Vasily Arkhipov Day: QAV AU #953

QAV AU 953

[00:00:00]

Cameron: Uh, wel­come back to QAV, episode 953. It is the 27th of Octo­ber, and that means it is Vasi­ly Arkhipov Day. Hap­py Vasi­ly Arkhipov Day, Tony.

Tony Kynas­ton: Thank you

Cameron: Did you, uh, pull one out for Vasi­ly Arkhipov today?

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, no.

Cameron: Well,

Tony Kynas­ton: pull one out any­more, but any­way, yep

Cameron: Well, you don’t have to drink it, you just pour it

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, okay. On the ground?

Cameron: Yeah,

Tony Kynas­ton: Like

Cameron: out. For the kids out there who don’t know, Octo­ber 27th is Vasili Arkhipov Day to hon­or Sovi­et Navy offi­cer Vasili Arkhipov, who on this day in 1962 pre­vent­ed a glob­al nuclear war. He was in a sub­ma­rine, Sovi­et B‑59 sub­ma­rine, when, uh, the US Navy dropped prac­tice depth charges on it to force it [00:01:00] to sur­face. This is dur­ing the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis. And they were cut off from radio con­tact. They believed that World War III had start­ed, and the sub­marine’s cap­tain and polit­i­cal offi­cer want­ed to launch a nuclear-tipped tor­pe­do. But the rules of Sovi­et engage­ment said that they had to have unan­i­mous con­sent from all three senior offi­cers on board, and Arkhipov refused the launch,

Tony Kynas­ton: And he was­n’t shot, some­one else, and some­one else was pro­mot­ed who said yes?

Cameron: Um, he, uh, well, he was a senior com­man­der and his job was to, um, you know, make sen­si­ble deci­sions and he said, “I don’t think so. Let’s just sur­face.” And, uh, it turned out he was right. He became rear admi­ral in 1975, became the head of the Kirov Naval Acad­e­my. In 1981 he was pro­mot­ed to vice admi­ral and [00:02:00] retired in the mid-1980s, died in 1998, aged, uh, 72. But, uh, there you go. One guy, um, who said, “Yeah, I don’t wan­na start a nuclear war today, uh, if that’s okay with you.” So there you go. I try and remem­ber him every day with Stanislav Petrov,

Tony Kynas­ton: Every, every week, every year.

Cameron: every. Uh, sor­ry,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: Well, every day too I’m thank­ful. When I do my lit­tle grat­i­tude list every day, uh, I’m like, “Thank you Vasili Arkhipov.”

Tony Kynas­ton: What was on your grat­i­tude list today?

Cameron: Oh, dude, like every­thing. I’m just grate­ful for, oh, come on, man. Like I’m grate­ful for the peo­ple that invent­ed, uh, all sorts of mod­ern med­i­cines. I’m grate­ful for all of the peo­ple who came before me that devel­oped Aus­tralia as a rel­a­tive­ly ratio­nal, safe, uh, pros­per­ous democ­ra­cy. Grate­ful [00:03:00] for, um, peo­ple that invent­ed tech­nol­o­gy.

Uh, I’m grate­ful for the peo­ple that, uh. I’m grate­ful to David Markham for intro­duc­ing me to Chris­sy. Grate­ful to just like end­less. I have an end­less, like if I did my grat­i­tude list, I used to do it every night when I went to sleep, but it kept me awake, so I had to replace it with some­thing that, uh, put me to sleep.

But it’s just an end­less list. I’m grate­ful to all my ances­tors who scratched a liv­ing out of the dirt in the harsh­est con­di­tions just so they could pass on their genes to the next gen­er­a­tion and get them to an age where they could pass on their genes and so forth and thence­forth that led to me, and, you know, I’m grate­ful.

I’m grate­ful to the doc­tors that, uh, gave, you know, helped my chil­dren be born safe­ly and health­ily, and none of my mamas died in child­birth. Um, yeah, all that kind of stuff. Just this end­less list of grat­i­tude and won­der­ment I have that got us [00:04:00] here safe­ly today.

Tony Kynas­ton: Lis­ten­ers, you could see I’m, I’m well down the list of grat­i­tude. I haven’t been men­tioned. I think,

Cameron: You’re

Tony Kynas­ton: I’ll be sign­ing off now. See ya.

Cameron: you are def­i­nite­ly on the list. You’re on the

Tony Kynas­ton: It’s okay. I was­n’t fish­ing for a com­pli­ment

Cameron: Grate­ful for my dad, despite every­thing. Um, well, uh, big news today, Tony. Lula won the Brazil­ian elec­tion.

Tony Kynas­ton: Are you grate­ful?

Cameron: Well, it’s, I don’t have a, I don’t have a posi­tion

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, okay.

Cameron: of Brazil­ians are grate­ful.

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm

Cameron: The ones that, uh, did­n’t wan­na be under a right-wing gov­ern­ment again. Some are prob­a­bly mas­sive­ly dis­ap­point­ed. But, uh, it was a sur­prise vic­to­ry.

Tony Kynas­ton: Ooh

Cameron: um, a lot of peo­ple thought Bol­sonaro Junior was gonna win, even though his dad’s still in prison. Um, but, uh, it’s sort of had a dra­mat­ic impact on some of our US stocks.

Tony Kynas­ton: So when, when [00:05:00] stock­hold­ers aren’t grate­ful

Cameron: Well, yeah. I mean, some went up. Suzano

Tony Kynas­ton: okay. Wow

Cameron: but PAGSe­guro Dig­i­tal went down 25%, Ban­co Brade­sco went down 25%, Petro­bras went down 14%.

Tony Kynas­ton: These weren’t all the com­pa­nies, uh, that we spoke about in the cor­rup­tion, cor­rup­tion car­wash scheme, were they?

Cameron: Well, Petro­bras was.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm

Cameron: of it. But it’s still up 25% since, since

Tony Kynas­ton: Ooh,

Cameron: so, you know.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah

Cameron: a week ago. It’s, but it’s still, still doing okay. We’ll see what hap­pens with the fall­out of that.

Tony Kynas­ton: Ooh

Cameron: that on the US show, but, uh, it’s inter­est­ing. The only oth­er bit of news that I have is, uh, our friends at Findy. When I say friends, uh, the CEO was gonna come on the show and then ghost­ed me. I saw this released last week, 20th of Octo­ber. [00:06:00] Um, update on strate­gic review fund­ing and finan­cial report­ing. Are you tap­ping your desk or some­thing there? There’s a lot of.

Tony Kynas­ton: Sor­ry, I’m play­ing with the micro­phone lead.

Cameron: “Stop

Tony Kynas­ton: Some-

Cameron: blind,” Tony.

Tony Kynas­ton: some­thing,

Cameron: you that when you were younger?

Tony Kynas­ton: I do while I’m wait­ing for you to fin­ish.

Cameron: You sound

Tony Kynas­ton: Sor­ry.

Cameron: three new non-exec­u­tive direc­tors were appoint­ed to the FND board. Sub­se­quent to the appoint­ment of the new chair­man, a strate­gic review of the busi­ness was per­formed by the board. Upon receipt of an inde­pen­dent finan­cial review and receipt of the draft audit report, the board placed FND in a trad­ing sus­pen­sion on June 22nd, 2026. Do we know about that? Did we talk about

Tony Kynas­ton: I think we might have, yeah. They’ve. Yep

Cameron: The board has con­tin­ued its strate­gic review of the com­pa­ny’s oper­a­tions, finan­cial posi­tion and cap­i­tal struc­ture, with par­tic­u­lar focus on the [00:07:00] finan­cial posi­tion and fund­ing require­ments of its Indi­an oper­a­tions. Despite exten­sive dis­cus­sions and con­sid­er­a­tion of alter­na­tive financ­ing and restruc­tur­ing options, the com­pa­ny has not yet secured a solu­tion capa­ble of address­ing its require­ments on terms accept­able to the rel­e­vant par­ties. In view of the short cash run­way, the board con­tin­ues to very active­ly assess the options avail­able to the com­pa­ny, hav­ing regard to its finan­cial posi­tion in the inter­est of share­hold­ers and oth­er stake­hold­ers, and remains in active nego­ti­a­tion with a range of par­ties cov­er­ing a range of solu­tions for the busi­ness. And the final­iza­tion of the com­pa­ny’s audit­ed finan­cial state­ments for the year end­ed 31 March 2026 remains out­stand­ing. So basi­cal­ly, the com­pa­ny remains sus­pend­ed from quo­ta­tion on the ASX. It’s, uh. They were sort of a super­star

Tony Kynas­ton: They were.

Cameron: min­utes

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, I think they got up to about $4 or, or more than that, um, in share price, and they’re well below that now. [00:08:00] Did, did you also see the Rear Win­dow arti­cle about the same thing?

Cameron: No

Tony Kynas­ton: So appar­ent­ly Mr. Smed­ley is a mem­ber of the Aus­tralia Club in, um, Mel­bourne,

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: fel­low club mem­bers formed a short sell­ing syn­di­cate nick­named Get Shorty.

And after they iden­ti­fied a mar­gin loan held by Mr. Smed­ley, they launched a short attack on Findy shares, and the Rear Win­dow reports that the syn­di­cate pock­et­ed over a hun­dred and forty thou­sand before clos­ing out their posi­tions. And then short­ly after that, Findy failed to lodge its finan­cial reports and suf­fered a nine­ty-five per­cent share price col­lapse from its peak and remains sus­pend­ed.

Cameron: I’m just look­ing up, uh, archive

Tony Kynas­ton: blood sport being a mem­ber of the Aus­tralia Club.

Cameron: Yeah. Uh, I think back in Jan­u­ary of ’25, Scott wrote in, was talk­ing about his [00:09:00] best per­for­mance for the year, and he said Findy was up 300%. So,

Tony Kynas­ton: So this is a, this is a com­pa­ny doing bank­ing in India. And from mem­o­ry,

Cameron: right?

Tony Kynas­ton: mem­o­ry, they had a big divi­sion of ATMs that they were gonna hive off and float on the Indi­an Stock Exchange, and that’s when I think they’ve suf­fered, uh, their fund­ing cri­sis

Cameron: My next note on them was in Octo­ber 25 when I said they’d gone from 150% up in our port­fo­lio to 1% down. So yeah, there’s a. So I know they were a QAV stock

Tony Kynas­ton: They were, yeah

Cameron: So

Tony Kynas­ton: Not now, but they were

Cameron: yeah, not only non-QAV stocks that can have huge dis­as­ters. I did, I did say some­thing about Nick Scali in my newslet­ter last week just to see who was pay­ing atten­tion and said, “I won­der what hap­pens to.

What, what, I won­der how those peo­ple that are, are, are gonna hold NCK for­ev­er are feel­ing?” And [00:10:00] won’t men­tion any names, but you can prob­a­bly guess. A friend of mine, he emailed me and said, “I told you before I sold it when they changed their, uh, strate­gic inter­na­tion­al things,” blah blah. I said, “How’d you know I was talk­ing about you?

I kept it anony­mous. Could’ve been any­body. By the way, you owe me lunch.” Uh, yeah, it was fun­ny. I just check­ing who’s read­ing the newslet­ters.

Tony Kynas­ton: right

Cameron: So, uh, any­way, that’s, uh, that’s, uh, Findy. Um, not good. Um, yes, that’s

Tony Kynas­ton: Not, not good, but we’re, we’re out of it, so that is good

Cameron: Well, yeah, we’re out of it, but, um, kind of, uh, shock­ing in a way, maybe not shock­ing in a way. It was always a bit kind of murky, murky, Findy. It was like they had this enor­mous growth

Tony Kynas­ton: Ooh

Cameron: and then there was lots of rumors quick­ly about some­thing and some­thing was­n’t what it appeared to be, and there was always these sto­ries going [00:11:00] around and alle­ga­tions and counter-alle­ga­tions going on at, at high lev­els. So I’m not alto­geth­er sur­prised that it crashed and burned.

Might revive, might turn around. Who knows? You know

Tony Kynas­ton: It cer­tain­ly had some good num­bers at the start any­way.

Cameron: Hmm. So what else you got on your list of things to talk about, TK?

Tony Kynas­ton: So last week I spoke about a com­pa­ny called Dai-ichi Life, bet­ter known in Aus­tralia as Tow­er Insur­ance, had made a bid for Chal­lenger at eleven eighty a share.

Cameron: Mm.

Tony Kynas­ton: Um, and the stock rose to that. But I, uh, just, uh, saw a cou­ple of arti­cles recent­ly that talked about, uh, some of the oth­er Chal­lenger share­hold­ers push­ing back and thought the eleven eighty offer was too low and thought that, um, a more per­ti­nent bid or an accept­able bid would be around thir­teen dol­lars per share.

So Chal­lenger have offi­cial­ly, offi­cial­ly declined [00:12:00] to rec­om­mend the offer, and the ball is back in Dai-ichi’s court. Um, so I, I guess a cou­ple of things about that, um, may not lead to a high­er offer because Dai-ichi already have, uh, uh, twen­ty per­cent rough­ly of the stock, maybe a lit­tle bit more. So they could just wait and use the creep pro­vi­sion, which allows them to buy three per­cent every half, um, with­out launch­ing a takeover.

See, the, the. Nor­mal­ly, if you have more than nine­teen point nine per­cent of a com­pa­ny, you’re meant to launch a takeover. But if you use the creep pro­vi­sion, um, of the Cor­po­ra­tions Act, you don’t need to do that. So Dai-ichi may stay just on the share reg­is­ter pas­sive­ly and increas­ing every six months by three per­cent, or they might come back and engage and give a, a stronger bid.

Um, I don’t. Yeah, it’s hard, it’s hard to say. And I think the share­hold­ers who are ask­ing for a high­er bid [00:13:00] are prob­a­bly spot on because the lat­est results from Chal­lenger have been very good. And, um, I did a Pulled Pork on them a lit­tle while ago. They pro­vide annu­ities to retirees, and that’s becom­ing more and more pop­u­lar as the pop­u­la­tion ages and peo­ple move from the accu­mu­la­tion phase of their super funds to the retire­ment phase and need to live off the income.

So Chal­lenger’s right in the, um, square of that space to be able to pro­vide that. So it’ll be inter­est­ing to see how it works out. Um, my gut says that it won’t be a quick process, though.

Cameron: Just turn on the cam­era and you stop talk­ing.

Tony Kynas­ton: Stop play­ing with your micro­phone cord.

Cameron: uh, yeah. Well, we still hold it in a bunch of port­fo­lios. Check­ing,

Tony Kynas­ton: do I. Yeah

Cameron: Right. And it’s up quite, quite a bit in some of them. Um, held it uh, May of this year. Oh, no, yeah, May of this year in some cas­es. It’s up, like, [00:14:00] 34%. But, um, should keep hold­ing it ’cause it might go high­er. Maybe

Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, it might, might go down if Dai-ichi don’t do much. But,

Cameron: Yeah

Tony Kynas­ton: I, um, I think the down­sid­e’s prob­a­bly pro­tect­ed because even if Dai-ichi don’t do much, um, they’re still a, a cor­ner­stone share­hold­er. They’re not going any­where. Um, so I think the down­side is prob­a­bly pro­tect­ed, you know, um, with­out want­i­ng to fore­cast or make guar­an­tees.

It’s just a ques­tion of whether they’ll get to thir­teen dol­lars quick­ly.

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: The three-point sell line for it is $9.55 at

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm

Cameron: to my charts, cur­rent­ly 11.88.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: Uh, we’ll see what

Tony Kynas­ton: But if you are a share­hold­er, mon­i­tor it, because if they do launch a high­er bid and it becomes accept­able, then even­tu­al­ly the stock will delist. And so you’ll, um, need to assess what the offer is. Is it cash? Is it scrip in a dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny list­ed over­seas? And make your deci­sions based on that too.

[00:15:00] Mm.

Cameron: Right. Okay.

Tony Kynas­ton: Well, speak­ing of, speak­ing of that, um, Chal­lenger popped up on the, in the AFR today on their rolling year records list, um, which I’ll look at. Uh, and there’s only three shares on that rolling year record high today. All the rest of the shares are at lows, um, that they report. And, uh, two of them have been on the buy list.

So Chal­lenger and oOh!media are two of the three, and Ansel­l’s the third, which we haven’t cov­ered. But, um, just thought it was inter­est­ing we got two. There’s only three stocks at new fifty-two week highs. Two of them are on the buy list or were on the buy list and two of them are under takeover. I think, actu­al­ly, I think they’re both back on the buy list this week, Chal­lenger and oOh!media.

So, um, I, I don’t know what that means, whether it’s a sign of, um, you know, the start of the mar­ket turn­ing from lik­ing, uh, growth stocks to val­ue stocks or what, but it [00:16:00] caught my eye any­way

Cameron: Yeah. They are both on the buy list. There you go

Tony Kynas­ton: Ooh.

Cameron: Along with, uh, a lit­tle nick­el min­er, Lun­non Met­als, LM8. You ever heard of them

Tony Kynas­ton: No, I had­n’t. I saw it there. I haven’t. I thought about doing a Pulled Pork, but I think nick­el’s a Josephine, isn’t it?

Cameron: It, oh, it’s a sell actu­al­ly. Yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: There you go.

Cameron: ADT too,

Tony Kynas­ton: Right

Cameron: thou­sand, so. But, uh, that’s about half the stocks on the buy list this week are small ADTs

Tony Kynas­ton: But I did, I did, um, decide to do a, a big ADT stock because we’ve done a cou­ple of small ones recent­ly for a Pulled Pork. Yeah.

Cameron: Who, is that

Tony Kynas­ton: AGL Ener­gy.

Cameron: AGL.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: Can­non-Brookes? Is he still

Tony Kynas­ton: is largest share­hold­er.

Cameron: got a chunk of that? Yeah, right

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. He sold a lit­tle bit recent­ly, but he’s still their largest share­hold­er.

Cameron: Right.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm

Cameron: Slept on his couch That’s

Tony Kynas­ton: him?

Cameron: That’s it. No Not with him, [00:17:00] no.

Tony Kynas­ton: Okay. Was he twid­dling his micro­phone, Lee?

Cameron: He was out, uh, try­ing to, try­ing to raise invest­ment in San Fran­cis­co for, uh, Atlass­ian at the time

Tony Kynas­ton: You

Cameron: rel­a­tive­ly small

Tony Kynas­ton: did­n’t kick a few dol­lars in?

Cameron: Me? If I’d had a few dol­lars, I would’ve.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, okay. Yep. All right

Cameron: get into it and I’ll put my shame back

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. AGL Ener­gy, uh, it’s large ADT stock, which is one of the rea­sons why I’ve s- I’m doing it. It’s on the buy list again this week. I have done it before, but that was in Feb­ru­ary twen­ty twen­ty-four. Um, so I thought it’s, it’s worth­while touch­ing again because the com­pa­ny’s going through a bit of a tran­si­tion from being a provider of elec­tric­i­ty fired by coal pow­er to being one that’s, uh, pro­vid­ed by wind and solar and then stored in bat­ter­ies and, um, released onto the grid.

It’s [00:18:00] still part­way through that, but I’ll get into that in a minute. Um, I am a cus­tomer of theirs too, I should dis­close, so I can. If they want me to do anoth­er pulled pork, they can give me a rebate or some­thing, I guess. But any­way, this is a free­bie. Uh AGL, every­one will prob­a­bly know about them or have dealt with them.

Uh, it’s one of Aus­trali­a’s old­est, largest, and accord­ing to, um, my research, most con­tro­ver­sial cor­po­ra­tions. And I guess it’s con­tro­ver­sial for a num­ber of rea­sons. So for a long time, pri­or to its recent piv­ot any­way, AGL topped the Clean Ener­gy Reg­u­la­tor’s list of Aus­trali­a’s high­est emit­ters, and at its peak, AGL was respon­si­ble for rough­ly 8% of Aus­trali­a’s entire car­bon foot­print.

And, um, and that amount was, uh, actu­al­ly larg­er than some coun­tries. So, uh, it’s, it was a big emit­ter and, and due to its heavy reliance on coal-fired pow­er sta­tions, uh, three in par­tic­u­lar, Lid­dell, Bayswa­ter and Loy Yang [00:19:00] A. Uh, so hav­ing a car­bon foot­print that large made AGL the num­ber one tar­get for Green­peace, uh, Aus­tralian Cen­tre for Cor­po­rate Respon­si­bil­i­ty and oth­er activists, um, and I guess, uh, activists who were also ask­ing the banks not to lend them mon­ey.

So, um, yeah, it’s been a tar­get of years of boy­cotts and ad cam­paigns and protests at share­hold­er meet­ings. That all came to the boil, speak­ing of Mike Can­non-Brookes in 2022, uh, when AGL attempt­ed to split the com­pa­ny into two, Accel Ener­gy, and that was gonna be the old dirty coal-pow­ered plants, and AGL Aus­tralia, which was going to be the clean retail brand.

And y- And I guess I should explain, in the Aus­tralian ener­gy mar­ket, there are the whole­salers which pro­duce the ener­gy and then the retail­ers who can sell it. And that’s why, you know, if you go online and say com­pare what’s the best ener­gy deal for my house­hold, you’ll [00:20:00] see there’ll be 15 or 20 providers.

A lot of those are just buy­ing. They’re retail­ers who are buy­ing their pow­er from, uh, two or three big providers in the mar­ket. So AGL is the ver­ti­cal here. It owns both arms of that, um, that, uh, mod­el. Uh, so it tried to, but it tried to split itself into, um, coal pow­er and then the rest, and that trig­gered, uh, Mike Can­non-Brookes to buy 11.28% of the com­pa­ny.

Um, I think he did it through a lit­tle bit of finan­cial sup­port and engi­neer­ing, but any­way, that’s what he end­ed up with, and he launched a pub­lic cam­paign against the board and suc­cess­ful­ly blocked the demerg­er. So every­thing stayed with­in AGL Ener­gy. Um, and the, the, the process real­ly was, um, well, I, I guess a bit of chaos, uh, ’cause the CEO, chair­man, and a lot of the board mem­bers resigned and, um, ef-effec­tive­ly that allowed peo­ple like Mike Can­non-Brookes and oth­er activist [00:21:00] share­hold­ers to try and force a faster tran­si­tion away from coal.

Um, the, the con­tro­ver­sy is still ongo­ing though, so even though they are mov­ing out of coal, it’ll take a while and, and AGL has pub­licly com­mit­ted to clos­ing all of its coal plants by twen­ty thir­ty-five. Um, but some, some peo­ple are ques­tion­ing whether that can be done, and some peo­ple are ques­tion­ing, uh, whether that’s too quick because, um, it may lead to black­outs and ener­gy short­falls and price spikes if there aren’t enough, um, renew­ables and mas­sive grid bat­ter­ies in time to be able to smooth that out.

Um, but it’s also, I guess, also in head­lines, not just for the sort of the decar­boniza­tion process, but also at the moment because of cost of liv­ing, um, pres­sures. And so one of the big con­trib­u­tors to infla­tion, uh, if you read the papers, is ener­gy prices, not just at the bows­er, but also for [00:22:00] pro­vid­ing elec­tric­i­ty and gas to, um, the house­holds.

And part of that’s dri­ven by the fact that, um, there are. These coal pow­er plants, um, are get­ting pret­ty old and they can become a lit­tle bit un-reli­able and suf­fer sud­den break­downs, and that caus­es spikes in the whole­sale elec­tric­i­ty prices. When there’s less sup­plies of elec­tric­i­ty, the, the, um, demand push­es the price up, and that even­tu­al­ly flows through the house­hold bill.

So there’s a bit of a catch twen­ty-two here, but, um, there’s, uh, you know, the desire to move away from, um, coal p- pro­vi­sion, but there’s also the need for coal pow­ered pro­vi­sion of elec­tric­i­ty to work well at the moment. So it’s a bit of a tightrope that AGL’s bal­anc­ing. You don’t wan­na. If you own those coal pow­ered plants, you don’t wan­na be putting bil­lions into them to keep them run­ning reli­ably if you’re gonna close them in the next 10 years.

So inter­est­ing sort of dilem­ma. Um, that’s, that’s kind of, I guess, a sum­ma­ry of where things [00:23:00] stand in terms of, uh, their pub­lic pro­file. Let me get back to the out­line, uh, and the his­to­ry of the com­pa­ny, which will pro­vide a bit of con­text. AGL was found­ed in 1837 as the Aus­tralian Gas Light Com­pa­ny, and was orig­i­nal­ly, um, set up to, to pro­vide gas for Syd­ney’s first street lamps.

Um, it’s grown over that time to now ser­vice about 4.6 mil­lion cus­tomer accounts, and it is the largest elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tor in Aus­tralia. It’s one of the big three, uh, the oth­er ones being, um, Ori­gin Ener­gy and a com­pa­ny called Ener­gy Aus­tralia. Um, Ener­gy Aus­tralia, I think, is owned by a Hong Kong com­pa­ny, but Orig­in’s local and local­ly list­ed.

Um, AGL man­ages mil­lions of, uh, elec­tric­i­ty and gas ser­vices for res­i­den­tial, small busi­ness, and com­mer­cial clients in New South Wales, Vic­to­ria, South Aus­tralia, and Queens­land. So that’s the east­ern states. Um, I think Ori­gin might be, um, ser­vic­ing the oth­ers, uh, with big- big­ger mar­ket shares, [00:24:00] but, um, that’s by the by.

Um, in recent years, AGL’s also diver­si­fied into oth­er util­i­ties for homes like broad­band inter­net, mobile plans, elec­tric vehi­cle sub­scrip­tion ser­vices. Um, it’s put all those into a, into a brand called Beyond Ener­gy, and it’s, um, posi­tion­ing itself as a sin­gle provider for house­hold ser­vices. Um I guess the, that’s a pret­ty good sum­ma­ry of where it is now.

It’s the largest pri­vate pow­er gen­er­a­tion port­fo­lio in the coun­try. As I said, it was relied on burn­ing coal. Um, it, I s- I men­tioned three pow­er sta­tions before, Bayswa­ter, Loy Yang, and, uh, yeah, Bayswa­ter, Loy Yang, and Lid­dell. Lid­dell has now com­plete­ly shut down, so that is the first stage of the tran­si­tion to replac­ing coal pow­er with bat­ter­ies.

Um, but it, but this tran­si­tion, which they call F35, is, um, you know, it’s one of the [00:25:00] biggest high-stake struc­tur­al tran­si­tions I can think of in cor­po­rate his­to­ry. I mean, it, it’s real­ly get­ting into new ter­ri­to­ry quick­ly whilst try­ing to man­age its oblig­a­tions with its lega­cy assets, which are aging. So, um, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, I think it’s gonna have some up and, ups and downs along the way, um, like is I guess what I’m say­ing.

Uh, to put some. I, I strug­gled to get my mind around exact­ly how big this is, but, um, they aim to pro­duce 12 gigawatts of new renew­able ener­gy and firm­ing capac­i­ty, and that’s grid-scale bat­ter­ies, wind, solar, and pumped hydro by 2035. And 12 gigawatts, I mean, that’s a bit like say­ing 12 googol. It, it’s a. I found it a very dif­fi­cult num­ber to under­stand, so I did a bit of research into what that meant.

But 12 gigawatts of elec­tric­i­ty pow­er would be enough to pow­er 9 mil­lion homes simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, and Aus­trali­a’s got about 11 and a half [00:26:00] mil­lion homes, so that’s most of Aus­tralia it can pow­er. Um, and if I sort of scale it, one kilo­watt is about the pow­er that a microwave would use. One megawatt, which is 1,000 kilo­watts, is enough to pow­er, say, a, a super­mar­ket, um, or about, uh, six or 700 homes.

One gigawatt, which is 1,000 megawatts or a bil­lion watts, is enough to pow­er, um, a, a city of about 750,000 homes. So that’s like about what the Gold Coast may be. And then 12 gigawatts, which is 12 bil­lion watts, is, li- like I said before, nine out of 11.5 mil­lion homes. So it’s, it’s a sub­stan­tial amount of pow­er that they have to build with essen­tial­ly, I guess, cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy and replace some­thing which has been work­ing for a long time.

The, I guess the sav­ing grace for that is that they are able to use. I mean, their, their strat­e­gy min­i­mizes some of the risk because if they replace [00:27:00] coal pow­er plants with, with bat­ter­ies, then, uh, they can use the exist­ing grid con­nec­tions. And that’s one of the prob­lems with, um, with renew­ables, is get­ting new poles and wires from the best place to put solar farms and wind farms into the grid because it might have to go through peo­ple’s prop­er­ties and they might object.

So that’s, that’s an issue. Um, but yeah, so big, big task for them, um, because they’ve bit­ten off a lot there. Uh, t‑t- I think the oth­er fac­tor to talk about is that, um, coal pow­er plants can run twen­ty-four sev­en, uh, unless, unless there’s a break­down or there’s main­te­nance. So they have what’s called a high capac­i­ty fac­tor.

Where­as at the moment, um, if you’re reliant on wind and solar, uh, you obvi­ous­ly have to be able to store the pow­er some­where for, for night times or for when it’s calm. And so there needs to be a large amount of grid-scale bat­ter­ies and pumped hydros [00:28:00] built to store the excess pow­er and release it when the grid needs it most.

So it’s a, it’s a large invest­ment into doing that. Um, as I said, the first stage of that is under­way. So Lid­dell closed in twen­ty twen­ty-three, and AGL have been. And, and doing a good job at build­ing grid-scale stor­age, um, uh, par­tic­u­lar­ly in one called the Tor­rens Island Bat­tery in South Aus­tralia, which is still under­way.

Um, oh no, no, sor­ry, it’s com­plet­ed. Uh, the Bro­ken Hill bat­tery and they’re, uh, build­ing a, a mas­sive bat­tery at Lid­dell, and that’s start­ed to be com­mis­sioned now. But to put those in per­spec­tive, I mean, I think, um, the coal-pow­ered plant at Lid­dell was gen­er­at­ing, uh, two gigawatts. Um, the Tor­rens Island bat­tery is gen­er­at­ing two hun­dred and fifty megawatts.

The Bro­ken Hill bat­tery is fifty megawatts, and the Lid­dell bat­tery [00:29:00] is, um, five hun­dred megawatts. So they’re still short of a com­plete replace­ment for Lid­dell. Now, uh, I, I don’t know, I don’t wan­na make their case, but I think they’d say that a dis­trib­uted net­work of bat­ter­ies may not need to have two gigawatts, um, of capac­i­ty avail­able at all the time.

Uh, you know, by dis­trib­ut­ing the net­work, if it’s calm in one place, it’ll be windy in anoth­er and, you know, bat­ter­ies can recharge and dis­charge overnight and all that kind of things. But cer­tain­ly, it’s a tricky replace­ment process. The oth­er thing which is, um, excuse me, help, hurt­ing the process is that there’s a bit of a, um, pipeline in renew­ables con­struc­tion.

So, uh, AGL cur­rent­ly has suc­cess­ful­ly amassed a nine-point-six gigawatt devel­op­ment pipeline of poten­tial projects. Um, but there’s still a lot of that, uh, stuck in plan­ning, com­mu­ni­ty [00:30:00] con­sul­ta­tion, and ear­ly con­struc­tion. So, um, there’s been some reports to show that it, it might take longer than they think.

So we’ve all seen the head­lines of peo­ple who don’t want pow­er cables near them or don’t want, uh, their, their wind tur­bines on their farm or what­ev­er. So it is a tricky process. It’s also being made worse by con­struc­tion costs going up, which has hap­pened recent­ly and, and the resources are being, for con­struc­tion are being dragged all over Aus­tralia between res­i­den­tial needs and, and, um, pow­er needs and all sorts of things.

So even though the pipeline’s pret­ty much sort­ed out by this com­pa­ny and is planned to be deliv­ered, they’ve still got to actu­al­ly do it. Um

So yeah, I think that’s prob­a­bly a good sum­ma­ry of where they are. Uh, I did note that Mike Can­non-Brookes thinks the progress is mov­ing too slow­ly and lacks ambi­tion. Um, and [00:31:00] so even though he’s still the largest share­hold­er, and that’s through his firm Grok Ven­tures, um, which holds about ten point four per­cent, um, he has made it clear that he’s frus­trat­ed with the com­pa­ny’s cur­rent man­age­ment team and their pace of change, and he has sold a lit­tle bit of his share­hold­ing, uh, even though it’s, he’s still the biggest, um, share­hold­er.

So there is a bit of man­age­ment ten­sion. Um, if I could sum­ma­rize it, man­age­ment is, I guess, focused on the prac­ti­cal­i­ties of get­ting all this, uh, new renew­able pipeline deliv­ered and deal­ing with a lega­cy coal pow­ered net­work which is ail­ing and get­ting old­er, and then, uh, their largest share­hold­er who is agi­tat­ing for it to all hap­pen quick­er.

So, um, it’s a fair­ly inter­est­ing dynam­ic going on there at the moment. Uh, get­ting back to the his­to­ry, uh, AGL, I don’t know if this was delib­er­ate or not. When they did light the first gas lamp in Syd­ney, it was on Queen, Queen Vic­to­ri­a’s birth­day in 1841. [00:32:00] Um, by 1871, they list­ed on the stock exchange. Uh, and roll for­ward to recent­ly in, in ’76, they con­vert­ed their net­work to nat­ur­al gas.

So before that it was what was called town gas, which was a coal byprod­uct. But then there were dis­cov­er­ies of nat­ur­al gas, um, as a resource which they could pipe, so they were doing that. Um, and they also around that time began buy­ing up elec­tric­i­ty net­works because they saw, uh, gas being dis­placed more and more by elec­tric­i­ty in the sort of lat­ter half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.

Uh, they did a, a, a big merg­er, a fair­ly com­plex merg­er with, uh, Alin­ta Ener­gy in 2006, and that’s when they became AGL Ener­gy and con­sol­i­dat­ed their, their space at the top of the peck­ing pile in Aus­tralia in, um, in this, uh, mar­ket. Um, in 2022. uh, sor­ry, 2012 and the ear­ly 2000 and, and teens, they bought the mas­sive Bayswa­ter and Loy Yang [00:33:00] coal fired pow­er sta­tions, and so they became, uh, um, this con­tro­ver­sial provider of, uh, green­house, uh, gas as well as elec­tric­i­ty.

And then, uh, in 2022, they’ve been through the green bat­tle which I out­lined before. All in all, the results are okay. If I look at their lat­est results, um, their statu­to­ry prof­it after tax went up a lot. Um, in FY25 it was a loss. This year it was a, a loss of 98 mil­lion. This year it was up to 756 mil­lion.

Um, but that’s a lot to do with, uh, non-cash items. So there were write-downs last year, and there was the sale of a busi­ness called Tilt Renew­ables, which was put into prof­it this year. So, um, if I look at, uh, net prof­it after tax, exclud­ing those items, it was down 2%, as was rev­enue was down 1.8%, and the div­i­dends were cut back a lit­tle bit, so they were down 7.4%.

So it, flat, [00:34:00] flat­tish to mixed results. Um, some. I did a bit of, um, research on what ana­lysts thought of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, and so they were kind of mixed as well. Um, some ana­lysts praised the cap­i­tal dis­ci­pline of exit­ing Tilt Renew­ables, um, and also the, the fact that the reli­a­bil­i­ty oper­a­tional­ly of the grid was improv­ing this year.

Uh, and I should men­tion that Tilt Renew­ables, um, is a com­pa­ny that pro­vides or oper­ates the biggest wind pow­er plat­form in Aus­tralia, and it was estab­lished about 10 years ago as a JV between, uh, AGL, the Queens­land Invest­ment Cor­po­ra­tion, QIC, and the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­men­t’s Future Fund. Um, and it grew rapid­ly, um, and it now oper­ates near­ly two gigawatts of, um, of wind assets across about 12 dif­fer­ent loca­tions and, um, AGL had a 20% stake in the busi­ness.

They decid­ed to sell it, uh, because it was a big, [00:35:00] um, cash injec­tion into the busi­ness of $750 mil­lion. Um, and as part of the sale, um, they did, they did a, um, a deal where they can keep access to the sup­ply of, uh, of, uh, the wind ener­gy from the, from Tilt going for­ward. But it did give them anoth­er $750 mil­lion of cash to put into, uh, build­ing bat­ter­ies and oth­er, um, stor­age, uh, like, like pumped hydro for, uh, the replace­ment of their coal pow­ered, uh, assets.

So was­n’t a bad, um, deal and, and ana­lysts liked it. But on the bear side, some ana­lysts thought that, um, you know, per­haps prof­its have essen­tial­ly plateaued and they went down 2%. Um, and they’re als- some ana­lysts are skep­ti­cal of the mas­sive cap­i­tal inten­sive lay­out required for 2035. Um, and, um, there, there, some ana­lysts also called out a thing called the green­wash­ing lit­i­ga­tion, which was inter­est­ing.

So at the moment, the com­pa­ny is actu­al­ly in court defend­ing an action, [00:36:00] uh, a class action brought against them. Um, and I think it’s prob­a­bly Aus­trali­a’s first ever green­wash­ing con­sumer class action brought. It’s brought by Slater and Gor­don on behalf of res­i­den­tial, uh, house­hold cus­tomers. Um, and basi­cal­ly what it alleges is that this com­pa­ny had a prod­uct out in the mar­ket that said that for an addi­tion­al, um, pur­chase price per week for pow­er, you would, um, they would source pow­er in a car­bon neu­tral way.

And the law­suit al-alleges that that was mis­lead­ing and decep­tive con­duct. And the crux of the mat­ter is that, um, AGL was buy­ing car­bon cred­its, um, with the extra, uh, rev­enue, and there’s been a, um, a review of the car­bon cred­it, uh, mar­ket, I guess, and there’s been some scruti­ny as to whether some of these cred­its are actu­al­ly, um, worth what you’re pay­ing for them and are actu­al­ly help­ing Aus­tralia low­er its, low­er its car­bon emis­sions.

So, uh, that’s before the [00:37:00] courts at the moment. Um, obvi­ous­ly AGL are defend­ing it and, uh, we’ll see how that plays out. But there could be, there could be some, um, fund­ing required for that, uh, in the future as well. So a cou­ple of issues there too. So like, I guess where I’m, what I’m say­ing is AGL’s gone from being this cash gen­er­a­tor, elec­tric­i­ty and gas provider with a very sta­ble busi­ness to, um, you know, risk­ing it all on rush­ing as fast as they can if you, uh, fol­low what MCB says to, uh, to a, a green bat­tery, wind, solar, uh, pumped hydro type busi­ness that can be reli­able and pro­duce the same out­put, um, as, uh, what the coal pow­er sta­tions do.

So it’s a, it’s a very inter­est­ing dynam­ic that’s going on. Be that as it may, and it’s hard for me to fore­cast what will hap­pen, um, if I look at the QAV num­bers, ADT is twen­ty-four mil­lion dol­lars, so this is a very large, um, large­ly trad­ed stock, so suit­able [00:38:00] for peo­ple to buy into regard­less of the size of the port­fo­lio.

Price for the analy­sis is nine dol­lars oh three. I think it’s a lit­tle bit less than that today when we checked in before. Uh, IV1 for this com­pa­ny is nine nine­ty-one, so it’s above the cur­rent stock price. IV2 is eight dol­lars and nine, so it’s a bit less than that. So we, we give it a tick for IV1, but not for IV2.

It’s eighty-eight per­cent of the con­sen­sus tar­get, so it scores for that. Net equi­ty per share is sev­en dol­lars eighty-four, um, but book plus thir­ty is ten dol­lars twen­ty. So again, we can buy it for less than, um, assets plus thir­ty per­cent. I do point out that NTA is a bit low­er than that. Uh, again, this com­pa­ny has had a lot of merg­ers and acqui­si­tions, so there’s a bit of good­will on the bal­ance sheet, but at least, uh, for net assets, um, it’s high­er than the share price.

Yield is five point five four per­cent, which is good, but not quite enough to, to beat the cur­rent, uh, mort­gage price, so we don’t, can’t score it for that. Stock Doc­tor [00:39:00] finan­cial health is strong and the trend is recov­er­ing, which scores a two.

So, um

Uh, this is one of the com­pa­nies that I kin­da like to focus on because, uh, we often see that if a com­pa­ny has a, a finan­cial health trend that’s recov­er­ing, um, it, its met­rics are improv­ing, and it’s a chance for us to get in, um, ear­ly again. So we scored a two for a recov­er­ing trend. ROE, we don’t score ROE, but I just want­ed to high­light it’s twen­ty-five per­cent, which is, um, sur­pris­ing when you think of the scale of this busi­ness.

So I, that, that caught my eye. PE is four point six times, which is the low­est in three years, so we can score it for that. PROPCAF is five point two nine times, so, um, it’s, uh, it’s, uh, throw­ing off a lot of cash, and we can buy it for a, a five-year pay­back in cash terms on the oper­at­ing cash le, uh, yield.

Um, and cer­tain­ly [00:40:00] we can get the pay­back before 2035, so that might be a, a nice risk mit­i­ga­tion. Uh, Stock­o­pe­dia give it a qual­i­ty rank of eighty-one, but an over­all of nine­ty-nine. Uh, that’s dri­ven by high­er rank­ings for val­ue and momen­tum. F score is sev­en out of nine, which is healthy. Earn­ings, earn­ings per share growth for this com­pa­ny, though, is fore­cast to decline.

Stock Doc­tor lists, lists the earn­ings per share growth as being neg­a­tive fifty-six per­cent, but I think that’s prob­a­bly because they fac­tored in the, the Tilt Renew­ables, um, receiv­able last year. Um, most ana­lysts are guid­ing for flat to slight­ly low­er EPS next year. But either way, EPS is, um, fore­cast to be neg­a­tive, so we give it a neg­a­tive one for growth over PE.

Uh, and this is a rare com­pa­ny, um, that does have a PE ratio less than the yield, so that’s usu­al­ly a, excuse me, an extreme val­ue indi­ca­tor for me. So that’s, uh, a score for that. There’s no own­er founder. Um, we can’t count the tech bro. He was­n’t [00:41:00] around in Queen Vic­to­ri­an times, uh, so not a founder. Um, it’s a new three-point trend­line buy.

It actu­al­ly may have just dropped back down again today, so by all means, check this before you, um, decide to do any­thing.

No con­sis­tent­ly increas­ing equi­ty. It is a new three-point trend­line buy, but just check that because it’s been hov­er­ing around its buy price. I think it may have dropped down again today. Um, qual­i­ty is over­all thir­teen out of sev­en­teen or sev­en­ty-six per­cent.

QAV score is point one four. If I can list the pos­i­tives and neg­a­tives, I think, um. Uh, man­age­ment is doing a pret­ty good job on con­vert­ing coal pow­er to green pow­er. Uh, and I think that will have its, uh, that will have a pos­i­tive, uh, ben­e­fit for the com­pa­ny because, you know, the com­pa­ny’s faced a lot of, um, a lot of activist protests, a lot of legal chal­lenges on its car­bon foot­print.

A lot of, um, a lot of banks are [00:42:00] pres­sured, um, not to loan com­pa­nies like this. Uh, so, you know, it’s, um, has, uh, prob­a­bly high­er debt lev­el of debt, debt costs than some oth­er com­pa­nies that are sim­i­lar. Um, so if that, if that, if they do man­age the 2035 green tran­si­tion, then I would have thought a cou­ple of things might ben­e­fit.

There’ll be a lot of, um, glob­al, uh, investors that can start to look at a com­pa­ny like AGL because they’re pro­hib­it­ed now by their man­dates from, um, own­ing heavy car­bon emit­ters. So that will, I think, uh, help the share price and also too if the banks can, uh, lend to it more com­pet­i­tive­ly, that would give them bet­ter access to debt financ­ing, which would help as well.

Um, but they’ve got to deliv­er a firm 2035 infra­struc­ture that can oper­ate, um, with reli­a­bil­i­ty at scale, and that’s a big, that’s a big issue. Um, uh, you know, who knows? But it might take longer than, than planned. It might be a mix. There might be some oth­er out­come there. [00:43:00] Um, on the neg­a­tive side, ana­lysts are say­ing that we’ve reached peak pric­ing for elec­tric­i­ty and cer­tain­ly for coal fi- coal-fired pow­er sta­tions, that might be the case.

Um, I, I won­der. I think this is going to, um. There’s a few oth­er things to play into this. Of course, if we, when it gets to a com­plete­ly green, uh, provider of elec­tric­i­ty, how does rooftop solar play into the mix? Will it still. I mean, I think elec­tric­i­ty sup­pli­ers are fac­ing, you know, not just the demands of becom­ing green and keep­ing the cur­rent grid sta­ble, but also man­ag­ing the fact that a lot of homes now have solar and they don’t, um, need grid sup­ply dur­ing the day, but they’ll need it at night, so they’ve got to change the way that they oper­ate, uh, or the grid, the providers have to change the way they oper­ate.

So there’s a few chal­lenges there. But I think it also comes down to what does the mar­gin and vol­ume look like [00:44:00] 10 years from now? Um, not just because there might be even more, um, home inde­pen­dence with bet­ter bat­tery infra­struc­ture and things like that, but also too I, I ha- could­n’t find any analy­sis to say whether oper­at­ing bat­ter­ies and, um, uh, a green elec­tric­i­ty grid was gonna have a bet­ter mar­gin for the com­pa­ny or not.

And, um, so there’s still a kind of, um, bit of a veil over the finan­cials when it does tran­si­tion to 2035, and it, it could be that they have that, but I just haven’t seen it. So there’s, there’s a few mov­ing parts for this com­pa­ny. So that’s AGL. Inter­est­ing, and do your own research.

Cameron: And I won­der about the impact of need­ing to cov­er the remain­ing coun­try­side with data cen­ters to run AI and how you pow­er all of that.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. No, I mean, it’s, that’s a big issue, I agree. I, I sus­pect the solu­tion for it is that you’re gonna build data cen­ters in very remote loca­tions, and I, I know Bill [00:45:00] Gates was over scout­ing out the Kim­ber­ley in Aus­tralia, and it’s the same sort of inter­est­ing pow­er prob­lem that min­ing com­pa­nies have, and they often build their own pow­er sta­tions near­by.

So I think that’s prob­a­bly the long-term solu­tion. But the, the prob­lem with that is, how do you then, um, get the data cables from the data cen­ter back to pop­u­la­tion cen­ters so you don’t have laten­cy? So there, there is a few issues to cov­er with that one too.

Cameron: I might just solve fusion and then it’ll, it all goes away. We just have unlim­it­ed fusion ener­gy.

Tony Kynas­ton: It might.

Cameron: We live in a sci-fi world, Tony.

Tony Kynas­ton: do.

Cameron: Yeah, but that is, I’d, I’d. I mean, I’d hate to be run­ning a com­pa­ny like AGL right now. It’s like such a com­pli­cat­ed, dif­fi­cult to be right now.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. And it reminds me of like, um, you know, I’ve worked, worked in big cor­po­rates, like before Y2K with mas­sive, um, IT type projects that were cut­ting edge and, [00:46:00] you know, had­n’t been done at that sort of scale with demand­ing that kind of resources, and they are dif­fi­cult to man­age. Um, they’re very com­pli­cat­ed, and you, you often make mis­takes along the way.

Costs blow out, time­lines blow out. Yeah.

Cameron: But, and then doing that in an envi­ron­ment where, you know, there’s a, some sort of a time hori­zon on your abil­i­ty to get a return on invest­ment on this infra­struc­ture, whether it’s five years, 10 years, 50 years, no one real­ly knows. But yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. And, and keep­ing the cur­rent grid sta­ble while you’re doing it too, which, you know, it, it could well mean that, you know, if they’re turn­ing it over and to, to green in 2035, that in 2034 they need mas­sive main­te­nance on the coal pow­er sta­tions, oth­er­wise the grid falls over.

Cameron: Yeah. Well.

Tony Kynas­ton: I like to, I like to think that a lot of stocks are on our buy list as val­ue stocks for a rea­son, and I think I’ve kind of out­lined the rea­sons here.

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: Less than book plus 30, and it is throw­ing off lots of cash, so at the moment it [00:47:00] stacks up for us.

Cameron: Hmm. Thank you, TK. So, uh, after hours, you wan­na kick it off?

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, we watched, um, Ten­z­ing, the movie recent­ly. Have you seen that yet?

Cameron: What’s that?

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, a movie about Ten­z­ing Nor­gay and the, and the, uh, first peo­ple to reach Ever­est. So Tom Hid­dle­ston and Willem Dafoe star in it, along with a, a local actor play­ing Ten­z­ing Nor­gay. It’s pret­ty good actu­al­ly. Um, you know, it’s a stan­dard sort of biopic, but, uh, pret­ty impres­sive moun­taineer­ing scenes.

Like, you know, I, I kind of be a lit­tle bit blasé about Ever­est these days ’cause it seems like lots of peo­ple have climbed it and if they can climb it, is it real­ly a chal­lenge? But this movie appar­ent­ly was, um, no green screen, all shot in either New Zealand or in the Himalayas, and you get a real feel for climb­ing moun­tain faces and fac­ing wind­storms and the dif­fi­cul­ties of what they did.

So it’s, it’s, it’s rea­son­ably [00:48:00] com­pelling. It’s good.

Cameron: Just look­ing up the direc­tor, a female direc­tor, Jen­nifer Peedom. She did Sher­pa before that, 2015. Solo.

Tony Kynas­ton: Top cast.

Cameron: Riv­er. Ten­z­ing. Yeah, she’s got a, she’s got a genre, her own genre.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm.

Cameron: Ever­est. Oh, it was a doc­u­men­tary. Any­way, good stuff.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm. Been lis­ten­ing to a lit­tle bit of Fontaines DC, um, main­ly because we’ve got­ten very hooked by the Mob Land theme which they do. So I’ve just been get­ting into a bit of them late­ly, which is inter­est­ing.

Cameron: who that is.

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, look at my,

Cameron: Irish.

Tony Kynas­ton: Alex put me onto them last year, and I kind of lis­tened to ’em for a while and put them aside.

But yeah, I’m, I’m lik­ing what I’m hear­ing.

Cameron: Oh, very good. I haven’t heard of them at all. I’ll have to check that out.

Tony Kynas­ton: And I’ve been using AI to help me code, uh, [00:49:00] my analy­sis of rac­ing for bet­ting strate­gies, and Gem­i­ni man­aged to kill about two years’ worth of work on the week­end.

Cameron: How did it do that?

Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, I had­n’t been as good with my back­ups as I should have been, and it wrote data, over­wrote data, which I was able to recon­struct and unpick, but a, a lit­tle bit’s gone for­ev­er into the void.

Cameron: Back up.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Well, I, I do, but, you know, um, I had to go back two months in this case. It had been doing it for a while and I had­n’t noticed. Hmm. Hmm.

Cameron: Yeah, you got­ta have a back­up strat­e­gy.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yep. Any­way, I’ve nev­er writ­ten a, well, Gem­i­ni’s nev­er writ­ten a bit of code, so every time I open the spread­sheet, it backs it up for me.

Cameron: Yes. Been doing that for years with my alert sheet, so every time it opens up, there’s an auto­mat­ic back­up,

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah.

Cameron: going back years.

Tony Kynas­ton: I, I used, I used to use Time Machine, but I found that

Cameron: Mm-hmm.

Tony Kynas­ton: of times I tried to go back to old ver­sions and they just weren’t there.

Cameron: Oh, real­ly?

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm. [00:50:00] So I gave up on Time Machine, but, hope­ful­ly it’s sort­ed.

Cameron: until my back­up dri­ve broke, and it now costs a mil­lion dol­lars to buy a replace­ment back­up dri­ve. So I was like, “Yeah, can’t do that any­more.” Well, uh, I, uh, went and gave that talk to the

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. And did you cor­rupt their minds? Which your plan was, I think, your cun­ning plan.

Cameron: you know, noth­ing from the teacher since, so she may have been fired as a result. Uh, it did, you know, uh, get pret­ty dicey. I

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh.

Cameron: orgies, um, drug-fueled sex orgies,

Tony Kynas­ton: You must have had good atten­tion.

Cameron: Mate, the kids were into it. I thought I’d be there for like half an hour. I think I was there for two hours. The Q&A went for an hour.

Tony Kynas­ton: Did you wear your QAV T‑shirt?

Cameron: No, I did­n’t. talk about invest­ing.

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: kung fu. They asked me kung fu ques­tions. Um, yeah, so we, we– It was [00:51:00] a long-rang­ing dis­cus­sion.

Tony Kynas­ton: Nice

Cameron: all of the girls in the room to, uh, learn a form of mar­tial arts

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm

Cameron: start­ed talk­ing about domes­tic vio­lence, rates in Aus­tralia and how shame­ful it is,

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: domes­tic vio­lence, men on women in this coun­try, how appalling it is, and women sad­ly need to learn some form of self-defense.

I said the men should learn it too. It’s gonna be great for health and fit­ness, but, uh, par­tic­u­lar­ly you young ladies, if you have the oppor­tu­ni­ty, some form of mar­tial arts, some form of self-defense. Um, but yeah, I talked about every­thing as I am wont to do, so it was good. It was fun. Good kids. And, uh, Mount Tam­borine, I think it’s like five years prob­a­bly

Tony Kynas­ton: Brought.

Cameron: Tam­borine.

Absolute­ly beau­ti­ful

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, good

Cameron: sun­ny after floods here last week. I thought, uh, I might get flood­ed out,

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: love­ly.

Tony Kynas­ton: Good

Cameron: And I’ve been watch­ing Demo­li­tion Man.

Tony Kynas­ton: The movie?

Cameron: Demo­li­tion. Yes, the

Tony Kynas­ton: Wes­ley Snipes?

Cameron: [00:52:00] Yes.

Tony Kynas­ton: I’d have, yeah.

Cameron: I’ve nev­er seen it,

Tony Kynas­ton: Oh, real­ly?

Cameron: a, friend of mine’s been telling me, “Oh, you got­ta watch it.

It’s fan­tas­tic.” And I st- I’m still only halfway through it ’cause I watch it in bits and pieces as I tend to do, but it’s fan­tas­tic. It’s hilar­i­ous.

Tony Kynas­ton: It is fun­ny, isn’t it?

Cameron: over the top,

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm

Cameron: Obvi­ous­ly, uh, of a piss take on ear­ly ’90s sci-fi, you know, action extrav­a­gan­zas. Um-

Tony Kynas­ton: So that’s also Sylvester Stal­lone too, isn’t it? And San­dra Bul­lock, if I’m remem­ber­ing?

Cameron: That’s right.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah. Yeah

Cameron: actu­al­ly, great cast, Nigel Hawthorne

Tony Kynas­ton: Ah.

Cameron: kind of the bad guy

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: like the leader of the new San Ange­les city and the, the sort of sav­ior of human­i­ty or the sav­ior of Los Ange­les. uh, play­ing an evil vil­lain, which is nice. Um, Denis Leary’s in it. Um, uh-

Tony Kynas­ton: how the Amer­i­cans cast an Eng­lish­man as the bad [00:53:00] man, isn’t it?

Cameron: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tony Kynas­ton: Like, uh, Alan Rick­man in Die Hard.

Cameron: Yes.

Tony Kynas­ton: Hmm

Cameron: Rob Schnei­der has got a small role in it, which he has a cou­ple of good lines. Um,

Tony Kynas­ton: Uh, he, he can be good, can’t he? I love that, uh, did you ever see that movie, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, that he had a bit part in?

Cameron: I’ve nev­er watched that

Tony Kynas­ton: The– I for­get now what the con­text was, but he was pre­tend­ing to be the, um, the ter­ror­ist hot­line. It’s like he’d answer the phone and go, “Press one for bombs, press two for rock­ets, press three for dyna­mite.”

Cameron: yeah. Any­way, enjoy­ing it. It’s fun. Uh,

Tony Kynas­ton: King then

Cameron: yeah, I keep mean­ing to check that out,

Tony Kynas­ton: Q

Cameron: I I watch. I’m near­ly fin­ished Game of Thrones, you know, I’ve been rewatch­ing that. I’m in the last sea­son.

Tony Kynas­ton: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: I’ll pick anoth­er sea­son to watch. But it’s, you know, I’m- I only got it on when I’m mak­ing din­ner or [00:54:00] clean­ing up the kitchen after din­ner.

Tony Kynas­ton: Yeah, right

Cameron: my only TV time. It’s on in the back­ground. I’m pay­ing, you know, scant atten­tion to it, so it’s, uh, got­ta be some­thing that I don’t need to pay atten­tion to real­ly, you know. Uh, that’s it, TK. That’s all I got. Let’s go talk Amer­i­ca.

Tony Kynas­ton: Very good. Thanks