The Gas Under Your Feet: Amplitude Energy and the Case for Boring Domestic Supply: QAV AU #946

QAV AU 946

[00:00:00]

Cameron: Wel­come back to QAV for Val­ue Investors, Tony. Q, yeah, QAV, I think we should call it.

Tony Kynas­ton: what are we detox­ing from? Growth stocks, AI stocks, chip

Cameron: Ba- yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bad invest­ing ideas. I wrote an arti­cle for my newslet­ter, for the QAV newslet­ter last week think­ing about,. I’d been talk- I told you when I went on the walk with Pep­si, I was talk­ing to Claude about just var­i­ous ideas, and one of them was about how the envi­ron­ment you put your­self in is more impor­tant to where you end up than any indi­vid­ual deci­sion that you make in terms of willpow­er or what­ev­er.

And I, of course, imme­di­ate­ly went to kung fu, ’cause that envi­ron­men­t’s had a big impact on me in the last five years. And I know that if I stopped going to kung fu and did­n’t replace it with some­thing else like that, my health, my weight, every­thing would [00:01:00] prob­a­bly start to slip over time, ’cause I know that I’m eas­i­ly sus­cep­ti­ble to choco­late and ice cream from pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence.

Tony Kynas­ton: That’s why I like you. That’s

Cameron: I’m sus­cep­ti­ble to ice cream?

Tony Kynas­ton: Choco­holic.

Cameron: yeah, I wan­na. I trade choco­late for liv­ing a long life now.

Tony Kynas­ton: Fuck what’s good for you.

Cameron: choco­late is?

Tony Kynas­ton: Look at

Cameron: Not, not look at Buf­fett.

Tony Kynas­ton: Peanut brit­tle and Char­lie. Peanut brit­tle

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: and

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. I think War­ren’s genet­ics prob­a­bly have more to do with his longevi­ty than his diet and exer­cise rou­tine. Any­way.

Tony Kynas­ton: genet­ics to Char­lie’s though

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know, being rich c-

Tony Kynas­ton: But they are, a good exam­ple of putting your­self in the right envi­ron­ment. Liv­ing in Oma­ha away from Wall Street had to count for a lot, I think, for those two

Cameron: And hav­ing the best health­care avail­able to peo­ple in the Unit­ed States prob­a­bly.

Tony Kynas­ton: [00:02:00] Yeah

Cameron: Any­way stop. You’re we’re on a time­line. You’ve got­ta f- catch a flight. From that, I went to think­ing about AA as a com­mu­ni­ty that, that helps peo­ple get and stay sober, and they always just say, “Keep com­ing back.”

And it’s about being around oth­er alco­holics and, and just hear­ing their sto­ries that keeps you or helps you stay sober, in the­o­ry. Uh, and then I thought about QAV, and I thought, well, you know, I think part of the val­ue for me as an investor talk­ing to you every week is I know that if I was­n’t, even­tu­al­ly, prob­a­bly not day one, but over time, m- the lev­el of my think­ing would prob­a­bly slip into, “Yeah, I’ll have a bit of cryp­to.

Can’t hurt.” Like that’s, you know, uh, just 1% of my, uh, but 1% on cryp­to. 1% of noth­ing is still noth­ing, but still. So o- 1% into cryp­to, and then it’s like 5%, and y- [00:03:00] your think­ing slips. So, you know, I think it’s this, hope­ful­ly for the lis­ten­ers too being part of a com­mu­ni­ty of peo­ple that keep you on track every week, pre­vents you from slid­ing into bad behav­iors or bad habits.

And, you know, the invest­ing world is full of them as we talk about every week. It’s just wall-to-wall hype, pro­pa­gan­da, FOMO, non­sense. I saw this, there’s this, some com­pa­ny’s adver­tis­ing this thing on Red­dit recent­ly tak­ing a crack at Jim Cramer, you know, the mad mon­ey guy on Amer­i­can

Tony Kynas­ton: yeah.

Cameron: cable TV. I know where he’s on CNN or what it is.

And, and their ad is, “You wan­na see how Jim Cramer’s stock picks are real­ly doing? Come to our site and, ’cause we track them all.” And the, and the, at least from the ad chart that they put up, woe­ful­ly, his stock picks do woe­ful­ly com­pared to the index. So there’s a lot of wall-to-wall pro­pa­gan­da out there, and I think, you know, being [00:04:00] part of a com­mu­ni­ty of peo­ple that are try­ing to be sen­si­ble and stick to the right thing and ignore the hype and ignore the FOMO and ignore the doom and gloom and Mr.

Mar­ket and all that kind of stuff is, is, um, val­ue over and above just, you know, the check­list and the buy list, hope­ful­ly. So any­way, I was think­ing this is QAV

Tony Kynas­ton: Is cryp­to the new choco­late or the new alco­hol, is it?

Cameron: Yeah. Gold, cryp­to, Nvidia Mag Sev­en stocks. Yeah. Any­way,

Tony Kynas­ton: It’s a good

Cameron: s-

Tony Kynas­ton: and

Cameron: of, speak­ing of all that, you bought a house

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, we spoke about that last week, did­n’t we?

Cameron: Well, no, last week you had­n’t bought it yet.

Tony Kynas­ton: Real­ly

Cameron: were, you were putting in the bid. You had to get off the show last week, the Amer­i­can show,

Tony Kynas­ton: yeah

Cameron: make some mys­te­ri­ous phone calls.

Tony Kynas­ton: longer than a week, isn’t it

Cameron: You wan­na tell peo­ple any­thing about it or you wan­na keep it secret?

No? Okay. [00:05:00] Keep it secret.

Tony Kynas­ton: got a

Cameron: Tony bought

Tony Kynas­ton: We’ll, be in Mel­bourne in a cou­ple of months, which is good. That’s the impor­tant thing. Clos­er to Alex, clos­er to Jen­ny’s fam­i­ly, so that’s all good. Look­ing for­ward to the move. it– I’ve been very busy though try­ing to find builders and archi­tects to help us ren­o­vate it once we move in.

Cameron: Yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: the the tur­moil has­n’t stopped. In fact, it’s prob­a­bly ratch­eted up a notch or two.

Cameron: I just, uh, was read­ing the Finan­cial Review before the call to see if, uh, there was any­thing new to talk about, and I saw a thing about Bath­la, I think their name is, a con­struc­tion com­pa­ny that’s gone under. Scrolling through the arti­cle in The Fin, it says, “Fig­ures released last week show 3,472 Aus­tralian con­struc­tion com­pa­nies went bust in the finan­cial year to June 30, 2026, one in four of all com­pa­ny insol­ven­cies nation­al­ly.

The only good news, the num­ber of builder insol­ven­cies were slight­ly down for the first time since a steep rise began dur­ing [00:06:00] COVID. How­ev­er, our research has found insol­ven­cies in the con­struc­tion sec­tor remain con­sis­tent­ly high­er than in oth­er indus­tries. That makes it hard­er to build the hous­ing we need.

Aus­tralia is falling fur­ther behind in meet­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­men­t’s 1.2 mil­lion new homes goal by 2029. Offi­cial fore­casts released last month indi­cate the tar­get won’t be met until Decem­ber 2030. New South Wales, Aus­trali­a’s largest hous­ing mar­ket, may not meet its tar­gets until March 2032, three years late on a five-year tar­get.”

And so that may make it hard­er for you to find peo­ple to do your renos. And I’ve been work­ing on this, um, thing, white paper about humanoids, and in Aus-

Tony Kynas­ton: let– Rather than you just talk inces­sant­ly, let’s go back to the first point, then

Cameron: Okay

Tony Kynas­ton: point, and then we can get to humanoid robots. All

Cameron: Wow. They were c- they were con­nect­ed, but sure, sure. Okay, you do it your way then. Okay. What was [00:07:00] my first point? bought a house?

Tony Kynas­ton: the envi­ron­ment of of where you are

Cameron: Oh, QAV. You going all the way back to that?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yes.

Cameron: Oh, geez. Okay. Thought you were in a hur­ry.

Tony Kynas­ton: you, need to take

Cameron: I’m rac­ing through my notes.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yes, you are.

Cameron: I’ve had three cof­fees today. There you go. Okay, go back to that

Tony Kynas­ton: yeah it’s. I remem­ber, get­ting some advice from peo­ple who are very fit about fit­ness when I was younger, and their num­ber one advice was always join a team. Play a team sport because then you’re in the envi­ron­ment that’s moti­vat­ing you to get fit, a bit like you with kung fu.

You’re at, you’re in the team, you don’t wan­na let your team­mates down, so you keep try­ing. You’ve got­ta turn up every week. they can see whether you’re improv­ing or not or lift­ing your weight or not. So that’s a

Cameron: so you took up golf?

Tony Kynas­ton: Even­tu­al­ly, yeah. No, I used to play squash. I used to play

Cameron: Oh.

Tony Kynas­ton: for a long time.

Cameron: All right.

Tony Kynas­ton: kid. Yep,

All those things I can see they were all moti­va­tors to get­ting fit, so I [00:08:00] can see, why that’s impor­tant. yeah, so in of how it affects us as investors, I think it’s real­ly impor­tant. And I remem­ber after we start­ed QAV I, we had a con­ver­sa­tion and my thought was, gonna– We’ll get sub­scribers, but they’ll churn because who’s gonna wan­na keep. they’ve learnt how to, to in this way and, get famil­iar with the check­list and maybe lis­ten for six months or what­ev­er, why would they keep doing it?” And you said no, they wan­na, wan­na keep lis­ten­ing to us every, every week.” And we still have lis­ten­ers and sub­scribers who’ve been around since the begin­ning, which I’m thank­ful for. But yeah, I think that goes to your point, which is peo­ple are involved ’cause they wan­na be a part of a com­mu­ni­ty where they can test things against, or they can judge a new oppor­tu­ni­ty against what they’ve learnt and have that rein­forced I think, week on week as well. ‘Cause we. Every year we get, when peo­ple tell us their results, it’s like, “I got this, but I would’ve got more if I had the, stuck to the [00:09:00] rules.”

And you know, so it is a process and it’s part of being in the envi­ron­ment which is impor­tant, I think. Yeah. So that rein­forces your point.

Cameron: And I’d, I’d nev­er real­ly thought about it in those terms up until like in the last week or so. But yeah, the more I thought about it, the more I thought, yeah, that makes sense. It keeps you on the– Hav­ing, hav­ing a group of peo­ple keeps you on the straight and nar­row if your, if your brain starts to.

Well, we’re all human, and we know the num­ber one, fac­tor that prob­a­bly bites most ama­teur investors in the ass over time is the fact that we’re humans. Emo­tions, fear and greed get in the way of being log­i­cal, ratio­nal, con­sis­tent day in, day out, week in, week out. So being part of a com­mu­ni­ty that’s telling you, “Don’t be, don’t be stu­pid,”, hope­ful­ly helps.

But yeah, as long as you’re recep­tive to being told, “Don’t be stu­pid.” Some [00:10:00] peo­ple go, “Ah, what do you know?”

Tony Kynas­ton: that’s a very good point you’ve raised. I enjoy your week­ly emails now. They’re– They’ve gone up a lev­el, which is great.

Cameron: Sure. Thank you

Tony Kynas­ton: them, sor­ry, I should say. I appre­ci­ate how much they’ve improved

Cameron: Okay. Thank you. I think that’s a back­hand­ed com­pli­ment, but I’ll take it.

Tony Kynas­ton: not

Cameron: What was the next point you want­ed to f- pull me up on?

Tony Kynas­ton: On hous­ing and what’s

Yeah, look, it’s a cycle I’ve seen before where when inter­est rates rise, some builders go under. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, some peo­ple lose deposits and get involved in legal stoush­es which tie them up and stop their abil­i­ty to buy a house, which is unfor­tu­nate.

So all of that thing’s gonna come through the wash, I think, in the next lit­tle while. But you also see– I know this par­tic­u­lar­ly in Mel­bourne can’t real­ly speak for oth­er cities, but when there’s a hous­ing down­turn, sud­den­ly you see every­one putting in an exten­sion on their house and going up a sto­ry, and there’s just so much work going on streets.

Not hous­es sell­ing, but [00:11:00] peo­ple say­ing I’m gonna put the mon­ey I was think­ing about using to upgrade into ren­o­vat­ing my house, and when the mar­ket turns again, there’ll be a lot more val­ue, or I’ll get a lot more val­ue for my prop­er­ty, and that’ll help.” So I think builders– cer­tain­ly, as you say, the stats are builders are going broke, and there’s a num­ber of rea­sons for that.

The most, the biggest is prob­a­bly infla­tion. Rate ris­es don’t help, of course, but their costs are going up, and if they’re on a fixed price con­tract, they just get killed. so that’s what’s hurt­ing them. Bath­la’s inter­est­ing. There’s cer­tain­ly been a lot of talk about what to do there. There’s a lot rid­ing on them either trad­ing through or get­ting out of admin­is­tra­tion or the gov­ern­ment step­ping in some­how because, that’s– there’s thou­sands and thou­sands of new homes which are required, which peo­ple have paid for, which they’re not get­ting, which just adds to the prob­lem if they go under com­plete­ly and every­one los­es every­thing. notwith­stand­ing all the peo­ple who need to get paid, the sub­con­trac­tors and tilers and con­creters and all that kind of thing. So it’s not a good [00:12:00] sit­u­a­tion. But it’s a bit the point that we had dis­cussed when Alan Kohler was on the show, that there’s just. Reg­u­la­tions con­tin­ue to go up.

The hous­ing code book in at least in Vic­to­ria is two and a half thou­sand pages. there’s so much stuffed in there now about which is real­ly around envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns. And I have a, a friend who was going to build a house and just decid­ed too hard. Kept– they kept get­ting thwart­ed by reg­u­la­tions.

They want­ed– they had a block of land on a hill over­look­ing the bay. They want­ed to put a big fea­ture win­dow in the– fea­ture win­dow in it to look over the bay. Could­n’t do it. Did­n’t meet the envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions. peo­ple are out there, they’re want­i­ng to spend the mon­ey, but it just becomes too expen­sive and too ridicu­lous, and they’re not get­ting what they want.

So they don’t do it. They don’t build. They go and do some­thing else. So that’s a real prob­lem. And a‑again it’s per­haps a bit of over­reach on the gov­ern­men­t’s point of view, and I know peo­ple out lis­ten­ing to this will say we need envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions to [00:13:00] help with cli­mate change.”

So I get that. there’s a– maybe the pen­du­lum swung too far now ’cause I think the hous­ing stan­dards are man­dat­ing a sev­en-star effi­cien­cy rat­ing when maybe what they need to do is man­date a low­er rat­ing, like a five star. But if you want to pay up for six star or pay up for sev­en star because you want that or because it’s gonna save your ener­gy bills down the track, then you have that choice. But, putting that man­date into, the sys­tem via the build­ing reg­u­la­tions, I think is part of the prob­lem. of course, there’s always the rate ris­es and the infla­tion and all the rest of the stuff that goes on. It was it was an arti­cle in today’s Fin Review that I, and I’m prob­a­bly mis­quot­ing here, but it’s some­thing in the order of mag­ni­tude of it takes about 50 days to get a, a new build approval in New South Wales, and it takes three times that to get the same approval in Vic­to­ria.

Yeah, who’d be a builder real­ly when you’re up against red tape, ris­ing costs and rate ris­es?

Cameron: AI will fix all of that

Tony Kynas­ton: I don’t think it will, Cam.

Cameron: No

Tony Kynas­ton: [00:14:00] does, it’s gonna take time. But we’ve got­ta solve it imme­di­ate­ly and if we want peo­ple to buy hous­es and it’s a real issue. And I guess where it leads me to is what I want­ed to talk about was I think there’s gonna be rate ris­es com­ing through. I think there’s, a lot of upward move­ment on bond yields around the world, which is gonna play into that a lit­tle bit. So

Cameron: in

Tony Kynas­ton: oth­er words, in a broad sense, if gov­ern­ments like the Fed­er­al Reserve, the cen­tral bank in the US don’t raise rates offi­cial­ly, bond yields will keep going up.

They just won’t care. They’ll take mat­ters into their own hands as a vote of no con­fi­dence in the US gov­ern­ment, and that will still have the same effect as rate ris­es in terms of bor­row­ing costs going up for it’ll affect the stock mar­ket. And don’t for­get all these big, what were cap­i­tal-light com­pa­nies, the Mag Sev­en ones, are now becom­ing very cap­i­tal heavy because they’re invest­ing in chips and data cen­ters.

So rate ris­es are gonna real­ly affect them as well. and that’s gonna play out in a neg­a­tive sense, I think, at [00:15:00] some stage, but who knows? I can’t fore­cast. But the risks are on the neg­a­tive side at the moment. A lot of talk around one or two rate ris­es for the rest of the year in Aus­tralia, which is prob­a­bly more impor­tant to us. Um, but the point I want­ed to make was that it’s not always a bad thing and that there are cer­tain­ly a num­ber of QAV stocks who– that might ben­e­fit from rate ris­es. There’s a cou­ple that I own which I can talk to. QBE Insur­ance was– I don’t think it’s on the buy list now, has been on it recent­ly. When rates rise, a lot of the float for Aus­tralian insur­ance com­pa­nies is man­dat­ed to being bonds. Their returns actu­al­ly increase because the bond yields are going up and they’re invest­ing the same mon­ey into bonds, and there­fore they’re get­ting a big­ger return. So it can actu­al­ly im-improve, the, the busi­ness met­rics for some com­pa­nies, a rate rise. Same with Chal­lenger Finan­cial. That’s the com­pa­ny that pro­vides annu­ities to peo­ple in retire­ment. So again, if they can go out and invest in bonds and get a bet­ter yield, then they can [00:16:00] offer a bet­ter yield to retirees, and that prob­a­bly dri­ves a sales increase for them. So that’s two exam­ples.

Gold is a pos­si­bil­i­ty, although it does. gold will go up if infla­tion is dri­ving the rate ris­es because peo­ple will wan­na buy more gold to hedge against infla­tion. are oth­er things that might go on, like if rate ris­es lead to down­turns and cen­tral cen­tral banks might want to hedge their bal­ance sheets by buy­ing gold, which they have done in the lat­est, run-up in gold prices.

So that’s a pos­si­bil­i­ty. And the last one is the banks. So per­son­al­ly, I own ANZ, which is not a rec­om­men­da­tion because it’s been on the buy list before, not on there now. But banks in gen­er­al can do well out of ris­ing rates because their net inter­est mar­gin improves but up to a point.

So the econ­o­my degrades with ris­ing inter­est rates, which it often does, because that’s the whole rea­son for the cen­tral bank increas­ing rates is to kill off growth in the econ­o­my and slow it down, slow [00:17:00] infla­tion down, or at least back to accept­able lev­els that, that may lead to bad debts. So that can be a two-edged sword for banks, but in the short term, me, it often leads to mar­gin improve­ment.

So there’s a cou­ple of exam­ples there that peo­ple might wan­na start think­ing about. it’ll obvi­ous­ly have a neg­a­tive impact on com­pa­nies which have lots of debt. Not that we have much of those on the buy list. It’ll. if there is some kind of slow­down, it’ll have an effect on retail stocks cus­tomer-fac­ing type busi­ness­es, trav­el type busi­ness­es, kind of thing.

Although super­mar­kets tend to do well ’cause every­one keeps buy­ing the same amount of gro­ceries. it’s the last thing to be cut, but dis­cre­tionary retail goes down first. So yeah, just some com­ments on the macro envi­ron­ment. Does­n’t change the way I’m invest­ing. We’ll still fol­low the rules. We still find things to buy, and if we need to sell them, we’ll sell them. But I just want­ed to put that out there for peo­ple to think about

Cameron: What about CCV?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Yeah, good exam­ple. Yep, that could [00:18:00] def­i­nite­ly have a sales increase if peo­ple need to find cash quick­ly.

Cameron: Cash Con­vert­ers.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: just a, a note on them. They turned up as a three-point sell on my alert sheet this morn­ing, but they’re actu­al­ly ex-div, so once you fac­tored that in, they were slight­ly below this morn­ing, but then when, by the time I got around to check­ing, they’d gone back above it, so. But they’re sort of a cent either way of their sell line if you fac­tor in the div­i­dend, but I think that’s nor­mal for these guys.

Can I talk about humanoid– Can, can I, can I. So I start­ed

Tony Kynas­ton: robot? Let me take you to a QAV meet­ing.

Cameron: I start­ed writ­ing this under the assump­tion that, uh, it was, you know, the intro­duc­tion of humanoids in the next what­ev­er years was gonna be a threat to Aus­tralian work­ers. But then quick­ly did some research and real­ized that we need hun­dreds [00:19:00] of thou­sands of work­ers,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yep

Cameron: in con­struc­tion and in infra­struc­ture in gen­er­al

we just can’t get fast enough to meet all of our require­ments.

So we actu­al­ly need a few hun­dred thou­sand humanoid robots to lift us up.

Tony Kynas­ton: will they be union mem­bers? ‘Cause that’s

Cameron: No, they won’t need to be union mem­bers. At least at first. Maybe they’ll have a robot union at some point. Agri­cul­ture is anoth­er sec­tor. and I’ve been think­ing a lot about elder care.

You know, you– there– I can see a point at some point in the future, a day at some point in the future where peo­ple don’t need– the elder­ly don’t need to go into a retire­ment facil­i­ty.

They have one or more robots at home that make sure they take their meds, do the cook­ing, the clean­ing, the gar­den­ing, main­te­nance can pick them up if they have a fall, can call triple zero or emer­gency if they do get injured, keeps an eye on them. Think about Chris­sy’s mom, who’s been in a, a Alzheimer’s facil­i­ty, mem­o­ry care facil­i­ty [00:20:00] for sev­en or so years, and, um, she would much rather have stayed at home in her com­mu­ni­ty with her friends and fam­i­ly around her, but, uh, was­n’t real­ly doable.

But if she had a robot to keep an eye on her or look after her, it would be so. I’ve been think­ing a lot about what needs to hap­pen before we get to that point.

Tony Kynas­ton: I think the biggest thing that needs to hap­pen is how does the exist­ing work­ers and users of labor react to that whole change? Because we could solve all the prob­lems we’ve just spo­ken about with builders and with infra­struc­ture pret­ty quick­ly if we just opened the, the door to more qual­i­fied but we don’t.

One of the rea­sons. there’s a cou­ple of rea­sons. One is because the union­ized work­force does­n’t– don’t want their to be erod­ed by cheap­er labor com­ing in. and that’s up to a point. I guess they’ll be prag­mat­ic if they become union­ized when they come in, but any­way. And the oth­er point, of course, is that immi­gra­tion is a hot but­ton top­ic.

If we do allow [00:21:00] more skilled work­ers in, where do we house them? That’s one of the issues that we have to face, and maybe they have to come in and build their own hous­ing. But as I’ve said, we’ve had dis­cus­sions over the last cou­ple of years around this, I think there are a lot of sec­ondary issues that need to be worked out before I can buy a robot to tuck me up in bed at night which I’ll look for­ward to, but I don’t think it’s com­ing tomor­row

Cameron: I think it will come, not tomor­row, but soon before any of those ques­tions are answered. I think we’ll get around to answer­ing those ques­tions when there’s already 100,000 of them in homes and busi­ness­es around the coun­try, and peo­ple will start to pan­ic. That’s part­ly why I’m writ­ing the white paper, is to start to think through what these reg­u­la­to­ry issues are, leg­isla­tive issues that need to be thought about now, ide­al­ly, rather than five years from now when it’s a lit­tle bit late.

Tony Kynas­ton: They won’t be though. Gov­ern­ment

Cameron: I know.

Tony Kynas­ton: time­line. Yeah.

Cameron: I know.

But I.

Tony Kynas­ton: the white paper for busi­ness.

Cameron: It is. That’s.

Tony Kynas­ton: to,

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: if

Cameron: It’s

Tony Kynas­ton: [00:22:00] wheels in gov­ern­ment between now and then, that’d be great. Thanks.

Cameron: it’s designed to be the found­ing doc­u­ment for a think tank that Steve Sam­marti­no and I wan­na start to, help indus­try and union to

Tony Kynas­ton: tanks with AI? that redun­dant?

Cameron: Shh.

Tony Kynas­ton: Why is your think­ing bet­ter than AI’s think­ing? Gee, I tell you what, I I use AI a lot these days. It’s just incred­i­ble how quick­ly it’s becom­ing

Cameron: How quick­ly you change your s- change your sto­ry

Tony Kynas­ton: I do lis­ten to you and you have been a good fore­cast­er of these things and you’re out there at the bleed­ing edge, so I’ll just wait for you to get a robot first, and then I’ll fol­low suit.

Cameron: You know who to ask if you have big dif­fi­cult ques­tions? Barn­a­by Joyce, Tony. Barn­a­by Joyce is, uh, he’s the man.

Tony Kynas­ton: answers to big ques­tions?

Cameron: he just says I’m not Jesus Christ. Don’t ask. Why I’ve come out here for an inter­view and you’re ask­ing me dif­fi­cult ques­tions?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, it’s unfor­tu­nate­ly pop­ulism is anti-intel­lec­tu­al, and [00:23:00] peo­ple would have thought that was a great reac­tion to a a fair­ly ques­tion on how you’re gonna pay for your poli­cies.

Cameron: Not my job. Um,

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, Jesus Christ.

Cameron: one s- one more sto­ry from The Fin. “Risk of a cor­rec­tion is high after oil surge bonds melt­down, econ­o­mists and strate­gists warn.” This is Gus McCub­bing, mar­kets reporter. Very nice like sort of etchy pho­to that Gus has here with a bit of a rec- He looks a lit­tle bit like Grou­cho.

Not Grou- Har­po Marx in this pho­to.

Tony Kynas­ton: okay

Cameron: ” Econ­o­mists and strate­gists warn that equi­ty mar­kets are tee­ter­ing on the edge of a cor­rec­tion as the price of oil push­es back up to $100 US a bar­rel and bond yields trade near the high­est lev­els since the glob­al finan­cial cri­sis amid renewed ten­sions in the Mid­dle East.

The oil price hit US $97 a bar­rel on Mon­day after Iran tar­get­ed three oil tankers in the Strait of Hor­muz” whi- which is appar­ent­ly impos­si­ble because, um, pret­ty [00:24:00] sure six months ago Don­ald Trump destroyed all of their weapons, and all of their mis­siles, and all of their drone capa­bil­i­ties, and, uh, their mines and every­thing’s destroyed.

We won. Nonethe­less, they tar­get­ed three oil tankers in the Strait of Hor­muz through which one-fifth of the world’s ener­gy sup­ply is usu­al­ly shipped, as well as US-linked ships in retal­i­a­tion for Amer­i­can attacks on its ves­sels over the week­end. So, uh, yeah, just anoth­er thing that’s going on. You already men­tioned bond yields, but, uh, oil price is back up, which means we can buy stuff

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I think it all plays into the same play­book about Ris­ing oil dri­ves infla­tion, which dri­ves rate ris­es, and it becomes a even­tu­al­ly a neg­a­tive impact on busi­ness­es who have to pay more for debt and there- there­fore the stock prices that go with them

Cameron: I I’ve been look­ing for US stock pod­casts to get us invit­ed on as guests to speak on. [00:25:00] There was one I was look­ing at called Excess. Yeah, he’s experts, yep.

Tony Kynas­ton: on the US e- US econ­o­my, yep.

Cameron: just on val­ue invest­ing, Tony. Yeah. Excess Returns Pod­cast. They had a guest on recent­ly called Ian Cas­sel, who wrote a book called Stock Pick­er.

It’s a sequel to his first book, Nose Pick­er. But he he said in, in this inter­view “A good stock pick­er would be some­body that can beat the S&P over a 10-year peri­od. A great stock pick­er, the def­i­n­i­tion would be a 20-year track record of beat­ing the S&P 500. How many make that cut? About 2.5, 2.7% of active man­agers.

And then the def­i­n­i­tion of a GOAT would be a 20-year track record of 20% net over 20 years. And that’s, I don’t know, it’s prob­a­bly less than half a per­cent or what­ev­er. It’s a sliv­er,” he said. So I reached out to the host and said, “I got a goat.”

Tony Kynas­ton: Thought you were gonna say you [00:26:00] sleep with one goat.

Cameron: Yeah, good sto­ry. Yeah, I said I got a goat. So you’re the goat, Tony. You’re a goat

Tony Kynas­ton: Myer returns aren’t 20%. they’re

Cameron: Well, it’s dou­ble mar­ket.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: I said that, it’s dou­ble mar­ket. But there, he’s talk­ing about that as being the S&P, which runs at about 10%, so dou­ble mar­ket in the US would be about 20%.

Tony Kynas­ton: true

Cameron: I said, “We’ve got a goat.” I, if you want a goat, come on and talk about being a goat. Or I, I can come on and talk about him being a goat.

I’m the goat, goat whis­per­er. I’m the goat whis­per­er.

Yeah. And the goat fluffer. Oh, putting that on a busi­ness card. Goat fluffer

All right, I’ll shut up now. What do you got?

Tony Kynas­ton: No. We cov­ered the ris­ing inter­est rates I want­ed to cov­er, and now I’ve just got a Pulled Pork to do on a com­pa­ny called Ampli­tude Ener­gy

Cameron: I love these guys.

Tony Kynas­ton: Do you?

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, that’s good.

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: [00:27:00] inter­est­ing com­pa­ny, inter­est­ing So let me start with that first. So Ampli­tude Ener­gy used to be called Coop­er Ener­gy because they oper­ate in the Coop­er Basin. They’re a domes­tic gas sup­pli­er, and eighty per­cent of its gas is on fixed-term con­tracts, the under­ly­ing com­mod­i­ty is not LNG. So LNG is what’s, what they do to nat­ur­al gas to ship it over­seas. They liq­ue­fy it. They’ve– You know, I think we’ve talked about this before. They, they freeze it until it becomes a liq­uid. and the oth­er thing is that there is a nat­ur­al gas com­mod­i­ty that we could track, and there are things like nat­ur­al gas futures in Stock Doc­tor, which is graph­able. but they basi­cal­ly refer to a thing called the Hen­ry Hub price. So gas prices tend to go through a mar­ket which is gen­er­al­ly around, where there’s a con­cen­tra­tion of gas [00:28:00] pass­ing through pipes, and Hen­ry Hub is a US mar­ket. in terms of where the com­mod­i­ty price is bet­ter to look at for this com­pa­ny, it’s in Aus­tralia, and it’s called the Wal­lum­bil­la price, and it’s the Wal­lum­bil­la Hub some­where in Queens­land. I think it’s down near the bor­der with South Aus­tralia and New South Wales, and a lot of the Aus­tralian gas flows through pipes in that area and gets priced accord­ing to that. But hav­ing said that this com­pa­ny has most of its gas pric­ing fixed for four, three or four years on long-term con­tracts. But it w- the twen­ty per­cent which isn’t fixed will, eas­i­ly cor­re­late with the Wal­lum­bil­la price. And I guess every time they come to fix a, a long-term con­tract, it’s gonna have some, basis in the Wal­lum­bil­la price.

So I think that’s the right com­mod­i­ty. It was­n’t easy get­ting a five-year graph for it, so I actu­al­ly went to the Aus­tralian Ener­gy Mar­ket Oper­a­tor, AEMO, and got the [00:29:00] long-term price move­ments, down­loaded it a five-year month­ly graph. And what that’s show­ing is that it’s just turned up back into a buy for nat­ur­al gas in Aus­tralia. So even if you take the view that the com­pa­ny has long-term fixed prices for most of its rev­enue and so isn’t gonna move around a lot it, you’re still gonna at some stage be affect­ed by the local gas price, nation­al gas, nat- nat­ur­al gas price. And in that case, it is just turn­ing up into a buy now. It does also have some crude oil from the Coop­er Basin and but that’s less than 40% of its rev­enue mix. So gas is big­ger dri­ver and prob­a­bly the one we should base any sort of check­ing for com­modi­ties against. What the com­pa­ny does is it drills for gas and oil in the Coop­er Basin, which is main­ly to the south of south­west Vic­to­ria, off the coast of Vic­to­ria. Lit­tle bit onshore, but it’s main­ly in the, in the off­shore area. They drill for [00:30:00] gas and they bring it onshore process it, and then sell it to com­pa­nies like Ener­gy Aus­tralia or AGL, who then pipe it into peo­ple’s homes. So it’s very much a, an infra­struc­ture type play here. They have pro­cess­ing plants one in Vic­to­ria, or actu­al­ly two in Vic­to­ria, I think. One’s called Athena Gas Plant, and the oth­er one’s called the Orbost Gas Pro­cess­ing Plant. they oper­ate off­shore in the Otway Basin, Gipp­s­land Basin, and onshore in some places in the Coop­er Basin as well. Otways are def­i­nite­ly off the south coast of Vic­to­ria think around War­rnam­bool. Gipp­s­land is more out towards where the tra­di­tion­al Bass Strait oil fields are, Coop­er is onshore in South West Vic­to­ria and South Aus­tralia. A lit­tle bit about the his­to­ry of the com­pa­ny. So it’s been around not for a long time. Oh, sor­ry, I should­n’t say that. It has been around for a long time, tw- some twen­ty-four years, twen­ty-five years.

It was incor­po­rat­ed in 2001 under the name Coop­er [00:31:00] Ener­gy, for­mer tick­er code was COE. And it, twen­ty years, it basi­cal­ly became a, what’s called a non-oper­at­ing oil pro­duc­er, which basi­cal­ly means it did JV part­ner­ships with com­pa­nies like San­tos, who would go in and oper­ate the drilling rigs and the pro­cess­ing plants, and Coop­er Ener­gy would help fund it, fund their half, and would also get a roy­al­ty on the gas or oil that was sold. But in 2024, the share­hold­ers decid­ed to change the name to Ampli­tude Ener­gy, appar­ent­ly, ampli­tude is a com­mon seis­mic indus­try term to mea­sure the resource poten­tial of new­ly mapped gas tar­gets accord­ing to the cor­po­rate blurb. And there was also, at the same time, a share con­sol­i­da­tion, ten for one.

The reg­is­ter was con­sol­i­dat­ed. The rea­son for a lot of that rebrand­ing was that they decid­ed to change their role from being a non-oper­a­tor [00:32:00] to becom­ing an oper­a­tor. That got passed through a share­hold­er vote, the strat­e­gy change was quite a big thing for them. Becom­ing an oper­a­tor gave them con­trol over their.

or more con­trol over their des­tiny. Rather than just being an investor, they become a, the dri­ver of their own strat­e­gy and oper­a­tions. It seems to have worked out well for them. So in 2026 the August for the finan­cials for June 30, which were released in August they had a 7% jump in sales rev­enue. They had a 12% increase in under­ly­ing EBITDA and but they did also have an under­ly­ing loss because they took a, a non-cash write-off on some of their lega­cy assets. So they basi­cal­ly cleared the decks a bit. What they did, more impor­tant­ly, for us as investors, was they reduced their net debt by 85%.

So that was a big debt reduc­tion for them which was booked at the [00:33:00] year results. They’ve done a cou­ple of things since they’ve become an ener­gy oper­a­tor. They acquired a field called Arti­san and, they pro­duced 50% of the oper­a­tional inter­est from Beach Ener­gy, and peo­ple will recall Beach Ener­gy as being on our buy list from time to time. They, Beach had done a fair bit of invest­ing in the field, but decid­ed that they did­n’t want to tie their cap­i­tal up in devel­op­ing it, and Ampli­tude decid­ed it was a good deal for them because had a lot of under­sea pipelines in the area which they could hook into for a much low­er cost than Beach would have to do to devel­op its own infra­struc­ture.

So it made sense for that. And also too the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and the Vic­to­ri­an state gov­ern­ment, gave a green light for the devel­op­ment of the Annie Field in Vic­to­ria. So it’s an off­shore gas field, both those two things cor­ner­stones of what this com­pa­ny calls their East Coast Sup­ply [00:34:00] Project.

So they’re try­ing to ramp up assets. They’re try­ing to do it in a way which is near to exist­ing infra­struc­ture, par­tic­u­lar­ly those two pro­cess­ing plants I spoke of before, and also to their cur­rent pipelines under­sea from oth­er drilling rigs which makes it cheap for them to be able to do that. But they, and they want to be a big sup­pli­er to gas users in the sort of New South Wales, Vic­to­ri­an, South Aus­tralian region. So where the pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty is and the need is, as well. If I just step back to the Beach Ener­gy acqui­si­tion they paid 58 mil­lion upfront, for Beach’s 50% equi­ty stake and they agreed to also give Beach a roy­al­ty of $3.75 per of gas pro­duced and there’s a cap on that at of 31 peta­joules of total gas from that par­tic­u­lar facil­i­ty. And it also, the takeover of that [00:35:00] also allowed for a realign­ment of anoth­er part­ner that Beach had called OG Ener­gy. They in the past had 40%, owned 40%, Beach owned 60%, OG their share­hold­ing to 50, so now they’re a 50/50 part­ner with and I think that’s prob­a­bly a good deal for Ampli­tude just on the basis of hav­ing OG as the part­ner in this, the non-oper­at­ing part­ner in this. A lit­tle bit about OG. So they’re a big big in gas infra­struc­ture com­pa­ny around the world, and I’m just try­ing to find my lit­tle notes on it. Oh, here they are. They’re the ener­gy arm of a big­ger com­pa­ny called Ofer Glob­al, O‑F-E‑R, that’s that com­pa­ny’s chaired by an Israeli chap called Eyal Ofer, and they have a lot of, the broad­er group has a lot of hold­ings in glob­al ship­ping real estate and bank­ing, but it also owns this com­pa­ny, OG Ener­gy, and they do a lot of work.

They’re a very deep-pock­et­ed [00:36:00] con­glom­er­ate which gives Ampli­tude access to fund­ing and access to expe­ri­ence, poten­tial­ly access to some of the spe­cial­ized vehi­cles that need to, these resources into actu­al­ly pro­duc­ing gas and oil. So one of the, for exam­ple, one of the under­sea, under, sor­ry, under­sea rigs, explo­ration vehi­cles is pur­chased off OG Ener­gy that Ampli­tude are using their fields. It’s, in some respects it’s all com­ing togeth­er for this com­pa­ny. They’ve expand­ed quick­ly. They’ve been able to do it effi­cient­ly by pig­gy­back­ing on their own assets, and they’ve got a, a part­ner with deep pock­ets and lots of expe­ri­ence. So the strat­e­gy point of view, that’s real­ly good. What is the big risk? The big risk is around the gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of domes­tic gas. So at the moment, there’s a thing called the Domes­tic Gas Reser­va­tion Scheme, which is set to be leg­is­lat­ed for [00:37:00] com­mence­ment on the 1st of July, 2027. So it has­n’t yet been enact­ed, and there’s cer­tain­ly a lot of lob­by­ing going on around it. But it may affect this com­pa­ny. So what is the gas reser­va­tion pro­gram? So it’s more tar­get­ed at exporters than it is at domes­tic sup­pli­ers like Ampli­tude, but what it’s designed to do is to make the LNG exporters put 20% of their gas exports in Aus­tralia back into the domes­tic mar­ket here. And there are some pric­ing mech­a­nisms around that, but the whole basis for it is so that indus­try in Aus­tralia, I guess also house­holds and oth­er com­mer­cial users, have enough to meet their pro­ject­ed gas demands in the future. And the gov­ern­ment is intend­ing to inject 200 peta­joules of extra gas into the East Coast Grid. The flow on for that for Ampli­tude is like­ly to be that it push­es the price down [00:38:00] and that may affect Ampli­tude, will affect Ampli­tude’s mar­gin, and it may actu­al­ly make some of these invest­ments mar­gin­al if they can’t get the price they need to recov­er their explo­ration and devel­op­ment costs. That’s a bit of a ques­tion mark about the future for this com­pa­ny. The CEO for Ampli­tude, Jane Nor­man, is a vocal crit­ic of the pol­i­cy. And she warns, of course, that as she would, that cap­ping the price will sup­press domes­tic returns and cur­tail domes­tic explo­ration, and there­fore, in the longer term, may actu­al­ly have a neg­a­tive effect because there’s no new gas fields opened up. A lit­tle bit in flux. There are a cou­ple of things, though, which gives Ampli­tude I guess some, not cer­tain­ty, but con­fi­dence to go for­ward with their cur­rent explo­ration projects. One of them is what’s called the infra­struc­ture bot­tle­neck. So at the moment par­tic­u­lar­ly in Vic­to­ria and to sup­port major util­i­ty cus­tomers like AGL and [00:39:00] Ener­gy Aus­tralia, a lot of the gas has to come down from Queens­land and trav­el through hun­dreds of kilo­me­ters of pipelines to get to Vic­to­ria. So by open­ing up the Gipp­s­land Basin, the Coop­er Basin, and the Otway Basin, Vic­to­ria becomes close to its source of gas and less reliant on inter­state flows. It is like­ly to be a sta­ble mar­ket need that this com­pa­ny can help. And as I also said, they’re also insu­lat­ing against pric­ing down­turns in the future by try­ing to, or by suc­cess­ful­ly sign­ing up big com­pa­nies like AGL into long-term con­tracts.

And so they haven’t, for exam­ple, gone ahead with this lat­est expan­sion with­out hav­ing con­tracts already in place for the off­take. So at least in the next short while they’re cov­ered, and that may buy them some time to sort out the reg­u­la­to­ry issues which could affect them. Yeah that’s in a nut­shell the com­pa­ny. Lat­est results were [00:40:00] good. QAV num­bers, this is a rea­son­ably large ADT stock, so trad­ing one point two sev­en mil­lion a day, which is pret­ty, dol­lars, which is pret­ty good. Share price for the analy­sis is $1.67 and inter­est­ing­ly enough, that’s two-thirds of the con­sen­sus tar­get price on the com­pa­ny, so ana­lysts are cer­tain­ly see­ing val­ue in the share price. Stock Doc­tor finan­cial health, though, is ear­ly warn­ing, but the trend is steady. And also too, Stock­o­pe­dia only give it a sev­en­ty-two for qual­i­ty, which is rea­son­ably low. So both Stock Doc­tor and Stock­o­pe­dia are call­ing out qual­i­ty on this one. Not sure if that was before or after the results, prob­a­bly after the results, but if the debt’s reduc­ing, I think that’s prob­a­bly a good thing, and I don’t know if it’s reflect­ed com­plete­ly in those two rank­ings.

But cur­rent­ly they are not scor­ing for us. And also too, I should call out that Stock­o­pe­dia only gives an over­all rank­ing of fifty-two for this com­pa­ny. It gives it a very low score for momen­tum, a sev­en­teen in its rank­ing for that. Hav­ing said all [00:41:00] that, the F score is sev­en out of nine, which is quite good. I think what’s affect­ing the qual­i­ty scores in the rank­ing ser­vices is that the com­pa­ny, even with its lat­est results, is loss-mak­ing. This year it was main­ly due to write-offs of assets, so impair­ments on assets. Under­ly­ing there’s a lot of oper­at­ing prof­it and a lot of good cash flow com­ing through. What I’m see­ing is that the fore­cast earn­ings per share growth is quite high. I think it’s around three hun­dred per­cent from mem­o­ry,

but it’s a loss-mak­ing com­pa­ny cur­rent­ly. It’s fore­cast to grow and make mon­ey next year and its PROPCAF is quite good. It’s two point sev­en sev­en times, which is good. The inter­est­ing thing I found also about val­ue for this com­pa­ny is that it’s cur­rent­ly trad­ing at $1.67, or it was yes­ter­day when I did the analy­sis. That’s also the price of its NTA, and it’s also the price of its book val­ue. So we can score it well for those two things. Does­n’t have an own­er founder, so we can’t [00:42:00] score it for that, unfor­tu­nate­ly. We could­n’t score it for PE because it was a loss-mak­ing com­pa­ny, so earn­ings are neg­a­tive. PROPCAF is good. If I add up all the scores I’m get­ting to a qual­i­ty score total of six­ty-three per­cent, ten out of six­teen, and a QAV score of point two three, which is rea­son­ably high. That’s Ampli­tude Ener­gy. Does­n’t come with­out risks. And the biggest risk, is what hap­pens with this twen­ty per­cent that’s turned back onshore from the exporters. But against that risk is the long-term off­take con­tracts with big cus­tomers. So have a look.

Cameron: Thank you, TK. I said at the begin­ning there one of my, that I loved them because I added them to a light port­fo­lio last week, and they’re up 10% already. But you con­cern me now about this com­mod­i­ty price. So how do I track that as a sell? Do you, how, if it’s that hard. Not

Tony Kynas­ton: the data.[00:43:00]

Cameron: gonna do that.

Tony Kynas­ton: I know. I know. Look, I was, I was, the data was there and I could pull it togeth­er, so it was good to have the con­fi­dence that it was a buy.

But by the same token, most of the rev­enue from this, for this com­pa­ny is locked up any­way in

Cameron: Yes.

Tony Kynas­ton: it’s prob­a­bly not as impor­tant as it is to some­body who is sell­ing gold on the open mar­ket or oil on the open mar­ket. It’s gonna be less volatile.

Cameron: Hmm, I won­der if I can get AI to build me a tool that pulls that data down once a week and does it all for me. Prob­a­bly would­n’t be that hard now that I have Astra. Astra, Astra, Astra.

Tony Kynas­ton: Good boy.

Cameron: Astro Boy.

Yeah. All right. Thank you, TK.

Tony Kynas­ton: Very.

Cameron: After hours, how was your Father’s Day?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, good. Went up to Mel­bourne and had lunch with my father-in-law and all [00:44:00] his grand­kids, and of course Alex was there and Sean, so nice. Thank you. Very good. Very good to catch up with every­one.

Cameron: It’s good. Oh, it was love­ly. Yeah, I had break­fast usu­al Sun­day break­fast with Hunter and Fox. Hunter let me win a game and then drew a game. I think he was being nice, see­ing as his ELO is now like 2,100, so there’s no way I could have done that by myself. Tay­lor called and chat­ted for half an hour while we were at the cafe, which was nice.

And then Chris­sy gave me a vouch­er for a mas­sage, and I’d giv­en her one for a birth­day, which she had­n’t used. So we went and had Thai mas­sages yes­ter­day at the local place where they stand on your back and walk up and down and all that kind of jazz. It was good.

Tony Kynas­ton: I was gonna ask about that. I see a lot of Thai mas­sage places around in the sub­urbs in par­tic­u­lar when I’m dri­ving. They’re all legit?

Cameron: I don’t know. I don’t know. But this one, actu­al­ly, we’ve [00:45:00] gone to this one, it’s just in our sub­urb. We’ve been going to it for 10, 15 years. But then the, um, the guy that runs the kung fu physio place that we go to rec­om­mend­ed it to us as well years ago, and we said, “Oh, we already go there.” He goes, “Oh, they’re the real deal.

They’re super legit.”

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah,

Cameron: yeah, they’re staffed all by women, but they have a pole, and they’ll climb up on your back, and she had her knees in my glutes at one point, and her elbows in my back, and her knees in my back, and then she would get up and walk up and down my spine. And she says, “Do you want, how hard do you want that?”

I said, “Hard.” So she went hard. Hard. Very hard, as they say in, I don’t know, Boston or some­thing. Hard. Park the car in the car park. I fin­ished The Con­formist by Bertoluc­ci over, uh, last night, over the week­end. You ever seen that?

Tony Kynas­ton: Many decades ago, yeah.

Cameron: I had­n’t seen it. Real­ly inter, beau­ti­ful, real­ly inter­est­ing weird sto­ry, but I read up on it and appar­ent­ly very influ­en­tial on the Hol­ly­wood direc­tors of the ’70s, Cop­po­la, Scors­ese, Lucas, Spiel­berg, those guys. And, and most­ly Cop­po­la because not only did he steal Storaro, his cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er to make Apoc­a­lypse Now, but Bran­do went and worked with Bertoluc­ci after that and.

But a lot of the light­ing, a lot of the shad­owy scenes, dark rooms, Cop­po­la stole the approach to doing that when he did The God­fa­ther. But yeah, beau­ti­ful­ly shot. Inter­est­ing sto­ry, good per­for­mances. Yeah. I real­ly enjoyed it.

Tony Kynas­ton: I’ll check it out again. Good.

Cameron: It’s on SBS if you can stand the ads.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: The same, sor­ry, when I say ads, the same ad every 10 min­utes and [00:47:00] before and after on repeat, the same ad.

And the ad that they’re show­ing me, ’cause it’s high­ly tar­get­ed, is bow­el can­cer, uh, ad in, guess­ing Viet­namese, with a Viet­namese guy in his obvi­ous mid-50s, and it’s all in Viet­namese. I’m like, “Okay, well, I’m def­i­nite­ly the right age.”

Tony Kynas­ton: Should­n’t go to Thai mas­sage places and leave your phone on.

Cameron: That’s all I got.

Tony Kynas­ton: To Robert Forster’s LP this week. I think it’s his most recent, but I think it’s 2025. It’s Straw­ber­ry.

Cameron: Straw­ber­ries.

Tony Kynas­ton:

Cameron: Some­one ate all the straw­ber­ries. Some­one could have been me. I love that album.

Tony Kynas­ton: It’s good, isn’t it?

Cameron: Yeah, it’s not the one Chris­sy played on it. She played on the one before that, but yeah, we love that album. And, you know, the Straw­ber­ry [00:48:00] songs with Cara and his wife, who’s Chris­sy’s friend, and it’s just a sweet, very sweet song, and a lot of his songs these days, very sweet.

A lot of it about get­ting old and hav­ing the love of his life and, yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. No, they’re good. And I’ve been wa- walk­ing along the Rose­bud Beach as I often do two or three times a week, and unfor­tu­nate­ly bird flu’s come to Vic­to­ria. I’ve been s- tak­ing pho­tos of a cou­ple of dead birds and reg­is­ter­ing them and actu­al­ly got the reply today to the one I did yes­ter­day say­ing, “Yep, we’re aware of it, but thanks.”

Cameron: So it was in Ade­laide I think I saw last week, so it’s moved up the coast already

Tony Kynas­ton: Yep. So yeah, there’s been yeah, dead birds on the beach at Rose­bud

Cameron: Right

Tony Kynas­ton: Which is of sad but I guess inevitable

Cameron: Also the name of a great ’70s punk album, I think. Dead Birds on the Beach at Rose­bud, was­n’t that one of the Saints’ ear­ly albums, I think? Some­thing like that.

Tony Kynas­ton: Strand­ed? I’m

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: [00:49:00] Yeah.

Cameron: that was their fol­low-up. Did you– Every time you see one, do you call them up and go, “She’s dead on a beach wrapped in plas­tic”? No?

Tony Kynas­ton: don’t. I just

Cameron: No, you should.

No, you should wrap it in plas­tic and then do that line from Twin Peaks

Tony Kynas­ton: Am I gonna– Hope­ful­ly I won’t catch any bird flu myself if I do that

Cameron: Yeah, I don’t know. How, how, uh, con­ta­gious is it to humans, this cur­rent strain?

Tony Kynas­ton: It’s

Cameron: Do you have to, do you have to eat the bird?

Tony Kynas­ton: them, if you believe them. They do tell you to keep

Cameron: If you believe it.

Tony Kynas­ton: About dogs, I think, at the moment. And I know it’s got­ten into the seal and pen­guin colonies as

Cameron: Yeah, I read about the seals, yeah. Oh, it’s full f- I’m sure the, the cra­zies will be blam­ing it on Antho­ny Fau­ci before s- too long. It’s all his doing. All right, TK, well, let’s get on and do our Amer­i­cano show, where I’m gonna be talk­ing about, uh, a hos­pi­tal [00:50:00] busi­ness that fired their CEO a few months ago.

Tony Kynas­ton: have bow­el can­cer?

Cameron: So can you say that in Viet­namese? Like I could­n’t quite under­stand it. Don’t mess with my algo­rithm. All right. Hap­py hunt­ing, every­body

Tony Kynas­ton: Bye-bye