Tony Abbott served as Australia's 28th Prime Minister from 2013 to 2015. He is a Rhodes Scholar and among the most polarising and consequential figures in modern Australian political history.

Rather than writing a series of memoirs detailing the turbulent years before, during and after his leadership of Australia, he instead, wanted to re-introduce a pride for Australia's history which he is afraid 'the black armband view of history' has erased.

Tony makes the case that Australians have far more to be proud of than ashamed.

His book is called 'Australia: A History' and tells the story of a not so long ago Australia. The evolution of Australia post 1788. Tony's speculated origins for Australia's egalitarianism. How settlers and convicts ending up working together to create the institutions that endure through till today. And all the meanwhile, not ignoring the devastating consequences the English expansion into Australia had to the indigenous Australian's who were here as long as 60,000 years before.

This interview would be good to listen to alongside my interview with Robyn Davidson. They aren't two different idea's of history, but rather two differently sympathetic perspectives on an Australia both have travelled widely and thoughtfully.

Link's To Tony Abbott

• Australia: A History

This is a summary of what was covered in the interview today.

• [00:00] — The Black Armband view of history? Abbott defines the term and stakes out his "glass half full" position on Australian history.
• [01:50] — Ryan pushes back: did Abbott downplay frontier conflict?
• [03:59] — The Myall Creek Massacre, the legal scandal of the first acquittal, the fury it sparked, and the eventual hanging of seven perpetrators.
• [06:03] — How short Australian post-1788 history actually is.
• [08:35] — Peter Thiel's stagnation thesis
• [12:08] — What evidence does Abbott see of Australians being ashamed of their history?
• [15:09] — Ryan offers a different read: most Australians are curious about history, not ashamed of it.
• [18:43] — Why isn't Australian history dramatised more on screen?
• [20:19] — Finding Nemo point: great fiction drives engagement more than philanthropy or think tanks.
  [21:04] — Mark Twain visited Australia and described Sydney as "an English city with American energy." Abbott loves the line.
• [24:47] — The convict origins of Australian egalitarianism.
• [27:26] — What made the early governors enforce the rule of law rather than create their own tyranny?
• [31:56] — Overrated / Underrated (Tyler Cowen's question).
• [35:05] — Indonesia. Why don't we have deeper cultural ties with a neighbour of 300 million?
• [39:13] — Serendipity vs. Providence.

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Link's To Eric Jorgenson

• ejorgenson.com (personal website)
• scribemedia.com (company)
• elonmuskbook.org (book)

Eric Jorgenson, author of the Naval Almanac and the Book of Elon, and CEO of Scribe Media joins me to discuss what makes Elon Musk the most consequential entrepreneur alive.

We dig into Elon's purpose-driven risk-taking, his philosophy of attacking bottlenecks, and why the people who make the biggest dents often pay the steepest personal price. Eric also reflects on his own journey from curating Naval's wisdom at 24 to defining an entirely new genre of book and what it means to do one thing so well the world notices.

Timestamps

03:53 – "A Million Musks" — what Eric actually means by it
04:42 – Can you be a world-changer and still be a good family man?
07:22 – The canonical 2008 Elon risk-taking story
12:47 – Rolling the winnings: Zip2 → PayPal → Tesla/SpaceX
Elon's pattern of compounding risk.
16:19 – Elon's talent attraction formula
18:20 – Has Elon's politics hurt his ability to hire?
19:44 – Elon's first principles communication style
21:23 – How much does Elon recognise his own luck?
26:09 – Vertical integration and the supply chain philosophy
32:36 – How Elon has influenced a new generation of hardware entrepreneurs
36:37 – ASML / Martin van der Brink — the supply chain counterpoint
38:25 – Could Elon disrupt chip manufacturing?
39:50 – Mark Andreessen on founder-led management
41:15 – How Eric got Elon's blessing to publish
42:32 – The almanac format and defining a genre
44:03 – Scribe Media: the business model and Eric's role as CEO
48:30 – What did Vance and Isaacson miss that makes room for the Book of Elon?
52:11 – Naval's foreword: the reaction and what it meant
53:13 – How the Naval Almanac changed Eric's life
56:03 – Eric's worldview in the Book of Elon
1:00:04 – What would Eric still ask Elon?
1:01:08 – "Don't aspire to glory, aspire to work" — what does Eric aspire to now?
1:03:21 – The serendipity question

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Will Marshall is the CEO and Co-Founder of Planet.

Planet own and operate a fleet of (200+) satellites which image daily, the entire world.

Planet’s ultimate ambition is to achieve a queryable earth.

The way you might ask Google what the population of Australia is, you’d be able to ask Planet any conceivable question you might have about the surface of the world. The way Google would refer to the Australian Bureau of Statistics for an answer to the countries population, Planet will refer your query to their data, millions and millions of indexed images of the planet’s surface to present you an answer.

The applications of this are huge.

Take economic intelligence as an example… all types of queries that could summon early indicators of movements that aren’t already priced in.

• For instance, as an early prediction of retail sales you could ask; How many cars are in Walmart parking lots across America right now? Or even, over the past 3 months, what’s the daily average number been?
• Which Chinese ports are seeing more or less traffic than they usually might since the 2026 Iran war began?

And then there’s uses for climate and the environment.

• I could ask, at what rate is a specific glacier retreating? Measure this season’s melt against each other year to date.
• Monitoring and acting upon overfishing in protected zones.
• Or as I ask Will in the interview, could Planet’s data be more accurate at early predictions regarding where an Australian bushfire season might be worst hit

You can imagine the applications for agriculture but as well, naturally, Planet’s data is also crucial for defence.

• Will comment’s on Planet’s data indicating very early the Russian buildup of activity closing in on a Ukraine border.
• And I caught Will just day’s after the 2026 war with Iran, a conflict where Planet’s data is also in use.

Will Marshall an incredible entrepreneur, but as you’ll see in the interview, he also has extensive interests beyond just those of his business.

Marshall’s PHD advisor was Sir Roger Penrose. He worked at NASA. He was on the team that discovered large quantities of water ice on the moon. He co-invented a space debris collision avoidance method using ground-based lasers. Will has lived in communal housing for 20 years. He’s a Brit abroad in America and is now the CEO of a company not only ambitioning for all the queryable stuff mentioned above, but as well is now partnered with both Google and Nvidia to explore the potential for data centres in space.

It’s a enormous pleasure to welcome to Will Marshall to the podcast.

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