UPDATE: The Contrarians Live
The first 100 tickets to The Contrarians Live have now sold out!
Due to unprecedented demand we have added another 10 TICKETS - buy now at this link, these will sell out today!
Join Adam and Adir, plus a special surprise guest, as they film the show in front of a crowd at The Commons in Cremorne, Melbourne, on September 10th from 4.00 until 5.30.
The Contrarians catchup
Adam gave himself a serious RSI from a badly positioned hotel desk in Sydney. The silver lining: he discovered Whisper, an AI-driven voice dictation tool. “Mine was hovering around the 200 words a minute mark and it was getting it pretty accurately. Imagine the output I was churning out with this thing.”
Telstra put Bender from Futurama on its free phone boxes campaign. The problem: in Futurama, a phone box is a suicide box. Adir: “I find it completely perplexing that that passed through Telstra’s marketing team. They’ve found this obscure character and they’ve gone and whacked it on a phone box and no one’s thought to say, hang on, might there actually be a phone box in Futurama and what’s it used for? And the answer is certainly not phone calls.”
Adam on the Governor-General Sam Mostyn commenting on the Pullman Five allegations before any charges had been laid: “She was definitely not the only person who commented on the case. She was the most high-profile and highest-positioned person. And when you start calling people actual victims, that certainly implies a pretty significant level of guilt.”
Adir on the same: “You can believe the victim and have a presumption of innocence simultaneously. You might believe the victim and also believe in judicial process. That means you’ll say the alleged victim. I thought it was even worse when people said the incident is terrible. It’s an alleged incident. No one has confirmed that that’s happened yet.”
Adam on the media response broadly: “The public is being far more mature than the media. And the media is this sort of dying asset now that is clinging to anything it can. We saw how it disgraced itself during COVID and people died as a result of the overreaction.”
Data privacy: nobody is reading the terms, and that’s the problem
Culture Amp changed its terms of use to explicitly opt customers into having their anonymised data used for AI model training. Separately, Spirit Airlines’ liquidator sold the company’s entire email server history to Google for US$14M as a training data asset. Adam and Adir used both stories to dig into a wider question around data privacy in the AI era.
Adir: “What does anonymised mean? And is anything really anonymised? If you pixelate a face, long ago AI was able to reverse the pixelation. It’s just a mathematical algorithm. So pixelating faces is not secure at all as a way of hiding faces. Now if you apply the same philosophy to anonymized data, the question is, could an AI model figure out who the individual was based on the nature of the anonymized data forming a pattern?”
Adam: “The Culture Amp example is a little different in that the clients of Culture Amp aren’t getting any benefit from the data they’re sort of involuntarily giving. Culture Amp customers are paying Culture Amp for the privilege of using Culture Amp, and then they’re taking that data and making money off them. I think if they are using that data, there should be some sort of payment back. Maybe it’s a discount in use or whatever.”
Adir: “I think we’re in an era where we’ve got to take data privacy more seriously. If you run a company, you should sit down very purposefully and think about what you’re going to do with customer data. Are you going to use it for training? Are you going to let them opt out or not? Be transparent about it. What are you going to do when people cancel accounts? Because we are going to end up in an era pretty soon, I think, where there are going to be deeper consequences for the misuse of data.”
Adir: “People will go and they will take relatively small gains in convenience, and in return, they will trade off very large losses in privacy. And that is a lot of what’s going on today. People whine about having to do two factor authentication and taking an extra five seconds. But privacy and security should be paramount in the age that we live in.”
GYG is a masterclass in building powers
Guzman y Gomez delivered a full-year result that the market loved: network sales up 18%, same-store sales up 5.3%, underlying EBITDA up 28% from $66M to $85M, and net profit after tax up 40% year on year. EBITDA margins have grown from 4.1% in FY23 to 6.2% now, a 50% expansion in four years. The share price, which dropped to $16 in early 2025, has recovered to $27, a $2.7B market cap.
Adam: “This is a classic story of a business building its powers. They’ve got their drive-through stores making 60-70% more profit than non-drive-through stores. They’re in a unique position to roll out these drive-through stores. There’s process power, there’s clearly real brand, there’s probably some scale benefits coming out in packaging costs. They’ve got the model down pat, they’ve got an incredible CEO-founder, a great management team. I think they’re just rolling this model out across Australia, picking up all this white space, and as you do it, you just get better and better.”
Adir: “22% revenue growth only resulted in 9% growth in cost of food and packaging. To me, that is the most salient point. That is possibly the best of all signs that the core fundamental economics of this business does seem to be in a very good place due to scale.”
Adir: “Net cash from operating activities is $76M. Now that doesn’t include the rent, but even if you drop that down to $55M after rent, that is absolutely real money that is being made.”
On whether it’s still a buy at $27:
Adam: “It’s a less obvious no-brainer than when it was at $1.6, $1.8 billion. But this business makes genuine money. It’s in that beautiful sweet spot where there’s space for around a thousand stores. They’re probably at two hundred and fifty to three hundred now. I think they’re just rolling this model out.”
Adir launches a luggage brand
After two years of product development, a factory hunt across Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, and China, and a manufacturing cost that blew well past original estimates, Adir has launched Tanssu, a premium cabin luggage brand. The first run is 1,000 individually numbered pieces at $890 each. The headline feature: a front pocket that opens on a hidden hinge and closes completely flush, so it’s invisible until opened, never been done before in fabric-covered luggage. The wheels are hollow skateboard wheels, manufactured from scratch.
Adir: “I was in Kyoto in Japan, and I was in this store that sold all of this very old antique stuff, and there was this beautiful chest there with wheels on the bottom. And I said, what’s this? And they said, oh, this is what they used in this period when they had expensive personal items. They would put it into this cabinet and close it and it was secure, but it had wheels on the bottom so it could go with them. And I thought, what a perfect analogy for a cabin luggage suitcase. Okay, I’m gonna try and build my cabin luggage with exactly what I want. And so that was a terrible decision.”
Adir: “I chose an industry where I felt very passionately about the problem and was completely ignorant about how to solve it. I wanted something I could put a laptop in the front of and access it very easily, but I hate the zips at the front. They look so ugly and I hate when you put stuff in the front pocket and it bulges out and doesn’t fit in the overhead. And so it’s like, how do I do a front pocket that opens on a hinge, but I don’t want you to be able to see the hinge? It turns out that’s never been done before with a fabric cover over the top of it. So that took a long time.”
Adir: “The first trip I went on, someone stopped me and said, what’s that suitcase? I said, oh, it’s this new brand, it’s Tanssu. And she’s like, oh, I really like it, where can I get one? And I literally had to say the words, there’s actually only one of these in the whole world at the moment. That has been an interesting journey. And I would say, you get punched in the face every day with problems.”
Adam: “A couple of businesses I know that started with making luggage. One was called Louis Vuitton, one was called Hermes. So you’re following in the footsteps of giants here.”
The Contrarians listeners: use the promo code in the show notes to get a free tote (valued at $290) with your purchase. Limited to the first 20 buyers.
Five other stories worth following:
PennPoa is commercialising Poa annua, once dismissed as a weed, for golf greens. Its Penn State-developed strain creates dense putting surfaces in 8–12 weeks, with demand exceeding supply and 2026 harvests nearly sold out.
London teenager launched KidsHustle, a gig-work app for under-18s seeking babysitting, dog walking and tutoring jobs. Unlike adult-only platforms, it includes live GPS sharing with parents while teens are completing jobs for added safety.
CaaStle founder Christine Hunsicker will serve five years in prison for defrauding investors of $300M. Her lawyers blamed the startup’s collapse on a 30-pound mirror injury, but extensive evidence of fabricated financial records prevailed.
Chinese humanoid robot Lightning ran 100 metres in 9.32 seconds, beating Usain Bolt’s 9.58 world record at Beijing’s World Humanoid Robot Games. Built by Honor, it celebrated by crashing directly into a wall afterward.
Paramount Skydance and California Attorney General Rob Bonta are set for preliminary settlement talks over Paramount’s $111B Warner Bros. Discovery takeover. Both sides face pressure, though Bonta insists any deal include robust structural remedies.