We Press the Button on KODK – QAV America #45

QAV AMERICA 45 Club

Cameron Reilly: [00:00:00] Welcome to QAV America, Tony, episode 45, recording this on the 24th of March, 2026. The Run, not a War, is in its fourth week.

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: My, my Iranian friend from Kung fu, uh, before this all started, we knew it was coming. I said, what, how long do you think it will hap it’ll take when, when it starts. He goes two days.

Be over in two days. Regime will collapse. IRGC will collapse. Like two days. Yeah, two days. And we got to about day three, I said, how he goes, two weeks, it’ll be over in two weeks. By the end of the two weeks. I said, how long? He goes, four weeks. Four weeks. It’ll all be, it’ll all be done. So I said to him the other day, if we get into week five, you owe me a thousand bucks.

He goes, yeah, yeah. Four weeks. It’ll all be done. It’ll all be over. I said, I don’t know, man. I don’t know.

Tony Kynaston: we’ve just passed the 48 hour deadline before the, uh,

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, yeah.

Tony Kynaston: be eliminated from Iran, [00:01:00] and

Cameron Reilly: Mm

Tony Kynaston: KO event, hasn’t it?

Cameron Reilly: mm Well, as I said to you in the last show, I think he’s just buying time to get troops in position so they can land on island, do whatever else they’re gonna do. At the same time, probably massive parallel. Bombing campaign of the mainland while they try and get troops on Har Island, but, um, or wipe out Har Island.

I don’t know what his idea is. Who knows?

Tony Kynaston: Yeah. I am not sure if Har Islands a destination. It could be, but it’s, it’s also possible they’re gonna go after the drone, the drone sites or drone manufacturers with boots on the ground. So who knows? And look, you know, it’s, um. A lot of people are suffering through this, so

Cameron Reilly: Hmm.

Tony Kynaston: gotta shout out to anybody out there who is where, um, I’m thinking of you anyway, hopefully you get

Cameron Reilly: Well my Iranian friends are all for it. You know, they, they think it’s the, it’s fantastic what’s going on. ’cause they wanted to see the end of the [00:02:00] regime and they figured this is the only way it would happen is through some sort of foreign intervention. But I’m always like, y you know, it’s never worked.

Foreign re regime change never works out well. And if. It was gonna work out well. You don’t want Netanyahu and Trump being the guys that are orchestrating, it’s like the worst possible scenario, uh, these two clowns, uh, trying to run it. But anyway, here’s what it is.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah. Well, and, and also too, the Wall Street Journal was reporting today that uh, a lot of the dissidents who’d been rounded up and put in prison who would lead regime change were almost bombed, um, recently. So that’s not a good way to get regime change. It’s to bomb all the people who were in mon bla who could do it.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, and guys like the, uh, the foreign minister Lani, um, who was, they thought was [00:03:00] gonna be the reasonable, moderate, you know, relatively moderate guy. They killed him. So that’s not gonna happen. Anyway, back to investing. So it’s obviously been another turbulent week in the markets. The oil price has gone through the roof, came back a little bit yesterday.

Where? Or last night? Our time when Trump said that he’d decided the 48 hour timeline. Wasn’t that Mabb hard of a timeline after all, but then when I checked the price an hour or so ago, it,

Tony Kynaston: negotiations and the Iranian said what?

Cameron Reilly: yeah. Yeah. Well there are different stories coming out of Iran today. Some say there’s no discussions, some say there are discussions sort of happening, three or four steps removed. I think the US is talking to Turkey, turkey’s, talking to Iran, something like that. It’s uh, impossible to know what the truth is.

[00:04:00] There’s lies and propaganda. Well, no one really knows. Um, what’s happening to the Ayatollah Kama Khomeini? Uh, I’ve heard that he’s in a coma. I’ve heard that he’s injured, but it’s not threat life threatening that he’s conscious. He’s just in a bunker. I’ve, there’s all sorts of different stories coming out of Iran.

No one really knows again.

Tony Kynaston: Fog of war.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah,

Tony Kynaston: Mm.

Cameron Reilly: again, what we do know is that, uh, over the course of the last week, the s and p is down. All the indexes are down. Uh, recovered a little bit in the last 24 hours, but we’re not back to where we were a week ago. And our portfolio, um, our American portfolios, surprisingly not doing too badly actually.

Uh, all things considered our US dummy portfolio, the one that’s been running for a couple of years is down about eight. Percent over the last 30 days [00:05:00] versus the s and p 500, which is down about 5%. But if I take the last, uh, year to date, we’re actually still up 17% versus the s and p down 4%. So, you know, relatively speaking, we’re doing all right.

If I take all time, we’re up 92% versus the s and p up 48%. That’s going back to September 23. So doing all right, the light portfolio, which I only started the American Light portfolio, I started just before Christmas, a week before Christmas, all time. Well, since then, it’s down 0.25% versus the s and p down 4.3%.

So. It’s not, it’s not doing great, but it’s not doing as bad as the index at this stage. And surprisingly, in the last 30 days, the light portfolio is actually up 2.3% versus the s and p [00:06:00] down 4% because we’ve added a number of oil stocks to it in the last month, like Cord Energy, eco Petrol, and Murphy Oil, which are all doing quite well.

Uh

Tony Kynaston: I guess two comments on that, Kim, if I can. But in, um, the, the first thing is oil could turn around again tomorrow, so those oil

Cameron Reilly: Turned down,

Tony Kynaston: turn down again. Sorry, those oil stocks might be sales, you know. the other point I wanted to make, and probably the more important one is we don’t know what’s happening with the oil price.

We’re not to favor one sector over another. It just happens. We look back in a couple of months or we look back now after a month and say, Hey, we have a lot of all stocks, and weren’t we lucky?

Cameron Reilly: hmm.

Tony Kynaston: like that, that’s happened to me all the time. E

Cameron Reilly: Mm

Tony Kynaston: since I’ve been an investor. Last year it was gold stocks.

Cameron Reilly: mm

Tony Kynaston: we, we don’t know in advance which sector’s gonna be favored. It’s just that we find things to buy in a particular sector [00:07:00] and then we turn around and say, Hey, weren’t we lucky to have those stocks in the portfolio?

Cameron Reilly: mm Well, you know, if we look back over the last couple of years I’ve been running the US portfolio, we know we had a lot of shipping companies and financial services companies that we were adding for a while there who have all done very, very well, even though some of them have come back a lot in the last, uh, couple of months, still have had tremendous performance in over international ENVA, which is an online financial services company, is up 130% since we added it.

Euro CSEA is up 136%. They’re in the shipping business, obviously with a name like that. Uh, Willis Lee’s Finance Company, uh, not surprisingly, is a finance company. Commercial aircraft and aircraft engines is what they’re mainly involved in. Financing. They’re up still 270% even though they’ve come [00:08:00] back a long way in the last uh, month, they’re still up nearly 300%.

So yeah, these were different sectors that our system put us into when these stocks were under value, and we were talking about this on the Australian show, um, when markets are volatile like this, relatively new investors might think the sky is falling and they become chicken little and they panic. But I’ve been doing this show with you now for six or seven years, and I think this is the fourth crisis I’ve seen.

In that period of time, you’ve been investing for 35 years and you’ve seen what you say every couple of years, every two years there’s one, right? Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: So they’re not, so each crisis is unique in its own way, but then, but the crisis is not unique.

Cameron Reilly: Yes.

Tony Kynaston: Hmm.

Cameron Reilly: And as I’ve learned by doing this over the last seven years, what a crisis means is [00:09:00] stocks good companies, companies that generally perform well, even though they might stumble during a financial crisis for one reason or another, end up cheap. And then they turn up on our buy list and we buy them because we buy when our system tells us to buy, regardless of what’s happening in the market or where, how, what the general level of panic is or is not.

And we tend to then buy things when they’re cheap. And then when the market relaxes, its sphincter and uh, starts. Going through, uh, greed, a greed phase, everything goes up and we ride that up and, uh, we, we end up outperforming the market again. And then, you know, we’ve got buffer that we ride down a little bit when the market crashes and then you rinse and repeat, right?

Tony Kynaston: Yep.

Cameron Reilly: It’s fairly simple, but it’s only, I think after you’ve survived a couple of these that you go, oh, okay, [00:10:00] this is normal. Crisis is normal.

Tony Kynaston: I can step back and look at this at the sort of slightly higher level. Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah,

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: yeah. This is, this is like I’ve talked about on shows before. This is like, winter follows summer, you know, winter doesn’t come and you don’t panic and go, that’s it. We’re gonna be dark and cold forever. You go, okay, this will last for a few months and then we’ll be back to spring and summer again and they’ll be buying opportunities at the end of winter.

So just, uh, put your, put your jumper on. Light a fire, get your pipe out some port and ride it out. Right. Just wait, be patient. Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? And here I am sitting in Brisbane where it’s autumn, where at the end of the first month of autumn, and it’s still insanely hot and humid here and rainy and crazy.

Tony Kynaston: Brisbane’s like, uh, Brisbane’s, like Florida for our US listeners

Cameron Reilly: Yes. Without all the crazy,

Tony Kynaston: [00:11:00] Well, there’s plenty of crazy people in Queensland, but

Cameron Reilly: yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about, uh, Pauline Hanson. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Tony. Let’s jump into my deep dive for the week. Uh, for people that are new listeners, what we do on this show each week is I look at our buy list for the week and I pick a stock that’s up near the top of our buy list, something that we haven’t seen before or haven’t talked about before.

And I do a bit of a drill down into it, a deep dive of what we call a pulled pork for reasons that are beyond me. It’s an historical thing that we came up with years ago. I can’t remember what it was.

Tony Kynaston: As a pull apart.

Cameron Reilly: A pull apart. That’s right. It was a pull apart. Became a pulled pork. This week, Tony, for my pulled pork, I am doing Eastman Kodak, a very old, very famous brand that today has very little to do with what people think it does,

Tony Kynaston: Hmm.

Cameron Reilly: [00:12:00] that’s what makes it interesting.

Um. Un unfortunately, or fortunately, it’s not one of those stocks that I’m used to doing where there’s like lots of deaths on their doorstep. I don’t know, it’s, it, there’s not a lot of, uh, manslaughter charges or there is a little bit of environmental damage that they’re responsible for, but

Tony Kynaston: the death of an industry.

Cameron Reilly: the death of an industry.

Yes. Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: Eastman through tragic

Cameron Reilly: here’s a question for you. What is the relationship between Linda Eastman slash McCartney and Eastman Kodak?

Tony Kynaston: Wasn’t she the, or? She’s the daughter of one of the Eastmans. Um, not sure if it was the Eastman that founded it, or the great grandfather was the founder, but yeah, that’s the li lineage.

Cameron Reilly: In fact, none of that is true. You fail, uh, you go to the bottom of the class, [00:13:00] her father.

Tony Kynaston: I can heckle from the bottom of the class. Great.

Cameron Reilly: Her father, a prominent entertainment lawyer named Lee Eastman was actually born Leopold Vale, Epstein, and changed the family name to Eastman before Linda was born.

Tony Kynaston: Oh, that’s a rumor, isn’t it? I always thought it was true.

Cameron Reilly: It is a rumor that she occasionally encouraged early in her career as a photographer.

Tony Kynaston: gonna say, she carried a camera around, didn’t she? Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: Well, she was a photographer and she was like, yeah, yeah, Eastman.

Yeah. Yeah, Kodak. Sure. Uh, later on in life, she admitted that she had no relation whatsoever because that I thought that was true and I looked it up and Yeah. Not true.

Tony Kynaston: So I should change my family name to Van Gogh. So Alex gets a leg up in the, in the

Cameron Reilly: No Buffet. Change it to Buffet. Yeah. Yeah. Buffet. Yeah. Me and Warren. Sure, sure. So the company. That invented digital [00:14:00] photography but didn’t know what to do with it. And I had to say like on the surface of it, when I first came across this in our buy list, and it was at the top of our buy list, our American buy list this week, I should say, it looks like a classic value stock to me.

You know, company that used to be riding high had to reinvent itself,

Tony Kynaston: It’s

Cameron Reilly: still making money, but uh, doesn’t have the brand that it once had, but it, so it’s not sexy at all. It’s best days along gone, but it still makes money and it’s doing some interesting things. So obviously those of us of a certain age, you think Kodak, you think little yellow boxes, envelopes that took a week to be ready and then you’d find out that most of them were blurry or you’d cut the head off and all of that kinda stuff.

Tony Kynaston: to pay for them. Yep.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. I dunno if the kids of today have any sort of [00:15:00] connection with the Kodak brand whatsoever. Um, anyone under the age of 40, I don’t know. But

Tony Kynaston: Well,

Cameron Reilly: for us it was a big deal

Tony Kynaston: yeah. And Jenny’s first job out of university was working at Kodak in Coberg in Melbourne.

Cameron Reilly: really in like

Tony Kynaston: A factory. Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: in the finance department. Was she like,

Tony Kynaston: in fact.

Cameron Reilly: right.

Tony Kynaston: Hmm.

Cameron Reilly: There you go. Well, these days they’re basically a chemical company, commercial print tech, and somewhat controversially pharmaceutical ingredients, which we’ll get into.

Tony Kynaston: involved in print, in photographs.

Cameron Reilly: Hmm. And it was a Donald Trump idea that they get into pharmaceuticals

Tony Kynaston: Good. That’s great.

Cameron Reilly: and a little bit of insider trading involved in the process. That’s the only real scandal we’ve got here.

Tony Kynaston: that goes with, that goes with the turf, doesn’t it really?

Cameron Reilly: It does, doesn’t it? With the grifter in chief. It’s been a bit of a difficult transition for them along the way. They went bankrupt in [00:16:00] 2012, wiped out their legacy shareholders, a lot of downsizing Today.

They’re led by CEO James Conza. Not to be confused with George Costanza and all my notes, I kept just writing Costanza Can’t stand you. Uh, he’s a restructuring, restructuring specialist who actually had joined the board before they went bankrupt

Tony Kynaston: Right.

Cameron Reilly: and, uh, helped them navigate that period and then ended up as the CEO.

And he’s spent the last five years turning them around. He is implementing what he calls the one Kodak strategy, which is basically eliminating corporate silos of which you could well imagine with 140 odd year old company they had. Quite a few. He’s been paying down debt, monetizing their huge patent portfolio

Tony Kynaston: mm.

Cameron Reilly: their real estate holdings.

So [00:17:00] he’s been stripping it down and figuring out what assets they have that can actually be made a little bit more profit. He’s doing a good and g go really? He’s like stripping it back and, um, figuring out what are its undervalued assets, you know?

Tony Kynaston: you read about the pension fund as part of that

Cameron Reilly: I did, it’s the last part of this story. Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: it then.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Which is a brilliant story.

It’s, yeah, it sounds really impressive. Anyway, let’s do the origin, uh, ’cause this is the fun bit, really. So founded in 1880 by George Eastman. No relation to Linda McCartney

Tony Kynaston: All the Epstein’s.

Cameron Reilly: as a partnership between George Eastman and Henry. A strong Eastman was, uh. A camera buff cameras were around before Kodak, but he, he was interested in it.

They started making plates, but ended up making [00:18:00] invented film, uh, cameras. And then they became, obviously one of the world’s largest film and camera manufacturers, and also developed a model of welfare capitalism built around the city of Rochester, New York, which I nearly moved to in 1998 when I was part of Microsoft.

I got a job offer

Tony Kynaston: Hmm.

Cameron Reilly: to be part of the Microsoft office in Rochester. Um, didn’t end up taking it, but, uh, yeah, I, I’ve always wondered what my life would’ve been like if I’d

Tony Kynaston: Yeah,

Cameron Reilly: to Rochester, New York. They, the company was so influential that the Kodak moment tagline ended up in the dictionary. For kids of a certain age that, dunno what that means.

Sort of a moment to be recorded for posterity. Everyone, you’d go, oh, that’s a Kodak moment. You know?

Tony Kynaston: Oh, okay. I thought you were looking at what the dictionary was.

Cameron Reilly: Yes. If you dunno what a dictionary is, we have bigger problems. [00:19:00] Um, they began to struggle financially in the late 1990s as a result, initially of just increasing competition, mostly from Fuji film. They really, they dominated the film space for a long, long time. And then they started to get some competitors, but then they developed the first self-contained digital camera prototype in the mid 1970s.

Tony Kynaston: Wow.

Cameron Reilly: was a guy who, a guy, one of one of their research guys there, who was convinced that digital photography was gonna be the future. They did a lot of work in that area, but then didn’t. Didn’t run with it soon enough. They did run with it eventually, but uh, weren’t able to execute on it and it was just too hard to lock it down.

Uh, there was too much competition. They continued to provide commercial, digital printing, uh, products and services, motion, picture, film, and even still film, [00:20:00] which still exists today, somewhat surprisingly. There is still, they spun it off a, a few years ago to a company called Kodak Alaris, which I think is owned by a private equity firm now it’s based outta the uk, but they still make Kodak film.

You can still buy Kodak film, put it in your retro Kodak film camera and, and get it, uh, developed. There are still people that are into that kind of thing. Actually, that reminds me of that film I told you about a few weeks ago. The, um. Japanese film. There’s a Vim Vens film, but in Japan,

Tony Kynaston: The

Cameron Reilly: main,

Tony Kynaston: toilet cleaner.

Cameron Reilly: yeah, the toilet cleaner.

I can’t remember what the name of the film is now, but that character, uh, that’s what he does. One, one, uh, each week he has a roll of film and he’s got an old time camera Instamatic or something, and he just sits and he takes photos mostly of trees, takes photos of trees or of people, and then [00:21:00] he goes in and he gets it developed, and he waits a week.

It’s part of the whole slow living thing that he does. He reads one book a week. He, he uses one roll of film a week. His, his life is built around simplicity. Yeah. Yeah. But it’s kind of enticing, I’m not gonna lie. Like this whole idea of just limit yourself to, huh.

Tony Kynaston: would be, you’d be bored.

Cameron Reilly: I know you’re like, I’m reading 20 books at one time.

You know, I’m like, I read five books at night. I don’t know if you’re like that, but I’ll lie in bed at night and I’ll read, you know, um, Frederick Forsyth for half an hour, and then I’ll go, okay, I, I need something else now. So then I’ll open up a history book or a science book, or I have to flip between.

Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah. I think we’ve been conditioned by social media because I’m, I’m the same. I like, I’ve got about, I don’t know, uh, 10 books sitting beside my armchair,

Cameron Reilly: Mm-hmm.

Tony Kynaston: I’ll go, okay. I’ll start to read this one. And if I doesn’t [00:22:00] take after a, you know, a couple of pages, I’ll put it down and try the next one. And eventually one will take, and I’ll read a chapter or two, and then I’ll get bored with that.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Well, I’m reading them concurrently because my brain needs bit of this stimulation, bit of that stimulation, bit of this I need to need, I need, I need all of the, all of the slots filled before I feel good at night.

Tony Kynaston: should, we should write an app to like, do that for books, TikTok for books,

Cameron Reilly: Just like give you a page and then you flip to another page and you flip to another page. Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: on your reading habits,

Cameron Reilly: Uhhuh.

Tony Kynaston: we think you’ll need this

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Here’s what you,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: here’s what you need to feel okay about yourself, because I’m like, I’m enjoying the Dessa file, but then part of my brain is going, okay, you’re learning a little bit about concentration camps and rat lines, but you already know that ’cause you’ve covered it in your history podcasts.

You haven’t read any science today. What are you doing? Well, you’re wasting your life. You need to, you need to read a little bit about [00:23:00] quantum, quantum mechanics. Just stop doing.

Tony Kynaston: for? It’s a great app. TikTok for TikTok for books.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. You know how many of us read books?

Tony Kynaston: your

Cameron Reilly: It’s like you,

Tony Kynaston: like,

Cameron Reilly: you and me are the only people that read books anymore. Tony and the entire planet.

Tony Kynaston: true.

Cameron Reilly: Tamino was telling me the other day that he’s writing another book, and I go, why? No one reads apart from us? He reads and he said, yeah, you don’t get it. It’s not about people reading it.

The writing of the book forces me to think about things. I, yeah, it was like when we did the psychopath epidemic,

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: you know, it, it was the writing of it. That was the interesting bit. Um, you know, I had to think through the model to write it. Um, the fact that no one read. It’s disappointing, but that’s,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah. But it’s like it,

Cameron Reilly: no one reads,

Tony Kynaston: with me. I think it was in a, in med school that I had a girlfriend who was in med school.

Cameron Reilly: I thought you were gonna say you did med schoolers. I go, what?

Tony Kynaston: I used to go up to anatomy classes. But, [00:24:00] um, they had a, a philosophy, I think it was something like, learn one, teach one, do one.

Cameron Reilly: Right.

Tony Kynaston: So you’d, you know, you’d learn about a disease, you treat, teach about the disease, and then you’d have to go and

Cameron Reilly: Then you go catch the disease and, and see what it was like

Tony Kynaston: But it’s like, that’s the epitome of learning, isn’t it, of education.

Cameron Reilly: you just turned up to anatomy classes. Uh, I bet you did. Yeah. Female anatomy just did, they were the classes,

Tony Kynaston: on the slab.

Cameron Reilly: right. Female cadaver.

Tony Kynaston: There was, it was a mixture.

Cameron Reilly: Sure.

Tony Kynaston: There were,

Cameron Reilly: Anyway, back to Kodak. Stop distracting me.

Tony Kynaston: it’s formaldehyde,

Cameron Reilly: Oh, yeah.

Tony Kynaston: bodies. Yeah. It’s like, um, you know how if you put chicken in the fridge after you’ve, um, cooked it

Cameron Reilly: Mm-hmm.

Tony Kynaston: day, it’s got

Cameron Reilly: Mm-hmm.

Tony Kynaston: to it.

Cameron Reilly: Hmm.

Tony Kynaston: hungry, but that’s, that’s what it reminded me of, sort of brown crinkly skin and, uh, yeah. [00:25:00] Old flesh.

Cameron Reilly: Wow. You’re creeping me out now. So. Kodak Alaris. Then, as I said, they started producing pharmaceuticals during COVID, but we’ll get into that. The name Kodak. Tony, you wanna take a guess at what it means,

Tony Kynaston: don’t

Cameron Reilly: it comes from?

Tony Kynaston: is, were they like really big Kelly surveillance fans?

Cameron Reilly: Hey, we’ll just take Kojack and we’ll just change your letter.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: Well, the other way around.

Tony Kynaston: They tried to call it Kojak, but they got copyrighted.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. In 1880. Yeah. Um, Kodak Elli Vals came back from the future and threatened them with a lawsuit.

Tony Kynaston: Rockwell.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: The name means absolutely nothing. It was invented by George Eastman using an anagram set, like a Scrabble set.

Tony Kynaston: like Linda Eastman.

Cameron Reilly: Like Linda Eastman invented her relationship. Yeah, apparently he liked the letter K. He thought there was [00:26:00] something about the letter.

He thought there was something about the letter K that was distinctive. It cut through, it was sharp, and so he was mucking around with the Scrabble board letters and he came up with Kodak. The company was actually originally called the Eastman Dry Plate Company, was founded on January 1st, 1881 with Strong as President and Eastman as treasurer Strong.

Henry Strong. His partner was previously running his family’s buggy whip manufacturing company

Tony Kynaston: Warren Buffet always warns about buying buggy whip companies,

Cameron Reilly: because no one has a buggy anymore.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah,

Tony Kynaston: he, when he talks about value investing, don’t get caught with the buggy whip company,

Cameron Reilly: right.

Tony Kynaston: which

Cameron Reilly: Well, I think.

Tony Kynaston: He, Kodak was what he was talking about.

Cameron Reilly: Right. Well, I think Strong was smart enough to realize, you know, buggy whips are on their way out. This, this camera thing might be the future. [00:27:00] It was like the high tech startup of 1880. So the company initially sold dry plates for those old timey cameras. But then Eastman started thinking about replacing the plates with a new roll film process.

In 1885, he patented the first practical film roll holder with a guy called William Walker, which would allow dry plate cameras to store multiple exposures in a camera. Simultaneously that same year he, Peyton did a form of paper film. He called American Film. Then he hired a chemist, Henry Ricken bark to improve the film.

He went on to invent Paul McCartney’s bass guitar just to. Close the loop on the McCartneys.

Tony Kynaston: they named the falls after him in, uh, in, uh, Holmes. The Uck Falls

Cameron Reilly: Oh, I don’t remember that one.

Tony Kynaston: [00:28:00] Holmes goes over to Uck. Falls with Moriarty. Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: Oh, okay. Right. It’s like in the TV series when they went over the building, went off the rooftop. Yeah. Right. Um, and then

Tony Kynaston: that was

Cameron Reilly: that

Tony Kynaston: not the TV show. It was in the book. You have to

Cameron Reilly: In the book. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: yeah. Then that culminated in the 1889 patent for Nitrocellulose film. Then in 1888, the Kodak camera was patented by Eastman.

It was a box camera with a fixed focused lens on the front and no, no viewfinder. It had two V-shaped silhouettes at the top that aided in aiming in the direction of the subject. It had a rotating key to advance the film, a pull string to set the shutter and a button on the side to release it, which exposed the celluloid film.

Inside. It had a rotating bar to operate the shutter. When the user [00:29:00] pressed the button to take a photograph and in a rope was tightened, and the exposure began. Once the photograph had been taken, the user had to rotate the upper key to change the selected frame within the celluloid tape.

Tony Kynaston: That really is high tech for the. Isn’t it? It’s

Cameron Reilly: It’s incredible.

Like the amount of thinking that had to go into that to figure it out sort of reminds me a little bit of the printing press when I, I did a whole series on Gutenberg coming up with the printing press and like you, I was talking to Chrissy about this this morning. Like you just think about the impact that film cameras had or cameras had on

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: civilization and history and you know, whatever over the last hundred years.

Like it’s a non-trivial, bloody invention and, and component of society.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah. So before the film camera, you wanted to, to capture a scene, you [00:30:00] hired a painter and they spent a day sketching and, and taking, you know, uh, drafts of it and then going away for a month and coming back with your landscape or your portrait or whatever. Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: And if you hired Leonardo da Vinci, good chance he wouldn’t finish it.

Tony Kynaston: right.

Cameron Reilly: I won’t mention anything about my commission for Alex. She, she’s the Da Vinci, you kindest and Da Vinci.

Tony Kynaston: to then.

Cameron Reilly: Da Vinci. Yeah. So then they sold a $25 camera, which came preloaded. You’ll love. This came preloaded with a film roll of a hundred exposures.

When you finished that, you sent the entire camera

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: to Eastman headquarters in Rochester with a $10 fee for processing. They would then process it for you, ’cause people didn’t have dark rooms and whatever to process their [00:31:00] own stuff. They would return the camera with the prints, the negatives, and a new roll of film.

You could also. Uh, get a $2 roll of film. If you’re a prote professional photographer who could develop your own, you can buy ’em for two bucks,

Tony Kynaston: Right.

Cameron Reilly: like pretty amazing full service business model. I dunno how much it would’ve cost you to ship a huge bloody box camera with the film in it to Rochester and get it sent back to you.

Can’t have been easy or trivial, but it was an immediate success and launched a fad of amateur photography. Their advertising slogan, Barry and Stan came up with this. You press the button, we do the rest.

Tony Kynaston: Good.

Cameron Reilly: Fantastic. Like, absolutely killer advertising, killer business model. One stop. We do it all like really, really impressive stuff.

Wanna take a guess at [00:32:00] what year the Brownie camera was marketed to children for the first time?

Tony Kynaston: Ooh. I’m gonna say it’d be like in the 1910s that decade, then 1915 maybe.

Cameron Reilly: I would’ve guessed the 1950s. It was 1900.

Tony Kynaston: Wow.

Cameron Reilly: released a camera for kids.

Tony Kynaston: Wow.

Cameron Reilly: Boggles my mind. So then they basically cornered the market when Thomas Edison and other film producers formed the Motion Picture Peyton’s Company in 1908. Uh, Eastman negotiated for Kodak to be the sole supplier of film to the industry.

So they locked all of that down

Tony Kynaston: It’s a good

Cameron Reilly: and

Tony Kynaston: he?

Cameron Reilly: yeah, really, really impressive, impressive guy.

Tony Kynaston: Hmm.

Cameron Reilly: Um. I mentioned before, they developed this version of welfare capitalism in Rochester. So they built a basically a, a a a village in Rochester. All of the employees lived there. [00:33:00] And during the 1910s and 1920s, it was sort of the vanguard of welfare capitalism.

There was a number of those experiments I’ve read about. Really? Ford was one I didn’t know about that

Tony Kynaston: He, I, I’m thinking

Cameron Reilly: thought he was a

Tony Kynaston: rubber plants in South America. He built a village and provided for the

Cameron Reilly: right,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: right. Well this is in America. There was a number of these sort of, I can’t remember the other one. There was, um, like water, not Waterford, crystal, um, who does the China, uh, the, it’s not Waterford. Wedgewood. I think Wedgewood was one of these guys. So, no, he was British, wasn’t he?

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: there was another company in the US that had one of these sort of welfare capitalism cities where they looked after their employees.

But of course, you know, if you know anything about. Early American capitalism. Employees were treated like animals. It was, you know, basically wage slavery at its worst. Workers had no rights. They were working long hours for [00:34:00] little pay. If they tried to go, there weren’t any unions if they tried to go on strike.

They would call in, um, troops to beat them and shoot them and whatever. They would terrorize them to get back to work. And there was really no laws to stop them from doing that. Most of the businessmen bribed their local senators and congressmen anyway, and it was, it was a very, very brutal time for employees in the early 20th century, which is one of the reasons why socialism was so popular around the world, even in the West in that period because workers were mistreated and they were fighting for, for more rights.

And that was apparently Eastman’s rationale here. He thought, well, he was terrified of labor unions and believed that the way to prevent his workers from unionizing was to look after them. Like, wow, what a concept. Um. So [00:35:00] he offered life insurance, disability benefits, retirement annuity plans for employees, um, profit sharing program for all employees.

In 1912. In 1919, he sold a large portion of his stock in the company to company employees below market value. He was just, uh, way ahead of his time. I mean, really believed that looking after his employees served, the best interest of the company wasn’t doing it. I think because he, maybe he did care about his employees, but he also cared about the success of the business and thought if you pay people well and look after them, they’ll be loyal and they’ll do the right thing.

Right? They’ll work hard.

Tony Kynaston: attract better talent too.

Cameron Reilly: True. So, uh, he also thought that selling stock to employees would make it more appealing to investors because a lot of investors were, uh, wary [00:36:00] about the amount of stock that he controlled. So he was diluting his control over the business and it also lowered the price of the stock, and it would keep antitrust lawyers from investigating the company or that kind of stuff.

Unfortunately, it’s not all good. Um, he refused to hire Catholics, African Americans, and Jews, but like Henry Ford. Um, and, but approximately one third of his employees were women. So a little bit progressive, not, not totally progressive in his thinking at the time, but you know, no one’s perfect.

Tony Kynaston: Unless you’re a black Catholic, then you Buckley.

Cameron Reilly: A black Catholic Jew. Yeah. Then you’re in trouble. 1972. Dr. Roger Van Heen. Which sounds like a name that, uh, Chevy Chase would come up with in a Fletch movie, except that would be Roger Van Heiden. J [00:37:00] Jensen can, he was the director of the physics division in Kodak Research Labs, KRL. He was the guy that was convinced that digital imaging would someday replace photographic film, and he established a small lab where they began investigating the basic processes of metal oxide, semiconductor technology to manufacture charge coupled device image sensors, CCDs, which every iPhone Android phone today has a highly advanced CCD in it for taking photos.

Larry Madison, another employee, wrote a report in 1979 predicting a complete shift to digital photography would occur by 2010. So.

Tony Kynaston: Very

Cameron Reilly: They had guys that could see this coming, but it’s uh, what was Clayton Christensen’s book? The, [00:38:00] um,

Tony Kynaston: is that the, uh, entrepreneur’s dilemma?

Cameron Reilly: the Innovators, innovators Dilemma,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: I think, yeah. When you, when you basically have a company that makes its money from one paradigm, uh, the replacement paradigm is gonna cannibalize that business and corporate culture makes it very difficult to make that transition. And they were also very skeptical the company executives about making the leap because it would require heavy investment for what was at the time, a very limited market

Tony Kynaston: Yep.

Cameron Reilly: and would put the company into direct competition with established firms in the computer hardware industry that they thought could probably build these CCDs

Tony Kynaston: Right.

Cameron Reilly: more economically.

As it turns out, they were right, but, uh, what do you do? Do you just not do it and let the computer industry come and crush you anyway,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: is what happened. But that said, [00:39:00] by 2005, Kodak were number one in the US in digital camera sales, which were running about $5.7 billion a year. At the time. It was a huge space.

So 2005, they were,

Tony Kynaston: I don’t remember Kodak digital cameras being that big

Cameron Reilly: yeah, I do. I remember. I remember surprisingly, they pivoted very early on and just seemed like they had navigated the space very well. Can’t remember what it the camera was called, but it was like. Easy snap or easy pixel or something like that. I think I had one. They were shitty. I mean, I have photos still.

’cause you know, my, my kids were five, um, about the same age as Alex. We had like one of those, I’ve got photos from ’em, they’re like three 50 by three. Like the,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: resolution on them is really small and terrible, but [00:40:00] at the time it was, uh, amazing. Um, but the problem was they had very low profit margins on these things because they had a lot of competition.

In the film business, they had very high profit margins, but it was declining. So they had declining main business, doing very well in another business, but they couldn’t keep their margins. By 2007, they’d fallen from number one to number four in digital camera sales with a 9.6% share. By 2010, they dropped down to a 7% share and were in seventh place behind Cannon, Sony, Nickon, and others.

Tony Kynaston: They’re the ones I re, I remember, so perhaps I was a bit late to wearing digital cameras, but I remember having a Panasonic and a, a Nick on, I think over the years.

Cameron Reilly: Hmm. So all of those Asian companies came out and just, uh, them, so they went bankrupt [00:41:00] and had to reinvent themselves in 2012. But then. On July 28th, 2020, the Trump administration announced that it planned to give Kodak a $765 million loan from the DFC, the Development Finance Corporation part of, uh, a Washington thing for manufacturing ingredients used in pharmaceuticals to rebuild the National stockpile depleted by the COVID pandemic and to reduce dependency on foreign factories.

Tony Kynaston: Why was Kodak involved in that?

Cameron Reilly: Well, he did a deal because they obviously had expertise in chemicals, so it was like, Hey, you guys dunno what to do with yourselves. You got experts in particularly light sensitive chemicals. We need, we need, uh, somebody to build pharmaceutical precursors. Uh, if we give you a 600 and a $765 million loan, can you, you know, [00:42:00] build up a division of the Yeah, sure.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: The story’s even better. So within two days of this announcement, the stock price had gone up by 2189%.

Tony Kynaston: and who owned the stock? Pre and post.

Cameron Reilly: It went from $2 15 to $60 in two days.

Uh, the New York Times reported that one day before the White House announced the loan, Kodak, CEO, Jim Conza was given 1.75 million stock options,

Tony Kynaston: So

Cameron Reilly: of

Tony Kynaston: 60 bucks.

Cameron Reilly: no at $2 15

Tony Kynaston: Right. But yeah. Okay.

Cameron Reilly: strike price.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: That was two days before, no one day before the announcement. He was given 1.75 million stock options,

Tony Kynaston: Lucky him. Lucky Mr. [00:43:00] Costanza.

Cameron Reilly: some of which he was able to execute immediately.

There was a, like a vesting period.

Tony Kynaston: Hmm.

Cameron Reilly: Couldn’t execute all of them, but he could execute some of them. Uh, this news blew up. Elizabeth Warren and people like that discovered this and went nuts over it. The funding was put on hold by the Securities and Exchange Commission. There was, uh, uh, allegations of insider trading by Kodak executives.

Big investigation happened. Conza and other executives had to testify in June of 2021. As part of SEC investigations. There was a class action lawsuit from Kodak. Investors

Tony Kynaston: Why? Why? Because they share price has gone from two bucks, 50 to 60 bucks.

Cameron Reilly: Didn’t stay at 60 bucks, Tony, it fell.

Tony Kynaston: Uh,

Cameron Reilly: Down to $7 where it’s more or less stayed, but still from $2 to $7. Not bad. It’s about $7 [00:44:00] 83 at the moment. Uh, well it was when I did my analysis, but, uh, all of the executives got off scot-free. Tony, uh, class action was dismissed. Um, uh, all the executives walked away from it unscathed, but two guys did not.

A guy called Andrew Stiles and his cousin both pled guilty to insider trading, but neither of them worked for Kodak. Andrew Stiles was the vice president at Flower, P-H-L-O-W, a Richmond, Virginia based medicine supply chain company that was working with Kodak, where he allegedly learned about the loan and tipped off his cousin.

An indictment included coded text messages between them, including where Gray Styles referred to the loan as the film we sent off a few weeks ago to get developed.

Tony Kynaston: The Chinese watch,

Cameron Reilly: Chinese watch [00:45:00] that, uh, brilliant attempt at, uh, coded text messages did not get past the SEC investigators apparently.

Tony Kynaston: You don’t put things in text if you like. These are amateurs. You go and play golf on the golf course. You happen to come across somebody else, you know

Cameron Reilly: Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: front, and you talk about it at the ninth. Green,

Cameron Reilly: Mm-hmm.

Tony Kynaston: from the clubhouse.

Cameron Reilly: This is how you do it. This is how you got rich

Tony Kynaston: No, is

Cameron Reilly: saying.

Tony Kynaston: how,

Cameron Reilly: No.

Tony Kynaston: I just know how it’s done

Cameron Reilly: So anyway, uh, the, all the company executives, uh, were found to be, uh, uh, innocent of insider trading.

Tony Kynaston: except for flow.

Cameron Reilly: Except the guy at Flow and his cousin. Uh, but the reputational damage was pretty bad. Cast appall over the company’s pharmaceutical ambitions. They didn’t get the loan, but they went and did it anyway,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: they have a pharmaceutical division [00:46:00] today.

So the physical heart of the company remains at Eastman Business Park in Rochester. They have 1200 acres and over a hundred buildings. It’s a small city in its own right. Has its own dedicated power plant, wastewater treatment system, 30 miles of private railroad tracks. But Kodak doesn’t operate all of the facilities there.

Now, they sold that off too, to a company called Red Rochester. That that’s all it does is it just runs Eastman Business Park. That’s its business.

Tony Kynaston: George Costanza can’t ride the railroads around the private railway

Cameron Reilly: Sure. He probably can. I’m sure he is. He’s, he’s got like a little gold pass, a Willy Wonka golden ticket.

Tony Kynaston: I’m riding the train. Gary.

Cameron Reilly: The company though, still owns the land and the laboratory space. It leases out the land to dozens of external tenants. Uh, so it’s basically an industrial landlord, but has its [00:47:00] own core manufacturing operations there. I read an interesting interview with Costanza, George Costanza. He, he says, um. The rough outline of how he got Kodak on the right path is relatively simple.

When you are losing money, stop spending so much. If consumers don’t want your products, figure out what they do want and make sure your internal operations are actually running smoothly. Of course, there’s more nuance than that, but the major issue is clear to Conza. On his first day on the job, he spoke to more than a thousand Kodak employees in the company’s theater and asked them to tell him what Kodak did.

Nobody could answer. And as Za dove deeper into the company, he discovered something that Kodak was good at doing, making products nobody wanted. Um, it reminds me of two things when I ran my marketing consulting business, and I’d run workshops for people when I was gonna write a strategy, I’d call a, like a one day workshop.

I’d get all of their team in and the first question [00:48:00] I would always ask them is, tell me what your business does.

Tony Kynaston: Right.

Cameron Reilly: And. No, I’d say, tell me what problem your business solves. The reason every business exists is to solve a problem. Tell me what problem your business solves. And they’d always say, well, we make this widget.

And I go, no, you’re telling me what you make. Tell me what problem you solve. Better than anyone else, faster than anyone else, cheaper than anyone else. What is it you do that has unique value proposition? Well, you know, we are, you know, no, they could never do it. Never. No. Even the CEO, the founder of the company, they could never explain

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: in terms of solving problems.

’cause it’s not how they thought about, usually it was founded by a guy who was a salesman for a company and he had some clients that he’d go and go, well, I can do it. You know, and they’d go into competition, maybe cheaper, maybe whatever. I have the relationships and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. [00:49:00] But the other thing it reminds me of is

Tony Kynaston: benefits.

Cameron Reilly: when.

Steve Jobs took over Apple again after Scully left, and Steve took it over in 1997, I think it was, and he just looked at all the products that they were making, which nobody wanted. He just like, they were doing printers and

Tony Kynaston: Right.

Cameron Reilly: the, the, actually the first tablet, whatever it was called, the, um, Newton. Yeah.

Which was great. I thought the Newton was amazing, but no, it, it didn’t have any sales and he scrapped like 90% of their products day one. Okay, we’re getting rid of all of this. Gone. We’re gonna figure out what people want and we’re gonna make it and we’re gonna sell it to them. Which was the iMac, I think was the first thing he came out with.

Right?

Tony Kynaston: we’re gonna figure it out before they need it.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Yeah. We tell them what they want. Yeah. Um, anyway, finishing this, he says, you have two choices You can turn around and try to survive for 12 years until you run out of money, [00:50:00] because you’re afraid if you spend money, you’ll die sooner, or you invest that money, you may die sooner, but you know the outcome.

At least you have a fighting chance of surviving. I always take the latter. So I like that. I thought

Tony Kynaston: yeah.

Cameron Reilly: guy makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s what he’s been doing. So their operations today is split into three reportable segments. The print segment is the number one revenue driver contributes about 67% of the top line did in 2025.

This is the classic razor and blade model. They manufacture and sell highly complex digital offset plate systems and high speed inkjet presses. The Prosper brand, so this is for commercial printers. I don’t understand much about it, but the razor is apparently the machine and the blades are the recurring sales of aluminum printing plates.

These CTP plates compute a plate, I think CT P stands for.

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: They’ve got their own technology [00:51:00] plus dig,

Tony Kynaston: Right.

Cameron Reilly: special digital links and maintenance services. So 20 FY 2025, they did about $715 million of revenue in. That side of the business. Commercial print. They also have the advanced materials and chemicals, which I’ll get to in a second.

But the, the smallest part of the business is brand. They license the brand. This blew my mind. A major driver is Kodak Apparel. It’s a street wear brand licensed to a South Korean company where they sell like retro Kodak clothing. It’s got the old Kodak thing, and that’s a thing, right? You see people wearing like retro added ass or whatever.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: But, well, I mean, added ass and Coca-Cola are still things really, Kodak’s not really a thing in the way that it used to be a thing, but it’s a thing. They, [00:52:00] they make money out of selling. The brand and it has retro value as of 2025. There are 123 physical Kodak branded retail stores in South Korea selling vintage style clothing bags and accessories.

They’ve expanded into Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan with Kodak branding on it.

Tony Kynaston: Wow. So it’ll eventually it’ll come to us too and to the

Cameron Reilly: It probably already has,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah,

Cameron Reilly: mind boggling to me.

Tony Kynaston: Can you, while we’re talking about that, did you come across in your research why they used red and yellow as their color scheme delivery?

Cameron Reilly: no, I didn’t, didn’t get into that.

Tony Kynaston: I’m always interested in that because it struck me when I was working at Shell, which is red and yellow. There are so many big, successful worldwide companies, which are red and yellow. There’s McDonald’s, there’s Kodak, there’s Shell, and I could never

Cameron Reilly: I.

Tony Kynaston: it out. [00:53:00] I, I know red and yellow are. Very obvious in terms of their, know, like, it’s like yellow and black is this, this colors of hazard. ’cause they’re easiest to see. yeah, I was always wondered why red and yellow works so well.

Cameron Reilly: Well, I read a lot when I was running the marketing business. I read a lot on color theory

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: you know, I can’t remember what red and yellow are, but I think they’re like, um, energetic, vibrant, exciting, those sorts of things. You know, your bank logos are usually a royal blue because it means conservative and, you know, steady.

Yeah. So I, I assume it probably has something to do with that, but I dunno if Eastman knew, knew that when he came up with Kodak,

Tony Kynaston: maybe

Cameron Reilly: the 1880s,

Tony Kynaston: like a red outline around the

Cameron Reilly: right. The QAV logo. Yeah. That might be the thing we’re missing.

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: Um, back to branding, they have. Long term and even perpetual license agreements with a whole bunch of consumer products categories, [00:54:00] eyewear, a perpetual worldwide license with Ellisor Luxottica to use the Kodak brand for its full range of product categories.

Tony Kynaston: Wow.

Cameron Reilly: So Kodak sunglasses, I guess. Um, they have even licensed the name for digital cameras, digital photo frames, portable projectors and speakers. So you’re buying a Kodak digital camera, not made by Kodak, just as the Kodak name on it. It’s like a Trump hotel, right? Um, they even have,

Tony Kynaston: any hotel. I mean, most of them are

Cameron Reilly: yeah, just licensing. Yeah.

The logo appears on flashlights, batteries, solar panels, power generators, and even wall paint.

Tony Kynaston: Wow.

Cameron Reilly: It has,

Tony Kynaston: very clever, isn’t it,

Cameron Reilly: it is.

Tony Kynaston: that, that part of the business. Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: It has legacy brand recognition value. Oh, it’s Kodak. It must be good.

Tony Kynaston: mm

Cameron Reilly: [00:55:00] Crazy. But they only make 23 million, like outta their billion dollars in revenue. $23 million came from brand licensing. So it’s not big.

But you know, I’d take it, maybe that’s what we should license the QAV logo for sunglasses. I think that’s, that’s the next thing we’ll go into.

Tony Kynaston: a great idea.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Or kung fu equipment. Uh, I wear this ’cause I go straight from here to Kung fu, so I wear this to my Kung fu class every week. Maybe I should just start.

Tony Kynaston: anyone ever ask you what it stands for?

Cameron Reilly: Never.

No one has ever asked me what it stands for. I keep waiting

Tony Kynaston: Like,

Cameron Reilly: five years.

Tony Kynaston: and I’m thinking, oh,

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, yeah,

Tony Kynaston: yeah,

Cameron Reilly: yeah. No, no one ever asks. Yeah. Should have a little thing on the bus. Says ask me like, like Amway or, uh, you know, some social, yeah, you, um. Okay, so the advanced materials and chemicals segment is the other one. That’s the profitability and the growth narrative.

So they, they do have deep [00:56:00] legacy knowledge of material sites, specifically light sensitive chemicals and high precision coating processes. The a m and C segment has four distinct lines of business, industrial film, and chemicals, and that’s high-end materials for industrial imaging motion picture.

There’s a surprising resurgence thanks to guys like Tarantino and Scorsese who are pushing for film. So, and Oppenheimer, uh, Christopher Nolan, you mentioned earlier, uh, this show or the last show,

Tony Kynaston: The last show, I think.

Cameron Reilly: they want 70 mil. They wanna shoot everything on 70 mil. Kodak are one of the big providers of that advanced materials and functional printing.

Uh, that’s, uh, electrically conductive inks and sensors for the electronics industry.

Tony Kynaston: Yep.

Cameron Reilly: And IP licensing and analytical services. They have a huge library of chemical and manufacturing patents. They’ve amassed over 140 years, so they’re [00:57:00] making the most outta that. Um, 2025 A and C saw a 17% revenue increase and accounted for the vast majority of the company’s operational profit.

So, uh, yeah, I think if you look at it, um, yeah, about 39 million, uh, of their profit out of 62 came from a m and C last year.

Tony Kynaston: Like, it’s an interesting situation, isn’t it? On one hand I’m surprised Kodak is still going, but on the other hand it’s, it’s gone from being this worldwide conglomerate to a company that’s making 60 million a year, which is good, don’t get me wrong, but it’d be a shadow of what it was making 50 years

Cameron Reilly: Oh yeah.

Tony Kynaston: Mm.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. So the pharmaceutical pivot that I mentioned. So they’ve begun producing regulated class one laboratory reagents, including phosphate, buffered saline, PBS, and water for injection. WFI. So [00:58:00] rationale, as I said earlier, is the US’ dangerously reliant on foreign nations, specifically China and India, for a lot of these key, um, underlying materials.

Kodak already possesses the chemical reactors and the high quality water systems to manufacture this stuff. So they’re seen as a by American. Um, option. They need to ramp up. They are ramping up, and this could be a big business for them moving forwards. It’s sort of a startup, but not really. I mean, it’s relying on something that they’re already very good at.

It’s just an area they haven’t been very active in previously. It’s a small fraction of their revenue at the moment, but it could be a big thing for them in the future. Uh, they have a bit of a dirty environmental legacy. They’re legally and financially responsible for over a century of industrial pollution in the Rochester area.

As part of their bankruptcy [00:59:00] exit in 2012, they committed to funding an environmental trust for the cleanup of Eastman Business Park and the Genesee River. There’s some dirt around that. They’ve committed to $45 million to a trust, which is supposed to be cleaning this up. That’s run by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

Expenses could get higher than that, could be as high as a hundred million. They’re also liable for 50% of any costs exceeding a hundred million legacy claims. But the company says, you know, it’s all manageable. It’s not a big deal. They think it’s fine. The physical infrastructure of Kodak Park is also heavily contaminated with asbestos.

There are a lot of lawsuits involved in people getting cancer due to exposure at Kodak facilities, but most of those claims are directed at the original manufacturers of the asbestos products, not Kodak itself, but they do have significant reserves set aside for legacy workers’ [01:00:00] compensation claims. Then there’s the billion dollar pension reversion, the Crip, which uh, is fascinating.

We hinted at earlier, so late last year, 2025, they had this idea. They had this. Kodak Retirement income plan, the KRIP, it was a defined benefit pension plan that somehow was significantly overfunded relative to its obligations. So they basically terminated the plan, settled all of the obligations to participants through the purchase of annuities in most cases, and then had $1.023 billion left over

Tony Kynaston: Wow. It’s not that, it’s not that unusual. So,

Cameron Reilly: really.

Tony Kynaston: yeah, I think Shell did something similar. When I was [01:01:00] working there in the eighties, I, I dunno what the numbers were and what the profit was, but it went from being a defined benefits plan to a, um, what we call a superannuation fund now. So a market based scheme. And, uh, we all got paid out a certain amount depending on how long we’d been there for, which was the profit in the fund. So I got a little, I got a couple of grand because I hadn’t been there long and then

Cameron Reilly: Right,

Tony Kynaston: new system. So,

Cameron Reilly: right.

Tony Kynaston: and if you think about it, if you are a, if you are a fund, if you were a defined benefit fund manager for a long enough period you’ve done okay, um, you’re paying out people usually an annuity based on their. Last salary or their last, know, average of the last three years or something like that. So you’ve got a defined benefit to fund, but if you’re doing better than that, you’ve creating a profit, a surplus in the fund.

Cameron Reilly: I’m just surprised that any fund manager is able to do well. Most of them would’ve lost most of it.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah, true. But

Cameron Reilly: By investing [01:02:00] in Ponzi schemes?

Tony Kynaston: It does

Cameron Reilly: the,

Tony Kynaston: yeah, no, it’s a great, great outcome though.

Cameron Reilly: so they paid a federal excise tax of 50% of surplus before credits, which was 153 million. They ended up with $870 million net benefit, combination of cash and investment assets.

Immediately deployed it to deleverage the company. Um, use 312 million to pay its term loans, prepay its term loans, reducing the principle balance for 512 million to just 200 million, use 256 million to fully fund a new, more sustainable Kodak cash balance plan for current employees. And yeah, so they’ve, they ended up with a lot less debt that they got rid of with this cash.

It was, uh, pretty smart. They’ve also been selling off. Hmm.

Tony Kynaston: sorry, just a question. Did anyone in the fund make the argument or matter legal case to say that they should have a share of the surplus?

Cameron Reilly: [01:03:00] I dunno, I didn’t get into that, but that’s interesting. Yeah,

Tony Kynaston: is. Yeah. I

Cameron Reilly: yeah, yeah. No,

Tony Kynaston: codex fulfilled its requirements to provide an annuity for someone based on their, you know, salary. so they

Cameron Reilly: this being the United States, Tony, I’m sure somebody had an ambulance chaser,

Tony Kynaston: possibly.

Cameron Reilly: Saul Goodman lawyer who would’ve gone in for something like that. Just to wrap it up, ’cause I gotta go to kung fu. They’ve also been selling off real estate assets as part of their slimming down. Um, and for the first time since they came outta bankruptcy in 2012, they actually are in a situation with significant liquidity as of the end of 2025.

The company’s unrestricted cash balance stood at 337 million, up from 201 million a year earlier, but it’s still really, really cheap. Um, now. In FY 2025, they reported a gap net loss of 128 million, which obviously doesn’t look good, but [01:04:00] when you break it down, that was driven by $153 million excise tax on the pension reversion, and a $7 million loss on the early extinguishment of debt,

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: both of which are, uh, very good ways to, to have a net loss.

Good reasons to have a net loss.

Tony Kynaston: So what does it say though about what’s the underlying profit without that pension payout?

Cameron Reilly: Well,

Tony Kynaston: have that

Cameron Reilly: I dunno, but if you, if you reverse the one time non-operational items from their gap reporting,

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: their operational EBITDA is $62 million positive,

Tony Kynaston: Alright.

Cameron Reilly: 138% increase over the $26 million generated the year before.

Tony Kynaston: Good.

Cameron Reilly: That was driven by better pricing in the print segment, higher volumes in a m and c and the reduction of $40 million in annual interest because of the debt pay down.

[01:05:00] So I like it. I like it. It’s, um, tremendous story, both in terms of its history and its failures, and this turnaround thing that George Costanza’s doing, um, is impressive.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah, it is. I agree.

Cameron Reilly: Let me just get into the scoring and the numbers. Um, so its price is not less than our IV number one. Um, our IV number one is EPS divided by our hurdle rate of 19.5% since it has negative EPS.

Uh, our IV one is uh, zero, so its price is not less than that. It has no forecast EPS, so we can’t do an IV. Number two, our IV number two is a forecast EPS divided by a 9.64 market hurdle. Um, so we can’t score it for that. It’s price is not less than the book value. The book value per share is $7 31. The price was $7 83 when I did it.

It’s gone up a little bit since then, [01:06:00] but either way, it failed that. But the price is less than book plus 30. We add a 30% premium to the book to allow for the fact that quality businesses sometimes trade modestly above their net assets. So book plus 30 is $9 51. Share price is less than that, so it’s scored for that.

The price to operate in cashflow, we want it to be less than seven. Theirs is 1.59. It would take approximately 1.6 years of current cash generation to cover their share price at this rate. So that’s nice.

Tony Kynaston: It’s very good, isn’t it? Good

Cameron Reilly: PE is not less than the yield because they have neither a PE nor a yield. Uh, the yield is not greater than the benchmark rate.

Again, because they have no yield, they do not have positive book value growth. They have a three year CAGR of negative 12%. They don’t have a new three point upturn. Um, it’s been a positive upturn for quite a while, but we did score [01:07:00] them for the Petrosky PETROSKY F score. Petrosky PETROSKY F score. It’s a seven INOP pedia.

We’ll score it over a 4.5. That means that their financial strength is pretty good, did score them for a quality rank. The Wikipedia quality rank is 66 above our threshold of 60, and the Wikipedia stock rank is 75, which is below our threshold of 90. So I couldn’t score them for that. Growth over PE is not greater than 1.5 again because they don’t have a pe.

Um, overall our QAV quality score is 77.78% above our. Sort of cut. We don’t have a cutoff, but we like to see ’em over 75, so it’s over that. And a QAV score of 0.49,

Tony Kynaston: No.

Cameron Reilly: which is pretty, pretty good. Don’t see them up that high very [01:08:00] often. So what do you think, Tony?

Tony Kynaston: I love it. It’s a very interesting story and a great turnaround story. Um, I think very, very well run. So

Cameron Reilly: Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: and I like

Cameron Reilly: Um

Tony Kynaston: that smart, they paid down their debt from the pension fund changes. Um, and as you said, that’s you, I think you said it saves 40 million in payments a year for interest,

Cameron Reilly: hmm

Tony Kynaston: um, which is probably the most of the difference between what they’re making prior to that and what they’re making now.

So it’s

Cameron Reilly: hmm.

Tony Kynaston: put them on a really solid footing.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, it’s really smart. Um, and absolutely no inside of trading whatsoever. Tony, I just can’t be clear on. Enough, no insider trading whatsoever. I added them to the light portfolio.

Tony Kynaston: Correct.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, I added ’em to the portfolio yesterday. They’re up 5% overnight, so,

Tony Kynaston: wow.

Cameron Reilly: and I haven’t even done a Reddit [01:09:00] post about ’em yet, but yeah, it’s a

Tony Kynaston: there, oh, I wonder if there’s a, um, are there chemicals business relied on the oil price? Is

Cameron Reilly: dunno.

Tony Kynaston: somehow? Yeah. Into the chem.

Cameron Reilly: Could be. Dunno.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: Uh, by the way, geo Park, uh, I think we did Geo Park last week.

Tony Kynaston: Yes.

Cameron Reilly: up 9% since we did them last week, so That’s good.

Tony Kynaston: that’s good. Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Uh, so anyway, that is my pulled pork for this week. Kodak, Eastman Kodak, um, not an oil company, not a shipping company, not a financial services company.

Haven’t killed anyone. Well, maybe some people died from asbestos and pollution, but they, apart from that, uh, killed a few shareholders along the way when they went bankrupt and they kind of said, what did you say? They, they killed an industry.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah, they killed an industry, film

Cameron Reilly: Uh, yeah. But, um, so my takeaway is cla, classic value investment [01:10:00] Buffet.

Berkshire Hathaway

Tony Kynaston: Turnaround work out.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. Good. Management seem to know what they’re doing. A lot of upside. Um, but even just as it is, it’s a cheap business that’s generating cash that even if it doesn’t grow, it’s just chugging along. So,

Tony Kynaston: And a very small part of it sort of is what we would think of when we think of Eastman Kodak.

Cameron Reilly: yeah.

Tony Kynaston: stuff that we wouldn’t think of

Cameron Reilly: Yeah,

Tony Kynaston: uh, chemicals. What’d you say? It was water, injectable chemicals or something. It’s, yeah.

Cameron Reilly: yeah.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: like that.

Tony Kynaston: Mm.

Cameron Reilly: After hours. Tony,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah. So a few things. Um, have you heard of Michael Rainer otherwise called the Broken Juggler?

Cameron Reilly: I have not.

Tony Kynaston: He’s, he’s, I started following him on my, um, on my reels and it’s quite, it’s quite surreal and quite fun to watch his clips. But I thought I’d mentioned it to you because, um. He, he’s been going for a long time and, and if you go to his website, you can see he’s been a, [01:11:00] an actor who’s always played the dork, often in commercials, um, as well as a juggler, but it’s, he’s more recent stuff, which I love.

So he is like this middle aged little guy who now posts almost every day, a clip of him juggling in his backyard. But the first thing he often does, he’s, he’s got a pillow with a picture of Nicholas Cage on it with a big grid. And he, he always starts off with something like, first I must throw Nicholas cage into the basket, and he tosses the pillow over his shoulder into a basketball hoop in his backyard.

And then he, then he’ll say, now I must juggle a chainsaw and a tomahawk and a balling ball. Or, or I, he’s, he’s sort of known for having a parasol that he spins and he balances a, um, a burger on it, which un wraps as it goes. So things like that, it’s very,

Cameron Reilly: Wow.

Tony Kynaston: good fun to watch.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, I’m just looking. I’ve got one of his YouTube videos going on in the background here with the

Tony Kynaston: the more recent ones. Yeah, yeah. [01:12:00] Anyway, is is worth looking up? Um, I’m reading a book called All Ords Fair, which is fairly old. It goes back to sort of post Clinton Times. It’s, it was ghost written, but it’s basically dual interviews with Mary Madeleine and James Carville who were, uh, if you’re a political junkie, like I’m a little bit, uh, used to run the campaigns for George Bush and Bill Clinton presidential campaigns and then got together and got married.

So, well actually they were together while they were running campaigns. So very interesting story how one was supporting the Republicans, one was supporting the Democrats, um, and I hadn’t read it. And uh, yeah, it’s good. Really interesting to get behind the scenes looks at that, those two campaigns.

Cameron Reilly: How did they make it work? Any like two opposite sides of the divide.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I think they just really liked each other, but, and I think also too, you know, the, they were very, very busy and probably didn’t see a whole heap of each other, but Yeah. [01:13:00] Um, Mary Mattman talks about the RNC would get really upset when Carville would turn up to take her out and out.

The Democrats would when she turned up to, to go on a day.

Cameron Reilly: And that was in those days,

Tony Kynaston: yeah.

Cameron Reilly: it was far less vehement than it

Tony Kynaston: Correct. Yeah. Yeah. But very interesting. Um. So that’s that. And I, I saw a trailer for the new Martin McDonough film, WildHorse Nine,

Cameron Reilly: Yeah, I’ve

Tony Kynaston: isn’t, isn’t coming out for, um, a few, not until end of the year, I don’t think. But, um, I didn’t realize what his filmography was.

I knew he’d made, um, three billboards outside of Ebbing, Missouri, but I didn’t realize he’d, he’d started off with in Bridges and had done seven soccer, soccer paths.

Cameron Reilly: Seven Psychopaths and then the Banshees of Insurance.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah,

Cameron Reilly: he’s a playwright

Tony Kynaston: yeah.

Cameron Reilly: originally, I think. Isn’t he an

Tony Kynaston: Irish playwright. Yeah,

Cameron Reilly: And he’s in a, he’s married to, in a relationship with, [01:14:00] um, Fleabag,

Tony Kynaston: correct.

Cameron Reilly: her name is. Phoebe

Tony Kynaston: Waller Bridge is, yeah. Phoebe Wooler, three bridges. Yeah. So, um, very interesting. I hadn’t really put all those things together until I saw the trailer and then looked into him.

Cameron Reilly: Well, he’s one of my favorite. Writer of directors,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: is all of those films are just magnificent.

Tony Kynaston: I agree. And I, I thought that before I knew it was the same person who’d done them all, but that was, um, yeah, just joined the dots when I saw the new trailer.

Cameron Reilly: and,

Tony Kynaston: Mm,

Cameron Reilly: what’s his face? Malkovich. I think

Tony Kynaston: yep.

Cameron Reilly: of looks like him, like a sequel to him. Bruge like two hip men together and one’s gotta kill the other one. But I think,

Tony Kynaston: Right. Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: doesn’t he get a, he gets a phone call from, who’s the mob boss in this one? It’s, oh. Um, Bamy, I think. Who says he has to kill John Malkovich? Sam Rockwell has to kill Sam. Yeah. Malkovich while they’re away or something.

Tony Kynaston: [01:15:00] Oh, it’s, it’s always, you know, even if you just follow the actors who get involved in these productions, it’s, he’s obviously attracting a really quality cast all the time too, which is great. Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: I, I’ll watch Sam Rockwell read the phone book. I’ve always loved Sam Rockwell for, dunno what the first thing was I saw him in. But he’s always, he’s one of these guys that’s just endlessly entertaining every role that he does.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah, although I didn’t, I, I watched the most recent movie of his, which was good, but not great. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, which is kind of apropros to what we talked about last week. What’s it called? It’s called Have Fun, stay Safe, don’t Die, something like that.

Cameron Reilly: Okay. I

Tony Kynaston: It’s,

Cameron Reilly: one.

Tony Kynaston: oh, it’s worth watching, but it’s, it’s, it’s not great. It’s, um, Sam Rockwell comes back from the future and he goes into a diner and like, it’s really, he’s, it’s great acting. ’cause he goes into diner and says, right, I’ve been here 300 times before, you are gonna die. You are gonna die. Put your hand up if you wanna come with me and save the world.

[01:16:00] And like everyone’s going, who the fuck is this? And then someone calls the cops and he’s like, ah, don’t call the cops. You do that every time. But it goes on from there. And, and like it gets, it’s a, it’s a pretty farfetched, he’s, it’s trying to stop an AI from being built. Um, yeah. So it’s kind of interesting from that perspective, but it’s, uh, it’s, it’s okay.

It’s not great, but he’s great.

Cameron Reilly: Well, I got a bunch of good things for you this week. Um, have you ever heard of David Lynch’s hotel room?

Tony Kynaston: No.

Cameron Reilly: Me either, until yesterday. Read about it on the Lynch subreddit and I was like, what? In 1993, I think he made a three episode miniseries for HBO called Room.

Tony Kynaston: Oh

Cameron Reilly: bit like Tarantino’s four rooms.

Tony Kynaston: Right.

Cameron Reilly: And I dunno about the connection between ’em, but takes place in a hotel room, three stories, three different casts. I think the only thing in common is [01:17:00] the, uh, the wait, the, the, not the whiter, the, the Bull Boy bellboy. A bit like four rooms.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: the first episode stars, Harry Dean Stanton, uh, Freddie Jones, who was the Elephant Man’s original

Tony Kynaston: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Cameron Reilly: Man,

Tony Kynaston: yeah, yeah. Right?

Cameron Reilly: Heley.

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: And, uh, yeah, I think they’re the three cast. Uh, fantastic. Really, really lynching

Tony Kynaston: Yeah. Right.

Cameron Reilly: Angelo Battle, Menti doing the, the sound, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s on, it’s on YouTube.

Tony Kynaston: Okay.

Cameron Reilly: dug it up out of no one, no one’s seen it for decades. Somebody dug it up and put it on YouTube, but it’s, I’ve only seen the first and half of the second episode.

But really enjoying that,

Tony Kynaston: Great.

Cameron Reilly: crazy that I’d never even heard of this Uh, Chrissy and I watched Gaslight, the 1944 version of [01:18:00] Gaslight with a George Ko film with Ingrid Bergman. um, Joseph Cotton and Charles Boyer as the husband. You ever seen that?

Tony Kynaston: I haven’t,

Cameron Reilly: Fantastic.

Tony Kynaston: is it.

Cameron Reilly: really good. Yeah. Apparently it’s not the original. So the, the whole Gaslight thing was based on a, play, a London play was made into a British film in 1940. was 44. It was like a remake, but said in London Charles Boyer’s French and Ingrid Bergman was Swedish and Cotton I guess was American, but really good and, and uh, really like, quite scary.

Um, but, uh, Ingrid Bergman’s performance, I don’t think I, you know, I was trying to think if I seen her in anything outside of Casablanca.

Tony Kynaston: Yeah, right. Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: I don’t, I don’t know that I’ve seen many of her films, but it’s very lynching actually. This, this [01:19:00] whole film. Which is funny when you realize that left her husband and ran off with Roberto Rossini and then they had Isabella Rossini and then David Lynch cast

Tony Kynaston: Yeah. Right.

Cameron Reilly: and Blue Velvet, and then they

Tony Kynaston: Yep.

Cameron Reilly: relationship

Tony Kynaston: Mm.

Cameron Reilly: I don’t know, five years or something.

So there’s a sort of a

Tony Kynaston: Six degrees.

Cameron Reilly: connection there to

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: thing. yeah, can highly recommend that it’s on HBO. Um, I watched Jackie Chan’s police story. Uh, you ever seen that?

Tony Kynaston: I don’t think I have. No, but I looked it up when you, um, told me you’re gonna talk about it, which looks great.

Cameron Reilly: I had never seen it. Uh, it’s sort of one of his most famous

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: a, the story behind it I read is that he’d gone to Hollywood to do a Hollywood film, the Protector or something, which was a huge flop. And he went back to Hong Kong with his tail between his legs and just decided that’s it. I’m just gonna make the craziest action.

[01:20:00] I’m gonna show Hollywood how to make an action film. he put together his stunt crew and they made this thing. The stunts in it are absolutely batch it crazy. Particularly, it was made in like 1985, I think. Obviously no ropes, no wires, no safety gear. He, I think it was in this one, he fractured his pelvis, two of his vertebrae. got second degree burns on his hands when he slides down a metal pole in a shopping center and just took all the skin off his hands. the, the crew apparently called it Glass Story, not, you got something

Tony Kynaston: thought there was, I thought there was a delivery arriving, but it’s not. I just heard a noise and saw a truck.

Cameron Reilly: the cast called it Glass Story because of how much glass they break in it.

It’s just like the stunts are crazy. There’s one scene in the beginning when he is chasing down or they, [01:21:00] they, they, they starts with him and his crew of cops taken down some gang and there’s like this, um, slum village built on the side of a cliff. And they’re getting cars and they drive cars, the crims, to try and get away through buildings on the side of a cliff, and the cops are chasing him. And you see people jumping out of doorways and out

Tony Kynaston: No, I.

Cameron Reilly: out of walls as they’re smashing and things are blowing up. They built this village and then trashed it, driving cars at full speed through it. And Gemini was saying, yeah, the stunt guys in the buildings couldn’t see what was happening. They just had to. didn’t know where the cars were coming from. They had a basic idea, but once a car hits a building, you dunno where it’s gonna

Tony Kynaston: Right.

Cameron Reilly: to.

Tony Kynaston: Yep.

Cameron Reilly: they just had to wait. And if a car came through a wall, you had to exit and jump out a window. And then of course, in like in Jackie’s films from that point onwards in the credit sequence, they show the outtakes [01:22:00] and you see cars flipping and exploding and them dragging guys out.

And there’s a, this scene after that where one of the bad guys is escaping on a double decker bus and Jackie runs down the street, steals an umbrella off a lady, and then jumps up and hooks

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: of the umbrella through a window, and then is being pulled along through the air on this bus swinging, holding onto this speeding bus an umbrella.

It’s, and then he has to climb into the thing. It’s just insane. The guy, like the fact that he is still alive is

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: amazing. Like completely mad. He is with a watch.

Tony Kynaston: Him and Tom Cruise,

Cameron Reilly: a punk band, uh, British punk band from the seventies. Dunno if you’ve ever heard of them. The Soft Boys post-punk.

Really? Not punk, post-punk. I like it. It’s kind of late seventies, early eighties. They went into the nineties and they broke up and then I think they did [01:23:00] a reunion album in the early two thousands. But kind of, uh, actually reminded me a lot of Robert Forster

Tony Kynaston: Oh, okay.

Cameron Reilly: stuff in, in a way.

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: I dunno, a little bit, sort of Nick Cavey in Elements a little bit.

Uh, you know, Robert Forster Never heard of them before, but, um, stumbled on them in Spotify. The Soft Boys

Tony Kynaston: are they from?

Cameron Reilly: to it all day. You say, Hmm.

Tony Kynaston: Where are they from?

Cameron Reilly: I think they were, um, Irish or

Tony Kynaston: Ah, okay.

Cameron Reilly: something like that. Yeah. From the uk. Anyway, somewhere

Tony Kynaston: Mm.

Cameron Reilly: I.

Tony Kynaston: back to stunts, have you seen It’s a Mad, mad, mad World, the old movie.

Cameron Reilly: was a kid. Yeah.

Tony Kynaston: Check out some of the clips, which I’ve been watching Yeah. On YouTube because, um,

Cameron Reilly: Really?

Tony Kynaston: like as a kid, I, I saw it then too, and it was just, yeah, okay. It’s a bit of fun and there’s a few comedians in it, but it’s actually a movie that was written and made by the stuntmen.

And when you actually, when you [01:24:00] actually see the clips now, you go, oh my God, how did they do like that is, you know, people on big fire engine ladders being swayed from side to side, cars, crashing into buildings, planes doing incredible stunts.

Cameron Reilly: You’re talking about the 63 film,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah. With like,

Cameron Reilly: Kong

Tony Kynaston: no, no, no. The American one. Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: Right. Tracy, Milton Burr. Sid Caesar.

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: Mel Brooks, buddy

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: Ethel Merman. Mickey Rooney, Phil Silvers, Jonathan Winters

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: Jimmy Durante. What a cast,

Tony Kynaston: Yeah. But it’s basically just one stunt after another, the whole way through.

Cameron Reilly: right?

Tony Kynaston: When you watch it from that perspective as an adult, you can sort of, and with a bit of hindsight, you can see, my God, that was, there’s no CGI. There’s no safety net. That’s incredible.

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. But it’s like Smoking in the Bandit, right? That

Tony Kynaston: Yeah.

Cameron Reilly: directed

Tony Kynaston: stunt man. Yeah,

Cameron Reilly: his stunt car, [01:25:00] uh, driver or stunt man.

Tony Kynaston: yeah, yeah. Same thing.

Cameron Reilly: Chrissy and I have been talking about this both in terms of police story and um. Gaslight, like just watching old films that were made pre CGI pre all of, you know,

Tony Kynaston: Mm-hmm.

Cameron Reilly: real people doing real stuff with. I don’t know, there’s something about it. It’s, it’s uh, there’s that slash real humans trying to do something element that, uh, has some sort of to it, at least to us anyway. I dunno if Fox’s generation will care, but we certainly enjoy watching old

Tony Kynaston: Yeah, no, I agree. Alex is gonna go and see Hail Mary tonight, which I, I’ll eventually get around to seeing it. And I love the book. I think I talked about the book on the show a couple of years ago. Yeah. Fantastic book. Well, [01:26:00] Andy Weir, like he wrote The Martian and he wrote Hail Mary. He wrote another one called Artemis, which was, wasn’t very good.

But Mary again is just like end-to-end physics. It’s just fantastic. Um, so the hard science and his books are great. Um, but the reason for bringing it up is, I’m interested to see what Alex thinks of it because it’s, um, the, the people who made it deliberately did it with all real effects, a bit like, um, uh, the guy who made 10 and, uh, Christopher Nolan, does he, they try not, or they don’t use CGI.

It’s all physical effects. Yeah. So same with Hail Mary.

Cameron Reilly: 19 14, 19 15.

Tony Kynaston: Yes.

Cameron Reilly: one he did the World War I thing?

Tony Kynaston: Yeah,

Cameron Reilly: Yeah. No, my, both my boys have seen Hal Barry and they raved about it. I’ve got other friends that have seen everyone I know who’s seen it says it’s really great.

Tony Kynaston: no, good. I look forward to seeing it because the book was fantastic.

Cameron Reilly: All right.

Thank you.

Tony Kynaston: Thank you.

Cameron Reilly: everyone.

Tony Kynaston: See ya. Don’t forget. [01:27:00] Have fun.

Cameron Reilly: Oh, that too.

Tony Kynaston: Have fun. Stay safe. Don’t die. Or Sam Rockwell will come back from the future.

Bernard: Q A V is a checklist-based system of value investing developed by Tony Khighneston over 25 years. To learn more about how it works and how you can learn the system, visit our website, Q A V Podcast dot com.

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