Eureka

Fun conversation with Delian Zebulgar, who is both a full time VC investor at Founders Fund and a co-founder of space manufacturing startup Varda. What better excuse to speak to a guy? I discover the space economy is much closer and bigger today than most people think. Also pleased and surprised to learn that Australia and New Zealand are up there in terms of pushing the space frontier - yet another reason to be bullish the region.

 

We talk about:

Space factories!

What a mature space ecosystem looks like

How he walks the line between exploring opportunities and focusing on doing something great, which is something I struggle with a lot as well

What makes a great operator

What he disagrees about with some of the people we both admire most

How he made his best public markets trade ever by betting against Peter Thiel

What impact his Eastern European immigrant background has had on him

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let’s go!

Nicholas is a prominent Australian economist, and has chaired various Australian government groups and initiatives as well as Kaggle, where he was an early investor. Lindsay Tanner has described him as "Australia's foremost public intellectual".We cover:

Toyota, Tech and Isegoria

Problems with technological scale vs human-centred design

Our inability to solve child abuse and indigenous disadvantage

Corporate value phoniness

The surreal waste of government programs

Mentorship

Interesting people

Investment philosophy

The Australian Dream and Australian identity

The meaning of life and what Nicholas would do with a billion dollars

New banking initiatives

Plain packaging cigarettes

Regrets and the long shadow of the Holocaust

A Poem

Advice he’d give his younger self

“We need the eggs”, a joke that gets better with age https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-M3Q2zhGd4

In this conversation Alex and I discuss:

The Big Lies we are told about relationships, family and meaning and the personal and social derangements that surround these issues today

Romania, where Alex lives, and the liminal space between Eastern and Western Europe

Individual optimisation vs group optimisation

Alex: “I’m here to bring the dad energy. Here are the facts of life. Place your bets”

We end on a bleak note: our society may be dominated by childless smart people filled with ennui, but that moment will pass, and the future belongs to those who propagate themselves – for better and for worse

 

www.mishasaul.com

Professor Rory Medcalf, Head of the National Security College at the Australian National University and author of Contest for the Indo-Pacific. We cover a lot to do with Australian defence including China, nuclear weapons for Australia, political interference in defence procurement, where he sees potential for technology obsolescence in the next war, lessons from his time as diplomat in India, and much more including his book recommendations.

What is the importance of steering Australian defence strategy towards the Indo-Pacific?

What are the key military threats facing Australia over the next 50 years?

Looking back, Australia first relied on British imperial support, then on the post-WWII US liberal order. What does Australia standing on its own look like going forward?

How do you think about Chinese threat to Australia? Where else could realistically a threat come from, and over what time horizon?

Should Australia get nuclear weapons?

What’s going to be the big military surprise next conflict? That aircraft carriers are rendered obsolete by drones?

How at risk is our strategic execution from provider capture and politically motivated employment schemes?

What’s your biggest learning and fondest memory while a diplomat in India

Book recommendations: 

The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s by Piers Brendon

Everything Under The Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power, by Howard W. French

The Leopard: by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Byrne generates one of the highest insights per unit of speech or writing I’ve come across.

Some of what we covered + highlights:

Interest rates and bubbles

Why interest rates have been declining over the long run

Low interest rates and private / public market valuations

Structural sellside optimism

Are Google and Facebook undervalued

Signs we might be in a bubble

This was recorded months before the Gamestop fiasco (!): “so you can find people on wall street bets who are just insanely exuberant and who are clearly just deranged gamblers who are buying out of the money call options and pyramiding up their gains until they get wiped out”

On the Buy Now Pay Later phenomenon

Why Australia?

All about CAC, baby! “My view on that is that in FinTech, the dominant factor is always customer acquisition cost. A lot of people come up with interesting ideas for financial products that are interesting to the kinds of people who dream up new financial products. Then they figure out that very few people are interested in a financial product as such people are interested in free money”

How FinTechs typically unravel

“A lot of that comes down to the fact that it's hard to market financial products, because it's just really hard to create an ad advertising something that is so ephemeral. You can't show someone on TV having insurance. You can't show a picture of alone.”

Byrne’s journey

Learning to trade stocks in high school

Dropping out of college

Realising he could be a tech analysis in a time before tech analysts – finding his niche and making it his thing

How he ended up writing full time

The natural narrowing of focus in finance careers

What he learned living in a former crack den in New York. One roommate was a currency trader who just listened to techno and day-traded the British pound all day: “I think practicing the ability to just grind out the normal thing at a fairly high quality level is a useful background for doing something different” (Byrne uses the Beatles and Picasso as examples)"

Ricardian comparative advantage: I first really appreciated Ricardian comparative advantage the first time I paid a laundromat to do my laundry and fold my laundry and while I was there, I was able to write an article that paid for the cost of the laundry.

Investing

What’s an overlooked asset class?

On investing discipline: “I try to be very disciplined about having stop losses, just so that I don't talk myself into really dumb reasons to own something or short something.”

Momentum investing: “Often being able to say, I agree only more so is actually a pretty powerful way to find things that don't look contrarian. That's why they are contrarians.”

Why shorting is such a hard game (note John Hempton!)

Self-perpetuating mechanisms for credit bubbles, and how in the short term they lead to volatility but in the long term can lead to stability and prosperity

Question from Patrick McKenzie:

I believe this is called a “lobster pot”: “In addition to being long short tech stocks and doing some stuff with futures from time to time, I have one company that is really tiny, illiquid enough that it does not trade every day. It's just a very deep value stock that I bought and have resolved to not pay attention to until the CEO dies and the company will presumably get liquidated then.”

Impressive companies, determinant optimism and recursion

Whether kids have made Byrne more or less ambitious

How the Anglosphere, largely surrounded by bodies of water as it is (UK, US, Australia / NZ) is inoculated from the existential risk of tanks rolling through, which happens from time to time basically everywhere else

On the meritocracy / nepotism tradeoff / synthesis

What Byrne disagrees with Bryan Caplan and Peter Thiel on

“You basically need a lot of natural Republicans to run a socialist country”

Rob Wiblin is a founder and leader of the modern Effective Altruism movement…. and one of my oldest friends!

This conversation is different because there’s not much about Effective Altruism – there’s Rob’s excellent podcast and prolific writing for that. This conversation is a chat between old mates, and it tries to track our intellectual development since we were teens. Is that self-indulgent? Maybe! But it’s the conversation I was excited to have with Rob.

We cover a lot:

What Rob learnt from his parents

How we shaped each other’s views

My Theory of Rob

Rob’s excellent conversation with Russ Roberts (best rebuttal of Effective Altruism on record)

How Rob’s views have changed since starting out with EA and how confident he is in his views

What keeps him up at night

Whether he’s winning

Should we stop eating animals?

What we’re watching

Why has the Lord of The Rings held up so well?

Podcasting tips

On kids

Was learning Spanish a mistake?

What was it like being an exchange student in Spain

On institutional decline and the US today

Hope you enjoy, and let me know what you think.

The Georgian language has one of the most beautiful scripts I have come across. Unique to Georgia, tucked away between the Russian, Persian and Ottoman empires, and unrelated to any other language in the world, I’ve always wanted to know how it came to be.

I got to ask that and more in this conversation.

Transcript at www.mishasaul.com

Daniel Gulati is one of the most all-round impressive people I know: brought up in Wollongong, NSW, he’s founded and exited 4 startups and launched his own VC fund, Forecast Fund, in the US.

We kick off this conversation with fatherhood, a subject close to both our hearts, and then cover what opportunities he’s looking for, why he’s bullish on Australia, building his VC business, the role of a Board member and much more.

Topics we cover and great quotes:

“I'm interested in…the anti-Amazon”

“I don't think there's any reason that the next great consumer company can't come out of Australia”

Why he’s a Zero to One founder and not a One to Ten founder

“If you're a really good idea or content creator or really good coder, you can take over the world. And if you're not one of those two things, better to invest in people that are”

“School teaches you to address your weaknesses, and I think life teaches you that you actually need to double down on your strengths”

“The best startups are the ones that exist in many categories or don't exist in any categories”

The power of the immigrant chip on your shoulder

How he’s built out his investment funnel and sourcing network for his VC fund

The role of a board member: “not holding a mirror to a founder but actually doing the opposite and trying to counterbalance a founder is really, really important”

“Good founders are able to execute on their vision and great founders are able to adapt”

Speaking to Tim is like drinking from a firehouse: singularly the most impressive growth marketing person I know, he seems to have seamlessly transitioned to company building. I love the way he thinks deeply about product and company strategy, building his team and capability, and the trade offs involved. But it’s really the insights that you get when he talks about his marketing craft, that you really won’t get anywhere else.

 

Transcript at www.mishasaul.com

I got to ask Agnes Callard questions about her work as well as on philosophical topics I’ve been pondering for years. I also appreciated her personal insights into family and Jewishness.

 

“There's something thin and insubstantial about tech optimism”

 

Full transcript at www.mishasaul.com