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Cameron: Welcome back to QAV America, Tony, episode 15. We are recording this July 22nd Australian time, 2025. Just did our Australian show. Now talking about America. For new listeners, welcome. We’re two Australian value investors that have been doing a podcast in Australia for about six years on value investing, and now we’re doing one on the American market as well, where each week I take a company.

On the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ in theory, but they always tend to be New York Stock Exchange. ’cause our system of value investing doesn’t tend to score very many NASDAQ companies very highly. But, uh, there’s a lot to choose from. On the New York Stock Exchange, so I, I pick one every week. That scores highly in our system of looking for [00:01:00] quality companies.

And by quality companies we mean a lot of different things, but essentially generating a lot of cash is the big one that we’re looking for. And then we look at the, the valuation. What can we, can we buy them at a discount? We’re looking for companies that generate a lot of cash. Particularly interested in the ones that we can buy to discount to what we think their intrinsic valuation is.

Then I’ll do a little bit of a deep dive or a pulled pork as we call them. And this week, oh, this is a terribly dirty, dirty company story. Yeah. I think last, I can’t, I think last week we were talking about dirty oil or dirty something. This week it’s dirty, dirty drugs

Tony Kynaston: about coal tile last week.

Cameron: Ah, that’s right. Well, this time it’s dirty drugs and dirty contact lenses.

You don’t want your contact lenses to be dirty, but uh, turns out the business of contact lenses is dirtier than I realized. So the company is called. [00:02:00] Bausch Health, you’re probably familiar with Bausch and lom. The, uh, eyewear brand. Well, this is the parent company now, confusingly Bausch Health. BHC is the company that I’ll be talking about.

Bausch Lo is a separately listed company on the New York Stock Exchange. They spun it out. I think it’s B-L-B-L-C-O is Bausch and Lam. Not talking about Bausch and Lobo. I’m talking about Bausch Health. They still own 90% I think of Bausch and lom. They floated off a small amount of it, and they might float off the rest of it too, which I’ll get to, but this is BHC.

Now, I do want to preface this by saying. From a sentiment chart perspective, they are currently what we call a Schrodinger. They are above their byline, but slightly below their sell [00:03:00] line. So they’re simultaneously a buy and a sell. So we wouldn’t buy them, they just tipped down they were a buy. So I ran my checklist, my, my buy list, like, uh, two weeks ago.

They were a buy at the time. They’ve just dipped a few cents below. Well, it’s a bit more than a few cents. Their sell price is $6 49. They’re currently about $6 31, so they’ve dropped 18 cents or so below their, uh, buyline. So we wouldn’t buy them at this stage, but I’m gonna talk about ’em anyway ’cause they could pop back up above that at any given moment.

They’re a global diversified. American Canadian. Really? Canadian American. ’cause they come outta Canada. Pharmaceutical company. Primarily global corporate headquarters are in Quebec at a place called Laval in, uh, Quebec. Its US headquarters are in New Jersey, which is [00:04:00] fitting because I think for a long time they sound like they were run by like the mob.

Tony Kynaston: Allegedly.

Cameron: Oh, it sounds like they were run like the mob, not by the mob, like the. Dirty. Very, very dirty. Uh, they develop, manufacture a market range of pharmaceutical products, from diarrhea to constipation, from female horniness to itchy skin conditions and better contact lenses. They’ve got it all covered, although they sold off their female Viagra product.

But it’s a really good story because I’m, I’m gonna get to that later on. They’ve had a bunch of scandals over the last decade in particular, uh, actually had other scandals going back to the nineties, but thi this is a company that has a stank on it. They’ve had lots of very, very expensive headline grabbing corporate scandals over the last 20, 30 years, [00:05:00] and that’s one of the reasons I think why they’re cheap at the moment.

It’s just one of the reasons so bad they had to do a rebrand to try and get away from the stink on their brand. So they used to be known as Valiant, V-A-L-E-A-N-T. But then about seven or eight years ago, they changed their name to Bausch. So, um, people, as I said before, if you, if you, if you wear glasses or you have ever walked past a glasses shop, you’ve probably heard of Bausch and lom.

They’re a pretty big global brand. This is the parent company. They bought that business quite some years ago. But they really are post-scan rebrand of this company, Valiant Pharmaceuticals. They have one of the filthiest backstories on the market. Um, about 10 years ago, they were in a heap of trouble in the US for all sorts of things.

Jacked up, drug prices, lied about sales cooking. The [00:06:00] books blew up one of the most famous hedge funds on Wall Street. Your old friend Bill Ackman, then they changed their name in 2018. To, you know, I guess to in hope that the market would forget, and it hasn’t really, but this is how it all went down. I mean, the company goes way back many, many years started by a, I think it was a Canadian pharmacologist, but it went through decades of development.

In 2003, it was called ICN Pharmaceuticals changed their name to Valiant. And decided they didn’t. The guy who was the CEO at the time decided they didn’t want to develop drugs. They just wanted to buy existing brands. So he started doing this massive rollup. A debt fueled rollup of other smaller drug companies, stopped really spending on r and d and just started borrowing like crazy, gobbling up small drug [00:07:00] companies.

And then once they bought it, jacking the prices up. Through the roof, they would. Buy an old medicine, cut costs, raise the price and then milk the hell out of it. Got some examples. In 2015, they bought two old cardiovascular hospital drugs, Isoprel and Nitropress, and then raised the prices overnight by 525% and 212% respectively.

No new research. No better version, just. A new sticker price, and that wasn’t a one off. They did that on 62 different drugs, raising the prices in some cases by more than 500%, and one antifungal called flu toine. It’s being sold in the US for 10000% more than it was costing in Europe, [00:08:00] 10000%. So they got themselves the, uh, in all sorts of trouble with Congress, the me there was a media storm around it.

Then in 2015, the activist firm, Citron Research called Seller, Andrew left, who I think we’ve talked about before. He’s one of these guys that like in the big short, uncovers companies that he thinks are doing dodgy stuff and then he shorts them and then. You know, writes about them and tries to destroy the business.

Yeah. He accused them of accounting fraud in 2015 through a shady pharmacy network called philidor. His allegations were that they had a fake pharmacy that they secretly controlled. Yeah, then they would use it to push their own expensive drugs and make the numbers look better than they really were.

Valiant employees. Were allegedly working at [00:09:00] Philly door under fake names. So basically valiant people. Um. Pretending to be philidor people emailing doctors and insurers using fake aliases to hide the connection. The whole thing blew up in October, 2015. Valiant denied it at first, then tried to quietly cut ties with Philidor and get rid of the whole thing.

Meanwhile, bill Ackman, the guy who runs the Pershing. Fund an activist investor, one of the biggest names on Wall Street. Loved Valiant. He took a massive position in Valiant over the years. At its peak, he was up billions of dollars. He loved the business model. Then when all of this stuff about the price gouging inquiries and the the filler door allegations all blew up, the share price dropped from $262 to under $15, and he sold [00:10:00] the lot.

He lost $2.8 billion dumping his steak and had to walk away. He’s still around though.

Tony Kynaston: Hmm.

Cameron: And, uh, he, he did okay. He invest, he’s invested in lots of things, but he called it a very costly mistake. But it was, I was reading through, like he was pumping these guys up massively and then it all just collapsed like a house of cards.

But the dur goes back even further. So their iCare unit, Bausch and loam were caught in the nineties. Selling the same contact lenses under different names and different prices, same product, different labels, different price tags. One was marketed to last a year, another would only last a month, and another would last for only two weeks, exactly the same contact lens.

And they got in trouble. The states sued them. They settled for $68 million in 1996 and agreed to stop. I remember that a similar sort of thing happened here, I think with uh, [00:11:00] Neurophin

Tony Kynaston: Hmm.

Cameron: a few years ago, wasn’t it? They got caught doing a similar sort of thing.

Tony Kynaston: Uh, well, similarly, yeah. I mean, they, they had, if you walked into a grocery store in Australia, you’d have different versions of neurophin. One for backache, one for one for this and that. But they’re all the same tablet, allegedly.

Cameron: Same thing, yeah. But these guys sort of have a history of price gouging and yeah, not being exactly the nicest people on the block. Um, really, really full on aggressive marketing of pharmaceuticals. Then, this is my favorite story. There was this company called Sprout Pharmaceuticals, developed by a woman called Cindy Eckert.

They developed this drug called Aye, which was a female Viagra, I think it had been originally discovered for lowering blood [00:12:00] pressure or something like that. Bit like Viagra and had a, another pharmaceutical use. Then people found out that it got made women horny and so they started marketing it. They got, she got approval from the FDA in 2015 to sell it as a female Viagra.

Uh, Valiant. Bought it the next day for a billion dollars.

Tony Kynaston: Whew.

Cameron: But that was 2015. Just as all of this price gouging stuff started to blow up, she then sued them two years later because part of the agreement when they bought it was they had to do a good job marketing and she must have been getting a percentage of the sales or the profits or something as part of the deal, and they didn’t do a good job.

So she got it back basically for nothing. They had to give it back to her a couple of years later for essentially for free. So she sold it for a billion dollars and then got it back a couple of years later, which, uh, I thought was great.

Tony Kynaston: excited, then, then [00:13:00] nothing. Nothing will,

Cameron: Steve was excited. Worked for her. Yeah. Oh, I’m sure. So that was a great story. So then the CEO, uh, Jay, Michael Pearson, I think his name was during this whole period, got the boot. They rebranded as Bausch Health in 2018, hoping the new name would sort of clean the blood off the walls, but they’re stuck with the debt.

’cause they went on this debt fueled

Tony Kynaston: Yep.

Cameron: rollup thing. They’re still carrying like $20 billion in debt. So that’s one of the problems with these guys. Massive amounts of debt. The, the CEOs, they’ve had two CEOs since Pearson got, uh, kicked out. And they’ve gone on a massive selling spree of their assets to keep the walls from the door.

They spun out Bausch and Lam, as I said in 2022, but still owe 90% of it. And that’s also one of the problems with this, I think from a market perspective, it’s one of these Frankenstein monsters, we’ve talked about this in [00:14:00] other e episodes, these massive conglomerates that have stakes in lots of different businesses and lots of different sectors with different levels of ownership and different things.

It’s hard, I think, for a lot of investors to figure out how to value it.

Tony Kynaston: Right.

Cameron: These guys have everything from drugs to beauty, lasers, gut meds, and eyecare division, which is partly spun out, but from our perspective, it’s still generating a ton of cash. So thumbs up, looking pretty good, carrying a lot of debt, but generating a lot of cash.

So. Despite all of the lawsuits and the stink and the bad blood, it’s a money machine. It’s throwing off $1.6 billion a year in operating cash, and its market cap is $2.6 billion. So it’s a prop calf of about [00:15:00] 1.6 I think. Which is very, very low. Part of that cache comes from a gut health drug called Xifaxan.

It’s mostly for IBS and liver related brain fog called hepatic slo. In, in, in, in encephalopathy, telepathy. Mr. Who’s the elephant on, uh, Sesame Street?

Tony Kynaston: Mr.

Cameron: Is he in n. Yeah, that’s it. It’s called hepatic snuffleupagus. It brings in about $2 billion a year, this one drug, and they, they had a recent court win that awarded them patent protection until 2029.

On that, they sued another company that was selling something similar, I think. So they have got a few years of runway at least, to keep milking that. The contact lenses division, Bausch and Lo, that brand has been around since the 18 hundreds. [00:16:00] Uh, don’t think they’re making contact lenses in the 18 hundreds, but depends on what contact lenses would’ve looked like in the 18 hundreds.

Uh, but it’s, it’s one of those, it’s got a sort of a moat in terms of the brand. It’s been around so long that it, it’s, it’s a trusted brand when it comes to eyewear. It’s got very, they’ve got very good. Channel penetration with optometrists and eyewear stores and that kind of things. B and l is sort of one of the go-to brands in that space.

So it’s kind of a moat and it brings nearly half the company’s revenue.

Tony Kynaston: So

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: Long got spun off though. They, what are they doing? So still has the contact lens business. What does Baus that’s been spun out? Are they the rest of the, spectacles? Are they?

Cameron: No, well, they spun it, so they spun it off as a listed entity, but I think it’s all still run by the same [00:17:00] company,

Tony Kynaston: well, okay.

Cameron: so they own 90% of it. They, they spun it off as a float, but I think they still own it. And they still run it. They still run the business, I think. They just spun it off, uh, as another publicly listed entity.

That’s my assumption that you don’t think that’s how it works.

Tony Kynaston: you normally wouldn’t retain ownership if you spun it off. You might keep some ownership, but what’s the point of spinning it off if you keep, if you

Cameron: Well, they’ve got 90%. Uh, I don’t know.

Tony Kynaston: Okay.

Cameron: Well, there is, there is talk that they’re going to sell off the rest of it.

Tony Kynaston: Okay.

Cameron: So maybe it’s, it’s a way of just offloading that to the public markets over time. Spin off the division. I dunno. But I know that it generates about half the company’s revenue, so the money is still coming into Bausch Health.

Uh, so [00:18:00] I’m assuming they still run it. I didn’t go down into that level of detail.

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: So why is it so cheap? Um, well the market doesn’t trust them and for good reason, even though they’ve had a couple of changes of CEOs since then. I imagine it’s culture that has spent decades. Manipulating the market and getting itself into trouble for it.

So there’s probably a lot of cultural legacy I imagine from that. They’re still carrying around $20 billion in debt from the valiant years. One bad quarter, one lawsuit go wrong, and the whole thing could look pretty wobbly. And they got a fair amount of legal overhang as well. They’re still. Some level of opioid litigation, Xifaxan patent challenges that they, they have been dealing with.

I think the Xifaxan is safe for a little while yet, but there’s a fair amount of legal uncertainty over the business as well, which [00:19:00] investors tend not to love. And then, as I said before, there’s the conglomerate discount. Bausch still owns 90% of Bausch and Loan, which trades separately, but there’s this structural messiness to the valuation.

Have you, uh, discovered anything? I see you

Tony Kynaston: Yeah,

Cameron: some research. Did you ask ChatGPT

Tony Kynaston: did. it said, back you up. It says that Bausch and Loan was spelt, it was spun off, but, uh, Bausch Health still retains a majority ownership stock.

Cameron: and manages a day to day? Is is my understanding as well, like the division is still part of the company. It’s not like it’s a

Tony Kynaston: says it’s a,

Cameron: length thing.

Tony Kynaston: it’s a subsidiary, so I just can’t get my head around why it’s listed separately then, but anyway.

Cameron: It’s America man. Your gut’s to it’s America to spin off stuff. So they’ve been exploring selling the rest of b and l. If they do that, that could bring in billions of dollars and help them knock a serious [00:20:00] dent in the debt. They’ve refinanced some of their ugliest debt in 2025. They locked in a new series of loans that pushed out maturities lowered their risk profile.

Wasn’t cheap. They had to pay a 10% coupon, but it bought them some time to pay off some of the debt that was coming due. If Trump’s able to get rid of, uh, Powell and interest rates come down, they could refinance again and save more money. They’re probably part of the Fire Jerome campaign. Hashtag fire Jerome.

But the bottom line is I think, uh, you know, it’s a really. Impressive cash generation machine with some really great products that make a lot of money with a really bad history of bad corporate activity and getting caught out for it and having to pay lots of fines and share price collapse, [00:21:00] and from $262 down to below $15 is.

A big hit. It’s trading at $6, by the way. Um, so it’s, it’s, uh, had a pretty steep fall since the heydays.

Tony Kynaston: But new management, I’m guessing so, um, that’s all be the, the old days are behind it.

Cameron: Yeah. As I said before, you know, well, as I said before, like new CEOs, but it’s a 30 year cultural legacy of. Doing things a certain way that I just know from working in big corporates like Microsoft. You know, you can have a change of CEO, but you have. A thousand senior executives that are still there and their little, you know, hierarchies and empires that are used to doing things a certain way.

And there’s a certain mindset, come on, we [00:22:00] wrote a book on psychopaths, Tony, you know, psycho psychopathic cultures don’t get. It cleansed easily. I think, uh, if you’ve spent decades developing a psychopathic business culture that’s like, yeah, screw the customer. Who cares? We’ll get away with it. And if we don’t, we’ll just pay the fines.

Uh, those sorts of cultures tend to have a residual effect. I think.

Tony Kynaston: Well, we haven’t, have you

Cameron: I hope I’m wrong.

Tony Kynaston: you seen any legal cases though, since your management took over?

Cameron: Well, they’ve got, yeah, they’ve got some residual cases around things like opioid litigation and stuff like that, but no, nothing,

Tony Kynaston: Okay. I.

Cameron: nothing that looked like it did 10 years ago, but they’re still cleaning up the mess from what happened 10 years ago. We, we dunno what’s gonna hit

Tony Kynaston: we’re

Cameron: a year from now. Right. Who knows?

Tony Kynaston: the current management though.

Cameron: No, I don’t, I, no new management. It’s been 10 years, you know, rebranding all that. They, they’re trying to do the right [00:23:00] things, like they’re trying to clean up the debt anyway. They’re trying to get rid of the debt, selling off divisions, making sound business decisions to dig themselves outta the hole brand wise, as well as business wise.

You know, it’s not the sort of company that if I, I wouldn’t want to go to a dinner party and hand over a business card and say, yeah, I work for Bao. Remember the old valet? Yeah, that was us, man. You know, I wasn’t even comfortable saying I worked for Microsoft. At the end of it. I had to like hide my head in the sand.

But, uh, but as an investment. I think it looks pretty good. Um, so as I said, uh, bringing in a ton of cash, dirt, sheep, uh, even after they pay, you know, we were talking on our last show about. Operating cash flow versus free cash flow. Their free cash is 1.2 billion, so they’ve got a lot of cash that they can [00:24:00] pay off debt.

Invest in r and d, buy back shares, whatever it is. Their FF score is seven out of nine.

Tony Kynaston: Very good.

Cameron: It’s, which is one of the strongest that I

Tony Kynaston: Hmm.

Cameron: we’ve seen, um, on the QAV America Show. Um, so financial health wise, it’s pretty strong. Particularly this is a company carrying $20 billion of debt. Um, for a seven outta nine F score.

That’s pretty good. The other, the other sorts of things that are interesting is the analyst consensus is that the earnings per share next year could hit $3 95, which would be about an eight time bump on what they earned last year.

Tony Kynaston: Right. So what’s happening?

Cameron: S

Tony Kynaston: driving that?[00:25:00]

Cameron: um, just dunno, Tony Dunno.

Tony Kynaston: Okay.

Cameron: I just dunno, Tony

Tony Kynaston: Dunno. Don’t care.

Cameron: much. Don’t, no analysts think it’s gonna make a lot more money next year than I made this year.

It’s good enough for me. I’m not an analyst just telling you what the analysts think they’re doing my work for me. Um, what else have I got? I mean, I can take you through some more numbers. Um, just quickly. Um, quality rank, they scored on quality rank. They got a 68, so I score them for that ’cause it’s over 60.

Couldn’t score them for stock rank ’cause it’s below 90. Did score them for the F score. The price is not lower than our IV number one, but it is lower than our IV. Number two, can’t score them for. Price less than book because their book is negative. ’cause they carrying $20 billion worth of debt, did score them for [00:26:00] a three point uptrend and there’s a new three point upturn.

Or there was actually, when I scored them, it’s dipped below the cell line. But um. You know, those sorts of things. I’d have to rescore them if I was doing it today, but when I did it a couple of weeks ago, they both scored for that. Uh, what else have I got? Growth over PE greater than 1.5. They scored for that book.

Value Growth is not positive though. PE less than yield. No. Yield bank debt? No. ’cause there’s no yield. They’re not paying a dividend. Um, the IV number two is greater than twice the share price, so that’s unusual. Scored for that as well. Yeah. So. Um, the, the quality score actually was 79% when I did it. Um, but I think I had to fix something in my sheet because there was a problem with the book price in the [00:27:00] first round of scoring.

I think it came down to about 67 when I rerated it, but it had, uh, a QAV score of about 0.4, 0.45 at the end anyway, so a pretty good. QAV score. But again, it’s one of these things that we see I see quite a bit on QAV America. It’s like a hold your nose stock. Um. Which to a degree, any mining company is here for me too.

You know, it’s a dirty business. I don’t like the business, I don’t like the impacts of the business. I mean, I’m happy for these people to sell drugs, but they’re obviously have a history of price gouging American consumers, which sucks to be an American consumer in the healthcare system, I guess, you know, come to Australia and get stuff cheaper.

There was this thing, it’s a funny thing. I saw Trump gave a conference a couple of weeks ago. He was talking about a friend of his who was in the uk, uh, who had to buy [00:28:00] Ozempic. He ran. Did you see this? Oh my God, it was so funny. Trump Trump’s, you know, doing this press conference. And he goes, it’s a friend of mine.

He’s a very, very successful businessman, very famous. You’d all know the name. He, he’s, he’s very fat. He’s very, very, very, very fat guy, very ugly guy. Very, very fat. But you’d know him. He’s very successful. Anyway, he says he’s on holiday in England with his family, and he’d run out of Ozempic. And he went to buy it in the uk and it was like one, 100th of the price that it costs him in the us.

And he got on the phone to Trump and said, what the hell, why, why are Jug so cheaper? And then Trump says, well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna slash all the drugs. He said, this press conference, he said, we’re gonna cut the prices by 50%, 60%, more than a hundred percent in some cases. Like, really, you’re gonna cut the price by more than a hundred percent.

You’re gonna gonna make it free. You’re gonna pay people to take the drug. What, what the hell are you talking about? But then, and then he’s [00:29:00] come out in the last week and said that they’re gonna start punishing Australia if we, if we keep, uh, making our drugs cheap.

Tony Kynaston: Well, we have the pharmaceutical benefit scheme where we, the government negotiates on price with the pharmaceutical companies rather than each chemist chain or network or whatever, which the

Cameron: Yeah,

Tony Kynaston: companies don’t like. Probably vouch doesn’t like. Yeah.

Cameron: so he’s gonna, he’s gonna

Tony Kynaston: Up our tariffs.

Cameron: penalize us, penalize us if we, uh, keep making healthcare cost effective for Australians. Any who, um, what do you think of Bausch Health, Tony from all of that?

Tony Kynaston: Well, look, I um, certainly was aware of Valiant and so I’m

Cameron: Were you,

Tony Kynaston: yet heard of

Cameron: you would’ve been living in Canada around about those times, weren’t you?

Tony Kynaston: And heard of Bill Ackman’s. Big loss on it too. [00:30:00] So, um, yeah. Um, was aware of that. So look, I haven’t researched this company. I can’t. Vouch for the rebranding and the change in management, but assuming it’s, it’s an improvement.

Um, I’d have to do some research into that. Uh, cashflow looks extremely strong, but they’re still carrying a lot of debt. So, uh, from the, from the quality point of view, I think they don’t rank as high in Wikipedia as the F score might suggest for, a quality ranking. I think they were down in the sixties from memory. Uh, but yeah. Um. Look, cash flow solves a lot of problems. And if they can sell off something like their majority stake in Bausch and long and pay off the debt, it’s, it’s cleared up quite quickly. So, um, I like the fact that it’s

Cameron: They get a

Tony Kynaston: and we’re buying it very cheaply. I,

Cameron: stocked, gives them a 97 for value.

Tony Kynaston: yeah. What’s the quality ranking though?

Cameron: 68. Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron: [00:31:00] Stock rank is 74 68 for quality, but, but a 97 for value.

Tony Kynaston: That’s probably a good summary though,

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynaston: quality’s down ’cause of the debt, but it’s a deep value buy. Um, yeah. Which is,

Cameron: But a seven for the F score, you know, so they can, they can pay their debt. They’ve renegotiated the debt, they can meet the debt. They generating enough cash to pay the debt. Yeah, so a bit different from the usual

Tony Kynaston: Hmm. Very.

Cameron: shipping companies and, uh, financial services firms that we’ve covered. Uh, I should say we, we don’t hold them in our US portfolio.

Uh, we don’t, you know, we are fully invested in the US portfolio. I should also do just an update while I’m here on our US portfolio. I guess. Uh, where are we at? Let’s have a look. So. For the last 12 months, we’re up 23.7% versus the s and [00:32:00] p 500, up 14.54%. Um, year to date we’re down 15.7 versus the s and p up 7.2.

Thank you Donald Trump for all your hard work.

Tony Kynaston: calendar, year to date or financial year to date?

Cameron: Y Yeah. Calendar, year to date since the beginning of January.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah,

Cameron: Yeah, and all time, so we started this portfolio back in September, 2023. We’re up 57.97% versus the s and p 500, up 41.89%. So we’re doing okay versus the index, not as good as we were. pre-Trump late last year we were up 90.8% versus the s and p up 34%.

The uh, Trump Trumponomics. Has had a massive detrimental effect on our [00:33:00] portfolio this year. It’s the greatest economy. It’s gonna be the best economy. It’s gonna do great. Has not done great for our portfolio over there, but it’s, it was doing so great before that, that it’s still doing okay.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron: So there you go.

Tony Kynaston: Very good. Thank you. Can

Cameron: Alright, well that is QAV. We’re into after hours. Tk, what do you got? What do you got for me?

Tony Kynaston: Well, we, I mean I’ve been watching the British Open, so that’s been my sort of entertainment diet for the weekend or the Open championship as they prefer to call it. get quite prickly when people call it the British Open, but everyone calls it the British Open, so,

Cameron: Why do they get prickly about that?

Tony Kynaston: Uh, because it’s officially called the Open Championship. And when I’ve pushed people over there as to why they get about it, apparently, and I don’t know if this is the the case, but apparently Northern Ireland is part of the [00:34:00] uk but not Great Britain. Uh, so they call it the British Open. If we call it the British Open, we’re not including Northern Ireland, which is where it was played this year. Um,

Cameron: right.

Tony Kynaston: you know, splitting hairs and you can, um, and when the English split hairs on things like that, you can see why the English language is so hard to learn if you weren’t born speaking. Um,

Cameron: see why everyone hates the poms. Like just get over yourselves. You get the Great Britain, England, the United Kingdom.

Tony Kynaston: yeah,

Cameron: on. Just pick something.

Tony Kynaston: like everyone else does.

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: fun, good fun to watch. It was, uh, at Port Rush in Northern Ireland, which is where, I went to with Ruddy when it was last there in 2019. Prior to COVID a great, great time in Northern Ireland, uh, and the rest of Ireland that trip.

Um, had a, I think this year they had much better weather. When we were there, it was just cyclonic, the, the wind and the rain, and it was won by a local Irish player. This year it was, uh, [00:35:00] and sunny and the Americans prevailed. So, um, that, that was interesting. But, um, the other thing we did this week was after watching the offer, Jenny wanted to go back and watch The Godfather.

So we did that, um, which was great. She hadn’t seen it in since it came out and, I hadn’t seen it for a

Cameron: What?

Tony Kynaston: Yeah,

Cameron: She hadn’t seen it since 1972. Wow. Chrissy and I kind of watch it at least once a year.

Tony Kynaston: We don’t do that. Um, uh, it was great to watch the offer and then go back and watch the, the Godfather and just get blown away by it again. And, um, and knowing some of the backstory on how it was created and, uh, really came away with the feeling of it being just like every scene is so special and just delivers a, a punchline in every scene set up, usually with a background of something big happening, a waiting, a funeral, and then tight, [00:36:00] you know, tight into a couple of protagonists and then punchline every scene, which was really, really quality filmmaking.

Cameron: Yeah. And like it just holds up so well, it’s so beautifully shot. The performances are so great. The story’s so great. Um, and the second one, you know, arguably even better, the part two with, uh, cutting backwards and forwards.

Tony Kynaston: our, next. Next, uh, watching this week. Hopefully to get to that,

Cameron: Yeah. Well thank, thank God for Bob Evans who saved it on the cutting room floor as we joked about last week. Yeah, no, just every time, like I never get tired of watching The Godfather. It’s just such, such a masterpiece. My only complaint over the years has always been Jimmy Khan, James Kearn as Tino, not Italian.

Doesn’t look at all Italian.

Tony Kynaston: Ann was the, was the pick to play Sonny and that was the compromise. [00:37:00] I said, we’ll keep him in, but we’ll make, uh, we’ll give it to Al Pacino, but we’ll keep James Carney in.

Cameron: yeah. Like he just does not fit with the rest of the cast at all. Um, but you know,

Tony Kynaston: Impressive. I mean, he’s physically

Cameron: yeah,

Tony Kynaston: Plays the part really well. It’s a great part, but yeah, it doesn’t look like he’s part of the family.

Cameron: he, he can do anger very well and you know, throws, goes off his rocker and all that kinda stuff. It’s great. Uh. Don’t want my brother coming out of the stalls with his, just his dick in his hand. Great line. Um, yeah. Anyway. Very good Godfather. Well, I haven’t really watched anything to speak of, was watching a bit of John Wick two last night.

Um, still just appreciating John Wick was doing, doing knife defense at kung fu this morning with my sifu and he was like, you know, you get stabbed and that’s it. It’s all over. And I was [00:38:00] like, I saw John Wick get stabbed and he went on and fought 500 guys. I saw him get, get shot. In the abdomen and then ran at full speed for hours and hours through, uh, CCOs and took out a bunch of guys.

Was doing, doing kung fu on people after getting shot in the belly. Uh, either being shot or stabbed in the belly isn’t as bad as you’re making it out, or I shouldn’t believe everything I see in a John Wick film either way

Tony Kynaston: That’s

Cameron: Anyway.

Tony Kynaston: comment we made about the Godfather with the Coone guys take, can take all the bullets, like you see the, you see Don Coone being shot and he gets shot about five or six times and he falls on the car and rolls over and lives, you see, um, being shot at the toll booth and he’s like machine gun, but he still gets outta the car and stands up and he gets machine gunned again and he Yeah. Takes about 30 bullets to kill him.

Cameron: Yeah, all the [00:39:00] squibbs going off. It was crazy. Um, but then, yeah, I’ve been reading this book on Robert Maxwell and it’s fascinating. Like I had no idea. I mean, I kind of, you know, I remember who he hearing about Robert Maxwell in the news in the eighties and when he died and that kind stuff. Never really paid that much attention to him.

Knew he had a great rivalry with Rupert. See, um, Trump has sued Rupert for $10 billion or $20 billion or something now. So he’s suing Rupert, who owns the Wall Street Journal, but also owns Fox News, which is sort of his number one fan base. And then there was a story that JD Vance went and spent a couple of hours with Rupert and Lachlan a month or so ago.

And then that’s followed by the Wall Street Journal article about Trump’s birthday picture drawing for Epstein and the suing. Like, [00:40:00] what’s going on? You know, how does Trump think this is gonna play out if he’s suing the guy that owns Fox News?

Tony Kynaston: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Cameron: to, it’s hard to figure out how much is performative theater?

How much is real?

Tony Kynaston: oh, I think Trump’s lashing out to try and stop the Epstein files from coming out, but I don’t know what, what it, what’s in it for Rupert to prosecute It

Cameron: Well, the, the word on the street has always been the Rupert completely loathes Donald Trump, like as everyone pretty much does, including his own administration, I think. But um, yeah, I don’t know, man. It’s fascinating. But anyway, the Robert Maxwell thing, Maxwell’s story is fascinating.

Tony Kynaston: that, did you

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: Colberts being, um, canceled

Cameron: Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: and,

Cameron: And the, the theories behind that,

Tony Kynaston: yeah. Yeah.

Cameron: I read Nate Silva did a big post on [00:41:00] it today.

Did you see that?

Tony Kynaston: No, I don’t fall on eight silver.

Cameron: He did a big analysis on it and talked about all the different theories and, you know, there’s no doubt that late night shows and the, the big television networks are doing it tough. The economics of all of that is hard to justify these days with the fragmentation of attention towards TikTok and streaming and all that kind of stuff.

Um, whether or not it was just, uh, a political hot potato after Colbert called Paramount’s payoff to Trump to get outta the court case over 60 minutes, a big fat bribe. And they just decided, you know what? This is, we don’t need you anymore. We’ll get rid of you because Larry Ellison’s son wants to take over Paramount needs, Trump’s approval, et cetera, et cetera.

I dunno, interesting how all these [00:42:00] big media companies and big law firms are, uh, paying off Trump. As Colbert said, it just looks a bribe.

Tony Kynaston: so-called,

Cameron: It’s a shakedown.

Tony Kynaston: independent, organizations.

Cameron: Mm. Mm-hmm. Anyway, back to Robert Maxwell. He was born in this little town in the middle of nowhere in, uh, Czechoslovakia, sort of on the border of Czechoslovakia and all the other countries around there.

Born to a poor family of nine kids. When he was 16, he left home and, uh, went and joined.

Tony Kynaston: was that called the Maxwell House?

Cameron: Well, funny you should mention that. So his name is not Robert Maxwell? No. His name is like Jan Yarn Cock or something. Changed his name three or four times during World War ii. Settled on Robert Maxwell and [00:43:00] then later on when he started building his empire in the United Kingdom in London, he did buy a building and called it Maxwell House.

Uh,

Tony Kynaston: Was there a

Cameron: but.

Tony Kynaston: like a big spoon coming out of the roof?

Cameron: I think he, I think he got sued or they had some trademark issue with the coffee brand in the, in the United States. But anyway, born with, in this poor family, nine kids, he goes off joins World War ii, goes off and later finds out that his entire family got killed by the Nazis. His mother, all of his siblings, except two sisters survived.

They got gassed at Auschwitz. Um, his father got shot by the Nazis. Um, so he’s a Jew, right? Um, they all got exterminated. And, but he, he ends up sort of becoming part of military intelligence, uh, in World War ii, working for the British [00:44:00] and changes his name and adopts a British accent and takes on the persona of a, he’s a bit like Don Draper and madman.

He just takes on madman, takes on. This persona of this British upper class gentleman ends up getting funded by MI six to buy a. Uh, the, the rights to a scientific publishing business outta Germany that was trying to figure out what to do with all of its scientific literature that it hadn’t been able to, uh, export or sell globally during the war.

So he buys all of these books, but it’s funded by MI six. So the big question at the moment with the Epstein stuff, which you probably have seen is whether or not Epstein was a, Mossad was working for Mossad and the CIA and how the line from him goes through Ghislaine Maxwell to her father, who it seems was a [00:45:00] Mossad agent, or was Mossad adjunct or something.

I’m still trying to get to the part of the book where they talk about that, but he did seem to be, his early entrepreneurial activities were funded by MI six. And, uh, he, when he died under mysterious circumstances, falling off his yacht, just after he’d taken over a big New York tabloid, that’s a great story.

So he took over this tabloid in New York in 1991 that was about to go outta business. He took it over and then made the managing editor of the newspaper, Paul Rupert Murdoch, and just to tell him, Robert Maxwell has just bought this paper. That was the phone call. So he calls Rupert, Rupert was in Australia at the time, apparently calls Rupert in the middle of the night.

Rupert answers the phone. He goes, yes. He goes, oh, it’s John Hoge from the Daily, the [00:46:00] Daily World, or whatever it was. Robert Maxwell wants me to tell you. That he just bought this paper in New York. ’cause of course Rupert owned the New York Post at the time. He said Rupert just burst out laughing and said, tell him that’s fantastic.

And I

Tony Kynaston: Uh,

Cameron: just, the, uh, the rivalry between the two was great. Anyway, so when he died, there was this massive state funeral for him in Israel,

Tony Kynaston: I.

Cameron: attended by Prime Ministers and the former heads of all of the intelligence services and uh, all this kinda stuff. So he was beloved by Israel for some reason. Anyway.

So his whole family died then. He had nine kids of his own and two of them died very young. Um, one from I know encephalitis and one from a car accident. His eldest son got brain damaged in a car accident, [00:47:00] survived for like another 10 or 12 years, but was a vegetable and to a lot of tragedy, a lot of tragedy in his life, but, uh, managed to somehow turn himself into this media barren.

And, and by the sounds of it, kind of one of those sort of psychopathic dudes who just treated everybody around him like. Shit. And, you know, yelled and screamed and abused his way. It could be extremely charming and flattering, but also extremely volatile and abusive. And when he took over the, uh, newspaper in New York in 1991, they were talking about how the, uh, security staff welcomed him to the building.

And the first thing he did was fire all of the security staff because he wanted to replace them with his own security staff. So he just walked in and got rid of everybody, got rid of all of the staff in the paper, et cetera, et cetera, firing people left, right, and center [00:48:00] on day one. Anyway, we’ll see how that goes.

That’s about it. Tony,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron: I got for you.

Tony Kynaston: Widow.

Cameron: to a lot of the Go-Betweens too. A lot of the Go-Betweens this week. Watched a good documentary on YouTube, on the Go-Betweens

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: the 16 Lovers Lane album, which was fun.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah, I’ll look it up.

Cameron: Hmm.

Tony Kynaston: watched that, uh, Tarantino clip on Dirty Harry too. That was great fun.

Cameron: It is great, wasn’t it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tony Kynaston: good.

Cameron: Okay.

Tony Kynaston: All right.

 

Cameron: All right. Talk to you next time. Thanks, Tony.

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