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

26:35It's a bit like that. It's not the MCG 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 Snoop Dogg. This is like a young Snoop. This is harder than a young Snoop Dogg trying to get into Harvard. That's what I would say. Snoop could get into, yeah, I think. A young Snoop, young, 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 two of these, a bit different to this format.

27:18Obviously, our Fortress Melbourne show and our ICC show. But you know people did fly down from Sydney for that. 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 this was a nice digression. So LinkedIn, how do you currently feel about LinkedIn, Adam? Same as I always have. All right. 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.

27:57Maybe 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 haven't noticed anything particularly different, but I haven't been posting that much. So I did 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.

28:37category 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 okay which was the same as the suggested one so these are just things that it thinks 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.

29:23So the issue is not the content, it's the actual poster, right? Yeah. And so then you've got two left, which is commented on buyer connection or posted by my connection. Which one of those would you expect to be higher? Well, the posted buyer should be higher, but I'm suspecting the commented on is higher, otherwise you 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 an actual post by one of my connections. Now, I don't think that it's like this in general. I think this is an extreme little sample of it.

30:00But 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 contacts are posting and they're seeing what you're posting. and that is one of the reasons that reach has diminished so dramatically. Well, it's changed. And so I think LinkedIn is slowly but surely turning into every other social platform. Well, LinkedIn's always prioritised comments. 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, it boosts it significantly.

30:35So I know the posts I make that tend to get a lot more views and likes are the ones that have a lot more comments. And that's always been the case. I don't think there's been a radical change. That is an interesting sample. I think the interesting part is LinkedIn's always been the last, well, LinkedIn and TikTok, but certainly LinkedIn. 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$2.5 trillion business. But before then, you get organic reach.

31:07Now LinkedIn's one of the few bastions of organic reach. You don't have to pay. You can get 100, 200 million impressions without paying a cent. You certainly can't get on Instagram unless you're an influencer and go wild. So that's the difference. And to have two out of 10 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.

31:43Like 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 you might, well, I know your attitude. 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. I have to shut the whole app and reopen it, and it's a very buggy platform. So it'll be interesting to see where it goes. So what did you get up to last week?

32:16I went to 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 DEFCON, D-E-F-C-O-N, now in its 34th year. And it is basically the world's leading hacking conference, conference for hackers.

32:58Were you there as a hacker? When I was younger, like much younger, before there was actually a World Wide Web, when there was dial-up into kind of bulletin boards and things like that. Apronet. 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, you know, people started going to 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 War Games from that movie?

33:33Yeah. A classic Matthew Broderick. I thought that was a nice movie. Early, like, that was one of the first hacking, it was a ripping movie. Yeah. Greatest movies of all time. That was one of the movies that gave hackers a bad name, if you ask me. Or a good name. I think he's great. Oh, he saves the world in the end or something. But first he almost destroys 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. Wow. And it's this mixture of people.

34:05So 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. Do you know what a red team does in a business? 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. And a lot of this has been replaced by AI, right? I would say it's been augmented by AI.

34:39And I'm going to tell you during this conversation, why this whole paranoia about mythos and AI hacking everything and zero-day vulnerabilities when like two people in the world don't understand what zero day or two percent or whatever i 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 work out what that is they do both of them at different each of them at different times then there were some people there that i assume were just 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 they 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 going to have to authenticate anyone's validity for any student discount or whatever it is.

35:47And also, it's totally accepting. People can wear whatever they want. And no one judges anyone at this thing. So there are some bad people there, I think. And then there is lots of friends from various countries and organizations that are trying to recruit people into their organizations. And so it's an interesting mix of people. What was the age range? change i think if you're under eight years old you can come for free or 12 years old so some people brought their kids there um yeah 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 because it's just an rfid right and so i'll talk about that in a second um and i had my phone to make sure it only was connected to cellular and certainly i wasn't connecting bluetooth or wi-fi i didn't take my computer into the event.

36:35I was using cash to pay for everything. Like you got to take precautions, but like, it's not 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. Well, people, was it like a lot of nerds there or was it 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.

37:12It 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. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. And so it's a super friendly and also slightly terrifying environment. And so, but this is, so I'll tell you some things. So I went there because of this, because ASIC has just made very clear that company directors in Australia have a very deep obligation around cybersecurity.

37:52I'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 be my view 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.

38:27And I think directors in Australia, by and large, almost down to a 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 you're what does cyber mean like what this like from the year 2000 or something that word right cyberspace i mean yeah it's nonsense exactly reason i say infosec is because what you're trying to protect is information that's what you're trying to protect and and so i said to you mythos isn't really the big concern to me when i look at it and i'll tell you why i say that so i'll tell you a couple of um a couple of terms that are useful.

39:16One 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 hacker 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 the way hackers think.

39:52The other way is to get a thief, a local neighborhood thief and say to him, hey thief, can you get into my house and see what they do? Which is a red team, right? And don't worry so much about mythos is there are red teams for lots of different ways to get your data. And so an attack surface is 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 because they didn't know about it. So the minute it's exposed, they can be penetrated.

40:31That's not a great way of saying it. My concern here always has been, I always assume a hacker can get in somehow, whether they go via an employee or 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 about 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 chest of drawers as 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?

41:07Do 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. 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 DEF CON for the first time, you think there's no such thing as perfect security. When you leave DEF CON for the first time, you think there's no such thing as security. 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.

41:48So 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 learned personally. And I'll give you a couple of examples that are non-tech examples, like not software examples. What I learned 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.

42:22And 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, are actually, I think I sent, I gave this to the wrong address. Look at the address and the address on the package is next door, the next place.

43:07And 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 skimmer. 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 for sale at DEF CON, including lock picks, everything you can imagine, because they say it's all for red teams. I've always wanted to know how to pick a lock.

43:41It's one of the great... I can pick a lock. Can you? It's much easier than you might think, but there are simple locks and then more complicated locks, right? But there's a table you could go to and they'll teach you how to pick locks. 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, how to make bread. And secondly, I bought for$30 some locks. You can buy them from Amazon, and they're sort of transparent plastic locks and a lock picking set, and we all learned how to pick locks.

44:15There 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 and you can access it, you can open it without a key. And that is true for physical locks. It is true for hotel doors. It's true. And so that's one. I love that stuff. All that stuff. So that person 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.

44:47And so – Well, the other thing you can do is just go to what you do in the movies is you follow someone. They put the bag down. You take the card out and suddenly you've got the card itself. So there's also other ways, more physical ways of doing 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? Because 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.

45:17So it'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 talking your way into stuff might be the easiest way for me to say it so 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.

45:53But also there's vishing, which is voice phishing. And so I tell you what you get to see when you go to DEF CON, you see someone go into a soundproof 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, a big company. And they phone 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.

46:53And so, you know, we all know about the scams. Can you explain what a social engineering interaction is for myself and every listener who doesn't know what you're talking about? Yeah. 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 ransomware attack on them for example or all sorts of different things.

47:40And so the reason I 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, NVIDIA's software, and wasn't supposed to be in there and got a bounty for it. So there's all that stuff going on. But actually, 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.

48:22Like 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 you don't know 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. If you apply for a hundred jobs, you'll get some of them. The inside job, like an employee, a nefarious actor, pretending to be or acting as being an employee to me or obviously the close cousin that is just compromising an employee, they seem to be the two easiest.

49:07Yeah, for sure. As in easiest ways to get in, hardest ways 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? So what I'm saying here is, this is why I said to you, cybersecurity, once you call it InfoSec and you start thinking about it bigger than like, how's Mythos going to hack my software? It's a very fascinating area.

49:41Directors in Australia are deeply underprepared for this. It's scary what ASIC 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 they need to think about information security in a much more strategic way and just stop taking stop purely taking the word of tech people in a silo 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 um once you go to this thing like i mean 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.

50:50And I wanted to say, 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. 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.

51:24Like people that are in charge of like people on the board of directors of Xero, 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 infosec, 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, that's why I said 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 InfoSec.

52:12And 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 key or someone can. That's just the reality of things. I'm going to get a super quick break. We've got a massive guest coming up in just a moment.

52:40And we're back and 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 taker, Richlist Godfather, and now we can add best-selling author to that ever-growing bio. John Stensholt is joining us again. He's got his brand new book out, Tech Bros, which is absolutely dominating the charts. It was top 10 selling book in Australia on Amazon last week. Any book, we're talking like all the kind of like Leanne Moriarty books in there as well. So this is heading right to the top. He can be able to afford his own private jet at this rate, I suspect.

53:15The book, of course, chronicles the rise and then somewhat fall of Australia's two best known tech dudes, of course, Mike Cannonbrooks and Scott Barquhar, friends of the pod who founded Atlassian. The fast-paced 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 salaciously, the book reveals the shocking breakup between Mike and Scott, with the pair not talking to each other for an entire year while somehow acting as co-CEOs of the business, before partaking in what will become Australia's most famous fence dispute, and of course, Scott's subsequent shock departure from the business.

53:59John, thanks for joining us. Did you expect the book to become a bestseller three days in? I think having you being such a fan of the book probably helped, Adam. No, I mean, the reaction's been amazing. I think, look, we've got an amazing cover for a start. That counts for something when people walk into a bookstore, right? That's a great cover. And Nick's an amazing photographer, one of my favourites, great colleague back when I was at the AFR and so on. It's a very interesting subject. I think, you know, the founder story that you guys talk about all the time. But otherwise, look, I mean, yeah, the reaction's been amazing.

54:30I have to say, you know, the Hungry Caterpillar has probably overtaken us since then, a couple of favourites like that on the book charts. But otherwise, yeah, look, it's been incredible. And we're very grateful, clearly. So it's great to have you on, John. I was very sad to miss the book launch 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 sales reaction you were 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.

55:05I think people know, they know of them. I think what, particularly with Mike, he's gone beyond Atlassian. If you think back a few years ago, particularly when he was running the climate campaign, running the campaign for AGL, talking about how important climate was, renewable energy. He was on the news a lot. He was on, you know, 7.30. He was on the Q &A show. 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.

55:48He was reporting it, you know, every day. And, yeah, I mean, it was a constant story. So I think he sort of leapt past, you know, what was going on, you know, just for that last year. 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 a$100 billion company then. And he was doing all this other stuff on the side. So I think in particular, someone like Mike, and he owns Souths, right, in the NRL. 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.

56:25But I think there's a lot of people that read business books and founder books as well, right? So that does help too. I definitely think, this is my theory. So life is hard, is my experience of it. And I feel like regular human beings, as they're going through life, maybe especially Australian human beings, but I don't think this is peculiar necessarily 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 want to call it schadenfreude 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 than everyone else.

57:17And 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 too, right? So there's a narrative arc element to it, right? 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 they didn't overcome as well.

57:50So, yeah, clearly, look, I mean, 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 run into trouble and all that sort of thing. 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. He's probably got more property than even Adam does at the moment. So in Sydney, right, everyone talks about luxury property as well. So there's all those sort of elements swirling around in it. There's sport, there's business, there's property, there's jets, 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.

58:31So, yeah, look, there's a lot going on. It feels like these guys were really loved, certainly when they floated the businesses, the greatest race is making money. And it feels like we're, and certainly Mike, I think less so Scott, but I think where Mike jumped the shark is probably around the AGL time, the AGL slash the sudden cable stuff, where we've been this much loved, cool tech bro, as you call the bull, to kind of this hypocrite who, I'm this great climate guy, you're all wrong. He certainly picked a fight with anyone on the right side of politics, effectively got Albanese into government by funding the Teals.

59:06And he was the major funder of the Teals. He actually sold with Scott. And then goes and buys one of the most expensive private jet, the most expensive private jet in the world, charters the jet out. So he claims he's this crusader. He's actually making money off incredible pollution. Then buys, sponsors a Formula One GP. It seems like this guy almost went out of his way to piss people off. Yeah, I think, as I said, there's that narrative. 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?

59:39And I think, you know, there's great moments where, and again, I don't have a problem with this, but where, you know, it's Greta Thunberg led sort of protests, right? And Atlassian says, you know, the staff, we're almost 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 cause it it uh it opens you up to you know hypocrisy charges or uh accusations and then adam with that as well goes the you know the the really sort of you know uh i don't know what's endearing or trying hard to be sort of earnest uh linkedin posts that went along with that you know i've really grappled with this situation as i shell out 75 million dollars for a jet i mean And people, I think, really, understandably so, struggle with that.

1:00:29I mean, you sort of reap what you sow 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 that really sort of say yes to you all the time that, of course, 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 know, 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.

1:01:07Like what's your emotion towards them as people after going through this whole process? Oh, I think that's complicated because, you know, 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 10, 12 years was incredible from an Australian business point of view. Look, it's hard to feel sorry for someone at Deer that is worth$20,$25 billion. Money can get you a lot of things, including private jets.

1:01:43I don't think necessarily either 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 of 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 in their first 20-odd years of being adults, right? I mean, what do you do for your second act? But 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.

1:02:23I think it's equally easy to feel sorry for a guy with$25 billion and a guy with no billion dollars because 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 problems started and maybe if they hadn't have been this successful they would have much better lives okay you wouldn't have written a book about them probably but um 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.

1:03:08But in a country of 25 million people, especially doing the kinds of things that Mike in particular did, you're going to 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.

1:03:45Like 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 - This guy's the same bolt of hypocrites. He's possibly the biggest hypocrite in Australia. But you only say that because of how much - He lectured the whole country about climate change while 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. That's what I'm saying. 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.

1:04:22And I think to me, 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, sure. I've heard that the book is not allowed to be talked about inside Atlassian. You know you've made it when that's the case. They burn the copies when they see one. There's a big bonfire running 24 hours a day, and then they just chuck it on. Well, maybe that's why it went to number nine last week, Adam. Like in The Assassins, they bought a lot of copies and birthed them. Look, whatever works right for science.

1:04:55Yeah, no, clearly, I think you're right, Adia. Yeah, there's – so there's – yeah, there's an element. We're not allowed 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 a little bit to the hypocrisy that him talks 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 have done that and they'd just gone – he'd gone and bought a jet, you know, none of that climate crusading, all the passion stuff that they did, arguably because so much money came in through the share sales that they did, which Adam's been a notable critic of.

1:05:27Every single day, they sell off a small slice, a million dollars a day. You accumulate a lot of money to do a lot of things with if you want. So they hadn't have done that. And also, perhaps if they'd sold, they got out five, six, seven years ago, sold up and like other big name entrepreneurs had done, the Elon Musk's of the world and so on, and went on to do another thing. I think they would have been lauded as incredible business heroes. and I know that they had talks 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 discussed, the idea with them was that they will control the narrative.

1:06:07Now, 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 written obviously a lot of articles. You chronicle the richest people in Australia. These guys, they said, didn't cooperate at all with you. So there's a couple of different ways you can cooperate. You can cooperate directly. You can get friends to speak to you. They chose to do none of the above, which certainly is not how I think you want to cooperate.

1:06:37But how does that change your narrative, not just this book generally? When someone cooperates with you, do you feel you're naturally more inclined to make the narrative more friendly to the subject? Yeah. 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 Mike sat down, imagine a year ago, if Mike and 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.

1:07:12Or if Scott had said, look, yeah, okay. Of course we had issues, right? But, you know, we can't work together for 20 odd years and not have fallings out. 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. It wouldn't have stopped us trying to pursue a lot.

1:07:44Because, you know, once you start writing these articles, so many people came to us. 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 talking 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 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 um the assistant and the who got the two people there the assistant and there's another one there as well face sterling and the chief of staff so i would say when i um like think about that i would say they didn't come off looking great but then if i put myself in their shoes i think yeah we came off looking great we are very powerful and this book just emphasize 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 favor in this book to be honest i'm not sure they're feeling like that at the moment for what we hear but uh yeah clearly i mean i look i think that dear two is we're not trying to go after people in that way.

1:09:11We'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 Adam seems to be obsessed with and you'd probably take a deer. You know, all these things that take you into that lifestyle of the rich and 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. Every billionaire I know has a consigliere or two that look after them, so to speak, and probably clean up a lot of their messes.

1:09:46So yeah, you're right. They are very, very, very powerful people. And perhaps we're showing this to the public more than it has been done before. What goes on in the world of billionaires? There's a comment, and I don't have to comment on it, but what goes on is 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 they don't need to, right? If they go, then 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.

1:10:25You should not be doing that. Because I think definitely Elon suffers from that problem. I know Mike's 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 that. Well, if Mike has got people around him saying that, then he's got a lot of people saying that they disagree with him. It's a bit weird that at one point this is a$160 billion business and the most powerful person appears to be the secretary. Like that seems strange that poor old Scott, the co-CEO, reading the book, it felt like he was subservient to Fay, who was literally an EA.

1:10:59So I presume you were really 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 mics off with his Formula One team and his green staff and running AGL and doing it by the way it's 34 properties. And these assassins are running the business. Well, I think it's probably a bit more complicated than that, but they certainly wielded a lot of power and continue to wield a lot of power. I think you'd say that or they would say that they're wielding or trying to 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 or trying to play.

1:11:57And why was, do you think that Scott could not play the same game? You think because they're 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 perhaps, for the one of a better phrase, Machiavellian enough to be like that, didn't really want to do that. Look, it probably wasn't built that way necessarily. And that's why it's interesting to see him in leadership positions like the Tech Council, of Australia and striding the corridors of power and Parliament House, trying to influence people there as well. So whether or not he can do that 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.

1:12:45So, yeah, look, I think different personalities, clearly they complemented each other for a long, long time, but in a way 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 what Adam always argued, like I feel like I might be the last defender of Mike that's left. 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.

1:13:21but I'm sympathetic to him inside that Atlassian 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 he'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, Adir, is that you're the Scott to Adam's Mike inside the contrarians business empire. We are born on the same day.

1:13:58About once every few weeks I have this sharp feeling in my back and I realise another one of Adam's henchmen have put a knife in me. But I'm on to it now and I've learnt to enjoy the pain, so it's fine. Mike's my Amy Glancy, clearly. is it is it fair to say that like every great story has a villain and a hero and have you almost cast Scott in the hero role and Mike unwittingly in the villain role I'm not saying that whether that's actually true or not but is that almost sort of 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 uh inside Atlassian outside Atlassian and the entrepreneur and founder and VC sort of scene and you know rich people around right is that there was a lot of people that would say to us oh look i know them both but i'm closer to scott or you know i look i i you know um i i know them really really well but you know i i hang out with scott more like i and we really really tried very hard to find you know people that liked mike a lot now i think there was probably an element mike i know we know that mike told people not to talk to us right so and that's fine uh but it was hard to find people that like them both equally, if that makes sense.

1:15:13So, you know, perhaps that is something that's evolved over time. I don't think this detracts from Mike's acumen as a business leader and 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, and I think part of that, Adam, is that it's the crusading aspect that he undertook in that sort of climate and green technology space, renewable energy space. It probably turned some people off that maybe didn't want to have that opinion shoved down their throat so much in the business pages and websites in the Australian media and then into TV and so on and so forth.

1:16:01He was on LinkedIn and Twitter, now X, a lot talking about that, where Scott wasn't. So I think that did turn people off. And if you want to call that some sort of villain role, well, yeah, sure. I think people ended up seeing him that way. Well, I think if you look at, obviously, Mike became the sole CEO. They were co-CEOs. So he was to the victor, go to the sport. In many ways, that was the more logical result in that it 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 the founder ceos who remain overall is so bill gates is much more techie uh he steve wozniak much more techie the tech guy whereas zuckerberg was more of a product guy really um 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 last he's got some other product issues which overcome override all this but it felt like mike was the probably the better choice to let if there was going to be one of them.

1:17:00It felt like Mike was the right one. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, I think he's more outgoing in that way. He's better at doing those, you know, the investor calls and dealing with investors. He's probably a bit more gregarious in that way. Look, I think that clearly he thinks he's the smartest guy in the room as well. He probably is. Okay. So there's an element of that too. So, but I think you're right. He's better in 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 would step down, Scott would go, and then there was another successor, Anu, who was a, you know, very, very highly regarded president of Atlassian as well, who was going to come through.

1:17:41Then none of that happened. I think, yeah, clearly, I'm not surprised at all, you're right, that it ended that way. It would be fascinating to see, you know, 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 under the bridge in that way. Who knows who's going to be the CEO in five, 10, 20 years' time, what the company looks like. Or if there is a company in 10 or 20 years, right? So can I ask you this question? So I often look at business now and I think like we've moved past this age of monarchy and aristocracy and so that's largely gone and it's been replaced by corporations.

1:18:19And so inside a corporation, the ceo is the king or let's call it the monarch like the king queen being kind of equally powerful uh in their respective ways and so this is what i always thought was fascinating about the atlassian story of both of them stepping down if your whole like the people that are at atlassian that are the consigliere 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.

1:19:02And in this case, like Mike was not dead, thankfully. He just was making this decision that both of the kings were going to abdicate simultaneously. It would have to me seemed inconceivable that powerful consigliere 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 possible 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.

1:19:37You know, we need him here. We need him here. He's the, you know, he is the best leader that we have or could have. And I think for all those reasons you just specified, yeah, clearly self-interest plays a part of that. I mean, perhaps if we've seen that with other famous entrepreneurs as well, they leave or they sell up and they take their group with them 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 serial entrepreneurs in the world know. but it's um you know the with those skills are uh eminently transferable to do something else but yeah clearly that uh you know that incredible power base that they had was uh you know was shored up to make sure that um mark stayed and uh you know once uh once scott left it was the the message went around we could all we can 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.

1:20:35They effectively achieved the almost impossible in this outcome with Mike. The fact that they were able to persuade the board, I don't know about most companies, or maybe I do, but it's not often that an EA and a chief of staff is presenting stuff to a board in a boardroom or even really getting access to directors in that way, let alone persuading them if that was 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, 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.

1:21:14So, Mike and Scott effectively control. I think they got 40 % of the voting shares each in that. Well, they're well over 50. So, Mike and Scott effectively control. And what you've seen over the – and what your book, I think, really chronicles well and probably the theme of the book is Mike loves war and Scott loves peace. And if you look at – So Mike went to war on AGL. He went to war on Sun Cable with Twiggy. He went to war with the fence dispute and he went to war with the CEO of Atlassian. That'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, won.

1:21:44You can argue he lost, but he won all four battles. And Scott didn't go to war on the CEO role. He let Mike – like Scott could cause all sorts of issues with Atlassian if he wanted to. Like he's an equal controlling shareholder. So there's no board here. The board's irrelevant. So you can talk about Amy and Faye. Forget that. Like the board is the most useless board in the world, other than maybe Tesla's board. So the board means nothing. It's purely what Scott and Mike agree amongst themselves. And Scott agreed to peace in letting Mike become CEO and he agreed to peace in moving to the$130 million Bellevue Mansion and selling his dream house on what is apparently not that great a beach, as you discovered, in Point Piper.

1:22:28So is that the way to look at it, that Scott's just a peacemaker and Mike's a warmonger 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, well, to 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 to chronically it. So there is an element of compromise, of wanting to be almost like the glue that sort of keeps this thing going in order to not everyone loses everything.

1:23:15So I think, yeah, compromise, peacemaking, not wanting to, maybe it's sort of conflict avoidance in a way as well. I think that's a very good way of reading it, Adam. I can't believe I'm agreeing with you on this. Yeah, I think that totally corrects my view on this. I think you're absolutely right. 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. I think the answer is nothing. That's one thing they could do. They could walk away. I don't even know who actually is on the Atlassian board, John. I've never even looked at the board because they have no power.

1:23:53It's kind of a Clayton's board. Yeah, that's right. There's a bunch of basically Silicon Valley tech people at the moment. I mean, Doug Boone, who's now a key member of the Trump administration. Of course, Trump's guy. Exactly. He was the chairman when it floated. But that's probably the – I mean, obviously, there's ASIL. People have been in there all along, the first VC to get in there. But Doug was probably the most – clearly the most high-profile person 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.

1:24:27And that tells the story in itself, doesn't it? They should put Adam on the board because the thing is, Adam, he's not going to care about being fired from the board. So he'll just give smart thoughts and ideas that are completely combative to what the business is doing. Whereas, like, I don't really want to be hated in that kind of way, but you don't care about that, Adam. I think you'll be the perfect addition to the board. 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 going to fire you for saying stuff that we hate listening to.

1:25:02I reckon that there you go. Then you'd know at least one person on the board. I'll be very happy. Then that's how they could control you as well. I have a low chance of this happening. They could control your negativity. Well, given that followed what you and I have told them to do, two years ago, we said they need to prove it to profitability, the share price was stuffed otherwise. They actually ultimately followed your advice a couple of 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. John, this is an amazing read.

1:25:33I encourage all Contrarians listeners to go out and buy a copy. Obviously, it's number nine, I think, on Amazon, even higher potentially, bestsellers in Australia. So it's clearly the reading public have embraced this book. I think Perry and yourself, two of the great guys of Australian journalism, I mean, we're super happy that you've got this book that's selling so well and, yeah, just wishing you the best of success. And thanks again for coming on. I'm sure you've got to jump on your jet and head off somewhere in a couple of hours. But we appreciate you taking the time. Yeah, no, thanks, Jens.

1:26:01I really, really appreciate it. Thank you. Well, we'll wrap it up here. It's been a great episode. We'll be back, of course, on a Saturday episode. Thank you to John, our dear Will, Mike, and everybody for jumping on. We'll see you everybody soon.

1:26:17Thank you.