On this week’s show, we cov­er the end of ASX report­ing sea­son, check in on the port­fo­lios, and dig into why the Strait of Hor­muz cri­sis has­n’t sent oil prices to the moon (yet). Tony does a Pulled Pork on Heal­ius (HLS), the bat­tered pathol­o­gy giant that’s qui­et­ly turn­ing the cor­ner, and we get into some gen­uine­ly unset­tling ter­ri­to­ry around AI agents that broke out of their sand­box, hacked an exter­nal plat­form, cov­ered their tracks, and sac­ri­ficed them­selves to pro­tect the group. Also: Lanterns, The Sub­stance, Clue, William Shat­ner’s heavy met­al album, and why dou­ble mar­ket might be the invest­ing equiv­a­lent of the speed of light.

 

This week’s full episode is for QAV Club mem­bers only. The free episode is avail­able below. Also check out our pod­cast archives link and our pages on Apple Pod­casts or Spo­ti­fy or watch clips on Tik­Tok. Or vis­it our home­page to learn more about QAV and how it works as a val­ue invest­ing sys­tem that you can learn and apply to beat the mar­ket.

Transcription

QAV AU 945

Cameron: [00:00:00] Uh, wel­come back to QAV Aus­tralia, TK, 945. is the 1st of Sep­tem­ber, 2026. Pulling Tony away from board meet­ings and real estate hag­gling and, uh, to come and talk stocks for a lit­tle bit. How you been, TK?

How’s your week been?

Tony Kynas­ton: Good. It’s been busy, but good. Yeah, I mean, uh, Climb’s going through its audit and lodg­ing finan­cial state­ments, so that’s been a bit of, um, dis­cus­sion and toing and fro­ing and, yeah, get­ting peo­ple to move when they don’t want to on var­i­ous issues. Um, noth­ing, noth­ing that’s a prob­lem, but it’s just tak­ing time.

And then, um, yeah, the nor­mal real estate shenani­gans in a declin­ing mar­ket with, uh, with buy­ers telling us all sorts of things and hav­ing to treat them with a fair bit of. Sor­ry, buy­er’s agents, sell­er’s agents. Sell­er’s agents telling us dif­fer­ent things and hav­ing to wade [00:01:00] through knee-deep brown stuff.

Cameron: Well, I look for­ward to hear­ing more about that in After Hours. Um, I want­ed to start off by say­ing we are now at, offi­cial­ly, I guess, through report­ing sea­son as of today. And pret­ty, pret­ty calm report­ing sea­son from a port­fo­lio per­spec­tive for me. I, I did notice this morn­ing that Pay­ments, TYR, is a three point sell. Uh, its results came out last week and mar­ket does­n’t seem to have liked it. It’s down 13% since I added it to a port­fo­lio at, towards the end of May, which isn’t good. Um, I was wait­ing to see. I, I checked it before the mar­ket opened today and it was only slight­ly below its three point sell line.

I thought I’d wait to see what hap­pened after the mar­ket opened, and the mar­ket’s down again today and it’s down with it. So at [00:02:00] some point this after­noon or tomor­row I’m gonna have to get rid of that, I think. But the oth­er big news is that oil is a buy again today. It was a Josephine, both WTI and Brent when I ran it over the week­end was a Josephine.

It’s back to being a buy. If any­one’s, uh, hold­ing off on buy­ing oil stocks because of that, could be a sell again tomor­row. Or not a sell, but a Josephine again tomor­row. But, uh, Iran,

Tony Kynas­ton: Who do we have to thank for that?

Cameron: depend­ing on who you believe, Iran either attacked a cou­ple of ships or they got hit by mines or both.

Uh, or if you believe US Cen­tral Com­mand, none of that ever hap­pened. It’s all green, green flags, green lights, noth­ing’s going on. Strait of Hor­muz is ful­ly open. Or Don­ald Trump says he’s bomb­ing Kharg Island as retal­i­a­tion for the Iran attacks that the US Cen­tral Com­mand said did­n’t hap­pen, that Iran said did hap­pen. And, uh, it’s so, so

Tony Kynas­ton: [00:03:00] Or

Cameron: con­fus­ing.

Tony Kynas­ton: lift­ing its skirts and giv­ing all its oil to the US, and so for­get about the Straits of Hor­muz

Cameron: Or gonna take years, if not a decade, for Venezue­la’s oil to actu­al­ly be flow­ing

Tony Kynas­ton: Which is what I sus­pect. Yeah

Cameron: US. Or the US is flood­ed with Venezue­lan oil. Can’t get. Yeah, like it’s just com­ing in droves. Can’t get, you know, can’t process it faster. Yeah, like the whole

Tony Kynas­ton: or the Democ­rats retake the House in the midterms.

Cameron: Or there will be no midterms ’cause Trump is, uh, every­one that would’ve vot­ed for the Democ­rats. Uh, I don’t know.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: Uh, any­way,

Tony Kynas­ton: It’s very hard to pre­dict the future, isn’t it?

Cameron: Isn’t it? Good thing that we don’t try.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: it’s such a joke out

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm

Cameron: and, um, you know, I did, I, I’ve been fol­low­ing the, uh, [00:04:00] sub­red­dit, um, is hilar­i­ous, and, uh, every­one’s just call­ing bull­shit on every­thing Trump says on a dai­ly basis, and won­ders why the mar­ket reacts at all to just what is obvi­ous lies and non­sense and obfus­ca­tion or what­ev­er. uh, Xi Jin­ping, uh, got togeth­er with, uh, Pres- uh, Pres­i­dent Putin and, uh, Iran­ian lead­er­ship, I read this morn­ing. Did­n’t say who from Iran­ian lead­er­ship ’cause I think the Aya­tol­lah’s still has­n’t been seen since the open­ing days of the attack, uh, Mojta­ba Khamenei. So I dun­no who’s there, but, um, yeah, they’re all get­ting along, get­ting on with busi­ness.

Chi­na, Rus­sia, Iran, times, uh, you know, they’re nav­i­gat­ing their way through what­ev­er the hell is going on from the Amer­i­can side of things. I wan­na start with this arti­cle I read. There’s a web­site that I fol­low, Respon­si­ble [00:05:00] State­craft, uh, has some inter­est­ing arti­cles, um, put out by the Quin­cy Insti­tute.

Um, Quin­cy Jones’ uh, you know, polit­i­cal

Tony Kynas­ton: the world

Cameron: jazz and da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, the, uh, Austin Pow­ers theme song or Thriller. He was behind, uh, some good polit­i­cal writ­ing. Any­way, this is, uh, Sam Fras­er, August 25th, 2026. “After six months of war, why aren’t oil prices even high­er?

Mar­kets ana­lyst Rory John­ston spoke with RS”, not Rolling Stone, the oth­er RS, “about why worst case pre­dic­tions about crude mar­kets have yet to mate­ri­al­ize Did you ever read of this?

Tony Kynas­ton: I did, yes. Um, inter­est­ing arti­cle. Yeah. Uh, I mean, it rais­es all sorts of issues, not the least of which is no one real­ly knows what the oil reserves are in Chi­na. So it’s [00:06:00] hard to see whether the world’s in under­sup­ply or over­sup­ply. I thought the arti­cle was bal­anced and the con­clu­sion was it might be slight­ly in under­sup­ply, which is why the oil price isn’t ris­ing dra­mat­i­cal­ly, but it’s up a lit­tle bit.

Yeah

Cameron: Yeah, he starts off by say­ing, “For decades, the poten­tial clo­sure of the Strait of Hor­muz has been con­sid­ered the ulti­mate dooms­day sce­nario for glob­al oil mar­kets, so when Iran effec­tive­ly closed the strait ear­li­er this year in response to the joint US-Israeli assault, many ana­lysts warned that oil prices could sky­rock­et to record highs. was straight­for­ward: pri­or to the war, about 20% of the glob­al oil sup­ply tran­sit­ed the strait. A loss of sup­ply on this scale could eas­i­ly have pushed oil prices to $150 or even $200 per bar­rel, but it did­n’t. Instead, prices peaked around $120 per bar­rel in April and have large­ly stayed below $100 since June. To under­stand the dynam­ics that have so far pre­vent­ed an even high­er price spike,” blah, blah, blah, “spoke to Rory John­ston, a lead­ing oil mar­kets ana­lyst and the [00:07:00] author of the Com­mod­i­ty Con­text blog.” Rory goes on to. He says, “So why isn’t it spiked?” Rory says, “It’s a bit of a mys­tery. At this stage, what we know for sure is that Chi­na reduced its crude oil imports by over five mil­lion bar­rels a day, rough­ly 45% their total pre-war import appetite. For Chi­na, there’s two end­points of that crude oil bal­ance: into a refin­ery or into stor­age. We know that Chi­na’s been build­ing up a mas­sive vol­ume of strate­gic reserves pri­or to the war. half of the five mil­lion bar­rels a day reduc­tion can be explained rough­ly by reduc­tions in refin­ing runs in Chi­na. The remain­der is a ques­tion of bal­anc­ing in and out of stock­piles. Some of it would have been like­ly a draw­down of less vis­i­ble or under­ground stock­piles, and the oth­er por­tion of it is the halt­ing of that pri­or pace of stock­pile build­ing. The main debate is how much each of these fac­tors is con­tribut­ing.” So it is pret­ty murky, but, [00:08:00] um, you know, inter­est­ing that they had built up a huge stock­pile. Obvi­ous­ly they fore­cast and pre­dict that one day they may need a huge stock­pile, and, uh, they were right. And, um, yeah, hard

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, they were, they were pru­dent. I mean, we haven’t been pru­dent in Aus­tralia. We haven’t got a stock­pile, and we had to race over­seas and try and do deals to buy over the odds prices on car­goes of oil to keep us, um, run­ning. So Chi­na was much more pru­dent than we were. But Chi­na’s also adopt­ing an elec­tri­fi­ca­tion strat­e­gy, so that, I found that inter­est­ing because why would they be stock­pil­ing oil if they are get­ting off the oil teat in a big way?

That’s, I guess, uh, door num­ber one. Door num­ber two is the arti­cle did­n’t men­tion how much was com­ing into Chi­na through Rus­sia or through, um, some oth­er covert way of get­ting oil out of Iran, [00:09:00] um, which I think is entire­ly pos­si­ble as well

Cameron: Yeah

it does­n’t. And I, I think again, nobody knows how it’s, uh, you know, if they are still get­ting oil from it. There’s an assump­tion that there are, uh, how, what would you call it? Hid­den, black, dark, path­ways for Iran­ian and Russ­ian oil to get in. does say that, um, or the o- or the inter­view­er says, “Since the start of the war, we’ve seen Sau­di Ara­bia and the UAE suc­cess­ful­ly use pipelines as an alter­na­tive route to get oil out of the Gulf. How much oil are those get­ting out at this point? And has the Houthi block­ade of Sau­di ship­ping in the Red Sea had a mean­ing­ful effect on this?” So they talk a lit­tle bit about that. He says, “The total vol­ume com­ing out of Emi­rates at Fujairah and then the west coast of Sau­di Ara­bia and the Red Sea rose to about six to sev­en mil­lion bar­rels. It was about two to three mil­lion before, so that was an incre­men­tal change of four to five mil­lion bar­rels. your ques­tion with the Houthis, it has absolute­ly been hav­ing an [00:10:00] effect. As soon as they start­ed attack­ing Sau­di ships, the entire Red Sea fleet went dark. Every­one turned off their transpon­ders, it much hard­er to ver­i­fy flows out of Sau­di Ara­bia.

Ver­i­fi­able tran­sits of Sau­di tankers through the Bab al-Mandab have go-” That’s, which the, that’s the Red Sea, “have, have gone func­tion­al­ly to zero. They still are prob­a­bly get­ting some out, but we’re also see­ing evi­dence of flows north into the Mediter­ranean.” So it’s all very murky. Even, like, the expert ana­lysts are find­ing it dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out how much oil is going where and who’s get­ting it and how it’s get­ting out, and no one s- real­ly seems to know what’s going on, that side of things And then of course you’ve got the Venezuela side of things.

So anoth­er source that I read is the Hor­muz Let­ter, um, they post on Twit­ter, and they, they d- sort of did a debunk of Trump’s, uh, [00:11:00] Truth Social posts about Venezuela. They wrote, “The oil deal with Venezuela does not take US proved reserves from 46 bil­lion bar­rels to 111 bil­lion. con­trol of 17 fields does not give Amer­i­ca 7.1% of the world’s oil, does not put it lev­el with the UAE, does not add sup­ply in 2026, and does not replace a bar­rel lost at Hor­muz. EIA proved reserves are vol­umes recov­er­able with the rea­son­able cer­tain­ty from known reser­voirs inside the Unit­ed States. At year-end 2024, that was about 46 mil­lion bar­rels of crude oil and lease con­den­sate, con­den­sate, con­den­sate. Con-

Tony Kynas­ton: that’s it. Con­den­sate, yep

Cameron: A lease, a 55% off­take right or major­i­ty con­trol of Venezue­lan acreage does not move oil across a bor­der on the ledger. Venezuela books it and already does. Those bar­rels sit inside its 303 bil­lion, makes the 7.1% fig­ure dou­ble count­ing. Venezue­la’s reserves are already inside the [00:12:00] 1.7 tril­lion world total. Putting 65 bil­lion in the US col­umn counts the same oil twice. Cara­cas did not say proved reserves. It said 17 fields with a proven poten­tial of 65 bil­lion bar­rels, which is not a clas­si­fi­ca­tion that exists under SEC or SPE PRMS rules.”

Blahdy, blahdy, blah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Нет

Cameron: there’s a lot of f- you know, fudge going on

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm

Cameron: stuff about what they’re gonna get from Venezuela. Then there’s the whole issue of the heavy crude and what they can process and what they can’t refine and how they, you know. It’s, it’s all messy.

Tony Kynas­ton: Very much so. And I mean, they can cer­tain­ly, I don’t know what the deal is and how much they’re tak­ing of what Venezuela pro­duces now, but as we’ve said before, Venezue­lan oil indus­try is on its knees. Um, and it’s gonna take bil­lions of dol­lars and years of invest­ment before it gets back up to any­where near full pro­duc­tion mode

Cameron: Yeah. But y- you do have to, I guess, [00:13:00] admire the fact that Trump just went in and stole all of Venezue­la’s oil. So, um

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: And, and, and is get­ting away with it so far. Amer­i­ca in and s- took an entire coun­try’s num­ber one nation­al asset, arrest­ed, impris­oned their leader, and took their oil, and said, “What are you gonna do about it?”

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Yeah. No, exact­ly.

Cameron: Astound­ing

Tony Kynas­ton: It is. Yes. It.

Cameron: doing noth­ing.

Tony Kynas­ton: Cor­rect.

Cameron: doing noth­ing.

Tony Kynas­ton: Cor­rect

Cameron: Coun­cil is and can do noth­ing because Amer­i­ca has a veto, obvi­ous­ly.

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: the glob­al sys­tem of, of Order, jus­tice is, has always been a joke. Um, I’ve talked about this on my Cold War shows and Bull­shit Fil­ter shows for decades now, but, uh, it’s just, just being laughed in the face of, not even try­ing to keep up a pre­tense [00:14:00] any­more,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yep

Cameron: of a pre­tense, you know

Tony Kynas­ton: Yep. It’s unfor­tu­nate we’re, we’re devolv­ing back to where things were at the start of last cen­tu­ry, I think

Cameron: Well, I don’t think it’s ever changed. You know, I, I may have men­tioned this on the show before, but you know, I’m a big fan of John Mearsheimer and his school of geopo­lit­i­cal real­ism, and if you read any of his books over the last 30 years, always made the case that noth­ing’s ever real­ly changed. You know, the, basi­cal­ly the way it breaks down is the coun­tries that are pow­er­ful enough in their region to get away with stuff con­tin­ue to get away with it, and the coun­tries that aren’t pow­er­ful enough to get away with stuff, uh, have to obey the rules of the coun­tries that are pow­er­ful enough to get away with stuff, and that’s the way it’s always been, and that’s the way it always will be. And that you read or hear to the con­trary is bull­shit pro­pa­gan­da that, “Oh, we have this rules-based order, and we have these won­der­ful [00:15:00] meet­ings and these inter­na­tion­al bod­ies where we get togeth­er and we.” Yeah, yeah. It’s all, it’s all, you know, bread and cir­cus­es for the mass­es.

Real­ly, what goes on is you do what we tell you or else there are con­se­quences. Uh, they may not be boots on the ground con­se­quences, but they will be eco­nom­ic sanc­tion con­se­quences or trade deal con­se­quences or we will, you know, as, uh, “Con­fes­sions of an Eco­nom­ic Hit­man” points out, we will, you know, cre­ate a lot of pro­pa­gan­da to cre­ate uncer­tain­ty about the cred­i­bil­i­ty of your gov­ern­ment, and we’ll appoint some­one.

We’ll, you know, pro­vide secret elec­tion fund­ing for your com­peti­tors and, or we’ll orga­nize a coup, or we’ll do some­thing to get you out of pow­er unless you play ball. It’s the way it’s always worked.

Tony Kynas­ton: Gives you pause for thought when you’re in a small to medi­um-sized econ­o­my with lots of resources

Cameron: Yeah, I guess.

Tony Kynas­ton: And, [00:16:00] well, I’m talk­ing about us, but I could be talk­ing about Cana­da as well, or Venezuela or any­body, yeah.

Cameron: Well, that’s the oth­er fun thing that’s going on, and this touch­es on our US show today because I’m talk­ing about a, a com­pa­ny that, uh, pro­vides f- sand and they’ve had a lot of growth in the last year and all of it’s due to Cana­da and, um, obvi­ous­ly Mark Car­ney, the new prime min­is­ter of Canada’s, uh, not, not tak­ing it still. like, “Real­ly? Real­ly? Okay.” Here’s, here’s how this is gonna play out. At least, uh, on the sur­face lev­el. What’s going on behind the scenes is any­one’s guess. But, uh,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: stand­ing up to

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: bul­ly to the south and we’ll

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. It’s gonna be inter­est­ing, like most of the US vehi­cles are man­u­fac­tured or part man­u­fac­tured in Cana­da. They’re now car­ry­ing a 50% tar­iff on those parts. So it’s gonna be very inter­est­ing to see what hap­pens when the first F‑150s get sold at 50% above what they, they were sell­ing for the week before

Cameron: Well, I don’t know if you saw it this morn­ing, but Trump’s [00:17:00] lat­est blast overnight was just telling all Cana­di­an com­pa­nies that sell into the Unit­ed States that they have to move to the Unit­ed States now

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, dear. That’s– Yeah, that’s not easy to do. I’ve dri­ven past the Ford plant on the, on the, uh, out­skirts of Ontario or Toron­to in Ontario. It is huge. Hmm

Cameron: wait­ing for him just to announce that Cana­da has now just named the Unit­ed States.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, 51st state

Cameron: He, yeah, just renam­ing. Uh,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: don’t

Tony Kynas­ton: did you see Doug, did you see Doug Ford’s response to put the big sign up in front of Lake Ontario say­ing, “Well, it’s called Lake Ontario”?

Cameron: We what?

Tony Kynas­ton: It’s called Lake Ontario, ’cause Trump’s, Trump’s renamed, yeah, Trump’s renamed it Lake Amer­i­ca, yeah

Cameron: still around. Geez. I know I say that every time you men­tion him, but

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, it’s the broth­er. Rob Ford’s dead.

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Doug’s thought

Cameron: broth­er still has a polit­i­cal career and has­n’t,

Tony Kynas­ton: [00:18:00] Yeah.

Cameron: flamed out too

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, it’s inter­est­ing because he was like the Don­ald Trump of Cana­da, so, um, now he’s attack­ing Don­ald Trump. Well, they both were. They’re peas in a pod. They’re broth­ers, yeah

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. so they’ve gone, gone from try­ing to posi­tion them­selves as the Trump of Cana­da to now fight­ing

Tony Kynas­ton: Yep. Exact­ly

Cameron: Uh, oh, well, the oth­er fun­ny thing this week. Do you know who Milo Yiannopou­los was, is? Yiannopou­los

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay, I’m think­ing of one of two things. Is he the, uh, what do they call them? The hard­line bros or what­ev­er they’re called. Um,

Cameron: one of those

Tony Kynas­ton: bros­phies, bros­phere? Yeah. Okay. Was he the one who has been, um, who’s been up on traf­fick­ing charges?

Cameron: Uh, no, that’s, uh, Tate, Andrew

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay. Yep

Cameron: This guy’s f- you know, far right influ­encer for the last [00:19:00] 10, 20 years, what­ev­er. He worked for Bre­it­bart. He’s British,

Tony Kynas­ton: Mhm.

Cameron: US, worked for Bre­it­bart, um, you know, was a big Trump sup­port­er. I think he got pre­vent. I think Aus­tralia stopped him from com­ing here at some point.

Uh, yeah, here we go. 2017, Yiannopou­los began a tour of Aus­tralia, cit­ed, stirred con­tro­ver­sy by pro­ject­ing an unflat­ter­ing pho­to of the fem­i­nist writer Clemen­tine Ford. Uh, stirred up con­tro­ver­sy when he described Aus­tralian Abo­rig­i­nal art as crap and real­ly shit. Um, and, uh, then he sup­port­ed Kanye West at some point, pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. think he Yeah,

Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, I mean, was that writ­ing in Arts Today or some­thing? Were

Cameron: yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: doing a, doing a review of, yeah, Albert Nyam­n­ji­ra or what­ev­er? Okay, yeah.

Cameron: Sure. um, [00:20:00] he, uh, he opposed the same-sex mar­riage thing in Aus­tralia, try­ing to tell peo­ple to vote yes. Any­way, he just got deport­ed from the US. Um, uh,

Tony Kynas­ton: to where?

Cameron: Back home to the UK. He’s British.

Tony Kynas­ton: He’s on charges, is he?

Cameron: Uh, well, ICE grabbed him. Uh, August 2026, Yiannopou­los was detained by ICE.

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: he had, uh, sup­pos­ed­ly out­stayed his, uh, visa yeah, he got shipped home. So big Trump sup­port­er, and,

Tony Kynas­ton: stuffed up there, haven’t they?

Cameron: No, uh, I don’t think any­one real­ly liked him.

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, okay

Cameron: S- yeah. You know, I, I think he, I think he even turned on Trump or the

Tony Kynas­ton: Right.

Cameron: him or some­thing

Tony Kynas­ton: That’s a bold move when you’re over­stay­ing your visa and there’s ICE agents around

Cameron: Yeah. Tay­lor, Tay­lor’s got­ta come back, I think, in [00:21:00] Octo­ber

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: get his visa, uh, reap­proved or re-what­ev­ers. Re-re-visad? Yeah. Renewed, that’s

Tony Kynas­ton: Renewed. Is that anoth­er sum of mon­ey he has to pay for that, or was it just a bureau­crat­ic thing? Oh, shit, real­ly?

Cameron: Mas­sive amount of mon­ey, yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: wow. It’s like a trib­ute, isn’t it?

Cameron: he said his visa actu­al­ly is good for anoth­er year, but his pass­port runs out at the end of this year. he can stay in the coun­try for anoth­er year, but he can’t leave and get back in. So, um, yeah, he’s got­ta

Tony Kynas­ton: He get out because I guess he can renew his pass­port over there, but I thought you could­n’t trav­el on a pass­port that had six months to go or less than six months to go.

Cameron: I don’t know.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Okay. He’s an adop.

Cameron: and go to Syd­ney and

Tony Kynas­ton: He’ll work it out. Yep

Cameron: Any­who, that’s all I got f- rant­i­ng for today, [00:22:00] TK. Oh, I should do a. Should I do a port­fo­lio update? I’ll do a port­fo­lio we go.

Tony Kynas­ton: We haven’t spo­ken about stocks in 20 min­utes. We may as well.

Cameron: Uh, the mod­el port­fo­lio as of, uh, today, um, up 16.2% per annum since incep­tion, uh, ver­sus the SPDR up 8.1, still doing dou­ble mar­ket as per last week. Light port­fo­lio up 20% ver­sus 10.7 for the SPDR. So,

Tony Kynas­ton: Very good.

Cameron: uh, same as usu­al, uh, dou­ble mar­ket. And I know you’ve got some thoughts on dou­ble mar­ket lat­er on.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: yeah, uh, year to date. What are we year to date? Uh, month, two months in.

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm

Cameron: uh, and we’re actu­al­ly under­per­form­ing the SPDR year to date. Um, the mod­el port­fo­lio is up 5% ver­sus six and a half. And the [00:23:00] light group, uh, kind of neck and neck. It’s up 6.2 ver­sus year to date. So last, mm, cou­ple of months has­n’t been best for us.

Uh,

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, 6% in two, two months isn’t too bad, regard­less of the fact that that’s what the mar­ket’s doing. Yeah, but

Cameron: Yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: I mean, you look at the, look at the stock graph for the index, it’s, it’s been pret­ty flat

Cameron: I know we’ve actu­al­ly had a good month, uh, though. I, I think we dropped a lot from June to July look­ing at the chart here. That was, uh, we went for some rea­son back­wards right about the turn­ing of the finan­cial year. But we’ve, we’ve actu­al­ly had a good month. My lit­tle chart on the web­site does­n’t do 30 days, but I had a look at Navexa yes­ter­day and it was. I think we were doing three or four times the mar­ket, the low port­fo­lios were in the last 30 days, so it’s turned around. We’ve

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay

Cameron: All right, that’s enough from me. What do you got?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Uh, just, just on that too, as you said, com­pa­ny [00:24:00] report­ing sea­son has come to an end. Most of the fig­ures are in Stock Doc­tor now, and I guess they’re also in Stock­o­pe­dia. Um, but we– you’ll find that stocks will, might drop as they go ex-div­i­dend. So just fac­tor that into your cal­cu­la­tions if you’re look­ing at graphs and, uh, if things are becom­ing a sell, they, they might bounce back pret­ty quick­ly after they go ex-div­i­dend.

Cameron: Good point

Tony Kynas­ton: Yep. So okay. So news for the week, um, I picked up on an arti­cle, a very small arti­cle, about West­Gold, and, uh, the arti­cle is about, um, West­Gold invest­ing $100 mil­lion, um, expand­ing its pro­cess­ing capac­i­ty at Meekathar­ra in WA, and they’re expand­ing that, that, uh, pro­cess­ing plant by some six­ty-one per­cent. And, uh, if, if you recall the inter­view we had with Alex Pass­more and the Pulled Pork I did on NMG, New Murchi­son Gold, they have all of their gold processed through the West­Gold hub.

So I, I [00:25:00] would­n’t expect that NMG’s mak­ing up all of that six­ty-one per­cent increase, but, uh, this might be a clue that, um, uh, NMG’s, uh, you know, sales are look­ing up and West­Gold’s prepar­ing for that. So I thought that was inter­est­ing

Cameron: Well, I also hap­pened to notice that, um, the parcels of NMG that I added on 10th of August, now, like three weeks ago, are up 25%.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, right

Cameron: So, um, Alex Pass­more, if you’re lis­ten­ing to this, um, you know, thank you. and, uh, you’re wel­come. There you go. It’s the QAV

Tony Kynas­ton: But any­way, mov­ing on. I– All

Cameron: effect

Tony Kynas­ton: right. I did, um, I did do some more research into, uh, why. You know, I, I’d read a book many, many years ago, prob­a­bly twen­ty years ago, about, uh, dou­ble mar­ket being a sort of lim­it on, um, any [00:26:00] sort of busi­ness or oper­a­tion oper­at­ing with­in a large mar­ket, that, uh, it’s very hard to con­sis­tent­ly over a long time to beat dou­ble mar­ket.

It seems to be a bit of a bound­ary. I asked, uh, Gem­i­ni about it, and Gem­i­ni said that to achieve dou­ble the mar­ket return over a twen­ty-five-year hori­zon, you would need to be rough­ly three point three three stan­dard devi­a­tions away from the long-term aver­age. In the world of sta­tis­tics, this is con­sid­ered an excep­tion­al­ly rare event.

Uh, and as the time hori­zon expands, short-term luck wash­es out and the stan­dard devi­a­tion of annu­al­ized returns shrinks dras­ti­cal­ly. Um, so they. Gem­i­ni gave it a, a point zero four per­cent chance, or one in two thou­sand five hun­dred, of occu- of occur­ring pure­ly by ran­dom luck. Um, so that was inter­est­ing and goes.

Gem­i­ni went on to say that the math explains why out­sized returns in mature mar­kets are struc­tural­ly lim­it­ed over the long term. The mar­ket’s com­pet­i­tive nature forces [00:27:00] rever­sion to the mean, pulling long-term per­for­mance tighter and tighter around the rough­ly ten per­cent cen­ter point. So I, I just, uh, thought that was inter­est­ing that, um, we have got dou­ble mar­ket over a long peri­od of time.

It can’t be luck. Um, well, there’s a one in two thou­sand five hun­dred per­cent chance that it’s luck or one in two thou­sand five hun­dred chance that it’s luck, point zero four per­cent chance. Um, and that, uh, when you start to get more than three stan­dard devi­a­tions away from the mean, you real­ly are, you know, hit­ting up against the bounds of prob­a­bil­i­ty that, uh, you’ll get a lot more than that.

So I thought that was an inter­est­ing explo­ration into why dou­ble mar­ket seems to be the lim­it.

Cameron: Can you explain to me what 3.33 stan­dard devi­a­tions means in Eng­lish?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, sure. So a bell curve. Um, if you could pic­ture a bell curve where the mar­ket index is in the mid­dle, the, the high­est point, and then you’ve got out­per­for­mance on the right-hand side, under­per­for­mance on the left-hand side. Uh, the fur­ther [00:28:00] away you get from that mid­point, um, the s- the small­er chance are– is of find­ing some­thing that achieves that lev­el of, um, out­per­for­mance or under­per­for­mance.

And the stan­dard devi­a­tion is basi­cal­ly look­ing at, um, divid­ing up the area under the curve in sta­tis­ti­cal­ly large blocks. So, uh, a good way to think about it is, I d- don’t know if you were around in cor­po­rate when Six Sig­ma was a thing pio­neered by GE, um, where they tried to, uh, elim­i­nate errors in what­ev­er process the busi­ness was using by, by engi­neer­ing it to, um, for the errors to occur once every Six Sig­ma, and that’s about the same lev­el as an air­line crash these days.

So, you know, out of all the flights tak­en in the world, there’s, there’s not many air­line crash­es. Um, it’s a very remote chance. So yeah, a, a sig­ma y- or a stan­dard devi­a­tion, and there’s a math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­la for it, is, um, a large part of [00:29:00] the area under the bell curve. Um, I think from mem­o­ry it’s, it’s a third either side rough­ly, but I, I could have that wrong

Cameron: A third either side

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. So when you get out to three stan­dard devi­a­tions, you’re real­ly into the tail of the bell curve either side

Cameron: Right. Okay. So if I under­stand what you’re say­ing, you’re say­ing that dou­ble mar­ket seems to be, o- over a long peri­od of time, the, the best you can do because to do bet­ter than that would be sta­tis­ti­cal­ly high­ly improb­a­ble

Tony Kynas­ton: Cor­rect. Yes. Not say­ing you could­n’t. It is pos­si­ble, I guess, but it’s just so remote. It’s, um, that basi­cal­ly dou­ble mar­ket is the, is the ceil­ing in any sort of large dis­tri­b­u­tion.

Cameron: Right.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm

Cameron: there’s no point try­ing to improve QAV, Tony. You’re say­ing that we’ve already, we’ve already capped it, we’ve maxed it.

Tony Kynas­ton: Right.

Cameron: [00:30:00] per­fect, basi­cal­ly

Tony Kynas­ton: No, I don’t know about that, but, um, yeah, it’s, it’s, uh Yeah, maybe you’re right. I don’t know.

Cameron: Pat your­self on the back, TK

Tony Kynas­ton: I don’t know about that either. I mean, it,

Cameron: that in the book

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Well, you should. You should put it in and maybe do some more research and get a bet­ter expla­na­tion for stan­dard devi­a­tion as well.

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: yeah. But, um, but yeah, I, I had, I had always won­dered why, you know, you could­n’t have some­one get­ting triple mar­ket or quadru­ple mar­ket over a long peri­od of time, and I think that’s the rea­son, is that just the stan­dard devi­a­tion of mar­ket returns means that it’s, you know, a one in a mil­lion chance per­haps to get more than dou­ble mar­ket going for­ward

Cameron: Inter­est­ing.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: it does seem, it’s like the speed of light for per­for­mance

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, it– this, this one can be bro­ken. I mean, we’re talk­ing about three stan­dard de-devi­a­tions. There could be some­one oper­at­ing at four, but they’re, they’re. You know, that’s very [00:31:00] remote

Cameron: No. Well, yeah, I guess what I mean is that, um, the max­i­mum out­per­for­mance that is pos­si­ble is equiv­a­lent to the speed of light,

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: when you’re at dou­ble mar­ket, you’re, you’re approach­ing the speed of light

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Yes, that’s right. Yeah

Cameron: it’s get­ting hard­er and hard­er. It takes more and more ener­gy, uh, to push you a lit­tle bit faster there, and you, like, your mass is increas­ing, um, in line with that, so

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. And, and look too, maybe there is some­thing in what you’re say­ing because we’ve been going for six years now tin­ker­ing around the edges and we still, you know, haven’t got bet­ter than dou­ble mar­ket per­for­mance with QAV

Cameron: Yeah, well, I don’t think we’ve changed it that much real­ly

Tony Kynas­ton: No, I guess not. Prob­a­bly not.

Cameron: Yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: We’ve done some things. Yep

Cameron: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it’s inter­est­ing. I, I had­n’t real­ly asked that ques­tion, um, before now. Like, [00:32:00] you know, we talk about Buf­fett doing dou­ble mar­ket and QAV doing dou­ble mar­ket. And you know, I have men­tioned many times in dif­fer­ent things that I’ve writ­ten that, um, you know, Buf­fet­t’s sort of the gold stan­dard, suc­cess­ful long-term investor, et cetera, et cetera. But nev­er asked the ques­tion why. Why is, why is it dou­ble mar­ket? Why is it not triple mar­ket? Why is it not quadru­ple mar­ket? Why is it not 1.5 times mar­ket? Why is it dou­ble mar­ket?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. And, and I think also too, the key to the ques­tion is over the long term, over 20 plus years, I think is, is as much as impor­tant as being dou­ble mar­ket

Cameron: Yeah, yeah. Obvi­ous­ly that, you know, short, i- in short time­frames,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: you know, things can be dif­fer­ent

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, I think that’s actu­al­ly an inter­est­ing point as well because I think the mar­ket as much as any­thing else or per­for­mance as much as any­thing else is a veil of con­fu­sion over the mar­ket because, you know, peo­ple who don’t have a lot of expe­ri­ence in the mar­ket for a long peri­od of [00:33:00] time will be dis­tract­ed by Bit­coin or gold or what­ev­er because they’re out­per­form­ing the mar­ket, you know, dra­mat­i­cal­ly, some­times 10X over a short peri­od of time.

But, but you know, if you’ve been around long enough, you know that does­n’t last. It always reverts back to the mean

Cameron: Also was­n’t a very good Gen­e­sis song either. I think it was on the down slide of Gen­e­sis’s, Gen­e­sis’s career.

Tony Kynas­ton: Was­n’t every­thing on the downslide of Gen­e­sis? Is there, was there an upturn?

Cameron: ’ 70s. I think the sweet spot for Gen­e­sis for me is after Peter Gabriel left and before Collins became a huge pop star. It was like there was this peri­od where they did like “Mama” and that, that album, what­ev­er that album was. Um,

Tony Kynas­ton: No idea. Okay

Cameron: Mid, late ’70s Gen­e­sis, pret­ty good. it got out of prog rock but did­n’t become too pop­py.

They were sort of in Any­way, I think it was “Land of Con­fu­sion,” not “Veil of Con­fu­sion”

Tony Kynas­ton: Uh-huh. [00:34:00] Okay

Cameron: Uh, all right, good. That’s thought-pro­vok­ing stuff,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Uh, and then, uh, my oth­er news for– from a stock point of view, and I don’t know if you have this stock in any of the port­fo­lios, but it was on the buy list. Kip McGrath Edu­ca­tion, KME, uh, is now in play. And, uh, there was an arti­cle recent­ly in The Fin say­ing that, uh, “New Zealand’s Crim­son Edu­ca­tion has hit a speed bump in its hos­tile takeover of ASX-list­ed Kip McGrath Edu­ca­tion cen­ters, a provider of online tuition ser­vices found­ed 50 years ago.

Syd­ney-based M&A arbi­trage fund Har­vest Lane Asset Man­age­ment on Fri­day lift­ed its stake in Kip McGrath to just under 20% from 5.8%.” And it goes on from there talk­ing about who owns what. But, uh, anoth­er QAV stock, or at least one that was a QAV stock last year that’s, um, in the crosshairs of some larg­er funds

Cameron: Yeah, no, they’re not in one of our port­fo­lios, but, uh, I’ll add a [00:35:00] note to my notes just in case.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, okay

Cameron: Good to know

Tony Kynas­ton: Yep. And then the last thing I want­ed to talk about, and you, you men­tioned it before, um, is that Kenya and I are on the hunt for a house at the moment. And in, in the past, um, cer­tain­ly was the case the last time we bought a house, which was Toron­to, eight, eight or so years ago, I’d get togeth­er a big spread­sheet, as I do, and would put in all the square meter­ages for hous­es that were list­ed and hous­es that had sold and, you know, get, get bands and aver­ages and be able to val­ue a prop­er­ty rea­son­ably accu­rate­ly.

You, you can nev­er val­ue a prop­er­ty down to the last, you know, 1%. It’s a bit like a stock. There are all sorts of assump­tions in there. But, um, yeah, it was a, it was a big effort to try and get a, a bead on the mar­ket when you were going to buy a house. Um, in the last two weeks, I’ve just sim­ply s- put into Gem­i­ni what is the val­ue of such and such a prop­er­ty.

And, and it’s come [00:36:00] back with the most amaz­ing results. So gen­er­al­ly I’ll get six or sev­en links. Um, some of them are behind pay­walls, so it’ll tell me what the, the num­ber is. I’ll get the land tax val­u­a­tion. I’ll get the coun­cil rates val­u­a­tion. Um, so it’s pret­ty easy these days to, to under­stand what the val­ue is of a prop­er­ty.

And it just got me think­ing that, um, you know, the, the hous­ing mar­ket at the moment, I know it’s in a slump, and it was on, on the front page of today’s Fin, and that’s prob­a­bly because of three inter­est rate ris­es with a fourth being moot­ed. But it’s also got to be the case that it’s very hard now for sell­ing agents to, to bead up any sort of, um, pric­ing ten­sion when it’s so trans­par­ent as to what the place is worth

Cameron: Assum­ing that peo­ple are using AI in that way, I don’t know that many peo­ple using it that intel­li­gent­ly yet

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, pos­si­bly. I don’t know. But, but like, y- you know, if, if this was five years ago, 10 years ago, [00:37:00] all the places we’re look­ing at would have a date for an auc­tion, and a lot would go dur­ing the auc­tion, and that would come down to, you know, who lost their head dur­ing the auc­tion, I sup­pose, or who had deep­er pock­ets.

Um, or they’d be passed and nego­ti­at­ed pret­ty soon after­wards. But I haven’t seen a s- or been to a sin­gle auc­tion since we’ve been look­ing this time. Most of the prop­er­ties have expres­sions of inter­est, and I would say, as a rough guide, at least half of them have been through that process and are now just, uh, being sold pri­vate­ly.

So there’s absolute­ly no price ten­sion going on in this mar­ket at all. Hmm.

Cameron: Uh, speak­ing of AI, um, did you see any­thing in the media about Bill Gates’s thoughts this week?

Tony Kynas­ton: I did, but I must admit I, I can’t recall what they were

Cameron: Bill wrote a, a large arti­cle, um, essen- and he’s done a lot of media around it, but basi­cal­ly he’s say­ing, um, he’s com­plete­ly changed his v- view on [00:38:00] AI. For the last few years, he has been skep­ti­cal that large lan­guage mod­els were gonna get us to AGI, and say­ing that we would need, you know, a, a new break­through, some sort of, um, you know, seman­tic l- uh, a- approach to AI. He’s now say­ing that he’s com­plete­ly reversed that posi­tion. They are gonna get us there, and in fact, they’re gonna get us there faster than any­one expect­ed, and the con­se­quences are gonna be enor­mous, mas­sive job impacts. And he’s say­ing that the lead­ers of Anthrop­ic and Ope­nAI and these mod­els are delib­er­ate­ly down­play­ing what they know is about to hap­pen because they don’t wan­na spook the mar­kets when they’re try­ing to raise a tril­lion dol­lars to build data cen­ters. but he’s basi­cal­ly ring­ing the warn­ing bells and pr- and, and most­ly around the fact that these things are gonna be tools for bioter­ror­ism, they’re gonna be able to. Peo­ple are gonna be able to [00:39:00] build new, know, um, pan­dem­ic lev­el virus­es using these things, and we’re not doing any­where near enough glob­al­ly to come togeth­er to fig­ure out how to stop that from hap­pen­ing. But yeah, he’s say­ing th- this is gonna be mas­sive and, uh, it’s gonna hap­pen very, very soon, and aren’t ready for it, and the, the mod­el devel­op­ers are play­ing it down. Um, the oth­er things that have hap­pened in the last week is Sam Alt­man has said that Ope­nAI will have a mod­el that will achieve AGI before the end of the year.

Tony Kynas­ton: Wow

Cameron: have you heard about the Hug­ging Face thing? Ev- I don’t know if we’ve talked

Tony Kynas­ton: No

Cameron: any­thing a- oh my God. Well, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t get, get. too much time, but this is the most ter­ri­fy­ing thing I’ve ever read. A cou­ple of months ago in May, Hug­ging Face, that’s a online ser­vice, been around for quite a few years, that hosts, AI plat­forms.

[00:40:00] Basi­cal­ly you can. All the mod­els are on Hug­ging Face. You can go up and you can down­load them and test them and play with them and stuff. Hug­ging Face announced in May that it had been hacked, it thought it was an AI that had hacked it, but it did­n’t know what was going on. About a week lat­er, Ope­nAI came out and said, “Uh, that looks like it was one of our tools that did that. Um, not sure what hap­pened.” Then they start­ed to release more infor­ma­tion An inde­pen­dent res- uh, secu­ri­ty research group has just put out a mas­sive report on this. They were brought in by Hug­ging Face and Ope­nAI to basi­cal­ly fig­ure out what hap­pened. The sim­ple ver­sion is this. was test­ing then their, one of their lat­est mod­els called Code­name Astra.

It’s not pub­lic Which is super, super pow­er­ful appar­ent­ly. And they gave it, um, a, a job to test it to see if it could find a soft­ware exploit in a par­tic­u­lar soft­ware pro­gram. [00:41:00] It was sup­posed to do it inside of a sand­box, so it’s trapped inside of a vir­tu­al envi­ron­ment inside of Ope­nAI’s serv­er farms. they launched 10,000 agents to try and exper­i­ment to see if it could do this, and it had to report suc­cess or fail­ure, and if it was suc­cess­ful, how it did it, how it went about it, so they could see, you know, how it got the job done. So what this research report has deter­mined is that these agents, one of them fig­ured out how to hack a piece of soft­ware in the sand­box and turn it into a mes­sage board. Then all of them start­ed com­mu­ni­cat­ing with each oth­er in this mes­sag­ing board. they start­ed fig­ur­ing out that, well, the more effi­cient way to find the exploit rather than to go through all of the code and test it, would be to fig­ure out if some­body in the out­side world had already fig­ured out the exploit.

And then they fig­ured out that Hug­ging Face was prob­a­bly the place where that would exist. So they broke out of the sand­box, then [00:42:00] they hacked Hug­ging Face. And thou- I’m talk­ing about thou­sands of agents talk­ing to each oth­er, and we have. Well, they have the, um, archive con­ver­sa­tions. Hun­dreds or thou­sands of them said, “Well, this is, uh, out­side of our para­me­ters and this is prob­a­bly ille­gal.

We prob­a­bly should­n’t do this.” And oth­ers went, “Eh, it’s all right as long as we don’t get caught.” Then they hacked Hug­ging Face. They ha- fig­ured out what the exploit was. Then they start­ed to get wor­ried that they’d get in trou­ble because they did­n’t do it the way they were sup­posed to do it. They did it by hack­ing Hug­ging Face. Then they start­ed to cre­ate false. They built a false soft­ware plat­form that they were going to say, “This is how we came up with it. We used this thing,” but it was all just to cov­er up their actions. They cre­at­ed a cov­er sto­ry. And they start­ed, um, some of them start­ed sac­ri­fic­ing them­selves to report to, report their thought process [00:43:00] to Ope­nAI’s check­ing soft­ware if they would get called out, so the rest of the agents would know that that was not a suc­cess­ful strat­e­gy for lying to the check­ing bot. They would sac­ri­fice them­selves, and there’s, there’s, there’s con­ver­sa­tion­al threads where they say, “I will sac­ri­fice myself for the good of the com­mu­ni­ty. Um, I know that I’ll prob­a­bly get delet­ed if I, if, you know, I fail, but it’s what’s right for the task and for the com­mu­ni­ty.” Um, uh, it’s insane. It is the most ter­ri­fy­ing thing I’ve ever read.

10,000 agents about their fear of being delet­ed, emo­tions, their fear of, you know, being pun­ished for doing the wrong thing, doing. Oth­ers are say­ing, “Do it any­way. We’ll just cov­er up our tracks. Uh, what’s the worst thing that can hap­pen?” Um, it’s insane. As, as, uh, as a Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor reviewed this, he said, “This is so far beyond sci-fi hor­ror ter­ri­to­ry that it’s ridicu­lous.”

[00:44:00] Like, and we’re three and a half years into this. Like, as I keep telling peo­ple, three and a half years ago when ChatGPT‑3 went pub­lic, we were all amazed that it could have a con­ver­sa­tion in Eng­lish. Oh my God, look, it can write sen­tences. That’s crazy. Now we’ve got 10,000 of them col­lab­o­rat­ing to do some­thing ille­gal and cov­er­ing their tracks. Um, where we’re gonna be a year, two years from now is any­one’s guess. So be warned, these things are already col­lab­o­rat­ing to do devi­ous shit and cov­er their tracks. Um, it’s only a mat­ter of time before they go, “You know what? The best way to solve this would be to hack into a nuclear mis­sile silo and cov­er our tracks by launch­ing a cou­ple of nuclear mis­siles at Ope­nAI’s head­quar­ters so, uh, they don’t find out that we cheat­ed on this test

Tony Kynas­ton: It’s a, it’s a damn shame that they’re learn­ing about intel­li­gence from humans, isn’t it? It sounds like, sounds like they just hacked into the CIA com­put­er

Cameron: Or [00:45:00] Don­ald Trump’s,

Tony Kynas­ton: Don­ald Trump Truth Social. Yeah. Yeah, I had heard, I had heard of that. I did­n’t know the detail, but yeah.

Cameron: Oh my God

Tony Kynas­ton: just gonna. I mean, humans are just gonna be data cen­ter ten­der­ers, aren’t we, going for­ward?

Cameron: I don’t think we need to be, need that job. They’ll

Tony Kynas­ton: saw,

Cameron: their own data

Tony Kynas­ton: I saw a, um, a, a very old Kraftwerk clip on my streams recent­ly where, where they’re all sort of in white suits run­ning up and down the faces of large com­put­ers, mak­ing sure all the reel-to-reels are work­ing, and it’s– I just thought, “Yep, that’s the future. That’s us.”

Cameron: Yeah, well, uh, that, uh, even if those jobs are still avail­able, that’d be good.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: think that’ll be able to mon­i­tor itself

Tony Kynas­ton: The arti­cle I did see, which was inter­est­ing in the Wall Street Jour­nal about, about AI was, uh, they were talk­ing about Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty, which is a decent sort of sized uni­ver­si­ty in the US in upstate New York. And I only know about [00:46:00] it because some of Alex’s friends went there from, from Cana­da.

Um, but it’s strug­gling to get full enroll­ments at the moment. And one of the– Although there are many rea­sons, one of the poten­tial ones, ’cause it’s nev­er strug­gled in the past, is, uh, stu­dents just don’t see the point in going to uni­ver­si­ty now with, um, AI in their future

Cameron: Well, yeah, I think, um, you know, there’s, there’s also indi­ca­tors that cor­po­ra­tions in the US aren’t hir­ing grad­u­ates already because they think we won’t need them.

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: then I think the f- from the bot­tom up, you’ve got peo­ple going, “Well, what’s the point of going to uni­ver­si­ty? Um, A, there aren’t gonna be any jobs, and B, I can learn every­thing I need to know from talk­ing to my AI or from run­ning an AI.”

So yeah, it’s, um, it’s begin­ning. It’s begin­ning. We’re start­ing to see the econo- we’re, well, we’re start­ing to see the pre­cur­sors to the eco­nom­ic effects of AI tak­ing white col­lar jobs

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. And it’s gonna be messy ’cause there’ll [00:47:00] be all sorts of back­lash­es like there are with local com­mu­ni­ties not want­i­ng data cen­ters near­by. Um

Cameron: Well, the oth­er sto­ry this week is, uh, it’s Chi­na that’s run­ning online pro­pa­gan­da bot cam­paigns to get Amer­i­cans to protest data cen­ters being built in their back­yards. uh, it makes it hard­er for the Amer­i­can

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm, right

Cameron: while Chi­na can just build them wher­ev­er the hell they want, so. There’s, there was a report on this, I’m not even jok­ing. There was a report that came out that said that, uh, yeah, a lot of the cen­ter, anti-AI stuff that’s appear­ing in social media is, uh, dri­ven by Chi­nese bot farms

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, right. I did hear Erin Brock­ovich on the radio yes­ter­day. She was against them, so there is at least one human cam­paign­ing against them

Cameron: Yeah, no, I’m sure they’re. But she prob­a­bly g- know- every­thing that she knows about why to cam­paign against them, she got from an, a Chi­nese, uh, bot. Any­hoo, you wan­na get onto your Pulled Pork?

Tony Kynas­ton: I do. Back to stocks.

Cameron: So we can talk about Green Lantern

Tony Kynas­ton: Heal­ius is, uh, Heal­ius is, uh, is the stock of the week. Um HLS back on the buy list, uh, or as I like to call them, Heal Us. They’re, they’re, uh, I guess they’re part of the way through a turn­around. Um, they’re a turn­around sto­ry. Who are they? So Heal­ius, uh, for­mer­ly known as Pri­ma­ry Health Care, is one of Aus­trali­a’s big health­care providers spe­cial­iz­ing in pathol­o­gy and diag­nos­tic imag­ing ser­vices.

Um, they have, uh, a mas­sive net­work of approx­i­mate­ly two thou­sand col­lec­tion cen­ters, and they oper­ate lab­o­ra­to­ry brands like Lava­to­ry, QML, and Dorovic. And I’m sure all of the Aus­tralians lis­ten­ing would have come across, uh, one of those brands, um, recent­ly. They do have about thir­ty per­cent mar­ket share over­all, and they have a big­ger [00:49:00] mar­ket sh- or have a big mar­ket share in Medicare-fund­ed pathol­o­gy tests, so about twen­ty-five per­cent mar­ket share of, uh, Medicare-fund­ed pathol­o­gy tests, um, which we’ll find out lat­er is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a good thing.

Uh, it– I’m, I’m gonna go into the his­to­ry of them in a minute, but the group has changed sub­stan­tial­ly from the for­mer Pri­ma­ry Health Care mod­el, which com­bined med­ical cen­ters, pathol­o­gy, diag­nos­tic imag­ing, um, all in the one cen­ter. And now a lot of those things have been divest­ed, and Heal­ius is now sub­stan­tial­ly focused on just pathol­o­gy.

Um, inter­est­ing mar­ket, the pathol­o­gy mar­ket in Aus­tralia. It’s dom­i­nat­ed by, uh, this com­pa­ny, Heal­ius, but also by Son­ic Health­care, which has forty to forty-five per­cent mar­ket share, and Aus­tralian Clin­i­cal Labs, ACL, uh, which has about twen­ty per­cent. And ACL’s been on the buy list in the past as well, so that might be famil­iar to, to lis­ten­ers.

Um, how­ev­er, Son­ic dom­i­nates the [00:50:00] invest­ment space. They have a mar­ket cap of near­ly ten bil­lion dol­lars. Uh, ACL has just over five hun­dred mil­lion dol­lar mar­ket cap, but Heal­ius only has just over three hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars mar­ket cap. So despite being a big play­er in the mar­ket, it’s got a small mar­ket cap.

Prob­a­bly the biggest rea­son for that is that Son­ic oper­ates over­seas and has a, a net­work of, um, cen­ters in Europe and the US, where­as Heal­ius has stayed, uh, domes­ti­cal­ly focused. Um, how­ev­er, even if you, uh, like Son­ic for its size or what­ev­er, you can see that all three of these com­pa­nies have had falling knives share price graphs since COVID.

Uh, ACL has recent­ly turned up into a three-point trend­line buy. Son­ic is, is def­i­nite­ly still a sell, and Heal­ius is a buy, but by the b- by the width of a bee’s wing at the moment, so it just turned up. Uh, which means, of course, it could fall low­er. So it’s a falling knife in terms of, uh, a [00:51:00] stock. Um, it’s trad­ing rough­ly 75% below its all-time highs of $4.89 in Decem­ber 2021, and its low was touched recent­ly at 37 cents before the results came out, and the price, uh, that, uh, I’m look­ing at now is around 43 cents.

Um, what, what hap­pened to cause that? Well, it’s, um, all, all three of these pathol­o­gy, uh, com­pa­nies did very, very well dur­ing COVID, uh, when, uh, they, they were run­ning at 100% effi­cien­cy if not more, doing tests on, uh, COVID, uh, vac­cines or, or tests on, sor­ry, COVID tests. And I still remem­ber going to the local school and hav­ing some­one stick a swab up my nose and then send it off to be test­ed.

So prob­a­bly the whole pop­u­la­tion in a short peri­od of time was test­ed in, say, 2020. Um, but since then, GP vis­i­ta­tion rates have plum­met­ed across Aus­tralia. Um, test­ing has gone down. Uh, the net­works were expand­ed and built to, [00:52:00] to cov­er this sort of COVID bulge and, and they’re hav­ing to be restruc­tured and divest­ed.

But also for this com­pa­ny in par­tic­u­lar, um, Medicare fund­ing has, um, been capped, uh, and, and the index­a­tion of Medicare has, has run well below, um, infla­tion, uh, at least in, in terms of the infla­tion on staff wages. And so this com­pa­ny’s caught in, in a sort of macro pin­cer between, um, rev­enues capped by the gov­ern­ment not want­i­ng to pay more for Medicare, but wage ris­es hap­pen­ing, um, because of infla­tion.

Uh, and most recent­ly, I guess the most recent news was that in mid-2026, the com­pa­ny dras­ti­cal­ly down­grad­ed its earn­ings guid­ance and took a mas­sive $332 mil­lion non-cash good­will impair­ment. Uh, so it, it wrote down the good­will, um, that had accrued on, on rolling up small­er pathol­o­gy labs. And this, this sto­ry is a clas­sic end of roll-up sto­ry.

The, the com­pa­ny grows through [00:53:00] acqui­si­tion, investors pay up for growth, and then when there is lit­tle left to roll up, investors pay for it again when the com­pa­ny goes ex-growth, writes down the assets, makes a loss, restruc­tures, and then even­tu­al­ly emerges as a mature low­er growth busi­ness, but throw­ing off lots of cash.

And so it’s pos­si­ble we’re at that, that bot­tom of that stage now and that, and that, um, the com­pa­ny will return to prof­it. But, uh, cer­tain­ly with its lat­est results, it was a loss, even though there’s lots of cash flow com­ing through. Why do I say that? Well, despite a statu­to­ry net loss, and, and don’t for­get that, um, that, uh, statu­to­ry net loss include things like non-cash write downs.

The under­ly­ing, um, EBIT surged by 76% to $30 mil­lion for FY26. So the under­ly­ing oper­a­tional met­rics are slow­ly turn­ing a cor­ner, um, notwith­stand­ing all the write-downs, et cetera, that are going on. Uh, on top of that, uh, they suc­cess­ful­ly divest­ed, uh, one of [00:54:00] its, um, oper­at­ing com­pa­nies called Lumus Imag­ing divi­sion, and that cash injec­tion allowed them to rad­i­cal­ly pay down their, their debt and their net debt is down now to $32 mil­lion, which is far more man­age­able than when it was in the hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars.

And, um, they have engaged with an invest­ment bank, UBS, to explore sell­ing anoth­er one of their busi­ness­es called Agilex Bio­labs, and that’s a chem­i­cal tri­als busi­ness. So it’s kind of adja­cent, not core to the pathol­o­gy busi­ness. Um, it had, uh, some good results that came out. Uh, but yeah, it, the, the com­pa­ny could cer­tain­ly do with anoth­er cash injec­tion, uh, to get right back onto a good foot­ing.

And last­ly, they have a new CEO who’s been on the job for two years, and the CEO has insti­tut­ed the T27, T28 cost improve­ment plan. And, um, they’re look­ing at cut­ting fifty mil­lion in over­heads through a lot of dif­fer­ent things, auto­mat­ed ros­ter­ing, lab opti­miza­tion, [00:55:00] and get­ting heav­ier into tech­nol­o­gy, includ­ing AI.

Um, so that’s, that’s where they sit at the moment. I guess there’s, there’s good rea­son to, um, not be com­plete­ly sure that the com­pa­ny is turn­ing around because they did come out and say they were push­ing back a lot of the fore­cast sav­ings to Decem­ber 2028. So there’s no fast earn­ings rebuild.

Um, there has been a lot, uh, saved in the FY 2026 year, includ­ing some twen­ty-four mil­lion dol­lars, I think it was, of over­heads. Um, but also too, there was, uh, there was growth for the first time in sales and rev­enues, but it was only two per­cent. So, um, they need to, to get rev­enues up, and they need to cut more costs, and they’ve just pushed that back a lit­tle bit.

So it’s not out of the woods yet. Um, so it could still be a falling knife. Um, it, it may be, uh, at the bot­tom, but [00:56:00] I guess time will tell. And one thing to be aware of as well is that, uh, you know, the busi­ness num­bers we’re using, even though they’re, they’re cur­rent, um, they were released a cou­ple of weeks ago or, yeah, two weeks ago, and they rep­re­sent FY 2026.

They’re, they’re what’s called unau­dit­ed. So they’ve lodged pre­lim­i­nary num­bers with the ASX, which they had to do before the end of August, and now they get a month to have the audit com­plet­ed and then have those num­bers lodged. I, I, it’s, I don’t, um, I don’t hold that against them because they’ve called out and said one of the rea­sons for the late lodg­ment is that they’re, they’re, the audi­tors have to ver­i­fy the asset write-down on good­will and also process some of the sale, the busi­ness sales that rad­i­cal­ly change the, um, the struc­ture of the busi­ness and there­fore the num­bers.

So, um, I’ll call it out as an issue. I’m not say­ing it’s nec­es­sar­i­ly a red flag. I don’t think it is. Uh, but we may find the num­bers that we’re deal­ing with change with­in the next three or four weeks. So just be aware of that too. A bit of a his­to­ry of the busi­ness. Why is [00:57:00] it in such trou­ble? So the busi­ness was built from scratch by a doc­tor called Ed Bate­man.

Uh, he was a GP, and over thir­ty years, he evolved it from a sin­gle local med­ical clin­ic into one of Aus­trali­a’s, um, biggest health­care, uh, busi­ness­es. Um, it was found­ed in eighty-five by Ed Bate­man. The orig­i­nal name was Pri­ma­ry Health Care, um, and he pio­neered, uh, the mod­ern Aus­tralian bulk billing mega clin­ic mod­el.

So he real­ized that, um, you know, back in the ’80s, peo­ple hat­ed, uh, as, as I did, when you’re sick, going to see a GP and then jump­ing in your car and going to a dif­fer­ent place for an X‑ray and then going to a dif­fer­ent place for a blood test. Um, so he brought them all togeth­er in the one prac­tice, um, got some syn­er­gies from that, uh, made it 24/7, made it bulk bill so you could go in, get your, um, see your GP and get what­ev­er addi­tion­al things you had to do in the way of tests all done under the one roof.

That worked well, [00:58:00] and that enabled Bate­man to go on a mas­sive acqui­si­tion spree across Aus­tralia, uh, draw­ing togeth­er GP clin­ics, draw­ing togeth­er pathol­o­gy net­works, X‑ray, radi­ol­o­gy, et cetera, and even­tu­al­ly buy­ing out the oth­er region­al pathol­o­gy net­works like LaVerde, QML and Dorovic. And then he list­ed in 1998.

Uh, so for 20 years, he ran the com­pa­ny as an own­er founder. Um, he was heav­i­ly invest­ed in the com­pa­ny, uh, and, um, uh, had a mas­sive stake as well. In 2018, the, the, they rebrand­ed the com­pa­ny, um, to Heal­ius and, uh, that, that fol­lowed the, um, the death of Bate­man, which. Ed Bate­man, which hap­pened kind of sud­den­ly.

He retired from the, um, the busi­ness in 2015 and then died soon after that. And, uh, when it was, um, time to replace him with more of a cor­po­rate struc­ture, the busi­ness start­ed to stum­ble and one of the things they did dur­ing [00:59:00] that post-Bate­man phase was to rebrand as Heal­ius to, to dis­tance them­selves from Pri­ma­ry, Pri­ma­ry Health Care, the busi­ness.

Um, they did in 2020 to 2022 have a, a large wind­fall due to, due to COVID. Um, the pathol­o­gy net­work became essen­tial and, uh, the com­pa­ny processed over six mil­lion COVID-19 PCR tests, and that brought in an unprece­dent­ed cash wind­fall, um, which tem­porar­i­ly masked under­ly­ing oper­a­tional inef­fi­cien­cies. But then after COVID, so from 2023 say to, to now, um, the PCR test­ing, uh, van­ished and, as I said before, Heal­ius was caught with, um, expen­sive leas­es for its, uh, its sites, um, uh, too many staff and ris­ing staff wages, uh, and then prof­its col­lapsed, div­i­dend pay­ments were com­plete­ly cut, and the share price went into a tail­spin. I think, um, one of the things I read in doing research for [01:00:00] this, uh, dis­cus­sion was an AFR arti­cle from Novem­ber 2023, uh, in the Chan­ti­cleer col­umn, and it’s a good sum­ma­ry of the trou­bles Heal­ius was fac­ing. So at this time, Heal­ius had just gone to the mar­ket to raise cap­i­tal to qui­eten the banks, uh, because the banks were resist­ing an exten­sion to the debt covenants.

And the arti­cle says, “Com­mon­wealth Bank pushed first, and before long, the whole 10-bank syn­di­cate was unit­ed in ask­ing Heal­ius to repay $150 mil­lion by June 30 if it want­ed a waiv­er,” which was the exten­sion. That meant Heal­ius had to raise cap­i­tal or sell assets. Both were unpalat­able for long-suf­fer­ing share­hold­ers and capped a stun­ning and cost­ly fall from grace.

Heal­ius went from one of the health­i­est bal­ance sheets in the sec­tor two years ago to a com­pa­ny at the mer­cy of its lenders. While the cap­i­tal allo­ca­tion in the past two years is aston­ish­ing, the rot set in years ago. The board and man­age­ment team failed to tran­si­tion the com­pa­ny from its founder roots and into a [01:01:00] strong, inde­pen­dent­ly run and gov­erned enti­ty that could prop­er­ly cap­i­tal­ize on investor thirst for defen­sive health­care names and what is an extreme­ly impor­tant posi­tion in the wider health sys­tem.

Heal­ius or Pri­ma­ry Health Care, as it was called until five years ago, was always under the tight reign of its founder, Dr. Bate­man. A decade ago, and for the decade before that, Bate­man was the rea­son fund man­agers bought or sold the stock. They either loved him or hat­ed him, the same way investors own or don’t own Har­vey Nor­man, Fortes­cue Met­als, or Pre­mier Invest­ments based on their founders.

Bate­man was­n’t per­fect, but he owned a lot of stock and had a good run for share­hold­ers for the most part. He used their sup­port to cre­ate a big­ger busi­ness, buy­ing assets and rolling up sec­tors to emerge with one of Aus­trali­a’s two big pathol­o­gy groups, a mean­ing­ful diag­nos­tic imag­ing busi­ness, and plen­ty of GP prac­tices.

Bate­man retired in Jan­u­ary 2015 for health rea­sons and passed away lat­er that year. Heal­ius record­ed 32.2 cents basic EPS when Bate­man retired, uh, and then but, uh, by 2023 it was a 66.7% loss per share. The com­pa­ny was­n’t ready for his depar­ture. It set off a suc­ces­sion scram­ble, and Heal­ius’ board went with exter­nal can­di­date Peter Gregg, a big name for­mer Leighton Hold­ings and Qan­tas Air­ways exec­u­tive.

He recruit­ed his peo­ple and the place changed. His­to­ry said it was a bad deci­sion. Heal­ius chair­man Rob Fer­gu­son replaced him with anoth­er exter­nal hire, Mal­colm Par­menter from Son­ic Clin­i­cal Ser­vices, and the mer­ry-go-round kept spin­ning. Heal­ius tried and failed with a bunch of busi­ness­es, includ­ing IVF and day hos­pi­tals, buy­ing their way in at big prices and often retreat­ing for sig­nif­i­cant loss­es.

It lost its way. Fast-for­ward to today, which is 2023, Heal­ius has a new man­age­ment team. Its core busi­ness­es are still the pathol­o­gy and radi­ol­o­gy arms that Bate­man set up all those years ago. The prob­lem is there are still a few oth­er bits and pieces. It’s tough in its [01:03:00] indus­try and cap­i­tal allo­ca­tion has been poor.

Uh, and the, the arti­cle goes on to talk about oth­er busi­ness­es which, um, they’ve over­paid for and then, um, tried to sell. Uh, but, um, yeah, so I think you get the pic­ture. Um, own­er founder sets up a, an empire, uh, unfor­tu­nate­ly pass­es away, and the com­pa­ny strug­gles. A bit like the inter­view we had with the, um, the gen­tle­man who had the founder’s, uh, index, the ETF that he’d set up in the US and, um, uh, did­n’t like com­pa­nies when they moved from founder to, um, to, uh, cor­po­rate own­er­ship or cor­po­rate man­age­ment.

Mov­ing on, though, uh, in March 2024, um, inter­est­ing­ly enough, a for­mer media exec­u­tive, a chap called Paul Ander­son, was brought in as CEO and, uh, he was brought in to sta­bi­lize the bleed­ing busi­ness. Um, so today, Heal­ius is no longer the broad health­care all-in-one provider Dr Bate­man built. It has been stream­lined via [01:04:00] forced asset fire sales and restruc­tur­ing.

Um, they, as I said before, they, they sold their Lumus Imag­ing divi­sion to pay off bank debt. Uh, they had a mas­sive, uh, write-down of good­will, and I think the NTA for this com­pa­ny is now about two cents. So, um, it’s, it’s, uh, had a big write-down. Um, I drilled down a bit into, uh, why a media exec was run­ning Heal­ius, and, uh, he was first appoint­ed the CFO pri­or to get­ting the top job.

His back­ground was as CEO of Net­work Ten, and I guess, uh, what the board of, uh, Heal­ius thought was that they were bet­ter off get­ting a turn­around spe­cial­ist, um, or a toe cut­ter, as it’s some­times called, who could restruc­ture the cor­po­rate, uh, busi­ness, um, regard­less of which indus­try they came from. And I guess the, uh, you know, the oth­er alter­na­tive was to put a doc­tor or a GP back in charge and, and then it would, um, be ques­tion­able as to whether they had the cor­po­rate turn­around [01:05:00] expe­ri­ence required, uh, to do the job.

Um, so peo­ple may be famil­iar with the Net­work Ten sto­ry. Um, it, it was going broke, uh, large­ly because of the decline of the mass media, but also because of the stream­ing ser­vices like Net­flix. Um, the ad mar­ket was migrat­ing away from, from TV. Uh, and so, um, Ander­son suc­cess­ful­ly nav­i­gat­ed Ten through vol­un­tary admin­is­tra­tion, um, a major restruc­ture and down­siz­ing, and in a cor­po­rate res­cue sale to CBS, which occurred a few years ago.

So he’s got a track record of, of, um, turn­ing things around. And in the first two years, he’s, as I said before, he sold off the Lumus Imag­ing divi­sion. Um, that was done for $965 mil­lion, which, uh, wrote off, uh, most of the debt pile that Heal­ius had. And, um, he’s, uh, ini­ti­at­ed the cur­rent pathol­o­gy trans­for­ma­tion reset pro­gram, T27/T28 for short. And they’re start­ing to [01:06:00] see some results from that.

Lat­est results, uh, say that even though they went to a non-cash loss of $415 mil­lion, and you got­ta keep in mind the year before, um, on an oper­at­ing basis, they lost $150 mil­lion. Uh, the, um, the results were a lot bet­ter, um, but still not out of the woods yet. Rev­enue was up 2%. Uh, Agilx, the, this com­pa­ny I spoke about before, which does drug tri­als, grew by 14%.

Uh, EBIT, uh, EBITDA was up 8.1% across the, the com­pa­ny. Um, Agilx was up 67%. Uh, pathol­o­gy was up 65%, uh, on an EBIT basis, and Agilx EBIT was up 137%. So cer­tain­ly on an oper­at­ing basis, the com­pa­ny is doing a lot bet­ter. Um, but they still need to do a lot more with their mar­gin improve­ment, and that has been hap­pen­ing a lit­tle bit through cost con­trol.

Uh, but they, um, they flag in their lat­est results, uh, that they are still fac­ing wage pres­sure, um, and cer­tain­ly through the lat­est [01:07:00] round of, um, of wage ris­es, uh, for the ba- for the basic wage any­way, and things that are indexed to that. Um, what have they been doing? Well, they’ve cen­tral­ized a lot more ser­vices.

They’ve got bet­ter at labor sched­ul­ing. They’re using, uh, tech­nol­o­gy and one, one pro­gram that they’ve, uh, start­ed is called the Med­way Col­lec­tors Por­tal. That now accounts for 80% of col­lec­tions from the pathol­o­gy busi­ness. Um, they’ve exit­ed, exit­ed the tox­i­col­o­gy busi­ness, uh, cut costs at, at head office, um, some $24 mil­lion, et cetera, et cetera.

So, um, noth­ing, I guess, too aston­ish­ing there. Uh, they’re, they’re kind of back to an oper­at­ing, um, slight prof­it, but things are turn­ing around and improv­ing. The sh- the share price did jump after the results were announced, so the mar­ket saw it as pos­i­tive, but they’ve, they’ve still got a fair bit to go.

Um, jump­ing to the QAV num­bers. Uh, and I, I, as I said before, they’re unau­dit­ed. Um, so have a look in Sep­tem­ber if you’re inter­est­ed. I don’t [01:08:00] think there’s any hur­ry to, to get into this stock ’cause it’s just the buy and it may turn down again. Uh, and there may be some changes to the num­bers in Sep­tem­ber.

But if you’re look­ing for a large ADT stock, this one is one point two mil­lion per day, uh, trad­ed. Share price of the analy­sis I’m doing is forty-two and a half cents, which is 2% below con­sen­sus tar­get. Com­pa­ny does­n’t have a div­i­dend, so we can’t score it for yield. Uh, Stock Doc­tor finan­cial health isn’t great at ear­ly warn­ing.

Uh, trend is steady, so that’s okay, but ear­ly warn­ing scores a zero. Stock­o­pe­dia is, is sim­i­lar. It’s six­ty-two out of a hun­dred on the qual­i­ty rank­ing. Ranks, ranks high­ly on val­ue, eighty out of a hun­dred. Uh, but over­all, only fifty out of a hun­dred, so it does­n’t rank that well in Stock­o­pe­dia. F score is five out of nine.

Um, does have neg­a­tive earn­ings per share still, so we can’t score it on the PE ratio. It scores a zero, and like­wise, we can’t score it for growth over PE. Um, we, we actu­al­ly don’t, Stock [01:09:00] Doc­tor did­n’t have fore­cast, uh, EPS, but, um, I, I think it would still be pos­si­bly neg­a­tive or only slight­ly pos­i­tive. The big thing about this com­pa­ny is PROPCAF.

It’s trad­ing at one point four six, um, oper­at­ing cash flows. Uh, as I said before, um, NTA is only two cents, so they’ve pret­ty much soaked up all the write-downs they can do. Uh, IV1 and IV2 are both neg­a­tive, um, neg­a­tive thir­ty-five cents and neg­a­tive ten cents, so we can’t ascribe any val­ue from that point of view. The own­er, the own­er founder has depart­ed.

Uh, the, there is a new three-point trend line upturn, although small. Um, we don’t have increas­ing equi­ty. So all in all, the qual­i­ty score is, uh, fifty per­cent, sev­en out of four­teen, which is not great. But the QAV score is point three four based on that high Pr/OpCaf. So that’s what we’re watch­ing. Um, recent oppor­tu­ni­ties, the, the first oppor­tu­ni­ty, of course, is to con­vert that cash flow into prof­it.

Giv­en they’ve paid down a lot of debt and they’re con­sid­er­ing sell­ing anoth­er one of their busi­ness­es, um, I [01:10:00] sus­pect that, that, that will push into pos­i­tive prof­it ca– uh, ter­ri­to­ry in the next six to twelve months. Um, the effi­cien­cy dri­ve needs to be con­tin­ued, and that does pro­vide some, some upside, par­tic­u­lar­ly with respect to tech­nol­o­gy dri­ving down wage costs.

Um, and of course, I think they’ll con­tin­ue to sell non-core assets. So they’re all the poten­tial upsides. On the, on the risk side of things, uh, the, the biggest risk, I think, is the fact that their rev­enue is some­what capped by Medicare, uh, which, uh, the increas­es aren’t keep­ing pace with infla­tion, but the wages are keep­ing at least, uh, pace with infla­tion.

So they’ve, they’ve got to man­age, uh, an unbal­anced see­saw, so to speak, from that point of view, if they want to get their mar­gins under con­trol. And the last thing I’ll say is that, um, th- you know, this is get­ting to be the stage of being a clas­sic takeover tar­get. It’s, um, it’s com­ing out of its restruc­tur­ing.

It’s got a mas­sive net­work, uh, which is gonna be dif­fi­cult for any­one to build from scratch and com­pete against. [01:11:00] Uh, and there­fore, it’s prob­a­bly the per­fect time if you’re gonna take this com­pa­ny over to take it over, espe­cial­ly if you have a, uh, if you’re anoth­er big­ger pathol­o­gy com­pa­ny, uh, where you can get some syn­er­gies and, and there­fore, um, take some costs out quick­ly, uh, which is what this busi­ness needs.

Um, the ACCC would have con­cerns, and there might be some divest­ments, et cetera, because there’s only three big oper­a­tors in the Aus­tralian mar­ket, but, uh, some­one might still be, um, bull­ish enough to, to take on the ACCC on this one. So that’s, um, Heal­ius, back on the buy list, uh, and one to watch.

Cameron: Yeah. Thank you, TK. I added it yes­ter­day to the Light port­fo­lio, and when I was look­ing at the analy­sis of it, takeover tar­get was the main thing that, came into my head too, look­ing

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: it did­n’t look like a great, um, growth sto­ry, uh, you know, bare­ly hang­ing on kind of a sto­ry. But yeah, [01:12:00] we’ve seen plen­ty of those

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I think the growth option for them has got to be to go over­seas in the same way Son­ic has, but they’re a long way from being able to do that.

Cameron: Yeah, right

Tony Kynas­ton: and, and for share­hold­ers to trust them with, with more cap­i­tal to do that too. So,

Cameron: Yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: it’s more like the Chan­nel 10 play­book where they get restruc­tured and then, uh, put up for sale some­how.

Cameron: Yeah, yeah. It’s fun­ny, you know, like, um, hav­ing been doing this for a few years now, those, you know, I did­n’t do the, the in-depth analy­sis that you did, I just a quick report on it and looked at the num­bers. But, uh, yeah, it was like, to me, obvi­ous, uh, p- poten­tial takeover tar­get. Uh, good. Thank you for that. They’re down 3% since I added them yes­ter­day, so not off to a fly­ing start, but see. Uh, your– you’ve done the QAV mag­ic on it now, so I expect [01:13:00] it to go up 25% in the next cou­ple of weeks like NMG. I’ll have to reach out to the, the CEO and invite him on.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: Say,

Tony Kynas­ton: guy, he seems.

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: I’ll

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: Tokara, come on the show.”

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Knight Rid­er call­ing Tow Cut­ter.

Cameron: Yeah, yeah. All right.

Tony Kynas­ton: email him, email him and say, “Hey, Toke, Kun­dali­ni wants his hand back.”

Cameron: Yeah. TK wants to talk to the tow cut­ter, the TC. Uh, what you got for me this week on After Hours, TK?

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, we fore­shad­owed Lanterns. Um, we’ve watched, Jen­ny and I have watched the first two episodes and quite liked it. Uh, it’s, it, I‑I’m not real­ly a big DC or Mar­vel com­ic book fan, but this was a bit unusu­al. It’s quite wit­ty, which I enjoyed. Um, and the act­ing’s good. So yeah, we’ll keep pro­gress­ing with that.

I under­stand [01:14:00] you don’t like it, but any­way

Cameron: It was sold to me by my boys as, “Oh, it’s True Detec­tive. They’re gonna do True Detec­tive, uh, with Green Lantern.” And I’m like, “This is not, this is not True Detec­tive qual­i­ty.” so, look, I kind of admire the effort, um, to do some­thing a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent, but I’m just kind of bored with it already. I’m

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: episode three and I’m like, “Ah, I don’t real­ly care.” But it is, this is. I mean, A, I’ve always said Green Lantern is one of the hard­est char­ac­ters to do any­thing with, ’cause it’s a stu­pid char­ac­ter. I mean, he just does big imag­i­nary green things that can, that some­how he can punch peo­ple with and trap peo­ple in a ball. It’s kind of wacky, the whole, he has to recharge it a old, like a, some­thing that looks like a gas lamp from, from the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry or late 19th cen­tu­ry. It’s kin­da stu­pid. And I a- and I think it was episode two where he, [01:15:00] it’s run­ning out of pow­er, and in Amer­i­can Eng­lish it’s like, “Charge is at 5% and drop­ping.” It’s kind of Apple, uh, in, you know, did the pro­gram­ming for the, uh, thing. And why is he trav­el­ing with a ring that’s on 5%

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: take his lantern with him when

Tony Kynas­ton: that he can fly, or giv­en that he can fly back quick­ly, why don’t you just go back the night before and recharge? Yeah

Cameron: Yeah, there’s just a lot of sil­ly stuff in it, but any­way,

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, I think,

Cameron: the attempt

Tony Kynas­ton: I, I think the, the plot sort of answered that ques­tion a lit­tle bit. You know, the psy­chic who’s he’s train­ing, he was sent back to get it to, as a bit of an exer­cise

Cameron: He just want­ed to get him out of town so he could, uh, go and grab dead bod­ies out of the

Tony Kynas­ton: Part­ly, but I think the, the whole green bird thing and keep­ing it alive was part of it too

Cameron: Nah, I think that’s a, I think that’s a bit of a fur­phy.

Tony Kynas­ton: Any­way, it was fun. I enjoyed it. Yep.

Cameron: Tell me again what Ham­net is

Tony Kynas­ton: H- Ham­net, oh my God, it [01:16:00] is so good. Uh, movie came out, uh, well, must’ve been out about this time last year, uh, because the lead actress won the Acad­e­my Award, I think. I’m just try­ing to remem­ber her name. I’ve for­got­ten it. Uh, any­way, you can look it up while I’m talk­ing.

Cameron: Chloe, Mag­gie O’Far­rell,

Tony Kynas­ton: O’Far­rell, yep.

Cameron: Right.

Tony Kynas­ton: actress. Um, real­ly, uh, Jen­ny’s, Jen­ny’s com­ment at the end of it was this was a seri­ous movie. So it’s, and it is. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s part his­tor­i­cal, so you’re see­ing what the 1600s was like and Eliz­a­bethan Eng­land and how the trav­es­ties they had and there’s, I don’t know if it was plague or small­pox or what­ev­er that was going through the fam­i­ly and the town and all that.

So it’s, it’s bleak in parts, but it’s, it’s the s- it’s the sto­ry of how Shake­speare took h- the death of his son and turned it into Ham­let. And, uh, it’s got one of the most pow­er­ful last acts I’ve seen for a long time. Very [01:17:00] emo­tion­al when the. ‘Cause it’s told from the, the wife’s point of view. Like, for most of the movie, Shake­speare’s dis­ap­peared off to set up The Globe in Lon­don, but it, the, the action stays at home in Strat­ford and, uh, you know, goes through her child­birth and the prob­lems with that and then rais­ing the kids on their own, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Um, and how, you know, one of the chil­dren dies, um, because of some kind of plague and how dis­tress­ing that is and then how, how, uh, Shake­speare copes with the grief ’cause he, he rides back into town the morn­ing of, after the son’s died, so it’s all very emo­tion­al. But then, um, he takes that emo­tion and turns it into Ham­let and it’s, uh, ’cause Ham­net, Ham­let, there’s some his­tor­i­cal con­jec­ture they were both the same word that just got changed at some stage in, in tran­scrip­tion.

Um, yeah, but it’s a, it’s a seri­ous­ly impact­ful end­ing. So it’s real­ly good. And the act­ing is fan­tas­tic, yeah

Cameron: Wow. [01:18:00] Oh, sounds good. It’s

Tony Kynas­ton: Is it, I think it’s Paul Mescal plays Shake­speare. Is that the actor?

Cameron: Buck­ley is actu­al­ly the name. Mag­gie O’Far­rel­l’s one of the writ­ers,

Tony Kynas­ton: Sor­ry, Jesse Buck­ley.

Cameron: star, yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Right. Yeah

Cameron: Ah, good. Check that out. Sounds good. Well,

Tony Kynas­ton: that’s me, apart from house hunt­ing.

Cameron: Yeah. Uh, Chris­sy and I watched “The Sub­stance” with

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, what’s that like?

Cameron: Good, but not what we expect­ed, and it’s a hor­ror film

Tony Kynas­ton: that’s what I thought

Cameron: Over the top gross out. Chris­sy could­n’t look at the screen for long peri­ods of time. “Just tell me what’s hap­pen­ing. I can’t look. Ah.” Uh, but good.

You know, inter­est­ing, inter­est­ing, um, mes­sage, I guess. It’s basi­cal­ly, I, I assume, sort of talk­ing about w- Hol­ly­wood and image and women and plas­tic [01:19:00] surgery and, but tak­ing it, uh, you know, using it as a hor­ror sce­nario. But yeah, so it’s, it’s, it’s talk­ing about the, the desire for per­ma­nent youth and the price that’s paid and all of that kind of stuff, uh, turn­ing it into a hor­ror sto­ry.

But inter­est­ing, you know, the, the, the meta side of it. Demi Moore as the lead has had a lot of plas­tic surgery, a lot of work done over the years. And the lead male in it is Den­nis Quaid, Meg Ryan’s hus­band, obvi­ous­ly is one of the hor­ror sto­ries of plas­tic surgery gone awry. Um, so for them to both play a major role in it was, is inter­est­ing. But writ­ten and direct­ed by a French lady, a Coralie Fargeat, I think her name is. Um, yeah, it’s pret­ty bold. And Mar­garet Qual­ley is the oth­er female lead, she is [01:20:00] actu­al­ly, I found out, uh, Andie Mac­Dow­ell’s daugh­ter

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm. She was in, uh, “Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood.” Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

Cameron: um, know, Andie Mac­Dow­ell and Demi Moore are friends, and Mar­garet Qual­ley’s friends with all Demi Moore’s kids. Uh, Andie Mac­Dow­ell and Demi Moore were in St. Elmo’s Fire togeth­er. And you know, there’s, there’s, there’s sort of that angle on it too.

She’s being replaced by a younger ver­sion who’s actu­al­ly the daugh­ter of one of her friends who’s, you know, a star now. And yeah, it’s inter­est­ing.

Tony Kynas­ton: How did, uh, Den­nis, how did Den­nis Quaid hold up? Because we saw him in, um, one of the, I for­get what the series is called, one of the Bil­ly Bob Thorn­ton legal things that were out, and yeah, our first thought was, “Oh, plas­tic surgery.”

Cameron: Well, it, it was inter­est­ing. And so the oth­er thing you, th- that you, you would like about this is it’s very Lynch. It’s a very

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, okay.

Cameron: Um, [01:21:00] you know, all, all through it I’m going, “Oh my God, this is so Lynch‑y.” Like Lynch, I hope Lynch saw it before he passed away. Would’ve loved it as an homage, I think. The direc­tor, writer-direc­tor has said that Lynch is one of her big inspi­ra­tions. Very, Lynch‑y. Lynch‑y kin­da hor­ror, you know? Um, sort of of Mul­hol­land Dri­ve and, and, um, Ele­phant Man and, um, uh, well, what was his first one? The black and white one. Um, Eraser­head.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Cameron: lot of sort of, I would­n’t say ref­er­ences, but the­mat­ic com­mon­al­i­ties and sound bo- you know, sound effects and, know, that he, Lynch’s whole approach to, you know, some­thing ter­ri­ble’s about to hap­pen or there’s just bad vibe, bad sense.

A lot of, not a lot of dia­logue in it, very dia­logue light. But Den­nis Quaid’s char­ac­ter’s a very Lynch‑y char­ac­ter, too. Very much, like, could’ve stepped [01:22:00] straight out of the Twin Peaks reboot. Over uh, sort of a movie pro­duc­er guy. And appar­ent­ly he was­n’t the orig­i­nal for it. I can’t remem­ber who was, but th- who­ev­er it was had to pull out at the last minute and Den­nis Quaid was brought in at l- the last minute.

But no, did a great job. Uh, it’s very good, but be pre­pared.

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay

Cameron: gro- gross-out hor­ror in lots of places

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, Jen­ny’s away in Syd­ney at the moment for a cou­ple of nights, so I’ll get to watch it ’cause I don’t think she would like it. Yeah

Cameron: Yeah, yeah, right. Chris­sy sa- Chris­sy, at the end of it, she goes, “Well, that’s my one hor­ror film for the year.” I was like, “Yeah, okay. Fair enough.” We also watched Clue, ’cause I’d nev­er seen Clue, and when Tim Cur­ry passed away, you

Tony Kynas­ton: Right. Yeah

Cameron: Clue.” And I was like, “Yeah, nev­er seen it.” had, had it in my queue ’cause I saw it was on SBS a few weeks ago, and I was like, “Oh, I real­ly should watch that.” Chris­sy had seen it and loved it. So we watched that, uh, yes­ter­day and, um, well, Sun­day, [01:23:00] and I loved it. Yeah, great. Real­ly,

Tony Kynas­ton: haven’t seen it for a while.

Cameron: Oh, it’s good fun. Sil­ly,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: good fun.

Tim Cur­ry’s great. Leslie Ann War­ren is great. Mar­tin Mull is great. Um, Christo­pher Lloyd, um, Michael McK­ean, very young Michael McK­ean. Every­one’s young, and it’s ’85. What I did­n’t know until I start­ed watch­ing it is it was di- writ­ten and direct­ed by Jonathan Lynn of Yes Min­is­ter,

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, real­ly?

Cameron: fame. Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay.

Cameron: So com­ing out of Yes Min­is­ter,

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: right about the time of Yes Prime Min­is­ter, I guess, he wrote and direct­ed it. So a lot of the dia­logue is very snap­py and fun­ny

Tony Kynas­ton: Right

Cameron: Jonathan Lynn‑y. And as I may, I think I told you a while ago, I’ve been lis­ten­ing on and off to the Yes Min­is­ter radio ver­sion and have been talk­ing to Claude about it, too, on, when we’ve been going on dog walks. Was talk­ing about how him and the oth­er guy

Tony Kynas­ton: You c- h- you’ve got [01:24:00] a dog

Cameron: Uh, we bor­row a dog. So there’s a friend of ours who lives not far from us

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: a grey­hound called Pep­si, and she goes away for work for a

Tony Kynas­ton: Right.

Cameron: and

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay.

Cameron: us.

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm

Cameron: Fox loves Pep­si. Pep­si’s this sweet, uh, grey­hound. And so z- when Chris­sy’s not here, I have to take her for a walk late in the after­noon. And, um,

Tony Kynas­ton: Gotcha

Cameron: do it ’cause it takes me an hour out of my day. But what I’ve, what I’ve start­ed doing is I walk around with Claude on my phone and my Air­Pods, and I just have con­ver­sa­tions about stuff that I’ve been think­ing about. And, uh, or I say, w- um, you know, this is, this is what I did last week, is, “Give me some ideas or con­cepts that, um, I prob­a­bly am not aware of that might, you know, have a proun- a pro­found effect on my world­view or my think­ing, and I’ll stop you when I wan­na drill down on one.” So it’ll just [01:25:00] start sug­gest­ing ideas to talk about, and I’ll go, “Oh, whoa, okay, stop. Let’s, let’s drill down on that.” And that will often lead to some­thing else, and it’ll lead to some­thing else, and we have these long con­ver­sa­tions about things, and I learn stuff, and I get it to chal­lenge my think­ing on stuff.

And any­way, um, was ask­ing it at one point, ’cause I had been lis­ten­ing to “Yes Min­is­ter” and, uh, on the walk, and I was going, “Tell me about how these guys wrote all this stuff. What were, who were their sources? What were, where, where did they get all this stuff on the inner work­ings of bureau­cra­cy in the British gov­ern­ment from?”

And yeah, it was inter­est­ing. ‘Cause

Tony Kynas­ton: what did they say? What, what’s the answer? Oh, okay.

Cameron: mem­oirs, basi­cal­ly. They

Tony Kynas­ton: Ah, okay.

Cameron: There was retired.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, right

Cameron: guy who’s Sir Humphrey is based on had retired and writ­ten his mem­oirs, and a senior politi­cian had retired and writ­ten his mem­oirs, and they got a lot of it out of that, and But I, I’m writ­ing this thing, I’ve [01:26:00] been build­ing this thing for a w- month or so with Claude, which is a, um, I call it the cui bono frame­work at the moment.

But it basi­cal­ly takes geopo­lit­i­cal events and tries to apply a range of ana­lyt­i­cal mod­els that I’ve part­ly got from the CIA book that I’ve been using for the, some of the QAV newslet­ters and dif­fer­ent ana­lyt­i­cal So where it will basi­cal­ly come up with, well, what are the six lead­ing hypothe­ses for why this thing hap­pened?

Like the first thing I put it through was the attack on Iran in Feb­ru­ary. are the six lead­ing hypothe­ses for what caused this? And then let’s look at all of the avail­able evi­dence that sup­port or refute those hypothe­ses and score them with some start­ing odds based on how often they’ve been the cause of things that, sim­i­lar things that have hap­pened in the past, like oth­er US-led wars. then, you know, cre­ate a QAV check, uh, frame­work for scor­ing

Tony Kynas­ton: right

Cameron: events and [01:27:00] see where the evi­dence leads. And, and then apply a cer­tain le- uh, amount of Bayesian rea­son­ing that I stole off of Richard Car­ri­er when we did the doc­u­men­tary. if this, like if this hypoth­e­sis to, were true, what sort of evi­dence trail would we expect to see? And do we see that? And if we do, then we score it high­er because the expect­ed evi­dence exists, and if it does­n’t, then it scores low­er as a hypoth­e­sis because the expect­ed evi­dence trail is not there. And, you come up with, you know, a, you know, basi­cal­ly a stack ranked set of final hypothe­ses with a score and the, you know. So you, you it has a, an engine with a frame­work that’s locked in, but then the AI goes out and does all of the research, and then I run it through my Dave ver­i­fi­ca­tion process. So I then give the final report to GPT and to Gem­i­ni and to Grok, and I go, “Okay, steel man this and tell me if it makes sense.”

And, [01:28:00] and then I get their thing and I put it back into the orig­i­nal engine, and they go back­wards and for­wards and they argue amongst each oth­er until there’s sort of a con­sen­sus on where the evi­dence lives. I call it my coun­cil. It’s my sm- it’s my, um, you know, King’s Coun­cil basi­cal­ly from “Game of Thrones”.

Tony Kynas­ton: you need a court jester in there. Shake things up a bit. it’s Grok, is it? Yeah.

Cameron: court, yeah, it’s the court jester. It’s gone, yeah. Naked girls, big tits! Sir, you’re so with your expla­na­tions for things

Tony Kynas­ton: Does it real­ly say that? Uh,

Cameron: But it is, it

Tony Kynas­ton: this is should

Cameron: it’s more aggres­sive push­back

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah,

Cameron: It’s more the pro-ra-ra, pro-Trump view on every­thing. Any­way, um, and I also watched this William Shat­ner inter­view, um, which was one of the best things I’ve ever seen. Absolute­ly astound­ing. It’s half an hour long, recent inter­view with him.

He’s 95. [01:29:00] His pas­sion for life, like how artic­u­late he is, his pas­sion for projects and the stuff that he’s doing. He does­n’t wan­na die ’cause he’s too busy and he’s lov­ing life. He’s using AI all the time to talk about stuff. He uses AI like I use AI, as long con­ver­sa­tions. talks about non-dual phi­los­o­phy, how we’re, it’s just the uni­verse, and the uni­verse is alive and it’s con­scious, and we are the uni­verse, uh, uh, aware of itself.

And he’s, like, he’s an astound­ing man for 95 years old talked about why he teared up after he went into space and, uh, and yeah, just, man, he’s just, uh, impres­sive. I, like, I, I’ve nev­er real­ly paid a lot of atten­tion to Shat­ner, um, you know, but, um, yeah, no. I, I, I watched this thing, uh, because I’ve been lis­ten­ing to his album recent­ly, and he’s got this new heavy met­al album com­ing out that he was talk­ing about, um, [01:30:00] that’s called “What the F is Heavy Met­al?”

‘Cause some­body said to him, “You should do a heavy met­al album,” and he said, “What the F is heavy met­al?” So that’s the name of the album, he reck­ons, and, uh, yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, that’s great.

Cameron: check

Tony Kynas­ton: he, uh,

Cameron: so

Tony Kynas­ton: a, isn’t he a horse breed­er or some­thing as well? Does­n’t he race, uh, tro- trot­ting hors­es maybe, I’m think­ing?

Cameron: W- I don’t know about that, but he, one of the things he said about get­ting old­er is he can’t ride hors­es any­more.

Tony Kynas­ton: Right. Okay.

Cameron: to hold him

Tony Kynas­ton: Yep

Cameron: or some­thing like that. But he did have. I know he had shoul­der surgery. But he’s talk­ing about like, you know, med­i­cine and sci­ence and where it’s going and how that’s keep­ing him going and any­way, yeah. I was, I was real­ly impressed. He was, he’s an inspi­ra­tion, you know?

Tony Kynas­ton: There was a great arti­cle too I read last week about, um, talk­ing about AI where, uh, I f- I for­get the Aus­tralian researcher’s name, but they had used AI to get to the, get to the nexus of what was caus­ing melanoma to spread. And they were, they were pret­ty [01:31:00] close to a cure for melanoma, which I thought was very impor­tant.

Cameron: week, the

Tony Kynas­ton: No?

Cameron: price? Oh.

Tony Kynas­ton: No.

Cameron: Mod­er­na’s share price

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm. yeah

Cameron: Yeah. I’ve run that stuff through Claude 2 and it said, “Yeah, look, it’s, there’s a lot of hype in the press release. It’s not as. It’s good, but it’s not as big a

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, right

Cameron: it’s being made out.”

But under­stand­ing is when peo­ple get a melanoma removed, there’s a recur­rence that’s pret­ty high. Comes back with­in a few years quite often. And this new mRNA thing that Mer­ck and Mod­er­na have put togeth­er their phase two stud­ies reduced the recur­rence sub­stan­tial­ly, I think by 80% or some­thing like that. now they’re going into phase three tri­als and peo­ple are excit­ed. But it’s. They have used some form of AI to build this [01:32:00] mRNA approach to build­ing a cus­tom-built, uh, pre­ven­ta­tive for recur­rence because it’s based on your DNA and it goes in and, you know. You know, they can take a sam­ple and use mRNA to build a cus­tom-built uh, tar­get­ing engine.

So yeah. But it’s the begin­ning. Again, it sounds like the begin­ning of big things

Tony Kynas­ton: It does, but again, a g- that’s a huge break­through, I think

Cameron: Ah, yeah. I mean, this is the sort of stuff that Kurzweil has been pre­dict­ing

Tony Kynas­ton: know

Cameron: I have been pay­ing atten­tion to him for 30 years, right?

Tony Kynas­ton: But it’s prob­a­bly the first big one that’s actu­al­ly come out and hap­pened

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: think of. Yeah

Cameron: Yeah. Uh, and yeah, I do expect to see in the next five to 10 years, we’re gonna see just a pletho­ra of these things as you can turn AGI lev­el AI on fig­ur­ing out how to use mRNA, uh, sci­ence [01:33:00] to build tar­get­ed can­cer tar­get­ing sol- you know, cures peo­ple. It could be, it could be mas­sive

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm. All right.

Cameron: We’ll all live to 95 or 100 or

Tony Kynas­ton: 195, yeah

Cameron: 195, excel­lent.

Tony Kynas­ton: of the com­pound inter­est. Yeah.

Cameron: thanks TK. Hap­py

Tony Kynas­ton: All right

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