Crouching Tiger, Hidden Fox: QAV AU #952

QAV AU 952

[00:00:00]

Tony Kynas­ton: How’s the weath­er in Bris­bane? I hear you guys got storms

Cameron: Yeah, it’s sun­ny now, but it has been rainy last cou­ple of days. Cool and rainy, which is nice for a change. Don’t mind it.

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, good.

Cameron: about down there?

Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, we’re hot. We had twen­ty-eight here yes­ter­day. Hot and windy. Mm.

Cameron: And high­ly enlight­ened. Uh, wel­come to QAV

Tony Kynas­ton: And don’t even need to med­i­tate about it.

Cameron: For the 20th of Octo­ber, 2026, episode 952. Tony was just telling me before the show how high­ly enlight­ened he is

Tony Kynas­ton: No, I was­n’t. You were telling me how you had to remind your­self every day of how high­ly enlight­ened you are

Cameron: I just do. That’s my form of med­i­ta­tion

Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, that sounds like a cult to me. A cult of one. No, three. You, Hunter, and Tay­lor out­do­ing each oth­er.

Cameron: Well, we have three sep­a­rate

Tony Kynas­ton: Right. Well, ’cause you can’t agree on who’s the, who’s cul­tic. [00:01:00] Right. Oh, my cult’s bet­ter than your cult. Come on,

Cameron: yeah. We all, we- the run­ning gag that Chris­sy and I have at kung fu is that our kung fu is a cult.

Tony Kynas­ton: It is.

Cameron: “It’s not a cult, you can leave any time you want.” I’m like, “Can you? me s- let me see you, let me see you do it then.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Cameron: you”

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Why can’t you exer­cise by your­self? View on Chris­sy can spa. Yeah.

Cameron: You–

Tony Kynas­ton: Save the mon­ey.

Cameron: We could.

Tony Kynas­ton: trav­el time, you could

Cameron: Mm-hmm

Tony Kynas­ton: that to sit and tell your­selves how so enlight­ened you are

Cameron: Chris­sy even, Chris­sy and I can’t even spar togeth­er at kung fu, at the class. We have to. When, when, if we get paired up in spar­ring, ’cause, you know, it cir­cu­lates, we pair up, we’re like, “Uh-oh, we can’t do this.” We have to, we have to do anoth­er drill because if I throw a punch at her, her fight or flight kicks in, and then she tries to kill me

Tony Kynas­ton: Right

Cameron: lat­er.

It’s just, it’s not good. Not good at

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, you and Fox can do it then[00:02:00]

Cameron: Oh, I do. He pa- he, he kicked me in the nuts in spar­ring

Tony Kynas­ton: him.

Cameron: week­end.

Tony Kynas­ton: learned some­thing from kung fu.

Cameron: he walked up to me and

Tony Kynas­ton: What’s that called? Cr- Crouch­ing Tiger

Cameron: hid­den fox. kicked me in the nuts. I was wear­ing a box, but still, it, he kicked it hard and it, it

Tony Kynas­ton: You wear a box. You wear a box to kung fu

Cameron: Dur­ing, yeah, class­es, yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Real­ly? So that is a move to kick some­one in the nuts, that’s a move, is it?

Cameron: it hap­pens. We

Tony Kynas­ton: Right.

Cameron: Any­way, let’s get

Tony Kynas­ton: Right.

Cameron: to uh, oth­er stuff. Uh, what’s in the news today, TK?

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, hap­py days for me. Chal­lenger’s hav­ing a, um, a takeover by Dai­ichi. Its brand in Aus­tralia is Tow­er Life. But yeah, I own shares in Chal­lenger and found out last night that they’ve received an offer which has sent their price up, I think 19%, [00:03:00] hmm, in a day. That’s great

Cameron: I haven’t checked my, um, alert spread­sheet today. I think I prob­a­bly own

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, right. Yeah, it’s been on the buy list for a while. It’s a large ADT stock.

Cameron: CGF.

Tony Kynas­ton: or is it CFG? CGF, yeah

Cameron: Um, I own it in my super, two parcels in my super. It’s in the dum­my port­fo­lio or the mod­el port­fo­lio. It’s in the light port­fo­lio. Good stuff. Good job,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yes. So they’ve already owned, I think they owned about, um, twen­ty per­cent-ish, uh, already. They’ve been there for a cou­ple of years, so peo­ple have been expect­ing a takeover. I guess the issue from here will be whether the board of Chal­lenger can get the offer up, giv­en that it’s unlike­ly any­one else will come in to make an offer if DHU already own twen­ty per­cent.

So we’ll see. But yeah, it’s good

Cameron: I’m not [00:04:00] see­ing it going up today, but my spread­sheet is say­ing it can’t update data. So did this just hap­pen today or did it hap­pen

Tony Kynas­ton: Hap­pened yes­ter­day. Yeah, it jumped from $10, around $10 to about $11.70, which is close to the offer price.

Cameron: Right.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm

Cameron: What does my sheet say it is? Eleven sev­en­ty-five. that sound about

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: Yeah. Okay. I’ve only owned it for a few months too, May, June, July. Looks like I bought most. Oh, one in Sep­tem­ber even. Parcels. up, uh, the old­est one from May is up thir­ty-three per­cent. The most recent is up thir­teen, four­teen per­cent. Not bad for a few

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. If, if you went to the Rivkin School of Funds Man­age­ment, you’d say, “33% in three months, that’s a 99% annu­al return.”

Cameron: Mm-hmm. good. We should be quot­ing

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: Yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: 33% in four months, I should [00:05:00] say

Cameron: Well, in terms of my glob­al con­se­quences brief­ing, Tony, uh,

Tony Kynas­ton: sound­track?

Cameron: Yes. Shostakovich. Do, do you wan­na take a guess which one it is this week? No, no. Num­ber 11 this week, AKA The 1905, ’cause it’s osten­si­bly about the 1905 rev­o­lu­tion, but it came out round about the time of the Hun­gar­i­an, the crush­ing, the

Tony Kynas­ton: Ooh.

Cameron: of the Hun­gar­i­an, what­ev­er it was, what­ev­er you wan­na call it, in 1956, I

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, blood in the pool at the Olympics. At the Mel­bourne Olympics, blood in the pool I had a

Cameron: what was that

Tony Kynas­ton: Hun­gary play, Hun­gary play Rus­sia in the water polo at the ’56 Olympics in

Cameron: Oh.

Tony Kynas­ton: just after it hap­pened.

Cameron: Yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: and the, it’s known as the blood in the pool event.

Cameron: Did s- was there blood in

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, yeah. It was. Yeah. Well, they’re off.

Cameron: Bit of bif­fo?

Tony Kynas­ton: of, a bit of, bit of nut sack grab­bing.

Cameron: Sounds [00:06:00] like kung

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. No box­ers. They don’t wear box­ers in the pool

Cameron: Hmm. Uh, well, you know, so, you know, basic

Tony Kynas­ton: I had a friend, sor­ry to inter­rupt. I had a friend,

Cameron: hmm

Tony Kynas­ton: a friend whose par­ents skied their way out of Hun­gary across the bor­der when the ’56 upris­ing hap- or ’56 crush­ing hap­pened

Cameron: Wow

Tony Kynas­ton: to get out. Yeah, get out in time and migrat­ed to Mel­bourne

Cameron: skied their way over the bor­der. Uh, so yes, uh, Mid­dle East is still a mess. Um, is still a mess. Uh, France is a mess. Spent a lot of time this week try­ing to get my head around what’s going on in France. I know you talked about it last week, but I’ve been drilling down into it. Just the his­to­ry behind it, you know, why their econ­o­my is in such a sad state. And it looks like there’s a bunch of fac­tors, but their pen­sions, pub­lic sec­tor pen­sions are a big com­po­nent of

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm

Cameron: and that’s been going back a long time. And [00:07:00] yeah, suc­ces­sive admin­is­tra­tions haven’t been able to curb their, uh, gov­ern­ment over­heads. So it’s not just a Macron thing. It goes right back to Mit­ter­rand and

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh yeah. No, def­i­nite­ly. Yep.

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: Def­i­nite­ly. Yep. So that, that’ll be real­ly inter­est­ing to see what hap­pens there. It’s a, it’s gonna be a big test for the EU, I think

Cameron: Well, one of the things I was read­ing this morn­ing when I was doing some analy­sis of it with GPT was that the cost of sov­er­eign debt across the EU is going up as a result of this too. So gov­ern­ment bonds are going up, um, yields hav­ing to be pushed up in the EU as well as in Amer­i­ca, um, part­ly because of the unrest in France. But it’s in– And I did­n’t men­tion this last week, but on the bull­shit fil­ter for the last cou­ple of months, um, I’ve been through a book that came out in ’97 by [00:08:00] Zbig­niew Brzezin­s­ki called, um, The Grand, The Grand Chess­board

Tony Kynas­ton: isn’t it? Yeah, some­thing like that.

Cameron: Yeah. And in the last episode, we were talk­ing about the EU.

Basi­cal­ly, for peo­ple who don’t know who Brzezin­s­ki was, younger lis­ten­ers, um, he was Jim­my Carter’s nation­al secu­ri­ty advi­sor, and, um, beyond the, the Carter admin­is­tra­tion, he was like a, like the Hen­ry Kissinger of the Democ­rats, basi­cal­ly. Polit­i­cal ana­lyst, sort of strate­gic guy. daugh­ter is the host or the co-host of Morn­ing Joe still today on MSNBC, I think.

She’s mar­ried to the oth­er guy. She’s mar­ried to Joe. Um, there, that fam­i­ly her­itage con­tin­ues. But he was the guy, most famous­ly for me, the Carter admin­is­tra­tion when there was some unrest going on in [00:09:00] Afghanistan, said to Jim­my Carter, “If we play this right, we can give the Sovi­ets their own Viet­nam.”

And i- they did sort of delib­er­ate­ly fund the Mujahideen and armed the Mujahideen to go into Afghanistan, cre­ate a lot of ter­ror­ism, cre­at­ed insta­bil­i­ty in Afghanistan. And gov­ern­ment, who was pro-Sovi­et at the time, beg­ging, uh, the Sovi­ets to, uh, come and assist them for well over a year. Brezh­nev, who was run­ning the– who was the pre­mier at the time, said no for a long time. Last thing you. He says the, the la. I, I did a whole series on this on the

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm

Cameron: He was like, “The last thing that you need is us to march in with troops. It’s, it’s gonna make your sit­u­a­tion worse.” is the coun­ter­point to what you often hear in the West, is that the Sovi­ets invad­ed Afghanistan, and so what hap­pened? He said, “No, no, no,” until [00:10:00] the, one of the main polit­i­cal lead­ers in Afghanistan assas­si­nat­ed the oth­er one, it was all sort of going to hell in a hand­bas­ket. And his advi­sor said, “Look, if you don’t step in, the Mujahideen are gonna come in from Pak­istan,” where they were, where they were being trained, “and we’re gonna lose Afghanistan.

It’s gonna end up as a, um, fun­da­men­tal­ist M- Mus­lim chaos on our bor­der. We can’t have that.” So they stepped in, and a bit like Bush in 2003, they thought it was gonna be a 30-day oper­a­tion. Get in, re- get rid of the b- re- get rid of the guy who’d assas­si­nat­ed the oth­er leader, replace him with anoth­er guy, mop up, get out, turned into a 10-year deba­cle.

And, and Brzezin­s­ki was right. They gave the Sovi­et Union their own Viet­nam. They could­n’t get out. They got in deep­er than they ever planned, and it, and it helped, uh, speed up the eco­nom­ic col­lapse of the Sovi­et Union. Any­way, so this book, he was talk­ing about, [00:11:00] you know, the, the world from an Amer­i­can per­spec­tive and what Amer­i­ca need­ed to do to main­tain its dom­i­nance. And he talked about the EU as being this thing between France and Ger­many, they both need­ed the EU. Um, France need­ed it to sort of regain their posi­tion of pow­er that they had before the 20th cen­tu­ry, and they could­n’t do it alone, so they need­ed pull all these oth­er coun­tries in West­ern Europe togeth­er.

But they them­selves as the, you know, the, the intel­lec­tu­al lead­ers of it. And then he said Ger­many need­ed it for reha­bil­i­ta­tion. Ger­many need­ed to rebuild itself, and this is around about the time, you know, just after the reunion of East and West Ger­many. Um, Ger­many could­n’t go and rebuild its mil­i­tary by itself, or else every­one would be like, “Uh, what?

No, we don’t think so. That’s not great.” It need­ed sort of a buffer of being part of the EU to. with the, the, [00:12:00] uh, NATO secu­ri­ty guar­an­tees of the US, et cetera, so it could do it with­out peo­ple get­ting a lit­tle bit ner­vous. But it’s inter­est­ing r- read­ing that at the moment, f- 30 years on, and watch­ing what’s hap­pen­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly with France, uh, you know, sort of falling apart eco­nom­i­cal­ly, polit­i­cal­ly, and real­iz­ing that the EU exper­i­ment has got a lot of fun­da­men­tal prob­lems

Tony Kynas­ton: And I think the, the biggest one is that they have one com­mon cur­ren­cy. So each of the mem­ber states can’t print mon­ey and can’t deval­ue their cur­ren­cy to get them out of these debt prob­lems that they’re in. Hap­pened in Greece, hap­pened in Spain, and now it’s prob­a­bly gonna hap­pen in France, when arguably if they had their old cur­ren­cies back, they could have trad­ed their own way out rather than deal.

have to do deals with the EU on their bonds and fund­ing and aus­ter­i­ty mes­sage, me, uh, aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures and all of that kind of thing

Cameron: [00:13:00] Hmm. Yeah, so it’s inter­est­ing to see it play out. Uh, what else is going on? Um, hor­ri­ble attack against Helen Haines, uh, yes­ter­day. Um, not a big deal being made of it, uh, in the Fin this morn­ing, I see. It’s not like, um, polit­i­cal vio­lence or vio­lence is any­thing new. But, um, yeah, shock­ing nonethe­less

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: And, uh, our econ­o­my is bug­gered from every­thing that I’m read­ing.

Um, NAB is lay­ing off a cou­ple of thou­sand, two and a half thou­sand peo­ple, I think, rough­ly in line with what some of the oth­er banks have already done. And, uh, there was a thing in The Fin today, I think it was in Chan­ti­cleer, basi­cal­ly say­ing this is what hap­pens before we go into reces­sions. The banks start lay­ing off thou­sands of peo­ple because they’ve, um, uh, added to.

He said, so he’s quot­ing some­body in it say­ing, “You blink and there’s 30 new peo­ple in this depart­ment and

Tony Kynas­ton: [00:14:00] Yeah

Cameron: so they’re cut­ting some of the fat.

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm

Cameron: I got an email from Swin­burne, some­body at Swin­burne offer­ing them­selves as a guest on one of my pod­casts. So that’s sort of some­body who looks after gov­er­nance there say­ing that this is an, this is about AI. Not con­vinced that it is about AI, but, um,

Tony Kynas­ton: What’s about AI? The lay­offs?

Cameron: lay­offs,

Tony Kynas­ton: right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, it does­n’t, does­n’t seem to be. I think it’s the banks are all shrink­ing at the moment, as you said. I don’t know if it’s a pre­cur­sor to reces­sion. It could be. I think the high­er bond yields are, are the more inter­est­ing fact and, and what hap­pens there because that, that is a direct drag on the econ­o­my.

Cameron: Yeah,

Tony Kynas­ton: And, you know, I was, I was gonna talk about the CoreWeave bond, which has been cov­ered in papers since I first saw it. The head­line was, “Elon Says Yikes” when, uh, the CoreWeave, which is a, a data cen­ter chip host­ing com­pa­ny in the [00:15:00] States, which was seen as the tem­plate for Fir­mus, which was the float that was pil- pulled in Aus­tralia recent­ly,

Cameron: Mm-hmm

Tony Kynas­ton: could­n’t get the fund­ing away.

But the, the CoreWeave bonds hit fif­teen per­cent last year. last week in the US and, um, yeah, I mean, chip mak­ers around the world dropped on that kind of news. If, if the data cen­ter mak­ers can’t get fund­ing to keep expand­ing data cen­ters for as far as we can see and into the future and geo­graph­i­cal­ly, then it kind of puts a cap on growth in the space.

Cameron: Hmm. Well, speak­ing of growth, look­ing at our port­fo­lios, uh, the mod­el port­fo­lio is up 15.2% per annum ver­sus the bench­mark SPDR 200 up 7.8. So we’re kind of dou­ble mar­ket there. light group are up 18.6% per annum ver­sus the bench­mark up 10.0, so slight­ly less than dou­ble mar­ket there. Have had to sell a [00:16:00] few things in the last week, sur­pris­ing­ly for the low port­fo­lio. Uh, I got a ques­tion for you, Tony, about AZJ

Tony Kynas­ton: Which is Aur­i­zon, yeah, the rail com­pa­ny.

Cameron: Yeah. were on my buy list this week, but when I went to add them to a port­fo­lio yes­ter­day, uh, when I looked at the Brett lat­er, uh, it did not have them as, uh, being above their buy line. In fact, one ver­sion of the Brett lat­er, the Google Sheets ver­sion, had them below the sell line, and my own ver­sion of the Brett lat­er, which I’ve, uh, built for my pri­vate, uh, amuse­ment, uh, had it above the sell line, but also below the buy line.

But the script had it above the buy line. So I spent a bit of time and drilled down into it, and it’s inter­est­ing because when I eye­balled the chart, the five-year chart, I would have said that the line both of the [00:17:00] Breadala­tor were show­ing as the buy line is a flat line. Um, but I know that you and Brett, uh, shout out to Brett, by the way.

He did send me an email this week, so it’s nice to hear from Brett. that, uh, you put a lot of time and

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: which lines are cho­sen and when. So want­ed to ask you, if you eye­ball this chart, what’s your take on the Breadala­tor buy line?

Tony Kynas­ton: Looks fine to me. What’s, what’s the prob­lem?

Cameron: Well, it’s a flat line. So uh, H1 that it’s pick­ing of April ’22 and the, uh, H2, which is March ’24, are with­in 8% of each oth­er. So should­n’t we be tak­ing the last of those, the March ’24 at $4? The first one’s at $4.03, the sec­ond one’s at $4, using that as H1 and then find­ing an H2 after that, which would prob­a­bly [00:18:00] be, I think it’s like Sep­tem­ber ’25

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I think you’re right, actu­al­ly. It is a, a, a flat bot­tom

Cameron: Flat top.

Tony Kynas­ton: top. Yep, what­ev­er. Yeah. No, you’re right. Looks like it is

Cameron: But the Breadala­tor, um, is dis­count­ing it. the, I, I did drill in with the GPT and the log­ic because I’ve engi­neered the Breadala­tor log­ic and to u- to build my own, and it says that acti­vat­ing some­thing that it about a rule that, um, takes the most recent line that’s been breached. Um,

Tony Kynas­ton: the buy line fol­lows the sell line.

Cameron: Yeah, read this to you. It says, um-

Bernard: Here­in, the boys con­tin­ued to debate the draw­ing of lines for sev­er­al hours, until Tony wise­ly said

Tony Kynas­ton: We could talk about this aft– our­selves, could­n’t we? I mean

Cameron: I could, but I don’t wan­na waste your [00:19:00] time. You’re like, “Oh, don’t bore me with that stuff. I got golf to play.” If I trap you on the show, you got­ta talk about it.

Tony Kynas­ton: Ah, that’s what it is. You’re try­ing to trap me, are you? Okay.

Cameron: Entrap­ment on the show. I don’t wan­na waste any more of your time. I thought you would look at it and just go, “Yeah, it’s right,” or, “Yeah, it’s wrong.”

Tony Kynas­ton: I did. I, hon­est­ly, I saw your notes and I thought, I, I can’t see a prob­lem with this.

Cameron: okay.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: you’re, you’re hap­py with the flat­line being the buy line?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: Okay. Well, take AZJ off the buy list then, folks. Tony dis­agrees with my, uh, buy line, sell line log­ic

Tony Kynas­ton: I, I can see what you’re say­ing about the buy line, but I can’t see what you’re say­ing about the sell line.

Cameron: Right.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: good to know. Toby, real­ly enjoyed the A1M Pulled Pork. Appre­ci­ate the efforts put into it, TK. Prob­a­bly one of my stronger per­form­ers as well. a sad­der note, I had MMI for a rule one sell on Mon­day morn­ing. Got caught on it and too late by the time I got [00:20:00] to it. Mar­ket spooked by labour and logis­tics ship­ping issue announce­ment and dropped 25% yes­ter­day. still a good com­pa­ny and the gen­er­al num­bers stack up. PE super low. Sit­ting on the fence to see what it does in the next 24 hours. I went and checked it when I got his email. Looked them up,

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm

Cameron: myself who they were. First of all, I made sure that I did­n’t hold them, which I did­n’t, thank­ful­ly. they have been on the buy list a few times late last year, ear­ly this year. Baux­ite, uh, most­ly shipped to Chi­nese alu­mini­um, alu­mini­um refiner­ies. Alu­mini­um.

Tony Kynas­ton: Not alu­minum. They’re alu­mini­um, yeah.

Cameron: we, have this,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: thing in our house­hold, as you can imag­ine. Um,

Tony Kynas­ton: at Kung Fu?

Cameron: yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: It’s not, huh, it’s not alu­minum, it’s, ah, po, alu­mini­um

Cameron: Fox goes around at Kung Fu and says to peo­ple, “What do you say, alu­minum or alu­mini­um?” [00:21:00] He takes a poll, takes Kung Fu polls as a shit stir­rer. Um, they put out a press release say­ing they had a barg­ing chan­nel depth reduc­tion, which sounds bad. Um, Toby sent me a fol­low-up email. He says, “They use barges about the size of a house block in riv­er swamps to ship prod­uct. Croc infest­ed as well, but that’s not the issue.

It might be ris­ing sea lev­els or as they said, a land or sand slide can restrict deliv­ery or access. Have spent a bit of time up there in my younger days, and there may, there may be a les­son in that or some­thing.” he says he got out of MMI. Anoth­er sign, AFR ran a sto­ry last week that alu­mini­um win­dows and prod­ucts are get­ting dumped and sit­ting in a few ports in the Mid­dle King­dom. God knows my rule one 20% times two. Man, I got done. Smooth sail­ing for the QAV port­fo­lio though, so that’s good for [00:22:00] the rest of it. But yeah,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: one of those hor­ror sto­ries that we do see from time to time where through no fault of any­body’s, um, com­pa­ny has a dis­as­ter, get arrest­ed by the local African gov­ern­ment or, uh, some­thing like this.

You have a major,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: of a dis­as­ter that’s gonna affect busi­ness. I mean, they’ll prob­a­bly recov­er from it, I imag­ine. I sure a barg­ing chan­nel depth reduc­tion can be solved at some point. I don’t know how long or how

Tony Kynas­ton: Just try­ing to remem­ber. I did a Pulled Pork on this com­pa­ny a while ago, and I think that they had spent a fair bit of mon­ey dredg­ing for the barges to get through, so maybe it’s silt­ed up again. Yeah

Cameron: Any­way, so that’s, uh, that’s my talk­ing

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, thanks for the feed­back, Toby, too

Cameron: Yeah. What else you got, TK? Have I used Reverse Engi­neer Any­thing? Fun­ny you should ask that.

Tony Kynas­ton: I did­n’t. You just asked it. I– You did­n’t let me– You did­n’t give [00:23:00] me a chance to ask it

Cameron: Fun­ny you should put that in your notes that I just read out loud

Tony Kynas­ton: Hey, they’re my notes.

Cameron: Well, after you give them to me, what’s. It’s my notes. Go ahead, ask you. Uh, got any ques­tions for me, Tony?

Tony Kynas­ton: No, noth­ing. I’m done.

Cameron: I did hear about it yes­ter­day,

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, okay

Cameron: it, uh, this morn­ing to build an app. There was a lit­tle app that I had a tri­al of on my Mac, did­n’t wan­na pay for it, dropped it into Reverse Engi­neer Any­thing, which for peo­ple who don’t know is a, it’s a, um, a frame­work that’s on GitHub at the moment. You can give it to your AI.

It will reverse engi­neer any app on your PC and, um, tell you how it does cer­tain things or rebuild the whole thing. There was this lit­tle app. I said, “Could you rebuild this?” “Yeah.” So it rebuilt it, about 15

Tony Kynas­ton: Wow

Cameron: of the app. And then you can cus­tomize it

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: Actu­al­ly [00:24:00] make it do this and not that, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Don’t like the way it does this, make it that. and peo­ple have been using this kind of a frame­work in the last few weeks. I’ve seen peo­ple reverse engi­neer Pho­to­shop and release a free ver­sion, engi­neer Microsoft Office release a free ver­sion. It’s the sort of stuff that peo­ple have been pre­dict­ing for the last few years would hap­pen to the soft­ware busi­ness, kick­ing in where, I mean, it’s kind of. I was sur­prised you’d heard about it. How did you hear about it,

Tony Kynas­ton: Was in the Fin.

Cameron: Oh, was it?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Uh, mm, not sure exact­ly would have been towards the end of last week, though, because there was a, there was a sell-off in stocks like, uh, what’s Mike Can­non-Brookes’ one? Atlass­ian. Yeah. Um, and oth­er sort of soft­ware as a ser­vice providers.

Cameron: Right.

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm.

Cameron: did a, um, uh, announced a joint ven­ture with Ope­nAI last week, which I thought was like a [00:25:00] des­per­ate attempt to stay rel­e­vant. Yeah, but we’re, we’re mov­ing into this world where it’s still ear­ly adopter stuff, but even, I, I may have men­tioned this to you, or I men­tioned it to some­body last week. Even Chris­sy said to me a week or so ago, she was get­ting ads for soft­ware to run your music

Tony Kynas­ton: Sol-lew

Cameron: you know, they’re a few hun­dred bucks a year or some­thing like that to run. And she was like, I’m pret­ty sure that I could prob­a­bly build my own now if I want­ed

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, right. Yep.

Cameron: help.”

And I was like, ” Yeah,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: It would not be dif­fi­cult at all.” So, you know, Chris­sy’s prob­a­bly uses AI, not, not like I do, but she uses it all day, every day, and does use it to help her run her busi­ness, and do billing, and account­ing, and, and sched­ul­ing for all of her stu­dents, and all of this kind of stuff. Um, but she’s like, “Yeah, maybe I could build my own app with it.” So that’s, I would [00:26:00] say that’s, you know, we’re through the ear­ly adopter phase get into the main­stream are start­ing to hear about this. “Oh, I could just build my own soft­ware. It can’t be that hard, right?”

Tony Kynas­ton: So my ques­tion to you is how, how hard would it be to reverse engi­neer Stock­o­pe­dia or Stock Doc­tor or even the Breadala­tor with that kind of device, with that kind of ser­vice?

Cameron: Well, I don’t think the, the, the tech­nol­o­gy that they have on the front end is the hard part. That’s pret­ty easy. I mean, the, the big dif­fi­cult com­po­nent of what they do is, you know, or expen­sive real­ly, is get­ting all of the

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Yeah.

Cameron: and

Tony Kynas­ton: That’s what I thought

Cameron: buy­ing a data feed from Morn­ingstar or one of those data sources and then just putting a front end on it.

That’s, with a lit­tle bit of their own, you know, pro­pri­etary scor­ing and

Tony Kynas­ton: Sure.

Cameron: and that kind of stuff like we do.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: yeah, it’s, it’s not a com­pli­cat­ed, um, busi­ness. It’s just are you will­ing to fork out grand a month for the data feed, you know?

Tony Kynas­ton: [00:27:00] Yeah. Okay. That’s what I thought

Cameron: Uh,

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, stay­ing in the field, stay­ing in the field of AI, um, saw an inter­est­ing arti­cle in The Wall Street Jour­nal dur­ing the week, and it was, uh, um, an econ­o­mist talk­ing about how, how AI will make, make the mar­ket even more effi­cient than it sup­pos­ed­ly is now. He was talk­ing about the effi­cient mar­ket hypoth­e­sis, which is, says that if every data point about a stock is known, it’s already fed into the price, and there­fore you can’t get an edge.

And of course, you know, Buf­fett and Munger poo-pooed that as being wrong because they’ve been able to find, uh, arbi­trage sit­u­a­tions between price and val­ue for decades, and I’m, I’m in the same camp as them. Um, but you know, it might, might start to close. But it real­ly got me think­ing that, um, it’s almost like going back to the old days where the real mon­ey is made through insid­er knowl­edge.

If it’s not pub­licly [00:28:00] known and fac­tored into the price by AI, by AI, then your edge is gonna be, you know, going out to lunch with some­one who tells you about what’s com­ing up in their busi­ness, so you can go and trade the stock off inside infor­ma­tion

Cameron: Is, uh, uh, you know, isn’t our assump­tion though that greed gets the bet­ter of most investors and not hav­ing a phi­los­o­phy and not hav­ing a frame­work that they stick to, that’s not gonna change. data does­n’t change human behav­ior. The, the big prob­lem for most investors is human behav­ior, you know, short-term think­ing, greed, FOMO, of those sorts of things, not whether or not the data’s avail­able

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I tend to agree with you, isn’t it’s behav­ioral eco­nom­ics? But I think the ar– what the arti­cle is basi­cal­ly say­ing is every­thing’s in one big index ETF, and it’s val­ued prop­er­ly every day, and active, active investors won’t have an edge, um, at least from the data going for­ward as it becomes even more frictionless.[00:29:00]

So, um, but yeah, I agree. It’s who wants to buy an ETF and who wants to sell an ETF and why are they want­i­ng to buy and sell? That’s gonna be the issue. It, it always has been

Cameron: And not every­thing’s gonna be in an ETF. So the ETFs, as we’ve talked about, sort of get index lev­el results. Um, we’re buy­ing the stuff that’s not in the index or

Tony Kynas­ton: Or it is

Cameron: is been, has been pun­ished for some­thing. Yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Well, we’re, we’re giv­ing greater weight to things in the index. Yeah. Any­way, inter­est­ing arti­cle I thought.

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: we spoke about CoreWeave, where the bonds are up to fif­teen per­cent. Um, and I mean, I think, you know, that’s, that’s kind of back­ground noise at the moment, but it does strike me that every time there’s a prob­lem in world eco­nom­ics that leaks into the stock mar­ket and leaks into Aus­tralia, it’s gen­er­al­ly where sub­prime debt [00:30:00] starts to get out of con­trol.

And giv­en that, giv­en that the US mar­ket at the moment is so heav­i­ly depen­dent on AI, if, um, if there’s some kind of crimp­ing to the future val­u­a­tions of AI com­pa­nies, that’s gonna hurt

Cameron: Yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: By the way, did you, did you. I saw the Tes­la Road­ster launch.

Cameron: Yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: I mean, it’s, it seems to me to be a good cir­cus. I don’t think they’re ever gonna make a fly­ing car based on what I saw. What’s your thought?

Cameron: Yeah, it’s a stunt.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: stunt,

Tony Kynas­ton: I mean, com­pressed air, it lasts for about a sec­ond or two before it los­es all its thrust for a start.

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: And,

Cameron: might be use­ful for when Elon is try­ing to out­run the, know, the mob that are chas­ing him with pitch­forks and torch­es a few years from now, and he needs to jump over a, you know, some sort of bar­ri­cade when they’ve bar­ri­cad­ed him in. it was [00:31:00] cool. It was some­thing

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: movie, a

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: do a, a flip in the mid­dle of the air over a truck. Not gonna deny that it was a cool stunt, but I think that’s prob­a­bly where

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: a cool stunt

Tony Kynas­ton: Even the suc­tion side of things where it goes up the su- half the super loop ramp, the half pipe.

Cameron: Yeah, yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: For­mu­la One cars banned suc­tion in about 2012, I think, from mem­o­ry. Um, and it works.

Cameron: how does it do that? I

Tony Kynas­ton: It’s ground force. It’s ground force. So if you, if you get the. If you get suc­tion under­neath the car, and For­mu­la One still uses it, they try and make the bot­tom of the car as close to the ground as pos­si­ble, so when it’s going at speed, the, it’s like a reverse air­flow.

The car gets sucked onto the road

Cameron: But this thing was going slow­ly. How did it

Tony Kynas­ton: ‘Cause it actu­al­ly uses fans that com­press their fans to force them through a fan under­neath the car.

Cameron: Right

Tony Kynas­ton: is that, um, it’s very depen­dent on how far off the ground you are. For­mu­la One cars are like mil­lime­ters off the ground,

Cameron: Aha

Tony Kynas­ton: you, [00:32:00] you try dri­ving a car with ground force effect over a speed bump, and you’ll find out it does­n’t work.

Cameron: Yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: Any­way, thought that was inter­est­ing.

Cameron: It was amus­ing.

Tony Kynas­ton: It was amus­ing. Good old Elon.

Cameron: Mm,

Tony Kynas­ton: and the oth­er amus­ing thing, did you see in the, in today’s fin, he’s gonna launch a mobile net­work in the US, a tele­phone net­work to take on AT&T and Ver­i­zon

Cameron: uh, using

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: So he’s,

Cameron: he has­n’t done that already

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, he’s buy­ing up Spec­trum. I think the prob­lem he’s fac­ing at the moment is, is the ana­lysts are still say­ing he’ll need mobile tow­ers to get, um, full net­work cov­er­age, which is the expen­sive part of it.

But

Cameron: Right.

Tony Kynas­ton: as Elon does, he talks about these things and ten or twelve years lat­er, they hap­pen

Cameron: Mm. Some­times.

Tony Kynas­ton: some­times, yeah.

Cameron: Yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, so the last thing I’ve got is a pulled pork, Cam, on Adrad Hold­ings

Cameron: Oh, I saw those guys on the buy list. Very, very small.

Tony Kynas­ton: They are, yeah.

Cameron: Hmm.[00:33:00]

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: All right

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, so it, it is a small ADT stock, I’ll say that now. And I, I wan­na just talk about what I’ve been doing over the last cou­ple of years as a lit­tle research table­top side project for me. So I put togeth­er a QAV port­fo­lio for stocks with ADT less than fif­teen K. Um, and I did that because we pub­lished the buy list with stocks above fif­teen K, and I want­ed to see how a port­fo­lio would per­form with low ADT and if, if oth­er QAV sub­scribers weren’t trad­ing in the same stocks that were on our buy list as well, but they were still QAV stocks.

So it’s been a great exer­cise over the last cou­ple of years and, um, I think the first year I did it, the per­for­mance of the dum­my port­fo­lio was about thir­ty-three per­cent, which well exceed­ed the mar­ket. And, um, I stopped doing it a lit­tle while ago, but up until then, the stats were, the sec­ond year was up eight per­cent and the mar­ket was slight­ly neg­a­tive, so out­per­form­ing the mar­ket [00:34:00] dra­mat­i­cal­ly.

Um, um, I decid­ed not to go ahead with it myself because, well, it’s, it’s, it’s beer mon­ey real­ly. You’re talk­ing about, um, I think my total port­fo­lio size was about forty-five thou­sand dol­lars or fifty thou­sand dol­lars for twen­ty stocks and,

Cameron: That’s a lot of beer.

Tony Kynas­ton: Sor­ry?

Cameron: That’s a lot of

Tony Kynas­ton: It is, espe­cial­ly if you’re get­ting thir­ty-three per­cent.

But, um, you’re also of course reliant on being a Comm­Sec cus­tomer or CMC Mar­kets cus­tomer and then, um, when I had a look at it at the time, CMC had a con­tract where you could get one free trade a day, because if you’re buy­ing a cou­ple of hun­dred dol­lars worth of shares, which you have to do in some cas­es, you can’t afford to pay a hun­dred bucks or ten bucks or what­ev­er it is in, in, uh, trans­ac­tion fees.

So. But, um, it’s a worth­while exer­cise and I, what it strikes, what it strikes me as is if some­one’s start­ing out with a, um, a kid or a teenag­er or a young per­son, it’s a great way to, to [00:35:00] learn invest­ing, um, with­out too much expo­sure. So any­way, I’ll throw that out there for peo­ple to have a look at and com­ment on.

But one of the rea­sons for talk­ing about it is that AHL was a stand­out per­former in that port­fo­lio over the last cou­ple of years, which is how I came to come across it. Um, and it’s actu­al­ly, I guess, been a part of the back­ground noise of my life because it has its, um, gen­e­sis in a busi­ness called Natrad, which peo­ple may remem­ber the, remem­ber the jin­gle for Natrad about, um, tak­ing it in to be, to be checked, uh, nip into Natrad if you have a car prob­lem with your radi­a­tor.

But, um, yeah, so Natrad is half the busi­ness and it, um,

Cameron: It was an adver­tis­ing busi­ness. Like, we make rad ads. It’s AdRad.

Tony Kynas­ton: No, it’s, it’s Adrad came out of Natrad, which was Nation­al, short for Nation­al Radi­a­tors. Um, they, they still have a net­work [00:36:00] of a lot of stores that help, uh, mechan­ics and help peo­ple with radi­a­tor prob­lems and flush­ing their coolant sys­tems and all that kind of thing. Um, and it real­ly goes back to the day when you popped your hood and let the radi­a­tor cool down and then looked to see if you had a leak and went into Natrad to have it fixed.

Um, but that’s half the busi­ness now. The oth­er half is what they call heat trans­fer solu­tions, and that’s kind of the sexy side that’s been get­ting a lot of peo­ple inter­est­ed in the stock. So they are also involved in cool­ing sys­tems, but they do it for, um, in indus­tri­al strength type appli­ca­tions and often­times in the twen­ty-four/­sev­en space.

So for exam­ple, they’ll pro­vide cool­ing to a hos­pi­tal. Um, they’re get­ting more and more into min­ing, uh, which I’ll talk a bit about lat­er, but they’re doing a lot of work with Fortes­cue Met­als. Uh, but they also do a lot with road trans­port, um, rail­ways, and the last [00:37:00] point is the prob­a­bly the one that’s got every­one excit­ed is data cen­ter cool­ing infra­struc­ture, because if you’re good at cool­ing hos­pi­tals twen­ty-four/­sev­en, it’s exact­ly what data cen­ters need.

So they’ve start­ed to sup­ply cool­ing sys­tems and back­up pow­er gen­er­at­ing infra­struc­ture for, uh, data cen­ters as well as build­ings and hos­pi­tals. Um, so that’s one half of the busi­ness. Uh, they recent­ly built a man­u­fac­tur­ing plant to sup­port that side of the busi­ness in Thai­land, even though their head­quar­ters are in Bev­er­ly, Ade­laide.

Um, and they recent­ly, with that, uh, open­ing of that Thai plant, they dou­bled their data cen­ter pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty with­in Aus­tralia, uh, this year, and so they had some good results. And they’ve just recent­ly approved a three mil­lion dol­lar expan­sion for its oper­a­tions in Thai­land to scale up for more data cen­ter work.

So I think up until this last week or two, that looked great. Um, [00:38:00] but giv­en what I said before about the bond mar­ket jit­ters about lead­ing edge data cen­ter com­pa­nies, has. The ques­tion I’ve got is, has AHL expand­ed at the wrong time? And, um, you know, we’re see­ing data cen­ter devel­op­ers are now being forced to scale back, delay or shelve projects.

Um, there’s also oth­er issues there, I guess, with, with peo­ple not want­i­ng data cen­ters in their areas. Um, that’s hap­pen­ing in Aus­tralia. It’s been hap­pen­ing for a while in the US. A lot of the data cen­ters are now pro­ject­ed to be opened in South­east Asia, which is one of the rea­sons why the, um, why the fac­to­ry was built in Thai­land.

Um, so, you know, have, but, but have AHL expand­ed at the wrong time? Well, I guess it’s a risk, um, but they are in the right place because South­east Asia is still expand­ing quite quick­ly. Um. There are oth­er demands which they can, um, which they’re also [00:39:00] piv­ot­ing into to, uh, uh, I guess get new busi­ness for. And one of those hap­pens to be, um, cool­ing sys­tems for elec­tric vehi­cles.

Uh, so I’ll talk about that in a minute as well. Um, but I think, you know, as a. I‑if AHL was just a pure play AI infra­struc­ture busi­ness, you might be wor­ried. And, um, I think the worst case from what I’ve seen is that if there is a slow­down in data cen­ter roll­outs, the busi­ness will still come, but maybe at a slow­er rate for AHL.

And if you look at the com­pa­ny, its, its debt expo­sure is rea­son­ably con­ser­v­a­tive. So, um, net debt, if you include cash on hand, is, is sev­en­teen mil­lion, and the debt to equi­ty ratio is thir­ty-three per­cent, which is about the right amount, I think, for a busi­ness. You’re not, uh, over-indebt­ed, and you’re not, uh, you don’t have a lazy bal­ance sheet.

So that’s a, that’s a good con­ser­v­a­tive way to expand. Um, I’m gonna devi­ate from the Thai [00:40:00] expan­sion now and just talk a bit about the his­to­ry of the com­pa­ny, ’cause it goes back over a hun­dred years. So the busi­ness began in Vic­to­ria under the name of Motor Radi­a­tors, and it rode the growth of, uh, of auto­mo­tive, of the auto­mo­tive indus­try in Aus­tralia.

It rapid­ly expand­ed, became the pre­mier sup­pli­er of radi­a­tors in the ear­ly Aus­tralian auto boom. Uh, in nine­teen forty-nine, it renamed to Nation­al Radi­a­tors, hence Natrad, and, uh, grew to be a very dom­i­nant play­er in the Aus­tralian auto indus­try. Such, such that by nine­teen sev­en­ty-five, it was the sole sup­pli­er of fac­to­ry radi­a­tors for Aus­tralian-built Ford, Hold­en, Chrysler, and Nis­san cars.

So it had the mar­ket sewn up and was effec­tive­ly a monop­oly busi­ness sup­ply­ing, um, local man­u­fac­tur­ers. Uh, nine­teen eighty-four saw the com­pa­ny cre­ate the Natrad fran­chise net­work, and the goal was to con­vert a [00:41:00] fair­ly rag­tag group of back­yard and small busi­ness­es that had, that had grown to ser­vice radi­a­tors and repair shops nation­wide under a sin­gle fran­chise trust­ed brand.

And nip into Natrad became a sta­ple of, um, of mar­ket­ing in the ’80s and ’90s. At the same time, um, in Ade­laide, but sep­a­rate­ly to, um, Natrad, anoth­er radi­a­tor com­pa­ny was being formed. So in eighty-five, the hus­band and wife team of Gary and Karen Wash­ing­ton found­ed Adrad Radi­a­tors, and they began, um, in the back of their garage.

Uh, they start­ed man­u­fac­tur­ing radi­a­tor parts for local mechan­ics, and then they expand­ed heav­i­ly, um, shift­ing into import­ing parts from over­seas and whole radi­a­tors from over­seas, and grad­u­al­ly start­ed to chip away at the, um, large uh, busi­ness that Natrad had built. [00:42:00] Um, dur­ing the two thou­sands, Adrad start­ed acquir­ing com­peti­tors, and they also, um, became a very large sup­pli­er in the indus­try.

They bought out sev­er­al of the biggest names, um, in the Aus­tralian cool­ing game. Uh, they acquired a com­pa­ny called Air Radi­a­tors, which was sup­pli­ers to trucks, par­tic­u­lar­ly Ken­worth. And they also acquired the Natrad Group, which was the Natrad busi­ness, and they com­bined every­thing into the Natrad retail net­work.

Um, and with their exist­ing pipelines for over­seas, uh, impor­ta­tion, they now had dis­tri­b­u­tion, and they also then grew into a man­u­fac­tur­ing busi­ness. And they basi­cal­ly pro­vid­ed nine­ty per­cent of the, um, what’s called the high­way radi­a­tor mar­ket, so trucks and cars. In twen­ty twen­ty-two, so exact­ly a hun­dred years after Motor Radi­a­tors was first found­ed, the com­bined busi­ness offi­cial­ly, uh, list­ed on the ASX as Adrad Hold­ings [00:43:00] Lim­it­ed, AHL.

So we still have the Natrad work­shops, that’s the retail face, um, and then they’ve, uh, grad­u­al­ly ramped up the man­u­fac­tur­ing side of things as well, and, uh, not just in radi­a­tors, but in the oth­er cool­ing type busi­ness­es I spoke of before. It’s worth­while call­ing out the dri­ving force behind this busi­ness, which is the Wash­ing­ton fam­i­ly, uh, Gary and his wife.

Um, Gary served as the exec­u­tive chair­man of the com­pa­ny for near­ly forty years. Um, he was the dri­ving force through the mas­sive nation­al expan­sion and the acqui­si­tion of the Natrad Group and the list­ing in twen­ty twen­ty-two. And the Wash­ing­ton fam­i­ly still retains six­ty-one point two per­cent of the busi­ness, so very much an own­er-founder sto­ry here.

Uh, Gary stayed on after the list­ing, but he did, um, he did, uh, sor­ry, not retire, but stepped back from being the, um, being the [00:44:00] exec­u­tive chair of the busi­ness or the chair of the busi­ness. But he was brought back in, uh, in a direc­tor role, um, in the last year or two, uh, to help out with the Thai expan­sion.

Um, but they do have a, now a cor­po­rate man­age­ment team. So Paul Proc­tor is the, the MD and CEO. He has a man­u­fac­tur­ing back­ground from the indus­try, so he knows it well. And they have an inde­pen­dent chair now called Don­ald McGurk, who, uh, was the CEO of a com­pa­ny called Codan for a while, which I know a lot of lis­ten­ers, um, would know about and some have invest­ed in.

That’s the, um, the, uh, met­al detect­ing busi­ness. Um, I want­ed to speak a bit now about the mar­ket. So it is an evolv­ing mar­ket. So, inter­nal com­bus­tion vehi­cles use radi­a­tors to cool water, and that flows through the engine. Um, but EVs, which are becom­ing a big­ger part of the mar­ket, do not need tra­di­tion­al radi­a­tors.

But they do need [00:45:00] cool­ing sys­tems to keep oth­er things, uh, oth­er than the engine cooled, like par­tic­u­lar­ly the bat­tery. And fun­ni­ly enough, they also need a sys­tem to heat the bat­tery. So gen­er­al­ly, for an EV bat­tery to work best, it needs to be oper­at­ed between fif­teen and thir­ty-five degrees centi­grade, and they require a, a sys­tem there­fore of heat­ing and cool­ing.

So needs to be kept rea­son­ably warm, so you can do a rapid charge. You can’t do a rapid charge in a cold bat­tery, and you need to also stop it from over­heat­ing, so keep­ing it below thir­ty-five degrees is impor­tant. Um, there’s also oth­er cool­ing needs in EV vehi­cles. So their motors spin rapid­ly, um, and the cop­per wires in the elec­tric, uh, elec­tric motors need cool­ing.

And last­ly, the invert­er that con­verts the DC bat­tery pow­er to AC motor pow­er heats up and requires cool­ing as well. So there’s a lot for AHL to work on there. And even though, um [00:46:00] the cars come with their own man­u­fac­tured cool­ing sys­tems. They are start­ing to get a niche in the mar­ket by putting these kinds of, uh, cool­ing and heat­ing devices into the Natrad net­work so that if you have an aging EV vehi­cle or a sec­ond­hand EV vehi­cle, you can still, um, fix up the parts and the, and the heat­ing and cool­ing sys­tem by vis­it­ing a Natrad store.

Um, so that’s part of what they’re piv­ot­ing towards. Uh, they’re also doing a lot of work with the high-pow­er ultra-fast charg­ing sta­tions. So they gen­er­ate an incred­i­ble amount of heat because their, um, their, uh, cables heat up, their trans­form­ers heat up. And so Adrad is also doing a lot of work in that indus­try to help build, um, heavy-duty cool­ing units, uh, for those road­side charg­ing sub­sta­tions that, uh, ener­gy com­pa­nies, uh, and petrol com­pa­nies are start­ing to pro­vide.

So that’s a source of busi­ness for them. Um, [00:47:00] and they’re also doing a lot of work in the min­ing sec­tor. So I found it fas­ci­nat­ing as I was research­ing this, but, um, the iron ore min­ers in Aus­tralia, they’re cur­rent­ly under immense pres­sure to, um, reduce their reliance on diesel in par­tic­u­lar, and some of them have signed up to, uh, twen­ty thir­ty tar­gets on emis­sions.

Um, and prob­a­bly the, you know, leader in this field is Fortes­cue Min­ing, and we’ve spo­ken about them in the past and what they’re try­ing to do, um, with their green cre­den­tials and, and their green busi­ness, which has­n’t always worked, but they’re still push­ing ahead with their own, uh, changes to their own busi­ness.

Um, and to the, to that extent, Fortes­cue signed a two point eight bil­lion US dol­lar deal with Lieb­herr, which is a truck man­u­fac­tur­er, and they’re gonna buy four hun­dred and sev­en­ty-five zero emis­sion min­ing machines and, uh, and trucks, uh, includ­ing three hun­dred and six­ty, um, autonomous bat­tery elec­tric trucks for their mines.

So they’re chang­ing over their fleet [00:48:00] quick­ly, um, and that’s gonna. They’re work­ing with Adrad to pro­vide, um, uh, engi­neered solu­tions for some of the, uh, par­tic­u­lar prob­lems that they face in out­back min­ing in WA. Uh, and so, um, one of them has to do with, uh, cool­ing plates for the bat­ter­ies and this is all, you know, not my baili­wick, but elec­tron­ic con­vert­er chillers and E‑axle cool­ing con­fig­u­ra­tions.

But appar­ent­ly, if you wan­na keep a truck run­ning, elec­tric vehi­cle truck run­ning in a mine, you’ve got to be able to keep it cool as it climbs a steep slope out of the open cut pit with a heavy load. And that’s one of the areas that Adrad is work­ing with Fortes­cue to do. And the oth­er one is to, uh, get the charg­ing sta­tions cooled down.

You need mas­sive, um, mas­sive charg­ing sta­tions to, uh, charge the truck bat­ter­ies quick­ly and to get them back into the mines to keep them opti­mized, um, at any­where near the capac­i­ty they’re run­ning at now with diesel. So, uh, that’s, that’s, [00:49:00] uh, anoth­er piece of work that Adrad are get­ting into and that their Thai man­u­fac­tur­ing plat­form is, um, is geared up to help.

So all of that has meant, if you look at the lat­est results in, that came out in August, rev­enue was, um, not up tremen­dous­ly. It was up one point six to two point two per­cent year on year. Um, uh, under­ly­ing earn­ings were strong, though they were up ten per­cent and net prof­it was up fif­teen point four per­cent because, um, the Thai fac­to­ry has, uh, meant things run a lot more effi­cient­ly for this com­pa­ny.

Uh, so, uh, it’s– the results have been good. They declared a div­i­dend, um, of two point– two and a half cents a share, rough­ly. Uh, but you know, it’s still trad­ing below what we need to score it for QAV. And if I go through the QAV num­bers, the ADT is twen­ty-six thou­sand, so it is pret­ty small. Um, when I first came across this, it was like two or three thou­sand dol­lars, so it’s cer­tain­ly, uh, big­ger than it was when I first noticed it.[00:50:00]

Uh, I’m using a stock price of a dol­lar forty-nine and a half, uh, for the analy­sis, which means IV1 is forty-two cents, IV2 is eighty-eight cents, so we can’t buy it for IV1 or IV2. We can buy it for book, though. Net equi­ty per share is a dol­lar fifty-eight, and if we add thir­ty per­cent, book plus thir­ty is two dol­lars and six.

Um, I do note that the NTA is less at a, at a dol­lar thir­teen. So, uh, net equi­ty is a dol­lar fifty-eight, NTA is a dol­lar thir­teen. Dif­fer­ence is good­will from some of the roll-ups in the past. Uh, but I do score it for net equi­ty. It’s eighty-three per­cent of con­sen­sus tar­get and that was inter­est­ing, I thought, because this is a tid­dler stock and it has enough bro­ker cov­er­age for Stock Doc­tor to post the con­sen­sus tar­get for this.

So that was inter­est­ing, I thought. Uh, yield is two point six eight per­cent, so we can’t score it for that. Stock Doc­tor give it a tick for finan­cial health and trend. It’s strong and steady. And Stock­o­pe­dia have a qual­i­ty rank­ing of eighty-nine and an over­all of nine­ty-three, which are [00:51:00] both good.

Inter­est­ing­ly enough, the Piotros­ki F‑score is five out of nine. Um, and that seems to be most con­cerned with the ris­ing costs due to the Thai expan­sion, I think. So bit sur­prised to see a qual­i­ty rank­ing of eighty-nine and a score of five, but it’s still, uh, okay. Pr/OpCaf for the com­pa­ny is six point sev­en eight times, so it’s just sneak­ing in below our sev­en cut­off.

PE is eigh­teen times, which is the high­est in three years, so we give the neg­a­tive one for that. Earn­ings per share growth is fore­cast at thir­teen per­cent, so we can’t score it for that. Uh, excuse me for a minute. I’m, uh, strug­gling with hay fever at the moment, Cam. It’s been very hot and windy down here.

Any­way, uh, earn­ings per share is thir­teen– a fore­cast growth of thir­teen per­cent. Growth over PE is point sev­en three, so we can’t score it for that. We want one point five. Uh, direc­tors, as I said before, still hold six­ty-one per­cent of the com­pa­ny, so there is an own­er founder. We score it for that. It’s, uh, it’s been a three-point trend­line [00:52:00] buy for a while, so we can’t give it a, a tick for a, a new upturn.

Equi­ty is, is con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing, which I like. Uh, over­all qual­i­ty is twelve out of sev­en­teen, and the QAV score is point one, so it is at the bot­tom of the buy list. It’s been much high­er over the last cou­ple of years, but it’s been below our, our pub­lished, uh, pub­lished cut­off of, um, less than fif­teen thou­sand ADT.

There’s obvi­ous­ly some risk with this, um, DC data cen­ter roll­out, uh, slow­down could, could, uh, delay returns from their cap­i­tal in, um, expan­sion into the, uh, Thai fac­to­ry. Um, EV roll­out will def­i­nite­ly replace radi­a­tor sys­tems from vehi­cles, and if AHL can’t make as much out of the new par­a­digm, then it, um, it, it, uh, reduces their mar­gins through that net­work.

And I think there’s a risk that, um, Mr. Wash­ing­ton might even­tu­al­ly retire and, you know, what hap­pens for the han­dover and what hap­pens for his shares. Um, it’s all been well man­aged so far, [00:53:00] and the com­pa­ny is being run cor­po­rate­ly, but he is back on the board, so that was inter­est­ing, I thought. Um, plen­ty of pos­i­tives, though.

They’re the risks. Um, obvi­ous­ly, data cen­ters are here to stay, so the– they are gonna require cool­ing and, and there’s a lot of busi­ness still ahead for this com­pa­ny, even if it is in South­east Asia rather than Aus­tralia. Uh, the min­ing fleet switch, I think, is a big, big thing. You’re talk­ing three hun­dred and fifty trucks.

There’s gonna be a fair bit of work, uh, for Adrad there, and that’s just one com­pa­ny. And I, I would think what­ev­er tech­nol­o­gy that they can bring to bear for a min­ing truck haul­ing large amounts of Tanu­japa steep slope is gonna also be applic­a­ble in Ken­worth trucks haul­ing, you know, um, pal­lets of gro­ceries for Coles or what­ev­er, um, on the high­way.

So I think that’s, that’s, um, an upside for them. Uh, and the EV and, and recharg­ing niche I think is a good one too, ’cause that’s, um, you know, a lot of peo­ple are say­ing we don’t have enough of those in Aus­tralia at the moment, and so that’s gonna [00:54:00] roll out quick­ly. Uh, and if Adrad have a, a foothold in there, that’s good for them.

And it, and it’s a, you know, on all the QAV mea­sures it’s, it’s, uh, it’s well man­aged. So low gear­ing, um, says to me the board know what they’re doing when they’re expand­ing. They’re not, not, not tak­ing over­ly, um, over­ly risky bets for the future of the com­pa­ny. So, um, they’re all pos­i­tives, I think. So that’s Adrad.

Cameron: I had to look up what a heat exchang­er was ’cause I have no idea how that works. Sounds pret­ty sim­ple

Tony Kynas­ton: than, yeah

Cameron: Sounds like a pret­ty sim­ple idea. I don’t know how you build an entire busi­ness out of it, but, uh, there you go

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, so is a radi­a­tor. Putting a fan and a tank in front of a car to, to cool water going through the engine. Yeah.

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm

Cameron: very sim­ple mechan­i­cal process, but I guess the dev­il’s in the details

Tony Kynas­ton: I think the issue with the EVs is, is they were say­ing was man­u­fac­tur­ing tol­er­ance. So yeah, you can build a heat exchang­er, but can you do it small enough and with the exact­ing tol­er­ances they need in the [00:55:00] EVs?

Cameron: right. Thank you, Tony. I learned some­thing, as always All right. That brings us to after hours, I think. By the way, I did also look up the QAV Bible, uh, about sell lines,

Tony Kynas­ton: Ага

Cameron: it, it does say that you pick the fur­ther­most trough as your L2.

Tony Kynas­ton: Real­ly? Not the lo- not the two low­est?

Cameron: Hmm

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay. Well

Cameron: it’s time for you to sit through the QAV course again, Tony, and remind your­self how Q– You’ve got so lazy using the bread lat­er,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: how your own sys­tem works

Tony Kynas­ton: we did a fair bit of test­ing on the bread late­ly, so I assumed it was okay

Cameron: Okay, Any­way, I will email you my find­ings when I a-

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay. Email Brett

Cameron: After Hours, Tony. You watched Parthenope. What did you think?

Tony Kynas­ton: I real­ly liked it. Big thumbs up. Yeah. Um, remind­ed me of those– [00:56:00] I used to like, Jen­ny and I used to go to movies at the Brighton Bay Cin­e­ma in Mel­bourne ye- or 20 years ago when they had great Euro­pean cin­e­ma, art house cin­e­ma, and this is def­i­nite­ly in that mold. I thought it was real­ly good

Cameron: And, Nicholas, like as I said to you last time, it got, like, pret­ty neg­a­tive reviews. Crit­ics hat­ed it. I don’t get it. You know, that’s, you know. Eh, I don’t get it

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, like it was– it’s, um, it’s kind of what’s– it’s like you’re swim­ming along. It’s like it’s, you know, very silky smooth and not much is hap­pen­ing. And then, you know, wow, you find out that the attrac­tive wom­an’s real­ly smart, and then wow, you find out the broth­er’s com­mit­ted sui­cide, although you don’t see it.

You know, all these things kind of. You got­ta– even though you’re being lulled into this ele­giac sort of movie with won­der­ful shots. I mean, what a beau­ti­ful place of the world that they’re, they’re in, in, um, in Italy. Um, and your, your eye­’s always drawn to the view and, and how good every­one looks and the rest of it.

And then bam, you’re [00:57:00] forced to think about what hap­pened and why and, and the effects it’s hav­ing. So I, I real­ly enjoyed it. Packed a, packed an emo­tion­al punch, but was also great to look at

Cameron: And then got real­ly weird at the end with the fat kid. Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: A lit­tle bit sur­re­al

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: Um,

Tony Kynas­ton: Gary Old­man was good too

Cameron: he was great, but he was­n’t in it for very long, right?

Tony Kynas­ton: No

Cameron: small cameo real­ly

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: Uh, yeah, I liked it. I thought just, uh, you know, I don’t know what I took away from it. But, um, sh- actu­al­ly, um, s- remind­ed me of Chris­sy when I met her

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: Um, you know, she was this. We had this con­ver­sa­tion after­wards. She was this pret­ty girl, late 20s, you know, in this, uh, exot­ic loca­tion, and all of the men were like– had this effect on all of the men and then prob­a­bly half the women there, but was­n’t aware of it. I think the girl in this

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: of the

Tony Kynas­ton: [00:58:00] Yeah

Cameron: but did­n’t, take it seri­ous­ly or the pow­er that she had, uh, uh, over m- men in par­tic­u­lar. I remem­ber hav­ing to say– ’cause Chris­sy, uh, then as now, um, en- engaged in a con­ver­sa­tion with some­one, she will rest a hand on their arm or touch them to empha­size a thing. And I said to her, “Well, Aman­da, you real­ize when you do that to a man, that’s a sig­nal, right?” She goes, “What? What are you talk­ing about?”

And I go, “No, that’s a sig­nal. If a pret­ty girl makes skin con­tact with you in a con­ver­sa­tion, that.” She goes, “No, it’s not.” And I’m like, “Go talk to any­one. That’s a sig­nal.”

Tony Kynas­ton: you do, don’t touch them. It’s

Cameron: Yeah, that’s

Tony Kynas­ton: it’s also the first thing they teach you in sell­ing school, right? You make phys­i­cal con­tact with some­one

Cameron: Uh, not if you’re try­ing to sell to me. I’ll deck you if you try and touch me. I hate it. Hunter does it to me all the

Tony Kynas­ton: Right.

Cameron: me when

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: touch­ing

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah,

Cameron: Stop touch­ing me. I don’t. You don’t need to touch me every time you wan­na make a [00:59:00] point. I’m lis­ten­ing. Let me, let me.” Yeah, I’m glad you liked it. My talks with Dean Span­ley you’ve got on your list. I’ve seen that, uh, adver­tised, but I don’t know any­thing about it. Is it good?

Tony Kynas­ton: Like, yeah, it’s, it’s nice and sweet. It’s not, like, dif­fer­ent com­plete­ly to Parthenope. But, um, I was, uh. I’m kin­da try­ing to watch one old movie a week, you know, just to get out of the, you know, US action mob lands, British gang­land sort of trope that we’re in at the moment. But, um, it’s– What attract­ed me was it’s Sam Neill, Bryan Brown, and Peter O’Toole, and they just put on an act­ing mas­ter­class.

They are fan­tas­tic. And the, the, the movie real­ly should’ve been, like, a four or maybe a five-hand­ed play. It’s only got a few cen­tral char­ac­ters. There’s not much action in it, but, um. And it’s a, it’s a kin­da nice plot, but it’s just great to watch them act and, and riff off each oth­er and

Cameron: Hmm

Tony Kynas­ton: all inter­act and their pres­ence.

[01:00:00] It’s, it’s real­ly, real­ly good.

Cameron: Mm-hmm

Tony Kynas­ton: But a gen­tle, sweet movie. It’s noth­ing great. I think it was made in about 2012, some­thing like that. But, um, 2008, okay. But yeah, good

Cameron: I do love a bit of Peter O’Toole

Tony Kynas­ton: Must have been close to one of his late, his last movies I would’ve thought, ’cause he looks very old in it

Cameron: Yeah, no, he made some­thing only a few years before he died. Uh, 2013 he died.

Tony Kynas­ton: Right

Cameron: years before the end. He was only 81 when he died too, so he would’ve only been mid-70s that. Yeah, yeah. He, uh, he did not age well. Are you a fan of, um, Lawrence of Ara­bia?

Tony Kynas­ton: Love it. Yeah.

Cameron: Oh, good.

Tony Kynas­ton: Isn’t it?

Cameron: And The

Tony Kynas­ton: “Take no pris­on­ers.” It’s one of the best lines in movies, I think. The blood­lust

Cameron: and also when he’s at the, at the be- begin­ning of the film where he’s putting the match out with his fin­ger and the oth­er guy tries it and he goes, “Oh, it hurts.” “Of course it hurts.” “What’s the [01:01:00] trick then?” “The trick is in not mind­ing that it hurts.” Just sets

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: char­ac­ter, you know?

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, and the, is it, I can’t remem­ber if it’s the start or the end, where he rides his motor­bike and kills him­self back when he’s back in Eng­land.

Cameron: I think that’s the open­ing of the

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I think it is. Yeah.

Cameron: yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: I, I thought that was ter­rif­ic, very brave. And, and the cin­e­matog­ra­phy, David Lean, I mean the, the boat going along the Suez Canal, and you see it through the build­ing, it’s incred­i­ble.

Yeah

Cameron: I had it on, it came out as like a spe­cial DVD thing in

Tony Kynas­ton: Mhm

Cameron: ’90s, I think. I had it on DVD back then. I don’t have it any­more, sad­ly. But yeah, I used to love just watch­ing it, just such a great, epic film.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: So beau­ti­ful. Um, tell me about your short sto­ry and then I’ll tell you about my short sto­ry

Tony Kynas­ton: I did­n’t– I hes­i­tat­ed to include this, but it just. I was lis­ten­ing to. I don’t know who I was lis­ten­ing to. Any­way, they were talk­ing about AI and how it’s gonna rev­o­lu­tion­ize human­i­ty, and it’s gonna be great and all this. And I sud­den­ly had the [01:02:00] thought that a good short sto­ry would be about, you know, this big hyped launch for a, an AI com­pa­ny that’s going to, uh, devel­op an AI that’s going to give the, you know, opti­mize and pri­or­i­tize all the solu­tions for human­i­ty.

And when they have their big launch and they type in the ques­tion, uh, it, the AI shuts itself off.

Cameron: That’s the best thing it can

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: Yeah. Well, I’ve been work­ing on a short sto­ry idea that’s kind of, um, I- you’re gonna like this. It came to me while I was med­i­tat­ing, um, which was lying on the phys­io’s

Tony Kynas­ton: I like it, I like, I like it that we have com­pet­ing short sto­ry ideas too.

Cameron: I’ve start­ed writ­ing mine. Have you start­ed writ­ing yours?

Tony Kynas­ton: Got bet­ter things to do. Gosh.

Cameron: Do you, though?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: Um, I was lying on the mas­sage table with a heat pack on my shoul­der before she dug her elbows into it. But, um, kind of a lit­tle bit based on the Life­line [01:03:00] sto­ry from Hein­lein that I talked about a cou­ple weeks ago. But what if AI can fig­ure out the physics under­ly­ing the block the­o­ry or the block uni­verse? If we know that the future does already exist, there’s a physics to fig­ure

Tony Kynas­ton: There should be a map. I’ve often thought that too. There should be a map, right? Just like you got a geo­graph­ic map

Cameron: yeah. So what if it can fig­ure that out and tell peo­ple, “I can tell you your exact future, 100% accu­ra­cy, any­thing you wan­na know”? And I’m sort of think­ing about this anthol­o­gy, dif­fer­ent sto­ry, a bit like the I, Robot anthol­o­gy, but with peo­ple it to find out cer­tain things, and then what hap­pens?

Like I, I was say­ing to Chris­sy, I was 20, if I’d used it and it said, “Okay, so, um, you’re gonna mar­ry y- your cur­rent girl­friend a few years, um, or, or the next girl­friend,” I can’t remem­ber who I was with at 20. “And that’s only gonna last three years. Then you’ll leave her, then you’ll mar­ry your high school girl­friend. You’ll have a cou­ple of kids with her. That’ll last for [01:04:00] 10 or 11 years, then y- that won’t– that’ll end. Then you’ll go to Cor­si­ca and meet Chris­sy, and that’ll be it. You’ll be with her for­ev­er. She’ll love you your life.” Uh, and I’m like, if I’d known that at 20 and known that that had to hap­pen,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yep

Cameron: because the future is the future. How do you then live the next 20

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Is it man­ic depres­sive? Like, look, just wait­ing for the high­lights, but you know you’re gonna go through the bad lights, yeah

Cameron: Or you just go, “Okay, well, this is the sto­ry that I need to live

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, you could.

Cameron: the,

Tony Kynas­ton: the human reac­tion is the inter­est­ing thing, isn’t it? Not know­ing what the future is. Yeah.

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: you try and change things? Do you accept them? Do you

Cameron: Well, you prob­a­bly

Tony Kynas­ton: shut down until the good things are com­ing?

Cameron: things

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm.

Cameron: is the future and y- your attempts to change things is already part of that.

Tony Kynas­ton: Cor­rect. But then you say, “But hang on, if the future’s the future and my attempts to change it are already the future, then I have to attempt to change [01:05:00] it.”

Cameron: yeah

they’re fac­tored in. Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Right?

Cameron: Yeah, yeah,

Tony Kynas­ton: Then you go, “Well, bug­ger that. I’m not gonna ch- I’m not gonna change it.”

Cameron: The oth­er, the oth­er thing I’ve been toy­ing with, you know, we had the dog last week, and when I was walk­ing the dog, as I do now, I just talk to GPT. I say, “Play the ideas game.” I told you about the ideas game? I

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Yeah.

Cameron: So

Tony Kynas­ton: D- does the dog ever talk back? That’s– You should watch Fam­i­ly. That’s, that’s the.

Cameron: Oh,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, a rein­car­nat­ed dog.

Cameron: Oh, okay.

Tony Kynas­ton: Which was inter­est­ing, ’cause that’s kind of like in that Robert Hein­lein sort of mold, too. Like, if the uni­verse is tem­po­ral­ly laid out like a map at the same time as it’s geo­graph­i­cal­ly laid out like a map, and there’s nev­er mat­ter cre­at­ed or destroyed, then rein­car­na­tion is a def­i­nite pos­si­bil­i­ty.

Why would I only exist in this mol­e­c­u­lar form? Sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, yeah, maybe that’s the case, that I’m only gonna exist in this form. But what if all my atoms were mixed togeth­er over a bil­lion years and I became a dog? [01:06:00] And what if some­how they had some kind of lin­ger­ing remem­brance of what they’d been before?

Cameron: Well, I’d ask what is it that’s being rein­car­nat­ed? You’re just talk­ing about which, which col­lec­tion of atoms? ‘Cause the col­lec­tion of atoms that you are now is not the col­lec­tion of atoms you were 10 years ago. So

Tony Kynas­ton: Right

Cameron: which col­lec­tion of atoms is being refor­mat­ted into a dog?

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, that’s a– But that’s a good point, isn’t it? Like, if, if we’re dif­fer­ent atoms yes­ter­day com­pared to today, then am I rein­car­nat­ed from yes­ter­day into some­thing else today? And if that can hap­pen, why can’t I be rein­car­nat­ed into a dog?

Cameron: Your atoms are always being repur­posed

Tony Kynas­ton: cor­rect

Cameron: So any­way, the oth­er idea that I was talk­ing about,

Tony Kynas­ton: Back to your idea.

Cameron: well, I was talk­ing to it about, you know, the increas­ing polit­i­cal divi­sion, social divi­sions that we have in the West and what, how, you know, if gonna be able to play a role in solv­ing or resolv­ing that

Tony Kynas­ton: [01:07:00] already,

Cameron: it just make it worse?

Tony Kynas­ton: already respon­si­ble for mak­ing it worse

Cameron: Is it?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. All the bots, the bot farms in Rus­sia, the meta plat­forms. Yeah

Cameron: Well, yeah, I think they exist­ed before AI, but yeah. Um,

Tony Kynas­ton: eas­i­er to get the memes out and just tar­get peo­ple and, you know,

Cameron: yeah. true.

Tony Kynas­ton: mm.

Cameron: And, and, you know, one of the divi­sions that we have now is about AI and data cen­ters and

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: and all, all of that kind of stuff, ener­gy con­sump­tion. And I– And the more I drilled down into it, the more I start­ed think­ing about ethics and our val­ues and how they gov­ern our pol­i­tics and our reli­gious per­spec­tives and our per­spec­tives on the envi­ron­ment and AI and all that kind of stuff.

And then was think­ing about the chap­ter in The Psy­chopath Epi­dem­ic when I tried to fig­ure out my ethics and my moral phi­los­o­phy and my val­ues and how dif­fi­cult it was. Um, and I thought, well, would­n’t it be great if you had a tool that would walk you through it [01:08:00] with AI on the back end? So you go, “Lis­ten, I don’t under­stand, you know, how to do this or why, why I think the way that I think and how I should think about this.” And you had an AI that was sit­ting there going, “Okay, well, l- let’s, let’s– let me ask you some ques­tions about why do you believe that. Why do you think that same-sex mar­riage is okay? Or why do you think the gold­en rule is the right sort of frame­work? Or why do you think this or why do you think that?” And it walks you through the intel­lec­tu­al exer­cise. a study that’s, um, ’cause there’s a few moral phi­los­o­phy frame­work things out there that have been built over the years by philoso­phers, and they strug­gle. Peop- when peo­ple do them them­selves, self-direct­ed online or in a form, peo­ple get stuck and tend to not com­plete them online. There’s a very low com­ple­tion rate because it’s just too hard to

Tony Kynas­ton: Right.

Cameron: up. But if they sit down with a human [01:09:00] guide, they can com­plete it ’cause they have some­body to talk them through the process. So I thought, well, AI can help talk us through the process now, so every­one has that pos­si­bil­i­ty. Whether or not peo­ple care enough to sit down and

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, yeah, but, but when you say AI, it’s not the cur­rent AI. I mean, I’ve tried this with AI, and it, it’s just got so many guardrails in there now, or back then when I last used it, you know? I, I remem­ber explor­ing the Mabo– Not the Mabo, the, um, voice to par­lia­ment ref­er­en­dum with it. And it was like, “Well, you know, if you think this, then this, and if you care about the Abo­rig­i­nals, then vote this way.”

It’s like it’s very guard­ed and, you know. ‘Cause I mean, it could v- if you had a– If you took the guardrails off, I could, you know, and you asked it, “Should I kill myself?” Yeah.

Cameron: Well, that’s,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yep.

Cameron: Just use

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: Say, yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: And then, then it becomes meta. Like, if you put guardrails in, who decides what the guardrails are and what are their val­ues and yeah.

Yeah

Cameron: Yeah, yeah. If you, if you use Grok, [01:10:00] it’ll say, “Well, let me ask you a ques­tion first. Did you vote Repub­li­can in the last elec­tion? No? Yeah, you should kill your­self.” Um, my only last thing is next Mon­day I’ve been invit­ed by a his­to­ry, a year 12 his­to­ry teacher at a school down in Mount Tam­borine to go and talk to her about Cleopa­tra before they do some assess­ment on Cleopa­tra.

Tony Kynas­ton: Nice

Cameron: She said she’s been assign­ing them my his­to­ry pod­cast as home­work for the last year

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, I hope these are senior kids at least.

Cameron: Year sev­en, uh, year 12

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, good

Cameron: I, had to lis­ten to them in the car before I went there just to see how far you went.” She goes, “But you know, they’re all pret­ty much adults and they can han­dle it.” Um,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: that should be fun.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, good

Cameron: my abil­i­ty to pre­pare for Tues­day

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, okay

Cameron: let you know. We might need to move our date around next week, ’cause it’s two hours to dri­ve down

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, right

Cameron: hours to get back, which is my entire day. But I’m like, look, the oppor­tu­ni­ty

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, [01:11:00] yeah,

Cameron: of I’m nev­er gonna say no to that.

Le- yes, please. I see it as a great, you know, a great hon­or, um, to be invit­ed to speak to school kids about his­to­ry.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: said, “Just come and share your pas­sion for his­to­ry and, and mak­ing it relat­able and, um, engag­ing for them.” She said, “I think they’ll real­ly enjoy that.” So she said they love the pod­cast, so

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, good. Well, all right, if any school teach­ers out there want an investor to come in and talk to them, it’s a lot clean­er than Cam’s his­to­ry pod­cast.

Cameron: Sure. Yeah, yeah. them drink a lot of cof­fee before­hand so he does­n’t. Don’t ask him about which trough to use to write a sell line though,

Tony Kynas­ton: Uh-huh.

Cameron: gets, gets con­fused.

Tony Kynas­ton: I, I’m old and con­fused, K.

Cameron: Oh,

Tony Kynas­ton: do, I do my Peter, Peter O’Toole imper­son­ation from Dean Span­ley, yes.

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: ” Do not ask me that again.” [01:12:00] There was a great line in that. It was some­thing like, um, uh. Was it the only mind that can– The only mind that is con­vinced is a closed mind. I thought, I thought that was very good.

Cameron: that is a great

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: Yes, I always say I want you to prove me wrong, just, you know,

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: bring a knife to a gun­fight. Like, pre­pared. Um, but yeah, con­vince me that I’m wrong, ’cause I wan­na know if I’m wrong. But, you know, make

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: come pre­pared. That’s QAV Aus­tralia this week. Hap­py hunt­ing, every­one.

Tony Kynas­ton: Thank you, Cam. Lot of fun

Cameron: you, TK