Ask Us Anything: Is the Welcome to Country Overdone? + Should businesses be more responsible with data +

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

0:07And we're back. Episode 147, Ask Us Anything. Over to the chief question asker himself. All right. This one comes in from Samuel over on LinkedIn again. Thanks to everyone for sending in your questions each week. Okay. This one is, has the welcome to country or acknowledgement of country become a meaningful act of respect when used in workplaces, or has it started to risk feeling performative? How do we make sure it actually builds understanding rather than just ticking a box? Your thoughts? Well, I hope that listeners enjoyed the last episode of The Contrarians now that we're going to be cancelled after the answer to this question.

0:48I did say to Adam, are you okay to answer a question about this? And he said he was happy to. Oh, what? Is he ever I'm not okay to answer a question.

0:59All right. Come on, Adam. Just get us cancelled. Let's do it. Actually, I like the welcome to country. I don't love it when they go on for ages and ages, like if it goes on for like five minutes. But a quick, sharp welcome to country, I really like it, especially at a sporting event. I think it adds a lot to sporting events. I don't mind it when you land in Australia if Qantas does it. I think that's quite nice. I know some people don't like it for whatever reason, but I really like it. I think it's a great acknowledgement of the First Peoples and I think it's a great touch and really uniquely Australian.

1:33I don't love it when it goes on for ages and ages. I think that can diminish it a bit, actually causes the reverse effect, but a quick sort of one-minute welcome or acknowledgement, obviously, if you're not Indigenous. I'm a fan. I get a bit confused about welcome to country versus just the acknowledgement. I think they're not the same thing, are they? Yeah, a welcome is when it's done by an Indigenous person and an acknowledge in a country is when it's done by a non-Indigenous person. So let's start with the worst examples because I agree, well, maybe this is my overarching view. It's taken a long time to get anywhere close to making Indigenous Australians feel like they're not strangers or enemies in their own country.

2:12And so there's going to be some overcorrection to try to compensate for like honestly like a genocide in Tasmania like 200 years ago, whatever it is, 150 years ago, and just general bad treatment, right? And so I can accept that there's going to be some overcorrection and I think it's important that Australia acknowledges its history because I think like I'm a non-apologist for Australia. Like I'm super proud that Australia is a Western liberal democracy and I make no, I'm not in this basket of like, woe is us, the colonialists. Like I'm very proud of this country, but I think there were some terrible things done to Aboriginal people at the front end of this country and for a long time.

2:56And we should make them feel like, yes, we know that this was the country where they were here first. And they're just as much a part of the country as everyone else and have a special place. So that's how I feel. And so if you want to do that at an AFL game and say something like, you know, we're playing on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri nation or something. I think that's super appropriate. I tell you when I hate it, it's out of control. Like I go to a board meeting and they open the board meeting with a white dude like saying like, you know, this kind of stuff. I just think to me, that's cringe.

3:34It's not respectful. I think that's a really good point. I think when a white person does it, I find it a bit performative. but I think when an Indigenous person does it, I really like it. So I think that's a really nice delineation. Like rich white dudes doing it at a board meeting is just pathetic and woke and a waste of everyone's time, but an actual Indigenous person doing it, I think he's really meaningful. So I think it's really, I think when I hear podcasts talk about it, I think that's ridiculous. Unless it's an Indigenous podcast, but yeah, I think I don't see why white people are doing it, but I love it when Indigenous people do it.

4:04I think maybe, sorry, could I just add, I think maybe part of the question sort of means from a business standpoint, I've heard that some businesses are like mandating that every meeting begin with something like this, which I guess maybe could be described as overkill. What are your thoughts from that perspective? Well, Adam would be happy that they came into the office to have the meeting for a start. I don't like meetings full stop. There's even more reason not to have a meeting. That makes no sense at all. It's ridiculous. That's my view on that. That's ridiculous. I tell her I think it's relevant in business.

4:39Again, it's just about being respectful. Be proud of Australia as it is today. There's always an opportunity to improve. We should always be trying to improve. But also we've got to acknowledge these first Australians, the fact that they were here and bad things were done to them. And like their life expectancy is still worse than other groups. They get these terrible diseases, especially in the Northern Territory that you only see in developing countries. there's lots of problems right and like but i do think so if you put it on a website i'm fine with that that's your choice as a business if you want to say we operate from this i don't like when people remove like the word melbourne or sydney and only use the traditional aboriginal because i think it's dumb like basically the aboriginal people they do not have a city of melbourne or a city of sydney in these locations like so it's dumb to remove the name of the actual city and i I think that's like self-flagellation.

5:36I hate self-flagellation. I should be proud of the country. So I think we agree there's a place for it, but it's definitely not in every board meeting. And if you make it cringe and you make it, once again, I just continue my ongoing theme of life. If you politicize good and important things, then 50 % of the population will start hating everything to do with that. And that is a bad way to live life. So we should just be respectful about this and not turn it into performative identity politics and political positioning. And the people on the right that hate everything about it because the left have gone overboard, they should calm down and not hate everything about it because it is fundamentally good and respectful to do this type of thing.

6:19I think the problem is it's just hypocritical for a rich white dude in a meeting, a woke white left-wing dude in a meeting to do this acknowledgement of country when they probably haven't given a cent to an Aboriginal cause. Like you could be actually doing stuff to actually help Indigenous people. Oh, that's a great point. And they don't, but they'll do some ridiculous welcome to – acknowledgement of country which doesn't help Indigenous people at all. Well, you're being too hard on them because they did do a like on a Facebook post. If that. That's a great question. Mike's generation, by the way, is much more – well, you've got to relax about that, right?

6:51When I look at Mike and I look at you, it's not obvious you're from the same generation. All right. But like let's say the generation that Mike's a part of, you can put yourself in there or not, like that is a generation that feels differently. Like there's definitely a generational gap in the way different generations feel about this issue. And I think like people around Mike's age, I'll say, like they feel differently to people that are 50. And I think that dealing with those different emotions and the way that different people feel without becoming combative is part of what is good for the, you know, reinforcing the social fabric of society.

7:30On to question number two. Question number two this week comes in from Jane into my LinkedIn DMs. How is Mike getting so many DMs here? This is ridiculous. Well, because Adir put up a LinkedIn saying to go direct to my DMs on LinkedIn. So I think - Did I? I think so. Yeah. You put so many LinkedIn posts, you don't remember what you put on. That's true. Janus, as more Australian companies experience data breaches, should individuals be expected to take more responsibility protecting their own data, or should the onus be entirely on the companies that collect and store it? When you guys shop at JB Hi-Fi, which I assume you do, they ask you for a phone number for an electronic receipt.

8:16What do you say, Mike, when they ask you for that? I always say yes. And what do you say, Adam? Yep. I don't care. There's no chance I would give JB Hi-Fi my phone number for that. They do not need it. They do not need it. I do not need a mobile receipt. I assume it's being taken for marketing purposes to spam me with SMSs to buy stuff from JB. It's just another place where my mobile phone can get hacked. It's getting hacked somewhere. We can't stop hacking. And so I think the answer to that question is yes. I think you should not be giving out your private information. My God, Like I can't believe how many people when they go to a website and it says get 5 % off your first order if you give us this information about yourself and the order is going to be$100.

8:59They give that information. Your personal information is worth more than$5. Don't do that. Like yes, take more personal responsibility for your data. Well, that's the baby boomer view. I'll give the millennial view, which is just ridiculous. And that baby boomer view. My God. Hang on. I just got my walking stick from over in the corner. basically so the reality is everybody's got information anyway uh and the notion that you're even worried about giving your phone number jb who i'm pretty sure a pretty good steward of info because they're a public company a well-respected australian public company who have significant rules around spamming but your information is everywhere everybody's been hacked everybody will be hacked i think you need to assume that everyone has your information and that nothing's secret your email's been hacked it passed we've been hacked a hundred times well that's a terrible attitude oh i totally disagree can i just clear that up when you say hacked what what do you mean by that i mean hacked i mean it's been accessed by like bad people and put on the internet we call bad or whatever these are um hackers uh well you think they're good people well i mean i don't want to make an assessment of their personality overall let's say bad actors their actions are bad i don't know these i don't i don't know these people but um All right.

10:14Well, they've just sold your passport details if you put those online somewhere. Yeah. I'm 100 % sure that my details are easily accepted. People can access my phone and my email address by typing an Adam Schropp email in Google. It's highly accessible by a million different ways. I don't think any of my data is secret. I think most millennials and below have this view. I think it's just some really old people. Unfortunately, you're in this category now based on your view. Well, you're wrong. Firstly, really old people do not have data. Because they do provide their information. I think Gen X is paranoid about data, not boomers.

10:52I think boomers are susceptible. So you've got a degree of boomers who just don't have a clue about anything. But I think most boomers are paranoid about giving data to anyone. They're paranoid about putting credit cards in the internet. You and I completely disagree about this point. And maybe I could even slightly modify generation. I'm just off skateboarding. Mike, if someone asked you for your date of birth, home address, driver's license number, passport number, you got any second thoughts about providing that information? It depends who's asking. If it's a business that I trust, I'd probably be pretty comfortable handing it to them.

11:34Maybe that's ignorant. But what if they don't need that information? Don't you think to yourself, do these guys really need this information? If it's a Russian porn site, he's not going to give it. If it's JB Hi-Fi, he might. But to be fair, like if any online purchase that I make will require that information to deliver that product to my house. Do you know what I mean? When you go and, yeah, I get it. But when you go and sign up to, I'll give an example. I sign up to Lime in Israel. in order for me to be able to rent a lime bike in Israel, I need to take a photo of my passport with me holding it.

12:12I felt very uncomfortable about that. I mean, I don't want – that is a – you know, passports, like replicating passports is a big problem. And so you would feel any discomfort about that or not? I would be hesitant to do that. Yeah. I would do that. Well, you wouldn't, Adam, because you think everyone's got your passport anyway. I do. I think nothing's really private. So don't be paranoid about this stuff and lose years of your life worrying about someone. It's like people who worry about credit card theft when they do an online purchase. They can get a charge back. It's nothing to worry about.

12:45The risk is on the acquirer, not on the purchase stuff. Well, you know, by the way, what you're saying is false because if you go and use Apple Pay, the banks try to get out of giving you a charge back. Do you know that? Well, Apple Pay is different. Because Apple Pay is you're touching and it's an in-present transaction. So why should you be charging that back? That doesn't make sense. Yeah, but you know, a lot of the fraud that happens today in credit cards is people that I would call bad people. And you would say they're just misunderstood. No, I'd say credit card fraud. So they go and get like this text message generated to enable your credit card in Apple Pay.

13:24And so you might get the text message. You didn't ask for it, but you don't have to do anything. they're getting it and they go and enable your credit card in their Apple Pay and go and do all these charges and then you'll find in the bank's terms and conditions that chargebacks do not carve a fraud that pertains to Apple Pay credit card usage and so you have to have a war with the bank I've three people I know had a war by the way you can win that war yeah yeah it's very common you can win that war so I think you are too flippant I think you should be more protective of your data It has nothing to do with – like even your constant state of paranoia won't protect you from that.

14:01Ultimately, you can get it back anyway because that is fraud and it's up to the bank to repay that or the vendor to repay. Well, you know, you have to get lawyers if you want to get that money back. I think you get it back without lawyers. You get lawyers and you get the banking ombudsman. No, you've probably got like a VC. You wouldn't go to an ombudsman. It's a waste of time. You go to a VC. No, the ombudsman does get your money back in this case. That's good advice I just gave people because I've been through this twice with people. Yeah. So it's a real problem. It's a real problem. Actually, whoever is in charge of credit card stuff, who's that?

14:32APRA? No. Whoever it is. Not sure. They should look into this and stop banks excluding Apple Pay. That's a one-off exception. I'm sure that loophole will be fixed. But usually they can get a chargeback if there's fraud and there's no risk on the cardholder. So I'm going to tell you a law because you know I don't like laws, but I'll tell you a law that I think should be passed. that companies are not allowed to collect private information that is not required for the transaction unless there is some bar of consent to get over. And so maybe I care less about an email address. But there's consent by someone giving it to you.

15:08You don't have to do the transaction. No one's holding a gun to your head. You don't have to buy the widget you're buying. You just not buy it. So many websites and businesses ask for private identifying information that they just want on the off chance to spam you later or to segment you in their database like the number of people that can ask you for your driver's license or passport number like i think that should be severely restricted legally because you're right places are going to get hacked and as opposed to your you know fatalistic view that your stuff's anywhere anyway you don't want your well that's that's that's the reality though like like or not the ship sailed it's not because i know my email is everywhere you know there's a Google site you can go to that tells you how many times your Google email has been involved in a hacking attack.

15:52So like mine, I'm 19. Mine is 19. Okay. No, that horse is bolted. Unfortunately, you can't shut that farm gate. But it hasn't bolted for your driver's license number and for your passport details. It hasn't. How about, so this is my, we have such different views. This is my overarching view. I was always worried that private information would be gathered by nefarious means, and that was the downfall. But that's not what I think anymore. I think if you just offer people 1 % more convenience, they will happily part with their private information. People have traded – Meta has shown that people are willing to trade privacy for convenience.

16:34And that whole business is based on this. Well, I think it's insanity and I think you should be more vigilant about your data. Well, you can think what you want, but it's happened and it's done. Well, I don't think it's done. The younger generation, i.e. Mike and myself, are more than happy to trade data for convenience and the older generations, like my parents and you, are less willing. So that's fine. This is the problem of having a very multi-generational show that we have different views and we can't help that. Do you let your phone track where you are? I don't turn stuff off. Well, you know, it can track all the places that you've been unless you turn it off.

17:07off you're happy with that no problem okay you too mike you're happy for everyone like apple or google whoever you use they know everywhere you've been at every point in time you're happy with that um i'm assuming it's happening so i i like i know it's happening well it's happening to you because you don't turn it off but i know it's happening so i'm aware it's happening so it's not like it's not like you're happy with that yeah and i think those services can add value to my life um so i'm happy to have them on. All right. Well, you know what? Enjoy the totalitarian dictatorship that comes and oppresses you.

17:40And your argument will be, but I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not worried about having my details tracked. I mean, God. All right. Well, hopefully we'll all be okay. On that note, we'll go to a super quick break. And I think we'll put the tinfoil on his room and we're back in a few minutes.

18:04And we're back. Final question. Last question on LinkedIn comments from Hugh Hazeman. Which books have you read two or more times throughout your careers that shaped your philosophy and business views? We need a longer episode for this. Oh, really? I thought that was a shorter question. No, I'm more of a reference idea than habitual book reading. What book have you read twice, Adam? I read a few Barbarians at the Gate. Have you? Obviously. Can't list your own books on this list. You asked the question. I answered it. I read my year 12 cat, you know, 15 times. What else have I read twice? I've read a few things twice.

18:47I read Fiasco, a book by Fran Portnoy. I've read that book, yeah. I read Lies' Poker a couple of times. I read Moneyball a couple of times. I've read a few. It's rare that I read a book more than once. There's so many books to read. Why do I want to read them twice? I'll tell you what I read. I'm just going to sound ridiculous. I read this Chinese book called The Tao Te Ching. I read that basically constantly. It's like, you know, Taoism, all that stuff. So it's basically the book that that is based on. I think that has got the best life advice. It's one of the best life advice documents I've ever come across.

19:24So I read that a lot. I read, what's it called? The Great Crash, you know, that Galbraith book about the – John Kenneth Galbraith. I've read that a couple of times, maybe three times. I think there's a lot – I like to read about like – because he has a very clear eye view of clearing up the myths about the Great Depression. You know, everyone blames it on the stock market crash. Yeah. It's not – it came way after that and like anyway. Yeah. And so I read that twice. I can't really think of many books that I've read. I can think of another couple I've read twice. When I was in year 11, I won this prize and I got to shoot my book.

20:00I bought the Forbes 20 Best Business Stories. It had stories on like Cyril McCormack's Reaper and I think IBM. Why do you have to read them twice? I read it like five times. I just loved it. It was just a great book on these great business stories. And they were like all about 20 pages each. I'd actually read it again if I could find it. What do you get out of like time number four? I only read it like four times in a row. No, I get that. I read it for 20 years. The other one I read was The Essays of Warren Buffett, which was about the first – my old university lecturer in Boston put together – he basically put together Warren Buffett's annual shareholder letters but categorized it by sort of topic.

20:37It was about the first 30 years. He wrote the book in like 99, 2000 or whatever. So it was like from what, 1970 to 2000, and he just categorized Buffett's views on EBITDA, Buffett's views on depreciate, whatever it was. I read that three or four times probably as well. I just don't understand reading books multiple times. Like you read it, you get it, you know, I understand it. I'm sure you've read, you've read Pigs of the Trough multiple times. Oh, yeah. I read it from back to front. That was confusing. In reverse. Yeah. Like the Quran. But the question, if the question would have been, which books did you read once that were so memorable that they had an impact on your business outcomes, like that, because I don't read them twice, I'm not like there are a few books, but they are dumb and boring books because Hamilton Helmer, would you put that in that category?

21:31Well, you're right. That's a smart and great book. That's in the category. But like accounting for dummies, like that's a dumb answer. But the truth is that had a big impact on my thinking. And like I think those kind of more practical books generally are the ones that have influenced me more. but like I read a lot of business books between the ages of like 15 and 30 like tons of business books that's when I really tried to learn as much as I could about business I think the most the big the business books that have had the biggest impact on my life have mostly been memoirs of people that have been successful in business and understanding the lessons from them and I think maybe like you could just summarize all of those books as be persistent, back yourself, and be lucky.

22:22That'd be the summary of all of those books, right? But I think those are the most useful books, like really great memoirs. And then books that have got nothing to do with business that just make me think more deeply about things. And they can be any books. I read a lot of physics, like books by physicists or something about how physics works. And I think like there's no book that I think, wow, that's so good. I want to read that twice because I got so much, but obviously you're different about, you think differently about that. I think we have a difference there. I think, I think it was a, the question was fine.

22:53I think your interpretation of the question was even better. And there were some great books. I think Hamilton Helm was, for me is a great one that you recommended. What's the best memoir you've ever read? Memoir or biography? Cause it's kind of different. Well, I generally like people writing books about themselves, right? A memoir, but you can put either one. I'm the opposite. I prefer people writing books about other people. I much prefer that. Oh, there's been so many great – and I love those sort of business company biographies like Den of Thieves. I loved all that stuff about the 80s stuff, the insider trading stuff.

23:25Disney War, I thought it was really good. But whose life do you think was the most – I love monkey business. Whose life do you think is the most interesting – like most – not interesting, but like you read it and you thought, wow, there's a lot of lessons to take out of that. I think the snowball on Warren Buffett's a classic one on investing. And he's obviously such an inspirational, not simply because he's had such a successful investing career, but because he's guided by such great values and takes those values into investing. And obviously there's criticism. He builds monopolies, he invests in monopolies and all this sort of stuff, but his financial purity is so much more than anyone else, which is really the linear between him and there's been a lot of other great investors like James Simon's Renaissance had a better IR than Buffett, but he did it through quant and beating the market 2 % of the time, essentially, and just leveraging on that.

24:17But so I'd take Buffett much, much more favorably than a Simon's despite the returns being higher. If people want an author, non-business, that I think will open one's mind, there's a guy called Alan Lightman. He's a professor at MIT. He's a professor of two weird things. He's an author, obviously. He's a professor of physics and literature at MIT. What a combo, right? This guy's off the charts. I think those books opened my mind to things that ultimately helped me in business and life. There's one book he wrote called Einstein's Dreams. I found that a very captivating book. I think those books, non-business books, are good to open your mind and think more broadly.

25:03That's right. On that note, we're going to make a quick escape here and thank you everyone for listening in as always thanks for the three amazing questions we'll see everybody for our big episode on tuesday