Tech Bros Goes Off, DEF CON Hackers, Waymo vs Zoox, and The LinkedIn Algorithm

This is what happens in our relationship, you agree with me, but you have to say it in a way that you're disagreeing. I'm not, that's what I'm saying. Manchwa, I'm a dear shiftman. And this is the Contrarians with Adam and Adir. (upbeat music) - And we are back episode three, three, one. We've got Adir, we've got Will, we've got Mike, no Joel, but you know, four's pretty good. - Well, it's very early for you. Although you wouldn't say it's early, it's probably you've probably lived half your day already by this hour, haven't you? - Well, I think we'll get up even earlier than me. So it's, he's really at lunch. - So both of you must be getting up before the sun. Is that correct in winter time? - Oh yeah, for sure. - For sure. - About now before usually. - Is that not depressing? I understand the sales pitch that says, waking up with the sun feels like a day of opportunity. I get that, but waking up before the sun, that feels like a prison camp to me. Is that not a prison camp? Do you not go to bed before the sun sets, after the sun sets though, isn't the same thing? - I do go to bed after the sun sets, but I feel like offline we should have a little conversation about night and what night my man's. Let's not waste other people's time 'cause I think listen as a generally across it, but like when I wake up and I open my eyes, it's light. And then I think to myself, huh, now I know it's day. And when I go to sleep, it's dark and I'm like, yeah, it's night. And when you wake up, it's the same as when you went to sleep. So you understand my issue with that? - It also depends on, if you're in the UK in summer and wake up at five, it's light. So I think it also depends on where you are. Obviously you're in Sweden, it's light at 1 a.m. So I think it's very much, so I think it gets, it's actually getting light in Melbourne and Sydney quite a lot earlier now. It's gonna, when I can start seeing my golf ball and I can now start seeing my golf ball just before seven. I turn off a lot, the light LED one. - Very excited for you. - Well, that's good, when I was in Denmark in winter time, which was rather cold and rainy, I did wake up very early. I might have woken up in the falls because that's when the sun was coming up and it's down by like two 30 or three approximately. And so I realized, unless I substantially modified my life, I was basically gonna get four hours of sunlight every day which was not gonna be ideal. - It's not so. - Anyway. Well, that's a good conversation about the sun to start off. - Yes, where are you now? Where have you been to? - Those in Vegas, then I went to San Fran. I've got some interesting things to tell you about that, the pertain to you and kind of Aussie tech more broadly. And I'm not gonna tell you exactly where I am now 'cause you know my rule. In fact, we're gonna talk about why I've got this rule on this episode and maybe you will come around and embrace some sanity given that you're the CEO of a massive company. - This is perhaps one of the most absurd rules I've ever heard in my life. - I know you do have an amazing resilience to reasonableness. So I'm not sure if that's through that. - It's a paranoia mixed with narcissism this rule. - It's, no, there's a much less narcissism, but the paranoia is true. We'll get to why I've got this 'cause we're gonna talk a bit about this. But I am away, but I can't tell you a bit about San Francisco that you'll find pretty cool. So, you know, you've been sales pitching me about this whole Waymo self-driving car for a long time. And then I fell in love with Zooks and then you kind of conflated those two as if they were the same thing. So I've now been in a Waymo and I want to tell you it's not the same thing. Like a Waymo kind of sucks after you've been in a Zooks. It's much better than an Uber. I'll say that, like with a driver. But it is, Zooks is a step up. But the thing about Waymo's, yeah, that's pretty cool. - Well, you're one of the few people, you're one of the people in the world who's actually been in a Zooks. So you can actually speak with pretty significant on thought. Obviously a lot of people have been in Waymo. There's a lot of Australians in the up any Waymo's. But I doubt any listeners been in a Zooks yet. Unless my kind of books is listening. - Well, I'll send you some videos I took in a Zooks and then you can, someone can splice those together and we can upload them to show what it actually looks like. Yeah, it's pretty good. 'Cause now I speak with confidence about something where I've actually got something to back it up, which isn't unusual emotion for me to be on. So that's good from a Zooks point of view. But with the thing about Waymo's, there are a lot of Waymo's and they're very easy, generally to get. I mean, sometimes in the middle of San Francisco and I was waiting 10 minutes, but generally they're easy to get. But the thing about them is they're still not going on the 101 Highway. So you can't take them on the highway. - Oh, back on the highways, they're still off. - I will mind kept saying, we have to take you on a much worse route into the Valley because like we can't go on the highways. And the other thing is, you know, everyone hates them, who drives a car. And the reason is, 'cause they don't really wait anywhere. They just hover around waiting for someone to hail them. And so they just fill up the stretch of San Francisco. And so people do do wine a little bit about that. I will, so let me ask you this. - Do you find people preferring to go Waymo over Uber? Generally not use specifically? - I did ask some cafe people about how they felt about Waymo versus Uber. You know, remember San Fran is a small city. So it's quite easy to walk around a chunk of it, although there's parts of it you don't want to walk through like Tenderloin. But basically, yeah, I think people's generally seem to have a preference for Waymo. Ironically, the place I found it hardest to get a Waymo from was from the Googleplex. It was like a 20 minute wait for a Waymo, I had to get Uber to pick me up from the Googleplex. This is completely a bizarre question. - You were hanging out with Sergio over the opportunity. - Yeah, well, I think I've wanted to correct you about this for a while, I'm just hesitant to correct you 'cause I feel like it might be you feeling I'm trying to show off or something and I don't think it really matters. But like, you know, this guy, he has a Russian heritage. And as far as I know, I could be wrong, but there's no J in Russian. I'm pretty sure he's named Sergei because every other guy that's called that is called Sergei. And so his parents might have felt differently and wanted to be a bit different. But I feel like Communist Russia was not the place to try that on. So I think, but anyway, I didn't hang out with Sergei or Larry, but it was very interesting. But I was sitting in San Fran and I was, I was sitting having a $10 coffee, coming coffees are expensive in the US for sure. So I was having a 10 AUD coffee, not USD, a 10 AUD coffee. And I had a zooks, a limed bike and a waymo, all like simultaneously in my vision. And I thought, you know, people should go to say, if you're involved in tech, I haven't been to San Fran since COVID. And people have said a year ago, it was much sketchier than it is today. I didn't find it really very sketchy at all. By and large, except, you know, tenderloin, obviously. But I think if you're in tech, you need to go to San Fran because number one will be it's very invigorating, like the whole place is just tech. And number two, you see the future. Like I got to experience the future. Okay, I was in Vegas, probably more than San Fran. But it's really an uplifting experience to go there if you're in tech or a lover of tech. It's just next level. I've got a question to ask you, okay? Well, who do you think is the most, gonna ask you some advertising questions about San Fran? Who do you think is the most prolific advertiser right now in San Francisco, which company? It's a company we speak about on this podcast. You've definitely heard of them. Do you mean I'll do Horticolder? Say one and I'll do Horticolder. - Oh, check every day. - So they do have ads. They're ads are just, I forget the name of their new service, but their ads are just open AI logo and then the name of their new service, that's their billboard. - Not like Codex? - Yeah, Codex, that's their ad codex. - Which is their coding business, which is apparently like-- - Yeah, exactly. It's a flawed code. - It's apparently catching up if not better than flawed code in some ways apparently. - Yeah, so it's not that business, but it is a business that is very connected to AI. - As is every single advertisement here, which I'll come to in a second, but it's less, it's not a foundational model business. - I'm not like Microsoft, is something like that? - No, not a hyperscaler. - Not a hyperscaler. Maybe one hundredth the size of Microsoft. - One hundredth is it. - Publicly listed. - Not loveable. - But they're not publicly listed. - Yeah, so Salesforce, HubSpot. - Well, HubSpot's getting close, but we didn't talk about HubSpot on the podcast, but you're getting closer in the kind of, HubSpot's a marketing thing. This is not exactly marketing. It's more on the product side. - Figma? - Yes. So Figma is the number one advertiser. - Really? - I'm surprised. - When I walk around San Fran, and what's amazing is that they just have their logo on the ad and then some text. They don't even look at Figma. It's like, he put us so familiar with the product. They don't even bother having to write the name. I saw one can for ad, one. - Really? - I saw 40 Figma ads everywhere. And it's interesting, isn't that because Figma's just had this really strong, like results period, where they grew from-- - Yeah. - 46% and they're advertising everywhere. And it's an interesting vibe that they're just spending all of this money, like they're really fighting hard. And I think that, again, like if you're not here, you don't feel that in the rest of the world, but definitely, you know, they're fighting very hard. And so tell me this other question, there are only three letters that feature-- Well, there are three letters that feature in every on every single billboard, on the whole of highway 101. If you want to drive that, that's where you get to learn who's raised money, basically, for lots of cash, 'cause there's only three letters and they're used in a combo of two letters and a combo of two letters. three letters that it only comprises three letters in total, three distinct letters. One combo is, you know, letter letter, one combo is letter letter letter and one or both of those combinations, acronyms is on every single billboard. So you know what the first one is, what two letter acronym is going to be on every billboard on Highway 101? Yes, we'll got it. Okay, so that's on every billboard, but there's also a three letter acronym that adds a letter to A and I in between them that is on every, or on every third billboard, API, exactly. Every single advertiser on the entire Highway 101 has a billboard that either says AI or API or both, because API obviously is like the way that information gets sent between different programs or different, it's an information. So in fact, I'm going to explain it for one second, because people often say to me, what exactly is an API? So the way to think about it is if you open an app on your phone, like and it's showing you where the data, for example, like the weather app, you can open four different weather apps and they all look a bit different and that's because every one of them has built a different presentation layer to show you the information, but that information is being piped in almost certainly from the same source and the way gets the information from that source is in kind of a raw data feed and that pipe is called an API. And so obviously, APIs are very relevant now because lots and lots of people are pumping data into large language models so they can analyze that data and there are a trillion different kinds of businesses that are just trying to optimize the way that you pump data into AI and large language models. So you and I can share data. So isn't it different in API and another way of sharing data is the API is effectively a template almost that anybody can use. So it's publicly available data that you can share with anyone you have an agreement with essentially or some people you don't potentially versus me and you just having a, effectively almost a land connection to each other or wife. So this isn't a bit more sort of publicly homogenous in API. Your point's right, like it's not publicly homogenous, like each API might have its own way that it structures data, but your point is correct, like essentially anyone using the API has to know when this flow of information comes through, how do I turn it from a pipe of information into like it, you know, makes sense of what the data actually is because it's just presented as like a, you know, firehose of information coming through. And so that's one of the challenges with the world of AI is that if you've, if you're using a large language model and piping data through from lots of different databases or that you've got or software or whatever it might be, they all of the APIs might use different formats to send the information through, which is one of the things that Claude has tried to overcome by trying to build a tool that kind of understands the main data sources and how their API structured. And the last thing we can say is one of the most common ways to actually send the information of format is like a JSON file. You probably know about that. JSOM, there's no A and that is basically just a format that this information is sent through. And so the reason that we talk about this boring technical stuff is because lay people involved in tech. So by lay people, I mean, non programmers, like this language is now the language of business. Like if you are not able to talk, like when you turn around and say, well, we need to get an agent to go and help the customer do this. And someone says, well, you know, we've got kind of a bit of a crappy API. We can't really get the data through to the agent effectively. I think in the commercial world now in tech, you need to understand like what that means because you can't just think, well, because they're tech people are idiots because it's not because they're idiots. I mean, they also might be idiots, but probably not explain what what what what what a crappy data set on API in real life. So I'm trying to run my customer service agent or my chatbot. And I've got a crappy API. What is exactly does that mean in real life? Well, I won't I won't say like let's so crappy might mean no API like some stuff just like some stuff just has data inside a platform and there's no way to get out of the platform easily. And so you have to build a pipe and specify how it's going to get out of the platform. And there's when you open up an API also, you need to have we're going to talk a little bit of security on this podcast, but you need to have some security around it because like you're opening a pipe. And so you don't want anything to come out of that pipe to someone that they shouldn't be able to access. And so like every pipe is like a door into your data. And so that's important. The other thing might be this as companies move more to using agents to do primary tasks like you're using them a lot for customer support, for example, probably use it for sales as well or not? Not well, we've got a cope. We're building a copilot for sales, but the sales agents that we don't think they're at level yet. So no, that's all human data. Okay, well, we can have that conversation offline about some stuff I've recently been listening to about that. I think we'll blew your mind. And like I've got something to do with me, I'm just trying to consume as much content about this stuff as possible at the moment. And so so you so all of the APIs that have been set up in the past have been set up to pump information through to an interface or a presentation layer that human beings interact with. It's got buttons and sliders, etc. But that's not what agents need, agents are not humans. And so basically you have to re engineer a lot of your APIs to pump data in in such a way that the machine can make sense of it, not a human being looking at a presentation layer. That sounds simple. It's not. I would say one of the single biggest challenges to moving from human customer service agents to AI based agents is often the APIs have to be recoded essentially. So that's definitely definitely one of the challenges in this world. Can I give you a super quick mini quiz before you move on to your exciting topic? Well, I've got another thing to quiz you on before that. But you do your, my quiz is not, you know, my quizzes are generally not real quizzes. They're like, I found this thing, guess these numbers. We'll, the score at the moment is Mike zero, Adam zero, will two. This quiz is Mike. I don't know if Mike's awake. You wake Mike. You good? Yeah, I'm here. I'm just listening intently. Yeah. So is this your normal? I think you get six there a little bit early. A little bit early. Yeah, six there is probably when I'm starting to get up. Yeah, it's about, it's about now. So I actually found this. I was reading the leverage. I don't know if you read the leverage. Is this a good mic quiz before you start? Just can we just have a prediction? How badly am I going to be slaughtered? I don't think this is a mic. Mike might get it right by like sort of luck, but I don't think he'll necessarily know this. I've got a chance in this quiz. I think that's horrible pressure. I prefer being underestimated. This is a very ideas talk. I was just reading something like a half an hour ago and I thought this is interesting. Is it about me? They're the quizzes on nothing to do with you. Absolutely nothing to do with you. All right, that's disappointing. So the company is raising either has raised or is about to raise. It's in the AI sphere. Do you know what company? Is this a regional or a quiz? What do we miss? Company is going to raise money and they're in the AI sphere. It's a pretty well known application layer. I'm not talking about the IPO of Anthropic obviously, which is is it pretty sure? It's an application layer. It means it's not one of the models. It's something that companies use to perform tasks basically. Yep. Okay. Do you know what it is? Do you know what company it is? Oh, that's it. That's the quiz. That's not the quiz. This is the Amuse Bhusha of the quiz. I don't even know. Is that French or something? It's the like on tray before the on tray. Is it? My French extends to a few basic food items. It's not really beyond that. Maybe in some numbers. Which company is an IPO of an application layer? It's not an IPO. It's not an IPO. It's just raising cash. It's a raising cash. Is it like a is it like highly health or something? No, it's a European company actually. I think it's lovable. Yes, lovable. So lovable is raising cash. Okay. A US 13 billion dollar valuation. How many how many employees do you reckon it has? Oh, God. This is that this is getting sort of more into the juicy bit of the quiz. I did see that there. Am I allowed to say what the ARR is? Because I did see the ARR. Yeah. I think it's 600 mil. Yeah, there's a note. It's about right. Okay. So there and so this is a this is basically I would say lovable is a platform that basically lets you make websites, right? Essentially. And there was weeks that Israeli business and that dominated this space. And then AI came along. And then AI platform said, Oh, workflow. That's what we're all about. We're just going to go and build a native workflow simplification for websites. It's even simpler than a week. And Wix has got some headaches because of this lovable business. It's just taken 600 mil of ARR. But which is part of our worry about Canva, which is if you're going to be exactly where I was. AI comes along makes it even simpler. Yeah. So I think they've got 100 employees. You're pretty close. Mike and he guesses. Well, why? 120. Michael. Oh, thank you. Absolutely, anchored here. Yeah. 500 500. That's not close to 100. You're both right. It's just 300. Sorry, that's the most generous you're both right ever. Yeah, problem is when I said 100 and he said you're almost right. Neither you nor I will thought what he meant is you're 300 percent too low. I would have said 5,000 or something. So I think you're like you're right in the sense that there aren't many employees. So what does that mean? That means $2 million per employee. Well, what's more interesting is the market cap per employee is, I won't ask the question because you can work it out yourself. It's about 62 million market cap per employee. I'll give you what I was trying and this is possibly an unfair comparison because this is the largest employer in Australia or second largest. But whatever you can call supermarkets. a cat per employee is $100,000 or something like that $270,000. So, you know, again, not miles off. So $270,000, I'll take that as closer. But, and how about, here's the big daddy, where he thinks he's got the biggest right leverage employee to market cap. I think this is right. I haven't checked a lot, but I'm pretty sure there's going to be right. I'm just going to go for Nvidia, because they outsource manufacturing. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you reckon Nvidia's market cap per employee is $150,000? And Nvidia's market cap, this is Australian dollars. I'm talking about this competitive strain, $192,000,000 per employee market value, which is pretty humble. I thought loveable 62 was crazy. $192,000,000 and calls, which is a pretty good business. It's got a bit grand, big scale. That's $270,000. So think of a leverage. But calls has a lot of cheap employees like wage one. Yeah. And so, but, well, they're not, and actually not that cheap. Now, to be honest, you still pay $89 a grand a reckon. So in the casino economy that we live in now, surely the lovable way to grow is just if they employ another hundred people, they're just going to increase another six billion dollars in market cap. Isn't that the way the math works? Can refer to engineer it. I mean, it is, it is pretty crazy. I think the revenue, they must be super profitable. Like, oh, they won't be, because it's all the token costs. Yeah, they're probably burning cash on tokens. Unless they've got some really efficient token utilization. Imagine a business in this world that makes $600 million of ARR. I know it's not revenue, but they're revenue is probably 400 mill. Okay. So like they're 12 months. So imagine a business that makes 400 mill of 12 months revenue. They only have a hundred employees. Those employees, like, I mean, they quit. I mean, what are those employees going to cost on average in cash 300k a year? So almost nothing. Okay. And yet I doubt they're profitable with 400, like they're positive cash with $100 million because of token costs. I could be so high. Yeah, because they must be, they must, they don't know if they're in model. Like, I don't know whose models they're using. But I expect them. I don't know. They could be, they could be generating heaps of free cash, but it would really surprise me because the gross profit on these businesses that are built on top of someone else's models are generally not amazing. And we'll start through at a wheel special announcement for Contrarians listeners over to the CEO. So our most commonly requested, I don't know if it's a feature or a product that we hear every time that we put out a survey is that people are desperate to come and see us live. They want to meet Adam and Adir. They want to see if it's, if it's true that Adir does have the biggest arms in the Western world. And so I am delighted to announce after much joling, we will be hosting our first proper live episode of the Contrarians recorded in front of a crowd on the 10th of September from four till five 30 at the commons in Cremorn in Melbourne. Tickets are available from the contrarians pod.com. We'll also be putting them out across all of our socials. We'll put it on our show notes as well. We expect this to sell out pretty quickly. Probably have about 100 to 150 people in the room. And so yeah, we're very excited. We're going to think more about where we go from here because we know that we've a lot of listeners across Australia. And so we'll see what we might be able to do in the future. But certainly for the first ever proper common contrarians live, we will be hosting that again on the 10th of September from four until five 30 at the commons in Cremorn. How do you get tickets? Exactly. Well, just yeah, if you go to the contrarians pod.com, we'll put up something there. It is a prerequisite that you'll sign up to our newsletter. So do sign up whilst you're there. We'll put a link in the show notes and we'll put it across all of our socials. So Adam, we're putting a post out a deal. We'll be putting a post out. We'll put it on the brand page. So yeah, there should be lots of different ways to buy. But if you're listening, just go to the show notes and you can buy one there. So I'm just going to add something to that. So you're English, which is probably better. Oh, right, the inside before you continue that. No, because the last 80 years has not been great for you. There's been a 300 years ago. You were like, you know, it's better to be English then. Let's not play that game. Amongst the long list, the other problem is you are the masters of understatement. And so just to I was going to say hype up, but just to bring a realistic frame to this, there's tens of thousands of listeners and a hundred to 150 tickets. And so if you want a ticket, you should buy it very quickly because there is no doubt that Adam and I and probably you and maybe even Mike are going to be receiving emails, LinkedIn messages, WhatsApp messages saying come on, surely there's another ticket, can't you get us a ticket? And so I don't want to deal with that. I want to say this is your chance to buy a ticket. Do it fast. And don't send me messages about whether there's extra tickets because there's not. And like you have to be a subscriber to the newsletter. And if you try and buy a ticket and you're not a subscriber to the newsletter, and then you can't follow basic instructions. And so we're definitely not going to get a ticket on that basis. But yeah, there's no mercy. It's first come first serve. We should say by the way, I was not the biggest fan of first come first serve, but apparently this is a democracy and I was got no votes except my own. So what was your plan like last come first serve? Like so as opposed to first come first serve, I guess you could use price as a clearing mechanism. We're potentially going to tailor this, we've been kept this price exceptionally low. Like always, great artists are doing to keep our fans accessible. But what's your grand strategy giving tickets that isn't done on a time chronological basis and every other content in the world have done it. Thank you. And I think that if we're going to reflect the true nature of the economy right now, it should be a lottery because that's basically the way the economy is running. And so whatever I'll make myself but you can next time. But my point really here is there are not many tickets. I said to you like on chat, the chances of getting a ticket like one quarter of the chances of getting into Harvard based on the equivalent applications. So you should just be very clear with people will and say we're very sorry to all of the people that try to get a ticket and missed out. There will be another one. But basically, they're never going to be very big apart from maybe one a year. So if you want one, like go and get a ticket. We'll also do something. I think we're going to do one in Sydney as well probably early next year. I think we're looking at the time. So our Sydney fans obviously have been deprived thus far. We're going to have one in Sydney this in next few months but there's a few little religious school issues. So I have to move it to early next year. But it's going to be massive of the Sydney one. This is this is Melbourne's bit more intimate. It's a bit like one of those, you know, when the Snoop Dogg came and did a gig at the SP, it's a bit like that. It's not the MCJ gig. We've now had the sort of marginally understated slightly stuttery English, demure, factual, like this is the event you can come to it. And then contrasted that with the Australian Jewish could not be more like this is like getting into Harvard or the Snoop Dogg and this is like a young snoop, this is harder than a young Snoop dog trying to get into Harvard. That's what I would say. So I can snoop good getting to, yeah, I think a young snoop is a young snoop. By the way, you know that last Melbourne show that we had because we did in the past we have done one of one of two of these bit different to this format. But yeah, Fortress Melbourne show and I say, yeah, but you know, people did fly down from Sydney for that. I just I do want to point that out. I'm sure you're aware of that. All right. Now I'm going to go back to content because like this was a nice digression. So so LinkedIn, how do you currently feel about LinkedIn, Adam? Same as I always have. I don't feel very good about it because I feel like I'm being throttled and I also feel like it's heading in the direction of other social media platforms, which is unless you pay, your reach is at best, it's erratic. And generally, I feel like the reach of me and all of the people that I speak to that used to have good reach. It's diminished over the last three months. Maybe you haven't felt that, but that's how I've felt about it. I've always felt it's up and down. Like yeah, I've noticed anything particularly different, but I've been posting that much. So I did a little, um, a little, this is a very low, like, maybe not so representative little thing that I did, but I think it's instructive anyway. So I looked at, I just went on LinkedIn the other day and I looked at the top 10 posts on my feed from the top down and I put them into three categories. Category one is suggested posts. Category two is promoted posts. Oh, sorry, there's four categories. Category three is commented on by one of my connections. Yep. And category four is posts by one of my connections. So they're the four categories of those four. So suggested, promoted, commented on by a connection or from a connection, which one do you think had the most in those 10? The paid one. So the paid one actually interestingly was only two of them, the promoted one, which was the same as the suggested one. So these are just things that are things I'm interested in, which invariably the content is interesting to me. And then I look at who posted it and I'm like, I don't care about what they say at all. So it's a, the issue is not the content. It's the actual poster, right? Yeah. And so then you got two left, which is commented by on by a connection or posted by my connection. Which one of those would you expect to be higher? Or the posted by should be higher, but I'm suspecting the commented on his high otherwise wouldn't ask the question. Yeah. So not only was it higher, but of the remaining six out of the 10, that was all six. Really? One of my top 10 was actually a, an actual post by one of my connections. Now, I don't think that it's going, it's like this in general. I think this is an extreme little sample of of it. But I do think that if you look at this, what you'll see is that LinkedIn is trying really hard to broaden the nature of its platform. And to move beyond, you just seeing what your contact's posting and they're seeing what you're posting. And that is one of the reach reasons that reach has diminished so dramatic. And so I think change is slowly but surely turning into every other social platform. But LinkedIn's always prioritized comments that you know, I think there's a part of the algorithm that's really relatively well known as if you get a couple of comments within 10 minutes at boosts significantly. So I know the posts I make that tend to get a lot more views and likes and the ones that have a lot more comments. There's definitely, and that's always been the case. So I think there's been a radical change. That is an interesting sample. I think the interesting part is LinkedIn's always been the last LinkedIn and TikTok, but certainly, remember in the old days, 2011, 2010, Facebook, you had organic reach. Before Facebook did the almighty bait and switch where they basically said, if you want to get any reach, you've got to pay for it. It's rather a two and a half trillion dollar business. But before then you get organic reach. Now LinkedIn's one of the few bastions organic reach. You don't have to pay. You can get 100 to 100 million impressions without paying a cent. Whether you certainly can't get on Instagram, well, unless you're an influencer and go wild. So that's the difference. And have two out of ten paid. That is the big shift to LinkedIn. Because I've never really noticed any paid content on LinkedIn. And now clearly 20% paid is a pretty big change. So it's something worth watching, but I do think that platform is going through some changes. And from a technical point of view, it is by far the weakest platform in terms of the ability. It's just buggy as all hell that platform in terms of posting and editing and all sorts of stuff. And like if you're on mobile and you select, like, well, I know you're editing, you're like, go and have a look at all of the photos in my whole phone and choose whichever ones you want to use. But I'm more restrictive than that with the platform. And so if I go and choose some more to add, then I decide I want to add another one. Now I have to shut the whole app and reopen it. And it's very a very buggy platform. So it'll be interesting to see where it goes. So what did you get up to last week? I went to like the craziest conference that I've ever been to by at least one order of magnitude and maybe three orders of magnitude. I don't think I could have conceived of a conference like this. And so I tell you what the conference is. And then I tell you why I went there. And then I tell you why I think it's so amazing. Now you and I had a bit of a discussion before this. And you said, cybersecurity, that's boring. I said to you, not if you do this, it's not. And so I went to a conference called DEF CON, D-E-F-C-O-N. Now when it's 34th year, and it is basically the world's leading hacking conference conference for hackers. We hear there is a hacker. When I was younger, look much younger, before there was actually a worldwide web. But when there was dial up into kind of bulletin boards and things like that, apprinet. Yeah, that's funny. So I would have done something that loosely you would have called hacking. But definitely I didn't do things that were illegal. And once people started going in jail for doing like I was not interested in that at all at that point in time. But like I kind of have some experience at that technical level, although not for many decades. Do you like the movie Wargames? That movie? Yeah. A classic Matthew Broderick. I thought that was a nice movie. Like that was one of the first hacking, the ribbing movie. Yeah, that was one of the movies that gave hackers a bad name, if you ask me. Or a good name. I think he saves the world in the end or something. But first, he was the one that stores it and causes nuclear warfare. So that wasn't great for the hacker reputation and made people terrified of hackers. And so how many people do you think are at this conference in Vegas? 10,000. 30,000. And it's this mixture of people. So a lot of people, I'm going to give you some terminology and I'll tell you why I went to this conference. And I was going to tell you some of the crazy things about it. I went there actually for a business reason. So it's a mixture of people that are called red team. Genoa the red team does in a business. I would just say are they the sort of guys who try and hack internal hackers? Exactly. You might call them like white hat in the past. But red team means we're doing mostly penetration testing to try to find holes in your systems. So a lot of this has been replaced by AI right there. I would say it's been augmented by an I'm going to tell you during this conversation. Why this whole paranoia about mythos and AI hacking everything in zero day vulnerabilities, when like two people in the world understand what zero day or two percent or whatever, understand what zero day vulnerabilities even are. But like that is like that is not the biggest worry at the moment, okay? Like in my view, at all after going to this. And so you have white, you have red team people there. You have blue team people. They're the defenders. Most organizations have blue team people in their tech team. They don't have red team. They outsource it to third parties to do penetration testing. Or if they have them, it's something called the purple team. You can look at what that is. They do both of them at each of them at different times. Then there were some people there that I assume which is bad people that were involved in trying to do things that we're trying to stop people doing. But there's no identification at this event, whatsoever at all. You know, let's take photos like everyone is using handles apart from maybe some presenters like it's completely anonymous. It used to be cash only back in the day. One of the reasons there's no discounts is they don't have to authenticate anyone's validity for any student discount or whatever it is. And also it's totally accepting like people can wear whatever they want. And no one no one judges anyone at this thing. So there are some bad people there, I think. And then there is one from various countries and organizations trying to recruit people into their organization. And so it's an interesting mix of people. What was the age range? I think if you're under eight years old, you can come for three or 12 years old. So some people brought their kids there. I mean, it's not a scary place, except I did like I did have my hotel key in a Faraday bag so it couldn't be accessed. It's just an RFID, right? And so I'll talk about that in a second. And I had my phone to make sure it only was connected to cellular and something I wasn't connecting Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. I didn't take my computer into the event. I was using cash to pay for everything like you got to take precautions. But like it's not it's only exactly scary once you've been there. I think it's scarier if you haven't been there in a sense. Have you been here before? No, it's my first time. But like I and I certainly did not let anyone know who I was at all. So absolutely not. Were people with it? Was it like a lot of nerds there? Or was it a normal cool people like skateboarders or like who was there? It was every single age gender. I'll say that loosely, you know, like appearance, everything you could ever imagine was thrown together in this one place. It was just a total soup of different kinds of people. And there's a rule which is if someone comes over to you, so it's a community. And there's a rule if someone comes over. It's called the Pac-Man rule. If someone comes over and wants to join an existing conversation, you have to bring them into the conversation. That's nice. Yeah. And so it's a super friendly and so slightly terrifying environment. And so but but this is so I'll tell you some things. And so I went there because of this because Asik has just made very clear that company directors in Australia have a very deep obligation around cyber security. I'm going to push back on that word in a second. And in order to fulfill that obligation, it is not enough to just say like my chief information security officer, SISO, has got this under control or I did a tabletop exercise like directors need to have a much better understanding strategically of what the risks are that they're facing. And then they don't have to be technical at all, but they need a strategic view of what are the risks and who wants this will remind you of it, who wants my stuff. And like how might they get it and what are the sort of things that we're doing to protect ourselves against that. And I think directors in Australia, by and large, almost down to last person, are completely vulnerable right now. And there's a lot of work to do. I want to come back saying, this is what I think company directors need to be doing in terms of their cyber security obligations. And the reason I say I don't like that word is a much better word for it is infosec information security because really what your what a cyber mean like with this from the years 2000 or something that word right cyber space. I mean, it's nonsense. And the reason I say infosec is because what you're trying to protect is information. That's what you're trying to protect. And so I said to you, Mythos isn't really the big concern to me where I look at it. And I'll tell you why I say that. So I'll tell you a couple of a couple of terms that are useful. One term is an attack surface. An attack surface means where can you go and try to get inside something that you shouldn't be inside. And so if you get locked out of your house, the attack surface would be like the windows and the windows and whatever else it might be. And really the way to think about the hack a mindset is that when you lock your house at night, you think it's secure, but you don't know if it's secure. The way to know it's secure is go outside in your underwear in the middle of the day, lock all of the doors with nothing and try to figure out how to get back in. And that is that is the way hackers think. The other way is to get a thief, a local neighborhood thief instead of him. Hey, thief, can you get into my house and see what I do? which is a red team, right? And don't worry too much about Mythos is there are red teams for lots of different ways to get your data, okay? And so in attack surfaces, the things that you can attack and a blast radius is how much is affected when a vulnerability occurs. And like a zero-day vulnerability just means the organization with that vulnerability has got no time zero days to patch it before it's vulnerable 'cause they didn't know about it. So the minute it's exposed, they can be penetrated. That's not a great way of saying it. - My content here always has been, I think I always assumes a hacker can get in somehow, whether they go via an employee or there's you can go via a partner. So I always assume that somebody will eventually get in if they want to. It's all about, for me, it's all that blast radius. Like how much can you access once you're in? So once you get in the house, do you leave your diamond ring right on the gesture drawers that you're walking in or do you put your diamond ring in a safe, buried, two floors down that you can't access? So for me, it's always been blast radius. - Or do you leave your key on the bench that the person can take and then they can come back and go into your house whenever they want? Do you even know they were there? But it's interesting you say this because, so I'll tell you a couple of things that I think are more relevant than people breaking into your tech. So here's a couple of interesting things. Some, I saw someone post the following on the Reddit thread. They might have been on the discord thread, I can't remember. They said, "When you go to DefCon for the first time, you think there's no such thing as perfect security. When you leave DefCon for the first time, you think there's no such thing as security." That is, there's definitely some truth to that. The second thing that is a hacker kind of way of speaking is to say, there's no need to pick the lock if the door's left open. So that is an important factor. Actually, this is what AI is doing, AI finds the lowest token cost way to get into something. And so if you've left credentials lying around somewhere, that's much easier than trying to figure out how to hack into like some package or something. And so the third thing that I would say is this, this is what I learnt personally, and I'll give you a couple of examples that are non-tech examples, like not software examples. What I learnt is this, if there is a lock and it can be accessed, it can be opened without the key. And that is true for digital or for physical. And the reason I say that is, I'll give you an example of something that no one thinks about, two examples of ways that infosec can be compromised without anyone having to write even one line of code. So this is the first way. I turn up to your work and I'm wearing an Australia post outfit and I knock on the door ring the bell and you come to the door and I say, here's a package for you from Australia post. You'll take that package and then I just wait a few seconds and then I say, actually, I think I give it the wrong address. Look at the address and the address on the package is next door, the next place. And so you hand the package back and then I leave and go to deliver it to next door. How do you feel about that interaction? - In what sense? - Well, you've answered the question. So let me tell you what I just did to you. Inside that package was an RFID schema and in the time that you were holding the package, it put all of the credentials off your swipe card to get into the building and now I can go and use a particular piece of technology. By the way, all of this was freely the same at DevCon including lockpicks, everything you can imagine 'cause they say it's all for red teams. - I've always wanted to know how to pick a lock. It's one of the great. - I can pick a lock. - It's much easier than you might think but the more like there are simple locks and then more complicated locks, right? And so, but there's a table you could go to and they'll teach you how to pick locks. - Well, were you like a cat burglar in a previous life world or something? - I just, I was the other weekend, it was a long weekend and I wanted to teach the boys something new and interesting and so I told them two things. One, I had to make bread and secondly, I bought 30 dollars, some locks. You can buy them from Amazon and they're sort of transparent plastic locks and a lock picking set and we all learn how to pick them. - There are no unpickable locks. Like, whenever someone new comes along and creates a new lock within about a week, the lock picking community is. - It's a community of lock pickers. - Yeah, I just said to you, like, if there's a lock, if there's a lock and you can access it, you can open it with etiquette and that is true for physical locks, it is true for hotel doors, it's true. And so that's why. - I love that stuff. - So that's all that stuff that did that to you. Just got your credentials and can now get access to your building at any time of the day or night and it will look like you're accessing it on the logs. And so. - Well, the other thing you can do is just go to what you do in the movies is you follow someone and they put the bag down, you take the card out and something you've got the card itself. So there's also other ways, more physical ways to do it. Without even this fancy skimmer. - But what I'm telling you is that you don't need to. Like, it's really terribly, scarily easy. And no one's thinking about, do I have a high frequency or a low frequency, RFID scanner at my door, 'cause there's a difference between them. So what I'm saying is none of that is software. That's not software. And the other one that's not software is this. So there's all divided into villages, it's called. And like there's a lock picking village, there's a physical security village. So physical security doesn't bother lock picking. They'll just use tools to get around the lock all together. They won't bother picking it open. And so that's kind of interesting. And there's another village called social engineering. This is the most interesting village for me. And so what that's about is, like you're talking your way into stuff might be the easiest way for me to say it. So phishing would be one version of social engineering where you send something and people click on it and it's got some malware or something with it. But also there's Vishing, which is voice phishing. And so I tell you what you get to see when you go to Defcon. You see someone go into a sample booth and then there are like a thousand people maybe listening outside to the speaker. And they get a 1-800 number of a company. I'm not going to say which company this is. What a big company. And they phoned up this 1-800 number. And they figure out their job is, see how much information you can extract about all of the software systems and security systems that this company is using. And what the authentication process is and what they would do if they lost their authentication and how they could get authentication. And so they rang up this company and over the course of like a 20 minute phone call, I won't tell you who they got through to. But it was someone who was certainly not in the tech team. This person basically handed over everything that you would need to be able to hack your way into this company just through a social engineering interaction. And so we all know about the scam. Well, can you explain what a social engineering interaction is for myself and every listener who doesn't know what you're talking about? So I might ring up, well, you know what it is. It's someone that rings up and says, I'm calling you from Telstra or whoever they might be. And starts telling you all this stuff. And then in the end, convinces you to hand over your payment details to them and goes away. And they're not at all who they say they were. And so now imagine doing this to a company. And instead of trying to get payment details for one person, you're trying to figure out how I'm being deliberately vague, right? You're trying to figure out how you would hack into that company and compromise it so you could go and maybe run some kind of rant, somewhere attack on them, for example, or all sorts of different things. And so there is no say all of this is that when people think about cybersecurity and directors think about cybersecurity committees, they're thinking about all this tech stuff. Yeah, there's lots of different tech ways that can happen. I saw an Israeli presenter provide a pretty detailed analysis of how he got into a part of CUDA in videos software. And I wasn't supposed to be in there and got a bounty for it. So there's all that stuff going on. But actually, in my main takeaway of that is, that is only less than half of the story of information security. And the other half is all of the other ways that your information can be compromised, that competitors can compromise your information and get it. Like I could tell you all sorts of stuff about how a North Korean intelligence agent managed to get employed by an American cybersecurity company by using AI images and spoofing their way in effectively and then using some social engineering. Now, eventually, they were caught when they injected some malware because it's a cybersecurity company. But like, you don't know you're necessarily who the people you employ are. Yeah, I think to me, that's always been the employee. It's not that hard to get a job somewhere. Like if you apply for 100 jobs, you'll get some of them. The inside job, I can employ a nefarious actor, pretending to be acting as an employee to me, or I was in the closed cars on that is just compromising an employee. They seem to be the easiest way to get in, the hardest way to protect against. And if I go and I steal someone's identity, then I will pass all of the police checks because that's a real person. And so that's not going to pick me up and catch me. And so how many organizations have got their technology team involved with people and culture in the recruiting process? Not many, almost none, right? But so what I'm saying here is, this is why I said to you, cybersecurity, once you call it infosecond, you start thinking about it bigger than like, how's Mythos going to hack my software? It's a very fascinating area. Directors in Australia are deeply underprepared for this. It's scary, what Asik has said, relative to the level of sophistication. The trick is not to be technical. Like people here are not going to be technical. No one needs to know, well, what's a man in the middle attack and how do I mitigate that? Like that is not what directors need to know, But I need to see. think about information security in a much more strategic way and just stop taking, stop purely taking the word of tech people in a site, so saying, don't worry, it's all fine because that's not going to cut it and and desktop exercises, which are predominantly, how would you respond to a cyber incident? Like that's probably not going to cut it either in terms of doing enough. And so I found it, yeah, completely fascinating. I mean, I would say if someone's a director of an ASX 50 or 100 company, and they should reach out to me if they're worried, I'm happy to have a conversation with them about, like I think we're in a new world with this stuff. And once you go to this thing, I would not recommend directors go to this. I don't think this is the right thing, but there's another one called Black Hat, which runs concurrently with this. But that's basically all about vendors and people are just trying to sell stuff to corporates. And I wanted to see, don't try and sell me stuff. Show me how you break into stuff, because I want to understand what the vulnerabilities are. It's fascinating. It's not the job of directors to be doing pen testing and blast radius testing. The job of directors is to ensure you've got an incredibly astute CTO, CEO and tech team that can handle this stuff. So I think it's less about necessarily having the specific knowledge, but having the right people. Well, I would say the job is more than that. You know, on the tools directors aren't coding, directors aren't pen testing. No, no directors absolutely should not be technical, but directors are not technical inside the company either. Like people that are in charge of like people on the board of directors of zero to pick an example, like a lot of them won't be accountants and they won't be coders. Like they'll have no technical expertise in the field, but they should be able to think about infos, infosac information security in a strategic way. Like what are the risks for us and why are the risks and what are the different ways that people might get in at a high level? I'm not at the low, let's say like not at the low level, but at the high level. And how can we ask the right questions to our CEO and our tech team and maybe our people and culture team as well, so that we can have a level of confidence that says, this is an organization that understands the breadth of risk currently facing companies around infosac, and we've got reasonable answers to all of this. And none of it is going to make you bulletproof because as I keep saying, if there's a lock and you can access it, you can open it without a kid or someone can. That's just the reality of things. And then I'm going to go to super quick break. I've got a massive guest coming up in just a moment. And we're back. We've got a very special friend of the pod with us. I think for his, potentially his fourth appearance, we've got Australia's favourite private jet take-out, which is Godfather. And now we can add best-selling author to that ever growing by John Stenschalt is joining us again. He's got his brand new book out, Tech Bros, which is absolutely dominating the charts. It was Top's 10 selling book in Australia on Amazon last week of any book. We're talking like all the kind of like the own mojardi books in there as well. So this is heading right to the top. We'll be able to afford his own private jet this way, I suspect. The book, of course, chronicles the rise, rise. And then somewhat fall of Australia's two best-known tech dudes, of course, Mike Cannon, Brooks and Scott Farquhar, friends of the pod, who founded Atlassian. The fast pace read starts when the former best friends met at university, of course, before starting Atlassian listing the business in 2015. At one point, becoming the richest two people in Australia. Far more selectiously, the book reveals the shocking breakup between Mike and Scott, with a pair not talking to each other for an entire year while somehow acting as co-CEOs of the business. Before partaking, what will become Australia's most famous fence dispute and, of course, Scott's subsequent shock departure from the business. John, thanks for joining us. Did you expect the book to become best seller three days in? I think having you being such a fan of the book probably helped that. No, I mean, the reaction has been amazing. I think, look, we've got an amazing cover for a start. They're accounts for something when people walk into a bookstore, right? Nick's a great cover. Nick's an amazing photographer, one of my favorites, great colleague, back when I was at the A. Fire and Seller. It's a very interesting subject, I think, you know, the founder's story that you guys talk about all the time. But otherwise, look, I mean, the reaction has been amazing. I have to say, you know, the hungry caterpillar has probably overtaken us since then. Cutler favorites like that on the book chart. But otherwise, yeah, look, it's been incredible. I'm very grateful, clearly. So it's great to have you on. John, I was very sad to miss the book lunch being away, but I heard it was terrific. Quite a few people actually reached out to me and told me how much they enjoyed it. Is this the reaction sales reaction you're expecting? Because I'm overjoyed for you, but I didn't understand that a book about these two guys was such a mainstream topic of interest in Australia. I think people know. They know of them, you know, I think what, particularly with Mike, right? He's gone beyond Atlassian. I mean, if you think back a few years ago, particularly when he was running the climate campaign, running the campaign for AGL, you know, talking about how important a climate was, you know, renewable energy. He was on the news a lot. He was on, you know, 730. He was on the Q&A show. He was on, he was doing other shows as well across the commercial networks. He was on TV a lot. I was quite surprised. You just sort of go back and do your research and your study. And Perry Williams, my co-author on the book, he was writing a lot of that sort of stuff at the time. He was reporting it, you know, every day. And yeah, I mean, it was a constant story. So I think, I think you sort of leapt past, you know, what was going on, you know, just for that, Atlassian. And that's probably one of the things, right? Like, you know, he was running a 20, what's now $20 billion? It was more than $100 billion a company then. And he was doing all this other stuff on the side. So I think in particular, something, someone like Mike, and he's, and he owns South's, right? In, in our realm. That's pretty substantial in the sporting world. You know, the private jet thing that he's had more recently as well. So he does sort of leap over into the mainstream a little bit in that way. But I think the, I mean, there's a lot of people that read business books and founder books as well, right? So that does help too. I definitely think, well, it's my theory. One, so, so life is hard. It's my experience of it. And I feel like regular human beings as they go through life, maybe especially Australian human beings, but it's I don't think it's as peculiar and necessary to Australians. They don't love the idea that these people have got billions of dollars. And then maybe they've got no problems because they've got billions of dollars. And they have these charmed lives. Actually, my experience, the reverse is mostly true. And I do think, I don't, I don't want to call it shard and Freud, because I don't think they're out to like wish evil on someone. But I do think it's nice for regular people to see just because you've accumulated this huge amount of money and you're a bit of a celebrity and in the public eye does not mean you've got fewer problems on everyone else. And fundamentally, your problems are just a different version of everyone else's problem. I think that's maybe what this book helps people with as well, which I think is kind of a community service for regular people. Oh, look, I think we've talked before, right? The rich list is not necessarily the happy list, right? So yeah, I think clearly there is a bit of a rise and fall scenario to rise. So there's a narrative element narrative arc element to it, right? So, but people do want to read about success too, I think. So they want to know about the start of it, how they went so well. And they want to know the challenges that they overcame, but they want to know the challenges that didn't overcome as well. So yeah, clearly, look, I mean, you know, you know, you read the media a lot. There's a lot of stories about, you know, people who are failing or people who have grown to trouble and all that sort of things. So yes, people are interested in that. I think also there's a, I mean, we won't get to the property portfolio that Mike in particular accumulated, you know, want to probably got more property that Adam does at the moment. So, you know, it's interesting, right? Everyone talks about, you know, luxury property as well. So there's all those sort of elements swirling around at it. There's sport, there's business, there's this property, there's jets, there's, you know, there's success, there's failure, there's money, there's ego, there's all sorts of crazy stuff that happens inside the company as well. So yeah, look, there's a lot going on. It feels like these guys were really loved. Certainly when they flow the business, this is a greater stressor, it's making money. And it feels like we're, and certainly Mike, I think less so Scott, but I think we're, we're Mike Jumpershark is probably around the AGL time. The AGL, slash the sun cable stuff where we're ever being as much loved call tech bro as you call the bull to kind of this hypocrite who on this great crop climate guy, you're all wrong, he certainly picked to fight with anyone on the right side of politics. He effectively got Albany as the intergovernment by funding the Teals. And he was the major funder of the Teals. And so that's just out of Scott. But, and then goes and buys a private, the one of the most expensive private jet, and he most expensive private jet in the world, charters the jet out. So he claims his this crop plant, Chris, he's actually making money off incredible pollution. Then buys a book sponsors a formula one GP, don't they seem like this guy almost whenever he's way to like piss people off? Yeah, I think as I said, there's a narrative arc element to it, right? So the rise and the fall. So look, I think that he had people around him that told him, you know, this is what you should be doing. This is what you need to be doing, right? And I think, you know, there's great moments where and again, I'm nothing problem. I don't have a problem with this, but where, you know, the credit thumb book led sort of protests, right? And that last year, I says, you know, the staff, well, we're obviously encouraging the staff to go out and protest as well. So yeah, they certainly, you know, planted their flag in that corner, so to speak. And then once you do that, and then you go and buy that private jet, and you do all these other things. I mean, it calls it, it opens you up to hypocrisy charges or accusations, and then Adam with that as well goes the really sort of, I don't know what's endearing or trying hard to be sort of earnest linked in post that went along with that, I've really grappled with the situation as I shell out $75 million for a jet. I mean, people I think really understandably so struggle with that. I mean, you sort of report your soul in this regard. So I don't think they should be surprised, but I think that there's an element of being in such a bubble and having people around you and that really sort of say yes to you all the time, that of course, do you think this is okay to do? You find a way to justify what you're doing no matter what. - And did you, I mean, they didn't cooperate with the book, but did you walk away with, I mean, you spent so much time inside their minds and inside their worlds? What emotion do you have for them? It's obviously complicated, but presumably, you don't view them as villains. Like what's your emotion towards them as people after going through this whole process? - I think that's complicated because you have a guy, Mike, who's clearly going through a massive divorce at the same time, I mean, that has to be hard. There's kids involved in there as well. There's an element of the end of a great story when Scott walks away from the company, right? And it was a great story. What they achieved in that first two or 10, 12 years was incredible from an Australian business point of view. Look, it's hard to feel sorry for someone at dear that it's worth, you know, $20, $25 billion. Money can get you a lot of things, including private jets. I don't think necessarily are the my emotions matter in this case. I mean, you know, we're just trying to find a story here. We're writing a story and we're writing an interesting story we hope for our readers at the Australian firstly. And then the book sort of, you know, springs from that. So it's, you know, I think there's a couple of these, these guys are sort of in their mid to late 40s now and they're still grappling with what to do with the rest of their lives. After achieving so much with what, you know, in their first, you know, 20 or years of being adults, right? I mean, you know, what do you do for your second act? - Well, that's why I don't really agree with you when you say it's hard to feel sorry for a guy with $25 billion. I think it's equally easy to feel sorry for a guy with $25 billion and a guy with no billion dollars because like you don't solve that many of your problems with $25 billion and you create a ton more. And my view about them in particular is, it seemed like when they became very rich, that's when their problem started. And maybe if they hadn't have been this successful, they would have much better lies. Okay, you wouldn't have written a book about them probably. But I do think like this is a small country. Like there's only 25 million people in this country. When I talk to people overseas about Atlassian, some of them have heard of it. Some of them haven't. No one has heard of the founders. Like the founders are not known in the US. But in a country of 25 million people, especially doing the kinds of things that Mike in particular did, you're gonna be very well known. And I think that's good for your book, but maybe there's a bit of a lesson to take out of that as well, which is like be careful what you wish for in terms of fame because people like Adam, your comments about him being a hypocrite, which I don't disagree with. But if he wouldn't have been on his high horse about the climate stuff, probably you would feel softer about the flip side of that as well. So I think maybe that's one of the lessons. Well, that's the hypocrisy. Like no one cares about him buying a private jet, but don't, I know, but you're a hypocrite. I'm a hypocrite. John's a hypocrite. We're all hypocrites in some part of our lives. The difference is, oh, this guy is a stri- this guy is the same bolt of hypocrites. Is the possibly the biggest hypocrite in Australia. But you only say that because of hammering- The election to hold country about climate change. Who are buying a private jet? This is what happens in our relationship. You agree with me, but you have to say it in a way that you're disagreeing. We, if he wouldn't have made such a big deal about the other part of it, it would have been completely forgivable that he was a hypocrite in that regard. And I think to me, like, if that's what I would change if I was them, I would go back and kind of change that. Have you heard anything from their world that you can share subsequent to publishing this book? Yeah, so we've heard that the book is not allowed to be talked about inside it, Lassien. It's a, that's the best thing. You know you've made it when that's the case. They burn the copies when they see one. He's a big bonfire running 24 hours a day, and then they just chuck it on. Well maybe that's why it's went to number nine last week out of it. Why can the assassins, they've bought a lot of copies and put them. Look, whatever works right for science. Yeah, no, clearly, I think you're right idea. There's, there's, yeah, there's an element. We don't let to talk about it. It's sort of like, we're hoping it goes away. I mean, the way they dealt with this, I think was, you know, probably goes to the little bit of the hypocrisy that I'm talking about. So look, a couple of things on that. I mean, obviously, you know, you can't go back and change history, but if they hadn't, if he hadn't had done that and they just got, he'd gone and bought a jet, you know, the none of that climate crusading, all of the passion stuff that he, that they did, arguably because so much money came in through the shares sales that they did, which hadn't been a notable critic of every single day, they sell off, you know, small slice of bill. And, you know, a million dollars a day. Yeah, you accumulated a lot of money to do a lot of things with if you want. So they had to done that. And also, perhaps if they'd sold, you know, they got out five, six, seven years ago, sold up and, you know, like other big name entrepreneurs have done the Elon Musk to the world and so on, and went on to do another thing. I think they would have been lauded as, you know, incredible business heroes. And I know that they had talked with other people about doing books earlier on, right? Like this is sort of like maybe five, six, seven, eight years ago. But the message that people I know that discussed the idea of with them was that they will control the narrative. Now, I think that shows, you know, that there was clearly stuff going on that they didn't want out there. So look, yeah, I think that if they hadn't done a couple of things and sold out earlier, things would have been a lot different. But it's easy to say that in hindsight. - You've given, obviously, a lot of articles, you chronic all the richest people in Australia. These guys, they said, didn't cooperate at all with you. So there's a couple of different ways in corporate and corporate directly. You can get friends to speak to you. They chose to do none of the above, which certainly is not how I think one should operate. But how does that change your narrative? Not just this book generally. When someone cooperates with you, do you feel you naturally are more inclined to make the narrative more friendly to the subject? - I think if they're going to do an interview and they're going to give you, or they're going to give you quotes and information, you do feel that you have to use that, right? I mean, if, you know, like, unless they're really, really boring quotes. But if Mark said that, imagine a year ago, if Mark had, Scott had said, look, you know, yeah, we've had our problems, right? Don't get me wrong, but I still have this amazing respect for Scott, or Scott has said, look, yeah, okay. Of course, we had issues, right? You know, we can't work together for 20 odd years and not have fullings out. And yeah, it was stupid in hindsight to buy a mansion next to each other, right? Look, what do you expect? We probably shouldn't have done that. But, you know, we still have respect for each other. You know, we catch up, you know, a couple of times a year, we have a glass of wine and we reminisce about the good old days. I mean, if they'd done that, it would have softened the edges of what we've done, surely, wouldn't have stopped us trying to pursue a lot because, you know, once you start writing these articles, so many people came to us, which you would not believe the amount of information that we got from people on and off the record or on background and documents that we got. I mean, a lot of it's because people saw that they weren't cooperating and they decided that, hey, if these guys aren't open to them, we want, you know, the truth out there. We want people to know what's really going on behind the scenes. So, yeah, absolutely, they should have spoken to us. Absolutely, we would have, in that way, would have felt compelled to use, you know, their quotes unless they were really, really boring. And, you know, and doing that actually sort of balances things out in their eyes. So, it's their own fault in that way, yeah. - You know, the assistant and the, who got the two people in there, the assistant and there's another one there as well, the face sterling and the cheaper stuff I need to handle it. - So, I would say, when I like to think about that, I would say, that didn't come off looking great, but myself in their shoes, I think, yeah, we came off looking great. We are very powerful, and this book just emphasises, you better watch out for us. We're very powerful and very ruthless and we're on team Mike. I actually think you might have done them a favour in this book to be honest. (laughing) - I'm not sure they feel like that at the moment for what we hear, but, yeah, clearly. I mean, look, I think that dear to us, we're not trying to go after people in that way. We're trying to tell the story of what really happens. People don't really know what happens behind the scenes with billionaires. What happens, you know, once you sort of pull back the curtain a little bit, you know, all those private jet trips that seem to be obsessed with and you probably take a dear, you know, always take you into that last dose of the rich of the famous, you know, probably more of this stuff goes on than you think. Clearly, there's always, you know, people that are trying to sort of get close to powerful people or work with them. You know, every billion I know has a consigliere or two with it, you know, look after them, so to speak, and probably clean up a lot of their messes. So yeah, you're right. They are very, very, very powerful people. And perhaps we're showing this to the public more than the more than it has been done before. - What goes on in the world of billionaires? There's a comment, enough to comment on it, like what goes on here. They get surrounded by yes people desperate to get some of the billionaires money and in general It's a lose-lose for everyone because the billionaires don't really part with a lot of their money to these people that hang around with them because That don't need to write if they go then the other people will come and the second thing that happens is that the billionaires End up in a situation where people generally won't say that's a terrible idea You should not be doing that because I think definitely Elon suffers from that Problem. I know it might actually got some people around him that will say I don't think that's a great idea But that is one of the challenges. There's no doubt about it Well, if Mike has got people around him saying that then you know It's that he's got a lot of people saying that they disagree with him Is it a bit weird that one point this is a hundred sixty billion dollar business and the most powerful person appears to be the secretary Like that seems a strange that poor old Scott the co-CEO But reading the book it felt like he was observing to Faye who was literally an EA. So, I presume you had you were really well Well sourced from I guess team Scott obviously not Scott himself, but team Scott Seems to really hate these assassins who effectively took over the company by stealth and now run their Microsoft with his former one team and his Green stuff and running a gel and doing it by allowing us 34 properties and these assassins are running the business Well, I think it's probably probably a bit more complicated than that, but they certainly are wielded a lot of power and continue to wield a lot of power You know, I think you'd say that what they would say that they're wielding or trying to You know use the power on behalf of Mike or Mike, you know, they're sort of Doing it that way. So maybe that's maybe that's not quite as harsh as what you're what you're saying But yeah, they're clearly I mean look, I think I think every every you know successful person behind them There's going to be someone who helps them get there or helps them keep them there probably is a better description and That's probably the part they're playing for trying to play and why does why was do you think that Scott could not play the same game? You think has they just fundamentally such different personalities that that is just not a game that he plays? I think so. Yeah, I'm not sure whether he was um perhaps Yeah, for the one of a better phrase Machiavellian enough to be like that didn't really want to do that look You know, it probably wasn't wasn't built that way necessarily and that's why it's interesting to see him in leadership positions Like you know tech council of Australia and you know Striding the corridors of power and parliament house, you know trying to influence people there as well So whether or not he can do that in a In a public in a little bit more public position like that than he did in the job that made him a billionaire will be very interesting to see So yeah, look, I think you know different personalities clearly they compliment each other for a long long time But in a way that's you know, that's probably the reason for I think that's clearly the reason why Scott left in the end I was sad that he went to the tech council because I hate the tech council and I don't hate him I mean, I actually had nice interactions with both Mike and Scott like I've got Like to add in my ways argue like I feel like I might be the last defender of Mike that's left But but like I've actually had only positive interactions limited but only positive, but yeah, that tech council I thought that was a strange decision personally But I'm sympathetic to him inside that at last any environment because I think I would Potentially be that same naive person that didn't quite realize Like the political machinations that were going on. I like I think it's kind of special in a way That a guy that is like that and fundamentally it's kind of a tech nerd right that a guy that is like that Can become this successful and this wealthy just like Building a tech business. I kind of think that's endearing if you ask me. So what you're saying a deer is that you're the Scott to Adam's Mike inside the contrarians We up on the same day about once every about once every few weeks I have this sharp feeling in my back And I realize one another one of Adam's henchman to put a knife But I'm on to it now and I've learned to enjoy the pain. So it's fine. Mark's my Amy Glancy clearly Is it is it fair to say that like every great story has a villain in the hero and have you almost cast Scott in the hero role and mark unwittingly in the villain role I'm not saying that whether that's actually true or not But is that almost so the feeling when you're reading it you kind of get that impression? One of the things I was really struck about when you went around talking to people inside out last year and outside out last year and the Entrepreneur and founder and VC sort of seen and you know Which people around right is that there was a lot of people that was say to us. Oh look I know them both, but I'm closer to Scott or you know, I look I you know I know them really really well, but you know I hang out with Scott more look. They were and we really really tried very hard to find You know people that liked Michael. Now I think there was probably an element like I know we know that Mike told people not to talk to us right So that's fine But it was hard to find people that like them both equally if that makes sense So, you know, perhaps that that is something that's evolved over time. I don't think this detracts from Mike's Accumen as a business leader or a business builder, right? I mean, I think what he's done is extremely brilliant He's a different personality to Scott in that way, and I think they sort of you know complemented each other very well Clearly for a long long time But yeah, I it's and I think part of that Adam is that the it's the crusading aspect that that he undertook In that sort of climate and green technology space and renewable energy space probably turn some people off that maybe didn't want to have that opinion shoved down their throat so much in the business pages and And you know websites that you know in the Australian media and then into you know tv and so on and so forth like he was on LinkedIn and Twitter now ex a lot talking about that where Scott wasn't so I think I think that did turn people off And if you want to call that you know some sort of villain role, well Yeah, sure. I think I think people ended up ended up seeing him that way. Well, I think if you look at obviously Mike became the coast Soul CEO they were co-seo so he was to the victor go this well. In many ways that was the more logical result in that I was Mike's idea to start the business Mike was the product guy Scott was the tech guy Generally the product person you look at sort of the CEOs that found the CEOs who remain overall is so Bill Gates is much more techie He Steve was not much more techie the tech guy whereas Zuckerberg was more for a product guy really Generally the product guys tend to have longer longevity because product because you can replace the engineering talent It's pretty hard to replace that sort of product which obviously less has got some other product issues Which over come over on all this but I felt like Mike was the probably the better choice to let you There was going to be one of them a felt like Mike was the right one Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, I think he's more outgoing and that way he's better at doing those you know The investor calls and dealing with investors is probably a bit more curious and that way look I think that clearly he thinks he's the smartest guy in the room as well He probably is cases an element of that too So but I think you're right he's better at that sort of outward facing stuff that you need to do I mean internally he's clearly got an extremely good power base now too But you know there were you know as the book reveals there was a whole bunch of plans along the way When Mike had stepped down Scott would go and then there was another successor I knew who was so you know very very highly regarded president of that last year as well He was going to come through then none of that happened uh, I think you're clearly uh I'm not surprised at all you're right that it ended that way It would be fascinating to see what Scott would be like as a sole CEO I mean who knows what happens right? I mean there's a lot of fun There's a lot of water to run into the bridge and um in that way is you know Who knows what where who's going to be the CEO in five 10 20 years time what what what the company looks like Or if it if there is a company in five in 10 or 20 years right but can I so can I ask you this question So I have a look at business now and I think like we've moved past this age of monarchy An aristocracy and so that's largely gone and it's been replaced by corporations And so inside a corporation the CEO is the king or let's call it the monarch like the king and queen being kind of equally powerful In the their respective ways and so This is what I always thought was fascinating about the adlession story of both of them stepping down If you're whole like the people that are at adlession that are the Consigliary as you would call them of Mike They are never going to get a job That is as good as this job ever again in their lives like there is a one-off thing that you get And so usually when a king swaps and a new king comes it's because the old king's dead Like abdication is not very popular in the world of monarchs And in this case like Mike was not dead thankfully. He just was making this decision that both of the kings We're going to abdicate simultaneously It would have to me seemed inconceivable That powerful consigliary that we're going to be reduced to powerless and never replicate this power anywhere else Wherever any possibility of allowing that to happen. It just seems like the most obvious Hossible outcome. Is that basically what happened in your view? Absolutely. Yeah. I think there's no doubt that the board was encouraged to sort of make sure that Mike stays And there was a lot of sort of internal discourse about that. You know, we need him here. We need him here He's you know, he is the best leader that we have all could have and I think for all those reasons you just specified Yeah, clearly self interest plays a part of that. I mean, you know, perhaps if uh We've said that with you know other famous entrepreneurs as well. They leave or they sell up and they take their they grew up with them to to found the next big thing as well so I mean I think there's clearly still time for them to do that. I mean, they could do that, but you're right. I mean, starting over again is hard. You know, as you, as you, serial entrepreneurs in the world, no, but it's, you know, the, with those skills are generally transferable to do something else. But yeah, clearly that, you know, that incredible power base that they had was, you know, was short up to make sure that Mark stayed and, you know, once, once Scott left, it was the message went around. We could all, we could all fly business class again, right? So things like that. But when you think about that, though, they are pretty amazing. Like they've, I mean, I would take them with me as well. Like they effectively achieved the almost impossible in this outcome with Mike. You know, the fact that they were able to persuade the board, I don't know about most companies, or maybe I do. But like it's not often that an EA and a chief of staff is presenting stuff to a board in a board room, or even really getting access to directors in that way, let alone persuading them if that was kind of the nature of what happened. I think they are two of the most efficient off-siders that I have ever heard of. It's actually astonishing. - I think, I think, John, if you look at it, I'm not sure that's the right way to read it because of the way the voting works in this business. So Mark and Scott effectively can try. I think they've got 40% of the voting shares each in that, well, they're well over 50. So they, Mark and Scott effectively can try. And what you've seen over the, and what your book, I think, really chronicles well, and probably the theme of the book is, Mark loves war, and Scott loves peace. And if you look at, so Mark went to war on OGL, he went to war on St. Cable with Twiggy, he went to war with the Fence dispute, and he went to war with the CEO of a last name. It's four times, and he didn't back down on any, all four times, he fought to the end in one or, say, inverted commas one, you can argue he lost, but he won all four battles. And Scott didn't go to war on the CEO. He let Mark, like Scott could cause all sorts of issues with the last name if he wanted to. Like, here's an equal controlling shareholder. So there's no board here, the boards are relevant. So you can talk about Amy and Faye, to get that, like the board is most useless board in the world, other than maybe Tesla's board. So the board means nothing. It's purely what Scott and Mark agree on amongst themselves, and Scott agreed to peace in letting Mark become CEO, and he agreed to peace in moving to the $130 million dollar bill, but you'll imagine and selling his dream house on what is not apparently not that great of each, as you've discovered, in Point Papa. So is that the way to look at it? That Scott's just a peacemaker and Mark's a war monger, and that's what ended up? - Yeah, I think that's a really, really, really starting point. I think it's, I think, yeah, there's a series of compromises, isn't there in that way? So, and the compromises are, or if you want to say, you know, allowing yourself to not lose it effectively, is for the greater good, right? So it's to keep the company together, or it's to keep, you know, they're not having major public warfare until we start a chronicle in it. So there is an element of, yeah, compromise, of wanting to be, you know, almost like the glue that sort of keeps this thing going in order to not, everyone loses everything. So I think, yeah, compromise, peace making, you know, not wanting to, maybe it's sort of conflict, avoidance in a way? As well? Yeah, I think that's a very, very good way for you to add in my couple of them, a great one with you on this. - I think that's, yeah, I think that totally corrects my view on this. I think you're absolutely right. Like that is, that is a great summary of how it played out. I mean, the question is, what a board can even do in a business like this? Like, I think the answer is nothing. - Quit, that's one thing they could do. They could walk, well, I don't even, I don't even know who actually is on the Atlassian board. I don't, I've never looked at the board 'cause they have no power, it's kind of a Clayton's board. - Yeah, that's right. There's a bunch of, there's a bunch of, I see, where Silicon Valley tech people, the moment, I mean, Doug Berman, who was the, who's now like a, you know, a key member of the Trump administration. - Of course, Trump's guy. - He was exactly ahead. - He was the chairman. I would have floated, but that's probably the, I mean, obviously there's ISIL, you know, people have been in there all along, you know, first, you know, VC to get in there. But, yeah, Doug was probably the most, clearly, the most high profile, personally, I've had on the board, since, and I mean, if you were to put me on the spot and say, you know, name me three or four other directors, I cannot do that. And that tells the story itself, doesn't it? - They should put Adam on the board, 'cause I think he's, Adam, he's not gonna get, care a bit, being fired from the board. Like, so he'll just give smart thoughts and ideas that are completely combative to what the business is doing. Whereas like, I don't, I really wanna be hated in that kind of way, but you don't care that. Adam, I think you'll be the perfect addition to the board. Like, the best chance they've got of making high quality decisions from this point onwards is putting you on the board and saying, we're not gonna fire you for saying stuff that we hate listening to. And I reckon that there you go. Then you'd know at least one person on the board. I'll be very happy. And then that's how they could control you as well. - Well, low chance of this happening. - We could control your negativity. - Well, given that followed what you and I have told them to, we two years ago, we said they need a proof of the profitability, the share price of stuff to otherwise. They actually ultimately followed your advice a couple years, a couple years later. So I think you're more likely to get a gig on this board than me for multiple reasons. - I think we're equally likely. - So on this, it's an amazing read. I encourage all the contrarians listening to go out and buy a copy. Obviously it's number nine. I think on Amazon, even higher, potentially. Best sellers in Australia. So it's clearly the reading public of embrace this book. I think pairing yourself two of the great guides of Australian journalism. And I'm so happy that you've got this book that's selling so well. And yeah, just wishing you the best success. And thanks again for coming on. I'm sure you've got to jump on your jet and it'll head off somewhere in a couple hours. But we appreciate you taking the time. - Yeah, thanks, Jens. I really, really appreciate it. - Thank you all. We'll wrap it up here. There's been a great episode. We'll be back next on a Saturday episode. Thank you to John, the idea, Will, Mike, and everybody for jumping on. We'll see you everybody soon. (upbeat music)