The $1.6 Billion Founder: The Slow Decline of Australia Nobody Wants to Talk About & How We Win!

Charlie Gearside co-founded a $1.6 billion telehealth empire from scratch. No medical background, no blueprint, just a bet that Australians deserved better access to healthcare. But now he's turned his attention to something bigger, a cultural movement to remind Australia how to take risks again. This episode covers how Eucalyptus went from a $2 million Blackbird raise to a US acquisition, why Australia's business creation rate has been declining since the 1970s, and what Charlie is doing about it through Build Australia. Learn more about Build Australia here: https://buildaustralia.com/ For more content like this: Subscribe to the Mentored newsletter here: https://the-mentored-platform-pty-ltd.myklpages.com/l/WWJGc5 Join my exclusive Mentored+ community: https://mentored.com.au/become-a-member/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Charlie Gearside, welcome to Straight Talk, mate.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Thanks, Mark.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Mate, you're doing some stuff, dude. I wanna talk to you about, and by the way, I wanna know, you're only a young guy and you've done it all in relation to business. Are you sort of getting, thinking about politics?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  It's a bit of a cop out to say, but I just don't think I have the personality type for it.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  We don't need personality for it. We don't want personality. We want policy and we want commitment.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  I don't know. I'm a little bit cynical about the politics stuff at the moment. So the answer's no. Yeah. For now, like at least where I'm at right now.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  Well, we could do with people like you. Um, I think you're best known for, in my world at least, that's in the startup world, the entrepreneur world. You're best known for your more recent exit from Eucalyptus. We'll talk about that in a moment. But I remember you from the days, the early, early days of Koala, the mattress mob.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  I learned about business from those guys.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I learnt so much in those couple of years.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  Well, so your background is not so much business, but more, more the marketing side of things. With advertising and marketing and messaging and branding, et cetera. Maybe go right back and tell me about your, your early experiences in business.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Well, I'll go way back. I didn't really know much of anything about business. Dad was an artist, mum was a teacher and I loved computers, loved dicking around on computers. And my, I've photoshopped cars before I could drive. So like by that, I mean literally get a picture of a car.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Cracked version, pirated version of Photoshop and I'd make the wheels bigger, you know, make it look really hectic.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  And then I, I got good enough at that, that I started selling the images to the Sydney Morning Herald and a few car magazines. And that was kind of my first sort of, you know, I was like, oh shit, you can make, make money doing this. And that was a bit of a, um, in, looking back, that was a bit of a, like an entrepreneurial sort of start.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  Totally. How old were you?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Fourteen or fifteen.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Doing that. Yeah. Obviously extremely cool thing to be doing.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  So you got a Tirona and fully cocked it?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, loved the skylines, you name it.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Nissan Skye.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  All that.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  So, and then what, what was your trans, your transformation from, say, school to years, those periods into work?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I loved design, loved computers. Dropped out of a couple of uni degrees, did advertising, went to a few ad agencies. Worked my ass off, long hours, burnt out. And then I ended up joining Koala. And it was, that was a real amazing moment. I walked in there, pulled up Shopify. Those guys had made a hundred grand in a day.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  And I'm like, I've never earned a hundred grand in a year.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm thinking, there's something here. Um, Danny and Mitch were guys our age. And I was like, well, if they can do it, maybe, maybe we can. And so, so Tim and I and Alexi.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  We were talking about Tim Doyle.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, Tim Doyle. We, we left Koala after a couple of years and, and went on to start our own thing, which was Eucalyptus.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  So the whole idea of Eucalyptus is like, it's a bit out there. If you look at it, I'm going back years now. If you go back a number of years, it's not so much out there now. But if you go back a number of years, it's a bit crazy. Like, what was your original thesis around Eucalyptus?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  It was definitely inspired by, I wish I could say it was some lightning bolt moment when we, when we started it. But we looked to the US, a company called Hims was doing it. They would end up buying us. You know, seven years later. Um, but the US was advanced from a telehealth perspective. Our innovation was, was bringing it to Australia because there was no infrastructure at all for telehealth.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  We had to set up the payment gateways, the operations, the logistics, the doctor workforce, all that kind of stuff. So it was definitely, it was definitely a slog, but I suppose it was, it was about making healthcare convenient at its, at its heart.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Why were you looking at what's going on in the United States relative to health? What, what prompted you to think about that?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  I suppose, well, for starters, I think that originality is overrated in business. And the direct to consumer wave that sort of, that Koala was part of, um, which was about uh, the rise of contract manufacturing. So going to suppliers to, to build brands on top of, and then selling them directly via like Facebook ads.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  This was the wave.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  And mattresses and, uh, you know, supplements were definitely earlier in that wave. And then later people started to pick off more complex, uh, industries. And healthcare was the one that we, that we witnessed. We're like, it's the right amount of hard, you know? You don't wanna pick the easiest thing because then you're surrounded by competitors.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Yes, crowded.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so we knew that healthcare would have been, was, none of us were doctors. None of the, the founding team. And so we knew this was gonna be tough. We didn't, I didn't think we thought it was gonna be as tough as it was. But that's why we sort of picked it and, and, um, you know, the states are a couple of years ahead generally on that front.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Generally they are. And, and what, a lot of times what Americans like, we sort of like, particularly when it comes to health and training, sport and all that type of stuff. So I sort of get why you might have gone to the United States to see what they're doing, that part. What was surrounding you or what you were reading or watching or listening to or part of that was saying to you, there's a massive rising tide in healthcare at that time. And, uh, and that, that philosophical concept of that hypothesis, it's gotta be hard enough, but not too hard.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  But at the same time, it definitely can't be too easy because of the, the natural competitive landscape. Can you take me through that thinking process?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think the, the healthcare thing is, is downstream of convenience. So time and time again, particularly in the post-internet world, if you make something more convenient, it wins.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  Really?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Is that a consequence of the internet period, the, the online period, maybe even COVID?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  I think it's this instant gratification that, I mean, you pull your phone out, you, you get pissed off if you have to wait eight minutes for an Uber.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Right? People are trained to, to want things now and they're willing to pay a premium to have the friction removed.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's about removing friction.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Removing friction.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  From what I want.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  From what I want. And with healthcare, again, it's a bit of a paradox because you can't remove too much friction. Because if it's too easy, then people start to question it.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Um, and I suppose the other, the other trend in healthcare that's interesting is this idea of patient centered care, which, you know, doctors and the industry have been pushing for ages. But it's actually quite hard to get doctors to go, hey, hang on patient, you know your body the best. So you can control your own healthcare experience, um, go out, do the research, seek the treatments, that kind of thing. And we were the start of that wave.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  So you sit down, I mean, cause a lot of people would be going intrigued. They're going, well, oh, would you sit in a coffee shop? Did you ride it on the back of a coaster? Did you have a whiteboard? I mean, how's that process look?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny, we, we pitched Blackbird, we raised venture capital, which we wouldn't have existed without that.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  But to do the, to go to Blackbird, what did you need?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  We were a bit cheeky. We hedged our, but we, we pitched them a house of brands.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  What's that mean?

• 7:35Speaker 01

  We had, we pitched that we would be like a holding company.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Um, like a LVMH, like a Louis Vuitton group or, or a Procter and Gamble of these 10 sort of different ideas. So we pitched them like 10 ideas, but basically it was like, hey, we're gonna have 10 cracks.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Cracks at these. Um, a bit of, we had, you know, shots in the, uh, in the chamber in case they failed. But the first one was men's health.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  And that was Pilot.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Um, and so what, we actually found product market fit with the first one.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  What was it that made you think there was a rising demand for Pilot? And maybe you can explain what Pilot distributes.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, Pilot, uh, is a online telehealth provider and it focuses on, the biggest condition was erectile dysfunction.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  So.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  ED.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  ED. So something that blokes struggle to talk about.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  But you can have, you know, you can communicate with men by having a joke about it. So it was great for, great territories for advertising. And then you want sort of private discreet treatment, which is great. The internet's perfect for that, really.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  And so it was, there was nothing out there that was trustworthy. And so it was ready made for like a nice piece of software and some good branding and good advertising.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  Did you go through the reasons why when you're talking to say someone like Blackbird, do you say like, well, one of the issues is they don't wanna go there because maybe their wife goes there? Or their girlfriend goes there, or they just, they become friendly with the GP and they know their GP. Did you do some analysis on this?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  There was, I mean, there was plenty of that. I don't think we did, like, I know it seems like I'm downplaying it, but I legitimately think that like more people could, could do this. We definitely learned a lot of this stuff after the fact.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Because our evidence was like, oh, these guys are doing it in America, there's a market. But we did learn those things after the fact. Like, the problem is, is that most young,

• 9:25Speaker 01

  you know, blokes in their thirties, forties, don't even have a regular G P.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  They say first cab off the rank G P in a medical centre.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They just turn up.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then all the other things that you mentioned about the awkwardness around these kind of conversations.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  Was it directed, were you thinking you're going to direct yourself to younger guys or more my age? Did you have a category or not really?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  We, we pitched it at younger guys because we were like, living in that, well, that was us.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  But we, but you naturally end up getting like an older demo for certain, certain conditions.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Usually just from age.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  You know, age, age tends to do that.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Obviously Pilot sold erectile dysfunction pills.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  The famous blue pill.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Um, that's one. Um, what else did Pilot sell?

• 10:13Speaker 01

  We did some hair loss, we did some weight loss and weight loss has become like big.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Weight loss is, but not weight loss programs, but weight loss, or maybe it was a weight loss drug.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, like treatments. I suppose the, the, the trend there was that G L P ones.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Came along.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  As in Ozempic.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, for example.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  For example, yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  So, so when, when you thought yourself, you know, you get this idea and you put it up and you get Blackbird to come in and give you some money. And they take a position, or just by the way, how, how much did you raise from Blackbird for a shot?

• 10:44Speaker 01

  First crack?

• 10:45Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  I think we raised about two million bucks.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  And what, they take twenty?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  They took twenty. Oh, yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Twenty percent.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we had some angels come in at the same time as well.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that, that's Blackbird's usual process. They take, they want twenty percent, they put in a couple of million.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Next round, they took twenty percent as well. And then, you know, and so on, so.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, they just kept taking the twenty, so to speak.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  And they're topping up. Did it, did it come in as a safe or did it come in as proper equity?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  We had price rounds every time.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Price round, price rounds, yeah.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  More or less, yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, proper price rounds. So like, people can't dilute you further on down the track. So I get that. So, and then when, and then you said you're like, but we've got to source these, these, um, these things, these products. How the hell do you source erectile dysfunction pills? I mean, like, do you, do you source them or does it come through the doctor?

• 11:28Speaker 01

  We connect to the, we connect to the pharmacies, the doctors and the pharmacies.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  Your next thing you have to do is build a layer of distribution. And the layer of distribution, really, at the end of the day, is the doctors who will take a telehealth call.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  It's a new way of doing consultation.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like a routing system on, on the healthcare system.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So where did that idea come from?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  That was the only way the business was going to work.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Is to, you can't sort of, you need doctors.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  But you couldn't go along to medical practitioners and say, look, excuse me, I'm here from Pilot. You know, we were, we're going to send client, we're, we're going to advertise, market our thing and we're going to send people to you. It's like build up a, sort of like a, a marketplace. You didn't think that would work?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  No, we, I mean, it was hard. Again, this thing didn't really exist. So building trust with doctors was challenging as well.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Like to, to say, hey, come and, um, on, use our platform and we'll bring patients to you.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  I would have thought most doctors are working in a doctor's practice somewhere.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  How did you find these dudes?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of G P's are, but then we, we have like, we had a lot of female doctors that were young mums.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  That were, um, that wanted the flexibility.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Cause this is, you know, this is the dawn of the sort of work from home era as well, right?

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, another fortunate bit of timing.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  I remember you finding some ambassadors.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we had Vaca.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, you had Vaca, did you?

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that, that game of finding out, finding, um, micro-influencers like him, uh, whose idea was that?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Oh, he's more than micro.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  He's macro.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  He's macro.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  He's huge. But like, but they're not like massive, they don't have massive audiences. So, you know, how, how, whose idea was that? And how do you go about something like that? I mean, what do you go knock on his door and or contact him via Instagram or something like that and say, hey, mate, we've got a proposition for you?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a lot of that. And again, a bit like the doctors, it's really hard at the start because like, these things are uncomfortable to talk about.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Right? So like.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  I totally would have been uncomfortable to talk about.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Especially for him.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Like, I, I hear him, I think, Block, what are you doing? Like, uh, when I first heard it.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. But now it's kind of normal, right? I think, I think, looking back, we've de-stigmatized it.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's right. You have de-stigmatized it. And to some extent, you've sort of democratized it.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  We can ask now for what we want as opposed to going to the doctor ordinarily. And the doctor says, well, if he doesn't ask you, you probably don't have enough guts to ask him yourself. Whereas now if someone goes on to Pilot, they'll ask, they're going there for a specific reason to ask for something that they think they need as a result of their own symptoms.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think healthcare, the whole balance has flipped, right?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  That's a major disruption though. Did you know you were sort of building a disruption?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, because heaps of people hate you.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  So I was going to ask you that. Did, so do you run into issues in relation to the regulators, Aperol, whoever the regulators are in this environment?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'll talk about this in broad strokes because I don't want to.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, totally.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  It's still prickly. But yeah, any disruptive industry runs into, and Australia is particularly beholden to a bunch of sort of, um, self-policing regula, regulations in all industries. Uh, regulatory bodies and, and associations.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  And they don't like change.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  They don't like change.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  I, I've done it through financial services. I've been through exactly the same process. And what you're up against is the big banks. That's a big, and they're all got tentacles everywhere.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  And, uh, no, I'm not, you know, like, as you would, if you're running a big bank, you would, you would definitely put tentacles out everywhere. But you do run into resistance.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  You do.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  And I'm, we still do, even now. Uh, I, I, I mean, I said the wizard business up to twenty five years ago. But in the yellow big road business, it's not that much different. We still have pushback, even though we represent eighty percent of the total market.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  Um, but.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Do you think the pushback's incre, increased or is it?

• 15:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it, it, it's starting to increase because largely is because people like us are eating the, the lender's lunch.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  We're, we're, we're eating into their profit margin. And really, they don't mind using us to distribute. But they don't like have the amount of money, have to pay us.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  And they would like to take a bit of their back. And the only way they can take it back is sort of start to promote their own proprietary brand, Come Direct. Which is sort of the, and then the one way of doing it is make sure the regulator is looking at, you know, if there's a fraud or something like going on, the, the first thing the regulator is going to think, the, the lender is going to say the regulator was the distributor.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not, not us, it's them. And so, you know, and it's natural. I mean, I, I get it how it works. It's fine. You know, and we have to be on our game to make sure that we've got the right compliance environments or the usual stuff. But, and you know, that all works. But so, so you're, here you are, you've built a big disruption. Um, you have to deal with everybody, um, including all those who don't like the fact that you've disrupted. You've got, and this is Pilot, did, apart from, and Pilot's putting out their weight loss stuff and Pilot's putting out their, um, you know, E D stuff. Then you launch to the female market. And that's Juniper, is it Juniper?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we actually had a couple, we did a couple in between. We did Kin.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  King.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Kin, K I N, during Covid, we had an awesome, awesome female team member, Nicole, who set up Kin, copying the Pilot sort of soft codebase.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Is, is there an equivalent for women?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, it was focused on sort of reproductive health. So we'd do like a lot of the, um,

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Hormones.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Delivery of contraceptive.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  Ah, contraceptive. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then it evolved to do more like pregnancy, postpartum stuff as well.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Right, okay.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Um, but then we did software, which was a skincare, um, vertical for prescription skincare. And then Juniper, which is now the biggest, which was actually, we launched it with our mums in mind. Cause you know, um, perimenopausal mums.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  All struggling in various, to various degrees with the symptoms associated with menopause. And so Juniper actually launched it as a menopause focus.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  It's, it's a hormone replacement therapy.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was the sort of, the, the first sort of conditions on Juniper. And Juniper, again, has been a lot more sort of like weight, weight management. Focus these days.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  More recently, yeah.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  More recently, but that's, that's not where it started, no.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  These days, the structure of medical practices are all owned by corporates mostly. And you just turn up and you're sitting there, you basically get whoever's, whoever's next in line. Um, so you could be talking to a doctor you've never met before. So that awkward conversation, when I get on to telehealth, would I talk to the same doctor each time or do I get a different doctor every time?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  It really depends. Like, the, the routing system would be intelligent enough to, if that doctor was available, but you have continuity via a really like solid records keeping system.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Which obviously we had the my, my health record in Australia, but it sort of like failed for a long time because people would opt out.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  And there'd be no, yeah, there'd be no consistent record.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Um, but we had that built in, right?

• 18:19Speaker 00

  And do, and in terms of data, what were you collecting?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  I mean, you just have all the standard sort of consult data. I mean, you walk into a G P practice, they say, and they, it's all the A I.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Transcript, um, transcribing.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Transcription. So it's, it's similar in that regard to the shape of that.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  You move from hormone replacement therapy in, um, Juniper, then across to Ozempic or G L P drugs. Did you have all of them? Monjaro, Wegovy, Ozempic, did you have the whole, the whole suite? And any other ones that might be existing?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, over time, it's like, we're sort of, the, the doctors can, um, if they choose to prescribe, they prescribe what they, what they want, really. And that's the gamut.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  And on your website, would you advertise all these things?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  No, you can't.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  You're not allowed to.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  But what's the messaging to, you know, your customer who comes on to, do they go to Euclid or do they go to Pilot and they went and went to a Juniper?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  It was all the individual brands.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Go to the individual brand. So you actually did have a brand holder, which is called Euclid, which owned all the different things underneath.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  And so, and when if I, if I went to your, your website, um, and I might go to Pilot. And what does pilot say to me?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's about the, it's about the condition. So it's not about any treatment.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  So I could be there about a, a bright money.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  I, it doesn't have to be about one of these things.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you couldn't get um amazing treatment for us on, from breaking a knee.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  So you self-select into these conditions.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Um, but they're definitely a more, it's, the entry point is a lot more general than.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not just, it's not just about ED. It's not just about one condition.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's where all these telehealth, like Huqueptus now, uh, owned, owned by humans, the American company.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  You'll see all these sort of global telehealth brands to be, to shift to like preventative proactive sort of health.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  As opposed to just giving me ED drugs, is that what you mean?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  It's broader.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you go in there for your bloods.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, ah, okay.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  And, and you, you build this, this healthcare picture.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  I mean, you guys don't know anymore, but what you're seeing in the US could end up being where telehealth in your orbit actually lands.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's definitely, there's, there's a young, there's a good young entrepreneur, Aussie, Aussie kid called Max, um, doing superpower.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Mark Johnny.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  I know him well. Yeah, well.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Thought you might. And um, he, so he's, he's a head, he's in the US. Superpower is, is similar to what I'm talking about. It's like preventative, preventative healthcare. Um, and that's definitely where it's going, where, I mean, you can do it with cord these days, right? It's like you get a blood panel, chugging in the cord. That's what I've been doing.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  Same.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's awesome.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, and superpowers, I think they raise, they've got a two hundred fifty million US valve.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Oh, I think it's.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  And they're.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Close to, close to a bill, close to a bill now.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Is it? Wow.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  He's there with three, two, three partners, I can't remember. They live in San Francisco.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, my mate, my good mate Tyler is working for him now, yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  You know, they're just sucking up a lot of, a lot of people and they all work in this one building and sort of live there and it's pretty cool.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  It's a cool life.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  It's, it's very cool.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  We need to get him back eventually.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  No, we will get him, we'll, we'll get him, I'm gonna get him on the show, but what, but Max, is that, you think that the superpower model is where we might end up here? Because the problem, well, not the problem, the issue of the superpower model is that um, you can get things much cheaper over there than you can get here. And therefore you can launch sort of cheap subscription prices, uh, like they're doing, which is pretty hard to do. Everlab's sort of trying to do it here.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Um, and I think Everlab's about to launch it cheaper. I think for Everlab's reason, they've got like a eight hundred million or some huge valuation.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  As well, yeah.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  I use, I use Everlab.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Oh, do you?

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Well, just to try these things out. Yeah, yeah, I, I know Stephen quite well. So like, yeah, we've, we, we've been using that for a while now, just mucking around with it. Um.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  You sold a bit, you all sold out and you sold out to him and hers. It's called him and hers or hers and him.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Him, him and hers.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Hims and, him's and hers.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  Big price. Are you allowed to or are you subject confidentially? Can you disclose the number?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  One point six billion.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  US or Aussie?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Aussie.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Aussie.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  One point six billion. So you're all pretty comfortable at the moment. Have you been paid? I mean, what, was that a cash or stock or what was it?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Uh, uh, cash.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  Cash.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, Tim's still there, Tim's still there.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Uh, Tim Doyle's still there, is he? Oh, it's Tim CEO or something, is he?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Tim's um, has a like head of international or sen- senior vice president.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Right, as of ill, not to be there.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Feels good, like, obviously, you become institutionalized, right? I mean, you, you've been really good in your career of sort of sticking, sticking with things, with your own, own businesses.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  I, I, but I can't, I, I just don't fit into the.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  I, I don't fit into the corporate structure.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  No, definitely not.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  That's not my guy.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  No, but it's, it feels good to be out because the, the new projects that I've been working on have been very, very um satisfying, yeah.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  I wanna talk about the new, the newest project.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  Can you, we, can we talk about?

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  So, uh, first and foremost, um, I wanna congratulate you for doing it. You've got this thing called Build Australia. Is it Build Australia?

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Build Australia.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, what is that?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  It's a cultural movement, I think is, is a good way to describe it. But like you said, I think we've, as I've got older, realised that Australia is showing signs of decline.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're depreciating.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, people think that everything around us, they forget that the quality of life we live is because someone built the schools, designed the suburb, dug the mine, taught the kids, you know.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Created the banks.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Decisions, exactly. And we've become complacent and entitled.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Well, it's too easy for us.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it wasn't easy always, right? Um, and Build Australia is about, it's, it's about changing, there's enough people focused on policy and the economic side of thing. I want Build Australia to help change Australia's culture, to, to remember, so we remember how to win. Um, and so we, we can have young Australians look at

• 24:38Speaker 01

  commercial activity, creativity, and, and see it as something that they actually wanna do, to take risks.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Commercial activity and creativity.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's say um, the idea of creation, so whether it's a film, a cafe, a tech startup, a house. You just wanna build something. There's like a spiritual calling behind the act of creation.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Is that in the Australian DNA? It used to be, but is it in the Australian DNA?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  I think so. I think if you look at what Australia has, like, Australia hasn't been around that long. If you look at, I suppose, the post-colonial era and what we've built, we were the richest country in the world.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  We probably still are in some, not per capita, but in terms of resources and things going in our favour, we probably still are.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  I think on some dimensions, you, maybe we are, but I, I think when you look at where we were in the late eighteen hundreds, same as Australia. Like, we were richest in the world per capita by like the length of the strait. And we're so far from that mindset that got us there.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  So there's a mindset involved in all this.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  I think it underpins everything.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  But wh- why hasn't mindset drifted?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's about the, if I had to pinpoint it, it's about risk appetite. So by risk appetite, I mean, people's appetite to take economic or productive risk. I'm not talking about like hanging off the side of a building.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  About um, making moves in their career or, or in business, taking chances that can pay off. And the way I think about it is that everyone has a risk budget, right? And.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Is it DNA based or socially acquired?

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Probably both, but like, you know, I grew up in a family without entrepreneurs, really. Um, it's, I think people are, not everyone's built with a high risk tolerance. Um, a society has, you know, maybe twenty percent of people have the risk tolerance to, to take these chances. But a functioning society knows that those people are important, right? Because they build the, the jobs that pay the taxes. And so.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  And employ the people to pay the taxes.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Employ the people, I think that's the critical part, right? Is that um, job creation and the taxes, not just that those businesses or those individuals pay themselves, but the, yeah, the jobs themselves pay taxes, right? Like, we think we're in a bad place now. It's only gonna get worse. I know for a fact the stats on new business creation in Australia have been declining.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Since the seventies, like, on, on the average.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so they're pretty much breaking even now. So what's happening is, once upon a time, let, let's, I'm just making numbers up now. But one, one, once upon a time, not once upon a time, like ten years ago, we might be establishing two hundred thousand new businesses a year. And, and one hundred thousand will go out of business, so net one hundred thousand. Now it's, they're even. So we're, we're not actually, we're actually, so we, we were net ahead substantially. Now we're even. In fact, we're going back down the other way. We're actually losing more businesses than we're creating. And that, and largely a lot of it comes down to how bloody hard it is, the regulatory environment.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  It's just too hard.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I, I think it's, I think that's one reason. I think back to that, that risk-taking thing is, why, why would people in the society take a risk, right? And to some extent, it's about the incentives, right? It has to be, um, there, there has to be upside. So it has to be worth the fear, the, the chances of failing. Um, and so where things like the capital gains changes, uh, you know, whittle that down.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  And I think the, the bit that other people are missing as well is this grassroots. So it's like a pincer movement on, on risk-taking because young kids are being advised culturally to take on, be settled themselves with huge amounts of debt, go to uni, get a safe job.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  And so, like, you, literally you're paralyzed by that level of, of debt.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Do you think, that's a trap, actually?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Massively.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  I mean, because when I went to university, it was free.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Now, my son's going to university and they all come out with debt.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  And uh, and to some extent, they're trapped and they can't actually do anything because they, I, when they start to get a good job, they're gonna start paying it back really fa- fast. So their actually rate of tax goes up.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Effectively, because you're paying your, off your, your extra debt. Um, it's, it, it, and also I think universities, to be honest with you, they're not offering the right courses. I mean, they, I mean, they should be able to, these courses should be done a year. There's bullshit that they take three years and they learn humanities and all this crap. I mean, like, if you wanna be a scientist for argument's sake, you don't need to learn humanities.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  No.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  And most of the stuff you've already learnt in year twelve anyway, that for the first year, and you just, and you should be able to just jam it all into a two-month period without all the holidays.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Totally. But the quality you're teaching at uni is like, since it's had to compete with the internet and YouTube, to your point, all those kind of soft, soft skill, but even like things like computer science, it's like, you know, you see ads on TV for universities saying, oh, you know, remote learning. Um, it's like, oh, great, I'm paying that much money to sit at home on a Zoom call to a lecture where everyone has their cameras turned off. Where I could be learning online from the best in the world on YouTube.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Like, as a product, it's been completely disrupted.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's expensive and I don't get a job.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  No.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  Well, why, why, I mean, for me, you know, and maybe this is something you guys, you might have an opinion on, but for me, if the government's gonna lend you money, they're not lending you money. They're basically saying, it's the greatest um con job in the world. I will lend you money to go to university. No, no, make university free. Don't, don't, like, you're not doing me a favour. I'm here to make this country better and I'm gonna learn something and I'm gonna be really productive. But I need to go to university in, in order to learn the skill.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Don't tell me you're gonna lend me money. And then, by the way, when I, when you lend me the money, um, I now owe you. So I've now got to pay it back. I would say, okay, if you're gonna lend me the money and you want me to pay, and you want me to pay you back, then you've got to get, you've got to guarantee me a job. The day I get out, I want a guaranteed job. You can go do a commerce degree today. Hard to get into commerce, really hard to get in. So you've got to be mum and dad paying for tutorials and your learning extra and blah blah. You get into commerce, the University of New South Wales, for your argument sake. You get the commerce degree and then now you owe the money to Hex. You don't, you, you don't get a job, but you still owe the money.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  And the moment you get a job, you start paying it back. So like, it's a, it's a two edged sword. It's a, to me, it's a con. You know, we should be encouraging young people to go to university and we should be saying, look, you know, go off with them. We'll do it for free. I know everyone's gonna say, oh, the budget, mark the budget. Yeah, but okay, take it from somewhere else.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Cause this is how you build nations.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  This is nation building. Is this the sort of stuff that you're trying to promote?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I would, I would say it's like university, even the pathway, because it's like, you know, we wanna build, we need, we need trades, but I think that there's a huge latent part of the population that could actually just get out there and build stuff.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 31:39Speaker 00

  In other words, we don't need to go to university for as many things.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  If you wanna be a doctor, maybe, or a lawyer, perhaps some of those things, or perhaps a scientist, but yeah, I, I agree. There's a lot of the courses are a bit of a waste of time.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's all about, again, it goes back to Australia, sort of like, you know, if the opposite of risk is safety, you know, getting the rubber stamp, you know, looking like you're doing something, pleasing mum and dad is, is kind of the way we do things here.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Do you think it's a conspiracy? I mean, do you think there's, and I don't wanna get into too political environments, but do you think there's a, some sort of conspiracy that they're stitched, we've been stitched up over a long period of time?

• 32:15Speaker 01

  I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think that it is how large organisations act when they are poorly led. Like, it happens in any bureaucracy, right? And that people, people avoid making hard decisions.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  It's a, a collective laziness.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, because, I mean, why, why, again, risk budget is the amount of risk you can take without blowing your life up.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  But if there's no, like, there's no reason to take risks because life is good, or, you know, you know that you can, you know, invest in property and get a guaranteed rate of return, or go work for the public service.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  And get paid and work from home two days a week, or three days a week.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Why would you rock that boat?

• 32:57Speaker 00

  So that's why I'm asking you, do you think there's not a conspiracy? I mean, that's probably going a bit too deep into it and dark, but there's a, quite a lot of policy decision making based on what works for the incumbents. I'm talking about political incumbents. You know, it might not be anything fantastic. We won't create anything. We won't disrupt anything like you do. Um, we won't, uh, we won't challenge ourselves.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a slow decline, which is much harder than notice, right?

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And what prompted you to notice this? Like, you're not that old. You're not someone crutch, crutch, crutch, crutchy old blast, you know, sitting around watching these.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  You watch this space. Um, I'm, I've had two kids now, so I've got a four year old and a, and a 10 month old.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Is it about making their future better?

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I think you realise that I love Australia. I, I think, um, there's so much great about living here. You know, what entrepreneurs have been talking about leaving, I couldn't, I couldn't leave. But I also.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  But you don't need to leave at the moment, though, because you've already, you've sold, you've got your capital against tax.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  But if you started again, what would you do? Let's say you, or let's say you never started and you're a younger version of yourself.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Would you, would you do, go overseas?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  I think you might go overseas in your twenties to have, for the lifestyle, but I, I think there's no better place to come back to, to raise a family.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, but would you go over there to save tax?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  No.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  I mean, like, yeah, but you're younger, you know, you haven't got your family. You're, you're Charlie, twenty two year old, or you're Max Machoni. Yeah, you're gonna set up structures overseas and then say, I'm gonna make it over there, pay not much tax at all, and then I'm gonna bring it back to Australia and I'm gonna live my life and get married, have kids, the whole, whole deal.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's a complex equation, cause it's like, I would love, you know, moving overseas to San Francisco or New York City in your twenties is.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Pretty cool.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  That's cool, right? Regardless, and then you probably are increasing your chances of success. But also, I think Australia is an underrated market to start a business in. I'm keen for your thoughts on this one, actually.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  I find it, it is underrated, but it's overtaken by, um, the regulatory environment. It's so bloody hard to do anything.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's hard to start, really hard to start. And then it gets, once you hit product market fit, it's a great place to scale.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  And then it probably taps out again.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  And you probably won't have, it definitely taps out because we don't have enough people for a start. It's a good place to trial something, to say that this works.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  Especially if it has global application, you know, it works. Um, and make all your mistakes here. But then if you're trying to raise money like you, you're lucky, you're a blackbird, but there's not many blackbirds around.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  No, there isn't, there isn't. And that's where the government needs to be liberalising things, you know, not just the sort of, the individual incentives, but also the capital, risk capital level incentives as well, right?

• 35:52Speaker 00

  So you would say to the government, um, if you were asked to, you know, give them some advice, or at least opine on something, you would say to the government, perhaps what we should be doing is offering some better tax, um, incentives to venture capitalists, for example, to invest in startups here in Australia.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I mean, I think that they're pretty, pretty solid. And my worry is that startups and venture capital carve, you know, that with the carve outs they're doing, is that it becomes this very exclusive club. But I'm actually more interested in the, I think the, where Australia's future as the richest country in the world potentially in, is if we can build some kind of manufacturing industry that links our resource wealth, um, to technology.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  Have you got any ideas on that?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, plenty of ideas, I'm no expert, but it seems to me that like, we have half the world's lithium, right? We invented the solar, the, the perk solar cell out at UNSW in the eighties, right? Um, we have so much sunshine, we're, we're a safe place with ocean borders.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  We've got the biggest uranium deposits in the world, biggest iron ore deposit in the world.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Uranium, iron ore.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  The biggest coal exporters in the world.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Exactly, and why?

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Second largest gas, uh, reserves in the world.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yes, and why do we have some of the most expensive energy in the world?

• 37:17Speaker 00

  That cuts a lot of people out from manufacturing here in Australia.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Like, look at an iPhone, right? Made out of aluminium, right? We, we mine bauxite, but then the value chain between mining the bauxite and a seventeen hundred dollar iPhone, the amount of value created in between those is potentially huge. We don't capture any of it, we just ship, dig up the rocks and ship them out. But what we could be doing with our, with our talent, with our, I think the government could step in here as well, is like, how do we eat more of that value chain by creating those industries, particularly heavy industries, manufacturing? I think that's where the opportunity is.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  And what, are you talking, what type of incentives are you talking about? Are you talking about sort of tax incentives? I mean, like, you know, like, if you're a foreigner, come over here and you do what they do in Ireland, or in Dublin, um, do what they do in Cyprus, do what they do in Dubai, do it in Singapore. You come in here, you're a foreigner, you spend so much money, you only have to pay blah amount of tax. Is that what you're thinking?

• 38:18Speaker 01

  I think you could do like, I think that's sort of table stakes, that kind of, uh, tax incentives, you could then step it up, special economic zones and, and that kind of thing. And I think that's how you have to do it.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  It's funny, they just did one in Papua New Guinea for Australians. Robbie Lee plays, he's gonna go to Papua New Guinea. They've effectively created them a special economic zone with no tax.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Well, I, we'll get filmmaking in the, in the seventies, eighties, right?

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  The golden era of Mad Max.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Fifty percent tax deduction upfront for a hundred. If you put a hundred grand in today, you get a hundred and fifty thousand dollars tax deduction this year.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think today, most people would look at that and go, how dare you guys ask for tax breaks? But I look at that and go, how good was it when all the Australian movies were so good?

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, Breaker Morant, Mad Max.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Gallipoli.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  That's all downstream of risk, the incentive for people to take risks.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  To fund amazing things.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, because a lot of people, a lot of the movies didn't make it. I mean, a lot of people put money in it and they got the tax deduction, but the movie, they ran the risk, the movie would be a flop. But equally, you, out of every maybe hundred, you're gonna get maybe ten, they're gonna kill it and put us on a global map. And as a result of that, our actors are globally recognised. And now a lot of film corporations overseas actually make movies here because of our infrastructure. That makes sense.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Exactly, and we missed out on Bluey as a result of that.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Right, because the ABC didn't take any equity in the, um, in the royalties around the merch. And so we had, we left billions on the table as a country in the last few years around Bluey.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  So do you, just, do you like have a manifesto for your movement?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  So there's one on the Bill Australia website.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  buildaustralia.com.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  That'll give you a sense of it. Um, it's definitely started out as like a vibes based movement, to quote Dennis Donato in The Castle. Um, it's the vibe, but now it's evolving to be like, we're raising money, we're not for profit, and we're starting, I think we're following in your footsteps in a way, in, we wanna be, um, we wanna popularise these ideas through media, become a media institution. And so there's gonna be more content coming from Bill Australia.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  So you guys are gonna do a podcast?

• 40:30Speaker 01

  We wanna get there.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, we wanna get there. At the moment, it's gonna, the way it's gonna work is, uh, so my YouTube channel.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Uh, will become Bill Australia, um, which I've been doing for the last fifteen months.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  What's your YouTube channel called?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Gear Side.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Soon to be Bill Australia.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  And, and what we're doing is we're moving it, um.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  You know this better than anyone, creating content's really hard.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  And like YouTube in particular is a brutal marketplace.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's crowded.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  It's crowded and the best content cuts through. And so I'm bringing some help in, got these um two young, we Build Australia fellows. So we're creating a fellowship where you get paid to come in and um.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  That's interesting.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  And produce content, tell stories about great Australian companies. Um, yeah, the vibe shift of Australia, basically.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  You're gonna put up a load of them on Spotify and uh Apple, et cetera.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, once we do a podcast.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  It'll go everywhere.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  It'll go everywhere.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  I'd love to, I'd love to like, it's a, it's a tough game, like you've obviously carved out an awesome.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Ten years took me.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Ten years, yeah. Um, so yeah, we've focused on video.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Oh, anytime we wanna fi- ask questions, come in, talk to the team, me, whatever you wanna do, I'm happy to do it. Yeah, a hundred percent. So in terms of raising money, uh what do you mean by raising money?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Well, it's a not-for-profit, right?

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a freelance hobby.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  So I'm putting my own dosh in.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Plus a, a, a bunch of um Australians or innovators are putting in money to get this thing going. But it's a charity, right?

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  And we don't even have um like DGR tax status where you get your tax back. I, I'm learning all about this. I had no idea how that wor- world worked. I was like, come on, guys, like, it's philanthropy, like, who cares about the tax rate, right? Um, but we just needed enough money to get going, you know?

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Get a studio.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Have you got a studio?

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, in Alexandria.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  You got a ju- and, and where do you wanna take this? Cause I mean, it potentially has, potentially it has um political clout.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  The way we see ourselves is we, we wanna be, we wanna stay out of the left and right bullshit.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Um, and we wanna tell optimistic stories that we think the media are missing. Um, and we do think that, like, the problem, one of the problems we see is that think tanks are producing heaps of interesting stuff, but they're producing PDFs.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Two hundred page PDFs that no one reads, like two hundred people read them.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  AI reads it, though.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so yeah, exactly. But what I want is, if, if a few, if young kids in schools and politicians alike share the same YouTube video, um, and it tells that optimistic story, that's what success looks like.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  In this world today, one of my observations, the US, everywhere around the world, is popular, populism.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  Um, and therefore divisioned.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  By working at what someone hates and then applying to be the opposite to what I know a certain part of the market might hate, is one way of building up, let's call it a brand, political parties. We're, we're seeing it right now. Um, each of the part, maybe the liberal, liberals aren't doing it, um, because liberals aren't anywhere. But Labour's definitely uh building this populist game.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  And uh, and obviously One Nation is too, and they're looking for the haters, you know, and which is fair. That, that's, there's a community who are like that, and you might as well try and look after them. So.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  That, that, but that process works, by the way.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Definitely, yeah.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Division works.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  But sometimes sitting in the middle, like liberal is at the moment, it's not really working. Do you run a risk?

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And yeah, there's, there's a massive risk there that your, your content becomes wallpaper.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  And no one pays attention, right? Like.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  Well, not really boring, but yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's, and people consume the news not because they want the, they'll say that they want the impartial take.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  They want the entertainment, right?

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Well, these days anyway, it's hardly gonna be impartial because you're consuming news through social media and social media knows what you're partial to and it's just gonna feed you that. It won't feed you anything else.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the algorithm, right, to that point, the algorithm uh is a force. So driving, dragging people to the um further to the fringe.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  And even, but even legacy media, which is focused, business model focused on clicks, you know, headlines and clickbait has pushed them to the fringes as well.

• 44:52Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  So I think it's a game you have to play, right? I've, I've learned that doing YouTube is that, you know, some of my um biggest videos have started with quite a doomer.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Um, a doomer perspective, but I Trojan, I've been clear about like Trojan horsing the viewer with like, hey, this seems really bad and you can get pissed off about it and feel the emotion. But here's how you actually take action. Things aren't as bad as it seems. You can actually take control of this situation.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  But do you think, okay, I get it, I get the China, that's smart. So you, so basically you hit them up with uh something theatrical.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  You know, doomsday or whatever.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Um, which makes sense, by the way, it's probably right, correct, um, um, in that regard. But then you, you take them then through a non-politicized process of how you fix something. Do you run the risk that those people are going, oh, yeah, like it's too, too hard?

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  Let's say you get a hundred thousand people look at it on YouTube. How do you know if you're gonna get them, but you got, maybe you gotta get them to join up? What's your sort of um close? How do you get them really onside and so that they're contributing, et cetera?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  It's a good question. I guess we're gonna find out.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  You haven't cracked that part yet.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  No, no, I think, I think you could, you know, view through rates of video and the way that people move through a story. It's, it's a storytelling challenge to some extent. It's like if people drop off. Well, A, you've got the feedback loop to know when people drop off. I think at the end, in terms of like, what, what metric are we trying to move? Um, I would look, you know, I'd talk to the one that you brought up earlier about number of new businesses getting created.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  You know?

• 46:34Speaker 00

  Hit them up with something.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  And it's gonna take decades for this.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  But how can we get people, yeah, yes, they can sign up, but how do we, how do you leave that imprint on people's brains?

• 46:43Speaker 00

  So they're thinking about it.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  And they're doing more searching up about it and becoming active about it. I mean, I like to see Australia become much more clued in on the problems. It just seems, I don't even know if people are clued in on the problems.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have to like diagnose before we sort of, I think a lot of people are in, uh, intuited from what, how bad things are.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  You know, sometimes I go around on a Saturday or a Sunday or give me a Friday, a nice sunny Friday in the middle of spring and no one's at work. Everybody, you know, where I live, I can look out my window and I see them on the beach. Beach is packed. Go down, I might take a day off, for, for example, which is sort of rare, but I might go down to the coffee shop, packed. Everyone's sitting around like there's not an issue in the world. And they're all ages, not just older retired people, it's, it's, it's a broad spectrum. And I think myself twenty years ago, I've, I, like, when I was in that age group or in that actual financial category, I would never have thought about taking a day off, just not even a thought.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Now, people, people are gonna criticize me, they say, oh, well, you know, that's not what life's about, Mark. Um, it's not about just making money. Well, for me, it wasn't just about making money. That's what I had to do to survive in my business and to make my business become valuable. Um, and I actually felt an obligation to do it. So there's this sort of attitudinal thing that you might need to turn around. Is there a, and how do you do that?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  It's a funny one, cause it's like, I'm aware that you and I are built different, right?

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  So I don't, I don't necessarily begrudge the person on the beach.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  Nor do I, but I don't understand them.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't understand them, right? I'm, I'm, I'm with you on that. I think the, the bit that I'm interested in is like those same people at the cafe, when they're paying eight fifty for their coffee, do they, like, do they understand how we got here?

• 48:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  With that, um.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  When it used to be two dollars ninety-nine.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Not even that long ago, right?

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, two years ago.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I saw something the other day that like Big Macs, you know, cause they have that Big Mac index globally that, you know, like you're paying nearly ten bucks for a Big Mac and, you know, it wasn't, it was only ten years ago that it was half that. It's just like the inflation's, I think people are starting to notice, yeah.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Well, we, the problem with inflation, Charlie, is we get drip fed every quarter, let's call it, the end of every quarter with the infla- the increase from the last quarter.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  And it, oh, it's, you know, it's run rate of three percent, people go, oh, it's nothing. But actually, if you look at the increases of every quarter for the last four or five years, the increases, or just take one item like coffee.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  It's not three percent, it's huge.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  It's massive.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  It's like double, it's a hundred percent. And uh, and, but we're not earning a hundred percent more across the nation. And that is all because of the way the country's going. I'm not talking about just economics, I'm talking about the, the system that we have here. And is that what you're trying to change?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, how do we connect in people's minds the idea that when people are taking risks, innovating, that like your wage growth is downstream of that, right? How do we connect those two ideas? And in Australia, wages have been flat and even declining, like real wage growth.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. When you take inflation in, into account, wage growth is negative.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Is negative.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  And so, and yeah, again, these things, it's like turning the Titanic, right? It takes decades to do this.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  We are in a country with some of the richest resources in the world. We should not be going, our standard of living should not be decreasing.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  No one ever, no one ever talks about our standard of living measured. Everyone just says our standard of living is great in Australia, no, it's not, relatively speaking, from where we were. We might have better standard of living than India or other places in the world, but we should be comparing ourselves to ourselves. How is our standard of living as measured by the same measurement process as it was five years ago? Or three years ago, or even two years ago? Are we in the same spot? The answer is no. What does that mean in twenty-five years for your children, for your children, for my grandchildren? What does that mean for them? And when do you make, and when do you start to fix it? I mean, if I diagnose you with cancer and I say, mate, you've got ten years time, ten, ten years to go,

• 51:07Speaker 00

  you would prefer me telling you that you had cancer ten years earlier. So you could do all those things to give yourself fighting chance.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  And that's sort of, that, to me, that's where we are.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 00

  With our country.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm a hundred percent with you. It's um, it's something that we can turn around. It's, it's within our control, both at an individual level and at a, I guess, a macro level.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  So Build Australia, um, how long have you been going for?

• 51:36Speaker 01

  We launched it, I think, three or four months ago. Had a really well received by both billionaires and people that hate billionaires. So it's like, it's a, it's a broad church.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  massive divide we have, yeah.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Massive divide, right? And, and, and people, that's the really encouraging part. Um, and now we sort of have to actually start doing some things.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  So how do people gonna find it?

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Head to buildaustralia.com.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  It's dot com, not dot U, dot com?

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Dot com.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Um, you can sign up there. There'll be um, and then we'll start, uh, we'll start producing a bunch of content there soon.

• 52:13Speaker 00

  Can they put money into it or do they get some sort of membership, so to speak?

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're, at the moment, we're, we're sort of, we've just been focused on, on the fundraising from the larger checks, but we're definitely having, we'll set up a membership and we, we want it to be something close to, remember Australian Geographic back in the?

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I sure do. The, the magazine?

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I still collect them.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  I do.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  I've got a massive collect, physical collection.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  How good are they?

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's, it's, that's like, you know, the kind of movement we wanna build and um, yeah, a big inspiration.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Well, mate, I wish you the best of luck. I'm, I will, my team will be going there and we'll put something up and then give everyone the link to how to get to buildaustralia.com. And I appreciate you, I, I, by the way, congratulations on everything you have built, along with the business partners here in Australia, well done. And um, you know, it's great to see Aussies build something that Americans want and that Americans are prepared to pay for. Uh, so congratulations, well done to you and your family for going through that process. And um, and I, I guess I wanna thank you for paying it forward. I mean, you know, with me, you, lots of us, we take a lot of risk, but we have a lot of luck.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  You know, there's, there's always a lot of luck. I mean, you know, COVID, I mean, they, sometimes just things turn out best for you.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  And you, and you have nothing to do with it. It's not like you could foresee it or whatever. And it's like all these people used to tell me that they predicted the, the GFC, what a lot of bullshit. That was, it was luck.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  And uh, but good on them and good on you and good on me and to some extent too, we've been lucky, but what's important is you're paying forward. You're doing something, you're not gonna make money out of it, it's a, it's a passion project, but it's good for the country.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Thanks. And yeah, you've been a big inspiration on that, that side as well.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  Thanks very much. Well done, Charlie.