Matt Friedman | Modern Slavery Is Getting Worse

Ed Cowan | Australian Test Cricket... “The output's objective. There's nothing subjective about a twenty-ball duck”

Ed Cowan is an Australian test cricketer, investor, podcaster and author. He’s one of those people whose name I jotted down 6 years ago when I started the show earmarked as a ‘dream guest’. He played in a golden era of Australian cricket and did so at a time when I was obsessed with the sport myself (I had delusions about being a test cricketer) and therefore like the music of your youth those cricketers you grew up with leave a certain impression. I've since been a long time listener of his 'Scaling Up' podcast series and tune in weekly for the ABC Cricket Podcast where he is a co-host. Ed has an occasionally controversial, but always influential voice on the Australian cricketing landscape. It's an absolute pleasure to have recorded this with him. He had 32 test innings for Australia across 18 matches, scored one test hundred and over 1000 runs in total. You’ll find a link to both his book [https://www.amazon.com.au/Firing-Line-Diary-season/dp/1742233155] and his podcast [https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/abc-cricket-podcast/id1445812977] here.  Leave a review on Apple or Spotify (nothing does more to help grow the show) It’s an enormous pleasure to have spoken with Ed, we discussed... * How Ed always kept a foot in multiple worlds, even though it came at a cost.  * The transition out of professional sport and why so many athletes struggle with it. * His mentor Peter Roebuck * Mental health in cricket and how the culture has shifted. * His Test career: the debut hundred, the weight of expectation, homework-gate, and his illness that coincided with the Ashes and the end of his international career. * Ed’s views on IPL money, BBL privitisation and governance. * The business of cricket: how he'd restructure Cricket Australia, player pay, and bringing patient, evergreen capital into the Big Bash. * And, as always, the role serendipity has played in his life, to which, as an opening batsman, he had the perfect answer. Timestamps... 00:00 — Realising a cricket career was possible 02:17 — Under-19s in Sri Lanka, surrounded by future Test players 07:38 — The transition myth: why it's a decade, not twelve months 14:08 — Do athletes have too much free time? 17:03 — Travel, brooding, and the Matthew Talbot shelter that shifted his perspective 27:02 — The Cricinfo depression piece 33:31 — NSW's logjam of talent and the fresh start in Tasmania 36:30 — Called up to Australia; the left-handed-opener mystery 39:36 — Peter Roebuck: discipline, mangoes, and the debut century dedicated to him 44:43 — The 18 innings: expectation, emotional regulation, homework-gate 50:42 — The Ashes, falling ill, and his final Test 54:00 — Resentment, selection, and "perception is reality" 55:12 — Death of a Gentleman, the IPL, and cricket's governance crisis 1:00:23 — Ambitions in cricket; the ABC podcast as a public service 1:08:08 — Privatising the Big Bash and bringing in patient capital 1:13:55 — Serendipity, Gideon Haig, and "I was an opening batsman" Some choice snippets from the conversation. On transition out of sport > "A lot of sportspeople think transition is your last twelve months of playing and your first twelve months of the real world. That's only a tiny speck of what it actually looks like. You come out of sport and you're at the bottom of the next mountain — you've got the tools to climb it, but that's another journey in and of itself." On identity > "One of the thresholds is: do you still think of yourself as a cricketer? It's not part of my identity anymore at all. Some people say, 'You're the guy who used to play cricket.' Yeah, that was me. But that takes a while." On the perspective that pulled him out of a funk (volunteering at the Matthew Talbot shelter) > "Here I was brooding over nicking one to second slip the day before. And here are guys who hadn't made any bad choices — they were just out of luck." On the chip on his shoulder > "You think I'm not training hard enough? I'll beat you in the beep test. You think I'm not preparing properly? I'll get a hundred on the weekend." On why cricket breeds brooders > "The output's objective. There's nothing subjective about getting a twenty-ball duck. And the time lag from error to atonement is long — it can be two days, and you're doing nothing.""The key to good mental health in cricket is celebrating your teammates' success. That's rarer than you'd think." On the fresh start in Tasmania > "The joy of a fresh start is you can be whoever you want to be the moment you walk in the door. There's no judgment about what school you went to. You're judged from day one only." On luck (the serendipity close) > "Two more centimetres of Morne Morkel's size-fourteen boot behind the line, and I'm out for forty-eight. No one remembers Ed Cowan, Test century.""The harder you work, the luckier you get. Luck can come and find you — but it's up to each individual to make that lucky moment count." On the business of cricket > "Our best players probably don't get paid enough, and our worst players get paid too much.""An IPL owner's incentive is not to grow the Big Bash. It's to pillage the Big Bash so the IPL gets stronger." Podcast Starter Packs * Investigative Journalists [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Investigative-Journalists-1baec29d0b358018bb55d01e71274eea] * Offshore Finance/Kleptocracy & Money Laundering [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Offshore-Finance-Kleptocracy-Money-Laundering-1baec29d0b3580e8afdcd887bf511614] * Geopolitics/Economics/Economic Development [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Geopolitics-Economics-Economic-Development-1baec29d0b358083ae54f2ac475f234d] * Explorers & Adventurers [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Explorers-Adventurers-1baec29d0b3580c58aeef3ac7d3b6020] Leave a review on Apple or Spotify (nothing does more to help grow the show)

Tim Marshall | 'Despite It All... We Remain Prisoners Of Geography'

Tim Marshall is back for a fourth time. We've now done a show for every book: Prisoners of Geography [https://www.buzzsprout.com/1485736/episodes/7785667-13-tim-marshall-prisoners-of-geography-the-taiwan-question-the-arctic], The Power of Geography [https://www.buzzsprout.com/1485736/episodes/8739762-31-tim-marshall-power-of-geography-geopolitics-saudi-arabia-space] and The Future of Geography [https://www.buzzsprout.com/1485736/episodes/13238632-145-tim-marshall-the-future-of-geography-europe-sweden-re-visiting-prisoners-of-geography]. Now the book that started a whole genre has turned 10 years, and Tim has gone back and rewritten the entire thing. So the question writes itself: how do you update a guide to how geography explains the world when the geography itself hasn't moved? Tim's answer is that we remain prisoners of it but the case is nuanced, he is quick to deny geographic determinism. In this episode we go region by region, the Strait of Hormuz and pipelines through Oman's mountains, China's escape from its "Malacca Dilemma," Europe's reckoning as America pivots to Asia. The surprise thread is Venezuela, which Tim argues is about Cuba, semiconductors and squeezing China out of Latin America far more than oil. From there: the global populist wave, and his sharpest reframing of the hour arguing that multi-ethnicity was never the problem; badly-done multiculturalism is. We close on the Indo-Pacific as the new centre of the world, on Taiwan and on what it all means for little old Australia — AUKUS, Pine Gap, and Tim's blunt verdict that we matter more to American strategy than even the UK. If this is your first geography episode, start where it began with Tim's very first appearance [https://www.buzzsprout.com/1485736/episodes/7785667-13-tim-marshall-prisoners-of-geography-the-taiwan-question-the-arctic] back in 2021 — or sit it alongside Robert Kaplan [https://www.buzzsprout.com/1485736/episodes/16686876-robert-kaplan-veteran-geopolitical-analyst-on-a-world-in-permanent-crisis] on a world in permanent crisis, Sam Roggeveen [https://www.buzzsprout.com/1485736/episodes/17500344-sam-roggeveen-the-echidna-strategy-how-australia-can-become-defensively-self-reliant-the-implications-of-china-s-military-rise-the-role-of-the-us-in-the-region] on the Echidna Strategy, and Robyn Davidson [https://www.buzzsprout.com/1485736/episodes/18045416-robyn-davidson-among-australia-s-most-mythologised-lives-memoir-is-the-slipperiest-genre-unfinished-woman-tracks-a-life-of-nomadism], whom I quote here on Modi's India. The 10th anniversary edition of Prisoners of Geography is out now. Links  * Tim Marshall Books [https://www.amazon.com.au/stores/author/B00LKZ4QKE/allbooks] * Curious Worldview Substack [https://curiousworldviewpod.substack.com/] Podcast Starter Packs * Investigative Journalists [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Investigative-Journalists-1baec29d0b358018bb55d01e71274eea] * Offshore Finance/Kleptocracy & Money Laundering [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Offshore-Finance-Kleptocracy-Money-Laundering-1baec29d0b3580e8afdcd887bf511614] * Geopolitics/Economics/Economic Development [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Geopolitics-Economics-Economic-Development-1baec29d0b358083ae54f2ac475f234d] * Explorers & Adventurers [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Explorers-Adventurers-1baec29d0b3580c58aeef3ac7d3b6020] Leave a review on Apple or Spotify (nothing does more to help grow the show)

Oliver Bullough | The Awful Consequences Of Moneyland Are Compounding

Four years ago, almost to the day of recording, Oliver Bullough was a guest on this show for the first time [https://open.spotify.com/episode/7ub0njnAi2N0rmt1VkxmZV] to discuss his concept of 'Moneyland'. This borderless virtual country where the wealthy go to keep their wealth beyond the reach of any government, any tax office, any voter. Between then and now, I've maintained interest on this thread. Nicholas Shaxson [https://open.spotify.com/episode/1YtyfNgKFJt9ojdtUx6VXR] discussed on the pod the cancerous plumbing of the offshore world in Treasure Islands. John Christensen [https://open.spotify.com/episode/1y16qp6vRVXet5e0PRC034] showed how that plumbing quietly corrodes culture and politics. Bill Browder [https://open.spotify.com/episode/4e7Cpzx5M9iEMYmSToRDcc] shows where the abstraction becomes violence. Nathan Lynch [https://open.spotify.com/episode/2wdmX0tBCgVxdGwfGnsfon] showed how Australia is every bit as dirty as anywhere else, and Matt Friedman [https://open.spotify.com/episode/1a61NvHHN9VhzghEvyjvyk], just a few weeks ago, put a number on the human end of it: $236 billion a year in illicit profit from modern slavery. Oliver's latest book is Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won. His argument is bleak, precise, and very hard to wave away. We have spent decades and roughly $200 billion a year building an anti-money-laundering fortress, and by the best available estimates the share of the world economy being laundered hasn't moved since the 1990s.  We get into why governments have failed so completely at this one. We follow the money where it actually goes: not just through banks, but through cash (central banks printing $100 bills faster than they can build factories), through crypto and stablecoins, and through the oldest trick of all — value hidden inside shipments of used cars, watches, oil, grain, the way the Medici did it in Florence. We talk about the scam compounds of Southeast Asia, where trafficked people are tortured into defrauding pensioners on the other side of the world, and how that horror connects — directly, traceably — to the very top of global power, through Tether, Cantor Fitzgerald, and a US Commerce Secretary's family. And underneath all of it, the real subject: the relationship between money and power, and what happens to democracy when the two become the same thing. Oliver's "offshore bandits" — elites who loot their own countries while living and banking somewhere else, feeling none of the consequences — are a darker upgrade on Mancur Olson's stationary bandit. It's a Moneyland story, and it's spreading. There are lighter turns too — Wright Patman, the forgotten Texan congressman who fathered anti-money-laundering law; Peter Pomerantsev and the propaganda war; Bill Browder before he was Bill Browder; and an unexpectedly lyrical detour to the walnut forests and white mountains of Kyrgyzstan. Oliver Bullough... Links  * Oliver Bullough Books [https://www.amazon.com.au/stores/author/B003YLKH2S] * Curious Worldview Substack [https://curiousworldviewpod.substack.com/] Podcast Starter Packs * Investigative Journalists [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Investigative-Journalists-1baec29d0b358018bb55d01e71274eea] * Offshore Finance/Kleptocracy & Money Laundering [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Offshore-Finance-Kleptocracy-Money-Laundering-1baec29d0b3580e8afdcd887bf511614] * Geopolitics/Economics/Economic Development [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Geopolitics-Economics-Economic-Development-1baec29d0b358083ae54f2ac475f234d] * Explorers & Adventurers [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Explorers-Adventurers-1baec29d0b3580c58aeef3ac7d3b6020] Leave a review on Apple or Spotify (nothing does more to help grow the show)

Matt Friedman | Modern Slavery Is Getting Worse

This podcast has returned to modern slavery three times now. Lisa Kristine [https://open.spotify.com/episode/5TGvkc5VgohWTbzDKexsiA?si=wLzEhSUyQNeOqVyeJefXYA] showed us its face through her photography. Bruce Ladebu [https://open.spotify.com/episode/26XPKzWBiDT3qaElAhazvC?si=ffdc402b16014b71] described what it actually takes to pull children out. And Matthew Friedman, in Episode 76 [https://open.spotify.com/episode/1a61NvHHN9VhzghEvyjvyk?si=bd62d0ca43444091], gave us the architecture: thirty-five years working across Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, the UN, and eventually the Mekong Club.  That first episode opened with the story of an 11-year-old Nepalese girl in a Mumbai brothel who ran across the room, wrapped herself around Matt, and begged him to save her. He couldn't, that day. He came back with police and she was gone.  This second conversation picks up in a deglobalising world. The USAID cuts have gutted sixty years of global anti-trafficking infrastructure. The $400 million available to address modern slavery has been halved. HIV clinics, maternal health programs, girls' education initiatives are all gone. And as Matt makes clear, the line from those cuts to a new trafficking victim is not abstract. It runs through hospitals, through debt, through desperation. This episode also goes somewhere I'm afraid I didn't communicate that well, the points of cultural judgement and critique. There's a story of a sixteen-year-old Bangladeshi girl, rescued after two weeks in a brothel, who was turned away at her own front door by a father who loved her because the shame she carried would make her siblings unmarriageable. That story sits at the centre of the hardest question in this conversation: when the cultural machinery enabling trafficking runs this deep, what can the outside world actually do about it? It's a delicate subject, I regret not treating it as such.  $238 billion modern slavery generates annually flows through the same offshore plumbing this podcast has covered with Oliver Bullough and John Christensen. Matt explains how banks are already tracking it and how the Mekong Club is working with Interpol, crypto companies, and social media platforms to find it and cut it off. It's a pleasure to welcome Matt Friedman back to the podcast.  Resources Walk Free Foundation's Global Slavery Index - https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/ U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report - https://www.state.gov/trafficking-in-persons-report/ Makon Club - Anti-Human Trafficking Organization - https://makonclub.org/ USAID Human Trafficking Programs - https://www.usaid.gov/what-we-do/gender-equality-and-womens-empowerment/human-trafficking Interpol Human Trafficking Unit - https://www.interpol.int/en/How-we-work/Operations/Operation-Scorpion Chapters 00:00 The Impact of Deglobalization on Modern Slavery 02:50 Statistics and Resources in the Fight Against Modern Slavery 05:54 Consequences of USAID Cuts on Global Health and Safety 08:38 Understanding Human Trafficking and Legal Responses 11:40 Cultural Attitudes and Enforcement Challenges 14:12 The Role of Vulnerability in Exploitation 17:23 Identifying the Most Egregious Examples of Modern Slavery 20:02 Cultural Change and the Role of Awareness 23:22 Internal vs. External Approaches to Addressing Modern Slavery 33:12 The Impact of Fiction on Awareness 36:24 Taking Responsibility: Individual Actions Against Human Trafficking 38:27 Creating Compelling Content: The Role of Film in Activism 40:47 Cultural Sensitivity in Addressing Trafficking 43:28 The Urgency of Addressing Human Trafficking 50:08 Financial Institutions and Their Role in Combatting Trafficking 57:47 The Power of Business in Addressing Human Trafficking 59:52 Finding Hope: The Starfish Parable

Joshua Bandoch | The Science of Persuasion - Why We Feel First Then Reason Later

Joshua Bandoch is the Head of Policy at the Illinois Policy Institute and the debut author of 'How to Get What You Want [https://www.amazon.com/How-Get-What-You-Want-ebook/dp/B0FDBGV22N]'.  It's persuasion and communication all the way down. Josh's argues that almost everything most of us were taught about how to win an argument is wrong and now the neuroscience proves it.  Aristotle, it turns out, had this figured out 2,400 years ago. Kant, the great rationalist of the Enlightenment, did not. We feel first and reason second, and any attempt to persuade that ignores that simple fact is doomed before it starts. Across the conversation we move from the Greeks to Adam Smith, from the Communist Manifesto as a piece of technical propaganda to what makes Steve Jobs, JFK, and Ronald Reagan so memorable as communicators. We talk about the difference between persuasion and manipulation, why authenticity is the most underrated tool in the kit, whether emotional intelligence can really be learned, and what Josh would tell the next Republican candidate trying to thread the needle between MAGA and the traditional conservative base. It's a wide-ranging episode, and one I throughly enjoyed recording. I'm thrilled to welcome to the podcast, Joshua Bandoch. ----- Link's To Joshua Bandoch * Joshua Bandoch Website [https://joshuabandoch.com/] * How To Get What You Want (Book) [https://www.amazon.com/How-Get-What-You-Want-ebook/dp/B0FDBGV22N] Timestamps. 00:00  Aristotle, Adam Smith, and the 2,400-year science of persuasion 07:18  Persuasion vs. manipulation — the three biggest misconceptions 12:26  Authenticity, politicians, and why we lose trust 16:45  The neuroscience: we feel first, then reason 18:37  Negativity bias and the power of being FOR something 24:43  The logic tsunami and the limits of pure reason 33:02  Body language, tone, and the 7% rule 41:25  Emotional intelligence, moral foundations, and what's universal 56:54  Storytelling, aesthetics, and the masterclass of practice 01:08:24  Reputation, the long game, and the deathbed test 01:23:17  Sales, Chris Voss, and advice for the next Republican 01:34:01  History's great persuaders, and serendipity Podcast Starter Packs * Investigative Journalists [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Investigative-Journalists-1baec29d0b358018bb55d01e71274eea] * Offshore Finance/Kleptocracy & Money Laundering [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Offshore-Finance-Kleptocracy-Money-Laundering-1baec29d0b3580e8afdcd887bf511614] * Geopolitics/Economics/Economic Development [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Geopolitics-Economics-Economic-Development-1baec29d0b358083ae54f2ac475f234d] * Explorers & Adventurers [https://curiousworldview.notion.site/Explorers-Adventurers-1baec29d0b3580c58aeef3ac7d3b6020] Leave a review on Apple or Spotify (nothing does more to help grow the show)