QAV #708 — Buridan’s Ass (fixed)

QAV 708 Club

[00:00:00] Tony: 3, 2,

[00:00:13] Tony: 1,

[00:00:14] Cameron: Wel­come back to QAV, episode 7 0 8, record­ing on the 20th of Feb­ru­ary, 2024. Tony Kynas­ton, what’s going on? TK, where have you been for the last week?

[00:00:31] Tony: uh, in Syd­ney, but had a three days in Wag­ga as well, which was good. Good fun. Catch­ing up with Rod­dy and play­ing

[00:00:38] Tony: golf.

[00:00:39] Cameron: How did, how did your

[00:00:39] Tony: And now we’re good. Yeah. I’ll tell you that sto­ry. I had the, you know, I had surgery on my eyes last year, cataract surgery, and got fit­ted with new glass­es and since then, haven’t been able to hit a golf ball to save myself.

[00:00:54] Tony: And then went back to the optometrist, well, a month ago. And, um. Came to the con­clu­sion I, I should­n’t be wear­ing mul­ti­fo­cals to play golf. I need­ed to have just straight dis­tance, vision glass­es. So he made me up a, a pair and I’m start­ing to become bet­ter again, which is good. I can see the

[00:01:14] Tony: ball clear­ly,

[00:01:15] Cameron: Oh, that’s good.

[00:01:16] Tony: is

[00:01:16] Tony: great.

[00:01:17] Tony: Hmm.

[00:01:18] Cameron: a dif­fer­ence.

[00:01:19] Tony: Made a big dif­fer­ence. Yeah. Huge dif­fer­ence.

[00:01:22] Cameron: Good stuff.

[00:01:23] Tony: Yeah. And I did­n’t even notice it. Like it was only when I sort of got so frus­trat­ed. I went to the dri­ving range one day and just worked every­thing out from the, from the basics. You know, here’s how you grip it, here’s how you stand, here’s how you, you know, posi­tion the ball.

[00:01:39] Tony: Oh, hang on, I can’t see that ball clear­ly. And I worked, I worked it out that, um,

[00:01:43] Tony: I was­n’t focus­ing on the ball prop­er­ly.

[00:01:46] Cameron: Well, there you go. That’s good.

[00:01:49] Tony: Yeah, and it’s rain­ing heav­i­ly here. We had a big light­ning storm go through Syd­ney yes­ter­day. Um, cou­ple of, well, I think one fatal­i­ty and a cou­ple of hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions, but it was very from our place, light­ning all around yes­ter­day.

[00:02:07] Cameron: No, good. Well, I hope that does­n’t, uh, neg­a­tive­ly affect on Tay­lor Swift’s con­cert there tonight, or there’ll be lots of very sad teenage girls.

[00:02:17] Tony: Oh, is it on tonight? Is

[00:02:18] Tony: it?

[00:02:19] Cameron: I, I, think that’s what it said in the

[00:02:20] Cameron: news. Yeah. Hmm.

[00:02:22] Tony: Yeah. No,

[00:02:23] Tony: they’ll be wet if it’s on tonight ’cause it’s still rain­ing. Hope­ful­ly

[00:02:25] Tony: it’ll clear for them.

[00:02:26] Cameron: I saw it in the finan­cial review this morn­ing. Even the finan­cial review­er talk­ing about Tay­lor Swift. Biggest thing to hap­pen to the Aus­tralian econ­o­my this year is Tay­lor Swift com­ing to the coun­try. Speak­ing of the econ­o­my, uh, let’s talk about the mar­ket, Tony. Jeez, I mean, it had a lit­tle bit of a slip last week, but then just, uh, has been going kind of gang­busters since then.

[00:02:49] Cameron: Um, you know what, what’s, what’s going on with the mar­ket, Tony? This, why is it just so exu­ber­ant at the moment?

[00:02:59] Tony: Well, it seems like it’s the, an exu­ber­ance because of report­ing sea­son. So, um, I dun­no if you wan­na talk about it now, but I sent you a link to an arti­cle, uh, in the AFR about, um, which was print­ed just before report­ing sea­son and it, um, the 4th of Feb­ru­ary. So the very start of report­ing sea­son, the head­line reads, sell Off Looms as Strate­gists Warn.

[00:03:24] Tony: Earn­ings to Dis­ap­point is the head­line. The arti­cle starts off, investors will be left dis­ap­point­ed by a soft earn­ings sea­son despite a ral­ly that has pushed the local share mar­ket to all-time highs. That is the view of equi­ty Strate­gist whose earn­ings fore­casts have slid more than 10%. The warn­ing comes after the bench­mark.

[00:03:43] Tony: S and PASX 200 index ral­lied almost 2% last week. Has traders ramped up bets that the Reserve Bank may cut inter­est rates at least twice this year. And I’ve, I’ve got­ta be hon­est, I, I thought it would be a tough earn­ings sea­son. And then almost straight away, the retail­ers start­ed report­ing if, if not great results and results that weren’t as bad as their fore­cast, which was sug­gest­ing that, um, the, there was still a bit of spend­ing out there in the econ­o­my.

[00:04:11] Tony: And, um, I think since then there’s been some real­ly good, uh, good, uh, num­bers being report­ed. In gen­er­al, I think we’re, usu­al­ly, there’s, there’s com­pa­nies that report ear­ly in the sea­son are the ones who are report­ing good results. And the ones that are com­ing. But between now and the end of the month might not be as good as they start to try and hide things.

[00:04:30] Tony: Uh, but, um, you know, for exam­ple, we spoke about Nick Scali and Maya last week, but, uh, su super retail group, uh, also report­ed good earn­ings today. Macmil­lan Shake­speare had very good results and their shares were up 10%. And, uh, I only know that because I own shares of Macmil­lan Shake­speare. Um, but just some of the high­lights from that result, um, which I found inter­est­ing was earn­ings per share was up 40% and div­i­dend per share is up 30%, rough­ly.

[00:05:00] Tony: Um, but they are max­ing out their pay­out range. So, uh, that either means that a div­i­dend will go down next half or, uh, they expect prof­it to rise next half enough to, to. Pay the same sort of div­i­dend, but a small­er pay­out ratio. Um, so they had a good result. Uh, they called out that elec­tric vehi­cles are now 40% of new inno­v­a­tive leas­es.

[00:05:21] Tony: So that is a real tail­wind for the, uh, car leas­ing com­pa­nies, which MMS is one off. Um, yeah, so that was, um, inter­est­ing. Inter­est­ing­ly enough, they report­ed neg­a­tive oper­at­ing cash flow so that they may not be on the buy list going for­ward once those num­bers hit. Um, the oth­er inter­est­ing thing today was ANZ.

[00:05:43] Tony: Their, their takeover got waved through on appeal. So, um, that was big news. Uh, I think, uh, Sun­corp Rose in val­ue as a stock and ANZ went down about 2% large­ly I think because, um, peo­ple have, uh, ana­lysts have always been a lit­tle bit con­cerned about the abil­i­ty to inte­grate Sun­cor­p’s Bank into ANZ and whether the ben­e­fits that that were called out will actu­al­ly be there when they hap­pen.

[00:06:10] Tony: Um, the cyn­ic in me says that the CEO will now retire and leave inte­gra­tion to the next per­son. Um, ’cause I know it’ll be dif­fi­cult. Uh, but yeah, it’s um. I think these kinds of good sto­ries are dri­ving the mar­ket up. And I think the oth­er thing to note, uh, I sent you anoth­er arti­cle before we came on air today.

[00:06:29] Tony: This was again in, um, a recent AFR Feb­ru­ary 11th. Um, the head­line is, Qan­tas Effect Hangs Over Prof­it Sea­son as Mar­gins Sur­prise. So giv­en the fact that the strate­gist thought there was gonna be a bad report­ing sea­son, uh, a week lat­er, there’s arti­cles about it being almost too good. And, um, this arti­cle says Investors love it when a com­pa­ny gets more prof­it out of every dol­lar that flows through its doors, but com­pa­nies are not nec­es­sar­i­ly cry­ing about it this year.

[00:06:59] Tony: Earn­ings mar­gins are a big pos­i­tive sur­prise for, for the report­ing sea­son. To date, AGL Ener­gy News Corp, Nix­car­ly and Transur­ban, or report­ed stronger than expect­ed mar­gins extract­ing what’s left from beat­en up Aus­tralian con­sumers and run­ning their own busi­ness­es. Hard­er to be lean­er and mean­er than expect­ed.

[00:07:18] Tony: Qan­tas is unrav­el­ling soon after report­ing a record prof­it, hang­over earn­ings sea­son. How­ev­er, that prof­it mar­gin sur­prise is good news for investors and sent share prices soar­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly at AGI and Nick Scali. Nine of the 11 com­pa­nies that report­ed last week saw their shares out­per­form the mar­ket and by 3% each on aver­age.

[00:07:36] Tony: Accord­ing to Mac­quar­ie’s analy­sis of the first week, uh, mar­gin was a big fac­tor in the top gain­ers. But mak­ing more mon­ey for investors by squeez­ing the lemon hard­er is not what it used to be. Just ask Qan­tas. Air­ways, one of the spec­tac­u­lar­ly unrav­eled weeks after report­ing a record prof­it for share­hold­ers.

[00:07:53] Tony: The same things that fuel prof­its, high­er prices, job cuts, a lack of com­pe­ti­tion also for your cus­tomer back­lash and reg­u­la­to­ry scruti­ny. So that’s becom­ing the sto­ry of this prof­it report­ing sea­son as well, and it’s, it’s gonna be an issue. Uh. What­ev­er the gov­ern­men­t’s focused on reduc­ing the cost of liv­ing.

[00:08:14] Tony: And it starts to see big com­pa­nies make good prof­its with that kind of back­drop. They’re gonna start focus­ing on, on whether the com­pa­nies are doing the right thing and what the gov­ern­ment should be doing to reg­u­late them hard­er. And we’re see­ing that with the super­mar­kets where there’s a, a review going on of their prac­tices and whether they’re, um, treat­ing farm­ers prop­er­ly and offer­ing the best deals to con­sumers.

[00:08:36] Tony: And I think that’s gonna be what’s gonna, you know, that’s gonna have to be what boards think about from these oth­er com­pa­nies going for­ward. It’s almost like if we make too much mon­ey dur­ing this time of cost of liv­ing, uh, focus, um, do we invite the gov­ern­ment to step in and reg­u­late, uh, our

[00:08:51] Tony: indus­tries even more

[00:08:52] Cameron: Did you see

[00:08:53] Tony: upside down world can,

[00:08:55] Cameron: Did you see the Brad Ban­duc­ci ker­fuf­fle this week?

[00:09:01] Tony: no, I did­n’t, I, I saw a lit­tle bit of the, um, analy­sis, but I did­n’t actu­al­ly see it

[00:09:05] Tony: hap­pen.

[00:09:06] Cameron: Oh right, yeah.

[00:09:08] Tony: Is that the four Cor­ners in the

[00:09:09] Tony: view?

[00:09:09] Cameron: yes.

[00:09:10] Tony: Right.

[00:09:11] Cameron: He got up and walked out of the four Cor­ners inter­view after he said like he made a crack. Uh, the, the jour­nal­ist had Angus, Grigg had said some­thing about Rod Simms take on what the super­mar­ket chains are doing. And Ban­duc­ci made some sort of crack about Rod Simms hav­ing been retired and things were a lot dif­fer­ent these days.

[00:09:38] Cameron: Com­pe­ti­tion’s a lot dif­fer­ent. The mar­ket’s a lot dif­fer­ent from when he did his big review in 2008, 2009, and Grigg said he only retired like a year and a half ago. It’s not like it was 20 years ago. Things haven’t changed that much. Then Ban­duc­ci real­ized that he’d sort of stepped in it and tried to, he basi­cal­ly tried to get Greg to agree to edit what he said about Rod Simzade of the inter­view.

[00:10:00] Cameron: And Greg said, well, this, this is on the record, mate. No, we’re leav­ing it in. And then he got up and he walked off and spoke with his PR team for a bit. Then he did come back and sit down

[00:10:10] Cameron: again. But, uh, he real­ized he’d stepped in it and, uh, said some­thing he regret­ted,

[00:10:18] Tony: Well, that’s, that’s a bit of a fum­ble for

[00:10:19] Cameron: which I’ve nev­er

[00:10:20] Tony: class.

[00:10:21] Cameron: to say I’ve

[00:10:22] Tony: Yeah. We, we don’t, we, we just put

[00:10:24] Tony: this out

[00:10:25] Cameron: straight, nev­er, nev­er

[00:10:28] Tony: I’m just going, I need to go and talk to

[00:10:30] Tony: my PR peo­ple for a

[00:10:31] Cameron: my

[00:10:31] Cameron: lawyer. Yeah.

[00:10:32] Tony: Yeah. Back in a

[00:10:33] Cameron: I tell you, one com­pa­ny whose, uh,

[00:10:35] Cameron: results did­n’t do well for its share price was data three. Tony, your, uh,

[00:10:41] Tony: Oh,

[00:10:42] Cameron: deep dive. Not that

[00:10:44] Cameron: long ago, they came out, they came out with their

[00:10:47] Cameron: results. Um, here’s the sto­ry in Yahoo Finance. One of the biggest sto­ries of last week was how data three lim­it­ed shares plunged twen­ty-two per­cent in the week since its lat­est half-year­ly results,

[00:11:01] Cameron: which were rough­ly the rev­enue was rough­ly in line with ana­lysts fore­casts, statu­to­ry earn­ings per share, beat expec­ta­tions being 3% high­er than what ana­lysts expect­ed.

[00:11:11] Cameron: The ana­lysts typ­i­cal­ly update their fore­casts to each earn­ing report, and we can judge from their esti­mates whether their view of the com­pa­ny has changed, et cetera, et cetera. Any­way, the results were good, but, uh, the share price dropped twen­ty-two per­cent, which was, uh, nasty. Um, the

[00:11:29] Tony: Yeah, I mean, I

[00:11:30] Cameron: broad­ly unchanged at $8 and five with

[00:11:32] Cameron: the ana­lysts clear­ly imply­ing that the fore­cast decline in earn­ings is not expect­ed to have much of an impact on val­u­a­tion, but the share price plunged twen­ty-two per­cent any­way.

[00:11:42] Tony: I can’t real­ly com­ment on that. I’m not that. I mean, I did the pull pork on data three, and I did high­light the fact that. It’s appear­ing on our buy list, but it may not be, it’s appear­ing on our buy list because of good prop CAF, but it may not be the right sort of prop CAF that we’re inter­est­ed in. Uh, because, you know, the diff their prop CAF for this com­pa­ny oper­at­ing cash flow was basi­cal­ly the dif­fer­ence between what they bought from cus­tomers, what they sold the cus­tomers ver­sus what they paid as sup­plies.

[00:12:07] Tony: There’s a lot of through­put going through, uh, their books. It’s not like, um, they’re man­u­fac­tur­ing some­thing, charg­ing a big mar­gin and, and get­ting sales from cus­tomers like a, a cof­fee shop anal­o­gy.

[00:12:19] Cameron: Right. Pret­ty stan­dard for that kind of a busi­ness the­o­rem.

[00:12:23] Tony: it is.

[00:12:24] Tony: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:26] Tony: Inter­est­ing.

[00:12:27] Cameron: they took a big

[00:12:28] Tony: Oh, sor­ry. One, one oth­er decline I should fess up to as well is I, I talked about the anti-QAV stock port­fo­lio a cou­ple of weeks ago on the show, and one of the stocks in that port­fo­lio was pro Medicus and they came out with results and their share prices gone down a lot since then too.

[00:12:44] Tony: So, which is always the risk, I think with the sort of, uh, growth at any cost cus­tomer, uh, uh, com­pa­nies, they, if they dis­ap­point,

[00:12:52] Tony: they can be beat­en about

[00:12:54] Tony: pret­ty severe­ly.

[00:12:55] Cameron: Did do you have to sell it? Did it break a through a cell trig­ger?

[00:12:59] Tony: It did­n’t actu­al­ly, it was one of those ones where the cell lines are well below, you know, what, um, what it was, and it’s back to pret­ty much what they put it in the dum­my port­fo­lio

[00:13:07] Tony: at. So it’s not a rule one either.

[00:13:09] Cameron: Right. Well, speak­ing of per­for­mance, Dar­ryl, one of our QAV Club mem­bers has been for quite a long time, post­ed on the Face­book group this week. I’ve been run­ning some analy­sis of my returns over the last four years of my QAV involve­ment, as I also use anoth­er source Intel­li­gent investor for stock buy­ers.

[00:13:28] Cameron: Using ShareSol, I can fil­ter stocks accord­ing to each process slash source. What I found was that QAV offered a bet­ter return 16.5% ver­sus 13.7%, but my WIN-loss ratio was 34% to 66% for QAV ver­sus 51%, 49% for the oth­er source. The bet­ter return was almost entire­ly due to one stock NHC, which account­ed for over half of the QAV return.

[00:13:56] Cameron: This alone jus­ti­fies my use of QAV, but I’m mind­ful that luck may be a fac­tor as I’m also con­strained by not being able to buy very small ADT stocks. I’m curi­ous what oth­ers are find­ing is their WIN-loss ratio. So I tried to look at the dum­my port­fo­lio, uh, which has been run­ning for five years now, and, uh, do some analy­sis on that using Nevex’s report­ing.

[00:14:21] Cameron: And I found it hard because there’s a num­ber of stocks in there that have had con­sol­i­da­tions and splits and acqui­si­tions, which maybe if I took those out, I might be able to get a sim­pler, well, and actu­al­ly the oth­er prob­lem was the best report­ing I can get from Nevex on per­for­mance. It kind of bun­dle, it bun­dles it into stocks.

[00:14:43] Cameron: So if I’ve bought and sold FMG five times, it just gives me an FMG prof­it or loss line and aggre­gates them all. So,

[00:14:53] Cameron: uh, I don’t think that’s real­ly, um. I don’t know, uh, uh, gonna give me an accu­rate reflec­tion of the win-loss ratio for the actu­al invest­ments them­selves, the, the, the

[00:15:04] Cameron: tranch­es. So I haven’t worked out an easy way to do this.

[00:15:07] Cameron: I throw, I tried throw­ing the, all the trades into Excel and get­ting GPT to help me. And again, I got stuck on the con­sol­i­da­tions and I, there’s a whole lev­el of work I’d have to do to go back through and work out what the con­sol­i­da­tion rates were and fac­tor that into the whole thing. So, yeah, I haven’t been able to come up with my num­bers yet, but just at a high lev­el, it looked like there were way more loss­es in the trades than there were.

[00:15:33] Cameron: If I, if I sort of ignore the cor­po­rate action ones looks like way more loss­es over the last five years than wins. But as we know, the dum­my port­fo­lio is basi­cal­ly doing twice the, uh, bench­mark over the last five years. It’s about 16.5%. Uh, Fun­ni­ly, like Dar­rel­l’s over four years. It’s about that per annum that is, um, over the five years ver­sus about eight point some­thing for the STW.

[00:16:06] Cameron: And I would­n’t be sur­prised if it’s sim­i­lar to Dar­ryl’s, like there’s gonna be, I would imag­ine 10% of the stocks that have out­per­formed the rest mas­sive­ly and car­ried it. Has that been your expe­ri­ence over the years that it’s a small num­ber of trades that car­ry the heavy lift­ing?

[00:16:24] Tony: Um, yes and no. So there’s a whole, uh, num­ber of things to unpack in, in this analy­sis. I think the first thing to note is that when, when Ryan, my, um, my ana­lyst went back and, and looked at, uh, you know, dum­my port­fo­lios that he made to do some regres­sion test­ing over the last three or four years, he was find­ing a sim­i­lar sort of thing.

[00:16:45] Tony: He found that, um. A 10% rule. One stop-loss worked bet­ter than a 20% rule one, rule one stop-loss, but not by much. But he thought the rea­son for that was that there were far more trans­ac­tions with a 10% rule one stop-loss, which meant you had more chance of, of buy­ing the NHC type stock that was going to per­form well.

[00:17:08] Tony: So, uh, I, I think it remem­ber that the dif­fer­ence in those two results was­n’t sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant. It was about one, one and a half per­cent dif­fer­ence, but he found that there was more like­ly to get the, the. Rock­et stock if you, if you were doing a rule one at 10%. Um, but he also found there’s a been a heck of a lot of churn­ing in the port­fo­lios in the last two years in par­tic­u­lar.

[00:17:29] Tony: And that’s cer­tain­ly been the case with my port­fo­lio as well. So if I, if I put that to one side, I’m not say­ing we should ignore it. That’s, that’s what the mar­ket did in the last two years. But before that, um, you know, going back to even pre-QAV, my expe­ri­ence I think was, I turned over the port­fo­lio a lit­tle bit over a 12 month peri­od.

[00:17:48] Tony: So, you know, 15 stock port­fo­lio meant 15 trades in a bit over 12 months. Um, and I got a 60, uh, you know, 60 out­ta 10 win­ners list at that time. I haven’t, um, gone back and revis­it­ed that analy­sis since then, but I would­n’t be sur­prised if it’s more like what Daryl has is that, um, it’s, it’s now, um, a lot because of all the churn in the last cou­ple of years,

[00:18:10] Tony: the, the win rate’s gone down, I would’ve thought.

[00:18:12] Cameron: Hmm. But in terms of a, a small num­ber of stocks. Car­ry­ing the heavy lift­ing for the port­fo­lio, like the super per­for­mance out of a small num­ber, like some of those wins aren’t gonna

[00:18:26] Tony: Yeah.

[00:18:26] Tony: it would be.

[00:18:27] Cameron: Yeah,

[00:18:28] Tony: Yeah, no, it would be, yeah, def­i­nite­ly. So the, yeah, so the out, if you have six out of 10 win­dows, there’s always gonna be one which is doing bet­ter than the rest,

[00:18:37] Tony: you know? Yeah. You’ll have some which are, yeah. Yeah. Whether it’s one or two, I’m not sure. I’d have to go back and have a look.

[00:18:43] Tony: But yeah, there was always an FMG, or in the past there was Mon­adel­phus or um, North­ern Star Resources. There’s always been real­ly good stocks in there doing, you know, sort of home runs, um, as results. Yeah. And they tend to be the ones that you hold for the longest too. ’cause they just don’t get back to their cell lines and they’re way above the rur­al ones.

[00:19:04] Tony: Um, so, you know, you let them ride, which is good too.

[00:19:08] Tony: Yeah.

[00:19:09] Cameron: A DUR Durat­e­ch for a lot of us. At the moment, it’s up 160. I, I haven’t looked this week. It goes up and down, but last time I looked it was like up 160% or some­thing since I first added it to one of our port­fo­lios, um, which was­n’t that long ago. Yeah, so I, I I think that Daryl’s find­ings, yeah, prob­a­bly would be, will be sim­i­lar.

[00:19:31] Cameron: Like the last cou­ple of years has been crazy as we know for some rea­son, lot of sell­ing going on. Um, lot of rule ones. But yeah, that this whole thing of one or two stocks car­ry­ing the heavy lift­ing for the port­fo­lios is kind of what I expect to see.

[00:19:47] Tony: Yeah, I do too.

[00:19:50] Cameron: Well, mov­ing right along then. Thank you for shar­ing that. By the way, Daryl. It’s real­ly good. Any­time any­one shares their analy­sis on their port­fo­lios, I find it very enlight­en­ing and use­ful and you know, it’s good to. See what’s work­ing or what’s not work­ing for oth­er peo­ple. But, um, you know, good to see that Daryl’s QAV port­fo­lio is doing bet­ter.

[00:20:10] Cameron: This, uh, his Intel­li­gent investor port­fo­lio. It’s good, mag­nif­i­cent sev­en prof­its now exceed almost every coun­try in the world. Should be, should we be wor­ried? Is the ques­tion being asked by Elliot Smith over on CNBC? The So-called Mag­nif­i­cent sev­en US Tech behe­moths encom­pass Apple, Ama­zon, Alpha­bet, Meta, Microsoft NVIDIA, and Tes­la.

[00:20:35] Cameron: Uh, in a research note, Tues­day, Deutsche bank ana­lysts high­light­ed that the Mag­nif­i­cent Sev­en’s com­bined mar­ket cap alone would make it the sec­ond largest coun­try stock exchange in the world. How­ev­er, this lev­el of con­cen­tra­tion has led some ana­lysts to voice con­cerns over relat­ed risks in the US and glob­al stock mar­kets.

[00:20:59] Cameron: I don’t know what to make of all of this. Tony? Uh, I dun­no if this is unusu­al. Like if I went back, if you went back in time 50 years and looked at the top sev­en or 10 stocks, who Buf­fett was talk­ing about some­body back in the six­ties? Who was the name of the group that were the killer

[00:21:20] Tony: The Nifty 50.

[00:21:21] Tony: in The late

[00:21:22] Tony: fifties and six­ties. Yeah.

[00:21:23] Cameron: lot. Big­ger num­ber than sev­en, I guess.

[00:21:25] Tony: Yeah.

[00:21:27] Tony: Oh, look, I’ve just, I, we spoke about this last week. Uh, you know, I, we’ve seen this sto­ry before. It’s, it’s the Mag­nif­i­cent sev­en. It’s the fangs, it’s the buy now, pay lat­er. It’s the Bit­coins. It’s the tech boom. It’s the nifty-fifty. They, they all do well until they stop, and then they all crash hard.

[00:21:47] Tony: And that’s, that’s why I would­n’t be buy­ing Mag­nif­i­cent sev­en stocks at the moment. I could be wrong. I could be wrong for years, but when I’m right look out, it’s like, you know, you lose all your, you lose all your upside. So unless you’ve got some kind of spe­cial Midas touch to get out at the peak, then I’m not gonna play.

[00:22:04] Tony: And Buf­fett also talks about the Greater Fool the­o­ry that peo­ple are buy­ing these stocks because they hope to sell ’em to some­body else for more, rather than think that, you know, these stocks are actu­al­ly worth what they’re pay­ing. Nvidia, I think I read today, is the third biggest stock on the US stock mar­ket.

[00:22:21] Tony: Now it’s about to. It’s about to release its results, um, either tonight or some­time this week any­way, and, uh, it’s priced to per­fec­tion. So unless it. Out­per­forms, I’d expect that there’d be a retrace­ment in that share price, at least going for­ward. I’m not say­ing these com­pa­nies are bad com­pa­nies, they’re not, or that they’re, they don’t have a high lev­el of qual­i­ty or lots of good things going for them.

[00:22:46] Tony: Um, I’m just say­ing you’re pay­ing three times or four times or 10 times what they’re prob­a­bly worth. And, um, I, I’d wait for the pull­back, wait for blood on the streets before I invest­ed in any of these, but that’s just me. And I’ve seen this before, but the, I, the oth­er thing that that real­ly both­ered me was the.

[00:23:03] Tony: Arti­cle I read out last week is I think that they’re becom­ing so over­val­ued and such a high con­cen­tra­tion in, in size. And as that arti­cle said that you are talk­ing about some of these, I think the mar­ket cap for the Mag­nif­i­cent sev­en is big­ger than the Cana­di­an econ­o­my, if you wan­na put it in per­spec­tive.

[00:23:19] Tony: So they’re get­ting to be the, these com­pa­nies are get­ting to be city-states real­ly. Um, so they’re huge and they’re, they’re get­ting that big because of all the pas­sive mon­ey that’s fol­low­ing them, that if peo­ple buy into an index fund, if it’s a world­wide index fund, increas­ing­ly it means prob­a­bly 20% of it is going to these par­tic­u­lar sev­en com­pa­nies.

[00:23:38] Tony: And, um, you know, when, when they do crash, that’s a big loss for

[00:23:43] Tony: peo­ple who are pas­sive­ly invest­ing.

[00:23:46] Cameron: I’ve got news for you, Tony. It is dif­fer­ent every time. It’s always dif­fer­ent. Tony. It’s nev­er the same.

[00:23:52] Tony: It’s always the same.

[00:23:53] Tony: cam. It real­ly is.

[00:23:54] Cameron: me with a

[00:23:55] Cameron: neg­a­tive waves so ear­ly in the morn­ing,

[00:23:57] Cameron: bad. Bridge will be there and it’ll be there. It’s a moth­er

[00:24:01] Tony: think those

[00:24:02] Cameron: bridge and it’s going to be there.

[00:24:06] Tony: think that NVIDIA NVIDI­A’s gonna pro­duce great results and

[00:24:09] Tony: it will,

[00:24:09] Cameron: Oh, you go More neg­a­tive waves. Have a lit­tle faith, baby. Have a lit­tle faith. Uh, haven’t used

[00:24:19] Tony: I love Kel­ly’s Heroes.

[00:24:21] Tony: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:22] Cameron: House­l’s lit­tle ideas. Tony. My idea from house­hold, it’s his idea this week, is Buri­dan’s arse. A thirsty don­key is placed exact­ly mid­way between two pails of water. It dies because it can’t make a ratio­nal deci­sion about which one to choose a form of deci­sion paral­y­sis. I asked, uh, my good friend Chat­G­PT to, uh, explain this to me. He says, Bour­dain’s ass is a philo­soph­i­cal para­dox that illus­trates the prob­lem of inde­ci­sion in a per­fect­ly ratio­nal agent fac­ing two equal­ly good options. It’s named after the French philoso­pher Jean Bour­dain. Although iron­i­cal­ly, he nev­er direct­ly pro­posed this para­dox, it’s more a car­i­ca­ture of his ideas.

[00:25:09] Cameron: The gist is this. You’ve got a don­key that’s as thirsty as a pub with no beer, and it finds itself smack bang in the mid­dle of two iden­ti­cal buck­ets of water. Now, because the don­key’s brain is wired to make per­fect­ly ratio­nal deci­sions, it tries to choose the best option. But here’s the kick­er, the options and mir­ror images of each oth­er equal dis­tance, equal amount of water, equal­ly tempt­ing.

[00:25:31] Cameron: So our poor don­key gets stuck in a men­tal loop, unable to decide which one to go for, because nei­ther option is ratio­nal­ly bet­ter than the oth­er. The trag­ic end for the don­key. Starv­ing or dying of thirst is a metaphor for deci­sion paral­y­sis when the fear of mak­ing the wrong choice leads to no choice being made at all.

[00:25:50] Cameron: It’s a poke at the idea that ratio­nal­i­ty alone can always guide us to the best deci­sion. Some­times life throws us into sit­u­a­tions where log­ic’s light does­n’t shine quite so bright­ly. And inde­ci­sion can be just as dead­ly as mak­ing a bad choice. Buradon’s ass slaps us with a ques­tion. Is it always pos­si­ble to make a per­fect­ly ratio­nal deci­sion?

[00:26:10] Cameron: And it cheek­i­ly sug­gests that some­times you’ve just got to pick a buck­et and have a drink mate. Analy­sis paral­y­sis can be a real bug­ger show­ing us that action, even based on a coin toss, can be bet­ter than stand­ing still, espe­cial­ly when the stakes are high, or you are just real­ly thirsty.

[00:26:27] Tony: So true. I mean, I’ve wit­nessed a lot of paral­y­sis by analy­sis and big cor­po­rates over the years for sure. Yeah. I, I think that was put in a dif­fer­ent way by one of my ex-boss­es who said that, um, an AFL game is more than just one kick. And he was talk­ing about one of the peo­ple we worked with and how that per­son would always make sure they score the goal because they would, um, check the wind strength, pick up the grass and toss it, um, line the ball up, re-line it, get the, get the slide rule out and work out the tra­jec­to­ry of the ball and take a few prac­tice kicks and then take a kick.

[00:27:04] Tony: But an AFL game has lots of kicks. You’re bet­ter off just tak­ing the, tak­ing your best punt and mov­ing on and doing it

[00:27:11] Tony: again in five min­utes

[00:27:12] Tony: time.

[00:27:13] Cameron: How do you think this applies to invest­ing?

[00:27:17] Tony: I think it applies real­ly well. I mean, we, we try and remove behav­iour­al anom­alies and imped­i­ments, you know, that are hard­wired into our brains from the invest­ing process. And this is one of them. I don’t know how many times I’ve sat down and said, oh, you know, my sys­tem is say­ing to buy X, Y, and Z stock, but gee, I real­ly like, I. Apple or you know, the Mag­nif­i­cent sev­en. Well, what am I gonna do? You know, you just got­ta put it aside and go with the sys­tem. And it’s, it, it, the flip side to it is you don’t beat your­self up if you got it wrong. Your sys­tem takes, well, self-cor­rect. If you, if you have to sell it, ’cause it went down 10%, sell it, move on.

[00:28:01] Tony: But it’s almost, you almost sort of start to wor­ry about fear of, fear of val­ue that you’ll get it wrong before you make the deci­sion. Well, you know, if you get it wrong, you can recov­er. Your sys­tem cor­rects for that.

[00:28:11] Tony: So just make a deci­sion.

[00:28:12] Cameron: Hmm. Yeah, that’s

[00:28:15] Tony: Have you done that Cam? Have you done that? You, you know, uh, the QAV buy list says to buy, you know, XYZ stock, but you go, oh, do I real­ly wan­na buy a tele­vi­sion sta­tion or do I real­ly wan­na buy, you know, news Corp?

[00:28:29] Tony: Or do I real­ly wan­na buy this or that?

[00:28:31] Tony: And you start to sec­ond guess it, and then noth­ing gets

[00:28:33] Tony: bought.

[00:28:33] Cameron: No, because I’m not smart enough to doubt the sys­tem. Like I do have those, like I, there was a News Corp stock at some point, or I don’t know, one of the TV sta­tions or some­thing. I can’t remem­ber. Oh, radio sta­tions. Sky, sky Tele­vi­sion. I think SKT is this

[00:28:51] Tony: Right.

[00:28:52] Tony: Yep. It is. Yeah.

[00:28:53] Cameron: and I’m like, uh, I have a gag reflex, uh, at the idea of buy­ing it.

[00:28:58] Cameron: ’cause you know, whilst I still. Stick very firm­ly to my the­o­ry that Rupert is actu­al­ly work­ing for the KGB and he’s a secret plant. And his, his strat­e­gy since, uh, his uni­ver­si­ty days has been to undo Amer­i­ca and cap­i­tal­ism by ris­ing to the top of it and cor­rupt­ing it from with­in. That said, I still loathe, uh, every­thing that he puts out, but, uh,

[00:29:24] Tony: alleged­ly

[00:29:26] Cameron: which bit alleged­ly that I loathe it

[00:29:28] Tony: your hypoth­e­sis.

[00:29:29] Tony: no, your

[00:29:30] Cameron: Yeah, that’s my hope.

[00:29:31] Cameron: I still stick to that as, as mak­ing a lot of sense. But

[00:29:37] Cameron: I bought it because I’m not smart enough. Uh, like, like it’s the same at Kung, Fu man. Like if my Sifu tells me to do some­thing and I’m not gonna ques­tion it, well who am I to ques­tion what my Sifu tells me? Uh, trust his 30 years of doing Kung Fu, he knows what he’s talk­ing about.

[00:29:52] Cameron: I don’t know. Shit, I just do it. Same with invest­ing. I fol­low the

[00:29:55] Cameron: sys­tem.

[00:29:55] Tony: look at, I mean, I, I can’t speak for Daryl, but you know, Daryl’s giv­en us the don­key prob­lem, has­n’t he? He’s, he’s got, um, one foot in the, what is it? Invest Smart Camp and one foot in the QAV camp. Qav is win­ning at the moment. I’d be inter­est­ed to know what his thought process is about how he invests going for­ward.

[00:30:14] Tony: Does he keep one foot in each camp? Does he not make a deci­sion or does he

[00:30:17] Tony: decide to go with the best returns?

[00:30:19] Cameron: Hmm. Get back to us on that. Daryl, Daryl’s a lot smarter than I am, but yeah. No, I, It’s one of the things that attracts me to QAV is it’s just, uh, it’s a sys­tem. I don’t need to think, I don’t need to get caught in Buri­dan’s ass. I got enough prob­lems with my own ass get­ting in the way of things, you know, I just, I, I like sys­tems, uh, that’ll tell me what to

[00:30:48] Cameron: do.

[00:30:49] Tony: Right.

[00:30:50] Cameron: Um, I

[00:30:51] Tony: be, you’ll be real­ly good when the

[00:30:53] Tony: AI takes over.

[00:30:54] Cameron: Yes. Just tell me what to

[00:30:55] Cameron: do. AI

[00:30:57] Tony: What? What can I do for you? What am I doing today? ai,

[00:30:59] Cameron: Yes, I already asked it that. Um,

[00:31:05] Tony: you’re try­ing to put in a good word for your­self when Skynet

[00:31:09] Tony: launch­es.

[00:31:10] Cameron: Uh, I’m I’m ful­ly on board with our new AI over­lords. Let me be the first to con­grat­u­late our new AI over­lords and sub­mit to them. Um, got an email just before we went to Air from Robert Man­frey at Stock Doc­tor. Not unfor­tu­nate­ly telling me why our new mem­ber’s QAV fil­ters are all asked back­wards, but telling me that in the com­ing weeks we are chang­ing the way we dis­play index con­stituents in Stock­Doc­tor.

[00:31:39] Cameron: This will affect your mem­bers using the QAV scan as it includes the cri­te­ri­on con­stituent of the ASX‑X. This will be replaced auto­mat­ic with the cri­te­ri­on con­stituent of ASX-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X‑X.

[00:31:54] Cameron: Reli­able data is a cor­ner­stone of our invest­ment process. Uh, edi­tors note you would­n’t know. It enabling us to eval­u­ate facts rather than opin­ions. Get back to me on news. Corps out­stand­ing shares, Robert, and we can talk. How­ev­er, we haven’t encoun­tered a sig­nif­i­cant change with one of our pri­ma­ry data providers, stan­dard & Poor’s.

[00:32:15] Cameron: They have amend­ed their dis­tri­b­u­tion agree­ments with their clients to pre­vent them dis­play­ing index con­stituents to users who don’t have their own S&P license to view con­stituents. As a result, we can’t dis­play S&P Index Con­stituents in Stock­Doc­tor to ensure our Stock­Doc­tor mem­bers con­tin­ue to receive the high-qual­i­ty quote-unquote data that they need with­out adverse­ly impact­ing their work­flow.

[00:32:40] Cameron: We have intro­duced our own set of proxy index con­stituents. These are designed to approx­i­mate. The com­po­si­tion found in the S&P indices and are ranked accord­ing to mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion and liq­uid­i­ty. Won­der if we could just put out our own data set and say it approx­i­mates, Stock­Doc­tor’s data set and scor­ing sys­tem.

[00:33:03] Cameron: We’re just, just, it’s not stock. We’re not tak­ing Stock­Doc­tor’s data. It’s, it’s a proxy for Stock­Doc­tor’s data.

[00:33:12] Tony: It. Yeah, it does sound like a workaround by stock doc­tor. Hey, but I don’t think there’s a, um, in our QAV fil­ter, I don’t think there is an ASX

[00:33:20] Tony: 300 con­stituen­cy

[00:33:21] Cameron: There is, there is one, um, that I added. A cou­ple of years ago, because

[00:33:29] Cameron: some of us, like me and some of our mem­bers can only invest in ASX 300 because of the, their super­fund, for exam­ple. So it’s just a, it is just anoth­er fil­ter at the end that you can then fil­ter your buy list by a SX 300 com­pa­nies if that’s what you need to do.

[00:33:47] Tony: Right. And then if you don’t

[00:33:48] Tony: need it, You just take it

[00:33:49] Cameron: You just leave it there. I mean, yeah. We don’t, we, you know, when in the fil­ter it’s just all, um, and then you can break it down into true or false, um, when you are fil­ter­ing your own buy list. Any­way, I just want­ed to let peo­ple know that, uh, so that’ll be hap­pen­ing. Appar­ent­ly it’s not gonna change any­thing, but that’s a weird thing for S&P to do too.

[00:34:12] Cameron: Real­ly? Like why, why can’t they tell us if it’s an index con­stituent? I don’t under­stand what’s

[00:34:18] Tony: Yeah, they

[00:34:18] Tony: pub­lish. Damn. They pub­lish the damn thing on the

[00:34:21] Tony: ASX

[00:34:22] Cameron: Yeah. Right.

[00:34:22] Tony: rebal­ance,

[00:34:23] Tony: so yeah.

[00:34:24] Cameron: I dun­no what’s going on with

[00:34:25] Tony: that.

[00:34:26] Tony: is

[00:34:26] Tony: strange.

[00:34:26] Cameron: Prob­a­bly it’s, it’s like World War I, bloody alliance agree­ments, man. Like they’ve prob­a­bly got agree­ments with some­one and those peo­ple have agree­ments with oth­er peo­ple who have agree­ments and all it’s gonna take is for some­body to assas­si­nate Franz Fer­di­nand and uh, watch out.

[00:34:45] Cameron: Not the band. Well maybe the band. Who knows.

[00:34:48] Tony: The first thing I thought of

[00:34:49] Cameron: Yeah. Um,

[00:34:50] Tony: kind of, and was kind of cheer­ing for,

[00:34:52] Tony: but

[00:34:52] Tony: any­way.

[00:34:53] Cameron: hey, they did Franz Fer­di­nand did a, an album with Sparks a cou­ple of years ago, a duet album with Sparks and it’s real­ly good stuff. I know, you know, the world’s biggest Sparks fan, but we love that album. Franz, Fer­di­nand, Sparks. It’s great stuff.

[00:35:09] Tony: Check it out.

[00:35:10] Cameron: No, you won’t. Prob­a­bly not. Um, okay. Got us this week, TK.

[00:35:15] Tony: I do, I have AGL to

[00:35:17] Tony: talk about.

[00:35:18] Cameron: Oh my God. This should be inter­est­ing.

[00:35:22] Tony: Oh, okay.

[00:35:22] Cameron: Wow. With the whole, what’s his

[00:35:25] Cameron: face? Atlass­ian.

[00:35:27] Cameron: Dou­ble-baked. Jesus

[00:35:31] Cameron: My old friend,

[00:35:32] Tony: Joe Aston.

[00:35:33] Cameron: Can­non. Brooks, slept on his lounge. I have. All right,

[00:35:39] Cameron: well, off you go then.

[00:35:40] Tony: some­one else did too. ’cause he got

[00:35:41] Tony: divorced last year

[00:35:42] Cameron: Oh, well, obvi­ous­ly she was sleep­ing in more places than just his lounge. Yeah.

[00:35:48] Tony: pos­si­bly.

[00:35:49] Cameron: Mm. Alleged­ly.

[00:35:51] Tony: Yep. Uh, so talk­ing about AGL and the rea­son for talk­ing about AGL is it popped up on our buy list this week after its results and it, um, we’re at that stage in the. Results sea­son where not every stock on our buy list has the cur­rent num­bers in there, but AGL does. So I thought I’d do a stock that had recent num­bers.

[00:36:11] Tony: Uh, it, it isn’t how­ev­er a buy at the moment in terms of sen­ti­ment. It’s still a hold. So it’s a, it’s above its first buy line, if I’ll call it that. The buy line fol­lows the cell line line. It’s below its cell line and it’s below its sec­ond buy line. So it’s a Josephine for us. But, um, it, as I said before, the results, uh, cause the share price to pop by 10%.

[00:36:36] Tony: So it’s worth hav­ing a look at. Um. For peo­ple who don’t know AGL, and I dare say there’s not many, maybe the over­seas lis­ten­ers might not know it. AGL Ener­gy is the full name for it. It’s an inte­grat­ed ener­gy provider and in this case, inte­grat­ed means, uh, it pro­duces pow­er through gen­er­a­tors. Um, both ther­mal coal-pow­ered, but also, uh, also renew­able gen­er­a­tors.

[00:37:03] Tony: And it also then sells elec­tric­i­ty and gas to retail cus­tomers and large busi­ness­es. And they also have some adja­cent busi­ness­es sell­ing broad­band, mobile, uh, spec­trum and solar type prod­ucts, solar pan­els, uh, for your home and bat­ter­ies, et cetera. Uh, they also have a divi­sion which trades, uh, elec­tric­i­ty prices and pow­er con­tracts and hedges their own.

[00:37:26] Tony: Um. Pow­er prices. Uh, basi­cal­ly both to man­age the price of the pow­er that they gen­er­ate, but also to, um, make sure that they, uh, uh, are com­pli­ant with the gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions and oblig­a­tions on Base­load Ener­gy and the like in Aus­tralia. Uh, and, and also to, um, to recir­cu­late the renew­able loads from Rooftop Solar.

[00:37:50] Tony: Um, as an exam­ple, uh, they invest in oth­er renew­able com­pa­nies and they have stakes in com­pa­nies like Actu, AGL, retail Part­ners, Tilt Renew­ables and Ener­gy Impact Part­ners, Europe. Uh. I guess what you were allud­ing to before in May 22, May, 2000 and twen­ty-two AGL pro­posed to de-merge the coal pow­er gen­er­a­tion busi­ness from the retail­ing divi­sion.

[00:38:19] Tony: Uh, this plan required a sev­en­ty-five per­cent vote of share­hold­ers, which was thwart­ed when Mike Can­non Brooks bought 11% of the com­pa­ny. I think he did that in part­ner­ship with Brook­field, uh, in March. Before that, before the uh. The, that par­tic­u­lar vote in May, 2022. Can­non Brooks also tried to buy AGL in part­ner­ship with Brook­field.

[00:38:41] Tony: Um, and he offered $5.5 bil­lion, which was rebuffed by the board. So, um, he, he still has a 10% stake in the com­pa­ny and he has been able to nom­i­nate four board mem­bers to the board. He does­n’t sit as a direc­tor him­self, but he has four nom­i­nees on the board. And his agen­da is all about, uh, get­ting out of the coal pow­ered fire sta­tions ear­li­er than what he thought AGL would do, um, by them left, left to their own devices and cer­tain­ly before it would hap­pen if they de-merge those coal pow­ered fire sta­tions.

[00:39:16] Tony: So that’s the kind of cor­po­rate his­to­ry back­ground for it. It’s, um. Uh, recent his­to­ry. So the stock price rose 10%. Uh, when it, um, report­ed its results, it swung to a prof­it of some, uh, $576 mil­lion in the last half. Uh, and it lost $1.1 bil­lion in the first half of 2023. So it was quite a big swing. Um, they report­ed that high­er elec­tric­i­ty bills bet­ter reli­a­bil­i­ty, uh, at the two remain­ing coal pow­er sta­tions.

[00:39:52] Tony: Uh, and low­er coal expens­es were the main dri­vers of, uh, prof­it prof­itabil­i­ty. And, uh, that was, as I said before, I think that might start to, um, cause some kind of gov­ern­ment focus on their, on their, um, their in, well, the indus­try going for­ward. But noth­ing’s hap­pen­ing at the moment. But it is a risk, I think. they also report­ed that ris­ing prices come with an increase in bad debts. And that makes sense because AGL does­n’t do any sort of cred­it check­ing on cus­tomers before they take out, um, uh, con­tracts with AGL for sup­ply. Uh, so it’s dif­fer­ent to a bank, um, which does a cred­it check before loan­ing you a, a mort­gage or a cred­it card, for exam­ple.

[00:40:38] Tony: Um, so it’s. It is real­ly the, the fact that the bad debts are increas­ing is also high­light­ing this fact that they are mak­ing prof­its, um, against the back­drop of increas­ing stress con­sumers. And that may attract polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tion and polit­i­cal atten­tion. So, um, there’s that. Um, to put AGL and its size into per­spec­tive, uh, it’s the num­ber two play­er in Aus­tralia in the ener­gy mar­ket.

[00:41:04] Tony: Ori­gin has about 27% mar­ket share. AGL has about 22.5%, and Ener­gy Aus­tralia are about, they’re just under 15%. Uh, and then there’s a lot of oth­er small retail­ers oper­at­ing in the space. So it’s a, it’s a very large, um, com­pa­ny. Um, it’s got an inter­est­ing his­to­ry, which I’ll, I’ll run through. I always find this in inter­est­ing myself.

[00:41:30] Tony: Uh. They go back to 18 thir­ty-sev­en when the Aus­tralian Gas Light Com­pa­ny was cre­at­ed by an act of the New South Wales Par­lia­ment. And in 18 forty-one AGL lit the first gas lamp in Syd­ney. And. Yeah, in the 1850s, soon after that, AGL had enough gas lights in the, uh, in the city to be able to pow­er the first, uh, late night shop­ping in Syd­ney.

[00:42:00] Tony: Uh, in 1857, AGL intro­duced gas purifi­ca­tion, mak­ing gas safe to use in homes, and they start­ed con­nect­ing up homes, so the gas sup­ply. And in 1871, AGL became the sec­ond com­pa­ny to list on the Syd­ney Stock Exchange. So it went from being gov­ern­ment owned to being the sec­ond com­pa­ny to list way back in 1871.

[00:42:22] Tony: In the 1890s, gas stoves were, uh. Avail­able to be sold or rent­ed in Aus­tralia for the first time. Uh, a lot did­n’t change in the next sort of 80 odd years. Um, the big sort of high­light, uh, for me after that was in 1976 when nat­ur­al gas was intro­duced into Syd­ney via a pipeline from South Aus­tralia. And, um, that was a big change.

[00:42:45] Tony: That was a big change when I was a kid. That nat­ur­al gas through direct pipelines from um, reserves in Aus­tralia start­ed to be fed into homes. And nat­ur­al gas was impor­tant of course, because, um, uh, not so much in Aus­tralia, but par­tic­u­lar­ly in places like Eng­land, the gas that they were using, uh, could kill you.

[00:43:04] Tony: So peo­ple would. You know, decide to sui­cide by clos­ing all the win­dows and turn­ing on the gas stove and open­ing the door. Um, where­as nat­ur­al gas, uh, elim­i­nat­ed that kind of, um, prob­lem from from homes. Uh, 19 nine­ty-eight saw the first solar pow­er sta­tion com­mis­sioned by AGL at a place called Wilpend Pound.

[00:43:25] Tony: At the Flinders Ranges 2005, they pur­chased a com­pa­ny called South­ern Hydro, and it’s, um, obvi­ous what they do. 2006, the com­pa­ny AGL merged with Alin­ta to become AGL Ener­gy. In 2009, they opened up the Bogong Hydro sta­tion, which oper­ates in Vic­to­ria 2012. They acquired the Loyang a Pow­er Sta­tion and the adja­cent Loyang Coal Mine.

[00:43:54] Tony: 2013, the largest wind farm in the South­ern Hemi­sphere opened. It’s called MacArthur Wind Farm, and it’s 50% owned by AGL. 2014 AGL bought Bayswa­ter and the Dell Pow­er Sta­tions in New South Wales. Um, both coal pow­ered and since that time, they’ve bought, had many oth­er pur­chas­es and acqui­si­tions, um, par­tic­u­lar­ly in renew­able and gas, includ­ing the New­cas­tle gas stor­age facil­i­ty, Nin­gen and Bro­ken Hill Solar Plants, Bark­er Inlet Pow­er Sta­tion in South Aus­tralia, and the Sil­ver­ton and Coop­ers Gap Wind Farms.

[00:44:29] Tony: So quite a sto­ried his­to­ry. Um, I guess a, uh, a. His­to­ry of inno­va­tion, or often­times the first com­pa­ny to do things in Aus­tralia, whether it was light­ing lights or bring­ing nat­ur­al gas to homes, or, um, get­ting big into renew­ables. So, um, that was a, that’s a big thing for them. Uh, and I think that will will stead them in in.

[00:44:54] Tony: Good stead going for­ward, as they do man­age, have to man­age this tran­si­tion away from, uh, ther­mal-pow­ered ener­gy into, um, into more renew­able types of ener­gy run­ning through the num­bers. Um, this is a large com­pa­ny, so the ADT is near­ly $20 mil­lion per day, which is very large and will suit all our lis­ten­ers.

[00:45:14] Tony: Uh, the share price I’m doing the analy­sis at is $8 63 and that price is more than IV-one, but less than IV-two IV-one being 6 59, IV-two being 10 72. Uh, but the 8 63, their share price is less than the con­sen­sus. Tar­get com­pa­ny’s got a good yield of 5.68%, but not, um, quite high enough to score with us. We need it to be above 6.8, which is the cur­rent aver­age mort­gage rate.

[00:45:42] Tony: Stock Dr. Finan­cial health is strong and recov­er­ing, and we cer­tain­ly like recov­er­ing com­pa­nies, so we scored an extra point for that. We’re hav­ing a recov­er­ing trend. PE is 6.71, which is not the high­est or the low­est over the last three years, so we can’t score it for that very good prop cap at the moment, 3.48 times.

[00:46:01] Tony: So, um, that’s, that’s right in our sweet spot. Net equi­ty per share is $8 17. So, uh, that’s just a lit­tle bit below the share price, but cer­tain­ly you can buy this for less than book plus 30%. But again, I’ll high­light the fact that, um, net equi­ty per share is $8 17, but NTA is $3 46. So obvi­ous­ly all the acqui­si­tions have an ele­ment of good­will, which is sit­ting on the bal­ance sheet.

[00:46:26] Tony: And, um, I’ll leave that with lis­ten­ers. I, I do focus on net net equi­ty per share and look to buy things at, at that book val­ue. But you are pay­ing for some good­will, uh, accu­mu­lat­ed with the com­pa­ny. Uh, fore­cast earn­ings per share is not good. It’s, it’s fore­cast to drop 14%. So we score at, uh, a neg­a­tive one for that.

[00:46:46] Tony: Um, we don’t have an own­er founder obvi­ous­ly, in, uh, because it’s, it’s, you know, a hun­dred and maybe 200 years old, 150 years old, this com­pa­ny. So we can’t, um. We can’t score it for that. And as I said before, Mike Can­non-Brooks, who owns 10% of the com­pa­ny, does­n’t sit on the board, but he does have four nom­i­nees.

[00:47:04] Tony: So, uh, I’m not gonna score it for that. So it does­n’t get known to founder score. Uh, equi­ty, uh, has not been con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing on the bal­ance sheet, so he can’t score it for that. So all in all, the qual­i­ty, uh, score for this com­pa­ny is nine out of 16, which is 60%, and the QAV score is 0.17, which isn’t too bad for a big com­pa­ny like this.

[00:47:27] Tony: Uh, if I can run through some risks that I see and I guess some pos­i­tives for it, um, I think, uh. Yeah, the, the risk that we, I spoke about before has to be called out that there, there could be a gov­ern­ment focus on the prof­itabil­i­ty of this com­pa­ny. Um, if the gov­ern­ment feels that it, uh, has been putting up its elec­tric­i­ty bills high­er than what it should, um, giv­en the gov­ern­men­t’s focused on the cost of liv­ing.

[00:47:53] Tony: So that might be an issue for them. That, but that’s, I guess that’s a watch to space. And I know that as a board, they’ll be, they’ll be try­ing to man­age their way through that. Uh, I think, I think, um, anoth­er risk. Uh, peo­ple will have read about a lot of the risks I’m gonna talk about, but I’ll just high­light them.

[00:48:12] Tony: Uh, a big one is gonna be in tran­sit­ing to the renew­ables sec­tor. Uh, it does involve, um, the, the build­ing of, uh, new trans­mis­sion lines and, and a, a dif­fer­ent sort of grid to what we have under the cur­rent arrange­ments. And, you know, they, some of those, um, will have to tra­verse across farm­lands or oth­er areas and that could be a, a prob­lem.

[00:48:35] Tony: Um, both in terms of, and it’s all sorts of prob­lems with that, not just from peo­ple who don’t want those things going through their prop­er­ties, but also, um, as we’ve seen in the recent storms in Vic­to­ria above ground pow­er lines can lead to, um. Out­ages, they, they can be blown over in strong winds or suf­fer dur­ing bush­fires, but that is still the cheap­est way of doing it, rather than putting the lines under­ground.

[00:48:58] Tony: But if there is, if, if com­pa­nies like this are forced to put the bill for under­ground pow­er lines, and that’s gonna be a huge cost, um, and a huge head­wind for them to try and, uh, get over. Uh, like­wise with wind farms, not just with trans­mis­sion lines, but um, there is resis­tance to wind farms both onshore and off­shore.

[00:49:16] Tony: So that’s some­thing that has to be man­aged through. Um. It’s, it’s not hard to imag­ine how dif­fi­cult it must be try­ing to man­age the base load man­age­ment and prof­itabil­i­ty in this tran­si­tion peri­od where, um, they’re oblig­ed to take out­put from solar pan­els on peo­ple’s roofs, um, and put that into the grid and try and, um, keep their coal-fired pow­er sta­tions oper­at­ing prof­itably, uh, and ramp­ing them up and ramp­ing them down to take into account what’s going on with the solar pan­els.

[00:49:46] Tony: So that’s a very dif­fi­cult, um, tran­si­tion for them. Uh, Vic­to­ria, the state of Vic­to­ria recent­ly banned gas from being put into new homes as their way of try­ing to, um, fight cli­mate change. So, uh, there could be lim­its on the gas mar­ket for this com­pa­ny going for­ward, and, and peo­ple will have their own opin­ions about whether that’s good or bad, but it’s, it’s, um, it’s hap­pen­ing.

[00:50:09] Tony: So we have to take it into account. And then the, there’s the inter­nal risk, uh, on the, on the board. If there are four direc­tors push­ing for the clo­sure of coal plants ear­ly. Um. You know, that that will be a, an issue the com­pa­ny will have to man­age, um, solv­ing for that whilst main­tain­ing prof­it for share­hold­ers.

[00:50:29] Tony: So, um, a few things going on there. I guess on the pos­i­tive sides, they, they’re a very large com­pa­ny. They with a, um, num­ber two play­er mar­ket share. So that’s got­ta count for some­thing and give them sort of finan­cial strength to be able to, to resist, um, times when they, the house, when they may not make mon­ey.

[00:50:46] Tony: Um. As I said before, they do have a, um, a cul­ture of engi­neer­ing and inno­va­tion and that’s got­ta help them when they’re tran­si­tion­ing to renew­ables. ’cause often­times these things are solv­ing from first prin­ci­ples. Um, so that’s got­ta count for them as well. Um, and they have been, um, with­out the push­ing of Mike Can­non-Brooks already being, get­ting into renew­ables and, and, um, you know, they, um, have been, uh, a pio­neer of bat­ter­ies and vir­tu­al bat­ter­ies in Aus­tralia as well, for exam­ple.

[00:51:14] Tony: So they know a fair bit about, um, renew­ables and the, the strengths and weak­ness­es of that. So yeah, that’s AGL. It’s on the buy list. Not quite a buy yet for Sen­ti­ment, but, um, peo­ple who need ADT stocks could have a look at it.

[00:51:27] Cameron: Thank you, Tony. Did you say that nat­ur­al gas isn’t, uh, a, a risk for suf­fo­ca­tion?

[00:51:37] Tony: I did­n’t think so. Was it LP, was it LPG? That’s not, or was it nat­ur­al gas? I can’t remem­ber which one. I did say nat­ur­al gas was­n’t.

[00:51:43] Tony: So you say­ing it is.

[00:51:45] Cameron: oh, look, I’m def­i­nite­ly, uh, unlike every oth­er top­ic, I’m not an expert on this. Uh, my, my under­stand­ing was it was methane and it is the, a risk for suf­fo­ca­tion if you don’t have the right ven­ti­la­tion, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:52:00] Tony: Okay, I’ll take it back. But there was, there was some change at the time. I remem­ber when it came in, peo­ple were, you know, push­ing it because it

[00:52:09] Tony: was, um, less chance of, uh, suf­fo­ca­tion.

[00:52:11] Cameron: Hmm. My under­stand­ing is that’s why it smells like rot­ten eggs, which is some­thing they is intro­duced into the gas ’cause methane nat­u­ral­ly has no smell. So they make it smell like rot­ten eggs. Um, called some­thing called mer­cap­tan. It’s intro­duced to it to, um, give it, that it’s a warn­ing smell basi­cal­ly.

[00:52:33] Cameron: So if you can, if you can smell it, you know, gas­es leak­ing

[00:52:36] Cameron: some­where. Chrissie’s got a good sto­ry when she, uh, was young, you know, late teens, 20, 19, 20 when she was work­ing for a hotel like a, a, an accom­mo­da­tion hotel in Cedar City in Utah, uh, home­town on recep­tion and start­ed get­ting headaches and real­ized that there was a gas leak in.

[00:53:00] Cameron: At the build­ing and spoke to the man­ag­er, uh, about it sev­er­al times and he just, noth­ing got done. So she end­ed up going to, I know the gov­ern­ment health safe­ty ombuds­man, what­ev­er they call it, over there and fil­ing a com­plaint that they were putting their employ­ees at risk and got, got him into a lot of trou­ble, uh, for not address­ing this.

[00:53:23] Cameron: It was like, it was, she was hav­ing headaches and, you know, oth­er stuff were as well from this gas that was pumped in and they were just like, ah, shut up. Get back to work. Any­who.

[00:53:53] Cameron: It’s kind of amaz­ing to me that we’re still using so much gas in 2024. Like it’s, it just seems like such a prim­i­tive pre 20th cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy light­ing.

[00:54:04] Cameron: You talk about gas light­ing and that kin­da stuff. Now if some­body’s gas light­ing you, it’s a bad thing. Back then it was state-of-the-art tech­nol­o­gy. Now it’s, you know, it’s con­sid­ered, uh, moral­ly, eth­i­cal­ly dubi­ous. Any­who, thank you for that. Mov­ing right along. Ques­tion time, Jor­dan. Now this is sort of a report slash some ques­tions and I’ve, I got some replies from Jor­dan that I got in the last cou­ple of hours, um, that I haven’t for­ward­ed to you, but I’ll talk us through it.

[00:54:40] Cameron: So, Jor­dan QAV mem­ber has been doing some of his own, uh, regres­sion test­ing. And I’ve report­ed on it pre­vi­ous­ly, but he sent me some­thing through the oth­er day, just an update. I thought I’d com­pare using a Renko chart to the oth­er Hug­line results I had pre­vi­ous­ly. The sale trig­gers were Bre­de­la­tor three point Trend­line Rule one Com­mod­i­ty plus the item being test­ed.

[00:55:07] Cameron: So in one case, there was one year week­ly Hug­line, which he said devel­oped, uh uh, not devel­oped, deliv­ered a 0.5% increase, a three year week­ly Hug­line, which deliv­ered a 1.7% increase, and Renko charts, which deliv­ered a 1.2% increase. It says the Renko charts I gen­er­al­ly used were five-year month­ly graph with the block size set auto­mat­i­cal­ly by stock doc­tor.

[00:55:39] Cameron: In some cas­es, the month­ly charts did­n’t give a block in the last five years, so I used five-year week­ly for those. There was about six out of the 50 stocks checked the results of the regres­sion test. Test­ing had me think­ing over the last few weeks that QAV relies on the Michael Jor­dan stocks to pro­duce the out­sized results and the churn of Rule one stocks helps to give you the best chance of own­ing the Michael Jor­dan stocks when they go up.

[00:56:03] Cameron: This is backed up by Daryl’s Post this morn­ing say­ing his win loss on stocks is thir­ty-three per­cent to six­ty-six per­cent, which is almost iden­ti­cal to what I got doing the regres­sion test­ing and bet­ter than my per­son­al port­fo­lio. It has me won­der­ing if focus­ing on sell­ing at the right time is mis­lead­ing and maybe we need a high­er bar to try and improve the win-loss ratio and improve the results by reduc­ing the loss­es.

[00:56:28] Cameron: Inter­est­ed to hear Tony’s thoughts on the last sec­tion? Uh, now I asked him to drill down on that a lit­tle bit. Um, I was try­ing to fig­ure out. So the increas­es that he’s talk­ing about, are they per year or over the entire peri­od of the test­ing? He said it was over the entire test peri­od, which was from ow.

[00:56:51] Cameron: Oh, just got a cramp in one of my thigh mus­cles. Just moved my leg and go, ah, god dammit, I need

[00:57:03] Tony: You should­n’t have said those. You should­n’t have said those nasty things about Rupert

[00:57:06] Tony: Mur­doch

[00:57:07] Tony: ear­li­er on.

[00:57:08] Cameron: He’s attack­ing me with his evil, uh, emper­or, you know, dark side

[00:57:14] Tony: the Wi-Fi

[00:57:16] Tony: through the

[00:57:17] Tony: 5G.

[00:57:18] Cameron: Oh God, that hurts.

[00:57:20] Cameron: So I should have had some elec­trolytes after kung fu train­ing this morn­ing. Um, so he said the test peri­od was from the 6th of Sep­tem­ber, 2021 to the 5th of Jan­u­ary, 2024. And so when he is talk­ing about a 1.7% increase for the three year week­ly hug line, that’s over that entire peri­od.

[00:57:39] Cameron: Which is, you know, sort of two and half years, rough­ly over two and a

[00:57:44] Tony: Mm-Hmm.

[00:57:46] Cameron: And then I asked him how the cell trig­gers work, like if he’s using all of our stan­dard cell trig­gers and a Renko or, and a three week­ly hug line, which takes pri­or­i­ty. Um, and he said it’s dri­ven by the date the cell trig­ger recurred.

[00:58:02] Cameron: I tried to mim­ic it if it was just added as anoth­er trig­ger to watch in the process and sold on the first trig­ger. So if a stock ruled one, uh, rule one on the 15th of April 22, but red brick Renko’d on the 1st of Feb­ru­ary 22, then I’d use the red brick Renko as the sale val­ue, which makes sense. So that’s, so he’s also got a ques­tion after this, but that’s his, uh, regres­sion analy­sis and, uh, look­ing at hug lines and Renko’s and, uh, what do you think about all of that, Tony?

[00:58:35] Tony: Yeah, it’s good analy­sis. Thank you. Um, it’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent to my Renko chart analy­sis. So Rud­dy also went through. Our dum­my port­fo­lio from the start and use Renko charts to trade. And the analy­sis came out to be about line ball com­pared to how we nor­mal­ly do it. And I set up a dum­my port­fo­lio last year to add Renko charts to our nor­mal rules.

[00:59:00] Tony: So as you just said, it was an addi­tion­al rule to how we buy and sell. And the, uh, the port­fo­lio under­per­formed a lot, so I’ve, I’ve just stopped doing that. It’s con­vinced me that, um, it was­n’t adding val­ue. I, I think there might be some val­ue to add, and I’m try­ing this now about, um, whether we buy a stock, if it’s a Renko red or not.

[00:59:23] Tony: So don’t wor­ry about the sell of it, but the buy­ing side of it. Um. I, I, the cou­ple of things about Renko’s, which I found dif­fi­cult and maybe, um, maybe, uh, who’s this, uh, Jor­dan, maybe Jor­dan solved it was, was actu­al­ly get­ting alerts for, for trades with Renko because what I’ve had to do is to go into stock, doc­tor, look at what, where I think the price would be if, uh, it changed col­or from red to green or green to red, and use the fixed price alert for that, and then go back in next month and have a look.

[00:59:54] Tony: And it, it is a bit of hit and miss because the Renko chart. The size of the box­es gets changed all the time. It’s a dynam­ic type of process, so you can be out of date with that. Um, but it also pro­duced lots of false pos­i­tives. So I was always going in say­ing, okay, it’s, it’s dropped to that cell price, but that has­n’t changed col­or in the box.

[01:00:13] Tony: It’s now on it’s way back up again. Or it’s, it’s just, you know, it was a green, it did­n’t go the red, it’s just cre­at­ed a new green box. So I found the alert side of things dif­fi­cult, but that’s a prac­ti­cal thing, which maybe Jor­dan can shed some lights on, light on. Um, I’ve nev­er test­ed a three-year week­ly hug line, but those results are inter­est­ing and we’d have to do some fur­ther test­ing on that.

[01:00:35] Tony: Um, you know, I, I think the way to test that is again, to set up a. Dum­my port­fo­lio and see how it per­forms going for­ward. Um, to use a three-year hug line, um, I’m, I’m guess­ing that Jor­dan was only doing that for the stocks where he need­ed it. So the five-year month­ly does take care of most stocks. It’s only those ones which are gone up quite con­sid­er­ably in the last sort of year or two, but it means the sell line’s well below where the price is now.

[01:01:01] Tony: So, um, but yeah, we could add that to the list and try and do some fur­ther research on that, but that’s promis­ing. Um, the one-year week­ly hug line and 0.5% increase, I think is get­ting too sta­tis­ti­cal­ly insignif­i­cant because I, I still, you have to be wary of the fact that even though it’s a four-year regres­sion test, it’s still, those four years weren’t the same as oth­er four years in the mar­ket.

[01:01:24] Tony: So I think it does require us to do a for­ward test as well to see if it, how it trades on paper any­way, going for­ward,

[01:01:30] Cameron: years.

[01:01:30] Cameron: It’s like two and a half years.

[01:01:32] Tony: Well, two and a half. Yeah. Um, so when things are, were only very mar­gin­al­ly bet­ter or worse, it’s hard to take them, um, as being any­thing more than just sta­tis­ti­cal­ly

[01:01:41] Tony: insignif­i­cant for that peri­od.

[01:01:43] Cameron: even the 1.7% increase for the three-year week­ly hug line over two and a half years, uh, one sev­en or 1.7% improve­ment over two and a half years is, is, does­n’t seem much per year.

[01:01:57] Tony: Yeah. It’s slim. So, but it’s, it may, it may indi­cate some­thing which works and maybe it works bet­ter in oth­er peri­ods. So I think it is worth­while set­ting up a dum­my port­fo­lio and, and tri­al­ing it going for­wards. Or if we get regres­sion test­ing auto­mat­ed to put that through the

[01:02:11] Tony: test­ing code. Yeah,

[01:02:12] Cameron: or 20 year. Speak­ing of which I, I, uh, by the way, thank you Jor­dan. I’ll get back to your ques­tion from your sis­ter in a minute, but, um, while we’re on the top­ic of regres­sion test­ing, I sent you an email last week. I’m not sure if you had a chance to look at it ’cause you were golf­ing about the regres­sion test I did.

[01:02:30] Cameron: Going back to ear­ly 2022.

[01:02:33] Tony: I

[01:02:33] Tony: did look at it. Yeah.

[01:02:34] Cameron: Did you have any thoughts on that? So just for the lis­ten­ers, I used Matt Walk­er’s regres­sion test­ing sys­tem, which still has, uh, a few bugs in it, but it is what it is. Um, and I, I, you know, we’ve been hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion about QAV and all of the rule ones and is it being dri­ven by us and us pub­lish­ing stuff and peo­ple all sell­ing and buy­ing at the same time?

[01:02:58] Cameron: This does­n’t, um, remove that total­ly as a fac­tor, but because it’s, uh, an auto­mat­ed regres­sion test and it’s not based around any­thing that we’re pub­lish­ing, hope­ful­ly it has some ele­ment of ran­dom tri­al qual­i­ty about it. But any­way, I, I start­ed it at the same date. I start­ed the light port­fo­lios 15th of Feb­ru­ary, 2022.

[01:03:20] Cameron: Gave it the same bud­get, 80,000 that they’ve had, and it returned a CAGR of neg­a­tive 13.5%, um, over that peri­od.

[01:03:30] Tony: Neg­a­tive. I thought that was, sor­ry. Neg­a­tive 13.5%. I thought it

[01:03:34] Tony: was like 1.3. Did I read that wrong? Did I?

[01:03:36] Cameron: Yeah. neg­a­tive neg­a­tive 0.135, which is neg­a­tive

[01:03:42] Tony: Okay.

[01:03:43] Cameron: Right.

[01:03:44] Tony: Mm-Hmm.

[01:03:45] Cameron: Um, I think 0.135 was the result. Yeah.

[01:03:51] Tony: Well, is it, is it a num­ber or is it a per­cent­age that I read it to be

[01:03:54] Tony: a per

[01:03:55] Tony: 0.13

[01:03:56] Cameron: No, I think, okay. Let me open the spread­sheet. Um, well, it’s not giv­ing me it, it’s not telling me here. It’s, it gives me a start date, an end date, final val­ue. Yeah. Well, the final val­ue was less, so the start­ing cash was 80,000. The final cash was 61,609 T.

[01:04:15] Tony: so it would be minus 13?

[01:04:16] Cameron: Yeah. So it’s minus 13.5%. Uh, well, not per annum though.

[01:04:22] Cameron: Or is it, uh, what’s it? Yeah. Minus say six­ty-two thou­sand

[01:04:28] Tony: in total,

[01:04:29] Cameron: 18. 18%. Yeah.

[01:04:31] Cameron: So that’s,

[01:04:33] Cameron: I mean, that’s what it got. Using the QAV rules over that peri­od the last cou­ple of years, which we know have had prob­lems. Um,

[01:04:45] Cameron: you know, think­ing it through, as I said, like does it com­plete­ly remove the QAV mem­ber com­mu­ni­ty trad­ing aspect of it, influ­enc­ing that?

[01:04:56] Cameron: Not com­plete­ly, but it does seem to sup­port the idea that just the sys­tem has not han­dled the last cou­ple of years very well because of the tur­bu­lence, I think, um, of the mar­ket.

[01:05:12] Tony: Look, I, I dun­no, I think you could be, you could be right. Um, it cer­tain­ly, cer­tain­ly has been a, a heavy churn­ing peri­od for the last two years for us. Um, and that’s, that’s my oth­er com­ment was that I have been in my own port­fo­lio a 20% rule one stop-loss, um, which has slowed down the churn dra­mat­i­cal­ly.

[01:05:30] Tony: Um, but I do have a cou­ple of stocks which are basi­cal­ly strand­ed at sort of, you know, rough­ly minus 15% on what I paid for them. Um, and using a 20% stop loss means I just sit there and wait for them to recov­er, which is not a bad thing, um, as opposed to a rule one where I would’ve sold them and tried to buy some­thing else quick­ly to, to make up that loss and some­thing that’s increas­ing.

[01:05:50] Tony: So, yeah, I’m not sure. I mean, there’s swings and round­abouts with this. I’m not sure what’s

[01:05:54] Tony: gonna work out to be best, but that’s why I’m tri­alling it.

[01:05:56] Cameron: mm Well, I can run a 20% regres­sion test, uh, using Mat­Sys­tem

[01:06:02] Tony: Yeah. Good.

[01:06:04] Cameron: you know, I mean, should I do it over the, that same time peri­od, 20 twen­ty-two onwards, or, yeah.

[01:06:11] Tony: Yeah. I mean, Ryan did that for me man­u­al­ly and he came over the three, three and a half year peri­od I think. And he came back say­ing that 10% beat had a CAGA that was bet­ter than 20%, but only I think by about one or 1.5% over that time peri­od. And his thought was it was because the 10% rule one had a lot more sell­ing and buy­ing than the 20% rule

[01:06:32] Tony: one, which meant you had more of a chance of

[01:06:34] Tony: catch­ing that,

[01:06:35] Cameron: Michael Jor­dan. That’s what Daryl

[01:06:37] Tony: per­form­ing. yeah. Michael Jor­dan.

[01:06:38] Tony: Yeah.

[01:06:39] Cameron: yeah. Gives you more

[01:06:40] Cameron: oppor­tu­ni­ties to find the Michael Jor­dan.

[01:06:43] Tony: Hmm.

[01:06:44] Cameron: Uh, all right, uh, so back to Jor­dan’s ques­tion then. He says, my sis­ter’s been ask­ing for advice about talk­ing with her chil­dren regard­ing the stock mar­ket. The old­est is nine at the moment, and I’d be inter­est­ed to hear yours or Tony’s thoughts or expe­ri­ences. Well, fun­ny you should men­tion that com­ing up as our new show, QAV for Kids.

[01:07:07] Tony: Is that right?

[01:07:08] Cameron: No. No, but it could be.

[01:07:10] Tony: Dis­ney? QAV. Dis­ney.

[01:07:12] Cameron: Can We just get

[01:07:13] Tony: we get

[01:07:14] Tony: sock pup­pets. Sock pup­pets to explain the stock

[01:07:16] Tony: mar­ket.

[01:07:17] Cameron: Hel­lo boys and

[01:07:18] Cameron: girls. I’m going to do it like this, the whole

[01:07:22] Tony: win­dow are we look­ing through today?

[01:07:25] Cameron: This is Jemi­ma. Hel­lo Jemi­ma.

[01:07:29] Tony: Uh,

[01:07:30] Cameron: Who was

[01:07:30] Tony: Ted. What’s that?

[01:07:31] Cameron: Who was that, uh,

[01:07:34] Cameron: play school host in the sev­en­ties and ear­ly eight­ies that, uh, said some ques­tion­able things? John Blondhead.

[01:07:43] Cameron: Yeah, there’s these clips on YouTube of him say­ing, uh, you know, sex­u­al­ly cod­ed words.

[01:07:52] Tony: real­ly?

[01:07:53] Tony: Oh, I hope I’ve got his name right then. I don’t wan­na impugn his motors

[01:07:57] Tony: if I got it wrong.

[01:07:58] Cameron: co-hosts sort of crack­ing up as their. Say­ing this stuff, which is sort of, you know, encod­ed sex­u­al­ly explic­it stuff for the lit­tle kids.

[01:08:09] Tony: Right. Well, apolo­gies to John Ham­blin, if it’s not John Ham­blin.

[01:08:13] Cameron: you can get away with that sort of stuff in the, uh, uh,

[01:08:17] Tony: Yeah.

[01:08:18] Cameron: Yeah. John Ham­lin, that’s a, I just

[01:08:20] Tony: it was John Ham­blin.

[01:08:21] Cameron: Yeah. He, he passed away so he’s not gonna

[01:08:23] Cameron: care. But, uh, passed away, uh, 2022 aged 87 Play School host for near­ly 30 years.

[01:08:31] Cameron: Oh, there you go. In the obit and the Guardian, it says, affec­tion­ate­ly known as Naughty John. There you go. I was right. Um, Ham­lin became affec­tion­ate­ly known as Naughty John while host­ing the show for his cheeky sense of humor. Uh, there you go. Um, I, they, they, uh,

[01:08:51] Tony: Well, look,

[01:08:52] Tony: it’s, this is a real­ly good

[01:08:53] Tony: ques­tion

[01:08:53] Tony: and, and, um,

[01:08:54] Cameron: John had a wicked sense of humor and was not afraid of a ante.

[01:08:59] Cameron: His pres­ence always man­aged to keep both our tod­dler tar­get audi­ence and their par­ents equal­ly engaged with the show. Says ABC, direc­tor of Enter­tain­ment, Rupert Mur­doch. Um, no. No. Jen­nifer Collins. No. He might as well be run­ning the ABC these days. Any­way, mov­ing. Yes.

[01:09:22] Tony: mov­ing along, I think it’s a good ques­tion that Jor­dan’s raised and yeah, we, we could talk a lot about it too. And inter­est­ing­ly enough, it’s, it’s kind of a, um, I was talk­ing with Steve Mabb yes­ter­day about the ASA and its strat­e­gy going for­ward. He has a num­ber of. Thoughts on that. And I, I think, again, good luck to him.

[01:09:40] Tony: I hope he achieves what he sets out to achieve. But one of the things he men­tioned was that the, the pro­file of ASA mem­bers is, is, is kind of like skewed towards retirees. Um, uh, and they weren’t bring­ing in young peo­ple into the asso­ci­a­tion. So I think it’s the kind of same thing. It’s it’s how do you talk about finances with young peo­ple who, um, may not be inter­est­ed in the share mar­ket or inter­est­ed in finances.

[01:10:03] Tony: So just try­ing to get a, you know, live from hand to, uh, live from week to week and hand to mouth. So, um, that’s prob­a­bly a dif­fer­ent ques­tion to some­one who’s nine years old. But for what it’s worth, uh, you know, I remem­ber when Alex was very young. I think she was about four or five. We used to sit down, I used to get stock mar­ket reports in the mail on print­outs.

[01:10:27] Tony: And,

[01:10:28] Tony: uh, I’d open the let­ter and sit down

[01:10:30] Tony: with her and go through it. And

[01:10:31] Cameron: You gave me shit for us tak­ing Fox to some Apple cours­es a cou­ple of weeks ago, and that’s what you used to do. Come on. Wow.

[01:10:42] Tony: Well, Alex took an inter­est. I’d be sit­ting there read­ing these, the stock mar­ket reports, and she’d come over and say, what are you doing? And we’d go, we’d go through it. But I used to give her the, the, the newslet­ter and I’d say, okay, what’s this? Is this a buy or a sell? And she’d open it up and have a look at, you know, AGL.

[01:10:57] Tony: And she knew enough to know if the graph was going from bot­tom left to top right, it was a buy. And if it was­n’t, it was a sell. So we used to play that game, buy or sell, and look at the charts of dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies. And, and that got her start­ed. Did­n’t real­ly take, that was the end of her inter­est in the stock mar­ket.

[01:11:12] Tony: But, um, we, we actu­al­ly talked about that recent­ly that we used to do that.

[01:11:17] Tony: Um, I think the, my oth­er com­ment

[01:11:19] Cameron: talk­ing with her ther­a­pist about the fact that that’s what you sub­ject­ed her to as a child.

[01:11:28] Tony: yeah. Um. But I think like for a nine-year-old, and even for Alex when she was six, the stock mar­ket is a, is a very abstract con­cept. I’d prob­a­bly start­ing way back before that in terms of sim­ple finan­cials. Like, um, you know, explain to them who paid for the house, who buys the food, who take, who does a job, how do they get paid?

[01:11:50] Tony: How, how does that all work as, um, as some­thing that a, a kid, a kid might get inter­est­ed in. And, you know, peo­ple talk about, you know, uh, pay­ing their kids’ allowances and, and to teach them how to save and to start get­ting ’em to pay for their own things. And I know you’ve done that with Fox,

[01:12:05] Cameron: And the

[01:12:05] Tony: um, as well, and the twins.

[01:12:08] Tony: Yeah. So that’s impor­tant. But, um, I, uh, you know, get­ting them inter­est­ed in get­ting a job I think was a big thing for me. When I was a kid. I was mind-blow­ing when I was a, I was­n’t nine, I was prob­a­bly about 12 or 13, that one of my class­mates was able to afford a boom box when they came into school with a Rodeo cas­sette play­er.

[01:12:26] Tony: Um, and you know, I said, where’d you get that from? And he said, well. I have a paper route. I get on my bike before school every morn­ing, deliv­er papers, and I get paid 15 bucks a week. And that kind of just blew my mind. It just moti­vat­ed me to get jobs. It just blew my mind. And, um, it was hard for me to find a job.

[01:12:42] Tony: The local newsagent did­n’t need anoth­er paper­boy. Um, and by law he had to be 15 to get employed, um, in big com­pa­nies. So it was hard to get a job. But because I was a tall kid, I start­ed work­ing at the local Wal­ton’s depart­ment store when I was 14 and put my age up, um, and made a lot of mis­takes. I prob­a­bly was too young to start work­ing in a com­plex busi­ness like that, but, um, but yeah, I think that for me was a moti­va­tor.

[01:13:07] Tony: So I’d start with sim­ple things about, um, earn­ing mon­ey, what to do when you earn, earn it, and then get into, okay, what do you do with your spare change? And talk about sav­ings, bank inter­est, and then how do you improve on bank inter­est and what are the risk and rewards of doing that? And that gets you into the invest­ment lat­er.

[01:13:28] Tony: Um, so you start talk­ing about the stock mar­ket and how it has an index and how you can buy that index and what that per­for­mance has been over time and get into dis­cus­sions of com­pound growth. And, you know, you can, there are, I guess, tuto­ri­als on online about that, but, you know, sim­ply you can take out some grains of rice and show that one becomes two, becomes four, becomes eight over time.

[01:13:50] Tony: And how you, how that is achieved through com­pound growth. Um, yeah. And go up the invest­ment lad­der to, to cre­at­ing your own index fund, to work­ing out which stocks in that index that you’ve cre­at­ed do the heavy lift­ing and which ones are the losers. And, and then look­ing, you know, wider into the rest of the ASX in terms of find­ing com­pa­nies that have those pro­files and.

[01:14:11] Tony: It’s, it’s kind of that whole process, um, which you do over time. You don’t try and do it all in half an hour after school one day. Uh, but, but that gets them into think­ing about those things and think­ing about what they might do when they’re old enough to have a job. And I guess you have to talk about prop­er­ty with that as well, um, and, and how the hous­ing mar­ket works too, and how, you know, you, you, how rent­ing works ver­sus own­ing your own home and how you often take a loan out to do that and all that kind of thing.

[01:14:37] Tony: So I think it’s just start­ing an open dis­cus­sion. And it’s great that this per­son­’s think­ing of doing that when the kids are nine. Because when I was nine, when I was 19, my par­ents did­n’t talk at all about, about finances and did­n’t know them­selves much about finances. So it’s great that, um, a par­en­t’s will­ing to do that for their ch for

[01:14:55] Tony: their kids.

[01:14:58] Cameron: Yeah, I, I agree. I think it, like I did­n’t get any edu­ca­tion on any of this kin­da stuff until. We start­ed doing this show five years ago. So, I mean, but you know, when, when the twins were lit­tle, and I’ve done the same thing with Fox. I’ve had this idea of the Bank of Dad­dy, which has always just been a spread­sheet.

[01:15:16] Cameron: And, uh, they have to take with the twins. And I think it start­ed the same way with Fox. It was a per­cent­age. If they, if they got any mon­ey as at birth­day times or Christ­mas from grand­par­ents or what­ev­er, they got half of it maybe to spend. And then the oth­er half went into an invest­ment account, which was the bank of Dad­dy.

[01:15:33] Cameron: And I would pay them an inter­est rate. And then they, they would check in every now and again. How much do I have in that? And they would put more mon­ey into it every time they got more mon­ey. And you know, Fox has been doing that since, I think we start­ed this pod­cast not long after that. He’s nine and a half, near­ly 10 now.

[01:15:52] Cameron: Nine and a half. He’s been doing it prob­a­bly for four or five years. Um, and you know, I, I was pay­ing him an, an exor­bi­tant inter­est rate in the ear­ly days of it so he could actu­al­ly see it going up in a short time­frame. I think I was pay­ing him like a dol­lar a day. He put a cou­ple a hun­dred bucks or a cou­ple hun­dred bucks in it ini­tial­ly as his start­ing cap­i­tal, I was pay­ing him like a dol­lar a day.

[01:16:17] Cameron: And you know, we’d work out every cou­ple of months how much it had grown by. ’cause that’s what I want­ed to get him inter­est­ed in, is the idea of putting some­thing away and it grow­ing while he does noth­ing over time. And then at some point a cou­ple of years in, I was like, yeah, this is ridicu­lous. I’m cut­ting it down now to a low­er inter­est rate.

[01:16:35] Cameron: And he was furi­ous and, and he for­got. And then he checked in with me like a month or so ago, how much mon­ey? And I told him, he goes, it should be a lot more than that. And I go, well, no, you remem­ber I adjust­ed. He goes, you what? He thinks it’s

[01:16:49] Tony: Cost of liv­ing

[01:16:50] Cameron: Yeah, that’s right. It is using me

[01:16:52] Cameron: of a bait and switch. And if he ever tries, if he ever tries to call it in, it’s gonna cre­ate a run on the bank of dad­dy. ’cause I don’t have the mon­ey to pay him. I’d be like, ah, sor­ry there is no mon­ey. Take it up with the gov­ern­ment. Um, but yeah.

[01:17:08] Tony: and Fox should com­pared bank rates to the bank of dad and take his mon­ey and put it in the bank.

[01:17:13] Cameron: Yeah. True. That’s what I’ll say. If you don’t like it, go put it some­where else. ’cause he can’t get his mon­ey to put in the bank. ’cause I don’t have the mon­ey,

[01:17:20] Cameron: so.

[01:17:21] Tony: I remem­ber when I start­ed hav­ing these con­ver­sa­tions with Alex when she was in high school and I took her to a Cana­di­an bank to open up a bank account and we put a thou­sand dol­lars in there and I said, you know, just watch this grow and learn about com­pound inter­est and stuff. I think the inter­est rate was like 0.01%, so I think for a thou­sand dol­lars, like a cent or 10 cents or

[01:17:39] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:17:39] Tony: and it cost, you know, 20 bucks a year to keep the account open.

[01:17:43] Cameron: yeah.

[01:17:44] Cameron: yeah,

[01:17:45] Tony: where the, that’s where the les­son

[01:17:46] Tony: end­ed.

[01:17:47] Cameron: Banks,

[01:17:48] Tony: anoth­er, anoth­er, anoth­er thing to that, that this moth­er or father could do with their 9‑year-old is to buy them a share. Buy them, buy them one stock in an index fund, or buy them one stock in BHP and let the kid do what Fox is doing with the your bank, but with an actu­al share and tell ’em how to look up the price and let them decide whether to keep it or

[01:18:07] Tony: sell it

[01:18:08] Tony: and all that kind of stuff too.

[01:18:09] Cameron: I should do that with Fox. Like the idea was always when he had enough mon­ey in his bank of Dad­dy account to do that, to set up a lit­tle port­fo­lio for him and start to buy shares.

[01:18:19] Cameron: And it’s prob­a­bly at a lev­el now where we could start to do that, um, and then help him man­age it and learn how to man­age it.

[01:18:26] Cameron: Have a month­ly meet­ing where we sit down and look at it. That kind of thing. Yeah.

[01:18:30] Tony: And there cer­tain­ly are apps out there which do micro port­fo­lios

[01:18:33] Tony: too,

[01:18:34] Cameron: Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, I, I should look

[01:18:37] Tony: you can

[01:18:38] Tony: put real mon­ey into them. Yeah.

[01:18:41] Cameron: Good idea. Any­way, I look, I do think it’s, it’s great, um, to teach kids this an ear­ly age. Of course, you know, I think by the time Fox’s 20, there will be no more econ­o­my. It’ll all be run by the ai. It’ll be cen­tral­ly man­aged. So no

[01:18:55] Tony: Yeah, that’s a

[01:18:56] Cameron: do all of that. But any­way,

[01:18:58] Tony: okay,

[01:18:58] Cameron: in case

[01:18:59] Tony: assume that may not hap­pen. Yeah, exact­ly. Yeah.

[01:19:02] Cameron: yeah.

[01:19:05] Tony: Well, you should ask the chat GPT. What are the chances of there being no, uh,

[01:19:09] Tony: cap­i­tal­ist econ­o­my in five years

[01:19:11] Tony: time?

[01:19:12] Cameron: Not five 10, but, uh, I was gonna, I was gonna say, the oth­er thing to do is I, like, I would get into chat GPT and say, you know, how do I teach my nine-year-old invest­ing? Because it’s real­ly good at that, at break­ing stuff down for kids. Fox. Fox got into, he, he read his first as. Directs com­ic over the last cou­ple of weeks that he got out from the library and strug­gled with it for the first week with the Latin.

[01:19:35] Cameron: He kept ask­ing me what the Latin meant, and I thought he was gonna give it up, but the, the oth­er, the oppo­site thing hap­pened. He be, he loves it. He’s now, he wants to read all of them in an order. And we’ve been watch­ing some of the ani­mat­ed ver­sions and a live action film that came out last year. He’s total­ly into it.

[01:19:49] Cameron: And, and so he was ask­ing me about the big rock that Obelisk was car­ry­ing around and we got talk­ing about Stone­henge and then we watched some videos on Stone­henge, but I was dri­ving him home from school the oth­er day and I just pulled up GPT on my phone and I said, talk to, uh, I’ve got my 9‑year-old in the car with me.

[01:20:07] Cameron: Explain. The his­to­ry and the sig­nif­i­cance of Stone­henge to him. And it did, you know, we had this chat for a few min­utes about Stone­henge and when it was built and why it was built and what it does, what func­tion it per­forms, and we could ask it ques­tions to drill down at it as we were dri­ving. And it is fab­u­lous for that kind stuff.

[01:20:26] Cameron: I’m, I’m so jeal­ous of kids

[01:20:30] Tony: Hmm.

[01:20:30] Cameron: today that they have access to this. Like it’s the world’s great­est ency­clo­pe­dia that will answer your ques­tions and, you know, explain things to you in detail or in dif­fer­ent ways if you did­n’t under­stand it, et cetera, et cetera. It’s uh, just an incred­i­ble, it is an incred­i­ble tool for kids.

[01:20:50] Cameron: It’s mind blow­ing.

[01:20:52] Tony: Mm.

[01:20:53] Cameron: Any­way. Yes, ask it about invest­ing. It’s a good, uh, good way to use it. Well, that is, uh, the reg­u­lar part of the show, TK. Now, well, we, we can do an after hour show, but in your email to me, you said you don’t have any­thing to talk about. So this whole idea of us hav­ing a stand­alone after hour show, kind of, I don’t feel, you know, you know, very con­fi­dent when you go, I got noth­ing to talk about.

[01:21:17] Cameron: I just was play­ing golf with Rud­dy for three days, so I’ve done noth­ing.

[01:21:20] Tony: yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m still read­ing Elon Musk’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy. That’s gonna

[01:21:25] Tony: take me a while to get through, I think, unfor­tu­nate­ly.

[01:21:28] Tony: Um,

[01:21:28] Cameron: are you up to in that?

[01:21:30] Tony: Still ear­ly days. He’s, um, he’s just, uh, set­ting up Pay­Pal

[01:21:36] Cameron: right.

[01:21:38] Tony: Yeah. Or deal­ing with Pay­Pal and merg­ing and

[01:21:41] Tony: there’s a lot of cor­po­rate shenani­gans going on with

[01:21:43] Tony: that.

[01:21:43] Cameron: Yeah. Him and, uh, Peter. What’s

[01:21:46] Tony: Peter Thiel.

[01:21:47] Cameron: The, yeah.

[01:21:48] Tony: Yeah.

[01:21:49] Cameron: Okay. Any­thing else?

[01:21:52] Tony: No, that’s me.

[01:21:54] Cameron: Mm, well, I’ve, I’ve been.

[01:21:56] Cameron: I read, uh, you know, I fin­ished, I think I told you last week, I fin­ished the Gogol book, but then I start­ed read­ing notes from the Under­ground by Dos­to­evsky, and I got about halfway through that and it’s just, uh, it’s just too angry for me.

[01:22:10] Cameron: I, I, I could­n’t sort of get into it. So I put that down. Then I start­ed I, Chrissie and I just did our first episode of our new Kung Fu pod­cast. And so I’ve been read­ing a cou­ple of books on the his­to­ry of Shaolin over the last cou­ple of weeks. So I was going deep into that and that led me to read­ing the Lanka­vatara Sutra, which I may have read when I was 19 or 20, but I don’t think I have.

[01:22:33] Cameron: It was the Bud­dhist Sutra that Bod­hid­har­ma sup­pos­ed­ly used as the basis for his teach­ing of Chan Bud­dhism at Shaolin. So I’ve been read­ing that, which has been fas­ci­nat­ing. Um, lot

[01:22:49] Tony: So let, let me, let me ask a ques­tion, right? So I’ve always been sort of entranced or. Enchant­ed by Bud­dhism, but I’ve nev­er felt the need to fol­low it or, or, you know, live by its prin­ci­ples. What, what, what would con­vince me to, um, look into

[01:23:04] Tony: anoth­er the­ol­o­gy?

[01:23:07] Cameron: Bud­dhism isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a the­ol­o­gy. Okay, so you know, it depends on which branch of Bud­dhism you want to go into. Like if you go back and you read about the life and the teach­ings as far as they can piece ’em togeth­er of Sid­dhartha, Gau­ta­ma, the Bud­dha, it’s real­ly about enlight­en­ment. It’s not about the­ol­o­gy, it’s not about gods.

[01:23:34] Cameron: It’s about enlight­en­ment, which is about. See­ing the one­ness of things and real­iz­ing that, uh, the, the per­cep­tion that we have of the uni­verse is real­ly an illu­sion caused by the sens­es. There’s a deep­er under­ly­ing real­i­ty, and that’s what my three Illu­sions book is all about, right? It’s okay. Well, we think of our­selves as sep­a­rate, and we think of all of the objects as being sep­a­rate, but real­ly that’s what our brain is telling us based on the infor­ma­tion that it gets from the sen­sors.

[01:24:03] Cameron: But that’s not what’s real­ly hap­pen­ing at a deep­er lev­el. It’s it’s mol­e­cules, it’s atoms, it’s sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles. And atoms don’t have a hard shell around them. They have a fuzzy prob­a­bil­i­ty cloud. So real­ly, your body does­n’t have a hard. Shell around it, it’s con­nect­ed to the air around you, which is con­nect­ed to the objects, the chair, the desk, the table, the wall, the oth­er peo­ple.

[01:24:28] Cameron: So it, it’s about rethink­ing your sense of iden­ti­ty and your place in the uni­verse and how every­thing is con­nect­ed, which in the­o­ry gives you deep­er lev­el of, of, uh, uh, peace. Uh, less anx­i­ety, less anger when you rethink the, the con­nect­ed tis­sue of the uni­verse. But,

[01:24:50] Tony: giv­en I accept all that stuff any­way. ’cause I’ve read your book and I,

[01:24:54] Tony: so I don’t feel any, I feel

[01:24:56] Tony: unchanged

[01:24:57] Cameron: no, that’s, oh, you do,

[01:25:00] Cameron: well, they,

[01:25:01] Tony: I, I know some­thing today I did­n’t know yes­ter­day, but that’s about it. It does­n’t make me feel, um, any more, you know, any more equi­lib­ri­um with things rather than get­ting angry if I

[01:25:10] Tony: stub my toe or, um,

[01:25:12] Tony: laugh at a joke.

[01:25:13] Cameron: don’t get angry. You’re already enlight­ened. You’re just nat­u­ral­ly enlight­ened, and so you have noth­ing to gain.

[01:25:19] Tony: I should talk to Jen­ny and Alex about whether I get angry or

[01:25:22] Tony: not.

[01:25:24] Cameron: Well, maybe then you should, uh, look into it a lit­tle bit more deeply. Maybe you, maybe you think you under­stand it at an intel­lec­tu­al lev­el, but you haven’t real­ly, and I’m being seri­ous, not about you, but there is, there’s a big dif­fer­ence between intel­lec­tu­al­ly under, and I find this with neu­ro­sci­en­tists.

[01:25:43] Cameron: Uh, and, and you know, um, when I read them say, look, I know, um, from the lev­el of physics and neu­ro­science that free will prob­a­bly does­n’t exist because we have no sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry for it. But I still feel like I have free will and I still act like I have free will. So that’s a dif­fer­ence between.

[01:26:07] Tony: I’m hap­py

[01:26:07] Tony: in my illu­sion.

[01:26:08] Cameron: Well, I would­n’t go so

[01:26:10] Cameron: far as to say they’re hap­py in it, but they are in it.

[01:26:13] Cameron: So there’s a big dif­fer­ence between under­stand­ing some­thing intel­lec­tu­al­ly and inte­grat­ing that under­stand­ing deeply into your dai­ly life and your self-con­cept about who you are and who every­one else is and how the world works. It’s, it’s a big­ger leap, um, to make. But any­way, so Bud­dhism though, for like a thou­sand years after the Bud­dha died in 500, BCE, give or take, did sort of become sort of a reli­gious type of thing where peo­ple were Mahayana Bud­dhism, you know, it was all about study­ing the scrip­tures and liv­ing accord­ing to the Eight­fold path.

[01:26:54] Tony: a the­ol­o­gy.

[01:26:56] Cameron: they did start to intro­duce God. I mean, it comes out of India, right? So you, it’s sort of. You had Hin­duism with all of its gods, and then Bud­dhism and Hin­duism kind of syn­cretized. And so the Bod­hisattvas became kind of gods that they would look up to, and all of

[01:27:13] Tony: Well even take.

[01:27:14] Cameron: and that kind of stuff.

[01:27:16] Tony: even if you dis­count the fact that there are gods or there aren’t gods, it’s still a the­ol­o­gy in terms of, you know, you become a monk, you shave your head, you get rid of your mate­r­i­al pos­ses­sions. There’s a kind of

[01:27:26] Tony: pre­scribed way of liv­ing so you can attain

[01:27:28] Tony: enlight­en­ment.

[01:27:29] Cameron: That’s not a the­ol­o­gy, that’s a

[01:27:30] Cameron: phi­los­o­phy though, right?

[01:27:32] Tony: okay, what’s the

[01:27:32] Tony: phi­los­o­phy then?

[01:27:33] Tony: If I’ve got my terms wrong, I’ve got my

[01:27:34] Cameron: Well, the­ol­o­gy assumes a DEOs a, a belief in a God,

[01:27:39] Tony: okay, well what do you, so what do you call some­thing which tells you how to live your life

[01:27:43] Tony: to achieve enlight­en­ment but does­n’t

[01:27:45] Tony: involve a

[01:27:46] Cameron: That’s, it’s, it’s a

[01:27:47] Tony: Look, it kind of does enlight­en­men­t’s the kind of God

[01:27:50] Tony: in this case, isn’t it?

[01:27:51] Cameron: No, enlight­en­men­t’s not a God. It’s noth­ing, some­thing that’s sep­a­rate to you and above you. It’s, uh, a process that you under­go. Which changes the way that you see your­self and the world around you and your place in the

[01:28:04] Tony: So God

[01:28:05] Tony: is, so, God is with­in you.

[01:28:07] Cameron: Well actu­al­ly, I mean, the way I would explain it to a, uh, reli­gious per­son is what enlight­en­ment real­ly is.

[01:28:15] Cameron: It’s kind of pan­the­ism. You know what I would argue that Bud­dha, uh, is say­ing, and what Zen teach­ers and Chan and Advai­ta Vedan­ta is that there is only God. Every­thing is God. You are God. Every­thing around you is God. And in sci­en­tif­ic terms, we call that the uni­verse. There is only the uni­verse. We are

[01:28:39] Tony: So it’s a the­ol­o­gy.

[01:28:42] Cameron: depend­ing on your

[01:28:43] Tony: I, what I, what I draw the line out is I can, I can buy into the log­ic of it, but I can’t buy into, it’s gonna change me spir­i­tu­al­ly. It’s gonna change my, the way I live my life every day, day to day. I don’t like being, hav­ing a pre­scribed way of doing

[01:28:58] Tony: things.

[01:28:59] Cameron: There’s no pre­scribed way of doing things.

[01:29:02] Cameron: at

[01:29:02] Tony: Mir­ror is, is a

[01:29:03] Cameron: in, my, in my

[01:29:04] Tony: pre­scribed way of doing things to get a

[01:29:06] Tony: to find enlight­en­ment.

[01:29:07] Cameron: No. Well, no, not real­ly. I mean, you can FI I’ve, I’ve known peo­ple I know. A, a woman, an Amer­i­can woman, a friend of ours who got her enlight­en­ment when she was sit­ting in the desert in Ari­zona, sud­den­ly came out­ta nowhere. Um, uh, when her father died, she was just sit­ting in the desert and had this real­iza­tion that there was no sep­a­ra­tion between her.

[01:29:31] Cameron: And, and then she did­n’t talk to any­one about it for like 10 years. And we were hav­ing din­ner with what with her one night. And she was sort of hes­i­tant­ly explain­ing this, like she, that we would think, what she was say­ing was like, real­ly weird. And I was like. Yeah, I know. I worked that out like 30 years ago too.

[01:29:49] Cameron: That’s how we live. And she was like, real­ly? I did­n’t know any­one else felt this way. And I’m like, yeah, lots of us. She had no. Sort of expo­sure to enlight­en­ment, schools of thought or what­ev­er. Any­way, my point was gonna be that what, what Bod­dhid­har­ma’s School of Thought, the Chan Bud­dhism, which turned into Zen Bud­dhism was say­ing, lis­ten, ignore the scrip­tures.

[01:30:11] Cameron: Ignore, you know, liv­ing the eight­fold path. It’s got noth­ing to do with that. That’s all good. If you want to go do that, go do that. Real­ly it’s about, it’s an intel­lec­tu­al exer­cise of under­stand­ing, um, how your mind works and that the mind is, uh, cre­at­ing these nar­ra­tives. But the nar­ra­tives are real­ly just that they’re a nar­ra­tive.

[01:30:31] Cameron: They’re not the under­ly­ing real­i­ty. And see­ing, see­ing through the nar­ra­tives into the under­ly­ing re real­i­ty and hav­ing a direct expe­ri­ence of enlight­en­ment, not try­ing to get it through wor­ship or prac­tices or, you know, being a veg­e­tar­i­an or the Eight­fold path. Stuff about treat­ing oth­er ani­mals as sen­tient beings and all that kin­da stuff.

[01:30:51] Cameron: And that, and that’s sort of the direc­tion that Zen took because it came out­ta Chan Advai­ta Vedan­ta, which comes out of Hin­duism and is old­er, but it’s the same. But from a, just from a Hin­du per­spec­tive, you know, but it’s the same sort of direct approach. Um, any­way, long sto­ry short, Lankan for Tara Sutra is the Bud­dhist scrip­ture.

[01:31:10] Cameron: That is sort of the Bud­dha talk­ing to a guy, one of his dis­ci­ples and telling him all this stuff. Um, so any­way, I also have been watch­ing the Black Lady Sketch Show. We just dis­cov­ered that, uh, the Black Lady Sketch Show. I think it’s on binge. Um, very fun­ny bunch of black ladies. Um, writ­ten, direct­ed, pro­duced.

[01:31:35] Cameron: Every­one behind the scenes is a black lady. It’s a very black lady cen­tric com­e­dy show, and we kin­da like those. So we like sketch slash com­e­dy shows that are writ­ten by non-white peo­ple. Um, they just have a dif­fer­ent kind of a focus and ener­gy and vibe to them. It’s a lit­tle bit fresh­er for white peo­ple to see com­e­dy that comes from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, I think.

[01:32:01] Cameron: So any­way, we’re real­ly enjoy­ing that. Chrissie’s, pret­ty con­vinced she’s half black girl any­way, so it’s sort of right in her wheel­house. New sea­son of Curb. Your Enthu­si­asm has dropped. We watched the first episode of that last night, Lar­ry’s final sea­son. There’s a great, there’s a great scene in the first episode where he’s try­ing to get direc­tions from Siri in his car and I can’t under­stand what he’s say­ing and he los­es his damn mind.

[01:32:26] Cameron: It goes on for like five min­utes. Him just get­ting angry and angry and scream­ing and vec­tor at Siri, which I think we can all relate to. It’s pret­ty good.

[01:32:38] Tony: Yep.

[01:32:39] Cameron: And then I was lis­ten­ing to a lot of Jacques Brel this morn­ing as peo­ple who got my newslet­ter will know because I was quot­ing a Jacques Brel song.

[01:32:46] Cameron: You ever got­ten a Jacques Brel? Tony

[01:32:49] Tony: I have not, no.

[01:32:51] Cameron: Alex would be famil­iar with at least one or two Jacques Brel songs because he was cov­ered a lot. He’s this Bel­gian singer in French in the fifties through to the sev­en­ties, died aged 49 in the late sev­en­ties. Um, but Bowie cov­ered a cou­ple of his songs and Scott Walk­er.

[01:33:13] Cameron: Cov­ered a cou­ple of his songs and I know that Alex is a fan of Bowie, but also of Scott Walk­er ’cause she and I have talked about Scott Walk­er and the Walk­er Broth­ers in the past. Um, uh, yeah. And then And Nina Simone and Dusty Spring­field and Mark Armand. A lot of peo­ple have cov­ered Jacques Brel and he was this French, well Bel­gian slash French singer-song­writer who was, had a bril­liant voice.

[01:33:39] Cameron: He was also an actor, but had a bril­liant voice, kind of like an ear­li­er, slight­ly ear­li­er Serge Gains­bourg kind of thing. This sort of mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry French very Latin love songs, but with a beau­ti­ful, warm, rich voice and bril­liant songs and all that kind of stuff. So we’re, we are very much into Char­lotte Gains­bourg.

[01:34:01] Cameron: Have I men­tioned that in the show recent­ly? Lis­tened to a lot of her music, a lot of Char­lotte Gains­bourg’s music over the last cou­ple of months. And we’ve watched a cou­ple of her TV series and films that she’s been in real­ly get­ting deep into her. Wan­na see, she did a doc­u­men­tary just a cou­ple of years ago on her moth­er, um.

[01:34:22] Cameron: Uh, shit. What was her moth­er’s name? Um, Sue Gaines’s, uh, uh, mis­tress girl­friend for many years. Kate, she was an, she was a British mod­el in em. She’s the Eng­lish girl and em, yeah, can’t remem­ber her name. Any­way, she passed away last year. There’s a hand­bag named after her too, that she dis­tanced her­self from because she was a veg­e­tar­i­an.

[01:34:48] Cameron: It was made out of leather. Any­way, wan­na watch that. But yeah, Char­lotte Gains­burg is a great singer. Got some real­ly great albums, great songs in that sort of tra­di­tion of her father, but a lit­tle bit more Pop­py.

[01:35:01] Tony: Okay.

[01:35:01] Cameron: Speak­ing of which, you’re off to

[01:35:03] Tony: I will check them out.

[01:35:05] Cameron: you’re off to see, uh, Tyler Swift tonight, I believe. Going, you’re a huge Tay­lor Swift fan.

[01:35:13] Cameron: Can’t get enough of Tay­lor. You’re a

[01:35:14] Cameron: Swifty. Secret

[01:35:16] Tony: I, uh, I don’t, think I only know one tale of one Tay­lor Swift songs. The Shake it Off, shake it off.

[01:35:22] Tony: Shake it up.

[01:35:23] Cameron: You know more than me.

[01:35:25] Tony: yeah. I dun­no.

[01:35:26] Tony: Any­thing about Tay­lor

[01:35:27] Cameron: I have heard that

[01:35:28] Cameron: song. I have heard peo­ple go, da da da da da.

[01:35:32] Tony: That’s it. Yeah,

[01:35:33] Cameron: Yeah, yeah. I dun­no where I know that from. Oh yes I do. The Bear. Have you watched The Bear yet?

[01:35:39] Tony: Uh, I tried, I watched the first three episodes and gave up on it.

[01:35:42] Cameron: Did­n’t like it

[01:35:43] Tony: Yeah. Did­n’t grab me. And it, it also too, like, it just seemed a bit clichéd, you know. Died. Guy comes back from a big restau­rant to run a small one. Finds out the, the loan sharks pay like loan mon­ey that like, it’s just like pulling on all the pres­sure and you just know he is kind of work his way out of it some­how.

[01:36:01] Tony: ’cause he’s smart

[01:36:01] Tony: and expe­ri­enced. And I just went, yeah,

[01:36:04] Tony: I’m not

[01:36:04] Cameron: That good? Did you watch Ted? Las­so?

[01:36:07] Tony: Yeah,

[01:36:07] Cameron: But you like that you like Ted Las­so, but you thought this was

[01:36:10] Cameron: cliche? ’cause I thought, I thought the Bear was the less smarmy ver­sion of Ted Las­so.

[01:36:16] Tony: Oh, okay. Yeah, it could be fair

[01:36:18] Tony: enough.

[01:36:19] Cameron: Uh,

[01:36:20] Tony: Any­way, I did­n’t like,

[01:36:21] Cameron: did­n’t like well,

[01:36:22] Tony: I did­n’t this, I did­n’t dis­like it. I just could­n’t be

[01:36:24] Tony: both­ered going on with it.

[01:36:25] Cameron: there’s a big scene, I think in the, I don’t know, first or sec­ond sea­son where Paz has a, an enlight­en­ment expe­ri­ence in his role in Restau­rant­i­ng, and it’s accom­pa­nied to the Tay­lor Swift song. I’m not sure

[01:36:39] Tony: Oh,

[01:36:39] Cameron: it was, but it might been

[01:36:40] Cameron: one of those.

[01:36:42] Tony: I just remem­ber Alex used to play, uh, used to learn bass gui­tar in Toron­to and they had a con­cert at the end of the year, and one of the girls, oth­er

[01:36:49] Tony: girls in the group got up and played that

[01:36:50] Tony: song, shake it off.

[01:36:52] Cameron: Wow. She’d been around that long. Tay­lor

[01:36:53] Cameron: Swift.

[01:36:55] Tony: Mm

[01:36:55] Cameron: Can’t think of her

[01:36:56] Cameron: as only hav­ing been around for a cou­ple of years, but I

[01:36:58] Cameron: guess

[01:36:59] Tony: no. It’s got­ta be a long time. Yeah,

[01:37:01] Tony: a long while.

[01:37:02] Tony: I.

[01:37:03] Cameron: Yeah. I com­plete­ly, as I said to you off air, uh, like a month or so ago, I, it was like, okay. I need to give this Tay­lor Swift thing a crack because I don’t wan­na be that old guy.

[01:37:13] Cameron: And I lis­tened to like 10 tracks on Spo­ti­fy, and I was like, eh, it’s, it’s fine. It’s like rea­son­able pop music, but it just sounds like lots of oth­er female pop acts to me. I, I did­n’t get, you know, it’s like Kylie’s new track that just, she won all these awards for. I lis­tened to that. I was like, oh, Kylie, good for you.

[01:37:33] Cameron: Kylie. Like, you know, good stuff. I, I moved when I moved to Mel­bourne when I was 17, you know, my whole plan was to date Kylie Minogue and cor­rupt her, uh, girl next door, uh, per­sona. But Michael Hutchins beat me too. Yeah, he, Michael Hutchins beat me too. Well, he did­n’t beat me. Yeah.

[01:37:52] Cameron: he

[01:37:52] Tony: Oh, why you were beat­en out by a bet­ter man,

[01:37:54] Tony: I think in

[01:37:55] Tony: that case.

[01:37:56] Cameron: Well, let’s not be judgy about it, Tony, but he, he, uh.

[01:37:59] Tony: well, you know, it’s, you’re all part

[01:38:00] Tony: of the same atoms and uni­verse, so it was real­ly you who

[01:38:02] Tony: was cor­rupt­ing

[01:38:03] Cameron: cor­rupt­ed her via my Michael

[01:38:05] Cameron: Hutchins per­sona avatar. But I saw, any­way, I lis­tened to her big new hit song too. The one that’s just won all the awards. And I was like,

[01:38:13] Tony: But dumb dumb.

[01:38:13] Cameron: I was like, it’s,

[01:38:15] Tony: I know, But I

[01:38:17] Tony: don’t get pop

[01:38:17] Tony: music. I nev­er did.

[01:38:18] Cameron: Well, I think she’s had some

[01:38:20] Cameron: real­ly good songs, uh, that I’ve liked over the years.

[01:38:22] Cameron: Like the last one that she won awards for like 20 years ago. Nah, nah, nah. The nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. I thought that was catchy. I, I’ll give that props,

[01:38:32] Tony: It’s catchy.

[01:38:33] Cameron: but, um, this one not

[01:38:35] Cameron: so much.

[01:38:37] Tony: it’s a bit bit like eat­ing a a no-sug­ar dessert. It’s not very fill­ing.

[01:38:45] Tony: Yeah. I’m not into

[01:38:46] Tony: that stuff

[01:38:46] Cameron: uh, look, I

[01:38:47] Tony: I’ve got­ta, I’ll tell a sto­ry. I’ll tell a, speak­ing of no-sug­ar desserts, I’ll tell a sto­ry against myself. I’ve been get­ting into, um, watch­ing Suits.

[01:38:56] Tony: Net­flix. You ever seen

[01:38:57] Tony: Suits?

[01:38:58] Cameron: uh, it was my old mate, Michael

[01:39:00] Cameron: Seward’s was telling me to watch that 10, 15 years ago when it first came out. And I, and I watched the first episode and it was like, it’s just a bit network‑y for me, and every­one tells me it gets bet­ter. I think Stephen, Madd might be a big fan of that.

[01:39:14] Tony: Oh, okay.

[01:39:14] Cameron: been telling me to

[01:39:15] Tony: I like, I’ve liked the first sea­son and it goes down­hill from there, but I’m still watch­ing it. A bit of a guilty plea­sure. Yeah, it’s um, what I found out though, sort of research­ing a bit, it was writ­ten by one of the writ­ers from the West Wing and it’s got that sort of vibe about it.

[01:39:29] Tony: But yeah, it’s a soap opera, like the first sea­son’s real­ly good. It’s fast, quick-wit­ted, think on your feet solv­ing prob­lems, and then it sort of gets into

[01:39:37] Tony: Megan, Markle’s love life and

[01:39:39] Tony: that kind of

[01:39:40] Cameron: Oh, she was in

[01:39:41] Cameron: it

[01:39:41] Tony: there.

[01:39:42] Tony: Yeah. And like I was, I was watch­ing it like halfway through the first sea­son.

[01:39:46] Tony: I’ve gone, oh, I get it now. Like the lead char­ac­ter in Suits is like this kind of lit­tle weedy, nerdy, um, idiot savant. And, and he’s in all these, uh, you know, scenes. It’s unre­quit­ed love scenes with Megan Markle. And I’m going,

[01:40:05] Tony: you know, if you squint, he looks like

[01:40:07] Tony: Prince Har­ry.

[01:40:08] Cameron: Is that who she hooked up with?

[01:40:11] Tony: yeah. Yeah.

[01:40:12] Cameron: I know noth­ing about, oh, tell you what I did watch, uh, was the, um, we are the world doc­u­men­tary.

[01:40:21] Tony: Oh, is that

[01:40:21] Tony: good?

[01:40:23] Cameron: I look, I would­n’t say it’s good, but it, it’s not like the last dance or some­thing like that. But it’s inter­est­ing,

[01:40:34] Cameron: um, you know, for those of us that were around and remem­ber the peri­od, like I did­n’t know until I watched this, that Lionel Richie was the main sort of guy I.

[01:40:43] Cameron: Pulling the whole thing togeth­er. It was, um, it was, um, well, you know, so, um, Boom­town’s Rats guy did the British ver­sion. Do they know it’s Christ­mas Geld­of, thanks. And then Har­ry Bela­fonte, it was this, this guy in the US who was sort of a big music man­ag­er, guy Krak­en, I think his name was released, the Krak­en.

[01:41:07] Cameron: And, um, he and Har­ry Bela­fonte were talk­ing and said, we need to do some­thing for Africa. Har­ry Bela­fonte was all about pover­ty in Africa at this stage.

[01:41:16] Tony: Mm-Hmm.

[01:41:16] Cameron: said, we need to do some­thing. So this guy, the music man­ag­er, I think he man­aged Lionel Richie, and he said to Lionel, you should do this. And Lionel got into it, and then they reached out to Ste­vie Won­der to write the song, and Ste­vie said, I’ll get back to you.

[01:41:28] Cameron: And then they nev­er heard any­thing back from him. So Lionel Richie got togeth­er with Michael Jack­son and said, who he’d known for­ev­er, since, you know, the Com­modores and the Jack­sons were on the same cir­cuit. So he and Michael got togeth­er to, to write some­thing.

[01:41:43] Cameron: And they weren’t mak­ing a lot of progress with it, and they thought they had plen­ty of time.

[01:41:46] Cameron: But then the music man­ag­er guy was try­ing to fig­ure out, now we wan­na have all these big celebri­ties come togeth­er, it’s gonna be impos­si­ble to coor­di­nate all their sched­ules. They fig­ured the only oppor­tu­ni­ty they were gonna have was when they were all in LA for the Amer­i­can Music Awards. That would be the only chance of get­ting them all in the one spot at the one time.

[01:42:05] Cameron: And that was a month away. So then it becomes this, holy shit, we’ve got a month to pull this togeth­er. Song’s not writ­ten. We have to sell all of these peo­ple on this thing. They’re gonna need some­thing before they’ll com­mit. And so they, they’re reach­ing out to Spring­steen and Bil­ly Joel and Bob Dylan and Cindy Lau­per and get­ting them all in the, and then they all get in the room, and then there’s the egos and there’s, you know, and, and Quin­cy Jones is involved in pulling the whole thing togeth­er and it’s, yeah, but it is kind of.

[01:42:38] Cameron: Like it’s the shmarmi­est song ever. And um, you know, any­way, it was inter­est­ing. I most­ly did it. I put it on for Fox to watch ’cause he kin­da likes a bit of Michael Jack­son and that kind of stuff. So I thought he’d, he’d sort of get, he likes eight­ies music. Um, I was gonna talk to you some­thing about before when we were talk­ing about TV shows.

[01:42:58] Cameron: Oh, Gia Mar­ty. So, yeah. The oth­er show that you keep talk­ing about is that Gia Mar­ty show. Yes. Which I still haven’t had time to get into, but I heard Gia Mar­ty, I saw a clip of him on, I think it was Stern. Have you heard the Gia Mar­ty share sto­ry

[01:43:17] Tony: No.

[01:43:18] Cameron: was a great sto­ry. I mean, Gia Mar­ty, you got­ta, you got­ta look it up and look him tell it.

[01:43:23] Cameron: But Stern goes, Hey, I heard this is a sto­ry about you and share. What’s that all about? Gia Mar­ty tells the sto­ry. He goes, yeah, for years peo­ple have been com­ing up to Gia Mar­ty and say­ing. Cher real­ly wants to speak to you. Like not, would like to speak to you, needs to talk to you, Cher. He goes, well, great, but you know, I don’t have Cher’s num­ber.

[01:43:49] Cameron: And they’re like, no, no, she real­ly, real­ly wants to talk to you. And he’s like, okay. And this goes on for like a cou­ple of years. He keeps hear­ing this. Cher real­ly wants to talk to you. Final­ly, some­body, he meets some­body who knows Cher, her hair­dress­er or some­body and woman who makes her wigs, I don’t know.

[01:44:13] Cameron: And, and like, well give her my num­ber, you know, and she can reach out to me. He gets this voice­mail one day from Cher is like, hi, this is Cher. I believe you real­ly need to talk to me. Here’s my num­ber. I. And so he calls her back, gets her voice­mail, and he says, this is Paul Gia­mat­ti. Great to hear from you and, and, uh, would love to talk to you, but I heard that you real­ly, real­ly want­ed to talk to me.

[01:44:48] Cameron: So if you do, and he goes, and I haven’t heard any­thing since. It was a great sto­ry. Some­body’s going around telling Gia­mat­ti that Cher real­ly wants to speak to him. She hears that Gia­mat­ti real­ly wants to speak to her. And any­way, maybe it’s not that good a sto­ry. I thought it was a good sto­ry at the time.

[01:45:09] Cameron: You

[01:45:10] Tony: Yeah, it’s all right.

[01:45:11] Cameron: don’t sound

[01:45:11] Tony: That’s a. No, it’s on the same lev­el of, um, the new Band of Broth­ers, sequel, Mas­ters of the Air. Have you seen that

[01:45:19] Tony: one?

[01:45:20] Cameron: Uh, I don’t even know what Band of broth­ers was real­ly, was that a

[01:45:23] Tony: Oh, you haven’t seen Band of

[01:45:25] Tony: Broth­ers?

[01:45:26] Cameron: was that again?

[01:45:28] Tony: Well, it’s the one about World War II Sol­diers

[01:45:30] Tony: and the Nor­mandy Land­ing.

[01:45:33] Tony: Yeah, yeah. Spiel­berg

[01:45:34] Cameron: Oh, no. Like I would throw up a

[01:45:36] Cameron: lit­tle bit in my mouth just think­ing about it. I can’t stand Amer­i­can rah rah, world war

[01:45:42] Cameron: II things, man. They just make me puke a lit­tle bit.

[01:45:46] Tony: Okay. Well, I real­ly liked it and it was, it was like right there at the fore­front of that HBA rev­o­lu­tion when in the ear­ly days of the tele­vi­sion.

[01:45:55] Tony: Ascen­dan­cy. It’s one of the, one of the very first ones that peo­ple point to as being a clas­sic. And any­way, they made a sequel of that called The Pacif­ic, which was part­ly shot in Mel­bourne, which was worth watch­ing just for that.

[01:46:07] Tony: But it was­n’t very good over­all. And now they’ve made one about the Air Force in World War II

[01:46:11] Tony: and it’s crap.

[01:46:12] Cameron: Oh, right.

[01:46:13] Tony: the first episode or two and I can’t watch any more of that either.

[01:46:16] Tony: So, um, just kind of warn­ing you don’t

[01:46:19] Tony: both­er,

[01:46:20] Cameron: Yeah. Like, you know, I, I, I

[01:46:22] Cameron: strug­gle with his­tor­i­cal. Stuff that Hol­ly­wood puts out. ’cause you know, the his­to­ri­an in me just goes, oh, that’s just fuck­ing bull­shit. And like the Amer­i­can pro­pa­gan­da, par­tic­u­lar­ly over their role in World War II, and, you know, the Viet­nam stuff tends to be a lit­tle bit more self-crit­i­cal these days.

[01:46:43] Cameron: But, uh, world War II, Korea,

[01:46:47] Cameron: I know too much about actu­al­ly Fox. The, the, you know, there’s this high school asso­ci­at­ed with Fox’s pri­ma­ry school. It’s called Human­i­tas, same sort of hip­pie sort of thing. They, one of the teach­ers there reached out to me a week or so ago and said, Hey, a bunch of our kids are inter­est­ed in mil­i­tary his­to­ry.

[01:47:05] Cameron: They wan­na know more about Kore­an War and the Viet­nam War. And the Gulf War I. Would you be inter­est­ed in com­ing down and talk­ing to them? I was like, what I. Absolute­ly. Just make sure you block out a good eight hours of their day if I’m gonna come down and talk to them about that stuff. Yeah. The Amer­i­can pro­pa­gan­da, the, the Amer­i­can sort of, yeah.

[01:47:33] Cameron: I real­ly, I real­ly strug­gle with that kind of

[01:47:37] Tony: Actu­al­ly one speak­ing on that sort of, I under­stand what you’re say­ing. Ban­dit Broth­ers is still worth watch­ing, I think because it. It takes you through all the neg­a­tive aspects of war, but it does­n’t, it does come from the Amer­i­can side. I’m not say­ing it, it’s crit­i­cal of the Amer­i­can involve­ment, um, or the Amer­i­can, the way it paints Amer­i­ca, but it’s, it’s worth watch­ing.

[01:47:55] Tony: Um, but the oth­er one I watched recent­ly, just out of the blue, I just was flick­ing

[01:47:58] Tony: chan­nels and came across from here to Eter­ni­ty.

[01:48:01] Cameron: Hmm. Oh, many years ago.

[01:48:05] Tony: Yeah. I called it for the first time, like last week. And it’s, it’s, it’s got its lim­i­ta­tions, but I thought it was just bril­liant with, um, Sina­tra’s, you know, ear­ly role and Mont­gomery Cliff and Burt Lan­cast­er and, and you know, their approach to mil­i­tary

[01:48:20] Tony: life and, and deal­ing with the war and the

[01:48:22] Tony: attack on Pearl Har­bour.

[01:48:23] Cameron: That’s the film the God­fa­ther is

[01:48:25] Cameron: refer­ring to. Uh, you

[01:48:28] Tony: Oh,

[01:48:28] Cameron: that

[01:48:29] Cameron: whole thing.

[01:48:31] Tony: Sina­tra should­n’t be in the

[01:48:32] Tony: movie.

[01:48:32] Cameron: Yeah. My, my under­stand­ing is when Mario Puzo was writ­ing the book, that was the film, he was, he had heard they did­n’t want Sina­tra, and then Sina­tra got Gian­car­ta. Was it Gian Carter? Was that the name of the mob boss, Sam Gian­car­ta, that he was con­nect­ed to.

[01:48:54] Cameron: I think who­ev­er the mob boss was that Sina­tra was close to at that time, to put some pres­sure on the stu­dio to get the role in the pic­ture, which every­one has always denied actu­al­ly hap­pened. But yeah, I think it was from here to Eter­ni­ty was the.

[01:49:11] Tony: Okay.

[01:49:11] Cameron: Was the film.

[01:49:12] Tony: Well, I

[01:49:12] Tony: was mild­ly impressed. It

[01:49:14] Tony: was, it was good.

[01:49:15] Cameron: I think I watched it after, you know, after I, in my ear­ly twen­ties when I start­ed get­ting into film Deeply and I watched The God­fa­ther and then I read up on it. I went and watched, I think from here to Eter­ni­ty. Yeah. And I like it. I like Sina­tra as an actor in those days. I always thought Sina­tra had this easy thing about him, like his singing.

[01:49:32] Cameron: He just had this easy

[01:49:33] Cameron: charis­ma. He was, he was a pret­ty good actor, you know, unlike

[01:49:38] Cameron: Elvis,

[01:49:39] Cameron: Sina­tra could actu­al­ly,

[01:49:40] Tony: Yeah.

[01:49:43] Tony: Actu­al­ly, if you, have you ever seen that movie? Some come run­ning.

[01:49:45] Cameron: I don’t think so.

[01:49:47] Tony: It’s Frank Sina­tra and Dean Mar­tin, but it’s, it’s kind of late in their career. Or maybe, you know, late sev­en­ties. And it’s bril­liant. Real­ly low, real­ly low key sev­en­ties, you know, um, you know, work­ing class drifters, work­ing for the, or, you know, going to the car­ni­val.

[01:50:05] Tony: It’s, it’s real­ly

[01:50:07] Tony: good.

[01:50:07] Cameron: All right. I have to check it out. I.

[01:50:10] Tony: Hmm.

[01:50:10] Cameron: like Fox is home and Chrissie’s back. Some come run­ning. Yeah. All right. I’ll check it out. Thank you, TK.

[01:50:17] Tony: All right. Thanks Cam.

[01:50:19] Cameron: Have a good one. Talk to You next time.

[01:50:20] Tony: You too. All right.