: I can see now you’re right. Sor­ry.

[00:43:36] CR: So, I mean, I was going to buy it and I went and read the announce­ments and I’m, you know, hav­ing a look at what’s going on.

[00:43:45] CR: And, uh,

[00:43:47] CR: so they just. They had their AGM recent­ly, a cou­ple of weeks ago, and so I was read­ing through the Chair­man’s Address at the AGM, and it just tick­led me.

[00:43:59] CR: So Ker­ry Stokes, good old Ker­ry Stokes, um, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he goes, um, We face indus­try wide chal­lenges, includ­ing a sub­dued eco­nom­ic envi­ron­ment that is putting sus­tained pres­sure on adver­tis­ing, and fed­er­al gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy set­tings that are cre­at­ing unnec­es­sary road­blocks. Ah, those gov­ern­ments and their road­blocks.

[00:44:25] CR: You’re bou

[00:44:25] TK: Patre­on Cap­i­tal­ism.

[00:44:26] CR: Your board act­ed swift­ly this year to con­front the head­winds fac­ing our indus­try, ini­ti­at­ing a group wide restruc­ture of our oper­a­tions and man­age­ment. This was designed to invig­o­rate the busi­ness and set us up to best exploit mod­ern con­sumer habits, fast track trans­for­ma­tion, con­trol costs, grow audi­ences.

[00:44:47] CR: Can’t do any­thing about the fact that our audi­ence is just dying off and we’re not replac­ing them, but you know, maybe zom­bies, maybe we’ll bring them back as he did­n’t say any of that. I’m mak­ing that up. Um, But the bit that got me was this bit, um, you know, he’s going on about sports pro­gram­ming, blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, telethons, rais­ing mon­ey for six kids, our peo­ple are deeply ingrained in our towns and cities where we fight for our view­ers and read­ers.

[00:45:16] CR: We are a busi­ness built on and loved by mil­lions of Aus­tralians who make up our Broad 7 fam­i­ly. This is in stark con­trast to over­seas base stream­ing plat­forms. Unlike them, we pay our tax­es, look after our peo­ple and fol­low the strict broad­cast­ing laws. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has failed to cre­ate a leg­isla­tive envi­ron­ment that allows Aus­tralians unfet­tered and guar­an­teed access to free sports pro­gram­ming.

[00:45:43] CR: Our par­lia­men­tar­i­ans are not doing enough to rein­force and strength­en. The anti siphon­ing rules in order to give every Aus­tralian access, for free, to icon­ic sport­ing events of nation­al sig­nif­i­cance. And then he goes on about what they’re gonna do. This is the bit that real­ly got me. Our nation­al broad­cast­er, the ABC’s Four Cor­ners pro­gram, recent­ly veered well away from the ABC char­ter to engage in an egre­gious, An unfair assault on our busi­ness and the rep­u­ta­tion of our good peo­ple.

[00:46:16] CR: Our for­mal com­plaint to the ABC, mak­ing a com­pelling case that Four Cor­ners had clear­ly failed to meet the broad­cast­er’s own prin­ci­ples of impar­tial­i­ty, accu­ra­cy, and fair­ness was unsur­pris­ing­ly ignored. Despite our request, the ABC’s ombuds­man has also refused to inves­ti­gate the mat­ter. The Four Cor­ners pro­gram back­fired as the ABC itself is now the sub­ject of charges of hypocrisy and entrenched cul­tur­al prob­lems includ­ing racism, misog­y­ny and bul­ly­ing.

[00:46:45] CR: This attack failed to dent the spir­it and pride of our incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed, hard­work­ing and pro­fes­sion­al teams. Oh, so, so pro­fes­sion­al. So hard­work­ing. Of course, you know, we know what he’s refer­ring to when it comes to The Four Cor­ners, ATT& CK on 7.

[00:47:07] TK: peo­ple can go and look at it for them­selves.

[00:47:09] CR: Yes.

[00:47:10] TK: Or they can read about the Bruce Lehrmann

[00:47:12] CR: Yes. Yes. So pro­fes­sion­al. So hard­work­ing. I just, any­way, my bot­tom line was, I was going to buy it

[00:47:24] CR: and I read that speech and I was like, you know what? Screw you, Ker­ry Stokes. That was, I’m not, like it was­n’t even, lis­ten, we’ve made mis­takes, but we’re, we’re address­ing them and we’re, cul­tur­al changes and we’re doing that.

[00:47:40] CR: Just like, dou­ble mid­dle fin­gers to the end every­body,

[00:47:45] TK: It’s our com­peti­tor’s

[00:47:46] CR: the fed­er­al

[00:47:47] TK: and we wrote to them. We wrote to our com­peti­tor and com­plained and they ignored us. How dare they?

[00:47:55] TK: Yeah.

[00:47:57] CR: I

[00:47:57] TK: Well, I remem­ber, Joe, we did the pool, we did the pooled pork last year at some stage and you raised the issues of why would we want to buy into a TV sta­tion, um, or a net­work of TV sta­tions. And I think the share price has reflect­ed that, um, since then, I think you were right. And you, even though it’s a buy on the buy list and the share price has ticked up again, you may

[00:48:20] TK: be right going for­ward too.

[00:48:23] CR: share price at the begin­ning of the year was 27 cents, it’s cur­rent­ly at 16 cents. I mean, I mean, how could you go back even longer? It was up 50 cents going back. Wow, Feb­ru­ary 22 is at 75 cents. Now it’s at 16 cents. I mean, you know, poten­tial­ly there’s some life left in it yet and it could maybe get a jump start, but fish rots from the head, Tony.

[00:48:51] CR: That’s my basic phi­los­o­phy.

[00:48:53] TK: well, it’s a it’s a clas­sic cig­ar butt stud, isn’t it? A Ben­jamin Gra­ham cig­ar butt. Pick it up and hope­ful­ly it’s got a few more puffs in it

[00:49:00] CR: And as a cig­ar smok­er, I would not touch a cig­ar butt. There’s no joy to be had in suck­ing. Some­body’s had that in their mouth. They’ve been suck­ing on it. I don’t want to put that in my mouth. And

[00:49:16] TK: Could be

[00:49:16] TK: Ker­ry Stokes has been suck­ing on it.

[00:49:19] CR: that they’ve been suck­ing through the tobac­co is con­gealed in it. And it’s going to have that. Maybe if you like lick­ing some­body

[00:49:26] TK: You real­ly are a cig­ar,

[00:49:28] CR: nico­tine,

[00:49:29] TK: afi­ciona­do.

[00:49:30] CR: I can tell you about

[00:49:30] CR: cig­ar butts. I will smoke my own cig­ar butts. If I’ve, if I’ve been smok­ing a cig­ar for an hour and then I need to put it down and go do some­thing and I’ll, I come back a cou­ple hours lat­er, I will clip the end off it, get rid of the con­gealed nico­tine and, you know, revive it, because I’m not going to waste it because it’s tak­en a bunch of poor­ly paid peo­ple in Nicaragua or Cuba sev­en years.

[00:49:58] CR: To make that, I’m not going to, you know, uh,

[00:50:04] TK: Bit like a Chan­nel 7 pro­gram, isn’t it?

[00:50:09] CR: any­way. So that was my SWM. I was just dis­gust­ed when I read that. It was like, uh, um, lit­tle bit of tech news. Uh, um, I wrote a news app, final­ly.

[00:50:22] TK: Whatcha gonna call it Chan­nel eight? not Chan­nel sev­en The final nail and the cof­fin for Sev­en

[00:50:30] TK: West Media.

[00:50:32] CR: So,

[00:50:32] TK: got­ta use that.

[00:50:33] CR: you’ve been ask­ing me for a while, is there a way you could like just use AI to get all the news sto­ries of all the stocks in our buy list each week?

[00:50:40] TK: Mm

[00:50:41] CR: And I could­n’t fig­ure out how to do it and I fig­ured out how to do it over the week­end. I had a, I had a light bulb that went off, two light bulbs, real­ly.

[00:50:50] CR: Um, so I did that and I’ve built it now, I can run it. When­ev­er I want, it’ll pro­duce sto­ries on all the stocks in my port­fo­lio. And the rea­son that I think that drove me to do it is that stock that I had that got delist­ed recent­ly, and I had­n’t known

[00:51:05] TK: Yeah. Right?

[00:51:06] CR: But basi­cal­ly what it does, um, quick ver­sion of the sto­ry is I was think­ing about Google News Alerts, which is some­thing that I’ve used for 20 years, but it pro­duces emails and then you get a, just a ton of junk emails.

[00:51:21] CR: And I did­n’t want to, I did­n’t want to deal with that, but I was try­ing to fig­ure out a way around it.

[00:51:25] TK: in direc­tors hold­ings

[00:51:27] CR: that kind of

[00:51:27] CR: crap.

[00:51:28] TK: Yeah.

[00:51:28] CR: and then when I was inside of Google Newslet­ters, I saw you can cre­ate an RSS feed, not, not an email, you can cre­ate an RSS feed. So I thought, well, if I cre­ate a newslet­ter based on a stock code, like ASX colon NAB, I can stick it in there, cre­ate an RSS feed, then I could drop the RSS feed into my RSS read­er and I could scan the RSS feeds, but again, there’s a hun­dred stocks in our port­fo­lios.

[00:51:53] CR: The light. dum­my, my super, what­ev­er. I don’t want to have to read through all of the bull­shit sto­ries. Then I had the idea. What if I write an app that down­loads the RSS feeds and then pass­es them through to Ope­nAI’s API and gets it to read them. Analyse them, pri­or­i­tize them, give them a score out of 10 being the most impor­tant, down to one, being unim­por­tant.

[00:52:20] CR: Look for cer­tain cri­te­ria. So I’ve told it. Any­thing that talks about an acqui­si­tion or a merg­er, any­thing involv­ing a change to the sta­tus of the CEO or the CFO, A few oth­er things. Uh, prof­it guid­ance changes, rev­enue guid­ance changes,

[00:52:40] TK: Oh, you could do

[00:52:40] TK: buy­backs.

[00:52:41] CR: could do buy­backs.

[00:52:43] TK: Yeah. Good

[00:52:44] CR: Write that as high as you

[00:52:45] TK: in div­i­dends.

[00:52:46] CR: then it goes all the way down to, you know, Bro­ker, Bull­shit, or, you know, those sorts of things down the bot­tom.

[00:52:53] CR: So I get a report, and it’s love­ly, it’s, it’s for­mat­ted, it’s HTML, it looks love­ly, I can just look at it once a day, and it gives me the high­lights of every­thing. But, I did­n’t want to have to cre­ate a hun­dred alerts in Google either, so then I wrote a script that just, Logs into Google News Alerts, cre­ates the alert, grabs the RSS feed, puts it in an OPML ref­er­ence list that the report then ref­er­ence every time it runs the OPML list.

[00:53:19] CR: I’ve got it all set. I was like, Oh my God, this is so great. So yeah, I wrote that in an hour on the week­end.

[00:53:26] TK: Wow.

[00:53:28] TK: Yeah, that’s great.

[00:53:29] CR: great. It’s awe­some, man. I was so, I was so pumped. I called Tay­lor. I was going to tell some­body this. Can’t believe I just did this. It’s like, Amaz­ing.

[00:53:39] TK: What did Tay­lor say?

[00:53:40] CR: Yeah, it’s real­ly cool.

[00:53:42] TK: Well done, Dad. Good

[00:53:44] CR: good boy. Yeah.

[00:53:45] CR: But the thing was, the thing I want­ed to say to like, I start­ed off think­ing, Oh, well, like RSS feeds and Google Newslet­ters, I don’t want to have to enter them all man­u­al­ly. So I’ll write a script that will do that. And that was the first thing that I did. But But then it was that, well, why don’t I just write an app that does every­thing that I want?

[00:54:01] CR: Like, what’s the dream here, here? Why don’t I just write the app that does But I was say­ing to Tay, and I was say­ing this to Sam­marti­no on the Futur­is­tic Show yes­ter­day too, my brain still does­n’t go to roll your own. With this sort of stuff, it has­n’t been trained to think, well, I’ll just build the whole thing that I want, because I can prob­a­bly do that now.

[00:54:20] CR: I just tell the AI what I want, and I can prob­a­bly fig­ure out a way to piece togeth­er the full solu­tion. I don’t need to just use pre exist­ing stuff. I can build the, the, the. Full kit and caboose. So that was like, Oh shit, why don’t, why don’t I just do that? You know, like I’ve been try­ing to work this out for months.

[00:54:43] CR: I’ve had a cou­ple of cracks at it over months too. And look­ing at List Corp and look­ing at exist­ing ser­vice providers that did­n’t give me exact­ly what I want­ed and make it easy. Like here’s a hun­dred stocks and every week in the buy list there’s, you know, a hun­dred stocks and 20 of them are new and they need alerts and all that kind of stuff.

[00:55:05] TK: Yeah. Right. Oh, well done. That’d be par­tic­u­lar­ly help­ful if we can get some of the man­u­al­ly into data, um, auto­mat­ed. That’d be great. And some of the new stuff that we’re look­ing at, like, um, like buy­backs and changes in div­i­dends or cuts and

[00:55:20] TK: div­i­dends.

[00:55:21] CR: All the man­u­al­ly entered data is auto­mat­ed. The,

[00:55:26] TK: I thought Alex was still doing

[00:55:27] CR: she does, but I give it to

[00:55:29] CR: her. I’ve got the whole thing auto­mat­ed. When she does her long down­load,

[00:55:35] TK: Well, good boy.

[00:55:36] CR: down­load, when she does her long down­load, her down­load once a month, she does it man­u­al­ly, but the rest of the time. It’s all auto­mat­ed now, but the one thing that isn’t, that I haven’t cracked yet, is the Qual­i­fied Orders.

[00:55:51] CR: The only thing I haven’t been able to crack is the Qual­i­fied Orders. And that is, that’s like, that’s the gold­en ring.

[00:56:00] TK: Book it in for

[00:56:01] CR: Oh yeah, it’s Sun­day after­noon.

[00:56:02] CR: yeah. Cig­ar, glass of scotch, solve this

[00:56:07] TK: Cig­ar

[00:56:08] TK: butt. Yeah.

[00:56:10] CR: two sto­ries that came out that I want­ed to talk about and then I’ll shut up and you can talk for the rest of the show.

[00:56:14] CR: Um, uh, JYC, Joyce Cor­po­ra­tion, it said Dan Smetana retires after 40 years. Dan Smetana. It’s got a nine out of 10 on my impor­tance rank­ing sys­tem. Um, and it also analysed, so

[00:56:34] TK: Dan scored a 10.

[00:56:35] CR: nine out of

[00:56:36] TK: A 9. A 9, sor­ry, a 9.

[00:56:38] TK: Right,

[00:56:39] CR: AI, uh, Chat­G­PT said the retire­ment of a long­stand­ing leader like Dan Smetana could lead to sig­nif­i­cant changes in com­pa­ny strat­e­gy and oper­a­tions, influ­enc­ing both man­age­ment dynam­ics and investor con­fi­dence.

[00:56:53] CR: So there’s a full arti­cle here. Don’t need to read it, but, um, there you go. So he’s

[00:56:59] TK: Don’t think it has, Cam. Share price has,

[00:57:01] TK: gone up tremen­dous­ly.

[00:57:02] CR: right. There you go. They, sor­ry, Dan,

[00:57:05] CR: peo­ple were like, you know what? You’re not that

[00:57:08] TK: So, so hang on. So, this is, is this the black box where the AI says this is impor­tant? You haven’t told the AI that some­one who’s been involved for 40 years

[00:57:19] TK: retir­ing is impor­tant. It’s just worked it out, has it?

[00:57:21] CR: Yeah, Chat­G­PT read the arti­cle, sum­ma­rized it, and then scored it based on the con­tent of the arti­cle. Yeah,

[00:57:29] TK: but based on para­me­ters you’ve set or

[00:57:31] TK: just worked it out for itself, it was

[00:57:34] CR: I told it to look for any­thing involv­ing changes to the CEO or the CFO and stuff like that. Yeah, I gave it some para­me­ters to guide it in its

[00:57:43] TK: Yeah. Wow.

[00:57:44] CR: And, um, this is one of the things that it

[00:57:47] CR: found. So, it looks like it’s a nice, smooth tran­si­tion, um,

[00:57:54] TK: Well, look­ing, dig­ging into it, which I did when I saw it, saw your notes. Uh, I mean, yeah, he’s, he has run the com­pa­ny since it list­ed, but since they bought it from, uh, Was it West­ern Foods? Any­way, since they bought it out of some­one else’s con­glom­er­ate that was doing poor­ly. Um, the shares are held in a fam­i­ly name, so chances are there are oth­er peo­ple involved, but they own 30 some­thing per­cent, 36, 37 per­cent, 36.

[00:58:26] TK: 86 per­cent of the com­pa­ny. So the ques­tion is, will they con­tin­ue with that share­hold­ing or will they sell

[00:58:33] CR: hmm, Smetana,

[00:58:36] TK: if he’s retir­ing? There’s no oth­er, there’s no oth­er, um, What’s his name? SS No, that’s on the board. So that says to me that per­haps there isn’t a dynasty being cre­at­ed here and he’s the last one inter­est­ed.

[00:58:51] TK: I don’t know. Um, but yeah, I think the inter­est­ing thing from that arti­cle is what hap­pens with the share­hold­ing.

[00:58:56] CR: hmm, okay, hmm, could end up in the mar­ket,

[00:59:01] TK: Yeah. And I, I imag­ine that a trade that big, um, might affect the, might depress the share

[00:59:06] CR: hmm,

[00:59:07] CR: so, hmm,

[00:59:11] TK: prob­a­bly, take our, the founder sta­tus away from in our buy list as well.

[00:59:15] CR: okay, so, if you held the stock and you got this sit­u­a­tion, news item. Um, I do hold it in a cou­ple of port­fo­lios and it’s up a lot. And it’s, uh, in the Stock­o­pe­dia Aus­tralian port­fo­lio, it’s up 56%. Um, in over a year we’ve held it. And in one of the live port­fo­lios, it’s up 32 per­cent since Feb­ru­ary. Um, how would you play it?

[00:59:46] TK: Same way as I’d always play. Um, I don’t think it’s a red flag. I think I’ll just wait and see what the ship, whether it becomes a sell with the bread

[00:59:52] CR: Yeah, ok, right.

[00:59:54] TK: Yeah. Um, but yeah, there’s a risk. It’s height­ened the risk of that block being sold on mar­ket at some stage. But yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s been doing well.

[01:00:03] TK: I mean, I, I’m more wor­ried about doing a pulled pork run than a few months ago. That could be, that could be a big­ger red flag than, uh, Dan Smetana get­ting old and tak­ing his, um, retir­ing from the board and tak­ing his, uh, toys home.

[01:00:20] CR: The oth­er sto­ry that it pulled up was about, one of the oth­er stocks that I hold, the Nation­al Aus­tralia Bank. They are being sued by ASIC for fail­ures in finan­cial hard­ship claims. Oh, by the way, one of the oth­er things my script does is it removes dupli­cates sto­ries. Cause always there’s like 10 dupli­cate sto­ries in any feed from dif­fer­ent out­lets.

[01:00:46] CR: Scans them, analy­ses them for dupli­cates, removes all the dupli­cates. So I only get one ver­sion of each sto­ry. Chef’s Kiss. Oh! Oh! Oh!

[01:01:01] CR: Oh! If only I could write soft­ware to put into the brains of my fam­i­ly. Um. That, that’s where I’m going, just upgrade Fox’s, uh, brain to be great. Shut up about

[01:01:15] TK: Well, it’ll up upgrade as he grows old­er.

[01:01:18] CR: Yeah, well, I’m not sure it’ll be an upgrade. Nation­al Aus­tralian Bank has been sued by the cor­po­rate reg­u­la­tor for fail­ures in deal­ing with cus­tomers expe­ri­enc­ing finan­cial hard­ship. ASIC has alleged that NAB did not respond to 345 hard­ship appli­ca­tions with­in the 21 day time­frame legal­ly required. So, that’s all there is to that sto­ry.

[01:01:38] CR: Don’t think it’s going to affect NAB’s busi­ness a great deal, but, uh, always dis­ap­point­ing.

[01:01:44] TK: did­n’t think so. They came out and apol­o­gized and said they got it wrong. Um, basic, get a bit of a win in the media might get a fine. I, I dun­no if this one’s nine out­ta 10 too. I’m not sure if it’s a nine on my, uh,

[01:01:59] CR: Yeah,

[01:02:00] TK: pro­file of news sto­ries.

[01:02:02] CR: it says poten­tial dam­age to NAB’s rep­u­ta­tion, it’s not real­ly assess­ing who NAB is, I guess, and, you

[01:02:08] CR: know, the fact that, ha

[01:02:12] TK: I’m not sure, I was gonna, I was gonna make a bad joke about the rep­u­ta­tion, not going any low­er,

[01:02:17] TK: but

[01:02:18] CR: ha, yeah,

[01:02:19] TK: is a bad joke.

[01:02:19] CR: ha ha ha ha, yeah, yeah, any­way, that’s, uh, that’s all I got for you, Tony,

[01:02:28] TK: Well done.

[01:02:29] CR: it’s a big

[01:02:29] TK: Good stuff. Well, you’re gonna, you’re gonna make that, you’re gonna make your news, news, what do you call it? News app? News wid­get? Avail­able to the mem­bers?

[01:02:39] TK: Are you gonna sell it? What are you gonna do?

[01:02:41] CR: I mean, I’m And what I am doing is, and I’ve been doing this last cou­ple of days, is, um, if there’s some­thing that comes up that I think is rel­e­vant, I’ll post it to our web­site. Um, and I’ll put it in the newslet­ters when they go out. Any­thing that’s rel­e­vant and, um, any­thing that’s real­ly rel­e­vant like RSG relat­ed stuff, I’ll throw it up on Face­book and what­ev­er and let peo­ple know.

[01:03:04] CR: But yeah, it’ll just become part of the, part of the ser­vice that we pro­vide. Um,

[01:03:09] TK: Very good.

[01:03:11] CR: I, uh, I,

[01:03:12] TK: I guess if If 20 years of pod­cast­ing has taught you any­thing, it’s that you need con­tent. This is gen­er­at­ing con­tent.

[01:03:20] TK: for you.

[01:03:20] CR: I’m a con­tent pro­duc­er, Tony. I’m a con­tent gen­er­a­tor, that’s what I am.

[01:03:26] TK: Soon to be replaced by AI. Yep. Well, I’ve got a few sto­ries, Cam. We’ve had some stocks in the news over the last week. First one, good news sto­ries. Our old friend, Daniel Smed­ley. Who still has­n’t come on the show, even

[01:03:50] TK: though you’ve asked him a cou­ple of times. But he’s too busy. He’s too busy tak­ing over

[01:03:55] CR: my report did pull up this sto­ry. My report,

[01:03:58] CR: it pulled up this sto­ry, but I did­n’t think it was worth

[01:04:00] CR: talk­ing about. But, um, okay. Yeah.

[01:04:04] TK: This could end up being one of the megafloats

[01:04:06] TK: of 2025.

[01:04:10] TK: Or 2026,

[01:04:11] CR: did­n’t under­stand it.

[01:04:13] TK: Alright, I

[01:04:14] TK: did­n’t.

[01:04:16] CR: No, it flagged it. And I was like, I read, I was like, I don’t care about what they’re doing with that. That’s that’s noth­ing.

[01:04:22] TK: Well, by the way, I mean, the back­ground of Fin­di is that, um, it’s kind of res­ur­rect­ed from, it’s mor­phed from a dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny into what it is now, which is an ATM provider in India. And it’s grow­ing from there into pro­vid­ing dig­i­tal bank­ing ser­vices. The sto­ry is about it buy­ing, um, uh, a whole heap of ATMs from Tata, the big Indi­an con­glom­er­ate.

[01:04:46] TK: And then, um. It also talks about, this is what real­ly caught my atten­tion, uh, the busi­ness being float­ed off onto the Indi­an Stock Exchange and sug­gests the guide is a float of 800 to a bil­lion dol­lars, 800 mil­lion to a bil­lion dol­lars. So, you know, this, this is a stock which if you bought it at the low point after, You know, gone through that restruc­tur­ing and piv­ot in its busi­ness.

[01:05:13] TK: It’s up 20 times since then. It’s up a lot since I did the pulled pork on it. Um, and its mar­ket cap is at the moment is 370 mil­lion and it’s going to sell off a divi­sion for a bil­lion dol­lars at the end of 2026. It’s say­ing it’s already hir­ing invest­ment banks to do that. So, you know, it’s, it’s, um, this could be up If you bought it at the low point, 60 or 70 times in a cou­ple of years.

[01:05:39] CR: Hmm. When

[01:05:40] TK: even though it’s a QAV stock, it’s done well, but real­ly inter­est­ing arti­cle, inter­est­ing busi­ness, even if the IPO, you know, is a pipe dream. I don’t think it is, but it may not get away at a bil­lion dol­lars. But, um, uh, the arti­cle says that, uh, Find­i’s agreed terms to carve out a 75 mil­lion busi­ness from Indi­an jug­ger­naut Tata’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions busi­ness, Tata, I love that name, Tata, see ya, um, in a deal that will swell its top line by at least a third.

[01:06:08] TK: Uh, Street Talks, this is an arti­cle from the AFR, can reveal Fin­di is set to acquire Teth­er Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Pay­ments Solu­tions, which will bring 4, 600 oper­a­tional ATMs into its net­work, anoth­er 3, 000 sit­ting in a ware­house, and the strate­gi­cal­ly impor­tant abil­i­ty to con­nect direct­ly with core bank­ing sys­tems.

[01:06:29] TK: Sources say the acqui­si­tion adds 30 mil­lion rev­enue to Find­i’s guid­ance of 80 to 90 mil­lion for the 2025 finan­cial year. So yeah, big, big boost to the cur­rent busi­ness. And if you think about What’s that? 7, 600 ATMs. I don’t know how many ATMs there are in Aus­tralia. I guess we could Google it and find out, but that’s prob­a­bly like

[01:06:50] TK: buy­ing the net­work in Aus­tralia.

[01:06:52] CR: the last time you used an ATM?

[01:06:56] TK: ques­tion, not for a while. And, you know, that’s the thing about this par­tic­u­lar com­pa­ny. India has­n’t reached our stage of, you know,

[01:07:04] CR: Cash­less­ness.

[01:07:06] TK: yeah, every­one’s still using cash in India. But Fin­di are also acknowl­edg­ing that the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion will hit and they are invest­ing in apps for bank­ing as well.

[01:07:16] TK: And, you know, I think they’ll, well, they’re say­ing that they can tran­sit from one to the oth­er in time. But yeah, it’s, uh, it’s a huge, huge invest­ment. Um, it’s also say­ing that they bought the busi­ness, which comes with 50 mil­lion in cash on the bal­ance sheet. And, um, and it also gets the ben­e­fit of 10 years of tax loss­es.

[01:07:37] TK: So appar­ent­ly there’s an account­ing law in India, which says that not only can loss­es be car­ried for­ward, but if you trans­fer own­er­ship, they get taxed. Trans­ferred to the acquir­er as well. So that’s a bit dif­fer­ent to Aus­tralia, but, um, uh, that’s a huge ben­e­fit for them as well. So, you know, this, um, Daniel Smed­ley is doing a good deal

[01:07:56] TK: for the com­pa­ny, I think.

[01:07:57] TK: So, um,

[01:07:58] CR: Do you think he knows Mr. Smetana? Do you think the Schmed­leys and the Smetanas hang out?

[01:08:05] TK: I don’t know, pos­si­bly, maybe they’ve got ATMs in the,

[01:08:09] CR: Smeg

[01:08:10] CR: Kitchen, Smeg Kitchen, and stuff. By the way, as of, accord­ing to Chat­G­PT, uh, as of June 2024, Aus­tralia had approx­i­mate­ly 5, 476 ATMs, mark­ing a 4 per­cent decline from the pre­vi­ous year and a 53 per­cent drop since 2019.

[01:08:31] TK: Yeah, there you go. So they’ve actu­al­ly picked up in one deal more ATMs in India than they there are in Aus­tralia. Oh, as an aside, I was scratch­ing my head dur­ing the week. I heard, I heard an announce­ment from the trea­sur­er, Jim, Jim, I had to wash my hair, Jim Chalmers, say­ing that he was going to, Going to leg­is­late to make sure that you could use cash to buy, to buy essen­tials.

[01:08:55] TK: And then, then, um, I think I heard it on the ABC News in the morn­ing, and they were, they were ask­ing view­ers to come in and talk about when, you know, what essen­tials they used to buy cash. I think almost every­one said, They only take cash at the mar­kets. And I’m like, what the, what the hell is the gov­ern­ment doing try­ing to keep the cash econ­o­my going?

[01:09:15] TK: It’s, it’s, it’s the biggest anti avoid­ance of

[01:09:18] TK: GST

[01:09:19] CR: a drug deal­er! The

[01:09:21] TK: Yeah.

[01:09:21] CR: you’re a drug deal­er. You’re a drug deal­er’s the

[01:09:23] TK: you want to be shut­ting down tax? Give all these peo­ple who want to use cash to buy their petrol and gro­ceries. Some kind of card. Gov­ern­ment should be doing that. Get it all on the, on the pay­ment sys­tem so they can charge prop­er GST and col­lect the tax­es to the right.

[01:09:39] TK: I thought that was very strange. Any­way, that’s an aside, but well done to Fen­di. It’s, um, not only has it been, you know, restruc­tured and, um, they found a very prof­itable mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ty in India

[01:09:52] TK: for them. So, hats off to them. That’s

[01:09:54] CR: up 150 per­cent since I added it to our light port­fo­lio back in May. Just

[01:10:02] TK: Maybe you sold

[01:10:04] TK: Atlas Pearls and

[01:10:05] CR: Yeah. I sold that was pearls in April. There you go. I

[01:10:09] TK: Ha ha ha ha ha.

[01:10:11] CR: All works out.

[01:10:13] TK: It does, yes. It’s a sys­tem. Um, and, and hats off to Gary, um, who, I think I owe him a beer, because he point­ed out, I don’t know, what, about a month ago, that, uh, he said, hey, how come Tony Stal­lone in Grain­Corp, because as you know, we put our stocks that we own on, on our dis­clo­sures page, what, why is Tony Stal­lone in Grain­Corp when wheat as a com­mod­i­ty as a sell.

[01:10:40] TK: So, um, I looked into it and he was right. I should­n’t have been own­ing it and, um, I sold it. And lo and behold, the price

[01:10:48] TK: dropped not too long

[01:10:50] TK: after it. So,

[01:10:51] CR: go up.

[01:10:51] TK: thanks a lot, Gary. No, that went down. I, I sold it,

[01:10:55] CR: What am I doing wrong? You sell it,

[01:10:57] TK: got­ta wait for Gary to give

[01:10:58] CR: it, goes, Oh,

[01:10:59] TK: Gary gives you the inside word. Yeah.

[01:11:01] CR: okay, Gary.

[01:11:01] TK: Gives you the inside

[01:11:02] CR: you doing, Gary?

[01:11:04] TK: Yeah. So, um, the arti­cle again from the AFR, uh, East Coast Bay, East Coast based grain receival and stor­age com­pa­ny, Grain­Corp, report­ed net prof­it of 61. 8 mil­lion in the 2024 finan­cial year, a 75 per­cent drop from last year’s 250 mil­lion. Uh, rev­enue also fell 21%. Uh, and, uh, the CEO said rel­a­tive to the To the site, well, our earn­ings in 2022 and 2023 were out­sized.

[01:11:35] TK: We had earn­ings stream of over 700 mil­lion in 2022, 550 mil­lion in 2023. This year’s result is a nor­mal­iza­tion of those con­di­tions. You have a cou­ple of great years, and then it drops back down. That’s just what hap­pens in farm­ing. So, um, that’s why we use the Brain Com­mod­i­ty Price Chart as an indi­ca­tor of what might hap­pen.

[01:11:58] TK: Uh, yeah, so the arti­cle goes on to say, The more wheat, bar­ley, and canola that pass­es through Grain­Cor­p’s stor­age and han­dling net­work and sev­en port ter­mi­nals, the more mon­ey it makes. In the 2024 finan­cial year, Grain­Corp han­dled 28 mil­lion tons of grain down from 37. Mil­lion, the pre­vi­ous year, uh, Mr.

[01:12:18] TK: Spur­way, not­ed that’s the CEO, not­ed that inter­na­tion­al grain pro­duc­tion over the past year had been rea­son­ably strong in all areas which had dent­ed Grain Cor­p’s mar­gins. So I think actu­al­ly, this is one of the stocks that ben­e­fit­ed from the Ukraine war break­ing out, because I think, uh, Ukraine was a big.

[01:12:39] TK: exporter of wheat, which, um, swung, swung back in the favour of Grain­Corp being able to, or the farm­ers in Aus­tralia being able to export via Grain­Corp more wheat over­seas. That seems to have caught up with them now. Yes, so that was an inter­est­ing arti­cle, and I have one more, if you can bear with me, and this was sent in By Steve Mabb.

[01:13:03] TK: I saw it on the week­end. Thanks for com­ing down, Steve. Good to see you. Uh, but, um, I meant to read this out when you were talk­ing about zom­bie com­pa­nies. Um, this is, I think I meant to talk about this last week as well, and we did­n’t get time, but, um, uh, the head­line is Bright Bro­kers Hike Prof­it­less, A SX, stocks to Rake in Fees.

[01:13:25] TK: Shame­less, shame­less Bro­kers, all About Mon­ey­mak­ing. Uh, it’s by our friend

[01:13:30] TK: Alex Glo­rias, who we’ve, um,

[01:13:33] CR: I reached out to Alex.

[01:13:34] TK: about a few times.

[01:13:35] CR: reached out to him. I invit­ed him on the

[01:13:36] CR: show. he did­n’t reply. Nev­er replied.

[01:13:39] TK: Oh. Bum­mer. Ana­lysts are encour­ag­ing investors to buy prof­it­less ASX list­ed stocks despite their dis­mal track record of returns, cre­at­ing a poten­tial wind­fall for bro­kers who stand to rake in the fees if the trou­bled com­pa­nies are forced to raise cap­i­tal.

[01:13:58] TK: That’s part of what we were say­ing before, that if you’re hold­ing these zom­bie com­pa­nies, they’re going to raise cap­i­tal, and there is a ben­e­fi­cia­ry to that, which is the bro­ker. Uh, some­thing which caught my eye in the arti­cle was that, um, uh, the ana­lyst who’s quot­ed, MST Mar­quis, is the, is the com­pa­ny, uh, put togeth­er a dum­my port­fo­lio.

[01:14:20] TK: If a 100 mod­el port­fo­lio was to back loss mak­ing com­pa­nies since 2000, the book would be worth just 0. 12 today, after com­pound aver­age loss­es of 24 per­cent a year, accord­ing to MST. The ASX 300, mean­while, has earned 8 per­cent a year on aver­age over that time frame. So uh, Inter­est­ing dimen­sion to why zom­bie com­pa­nies exist and con­tin­ue to exist, even when they don’t make mon­ey.

[01:14:46] TK: They make mon­ey for some­one. Yeah.

[01:14:50] CR: mm

[01:14:52] TK: Thanks to Steve for send­ing that

[01:14:53] CR: It’s the, it’s just the, it’s the finan­cial, finan­cial indus­try. I won’t call it a scam, but it’s the busi­ness mod­el. Right. It’s

[01:15:03] TK: a busi­ness mod­el. It’s not a scam. I’m not doing any­thing unto­ward, but you’ll nev­er, I think the arti­cle also points out the num­ber of buy rec­om­men­da­tions that exist by bro­kers on these

[01:15:14] TK: stocks. There’s a large num­ber of buy

[01:15:16] CR: well, scams are busi­ness mod­els too, just,

[01:15:19] TK: They are.

[01:15:20] TK: Yeah,

[01:15:22] CR: but it’s, yeah, tak­ing, tak­ing advan­tage of gullible investors, um, who are sold on the sto­ry and, um, uh, are will­ing to take a gam­ble and lose and then gam­ble again. Oh, there’s always fresh meat. Mmm,

[01:15:45] TK: There’s always fresh meat. There’s always a fresh sto­ry. It’s always a good sto­ry. We’re going to cure can­cer. We’re going to solve cli­mate change, glob­al warm­ing. It’s a thing of the past once we get all the slithy mad to the ground. All that kind of stuff. Yeah. So, um, some­one ben­e­fits from it. A lot of

[01:16:03] TK: mon­ey.

[01:16:05] CR: Cui bono,

[01:16:06] TK: that’s all, that’s all I had. Um, I do have a pulled book, which I pre­pared on QBE, but we’ve been going for a while now, so I won­der if we should just hold it off till

[01:16:17] CR: yeah, hold it off until next week.

[01:16:19] CR: when my app

[01:16:20] TK: think

[01:16:20] TK: so.

[01:16:23] CR: I got no sto­ries. Let’s get into after hours, Tony. What do you got?

[01:16:28] TK: Well, back from Cape Shanks, I’ve been down. We extend­ed the stay down at Cape Schanck so we could watch Dou­ble Mar­ket on the week­end, race in a Group 1, our horse, which Steve Mabb and I own, or own most of, and, uh, unfor­tu­nate­ly it did­n’t do well. We, um, we were both excit­ed. We thought it would do well, the sta­ble thought it would do well, um, but it was a very windy day at Caulfield and the jock­ey sat four wide into a head­wind for 800

[01:16:55] TK: metres and, uh,

[01:16:57] CR: trans­late that into

[01:16:58] CR: Eng­lish? He sat four wide.

[01:17:01] TK: Uh, okay, so in rac­ing, if there’s a head­wind, you try and snug­gle in behind the horse in front, like bike rid­ers do on a pelo­ton. So you’re not, you’re not exert­ing ener­gy to push­ing to a head­wind like you’re not swim­ming against the tide so all the oth­er smarter jock­eys did that but left our jock­ey out on a limb um swing­ing against the 40 km head­wind so we did­n’t do too well he got off the horse and apol­o­gized and said that um it did­n’t pan out the way he thought it would and he said if he had to run the race again he would have gone to the back and and then tried to Peel off and run home.

[01:17:39] TK: I did­n’t say any­thing, but I thought to myself, yeah, I had 800 meters, 800 meters to work that out. You see, you could­n’t just pull the horse up and duck in any­way. But I don’t like arm­chair jock­eys or grand­stand jock­eys as they’re called. Um, it’s a hard job, but, uh, you don’t get many hors­es in group ones, and that was a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty and we, we squan­dered it.

[01:18:00] TK: Or the jock­ey squan­dered it, or some­one squan­dered it. So, the only good news is it was­n’t the horse’s fault. The horse has pulled up fine,

[01:18:06] TK: So hope­ful­ly we’ll get anoth­er shot at a good

[01:18:08] TK: race in the

[01:18:08] CR: So the jock­ey goes to the glue fac­to­ry and the horse gets to run anoth­er day.

[01:18:14] TK: Well, that may have been Steve Mab­b’s opin­ion. He was, uh, he was lob­by­ing for a change of jock­ey, but, um, I’m going to sort of let my, let myself cool down before I call the train­er and have a chat about that. And we don’t have to hur­ry. The horse won’t race now until the order again. So we’ve got plen­ty of time to work out what to do about jock­eys between now and then.

[01:18:36] TK: Yeah. So, um, excit­ing up until. The main race at Caulfield on the week­end and then a bit of a let­down after that. Uh, we also had Indu­bitably rac­ing, was meant to race, uh, in, in and around South­east Queens­land and was accept­ed all over the place. But most of the races in South­east Queens­land were aban­doned on Fri­day because of the wet weath­er.

[01:19:01] TK: And they were sup­posed to race today, I think. Um, and then that was aban­doned because of the wet weath­er. So, um, she, she hopes to get a run on Fri­day at this stage. Depends on the weath­er gods up there. I guess it’s rain­ing up there, what’s the weath­er like in Bris­bane?

[01:19:17] CR: down. It’s

[01:19:18] TK: There you go. Yeah. Uh, so that’s the horse side of things.

[01:19:23] TK: Had a great stay at Cape Schanck. They played some, uh, a lot of golf and always helps being down play­ing golf. Your golf gets bet­ter. Uh, and then, oh, in terms of what I’ve con­sumed, the media I’ve con­sumed, uh, I’m into the sec­ond sea­son of Broad­church, which I’m enjoy­ing. Um, very good. Uh, but I watched the movie.

[01:19:47] TK: It’s very dark. Oh, yeah, I mean, it is. Yeah, I warn you, it is dark, but just, it’s great to go back, you know, 10 years or how­ev­er long it’s been and see those actors all togeth­er. It’s a bit like a Har­ry Pot­ter film, it’s like every, all the best work­ing TV actors in the UK have been put into the one series.

[01:20:05] TK: And series two, I think it’s Cather­ine Deneuve, I think is in it all, one of those old actress­es.

[01:20:11] CR: Oh, I don’t remem­ber.

[01:20:13] TK: 70s, some­one, yeah, some­one famous is play­ing a bar­ris­ter in it. And Phoebe Waller Bridges, a young Phoebe Waller Bridges is play­ing the assis­tant bar­ris­ter in it. So, yeah, so that’s what I mean.

[01:20:26] TK: There’s all these like East­er eggs

[01:20:27] TK: in there.

[01:20:28] CR: Wow. Before Fleabag or after

[01:20:30] CR: Fleabag?

[01:20:32] TK: I think it would be, I’m guess­ing before.

[01:20:35] CR: Wow.

[01:20:37] TK: Yeah. And plays the sort of real­ly awk­ward, gan­g­ly, nerdy, smart girl,

[01:20:44] CR: She’s not the jour­nal­ist?

[01:20:46] TK: mak­ing

[01:20:46] CR: Is she the

[01:20:47] TK: No, no, she’s the, no, she’s the solic­i­tor assist­ing the bar­ris­ter, what­ev­er they call it in the

[01:20:52] CR: Right. Huh.

[01:20:55] TK: don’t know if they have solic­i­tors in the UK, but that’s what she’s doing. But I watched the movie last night. Have you seen Prey?

[01:21:02] CR: Is that the Preda­tor one? I

[01:21:05] TK: It is.

[01:21:06] CR: think I watched a bit of it

[01:21:08] CR: and just did­n’t fin­ish it. Yeah.

[01:21:12] TK: Yeah. Okay. Look, it’s low bud­get. Um, all the, all the com­put­er graph­ics and, and com­put­er sounds. I just, You know, record­ed from the orig­i­nal Preda­tor movie and replayed. So it’s, it’s low bud­get, but I real­ly enjoyed it. I thought the act­ing was great. I thought, um, it was just a nice, tight, small bud­get, you know, low, low bud­get, high, uh, sci fi

[01:21:37] TK: movie.

[01:21:37] TK: I real­ly enjoyed it. Ah,

[01:21:40] CR: Ram­pling is the actress in Broad­church who we’re try­ing to recall.

[01:21:45] TK: I was not Cather­ine Deneuve, Char­lotte Ram­pling,

[01:21:48] CR: her in it now. Yeah, she’s fan­tas­tic. She’s always fan­tas­tic. Hooray! I’ll have

[01:21:54] TK: I enjoyed Prey.

[01:21:54] CR: go. Yeah, I, the boys

[01:21:56] CR: raved about it when it came out. I think I watched a bit of it. I don’t remem­ber fin­ish­ing it though.

[01:22:03] CR: Well, I fin­ished Ban­shees of Inish­erin. Uh, Chris­sy and I fin­ished it. Loved it. Just loved it. Yeah.

[01:22:11] CR: Yes.

[01:22:12] TK: dark as well. Speak­ing of Dark, movies.

[01:22:14] CR: Dark, but with a lot of com­e­dy in it. Very black com­e­dy, but yeah, very dark. It just, those guys, Bren­dan Glee­son and Col­in Far­rell and the woman who played the sis­ter, what­ev­er her name is, I can’t recall, and all the small­er char­ac­ters, just fan­tas­tic.

[01:22:31] CR: Yeah, it’s real­ly good.

[01:22:34] TK: What’s the, what’s the, um, Irish guy? Is it Keoghan who played the small part?

[01:22:39] CR: Oh.

[01:22:39] TK: to make Salt­burn

[01:22:41] CR: I, I

[01:22:42] TK: Bar­ry. Bar­ry Keoghan, I

[01:22:43] CR: some­thing like that. Hunter was telling me that, I haven’t seen Salt­burn yet, but we were talk­ing, Hunter men­tioned that guy and how he’s. Quite big now, but he was great in it as

[01:22:53] TK: He was,

[01:22:54] CR: slight­ly men­tal­ly defi­cient son who was get­ting sex­u­al­ly abused by his father, the police chief or the cop in town or what­ev­er it was, alco­holic

[01:23:03] TK: mm Mm

[01:23:05] CR: And yes­ter­day, uh, you and Spence and I did a pod­cast for a cou­ple of hours to sort 20 years in pol­i­tics. pod­cast­ing this week or next week. It’ll be my 20 years. The first episode of G’day World came out 29th of Novem­ber, but we record­ed it four or five days before that. Um, so right about the 24th, 25th of Novem­ber.

[01:23:30] CR: Uh, 20 years of pod­cast­ing, and then Ewan, uh, we inter­viewed a few months lat­er and his, his show on the Pod­cast Net­work came out in Feb­ru­ary 2005, the Mobile Show, Mobile’s Tech­nol­o­gy Show. Um, pre iPhone, two years pre iPhone. I was, I was explain­ing to him on the show, like, just to put it in con­text, how long ago this was, this is before the Doc­tor Who reboot.

[01:23:55] CR: That’s when we start­ed

[01:23:56] TK: Oh wow.

[01:23:57] CR: the Doc­tor Who reboot. Because Ewan’s a big Doc­tor Who fan, being a Scots­man, and, um, we were, uh, I remem­ber us talk­ing about, I did­n’t know who Rus­sell T Davies was, I did­n’t know real­ly who Christo­pher Eccle­ston was, and we were talk­ing about, Yeah, that lat­er on when it hap­pened, I think that was 2005, but yeah, 20 years in pod­cast­ing, uh, this week.

[01:24:21] TK: Is it still pos­si­ble to down­load Gade

[01:24:23] TK: World? Are they still up there on the serv­er in the cloud

[01:24:26] CR: many of them are, um, well, they were until the whole Spo­ti­fy issue that hap­pened a cou­ple of months ago. I haven’t gone to the effort of fix­ing all of them yet. I’ve, the first one is, and some of the ear­ly ones, but, um, I haven’t. Got around to doing that one yet. Cause it’s not real­ly a pri­or­i­ty, but yeah, we lost a lot when I had the serv­er crash of 2008, a lot of them got lost cause there weren’t back­ups.

[01:24:54] CR: Uh, but I do have back­ups of a cou­ple of hun­dred G’day World episodes. They’re up on my cameronreilly.com site now, cause I did­n’t renew the G’day World, um, domain name cause I could­n’t afford the 50 bucks to renew it at some point, some­body else has that now. It’s like a trav­el site. But, um, Yeah, so that was fun talk­ing to Ewan.

[01:25:17] TK: do your­self a favour if you haven’t lis­tened to some of those G’day Worlds and down­load them and have a lis­ten. That’s

[01:25:23] TK: still my favourite. I loved

[01:25:25] CR: I’ll,

[01:25:25] TK: And I think, I think I was just admired your hood spir­it. Ring­ing up peo­ple and get­ting them on the

[01:25:31] TK: show

[01:25:32] CR: We talked about that. Like we invent­ed, because, uh, Mick and I, my orig­i­nal co founder, co host, uh, the first, we, I played a lit­tle bit of the first episode on this thing we did the oth­er day. And the first 10 min­utes were just Mick and I talk­ing about how hard it was to make the pod­cast. Cause I, we call each oth­er over Skype.

[01:25:54] CR: But then we had to fig­ure out how to record the Skype call. The tech­nol­o­gy did­n’t exist back then to do that. We had to fig­ure it all out and we had cables going in and out of PCs and it was just a com­plete night­mare and then I had to upload the file to him via FTP and back in those days we Inter­net, and the, try­ing to upload a 150 meg audio file, which would fail, you’d, it’d spend 12 hours try­ing to upload, and then it would fail, and you’d have to start it again, and it was just this com­plete night­mare of pro­duc­tion.

[01:26:33] CR: But then we’ve, when we fig­ured out how to do it, we would start to Skype peo­ple and just say, hey, you’re on a pod­cast, and they’d go, what’s that? And,

[01:26:43] TK: But not just peo­ple. I mean, you had, uh, Tim Burn­ers, Leon, you had,

[01:26:47] TK: um,

[01:26:47] CR: no, not Tim Bern­ers Lee, nev­er hit him on, I had, um, Vince Cerf.

[01:26:51] TK: oh, sor­ry. Vince

[01:26:52] CR: Yeah, and Ewan was say­ing he met Vince Cerf at

[01:26:55] CR: some event

[01:26:56] TK: Oh, right. Okay.

[01:26:57] CR: for peo­ple who don’t know Vince Cerf, in the 70s, Vince Cerf and one of his col­leagues sat down in a hotel room some­where near San Fran­cis­co and wrote a book. TCPIP, The Pro­to­col, On Yel­low Legal Pads, which is still the foun­da­tion of the inter­net today.

[01:27:18] CR: if you’ve ever seen the Matrix films, the, when Neo meets the Archi­tect, the Archi­tect is based on Vince Cerf, because he is the archi­tect of the inter­net. And, uh, yeah, I got to, I got to talk to him, which, and Ray Kurzweil, and Leo

[01:27:33] TK: Well, that’s right.

[01:27:34] CR: Leo Say­er I got

[01:27:35] CR: to chat to, which was huge because I’m a huge Leo Say­er fan.

[01:27:40] TK: Yeah, but so many peo­ple, it was just incred­i­ble, the

[01:27:43] CR: Noam

[01:27:44] TK: of, I, Chom­sky was the one I was try­ing to think of, yeah. You hit him on a cou­ple of times I think,

[01:27:49] TK: did­n’t

[01:27:49] CR: No, just once for Chom­sky, but I had oth­er guys on, um, and even, um, Oh, one of Spiel­berg’s part­ners, the guy who runs Spiel­berg’s ani­ma­tion com­pa­ny, whose name

[01:28:03] TK: right, you had, is it Katzen­berg, not, it’s Katzen­berg, was­n’t it?

[01:28:06] CR: Katzen­berg, Yeah. had Katzen­berg on? Yeah.

[01:28:10] TK: I know,

[01:28:10] CR: But yeah, it’s crazy, just talk­ing about all the things that have hap­pened, like, I remem­ber hav­ing to explain to peo­ple what a pod­cast was when I launched it in Feb­ru­ary 20, 2005

[01:28:23] CR: at a con­fer­ence in the U.

[01:28:24] CR: S., the pod­cast net­work, um, to all of the big hit­ters of the tech jour­nal­ism indus­try over there. To today, where Trump being on the Joe Rogan pod­cast, a lot of peo­ple are say­ing is one of the, Turn­ing the defin­ing fac­tors in in win­ning the elec­tion, prob­a­bly played a small role, I think, but, you know, pod­cast­ing is now pret­ty main­stream, TV shows, Only Mur­ders in the Build­ing, Steve Mar­tin, and Mar­tin Short, Play pod­cast­ers in a TV show.

[01:28:59] CR: Like it’s, it’s been a crazy 20 years. And of course I’m rich and famous and have my own Island and pri­vate jet. And, um, It all panned out

[01:29:09] TK: bucks to reg­is­ter your com­pa­ny name, yeah. Well, it’s been an amaz­ing jour­ney, hats off to you. And I say, thank you, because, um, you know, you, you won’t believe this, but I was at the cut­ting edge of tech­nol­o­gy

[01:29:25] TK: 20 years ago and

[01:29:27] CR: You must’ve been, if you were lis­ten­ing to

[01:29:29] TK: ear­ly iPod. Yeah. Bought a very ear­ly iPod. And I think there was­n’t much out there to lis­ten to in terms of pod­casts, but the, the app was there, but, um, was­n’t much behind and not, not much that I want­ed to lis­ten to any­way.

[01:29:42] TK: There was, you know, like, uh, TV show clips and things like that. Radio, like The Break­fast Radio, peo­ple are just Record what they did and put it as a pod­cast. But, um, but no, um, Napoleon pod­cast was, um, just such a breath of fresh air. And the G’day World pod­cast was just

[01:30:00] TK: huge. I, loved it.

[01:30:02] CR: I always ex, you know, I explain to, to you, and I’ve always told this sto­ry, the, the turn­ing point for me. ’cause I left Microsoft at the end of June, 2004. Went to Europe for a month, bought an iPod, went to bought, lis­tened to audio books on it. When I went to Europe. Came back, pod­cast­ing kind of got invent­ed, they say now in 2003, but it real­ly, the first pod­cast real­ly was 2000, July, 2004, no, August, 2004, the Dai­ly Source Code when Adam Cur­ry, for­mer MTV VJ start­ed his show. I start­ed lis­ten­ing to that in August when I got back and then lis­tened to the Engad­get pod­cast, which was two tech. Jour­nal­ists talk­ing about, blog­gers talk­ing about the tech­nol­o­gy indus­try and in 2004, when you lis­ten to any­thing about main­stream media, on main­stream media about tech­nol­o­gy, morn­ing shows or radio or TV, it was always, have you seen what the kids are doing with the inter­net and the thing and it was all

[01:31:10] TK: Yeah.

[01:31:12] CR: and it

[01:31:12] TK: Oh, yeah.

[01:31:13] CR: to dri­ve me nuts.

[01:31:13] CR: And then I lis­tened to this

[01:31:14] CR: Engad­get pod­cast and I was like, holy shit, this is like my friends and I talk­ing about tech­nol­o­gy. I could lis­ten to these guys for half an hour and it sound­ed like my friends and I, and that was the, like, blew my mind. I could lis­ten to real peo­ple have real con­ver­sa­tions about shit that I was inter­est­ed in, which was­n’t radio.

[01:31:34] CR: You know, you could find stuff on RRR or some­thing like that, but it was hard, you know.

[01:31:41] CR: The idea that you could just tune in and lis­ten to intel­li­gent peo­ple have intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tions about intel­li­gent top­ics was,

[01:31:50] TK: And car­ry it around with you, go for a walk, lis­ten to it, catch up. Next week there’d be anoth­er one. And, um, and you did­n’t have to sort of stay up until three o’clock in the morn­ing to lis­ten to the RRR to get this, the half an hour of. Inter­view you want­ed to lis­ten to, you could, you know, you could have it with you.

[01:32:07] TK: But I, but I remem­ber too at the time, like, um, what, how rev­o­lu­tion­ary the design of the pod, the iPod was. So I was giv­en, um, by my broth­er in law, Wal, who lis­tens to this show, um, I think it might’ve been like a 500 gig hard, like portable hard dri­ve, and it was like this brick. And I’m like, thanks. Mer­ry Christ­mas.

[01:32:33] TK: Thank you. What, what do I do with this? You guys, it’s great. You can down­load all your music onto it. You can plug head­phones and then lis­ten to it. And you know, I got, I got to about the third CD, putting it into the disk dri­ve on my Apple XT and load­ing it onto the thing. And then the thing was heavy to car­ry around.

[01:32:50] TK: It just did­n’t work. But then the iPod came out a few months lat­er and just all makes sense. Ah, this is what, That was try­ing to be, but it was, you know, had­n’t sort of got­ten to the stage of being user friend­ly and it was just like a light bulb going off. You could take all your music with you, you could lis­ten to pod­casts.

[01:33:07] TK: It was just great.

[01:33:09] TK: Audio­books.

[01:33:10] CR: hmm.

[01:33:11] TK: But, but yeah, no, like you’ve been a big part of my life over that 20 years lis­ten­ing to you reg­u­lar­ly. Um, inter­est, always inter­est­ing, always, um, chal­leng­ing, thought pro­vok­ing. It’s been great.

[01:33:23] CR: I’ve got peo­ple that have been lis­ten­ing to me for 20 years out there, like, have grown up. Like, peo­ple that were lis­ten­ing to me when they were 20 and are now mar­ried kids, I get emails from peo­ple all the time going, you know, You’ve been in my head for half my life,

[01:33:39] TK: Yeah.

[01:33:39] CR: and shaped how I think

[01:33:41] CR: about pol­i­tics and work and

[01:33:43] CR: phi­los­o­phy, peo­ple who lis­ten to The Three Illu­sions and all sorts of stuff.

[01:33:49] CR: Yeah, so it’s been about, you know, and I met Chris­sy because of the Napoleon pod­cast. So if noth­ing else, It led me to you, it led me to Chris­sy, to Ray, Ray and I have been work­ing togeth­er for over 10 years. You know, some of the best friend­ships, work­ing rela­tion­ships, and you know, the, my wife, Fox, all came out of pod­cast­ing.

[01:34:10] CR: No mon­ey, but uh,

[01:34:13] TK: Ha ha ha ha

[01:34:14] CR: Lots of oth­er great things came out of it, um, any­way. And then, um, I’m gonna do a series on fas­cism on the bull­shit fil­ter, I think, uh, next. So I’ve been read­ing a lot of books on fas­cism recent­ly.

[01:34:28] TK: What do they call that when This is where pod­cast­ing’s got­ten to. When they bring

[01:34:33] TK: up Hitler. What’s that called?

[01:34:35] TK: Is it

[01:34:35] CR: Rule 34.

[01:34:37] CR: Yeah, It’s Rule

[01:34:37] TK: Rule

[01:34:38] TK: 34, is it? Yeah. Okay.

[01:34:40] CR: every­one gets referred to as Hitler. Yeah, Rule 34 might be the porn ver­sion of some­thing. It’s one of those rules.

[01:34:47] TK: Yeah.

[01:34:48] CR: There’s one of the rules that like, if it exists, there’s a porn ver­sion of it. I think Rule 34 might be the Hitler one. If

[01:34:59] TK: Yeah. Ha ha ha ha ha.

[01:35:00] CR: it goes on long enough,

[01:35:02] CR: yeah, no, it’s inter­est­ing because, you know, there’s, there was a lot of peo­ple, um, includ­ing for­mer cab­i­net mem­bers or for­mer chiefs of staff of Trump from his first admin­is­tra­tion, John Kel­ly, who said that he has fas­cist ten­den­cies.

[01:35:17] CR: Mark Mil­ley, who was the chair­man of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump said that he’s a fas­cist. A lot of alle­ga­tions that Trump is a fas­cist and a lot of peo­ple are push­ing back on call­ing him a fas­cist or Hitler and, you know, I real­ly, you know, I’ve, I’ve read stuff on fas­cism over the years, obvi­ous­ly in my study of, of the Cold War and World War II and stuff like that. But, um, I’m real­ly inter­est­ed in what, 20th cen­tu­ry fas­cism was real­ly shaped dur­ing the inter­war peri­od the con­di­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Europe, very dif­fer­ent to the con­di­tions that we have in a place like The Unit­ed States today, but there’s a lot of, a lot of, a lot of com­mon ele­ments, a lot of dif­fer­ent ele­ments, you know, fas­cism, you would­n’t expect fas­cism to take the same form in Amer­i­ca in 2024 that it took in Ger­many in 1924, right?

[01:36:18] CR: Or Italy or Spain. Um, so I’m, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m, Gonna do a deep dive, I’m look­ing at all of the old stuff, like I pulled out my old Trot­sky book on fas­cism, he wrote a real­ly good analy­sis of fas­cism in the 40s, um, but some more mod­ern schol­ar­ly works too on fas­cism that I’m look­ing at by guys like Michael Mann, not the direc­tor, but a uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor in the U.

[01:36:46] CR: S. But, um,

[01:36:48] TK: And you know, there are some sim­i­lar­i­ties. I mean, I read that Trump’s had over 900 ral­lies, you know, in his cam­paign for pres­i­dent. And that’s, I mean, that’s, we’ve all seen the footage of Hitler at ral­lies, whip­ping up the crowd with his speech. So it’s a sim­i­lar, it’s a, it’s a par­al­lel. I’m not sure if it’s exact­ly the same.

[01:37:14] TK: Because as you say, there’s no, yet, there’s no Great Depres­sion. Going on, and par­tic­u­lar­ly hard hit in Ger­many

[01:37:22] TK: with the con­straints placed after World War I on

[01:37:24] CR: but there is a huge amount of eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty in the Unit­ed States, and it’s been

[01:37:29] TK: that, but there is, yeah,

[01:37:31] CR: And I went back, you know, I’ve been draw­ing the lines to, for my boys actu­al­ly, um, been explain­ing to them over the last few weeks what Cit­i­zens Unit­ed was, cause they don’t know, they’ve nev­er heard of the Cit­i­zens Unit­ed rul­ing.

[01:37:45] CR: They don’t know any­thing about Occu­py Wall Street. And I’ve been try­ing to explain to them these things that hap­pened dur­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, Occu­py Wall Street, Cit­i­zens Unit­ed was 2010, uh, where basi­cal­ly the Unit­ed States Supreme Court decid­ed that cor­po­ra­tions could spend as much mon­ey as they want­ed on elec­tion cam­paigns.

[01:38:07] TK: set up the

[01:38:07] CR: Who could have thought that would end bad­ly? And then you had Occu­py Wall Street

[01:38:14] CR: in 2011, and I went back, Yes­ter­day, and I was look­ing at what Trump had to say at the time about Occu­py Wall Street and what Oba­ma had to say about Occu­py Wall Street. And they both basi­cal­ly threw it under the bus. Both said sim­i­lar things, actu­al­ly.

[01:38:32] CR: Well, look, we under­stand, we kind of under­stand that they’re angry and why they’re angry, but basi­cal­ly, you know, then it got crushed. The police came in and crushed Occu­py Wall Street and Oba­ma did noth­ing about it. The Democ­rats did noth­ing real­ly to change. The tra­jec­to­ry of grow­ing income inequal­i­ty in the U.

[01:38:52] CR: S. under him or under Biden. Uh, and so you’ve had this thing that’s been grow­ing. He had the Tea Par­ty around the same time, which was dri­ven by the Koch broth­ers, but they were try­ing to, um, uh, uh, engage the dis­pos­sessed and the dis­en­fran­chised. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of sim­i­lar­i­ties there. Uh, and, and, uh, It’s not as bad as Ger­many or Italy in the ear­ly 1920s, but, or dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, but a lot of sim­i­lar­i­ties, they’ve had depres­sions in the US, we’ve had reces­sions, we had 2008, you know, we’ve had these sorts of things hap­pen, we’ve had man­u­fac­tur­ing get stripped out of the coun­try.

[01:39:35] CR: Then the oth­er thing is look­ing for para­mil­i­tarism. Um, obvi­ous­ly one of the big defin­ing fac­tors of fas­cism was the para­mil­i­taries.

[01:39:44] TK: yeah,

[01:39:45] CR: not walk­ing around with a para­mil­i­tary, but the,

[01:39:50] TK: proud boys stand down,

[01:39:51] CR: yeah, so you have the Oath Keep­ers, you had the Proud Boys, you had the whole cap­i­tal rights thing, which they were big.

[01:39:57] CR: Fif­teen hun­dred of them have been charged, which will all obvi­ous­ly go away. Wait to see, I’m, I’m wait­ing to see what hap­pens with their recruit­ment dri­ves after all of their charges get dis­missed and Trump’s. in the White House again.

[01:40:13] TK: lots of them are in jail, so they’ll be released, they may have already been released,

[01:40:17] TK: by now.

[01:40:18] CR: Some of, some of the lead­ers are in jail. Um, the, the orga­ni­za­tions them­selves pret­ty much fell apart after the Capi­tol riot charges and con­vic­tions and all that kind of stuff. But I expect­ed them, I expect them to all be back. In a huge way now.

[01:40:35] TK: With their own ver­sion of Mein Kampf under their arm from time on their hands in

[01:40:39] TK: jail.

[01:40:40] CR: Yeah. And you know, peo­ple say to me, peo­ple argu­ing, Oh, Trump’s not a fas­cist. He just says stuff. It’s just polit­i­cal the­atre. And I go, yeah, that’s what peo­ple said about Mein Kampf when it came out too. Oh no, you can’t take Hitler seri­ous­ly. He’s just crazy. He just says stuff. He’s just say­ing stuff to, you know, get peo­ple’s atten­tion.

[01:41:02] TK: Well, I think, what do I think? I think that Trump, I think you said it before, Trump does dis­play fas­cist ten­den­cies, and it, you know, there won’t be anoth­er Nazi Ger­many. I don’t think any­way, it looks like Nazi Ger­many did in the 1930s, but there could be some­thing which is fas­cist in nature. I’m care­ful of throw­ing that word around, I used to throw it around a lot, you know, called Mal­colm Fras­er a fas­cist.

[01:41:34] TK: When he cut wel­fare for stu­dents. So, um, you know, it’s a word that gets tossed around a lot, par­tic­u­lar­ly against, um, con­ser­v­a­tives. Um, but I think there’s a, there’s an ele­ment of truth in what you’re say­ing. And so I think the thing is, what are the, what are the, What are the signs to be aware of? If I ever, and I think, you know, back because prob­a­bly every­one has done, what would I have done if I was around in Nazi Ger­many in 1933 or 34?

[01:42:06] TK: And I think, you know, you’d prob­a­bly try and go about your life. You might try a bit of pas­sive resis­tance, sort of, you know, pas­sive aggres­sion or some­thing. But the, if I think about it, the only out­ward vis­i­ble sign that the world had that some­thing was bad was going on in Ger­many was that smart peo­ple were leav­ing.

[01:42:25] TK: We haven’t seen that yet for the U. S. I remem­ber when Trump got elect­ed the first time, Alex was decid­ing where to go to uni­ver­si­ty, and I think from mem­o­ry, in what was usu­al­ly a big mar­ket at a Cana­di­an school, for U. S. enrol­ment, one per­son in her whole senior year went to an Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty.

[01:42:45] TK: Where­as you’d expect, You know, the major­i­ty of them to go down to an Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty because they’re just across the bor­der. They’re on their doorsteps. Um, and there’s such a big thing on the CV. So if you have a chance to go to Prince­ton or Har­vard or one of those pres­ti­gious places, you’d take it.

[01:43:00] TK: But I think only one per­son did because they were, they were just fright­ened of being a part of Trump Amer­i­ca. Um, so that’s, they’re the kind of tell­tale signs I’ll be look­ing for is when, when do the. When do the

[01:43:12] TK: smart peo­ple leave?

[01:43:15] CR: Well, in Ger­many it was the smart Jew­ish peo­ple who left when things start­ed to look dicey. Um, I don’t think Trump,

[01:43:26] TK: too far gone,

[01:43:27] TK: but yeah.

[01:43:28] CR: yeah, I don’t think Trump’s Amer­i­ca is going to be that anti Semit­ic, but they’re going after a dif­fer­ent kind of tar­get.

[01:43:35] TK: They’re still going after elit­ists and, you know, a lot of peo­ple in the uni­ver­si­ties left Ger­many ear­ly on.

[01:43:41] CR: The rad­i­cal

[01:43:42] TK: They just could­n’t get work.

[01:43:43] CR: is who they’ll go after in the

[01:43:44] CR: US. I got this quote, a guy called Roger Berkovitz, who, you know who Han­nah Arendt was? You ever read her stuff?

[01:43:53] TK: do not, no.

[01:43:54] CR: Uh, Han­nah Arendt was an author, a Ger­man. Uh, Descend­ed Schol­ar, who wrote a lot of stuff about the holo­caust in Ger­many. Um,

[01:44:06] CR: she, um, she was a Jew­ish, uh, Ger­man Jew­ish Amer­i­can schol­ar, I think, from mem­o­ry.

[01:44:11] CR: I read one of her books years ago, but Roger Berkowitz sort of runs the Han­nah Arendt what­ev­er, you know, um,

[01:44:20] TK: foun­da­tion,

[01:44:21] CR: some­thing like that. I was read­ing one of his arti­cles. From a lit­tle while ago, but I like this, this, uh, para­graph. The mod­ern con­di­tion of root­less­ness is a foun­da­tion­al expe­ri­ence of total­i­tar­i­an­ism.

[01:44:35] CR: Total­i­tar­i­an move­ments suc­ceed when they offer root­less peo­ple what they most crave, an ide­o­log­i­cal­ly con­sis­tent world aim­ing at grand nar­ra­tives that give mean­ing to their lives. By con­sis­tent­ly repeat­ing a few key ideas, a manip­u­la­tive leader pro­vides a sense of root­ed­ness ground­ed upon a coher­ent fic­tion that is con­sis­tent, com­pre­hen­si­ble, and pre­dictable. He wrote that in 2017. So in the ear­ly stages of Trump’s first term,

[01:45:14] TK: I was lis­ten­ing to a cou­ple of pod­casts in my jour­neys over the last few days, some long, long form ones analysing the elec­tions, and one of the things that seemed to be set­tled on was that Trump picked up the dis­af­fect­ed vot­er that, you know, so many peo­ple in the US don’t vote because they just don’t have time for the sys­tem.

[01:45:33] TK: But Trump made inroads into that dis­af­fect­ed vot­er

[01:45:37] TK: along the lines of what you’re say­ing or what that arti­cle was

[01:45:39] CR: but also picked up the work­ing class, I mean, you know, picked up the work­ing class and got, made inroads into the Lati­no and the African Amer­i­can vote.

[01:45:50] TK: Yep. Mm

[01:45:51] CR: Um, you know, there’s a lot of, like, it gets back to. Occu­py Wall Street and the Tea Par­ty and all that kind of stuff. There’s been this grow­ing move­ment for decades of the dis­en­fran­chised in Amer­i­ca who, man­u­fac­tur­ing has gone to Mex­i­co and Chi­na, farm­ing is strug­gling, you know, it’s been farm­ing is sort of been, um, cen­tral­ized and, you know, uh, they’ve cor­po­ra­tized,

[01:46:15] TK: cor­po­ra­tized,

[01:46:17] CR: that’s the word I’m look­ing for, and the finan­cial sec­tor has gone, you know, it keeps hav­ing.

[01:46:24] CR: These huge busts and all this mon­ey’s

[01:46:26] TK: Oh, I mean, I mean,

[01:46:27] CR: and,

[01:46:29] TK: and most big com­pa­nies only employ uni­ver­si­ty

[01:46:31] TK: grad­u­ates. That kind of thing,

[01:46:33] CR: and it costs you a mil­lion dol­lars to get a uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion. Um,

[01:46:39] CR: yeah, so there’s this under­cur­rent of, uh, stuff hap­pen­ing over there. And here too, we’ve got the. Hous­ing cri­sis here, you know, it’s, it’s, there’s a lot of, a lot of anger, a lot of, uh, peo­ple feel­ing like they’re miss­ing out on the Aus­tralian dream.

[01:46:57] CR: Like these peo­ple feel like they missed out on the Amer­i­can dream. It

[01:47:03] TK: Well, be care­ful what you wish for because, um, I played golf with a guy who’s old­er than me. He worked in Japan, lived in Japan, and he was say­ing that 30 years ago, the prop­er­ty mar­ket, the aver­age price was a mil­lion bucks for a house and it dropped back to 300, 000 overnight. And it’s only get­ting back up to that lev­el now, 30 years on.

[01:47:24] TK: So that solved the prob­lem. Bet­ter access to hous­ing, but it’s not, it’s not a solu­tion that peo­ple will find palat­able.

[01:47:34] CR: was an eco­nom­ic col­lapse

[01:47:35] TK: oth­er things done. Yeah. But, um, you know, that, that struck me yes­ter­day, like, or soon after the elec­tion. It may not have been yes­ter­day, but I agree with you. It’s glar­ing­ly obvi­ous that if the gov­ern­ment wants to be re-elect­ed in Aus­tralia, or if they’re the oppo­si­tion and want to be elect­ed, it’s the econ­o­my stu­pid.

[01:47:54] TK: And what’s the gov­ern­ment Come out on Mon­day and spend polit­i­cal cap­i­tal on? Keep­ing kids off social net­works. It’s like, fuck, that’s a clas­sic elit­ist demo­c­rat, you know, big gov­ern­ment will run your fam­i­ly bet­ter than you can approach to pol­i­cy­mak­ing. When big, the big rel­a­tive over­seas has told you what you need to focus on and you’re not doing it.

[01:48:24] TK: It’s just, it’s just absurd­ly stu­pid. It’s like going to see a Godot play.

[01:48:30] CR: Yeah. But, you know, yes, but we’ve seen the rise in this coun­try. We saw it dur­ing COVID, uh, like they did in the US, the rise of peo­ple get­ting sucked into stu­pid nar­ra­tives too.

[01:48:46] TK: Yeah. Yeah,

[01:48:47] CR: Um, peo­ple who should know bet­ter, like I had friends, and I’m sure you had friends that I thought of as intel­li­gent

[01:48:56] TK: Mm hmm.

[01:48:57] CR: peo­ple. I just saw got caught up in the QAnon nar­ra­tive and at first I gave them the ben­e­fit of the doubt.

[01:49:07] CR: I spent like the first year of COVID going, all right, let’s, let’s have a con­ver­sa­tion about what you believe and why you believe in what’s the evi­dence for this case that you’re mak­ing. And after about a year, I just gave up. I was like, okay, you don’t, um, you don’t real­ly care about facts or evi­dence or log­i­cal rea­son.

[01:49:26] CR: Do you just want to believe what you want to believe?

[01:49:28] CR: And.

[01:49:29] TK: Well, they think they are. They think they are. They think they have the set of facts. I think Moses has come down the moun­tain and they’re, and it’s a, yeah, they’re the cho­sen peo­ple to inter­pret the

[01:49:39] CR: I would get emails from peo­ple, you know, from around the world, lis­ten­ing to the bull­shit film or what­ev­er it was, that would send me, like, lengthy emails. Watch all these YouTube videos and read all these things, and I would, and it took me about three min­utes with each one to just go, oh, hold on.

[01:50:01] TK: yeah,

[01:50:02] CR: What? And I would point that out to them.

[01:50:05] CR: Hold on. Well, they said that they made these claims in the first three min­utes of the video, which are objec­tive­ly wrong and, and, and

[01:50:12] TK: yeah, it can be

[01:50:13] CR: with the small­est amount of, you know, look­ing into it and they go, Oh, but then you watch these 12, three hour long YouTube videos. I’m going to wait, deal with this one first.

[01:50:24] CR: And then we’ll talk. No, but it’s just, it’s

[01:50:27] TK: I know. you know what? I saw that, I saw that 30 years ago when I was work­ing in cen­tral Queens­land, but it just did­n’t have the tech­nol­o­gy boost behind it. So I remem­ber being giv­en a VHS record­ing, kind of like, you know, yeah, check this out, Tony, don’t tell any­one you watch it tonight when you’re at home by

[01:50:47] CR: Yeah,

[01:50:48] TK: And it was this guy. Uh, real­ly low grade video, stand­ing behind the lectern,

[01:50:54] TK: talk­ing about the One

[01:50:56] CR: the New World Order. I used to

[01:50:58] TK: But you will order! Yeah!

[01:51:00] CR: peo­ple in the late 80s, ear­ly 90s. I used to have guys telling me about that. And I used to say, sounds good to me, like one world gov­ern­ment, like I can move to any coun­try I want, like we just have one set of laws. So what’s

[01:51:15] TK: no more

[01:51:16] CR: yeah, what’s the prob­lem?

[01:51:17] CR: They go, I

[01:51:17] CR: don’t under­stand. I go, yeah, what’s,

[01:51:22] CR: isn’t

[01:51:22] TK: But I remem­ber

[01:51:23] CR: that what we want to get to? Isn’t

[01:51:25] CR: that the goal?

[01:51:26] TK: the first three min­utes of this video was this guy going, went into the New York Pub­lic Library and tried to get these books out on the New World Order, and they would­n’t give them to me. That’s proof! It’s proof it exists! I’m like, no, they just, either they did­n’t have them, could­n’t find them, or they just, well, they did­n’t have a library card, yeah.

[01:51:49] TK: Why would they try, they’re a library, why would they try and hide books?

[01:51:53] CR: Yeah. Look, the thing, like, the dif­fi­cult thing, you know, we had to han­dle when we did the Psy­chopath Epi­dem­ic book, and I’ve had to han­dle on all my shows over the years, is that the more you read about his­to­ry and the more you read about how the world works, There is a lot of pro­pa­gan­da. There is a lot of lies being told.

[01:52:16] CR: We are being lied to con­stant­ly by cor­po­ra­tions and politi­cians and reli­gions and think tanks,

[01:52:25] TK: Ker­ry Stokes,

[01:52:27] CR: Stokes,

[01:52:27] CR: the media. We, so peo­ple are right to be, like I always say, you

[01:52:33] TK: Alan Jones.

[01:52:34] CR: right to be skep­ti­cal.

[01:52:36] TK: Cor­rect.

[01:52:37] CR: Being skep­ti­cal is your first response to any­thing you hear, I think, is the ratio­nal response.

[01:52:45] CR: But before you believe in a, in some the­o­ry or what­ev­er’s hap­pened, what, if some­thing’s going on, some the­o­ry that

[01:52:53] TK: used to be UFOs. Now

[01:52:54] CR: still UFOs, UFOs are huge, man. I fol­low all of the UFO sub­red­dits because they amuse the hell out of me. Um, and it’s, they’re absolute­ly bonkers. Um, And they’re so con­vinced they’re right, and every­one’s crazy, and oh, it’s all gonna come out!

[01:53:11] CR: Soon as Trump’s in the White House, the first time, it was all gonna come out. Trump

[01:53:15] TK: Yeah, that’s right, he was gonna release, he was gonna, yeah,

[01:53:18] CR: assas­si­na­tion, he’s gonna release it all!

[01:53:21] TK: the footage,

[01:53:22] CR: This time it’s going to be Jef­frey Epstein’s mur­der. He’s going to release all the infor­ma­tion. Well, except Trump goes, some peo­ple’s lives could get ruined and we don’t want to do that.

[01:53:31] CR: And by some peo­ple, I mean mine. And

[01:53:34] TK: I’ve looked at it. I’ve looked at it. It’s, it’s incred­i­ble. What just

[01:53:39] TK: hap­pened?

[01:53:41] CR: uh, but yeah, like, like my thing, like, yes, you should be skep­ti­cal. We’re being lied to, but before you believe a the­o­ry is true,

[01:53:54] TK: Yeah.

[01:53:54] CR: sure you have enough evi­dence. To be able to back it up, um, do, do some work, do some research.

[01:54:02] TK: Espe­cial­ly in this day and age, when you’re car­ry­ing around the Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­ni­ca in your pock­et, just

[01:54:06] TK: look, look it up.

[01:54:08] CR: Yes. And then, you know, I always go on about my rule of thumb, which is heuris­tics and, and epis­te­mol­o­gy have, have, have a way of under­stand­ing. How do we know what is true in this par­tic­u­lar, yeah. Have a frame­work. Exact­ly. Have a frame­work for how you think. Think about the top­ic that is ratio­nal and objec­tive.

[01:54:29] CR: Cause you can’t be an expert. You’re nev­er going to be an expert on stuff. It does­n’t mean you can’t edu­cate your­self, but you have to know, okay, what’s my heuris­tic for this? Who do I turn to? Why do I turn to these peo­ple? Why are all these insti­tu­tions, why are they cred­i­ble? Why are they respectable? How do I know they’re not full of shit?

[01:54:50] CR: and run­ning their own scam, um, you have to have a, we don’t, we don’t get taught how to do that. We don’t get taught how to think log­i­cal­ly and ratio­nal­ly. It’s, there’s no, I don’t know.

[01:55:06] TK: And it, there’s no mon­ey. And it’s one of the things that Trump’s going to shut down or Elon’s going to shut down. The

[01:55:12] TK: lib­er­al uni­ver­si­ties. Yeah.

[01:55:15] CR: you know, and again, get­ting back to fas­cism, like Trot­sky always, Trot­sky’s view was that fas­cism was where cap­i­tal­ism went when it’s tra­di­tion­al mech­a­nisms of con­trol. I’m pret­ty sure I quot­ed this in the psy­chopath epi­dem­ic. When cap­i­tal­is­m’s tra­di­tion­al meth­ods of con­trol­ling the peo­ple start­ed to fal­ter.

[01:55:40] CR: They went to author­i­tar­i­an­ism and fas­cism tend­ed to be a pro cap­i­tal­ist form of author­i­tar­i­an­ism as a means of reassert­ing con­trol when the tra­di­tion­al insti­tu­tions of con­trol start­ed to fail. Peo­ple asked too many ques­tions, start­ed push­ing for too much change, too much rev­o­lu­tion, you know.

[01:56:07] TK: So we should all go out and buy 7 West Media shares to

[01:56:10] TK: keep that method of con­trol alive. Yeah, it’s our bul­wark against fas­cism.

[01:56:17] CR: Free sport. Peo­ple need the Free sport.

[01:56:23] TK: Actu­al­ly, the peo­ple can go and watch it if they want. It’s 7 West Media who needs the free

[01:56:27] TK: sport. It’s not the

[01:56:29] CR: I watched the Tyson fight for free on the week­end. Did you watch that?

[01:56:33] TK: God. No.

[01:56:35] CR: I was­n’t plan­ning on it, but then we got home from Kung Fu and after,

[01:56:41] TK: fired up.

[01:56:41] CR: oh, and my fin­ger got

[01:56:42] CR: bro­ken, You see my fin­ger?

[01:56:45] TK: Oh, wow.

[01:56:48] CR: what it should look like.

[01:56:49] TK: Yeah,

[01:56:50] CR: This fin­ger got bent

[01:56:52] CR: back dur­ing spar­ring on Fri­day night and it all got swollen and it was all bruised.

[01:56:56] CR: I went and did, that was Fri­day night, then I went and did anoth­er cou­ple of hours of kung fu on Sat­ur­day morn­ing and we got home and we were just knack­ered and it was about the time the fight was due to start so I said to Fox, hey you want to watch Mike Tyson fight?

[01:57:10] TK: Oh.

[01:57:10] CR: So we sat down and we watched

[01:57:12] CR: it and after­wards Fox, and we had Hunter and Tay­lor on Face­Time watch­ing it as well so we’re all doing it.

[01:57:19] CR: After­ward Fox went Well, that was the biggest waste of time I’ve ever seen.

[01:57:25] TK: Oh, because there was no

[01:57:26] TK: knock­out.

[01:57:27] CR: Cause it was just stu­pid. The whole thing was Tyson basi­cal­ly just. Bare­ly threw a punch, it was just get through eight rounds, that was like against a guy half your age. Tyson just

[01:57:42] TK: Because he bet

[01:57:42] TK: on him­self to last eight rounds,

[01:57:45] CR: Well, I think he was

[01:57:45] CR: get­ting paid 20 mil­lion dol­lars either way and prob­a­bly, I don’t know, I’m guess­ing it was a, there was a bonus for From Net­flix, if it went on as long as pos­si­ble.

[01:57:59] TK: Yeah,

[01:57:59] CR: know, I said to the boys at the, before it even like, when it was announced, I said, this is a, this, like every­thing Jake Paul does, it’s, uh,

[01:58:07] CR: It’s bull­shit. It’s just, it’s, it’s a

[01:58:10] TK: Yeah.

[01:58:11] CR: It’s WWE box­ing, you know.

[01:58:15] TK: just like the Amer­i­can

[01:58:16] TK: elec­tions are WWE

[01:58:18] CR: Amer­i­ca’s been com­plete­ly WWE’d. The whole cul­ture’s WWE’d. Any­way, so then we, and it was. It was just such a,

[01:58:27] TK: And I did­n’t

[01:58:27] CR: uh, it was so appalling.

[01:58:29] TK: not a big, I must admit, I’m not a big fan of box­ing any­way. I mean, I, I did grow up watch­ing Muham­mad Ali, who was an amaz­ing

[01:58:37] CR: Yeah.

[01:58:38] TK: Um, yeah,

[01:58:39] CR: an incred­i­ble human being, too. I mean, real­ly, a man with very, very high integri­ty and prin­ci­ples and, um, put it on the line, had his belt tak­en away from him. no Viet Cong nev­er called

[01:58:54] TK: gold medal in the riv­er.

[01:58:55] CR: N word. Yeah, Yeah, like a man of very high prin­ci­ples and integri­ty.

[01:59:02] CR: I mean, I, I think he may have one of his wives a few times, so I don’t want to apol­o­gize for that, but he was a black man who grew up in the South in the fifties and six­ties.

[01:59:12] CR: So, you know, not mak­ing excus­es for vio­lence against women. You know, there was a time Sean Con­nery did it.

[01:59:22] TK: Did he real­ly?

[01:59:24] CR: yeah.

[01:59:24] TK: Oh, that’s,

[01:59:25] CR: Oh yeah, Sean Con­nery had a

[01:59:26] TK: was a, I was a

[01:59:27] CR: Sean Con­nery used to go on talk shows and say that, uh, you know, you have to smack a woman around, smack her in the mouth a few times so she remem­bers her place.

[01:59:38] TK: Okay.

[01:59:40] TK: I nev­er saw any of those

[01:59:41] CR: But the way he said it,

[01:59:43] TK: They’ve been, prob­a­bly been,

[01:59:44] TK: cen­sored. Prob­a­bly can’t see them

[01:59:45] CR: I don’t know, when he died, all this stuff came out. It was, it got revived by cer­tain peo­ple, but he said it, it sound­ed cool. You know, you got­ta, you got­ta hit her a few times, slap her in the face a few times, just so she knows where she stands. She’ll appre­ci­ate it. You know, she knows that, uh, she’s tru­ly loved if you slap her in the face a few times, Miss Mon­eypen­ny.

[02:00:08] TK: Did he, Did

[02:00:08] TK: he real­ly say that?

[02:00:10] CR: I, I swear to God, like, I can’t, I can’t believe you’re ques­tion­ing me. Well, like, like, who am I? Like. Con­spir­a­cy,

[02:00:19] TK: who are you? You, you are, you’re, I’m gonna have to go away and

[02:00:25] CR: to this I know Sean Con­nery regrets this con­ver­sa­tion. An inter­view in which you said, What’s the worst thing to slap a woman now and then? As I remem­ber you said, you don’t do it with a clenched fist, it’s bet­ter to do it with an open hand.

[02:00:38] CR: Yeah, remem­ber that? Yeah. Yeah. I did­n’t love that. I haven’t changed my opin­ion. You haven’t? No, not at all. You think it’s good to slap a woman? No, I don’t think it’s good. You don’t think it’s bad? I don’t think it’s that bad. I think that it depends entire­ly on the cir­cum­stances and if it mer­its it, yeah.

[02:00:55] CR: And what would mer­it it? Well, if you have tried every­thing else, and women are pret­ty good at this, they can’t leave it alone, yeah. They don’t want to have the last word, and you give them the last word, but they’re not hap­py with the last word. They want to say it again and get into a real­ly provoca­tive sit­u­a­tion.

[02:01:18] CR: Then, I think it’s absolute­ly right. ha!

[02:01:26] TK: No

[02:01:26] TK: dear.

[02:01:27] CR: ha!

[02:01:28] TK: I did­n’t, I did­n’t know

[02:01:29] CR: no. Any, any oth­er heroes you want me to destroy while we’re on the show?

[02:01:37] TK: Don’t say any­thing about Michael

[02:01:38] CR: Oh, no, I’ve got noth­ing bad to say about Michael Caine.

[02:01:43] TK: Well that’s cool

[02:01:43] CR: You’re only sup­posed to blow the bloody doors off!

[02:01:49] TK: Yeah. Yeah, Kane and Sean Con­nery are my two favourites from grow­ing up.

[02:01:54] CR: Ugh,

[02:01:55] TK: The Men Who Would Be Kings, one of my favourite films when I was grow­ing up.

[02:01:59] CR: don’t think I’ve seen that one. I mean, it would be King’s, eh?

[02:02:02] TK: Do Your­self A Favour,

[02:02:03] CR: Got­ta add that to my

[02:02:04] CR: list.

[02:02:05] TK: Peachy, Peachy, and who was the oth­er guy? They played British army offi­cers who went rogue and went free­lance in Pak­istan or India

[02:02:13] TK: or some­where like,

[02:02:13] TK: that.

[02:02:15] CR: Oh, like,

[02:02:16] TK: war so they could fight either side. It’s a Rud­yard Kipling book.

[02:02:19] CR: oh, okay. Like

[02:02:20] TK: And it’s where Michael Caine hired Shaki­ra, uh, Shaki­ra, his wife, to, to be in

[02:02:27] CR: Oh, have you ever seen the Three, the Three Kings?

[02:02:33] TK: The George Clooney

[02:02:34] CR: Yeah,

[02:02:35] TK: Yeah.

[02:02:36] CR: sort of thing.

[02:02:37] TK: Where they steal the gold? Nah. Com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent.

[02:02:39] CR: okay.

[02:02:40] TK: Yeah. These are good actors. Iconar­ia. Iconar­ia.

[02:02:44] TK: And Caine. Haha­ha. Haha.

[02:02:47] CR: Okay.

[02:02:49] TK: Ooh, nah, great film.

[02:02:50] CR: All right. Well, I think that’s enough. It’s anoth­er like two hour show talk­ing about fas­cism or some­thing. Tony, we, you know. What?

[02:02:58] TK: hours 20. Well, it’s 20, it’s 20

[02:03:03] TK: past 6 my time here and we start­ed at

[02:03:05] CR: Oh my God. I was only jok­ing. I did­n’t know. We got­ta stop talk­ing. All right.

[02:03:14] TK: Time flies when we have fun and we do.

[02:03:17] CR: All right. Thank you, Tony. Have a good week. Any­one

[02:03:19] TK: You’re wel­come. Thank you.

[02:03:24] TK: Yes, hap­py ASX.