Ask Us Anything: Finding balanced views in modern journalism + How AI will impact spreadsheets + Meditation as a tool for success

0:00I'm Adam Schwab. I'm Adir Shiffman. And this is The Contrarians with Adam and Adir.

0:08And we are back. Episode 176, Ask Us Anything. We've seen a public shaming this morning with Mike later than Adir for the pod, which has got to be a first for like, certainly a first for us. How come you didn't say that you were later than me? I like the way that you just say Mike was later. I was two minutes early. Well, I had some issues with my ear pods, but Mike had no excuse. He couldn't even click on his own link it appeared so this is mike's day of shame we'll refer to this day as i am ashamed i wear it in full to the listeners but i will ask the first question to spare myself the embarrassment we're planning on doing a game of thrones style you know when um cersei has to walk through the town and people threw things at her and people yelled out shame i think we might do something like that post this pod recording the listeners throw tomatoes at me or something like that yeah okay exactly and feces that's the next live podcast in the meantime first question this week comes in from sam robinson over on linkedin in a world where the traditional media seems to be more partisan than ever who do you tend to listen to for their balanced views on current economic and geopolitical issues apart from the excellent contrarians podcast which i I know Adam is an avid listener of, can you each give a centre-left and centre-right commentator who you think provide credible and sensible points of view?

1:31I'm sure more will come to mind. There's a lot of good business commentators out there. Obviously, I love Joe because I think Joe Astin is probably the straightest shooter going around, tells it how it is. In terms of who's at the Financial Review and those types of publications, I think James Thompson is doing a really good job in Chanticleer. I think he's the quantity. and so is Anne McDonald as well. But I think the quantity of the output that both James and Anne produce is exceptional. Like one or two articles a day, almost always high quality. I think they're excellent. I think John Kehoe has excellent economic analysis.

2:05I think Adam Creighton used to have brilliant. He's moved on. He's not writing as much anymore. He's not writing for The Australian anymore, but I thought Adam Creighton was great. I think John Stencholt does a fantastic job, friend of the pod obviously, with wealth. I used to like Michael Bailey. He writes a bit less now, but I thought he did a great job with the lists as well. I'm trying to think who else. I used to love Alan Coler. He's probably getting a little bit sort of long in the tooth now, Alan, but certainly his glory days of the early 2000s, he was second to none. Stephen Mayne, I used to love reading.

2:31He was very irreverent. He doesn't write as much these days. Obviously, he found a crikey, but really sort of centrist and kind of just took on everyone. And Joe's probably the next generation of that, and Joe's obviously taken it to an art form idea. I was with Scott Galloway internationally. I really love, as listeners know. He's really centrist and straight down the line. There is a lot of great quality business content out there. Adil, who do you think? Well, by the way, Michael Bailey doesn't write as much because I think he hit it's The Week in Finn now. That's why. Oh, does he? Yeah, yeah.

2:58Fair enough. Yeah, that's why he's not writing as much. So I think about this less in terms of journalists. I think the best invest – I mean, there are some very good investigative journalists. One is definitely Johnny Shapiro. Of course. at the AFR who, you know, kind of the best people in life are people with a chip on their shoulder. Now, like I know Johnny quite well and like his chip is nothing dramatic but he just can't stand dishonesty in business would be how I would characterize it and so I think that that is what makes a really high-quality journalist. I'll tell you my views. I mean we are lucky in Australia because The Fin is pretty much a centrist publication on both, like obviously it's economically right, but it's not extreme right in any way.

3:50And the editorial and geopolitics of that paper are right down the center, sometimes a bit center left, sometimes a bit center right. We're lucky to have that. The Australian is obviously more further right. But actually I feel like in the last few years, maybe from COVID onwards, anything that was kind of more extreme in the Australian seems to have dissipated. And it's become an extreme advocate for maybe what you could call enlightenment values. And so I think that we're lucky to have both of those publications in Australia. I see what I do internationally. I mean, the Wall Street Journal is also good.

4:30It's further right than the Financial Review. There's no doubt about that. I don't actually fool. I think it's very critical of Trump in many ways. It is. It is. But it's economically – sorry, I should have said, not geopolitically. Economically, it's to the right of the Fin Review. I find the journal pretty centrist actually. Interesting. Maybe it's a little right, but if you call it sort of 10 being far right, zero being far left, I find it maybe a six. Like it's pretty straight down the line. I think it is. I think the difference between the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Review is the difference between the way Americans and Australians view capitalism.

5:04That might be the difference between them. But the opinion pieces in that publication are excellent. And they really like, they're fairly broad. Also, you know, I would say this, if you want to know geopolitical facts about a country, a foreign country, and that country is a liberal democracy, you should just read the publications that come out of that country. Because reading an Australian publication to get news from India, for example, or Israel, it's much worse than going to the source and just reading them. And so for Israel, I might read Times of Israel, which is kind of a center-left publication, or Ynet, which is Yediot, which is, I don't know, centrist, maybe, you know, again, sometimes center-left, sometimes center-right.

5:48I'd really encourage people, you know, when you're reading news about a liberal democracy, obviously you can't read Iran's state media. That's not, oh, Russia's, that's not going to give you the most honest view. but I think people should go to the source of those things. I also love it when there are journalists who fight the orthodoxy of the publication they work for and so that's like really interesting and so the biggest advocate of that was Barry Weiss who in the end – The New York Times, right? Yeah, she left slash was pushed out the door and created – what was the thing she created? The Free Press.

6:21The Free Press which was bought by Paramount. Yeah, essentially the Ellison's bought. Yeah, exactly. And so for a huge payday. And she now runs CBS News. Yeah. And so I think she was interesting because she fought the orthodoxy of the New York Times, which I think – I mean, I read the New York Times. Look, I've got it on my app. I told you because they charge me like$2 a year or a month or something. Who knows what they charge me. But it's not much. It's often unreadable for me. Like it's too far left. It's become extreme left now, sadly, the New York Times in too many cases. But it's got good book reviews and sometimes it has some – and sometimes it has some good authors writing for it.

6:55So I think one of the most interesting journalists to read on geopolitics is a guy called Brett Stevens. Oh, yes, of course, yeah. Do you read Brett Stevens stuff? He's in the Times, right? Yeah, and so what I love about him. He's their only token right-wing columnist, really. I mean, if he wrote for The Australian, you'd call him left-wing. Like, he only looks right-wing because he writes for The New York Times. I don't think you'd call him left-wing. I think you'd still call him centrist from centre-right. Anyway, I think he's great. Maybe you call him centrist. But the thing about – I tell you what I look for geopolitically.

7:30So I'm scared of the extremes on both sides. And so sometimes I'll deliberately go and engage with the ABC or the Guardian because it's very easy to be totally swamped by your own feed and your own algorithm. And then when you read that, you feel like there's two worlds simultaneously operating, don't you think, like when you read that stuff? but what I like doing is finding people who associate historically with the left but have moved to the middle or even slightly center right and to read what they have got to say because I think they represent maybe this is my own bias in saying this although you come from the same place Adam like I think they represent people that have a heart but also have decided that the world we live in today, like it needs this dose of reason that has departed from the left, especially kind of as you move further to the left.

8:27And so those are my favourite journalists to read, but it means I do have to parse through a whole lot of very left junk in order to find them. As I said, I think I said a few times on the pod, I think the left had probably a claim to moral superiority from the Iraq, caught the Iraq invasion, which was obviously a disaster, till COVID. And I think since COVID, the left has just lost the plot between the whole COVID debacle into the whole loving of Hamas to hating the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. I think the left has shamed itself over the last seven years. And the right has probably become the voice of reason.

9:03Not the far right, obviously, but the center right has become the voice of reason. So it's arguably a shame that we've sort of flipped in that way. Just a couple of quick call outs for Sam. I think Bloomberg does a great job. Matt Levine has a free daily column which is one of the probably the highest quality daily column that's free anywhere I think Daily Reckoning doesn't I think Bill Bonner generally does a really good job and Daily Reckoning it's it's it's quite right very libertarian but it's a great counterbalance to a lot of the stuff you read so there is some great content out there that's actually free and it's really high standard as well what about if we say you know we've talked a lot about words reading words the printed word but what we would say is that podcasts are if you want to go deep on something podcasts are the place to go in order to go deep on things and there are so many good reliable podcasts floating around on geopolitical issues on um business issues like you're i mean obviously you listen to acquired what are there other podcasts you listen to or mike that you listen to prof g what the flux equity mates how i built this acquired I had obviously Revisionist History by Malcolm Gladwell.

10:12Probably eight or ten that I tend to – all pretty much business. I listen to and try – I used to listen to Pivot. I've actually cut Pivot because I find Cara is just so extreme left now. It's actually unlistenable. So I listen to Scott and Ed Elson who I think is excellent. I tend to stick to business podcasts. I think you probably have a bit more political stuff in your rotation. I mean there are some things. Like I think if you – from time to time I listen to a podcast called call me back with Dan Senor. That's kind of a Middle Eastern thing where he interviews really interesting people. But again, I also will hunt down stuff that has been put out by the left that I find interesting.

10:50And so I listened to, I'm going to say a specific podcast episode that I listened to. So I listened to a podcast, it was from May 2025, called Failing the Test Australian Universities in Crisis. And that was put out by the Australia Institute, which is a left-wing think tank is that right adam yes and i thought that was a tremendous podcast because we all know the right bashes universities and rightly so at the moment in some cases i don't want to tar all of it with one brush but it was interesting hearing a left-leaning think tank critique what's going on in universities predominantly they were critiquing the cost and financial structure of the universities and the pivot towards kind of profit generation.

11:33But again, I just come back to this point over and over. I really enjoy finding things geopolitically that come from the left that I think are insightful and reasonable because it's different to the narrative that I often will be fed in my socials. Let me finish by asking you this question. So where do you, how much would you engage with the following publications? The Age slash Sydney Morning Herald. I read it every day. Do you? I get it delivered every day. I'm shocked to hear that. I am shocked that I did not think that was going to be your answer. Why are you still subscribing to that? I'm interested to know that.

12:06Well, I get it. We're an advertiser, so we get it. I get all the four papers delivered every day. But you don't have to – I mean, there's no compulsion to read it, so why are you reading it every day? No, I still – I find it – I actually find there definitely are some articles that skew too far left, but I actually find that's probably the exception, not the rule. It's probably an article a day that they get – Interesting. But the rest of it's probably straight down the line. I find it relatively centrist. You'll find the left actually complains about the papers being too far right. So you get the age and the SMH copper from both sides.

12:37Mike, do you read the age, SMH? I will occasionally read an article from the age, but I should disclose I don't really seek out articles from particular publications. I kind of just see what the algorithm puts to me and I use Substack a lot. So I'm not sure if my perspective is as relevant as Adam's. So your view on news is I'll take what's fed to me by, because an algorithm, you know what an algorithm means? It means a set of rules that's been turned into maths. That's what an algorithm means. And so there's some AI, right? So they are self-generating rules as well. And so do you not find that a dangerous way to live your life?

13:21Do you look at the source that you're reading before you read the information? Yeah, definitely. And I hear what you're saying. I would put myself like as a little, maybe more media literate than, than the average person, just because of the industry I'm in and being in it for a while. Yeah. I like to have lots of different perspectives in my feed though. And I usually read everything with a pretty critical eye. Interesting. Adam, I'll ask you three more quick ones. Sky News? No, don't really watch it. Don't engage with it. The Guardian? Very rarely. The ABC? Virtually never. So really you're kind of trying to go straight down the middle.

14:02Oh, very – Crikey's – I still sort of breeze through Crikey every day, which is obviously ultra left, probably as far left as that can. That's just because you suffer from low blood pressure when you're trying to get your blood pressure up, probably, right? Well, it gives a good impression of what the sort of ultra far left are saying essentially because that's about as far left a publication as you can get these days. it's further left than the ABC and Guardian by a long way. Yeah. Let's move on to question number two. Great question, Sam. Thank you. All right. Question two this week comes in from Nathan Conton.

14:30Excel has quietly been one of the most important productivity tools in business for decades. Looking ahead 20 years, do you think AI will have an even bigger impact on how businesses operate and make decisions? And if AI becomes as simple, accessible, and widely used as Excel, what does that mean for markets? Well, we can say five years, not 20. Who knows 20? But we can talk about five years, right? Yeah, and Nate is just one of our star leaders at Luxury Escapes, funnily enough, so great question. I'll let you, you need a resident AI expert. I'll let you handle it. I think spreadsheets are going nowhere.

15:08AI is going everywhere, and so they're going to intersect. They're already intersecting. If Copilot was better, the Microsoft AI platform, they'd already have intersected much more by this point in time. And Google is doing the same with Sheets, right? Gemini is better integrated into Google Sheets than – I think if you pay for Gemini Pro, you get full Gemini integration into Google Sheets. Well, I thought Nate's question was more, will AI have a similar impact on productivity as Excel has had over the last 30 years? Is that the – well, I think the answer is Excel was the – Or Lotus 1, 2, 3, whatever you want to call it.

15:44Call that nation of spreadsheets from the mid-80s versus let's say a comparison of how have we changed since 1985 when Lotus 1-2-3 came out to where we are with AI now. Okay. So it's good you got me back on track. So Excel, nothing can match spreadsheets. Forget Excel. Like, yeah, let's say Lotus 1-2-3 or VisiCalc. The original. Even earlier. No one can match that because that was a killer app that set off the PC revolution. So that's that. And that's in the category of its own because whatever device you're using today, it's downstream of the personal computer and the reason the personal computer took off was because a spreadsheet was brought to the personal computer that stopped people having to do it all by hand and then you need to say well what are people doing extremely manually today that ai could overcome to have a similar effect and then what would that be the killer app for and the answer is it's not obvious to me that there's going to be a new technology platform that is going to be driven by ai it seems to sit on existing technology platforms so that's already a fundamental difference and then you say could it have the same productivity uplift as Excel?

16:49I think the answer is certainly. I think it's already heading in that direction. And I think for all the promises that will prove to be hollow that AI is making, fundamentally improving the efficiency of workflows and of coding in particular, I think without a doubt that's going to be happening. And so I don't think - What's already happened with coding, right? Coding's already 50%. That's right. 50 % automated. I would say the, we can call it the Excel effect, but we're just using it as a proxy for the spreadsheet effect. The Excel effect has already happened to coding. Like we have taken that leap.

17:28The leap is I had to hand code syntax, which is like the words of coding, and now I can prompt in Claude code and then just modify that syntax. and that is pretty similar to the Excel effect and what that did for bookkeeping and accounting. So I think, yes, I agree with you. We are there. And financial modelling and all that. Not just bookkeeping and accounting. If any, probably less so accounting. Well, imagine this concept of like you change a number on a piece of paper with lots of rows and columns and then you have to change every other number manually because you have to recalculate it manually.

18:04Like it's hard to really communicate how dramatic that the spreadsheet was. And it's pretty obvious why it drove the PC revolution because anybody that was dealing with a large volume of numbers and calculations, their life was completely transformed by the spreadsheet. If you're talking about accounting or financial, then I'd argue that what was probably more game-changing was the database. and that if you look at Intuit Zero, et cetera, they don't technically run off spreadsheets, they run off databases. So they're kind of brother-sister relationship almost, but they're not quite. Like if you look at the massive improvement in productivity we saw from the ability to synthesize data across different tables and the like, which is caught in a more advanced spreadsheet, that arguably is a bigger impact.

18:59Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, you're kind of alluding to the fact that like the three key productivity tools initially were a spreadsheet, a database and a word processor. And then they add a presentation tool to that. That's Microsoft's core office offering, obviously. And that was huge. I think this is the fundamental difference that exists today with a lot of what AI is doing and what Excel was doing. When you use Excel and you do the calculations or functions or code in it, whatever you want to do, like your tolerance for error is zero. Like, you know, the calculations are going to be right.

19:31Even complex function calculations that you can't do manually very quickly. You just trust that they're going to be right. And one of the challenges with outsourcing productivity to AI is just these hallucinations and the need to oversee it and double check it. And I think that what is really holding back AI from having this same Excel effect in the same way is reliability and trustworthiness. I think it'll get there for some tasks and won't get there for others. And I think AI is both much more dramatic and much less dramatic than its impact versus the spreadsheet. I think there's also a, we talk about hallucinations, which is obviously right, but there's also the other element that when you ask, I'm trying to use AI to do certain things in my sort of general workflows, and it's not that it hallucinates necessarily, it just gets it wrong or gets it suboptimal.

20:19And no matter how many times you prompt it, how many times you change the prompt, it still just doesn't get it to where it needs to be. So it's that quality gap that AI should be able to resolve and maybe the world's best prompter can resolve this or using multiple LLMs can resolve it. But sometimes you just sort of run into this brick wall where I just can't get the output. Like at your point, on Excel, the output's correct. I'm asking to create this financial model and the financial model will be 100 % perfect to what I put in there. Whereas with AI, someone just doesn't get it ever right, doesn't get to the standard that you need it to get to yet.

20:50So whether it will get to it or whether it's ever capable, that becomes the question. I mean, I mostly think of spreadsheets as an automation tool. That's predominantly what they are. AI is supposed to be an automation tool. They're similar in that regard. And spreadsheets are much more reliable today than AI, but AI can do a much broader range of things. So it would be very disappointing if AI did not have the productivity improvement equivalent to the spreadsheet, but I do not think it will create different changes in society. But unlike the spreadsheet, I don't think it will lead to a platform revolution.

21:21Let's go to a super quick break, back with our third question just in a moment.

21:32And we're back. My question number three. Third question this week comes in from James Murray. James asks, what are your views on meditation? Is this something you incorporate into your daily routine? For me, I have observed a huge emphasis on meditation from high-flying executives and founders, particularly in the US. Tim Ferriss claims that 80 % of the world's leaders meditate. As an extension to that, what other things do you do to optimize brain health? I think this could be one of our fantastic former LUX team members, Jimmy. So, being in the US. But, dear, I'll flick this one to you. I suspect you meditate for a couple of hours a day.

22:14Can you imagine? So, I spent years trying to meditate. I thought it was just crazily boring. Couldn't relax my mind. Then I felt like I was in a place where I was ready to embrace it. And I was like, I think I would have been one of the quite early users of the Headspace meditation app before they gamified it, which you have to admit is the dumbest, most counterintuitive thing to do to a meditation app. I mean, it's actually infuriating. And then I got into that and I was doing it for like, let's say 20 minutes a day, religiously every day and it made a quite significant difference to me because of where I was at personally at that moment in my life.

22:55It was dramatically helpful and now I try to do it every day but I largely fail and I fail for pathetic reasons because there are all sorts of things you do. I'm happy to do 10 minutes of it. There's all sorts of things you do for a 10 block and it passes so quickly. But actually to do meditation, you have to find this, for me, I have to find a mental space that I can clear out to do this 10 minutes. But I have to say that when I do it, I feel a difference like physically, mentally, functionally, like it really makes a big difference to my life. I know a lot of people struggle to do it. I struggled at the beginning.

23:32As for like, so I think there are benefits to it. Other people do like different kind of thing. It's basically about, these are two things I learned from meditation. One is it helps me clear my mind for those 10 minutes and wherever I am or whatever I'm thinking about, worried about, et cetera, by the end of those 10 minutes, it's gone and my mind has been cleansed. The second thing it did is help me understand this idea about emotions and where emotions fit into life and the fact that you don't need to fight your emotions. You can't. I mean, you can't fight your emotions. But also, you don't need to let them own you.

24:13You can just observe them from a distance. And what I mean by that is I always say like your mind is like a clean glass of water and emotions are like, let's say, a red dye. And you don't want to drop the red dye into the water because even a few drops turns the whole mind red. And so, you don't have to. You can just say, oh, there's a red dye over there. I see it. I understand what that is if I'm in, like I understand what's driving those emotions, but I don't need to engage with those. And so that's the other thing it taught me. It taught me how to think about some self-awareness around my emotions.

24:46So that's how I feel about it. But as for these people, 80 % of leaders do meditation and they do, like, I mean, I hate all these, like leaders that want to be, have a personal brand, they say all sorts of stuff and they do all sorts of stuff. And now the current trend is, you know, these extreme ways to try and live forever, right? That's the cool thing. Ice bars and this and whatever else it is. And like, it might work, it might not. But I'm very cynical about leaders saying that they do those sorts of things because I think that's all for promoting the personal brand. Like 20 years ago, you know what leaders said?

25:19They said, I sleep two hours a night. That's what they said. That was the cool thing. Now it's I sleep 28 hours a night because like everyone's sleep health, right? And so I just don't worry what leaders do. I think we know that people have been doing meditation for thousands of years. It came from the East. It's not a Western thing. It really works for some people. For many people, they just can't get into it. I would say to people, give it a try. If it doesn't work, try again six months later. Eventually, it might work for you. But like I, yeah, I don't want to jump on this bandwagon of it's another productivity tool.