QAV 751 — The Buffett Indicator

QAV 751 Club

[00:00:00] TK: Yep.

[00:00:05] CR: Give me a three, two, one.

[00:00:09] TK: Three, two, one,

[00:00:13] CR: We have liftoff.

[00:00:15] TK: Thun­der­birds are go!

[00:00:19] CR: uh, visu­al jokes. Hey, wel­come to QAV751, Tony.

[00:00:27] TK: Team QAV

[00:00:28] CR: you’re look­ing very

[00:00:29] CR: sharp there today, Tony, with your QAV t shirt. Put this

[00:00:35] TK: Yes, you are too.

[00:00:37] CR: video up so peo­ple can see how good the new QAV t shirts look.

[00:00:42] TK: And just in time for Christ­mas on Red­bub­ble.

[00:00:45] CR: just what every­one wants, QAV t shirt. Give them to your kids. They’ll love it. Make up some­thing cool that it stands

[00:00:53] CR: for. Speak­ing of which, my son Tay­lor was, uh, chastis­ing me over the week­end because he was on, I don’t know, the Apple, uh, pod­cast search thing for some rea­son, look­ing for our pod­cast, and, oh, he was just search­ing for val­ue invest­ing, and we weren’t com­ing up high in the stock, um, in the, in the, uh, Pod­cast rank­ings.

[00:01:20] CR: And I real­ize it’s because it says, you know, the title of the show is QAV and peo­ple aren’t search­ing for that unless they are. So I changed it in Apple to Qual­i­ty at Val­ue Share Invest­ing. So hope­ful­ly we’ll pick up more. Good old Phil Mus­catel­lo and shout out to Phil. He and I did our, um, our bi direc­tion­al inter­views.

[00:01:42] CR: Phil and I have come out as bi direc­tion­al. Um, he inter­viewed me and I inter­viewed him the oth­er day, but shares for begin­ners ranks real­ly well because you type in shares in the pod­cast thing and you get that, but we don’t do as well. So Tay­lor’s like, what are you doing? You know, SEO and iTunes sucks.

[00:02:03] CR: You need to fix it. So I spent some time on that. Any­who, um, how’s your week been, Tony? Apart from ABA that we’ll get to? Yeah. Pack­ing?

[00:02:14] CR: Is that why you’re wear­ing your QAV shirt? It’s

[00:02:16] CR: the only thing that’s, uh, has­n’t been packed.

[00:02:19] TK: No. No, I actu­al­ly, um, went for a walk before and came back sweaty. So I thought, oh, good, good oppor­tu­ni­ty to have a quick show­er and

[00:02:28] TK: get changed

[00:02:30] CR: And, uh, when do you head back down south now?

[00:02:33] TK: tomor­row.

[00:02:34] CR: Right. So you have been get­ting ready for that.

[00:02:38] TK: Yeah. So head­ing back tomor­row, back up for New Year’s, then the uplift hap­pens Jan­u­ary 2, and then we’re out.

[00:02:47] CR: Wow. How are you feel­ing about it?

[00:02:51] TK: Good.

[00:02:52] CR: Yeah.

[00:02:53] TK: look­ing for­ward to liv­ing at Cape Schanck, yeah.

[00:02:54] CR: yeah. That’s good.

[00:02:56] TK: Yeah, I am. And being close to Alex will be good fun.

[00:03:00] CR: Yeah,

[00:03:01] TK: Yeah,

[00:03:02] CR: you’ll be able to see her way more often. Then she’ll, she’ll move to Syd­ney to get away

[00:03:06] CR: from you. She’ll be like, ah, my dad, he’s just always want­ed to catch up. It’s like my kids. They, they called me a cou­ple of hours ago. And they’re like, hey, we’re going out for a cof­fee. You wan­na come? I was like, no, I have things to do.

[00:03:18] CR: Ah, you don’t just come for a cof­fee before. I’m like, no, I actu­al­ly have to do stuff. I’m record­ing a show. What time? Oh, one o’clock. Oh, that’s hours away. Okay. Yeah. But I got to do a pulled pork on a US com­pa­ny. I got stuff to do. Ah, pathet­ic. You’ll be part of that.

[00:03:37] TK: I, I, I respond­ed with Tay­lor last night cause I was, um, on Face­book and one of the groups I fol­low is called Amer­i­cans Decline, what’s it called? Amer­i­cans, Amer­i­ca’s Declin­ing to Idiot, Idio­cy. And, uh, there was a clip of Mar­ty and Michael.

[00:03:52] TK: Yeah.

[00:03:53] TK: Mar­ty and Michael?

[00:03:54] CR: Yeah. Yeah. Mates are his.

[00:03:55] TK: Who, uh, Who we used a long time ago to pro­mote one of the raf­fles that we were run­ning for char­i­ty and, um, yeah.

[00:04:02] TK: Some­one picked it up from the States and thought it was real and post­ed it to the, um, Amer­i­ca’s Declined Into Idio­cy web­site. One of the, either Mar­ty or Michael was run­ning over their hand with a car.

[00:04:15] TK: Which is the kind of shit they get up

[00:04:16] TK: to.

[00:04:17] CR: but they’re Aus­tralians, not Amer­i­cans. What’s that got to do with Amer­i­ca declin­ing?

[00:04:21] TK: Yeah, so real­ly, the idio­cy was the

[00:04:23] CR: All the Amer­i­cans think­ing it was real. Oh, right. Did you see, did you see your com­peti­tor with the char­i­ty busi­ness has just been charged with 13 counts of fraud or some­thing?

[00:04:36] TK: Yeah, Rod­dy and I had a good chat about that. Not fraud, no, breach­ing the South Aus­tralian

[00:04:41] TK: Lot­tery rules.

[00:04:43] CR: But Tay­lor

[00:04:43] TK: And we’ve long

[00:04:45] TK: Sor­ry.

[00:04:46] CR: Tay­lor says it’s a slap on the wrist. Like his fine’s

[00:04:49] TK: Oh, not even that.

[00:04:50] CR: 130 grand or some­thing out of the 100 mil­lion he’s made.

[00:04:54] TK: Yeah, yeah, So the South Aus­tralian Lot­tery Com­mis­sion’s bored, but they don’t real­ly have a case. Um, We all thought that he was get­ting off scot free because the Vic­to­ri­an and New South Wales gam­ing com­mis­sions were so busy with Crown Casi­no and Star Enter­tain­ment Group that they did­n’t have time to wor­ry about him.

[00:05:15] TK: So he just went hell for leather and built up a big bank. Now he’ll defend him­self when­ev­er they come after him again.

[00:05:21] CR: Trump strat­e­gy, again.

[00:05:23] TK: Yeah,

[00:05:24] CR: Make the mon­ey and then pay the fines lat­er or use the lawyers to fight it.

[00:05:28] TK: Yeah.

[00:05:29] TK: Yeah.

[00:05:30] CR: Any­way, I’m going to have to edit all this out. Uh, so back to invest­ing.

[00:05:36] CR: I’ll put it in

[00:05:37] TK: that’s, that’s a, that is invest­ing. That’s a les­son in the real world of invest­ing.

[00:05:43] CR: Yeah. Uh, well, let’s start with port­fo­lio updates. Tony, uh, I think all of the BOL stuff has sort of sort­ed out. I had a bit of a back and forth with Navarre at Navexa and he said, yeah, no, the buy price does­n’t change. It all just gets sort­ed out behind the scenes. So, he reck­ons it’s all good and I should shut the hell up and stop wor­ry­ing about it.

[00:06:05] CR: Um, I wor­ry though because BOL looks like it’s way down in terms of, um, the cap­i­tal gain, so I’m not sure how that works. But, um, any­way, the dum­my

[00:06:18] TK: did­n’t, you did­n’t change any­thing.

[00:06:20] CR: nah, I haven’t changed any­thing.

[00:06:22] CR: I’ll drib­ble down in a sec­ond, but the dum­my port­fo­lio still, uh, over, since incep­tion, still at about 16 per­cent ver­sus the STW about 9%, so not quite dou­ble.

[00:06:36] CR: Over five years or what­ev­er it is. Biggest per­form­ers, uh, over that time in terms in terms of the stocks that we still hold, uh, DUR up 48, 40 9% per annum since we held them. I dun­no when that is exact­ly. Can’t be both­ered. Um, MAH up 42% per annum. Uh, what else? We got LAU up, 32%. Uh, PRN up 33% per annum.

[00:07:06] CR: Whole bunch of 20s and 30s there. The worst that we hold is, uh, Qan­tas. It’s cap­i­tal gain is down 10, but it gets up a lit­tle bit on income return. Those oth­ers have got some income return in there too that I did­n’t even men­tion. But, um, BOL is inter­est­ing. So, we bought that in, uh, April of this year at 14 cents.

[00:07:34] CR: It’s had its con­sol­i­da­tion, uh, one for 10 or 10 for one, one of those, one for 10, 10 for one, one for 10. Yeah, you get one and you lose nine. Is that right? It’s now trad­ing at, uh, 1. 38. So I guess it is a lit­tle bit down. It should be 1. 40. So that’s dis­ap­point­ing. I would have thought that that would have made it bet­ter.

[00:07:59] CR: Don’t con­sol­i­da­tions nor­mal­ly help? It’s less

[00:08:03] TK: Well, they should­n’t make any dif­fer­ence. I mean, peo­ple do them because they think they do, but I don’t know if they do. Um, but I’m look­ing at BOL and the bread lat­er, which is using Google Finance, and it’s got pre­vi­ous mon­th’s close, 14, cur­rent price 1. 38. So there’s some­thing skewy with the data feeds there.

[00:08:22] CR: Why?

[00:08:24] TK: Well, because if you look at the graph, it drops from 14 to 1. 38 this month.

[00:08:30] CR: 14?

[00:08:31] TK: Yeah.

[00:08:33] CR: Okay, well that is wrong. Yeah, should have

[00:08:35] TK: Yeah. So that might also be feed­ing into Navexa as well, I

[00:08:38] TK: guess. I don’t know.

[00:08:40] CR: No, Navexa does­n’t show up being 14.

[00:08:44] CR: Let’s see, I’m look­ing at the, I’m look­ing at the Bret­ta­la­tor.

[00:08:50] CR: Yeah, that’s con­fus­ing, isn’t it? Oh, well, any­way, port­fo­lio is doing okay. That one’s a lit­tle bit con­fus­ing, but that’s all right. Um, in terms of the Stock­o­pe­dia port­fo­lios, that’s the Stock Doc­tor port­fo­lio, the, um, Aus­tralian dum­my in the, in the, And this one, the graph is all over the place because of BOL.

[00:09:13] CR: It shows the returns like drop­ping to minus 50 per­cent back in ear­ly 2004 when I bought BOL and then it rebounds all of a sud­den after the con­sol­i­da­tion hap­pened. The graph, I don’t know why they can’t fix that. But any­way, um, the Aus­tralian port­fo­lio is doing about 15. 6 per­cent since incep­tion, which is a year and a bit.

[00:09:37] CR: Uh, ver­sus the S& P 13. 5%, so we’re above the index, but not by much, but it’s only a year and a bit. The U. S. dum­my port­fo­lio, uh, since incep­tion is up 80 What? No, 93. 93%. I think that’s from Sep­tem­ber 23 ver­sus the s and p 500 at 36, near­ly 37%. So again, near­ly, near­ly three times the mar­ket over there. And I will be doing a pulled pork lat­er on in this show on one of the stocks in our Amer­i­can port­fo­lio.

[00:10:15] CR: Region­al man­age­ment or region­al finance is their con­sumer brand. They’re a lender of last resort, very, very high inter­est rates, and they’re mak­ing mon­ey. And, um, it’s inter­est­ing. I want to talk about, you know, sev­en out of the 14 stocks in our U. S. port­fo­lio are finance com­pa­nies or banks.

[00:10:36] TK: Mm hmm.

[00:10:36] CR: uh, I spent a lot of time with Chat­G­PT today going, what does that say about, what does that say about the US mar­ket in the last year or so that we bought all of these, you know, end­ed up 50%.

[00:10:47] CR: As we’ve said many times, we’re not the­mat­ic buy­ers inten­tion­al­ly, but that’s just the way it turns out. Some­times sec­tors are under­val­ued and it seems like finance and bank­ing was that. They’ve all done very well, par­tic­u­lar­ly WLFC or WFLC. One of the two. What’s up with Will whatcha talk? What, what you talk­ing about Willis?

[00:11:09] CR: What­ev­er that one is, it’s up like 400%. The rest are doing okay. But, um, so it, they were under­val­ued a year or so ago. Now

[00:11:18] TK: Mm hmm.

[00:11:18] CR: doing real­ly well.

[00:11:21] CR: But then again, the, the ques­tion I had is, well, if a lender of last resort that’s charg­ing like 40. Inter­est rates for loans is doing well. What does that say about the state of the US econ­o­my?

[00:11:35] CR: And any­way, we’ll get into that.

[00:11:40] CR: Oh, the only news item I had this week is in Aus­tralian news is SXE, which is a com­pa­ny that I hold in a few port­fo­lios, um, includ­ing the RRTP. Stock­o­pe­dia Port­fo­lio and a cou­ple of the light port­fo­lios. It’s been hav­ing a good run. Had an announce­ment last week that it has received awards, con­tracts totalling 125 mil­lion, range of projects in the data cen­ter, com­mer­cial, man­u­fac­tur­ing, resources, and water sec­tors.

[00:12:12] CR: South­ern Cross Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing, SCEE Group, they call them­selves. SCEE Ski Group

[00:12:20] CR: They’re doing well. Share price got a lit­tle bit of a bump out of that,

[00:12:24] CR:

[00:12:24] TK: Mm. I saw that.

[00:12:27] CR: Well, it bounced from 1.

[00:12:28] CR: 38, I guess, the day before. That press release came out, it jumped up to 1. 58. Then some­body took their prof­its and it’s rebuilt since then.

[00:12:37] CR: So it had been declin­ing from as high as 1. 70.

[00:12:42] CR: So do you think they put that out just to tell peo­ple the things are good? Again, it’s up as high as 1. 90 going back to August. Wow. It’s

[00:12:49] TK: Yeah. I

[00:12:50] TK: do think that’s what they did.

[00:12:51] CR: They’re like, hey, come on, it’s not as bad as you think. Well, I last, I looked this morn­ing and it’s up like 40 per­cent in our port­fo­lios, so we must have held it quite a while.

[00:13:01] CR: It’s doing

[00:13:01] TK: Yeah. Look, if you look at the bread lat­er, it was as low as, well, when it became a buy on the cur­rent cycle, it was at 69 cents back in July, 2023.

[00:13:12] CR: Right,

[00:13:13] TK: now 1. 48, even though it’s down from 1.

[00:13:17] TK: 88.

[00:13:19] CR: well,

[00:13:20] TK: So it’s done well.

[00:13:21] CR: I’m just look­ing to see when I added it. So, bought it, oh, August 23 at 0. 78, then in Novem­ber 23 then in Novem­ber 23 again at 0. 90. So, um, yeah. Oh, it’s up 88%, 79 per­cent and 63 per­cent across those port­fo­lios. So yeah, it’s, it’s done okay. It’s come back a long way, but it’s still doing okay. Can’t com­plain.

[00:13:48] CR: So good on you SXC. Con­grat­u­la­tions on your con­tracts.

[00:13:52] TK: The sexy engi­neers.

[00:13:53] CR: Yeah!

[00:13:56] TK: Um, who’s Leon Levy and what’s he, what’s he know?

[00:14:00] TK: Leon Levy wrote a book called The Mind of Wall Street. I can’t work out whether that means he thought he was the brain of Wall Street, or whether he’s just talk­ing about the way that Wall Street’s minds work. I think it’s the lat­ter. Any­way, um, came across a good quote. I’m read­ing that book at the moment, which is, um, was writ­ten just after the dot com bub­ble burst.

[00:14:21] TK: And, um, Leon is an old fund man­ag­er from a fund called the Oppen­heimer Fund.

[00:14:28] CR: Mmm!

[00:14:28] TK: book, and um, I’ve just come across this quote which I thought I’d recount. Account­ing is sup­posed to pro­vide the real­i­ty behind a cor­po­rate spin. Which I thought was a good sum­ma­ry of QAV as well. Ignore the spin.

[00:14:47] CR: Was, um, the Oppen­heimer Com­pa­ny cre­at­ed by Oppen­heimer, the Man­hat­tan Project

[00:14:52] TK: Well, I thought it might be, but I haven’t come across that yet in the

[00:14:55] TK: book. Hmm.

[00:14:58] CR: after Ger­man Amer­i­can invest­ment bro­ker Max E. Oppen­heimer, a Jew­ish refugee from the Nazis who advised the Syn­a­gogue Coun­cil of Amer­i­ca and worked at a New Hamp­shire real estate firm, a Bay Area Sav­ings and Loan Asso­ci­a­tion, and Lehman Broth­ers. Oppen­heimer Hold­ings was found­ed in 1950 when a part­ner­ship was cre­at­ed to act as a bro­ker deal­er and man­age relia I’m sure that it did­n’t, it did­n’t hurt.

[00:15:23] CR: You just go, yeah, I’m Oppen­heimer. Oh, real­ly? Real­ly.

[00:15:27] TK: Hmm. Oh real­ly? Yeah. Ha Ha

[00:15:31] CR: I’m gonna drop the moth­er of all

[00:15:33] CR: bro­ker­age bombs on you.

[00:15:36] TK: Hmm.

[00:15:38] CR: Um, I see you’ve got a Buf­fett quote here. I, it’s, I, you know, I have a Google search alert for Buf­fett and, um, it nev­er

[00:15:46] TK: go off.

[00:15:47] CR: it does,

[00:15:48] CR: like 50 times a day, nev­er ceas­es to amuse me. I actu­al­ly was going to talk about one today and decid­ed it was­n’t worth your time, but now that you’ve.

[00:15:56] CR: Brought buf­fet up, . It’s like, you know, they’re always, um, what you can learn from War­ren Buf­fet’s trad­ing. And I go, okay, it’s good. And these are like Mot­ley Fool esque type arti­cles, you know, um, uh, prob­a­bly writ­ten by AI in a lot of cas­es. So I go and look at one and he goes, oh, he sold down his stakes in Apple, but he still owns a lot of apples, but he sold a bit down and blah, blah.

[00:16:24] CR: And then the next bul­let point is diver­si­fi­ca­tion. Every­one should be diver­si­fy­ing into. Dif­fer­ent sec­tors and blah, blah, blah. Diver­si­fi­ca­tion. Oh, hold on. Buf­fet­t’s always say­ing that diver­si­fi­ca­tion is for peo­ple who don’t know what they’re doing. This is what you’re sell­ing is War­ren Buf­fett tips.

[00:16:43] CR: Any­who, what have you

[00:16:44] TK: And there was anoth­er one, anoth­er one in the week­end papers. Some­one’s writ­ten a book about Buf­fet­t’s first 10 trades and gone through them foren­si­cal­ly to see what they could learn. And I read the review of the book and I decid­ed not to buy the book because, um, very ear­ly on in the book, This was real­ly hard to do and you could­n’t recre­ate it today. So I’m think­ing, well, what’s the point? If you can’t, if you can’t do what War­ren did back then, then why tell us about it? It’s, it’s like a, it’s a nice his­tor­i­cal fact, but an inter­est­ing read, but it’s com­plete­ly use­less. And that, I mean, you can’t do it today because it was large­ly about War­ren. Um, You know, wear­ing out shoe leather, going and talk­ing to CEOs hours about their busi­ness­es.

[00:17:28] TK: And you can’t do that today because, uh, mar­ket dis­clo­sure rules say as soon as the CEO tells you one thing, they’ve got to tell the mar­ket. Um, or they don’t tell you any­thing they haven’t told the mar­ket, so it’s kind of a use­less rule. cir­cle of, um, of a way to invest. And the oth­er one was too, that Buf­fett was using, you know, the old annu­al reports and paper based fil­ings and, um, was deal­ing in stocks that were so illiq­uid he was putting ads in the local papers to get peo­ple to sell them their shares.

[00:17:56] TK: And yeah, very archa­ic. It worked for him, but the very archa­ic way of doing things, which would­n’t work today.

[00:18:02] CR: Very

[00:18:03] TK: But the quote I did pick up on,

[00:18:04] CR: very dif­fer­ent stock mar­ket back then too, right? It

[00:18:07] TK: oh yeah, yeah,

[00:18:09] CR: what it is today. It was, you know, a hand­ful of hard­core guys. You know, buy­ing and sell­ing stuff. It was­n’t like, uh, on the front cov­er of, we did­n’t have 24 sev­en cable chan­nels and web­sites and dig­i­tal feeds and all of that kind of stuff.

[00:18:26] CR: Elon Musk telling peo­ple to buy Doge­coin or what­ev­er he’s doing.

[00:18:32] TK: yeah, well there would have been a fair amount of that because Buf­fett talks about being in Oma­ha to avoid the noise, but chances are a lot of that was just net­work­ing and, and, you know, Being told things up and down Wall Street or in New York or what­ev­er. Yeah,

[00:18:46] CR: Any­way.

[00:18:47] TK: um, the quote, the quote I did pick out though was talk­ing about the Buf­fett indi­ca­tor, which is I think some­thing we’ve raised before.

[00:18:54] TK: Sim­i­lar sort of arti­cle that it goes along the lines of, With the US bench­marks at record highs, it is no sur­prise that War­ren Buf­fet­t’s Berk­shire Hath­away has accu­mu­lat­ed the record cash pile of over 300 bil­lion after sell­ing down key hold­ings, includ­ing Apple. So again, they’re say­ing, he’s kind of using that as a, you know, his Buf­fett, is Buf­fett rais­ing cash because the next crash is com­ing?

[00:19:20] TK: And he prob­a­bly is, to be hon­est. That’s his modus operan­di. Um, but I don’t know if he delib­er­ate­ly does that or whether he’s just say­ing I can’t find any­thing else to buy up there because every­thing’s high­ly priced. So it kind of, works for him, whether he’s doing it con­scious­ly or not. But, um, I thought it was worth­while doing a bit of research into the Buf­fett Indi­ca­tor.

[00:19:41] TK: Uh, and I looked it up. There’s a web­site which tracks it called the cur­rent­mar­ket­val­u­a­tion. com. Um, and they have a num­ber of dif­fer­ent, um, tabs in there, but there is one called the Buf­fett Indi­ca­tor. But the Buf­fett Indi­ca­tor, uh, the, the for­mu­la is, uh, it’s the sum of the total of US stock mar­ket val­ue, Uh, and

[00:20:05] TK: yes to, uh, total of US stock mar­ket val­ue over the gross domes­tic prod­uct. And as of Sep­tem­ber 30th, 2024, US stock mar­ket val­ue was 60 odd tril­lion dol­lars, and the US GDP annu­al­ized is just under $30 tril­lion, and there­fore the buf­fet indi­ca­tor sits at 208%. Um, which is a long way from the aver­age. It’s like two stan­dard devi­a­tions above the aver­age.

[00:20:31] TK: Um, and so Buf­fett has long used that as a way of say­ing that com­pa­nies are over­val­ued because they’re not going to make their, their prof­its are at least some­what linked to the GDP of the U S because, um, some com­pa­nies will out­per­form the econ­o­my and some will under­per­form the econ­o­my, but again, they’re always kind of.

[00:20:51] TK: trade around the econ­o­my. They can’t just man­u­fac­ture prof­its out of thin air if there’s not enough buy­ers to buy their prod­ucts. So, um, if you graph it all, we’re at an all time high for the Buf­fett indi­ca­tor. And if you look at the high points in the past when it’s got two stan­dard devi­a­tions above the aver­age, the last was in, um, 1999 slash 2000 at the end of the dot com bub­ble and then it goes all the way back to 1970, which was the start of a big, the oil price shock, which was the start of a big crash in the US mar­kets as well.

[00:21:26] TK: So there’s some­thing in this, um, but one thing I did notice as well is that it does­n’t always reach two stan­dard devi­a­tions and then crash straight away. It can some­times hang up there for as much as a decade. So, uh, It’s not, it’s not, it’s an indi­ca­tor of over­val­ued, over­val­ued­ness, but it’s not a pre­cip­i­ta­tive, like it’s not one that we need to take notice of and do some­thing about tomor­row, I don’t think.

[00:21:54] TK: And it’s also some­thing I don’t track and we all know the US stock mar­ket’s over­val­ued and our, the Aus­tralian stock mar­ket’s above aver­age, so you could say it’s over­val­ued as well, it is. Uh, but we have our own frame­work for trad­ing through these things, so I’m not going to change that.

[00:22:13] CR: won­der if you took

[00:22:14] TK: Been inter­est­ing, I thought.

[00:22:15] CR: yeah, if you took out the Mag­nif­i­cent 7, I won­der how those num­bers look.

[00:22:19] TK: Yeah, it’s a good ques­tion. Um, prob­a­bly a lot

[00:22:22] TK: less.

[00:22:23] CR: And my

[00:22:24] TK: I’ve seen, I’ve seen graphs that most of the growth in the U. S. stock mar­ket is from the Mag 7,

[00:22:28] TK: so yeah.

[00:22:29] CR: Yeah. My sec­ond ques­tion was going to be, if you have any under­stand­ing of why Berk­shire Hath­away sell stocks, like they’re sell­ing Apple, why, you know, why would they be sell­ing Apple? You know, I thought they were, hold for­ev­er

[00:22:47] TK: buy and hold. Yeah. Yeah, I don’t have an insight into that. Um, I agree with you. War­ren tra­di­tion­al­ly is buy and hold for­ev­er. And, uh, I can’t think of exam­ples where he’s sold. So I’ve long thought that Apple was a Todd or Ted trade. Um, and I think that could be the case. And I think that they prob­a­bly are more traders than Buf­fett is.

[00:23:13] TK: But I don’t know for sure. Oh,

[00:23:18] CR: so you think that,

[00:23:19] TK: I take it back. Buf­fett has trad­ed in and out of things when he thinks he’s made a mis­take. So the last time I think I saw Buf­fett sell stocks was about two or three years ago when he had bought into the US air­line indus­try and then he sold out again fair­ly soon after­wards and said that, look, I’ve been burnt before and I’ve been burnt this time and I made a mis­take.

[00:23:39] TK: But, but gen­er­al­ly he’s buy and hold.

[00:23:42] CR: hmm, he nor­mal­ly is pret­ty trans­par­ent about that kind of stuff come annu­al gen­er­al meet­ing time, right? He’ll say if he, why he got out of things and what his think­ing is, so we might have to

[00:23:54] TK: Well, he nor­mal­ly leads with his mis­takes. He nor­mal­ly says here’s how I goofed dur­ing the year. You can get that right out there up front. You know, that’s not a bad way to run a busi­ness, right? Here’s how I fucked up. And that takes all the wind out of the sails of most of his crit­ics and he can get on to just Good news from their end on the high note.

[00:24:12] TK: It’s kind of smart, real­ly.

[00:24:14] CR: yeah, so we’re gonna have to wait until May to find out why they got out of Apple,

[00:24:22] TK: Yeah, if we find out then, I mean, he may just say it was­n’t my trade.

[00:24:27] CR: right? So the Todd and Ted trades he does­n’t have to pro­vide com­men­tary on.

[00:24:34] TK: Yeah, look, he does­n’t nor­mal­ly, because he’ll just, if they’re there, he’ll defer to them. I don’t think I’ve ever spo­ken, though, at the meet­ing. But look, it could be some­thing else, too. I mean, Berk­shire Hath­away is more than just His hold­ings in stocks, they’re also the insur­ance com­pa­ny’s hold­ings in stocks.

[00:24:52] TK: So it’s, I think he does run that, but um, if some­one like Ajit Jain, who runs the insur­ance busi­ness, had to rebal­ance his port­fo­lios for what­ev­er rea­son, per­haps he was a sell­er of Apple. I don’t know.

[00:25:05] CR: Oh, okay, so they might all get bun­dled up under the Berk­shire head­ing.

[00:25:10] TK: Yeah,

[00:25:11] CR: Well, Rupert Mur­doch, we want to talk about the poor Mur­doch fam­i­ly. Did you hear the suc­ces­sion relat­ed sto­ry with this?

[00:25:21] TK: I did­n’t. I have heard

[00:25:23] TK: a cou­ple, but what’s yours?

[00:25:24] CR: Well, I heard over the course of the last week that sup­pos­ed­ly when the episode where Logan died went to air, A cou­ple of the Mur­doch kids got on the blow­er to each oth­er and said, uh, Hey, uh, we should get togeth­er and talk. These are the ones that are on the outs. So James and Eliz­a­beth and who­ev­er the oth­er one is.

[00:25:51] TK: Pru­dence? is. it Pru­dence? No.

[00:25:52] CR: No, I think Pru­dence is the eldest one. She does­n’t get real­ly involved in this stuff. I think there’s anoth­er one. Who­ev­er the, uh, Roman is of the fam­i­ly got togeth­er and said, we should, we should, we should have a sit down. Uh, what hap­pens when dad dies? And that’s when the whole thing about. Uh, Lach­lan tak­ing over the trust, or tak­ing over con­trol, came up and rejig­ging the trust, blah blah blah blah. So the, heh, the claim is that it was an episode of Suc­ces­sion that was loose­ly based on the Mur­dochs that trig­gered the Mur­dochs to sit down and have this, I find that hard to believe that they had­n’t already had these con­ver­sa­tions about what hap­pens when Dad dies, he’s like 205 years old, I’m sure they’ve had this con­ver­sa­tion, but uh, any­way, it’s a fun sto­ry.

[00:26:37] TK: it’s a fun sto­ry. Um, so for those who have been under a rock, uh, the, um, the court case in the U. S. where This is being test­ed, so Rupert wants to rejig the trust to give most of the con­trol to Lach­lan because Lach­lan will con­tin­ue to invest in Fox News in par­tic­u­lar, and the oth­er three kids don’t like that.

[00:26:59] TK: The judge, though, ruled that the trust could­n’t be changed, and so that all four kids will share in the assets of News Corp when Rupert goes. A cou­ple of inter­est­ing things, I thought. One was the stock price was unmoved. The stock price was unmoved. So you would think if that was a, you know, if, if Rupert’s right, and if the, the more, I’ll call them the more pro­gres­sive kids, I don’t know how more pro­gres­sive they are, but the ones who may want to either sell Fox News or change Fox News and make it more sort of main­stream, uh, or inde­pen­dent, if they get con­trol of the share price, then Rupert’s argu­ment is that the price will go down.

[00:27:40] TK: Well, the share price did­n’t move and they’ve, you know, had the. Own­er­ship stake rein­forced by the cur­rent judge. Now that will be appealed, so per­haps that’s why the stock price has­n’t come down. It’s not the end of the road yet with this. Um, that was the first thing I thought was inter­est­ing. The sec­ond thing is that, um, in the arti­cles I was read­ing about this, I was real­ly sur­prised to see that Fox News now has 70 per­cent of the cable news mar­ket in the U.

[00:28:07] TK: S. So it’s killing CNN and MSNBC and what­ev­er else is in the mar­ket. Turn­er News or what­ev­er else is over there, but I was real­ly sur­prised at that, so, um, some­thing cul­tur­al­ly has shift­ed in the US in the last six months.

[00:28:25] CR: But I’m guess­ing that Cable News Sub­scrip­tion is basi­cal­ly dying.

[00:28:32] TK: Not Fox News­es. Now this is mar­ket share, this is the eye­balls,

[00:28:38] TK: like a Nielsen rat­ing.

[00:28:39] CR: Yeah, but again, I’m guess­ing that, um, yeah, I’m just ask­ing, uh, GPT. Cable news sub­scrip­tions in the U. S. have been on a steady decline over the last 20 years, a trend that has accel­er­at­ed in recent years due to shift­ing media con­sump­tion habits. It goes on to talk about the rise of stream­ing ser­vices, Net­flix, etc.,

[00:29:00] CR: decline in tra­di­tion­al TV view­er­ship because of YouTube and high speed inter­net. Uh, Polit­i­cal Polar­iza­tion and Audi­ence Frag­men­ta­tion. While Fox News remains dom­i­nant in rat­ings among cable news chal­lengers, even its view­er­ship has seen declines com­pared to its peaks in the 2000s and dur­ing Trump’s pres­i­den­cy.

[00:29:24] CR: Uh, plat­forms like Twit­ter, Face­book, Insta­gram and Tik­Tok have replaced cable news. And Rum­ble, too. Um, you heard of Rum­ble?

[00:29:34] TK: No, pre

[00:29:35] CR: Rum­ble has been around since 2010 or some­thing, I think. It posi­tions itself as the free speech ver­sion of YouTube and there

[00:29:45] TK: speech

[00:29:46] TK: ver­sion.

[00:29:46] CR: Yeah. There’s a big, um, New York Times arti­cle about it this week call­ing it the right wing YouTube.

[00:29:54] CR: But then I’ve been lis­ten­ing to Glenn Green­wald, because he hosts his night­ly show on Rum­ble. He’s a big sup­port­er of Rum­ble, and he’s like, yeah, they don’t men­tion me in the New York Times arti­cle and shows like mine, because, you know, obvi­ous­ly we’re not right wing, but, you know, we’re one of the biggest shows on Rum­ble.

[00:30:11] CR: It works for the New York Times audi­ence if you can call some­thing right wing, every­one gets upset about it, but, um, their plat­form, you know, their basic posi­tion is they don’t cen­sor like YouTube does, and they’re not going to de plat­form peo­ple because they don’t like what they’re say­ing. Um, and he was talk­ing about how Al Jazeera got deplat­formed, uh, when the Ukraine inva­sion hap­pened because the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment did­n’t want Amer­i­cans hear­ing Rus­si­a’s side of the sto­ry.

[00:30:42] CR: Um, all that kind of stuff, so, yeah, any­way.

[00:30:44] TK: Deplat­formed off Rum­ble or just in

[00:30:46] TK: gen­er­al?

[00:30:48] CR: Al Jazeera was de plat­formed off of cable net­works in the US and in Europe, so they were being dis­trib­uted, Al Jazeera was being dis­trib­uted in the US, you could watch Al Jazeera on one of the cable net­works and they got tak­en off cable net­works in the EU and in the Unit­ed States. Um, but any­way, yeah, so what that says to me is that peo­ple are leav­ing cable news in droves, but Fox’s audi­ence is more hard baked in than the rest of the cable news audi­ence.

[00:31:23] CR: They’re, they’re stick­ing with it longer than every­body else.

[00:31:28] TK: I just thought all the Democ­rats were curled up under their doonas suck­ing their thumbs after the elec­tion.

[00:31:34] TK: They weren’t churn­ing into the u’s.

[00:31:36] CR: Yeah,

[00:31:37] TK: too hor­ri­ble.

[00:31:38] CR: too, but I think this has been going on a long time. Yeah, it’s been inter­est­ing about the Fox stuff, so we’ll see what hap­pens. If Rupert ever dies, and I per­son­al­ly don’t think he ever will,

[00:31:47] CR: I think he is get­ting blood trans­fu­sions from, uh, Uh,

[00:31:56] TK: It’s like in Fury Road. Lach­lan’s on the front of the car with a, with a nee­dle. What do they call Mad Max? The blood bag.

[00:32:06] CR: yeah, that’s it. Alright. You wan­na do your pub

[00:32:10] TK: Okay. Yeah. So inter­est­ing one. I real­ly quite got into this one. Uh, the com­pa­ny is called GTN. It’s on our buy list. GTN stands for Glob­al Traf­fic Net­work, and a bit of an out­line of the com­pa­ny, GTN began oper­a­tions in Aus­tralia in 1997 and has selec­tive­ly and suc­cess­ful­ly expand­ed into oth­er attrac­tive mar­kets, includ­ing most recent­ly the Brazil­ian mar­ket.

[00:32:42] TK: Today, GTN is the largest sup­pli­er of traf­fic infor­ma­tion reports to radio sta­tions in Aus­tralia. The UK, Cana­da and Brazil, four of the ten largest adver­tis­ing mar­kets in the world. In exchange for pro­vid­ing these reports and in cer­tain cas­es mon­e­tary com­pen­sa­tion, GTN receives com­mer­cial adver­tis­ing spots adja­cent to traf­fic, news and infor­ma­tion reports from its large net­work of affil­i­ates.

[00:33:08] TK: These spots are bun­dled togeth­er by GTN and sold to adver­tis­ers on a nation­al, region­al or spe­cif­ic mar­ket basis. GTN’s adver­tis­ing spots are short in dura­tion, adja­cent to engag­ing infor­ma­tion reports, and are often read live on the air by well known radio and tv Per­son­al­i­ties dur­ing peak audi­ence hours.

[00:33:30] TK: So that’s a pricey of what the com­pa­ny does from its web­site. Am I able to play a YouTube clip over this record­ing or will it just not

[00:33:39] TK: work? Is there a way of doing it?

[00:33:41] CR: And, uh, and for an update on pro­ceed­ings before the Inde­pen­dent Com­mis­sion Against Cor­rup­tion, let’s cross to court reporter Lois Price. Uh, Lois, uh, who gave evi­dence before the com­mis­sion today? Yeah, good ques­tion, Sean. Look, it’s hard to say from my posi­tion high in the sky, it looks like Ants.

[00:33:58] CR: Yeah, yes, of course. What about Sen­a­tor Sin­odi­nos? When’s he due to appear as a wit­ness? This states, Sean, exact­ly when the Sen­a­tor will appear is unknown, cer­tain­ly by me. Plan­ta­tion shut­ters from legal­ly blinds add beau­ty to your home and help cut cool­ing and heat­ing costs. All legal­ly blinds for a free mea­sur­ing quote today.

[00:34:20] CR: I’m Lois Price for Mat­ters Health. Thanks very much, Lois.

[00:34:26] TK: that gives you an idea of what GTN

[00:34:28] TK: is all about.

[00:34:29] CR: By the way, I’m look­ing at their last annu­al report pre­sen­ta­tion, I see that their actu­al pub­lic brand is ATN, the Aus­tralian Traf­fic Net­work, which of course was the name of Logan Roy’s Fox News com­pa­ny,

[00:34:46] TK: ha

[00:34:46] CR: the Amer­i­can Tele­vi­sion Net­work, ATN. They took an oppor­tu­ni­ty to rebrand in line with Suc­ces­sion, so con­grat­u­la­tions, good think­ing to those guys,

[00:34:55] TK: yeah. Well, they have, they’re in four coun­tries. So I think they have CTN in Cana­da, and BTN in Brazil, and I guess UTN or UKTN in the UK.

[00:35:05] CR: right.

[00:35:05] TK: But, okay, so it’s, it’s a, it’s a good com­pa­ny. It’s, it’s, uh, num­bers are good, and I’ll go through those in a minute, but, um, I think the inter­est­ing thing about the com­pa­ny is that, In the last cou­ple of months, there’s been a takeover offer, um, by a com­pa­ny or an investor called Vibur­num, which is a fund man­ag­er.

[00:35:23] TK: And it’s a good old fash­ioned cor­po­rate raid. We haven’t seen one of those for a long time. On mar­ket, um, hos­tile, uh, But it’s worth unpick­ing to, to look at, look at, um, a bit about vibur­num, and this is from Chante Clear, last year, Octo­ber, 2023. The head­ing is, this is how to make 16% a year as an activist, investor, activist, invest­ing does­n’t have to be so pub­lic and out­ra­geous and is usu­al­ly more effec­tive when it isn’t.

[00:35:54] TK: Accord­ing to Vibur­num funds man­ag­ing part­ner Craig Cole­man, who runs a $600 mil­lion. Aus­tralian Equi­ties Fund and spe­cialis­es in activist type sit­u­a­tions. Need proof? Look at ASX list­ed Main Phar­ma Group, which announced plans to aban­don any M& A ambi­tions and ramped up its buy­back and cost cut­ting strat­e­gy.

[00:36:17] TK: Although the announce­ment came out of the blue on Octo­ber 18, 2023, none of that hap­pened by itself. It’s all counter growth stuff, and the sorts of things that run against the grain of most boards and man­age­ment teams. But with some nudg­ing from share­hold­ers, includ­ing Maine’s biggest investor Vibur­num, which encour­aged man­age­ment teams to think like own­ers, it hap­pened.

[00:36:40] TK: There was no board spill, pub­lic attack cam­paign, or share­hold­er funds being used to fight a proxy bat­tle. The result? Maine Farm­ers shares are up 40 per­cent in the past fort­night. So, Vibur­num is an activist investor. They tend to buy a stake in com­pa­nies and then work to, um, to improve them. I could­n’t find any offi­cial ver­i­fi­ca­tion of that CAGR num­ber of 16 per­cent per annum.

[00:37:08] TK: So I’ll take them at face val­ue. Um, but I, I do think it’s not a good look when you go to a fund man­ager’s web­site and you can’t find their returns. So, um, any­way, that’s buy the buy. I, I, I think If a fund man­ag­er was doing well they’d be telling you. Any­way. Uh, anoth­er Street Talk arti­cle from Sep­tem­ber 10.

[00:37:29] TK: Vibur­num’s GTN takeover finds ear­ly tak­ers after trad­ing fren­zy. Activist investor Vibur­num Funds Man­age­men­t’s takeover bid sent list­ed adver­tis­ing busi­ness GTN’s reg­is­ter into a tail­spin on Mon­day. StreetTalk under­stands at least 25 per­cent of the reg­is­ter turned over. Anoth­er GTN share­hold­er, MicroE­quities Asset Man­age­ment, scoffed at the bid.

[00:37:56] TK: They said, no pre­mi­um for a high­ly under­val­ued, high cash gen­er­a­tive busi­ness. No inter­est in sell­ing at these prices. MicroE­quities founder, Cory Doc­torow.

[00:38:09] TK: As for buy­ers, Vibur­num was­n’t the only one in the mar­ket. M& A Arbi­trage Fund Har­vest Lane Asset Man­age­ment was in and around the stock and end­ed up with a cir­ca 10 per­cent stake in GTN, sources said. Vibur­num, which was sit­ting on a 35. 5 per­cent stake of GTN, is said to be hov­er­ing near the 50 per­cent mark after scoop­ing up about 15 per­cent of the reg­is­ter.

[00:38:33] TK: Vibur­num, Change in own­er­ship notices should hit the ASX immi­nent­ly, sources said. So that was back in, uh, ear­ly Sep­tem­ber. And, uh, the board put out a stan­dard reply. GTN announced the mark the com­pa­ny notes the announce­ment of buy by Burn­ham Hold­ings regard­ing its off mar­ket bid to acquire shares in a in it at 46.

[00:38:56] TK: 5 cents per share, a nil pre­mi­um to last close, and rec­om­mends that share­hold­ers reject that offer by tak­ing no action at this stage. So Vibur­num has gone hos­tile, I had a stake in the com­pa­ny, they want to get con­trol, they’ve launched a bid to buy shares in the com­pa­ny at the cur­rent share price. This was as in Sep­tem­ber.

[00:39:18] TK: I don’t think Vibur­num got to 50 per­cent then because they issued a more detailed bid­der state­ment on Octo­ber 7, but did not lift their price. The board again respond­ed, reject­ing the new pre­mi­um takeover offer. On the 7th of Novem­ber, Vibur­num announced con­trol, acknowl­edged by GTN in this announce­ment.

[00:39:40] TK: GTN announced on 7th of Novem­ber 2024, Vibur­num lodged a change in sub­stan­tial hold­ing notice stat­ing that it and its asso­ciates hold a rel­e­vant inter­est of 53. 35 per­cent in the com­pa­ny. As a result, the offer peri­od has been auto­mat­i­cal­ly extend­ed and is sched­uled to close on 20th of Novem­ber 2024.

[00:40:01] TK: The com­pa­ny’s inde­pen­dent board com­mit­tee con­tin­ues to unan­i­mous­ly rec­om­mend that its share­hold­ers reject the offer. Going fur­ther for­ward, Novem­ber 28, Vibur­num sacked two of the board direc­tors in replace­ment with their own appoint­ments, and the GTN share issued a state­ment that includ­ed the board intends to engage an advi­sor To assess tax effect of cap­i­tal man­age­ment options for share­hold­ers.

[00:40:27] TK: As at 30th of June 2024, GTN had 23. 6 mil­lion of net cash. 20 mil­lion after includ­ing lease lia­bil­i­ties under AASB 16. The board is explor­ing a mean­ing­ful one off return of cap­i­tal or spe­cial div­i­dend with the exact quan­tum and struc­ture to be updat­ed sub­ject to fur­ther work and advice. In the inter­im, GTN intends to rein­state its on mar­ket buy­back.

[00:40:52] TK: GTN has 15. 9 mil­lion secu­ri­ties avail­able to be bought back under its exis­tence on mar­ket buy­back. The board is also assess­ing the opti­mal use of future free cash flow gen­er­a­tion. GTN gen­er­ates rel­a­tive­ly high free cash flow owing to mod­est cap­i­tal expen­di­ture require­ments. In FY24, GTN gen­er­at­ed 21. 9 mil­lion of free cash flow post tax, equiv­a­lent to a 24.

[00:41:20] TK: 5 per­cent yield based on cur­rent assets. Equi­ty. So, I mean, that was writ­ten by Vibur­num, basi­cal­ly, even though it was issued by the share, they’ve sacked two direc­tors, and they’ve high­light­ed the fact that they love the cash flow in the com­pa­ny, it’s got 20 mil­lion sit­ting on its bal­ance sheet, which they can use, and they’re inves­ti­gat­ing how to use it.

[00:41:41] TK: In the mean­time, they’re going to keep up with a buy­back. So, share­hold­er friend­ly, the share price is up since then. Um, anoth­er, uh, Anoth­er, um, announce­ment which is com­ing from Mr. Cole­man, uh, he advised the board that notwith­stand­ing Vibur­num’s con­trol share­hold­ing, we believe GTN con­tin­ues to be rel­e­vant in a list­ed con­text.

[00:42:05] TK: Con­sis­tent with this belief, Vibur­num will be retain­ing a con­trol inter­est in GTN, how­ev­er, has agreed to sell a por­tion of its inter­est to a num­ber of well regard­ed Aus­tralian fam­i­ly offices. Set­tle­ment will occur in Decem­ber 2024, with any fur­ther required ASX dis­clo­sures to fol­low short­ly after. Mr Cole­man added, Vibur­num’s Strate­gic Equi­ties Fund is a high con­vic­tion, active own­er­ship invest­ment man­ag­er of pub­lic equi­ties.

[00:42:33] TK: We are attract­ed to GTN’s free cash flow yield and cap­i­tal growth prospects from con­tin­ued oper­a­tional per­for­mance. Our approach is to act quick­ly. To is to think and act like hands-on long-term busi­ness own­ers with the objec­tive of deliv­er­ing mul­ti-year com­pound­ing returns. So the upshot is GTM remains list­ed.

[00:42:52] TK: It’s under by Burn­ham Con­trol Stock Dock states that they have sold down from achiev­ing an 80% own­er­ship of the com­pa­ny back to 53% of the stock. So they, they con­trol the stock, but they decid­ed to keep it list­ed. Um, they’re under­tak­ing a share buy­back and look­ing at what to do with 20 mil­lion of cash.

[00:43:10] TK: So what, what will they do? What are my opin­ions? Well, options from here are that they can use the CREEP pro­vi­sion to increase their hold­ings in the way that Ker­ry Stokes mas­tered at Boral and oth­er com­pa­nies. But I think that’s unlike­ly. If they owned 80 per­cent but sold down to 53%, what’s the point of creep­ing up the reg­is­ter again now?

[00:43:32] TK: What I did find out was anoth­er inter­est­ing fac­toid about Vibur­num. Craig Cole­man is also a direc­tor of a com­pa­ny called SEG, Sports Enter­tain­ment Group. Vibur­num holds 20. 75 per­cent of SEG, just nudg­ing out the founder, Craig Hutchin­son. Who owns 19. 1%. So Craig Hutchin­son will be a name any­body who’s paid atten­tion to sports report­ing will know.

[00:43:59] TK: Uh, this, this is from, um, uh, pré­cis of the busi­ness. Mr. Hutchin­son start­ed out with the Her­ald Sun news­pa­per in 1994. After a career in news­pa­pers, he moved to radio. Mr. Hutchi­son tran­si­tioned into tele­vi­sion in 1997, report­ing for Chan­nel 10, then Chan­nel 7. He has co host­ed Nine’s Pop­u­lar Footy Clas­si­fied for the past 16 sea­sons.

[00:44:23] TK: Mr. Hutchi­son co found­ed Sports Enter­tain­ment Net­work in 2006, which has grown to become a key play­er in the AFL land­scape under his lead­er­ship. SEG is a sports media con­tent and enter­tain­ment busi­ness, which through its oth­er com­ple­men­tary busi­ness units has capa­bil­i­ties to deliv­er brand sto­ries. To nation­al, met­ro­pol­i­tan and region­al audi­ences with unique and exclu­sive con­tent via mul­ti­ple plat­forms includ­ing radio, print, tele­vi­sion, online, in sta­di­um events and sports teams.

[00:44:56] TK: In Jan­u­ary 2024, SEG bought a sports team. The new­ly formed Mel­bourne Mav­er­icks net­ball team, which will be the eighth license in the Sun­corp Super Net­ball League, Aus­trali­a’s nation­al pro­fes­sion­al net­ball com­pe­ti­tion. The group is into its sixth year of sports team own­er­ship, which cur­rent­ly con­sists of four bas­ket­ball teams.

[00:45:16] TK: So one com­pa­ny sells radio ads next to traf­fic reports. One com­pa­ny pro­vides sports reports, both list­ed, both have Vibur­num as a cor­ner­stone investor, GTN mar­ket cap 116 mil­lion, SEN mar­ket cap 63 mil­lion. Kind of got an idea of what that 20 mil­lion on the GTN bal­ance sheet might be about to do, but I guess we watch this space and see what hap­pens.

[00:45:49] TK: GTM remains on the buy list, and for the same rea­son Vibur­num likes it, we like it. Lots of cash, throw­ing off, um, lots of cash as it goes for­ward. Lit­tle debt, uh, I think there’s going to be some kind of, um, poten­tial acqui­si­tion, uh, Going on, but we’ll see. Look­ing at the num­bers, GTM report­ed sol­id results for FY24.

[00:46:12] TK: Rev­enue was up 4%, NPAT was up 115%, and net debt was reduced, uh, to 8 mil­lion from a lot high­er than that. I think it was about 14 or 16 mil­lion repaid from mem­o­ry. Uh, the com­pa­ny repur­chased 4. 7 mil­lion shares. So, doing quite well. The QAV scores. Um, I guess this is one thing to high­light. GTN is a small cap with an 000.

[00:46:38] TK: So, I won’t be invest­ing in it, um, but it suits some­one with a port­fo­lio of, you know, sort of 300, 000 odd or less. Share price for analy­sis is 58. 5 cents, which is 90 per­cent of con­sen­sus tar­get. Uh, IV1 is, um, what have I got there? It’s above IV1, sor­ry, I can’t read my notes. IV2 is 78 cents. Um, so it’s below IV2.

[00:47:03] TK: So it’s find­ing fair val­ue on that score. I think IV1 is 14 cents, if that makes sense. NEPS is 1. 09, which is way above the share price, but I do high­light there is a big dif­fer­ence in net tan­gi­ble assets and net equi­ty for this com­pa­ny. NTA is 51 cents, so the share price is slight­ly above that, which sug­gests that there’s pri­or good­will on the bal­ance sheet from acqui­si­tions it’s made.

[00:47:30] TK: Yield is strong at 4. 9. per­cent, but not above the aver­age mort­gage inter­est rate, so we can’t score it for that. Stock Doc­tor finan­cial health is strong and the trend is steady. Uh, Stock­o­pe­dia, um, is uh, rank­ing at 84 for qual­i­ty, which is pret­ty good, and gives it a total rank­ing of 97, which is quite high.

[00:47:53] TK: I delved into the qual­i­ty score and it gets a high F score of 7 out of 9. Um, but the bank­rupt­cy score, or the Z score, is in dis­tress, which is very low. Um, but I’m get­ting very scep­ti­cal of this Z score. Every time we look at it, it makes no sense to me. Because this is a com­pa­ny with 20 mil­lion of cash sit­ting on its bal­ance sheet.

[00:48:15] TK: With, um, almost no debt. 8 mil­lion com­pared to a mar­ket cap of 120, rough­ly. Um, and, uh, throw­ing off, you know, good results. Throw­ing off lots of oper­at­ing cash. Enough to attract, uh, investors. Pri­vate equi­ty style fund man­ag­er radar to take it on and accord­ing to the Z score, it’s a bank­rupt­cy risk. I just don’t get that.

[00:48:37] TK: So I’m, I’m tempt­ed to ignore the Z score from now on in Stock­o­pe­dia. I just don’t, sim­ply don’t believe it. Um, mov­ing on. P is 20. 87 times. So not the high­est or the low­est. So we can’t score it for that. Prop­Caf is 4. 2 times, um, which is pret­ty good. Stock Doc­tor reports EPS fore­cast growth of 189%. So growth over P is nine times, which we score, uh, well for that.

[00:49:06] TK: Does­n’t have an own­er founder, uh, but we, we score it any­way for that, giv­en the con­cen­trat­ed own­er­ship of, um, Vibur­num now on the reg­is­ter. Uh, so not a founder, but cer­tain­ly a high con­vic­tion own­er. Uh, not a recent 3PL, 3PTL upturn. It’s been going on for a while now. Does­n’t have con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing equi­ty.

[00:49:27] TK: So all in all, 14 out of 16 for qual­i­ty or 88%, and a QAV score of 0. 21, which is rea­son­ably high. Uh, what are the risks? Um, Vibur­num could stuff this up. And, uh, you know, we’ve seen it hap­pen before that peo­ple get, Con­cen­trat­ed. In a stock they could actu­al­ly put their own inter­ests first like PE com­pa­nies some­times do by strip­ping out assets and load­ing up with debt.

[00:49:54] TK: I’m not for a minute say­ing Vibur­num will do that but that’s a risk. They could make a bad acqui­si­tion and if they are try­ing to merge two com­pa­nies togeth­er that could be a risk as well. Oppor­tu­ni­ties is Vibur­num gets it right. Um, and we, we cer­tain­ly haven’t seen this style of investor in the mar­ket much for a while.

[00:50:12] TK: So, uh, it’s, it’s kind of fun to watch it come back to life again, a good old fash­ioned pirate raid on a com­pa­ny, nil pre­mi­um, but, um, uh, you know, appeal­ing to peo­ple who think the com­pa­ny can be run bet­ter. Um, and I guess the oth­er upside in this is that it’s, this is per­haps the start of a roll up in the media sec­tor.

[00:50:31] TK: And we cer­tain­ly seen on our buy list over the last few years, com­pa­nies like the sev­en, Net­work. Um, a few of the region­al, uh, tele­vi­sion net­works come on to our bio list, uh, large­ly because of declin­ing share in main­stream media, as you allud­ed to before. Uh, but you know, there could be some­thing in syn­er­gies of putting all these things togeth­er into one big com­pa­ny.

[00:50:53] TK: Umm, not say­ing it’s gonna hap­pen, it’s maybe a bit of a, a moon­shot, but, um, uh, it, this could be the sale of a roll up in the media sec­tor. So have a look if you have a small port­fo­lio, but I found it very inter­est­ing to research GTN.

[00:51:07] CR: I’m just look­ing through their last AGM pre­sen­ta­tion from a cou­ple of weeks ago, see­ing that the CEO of ATN is Vic LaRus­so. Which makes me think of Daniel LaRus­so from Cobra Kai, but that’s by the by. When I look up Vic LaRus­so, he was, uh, a traf­fic reporter. As, accord­ing to his, uh, Twit­ter bio. So he’s gone from

[00:51:37] TK: Well, he’s gone far.

[00:51:39] CR: yeah. I liked it so much, I run the com­pa­ny. Uh, so

[00:51:46] TK: The Vic­tor Kiam of traf­fic report­ing. Oh.

[00:51:51] CR: And a real estate auc­tion­eer. He is a real estate auc­tion­eer, done traf­fic report­ing for var­i­ous radio sta­tions in the TEN net­work, and, uh, in 2016 he was the Aus­tralian Auc­tion­eer of the Year. So, from that to the CEO of this com­pa­ny, he’s done, done very well for him­self.

[00:52:11] CR: Shout out, con­grat­u­la­tions to Vic LaRus­so. Uh, yeah, inter­est­ing, inter­est­ing busi­ness. That’s some­thing that gets out­sourced, traf­fic reports.

[00:52:25] TK: Yeah. Why would every radio sta­tion want to

[00:52:28] TK: buy or lease a heli­copter?

[00:52:30] CR: So it’s the same heli­copter doing the traf­fic reports for all the radio sta­tions? Who?

[00:52:34] TK: so.

[00:52:38] TK: If they’re real­ly quick, they can fly between Bris­bane, Syd­ney and Mel­bourne, use the one heli­copter.

[00:52:45] CR: Like, I don’t lis­ten to radio. I haven’t lis­tened to radio for 20 years. I have no idea what’s going on with radio. But, uh, real­ly, peo­ple real­ly sit­ting in the car in the morn­ing going, Oh, need to lis­ten to my traf­fic reports, I know what’s going on.

[00:53:00] TK: No, you’re so out of touch Cam.

[00:53:05] TK: When com­mute times are an hour or so, more a day. Yes, I think there prob­a­bly are peo­ple lis­ten­ing for the, where the,

[00:53:10] TK: snails are.

[00:53:11] CR: Does­n’t Google Maps tell you that? Google Maps tells you that there’s a traf­fic prob­lem and traf­fic is slow? What do you need a, what do you need a heli­copter for?

[00:53:20] TK: Yeah. Good point. Don’t know.

[00:53:22] CR: My

[00:53:22] TK: I don’t do it.

[00:53:23] CR: me a week from now.

[00:53:25] TK: right.

[00:53:26] CR: Give me a new route.

[00:53:29] CR: Any­how, very good, very inter­est­ing, thank you. Time for me to do mine now.

[00:53:34] TK: Sure. Are

[00:53:35] CR: Region­al Man­age­ment!

[00:53:37] CR: is the name of the com­pa­ny. RM is their tick­et code on the New York Stock Exchange. Uh, Region­al Finance though is the brand that they trade under right across the US. I think in 19 states, 350 loca­tions, they have branch­es across 19 states. And as I said ear­li­er on, they basi­cal­ly are a lender of last resort in Amer­i­ca.

[00:54:05] CR: Um, we’ve owned them since

[00:54:09] TK: the cash

[00:54:09] TK: con­vert­ers of the US are they?

[00:54:11] CR: of like that, yeah, or the Jacaran­da Finance, who I’d nev­er heard of, but I looked them up in Aus­tralia. They’re charg­ing 45 per­cent inter­est rates on some loans. Um, well that’s when all the fees and every­thing are tak­en into account. So, these guys I don’t think go quite as high, but they’re up there in the high 30s with their inter­est rates.

[00:54:33] CR: Um, I added them to the US port­fo­lio in March. They’re up near­ly 50%. Over that peri­od of time. And I ran a buy list today, a US buy list, and they’re still on the buy list, despite hav­ing gone up 50 per­cent over the course of the year. So I’ll go through the num­bers a bit lat­er on, but a sol­id per­former for us.

[00:54:54] CR: And as I said ear­li­er on, it’s been a good year for finance com­pa­nies and banks, uh, for us with the US port­fo­lio right now, sev­en out of the four. 14 stocks in our U. S. port­fo­lio are banks or finance com­pa­nies. And I know it’s not just a U. S. phe­nom­e­non. We’ve had plen­ty of finance com­pa­nies and some banks on the Aus­tralian buy list over the last year or so.

[00:55:17] CR: And I assume that has some­thing to do with inter­est rates and fears of the econ­o­my slow­ing down and all sorts of, uh, macro­eco­nom­ic fac­tors that depress the val­u­a­tion of these, you know, stocks. Uh, finance and bank­ing sec­tor com­pa­nies, even though they were. And are gen­er­at­ing a lot of cash, their share price has been under­val­ued.

[00:55:41] CR: Um, cer­tain­ly in the US, in my analy­sis, the val­u­a­tion of these finance com­pa­nies going back a year seemed to have a lot to do with ris­ing inter­est rates, the region­al bank­ing cri­sis that hap­pened for a while there, gen­er­al pan­ic about the poten­tial eco­nom­ic down­turn in the US, and as we know, what is Buf­fet­t’s old say­ing?

[00:56:04] CR: Buy when oth­ers are fear­ful and sell when oth­ers are greedy or some­thing like that. Yeah, as I said ear­li­er on in the show, we’re not the­mat­ic investors. We don’t go look­ing for par­tic­u­lar sec­tors, but it just often hap­pens. I know I’ve seen it hap­pen over five or six years in Aus­tralia, where we’ll find a large per­cent­age of our port­fo­lio are in min­ing stocks at dif­fer­ent phas­es.

[00:56:30] CR: And then we’re not in any min­ing stocks in oth­er phas­es. Moves us into sec­tors that are gen­er­al­ly under­val­ued when that hap­pens. And bank­ing and finance seems to have been one of those in the U. S. in recent times, but now that they have high­er net inter­est mar­gins and renewed investor con­fi­dence and the econ­o­my is, well, it’s sort of sta­bi­lized as, as inter­est rates start­ed to come down over there, but.

[00:56:59] CR: Then of course, you’ve got the Trump bump and peo­ple are excit­ed about what that means to a cer­tain degree. Um, they’re, they’re doing very well. This com­pa­ny in par­tic­u­lar, Region­al Man­age­ment, focus­es on instal­ment loans for con­sumers who don’t have access to tra­di­tion­al loans. Bank­ing, cred­it, peo­ple with either lim­it­ed cred­it his­to­ries or bad cred­it his­to­ries or low incomes, irreg­u­lar unem­ploy­ment, gig econ­o­my, things like that.

[00:57:29] CR: Um, or the, the, the worst kind of finance com­pa­ny client of all, pro­fes­sion­al pod­cast­ers. They’re the ones that most banks won’t even look at. They, they spit in your face as soon as you Walk in the door. Uh, and, and they get charged real­ly high inter­est rates for the priv­i­lege of get­ting finance. As I said, I think these guys go up as about 39%.

[00:57:52] CR: I, I sort of read some reviews on TrustAd­vi­sor. Some were good, some were not. I saw some men­tions of these guys in some sub­red­dits where peo­ple were say­ing my father with demen­tias, Pay­ing like 39 per­cent per annum on this loan and he can’t afford it. And how do I get him out of it? And that sort of stuff.

[00:58:14] CR: Preda­to­ry was a word that I would­n’t use, but I did see used in some of the reviews of this com­pa­ny. But as I said, it’s, it’s not just a US phe­nom­e­non. There are obvi­ous­ly com­pa­nies in Aus­tralia and always have been that make avail­able sources of finance to peo­ple who can’t get it through Tra­di­tion­al, more con­ser­v­a­tive finance Lend­ing and you pay, you pay through the nose for it.

[00:58:43] CR: Some­times it’s, these are short term loans. Some­times they’re not so short term because you end up refi­nanc­ing and you get stuck if your cash flow isn’t what you think it’s gonna be. But yeah, Jacaran­da Finance was one that I saw that is charg­ing 45 and a half per­cent For one of its, uh, fees. That includes month­ly fees of up to 990.

[00:59:07] CR: Month­ly fees. But in

[00:59:11] TK: I think, um,

[00:59:12] CR: all of that.

[00:59:14] TK: yeah, and I think also too, uh, I don’t know Jacaran­da, but they’re, I mean, there’s a cat­e­go­ry called pay­day lenders. So the idea is you’re only tak­ing the loan out for a num­ber of weeks or a month until you get paid. So it’s 47 per­cent annu­al­ly, but it might work out to be five or 10 per­cent on the, for the peri­od you have the loan out for.

[00:59:36] TK: Not say­ing peo­ple, some peo­ple then. Pay the loan back and it rolls over and it becomes a prob­lem, but the idea is they have to report the annu­al inter­est charge, but the idea is you don’t take the loan out for a whole year.

[00:59:49] CR: yeah, ide­al­ly. I’m sure you’re right. So that’s the busi­ness these guys are in, and obvi­ous­ly it’s some­what of a risky busi­ness. Defaults can be high­er, peo­ple are not in the best finan­cial sit­u­a­tion, if the econ­o­my hits a rough patch or Peo­ple are liv­ing pay­check to pay­check and then they have an emer­gency, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the U S can be a health­care emer­gency or some­thing like that.

[01:00:14] CR: And they charge the high­er inter­est rates obvi­ous­ly to make up for that risk. They also get a fair amount of reg­u­la­to­ry scruti­ny. And of course they also, when they, To finance their busi­ness, they bor­row mon­ey usu­al­ly to lend it out. So if the cred­it mar­ket tight­ens, their mar­gins can get squeezed. So they’re, they’re danc­ing a lit­tle bit of a high wire act.

[01:00:41] CR: But that’s bank­ing and finance in gen­er­al, as I under­stand it, get­ting those Get­ting those mod­els right. These guys, as I said, have a branch based mod­el, 350 loca­tions across 19 states, so on their web­site they make a big deal out of hav­ing rela­tion­ships with their cus­tomers, and some of the tes­ti­mo­ni­als on Trust­pi­lot and those sorts of sites seem to con­firm that, that they get well treat­ed.

[01:01:10] CR: Oth­ers, not all of them are pos­i­tive as you would expect, and they might just be a branch based thing or a per­son to per­son based thing, but gen­er­al­ly the reviews seem to be pret­ty good. They put out their quar­ter­ly results a cou­ple of weeks ago, Novem­ber, this is for Q3 2024. Rev­enue growth, was up 3. 9 per­cent year over year record rev­enue of 146 mil­lion.

[01:01:40] CR: Port­fo­lio growth, net receiv­ables grew 46 mil­lion, uh, peri­od on peri­od, but 10 per­cent that is annu­al­ized. Uh, cred­it improve­ment, net cred­it loss­es improved to 10. 6 per­cent and delin­quen­cies dropped to 6. 9%, so they’re that pret­ty well. Their small loan port­fo­lio grew 10. 7%. which increased yields to 29. 9%, the high­est in two years, and oper­at­ing expens­es were just up 0.

[01:02:12] CR: 6%. So they’re keep­ing a han­dle on their costs as well. The low point for them this year is, uh, they had to cov­er the cost of hur­ri­canes in the US. It cost them 4. 3 mil­lion 2 mil­lion. They, they have like a sort of an insur­ance busi­ness as it turns out. If you, uh, if they take col­lat­er­al on your house or your car or some­thing like that, they give you the option of tak­ing out insur­ance on that thing in case some­thing hap­pens to your col­lat­er­al and they obvi­ous­ly charge an extra fee for that.

[01:02:51] CR: But then when the hur­ri­canes hit, they had to pay out, um, on insur­ance claims. So they had a short term hit because of the hur­ri­cane and their net income was down as a result. It was down 13 per­cent year over year, but it was blamed on this hur­ri­cane event, which had an impact. Now, from my read­ing of the media, hur­ri­canes hap­pen all the time in the US and you would think that’s not a one off deal, but any­way, they’re call­ing it out as a, as a, uh, Extra­or­di­nary, uh, cost to them, but their rev­enue was up.

[01:03:25] CR: Every­thing else is look­ing pret­ty good. Um, they’re obvi­ous­ly, as I said, man­ag­ing the US econ­o­my, which has been going through an inter­est­ing phase, like on one hand. You know, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion has been talk­ing about how well the U. S. econ­o­my has been doing. On the oth­er hand, plen­ty of peo­ple seem to have vot­ed for Trump because they don’t feel it’s doing very well.

[01:03:50] CR: They’re doing it tight. We know the Mag7 side of things is doing real­ly well. Wall Street seems to be doing real­ly well, but the rest of the mar­ket, So it’s hard for me to get a real sense as to where the U. S. econ­o­my real­ly is, gen­uine­ly, and how that would play into the for­tunes of a busi­ness like this.

[01:04:15] CR: And as I said, I asked GPT to analyse what it means for the U. S. econ­o­my, the fact that A, half of our port­fo­lio are bank­ing and finance com­pa­nies, and B, why, uh, And a bank­ing or a finance com­pa­ny like this would be doing rel­a­tive­ly well. Its rev­enues are going up. It’s got big­ger inter­est mar­gin, um, oppor­tu­ni­ties and those sorts of things.

[01:04:40] CR: And, and it said like, there’s some pos­i­tives and neg­a­tives in this. The fact that peo­ple are hav­ing to rely on these sorts of high inter­est rate loans, obvi­ous­ly isn’t a good sign, but the fact that they can repay their loans is a good sign. It means employ­ment lev­els are hold­ing up. Wages are steady enough.

[01:05:00] CR: Peo­ple aren’t com­plete­ly buck­ling under the cost of liv­ing, which is an issue over there that obvi­ous­ly came out dur­ing the last pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. And there’s obvi­ous­ly a strong demand for cred­it, which is a bit of a mixed sig­nal. On one hand, it means that peo­ple don’t have sav­ings to go and buy what­ev­er it is they need to buy or pay for, what­ev­er they need to pay for.

[01:05:23] CR: So they need to bor­row mon­ey. very high inter­est rates, or they’re feel­ing the pinch and need access to cred­it for one rea­son or anoth­er. But on the oth­er hand, it shows that they’re still con­fi­dent enough to bor­row, which it said could be a sign of opti­mism. But I don’t know. I think if you’re in a tight spot, depends on why you’re bor­row­ing the mon­ey, right?

[01:05:44] CR: If you need it to cov­er the rent, because you’re three months behind on the rent, uh, that’s dif­fer­ent from you want to buy a Big TV and you know, you think you’re going to cred­it your way through it because it’s, or you want to pay your meth deal­er. I don’t know. There’s dif­fer­ent rea­sons why peo­ple bor­row mon­ey, I guess is what I’m say­ing.

[01:06:04] CR: I don’t know if I take that as a pos­i­tive or a neg­a­tive. It says it’s a pos­i­tive that the econ­o­my is still sta­ble enough to sup­port high risk bor­row­ers. They’re not see­ing a wave of defaults. Which means that the job mar­ket and the broad­er econ­o­my are hold­ing steady, at least for now. But get­ting back to your sto­ry about the Buf­fett Indi­ca­tor ear­li­er, and what’s going on over there, I mean, it just feels like they’re danc­ing on the head of a pin, a lot of these com­pa­nies.

[01:06:32] CR: But again, that’s spec­u­la­tion, not for me to judge where the US econ­o­my is at. As you said about the Buf­fett Indi­ca­tor ear­li­er, the fact that it’s very, very high does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that it’s Going to crash tomor­row. It could be 10 years before it goes in the oth­er

[01:06:50] TK: hmm.

[01:06:51] CR: Our job is to find stocks that are under­val­ued today and that are mak­ing mon­ey.

[01:06:56] TK: Cor­rect.

[01:06:57] CR: Um, so com­pa­nies like this are fill­ing a gap in the mar­ket. They’re lend­ing to cus­tomers that banks won’t touch. They’re prof­itable. They’re grow­ing apart from hur­ri­canes. Um, Means they’re, well, they’re still prof­itable, just not as prof­itable. It’s work­ing for them. Um, whether or not they’re a bell­wether for the econ­o­my and what will hap­pen to them if there’s a down­turn, if Trump bug­gers it all up and puts 50 per­cent tar­iffs on every­thing com­ing in from Mex­i­co and Chi­na and Cana­da and bank, tanks the econ­o­my.

[01:07:32] CR: You know, we have our trig­gers that get us out of stuff when we need to get out of stuff. So we don’t need to pre­dict what’s going to hap­pen.

[01:07:40] TK: Mm hmm.

[01:07:40] CR: In terms of the QAV num­bers, um, They have pos­i­tive sen­ti­ment. Aver­age dai­ly trade is about 792, 000. So, rel­a­tive­ly big, but, uh, still not, uh, over a mil­lion dol­lars. So, what we would clas­si­fy as a low cap, small cap com­pa­ny, but big enough for a lot of peo­ple.

[01:08:07] CR: Their price 1. 27. And again, we see this a lot with finance com­pa­nies, don’t we? Their price Prop­Caf is quite often, looks very low when com­pared to

[01:08:22] CR: oth­er sorts of busi­ness­es, man­u­fac­tur­ing, retail, etc. The qual­i­ty rank in Stock­o­pe­dia is 54, which is below my cut­off of 60, so I don’t give them a score for that.

[01:08:36] CR: The stock rank is 97, though, above my cut­off of 90, so they get a 1 for that. The F score is 6, which is above my cut­off of 4. 5, so they get a point for that. They don’t get a Z score, because they’re a finance com­pa­ny, and finance com­pa­nies don’t get Z scores. As we’ve dis­cov­ered, you don’t like Zed scores any­way.

[01:08:59] CR: And I agree. I mean, the last time when I did my side by side analy­sis with Stock­o­pe­dia and Stock Doc­tor a few months ago, look­ing at the Aus­tralian stocks, the Zed scores were all over the place for com­pa­nies that had a good, Finan­cial Health Rat­ing and Stock Doc­tor and Stock­o­pe­dia, they’re all over the place and I asked Elio and he said, ah, it’s got to do with cheap mon­ey and financ­ing lev­els and all of this kind of stuff.

[01:09:23] CR: But even with that, I can’t make a lot of sense out of it. The price today is 34. 17. They’ve got an IV1 of 12. 17. So they’re well above the IV1. So they don’t get a score for that. But the IV2 is 40. 08. They’re below that. So I got a, they got a score for being below the IV2. Dou­ble the share price is 68. 34 and that is above the IV2, so they don’t get a score for that.

[01:09:52] CR: Equi­ty per share, the book val­ue is 34. 81, which is slight­ly above the price, so they don’t get that. But, um, Hold on, so they do get that, the price is below that, price is 34. 17, it’s slight­ly below the book val­ue, so they do get a score for prices low­er than book, and obvi­ous­ly book plus 30. They do have a three point uptrend, but not a new three point uptrend, they’ve been in a three point uptrend since, I think, ear­ly this year.

[01:10:23] CR: EPS growth is 71%, which is, uh, I don’t know if that has to do with the hur­ri­cane hit, or Com­ing back, there’ll be no hur­ri­canes next year in Amer­i­ca.

[01:10:37] TK: No,

[01:10:38] CR: fore­cast says it’s all clear. No hur­ri­canes. Under a Trump admin­is­tra­tion, you see, that’s what it is. Uh, Jesus isn’t going to be send­ing hur­ri­canes under a Trump admin­is­tra­tion because he wants it to go well.

[01:10:50] CR: It’s pun­ish­ment

[01:10:50] TK: been work­ing

[01:10:51] CR: homo­sex­u­als and the

[01:10:54] TK: work­ing on, well Trump should be in the eye of a hur­ri­cane, but, um, I’ve been work­ing out insur­ance scams for this com­pa­ny, right? So you bor­row the mon­ey, buy a car, take it to New Orleans when the hur­ri­cane’s com­ing, hide it, make a claim,

[01:11:08] CR: Right.

[01:11:09] TK: pay back, pay back the loan, you get a free car.

[01:11:11] CR: There you go. Any­one lis­ten­ing? In Amer­i­ca, that’s, that’s, go, go test that. Let us know how it works out. Don’t blame us. Um, the, let’s see, the PE is about 6. Growth over PE is 0. 12, so it’s not over 1. 5. They don’t get a score for that. Yield is about 3. 52%. I did fix my yield PE, uh, cal­cu­la­tions based on your com­ments a cou­ple of weeks ago and your help on that.

[01:11:40] CR: Don’t know why I was Unper­centag­ing one of them. So any­way, the PE is, uh, not less than the yield. They don’t get a score for that. Yield is, uh, not greater.

[01:11:52] TK: If I can inter­rupt on that, we, uh, in the U. S. will need to change our bench­mark because it’ll have a dif­fer­ent home loan, aver­age home loan

[01:12:01] TK: mort­gage rate com­pared to Aus­tralia.

[01:12:03] CR: Yeah, I’ve already done

[01:12:04] CR: that. I’ve, I’ve got

[01:12:05] TK: You’ve done that? Okay. Thank you.

[01:12:07] CR: I’ve got a US mort­gage rate. Don’t ask me what it is, but it’s in the spread­sheet some­where.

[01:12:13] TK: Okay.

[01:12:14] CR: Um, book val­ue growth is pos­i­tive, uh, so they get a score for that. Um, so any­way, they got a score of 10 out of 14, qual­i­ty score of 71 per­cent for us. What’d I say their qual­i­ty, qual­i­ty rank was 54 on Stock­o­pe­dia, but ours is slight­ly high­er.

[01:12:33] CR: And they get a QAV score of 0. 56.

[01:12:40] TK: Wow.

[01:12:41] CR: A lot of these Amer­i­can com­pa­nies though have mas­sive QAV scores.

[01:12:46] TK: It’s the Prop­Caf, isn’t it?

[01:12:48] CR: I think that’s one of the things. Yeah. Yeah. Prop­Caf. But you know, they, they scored on a lot of oth­er things as well. Their qual­i­ty score was quite good. And with the low Prop­Caf. Yeah. And,

[01:12:59] TK: you say there was an

[01:12:59] TK: own­er founder? Sor­ry. Okay.

[01:13:02] CR: to score it on that.

[01:13:04] CR: They, I can’t find that in Stock­o­pe­dia. Yeah, so, Stock­o­pe­dia don’t, don’t track that. I could go to oth­er sources, I guess, and find that kind of data and add it in, but I’m just try­ing to keep it all with­in Stock­o­pe­dia at this stage, try and do it all holus bolus, so we don’t, we don’t look at that. So that is, uh, region­al man­age­ment.

[01:13:31] CR: As I said, they’re up 50 per­cent since I bought them March. Um, done quite well. Not as good as what you’re talk­ing about, Willis, which is up near­ly 400%. But, uh, you know, you don’t get, you only get one what you’re talk­ing about, Willis, at a time. You can’t expect too many of those. Gary Cole­man! Gee, that just came into my head.

[01:13:57] CR: You only, you only get one Gary Cole­man at a time. You can’t, you can’t ask for too many Gary Cole­man’s in your life at any one time. So there you go, that’s all I can tell you about region­al, region­al man­age­ment. And as I said, they are still, they are still on the buy

[01:14:13] CR: list, so, I, I don’t know where they rank in the buy list, but with a QAV score of 56, they’re prob­a­bly up in the top sec­tion some­where.

[01:14:23] CR: I only did the analy­sis on that stock because I did­n’t need to buy any­thing, and I just did that!

[01:14:29] TK: So, so thank you. I just jumped into Stock­o­pe­dia.

[01:14:33] CR: Mmm.

[01:14:34] TK: And went to a sec­tion called Accounts,

[01:14:37] CR: Mmm.

[01:14:38] TK: and it’s a drop down box, Direc­tors Deal­ings, and I can see there’s some­one called JD Brown, owns 10. 25 per­cent of the

[01:14:46] TK: com­pa­ny.

[01:14:47] CR: Where do you see that? Direc­tor’s deal­ings.

[01:14:50] TK: Yeah, so if you go, just go into RM,

[01:14:53] CR: Yep, I’m in

[01:14:54] TK: and then, yeah, there’s like a tab under­neath the main

[01:14:58] CR: Yep,

[01:14:59] TK: details about the com­pa­ny. Accounts is the mid­dle, and then drop down one say­ing Direc­tors Deal­ings.

[01:15:06] CR: yep.

[01:15:07] TK: And in there, if you scroll down a bit, you’ll see that, uh, JD Brown bought stock back in May 7th and that took him to 10.

[01:15:17] TK: 25 per­cent

[01:15:19] TK: of the com­pa­ny.

[01:15:20] CR: Inter­est­ing. So I

[01:15:23] TK: So that might be a way to work out whether there’s an own­er founder.

[01:15:27] CR: Yeah. I don’t think I don’t think I can get that in my down­load, though.

[01:15:35] TK: Ah, okay. Alright.

[01:15:39] TK: Um, I’ll have to ask Elio about that. I think it’s fair­ly impor­tant. I think there’s a high cor­re­la­tion between own­er founders and share price per­for­mance. Despite the fact that they some­times do some dumb things like buy their girl­friends hous­es and stuff like that. Um, gen­er­al­ly, com­pa­nies with an own­er founder do bet­ter.

[01:16:04] CR: yeah, all right, good pick­up.

[01:16:08] CR: After hours, Tony.

[01:16:11] TK: Yes. Did you just click on the link I sent you? I

[01:16:19] CR: Look, the num­ber of

[01:16:20] TK: was just kind of like half asleep look­ing at Face­book and I saw that pho­to and went, Oh my God,

[01:16:26] TK: Cameron’s, Cameron’s a mem­ber of a band.

[01:16:28] CR: the num­ber of times peo­ple send me pho­tos of, uh, guys in their 50s with long gray hair who they say looks like me, you don’t want to

[01:16:36] TK: And black glass­es.

[01:16:38] TK: Yeah.

[01:16:38] CR: yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, my look isn’t as orig­i­nal as, you know, I would hope it is, but, uh, yeah. Thank you for that. What else? Apart from look­ing at

[01:16:50] TK: So I’ve been

[01:16:51] CR: me.

[01:16:52] TK: play­ing, uh, Apple Music, I think Spo­ti­fy does it too, they do a year end rap and give you stats on what you’ve played. The num­ber two albums for me this year were Wild Gods by Nick Cave and Pink Moon by, um, what’s his name? Drake. Yeah, Nick Drake. Uh, and so of course I start­ed play­ing them again because it’s great albums, both of them are great albums.

[01:17:16] TK: Um, so that’s been fun. Have you seen Skele­ton Crew? The

[01:17:20] CR: No, no,

[01:17:22] TK: Wars series. I’m enjoy­ing it. It’s a, it’s a kid­dies pro­gram. Um, but it’s kind of a bit like the Goonies, kind of a cross between Star Wars and the Goonies. Uh, I’ve only released three or four episodes so far, but, uh, I’m enjoy­ing it.

[01:17:37] CR: yeah.

[01:17:38] TK: Yeah.

[01:17:39] CR: Worth watch­ing.

[01:17:41] TK: Yeah. I thought so. I think so.

[01:17:43] CR: we’ll sit down with Fox.

[01:17:45] TK: Yeah. He’d love it. It’s Dr. Who ish. So he’d love it, but it’s just, it’s just real­ly well done. There’s um, I was real­ly blown away by, like, just the graph­ic design, like, uh, the archi­tec­ture in the hous­es they live in, and, uh, all the cars run in slots around town, like a big slot car set.

[01:18:03] TK: Just real­ly inter­est­ing. Just lit­tle touch­es to things, which I found real­ly good.

[01:18:09] CR: Cool.

[01:18:09] TK: So that was good. And to my great joy, Sea­son 2 of Book­ie is drop­ping, week by week, I’ve only seen the first episode, which is the only one avail­able, but love Book­ie,

[01:18:20] CR: Still haven’t watched

[01:18:21] TK: high­ly rec­om­mend it.

[01:18:22] CR: What’s that on

[01:18:23] CR: again?

[01:18:25] TK: It’s on Fox­tel, so it’s It’ll be avail­able some­where else, I guess, but that’s where I’m watch­ing it.

[01:18:31] TK: Yeah, um, Sebas­t­ian Man­is­co­lo, and some oth­er great actors are in it too.

[01:18:37] CR: I dun­no. Him

[01:18:38] TK: Very, very dark humour, lots of fun.

[01:18:41] CR: you’ve told me this before, but Yeah. About who’s this guy,

[01:18:46] TK: Well, he’s a book­ie, he’s one of the last book­ies in LA, um, because he’s being sort of mus­cled out by the big cor­po­rate book­mak­ers who are tak­ing over. And he’s got this old school sys­tem where peo­ple don’t tell him who he is, he answers the phone, they give him a num­ber, they give him the spread.

[01:19:02] TK: He records it man­u­al­ly, and then he’s got an ex NFL play­er, a big black guy, as his part­ner, and they go around and vis­it peo­ple who haven’t paid their debts, uh, who claim, try and claim on hur­ri­cane insur­ance, but it does­n’t work, and it’s just lots of fun. It’s, it’s, it’s very dark humour.

[01:19:23] CR: Good.

[01:19:24] TK: Yeah, so in the first episode, he’s like, it’s a car­ry on from the last episode of the last sea­son.

[01:19:30] TK: He’s dri­ving around town with mil­lions of dol­lars in cash in his boot, gets pulled over by the cops for speed­ing, because he’s rac­ing to the sub­urbs to try and get his wife back who’s left him, because she wants him to get a real job with one of the cor­po­rate book­mak­ers and he’s like, I can’t do it, so they split.

[01:19:46] TK: He’s going, he’s rac­ing off the seat to get to her. The cops point over for speed­ing. They search his car, find this, um, big bag of cash in the back, and he goes, you know, what would you like a brick ? And the guy, the cop takes it , and they strike up a con­ver­sa­tion. The cop, some kind of, you know, right wing sur­vival­ist.

[01:20:07] TK: And so he strikes up a con­ver­sa­tion like he is too. And the cop lets him off with a wink. It’s just like , you know? He’s just danc­ing his way. Through life as fast as he can to make a liv­ing. It’s real­ly good fun.

[01:20:21] CR: Sounds great.

[01:20:23] TK: Yeah. Read­ing the mind of Wall Street, which I told you about before, which is good fun, um, post dot com boom.

[01:20:30] TK: So lots of talk about, uh, manias and the psy­chol­o­gy of the stock mar­ket in times like that. Lots of great quotes about com­pa­nies. Like I think it was called. Price. com, where you could log on and buy an air­fare for what­ev­er price you want­ed to pay for it. Fun­ni­ly enough, it went broke after hav­ing a huge PE and lots of attract­ing lots of invest­ments through the dot com, dot com boom.

[01:20:58] TK: So it’s fun to get remind­ed of all those details. And I lis­tened to Futur­is­tic last week and was real­ly inter­est­ed in your dis­cus­sions with Steve around the era of abun­dance and, um, Your man­i­festo

[01:21:15] CR: Ah, my man­i­festo,

[01:21:16] TK: hap­pen and cor­rup­tion. Yeah, so I rec­om­mend that to peo­ple.

[01:21:22] CR: Cor­rup­tion? What was I talk­ing about? I don’t

[01:21:26] TK: no, well, I think that AI will live or die on the

[01:21:34] TK: cor­rup­tion of the peo­ple who are behind it. And I’m see­ing so many sto­ries about that in the last week, includ­ing Sam Alt­man donat­ing a mil­lion

[01:21:41] TK: dol­lars to Don­ald Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion.

[01:21:43] CR: They’re all doing that. Musk, every­one.

[01:21:47] CR: Zucker­berg, obvi­ous­ly. Musk, obvi­ous­ly. Zucker­berg, yeah, they’re

[01:21:50] TK: Ama­zon.

[01:21:51] CR: Yeah. I don’t know what’s hap­pened. Some­body’s sat down with them and said, Hey, lis­ten, uh, it would be a real­ly good idea if you kicked in a mil­lion bucks to the inau­gu­ra­tion

[01:22:00] TK: Yeah.

[01:22:01] TK: And all is for­giv­en.

[01:22:03] CR: Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah, look man, I tell ya, the AI hur­ri­cane is a comin It’s a comin It’s, uh

[01:22:15] TK: I guess, yeah, I don’t dis­agree with you, but I think it’s going to have a fair bit of human frailty thrown into what even­tu­al­ly hap­pens and, uh, you know. Whether we see the age of abun­dance or not that you’re talk­ing about.

[01:22:30] CR: Yeah,

[01:22:30] TK: And actu­al­ly, you know, the ques­tion I raised was, are we already in the age of abun­dance?

[01:22:35] TK: It’s like Voltaire said, is this the best of all pos­si­ble worlds, or the worst of all

[01:22:39] TK: pos­si­ble worlds.

[01:22:40] CR: You, you are.

[01:22:43] CR: Not sure if I can pay my rent, but yeah, some of us are in the Age of Abun­dance. look, I think, obvi­ous­ly, you know, large num­bers of peo­ple liv­ing on the plan­et com­pared to any oth­er time in his­to­ry Any­one, I mean, this, I’ve told this sto­ry a mil­lion times on dif­fer­ent shows, but I remem­ber 15 years ago, ear­ly days of pod­cast­ing, uh, hav­ing this dream that one of my ances­tors from 500 years ago, some chick­en farmer in Ire­land, um, saw how I was liv­ing at the time.

[01:23:23] CR: I was in my mid 30s and sort of tak­ing a year off from work after I left Microsoft to fig­ure out what I want­ed to do with the rest of my life, liv­ing in an air con­di­tioned three bed­room town­house in inner city Mel­bourne, dri­ving a BMW, and they would have thought I must have been land­ed gen­try, right? I must have been roy­al­ty.

[01:23:42] CR: Um, most of us are doing just, we live like kings com­pared to how our ances­tors live, so in that sense, yeah, absolute­ly, I don’t dis­agree.

[01:23:54] TK: yeah. And, and so to your point, you know, some peo­ple have more abun­dance than oth­ers. It’s, it’s how do you cre­ate the incen­tives to even it out?

[01:24:03] CR: Well,

[01:24:04] TK: tips that point, tips that or not, I’m

[01:24:05] CR: tech­no, tech­no com­mu­nism, that’s the point of my man­i­festo, is how we bring

[01:24:10] TK: I know, I’m, I’m scep­ti­cal. Well, I think the way, the way you bring it about is to cre­ate incen­tives to, to share. I don’t know what those incen­tives are, but like some­how point out to some­one who has more than they need that they are bet­ter off

[01:24:25] TK: shar­ing it.

[01:24:27] CR: Well, I, yeah, I don’t think it’ll be up to peo­ple to share. I think we will, we’re going to have to put mech­a­nisms in place. If, you know, if AI and robots start to, uh, remove jobs for peo­ple en masse, it’s already hap­pen­ing, um, slow­ly. I’m see­ing peo­ple on Red­dit every day say­ing they’ve, you know, their entire depart­ment has lost their job.

[01:24:55] CR: They’ve all been replaced by AI. It’s hap­pen­ing slow­ly. It’s, I think it’s increas­es the mod­els become more and more. More reli­able and, uh, gov­ern­ments are going to have to fig­ure out what they do about peo­ple not earn­ing incomes. They’re not going to be able to afford to pay them wel­fare. They’re not going to be able to afford to deal with the impli­ca­tions of the drop in the tax base, in the drop, um, in terms of health­care invest­ment.

[01:25:25] CR: How do you cov­er health­care costs and all that kind of stuff? It’s going to have a major impact on how gov­ern­ments run economies. We need a plan for

[01:25:32] TK: And let’s, Yeah, unless all the costs come down because AI lives up to the

[01:25:36] TK: hype and makes every­thing effi­cient.

[01:25:38] CR: Well, that’s the, that’s the hope too, but they prob­a­bly won’t hap­pen simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. There’ll be a lag, I think. And that lag could be a year, it could be 10 years. If it’s in the 10 year cat­e­go­ry, we have prob­lems. But, uh, my big con­cern, the rea­son I’m work­ing on this man­i­festo is I don’t trust gov­ern­ments to deal with this.

[01:26:02] CR: Quick­ly enough and effi­cient­ly

[01:26:04] TK: You don’t trust Trump? Come on.

[01:26:06] CR: I’m talk­ing about Albo and Dut­ton.

[01:26:09] TK: Yeah,

[01:26:09] TK: I would­n’t trust them either.

[01:26:11] CR: I mean, we saw, we saw how ill pre­pared our gov­ern­ments around the world were when COVID hit. They should have been very pre­pared for a glob­al pan­dem­ic because peo­ple have been pre­dict­ing some­thing like that was going to hap­pen for decades.

[01:26:29] CR: They weren’t. We still haven’t fig­ured out what we’re going to do about cli­mate change, even though peo­ple have been warn­ing us about that for decades. Our gov­ern­ments just don’t have the incen­tive struc­ture to deal with big, hoary prob­lems like this, par­tic­u­lar­ly when they get replaced every three and a half years.

[01:26:48] CR: And,

[01:26:48] TK: not just the how to deal with crises. It’s the how to deal with every­thing. Roads, infra­struc­ture, hos­pi­tals, edu­ca­tion, blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

[01:26:56] CR: that kind of stuff. Uh, cor­po­ra­tions don’t have an incen­tive to deal with this either, look­ing at it from a macro­eco­nom­ic per­spec­tive. So who’s going to, who’s going to fig­ure out the path for­ward when we have pro­lif­er­a­tion of advanced arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and robots? If it’s not

[01:27:13] TK: Well, you can, but these things, these things tend to only be. dealt with when they’re a

[01:27:19] TK: cri­sis, just like COVID,

[01:27:21] CR: So what I’m say­ing is let’s not wait to that point. Let’s build a shad­ow gov­ern­ment that, that puts every­thing in place. Uh, yeah,

[01:27:31] CR: yeah, yeah.

[01:27:31] TK: Like, we don’t trust the real gov­ern­ment, but we’ll trust the shad­ow

[01:27:34] TK: gov­ern­ment.

[01:27:35] CR: the shad­ow gov­ern­ment will be by the peo­ple and for the peo­ple.

[01:27:38] TK: Isn’t that the gov­ern­ment?

[01:27:39] CR: No. No, no, no. What fan­ta­sy are you liv­ing in? Come over to my Alex Jones pod­cast, Tony.

[01:27:46] TK: But why would the shad­ow gov­ern­ment be any bet­ter than the real gov­ern­ment

[01:27:49] CR: Well that’s what I explain in the man­i­festo, is we need to

[01:27:51] CR: put things in

[01:27:52] CR: place to stop it being cor­rupt­ed by psy­chopaths. Read a

[01:27:56] TK: Well, why don’t you do that to the main

[01:27:57] CR: Epi­dem­ic. Well,

[01:27:58] TK: Why don’t you

[01:27:59] CR: psy­chopaths have already got con­trol of that. They’re not going to let me put con­trols into place to stop them from con­trol­ling it.

[01:28:06] CR: They already con­trol it. It’s too late. Need a shad­ow gov­ern­ment where the con­trols are in place from day one. I’m the only psy­chopath that’s allowed to be in con­trol of it. One’s enough! We only have room for one psy­chopath.

[01:28:21] TK: Right.

[01:28:22] CR: Speak­ing

[01:28:23] TK: rule, is it?

[01:28:23] CR: yeah, I watched Dune Part 2 over the week­end.

[01:28:28] TK: And?

[01:28:30] CR: Um, it’s fun­ny because I had the impres­sion, I can’t remem­ber if you liked it or not, I had the impres­sion that you did­n’t

[01:28:36] TK: I did it.

[01:28:37] TK: Yeah.

[01:28:37] CR: And I had the impres­sion that the rat­ings were real­ly bad on it, and I watched it, and I thought, Look, I did­n’t mind it, but I can see why peo­ple would­n’t have liked it, it was very I thought they tried to com­press a lot in, even though it was three hours long or what­ev­er, it moved very quick­ly. It was even con­fus­ing for me in the last half of it.

[01:28:58] CR: And I’ve read the books a bunch of times. And then I went and looked at the reviews and they’re very high. They’re like 92 per­cent Rot­ten Toma­toes rat­ings. It’s a lot. The crit­ics and the, and the toma­to meter or the No, they don’t call it that now, they call it the Pop­corn Meter, Pop­corn O Meter or some­thing, Pop O Meter.

[01:29:17] CR: Very, very high rat­ing, so I don’t know why I thought it was, um, had a

[01:29:22] TK: is it hack­able? Is the Rot­ten Toma­toes

[01:29:26] TK: meter?

[01:29:27] CR: but, um, yeah, it

[01:29:29] TK: toma I got some toma­toes for

[01:29:30] TK: your meter. I’m gonna pay.

[01:29:31] CR: it. It looked beau­ti­ful. I think it uh, cin­e­ma, cin­e­matog­ra­phers, a Mel­bourne guy, do you know that Greg Fras­er? He’s a Mel­bourne boy, does the cin­e­matog­ra­phy for it. Beau­ti­ful cin­e­matog­ra­phy.

[01:29:45] CR: Um, I thought the act­ing was great. Um, I thought,

[01:29:49] TK: like Cha­la­met in it.

[01:29:51] CR: Oh, okay. I mean, I like him, but hav­ing seen Willy Won­ka in between the first one and this one, Fox walked through at one point, he goes, You watch­ing Willy Won­ka? I mean, yeah, yeah, it’s Willy Won­ka in the desert, part two. Willy Won­ka goes, You know what, choco­lates?

[01:30:07] CR: Nah, I think I’ll just become the mes­si­ah. I’ll become the emper­or. Um, but yeah, a lit­tle bit con­fus­ing. I thought Austin But­ler. As Feyd-Rautha was great doing the sort of evil psy­chopath,

[01:30:21] CR: um, it’s great to see

[01:30:23] TK: You know, he was­n’t He was wear­ing a skull­cap dur­ing that.

[01:30:28] CR: okay.

[01:30:28] TK: That was like, he did­n’t shave his head. He was mak­ing anoth­er movie and like, he asked straight after and he could­n’t shave his

[01:30:35] TK: head. Yeah, it could be, yeah.

[01:30:36] CR: Well, yeah, they, yeah.

[01:30:38] CR: the Skull­cap stuff is real­ly good. Well, they could just CG it out these days.

[01:30:43] TK: I, I was dis­ap­point­ed it did­n’t have the, it elim­i­nat­ed the old Ben like a reed in the wind,

[01:30:49] CR: Right, and

[01:30:51] TK: is always one of the big quotes for me

[01:30:54] TK: from June.

[01:30:55] CR: Right, and I was wait­ing for him to teach them to use the weird­ing way the Fre­men do it. Uh, and to use the voice and the stuff like that, but I, I, you can, I, and then I got con­fused. Is that from the books or am I think­ing of the Lynch film? And I asked GPT about it and it said, no, he does­n’t teach the Fre­men the weird­ing way until the Jihad comes along.

[01:31:20] CR: Uh, Moi Dibs Jihad, and that would be the next film, which they’re now mak­ing, Dune Part

[01:31:25] TK: Ah, okay.

[01:31:26] CR: I think. But it just seemed to hap­pen quick­ly, like, my prob­lem, like, okay, he’s got this Fre­men army and all of a sud­den, overnight, they’re defeat­ing the Harkonnen’s and the Emper­or’s troops, like, eh, real­ly? Eh, it seems like a bit of a stretch, all of a sud­den, these troops are

[01:31:47] TK: And all the, and the hous­es, the great hous­es. And they can’t, it was like, it’s com­pressed. He’s kind of like turns and goes, and now they detect the great

[01:31:55] TK: hous­es and like they’re bring­ing down their ships. It’s

[01:31:57] CR: yeah, yeah,

[01:31:58] TK: how, when, what were the resources?

[01:32:00] TK: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:32:02] CR: all of that part just seemed to move, and him tak­ing the spice and all of that kind of, drink­ing the water of life, you know, that all just seemed to move real­ly, real­ly quick­ly, and it, it, I don’t know, they just sort of skimmed And then you see one clip of Queen’s Gam­bit chick as his sis­ter Alia grow­ing up, but that’s it.

[01:32:26] CR: And then I guess that’s a teas­er for the next film or some­thing, which I guess will be Dune Mes­si­ah or some­thing like that, the next film. Any­way. Yeah, it was­n’t as good as the first one. I mean, I liked it, but it sort of was messy, I thought. A lit­tle bit sort

[01:32:41] TK: Yeah. I thought so too. Yeah.

[01:32:45] CR: Um, well my, my big obses­sion in the last week though has been Vivaldi’s Four Sea­sons. I’ve been on a deep dive. Do you ever get obsessed with pieces of clas­si­cal music and then you have to lis­ten to every ver­sion of them that’s ever been record­ed?

[01:33:01] TK: ha. Don’t know about that. I obsessed, I used to, prob­a­bly if you had my Apple Music review 30 years ago, it would have been, my most favourite album would have been Otto Klem­per­er con­duct­ing the Berlin­er Phil­har­mon­ic for Beethoven’s 9th.

[01:33:18] CR: The Ninth, ooh,

[01:33:21] TK: Ode to Joy, but

[01:33:22] CR: hmm,

[01:33:23] TK: that was just, that’s just one part of it. The whole sym­pho­ny is fan­tas­tic.

[01:33:26] CR: yeah.

[01:33:28] TK: Mm. Mm.

[01:33:29] CR: well, yeah, I go through phas­es where I get obsessed with a piece of clas­si­cal music and then obsessed lis­ten­ing to dif­fer­ent record­ings with dif­fer­ent con­duc­tors and see­ing how they treat the phras­ing and the dynam­ics and all that kind of stuff. You know, like it was Ruck 3 for a while and it was Mahler’s 5th or it’s Death and the Maid­en by Schu­bert, which I love.

[01:33:53] CR: But late­ly, Again, it’s been the Four Sea­sons. Chris­sy and I, about 10 years ago, we went to see an Ital­ian string ensem­ble called I Musi­ci that were play­ing at QPAC and they did the Four Sea­sons. And my jaw was on the floor hear­ing them do it. Cause in my head, the Four Sea­sons has kind of become ele­va­tor music.

[01:34:13] CR: It’s this nice, polite, gen­teel back­ground music, but when it’s played well, it’s like,

[01:34:20] TK: I know.

[01:34:21] CR: it’s like heavy met­al,

[01:34:22] CR: par­tic­u­lar­ly the sum­mer move­ment. And so I’ve been going through that. I acci­den­tal­ly stum­bled across some vio­lin­ist and some orches­tra doing it recent­ly, a new record­ing. I think Spo­ti­fy rec­om­mend­ed it to me and I lis­tened and it was like real­ly great.

[01:34:36] CR: But then I start­ed lis­ten­ing to a bunch of oth­ers and I lis­tened to one last night Uh, buy, and, um, a British group, but they’re called La Serenis­si­ma after Venice, the great Seren­i­ty or some­thing. Um, and they only use Baroque instru­ments. That’s their shtick, but their record­ing of it, um, which is fair­ly recent, is just mind blow­ing.

[01:35:04] CR: Chris­sy and I were lying in bed with, um, my heir. My iPad going through both of our Air­Pods, doing a Spo­ti­fy jam as they call it, lis­ten­ing to it last night, and then she was like, oh, you got­ta lis­ten to this, and then we end­ed up going, we were spend­ing like an hour just shar­ing bits of clas­si­cal music that we’ve been lis­ten­ing to late­ly and get­ting nerdy on it.

[01:35:24] CR: But any­way, yeah, Vival­di Four Sea­sons, I can’t get enough of at the moment. It’s kind of obses­sive.

[01:35:31] TK: I’m try­ing to remem­ber. There’s a movie called The Four Sea­sons, and they have a real­ly great sound­track from it.

[01:35:37] CR: Oh, right, Car­ol

[01:35:39] TK: I was try­ing to look it up. I thought it was a Neil Simon movie, but it does­n’t look like it is. But it real­ly used the music well. Here we go. Yeah, Alan Alda, that’s what I’m think­ing of. Car­ol Bur­nett, Alan Alda. Uh, does­n’t say who wrote it though.

[01:35:57] TK: I thought it was Neil

[01:36:00] TK: Simon, but it may not be.

[01:36:02] CR: I’ve been watch­ing the Car­ol Bur­nett Show

[01:36:05] TK: Love the Car­ol Bur­nett show.

[01:36:07] CR: Yeah, so great. Like, she

[01:36:12] TK: Yeah, sor­ry.

[01:36:13] CR: real­ly inter­est­ing back in, what­ev­er that was, what, the 60s? Um, just, like, not an attrac­tive woman, real­ly, but she just had so much char­ac­ter and per­son­al­i­ty, and it was a great show. And,

[01:36:29] CR: um, What’s his name? Cor­man. Har­vey, Har­vey Cor­man,

[01:36:35] TK: Yeah,

[01:36:36] CR: as her hus­band in lots of the

[01:36:39] TK: The Straight Man,

[01:36:40] TK: yeah, and Tim Con­way. Fan­tas­tic.

[01:36:43] CR: But I love Har­vey Cor­man, because I mean, Har­vey Cor­man for me is like Mel Brooks films from the 70s, right? He was in Blaz­ing Sad­dles and His­to­ry of the World Part One and things like that. I was asso­ci­at­ing with Mel Brooks.

[01:36:57] TK: what was the char­ac­ter he played in Blaz­ing Sad­dles? I had to change the name because it was, um, I’ll look it up.

[01:37:04] CR: I

[01:37:04] TK: It’s the name of an old movie actor. Um, I’ll see if I can find it quick­ly.

[01:37:19] CR: Car­ol Bur­net­t’s show ran from 1967 to 1978.

[01:37:24] TK: Yes, it was on our TV a lot. Hed­ley Lamarr.

[01:37:29] CR: Yeah, that’s right.

[01:37:30] TK: they wrote the script and called it, called him Hed­ley Lamarr. And she, she sued. So they, they said, okay, I’ll call him Hed­ley Lamarr. Which was just as fun­ny.

[01:37:43] CR: Yeah. I was talk­ing to some­body about her the oth­er day. Hedy Lamarr, that is. Like, um, She co invent­ed, like, radio guid­ance sys­tems for allied tor­pe­does.

[01:37:59] TK: mem­o­ry. Yeah.

[01:38:01] CR: Yeah.

[01:38:02] CR: she was like, super smart lady. Um, so, the only oth­er thing I want­ed to talk to you seen the sto­ry about, um, Google, Face­book, and Tik­Tok in Aus­tralia gonna get hit with new tax­es to pay for Aus­tralian jour­nal­ism?

[01:38:21] TK: Yeah. I did.

[01:38:23] CR: ha, ha,

[01:38:23] TK: It’s about time. I mean, I, I, I can’t work out why the gov­ern­ment just does­n’t tax these multi­na­tion­als based on their rev­enue. Like a qua­si GST type tax.

[01:38:33] CR: Yeah.

[01:38:35] TK: Get around the trans­fer pric­ing issues. Whether it’s used to, I think what they’re say­ing is if you don’t pay for news, then we’re going to tax you at this rate, which is not a bad nego­ti­at­ing

[01:38:45] TK: ploy.

[01:38:47] CR: Yeah, will they

[01:38:48] TK: So it’s obvi­ous to see,

[01:38:49] CR: Pod­cast­ing as well,

[01:38:51] TK: I hope so,

[01:38:52] CR: pay for, pay for,

[01:38:53] TK: being scraped.

[01:38:54] CR: but like, how does, how do the news com­pa­nies get the lever­age on the gov­ern­ment to force

[01:39:05] TK: talk­ing about Rupert Mur­doch before, how does he ever con­trol

[01:39:09] CR: yeah.

[01:39:11] TK: Front page of every news­pa­per says, vote for Peter Dut­ton and they don’t want that to hap­pen, Alba has to

[01:39:15] TK: do this for him.

[01:39:17] CR: But the media com­pa­nies are strug­gling finan­cial­ly, obvi­ous­ly, and so, and they’re blam­ing Face­book and Google for it. And so they’re say­ing, well, if you’re not going to pay us. To have your con­tent on our plat­form, then we will just get the gov­ern­ment to tax you and then get them to give us the mon­ey.

[01:39:44] TK: It’s the It’s News Corp.

[01:39:47] CR: Yeah,

[01:39:49] TK: Yeah.

[01:39:50] CR: don’t know. Like I’m all for tax­ing these com­pa­nies more, but not to prop up a fail­ing indus­try.

[01:39:57] TK: Oh, exact­ly.

[01:39:58] CR: Tax them and use the mon­ey for some­thing, but not use it to prop up News Corp.

[01:40:03] TK: Yeah. And the part of the argu­ment is, well, we’ve got all these resources in reporters and news­rooms, et cetera. Um, and I’m like going, you might have those resources, but they’re pro­duc­ing shit.

[01:40:14] CR: Yeah,

[01:40:15] TK: you know, maybe they need to be dis­in­ter­me­di­at­ed

[01:40:20] TK: or dis­rupt­ed.

[01:40:21] CR: well they’ve been dis­in­ter­me­di­at­ing their own news­rooms over the last You know, 10, 15 years. I mean, they’ve con­sol­i­dat­ing them all down. They tend to have one cen­tral­ized news­room that push­es sto­ries out to the rest of the coun­try, buy­ing a lot of stuff from AAP and Reuters and steal­ing stuff online.

[01:40:40] CR: Like half of the sto­ries are things that they saw on Twit­ter in the first place.

[01:40:45] TK: Well, yeah, so like I’ve tak­en out a Wall Street Jour­nal sub­scrip­tion in the last week so I can sort

[01:40:50] TK: of keep up with news in the US,

[01:40:53] CR: sup­port Rupert Myr­tle.

[01:40:55] TK: well, to um, to launch our US show even­tu­al­ly. But um, like I’m read­ing it going, did­n’t I just read that in the AFR, did­n’t I just read that in the AFR, so like, their, their so called invest­ment in jour­nal­ism is basi­cal­ly quick copy paste from the Wall Street Jour­nal.

[01:41:13] CR: Yeah, right. Yeah, any­way, I thought it was just out­ra­geous to see the, the

[01:41:20] TK: It is.

[01:41:21] CR: tak­ing

[01:41:22] CR: mon­ey

[01:41:22] TK: It is.

[01:41:23] CR: prop up.

[01:41:25] TK: Oh, look, um, we do need strong inde­pen­dent inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism. You know, look at, you know, look at sto­ries on Qan­tas and, and 3 accounts at the CBA, all that kind of stuff. It’s bro­ken by strong inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism. But that’s not News Corp.

[01:41:44] CR: No. Or the, Yeah. Or even the Fin Review, usu­al­ly. I mean, okay, you had some stuff in Chan­ti­cleer and that kind of thing, Joe, Joe’s Col­umn, which you liked. But, you know, gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, Aus­tralian jour­nal­ism is in the toi­let, has been for a long time.

[01:42:03] TK: Yeah, because they do this dance. Like, you know, if I, if I want to keep inter­view­ing the CEO or the cor­po­rate affairs depart­ment from that com­pa­ny, I’ve got to be nice to them. It’s like stock­bro­kers. They nev­er rec­om­mend you sell a stock in case they have to go and do, you know, go and do some work for that com­pa­ny com­ing up.

[01:42:20] TK: So, yeah.

[01:42:21] CR: Steven Mayne told me that sto­ry years ago on G’day World, when he was a guest on G’day World, 15 years

[01:42:27] TK: Mm hmm.

[01:42:28] CR: All

[01:42:28] TK: Yeah, no, exact­ly.

[01:42:30] CR: Well, I

[01:42:30] CR: got­ta go to Kung Fu. Thank you, TK.

[01:42:33] TK: Oh,

[01:42:33] TK: well. Okay. Thanks, Cam.

[01:42:35] CR: Go have a good

[01:42:35] CR: week.

[01:42:36] TK: Talk, talk to you next week.

[01:42:38] CR: You too,

[01:42:38] TK: Hap­py 8. 06.