QAV 816 — Gold Diggers

816 Club Video

Cameron: [00:00:00] to QAV, episode 8 1 6, the 22nd of April back from East­er break, long week­end mar­ket’s back crashed first thing this morn­ing and then recov­ered. I think it’s kind of back to where it was it opened, but, uh, it’s been anoth­er, well, it’s kind of been a noth­ing week real­ly on the mar­ket, Tony.

The mar­kets have been not doing too well, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the US here. It’s been kind of coast­ing along. Um, but uh, just more sto­ries every­where. Like I can’t find any­thing else in the finan­cial media real­ly, apart from just hold on. Every­thing’s going down. Don’t, don’t, don’t don’t save the women and chil­dren first.

Save the rich white men first, and and chil­dren lat­er. If we’ve got time. Uh, the, all, the, all odds over the last week is actu­al­ly up, uh, [00:01:00] sur­pris­ing­ly. Um, the Dow Jones, not so much the s and p 500. No, they’re both down. Bit­coin is up, apple is down, Google is down. Uh, meta is way down. Microsoft­’s way down Nvidia, the Mag sev­en are all way down in the last week, but the all ords is up. What do you, what do you make of that tk.

TK: the best place in the world, cam. That’s what I make of it. We just.

Cameron: I think it’s because dut­ton’s polling num­bers have fall­en down and every­one’s, uh, cel­e­brat­ing that dut­ton’s whole thing about be a Trump light prob­a­bly was bad­ly timed

TK: No, he’s been walk­ing away from that, has­n’t he did­n’t, um, Jac­in­ta, I for­get now, her name, Jac­in­ta Price. Yep. Came out and

great again. And they had to run for cov­er after she said it

Cameron: Oh dear me.

TK: any­way.

Cameron: no, seri­ous­ly, why do you think that our [00:02:00] mar­ket’s up when, uh, the US has been tum­bling?

TK: Yeah, that’s a good ques­tion. Um,

got­ta say that we’re, we’re still like, we were, we’re our com­modi­ties main­ly go to Chi­na? Not to the us. We’re not a big exporter to the us. Um, we’re, we’re a net importer from the US so tar­iffs are, are, are an issue, but they’re not gonna be a huge deal for us. Um, ISIS.

Cameron: us direct­ly, but indi­rect­ly it’s prob­a­bly gonna be a big issue for us as I under­stand it.

TK: If Amer­i­ca goes into reces­sion and there are some peo­ple say­ing it’s already there, then, um, yeah, well I expect that we’ll catch the cold when Amer­i­ca sneezes as well.

Cameron: And if but e exports to the US drop as a result of the tar­iffs, then Chi­na does­n’t have as much mon­ey to buy stuff from us, et cetera, et cetera.

TK: Yeah,

Cameron: effects. Yeah.

TK: down get­ting up close to 10% on the basis of that use. Um, I think the Amer­i­can mar­ket’s down, I, I sent you a link to a sto­ry about it, um, [00:03:00] that came out from Bloomberg today say­ing that, uh, the mar­ket was off two, two point a half per­cent in the US overnight.

And a Bit­ly, unlike vol­ume ’cause it’s East­er Mon­day over there when the mar­ket was trad­ing. Uh, but the mar­ket was down 2.5% because Trump was. Sup­pos­ed­ly ask­ing around to see how he could sack Jerome Pow­ell, the of the Fed. So

Cameron: Jay Pow­ell. as they call him.

TK: No. Too late. Too late.

Too late,

Trump wants to sack him or is try­ing to work out how to sack him because I think it’s pret­ty hard to do to sack a cen­tral bank gov­er­nor that’s thrown the mar­ket into a Ts because, uh, it’s, there’s not many things uni­ver­sal­ly agreed to by econ­o­mists, but one of them is that cen­tral banks should be inde­pen­dent and, um.

know, that’s a les­son learned the hard way in a lot of coun­tries in Africa when they let the gov­ern­ment print mon­ey. Because that’s the thing, like we had, we had, uh, econ­o­mists on our show back in Covid, and we talked about MMT and [00:04:00] we about the mag­ic fer­ry dust that the RBA could sprin­kle on the print­ing press­es to mag­ic paper mon­ey out of in air.

Uh, and uh, that’s the prob­lem with the cen­tral bank is if you let, uh, the gov­ern­ment of the day run it, then they can just go into an elec­tion cam­paign print­ing mon­ey, like there’s, there’s no tomor­row and hand­ing it out. And that just leads to hyper­in­fla­tion, which has been the case it’s

Cameron: And as I recall with the MMT con­ver­sa­tion, there were gonna be no neg­a­tive side effects of it

what­so­ev­er.

TK: Yeah, cor­rect. Except for the what­ev­er it was, $120 bil­lion sit­ting on the RBAs bal­ance sheet is a loss since stat­ed that dur­ing covid uh. Which the gov­ern­ment has to the way. Yeah, yeah. No, well that’s the thing. And um, so yeah, and that’s exact­ly what’s gonna hap­pen. If Trump gets, if Trump can sack pow­er and take over the con­trol of the cen­tral or the Fed, the Fed in the US the cen­tral bank, and they start print­ing mon­ey ’cause he wants inter­est rates to come down, [00:05:00] um, then infla­tion will take off.

It’ll become hyper­in­fla­tion you val­ue.

Cameron: Wants to be the

head of the Kennedy Cen­ter the head of the Fed, as well as

pres­i­dent and com­man­der in chief. He wants all, like Poke­mon. He wants to col­lect all the, all the titles, all the roles. Have them all.

Why not

TK: Yeah, exact­ly. So any­way, it’ll be inter­est­ing to see what hap­pens. So, um, tonight in the US the, uh, there’s, it’s, they were in quar­ter­ly report­ing sea­son, I think as we talked about before. Tes­la are report­ing. Um, it’s not sup­posed to be pret­ty. few ques­tions lined up about why you on is spend­ing so much time in the gov­ern­ment and not run­ning Tes­la.

Uh,

Cameron: It does­n’t mat­ter though, real­ly, at the end of the day, like I’m, I’m sure his pow­er is pret­ty entrenched in Tes­la. Uh, he’s like, you know, he’s gonna have vot­ing class shares like Rupert if he does­n’t already, if he does­n’t just have the, the major­i­ty of the vot­ing stocks. So I [00:06:00] don’t know that it’s gonna mat­ter too much.

If the share­hold­ers

are unhap­py,

uh,

what’s he

gonna, what are they gonna do? Vote him I thought you were gonna say is he does­n’t real­ly mat­ter if he comes back to

TK: not, because I think that’s the more,

prob­a­bly the more apt take on, on, Tes­la. Is it bet­ter off with­out him

Look at the US gov­ern­ment for God’s sake.

Cameron: Yeah, yeah, Well, maybe he’ll just go in and fire every­one at Tes­la. good at that. It’s, uh, just fir­ing peo­ple appar­ent­ly. What comes next? Eh, wor­ry about that lat­er. It does­n’t mat­ter. I’ve got these Trump sup­port­ers, or Trump

Trump’s chumps as I call them now, telling me

what a great job Elon’s doing with Doge.

I’m like, lis­ten, any­one can fire peo­ple.

It does­n’t take any sort of genius to come in and fire peo­ple. Any­one

can fire peo­ple. That’s, that’s the eas­i­est thing

to do. We’ve seen this in cor­po­rate land for decades, right? You’ll

get a new CEO comes in,

fire every­one, let [00:07:00] go,

every­one, all of a sud­den the busi­ness falls apart and they have to hire every­one back again. Uh,

TK: Often­times as con­sul­tants, there’s a high­er price.

Cameron: price.

That’s what I was gonna say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. like any­one can fire peo­ple. That’s, that’s easy. and the, the anal­o­gy I’ve

been using is when Stal­in fired or gagged or killed all of his gen­er­als in the late 1930s, as part of the perch, get rid of all the gen­er­als. We don’t need the

gen­er­als. Uh

oh, the Nazis

invad­ed. Where are our gen­er­als? Well, you got rid of them all, sir. Oh

TK: gone across the Ger­many

Cameron: They would. no they one did, but the rest were dead. Like,

who could have seen that com­ing? Like fir­ing, fir­ing peo­ple in dis­man­tling agen­cies. Like I’m all for effi­cien­cy. Effi­cien­cy is great, but just arbi­trar­i­ly

fir­ing two thirds of your work­force and not think­ing there aren’t

gonna be con­se­quences

down the track,

is [00:08:00] just

ridicu­lous.

But any­way, not my coun­try.

TK: you know, the sen­ti­men­t’s fine. I think any gov­ern­ment can prob­a­bly do with a bit of a dose of salts. They get fat and lazy, like big book cor­po­ra­tions do.

Cameron: Yep.

TK: but I’ve seen no evi­dence to say that Doge has, has, has the fat and not the mus­cle in the US

Cameron: Or

TK: It’s been fair­ly polit­i­cal

Cameron: or

TK: yeah,

Cameron: for what we’re

cut­ting and why we’re cut­ting it and how we’re gonna do bet­ter with­out that. It’s just, and I like the fact that went from we’re gonna save $2 tril­lion a

year to, we’re gonna save a

tril­lion dol­lars a

year to, now it’s down to $155 bil­lion. I think it’s

TK: yeah.

Cameron: clas­sic musk reeval­u­a­tion on the fly.

TK: Reframe.

Cameron: Any­way, back to uh, back to the mar­ket. So, I, dun­no, I, I, I’ve been. You know, I don’t wan­na

get too buried in this,

but there are, there are sto­ries, the Wall Street Jour­nal, and this

inter­ests me be, and I think I may have men­tioned this [00:09:00] last week, I know I cer­tain­ly men­tioned on

Face­book at some point, it’s inter­est­ing to me when I see the Mur­doch media start­ing to take shots at Trump’s tar­iffs plan and admin­is­tra­tion, uh, because, you know, you kind of expect the Mur­doch media to be in lock­step with the far right. But they don’t seem to be Wall Street Jour­nal this week. Uh, who will pay the price for Trump’s eco­nom­ic goals

slash the trade deficit and the net inflow of

for­eign mon­ey dries up. This will hit share

prices and raise the cost of

bor­row­ing for

com­pa­nies. what Pres­i­dent Trump

real­ly wants has become a thriv­ing indus­try in its own right, often proved wrong as soon as it is pub­lished. Two things are clear about his tar­iff pol­i­cy, how­ev­er. He wants a low­er trade deficit and he wants invest­ment to rebuild US man­u­fac­tur­ing true believ­ers who think he

might achieve those goals should think [00:10:00] through what

else has to hap­pen as a result. start­ing point is The bal­ance of pay­ments, the broad­est mea­sure of trade and invest­ment in and out of the econ­o­my.

It’s two sides have to bal­ance the cur­rent account, which tal­lies up trade flows and some oth­er stuff not worth get­ting

into. And the

cap­i­tal and finan­cial accounts which mea­sure

well cap­i­tal and mon­ey flow­ing in and out to buy things

such as stocks and bonds and invest­ments in fac­to­ries. For years, Amer­i­cans have import­ed way more than they export­ed.

Thus, the trade deficit and the

cur­rent account part of the equa­tion

the bal­ance of pay­ments to bal­ance, there needs to be a cor­re­spond­ing

inflow of cap­i­tal that has large­ly come from

for­eign­ers buy­ing assets, most promi­nent­ly stocks and gov­ern­ment debt in the form of trea­suries. Trump’s plan will dis­rupt that dynam­ic.

Small­er trade deficits mean small­er inflows of cap­i­tal and it goes on, but it basi­cal­ly just throws, um, a big can of feces over the whole [00:11:00] Trump’s plan he fin­ish­es. This is

James McIn­tosh of the WSJ. I doubt that Trump’s tar­iffs will bring much man­u­fac­tur­ing back to Amer­i­ca. If they do, investors

and con­sumers will suf­fer.

So, uh, yeah, I mean, I just,

TK: point, cam, is that the

Cameron: I.

TK: do come back to Amer­i­ca, the jobs Amer­i­cans may not want.

Um,

Cameron: I.

mean, yeah, every­one’s been mak­ing that

point for weeks. Yeah,

TK: yeah. Work­ing in car fac­to­ries, weld­ing,

you know, seat belts into

seats. It’s, it’s not. It, it left Amer­i­ca for a rea­son. it’s bet­ter, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a, some­thing that’s, it’s a, it’s a non-crit­i­cal job done by a non-crit­i­cal employ­ee, so it should be done by the cheap­est employ­ee.

Um, B, if it comes back, it’s prob­a­bly gonna be done by a robot, so it’s not gonna cre­ate employ­ment. So,

Cameron: that was my

TK: yeah.

Cameron: I was gonna make. Yeah, I mean, it’s prob­a­bly gonna be done

by robots and I, I actu­al­ly do [00:12:00] think are head­ing towards a, towards a world

where man­u­fac­tur­ing does become actu­al­ly hyper­local. I

can, I can see a world in a decade from now where there’s a fac­to­ry in every sub­urb just staffed full of robots, humanoid robots that are pro­duc­ing stuff that you, your robot at home can’t pro­duce.

you have, uh, your local fac­to­ry that’s just com­mu­ni­ty run or run by some sort of local orga­ni­za­tion that’s just full of robots. That’s just churn­ing out stuff on demand as you need. you know, with a com­bi­na­tion of nano fab­ri­ca­tors and dif­fer­ent fab­ri­cat­ing machines and robots and all of this kind of stuff. it does become hyper-local. You don’t, the vast major­i­ty of things don’t need to be shipped from over­seas, don’t need to get made over­seas. ’cause they can be made local­ly with, you know, very, very cheap robot

labor. [00:13:00] But that’s

not gonna hap­pen

quick­ly. That’s, that’s, that’s a 10, 15, 20 year you know.

TK: look, I don’t, I don’t

doubt that that’s the Kurzwell pro­jec­tion and he’s been pret­ty accu­rate

to date. Um, dun­no what the time­line is on that, but it’s. hap­pen but the way things are going, you’ve just described the Chi­nese local robot, the Amer­i­can one’s gonna have two left feet. If it’s, you know, the way Amer­i­ca’s going, their robots aren’t gonna com­pete with the Chi­nese unless they dra­mat­i­cal­ly improve how they’re man­ag­ing things.

Cameron: Yeah, but the, uh, the most inter­est­ing point for me here is that, you know, again, the, the finan­cial elite over there, you saw when he announced the tar­iffs, all the heads of Wall Street, Jamie Dia­mond, and, uh, um, who’s the guy? Bill Ack­man. All the big Trump sup­port­ers came out and were like, this is hor­ri­ble.

This is ter­ri­ble. This is a, this is a dis­as­ter. soon as Trump announced his 90 day pause, they were all back on the band­wag­on. Bril­liant [00:14:00] strat­e­gy, Mr. Pres­i­dent, fan­tas­tic job. Who could have seen that come and you’re an absolute genius. You know, they, they sort of. Uh, showed feal­ty again very quick­ly, but they were ready to, you know, smack him in the face.

Uh, for a cou­ple of days there. The Mur­doch media still fair­ly neg­a­tive towards him. I, I don’t think Fox News is nec­es­sar­i­ly, but the print side of Fox still, uh, fair­ly neg­a­tive about the way Trump’s man­ag­ing the econ­o­my. So it’d be inter­est­ing to see that plays out when his key sup­port base in terms of the guys with the mon­ey and the, the

media are not hap­py with the way he’s run­ning things.

I saw anoth­er sto­ry I want­ed to ask you about in the New York Times, uh, there’s a rea­son the world

is a mess and it’s not Trump. Um, we’ve sort of

talked about this a lit­tle bit in the past.

You’ve been. Talk­ing about this in some

ways, I think over [00:15:00] years. And then we talked

about Ray Dalio’s analy­sis last week.

But this is basi­cal­ly talk­ing about, uh,

there’s a deep­er force under­ly­ing today’s dis­ar­ray, eco­nom­ic stag­na­tion. world has expe­ri­enced in long-term slow­down and growth rates that began

in the 1970s, wors­ened after the 2008 glob­al finan­cial cri­sis and

shows no sign of improv­ing, stuck with low growth, wan­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in an aging work­force.

The world econ­o­my is in a rut. This shared eco­nom­ic predica­ment lies behind the polit­i­cal and social con­flicts the world. Over state of the group of 20, a col­lec­tion of the Globe’s biggest economies tells us a lot about the world’s eco­nom­ic health. The data is damn­ing. of them have grown by less than 10% since 2007, adjust­ed for infla­tion. An addi­tion­al four are just above that bar some such as India, Indone­sia, and Turkey have main­tained stronger growth rates, but most are

expe­ri­enc­ing pro­longed eco­nom­ic malaise in the past. Gee, 20 [00:16:00] economies reg­u­lar­ly grew two to 3% per year, dou­bling incomes every 25 to 35 years. Today, many growth rates are 0.5 to 1%, mean­ing incomes now take 70 to a hun­dred years to dou­ble too slow for peo­ple to feel progress in their life­times, the sig­nif­i­cance of that change can­not be over­stat­ed. Stag­na­tion does not have to be absolute to col­lapse expec­ta­tions when peo­ple no longer assume their or their chil­dren’s liv­ing stan­dards will improve. Trust in insti­tu­tions erodes and dis­con­tent

ris­es, then it talks about the rea­sons behind it and de-indus­tri­al­iza­tion

Amer­i­ca and Europe, we know what

that looks like.

Lost man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs amid

declin­ing demand for indus­tri­al goods. And then it talks about how it

all moved to a ser­vices indus­try and ser­vices. you

don’t get pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains like you do in

man­u­fac­tur­ing, et cetera, et cetera. So. Look, I dun­no much about this sort of stuff. [00:17:00] Uh, why is

eco­nom­ic stag­na­tion

pro­duc­tiv­i­ty stag­na­tion such a bad thing? Tk.

TK: Well, that’s such a bad thing. Um, ju well, just

you said before, there’s been

research which says that the,

one of the core attrib­ut­es of hap­pi­ness in peo­ple’s lives is the fact that they think they’re doing bet­ter than they were

one year ago, two years ago, 10 years ago,

or what­ev­er.

that peo­ple don’t feel sat­is­fied or hap­py or con­tent­ed if they’re doing the same as they were.

years ago, or as their

pri­or gen­er­a­tions did,

see some progress in their lives. So that’s

prob­a­bly at the core of it. Um,

it, there are

oth­er things that come into play if like one trad­ing block is grow­ing faster than the

ones that’s, you know, then you start to have

poten­tial because,

you know, the,

the trad­ing [00:18:00] block that’s grow­ing faster, IE Chi­na may well decide that.

Um.

You know, they’re gonna leave the rest of the world behind and

the rest of the world does­n’t like that. Then you get sort of, uh,

it starts off per­haps as trade wars, but then it gets into con­flicts as well. So there can be all sorts of prob­lems like that. Um, but yeah, it’s like that’s, you know, if you’re not grow­ing, you’re stand­ing still, I guess is the sum­ma­ry for it.

some­one’s gonna cut your lunch even­tu­al­ly, but you’re also gonna feel like, you know, you’re nev­er gonna get ahead. You’re not gonna be able to afford to buy a house. You’re not,

if you do buy a house, you’re gonna be in one house, the same house for the rest of your life. Your kids aren’t gonna do any bet­ter, et cetera, et cetera.

So, yeah, it’s, it’s the end of the Amer­i­can dream, I guess is anoth­er way to, to put it. Um, I guess in our life­times, cam, we’ve been had two pro­duc­tiv­i­ty dri­vers. The big one was the inter­net. So if you look at pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in cor­po­rate life, it real­ly took us, um, a quan­tum leap for­ward when you could start to dig­i­tize things from [00:19:00] just reduc­ing bureau­cra­cy and less.

Cler­i­cal activ­i­ty, through to, you know, dis­in­ter­me­di­at­ing lots of busi­ness­es that were doing things, you know, fair­ly slow­ly and unpro­duc­tive­ly like. Um, taxis like real estate ads, you know, um, all that kind of stuff. So that was a big burn to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. That’s kind of hap­pened now, and we’re not see­ing step changes again on the back of that.

But it does­n’t say it won’t hap­pen again in the future. If we see big step changes due to AI or robot­ics or any of those kinds of things, we could go through anoth­er prod­uct pro­duc­tiv­i­ty cycle. The oth­er that we’ve had in our gen­er­a­tion is, has been a decrease in inter­est rates. ’

Um,

you know, prob­a­bly got their low­est to their low­est in the GFC and then

to the low­est again dur­ing covid.

We’ve had a,

a,

head­wind over the last few years ’cause they had a quick rise. now they’re back to where they, you know, it’s still a fair­ly low rate, but we’re prob­a­bly, they were on aver­age over the [00:20:00] years. Um, so that’s been a bit of a head­wind for us.

So

hard, it’s hard to know what’s cycli­cal and what’s short term with all these things.

and it’s, you nev­er know what’s around the cor­ner that, um. You know, uh,

apple or Google or some­thing like that could unveil a, an AI tomor­row, which just boosts pro­duc­tiv­i­ty again

across the globe. And

we, you

know, we go through anoth­er pro­duc­tiv­i­ty boost.

but yeah,

you could say, I, I think, you know, Dahlia was right where, and as I said before, when we look at the

the sort of sce­nario plan­ning at the macro lev­el that Shell does on the long term, we’re in an era of decou­pling where coun­tries are retreat­ing back into them­selves.

we’ve come through a,

a gen­er­a­tion of inter cou­pling where we, we

cre­at­ed trad­ing blocks and trad­ing part­ners and sold things

and, and we’re hap­py to run trade deficits, et cetera, because it was bet­ter off for our [00:21:00] economies. And now,

uh, you know, that’s being reversed for what­ev­er rea­sons, either ’cause we don’t, I.

US does­n’t trust Chi­na or US is scared. Chi­na’s get­ting too big or what­ev­er. you know, there’s, there’s actu­al­ly down­sides to, of course, you know, that trad­ing,

um, sort of inter­con­nect­ed­ness that

if there ever is, uh,

some­one out there who won’t trade with you and they hold some stuff that you need, then you’ve, you know,

you got­ta of run around and try and find it from some­one else.

And if it only exist­ed with that part­ner,

you’re stuffed. So,

um, you,

it’s not a bad thing to keep.

Some man­u­fac­tur­ing lev­el of skill going in your econ­o­my, even if it’s not pro­duc­tive. Usu­al­ly

way that has hap­pened in Aus­tralia tra­di­tion­al­ly is it gets gov­ern­ment sup­port rather than pri­vate sup­port.

Um, you know, uh, you, you keep oil reserves in case you can’t get oil from over­seas. You keep food reserves. Not a big thing in Aus­tralia ’cause we can prob­a­bly feed our­selves, but coun­tries will have to do that. So

it’s,

[00:22:00] we’re kind of enter­ing more into that era now, which is, which is a low pro­duc­tive era.

’cause if you can buy or cheap­er from over­seas, but you’re hav­ing to

stock­pile here, um,

which means

if you do need to rely on that, it’s gonna be rationed, which means the price goes up, it’s gonna be a, a hit to the econ­o­my. So,

uh, per­son­al­ly I think that an inter­con­nect­ed world where every­one trades with the best pro­duc­er, um, for the low­est price is the best mod­el.

but it does expose you to, you know,

risk. I guess if the oth­er side of the, the

um, block decides to, uh.

Pull up stumps and not trade with you and you need them, then you’ve got issues. So we’re kind of,

we’re kind of work­ing through all those things in real time. It’s just that we’ve got

who’s not an econ­o­mist

lead­ing the charge at the moment.

reminds me of that book, Con­fed­er­a­cy of Ds,

I dun­no if you’ve read that

Yeah. The, the guy, the lead char­ac­ter and that who was always blam­ing the rest of the world for his prob­lems and [00:23:00] how, and he was always think­ing he was great, but, um,

of ran around caus­ing may­hem wher­ev­er he went.

That’s the, that’s the kin­da style of things.

Cameron: It’s fun­ny ’cause I was think­ing about that thing last night. Um, you know,

Trump always per

por­trays

him­self as a vic­tim And, the Unit­ed States as a vic­tim, so.

TK: Hmm.

Cameron: Like, it’s, oh, they’re, they’re out to get me. They’re attack­ing me. Um, the Democ­rats are after me. Every­one’s after him. Every­one’s mean or rude or hor­ri­ble towards him. Like he was, you know, born with a sil­ver spoon in his mouth. Born rich, born a bil­lion­aire, lived this life of, you know, com­plete obscene lev­els of lux­u­ry and, uh, um, know, and, and, and, uh, uh, mak­ing a big deal out of how lux­u­ri­ous his life was and how Richie was very pub­lic about his [00:24:00] osten­ta­tious­ness. Um, but he’s also the vic­tim and every­one’s out to get him, and he’s being attacked and Amer­i­ca’s being tak­en advan­tage of by the world Poor Amer­i­ca. It’s this, this coex­ist­ing thing where he’s the great­est and the smartest guy who’s. Six foot three and weighs

220 pounds

accord­ing to

his

med­ical exam­i­na­tion last week.

TK: And they said he had the high­est

on the, uh,

on the Test

Cameron: the

TK: um,

Cameron: abil­i­ty. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, but at the same time, he’s a vic­tim and every­one’s out to get him. Amer­i­ca’s the great­est coun­try on the plan­et, but at the same time is being picked on by all these oth­er coun­tries. It built the World Trade Orga­ni­za­tion in order to main­tain its eco­nom­ic hege­mo­ny around the world.

And now it’s, uh, try to basi­cal­ly, you [00:25:00] know, throw a bomb under­neath the World Trade Orga­ni­za­tion and pre­vent it. Do you know about how they’ve

been block­ing judges

to the apple at

court in the WTO for

the last eight years or so? I just was read­ing

TK: Yeah.

Cameron: over the

last cou­ple of days.

TK: Try­ing to defund it basi­cal­ly as well.

Cameron: Defund­ing it and also just not allow­ing any judges. So if any­one gets, uh, you know, any, any trade issue is dis­pute is tak­en up to the, WTO, the WTO rules against it. You just appeal it. But there’s no judges in the apple at court, so it just goes into the void and noth­ing hap­pens. And the US is, and, and this was under Trump ini­tial­ly, but then also under Biden, delib­er­ate­ly just not. Approv­ing any appointees to the appel­late court. So the WTOs basi­cal­ly just rel­a­tive­ly tooth­less and ’cause it was, ’cause it, they were rul­ing against the [00:26:00] US and the US was like, okay, well they can’t have that. We can’t have an inter­na­tion­al body that does­n’t do let us do what we wan­na do. So, uh, let’s, let’s destroy it. So all of these inter­na­tion­al bod­ies, the WTO, the World Bank, the un nato, um, the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion that were large­ly estab­lished by the Unit­ed States, are now being dis­man­tled by the Unit­ed States because they no longer serve their hege­mo­ny. They’ve been, are now oth­er major play­ers that are tak­ing

advan­tage of these inter­na­tion­al

bod­ies in the US is,

try­ing to shut them down. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing.

TK: is, isn’t it? Yeah, I agree.

Um, I, I think,

I think,

you know, Trump’s quite

when he thinks the world’s out to get him. I mean,

based on the last three months,

it’s pret­ty hard to see why it would­n’t be out to get him

and his, [00:27:00] his busi­ness career. I mean, he’s had many bank­rupt­cies. He’s,

you know, uh, style of doing busi­ness is not to pay the last invoice.

It’s to sue peo­ple. It’s like, you know,

why would­n’t be peo­ple out? Why would­n’t peo­ple be out to get him?

Um, I can see why it feels like a vic­tim as to why the US is a vic­tim. I don’t buy that at all

Cameron: Oh, it’s,

the most pow­er­ful coun­try in the his­to­ry of the human race is not a vic­tim. And, and

TK: Hmm.

Cameron: when they’re, they’re, you know, accus­ing the insti­tu­tions that they estab­lished as being mean towards them. And, uh, know, the whole thing about, Chi­na’s sell­ing us too much stuff. Well, that’s ’cause you out­sourced all of your man­u­fac­tur­ing to Chi­na delib­er­ate­ly. So they could sell you cheap stuff and now you’re

com­plain­ing about the fact that they’re

sell­ing you

cheap stuff. I mean, it makes no sense at all. but any­way.

TK: but it’s, but it’s also too, it’s, it’s a,

a, [00:28:00] I mean, I, I think,

know, to be kind to the US gov­ern­ment that, that Trump trump’s try­ing to do things quick­ly before the midterms, he was the, what he learned from the first time around, he’s got­ta get every­thing done before he faces a chance of los­ing con­trol over every­thing, over every lev­el of gov­ern­ment.

So he is run­ning real­ly hard and blow­ing things up. But, you know, if you are an adult in the job you did­n’t like the World Trade Orga­ni­za­tion, and this is as much a crit­i­cism of Biden as any­body else, I. Just don’t par­tic­i­pate in it. Say, look, you know, here are all the rea­sons we don’t like this. Can we fix it?

No. Okay, well, We’re not gonna be a part of it any­more. Here are all the things we don’t like about the un. Can we fix it? No. Okay, well, we’re not gonna play there any­more.

Or here’s, here’s our issue with Chi­na dump­ing what­ev­er steel or what­ev­er on our, you know, on our econ­o­my, we don’t like that. So let’s do a deal around it.

Instead

of, you know,

like the guy from Confe Con­fed­er­a­cy of

nces sort of spin­ning around the room, [00:29:00] knock­ing things over, say­ing, it’s all, every­one’s out to get me. And it’s, it’s the world that’s, that’s not me.

And blow­ing things up. Just fix the prob­lems and get on with it.

Cameron: Yeah, but the, the prob­lem I, have with that is, okay, so they, if they don’t like the, the way the WTO is oper­at­ing or, or rul­ing against them, well, you set it up that way. You estab­lished the rules that there had to be unan­i­mous agree­ment on cer­tain issues. That was how you set it up to turn around now and go, well, we can’t get any agree­ment. it’s invalid. Well, you set it up to be very, very demo­c­ra­t­ic. Because you love democ­ra­cy. You don’t like the way the Unit­ed Nations Gen­er­al Assem­bly votes against Israel or the Unit­ed States. Well, you set it up to be a demo­c­ra­t­ic world body. That was what you said you want­ed. It’s this whole rules [00:30:00] based order that they like to say that they sup­port, but it’s rules for the, and not for me. When the rules, when the rules come back and bite you on the ass, you can’t go, well, we don’t like the rules any­more. We, we liked them when they worked in our favor. We don’t like them when they work against us. It’s just, it’s just ridicu­lous. If you, you either want to have these demo­c­ra­t­ic based inter­na­tion­al bod­ies to work on a prin­ci­ple of, yeah, the world all needs to agree to some­thing for it to be valid. And then if you don’t like the fact that the rest of the coun­tries or enough of the coun­tries around the world dis­agree with you, then. Tough tit­ties. It means you’re wrong. You

either, you either want

democ­ra­cy

or you don’t. Any­way, don’t get me start­ed.

TK: I, I think, I think, there’s an ele­ment of truth to that, but I also see the argu­ment which says, Hey, you know, it’s been around now for a long time and it’s not work­ing for us. Let’s

again, an adult would say,

what do you want out of this that you’re not [00:31:00] get­ting? We want this out of it. We’re not get­ting it.

Let’s do a deal to change it.

I’ll give you some­thing that you want. You gimme some­thing that we want, we’ll do a deal

Cameron: Yeah, it’s diplo­ma­cy. I,

TK: defund­ing the court judges to shut it down, won’t

just be an adult and say, we’re gonna shut it down.

Cameron: as

for the midterms, I don’t think there are gonna be any midterms, but we’ll see. I

might be wrong.

TK: Yeah, too.

Cameron: Um, what else you got?

TK: Yeah. So what have I, I’ve got a

to do,

but, um,

I, you

know, over East­er,

bit more time to read, I guess. Um,

popped up on my social feeds, which I thought was real­ly apt at,

um, believe it or not.

I get quotes on my, on my social feeds from great lit­er­a­ture, from time to time,

as well as

of oth­er things.

Um,

movie quotes and things like that too. But

popped [00:32:00] up, which I just, it just res­onat­ed with me. And, and peo­ple will know the first line, um, they don’t prob­a­bly know the first para­graph, but I’ll read it out.

Just see if this res­onates with you as well. was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It was the age of wis­dom. It was the age of fool­ish­ness.

It was the epoch of belief.

It was the epoch of

increduli­ty.

was the sea­son of light. It was the sea­son of dark­ness.

It was the spring of hope.

It was the win­ter of despair,

which of course is the start of a

of two Cities

by Charles Dick­ens.

But

with me.

Cameron: writ­ten what, 200 years ago?

TK: Yeah. At, at the time of the French Rev­o­lu­tion.

Cameron: 250

years ago.

Um,

60. So noth­ing changes, that what you’re say­ing?

TK: does­n’t that feel, this, does­n’t, does­n’t that sort of just sum up how it’s at the

like, we’re at the the edge of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Uh, we’re [00:33:00] on the edge of poten­tial­ly liv­ing for­ev­er.

on the edge

of, you know, all sorts of

med­ical and sci­en­tif­ic break­throughs

day.

You know, if you’re, if you’re

look­ing for it, there’s just such fas­ci­nat­ing sci­en­tif­ic

com­ing through all the time. you know, then you got across all the stuff that’s going on in the, in the eco­nom­ics, in the world. It’s just a, it is real­ly a tale of two cities, a tale of two worlds, real­ly.

Cameron: Well, yeah, I, I think it is, um, know, the, the sort of death now of the chap­ter two of the human race, start­ing a thing I’m call­ing it chap­ter three. Um, it’s where I’m try­ing to get togeth­er. The bright­est minds I can find to talk about how we, how do we nav­i­gate this next tran­si­tion from chap­ter two to chap­ter three, for me, chap­ter [00:34:00] one is basi­cal­ly all of human his­to­ry up to the Indus Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion and chap­ter two was the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion through to today or through to the what will be the robot­ics rev­o­lu­tion where humans are replaced as the dom­i­nant. Life form on the plan­et by the ai, robot, hybrids, what­ev­er they are. That’ll be chap­ter three for the human race. You know, we don’t real­ly.

know what it’s gonna look like, what form it’s gonna take, but we do know it’s, it’s gonna be vast­ly dif­fer­ent in incon­ceiv­able ways to every­thing that came before. And I think this is just the death nail of chap­ter two of, of the human race.

We’ve, we, we’ve sort of maxed out, uh, social and eco­nom­ic coop­er­a­tion and it’s all com­ing crash­ing down just in time to be replaced [00:35:00] by the next thing that comes along. I was watch­ing a YouTube the oth­er day by, it was a, it was a con­ver­sa­tion between Hugo De Gar­ris and Ben Zel. Um, I spoke at a. Um, sin­gu­lar­i­ty con­fer­ence in Mel­bourne about 10 years ago with Hugo De Gar­ris.

He’s an AI researcher, a Aus­tralian AI researcher, has been work­ing in the field for 30 years and, and spent a lot of time in Chi­na work­ing on Chi­nese AI projects. And Ben Ger­el, I think I had on the pod­cast 20 years ago, he’s anoth­er decade. He’d been around AI research for decades, but they were talk­ing about, um, how do You align the AI with human val­ues? And Gertz will had a good anal­o­gy. He was like, it’s like say­ing, are humans aligned with squir­rels in Yel­low­stone Nation­al Parks val­ues? He said, like, we don’t real­ly care about the squir­rels. We, we don’t pay much atten­tion to the squir­rels. We find them amus­ing. We’ll sit and watch them. We try not to hurt [00:36:00] them. You know we try and leave them alone to do their thing. know, we, we, we, we think they’re cute and fun­ny to watch, but real­ly our val­ues aren’t very aligned. Maybe we all want trees to still be around and we want there to be oxy­gen to breathe and that kind of thing. And we want them to have babies and have fam­i­lies.

But real­ly, our val­ues, there’s not a lot of a, there’s no room for align­ment. We’re so vast­ly dif­fer­ent to the squir­rels that, you know, there’s no over­lap real­ly there. And he goes, that’s like,

that’ll be the super

intel­li­gent AI in humans. Like, it’s not gonna be aligned to

1. It’s not gonna, it’s gonna,

be a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent form of

intel­li­gence, you know, it’s.

TK: We are bugs.

Yeah. Look, you could be right. I don’t know. I’m just gonna focus on

where I am at the moment and mak­ing the best deci­sions around my invest­ments and my life.

Cameron: all you

TK: Um,

Cameron: You know, peo­ple

TK: See

Cameron: you know, what are

kids got­ta do to pre­pare for this

world in 10 years? [00:37:00] I’m like,

do what seems to be the next sen­si­ble thing right now. Like, it

TK: Yeah.

Cameron: hap­pen, but it looks like it’s gonna hap­pen, but it may not hap­pen. So, and if it does hap­pen, all bets are off. And if it does­n’t hap­pen, then the world as we’ve known it will con­tin­ue for a while longer. So,

just,

you know,

keep, keep doing what you can do from day to day, I think is all you can do.

TK: So, back to stocks.

After our tour,

the

world And its future and its prob­lems,

uh, bank of Queens­land results came out.

In the last week or so.

’cause they’re on a dif­fer­ent

cycle.

Cameron: you talk about them over din­ner with your board mem­ber?

TK: Well, she was a board mem­ber. She’s not

not any­more.

Cameron: Oh. When did that

TK: Jen­ny left

board when she went onto the board of Inge­nia.

Um, a few months, or it’s three or four months ago. End of last year,

maybe six months ago.

Cameron: I don’t [00:38:00] think you

TK: Yeah. She had

Cameron: that, huh?

TK: Yeah,

a three year term on the Bank of Queens­land and then

came off rather than stand for reelec­tion.

Cameron: Oh,

TK: Um, but we still have shares. I mean, she has shares, so I’ll, I’ll

acknowl­edge that. And it was on our buy list, um, last year. It’s not there now.

Uh, so I thought I could talk about it.

Some peo­ple may still own them, but they’ve had a rea­son­able result. Uh, the head­line from the fin said that,

uh, the Patrick Cal­loway, the boss was going to stay.

Uh, in the role to see through a trans­for­ma­tion he’d start­ed.

So he promis­es to be there for at least anoth­er 18 months. Um,

and the, the quote is to see through a rad­i­cal dig­i­tal

of the region­al lender designed to arrest the shrink­ing mort­gage book and improve returns amid intense com­pe­ti­tion, Patrick All­way has tak­en an X to BOQ to reduce a bloat­ed cost base and put it on a more sus­tain­able foun­da­tion.

Ooh. Sounds like Doge

tak­ing an X to [00:39:00] cost.

Over the past year, uh, it has ter­mi­nat­ed the mod­el where fran­chisees oper­at­ed branch­es, cut branch num­bers, sliced hun­dreds of jobs, pulled back the num­ber of prod­ucts reduced the use of con­trac­tors in cold

head office force floor space.

Over the last 18 months, we have seen what has prob­a­bly been the most mate­r­i­al com­pres­sion and retail bank­ing mar­gins indus­try has ever seen.

LOA said as a small bank, the mar­ket dis­rup­tion we have seen is exac­er­bat­ed for us. We have said parts of our home lend­ing book are not sus­tain­able,

and we will be recy­cling cap­i­tal, the high­er return­ing seg­ments of our book. And the arti­cle goes on to talk about a strat­e­gy of doing that, about how wants to, uh, take mon­ey out of, uh, low income mort­gages or cer­tain­ly some parts of the mort­gage book, which are low income.

1. Uh, put it into more prof­itable parts of their busi­ness, which is basi­cal­ly busi­ness bank­ing. Um, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the, the, uh,

[00:40:00] med­ical space and the agri­cul­tur­al space, which I think was some­thing I talked about. Maybe the pulled pork on BIQ, that I think one of their, their strengths was the fact that they, they were Queens­land based, um, notion­al­ly still are, and they have a, a large rur­al and region­al, um, lend­ing, uh, seg­ment, which, um, they kind of own and they should be focus­ing on that.

yeah, that’s, that’s BOQ, um,

Cameron: Well, I’m PO qd about BOQI sold them last year in two trench­es, April and Octo­ber, by the looks of it, when they were around about six bucks, and they’re now at, uh, near­ly

sev­en some­thing, what

are they? Sev­en

20 this morn­ing. Wow. They’ve

done well.

TK: Yeah, done. Done. Well, they’ve still got some

plen­ty of,

um, head­winds. I mean, they’re doing a big dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, which is nev­er easy for a bank. Um, I maybe Comm­Bank has pulled it off. Um, but cer­tain­ly no, [00:41:00] none of the oth­er banks have been able to get off their, what they call the bank stack, the lega­cy IT sys­tems, which were all built in the eight­ies and nineties, and move on to a more sort of dig­i­tal based IT plat­form.

It’s a very hard thing for them to do. It’s kind of like, um, build­ing the rac­ing car. Well, it’s run­ning around the track still. So, um, we’re rebuild­ing the rac­ing car while it’s going around the trap. Uh, so they’ve got that to accom­plish. And they’ve also got the fact that, um. of their cost sav­ings has come from their, their fran­chise busi­ness mod­el.

So they took on fran­chise part­ners in lots of region­al and rur­al areas, um, as bank

And now they offered to buy

those peo­ple out. They wan­na take them back as com­pa­ny oper­a­tor branch­es, um, I guess

to shut some of them down. But, um, but cer­tain­ly to try and increase their share of the prof­it

the the peo­ple who are being bought out aren’t [00:42:00] hap­py and they’ve tak­en a legal, uh, tak­en legal action against it.

So

that’s got­ta be resolved too. So, you know, ear­ly days there’s some progress, uh, and some turn­around, but, um, but it’s, they’re not there yet.

So that’s BOQ. And then I’ve got a pulled pork to do on Tri­bune resources

Cameron: Oh, um, yeah, do that now, but don’t, uh, say any­thing bad because they’re, uh, I just added ’em to the port­fo­lio, I think. uh.

They’re not far.

Uh, they’re, they’re,

okay. They’re off their three point train line. That’s okay. Good. Good. Off you go.

TK: any­thing bad about them. It’s pret­ty hard to find

say about gold min­ers these days. They’re the only bright spot

in, uh, in our port­fo­lios. Um, there’s no, no points for guess­ing why gold’s going up at the moment. I think we’ve cov­ered off on a lot of Um, [00:43:00]

but gold is hav­ing a very good run.

Cameron: Mm-hmm.

TK: a very good day.

Cameron: Mm-hmm.

TK: DRA was said in, uh, what’s that movie? Um, let It Ride.

Cameron: Mm-hmm.

TK: Tri­bune resources, Perth based gold min­er, uh, only a small A DT, so I hes­i­tat­ed to about them, that they’re doing 38,000 per day on aver­age a DT. So one, only helps small port­fo­lios. Uh, inter­est­ing thing about this com­pa­ny Tri­bune is it chairs the same board as anoth­er com­pa­ny, um, uh, Rand and d, which is at the bot­tom of our bio list as well.

That kind of hov­ers on and off it. So I got a QAV score of 0.1 today when I did it. So I did think I could per­haps com­bine the two if you are look­ing at buy­ing into them. But a, the a DT for, for Ram is even small­er. It’s only about 3000 a day, so could­n’t bang them togeth­er to get to a decent a DT size.

Um, but

this will suit some [00:44:00] peo­ple.

Uh,

a lot of the com­ments I’ll make ge you know, gen­er­al­ly is that if you like, um, a com­pa­ny like Tri­bune, you’ll prob­a­bly, may wan­na look at some of the, the com­pa­nies which have been on the buy list but are now off the buy list. Uh, large­ly because their prices have run up dra­mat­i­cal­ly.

Um, com­pa­nies like, uh, evo­lu­tion, um, North­ern Star Resources,

still good com­pa­nies scor­ing well and the qual­i­ty met­ric, it’s just the prices going up, um, as we speak. And in fact, I did my analy­sis, uh, this morn­ing before the mar­ket opened at the price of, um, I’ve used $5 oh six, I think $5 oh four.

And last time I looked before we came on the show, it was $5 16. So Caribbean resources share prices going up, um, as we speak, uh, as is all of the goal min­ers real­ly. Um, I don’t own shares in this one. Uh. But I do own shares and oth­er gold min­ing stocks, but I won’t touch on those today. [00:45:00] Uh, what can I say about r and d?

Uh, sor­ry, about, um, TBR. Yeah, thank you. It’s, um, it owns,

or it actu­al­ly par­tic­i­pates, I guess, is a bet­ter way of putting it into a cou­ple of, into three min­ing projects, uh, at least two of which are JVs. the big one is, um, uh, one called East Kan­dana, which is in, uh, out­side of Kal­go­or­lie in Perth, a big gold min­ing, uh, area for, for decades in wa.

Uh, it’s a, in a JV with ran min­ing. Um, togeth­er with Tri­bune, they have the minor share of the port of the jv, 49%. Um, uh, the com­pa­ny that owns 51% is North­ern Star, which we’ve just spo­ken about. Uh, also apart from hav­ing the same boards, uh, Tri­bune owns 47% of Rand, so they do have cross own­er­ship there, which is one of the fea­tures of talk­ing about this com­pa­ny.

[00:46:00] Um, seems like the prin­ci­ples have been around for a long time in the Perth min­ing scene, and there’s a lot of lega­cy cross own­er­ship going on, um, between var­i­ous com­pa­nies. Um, evo­lu­tion owns a share of Tri­bune. Tri­bune owns a share of Rand. North­ern Star owns 5% of r and d, so there’s a lot of cross own­er­ship there.

Some of it, um,

his­tor­i­cal­ly has been attempts to take over Tri­bune, which has been rebuffed in the past. Um, cross own­er­ships, um, uh, in between Tri­bune and Rand is a, know if it’s the case, but it is a, um, a defen­sive, uh, which is often used by com­pa­nies to make it hard­er to take over, um, one or the oth­er because they.

Own big slabs in each oth­er, so you’ve bet­ter take out both. Um, any­way, uh, they own, um, the mon­ey­mak­ing machine for them is East Kan­dana. quot­ing from their web­site, Tri­bune is a par­tic­i­pant in the East Kan­dana joint ven­ture, [00:47:00] which is 51% owned by Gil Edge Min­ing. Um, with Gil Gilt Edge Min­ing, now whol­ly owned by North­ern Star Resources, Tri­bune and R Share, uh, has remained con­stant over the life of the EKJV.

That’s the East Ken­na JV Own­er­ship of Gem has passed var­i­ous min­ing com­pa­nies, Gold­field, Ori­on, ome Bar­rick with North­ern Star Resources, assum­ing con­trol of Jim and oper­a­tional man­age­ment of EKJV in 2014. EKJV is present present­ly, an oper­a­tional under­ground gold min­ing project locat­ed in the Kan­dana area, 25 kilo­me­ters west north­west of Kal Goo­ley, and, uh, 47 kilo­me­ters north­east of kil gar­ley in the East­ern Gulf Fields of West­ern Aus­tralia.

The project com­pris­es two pro­duc­ing under­ground mines. Uh, ral­ly is one of them, and the Rubi­con slash Hor­net slash Pega­sus. [00:48:00] Uh, mine is the oth­er. Uh, prospect­ing in small scale min­ing in the kan­dana area com­menced cir­ca 1895. min­ing com­menced in 1988 with the devel­op­ment of sev­er­al open pits in the area.

Tri­bune resources and its sis­ter com­pa­ny ran min­ing held leas­es in the dis­trict from the ear­ly 1980s. Informed an explo­ration joint ven­ture with GEM in 1997, explo­ration suc­cess saw the cre­ation of the an EKJV pro­duc­tion joint ven­ture agree­ment in 2002 to con­duct devel­op­ment and min­ing of the resources with the, in the area of the lease.

Um, min­er­al­iza­tion uh, occurred in 1999. The project, uh, con­tin­ued. Um, uh, mines were dis­cov­ered in the area in 2000. Open pit min­ing of Rubi­con and ral­ly com­menced in 2002 and was com­plet­ed in 2004. under­ground [00:49:00] min­ing com­menced in 2006 and at Rubi­con Hor­net in 2011 and is ongo­ing. So basi­cal­ly.

This com­pa­ny was a, a gold prospec­tor. going back 30 or 40 years, a, um, struck a, a good mine, um, pro­duc­tion­ized. It went into a JV to do that, and, um, has been pro­duc­ing gold from there. They’ve, they’ve now’s gone out and looked for gold in a cou­ple of oth­er areas over­seas. And, and there are oth­er two projects, one’s called Jaa, and the Japa Gold Project is locat­ed in the west­ern region of So we’ve talked about Gar­ner before as being, um, a gold prospect, gold min­ing area for oth­er list­ed Aus­tralian gold min­ers. And it’s near a fair­ly well-known, um, gold area, uh, called Ashan­ti or the Ashan­ti Belt. And peo­ple would’ve heard of Ashan­ti [00:50:00] Gold­mine, com­pa­ny. Um, if, if they fol­lowed gold min­ing in Aus­tralia for a while.

Um, did­n’t look like that was in pro­duc­tion from what I could tell. And then their oth­er, uh, region of explo­ration is called Dalal. I dun­no if I pro­nounce that right. Di pro­nounce that right. Diw­al. D‑I-W-A-L-W-A‑L. And that’s in, uh, Min­do in the Philip­pines. again, a joint ven­ture, which they have 40%, um, inter­est in looks like what they’ve done there is to take over, uh, and to up again, uh, what’s called the vic­to­ry tun­nel.

So a tun­nel into a mine. get­ting that, uh, work­ing again slow­ly and they haven’t, as far as I can tell, start­ed pro­duc­tion from there. um. They may, well in the future as they keep explor­ing and, and mak­ing that, uh, vic­to­ry Tun­nel, um, come back onto, uh, uh, onto, um, pro­duc­tion again. [00:51:00] Um, so that’s, that’s basi­cal­ly them.

The jaw and the mind is obvi­ous­ly this JV they have going in Kal­go­or­lie. It’s pos­si­ble that they might strike, um, strike it. Lucky again in Ghana and the Philip­pines and repro­duce what they’ve got in Kal­go­or­lie. That has­n’t hap­pened yet, but they’ve cer­tain­ly got a lot of, prospects in those areas.

I’ll call them a cou­ple of oth­er things to talk about. With Tri­bune, it’s buy­ing back up to 10% of its shares on mar­ket this year. So that’s some­thing that we like to see. The finan­cial results were very good. So rev­enue was up 44% from the first half of 2024. Income was up, 73% prof­it was up 21%. earn­ings per share in the last half was 36%, up from 21% in the first half.

I think it’s fair to say that it’s, um, it’s pos­si­ble that, uh, what they’re, what this com­pa­ny is doing is, uh, sit­ting on a lot of gold resources in [00:52:00] Kal­go­or­lie and then sell­ing them into the mar­ket to cov­er their cost basi­cal­ly while they keep explor­ing. That’s, I mean, I’m, I might be being a lit­tle bit disin­gen­u­ous to them, but that’s kind of how I read this because if you look at, uh, num­bers, even though prof­it was up, um, their PE ratio is quite high.

So their, their earn­ings aren’t great, even though their, their prop cap is five point some­thing. So, um, uh, you can, I’ll go through the num­bers in a minute, but basi­cal­ly the sort of pic­ture I’m paint­ing is that they have. Uh, lots of resources. Um, and then they, they mine them and sell ’em as need­ed to cov­er costs, and they keep look­ing for more.

Is is kind of how I, I see this com­pa­ny, which is not a bad busi­ness mod­el. And cer­tain­ly trick­ling gold into a, into a, a mar­ket as the gold price increas­es, it’s a good time to be doing that.

Cameron: Yeah.

TK: Um, one thing I saw when I was doing research, and I could only see it

uh, place, and the, the [00:53:00] web­site was called Investor Insight.

Uh. And it was­n’t in any of their A SX announce­ments, which I found inter­est­ing. But there was a head­line which reads Tri­bune Resources and Ram Min­ing to sue North­ern Star Resources dat­ed 23rd of Decem­ber last year. And in a nut­shell, it looks like, um, North­ern Star con­trols the pro­cess­ing of the a that comes out­ta the JV in Kal.

And, um, Tri­bune was­n’t hap­py with, uh, the pro­cess­ing the pri­or­i­ty of pro­cess­ing, um, the, the gold or that they were get­ting a, um, their share of the, of the, con­trol of the pro­cess­ing, I guess the order in which it was done. but any­way, it, it, was the head­line. Uh, I could­n’t find any­thing else about it.

So it’s quite pos­si­ble that you know, I. a lobbed, a suit, and it was set­tled straight away. Um, [00:54:00] but the, the con­text of all of this is that North­ern Star tried to buy them out a few years ago, could­n’t, rebuffed and, and uh, kind of all exist­ing in, you know, kind of trou­ble in par­adise sort of rela­tion­ships.

They’re mak­ing lots of mon­ey. They’ve got peo­ple on their reg­is­ters, there’s cross own­er­ships. there might be a bit of gie barge going on in the jv that’s not com­ing out any­way. That’s all by the buy. Um, I think that’s prob­a­bly the his­to­ry of a com­pa­ny like this where you’re, where you’re always enter­ing into JVs and you are, Uh, you know, peg­ging new ten­e­ments and dis­cov­er­ing things and look­ing for part­ners, et cetera, et cetera.

Com­pa­nies, uh, it, the com­pa­ny has an own­er, founder, and he’s been doing this for 30 years, so cer­tain­ly is part of the land­scape and knows what he’s doing in, the Perth min­ing scene. So that’s a, that’s a tick. I think. if I go through the num­bers, they’re all very good. [00:55:00] Uh, this com­pa­ny does­n’t have a con­sen­sus tar­get, so, uh, lit­tle bro­ker cov­er­age, Prob­a­bly the rea­son for that is the low a DT, even though the mar­ket caps, if you put these two com­pa­nies togeth­er is, you know, get­ting up around $400 mil­lion, you’re not get­ting a large a DT ’cause of all the, um, sit­ting on the reg­is­ter e either the own­er, founder or the cross hold­ings, or the failed takeover attempts, all the JV part­ners, et cetera, et cetera.

so that’s some­thing to bear in mind. I guess, you know, it’s pos­si­ble that there’s gonna be more, um, more, uh, cor­po­rate action with this com­pa­ny. Um, uh, you know, I, I sus­pect that they have their price and if the gold price keeps ris­ing and it becomes attrac­tive enough to start anoth­er, takeover offer, they might, they might even­tu­al­ly, um, count this one.

But at the moment, they’re mak­ing lots of num­bers. Uh, lots of good prof­it and num­bers are good. Um, if I go through the QV num­bers, IV one is only 42 [00:56:00] cents because they have, um. Uh, a small earn­ings per share. There’s no IV two ’cause we don’t have a fore­cast earn­ings per share from the, from the bro­ker­age com­mu­ni­ty.

What we do have is net equi­ty per share, which is $5 46. So share price. Um, this morn­ing was 5 0 4. It’s now up around five 16 below the way we’re buy­ing it for less than book val­ue and cer­tain less than book plus, uh, 30%. So that kind of backs up what I’m say­ing. This com­pa­ny has lots of resources and I think is prob­a­bly sell­ing gold as it needs to, to cov­er its costs.

Um, and, uh, and there­fore not mak­ing a lot of mon­ey, yield. They pay a 20 cent, uh, per share. Div­i­dend yield is up around 4%. Nice, but not scor­ing, um, high enough for us. Stock doc­tor finan­cial health is, uh, is strong and the trend is steady. Stock stocked qual­i­ty rank­ing is 99 out of a hun­dred, which is very good.

F score is eight out [00:57:00] of nine, again. Very good. And the over­all rank­ing is 95. So it’s, it’s up there in terms of stock pedias rank­ing. Uh. As I said before, not mak­ing much at the earn­ings per share Line, PE is high, but not the high­est, so it’s cer­tain­ly been high­er in the past, but cur­rent­ly sit­ting at around 61 times.

So, um, high PE ratio. Again, I think it’s because they’re, um, sit­ting on assets and, and only sell­ing them when they need to cov­er their costs.

cash, how­ev­er, for this com­pa­ny is only 5.6 times, which is why we put it on our buy list ’cause we can buy it. Um, with strong cash flows, direc­tors hold 33% of stock pri­mar­i­ly through,

uh, a check by the name of Antho­ny Bil­lis, some­times known as Anton Bil­lis.

Um,

own a founder with more than 30 years in the indus­try. Um, both, uh, with Rand and with uh, Tri­bune.

Um. Tri­bune in terms of man­u­al­ly entered data, does­n’t have con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing [00:58:00] equi­ty.

Um, but a lot of the oth­er met­rics look good over­all. The qual­i­ty score from a QAV per­spec­tive is 85%, 11 out­ta 13.

So kind of mir­ror­ing what stock Edia says

and stock doc­tor.

And the QAV score is 0.15. So it’s, um, it’s kind of in the mid­dle of our bio list, but not doing too bad.

Most of the oth­er gold min­ers on the bio list have left because of price increas­es. Um, Tri­bune is just start­ing to get there. Rand, it’s, it’s, uh, sis­ter com­pa­ny with the same board is just below.

Its by price where they have a look. On the bread lat­er today when I was doing research. So, that will be com­ing into a buy. But again, there’s very lit­tle a DT for Rand, um, to assess. Its, its risks and oppor­tu­ni­ties. Obvi­ous­ly the gold price is, is hav­ing a, a huge upturn at the moment. That’s got­ta be a tail­wind for us for it.

Um, they are oper­at­ing over­seas for, for two of their, um, major projects. Uh, so there’s sov­er­eign risk, [00:59:00] which, um,

we’ve heard about before with, uh, with, uh, gov­ern­ment regime changes in, in Africa in par­tic­u­lar

JV risk. Um, whether or not

they sued North­ern Star over the pro­cess­ing of their raw and whether they’re get­ting a fair share.

There’s, there’s got­ta be a risk in, um, not being the major part­ner over there.

Um. pro­duc­ing asset.

But you know, they’ve had many decades to man­age those, those risks. So they’re good at it. Uh,

pos­si­ble tail­wind is the pos­si­bil­i­ty of anoth­er takeover offer.

And, um,

neg­a­tive is even com­bined with r and d.

This is a very low at t stock, so

it’s not gonna suit the major port­fo­lios that, um, that some of our lis­ten­ers have. But if you have a small port­fo­lio, have a look.

it’s

cer­tain­ly get­ting to the stage now where we’re not see­ing,

um, many

gold min­ers on our pilots that we have in the past, where­as as many that we have in the [01:00:00] past.

And so if you wan­na sort of jump on the band­wag­on, this might be one of your last, uh, chances from a QAV per­spec­tive any­way. I guess the oth­er point to make is that

if you do wan­na get into goal and you haven’t.

the ones that were on our buy list in the past, you may still wan­na have a look at their qual­i­ty.

Um, it’s gen­er­al­ly just the gold price, which is stop­ping them from being on our buy list a prop calf point of view. But, you know, if you want­ed to par­tic­i­pate,

um, in,

the sort of, uh,

one area of the share mar­ket, which is going up at the moment, you can still look at some of those com­pa­nies like North­ern Star and Evo­lu­tion, which are, have dropped off our bio list, but still have good qual­i­ty scores.

And their share and sen­ti­men­t’s still very strong for them.

But that’s trib­ute. What’s a Tri­bune cam? Is that a Russ­ian, sor­ry, a um,

a Roman sol­dier of some kind. You’re

the his­to­ry expert.

Cameron: A Tri­bune was a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of, could be the army, could be the peo­ple. Quite often the, the Tri­bune of the Plebs. [01:01:00] So you would have elec­tions for the per­son that was going to be your to the Sen­ate or to what­ev­er the body was? Yeah, they’d be a tri­bune out in the. That could be in the army, that could be to the Sen­ate. it was a very, it was a pro­tect­ed role. So you basi­cal­ly, um, were allowed to present the opin­ion of the body that you rep­re­sent­ed the pe and you could­n’t be killed in

TK: Right.

Cameron: for it. You were, you were a pro­tect­ed species. Of course, a lot of ’em got killed. But, uh, you know, in the­o­ry they were sup­pos­ed­ly, yeah.

The, The, the,

the

voice of a body.

TK: And no obvi­ous rea­son why you’d name a gold min­ing com­pa­ny after a trib­ute

I.

Cameron: Yeah. Hope­ful­ly it is a, [01:02:00] the, the, voice of the

the,

the share­hold­ers.

I dun­no

why.

TK: I don’t know, just like

the num­ber of,

there’s no rea­son why you would­n’t call your gold min­ing com­pa­ny Tri­bune resources. I just thought there might’ve been a, some kind of link to gold some­how, but does­n’t sound like it.

Cameron: Unless there’s anoth­er def­i­n­i­tion of

the word that got noth­ing to do with Ancient Rome, but for

TK: Well, often­times you’d

will call the Tri­bune as well. You know, the

Cameron: Y

TK: coun­tries, var­i­ous cities

Cameron: Well, it’s the voice of the peo­ple. Yeah.

TK: Yeah. Right.

Cameron: Hmm. Well, speak­ing of Tri­bunes, so we’ve got, um. sort of not a ques­tion, real­ly a sug­ges­tion maybe from Trent. He says, pri­or to buy­ing a stock, I like to do some research to make sure I under­stand the basics of the com­pa­ny and have not missed any­thing major if you talk through how you get the best out of your inter­ac­tions. He’s talk­ing about. [01:03:00] AI here. I think here is an exam­ple prompt that I used on Fleet­wood and then Indi­ana Resources. Keen for you to pull apart and break down. The best way to write a prompt I can use time and time again as a check pri­or to hit­ting buy. Here’s the prompt that he gave to chat. GPT.

I’m look­ing at invest­ing in Fleet­wood, list­ed on the A SX Before doing so, can you pro­vide me an overview to make sure I haven’t missed any­thing impor­tant? Please con­sid­er exter­nal envi­ron­ment and impact on the indus­try it oper­ates in. Also to think about is gov­er­nance issues, board changes, direc­tor sell­ing, key man­age­ment changes, legal issues, merg­ers or acqui­si­tions.

One-off wind­falls that may have boost­ed his­toric finan­cials. Hap­py for you to save ques­tions for a time that Tony is busy and you are co-host­ing with his AI clone, I am this week. So I thought I’d, um, oh, I should­n’t have said that. Damnit. Uh, any­way, let’s just, just pre­tend I did­n’t say that. So I actu­al­ly took, [01:04:00] I took his prompt and threw it into the lat­est mod­el of chat, GPT or one of the lat­est mod­els, the oh three mod­el, the mod­el, and for tib­ian resources while you were doing your pulled pork to see what it came

up with, uh, I thought I’d read it out and, and I think it’s a great idea and not some­thing that I have done, Trent, because as a, uh, con­firmed QAVI don’t real­ly care, uh, what the com­pa­ny’s doing.

I just to the num­bers and buy what the spread­sheet tells me to buy. But I do think it’s, it’s a great idea and some­thing I’m gonna think about into my process. any­way, here’s what it, uh, has to say. Core asset, what you need to know, 36.75% stake in the East Kan­dana JV Rubi­con. Well, there you go.

Anoth­er, Rome ref­er­ence. Rubi­con Hor­net, Pega­sus Under­ground plus ral­ly restart, attrib­ut­able pro­duc­tion Q4 24 [01:05:00] equals four KZ. Aussie at 3.4 g slash t cash inflow, 20 mil­lion. I don’t under­stand any of that. But that’s what it thinks I should know. then it’s got a col­umn that says, so what? Small high grade under­ground oper­a­tion, cash gen­er­a­tive, but

sin­gle asset expo­sure. Then under theme, it’s got

growth pipeline and it talks about Hor­net Open pit slat­ed to kick off FY 25 under. So what? No near term vol­ume kick­er Explo­ration CapEx option­al­i­ty

only talks about

cap­i­tal moves new on mar­ket. Buy­back man­age­ment sig­nal­ing cheap stock. Also a,

tidy way to tight­en Bil­lis fam­i­ly con­trol. Exter­nal set­ting. Gold just punched fresh all time highs mar­gin tail­wind for all pro­duc­ers, but cost infla­tion. Diesel

labor still

nib­bling in wa. red flags.

2018 takeovers pan­el found MD [01:06:00] Anton

Bil­lis failed to dis­close greater than 60% effec­tive con­trol. Unac­cept­able cir­cum­stances, bored, unchanged for decades, only one nom­i­nal­ly inde­pen­dent con­trol is tight.

Trans­paren­cy. His­tor­i­cal­ly poor. Don’t expect share­hold­er friend­ly behav­ior in a fight. Has some stuff on direc­tor trad­ing. Recent activ­i­ty, benign, no pan­ic sell­ing, but strike price on option sits well above spot quirks. FY 24 EPS bounced to 8.70 cents ver­sus 1 cent FY 23 chiefly on right back of EKJV.

Reha­bil­i­ta­tion. Esti­mate of tax cred­it. Nor­mal­ized earn­ings clos­er to FY 22 FY

23 run rate. Don’t anchor on FY 24. Head­line. It’s got some oth­er stuff as well. Indus­try m and a drum­beat lawyers flagged more gold sec­tor con­sol­i­da­tion in 2025 as costs by small­er play­ers. EKJV part­ner evo­lu­tion could be a log­i­cal aggre­ga­tor.

[01:07:00] Tbrs tight reg­is­ter makes any bid tricky. Quick take what’s work­ing. Record bull price and a lean un geared bal­ance sheet. A cush­ion­ing cost creep buy­back adds a floor what’s not sin­gle asset depen­dence, glacial project pipeline, and a gov­er­nance his­to­ry that would make a com­pa­ny sec­re­tary blush. could sur­prise

a high­er grade shoot at Hor­net Open Peter A restart.

A full scale ral­ly could juice ounces quick­ly. Con­verse­ly, anoth­er seis­mic event or. Paste fill issue under­ground would hit pro­duc­tion hard. renewed ASIC or takeovers pan­el scruti­ny of the bil­lis com­plex could spook the mul­ti­ple bot­tom line. TBR is effec­tive­ly a fam­i­ly con­trolled small cap WA gold play, rid­ing a stel­lar gold price.

If you can live with con­cen­trat­ed geol­o­gy and con­cen­trat­ed gov­er­nance pow­er, the cash yield plus buy­back has appeal, just don’t price it like a growth sto­ry

and read every appen­dix

five B

foot­note. So what do you think of all of that, [01:08:00] Tony?

TK: that was a good sum­ma­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly of the last bit. Yeah. Um,

it’s a good idea. Trent. Uh, I’d prob­a­bly add a cou­ple of things or he might wan­na con­sid­er adding a cou­ple of things to his prompt. Um, I don’t know if chat GPT could tell you if there was a qual­i­fied order, but that, um. Might be

Cameron: I’ve been

TK: pos­si­ble these

Cameron: Yeah,

TK: Well, but cer­tain­ly the oth­er red flags, like if there’s been, um, direc­tor or CFO res­ig­na­tions, that would be some­thing I would prompt for. Um, and poten­tial bro­ker cov­er­age. So it would­n’t be the case with Tri­bune, I don’t think there’s many bro­kers cov­er­ing it, but if it was a large cap com­pa­ny, um, Trent, it might be worth­while read­ing what­ev­er, you know, some of the bro­kers have to say about it they would’ve done a deep dive on a lot of these ques­tions and might have a, a more nuanced, uh, on the com­pa­ny and what’s going on in the indus­try than, um, than we can see from just [01:09:00] read­ing the releas­es.

So yeah, that’d be the cou­ple of things I’d add to the, the prompt, but it sound­ed good. Good idea.

Cameron: GPT says it thought for one minute, 56 sec­onds In prepar­ing its response, did 13 search­es across 46 sources. And it links all of the sources here. And I’m just scrolling through them. So there’s list corp. investor, the A, b, C share, cafe Reuters pan­el. a repeat of lots of those.

Uh, heatherington.net au, what­ev­er that is. Aus­tralian Resources and Invest­ment web­site, but no annu­al reports, which is what it.

would need to go to to find audits and stuff like that. for some rea­son it does­n’t go it, no men­tion of the com­pa­ny’s own web­site, no men­tion of annu­al reports or any of that kin­da stuff, which I’m not sure

why it does­n’t

go there

straight up and start look­ing for stuff.

But, [01:10:00] um, yeah.

TK: that in the prompt. go to the com­pa­ny’s web­site and look at the annu­al report. Yeah.

Cameron: that. Might try that. Yeah. But it’s a good idea,

TK: Okay.

Cameron: that, uh, I haven’t real­ly built into my process and I’m gonna think about how to do that. Par­tic­u­lar­ly look­ing for red flags, like our gov­er­nance red flags. Like, um, par­tic­u­lar­ly to get it to look for, as you said, you know, um, sud­den res­ig­na­tions or oth­er sorts of gov­er­nance issues, um, to high­light those when I run

the list every

week.

It’s,

um, it’s a good idea. So thank you, Trent. Good think­ing.

TK: takeovers as well. Make sure It’s, the com­pa­ny’s not in a takeover

sit­u­a­tion, I guess, before you buy it.

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah, good stuff. And peo­ple may note, um, with the bio list I put out today, I have inte­grat­ed the notes sec­tion into the bio list. So for things like a RMS and [01:11:00] HLI, the gov, the gov­er­nance red flags, it

now shows in the mid­dle of the buy list. So I

don’t miss things like RMS in the future. By the way, RMS went up 10% after I bought it.

So, um, to you, you can take your gov­er­nance red flag and stick it up

your back­side, but,

uh, I end­ed up, I did

sell it.

after the show last week. I was like, oh, I’m gonna take the 10%, but I’m

gonna get out as well. So, uh,

yeah. um,

we’ll see what hap­pens, but, um, I was glad, I was

glad I could

make a mis­take and still get out

of it at a prof­it. I’m not gonna look that gift horse in the mouth, you know? Um,

anyw, who, yeah. That’s good. Good stuff, Trent. I think that’s it, Tony.

I got five min­utes

to talk about after hours and I got­ta go. What do we, what do you, what do you got for me this week?

TK: Have you seen Tul­sa King?

Cameron: Is that the Stal­lone thing?

TK: is, yes.

Cameron: I haven’t,

TK: Um, watched the sec­ond sea­son [01:12:00] over East­er and loved it.

Cameron: real­ly? It’s good. What’s the set­up?

TK: Uh, he

in sea­son one, Stal­lone has been.

In jail for

20 odd years, kept his mouth shut, put there to pro­tect the mob. Boss gets out, times have changed, and the son’s kind of tak­ing over from the father and sends him to Tul­sa rather than give him his just rewards for keep­ing his mouth shut and doing time for the fam­i­ly.

then Stal­lone, um, you know, kind of starts from scratch and hus­tles his way to cre­at­ing an empire in Tul­sa in the mid­dle of nowhere. Um, you know, tak­ing over a weed shop and weed fac­to­ry and a casi­no, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s all very good natured and,

Um, lots of charm. it’s, it’s pret­ty light, but it’s good fun.

ever seen Lily ham­mer? It’s a bit bit in the style of lily ham­mer.

Cameron: I watched a cou­ple of episodes. Lit­tle

Ste­vie fan

TK: [01:13:00] yeah. Sim­i­lar sort of thing. Yeah.

Cameron: I.

TK: Ban­ish to the, regions, then uses all your, your sort of skills to

cre­ate some­thing from noth­ing.

Cameron: Yeah. Ah, good

TK: Hmm.

Cameron: Well, we’ve been watch­ing

TK: So that was

Cameron: and Right­eous gem­stones. We haven’t watched

much TV this week, but the lit­tle bit that we have, yeah, watch­ing those, been want­i­ng to start Black Mir­ror, but haven’t had a chance to get into that yet. Um, but

enjoy­ing, enjoy­ing White

Lotus, uh,

enjoy­ing most­ly Wal­ton Gog­gins in that.

Yeah.

TK: I can’t get into it. I’ve tried a num­ber of times. I can’t get past the first episode of White Lotus, It just a, it bor­ing, and b, it’s just too Kar­dashi­an for me. You know, just,

Cameron: what’s two Kar­dashi­an? I mean,

TK: just, you know,

on the beach sip­ping cock­tails, bitch­ing to each oth­er. It’s just, Okay.

Cameron: mm.

TK: I, don’t need it.

Cameron: Okay.

TK: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: Um, one inter­est­ing thing I’ve been doing the last few days is [01:14:00] con­ver­sa­tions with Chachi t about things like the his­to­ry of the World Trade

Orga­ni­za­tion and Trump and tar­iffs and all of that kind of stuff. Try­ing to get my head around dif­fer­ent things and then I, I, I will take its answers to me and then put them into deep seek. Gem­i­ni, which is Google’s lat­est state of the art mod­el and grok and say, what do you think of this? Deep seek usu­al­ly will basi­cal­ly agree with chat. GPT. It was trained on chat, GPT, so that’s no big sur­prise. Gem­i­ni will most­ly agree with it as well. Grok takes a big issue. I. Yeah, if chat GPT says any­thing crit­i­cal about the Unit­ed States and its role in the WTO or Trump or Elon, or any of that kind of stuff.

And so then I’ll take Grs answer and I’ll put [01:15:00] it back into GPT and say, what do you think about Groks response? G PT will go, well, gr would say that, would­n’t he? And then it, it, it evis­cer­ates that response. And then I take that and give it back to Grok, and then Grok takes issue with that. And then I, and I bounce them back­wards and for­wards. What is

quite clear to me is that Grok has a very pro

US bias, pro-Trump bias, a pro-US bias, not

in a way that it’s.

You know, over the top. But it’s always

try­ing to pro­vide for Trump’s behav­ior, or the Trump Trump

behav­ior, or the US’ behav­ior and the WTO, it’s almost like it’s, talk­ing to, uh,

some­body like our friend David Markham.

It’s always like, well, you have to under­stand like the US

if it does some­thing bad, it was­n’t as part of its role [01:16:00] as a glob­al hege­mon. It was a

mis­cal­cu­la­tion. know,

or

they, you know, they thought some­thing would hap­pen And some­thing else hap­pened, so then they had to tear it all up and

burn it down and start

again kind of thing.

So I was ask­ing chat, GPT,

like why does rock­’s, why do rock­’s

respons­es just seem so heav­i­ly biased towards the US try­ing to fig­ure that out?

You know, Elon says that he built grok to

be neu­tral. So it was­n’t woke, it was­n’t a woke ai. It would be the neu­tral, but it’s

evi­dent­ly not. And I, I’ve been try­ing to

work out how you would even build an

AI to have that lev­el of bias in it.

And you know, I think it’s part­ly. Uh, the train­ing set, which would be a lot of x, a lot of Twit­ter. That’s the oth­er thing about GR is every para­graph it says, accord­ing to peo­ple on X, blah,

blah, blah, blah.

blah. And you know, the feel­ing on

X is, and I keep going. I

don’t give a shit about X. Stop telling me about X.

I don’t wan­na hear about x, [01:17:00] I don’t care. He goes, oh, okay, I’ll stop doing that. But then it does it again.

Um, but it’s also the rein­force­ment learn­ing

com­po­nent. So, you know, after you it to read every­thing, then you

ask it ques­tions, and when it answers

ques­tions, you score its answers as good

or not good based on how it answers.

That’s the rein­force­ment learn­ing part of the train­ing mod­el. And then it. learns to adjust its algo­rithm to give you the answers that score bet­ter. I think the, the, um. Rein­force­ment learn­ing frame­work

for it was heav­i­ly biased towards a

cer­tain view of the US and

its geopo­lit­i­cal role in the world. it’s, it’s, just an inter­est­ing ear­ly Yeah. And inter­est­ing ear­ly exam­ple of ais and their bias­es and bounc­ing ’em off each oth­er to, to get a

feel. not say­ing that Chachi PT prob­a­bly does­n’t have its own guardrails and bias­es as well, but to get a sense for where they sit in the quad­rant, [01:18:00] you know, and, and hav­ing them, uh, debate each oth­er basi­cal­ly is

lot of fun. That’s most shits

and

gig­gles for this

week.

TK: Uh,

Cameron: Yeah.

TK: well, I’m glad you are doing it rather than me.

Cameron: Why?

TK: I’m

Cameron: It’s like hav­ing two real­ly smart peo­ple hav­ing a debate in front of you and you go, well, hold on. He says this. And the oth­er one goes, no, no, no, no. Well, you got­ta under­stand this con­text. And you go, well, okay, well, you know, what do you think about that? How do you

respond?

You don’t like that?

I thought you loved that intel­li­gent debates between smart peo­ple, but

TK: it. I do love

Cameron: I,

TK: Yeah, I’m sure.

not sure I’m get­ting it by tak­ing

chat, GPTs, out­put, and putting it into roc. but I mean, it’s just, Musk came out and said Crock was gonna be biased. Did­n’t want it to be worked, did­n’t want it, want­ed it to be the anti­dote of chat, GPT.

So

Cameron: I don’t think hav­ing, mm,

TK: kind of, usage com­pared to chat [01:19:00] GPT?

Cameron: ah, well, I don’t think any­thing is as big as that, but it’s, they’ve built it into X, so I guess it’s

prob­a­bly get­ting quite a bit of usage of

that. The

rumor this week is that Ope­nAI are gonna launch their own social net­work now to com­pete with

TK: Oh,

Cameron: and x. Because there’s just

so much data being gen­er­at­ed that you can train an AI on in the social net­works, they’ve

run out­ta data to train ’em on apart from and more video.

But, um, you know, e Elon’s got all of the video that the

Tes­las

grab, where­as they dri­ve around, um, and all of the X stuff and Meta has all of their stuff. So Ope­nAI needs its

own

social net­work data set now. So that will be inter­est­ing. That’ll have an inter­est­ing impact on some Mag sev­en share prices if Ope­nAI launch that.

’cause they’ve got, uh, I saw [01:20:00] Sam on stage at a con­fer­ence in the last week or so. It was a Ted actu­al­ly Chris Ander­son was inter­view­ing him and he, they asked him how many users they have, active users, and he said 500 mil­lion. And Chris said, you told me back­stage that it’s dou­bled in the last three weeks.

And he said, yeah, that was pri­vate. You weren’t sup­posed to say that pub­licly. So it’s more like prob­a­bly a bil­lion active users they have on chat GPT right now. Which is insane for a com­pa­ny that did­n’t exist.

pub­licly, had no pro­file two years ago. Right.

The fastest grow­ing

TK: Be

Cameron: of adop­tion in human his­to­ry.

TK: inter­est­ing to see if, Uh,

a they can make mon­ey out of it and b, what a social net­work looks like.

need anoth­er social net­work?

Cameron: mm mm

TK: Yeah, Is it gonna work

Cameron: Yeah, We do. We, do. Because the ones that We

got suck, they’re hor­ri­ble.

Uh, alright, I got­ta go. Thank you tk. [01:21:00] Have a

TK: Have a good week. Bye.