QAV #712 — China Beats Expectations… Again

QAV 712 Club

[00:00:00] Cameron Reil­ly: Wel­come to QAV 712, 19th of March, 2024. Has the RBA met yet, TK? Are you keep­ing an eye on the RBA? I know you love the RBA. RBA fan num­ber one, aren’t you?

[00:00:26] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I’ve got the binoc­u­lars out on the patio look­ing down at Mar­tin Place, wait­ing for the, wait­ing for the grey smoke or the black

[00:00:33] Tony Kynas­ton: smoke or the white smoke to come out.

[00:00:35] Cameron Reil­ly: Out of the chim­ney. Ah, here we

[00:00:39] Tony Kynas­ton: on my high speed inter­net con­nec­tion and sell every­thing or buy every­thing.

[00:00:44] Cameron Reil­ly: no, hold on.

[00:00:47] Tony Kynas­ton: It’s usu­al­ly 2. 30 we get the news.

[00:00:49] Tony Kynas­ton: When they break.

[00:00:51] Cameron Reil­ly: Well, isn’t it? What time is it there now? Oh, it’s only 1. 45. Oh, okay. Yeah, right.

[00:00:58] Cameron Reil­ly: Um, okay.

[00:01:00] Tony Kynas­ton: But yes, they are meet­ing today. Every­one expects them to stay on hold. Well, we know they do noth­ing, but cer­tain­ly, cer­tain­ly in terms of con­tri­bu­tion to the econ­o­my, they do

[00:01:12] Tony Kynas­ton: noth­ing. But any­way, yeah, a

[00:01:16] Cameron Reil­ly: had a chop­py week, Tony, yet again. Uh, It was sort of, was recov­er­ing last week and then decid­ed, nah, recov­ered enough, time to, time to de recov­er. Was it Fri­day? I think it took a big hit. And then recov­ered a lit­tle bit, uh, and then just been sort of mud­dling along ever since then. Uh, noth­ing real­ly excit­ing, but ABB!

[00:01:45] Cameron Reil­ly: Wow, did you see what hap­pened to ABB last week? Um, Ori­gin sort of abrupt­ly can­celled their, I think it was like a white label agree­ment. Ori­gin Ener­gy will ter­mi­nate the white label whole­sale agree­ment with ABB effec­tive 12th of April 2024. And FY24, the Ori­gin white label whole­sale agree­ment is expect­ed to con­tribute an esti­mat­ed 14 mil­lion eBit per share.

[00:02:10] Cameron Reil­ly: Star under Orig­in’s most recent lay­er three whole­sale pro­pos­al ori­gin would’ve con­tributed an esti­mat­ed 10 mil­lion EBITDA in the first year on cur­rent vol­umes with declin­ing EBITDA mar­gin per­cent­age of future years. Any­way, they all of a sud­den said, nah, and the share price dropped 20% in a day. That was, uh, kind of bru­tal.

[00:02:33] Tony Kynas­ton: a big ric­o­chet because they’re still I noticed fur­ther on in that arti­cle that Aussie Broad­band reaf­firms its upgrad­ed FY24 guid­ance. So they haven’t, they haven’t backed out that loss in their guid­ance yet, and they’ve reaf­firmed it. So, which means that they have noticed it’s hap­pened, obvi­ous­ly. So, um, yeah, sur­pris­ing the mar­ket

[00:02:55] Tony Kynas­ton: cut it down like that.

[00:02:56] Tony Kynas­ton: Uh,

[00:02:57] Cameron Reil­ly: do hold it in one of the light port­fo­lios. Bought it back in August and it was doing okay. Now it’s back to zero, but still adds 1 per­cent

[00:03:09] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Look, um, it was a good com­pa­ny on the buy list a lit­tle while ago. I actu­al­ly, I mean, if you had said to me before, you know, before you bought this stock, should I buy it because they’re doing this deal with Ori­gin Ener­gy Retail Lim­it­ed? I would have said, yeah, it’s not going to make any dif­fer­ence.

[00:03:26] Tony Kynas­ton: I mean, who’s going to buy mobile tele­pho­ny from, or data from, um, An elec­tric­i­ty gas com­pa­ny. I’ve nev­er under­stood. I know they like to think they can bun­dle up prod­ucts and sell them to their cus­tomer bases. And I guess if you gave the mobile broad­band away free, it’s a good mar­ket­ing offer, but it just, you know, in my 40 years of watch­ing these things and being in busi­ness, I’ve nev­er worked,

[00:03:52] Tony Kynas­ton: very rarely work.

[00:03:53] Tony Kynas­ton: Can’t think of a case where it’s ever, there’s kind of a bun­dled

[00:03:56] Tony Kynas­ton: prod­uct works.

[00:03:57] Cameron Reil­ly: peo­ple, you know, the brand loy­al­ty. Tony, the peo­ple have for their elec­tric­i­ty com­pa­ny. The love, the love for the brand is what it’s all about. You can’t beat the brand. Speak­ing of inter­net, I, um, I was, uh, you know, I use the, uh, the, uh, the Chat­G­PT, Tony, I don’t know if I’ve ever men­tioned that, uh, use the Chat­G­PT and it’s got the, it’s, it’s got, it’s got the voice thing now where you can talk to it.

[00:04:23] Cameron Reil­ly: So I do that a lot, par­tic­u­lar­ly with fox­es around them. We’re ask­ing it things and it’s been a bit lag­gy. A lit­tle bit chop­py, the voice. And so I down­loaded an app to test my, uh, net­work and it came back and told me that I had one of the low­est Wi Fi inter­net speeds and MBN speeds in Bris­bane. Like low­est 25%.

[00:04:44] Cameron Reil­ly: And then it told me who the best one was and I went on to Red­dit and looked it up and every­one was like rav­ing about this com­pa­ny. So there’s a com­pa­ny called Lawn­Tel out of Launce­s­ton, L A U N Tel. I was with Intern­ode, which is now, uh, Been sold to, I don’t know, one of the oth­ers. I went on to Lawn­tel, had a look at their deals.

[00:05:02] Cameron Reil­ly: Upgrad­ed, with­in 10 min­utes they’d switched me over. My down­load speed went from about 80 megabits a sec­ond, 100 on a good day, to 400 with­in 10 min­utes! Quadru­pled! Noth­ing changed, no tech­nol­o­gy, noth­ing com­ing in the house, no, no, no, no, no. No new router. I was going to buy a new router. Actu­al­ly, I lie. I had, I had to go get a Cat6 cable.

[00:05:28] Cameron Reil­ly: Had a Cat5 cable because for the last five years. Went, went down to Bun­nings, bought a Cat6 cable to plug into the NBN box because I thought it was a bit slow. Yeah, four times my inter­net speed and triple my upload speed from like 10 to 30 megabits a sec­ond. So thank you Lawn­tail. Giv­ing a free plug to Lawn­tail.

[00:05:48] Tony Kynas­ton: we can hear even

[00:05:48] Tony Kynas­ton: more from you going for­ward.

[00:05:51] Cameron Reil­ly: Well, and the fun­ny thing is, when, the next time I went to use the voice thing on Chat­G­PT, still lag­gy. Yeah.

[00:05:59] Tony Kynas­ton: Well, it does have to go, it does have to go all the way to Chi­na and get passed and

[00:06:02] Tony Kynas­ton: then come back to Bris­bane.

[00:06:04] Cameron Reil­ly: Well, speak­ing of Chi­na, Tony, We like to laugh about all of the media cov­er­age about Chi­na’s econ­o­my. All I’ve been, all I’ve been hear­ing in the West­ern media for the last six months is how Chi­na’s econ­o­my’s just stuffed, no good, ter­ri­ble. Then, all of a sud­den, yes­ter­day in the Finan­cial Review, oil extends run as Chi­na growth sur­pris­es.

[00:06:30] Cameron Reil­ly: Oil ticked high­er fol­low­ing the biggest week­ly advance in a month. As macro­eco­nom­ic data from Chi­na came in ahead of expec­ta­tions and Ukrain­ian attacks on Russ­ian refiner­ies height­ened geopo­lit­i­cal risks, Chi­na’s fac­to­ry out­put invest­ment grew more strong­ly than expect­ed at the start of the year.

[00:06:47] Cameron Reil­ly: Fig­ures on Mon­day showed the coun­try is the world’s largest oil importer. So, um, there you go. I mean, I guess the, there will be some peo­ple that will say, well, Chi­na just makes up their num­bers any­way, so, does­n’t

[00:07:01] Tony Kynas­ton: And I think there’s an ele­ment of truth in that. You can’t con­sis­tent­ly keep mak­ing them up for­ev­er, but they do, I mean, the ker­nel of truth in the fact that, is the fact that Chi­na is the fastest coun­try in the world to put out its eco­nom­ic stats. Like com­pared to Aus­tralia, I think Chi­na gets its num­bers out, A month after they close off the order, or the month, um, Aus­tralian, the ABS takes like three to six months to get its fig­ures out, um, which is an indict­ment on the ABS as much as it

[00:07:30] Tony Kynas­ton: is on,

[00:07:31] Cameron Reil­ly: it’s cause in

[00:07:32] Tony Kynas­ton: on any­thing on Chi­na.

[00:07:33] Cameron Reil­ly: shot. If you don’t get,

[00:07:34] Cameron Reil­ly: if you don’t get your fig­ures out in a month, they take you out in the back and shoot you. It’s incen­tives. Incen­tives dri­ve per­for­mance,

[00:07:40] Tony Kynas­ton: Incen­tives.

[00:07:41] Tony Kynas­ton: Yes, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah, but, uh, but no, I mean, and it’s also too, I mean, what do peo­ple expect? It’s a cen­tral­ly run econ­o­my. Last, at the end of last year, they start­ed putting stim­u­lus into oth­er sec­tors of the econ­o­my because the real estate side of things was turn­ing down. And gol­ly, it’s worked.

[00:08:01] Tony Kynas­ton: Why are we sur­prised?

[00:08:03] Cameron Reil­ly: well that, you know, you know, and I’ve banged on about this before on this and oth­er shows, but I’ve read quite a num­ber of books on. Um, the Chi­nese, uh, gov­ern­ment and the, and, and how they’ve learned from Sin­ga­pore. They sort of, I mean, Chi­na, Chi­na has been doing this for thou­sands of years. I mean, they’re, they’re not new at fig­ur­ing out how to run a big coun­try.

[00:08:21] Cameron Reil­ly: And, uh, then they also learned from what Lee Kuan Yew did in Sin­ga­pore. And this whole idea of just get­ting the best and smartest and bright­est minds from across the coun­try, test­ing them in low rank­ing. Jobs and posi­tions and the ones that per­form well, you give them a big­ger job and a big­ger job. And it sounds like how cor­po­ra­tions sup­pos­ed­ly oper­ate.

[00:08:46] Cameron Reil­ly: They just run the coun­try like a cor­po­ra­tion, which in the West, we often talk about that. Would­n’t that be great if we could run our gov­ern­ment as effec­tive­ly as we run a cor­po­ra­tion. When Chi­na does it, we go, ah, yeah, but it’s, you know. Can’t trust them, they’re Chi­nese.

[00:09:02] Tony Kynas­ton: Well, well here the cor­po­ra­tions run the gov­ern­ment. It’s kind of the oth­er way

[00:09:05] Cameron Reil­ly: the oth­er way around. I see, Yeah.

[00:09:08] Cameron Reil­ly: Any­way, look, I don’t know, I don’t know what to believe or what not to believe, but I do think, you know, they got a lot of, despite what you might, peo­ple might think about Xi Jin­ping or the Com­mu­nist Par­ty or what­ev­er, The coun­try is very, lots of peo­ple, lots of very bright peo­ple, and they find lots of very bright peo­ple and they put them in, Okay, your job is to run this part of the econ­o­my, fig­ure out how to make it work, or else, and they do.

[00:09:33] Tony Kynas­ton: But yeah, look, all of that aside, I guess one of the ben­e­fits of a cen­tral­ly planned econ­o­my is last year they said real estate’s going to take a hit. How do we make up for it? It looks like it’s fac­to­ries. Okay. Let’s, let’s do what­ev­er we can to, to push that sec­tor of the econ­o­my. Let’s get, if we can’t get eight cylin­ders fir­ing, let’s get sev­en cylin­ders fir­ing and, and, you know, move the, move the pieces around the board to achieve that.

[00:10:01] Tony Kynas­ton: Com­pared to West­ern democ­ra­cies like Aus­tralia or the US or what­ev­er, where, you know, it can take. A year, two years for the gov­ern­ment to enact leg­is­la­tion to sup­port one par­tic­u­lar sec­tor over the oth­er. And that’s after a bruis­ing round of media scruti­ny, um, cor­po­rate lob­by­ing, water­ing down to do deals because you don’t have a major­i­ty, all that kind of stuff that goes on.

[00:10:23] Tony Kynas­ton: It’s a very, very

[00:10:24] Tony Kynas­ton: dif­fer­ent sort of

[00:10:25] Cameron Reil­ly: Mm. Yeah, the book by Daniel, um, uh, some­thing, the Cana­di­an pro­fes­sor, his book I read, You know, he basi­cal­ly talks about how Chi­na tries to run its econ­o­my, um, well, its coun­try. But the way that we talk about try­ing to run cor­po­ra­tions in the West, you know, CEO makes a deci­sion, it fil­ters down, whips are cracked, and peo­ple get on with it.

[00:10:52] Cameron Reil­ly: It’s the way they do it, and um, you know, it does­n’t work nec­es­sar­i­ly 100 per­cent of the time as cor­po­ra­tions, it does­n’t work in cor­po­ra­tions 100 per­cent of the time as well, but, But they, and they also had that con­sis­ten­cy decade after decade after decade too, because it’s one vision, pret­ty much. Since Dong, Dong Xiao Ping, one, one vision.

[00:11:13] Tony Kynas­ton: also too, to put some per­spec­tive around it, um, the num­bers came out say­ing the Chi­nese econ­o­my grew by 7. 5 per­cent last month. Per­haps with the excep­tion of India, that would have to be up there with one of the fastest grow­ing economies in the world, but it’s been num­ber one for, what, 15 years now?

[00:11:31] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, yeah, so, um, I, I, I accept all the crit­i­cisms that peo­ple have on Chi­na on var­i­ous issues, but you can’t fault the man­age­ment of the

[00:11:40] Tony Kynas­ton: econ­o­my.

[00:11:42] Cameron Reil­ly: Well, you can, but I’m sure peo­ple, sure peo­ple do. Um, I’ve got, I had a quote I was going to read here. Um, yeah, Daniel A. Bell, Chi­na Mod­el, is the book, um, that I read. Um,

[00:12:02] Cameron Reil­ly: look­ing for the quote. Yeah,

[00:12:05] Cameron Reil­ly: yeah, this one, this’ll do. From Deng Xiaop­ing to Xi Jin­ping, Chi­na’s lead­ers have repeat­ed­ly stressed the need to study aspects of Sin­ga­pore’s polit­i­cal mod­el. Part­ly inspired by Sin­ga­pore, Chi­na has evolved a sophis­ti­cat­ed and com­pre­hen­sive sys­tem for select­ing and pro­mot­ing polit­i­cal tal­ent. As a result, the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment has a high pro­por­tion of econ­o­mists and sci­en­tists will­ing to exper­i­ment on the basis of tri­al and error, most of whom could not have been elect­ed in a demo­c­ra­t­ic con­text.

[00:12:34] Cameron Reil­ly: And sev­er­al hun­dred mil­lion Chi­nese have been lift­ed out of pover­ty over the past three decades. The mer­i­to­crat­ic ide­al, the idea that gov­ern­ment offi­cials are select­ed and pro­mot­ed on the basis of abil­i­ty and moral­i­ty, rather than polit­i­cal con­nec­tions, wealth and fam­i­ly back­ground, is still a long way from the polit­i­cal real­i­ty in Chi­na.

[00:12:54] Cameron Reil­ly: But if Chi­na con­tin­ues to mer­i­to­c­ra­tize and avoids the bad pol­i­cy mak­ing stem­ming from vot­er igno­rance in demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­tries, espe­cial­ly the Unit­ed States, the pow­er­ful and pop­u­lous coun­try it is usu­al­ly com­pared to, oh thank you baby, it will set a mod­el for oth­ers. Uh, at the moment, Chi­na is not good enough in terms of gov­er­nance, and the Unit­ed States is not bad enough for Chi­na’s polit­i­cal mer­i­toc­ra­cy to exer­cise much soft pow­er.

[00:13:22] Cameron Reil­ly: But he sort of com­pares, you know, the two coun­tries side by side and talks about how their economies are per­form­ing over the last 20, 30 years, and you know, you can sort of see the diver­gence in the two. One’s going up, the oth­er’s going down. In, in most met­rics.

[00:13:40] Tony Kynas­ton: I think it’ll be inter­est­ing to see how India goes, I mean, it’s, it’s, um, I for­get now the pop­u­la­tion dif­fer­ence. I think it’s got a big­ger pop­u­la­tion than Chi­na from mem­o­ry. Um, but a West­ern style democ­ra­cy. Uh, and it’s start­ing its, its increase in, um, the mid­dle class that Chi­na sort of did about 20 years ago.

[00:14:00] Tony Kynas­ton: So, um, inter­est­ing to com­pare and con­trast the num­bers from Chi­na where it’s a dif­fer­ent style of man­age­ment com­pared

[00:14:05] Tony Kynas­ton: to India going for­ward.

[00:14:08] Cameron Reil­ly: Accord­ing to Reuters, Indi­a’s pop­u­la­tion by the mid­dle of last year was 1. 4286 bil­lion against 1. 4257 bil­lion for Chi­na.

[00:14:19] Tony Kynas­ton: Okay, so neck and neck pret­ty

[00:14:20] Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah, cou­ple of mil­lion between them. Well, speak­ing of Chi­na, steel. Uh, they use a lot of steel.

[00:14:28] Tony Kynas­ton: Mm hmm.

[00:14:28] Cameron Reil­ly: declared steel a sell on

[00:14:30] Cameron Reil­ly: Mon­day. Um, I declared it not a sell Mon­day after­noon.

[00:14:35] Tony Kynas­ton: believe her.

[00:14:36] Cameron Reil­ly: I did the num­bers and it was, it was a notch and I did­n’t want to have to sell BSL.

[00:14:43] Cameron Reil­ly: Well, I checked this morn­ing and it was def­i­nite­ly below the sell line. Yeah, so I ran the num­bers through the three point trend­line cal­cu­la­tor. Def­i­nite­ly a sell, sad­ly, this morn­ing. Um, so I guess Chi­na’s con­struc­tion indus­try not buy­ing as much steel as I would

[00:14:59] Tony Kynas­ton: No, and the con­struc­tion indus­try is a retail based indus­try, I think, if not about half the steel that’s used in Chi­na. Maybe a lit­tle bit more goes into con­struc­tion, apart­ment build­ings and all that kind of stuff. And there’s Chi­na right­ful­ly is putting the brakes on all that stuff. So steel is going to have some issues, at least in terms of rely­ing on Chi­na to give it a boost.

[00:15:24] Cameron Reil­ly: so any­one hold­ing on to steel stocks, par­tic­u­lar­ly BSL, you may want to think about that today. Um, speak­ing of resource stocks, I had to sell SMR out of the Lite Port­fo­lio this morn­ing. Um, it became a Rule 1 sell, it was up 40%! Not that long ago, and with the Coke and Coal price plum­met­ing, it went with it and, uh, you know, went from 40 per­cent up to a Rule 1 sell.

[00:15:57] Cameron Reil­ly: That was heart­break­ing.

[00:16:01] Tony Kynas­ton: Well, yeah, I mean, it’s, it is heart­break­ing. Um, cok­ing coal is going to

[00:16:05] Tony Kynas­ton: fol­low steel real­ly, isn’t it? Cok­ing coal is used to make steel. So they go hand in glove.

[00:16:12] Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah. So it’s one of those. One of those instances that we all hate, where you’ve got a stock and peo­ple go, Oh, I should have

[00:16:22] Tony Kynas­ton: I’d sold it when it

[00:16:23] Cameron Reil­ly: should have tak­en my prof­its.

[00:16:27] Cameron Reil­ly: But, oh, well, I was going to say, we know from regres­sion test­ing that it works more often than it does­n’t. At least we think it does. Speak­ing of which, so I’ve men­tioned a few times.

[00:16:38] Cameron Reil­ly: One of our young, savvy, pro­gram­mer lis­ten­ers, Matt Walk­er, has been work­ing on build­ing a regres­sion test­ing sys­tem and I’ve been test­ing it with him over the last month or two. Um, I ran anoth­er test for his lat­est iter­a­tion over the week­end and I said to Tony off air, it only returned a 12. 5 per­cent CAGR.

[00:17:02] Cameron Reil­ly: It’s going from like 2016 to the end of 2023 is the data set that we’re run­ning it on. And I thought that was bad, and I’ve been, I spent hours on the week­end try­ing to fig­ure out why it looks, why it was so bad and could­n’t fig­ure it out. Tony said, well hold on, what was the STW’s CAGR over that peri­od?

[00:17:18] Cameron Reil­ly: And we worked it out, it was what, 4. 5%?

[00:17:21] Tony Kynas­ton: about 5%, just under 5%.

[00:17:23] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

[00:17:24] Cameron Reil­ly: So, yeah, it’s like two and a half times bet­ter than the STW, so,

[00:17:29] Tony Kynas­ton: No, triple, triple

[00:17:31] Cameron Reil­ly: yeah, so I think that’s, uh, we might have a regres­sion test­ing sys­tem that works.

[00:17:36] Tony Kynas­ton: Fan­tas­tic. Yeah.

[00:17:39] Cameron Reil­ly: uh, we can also, uh, I’ll have to chat to Matt, but with some of the data sources that we, uh, uh, we have dis­cov­ered recent­ly, we, we can prob­a­bly put a lot more data into it too, like 10, 20 years of data into it.

[00:17:53] Cameron Reil­ly: The first step was just get­ting it work­ing. And I think, uh, It is now. And, um, yeah, now we can, I mean, there’s a cou­ple of things that it does­n’t fac­tor in. It does­n’t fac­tor in qual­i­fied audits. It does­n’t fac­tor in com­mod­i­ty sales. Um, although I think I could prob­a­bly intro­duce that. As well, if I, like, it’s, I’m try­ing to code the qual­i­fied audits thing at the moment, then I’ll try and code the his­tor­i­cal com­mod­i­ty sells by down­load­ing the World Bank data, which I think goes back 20 years.

[00:18:28] Cameron Reil­ly: But any­way, uh, We can start to play around now, I think, with some of the vari­ables that, uh, you want to

[00:18:37] Tony Kynas­ton: Good.

[00:18:38] Cameron Reil­ly: So, I’ll get you to, uh, give, I mean, we can send you the code, or you can give me a list of test sce­nar­ios. Because the one I ran on, the one I ran on Sat­ur­day took 15 min­utes to run. So, I can pret­ty much run, ha, we can run, Eight year set tests in, you know, 15, 20 min­utes.

[00:19:01] Cameron Reil­ly: It’s, um, pret­ty amaz­ing. So shout out to Matt, um, and his dad, Toby, for, uh, uh, putting that togeth­er. It’s

[00:19:13] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Thanks,

[00:19:13] Tony Kynas­ton: guys.

[00:19:16] Cameron Reil­ly: Well, that’s all I’ve got today, Tony, what have you got left to talk about?

[00:19:21] Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, a cou­ple of things. Uh, so I’ve got, um, an update on Damstra. We may, lis­ten­ers may recall, we had a friend of mine, Jan Rousseau, on the show way back in our first year, I think it was. And he talked about how he had tak­en the com­pa­ny he was exec­u­tive chair­man of, to list­ing on the ASX. And now they’ve come full cir­cle and they’re being tak­en over by a com­pa­ny called IdeaGen, which is a UK, looks like it’s a UK fund for invest­ing in soft­ware as a ser­vice com­pa­nies.

[00:19:55] Tony Kynas­ton: So, um, I raise it because Damp­stra was on the buy list a lit­tle while ago. And if any­one had bought it then, uh, you would have made a nice prof­it. I think it was on the buy list around when it was about 17 or 18 cents and the takeover price is 24. So

[00:20:11] Tony Kynas­ton: you would have done well.

[00:20:13] Cameron Reil­ly: What’s the share code?

[00:20:15] Tony Kynas­ton: DTC, Damstra,

[00:20:18] Cameron Reil­ly: DTC.

[00:20:20] Tony Kynas­ton: a, it’s going through a scheme of arrange­ment, which means that there’ll be a vote, uh, next month.

[00:20:26] Tony Kynas­ton: And then if the votes, uh, pass­es and accepts the takeover offer then you’ll get your 24 cents or it’s been pret­ty much trad­ing at 23 and a half 24 cents on the mar­ket now so if you feel like it’s all over there’s there’s always a chance of anoth­er offer com­ing through pri­or to that vote but um if you want to move on then you could sell on on mar­ket now for the price that’s being offered by Ideagen.

[00:20:50] Cameron Reil­ly: And if you’re one of the peo­ple who bought it back in Octo­ber 2020 when it was trad­ing at 2. 14,

[00:20:56] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah!

[00:20:58] Cameron Reil­ly: you’re prob­a­bly, you know, not hap­py.

[00:21:03] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, had a rocky ride. It list­ed at 90 cents and it’s been up and down since then. It went all the way back to 10 cents,

[00:21:09] Cameron Reil­ly: Wow.

[00:21:10] Tony Kynas­ton: uh, and then came on to our buy list, um, after it turned up from there at about 17 or 18

[00:21:15] Tony Kynas­ton: cents.

[00:21:16] Cameron Reil­ly: So is it time to get your friend back on to talk about that jour­ney?

[00:21:20] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I think that, I mean, I think he’s pret­ty busy at the moment, but maybe in a month or two, sure. He can tell us how he’s going to spend

[00:21:26] Tony Kynas­ton: his, uh, his wind­fall.

[00:21:28] Cameron Reil­ly: He’s got a wind­fall.

[00:21:31] Tony Kynas­ton: well, he owns, uh, I for­get now how much, 10 per­cent of the com­pa­ny, some­thing like that. A

[00:21:35] Cameron Reil­ly: Right.

[00:21:38] Tony Kynas­ton: lot less than when it was 2, but, uh, it gets out with

[00:21:40] Tony Kynas­ton: some­thing.

[00:21:42] Cameron Reil­ly: Nice. Well, con­grat­u­la­tions to any­one that’s hold­ing that.

[00:21:47] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. And the last thing I’ve got to go through today is a pulled pork. We had a request last week for an update on Mitchell ser­vices.

[00:21:55] Cameron Reil­ly: Which we

[00:21:56] Tony Kynas­ton: And I did a pulled pork.

[00:21:57] Cameron Reil­ly: 2019, yeah.

[00:21:59] Tony Kynas­ton: Right. So I did the pulled pork back in 2019. Actu­al­ly, I haven’t checked the share price since. Do you have a date for when that

[00:22:05] Tony Kynas­ton: was done?

[00:22:06] Cameron Reil­ly: Uh, yeah, I men­tioned it last week. Let me see, um, MSV, oh well, um, no, I don’t. It’s in my email some­where.

[00:22:17] Tony Kynas­ton: Any­way, I’ll put in 19th of March 2019. See what the price was. See how the curse of the pulled pork went since last time. Oh, OK, well, it’s gone down. So back then it was at 58 cents and today’s at 36

[00:22:38] Cameron Reil­ly: whoa,

[00:22:40] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

[00:22:41] Cameron Reil­ly: not good. Uh, yeah, hold on, I did, yeah, it was May, 7th of May, 2019.

[00:22:47] Tony Kynas­ton: Okay. And yeah, 63. So about the same.

[00:22:51] Cameron Reil­ly: Wow,

[00:22:53] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

[00:22:54] Cameron Reil­ly: 2019.

[00:22:55] Tony Kynas­ton: been drop­ping. Um, it’s

[00:22:57] Cameron Reil­ly: sure, I’m not sure back then we said it was a buy. That was back in the days when we were just try­ing to, I was still build­ing my check­list and we were try­ing to Ana­lyze stocks so I could under­stand what the num­bers meant. So I’m not sure what con­clu­sion we came to at the end of that.

[00:23:18] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. And I’ve got to say that I don’t do pulled porks as nec­es­sar­i­ly rec­om­men­da­tions on stocks. I just do them to, to, uh,

[00:23:25] Tony Kynas­ton: show how I ana­lyze

[00:23:26] Cameron Reil­ly: Well, you do them when they’re on the buy list. Usu­al­ly these days, back then we did­n’t have a buy list, so we would just do them and see what hap­pened, I think, back then. Yeah.

[00:23:36] Tony Kynas­ton: Okay. Well, this Mitchell Ser­vices is not on the buy list and it has been at var­i­ous times and it may well be because it’s, it’s, um, it’s scor­ing well from a QAV per­spec­tive.

[00:23:47] Tony Kynas­ton: It just has sen­ti­ment, uh, recent sen­ti­ment to over­come to get back on the buy list. And I should point out. point out it’s trad­ing, I did my analy­sis at 36 cents and it’s trad­ing at that today and that’s the right on the sell line. The sell price is 36 cents. How­ev­er, the buy price is only 39 cents and as each month ticks for­ward the buy line and the sell line are get­ting very close to con­verg­ing.

[00:24:17] Tony Kynas­ton: Peo­ple who fol­low charts and char­ters and tech­ni­cal analy­sis ana­lysts would say that that’s a tri­an­gle for­ma­tion where the buy line and the sell line come close togeth­er. And it can only mean one thing that if the share price is either going to break up or break down above the buy line or below the sell lines.

[00:24:34] Tony Kynas­ton: And, um, If you believe the char­ters, they say that’s usu­al­ly the start of a new trend, so we’ll see which way it goes. With the QAV score where it is, I’m hop­ing, or it does­n’t wor­ry me either way, I should­n’t say I’m hop­ing, I think it might go up, but that’s spec­u­la­tion and I can’t, I can’t, I can’t be 100 per­cent sure of that.

[00:24:55] Tony Kynas­ton: But any­way, I’ll go through it, we’ve had a request last week to talk about it, uh, and It’s, it, I also should say it’s a small ADT com­pa­ny. It’s only 63, 000 trad­ed per day on aver­age. So it’s not for every­one. Um, to give, give some back­ground on Mitchell Ser­vices. It’s, it’s a drilling com­pa­ny start­ed in Queens­land back in 1969 by Peter Mitchell.

[00:25:19] Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, he, he bought, he had worked in the indus­try as a sales­man and then decid­ed to go off on his own, bought a truck and start­ed drilling bores for Kingaroy peanut farm­ers. And then decid­ed that was­n’t work­ing by 1971, because every time it rained, they would can­cel their bore con­tracts. And so he moved into the min­ing sec­tor and got a con­tract west of Nebo.

[00:25:44] Tony Kynas­ton: And that was to the min­ing explo­ration com­pa­ny, Tees Peabody Mit­sui. A cou­ple of those names are still around in Queens­land today, uh, and moved on from there. So it’s actu­al­ly, I rec­om­mend peo­ple go to their web­site and have a look at the com­pa­ny his­to­ry because it’s a lot of fun. In the ear­ly days, they were a bit of a cow­boy out­fit and, um, did some, did some inter­est­ing things like in 1972, Peter Mitchell was con­tract­ed for four months to drill for ura­ni­um in Arn­hem Land, um, where he said it was very hard to find crew and, um, he devel­oped the mot­to if it can’t be done, we’ll do it.

[00:26:22] Tony Kynas­ton: And, uh, they, so they drilled, he drilled for Ura­ni­um in Arn­hem Land and Got out 1974. So they, um, they’ve had a, uh, a bit of a wild ride at the start. Lots of fun. There’s a, a few poems about brib­ing Indone­sian cus­toms offi­cers when they were try­ing to get rigs into Indone­sia to ful­fill con­tracts, sto­ries like that.

[00:26:47] Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, after about 25 years of build­ing the, um, Build­ing their equip­ment base, their drilling base, because this is a drill rig com­pa­ny, I should say, they hire out drills to min­ing sites in the main, but they’ve worked, they cur­rent­ly work in Aus­tralia, they’ve worked all over­seas though, and they worked in PNG in Indone­sia in about 19, I don’t have a day here, sor­ry, any­way, uh, So 25 years in, so that must be about, what would that be, 95, Nathan Mitchell the son takes over as CEO and a cou­ple of years lat­er it seems like, well I could­n’t get this straight in the, in the his­to­ry of the com­pa­ny, it seems like they sold the Aus­tralian busi­ness to a com­pa­ny called AJ Lucas for 150 mil­lion and the par­ents took their mon­ey and retired to the Gold Coast and Nathan took over.

[00:27:43] Tony Kynas­ton: And it looks like he went over­seas, um, basi­cal­ly because they helped pio­neer the Gas boom, which was a big thing in Queens­land back in the 90s. Uh, they had a spe­cial extrac­tion method, which they took over­seas to the US and Chi­na and Africa, Zam­bia, Mozam­bique, as well as Rus­sia, Botswana. Um, then it looks like they, he came back into Aus­tralia and.

[00:28:11] Tony Kynas­ton: By 2013, they’d, uh, did a reverse merg­er and list­ed Mitchell Ser­vices again on the a SX. They, they were required by a com­pa­ny called Drill Talk, which was already list­ed, but then in real­i­ty it was a reverse merg­er. And then, uh, Mitchell Ser­vices took over and, and became MSV, the list­ed com­pa­ny, uh, a chap by the name of Andrew Elf was appoint­ed CEO in 2014.

[00:28:35] Tony Kynas­ton: And, uh, through var­i­ous acqui­si­tions, they, um. They, they grew the size of the rigs that they have, uh, they began under­ground oper­a­tions, includ­ing auto­mat­ed drilling under­ground, uh, they devel­oped, uh, a com­pa­ny called RAGCO to, to pio­neer that, uh, under­ground drilling part of their busi­ness, and, um, 2019 acquired anoth­er com­pa­ny called Deep­Core Drilling.

[00:29:00] Tony Kynas­ton: So, Basi­cal­ly grow­ing through, I guess, a bit of a boom through the coal seam gas explo­sion in Queens­land. And if peo­ple can remem­ber back that far, there was, it was a big boom in that sec­tor of the, uh, the ener­gy sec­tor back then. Um, then now they were list­ed, they were bought out or they sold to AJ Lucas, they’re back, they’re online, sor­ry, they’re on, they’re on the boards again.

[00:29:26] Tony Kynas­ton: Um, what else can I say about them? Not, not a whole lot. Um, I think the, the thing to turn to now is their lat­est results. And it seems like, uh, they were indebt­ed, which I’m guess­ing was part­ly due to COVID and part­ly due to Uh, the acqui­si­tions they’ve been mak­ing, but in the last, uh, year or so they’ve been able to throw off lots of cash and pay down the large amounts of debt.

[00:29:50] Tony Kynas­ton: So their debt’s basi­cal­ly halved in the, uh, the last 12 months. And, uh, that’s, that’s a tes­ta­ment to how much cash they’re throw­ing off and also, uh, I guess the good man­age­ment, but it’s allow­ing them to under­take a share buy­back and also to start pay­ing div­i­dends. So lots of mon­ey fly­ing into this com­pa­ny from its oper­a­tions.

[00:30:12] Tony Kynas­ton: That sug­gests to me that if that con­tin­ues any­way, they’ll either be acquired them­selves or the share price will be dis­cov­ered and it’ll take off because the num­bers on this com­pa­ny are quite good. I’ll go through them now. The price I’m using is 0. 36. That’s only 64 per­cent of the con­sen­sus tar­get on this, uh, this com­pa­ny.

[00:30:38] Tony Kynas­ton: So we, we often see com­pa­nies trade below con­sen­sus tar­get. In fact, the major­i­ty of them do, because bro­kers want the trans­ac­tion busi­ness. But to see some­one trad­ing at 64 per­cent is, uh, is unusu­al. Uh, 0. 36, which is the share price, is, uh, just above IV1 of 0. 27 and below IV2 of 0. 48. Uh, the yield on this com­pa­ny is 11.

[00:31:01] Tony Kynas­ton: 3%, so a huge amount of mon­ey is com­ing in and going back out to repay the share­hold­ers. And this is one of these com­pa­nies where the yield is greater than the PE, which is, I think, a real short­hand indi­ca­tor of val­ue, uh, to me. Stock Doc­tor finan­cial health is strong and steady, so it scores well for that.

[00:31:21] Tony Kynas­ton: I should say, sor­ry, the PE is just under sev­en times, which scores as a record low for the last three years, and it’s 6. 95, which is less than the yield of 11. 33, so, um, I like that. Uh, the oth­er thing to say, of course, is that, um, this has been a fam­i­ly, uh, oper­at­ed com­pa­ny for a long time, and the direc­tors are still hold­ing 30%.

[00:31:42] Tony Kynas­ton: Nathan Mitchell is still the chair­man of the com­pa­ny and still involved on the board. So, we give it a score for being an own­er founder. I guess Nathan isn’t the founder, his father was, but he’s cer­tain­ly spent a long time run­ning the busi­ness and work­ing in the busi­ness and knows a lot about it. Uh, Prop­Caf, this is where the fun comes in.

[00:32:02] Tony Kynas­ton: Prop­Caf is 23 cents per share. Oper­at­ing cash flow is 23 cents per share. Share price is 36. So, Prop­Caf is 1. 57 times for this com­pa­ny, which is amaz­ing. It’s amaz­ing you can buy a com­pa­ny like this on the stock mar­ket where you get your mon­ey back in 18 months in terms of the cash flow­ing out of it. Uh, it’s trad­ing below book plus 30.

[00:32:23] Tony Kynas­ton: So, Net equi­ty per share is 0. 31, book plus 30 is 0. 40, and the share price is 0. 36, so you can buy it for a very rea­son­able price in terms of the assets it holds. Uh, what else can I say? That’s prob­a­bly it. Um, qual­i­ty score for this com­pa­ny, and if I add it all up, is 11 out of 16, or 69%, and the QAV score is 0.

[00:32:45] Tony Kynas­ton: 44, so it’s gonna score well on the buy list. It just needs to get above that 0. 39. Buy price, and it’s only three cents off it, so cer­tain­ly one to look at, and one to, uh, just, um, if you, well, you could have a look at buy­ing it now, I guess, or you could wait for sen­ti­ment to con­firm. Um, inter­est­ing sort of, uh, indus­try I should com­ment on.

[00:33:07] Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, pros and cons. Um, I might start with the cons first because they’re short­er. Uh, they, the Mitchell Ser­vices called out in the last lit­tle while, a year or so ago, that they were affect­ed by bad weath­er. And so cer­tain­ly the above ground drilling can be affect­ed by bad weath­er. Bad weath­er. Um, so it’s weath­er depen­dent, which is an issue.

[00:33:27] Tony Kynas­ton: And one thing I did call out when I did this com­pa­ny last time is that in this kind of sec­tor where you’re, you’re loan­ing out or you’re hir­ing out drilling rigs, uti­liza­tion rates are impor­tant. And I was kind of inter­est­ed that they make com­men­tary on the fact that they have high uti­liza­tion rates, but they don’t actu­al­ly, in any of the work I saw, Um, uh, the pre­sen­ta­tions I went through, I could­n’t see the uti­liza­tion rates.

[00:33:52] Tony Kynas­ton: So I thought that was a lit­tle bit inter­est­ing, but this is a busi­ness where when a down­turn comes, it can come hard because as it prob­a­bly did dur­ing COVID, which is why they, um, have had debt, which they’re pay­ing off for one of the rea­sons any­way. But, um, yeah, you don’t want to be strand­ed own­ing lots of rigs if there’s a down­turn in the min­ing sec­tor.

[00:34:12] Tony Kynas­ton: Hav­ing said that, the pros are that, um, As they call out, their com­mod­i­ty prices are rel­a­tive­ly high, um, and that dri­ves demand in the min­ing sec­tor to keep drilling, to expand mines. Uh, infla­tion­ary pres­sure is eas­ing. Um, which is, which is again, their com­men­tary, which will help their mar­gins. Uh, they have almost, they’re call­ing out 40 per­cent expo­sure to the gold sec­tor.

[00:34:38] Tony Kynas­ton: And as we know from oth­er com­pa­nies, we’ve looked at the gold prices is high, if not get­ting close to a record high. So lots of explo­ration going on in the gold sec­tor, and they have no expo­sure to lithi­um or nick­el, which is the two min­er­als, which are in the dog­house at the moment. So, um, that bodes well for them.

[00:34:55] Tony Kynas­ton: I think the share, the fact that they’re doing a share buy­back. We’ll under­pin the share price. Um, it’s a record high oper­at­ing cash­flow, which is, uh, you know, good and through with man­age­ment. Debt’s halved, as I said, which is not just a good thing, but it’s reduc­ing their financ­ing costs, which improves mar­gins.

[00:35:11] Tony Kynas­ton: Um, and I just want­ed to call out the last thing. I did men­tion before they’re a pos­si­ble takeover tar­get, but this, this sec­tor in the last year or two, since we’ve been look­ing at it on this show, has had a lot of con­sol­i­da­tion, and I’m think­ing back to two com­pa­nies that were on our, three com­pa­nies that were on our buy list in the past, uh, one was Zwick, Zwick.

[00:35:32] Tony Kynas­ton: Um, which was a drilling com­pa­ny which was tak­en over by DDH1, um, DD, I think the DD in DDH1 stands for Dia­mond Drilling, uh, and then DDH1 last year was tak­en over by Par­en­ti, so there’s three acqui­si­tions in this sec­tor in the last year or so, and, um, Mitchell Ser­vices with all this Cash gen­er­a­tion, you’d have to think was on the radar of a larg­er drilling com­pa­ny, but who knows.

[00:35:57] Tony Kynas­ton: So yeah, thanks for call­ing it out. I think it’s um, uh, looks like a rip­per of a com­pa­ny, and um, if we can just, you know, per­haps rise two or three cents a share, it’ll be a buy on our buy list fair­ly soon.

[00:36:10] Cameron Reil­ly: Thank you, Tony. I pulled up the tran­script from that episode back in May 19. Episode 10, it was. Episode 10. Uh, I was, uh, we sort of did line by line analy­sis, com­par­ing your num­bers in Stock Doc­tor to the num­bers I was get­ting from Yahoo Finance or, or ever. The old painful days of me try­ing to, you know, man­u­al­ly build a thing.

[00:36:35] Cameron Reil­ly: We end­ed up, uh, the rea­son we did it was you said it had just turned up on the AFR’s 52 week high list,

[00:36:43] Tony Kynas­ton: mm hmm, mm

[00:36:44] Cameron Reil­ly: week high, and you thought that was

[00:36:45] Cameron Reil­ly: a good rea­son to have a look at it. We end­ed up giv­ing it a score of 0. 07 in May of 2020.

[00:36:51] Tony Kynas­ton: ah, okay,

[00:36:52] Cameron Reil­ly: we said would­n’t

[00:36:53] Cameron Reil­ly: be a buy for us at that par­tic­u­lar point in time.

[00:36:56] Cameron Reil­ly: Share price was a bit too high. Um, and so there you go. And now share price is a lit­tle bit too low.

[00:37:05] Tony Kynas­ton: yeah,

[00:37:08] Tony Kynas­ton: but the score’s good.

[00:37:09] Cameron Reil­ly: Always the brides­maid, nev­er the bride MSV. But I think I have bought and sold it a few times.

[00:37:17] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, it’s been on the buy list for a

[00:37:18] Cameron Reil­ly: Well, RBA still has­n’t pub­lished any­thing. So that’s, that’s it. We’ve got no ques­tions today. So it’s a short show. We just have after hours. So we’ll now talk for two hours about TV and, and music until I need to go to Fox’s par­ent teacher meet­ing.

[00:37:37] Tony Kynas­ton: Uh huh,

[00:37:38] Cameron Reil­ly: What has, what have

[00:37:39] Cameron Reil­ly: you been watch­ing, read­ing, lis­ten­ing to this week, Tony?

[00:37:44] Tony Kynas­ton: Well, I’ve seen a cou­ple of good movies, Ken, both fea­tur­ing in the Oscars recent­ly. Have you seen Amer­i­can

[00:37:51] Tony Kynas­ton: Fic­tion yet?

[00:37:53] Cameron Reil­ly: Nev­er even heard of it. What is it?

[00:37:55] Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, okay. Uh, it’s a, it’s, I think it’s on Apple, Apple or Ama­zon, one of the stream­ers. It’s a movie, it stars Stephen Wright, um, not the come­di­an, but the actor, who played Felix Leit­er in the more recent James Bond movies. Yeah,

[00:38:11] Cameron Reil­ly: West­world, I was one of the main guy, I

[00:38:13] Tony Kynas­ton: he was in West­world, that’s right, yeah. So this, this is his sto­ry. It’s about, um, well, he stars in the movie.

[00:38:20] Tony Kynas­ton: It’s about a, uh, an African Amer­i­can writer, Who gets upset that his very schol­ar­ly nov­els don’t sell well, but trashy black sploita­tion nov­els do real­ly well. And, um, In a sort of fit of pique one night with a bot­tle of booze, he writes a blax­ploita­tion nov­el which becomes incred­i­bly pop­u­lar in a run­away cel­lar and he kind of spends the whole time try­ing to, you know, point out that white peo­ple are ter­ri­bly polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect and they’ve got no brains and it’s, it’s a fun ride.

[00:38:57] Tony Kynas­ton: It’s a very gen­tle sort of movie, um, but, uh, remind­ed me of, I don’t know if you saw a movie called Con­ti­nen­tal Divide many years ago, back in the 80s

[00:39:07] Cameron Reil­ly: hmm, sounds

[00:39:08] Tony Kynas­ton: With Dan­ny Glover and Kevin Kline, that kind of gen­tle satire com­men­tary on cur­rent soci­ety. I mean, the open­ing scene is he’s in a, he’s a uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor teach­ing Eng­lish and he’s teach­ing, in par­tic­u­lar, South­ern Eng­lish his­to­ry.

[00:39:25] Tony Kynas­ton: And one of your stu­dents objects to the word nig­ger being writ­ten on the black­board. And it sort of, you know, he gets put on sab­bat­i­cal from uni­ver­si­ty for not being polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect enough and hurt­ing the stu­den­t’s feel­ings, which kind of sets a time for the rest of the movie. But very good. I like

[00:39:43] Tony Kynas­ton: it.

[00:39:44] Tony Kynas­ton: Okay. Yes,

[00:39:45] Cameron Reil­ly: Good stuff. I’ll check it out. I’m just look­ing at it on Wikipedia. I noticed there’s an actress called Issa Rae in it. Um, I’ve seen her name pop up a lot recent­ly. A lot of stuff that I’ve been watch­ing. She’s a direc­tor or a pro­duc­er or a writer. She’s a black lady, um, black lady sketch show. I don’t know if I’ve men­tioned that to you before.

[00:40:12] Cameron Reil­ly: and I have been watch­ing that for the last few weeks. She’s one of the peo­ple who’s involved in that from time to time, which is very good. Very fun­ny. Amer­i­can fic­tion. All right. I’ll have to check that out. I do like Steven, right? He’s good. He always does a good per­for­mance or inter­est­ing, always inter­est­ing per­for­mances he has.

[00:40:32] Tony Kynas­ton: in this too.

[00:40:33] Cameron Reil­ly: Hmm.

[00:40:34] Tony Kynas­ton: And the oth­er one I watched was Poor Things. Poor Things.

[00:40:36] Tony Kynas­ton: Have you caught that one

[00:40:37] Cameron Reil­ly: No, that’s the Emma Stone one, right?

[00:40:41] Tony Kynas­ton: Yes. Very, very good.

[00:40:42] Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah,

[00:40:44] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I start­ed watch­ing it a week or two ago and got dis­tract­ed. Some­thing hap­pened. I could­n’t fin­ish it, but I fin­ished it last night and gee, it’s

[00:40:51] Cameron Reil­ly: What’s it about? She’s some sort of, uh,

[00:40:54] Tony Kynas­ton: Well, it’s a sen­tence sort of a steam­punk. Vic­to­ri­an era and Willem Dafoe plays the, it’s basi­cal­ly a retelling of Franken­stein, but he plays the Doc­tor Franken­stein and it’s very whim­si­cal. It’s kind of David Lynch y, Ter­ry Gilliam style movie, so all around his house are ani­mals like pets with like a dog’s body and a goose’s head and they’ve been sewed togeth­er.

[00:41:21] Tony Kynas­ton: Any­way, some­one, he pays peo­ple to bring him. recent­ly dead bod­ies and one of them is a lady with a baby in the stom­ach and he, uh, takes the baby out and puts the baby’s brain in Emma Stone’s. Skull. And then revives, rean­i­mates her with elec­tric­i­ty, as they did back then. Revives her, and it’s basi­cal­ly kind of a moral­i­ty tale of how she matures and deals with the world and deals with men and, you know, grows up, basi­cal­ly, work­ing out, you know, deals with, with, uh, rich­ness and pover­ty and just life in gen­er­al.

[00:42:00] Tony Kynas­ton: And the sets are fan­tas­tic. The cos­tumes are bril­liant. Act­ing’s great. Um, and yeah, it’s, uh, it’s pret­ty raunchy, so I’ll just warn peo­ple about that, but I real­ly enjoyed it. One of the most refresh­ing orig­i­nal movies I’ve seen for a long

[00:42:15] Tony Kynas­ton: time.

[00:42:16] Cameron Reil­ly: I’m just look­ing up who’s behind it. So it was writ­ten by Aussie Tony McNa­ma­ra,

[00:42:22] Tony Kynas­ton: Mmm.

[00:42:23] Cameron Reil­ly: wrote The Great, cre­at­ed The Great. Uh, did you ever watch that? The Cather­ine of the Greats? Uh, it’s fan­tas­tic.

[00:42:31] Tony Kynas­ton: I did­n’t. No.

[00:42:32] Cameron Reil­ly: This TV series, it

[00:42:33] Cameron Reil­ly: ran for three sea­sons, I think, um, based on a Play that he did. Um, it’s, it’s a very, very, very loose telling of the sto­ry of Cather­ine the Great, um, TV series starred Elle Fan­ning as Cather­ine and Nicholas Holt as Peter, and it’s just, you know, full of sex and swear­ing and vio­lence.

[00:42:57] Cameron Reil­ly: And, uh, very, very.

[00:42:59] Tony Kynas­ton: As is Poor

[00:43:00] Cameron Reil­ly: Right. Very, very

[00:43:01] Cameron Reil­ly: fun­ny. And Poor Things is direct­ed by Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos, who did The Lob­ster. Did you ever see The Lob­ster?

[00:43:10] Tony Kynas­ton: I haven’t got­ten around to see­ing it yet. I need to, I need

[00:43:12] Tony Kynas­ton: to see it.

[00:43:13] Cameron Reil­ly: Fan­tas­tic. Like, it’s one of the weird­est films I’ve seen in the last ten years. One of the, Col­in Far­rell stars in it. Col­in Far­rel­l’s one of those guys I always say. Bril­liant actor when he has good mate­r­i­al. He sort of had a peri­od of Hol­ly­wood films that

[00:43:29] Cameron Reil­ly: was, that was­n’t great, but then he sort of has ditched that and gone back to small indie films.

[00:43:36] Cameron Reil­ly: I still haven’t seen that last Irish one. I’ve got the, I’ve had that flagged. Yeah.

[00:43:41] Tony Kynas­ton: That’s bril­liant. That is so good.

[00:43:43] Cameron Reil­ly: I can’t wait. Cause I love the one that they did Bruges. Um,

[00:43:48] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, that was good, too.

[00:43:49] Cameron Reil­ly: But he’s great in those films. Like, when he does indie films, he’s, you know, real­ly, real­ly, real­ly good. Any­way, those two

[00:43:55] Tony Kynas­ton: hmm.

[00:43:56] Cameron Reil­ly: Tony McNa­ma­ra and Yor­gos, uh, rate high­ly in my, um, book.

[00:44:03] Tony Kynas­ton: Yes, I think you’ll real­ly enjoy Poor

[00:44:05] Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah, thanks for putting that on my radar. And Steve Harley died. Did­n’t

[00:44:12] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I’m sad to hear that. Um, he, I think he toured here last year or recent­ly any­way, but he was the lead singer for Cock­ney Rebels, Steve Harley and the Cock­ney Rebels. And they had a, a hit when I was young, come up and see me and make me smile. And I’m pret­ty sure it was a track on one of the first, Albums I ever got giv­en as a kid for Christ­mas on Rip­per, Rip­per 74 or some­thing like that or 76 or what­ev­er.

[00:44:37] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Um, and I’ve always loved it. I still love it. It’s one of the great tracks, I think, in pop music. It’s

[00:44:42] Tony Kynas­ton: fan­tas­tic.

[00:44:44] Cameron Reil­ly: sort of makes me think of, there was this band, I used to go see them, I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about the Melody Lords, have we ever talked about the Melody Lords?

[00:44:52] Tony Kynas­ton: I think I’ve seen them in Mel­bourne, the

[00:44:54] Tony Kynas­ton: cov­er

[00:44:54] Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah,

[00:44:55] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

[00:44:56] Cameron Reil­ly: we might have been there at the, they used to play some lit­tle bar down in Rich­mond, in Bridge Road or some­where in Rich­mond,

[00:45:04] Tony Kynas­ton: well, they’re in either the Cen­tral Club or the Cor­ner. I can’t remem­ber which one I

[00:45:07] Tony Kynas­ton: saw them

[00:45:07] Cameron Reil­ly: it was The Cor­ner.

[00:45:08] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Okay.

[00:45:09] Cameron Reil­ly: to go there like every week when I

[00:45:11] Cameron Reil­ly: was, when 18, 19 and watch them. And so for peo­ple lis­ten­ing at home, they were, uh, a glam rock band all done up as like, you know, mid sev­en­ties glam rock with a lot of. Um, you know, bisex­u­al, gay talk between them. And there was always tiffs between the, the, the, the bass play­er’s name was Throb­bing Glit­ter­ous.

[00:45:36] Cameron Reil­ly: The, and fun­ny thing, like then, you know, 10 years ago, I was run­ning Sun­day Assem­bly up here. And one of the guys that was part of Sun­day Assem­bly, one of the per­form­ers, this was a Church for Athe­ists that Chrissie and I ran for four or five years. Turned out he was a mem­ber of, Uh, Melody Lords down in Mel­bourne.

[00:45:53] Cameron Reil­ly: We got talk­ing one day and he was the lead singer, uh, the sec­ond lead singer. They replaced lead singers. I can’t remem­ber his name, but I had their EP and every­thing. But any­way, they used to do that. That was one of the

[00:46:03] Tony Kynas­ton: Eugene, was it Eugene Hamil­ton or

[00:46:05] Tony Kynas­ton: some­thing like that? I can’t remem­ber now.

[00:46:08] Cameron Reil­ly: The, uh, lead singer? Oh, not this guy. Yeah. It must’ve been the orig­i­nal one. And it’s one of the things I don’t, I mean, I don’t have records any­more, but I must’ve got rid of at some point. It’s one of the things that I’ve, I just wish I still had the EP that I had lots of friends and stuff in the eight­ies and nineties.

[00:46:26] Cameron Reil­ly: It would put out EPs and I’d had them on cas­sette or record and let them go and

[00:46:32] Cameron Reil­ly: kind of piss now. Cause you can’t, cause obvi­ous­ly you can’t, they’re not on

[00:46:36] Tony Kynas­ton: No, you can’t get

[00:46:37] Cameron Reil­ly: or any­thing, that kind of shit.

[00:46:38] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

[00:46:39] Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, same with me and my album col­lec­tion. I remem­ber I held on to this album col­lec­tion. Every time I’d move house, I had crates of albums and then they got put into a back shed when I got mar­ried and the shed had a leak in the roof and they all got destroyed. And then about a year lat­er, Vinyl came back.

[00:46:56] Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, my

[00:46:57] Tony Kynas­ton: God.

[00:46:59] Cameron Reil­ly: well I nev­er

[00:47:00] Tony Kynas­ton: could have giv­en them to Alex or nieces and

[00:47:03] Cameron Reil­ly: ah, be worth a for­tune now. I nev­er real­ly had that many records, nev­er got into that phase. It was like CDs, by the time I was old enough to buy a music play­er, it was, every­thing was CD. In the ear­ly 90’s,

[00:47:16] Tony Kynas­ton: Okay. Now I had albums and one of them had Steve Harley on it. So sad to see him go.

[00:47:21] Cameron Reil­ly: He was. young

[00:47:22] Tony Kynas­ton: and yes, ear­ly sev­en­ties, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And he always called that, that song. He’s. His super­an­nu­a­tion paid, paid all his bills and I heard him inter­viewed, he was on Rock Quizz when he came out last time. And you can, if you Google that, the YouTube clip’s fan­tas­tic.

[00:47:42] Tony Kynas­ton: ’cause he plays come up and see me live with the back­ing band from Rock Quizz. Um, and I think Vic­tor and Lin­da are singing back­up vocals or, any­way, some­one is, it’s good. And um, but he said like, you know, the song isn’t a hap­py song. It was about the breakup of the. Cock­ney Rebels band, how they were all fight­ing and, um, it was a sort of a sad song.

[00:48:02] Tony Kynas­ton: It was a very bit­ter take on his thoughts on the rest of the

[00:48:05] Cameron Reil­ly: Nah. Well,

[00:48:06] Tony Kynas­ton: But it become a sort of hap­py, hap­py sort of sin­gle

[00:48:10] Tony Kynas­ton: for them,

[00:48:12] Cameron Reil­ly: Did they have a big hit and then break up?

[00:48:15] Tony Kynas­ton: pos­si­bly. I’m not sure what hap­pened to them, but that was their one hit. So yeah, quite

[00:48:19] Tony Kynas­ton: pos­si­bly.

[00:48:21] Cameron Reil­ly: Well, speak­ing of record col­lec­tions, I’ve just final­ly got into Robert Crumb. His.

[00:48:27] Tony Kynas­ton: Mm hmm.

[00:48:28] Cameron Reil­ly: and I watched the trail­er for the, there’s a doc­u­men­tary on him and he had an insane record col­lec­tion that I saw in the doc­u­men­tary. I was like, Oh, like one of these ones where it’s every­thing’s sort of labeled and orga­nized in this mas­sive thing.

[00:48:43] Cameron Reil­ly: You ever got­ten to Robert Crumb?

[00:48:45] Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, look, I’ve seen his stuff. I would­n’t say I was into it. That was, um, uh, what’s his name’s first movie? Um,

[00:48:53] Tony Kynas­ton: The Guy in the After Hours Now,

[00:48:55] Cameron Reil­ly: Uh, Paul

[00:48:57] Tony Kynas­ton: Gia­mat­tas.

[00:48:58] Cameron Reil­ly: Did­n’t he play Har­vey Pekar? Was, did he do Crumb or

[00:49:00] Cameron Reil­ly: Pekar?

[00:49:01] Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, sor­ry. I thought it was

[00:49:03] Tony Kynas­ton: Crumb.

[00:49:05] Cameron Reil­ly: I, I, in my head, I’ve got the two of those con­fused too. I,

[00:49:10] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. I,

[00:49:11] Cameron Reil­ly: I think it might have been Pekar that he,

[00:49:12] Cameron Reil­ly: any­way. Um, yeah, like, I’ve nev­er got into Crumb before. It’s one of those things that I’ve always meant to do.

[00:49:17] Cameron Reil­ly: Like, I’ve been aware of him my entire life, but nev­er So I went, I got a cou­ple of his sort of com­pendi­ums and it’s inter­est­ing stuff, like very under­ground, sort of a lot of sex and pol­i­tics and phi­los­o­phy and, um, deep, deep stuff like deep, fun­ny, rude, you know, rude, blue. Um, yeah, comics is an inter­est­ing medi­um for that kind of stuff too.

[00:49:43] Cameron Reil­ly: Any­way, sort of enjoy­ing that. I’m read­ing a book on the his­to­ry of the dev­il. Um, the con­cept. of evil in, um, you know, com­par­a­tive reli­gions and going right back. Accord­ing to this guy, it came out of Zoroas­tri­an­ism. It was Zarathus­tra who’s the first per­son record­ed in his­to­ry to come up with the idea of good ver­sus evil gods.

[00:50:15] Cameron Reil­ly: Uh, you know, before that, whether it was Egypt­ian or Norse or ancient Greece. Um, the gods were all a lit­tle bit good and a lit­tle bit bad. I mean, all of the gods had their good days and their bad days. If they liked you, they’d do some­thing good for you. If they did­n’t, they’d mess your life up. You know, that was just part of the course.

[00:50:35] Cameron Reil­ly: As he says, they were all man­i­fes­ta­tions of the one­ness. And they, they had all aspects of good and bad and every­thing in between. But it was Zarathus­tra. Sort of 600 BCE, rough­ly, that, um, came up with this great bat­tle between Ahu­ra Maz­da and, uh, the Angria, the angry, um, god, which then seeped into Judaism, par­tic­u­lar­ly the intertes­ta­men­tal peri­od of Judaism.

[00:51:06] Cameron Reil­ly: Um, Sec­ond Tem­ple Peri­od, and then seeped into Chris­tian­i­ty, you know, this idea of there being forces of evil, you know, it’s not just the one God that does the good and the bad, which you see in the Old Tes­ta­ment, if you go back and read the ear­li­er books of the Old Tes­ta­ment, you know, there’s good and bad in the one guy, but there’s no men­tion of the dev­il.

[00:51:26] Cameron Reil­ly: in the Old Tes­ta­ment. Dev­il did­n’t exist in the Old Tes­ta­ment, but, you know, and not as the dev­il any­way. There are, there are char­ac­ters that they point at and they go, Oh, well, the ser­pent was the dev­il, or, you know, the adver­sary was the dev­il. But then what it was, they weren’t, um, depict­ed that way.

[00:51:44] Cameron Reil­ly: Actu­al­ly, the Chris­tians sort of reshaped it lat­er on and decid­ed that that’s who the Old Tes­ta­ment was talk­ing about. But yeah, he’s seen his books, but his books from the sev­en­ties, some schol­ar talk­ing about it. It points out that when our gods could be both good or bad, you know, it’s, and the gods are a reflec­tion of us, it means that we all have that in our nature.

[00:52:09] Cameron Reil­ly: But when post Zarathus­tra,

[00:52:13] Cameron Reil­ly: we divid­ed them into exter­nal forces that were try­ing to manip­u­late us, it, it took humans away from embrac­ing the fact that, you know, I have my good days and my bad days, or I have my good side and my bad side. And think­ing of them all as dif­fer­ent. The, the, the part of who you are, um, and then to think­ing about them as exter­nal to you and exter­nal influ­ences.

[00:52:38] Cameron Reil­ly: And then the con­cepts of evil and evil peo­ple and Hitler and all that kind of stuff. You know, we, um, you know, I’m always bang­ing on and the his­to­ry shows, I don’t, I don’t real­ly like the con­cept of say­ing some­body is evil or did an evil thing. I like to think of, His­tor­i­cal fig­ures as, you know, most­ly being ratio­nal actors.

[00:52:59] Cameron Reil­ly: They have goals, they have objec­tives for them­selves or their nation or their race or their tribe. And they’re try­ing to achieve those things. It’s some­times at the cost, at a cost to their ene­mies, you know, who­ev­er they decide that they are. And, you sub­jec­tive­ly from their per­spec­tive, they’re doing the right thing.

[00:53:21] Cameron Reil­ly: to save their peo­ple, or save their coun­try, or save them­selves, or build their econ­o­my, or what­ev­er it is. I think clas­si­fy­ing them as evil is sort of a, it’s a lazy, uh, lazy, because once you, once you declare some­body’s evil, you just, you can stop think­ing about what their incen­tives or moti­va­tions or objec­tives are, real­ly.

[00:53:44] Cameron Reil­ly: It does­n’t force you to think about them as being ratio­nal peo­ple try­ing to achieve some­thing that they think is right and good and wor­thy. Yeah,

[00:53:54] Tony Kynas­ton: You make a good point, but how do you, how does that fit into things like the Holo­caust? I mean, that was, how does exter­mi­nat­ing Jews, Adolf Hitler, achieve his eco­nom­ic goals or the

[00:54:07] Tony Kynas­ton: goals for Ger­many? Hmm.

[00:54:11] Cameron Reil­ly: want to exter­mi­nate the Jews, he want­ed to deport them, um, but no, no, no coun­try would take them, you know, I always like to talk about the Evian Con­fer­ence,

[00:54:21] Cameron: 1938

[00:54:22] Cameron Reil­ly: I think, um, host­ed, well, well, set up by FDR. There was a meet­ing of all the for­eign min­is­ters from the world try­ing to work out what they were going to do about the prob­lem of the Jews in Ger­many and Czecho­slo­va­kia, where Aus­trali­a’s for­eign min­is­ter, uh, the apt­ly named Mr.

[00:54:43] Cameron Reil­ly: White said, uh, we don’t have a, uh, racial prob­lem in Aus­tralia and we don’t intend on inher­it­ing one. They were like, real­ly? Did you talk to any of the indige­nous peo­ple, Mr. White, about the racial prob­lem? yeah, so, you know, there was this con­fer­ence and basi­cal­ly the whole world said, nah, we don’t want them.

[00:55:06] Cameron Reil­ly: I mean, it was not that long after the Great Depres­sion but peo­ple were like, man, that’s not our prob­lem. Hitler actu­al­ly offered to pay. to trans­port the Jews to any coun­try in the world that would take them. He offered to pay for ship­ping and the whole deal and the whole world went, no, not our prob­lem.

[00:55:26] Cameron Reil­ly: It’s your prob­lem.

[00:55:29] Tony Kynas­ton: was he try­ing to do that? What, you know, what, was this part of racial purifi­ca­tion? Or what was his rea­son for deport­ing

[00:55:37] Cameron Reil­ly: He believed, and like most peo­ple in the world believed, that the Jews were, um, had infil­trat­ed the econ­o­my, And the gov­ern­ment and when manip­u­lat­ing it to their own advan­tage, you know, and the thing that we have for­got­ten today is it was­n’t just Hitler that was anti Semit­ic. The entire world was anti Semit­ic before the Holo­caust.

[00:56:04] Cameron Reil­ly: You know, you read some of the stuff that, I’ve talked about this on the Cold War show, some of the stuff that FDR said about Jews in Amer­i­ca. Like, I mean, in the days of Trump, maybe it would­n’t be so shock­ing, but pre Trump, it would have been shock­ing for any Amer­i­can politi­cian to say that out loud. You know, the stuff that he was quite hap­py to say, you know, rel­a­tive­ly pub­licly back in the 30s about Jews and Jews, the way that they were always try­ing to.

[00:56:38] Cameron Reil­ly: Get things out of the econ­o­my and the gov­ern­ment and try­ing to influ­ence this, that, and the oth­er. The vast major­i­ty of the way, and they’d always been anti Semit­ic. I mean, the his­to­ry, I mean, you know, I met Chris­sy at this, uh, when Chris­sy and I first met in, at the Napoleon con­fer­ence in Cor­si­ca, there were two 80 year old, you know, Israeli his­to­ri­ans there.

[00:57:00] Cameron Reil­ly: And my first con­ver­sa­tion with them on the first night, so pre me hook­ing up with Chris­sy and get­ting dis­tract­ed, we sat down to din­ner and I sat down next to him. I said, right, explain anti­semitism and explain anti­semitism to me. Let’s go. Where did it start? Why did it start? And so we talked about the his­to­ry of it over the last 2000 years, real­ly.

[00:57:22] Cameron Reil­ly: And, um, you know, I’ve stud­ied it ever since. I mean, it goes back a long, long way, but it goes back to, you know, the Rome, basi­cal­ly, and the Jews, when Rome took over Syr­ia and Judea, the Jews sort of, Not get­ting on board with what the Romans want­ed from them in terms of, you know, wor­ship­ing the pan­theon of gods and the Romans hav­ing to crack down on that from time to time and Jew­ish rebel­lions and Jew­ish peo­ple get­ting kicked out.

[00:57:54] Cameron Reil­ly: Then they, they got kicked out of Judea. You know, sort of late first cen­tu­ry,

[00:57:59] Tony Kynas­ton: hmm.

[00:58:00] Cameron Reil­ly: uh, under the orders of Nero, first Jew­ish Roman war, and then the sec­ond one 50 years lat­er. And then they basi­cal­ly scat­tered across the dias­po­ra across Europe, and when Europe became Chris­tian­ized, the Chris­tians, All blame the Jews for Jesus’s, uh, cru­ci­fix­ion.

[00:58:20] Cameron Reil­ly: So all of Chris­tian­i­ty was anti Semit­ic from that, from then on, like for 1500 years, most Chris­t­ian coun­tries were anti Semit­ic and they, they kind of came and went in real waves of pogroms. Every hun­dred years or so, Rus­sia, France, Ger­many. Um, right through­out, you know, Spain, Por­tu­gal, every hun­dred years or so, 50 to a hun­dred years, some Jew­ish mer­chants.

[00:58:51] Cameron Reil­ly: Uh, we’d start to make some mon­ey, bankers, mer­chants, financiers, they’d get a nice house, they’d get a lot of nice prop­er­ty, and there’d be a pogrom, ARGH! The Jews are doing this and they’re doing that, and they’d come in and kill them, take all their prop­er­ty, kick them out. It just hap­pened, it was just par for the course, for cen­turies.

[00:59:12] Cameron Reil­ly: The oppres­sion against Jews was just, you know. nor­mal­ized for most of Euro­pean his­to­ry. But these days we’ve for­got­ten all that. We go, Oh, Hitler was an anti Semi­te, but you go back and you read what peo­ple were, you know, the views in the West about the Jews in the first part of the 20th cen­tu­ry, it was ter­ri­ble, hor­ri­fy­ing.

[00:59:33] Cameron Reil­ly: Any­way, I don’t know how I got into that. So that was, yeah, it was just stan­dard, pret­ty much stan­dard anti Semi­tism, I think is my point. If you read Mein Kampf, it’s not that dif­fer­ent from

[00:59:43] Cameron Reil­ly: what, you know, Uh, large per­cent, which is why they want­ed a place of their own. It’s why Zion­ism exist­ed, you know, from the late 19th cen­tu­ry onward, they were sick of the pogroms.

[00:59:55] Cameron Reil­ly: They want­ed to get away from the pogroms and find a place where they could run their own thing. Oh, haven’t they, haven’t they done a good job of that too?

[01:00:04] Tony Kynas­ton: I think they have.

[01:00:04] Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah. Yeah, they do.

[01:00:06] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Any­way, well, I’ve read a good book dur­ing the week. I’ll change top­ics. Um, I was get­ting quite jad­ed about read­ing any more non fic­tion, so I picked up Break­fast at Tiffany’s and read that. Short read, 100 pages, fan­tas­tic writ­ing, noth­ing like

[01:00:26] Tony Kynas­ton: the movie, and I had heard

[01:00:28] Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah. I’ve heard that. too.

[01:00:30] Tony Kynas­ton: yeah, noth­ing like the movie, and it’s um, it’s good, it’s a real­ly good read.

[01:00:34] Cameron Reil­ly: Capote?

[01:00:35] Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, Tru­man Capote, yep, Hol­ly Go Light­ly is a poor, dumb farm girl who has a few good looks and knows how to manip­u­late men, makes her way through New York soci­ety, and even­tu­al­ly, even­tu­al­ly gets wrapped

[01:00:52] Tony Kynas­ton: up in a mafia drug scan­dal.

[01:00:55] Cameron Reil­ly: It is love­ly, I like the film.

[01:00:58] Tony Kynas­ton: it’s noth­ing like the film.

[01:01:00] Cameron Reil­ly: Wow. Yeah.

[01:01:02] Tony Kynas­ton: a good, just, you know, I mean, good writ­ing just drags me in.

[01:01:05] Tony Kynas­ton: It was great writ­ing. And the oth­er thing that struck me about read­ing a book from that vin­tage was there’s no tech­nol­o­gy in it. Like it’s all about how the char­ac­ters devel­op and manip­u­late peo­ple and use their nat­ur­al abil­i­ties to, to try and get ahead. Isn’t, you know, there’s no, Influ­encers, Search Engine Opti­miza­tion, AI, noth­ing at all.

[01:01:27] Tony Kynas­ton: Hard­ly even tele­phones in it. And it’s just such a dif­fer­ent focus, to focus on the char­ac­ters so intent­ly, to try and, you know, work out what dri­ves them and their moti­va­tions. It’s real­ly good.

[01:01:40] Cameron Reil­ly: The only book of his I’ve ever read was In Cold Blood, which was real­ly good.

[01:01:46] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

[01:01:46] Cameron Reil­ly: Hmm.

[01:01:48] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. So any­way, it’s a short read. It

[01:01:50] Tony Kynas­ton: was good.

[01:01:51] Cameron Reil­ly: Well, I read a novel­la too this week, The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster. You ever heard of that?

[01:01:58] Tony Kynas­ton: No. So Ian Forster.

[01:02:00] Tony Kynas­ton: Um, what else has he

[01:02:02] Cameron Reil­ly: Room with a View,

[01:02:04] Cameron Reil­ly: he

[01:02:05] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Okay.

[01:02:05] Cameron Reil­ly: Ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry

[01:02:07] Cameron Reil­ly: British, like Tru­man Capote, gay, um, author, Room With A View, and anoth­er Mer­chant Ivory

[01:02:15] Tony Kynas­ton: Rides have revis­it­ed.

[01:02:16] Cameron Reil­ly: Real­ly?

[01:02:18] Tony Kynas­ton: I think so. He was

[01:02:19] Tony Kynas­ton: that, was­n’t he? Could be wrong.

[01:02:21] Cameron Reil­ly: Any­way, this book, this novel­la, The Machine Stops, 1907, sci­ence fic­tion, takes place long time in the future. Quite stun­ning. Inter­est­ing. Um, peo­ple all live under­ground in Uh, basi­cal­ly, apart­ments, self con­tained apart­ments.

[01:02:45] Cameron Reil­ly: The, all of human civ­i­liza­tion is run by a machine, basi­cal­ly, a super­com­put­er. Um, and it’s been so long that, sort of, see­ing oth­er peo­ple or phys­i­cal con­tact with oth­er peo­ple is con­sid­ered, um, dis­gust­ing. Every­one’s sort of iso­lat­ed. They talk to each oth­er through basi­cal­ly Face­Time. They have video con­fer­enc­ing.

[01:03:13] Cameron Reil­ly: They give Zoom lec­tures. They com­mu­ni­cate via Zoom. So peo­ple will give and oth­er peo­ple will attend online lec­tures on top­ics. So every­one’s just study­ing and the, the cur­ren­cy is all about ideas. Every­one’s talk­ing about, have you had any ideas late­ly? It’s all about ideas. Every­one’s iso­lat­ed. In these her­met­i­cal­ly sealed apart­ments, basi­cal­ly, where light and air and every­thing is piped in, food is brought to them, and every­thing’s wired up, et cetera, et cetera.

[01:03:44] Cameron Reil­ly: And every­one’s so far removed from know­ing how to sur­vive that when the machine stops, even­tu­al­ly, um, peo­ple stop fig­ur­ing, they’ve for­got­ten how to repair the machine.

[01:03:57] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Right.

[01:03:58] Cameron Reil­ly: Um, it all crum­bles and you know, there’s a cou­ple of, there’s the, there’s the rebel who’s try­ing to break out and get up to the sur­face.

[01:04:06] Cameron Reil­ly: They’ve all been told that the sur­face was destroyed and he’s try­ing to get up there and see what’s real­ly up there. And that kind of typ­i­cal sci fi trope. But this was 1907 and real­ly, you know, A, I did­n’t know E. M. Forster wrote any sci­ence fic­tion. B,

[01:04:24] Cameron Reil­ly: pret­ty spec­tac­u­lar sort of fore­cast of a cen­tu­ry lat­er, peo­ple iso­lat­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing online.

[01:04:31] Cameron Reil­ly: So, it was, yeah, enjoy­able. I heard, I think, Demis Has­s­abis, the founder of Deep­Mind, um, Google Deep­Mind men­tioned it in a, in an inter­view and I thought, oh, I bet­ter look that up. So yeah, very ear­ly. Sci fi nov­el, um, sur­pris­ing­ly on the mon­ey.

[01:04:49] Tony Kynas­ton: Sounds like the silo of the series I watched a cou­ple of months

[01:04:53] Tony Kynas­ton: ago. About peo­ple liv­ing

[01:04:55] Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah, you men­tioned that. Oh, and Three Body Prob­lem comes out, I think, is it this week on Net­flix? Yeah,

[01:05:02] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, look­ing for­ward to it. Thurs­day, I think

[01:05:04] Cameron Reil­ly: I’m kind of, you know, you know, wor­ried that it’ll be a deba­cle, but we’ll see.

[01:05:12] Tony Kynas­ton: And, uh, you know, what kind of per­spec­tive it’ll have, because Three Body Prob­lem was writ­ten by a Chi­na­man and had a very Chi­nese CCP

[01:05:20] Tony Kynas­ton: per­spec­tive.

[01:05:20] Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah, just from judg­ing by the trail­er, there’s a bit of that, but they seem to have west­ern­ized a lot of it, watered down the Chi­nese per­spec­tive we’ll see.

[01:05:31] Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah, but any­way, I’m

[01:05:32] Tony Kynas­ton: I should,

[01:05:32] Cameron Reil­ly: that.

[01:05:34] Tony Kynas­ton: I should say Brideshead was writ­ten by Eve­lyn Waugh. I just looked it up. Not

[01:05:37] Tony Kynas­ton: Ian Forster.

[01:05:39] Cameron Reil­ly: and um, have you seen the Dune sequel yet?

[01:05:44] Tony Kynas­ton: No, is it out?

[01:05:45] Cameron Reil­ly: I believe so. Yeah. Not on the

[01:05:47] Tony Kynas­ton: know it was out. No, I haven’t.

[01:05:48] Cameron Reil­ly: the cin­e­mas.

[01:05:50] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Okay.

[01:05:51] Cameron Reil­ly: Can’t, I can’t be

[01:05:52] Cameron Reil­ly: both­ered going to the cin­e­mas any­more.

[01:05:54] Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I’m the same.

[01:05:56] Cameron Reil­ly: I’ll wait till it hits the stream­ing.

[01:05:59] Tony Kynas­ton: And I can’t, I don’t know how that busi­ness is sur­viv­ing because I don’t even hear of many movies going

[01:06:03] Tony Kynas­ton: to the cin­e­mas these

[01:06:05] Cameron Reil­ly: It’s all influ­encers. My boys go to, they took Fox to the Kung Fu Pan­da 4

[01:06:11] Cameron Reil­ly: pre­miere this week, um, where there was a mas­sive Kung Fu demon­stra­tion on stage, so he loved

[01:06:16] Tony Kynas­ton: Oh,

[01:06:17] Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah, my boys go to like a pri­vate Screen­ing. They get invit­ed to one a week. They’re, you know, they go, they get invites to so many.

[01:06:23] Cameron Reil­ly: They don’t go to half of them cause they can’t be bug­gered. But, um, that’s, I think that they’re the only peo­ple who go to cin­e­mas who peo­ple would get free tick­ets from influ­encers to go to cin­e­mas

[01:06:33] Tony Kynas­ton: well, I’m ask­ing for it. Hit them up for June, the sequel.

[01:06:36] Cameron Reil­ly: Well, the prob­lem is the, the, like the stu­dio peo­ple know them and they’re there at the thing.

[01:06:44] Cameron Reil­ly: So you can’t, it’s, you can’t real­ly sneak in on some­body else’s tick­et. If they get a plus one, they actu­al­ly, they took me to the Napoleon thing as their plus one. But, uh,

[01:06:56] Cameron Reil­ly: I remem­ber when I used to get invit­ed to pre­mieres all the time, back in the ear­ly days of pod­cast­ing.

[01:07:00] Tony Kynas­ton: Is that right? Wow.

[01:07:02] Cameron Reil­ly: Yeah, it does­n’t hap­pen any­more.

[01:07:03] Cameron Reil­ly: Peo­ple don’t care now.

[01:07:06] Tony Kynas­ton: I think I’ve been to maybe one or two pre­mieres in my

[01:07:09] Cameron Reil­ly: No.

[01:07:12] Tony Kynas­ton: Not

[01:07:12] Cameron Reil­ly: Well, I got­ta go, TK.

[01:07:17] Tony Kynas­ton: Yes. Enjoy your inter­view. Par­ent teacher

[01:07:20] Tony Kynas­ton: inter­view.

[01:07:21] Cameron Reil­ly: I will. And, uh, if any­one has any ques­tions for next week, shoot them through.

[01:07:28] Tony Kynas­ton: Oth­er­wise, we’ll talk for anoth­er hour

[01:07:30] Tony Kynas­ton: about what we’ve read and seen.

[01:07:32] Cameron Reil­ly: And we’re going to talk on Fri­day on the oth­er show

[01:07:35] Tony Kynas­ton: Mm. Mm.

[01:07:36] Cameron Reil­ly: what are we talk­ing about, the Tik­Tok ban and, uh, Chi­na’s econ­o­my, Mur­doch papers, dif­fer­ent things.

[01:07:44] Tony Kynas­ton: Yep.

[01:07:45] Cameron Reil­ly: that’ll be fun. I’ll look for­ward to that. I’ll talk to you then.

[01:07:48] Tony Kynas­ton: All right.

[01:07:48] Cameron Reil­ly: Thanks, mate. QAV a good week, every­one.