Nicholas Gruen | Brilliant Australian Economist On Pokies, Citizen Juries, Institutional Lethargy, Superannuation & The HALE Index

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I joined the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen recently in his Melbourne home to host his first 'long-form' podcast (although I'm not sure at what hour it goes from short to long)

At the core of Gruen's worldview is the “un-seriousness” he levels at Australian politics, the media landscape, institutions and in a word... bureaucracies.

From his creation of the HALE Index to his decades inside Australia’s public institutions, Nicholas continuously challenges orthodox thinking.

The podcast covers the (in my opinion) radical yet (Nicholas's opinion) ancient idea of citizens’ juries as a second pillar of representation, the reasons bold policy rarely survives bureaucratic reality, and how lessons from the Toyota production system could help governments actually listen to people at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Along the way, Gruen takes us from Australia’s superannuation system to pokies, from the mental health crisis to the subtle erosion of public-spiritedness inside organisations. 

To be specific, these are all the topics covered in this chat.

• The HALE Index of Well-being – Why GDP misses the mark, how HALE works, and what it reveals about Australia’s progress.
• Measuring What Matters – The limits of subjective well-being metrics, correlations between indicators, and why faux indexes mislead policymakers.
• Indigenous Policy Contradictions – The tension between material “gap closing” and self-determination, and why policy rarely confronts it.
• Citizens’ Juries & Political Reform – Introducing random selection into governance and how it could act as a check on elected officials.
• Goodhart’s Law in Action – How turning measures into targets corrupts them, and the problem of gaming metrics in education and beyond.
• Internal vs External Goods – Alasdair MacIntyre’s framework and its relevance to public service, corporate culture, and motivation.
• Institutional Stagnation – Why promising initiatives stall, and how bottom-up programs could scale without being crushed by bureaucracy.
• Toyota Production System Lessons – Building respect for frontline workers into systems and how it transforms performance.
• Australia’s Superannuation System – Strengths, inefficiencies, unfair taxation, and misaligned regulation of self-managed super funds.
• Compulsory Voting & Preferential Systems – How they shape Australia’s political centre and guard against extreme populism.
• Universities Today – The shift from idea-driven discourse to metric-chasing careerism, especially in economics.
• Trade-offs vs Synergies – Why economics often overemphasises trade-offs, and examples of where quality and cost improve together.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to Nicholas Gruen
05:41 The Limitations of GDP as a Measure
11:08 Inequality and Its Impact on Well-being
16:45 The Role of Metrics in Policy Making
22:10 The Importance of Community Engagement
41:48 Connecting Education to the Real World
47:24 Learning from Toyota's Success
56:52 The Flaws in Superannuation System
01:02:55 Reforming Auditing Practices
01:11:39 The Shift in University Education
01:20:59 Divergent Perspectives in Economics
01:32:49 Rethinking Representation in Democracy
01:48:25 The Role of Elite Consensus in Political Change
02:07:58 Understanding Domestic Violence in Indigenous Communities
02:21:55 The Role of New Media in Political Discourse
02:26:38 The Impact of Gambling on Australian Society
02:36:08 The Nature of Optimism and Serendipity in Life

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:00

I'm sure I would have seen Nicholas Gruin's tweets pixelated across my screen prior to this. But when I was first given an introduction to this economist worldview, it was in fact in the middle of a previous interview. I was seated across from a man wearing three vapes from three lanyards. We were outdoors in a parking lot in a sunny rural London cafe, and it turns out Rory Sutherland had been singing Gruen's praise for years. But in one of the many twists of his Aerudite thinking, he suggested out of nowhere, you have to speak to Nicholas Gruen. He's wonderful on this. I shared as much with the man seated across from me today, and thankfully he was generous enough with his time and space to allow me to follow up on Rory's demand. As soon as I started looking into Mr. Gruen's substack and work, it became abundantly clear why he's top of Rory's mind and heaping praise from the likes of Martin Wolf, calling him the most brilliant economist you've never heard of. Well, not anymore, dear listener. It seems there is no topic or niche value of interest that escapes Gruin's worldview. When we first got on the phone to discuss the podcast technicalities, two hours later we finally got around to them solving the problem of faith in the meantime. Nicholas Gruen is the CEO of Lateral Economics, a visiting professor at King's College London's Policy Institute, former chair of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, constructor of the Hale Index of Wellbeing, loads more as well, but someone I'm extremely lucky to have gone to have spoken with today. We discussed the Hale Index, the McDonnellization of politics, a bit of the cancerous nature of pokies, your core idea, which maybe you want to just say what it is.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Well, I'd say my core idea is that that there are two ways to represent the people in a political system. One is by by being represented by people we elect, and the other is what we do in juries, and that is to be represented by people like us, people sampled from the community, drawn by lottery. And secondly, that we need a political system that does across the board what has already been done by Magna Carta in the judicial branch of government, and that is to have a jury entangled with the pyramid of power and patronage to for each of those things to be checks and balances on the on the other in running our political system.

SPEAKER_02 2:22

Which we definitely go top to bottom on. I would call it a new interesting idea. Nicholas corrected me and said it's in fact very, very old.

SPEAKER_00 2:28

It's an old, interesting idea.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

But it will sound at least radical and fresh, and hopefully you'll end up agreeing with it as well. Anything else you want to add? No. It is now my pleasure and good fortune to play the podcast we just recorded. What is the Hale Index and what does it reveal about Australia's progress?

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Okay, so the Hale Index is a nice name that I gave, an index that Ross Gittens, the chief economics correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, asked me to build. And that is an index, lots you will lots of people will have heard of this. Bobby Kennedy is the most eloquent person to put that rhetoric in 1968, and he says, our GDP tells us it measures uh all the dollars that pass through our economy. But every time someone adds a lock to their door or buys a gun or shoots someone and then they go to hospital, all of those things get measured by GDP, and then he and and they all drive GDP up. And then he says, in short, doesn't measure the content of our character, the quality of our schools, the quality of our families, and so on. And then he says GDP, in other words, measures everything except what is most important to us. Now that's a nice sentiment, and it surfaces regularly, about every 15 years, when people get a bit embarrassed about how well they're doing. They say we should we should look, we should have a measure like GDP that tells us more than just how many dollars are circulating in the economy. And this is responsible for endless false starts. And if you want to see one, you can read a paper that the Center for Policy Development put out just last month about how to re-jig government policy in pursuit of well-being. I'm a critic of that, but I'm not a critic. If you want to build an index of well-being, you need to understand that what you're trying to measure is not very measurable. So you know that you are going to be, it'll be crude but uh maybe directionally right, but not exactly. Yeah, exactly. And and so it's absolutely the case that we make decisions constantly. Should we invest more in this number of hospital beds or in school places or in cops on the beat and so on? And well, to take a simple example, when people are working on on a health question, they've invented this thing called quality, qualies, which is quality-adjusted life years. If you can say if you can give someone another nine months but they're in an iron lung, maybe it's not so maybe it's not worth doing. If you can intervene in such a way that you spend $100,000, but you give some you you cure, say, an autoimmune disease for a young kid of four, then you give them a whole give them a whole life.

SPEAKER_02 5:38

Qualies more than the person with the iron lung at the end of their life.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

Heck, lots more, lots more. Now there's something that our common sense and our moral sense rebels against that. They say, you because you say you can't measure these things in dollars and cents. But the point is you're interacting with a system that has to make choices. And so you've got you do you want to help them make that choice? And the answer is yes. But if you want to build an index that helps us say, have we, has our well-being grown, rather than many of the things that lots of people have done, we can talk about that if you like. What I did was I said, let's start with GDP, let's start with the economic measure, let's come up with some quick and dirty things we can do to correct things that are obviously wrong and wrong in a big way. And so that's essentially how the Hale Index works. It does things like say, says, if we have a windfall, we might end up talking about resource rent in Australia. If we have a windfall, we can do two things. We can all go on a holiday, and when we come back, it'll be paid for, and that's fine. Or we can invest it in our children's education. And we want a measure of economic well-being that tells us that that second course is gonna generate more economic well-being than a holiday. So that's what I built. And um there are lots of people with faux indexes, with pretend indexes. Let me give you an example. Well, I'll give you an example. The OECD, that's a pretty uh that's a pretty august body, isn't it? Okay. So what do the OECD do? They say, well, well-being. How are we going to define well-being? Well, well-being is, you know, your housing's important, your health's important, your social in conditions are important, your politics is important. These are all so we'll have these as dimensions to our well-being index. And then you go and get some numbers on these things, and of course they're all pretty incommensurate with each other. And then you say, hmm, how should I measure? So what weighting should I give income? What weighting should I give housing? What weighting should I give life expectancy? What weighting should I give life expectancy? And basically you've got no idea.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

And then there's another problem. Because the problem is how you measure it.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

Well, A, yes, you've you've made Herculean assumptions about measuring it. But if you're going to I mean, another one of these metrics is self-reported well-being. Right. If you get self-reported well-being, you ask someone between zero and ten, how would you rate your self-reported well-being?

SPEAKER_02 8:25

Could be anything more subjective than that.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

Well, one, it's subjective, but two, you can't get above 10, can you? Right. Now, if you map this against GDP, whatever GDP is this year, it can be higher or lower next year. So if you say that over 35 years GDP's increased, but self-reported well-being has not increased, well, there will be a time when it can't increase. If it gets to, if we get it to 10, which we never will, it can't increase. So, so there's the the the none of this makes any sense. It's completely incoherent. And then there's another issue, which is that housing and income are heavily correlated. Most of these things correlate with each other. This is a completely, this index is just is a big flashing sign saying don't go this way. Go back to the start and see if you can do a better job. Well, who does that in politics and bureaucracy? They just keep going through the motions. So I tried to build this thing, and it uh one of the things it turned up, the big things that were driving it, is that some of the things that we added was obesity is a thing which is widespread, it's a widespread issue, and there's good evidence that it lowers well-being. Mental health, anxiety, and depression likewise. And education is something which we build we spend a vast amount of money on education, of our resource on education. Human beings are the the being that edu, you know, we we educate our young, and that's now gone to to, that's now spun out to 18 years or something like that. So what people are interested in is what does GDP tell us, and what does this other measure tell us? And what it showed is that during the during the Gillard years, uh Gillard Rudd years, this index that we built, the Hale Index, outperformed GDP because we were building a lot more human capital because we were moving university attendance up and so on. But the long run, there was also a long run drag on on well-being because of obesity and mental health and so on. So so it brought out some of these, it brought out some of these very general things, but again, it didn't it doesn't give you any great insights into how to address those things, which is another interesting thing which um we could talk about, but we anyway.

SPEAKER_02 10:53

Just quickly on the mental health and anxiety, do you suspect that mental health and depression is more prevalent now than it maybe has been in the past, or we just have more ways to identify it and therefore it's a very important thing.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

That's super hard to answer. But what you can say is that you're in a kind of hermetic, if you go out and ask people subjective questions like that, you're in a kind of a a hermetically sealed area, you're in a hermetically sealed universe, so that if you go and ask questions like that of people in a Spartan culture, they'll tell you they're fine, even when they're going through hell. Uh, that's an important that it would be shameful to do anything other than that. They were all thinking there, but for the grace of God go I, who am I to complain? I'm doing fine. And the social stigma of being weak if you do. Just the internal stigma, too. Just the internal stigma. Like my father had uh a grandmother who was engulfed in the Holocaust, and he's not gonna be sitting around telling me about multi-generational trauma. Uh he's gonna be getting on with a life. And um I can't give you an answer to that question, but it's certainly you wouldn't do the work responsibly if it didn't sort of just hang over it if it wasn't present to you from time to time. And unfortunately, it's not very present to us.

SPEAKER_02 12:13

So the Hell Index, uh, you looked at health outcomes, education levels, inequality, environmental degradation, depletion of natural resources, mental health and life satisfaction, job satisfaction. And it's improving much more slowly than GDP growth has been. Like you said, maybe in the Rudd Gillard years, it ticked up.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Yeah, it ticked up and then it's fallen off. That's right.

SPEAKER_02 12:32

So, broadly, what's your explanation for that?

SPEAKER_00 12:35

Uh, my explanation for that is that the long-run weight on it from obesity and anxiety, those are long-run public health challenges. There's also a little bit there from inequality. Those things continue to run and continue to get slowly worse. And the kick we got from more uh tertiary education started flatlining and possibly even declining somewhat, I'm not sure. So that's that's basically the story. I mean, it's quite interesting to talk about a couple of those things. One is natural, one is um inequality, and the other is natural resources. So with inequality, you know, it's not me turning up saying, hey, inequality is a bad thing, wag of finger. It is an attempt, again, it's somewhat hubristic, it's somewhat grandiose, but it's an attempt to actually go back to an idea that the early 20th century economists had. And so very famous economist Char um Alfred Marshall said that a dollar in the hands of a working man was worth more utility than another dollar in the hands of a rich man. He said, man. We were not supposed to say that anymore. People, obviously. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the same thing. Uh, a few dollars to me doesn't mean much. To some people who really need it, it really does mean something. So there are various ways that you can So like how how do you how do you measure that distribution? How do you measure that? And so there are ways, and they're not great, but there are ways in which you can either by way of experiments or questionnaires and getting people to reflect, you can say to someone, how uh how many dollars would I have to give you if you say you're seven, or let's say you rate yourself as seven out of ten in terms of subjective well-being, how much would I have to give you to make you seven point five, to get you to seven point five? And it turns out that what uh people's our best evidence about that is that it's a share of the income you have now, which means exactly what the commonsensical thing told you, which is that money to poorer people is worth more to them than money to richer people. Yeah, it's a basic axiom of economics. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it's in fact one of the uh sort of central to my method, which is you don't in economics don't ever go very far from common sense. Uh because you just don't have the it's not physics, you know. Right, right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:03

They're just recommendations, they're not laws of the universe.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 15:08

Uh what metric, if any, do you think the Aboriginals would want to add to the Hale Index? Or might be most important to them.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

Well, I think it's a very strange thing to well, I mean, that's a very classic story, which is we turn up and we say we'll give you your choice of metrics. Right. I mean, it's just a totally different language. It's ridiculous. I'm not a big fan of metrics. I think they're necessary, they're very crude, we need them for these big, crude decisions that we make.

SPEAKER_02 15:36

In fact, it's such a good example of how just measuring the you know increase in GDP over time for one specific part of the Aboriginal community is totally missing the point of their well-being.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

We turn up and we say, we're gonna close the gap. Is that uh something that has come out of deep engagement with Indigenous people, particularly indigenous communities not their spokespeople? Absolutely no way. There are kind of profound contradictions in the whole story, and we just sail by them. So for instance, we say that we want to close the gap in a material sense, and we also say that we want them to have self-determination. Well, it stands to reason that there is some tension between those two things. And can you tell me a leader in Australia who's tried to focus on that tension and said we should try and sort ourselves out on that question? No. We all pretend that it's all nice and we just keep going. We just keep going through the motions. We don't say we don't like the big flashing sign. I mean, if you have those two objectives, it's a big flashing sign saying they're not the same. They're in a substantial tension with each other. What do we do when we have to make choices? Because we make choices, and the question is do we make them by design or by default? And we make them by default because we cannot, because our whole culture revolves around getting powerful people, uh around powerful people saying things that don't that minimize offence and minimize difficulty, minimize discomfort. And these are very difficult subjects. So this problem goes back to the first fleet. The first, you know, Australians can be let me ask you, what country was the first country in the world to abolish slavery?

SPEAKER_02 17:26

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

Australia. So the Western, you know, the European nation of Australia. Well, it wasn't a nation, it was a colony, it was called New South Wales. So when Governor Phillip was given the commission to be the governor of the First Fleet, he's an Enlightenment guy, and they say, We want you to do this, and he says, Not if there's slavery, not having slavery. So they go, okay. Uh that's well before Wilberforce. Wilberforce is in short pants, or maybe not even with us at that point. 1787, I suppose. Um, so that's something we can be incredibly proud of. And then he gets here, and then he puts up this sign, and the sign has intended for indigenous consumption, and the sign has a an indigenous person stealing something or killing someone, and then they get strung up or beaten or something. And then the they have an indigenous, they're trying to say, if you do these things, we will punish you, and we will do the same for white people, and they have another picture there. They also get to the locals, the indigenous folks, and they say, come around and watch us flog one of our people for stealing from you. Well, nobody has got the slightest idea what's going on. They're going, This is gross. This is just what why didn't you invite us to this hideous event? So, right from the start, there were good intentions which went nowhere. Because here we are. No, because we because to engage that we these are two civilizations from different planets. And that's hard. A different language, but even if you have, you know, you might get on top of some of the language points. They're just everything about them is different.

SPEAKER_02 19:15

The foundational story is completely unrecognizable.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

And so we turn up, we're the powerful ones, and we say, look, we're just pretty great, you know?

SPEAKER_02 19:23

You know, pretty terrific. We just got off a ship.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

Yeah, look, you're gonna love it here. And they can't there's a few of them who take an interest in the language and stuff, but even so, it's hugely, it's hugely freighted with, you know, the noble savage and all this. There's no real engagement, and here we are, and we're in roughly the same situation.

SPEAKER_02 19:46

But to return to the original question, is there one unit of measurement? That's the wrong way to phrase the question, but rather one index on the Hale index that you think would be most relevant to the Aboriginals?

SPEAKER_00 19:58

Well, I think if I was trying to have an index, the sort of thing that I the sort of metric that I go for is what I call a metric of kind of soft subversion. And what I mean by that is a metric that's going to tell you when you're having a lend of yourself. So I guess I would be interested in a metric. I guess I'd be interested in a metric that you could get from younger indigenous people, but indigenous people generally asking them, are they feeling optimistic? Are they feeling like the world is giving them agency? That there's stuff that they can do in their lives that they're going to be proud of. Those kinds of things. I also kind of believe in those sorts of metrics inside um corporations and things. You're sort of getting the voice from below because the voice from below.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

Feeling you're a part of it, not just a cog.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Well, yeah, but it's always suppressed either brutally, which is the old way, or with great subtlety. But through elaborate HR systems and and you know, Utopia, the the comedy covers a lot of those things. They have these HR people coming out. You recommended, I haven't seen it. Well, well, you know, HR just make nonsense of everything. And it's all it's all a kind of a therapy to get the raw material into a nice form.

SPEAKER_02 21:23

Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

And so on.

SPEAKER_02 21:25

If tomorrow we replaced GDP with the Hale Index, what do you suspect would be the first one or two big errors that we would make? Errors. For instance, now we're making all these assumptions based off the Hale Index. Where are we going to go wrong, do you suspect?

SPEAKER_00 21:40

Yeah. Um Well, there's a there's a thing sometimes known in economics as Goodhart's law, which is when you go from when you take the transition from identifying something as a measure of, you know, as as a thing that you watch to measure something to it turn it into a target, and that's then it loses all value. Totally. So if you are you can so the sort of thing that might happen is that if the Hale index was targeted, then people might be out there trying to get the measurements of depression down, and you might do that in a way that didn't get depression down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so that's all I can say. But but but it's pretty benign in the sense that it looks for the big problems of GDP and then it just tries to correct them. And I think the other thing is that to measure education, that's a hard thing to do. We're not really measuring the quality of education. Yeah, we we so so the PISA process, which is an international benchmarking process, has some pretensions to measuring educational outputs as opposed to inputs. So it'll tell you how successful we have been in teaching numeracy and literacy and so on. But it's very it's crude.

SPEAKER_02 23:04

But the problem is how are you measuring that success? It's and we've done that already with NAPLAN.

SPEAKER_00 23:09

So we have all these teachers teaching to the test, and that's done lots of damage. It's essentially one of the most fundamental things it's done is it's undermined the intrinsic motivation of teachers. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 23:23

It seems like that's kind of circuitous. You'll invent a new way to measure something, and then you realize the way that's been measured has been gamified and not actually solving the underlying problem. Like how do you how do you defeat that? Can you overcome that?

SPEAKER_00 23:37

No, you can't overcome it. You can acknowledge the problem, and the best philosopher I know of to write about this is a guy called Alistair McIntyre, and he distinguishes between what he calls internal goods and external goods. Internal goods are he talks about the internal goods of a practice. So the way he introduces the topic is to talk about teaching a young girl to play chess. And the young girl, to give her an interest, the young girl's offered candy if she wins a game. And that's an external motivation. That's an and it's an ext and the candy is an external good. And the internal good of chess is calculat um, you know, accuracy in calculation, spatial visualization, competitive intensity. These are things which to be good at chess, you need to get good at those things. And then if you want to be serious about a practice, because he's really writing about accountancy and government and business and all these other things. If you want to be, if you want to dedicate a substantial amount of your life and other people's lives to these practices, to doing these things, you've got to go and get external goods, money, prestige, and so on. And McIntyre's argument is that these two worlds are in tension with each other. Money, you can always cut some corners to make some money, and that undermines the intrinsic value of what you're doing. And so I think that's an incredibly powerful idea. And I don't know whether we're going to talk about public and private goods in some time down the line, but but but that's an idea that that modern modernity is kind of driven out of our world. And of course, you know, well, yeah, it's it's not an easy thing to deal with. You can't build an institution that will make sure that everyone does a good job. And so you're pla uh you're playing with with incentives, extrinsic motivations in order to try to get people to do a good job. Super hard. What's happened with our in our world is that we've kind of ignored the fact that if you want people to do a good job, they have to buy in. They have to want to do a good job, and then that these metrics might be helpful to structure it and so on.

SPEAKER_02 25:56

Do you think like these surmounting problems explains why there is much more of a sense of individualism, like uh, you know, a nihilistic look at the institutions around you and realize I just got to look after myself here. I'm gonna do whatever I can for myself. Absolutely. And if you're good and hearted and good natured, you'll do your best, you know, once you've made the money.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Well, if you're good hearted and good natured, you'll be taken ad advantage of.

SPEAKER_02 26:18

No, hopefully not. That's that gets quite cynical quite quickly.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

No, no, no, but that's what that's why.

SPEAKER_02 26:23

That's at the top of the tree, that's your musks, that's your basics.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

No, it's not, it's in school tuck shops. It's it's everywhere. That's human morality is about are you gonna absolutely. I'm not saying there are kind of super predators everywhere. I'm saying that these norms of good behavior are quite fluid over time and um and it's kind of understood that if you're in a if you're in a bureaucracy and you just notice that you're trying to do the right thing and people grab hold of your capacity to work well and work hard and exclude and and exploit it, well, that's a pretty good way to think, hang on, I'm miss I'm getting something wrong here. So a person who you're not asked, these people are not saints in this position. These people start off as normal human beings. They're we call that idealistic, but they also want to look after their own interests. That's what you you expect that, but they learn. I mean, a lot of people will try and do the right thing and think that their interests will be looked after, and they learn that that's really a little bit naive and a bit dumb in our world. Um so so they learn, and it's a it's bruising and it's undermines their sense of doing their best. That's where I would say that there is that this mental health crisis is is real to some extent. And so they undermine it for themselves, they train themselves that doing the right thing is being a mug, so they dial that down. But of course, that is a within an organization, people's preparedness to help each other out, that's a public good, that's a shared good. So the whole thing goes down a notch and down a notch. So these things are very delicate and they're incredibly important and they're not they're not thought about. This you know about the Ross Ross tests? I do, I do. There's some good, I don't know, do you know the do you know the um 1960s sitcom Get Smart?

SPEAKER_02 28:35

I think it's the the um the clown spy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

That's got the phone in his shoe and so he's being interviewed by a psychiatrist and he shows in the Rorschach test and he says that's a man and a woman kissing, and then he shows him another one and says, Well, that's a man and a woman doing more than kissing, and then he shows him another one and he says, Well, I can't even say what that is. And the psychiatrist says to him, Well, you seem to be preoccupied with sex, Maxwell Smart. And Maxwart says, Well, you're the one with the dirty picture.

SPEAKER_02 29:10

But underneath that, you know, the you're presented with two ink blots and you see one thing or you see another thing as some sort of indication for where your biases are. This were the Hale index to replace the GDP, would also become an opportunity for different policymakers according to how they perceive the Rossach test. All of a sudden it's like, okay, now this is the one that I'm going to pin my hat to. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:31

Well, you've asked for mistakes, and I'm not sure what the mistakes are, but let me just totally change your question and say, Imagine you've asked me what would the good things be. Yeah. So what the good things would be is let's imagine that we thought that depression, anxiety starts young, that it's got something to do with social media, that it's got something to do with the powerlessness of kids in institutions that don't think about them, that don't try to put their interests first, not their wishes first, but their interests first. Um another one is that we are remarkably bad at teaching dyslexic kids. Now it's tricky to teach dyslexic kids, but it's by no means we could if we have we were actually thinking about uh impact on well-being, and one of the things that the Hale Index allows you to do is to say, here's an improvement in well-being and that is worth this amount of dollars, then we would have a then we would really uh pay attention to these kinds of uh pedagogical issues, and we would people would be interested how, you know, I don't know what the proportion of kids are dyslexic, but from mild to severe, it's sort of between, you know, ten or two percent or something. It's it's quite substantial. Well, they're gonna feel a lot better about themselves, they're gonna understand themselves a lot better. They're gonna and of course, Richard Branson's an example. I would say Paul Keating is an example, but he would he might sue me if I said that. Um because he got a book pulped uh for saying that. But um really yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh because a book came out saying he was dyslexic and he got it pulped. But but these are remarkable people, but they're different and they're a great asset, and that's an incredible thing that we could try and bring out. Um so that's a good thing that could come from the index. Um there are lots of things that we if we connected up measurements of well-being to actual things we can do. I'll give you another example because I've got this running disagreement with most people who are out there spruking well-being measures and they're not connecting them to any concrete things to do. But if you're measuring people's subjective well-being and you're saying that someone on average wages, if we increase that by 1%, that's worth, I think it's $14,000 a year. Okay. Um, you can you then look around for low-hanging fruit. Remember how we, well, I don't know whether you do remember, but at the beginning of the greenhouse adventure, when people started saying we've got to do something about greenhouse, the very first thing they said was, let's find things that we will call no regrets measures. That is things we can do that lower greenhouse emissions that don't cost any money, but that in fact save money. Okay? Now, there are plenty of those things we can do in social policy. And I'll give you an example. I can't prove this. This is the sort of thing that you would go and prove up if you took any of this seriously. But it's well known that single elderly people who've become carers of their spouse, their well-being plummets because they get socially isolated and it becomes very difficult for them. So the idea is there are quite low-cost ways and possibly, well, arguably, with all the effects it would have on well-being, very negative cost ways of engaging those people. Once someone is a carer for an older person, you engage them in a series of local initiatives that keep them in touch and and so on. Um, my wife built a program called I Wish I'd Asked, which connected up primary schools and aged care homes in which these people, you know, the people in aged care homes can tell their stories to the young kids, and the young kids can write up oral histories and so on. These things are massively positive. They're massive, they're cheap and massively positive. Is anyone doing any of this stuff? Well, they are. They're doing it in tiny little pockets, but nobody has said, hey, let's try and make some of those things happen. Let's make them happen at a big scale. So those are the types of things that might be done to get a well-being agenda going and get the community to say, hey, that's pretty cool, rather than our betters have told us that we've got a new way of measuring well-being. I mean, really. Right. You know, they're just gonna go, really? You know, I mean, a bit more propaganda, a few more TV ads.

SPEAKER_02 34:10

This was actually something I really wanted to ask you regarding that point. You know, this is a great theoretical program where the elderly will tell the young about their life story and then they have to write up an old history of it. Yeah. But actually, what are the mechanisms that have to have to happen for this theoretical idea to become public policy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, can you take us through that?

SPEAKER_00 34:31

So, firstly, that's not the idea, that's an illustration of the idea. Right. So, to do it, you would get the kids and you get the older people, and you'd say, Look, we've got a half an idea here, um, which is roughly what my wife Eva did. And in fact, what happened was that I wish I'd asked, which was a program that was built in Shepperton, it had 14 streams. It had dancing, gardening, storytelling, philosophy, and it had these two, this multi-generational cadre of people who it was fabulous. It was a fabulous thing. What needs to happen? A degree of funding, not a lot of funding, then what I call uh accessing vectors of enthusiasm. So you're not saying I'm rolling out this, I'm it's a national program, every child will tell its story to an oldie or vice versa. You say we are in a social capital-starved society. It's not that hard to build these things, they're a little bit artificial because we're used to this idea of a long chat over the back fence, which hasn't even happened in my lifetime, really. I mean, that was kind of back in the 50s and the 30s.

SPEAKER_02 35:42

When you have TV to occupy all that.

SPEAKER_00 35:44

Exactly, exactly. So we're going to do something that's a little bit artificial. No one's going to have to do it if they don't want to. We will this so so the polis, the politicians could say, we'd like these kinds of things to happen. If you need our help, if there's regulation getting in the way, if you want a bit of funding, we'll help with that. We will hold ourselves accountable. So you set up some process, not a not a very heavy-handed process, but some process which will generate objective information and it will go out to the community. Why would you do that? To give the politicians and the bureaucrats sweaty palms so that they can fail or succeed. But if they build the system of reporting, they will airbrush that out because that's uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_02 36:32

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_00 36:33

So you so you sort of build this skeleton and then you say we're going to give prizes out, and uh local councils will will give them some money for where the best ten or hundred of these exercises have been. You build stuff. You build stuff slowly, and you build it with these with the people who are involved.

SPEAKER_02 36:56

So because of the effort of the people who come up with the idea, they get a couple of test cases at a couple of nursing homes and a couple of schools, and you show, look, everyone's saying they love this, looks like it works. Here's a rough idea for what it might cost for, say, this region of Victoria.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

And then But no, no, no, but you're still thinking of it from the top down. I'm growing it from the bottom up.

SPEAKER_02 37:19

It's just like how because I'm underneath the question is how many roadblocks get in the way of these great ideas?

SPEAKER_00 37:26

Yeah, well you've that that so starting in a bottom-up way and understanding that there will be roadblocks, then you build the program to uncover the roadblocks and then give some people some sweaty palms. Give some people some problems. So their problem isn't gee, what do I say on the 730 report about the interest rates going up or something? They'll have to if the if they've got to handle that, they'll have to handle that. But I said that I wanted more of this sort of stuff to happen. And there's you know, Shepherd and happy and Achuka are happy, and nothing's happening in Wangarata, and they're blaming me for that. You and and uh and now the people who are in charge of child safety are saying that they want everyone to have a police check, but the people who are really successful at doing this in Shepherd and Achuka say that that massively harms their number of volunteers, and they've got an alternative way to keep kids safe from pedophiles. So have these people seriously considered that? It's building and bug fixing. Well, it's that you don't start with the end all stitched up. You don't start with a natural policy. We don't know what the fuck we're doing here. You know, so so this is like turning up in Sydney in 1788 saying, who are they?

SPEAKER_02 38:45

But the but the these these you know inescapable roadblocks towards creating new whether you call this a policy or just an initiative or whatever, is that partly explicable for why there is a stagnation for new policies and initiatives? Same old, same old again and again and again because of just too much effort to try and overcome it.

SPEAKER_00 39:03

Well, well, there's the another set of resources there are resources in schools. Now, schools are got a lot of resources. You can say they should have more, but they've got a lot of resources. We are constantly throwing responsibilities on them, teach this, teach that, and you're saying, hey, it'd be good for schools to start doing this. Now, and here is some money and some grants for you to A, apply for, but B, I'm a bit more of a fan of picking these things up after the event, after you've shown some success. So you say, you know, the government says here's ten million dollars, which is a rounding error in the budget. It's just nothing to get too fussed about. And then you say, um, and then you say schools that get their act together will get some of this money, and then you you you're you're redirecting the energy, the institutional energies of Australia, of the school system, back out into the community to draw it into the school system. So the school will then, if it's if this is functioning properly, the school will then say, we should build oral history into our history curriculum or our social studies curriculum or stuff like that. So it's not the idea that you've got a brand new program that is a big spanking new program that you go on to telly and take credit for. It is that we've got a problem. And our problem is that these we've got very siloed institutions. Maybe 80% of what they do should be siloed, or 90% of what they do should be siloed, but absolutely the other five or ten percent shouldn't be. That should be about connections, and we've made those connections virtually impossible. So a school, I mean, I know of another example of a school who wanted to buy a vineyard next door and build a whole educational curriculum around vineyards. But to do that, the vineyard had a whole bunch of occupational health and safety regulations, and you know, it just goes on and on and it becomes too hard, and people give it away.

SPEAKER_02 41:09

Insurmountable.

SPEAKER_00 41:11

Well, ultimately insurmountable. Yeah. Ultimately insurmountable. And when you're trying to do something as an innovator, you have the collected resources of government. What is that now, you know, maybe $800 billion a year, to pay people full-time to receive your correspondence to come meet with you. So it's just terrific what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 41:36

Right.

SPEAKER_00 41:36

I've got this problem. Police checks, yes, you've got a problem with police, and we'll go and talk to the some other people about that, and we'll be back in touch with you. So nothing is happening, but the meter's been cranked over. Yeah. Uh so you're trying to say to these institutions, this is your job. It's mostly teaching kids in classrooms, but it's also connecting that to the world. And it's also listening to people who have different ideas. And if you want to knock them back, that's fine too. But have a piece of paper or have a process where you say, Yeah, we we heard that person, we're quite impressed with what they're doing. We went down that path and we decided we couldn't do it.

SPEAKER_02 42:15

And what you're suggesting is all that due diligence is not happening.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

Uh of course it's not happening. Of course it's not happening. Absolutely not happening. And to get it to happen, decades go past. I can tell you, I here am I on the decades. Nothing happens. But people tell you it's terrific that you're doing this stuff.

unknown 42:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:33

It's it's it's it's woeful. It's a shocking story. It's a shocking business.

SPEAKER_02 42:38

How much of it is the problem of just the scale of 20 million people? You know what I mean? So for instance, if we were five million people, do you think our institutions would all be functioning way better? And these types of the due diligence you gave on the Shepherd and School for this great person coming in and following up on how the project was going and how it was good and who the constituents are that they can then spread it to? Like it'd be more likely with a small population.

SPEAKER_00 43:00

Maybe. But look, we've got to take seriously this problem that as systems get bigger, you have to put more effort into having those systems hear people. I mean, it's not a so so the best example I can give you for this is the Toyota production system, in which they revolutionized car production, and they did that by building a system around workers on the line and supplying companies. And all of the systems that they learned from, the American systems, had the thinking staff at the top, managers and designers and engineers, and then all the doing staff below that. And what Toyota showed is that you can build a system. It's a delicate, it's a beautiful system, and it's not you can't just issue commands. You can't just say things like our people are our greatest resource, dust off the house. Hands and walk off, you know. But you can build a system in which people feel empowered to identify bugs, to identify opportunities to improve, and to have them to have managers regard themselves as largely responsible for facilitating the the desire to do a good job of the people lower down. And that's possible. It's not perfectly possible, but it's massively more possible than we have today. And in fact, you can that there are some metrics that can bear on that. So for instance, in the State of the Service report, which is a questionnaire that is administered to all public servants. I can't remember what the nature of the question is now, but it's something like, you know, I think I'm well managed, or if I came up with an innovative idea, it would be taken seriously. I think you might want to develop that quite a lot more, but we get that data and then we suppress it. We don't publish it agency by agency.

SPEAKER_02 45:01

Why is that? Because they don't like what it says.

SPEAKER_00 45:04

Sound chaps. We'll have a chat with them. We're, you know, we don't want all these problems being coming out of the yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:10

Maybe they misunderstood the question.

SPEAKER_00 45:12

Well, whatever. It's dis it's uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_02 45:14

And there's cultural differences obviously with Japan and Toyota, but presumably there aren't.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

So of course Japanese culture is very different to to Western culture, and it may be the case that that the Toyota production system couldn't have been produced in the West. What is but but we've got we've had controlled experiments over your question because the factory in which Teslas are made today was first built by General Motors. And it was in California, so it was away from it from it's called the NUMI plant, it was away from Detroit, and it was gonna I think they were gonna build their ill-fated satin car there, and it was gonna it was a sort of utopian, this is all gonna be perfect. It was the worst plant in the in the General Motors network, and they joint ventured with Toyota to build a badge engineer, I think it was Corollas and Sat and and Satins or whatever it was, I'm not sure. It was Corollas and rebadged Corollas, I believe. And they were told, Toyota were told by Americans, well, now you'll see how tough it is to interact with our workers and our unions. And very quickly the NUMI plant became easily the most productive in the GM network, but it later on became one of the more productive, not the most productive, but one of the more productive and higher quality plants anywhere in Toyota's anywhere in Toyota's world. What does that tell you?

SPEAKER_02 46:44

With the lesson being that the culture is in a point there, it's rather the way the system is designed to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 46:50

Well, indeed, but it also might tell you that Japanese if you want to make it a cultural explanation, then Japanese managers are better managing a situation like that. But but really, I don't know whether you have to say that. There are powerful, I can show you some terrific talks by American engineers because when you see this, you go, My God, this is extraordinary. This is wonderful. I remember encountering it in 1983 when I was working for John Button on the car plan. And I couldn't believe my I just couldn't believe it. It was this transformation. And what has shocked me ever since is that economists have never taken any interest in it. Economists just say, oh, that's a rightward shift of the supply curve. It's, you know, a supply curve is this curve of the cost of production over against volume. And if it moves right, that means that you've had a positive productivity shock. Well, that doesn't tell you anything about how you did it. And economists just haven't interested themselves in it because their discipline doesn't allow them to ask the interesting questions, which are not questions that metrication can be very, very powerful in understanding.

SPEAKER_02 48:00

And the interesting questions you want to get to the bottom of is what actually is it about these systems that produce these different outcomes, not just the singular metrics.

SPEAKER_00 48:09

And and in fact, there's a marvelous quote from a guy, quite a famous guy, who's an American who stayed up behind after the war in Japan and worked with Toyota, and he was a statistical control guy called Edwards Deming. And he said, you know, and and what had happened was that Toyota had built their production facilities by visiting Ford and writing down what they did and learning from what they did and reading Henry Ford's advice about always driving out waste and stuff like that. And so they, when the Americans finally accepted that they had something to learn, because they spent most of their time saying, Oh, the the Japanese are dumping, you know, they're just subsidizing, they can't possibly have done all this. Eventually, the Americans, tail between their legs, come over, and he and Edward Stemming said words to the effect of the Americans come, they bring their notebooks, they write everything down, and then they go home and try to copy what we've done, but they don't know what to copy. And and it's a it's a socio-technical system. It's built on respect, it's built on the respect due to a person working on the internet. And you could say that's a that's having lunch with someone today who was saying that's a very Japanese thing, but it's entirely transferable. Nobody on the line doesn't want respect. But the Japanese understood that they could build a massive surge of productivity around respecting the people who were there and who knew this stuff. And it's that those sort of thoughts that I'm appealing to when I'm talking about improving the teaching of dyslexia and the you know multi-generational programs in Shepperton and so on. It's the same kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 49:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:57

That you are trying to show respect to the people at the bottom and you'll be rewarded for that. You can't exactly know how or why.

SPEAKER_02 50:06

And then there's all these intangibles about how people might feel about the community that they're involved in and and for other their other hail indexes, their quality of life, their sort of overall satisfaction, maybe their relationships with the.

SPEAKER_00 50:19

But if you want to do difficult things, try to do something difficult and and and measure yourself against. I mean, you say it it's being happy. I think we should be thinking of being happy as a byproduct. Trying to be happy is a good way to be not happy. Right, exactly. So if you are in Shepherd and you do something really tricky, which is to take disadvantaged kids and show that they here's a saxophonist and here's someone who's done some amazing data science or some drawing or something, that fe that that's a that's an anchor. It's not it's not something which you you know, it's not something which depends for its validation on people feeling nice about something. You go, holy shit, did they do that? They did. They did, and they feel good about that. Playing football is an example.

SPEAKER_02 51:14

I'm thinking now about time and also maybe triaging. You wanted to go economics into politics. I don't mind. I don't mind. I think I think I'm just the the right the right way to go from economics into politics. Actually, I don't even think it's possible. I think we just sift between the two. Okay, whatever. Uh do you want to do the Australian scorecard or the McDonald's?

SPEAKER_00 51:34

I won't I don't think I'll have anything much useful to say about the Australian scorecard because it's not really a way I think.

SPEAKER_02 51:40

Yeah, but it'll be just nice to hear your quick thoughts about it. Should we do that?

SPEAKER_00 51:44

Sure, if you want.

SPEAKER_02 51:45

Okay, so I asked one of the the big LLMs to give me a scorecard for Australia. And then, you know, many of the follow-ups I was asking are how it fed against the rest of the world. So high level, you know, according to this LLM, we have one of the most desirous countries in the world, which isn't a surprise over to all these metrics. So economic strength, 30 years of uninterrupted growth.

SPEAKER_00 52:02

This is the problem with GDP, but still that's GDP, not GDP per capita.

SPEAKER_02 52:06

Low government to debt GDP, which is a good factor. AAA credit rating, not sure what that means.

SPEAKER_00 52:12

Well, just a high credit rating.

SPEAKER_02 52:13

Right. Natural resources available to us, naturally, and then a really good superannuation system. Would you say it is world-class, that that personal saving system that we've got?

SPEAKER_00 52:23

Oh, uh no. Uh it's very unusual, and I I've gradually grown more and more deeply out of love with it. Um so what's good about it is that um yeah, there are there there are a c a few terrible things about it. Um the worst thing about I was there when it was first built in in the Labour government, in the Hawke and Keating governments. And as I recall, the very first bit of it, which would have occurred around about 1984-85, was the beginning of the superannuation system, and they they had a fairly um equitable taxation system on the on the super system, and then the um and then the insurance the the pensions uh, you know, the the superannuation managers, the the the the wealth management business, and then as I recall, the New South Wales trades unions, led by Barry Unsworth at that stage, he went on to become premier, objected to the way in which higher earning employees would be taxed more than they wanted to. And so they imposed a 15% flat tax on everyone. Hard to imagine a less fair taxation system, which is now, you'll have to remind me, I think it's three and a half trillion dollars or something. It's the value of the funds, yeah, more or less. So here we have this vast body of resources that we have a very what I regard a very unfair tax system uh around.

SPEAKER_02 54:10

Because there's blanket 15%.

SPEAKER_00 54:12

Yeah, exactly. And we occasionally put some some band-aids on that. The Liberals put some Scott Morrison put a bit of a band-aid on that for higher income earners. The current government has just got in and they will put a bit of a band-aid on that. But the system is unfair. The system is extremely expensive in terms of in terms of revenue foregone. I think it costs I mean it depends how you calculate these things, but certainly, well, among the I'm now quoting propaganda from people who are arguing against away. Yeah. Well, well, that it costs more, it's it's more expensive than the pension system. Yeah. Just these tax concessions which go mostly to wealthy people. So that's a terrible thing. It's also So the other thing is that an astonishing thing happens, which is that we take money off people at the time of their lives when they need to invest in a house. Right. It'd be pests. And we don't say, oh, by the way, we're forcing you to save, but that some of that saving or all of that saving for the time being could go into buying a house. Of course it should be able, you should be able to do that. It's so unbelievably inefficient to not do that. But instead, we get these little pat lines about how it would increase house prices. Well, yes, allowing people to buy houses increases house prices. You know, we allow people to buy houses in every other damn way.

SPEAKER_02 55:35

But then we also have a lot of tax concessions for first home buyers.

SPEAKER_00 55:38

Well, we don't there there's well, there's state tax concessions. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 55:41

I'm currently trying to buy my first house, and I know that if I purchase one under $800,000, I get a stamp duty for free.

SPEAKER_00 55:48

That's right. Let's estate tax.

SPEAKER_02 55:50

Um when there's probably a lot more room for those types of incentives to maybe offset the increase in the house price if we're letting our superannuation contribute to a house price. Exactly. What's happening now is that you know a rich buyer can come in and bid $20,000, $30,000 over my offer because they already have three investment properties. Yeah. And it's just rent for them.

SPEAKER_00 56:09

Just go on and put it as Airbnb. So there's all that. And the other thing is it's quite good that the system allows private investment, not just I mean, a lot of superannuation systems are basically government bonds and they're lower return. But the but the way in which our super is managed creates billions dollars, but many it's many billions of dollars too expensive, and you could get the same managing expensive because of the fees? Yes. Uh so there's that and there's one other thing which will no doubt come to mind.

SPEAKER_02 56:46

Because it's uh private saving, there is no collective use for that huge pool of money. Could be a negative way to look at the superannuation.

SPEAKER_00 56:54

Oh, yeah. Well, I know you've written about that and we could talk about that, but no, that's not what I was gonna say. But you chased it, it was just coming into my head and you chased it out.

SPEAKER_02 57:04

Well, let him fly around for a bit and all come back.

SPEAKER_00 57:08

Yeah, this is the other thing. So something like a third, this is just wild. This is just wild. Something like a third, and don't quote me on this, you know, it might be, well, you can quote me, but it's not guaranteed to be exactly accurate. Something like a third of the pool of savings is in self-managed super funds. And of course you want to manage those self-managed super funds so that people aren't ripping off the system and that people aren't doing things with their savings, which is so risky that they then end up back on the public person.

SPEAKER_02 57:42

Don't put in Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_00 57:43

And we have put a regulatory regime there that is simply extraordinary. So we took a the regulatory regime that we would impose on a billion-dollar wealth fund. We imp we have trustees involved. We then cut that down. Each of these funds is audited every year. They're audited in a way that is a bizarrely anal retentive, if you like. They have to comply with about 20 different subsections of the Act.

SPEAKER_02 58:15

For where they can put the money?

SPEAKER_00 58:17

No, not where they can put the money, but just how they audit. So if you let's say you're trying to audit some money, uh you you're trying to audit a fund and the fund paid a fee of, you know, a quarter of a percent of its corpus to somebody, and you it's going to take you a long time to prove that it was, you know, your auditor is is you're racking up lots of bills because a payment that might have been rounded up in the accounting software can't be accounted for, and so there's an there are two columns that can't be reconciled, and there's a difference of two dollars or something. Oh, well, that's not good enough. Then you just have to keep going and spend more and more money doing this kind of stuff. None of this is necessary. What's necessary is that you set up a system so that you is that you set up a system which asks the sort of questions that our tax system asks, which is is this person ripping off the system? Are we getting proper declaration of these? Just really simple stuff. And then you get people to declare that they've followed the rules, and then they know that they might have a random audit. They might have a someone come after them. That would cost uh I mean, the current auditing of a self-managed super fund costs maybe $5,000 a year for just a normal family fund. It ought to cost $150 or whatever to just sort of make sure that things are ticking over. And the and here's the kicker, that it doesn't actually protect people because at the same time, if you can dress up some if you can dress up some product like macadamia farms, and you can sell it to someone, then it can go in there. It doesn't matter how risky it is.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:11

Um by dressing it up, you just meet these auditory requirements that they set up.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:16

You just you just turn it into a financial product, and if someone is and if some so so there are cases of this, I'll send you an article, there are cases of this where a woman who got a huge payout for being made paraplegic or something like that, and she put a lot of an investment advisor comes along and says, Well, you should put this into macadamia farms, or whatever he said. And the thing fell over, too bad. Too bad, too sad. The system didn't help her. She would have been paying five thousand dollars a year to to have it audited, and the auditor would come along and say, Yep, those macadamia farms are right there.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:51

The way they justify those huge auditing costs and that huge auditing burden is that we're setting really, really strict investing rules on these super funds so they're they're very safe. And we don't have the case where it gets into a macademia.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:03

So that's what a politician would say. But the the thing is, this is just confirming that these investments exist, that they have paid what you claim they've paid. This is all expensive. So if you're told that this person has shares in BHP billing, then you can spend a lot of money auditing that. You can ask to see the certificates, although you can't see certificates anyway.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:27

So you're suggesting there is some grift from these auditors and their relationship with the superannuation. Or just pure inefficiency and expensive bureaucracy.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:36

They have requirements. They have to do. It's called a sys audit. SIS stands for superannuation something system. I don't know what it is. And there are about 20. You can read it in my article. Um, and they have to do all these things. So there's no grift. It's a it's a collective standard. It's not really and it's partly regulation that set it up, but it's also standard practice and for a and for a billion-dollar superfund, it might be the best you can do. It's absolutely not the best you can do. It's simply never been designed in a way that was fit for purpose, and yet it's been going on for over 20 years. And um, because it's got that word audit in it, if you go out into the marketplace and say, hey guys, this is really stupid, then a politician's gonna say, Well, I'd look very carefully at any proposal to remove auditors from our super funds. Yeah. Total, absolute, you just have to pay attention and do a bit of auditing yourself, auditing of the argument, and it just falls to pieces.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:44

But then what what can be done? Because despite that big problem, this would do is you can rebuild this.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:49

And it would be, you know, any Teals members out there, you'd like to think backbenchers of every party would be interested in this. You can save many small businesses in the country five thousand dollars a year. I mean, to give you an example, when Penny Wong was Minister for Finance and Don't Laugh, deregulation, she presid there was a recommendation, I think, from a parliamentary committee saying that if you had had an audit done, then you it should normally be the case that you're not asked to do another audit for another three years. And I'm pretty sure that didn't get up. And you would would be nice to ask why. But it just didn't get up because it's a detail, you no one's gonna do a 730 report on it. Um but it's just it's just hundred dollar bills lying on the pavement for someone who's got a little bit of attention to detail.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:50

And the success, rather, at least on paper, rhetoric success of the superannuage fund. I don't want to trigger you into saying that it's super successful, is is that um is a major bulwark against potential policy which would introduce a type of sovereign wealth fund for our huge natural resource bounty that we have extracting from the ground every single day. Doing doing more with that income than just spending it on state and national budgets that year. Well you know, like the I suppose when the argument is presented, they'll say, but this superannuation fund already is this multi-generational savings system, even though maybe for several reasons it might not be.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:33

Um Well, I think it does give us a lot there's a lot of capital in Australia hunting round for opportunities. I think that's a good thing. So and in some ways that addresses your sovereign wealth anxiety, if I can put it that way. So that's a plus. I think my hunch is, I can't prove this, but my hunch is that that's one of the reasons why Australia has outperformed New Zealand, because it doesn't have a pot of capital sitting around chasing good targets to invest in, as we do. So there are some benefits. I'm more focused on the unfairness of it, and I I'd be uh uh the other thing is that I think we should use compulsion or tax concessions, not both. We've used both. We've compel people to save, and then we give them a tax concession, which is an unfair tax concession. But if we're going to compel them to save, why give them a tax concession at all?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:27

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:28

So I'd be that so that's that's my go-to system, a system which is like the current one that is after tax and that makes exceptions for people's need to dip into their savings to lead their lives, for instance, your buying a house.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:45

Yeah, rather than wait till I'm sixty five and I've got two million dollars in superannuation, plus a lifetime of earning a salary.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:51

It's like not necessarily there is a grift there. It's a str it's a why you can't do it, because everyone's clipping the ticket on the super that you've Got invested. If you took it out and put it in a house, no one's clipping the ticket. And that's one of the reasons why it's much more efficient.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:07

Yeah. Okay. Returning to the to the scorecard, robust democracy, that's true. Transparent institution.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:12

No, it's more robust than others, but it's in some trouble. But yeah, we've done this marvelous thing of having a crossbare because we've got compulsory voting and preferential voting. The compulsory voting means that politicians depart from the center at their peril. And preferential voting allows a nice hybrid between proportional representation, which has some good things and some bad things, and single member electorates. What it allows is that people can start another party or another, it doesn't have to be a party, it can be an independent candidate, and they can pick up votes and people get a second vote. In other words, I vote for Monique Ryan. I mean, I'm not in that seat, but I'm I vote for Monique Ryan in Kuyong. He doesn't get up, I'll vote for the Greens or the Labour Party or whoever. Now you can't do that in the UK, you can't do that in most parts of the United States, and that's awful. Or Canada. It's amazing that Canada has such a good is comparable to us in having a functioning democracy because its basic voting system is incredibly unfair.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:26

D do you you mentioned that because it's compulsory voting, that politicians straying from the centre beware?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:33

Do you think there's also a nice counterfactual to that, which is that it might keep populism at bay as much as possible because everyone everyone eventually has to go to the polls, and rather than just electrifying people to make them go out, and the rest of the people that couldn't be fucked up. That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:48

Exactly. It's a reasonable argument. In some circumstances, I would be influenced by it, but ultimately I think most of these arguments you also have to think about the effects of different options. And it's a reasonable argument to say, what the hell are we doing forcing people to vote? Now, I've got a bunch of things to say about that. But one is you know that Monty Python sketch, what did the Romans ever do for us? One of the things the Romans did for us is they invented the census. And the census tells you that you, as a citizen, have certain obligations to the centre and you have an obligation to provide it with information. And so I don't think it's so unreasonable in return for schooling and all of the public goods that government has to say to people, oh, we're going to take an hour of your time once every three years. I don't think that's such a terrible obligation. It seems like a reasonable trade-off. It sounds like a reasonable trade-off. Um and if that doesn't get you, then another way to put this is to say that you can think of compulsory voting. Firstly, it's not compulsory voting, it's compulsory attendance at the polling booth, as you said, because people can vote, they can draw a dick pic on their ballot or do whatever they want. But the But another way to think about it is to say that we could pay everyone seventy dollars for attending the polling booth because they're doing something good for democracy, but that's expensive. It would be better to fine them $70 for not attending. That's what we do on the roads. We don't pay people money for driving well, we punish them for not driving well. Yeah, for for driving badly. So one way to think about a $70 fine for not attending the polling booth is as a net poll tax. You're familiar with the term poll tax? So poll taxes were used particularly, I think, in the South during the Jim Crow era, and you would pay, uh you would not be eligible to vote if you hadn't paid your tax. And that was hugely unfair to poor people. Uh because it was a poll tax, it was a unit tax, everybody had to pay it. Say it was $100 or $2,000, and that's obviously very unfair for a poor person. So this is a negative poll tax. It says that if you don't vote, you get hit with a poll tax. It's not such a I don't think that's such a such an imposition. There already is a fine if you don't vote, though, I believe. And that's what how I'm choosing to characterize it as a negative poll tax. That's my point. It's uh it's a saying to people if you don't vote, here's a tax. This is a tax reflecting the fact that you wouldn't give us information that we need to govern the place.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:35

Okay. Universal healthcare, Medicare, we get a good score for this. Uh among the highest life expectancies, great score. Yep. High same point. World-class universities, 100%. Right. Maybe New South Wales and uni, ANU.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:51

Maybe. I mean, there's good things there. I think of universities as um as kind of careerist ant heaps, but there you go. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:01

But what about for the graduates that are going there, you know? Well, they're okay. They're okay. The professors and the students' experience.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:08

Well, let me let me give you an example. I was somebody came up to me, he was a PhD student in economics, and I gave a speech. Um, I was giving a speech, launching a memoirs of Max Corden, who's a well-known um Australian economist who's no longer with us. And he came up to me and said, Look, I'm an economist. Would you like, you know, be nice to catch up with you and get, you know, pick your brain and so on. So I said, good, and we organized to have lunch, and you know, we basically spent our time talking about ideas for an hour and a half, two hours, and then off he went. And he said to me, It's amazing, but I've never had a conversation like this at university. So universities used to be about ideas, and now they are um they go charging around trying to get money any way they can. Uh they chase metrics, uh, and the it's very clear, certainly in all the professions I know anything about, that you won't get good metrics if you try to do new, difficult, if you try to di develop new and difficult ideas. You you work within the frameworks that you've been given. There will be uh, you know, a realist school and an idealist school or some such nonsense, and you just pump this stuff out. But I was just shocked when he said to me, Well, I I just don't have these conversations at uni. Well, I certainly did, and that's a big change that's come over uni. They are they're they're a big thing that that they understand themselves as these custodians of a process of giving you a certificate and taking you through a process, and it's not really about a liberal education.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:56

This was a fellow professor, not a student.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:58

This was a person who was doing a PhD and was finishing his PhD.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:04

Do you think his comment though could just be more of a reflection of the fact that he was having it with you rather than because I just couldn't imagine, you know, a PhD student isn't maybe not constantly but quite routinely being excited about oh, what are you doing? Absolutely not.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:20

No, no, absolutely not, because they're a PhD student in economics and they're learning one econometric technique after another. That's what they're doing the whole time.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:30

And they're not intrigued by you know the geopolitical world order and applying all their education to trying to make sense of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:37

There's no way to apply it. There's no way to apply your knowledge to that. If you want to get a PhD, you've got to find a little area in which you can do some econometrics that will be received as some new insight into an established field. So no, um, that's economics. That's economics. And it's true of a large number of these areas. They're kind of deracinated. Um pro uh in economics, it's all about tet teaching techniques. Um in some other areas, uh they go. I mean, uh I I don't know whether you had a look at this. I wrote a piece for the Institute for New Economics in which I talked about metaphysical fairy floss. So they're so you get told by an economist that health policy is necessarily about trade-offs. Well, that makes someone feel like they're doing economics. And then they say you can have you can go for income, you can go for good health, and those uh uh and those th and you can go for equity, and those things all trade off against each other. Well, pigs ass, they trade off against each other. This is exactly the analytical framework that you would apply to buying whether you buy apples or oranges at the at the market. That you've got a limited budget, you've got these things that exist, and you trade them off against each other. That's not true. We've I mean, at the time this person was asserting this framework as if it was kind of metaphysically true, we were going through COVID. Does that show you that health and income are in tension with each other? No. There's a relationship which is a kind of elaborate relationship. Yes, there will be times when you can trade one off against the other. There will be lots of times when the two things reinforce each other. Healthy workers are better workers. You know, we can all it's all obvious. And yet, if you go and do health economics, some clown will stand up on the board and show you this diagram. Right. It's just bullshit.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:50

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:50

Because they can't be bothered thinking, and but it's easy to s to kind of get some trope out of the core of the discipline and then bore everyone to death with a kind of point that is ultimately obvious or wrong.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:04

And frame it as a big discovery.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:05

Yeah, exactly. And frame it as a as a kind of organizing concept. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:10

Which we can now create institutions around.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:13

Is that one of your most radical ideas? The problem you have with trade-offs, that it's the worst thing economics ever taught people.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:20

No, no, no. That's I have a dear friend, Rory Sutherland, who takes me to be saying that, and I'm not really saying that. I'm saying that there is loads of interest in relationships, and often you will in relationships between different metrics, and often you will you can say that things are presumptively in tension with each other.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:44

The the core of the idea, whether it is attributed to or not, or Rory's just making it such that it's attributed to, is that we're thinking about trade-offs as always some zero, and that's not the case.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:55

So the example that I use in that article that Rory loves is that it's Toyota again. And everyone knew that you could have high quality or low cost, that quality was costly. And at the time when I encountered the Toyota production system, this thing jumped out at me, and the best way to convey it to you is with a factoid. And that factoid is that in 83, when I was doing this, on the Australian car market, the two cars that had the highest build quality were the Mercedes-Benz 350 SLE, available to you for about $150,000, which was a lot more than it is now. It would cost a lot more now, the equivalent. And the other car was a Toyota Corolla. And why was the Toyota Corolla such high build quality? Because doing all of the 90,000 operations that go into building a car had been conceptualized by Toyota as an engineering problem involving people getting it right first time. And the Mercedes-Benz 350 SLE was the best the highest build quality car in the world, made in Germany, I think Stuttgart, not sure about that. And that was because it had more inspectors on the line per car than any other place in the world. And Toyota had no inspectors on the line. There were no inspectors on the line. What there was was and-on cords. And if a pro if a problem arose, then the worker would try to fix the problem, and if it couldn't be fixed, he would pull the and-on cord or she would pull the and-on cord, and the whole factory would stop. And that sets up a set of incentives for getting it right first time, and nobody can hide. As Warren Buffett says, it's when the tide goes out that you can see who's been swimming naked. And so that was what it was about.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:52

And so you might feel more empowered that you have the responsibility to try and fix it yourself without needing to involve other people.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:59

Correct. And um but but the point was again, it's my bottom-up point. It was building from the bottom up, empowering the people at the bottom. And remember earlier I said that, as Edwards Demings said, American managers came over and they copied everything, or they wrote everything down, and then when they back went back to America, they said, Well, we'll put in and-on courts. So they put in and-on courts, and all the workers online say, I don't think you want me to pull it out. I'm too scared to pull that. I don't think you want me to pull that out. Oh no, no. They say, Will you pull the and-on court? And they said, No, no, I don't think we'll do that. And eventually, you know, lots of cultural this and thats. Somebody pulls the and-on cord and there's complete mayhem. And they go. Lots of people get fired who know whose idea was this anyway, you know. So that's that there are always these things, and there are lots of them. You just have to look around, take idea, take these things seriously, and sort of ask, again, it's a bit of a Rory Sutherland question. Um you know, just look at what's happening and say, is the description I've got of what's happening really what's happening. Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:11

Uh he's so good at reframing things.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:14

So the doorman comes to me and he lets me in the he opens the door for me. And as Rory will point out, that a management consultant will think of that as a cost, and he needs to resize. Exactly. And and and Rory's showing you the social richness of all this now.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:31

All those intangibles which are immeasurable. Like you can't measure that. You're not going to stand there with a clipboard and say one to ten. How much did you enjoy the fact that the doors open? I didn't even realize. Yeah. You know, it just sat in the back of my head and I have a positive association with this thing afterwards. Yeah, I I I have internalized, well, I think I've internalized at least from you that idea, not thinking so binary about trade-offs. Like there is so much room, you know, in the bottom 30% of whatever that conceivable trade-off is that you might be making. And it's apply, it's applicable to so many different things.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:02

But but what I like about economics is that you can have these very divergent ways of looking at something, and then you can cash it out at the end, which is to say, well, you know, we all came up with like there's no shortage of these fancy ideas about keep your workers happy and they'll work better for you. But that's not really true. Lots of workers have been made happy by various things and they haven't worked better. So it's fantastic to have this discipline of did you make better cars for less? That's that really that that really holds your what is it, you know, your belly to the fire. Something like that. Yeah. Anyway, that that that um that really keeps you honest. And there's lots of people bloviating around and saying we've got to be holistic, this. Well, you be as holistic as you like, as you like, cash it out in something that we can all say, hey, that's great. And that's what I'm talking. That was the sort of picture I was trying to paint with the Hale Index and teaching dyslexia, or I wish I'd asked in Shepperton, where people go, Yep, this is this is the real thing. This is good.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:17

We we spoke about this on the phone, but you made the observation that a lot of Swedish businesses sort of have historically operated in this fashion, very bottom-up.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:27

And it was I didn't know I'd made that point.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:29

It was, yeah. And it was one of your because I asked you the open question, like, how can it be that this tiny country uh just punch above their weight across industries? It's not just one industry they're very good at, but almost everything. Yeah. Um, and I imagine for a Hale Index they would score exceptionally high, let alone the GDP per capita and and and and all the and all the rest. Yeah. But now you're telling me maybe you didn't say that.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:51

So is it I think what I was saying is that they were very high skill and that they that that that there are there are some things that I know only a tiny amount about Swedish management and so on, and it's been pretty keen to pioneer bottom-up methods. It hasn't been that successful at doing that. So, for instance, in the 1970s, Volvo, maybe Saab as well, were trying to do the kind of thing that Toyota brought off so brilliantly by saying, Well, workers hate just working on one part of the line, so we'll turn them into our artisans and they'll move down the line and they'll learn they'll sort of multi-skill making a car. Great idea. It was one of the things I was thinking about when I said it's easy to make workers happier, and then the question is, can you bring it all through and actually show some productivity? Are they happier but also just as productive? And they couldn't. So but but at least they were trying, and they weren't trying too hard in America. Yeah. Um, although Americans have got their own reputation for innovation, which is pretty impressive in some ways and rather scary in other.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:59

Yeah, well, there's some insane statistic. I feel like I'm throwing out a lot of fake news here, but something like within a four or five block radius near Menlo Park is more GDP than all of Australia. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is one suburban wealth, yeah. Wealth would be yes, at least. The companies with the headquarters in these locations. Yeah, yeah. What what are has there been a time in your life you've fallen into the trade-off mindset and then you've later regretted it big time?

SPEAKER_00 1:24:28

Oh no. Well not that I can think of. Um I don't want to argue there aren't trade-offs. Trade-offs are one of the ways we keep ourselves honest. It's just that they're not a metaphysical category. Uh um, or or it so so, you know, I'm spending time with you, it means I can't spend time in another way. That's a trade-off. That's just the way it is. So trade-offs are everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:53

That's the opportunity cost. Or is that just a synonym for trade-off?

SPEAKER_00 1:24:56

Zero sum ideas. Uh opportunity cost is to compare something with the next best thing you could do or be doing. So they're they're very similar ideas. And they're it's a very that that's the ide that is that idea is central to economics, and perhaps because of that, it gets taken to be some sort of metaphysical proposition. And in a way, I've just given you an example of the way in which it is. You just have to frame this thing properly and not just sort of galumph around and say, listen, children, health is always traded off against income.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:30

Yeah. Okay, we're gonna now lean into the McDonaldization of politics. Let's do it. Because I think that follows up well from this, but I've just got to change the batteries on this. Okay. What does it mean? The McDonaldization of politics.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:41

I think I might have called it the fast foodization of politics. And I guess I thought of that as a very good metaphor for trying to talk about what I care about, about what's wrong with politics, and that is that if you're in politics, you have to cut through. Well, a nice little factoid is that, and and a lot of people blame the internet, and I'm happy to for the internet and social media to bear some of the blame, but this is a pre-Internet stat, which I think couldn't be more important. In America, between 1968 and 1988, in other words, before the internet had anything to do with our lives, uh, the length of a presidential soundbite on TV network news went from I think the figure is 49 seconds, sorry, 48 seconds to nine seconds. Now, democracy is kind of over if you are limited to nine seconds.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:42

If that's how you consider the complexity of the big ideas.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:45

Exactly, exactly. So uh and the other thing I wanted to appeal to about the idea of fast food is that fast food uses instincts and reflexes that we have that evolved on the African savannah to keep us safe and healthy. If you ate food that was fatty or sweet, that was a sign that it was good. And here we are in a very different circumstance in which fast food manufacturers make food for us. It's actually pretty good food, but it's laced with things to kind of quasi-addict us, sugar, fat, salt, things that make it finger-licking good. And it turns out that over time that's now a poison. And that's kind of what's happened to our ability to think uh collectively, because we do it through this um corroded system, this incredibly corroded discourse.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:52

Corrupting, it's it's it's a very bad thing. It might be obvious, but say more about what you mean the implications of our ability. To think. Like what does that mean in practice?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:03

Well, if I want to say we're thinking about this in the wrong way, we should think let uh well, I don't know, we've just talked about trade-offs or something. There's no way I can get any of that across on the news or anything else. So then uh and yet these things are incredibly important. How we think about something really matters. But if you do any media training, I mean one of the things that happens with media training is that you go into media training and they sort of ask you a question about they might say, Well, your opponents say this. And you go, Yeah, well, it's quite a good point, but I think this for these reasons, but they have a good point too. Well, the media trainer will say, no, no, that's the wrong way to do it. The media trainer will say, no, no, that's you you you're giving them way too much airtime, you're giving them respect, they're not doing that for you. So you just you just make it a nice simple line, which is this is all mistaken, this is all bad, these people are bad people, they're trying to rip you off, they're trying to lie to you, they're trying to mislead you, they're making money, yeah, they're m taking money on the side, whatever. I mean, you don't have to say all those things, you just hope that your audience thinks that. And virtually every communication in front of us is an attempt to manipulate us. So all marketing is an attempt to manipulate us, all politics is an attempt, and these are and these are professional people who are there, who are paid, who've got full-time jobs to workshop things, to focus group things, and go on if we say that, then that'll really trigger this response in Roselle and these other outer suburbs, and that's really what we want to do. So so we have a um we've allowed this so this is uh this is ultimately in its maturity, this system is uninhabitable. Everyone knows this is going on, they've sensed it. They don't they may not have done uh, you know, they may not be able to quote Alistair McIntyre, the philosopher, like I can or whatever. If they know that this is bullshit. This is bullshit. And that they know that all of their politics is bullshit like this. And it doesn't matter who they vote for. So I'm getting at a discourse that there are also questions of what policies get pursued. And in fact, in some ways, the argument that our politics is busted because the politicians don't give us what we want. I think that is uh well, that's a dumbed-down argument as well. What really five seconds though? Exactly. What really gets us about our politics, I assert and cannot prove, is that it is uninhabitable, that it is a bunch of professionalized, optimized responses which doesn't feel authentic in any way. It feels like bullshit and it is bullshit.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:00

And it creates a desperate amount of cynicism.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:05

Exactly. And yet, and yet the trains still run on time. So the public tell themselves they're getting ripped off and so on, and there are lots of things wrong with what's happening. But actually, politicians are terrified of the population. That's kind of where we want them. But the population can only respond in this incredibly dumbed down way, because that's the only purchase they can that's the only agency they can show once every three years when they get to vote.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:34

And then also what we're selecting for because of these shorter sound bites and the constant spin and you know polling for what the right amount of words are is actually just for the best rhetorician. The person can speak best. Exactly. Totally separated from any other qualities or effectiveness they might have. In your YouTube series, you talk about the better angels and how the two of the Machiavellian triad, two traits of the Machiavellian triad, is now what we are selecting for with our politicians.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:06

Correct, correct, correct. So we set up so the idea is that we have lots of competition. Competition's supposed to be a good thing, and in principle it's a good thing, because you just get these people to compete and you choose who you want. But in fact, they're competing, the media are all competing for our eyeballs, and the result of this is this incredibly inauthentic kind of gruel, this this kind of non-substance that we are we held out. And um yeah, that's that's that's um driving people to despair.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:42

What has the response been to this idea that you floated?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:46

Oh, everyone kind of agrees with it but doesn't want to do anything about it? What what can be done about it? So what can be done about it is that this is so I have this kind of very simple way of the my metaphysics of democracy, if you like. My simple idea is that there are two Well, firstly, that I'm a believer in representative democracy, that if we're going to have issues taken seriously and thought about at length, they can't be the result of a plebiscite because we don't have the time to cover everything. And so we need representatives. And the way we've got representatives in our system is through electoral competition. There is another way to have representatives which we have used for 800 years since Magna Carta in our legal system, and that's called a jury. And I call that representation by sampling. So it's not representation by election, it's representation by sampling, and it is unmediated democracy in the sense that you can't go and go to uni and Brown knows the right people to become a representative of the people in a jury. It's just a lottery. And as Aristotle said, democracy, the essence of democracy is Aristotle regarded elections as an aristocratic mechanism because it separates the governed from those who are governed. Sorry, it separates the governors from those who are governed, and it sets up a competition so that the those who are governed go, I'll have the VAT one. And we can talk about the pros and cons of that. Aristotle talked about democracy as taking turns in governing and being governed, and that's what was going on in Athens. So this is there's that there's great there's profundity in that. There's there's so much different about that way of representing the people, that I think of it as a different institutional DNA, and I want to inject some of I want to basically complete the complete the job that Magna Carta began. Magna Carta began by trying to inject this into our legal branch, and I want to inject it as a partner with the pyramid of power and patronage, which we all know and love, which we populate through people who've won elections. I want to entangle it like the legal system is entangled with institutions to represent ordinary people and their life world.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:18

And this would eliminate campaigning.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:20

No, it wouldn't eliminate it, but it would it would be another mechanism. So I would like to have a privately funded I mean the reason I want it privately funded is that the government won't fund it, but uh over time I want the government to fund it, and I want it to be a house like the House of Representatives or the Senate in Australia and in the United States, or the House of Commons and the and the House of Lords in the UK. This is another house, and it is populated by people who are chosen from a lottery, and they sit in this house and they vote the way they want to vote. And I think when Tony Abbott was getting rid of carbon pricing, they there's quite good evidence that ordinary Australians, if they'd looked at that and spent their time and worked out that by now we'd have to find another $12 billion a year in revenue because we were getting all that revenue, they'd go, well, hang on, what's your plan for all that? Who's going to pay for that? And so they would have said maybe 60% of them or more would say, No, we don't like the look of that. That would have made it harder for Tony Abbott to get it through the Senate. So it's simply introducing this other way to represent the people alongside the existing system. And another model of that is the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. In Michigan, the Republican Party, Michigan is a kind of majority Democrat state usually, and the Republican Party had managed to get sufficiently strong gerrymander that they were and they were they every 10 years, I think it's every 10 years, they have to do a redrawing of the boundaries. People got hold of emails exchanged between officials and Republican Party um apparatics saying, testing how much whether these new boundaries would sustain a Republican government if the vote went against them by more than 60%. And they said, yep, yep, we can live with those boundaries because that all that's what they will do. So that went all the way to the Supreme Court. In the Michigan Ind in the Michigan Supreme Court, I think that's what it's called, they held that this was unlawful and that that they would have to reject that redistricting and do it honestly. And it went to the Supreme Court and they said, Nothing to see here. This is just states' rights, and isn't it wonderful? And then a young woman on a Facebook group said, I want to campaign for a citizen-initiated referendum for a body of ordinary people from Michigan to supervise the drawing of those boundaries. And that's what happened. And they've already done a re uh they've already done a redrawing of the boundaries. It's a fair redraw, broadly speaking, a fair redrawing, and I think that is a safer way to deliver fairness and a and and a system that is resistant to corruption than any method of politicians appointing someone for reasons that I think are obvious. So that's these are little these are one is a little thought experiment by me, or a little say, this is what I want to do, and I want to privately fund it because I can't persuade governments to agree. Uh, and another and this other institution could be the beginning of a revolution. Uh, Australia's recently been through a process in which the duopoly, our Liberal slash conservative party, and the Australian Labour Party voted as a block to come up with an electoral funding regime that keeps the money running to them and starves their competitors. Completely outrageous, completely self-serving. Those are the kinds of things, those are the kinds of rules that should be made by an independent body. Exactly. Exactly. So what we need is we haven't properly established the public goods of the system. The public goods are the So public goods are things that governments provide and private goods are provided through the market. Private goods are things that are well provided by competition. Something that everyone has to accept. You don't want competition for that. You have to get a social agreement to a single standard. Um if we uh and and that so a public good is a on a public good you don't want competition. Correct. I mean you may want competition for supplying it. So on a public good a bridge, you might commit well, you will typically commission to get the lowest bid, but it will be the public sector that says the bridge goes here.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:22

Four separate railway tracks all going to the same place with four different operators on it.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:26

Exactly. Exactly. So this is a piece I wrote a while back in which I distinguish between public goods of ideas and kind of well, ideas that can live in competition with each other and other ideas that are like public goods. They're delivered by collective agreement. So one of those things is that our sense of not making up our own facts that's not something which we collectively agree on. We're going to speak English. That's a that's a public good. It's not provided competitively. So there are all these things that are provided in a unitary way, and they very and that's where they get undermined in politics because we expect politicians who are all competing with each other to administer their own affairs. I mean, it's just basically obvious that they've all got a conflict of interest. And it's not that hard to invent a it's not that hard to invent an institution where they don't have a conflict of interest.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:27

I thought um, and you give this example in one of the YouTube videos, but the Brexit example is is such a good encapsulation of all of this because it was this pretty hectic rhetoric that swept the country up to a frenzy. Why are we sending out pounds abroad? We can take care of ourselves, these bloody European bureaucrats are just ruining my country. Let's get rid of them. That's right. We're the great kingdom, we can take care of ourselves. So the point, if they had this third independent body that actually came and assessed it, it would it would have become hopefully you would think at least abundantly clear that all right, this is just rhetoric we're getting swept away by, not in fact an economic Well look, I don't I mean I happen to be self-inflicted wounds in modern history.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:10

Yes, exactly. And I would say the same with the great self-inflicted wound in Australia is carbon is the abolition of carbon pricing, exactly the same story. I don't even I mean I happen to think that Brexit was nuts, but I don't really want to argue that well, it's sort of important to me that that the considered opinion as well they saw it and still went with Brexit. Yeah, exactly. And that's fine. But but what I want to say to you is do you want to go with the opinion of the people or the considered opinion of the people? Yeah. I want to go with the considered opinion. And if the considered opinion is we should abolish carbon pricing or go ahead with Brexit, then we should. Because I disagree, but this is democracy.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:53

You're suggesting it is like jury duty. It is a lottery, you're picked out of a hat, and you are obliged to participate.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:01

Look, if I'm the dictator, yes, you're obliged to participate. What did the Romans ever do for us? But I'm not. So I'm just trying to say let's do this, just like I was it's a bottom-up story. Let's not ask for permission, let's get some money together. It's not a vast amount of money, there's lots of philanthropic money around. All we need is an understanding of why this is an important thing and why this could be a really useful institution to build. And if we can do that, then we can at some point, like when a government needs the crossbench to form a government or whatever, you actually tip the institution into the constitution. Because the crossbench might well say, as I think the Teals would say, if uh the the crossbench in Australia would say, if this institution was up and running, it would say, Well, if you want us to if you want us to help you form a government, we'd like to s we'd like to have this this third chamber ticking away.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:00

So that's that's the idea. And the fundraising is happening through lateral economics or uh well I'm not no.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:07

I mean I that none of this is going, but all I need is some people with more money than me to put down, you know, the first hundred grand or whatever. I've certainly been talking to various NGOs um who have enough money to do this. Um I haven't been able to persuade them to do it. Uh, but I, you know, I uh this is what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to create what I call an activism of sortition. And what I mean by that is I don't want to go and ask for permission. I don't want to go and see politicians and have them pat me on the head and send a few bureaucrats out and say how great it is and all the rest of it. I want to try and do it as much as can be done. Um I want to try and do it and do as much as can be done without government buy-in and then present it to government at a time when they might when they've got sweaty palms, when they're thinking, geez, uh yeah, okay, look, if you really want that thing, you know, it's a bit a bit uncomfortable for us, but geez, it's not a deal breaker. It it doesn't that hard.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:17

It it it doesn't sound radical. No, it is uh but it does sound extremely ambitious.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:23

Well, it's just a different way to think, and that's the hardest thing. Um it's not uh so if I said we need 20 we we need to double indirect tax in Australia, I would have no confidence that you could ever negotiate that with a government that has just got into with a party, let's yeah, with a party that's just got into power with a promise not to do that. Um that's really hard. That's a there's a sort of red political line. There's no red line here. It's just and it's not even the case that these polys look at it and go, oh, that's a bit of a loss of power for me. I mean, they're they're grown-up people, their whole life is about finessing a thousand constraints on their time, on their power. So they're used to this stuff. But because not enough powerful people are saying in sufficient unison do this, they just do other things. But you can do difficult and unpopular things. If you get an elite consensus that it needs to be done, politicians go through hell for you. Look at John Howard and the indirect tax.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:32

Define an elite consensus.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:34

Who are the Well, I mean, the m my example comes from economics because my father was part of a um a of of the bringing of of the discipline of economics to Australian policy making through the 60s. Australia had high tariffs, and my father was one of the people who said this doesn't make any sense. It's making us poorer, it looks like it's making us richer. If you want to go out into the electorate and say it's helping, it's protecting your jobs, you can, but you're kidding yourself, you're kidding the community, and we know it's bullshit. 1968, Max Corden wrote an article and it began Australia's tariffs are largely an academic question. Politicians will never support lowering tariffs. Seven years later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's just part of the Australian psyche. Seven years later, there was a 25% tariff cut, which my father was involved in, as he said, whispering into the ear of the prince. What was happening was that inflation was rising, there was overfull unemployment, there was overfull employment, and this made a huge this made a huge amount of sense. And he was able to kind of um graft away and get it through the bureaucracy. And so that's 1973. Sorry, it I said it's that's only five years later. That's 1973, and then in 1988 it was all over. Uh 1988 there was a big industry statement, and they reduced all tariffs down to five percent. Um now that is the power of elite consensus. If you went uh if you went to ask someone, they'd say this is nuts. So with your idea for the third governing body, who do you identify as the elite consensus that you need to there are lots of people bloviating away about how trust is going down in our society, we need to consult more, all that kind of stuff. And so there are lots of people doing this, and there are lots of people who think it would be good to have a special purpose advisory citizen assembly, say on house prices or tax or something. And I think that would be better than nothing, but not much better than nothing, because it doesn't build an institution. And it also involves endless, it also involves setting yourself up as a sort of policy entrepreneur with a hundred randomly selected Australians connected to you, going as supplicant to the government, going to government and saying, This is our idea. Can we please can you, you're the government, can you please do this? And then that becomes an issues management issue for the government, and they go, Oh, yeah, that's all right. Well, we'll do this, this, and this, and we won't do that. And they and then it and everyone moves on. Um bullshit, in other words. I mean, they will probably have some quite good. It's not that citizen juries always come up with all the right answers, but what I'm trying to do is to build some build some kind of check and balance, some kind of way in which these two things become entangled. These two things are answerable to each other. Most people aren't talking like that. Most people really are just trying to have trial things and Temporary things and it just sounds sounds easier to get someone to agree to.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:06

And the the media buy-in? How important is that for this elite consensus?

SPEAKER_00 1:50:11

Yeah, I don't think you see, I was involved. Let me tell you a story. I was involved with Rory Stewart when Rory Stewart was running for mayor of London, and he's a big fan of these ideas, and part of his platform was to govern with a randomly selected council of citizens. And I organized a group of stars to talk to Rory. I won't say I was a star, but a guy called Joe Trippy, who took Howard Dean from backmarker to front runner in the 2004 presidential election, who put together the team, the eyes of which were picked out of, I've put that correctly, and went into Obama's campaign. He worked out how to use the internet for campaigning back when the in the days when we weren't trying to use it to wreck the world. And um so there was him and there was a guy called Dane Waters who was a fairly senior person in the John McCain campaign. And so we all met we all had this meeting by teleconference. And Rory's staff just didn't like much of this stuff. And I thought, well, I know what this is. This is gatekeeping, you know, they're they're pissed off that I've managed to kind of I've managed to knock on the door and be be invited into the into the living room, you know. I was completely wrong. They said, well, we focus group this. And when you tell people that he's going to do this, people say to us, we don't need another committee, we need a strong leader. So you have to show people what this is. It's that's the hardest bit of work. If people knew this, if people had seen the citizen juries that I've seen, they would be all for this. But you can run this for another two decades and they won't that, you know, there will be a citizen jury run. Most people won't really be aware of it. They will have heard that there was this citizen's group, and they suggested a new package on housing, you know? So something needs to be done so that people get the feeling that this is counts for something, so that the government is sweating on what these citizens will say because they're trying to get something through the Senate. And the people in the Senate say, Well, I'd like to know what they think, uh, which some of them will. So it's a way to fold uh it's a way to build an institution from outside and and just have it there, and it can have its own impact because we're still in an open society. Uh no one gets arrested for doing any of this stuff yet. And um and it can have a quite a big impact. And as people participate in this, I mean it's just incredible if you run these things properly. Um 95% of people report it as a good experience, half of those report it as a very good experience, half of those report it as an amazingly, exceptionally good experience. And then as you get to the tail, and we're still talking about say 15% of these people, it's life-changing. You know, they go and stand for local council at the next opportunity. They walk out thinking, why aren't we doing things this way? So so that's the thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:53:29

Is it because it's it's new, and you can say radical, revolutionary, whatever, but just anything that's new is naturally always going to be rejected immediately.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:39

It's also old.

SPEAKER_02 1:53:40

Change, no, but rather it's a new idea to No, but it's also an old idea. All right. So but but so because maybe because it's Lindy that suggests that it could be worthwhile, but like I just mean in the psyche of the individuals to the point that you were just Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Because it's new, it's gonna be met with rejection, it's gonna be met with skepticism, it's gonna be but like why change things? Yeah, you know, this is just gonna be a big effort for nothing. I don't like change, whatever. Yeah, like that might be the steepest part of the time, would you say? Right. Um and in your eyes, is uh are you thinking this could be a decade, a two-decade, a lifetime project?

SPEAKER_00 1:54:16

Uh well, all these things are lifetime projects, but you know, you can't know well it was likely three months ago, it was likely that there would be a hung parliament and that the crossbench would have a lot of power. And I was very down and dirty with the crossbench, and I would I'd spoken to a whole bunch of those crossbenches. Uh, I was I r raised quite a bit of money for one of them. I wasn't any kind of pre-quid pro quo. I knew that she was quite sympathetic to this, but at the same time wasn't becoming, you know, someone who would take any instruction from me. And I even before it became clear that the government would have an increased majority, I went from being somewhat optimistic that the crossbench might insist upon that that to realizing that I hadn't really even got them over the line because they're uh if you're a politician, you're very sensitive to social proof. So you kind of go and ask other people and they go, Oh, that's an interesting idea. Um, but nobody seems to be saying it. So I realized that it was even if we got across even if we got a hung parliament, that they wouldn't, it's uh very unlikely that they would have the solidarity and the presence of mind to say this is very high on our list of what we want, and we know we can put it high on our list because there's nothing about this, even though you might, you know, when we go into your office and say to Albo or Peter Dutton, we want this, and he'd go, gee, that's pretty weird. That's all they're gonna say. They're not gonna say, Well, I can't possibly live with that. So it was obvious to me by the time we got to the election that even if there was a hung parliament, it wouldn't be strong enough at that point. But I work away on all kinds of people who have money and are quite senior, and you just keep working away, just like my father did on tariffs. The difference is that tariffs had a fairly monolithic profession behind them, and it was kind of obvious that they were dumb. This is a similarly clean and crisp idea, but it's a constructive idea, not a destructive idea. It doesn't just say take this away and everything will be better. So it's harder. But what's life about? It's just about if you think you've seen something that's simple and powerful, I enjoy and the difficulty's worth it. Yeah, and and and the more I think about it, the more I see. So it's not just that I it's not just that I'm running a campaign for this, which I am, but as I, you know, the way I've you you introduced this by talking about fast food, and I've moved a long way since then. I've got to a much deeper level of understanding all these things than then. I don't, you know, I didn't have any problem explaining my views in relation to fast food. But I was talking about fast food before I'd got to the stage of saying things like there are two ways to represent the people. We we've in in the legal system, we entangle those two ways with the pyramid of power and patronage and the life world of the people represented by a jury, and we need to do something similar for legisl for the legislative and executive branch. It's kind of beautifully simple, isn't it? It really is. And it's beautifully risk, it's low risk. What what what you know what can happen? But there you are. I would say that it makes such great sense.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:58

When did you first uh conceptualize this? Was there a light bulb moment?

SPEAKER_00 1:58:01

No, no, no, no, no. I can tell you exactly when I started thinking about this. And this was at the time when there was a confluence of two things. Um the Republican so John Howard's just got elected in 1996. He's promised to neutralize the issue of the Republic. He's promised to have a referendum on the republic, and Pauline Hansen, who, if you're not Australian, is a sort of early, just to dumb it down a bit, a kind of early right-wing populist. Her political party's one nation, and she's surfacing the kinds of things that have become more salient over time, if you like anti-woke before woke was even a word. And I was extremely unhappy about this because the political system was organizing a debate between Republicans and monarchists. And my attitude is we already live in a republic, it's just got a Monty Python show up the top, and there's only there are only a few, the royal family they're called, and there are occasional, very unusual circumstances in which they actually have a have some input into the into the choice between but but this was then turned into a big symbolic thing about real change by electing the president or more of the same which was appointing the president. And none of this made any sense because the only reason people wanted to el well, the the reasoning behind elect the president went like this. We don't want just another politician being the president. We want our own person, so we'll vote for them. Who do you think that might get you? You think you might get a politician if you vote for them? All the other votes you've had, you get politicians who win those votes. So it was just complete magical thinking. The idea that if you elect the president, it'll be it will somehow improve your democracy.

SPEAKER_02 1:59:59

No one had said, Well, you're running a campaign.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:05

People will campaign and one of them, somebody will win. So it was just a sort of piece of it. It was a little bit like the process that led to Trump in some ways. I just had a conversation with someone today where he said, you know, things are so broke, it's good to smash things up and see what arises in their place. Well, no, it's not. Our worse things arise in their place. So this was just a sort of magical thinking brought about by the idea, hey, let's have an Australian head of state. It wasn't thinking what's wrong with our democracy, what can be done better. And on the other hand, you've got someone who's showing you that there's a real dissatisfaction with a bunch of things. Now, I'm not a particular fan of Pauline Hansen. I always believe in trying to just to understand someone, you kind of paint what they're saying in a good light. Think if I imagine this person wasn't just a dark, horrible person, what are they trying to tell me? And what she's trying to tell me is that she feels, and her all the people who vote for her, feel pretty pissed off about the fact that they've had no damn education. They're ignored, they're belittled, they're told that if they were indigenous, they'd get a grant, but if they're white, they won't get a grant. I don't want to particularly buy into that. What I want to say is that the democracy should take that seriously, not hold the cross up like she's some vampire. And again, it's not really about her. It's about a large number of people who are responding to this message and saying we are not being heard. And in that context, I just sort of, you know, just as a thought experiment, and I might have I think I did write something, but it wasn't me campaigning for it particularly. But in that context, I started thinking, well, you know, you could something which would be a change and would address some of the things that I think are wrong with our democracy, it would actually be change the system, but not in a foolhardy and radical way to say to Pauline Hansen, well, you've got concerns, why don't you we'll put this body together and it'll be just ordinary Australians and we will, for the first time in our history, we will know what the considered opinion of Australians is. We've got 100,000 opinion polls sticking microphones into people's face when they walk out of the supermarket.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:29

But this will be an opportunity to discover the considered opinion of the people. Isn't that going to be a good thing? So that was where it that's where I first started thinking.

SPEAKER_02 2:02:43

Exactly. And then someone who maybe does adore Pauline Hansen and a lot of her policies when met with a bunch of other people who are also taking the time to talk about and consider as well. They might not lose those ideas, but they might soften them a bit.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:56

Or they might go the other way. And the people who are saying that certain things are politically incorrect, they might go and visit her in Ipswich and find that there's a lot of white dysfunction. A lot of white dysfunction. A lot of people wandering around in offices without shoes on, for instance. And they might get a bit of a wake-up call. And they might, you know, good things might happen. And I, in many ways, feel a sort of stronger solidarity with that than the elite. You know, us elites, we've over we've got lots of education, lots of resources. Elites don't need any help from me. We've always, you know, the idea of social democracy, the idea of progressivism is based on a kind of a Christian is something that sort of is is the sort of one essence of Christianity, which is that we make our moral bearings against the sentiments of people who aren't doing very well. Well, let's take that seriously. That's what I want to do. But I don't want to do it in an ideological way. I don't want to sentimentalize them. I don't want to say they're good and we're bad. All that's reductive and silly. I want to get the it's a bit like the people in Port Jackson in Sydney in 1788. I want to get these two worlds together and say, what do you make of each other? Because you'll you'll like each other in the end. You will, trust me, you will like each other and you will learn that you can disagree with someone and still love them as a brother. Because that's what you got, that's what I can show you on some on some filmed citizen juries where people continue to disagree and actually got very angry with each other, and then they thought, yeah, that's what democracy is supposed to be about, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 2:04:49

Do you do you think in your in your lifetime that something which used to be taken for granted, at least I feel like it used to be taken for granted, I'm not sure, but you could really disagree with people on pretty fundamental parts of their worldview, but still be like best mates, yeah, or at least be mates. And I don't know if this is just my own anecdotal experience, but it feels like the cost of disagreeing with someone has really grown. That's right. And whether that's because of the sort of medium being the internet, all the various social medias, and that's a way to filter who actually ends up getting into your life. Um but I don't know if this is just you know hogwash anecdotal experience. No, I think it's whether there is some truth to it.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:30

And like that's also kind of sad because you know, so so my model of this is rather inarticulate, but think of think of life world, what we learn in our families and in neighborhoods and so on, and then think of the set of rules and procedures that an institution has. And then imagine that when I was first in the workforce, there was 30% rules and procedures and 70% the life world. And now imagine it's reversed or it's worse than that. And everyone who goes into an office spends endless time acknowledging the traditional owners, going through all kinds of what I call new parties, and and they censor their own speech, and there are all kinds of things they can't say. What's happened is that the institutional world has taken over the life world.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:31

Um and politics, the way we do so so at a deeper level, the difference between representing representation by election and representation by lottery is that representation by election is representation by words. It is people will use words and symbols and rhetoric and tick tocks and charisma to do whatever it takes to get your vote, and then they've got to govern for three years, then they've got to get your vote again. And that's they're not that that that's a um the life world is not feeling good about it. It doesn't feel that it lives in that process. It feels like it's that this process has occasional need to manipulate it. That's it. And so so I find that manipulative, inauthentic, just part of the uninhabitability of our culture. Trevor Burrus, Jr. It's very sort of devastating and grim, like that sort of realization, or at least that on the Trevor Burrus, and that we are right next to something that could work so much better. So it's not that we are in a Great Depression, or it's not that there's anything so terribly wrong. It is that well, I think it is sort of terribly wrong, but it's wrong in a very subtle sort of way. It's wrong in a way that keeps making us like scratching an itch. We keep wanting to vote in a way that will fix this, but by definition it can't fix this because it has to run the gauntlet of legibility. It has to uh and to be legible, you have to work with comms people to dumb it down and to get your message across. Um so so this is the the eclipse of the life world in our political life. You can't really even do, you know, so if you've got a if you've got a domestic viol and then everyone knows in my cadre, in my group of people, that it's it's a sort of factoid, and I I believe it's fairly well supported, that the indigenous women um are substantially have substantially more domestic violence committed against them than non-Indigenous women. So we're all invited to think of that as a scandal, which I'm happy to think of as a scandal. Nobody mentioned that indigenous men beat them up. Now, some white people beat them up as well. But you can't talk about that. And yet that is at the heart of the problem. This is not me blaming anyone. I'm not interested in blame, I'm interested in trying to deal with it. You are not allowed to talk about it, so you won't be able to deal with it, would you? But we will spend more and more money, and and some of these programs will be good and some of them won't be, but what but they will not be predicated on looking at the problems and thinking, what do we do?

SPEAKER_02 2:09:22

Yeah, that that's um anecdote, or not an anecdote, but you mentioning how the majority of domestic violence against Aboriginal women is committed by Aboriginal men. Yep. Uh reminds me of an interview I did with a fellow called Mike Salbro. He works in the uh Cherberg community in Brisbane. He actually was born and raised in well born in Australia, raised in Sweden, finally. Anyway, he's he's Aboriginal and he's actually one of the last of the stolen generation. But anyway, he it was amazing talking to him because he's he's at this cross-section where he's part of the Aboriginal community in Cherbourg, which is on all the social and economic indicators, one of the lowest performing parts of the country. And he's the sort of medium between the Aboriginal community and then the police force, and just the the the constant social tension and social costs you he's he's dealing with every day. But like, no, you just beat up your wife and you haven't addressed your kids for who knows how long, you're going. Yeah. And then he's like the bad guy because he brought the police into the community. That's where it's like a guy like this, man, what a what a fucking hero.

SPEAKER_00 2:10:22

That's so so there's a guy, and I'm just I don't know whether I can remember his name, and maybe you can, I don't know whether you're an AFL fan, but there was a guy, I think he was a coach of indigenous players. I think he was in Adelaide, and then he was at Collingwood and various places. And he went on a TV program and he said something which was kind of designed to be provocative, and it might also be something that he believed, and he said he wouldn't take an Aboriginal recruit who had two Aboriginal parents. He said he would take one with one Aboriginal parent because spicy indeed, and he was basically run out of town. Now that guy helped a hundred Aboriginal players, was had given his life to treating to to coaching Aboriginal players. Now, I'm not telling you that what he said was was either offensive or not offensive. Well, whatever. That's not his job. His job is his job is to deal with indigenous players, not manage the media's sensitivities on that question.

SPEAKER_02 2:11:29

Because of how uncomfortable if people are to start saying, wow, why did he say that?

SPEAKER_00 2:11:37

Well, why don't you before we produce this guy came from before we slander this guy, why don't we ask like why don't we go and talk to the hundred indigenous players that he's helped and ask them? Um This is just going this is sort of the case everywhere. Yeah. And that's the and this is putting legibility ahead of the life world. That's the key idea. And the jury is about carrying the life world into the pyramid of power. I really like the way that's all framed.

SPEAKER_02 2:12:09

And it I'm happy that it was framed that way as well, because the whole point of me introducing that Australian scorecard, which we won't finish, but was to make the point that look, we're doing pretty bloody good, all external metrics, especially compared to the rest of the world. Yeah. Yet nonetheless, here is a bunch of ideas for how it could be even better. Sure. Because something I sense in your work as well is that, yeah, like things are great, but why not try and make them as good as they can possibly ceiling can keep it?

SPEAKER_00 2:12:37

Can we be grateful for the fact that if this was 200 years ago, we wouldn't be sitting here with a cup of tea here and all this stuff. We wouldn't be out having a cappuccino when we felt like it, or dare I say, smashed avocado. We would be living at it at subsistence. We've got a massive amount to be grateful for. I love Western culture. That's nothing against Asian culture. I don't know about Asian culture. I think the Parthenon is the greatest building I've ever, ever had anything to do with. How the cathedrals were built is beyond me. We live in this world of unbelievable achievement. And can we be grateful for that? And then we can also say there's a lot of shit going on. And and and and we have the tools to not to solve all these problems and certainly not to solve them by edict from the top, but we have the tools to work on these problems. Why don't we? And it's not about talking. That's my that's another thing. It's not about being legible, it's not about going on QA and listening to the panel. It's about the people in the audience.

SPEAKER_01 2:13:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:13:46

We're supposed to be a democracy.

SPEAKER_02 2:13:47

The best questions come from the audience. Yeah. But then I haven't watched so much QA, but at least from some of the YouTube clips that I have come across. It's always kind of an interesting quad check. There could have been something more there.

SPEAKER_00 2:14:00

Yeah, yeah. Well, I remember I was doing I was chairing a thing called the Government 2.0 Task Force in Tonine, and Mark Scott, who was then the CEO of the ABC, said they had this. And and the buzzword of the time was social media. And he was telling me of this amazing new program they were proving up. And what was amazing about it was that people could tweet. Big deal. Anyway, so they it was quite a fresh program to start off with, but pretty quickly, journalists' instinct to frame everything as a conflict between left and right took over. Yeah, and so I've even developed a I've developed, I think in the industry it's called a treatment, which is uh an idea for a show, which is and and here's this idea that if we have if our democracy is built around the DNA of rep of representation by election, it means that the entire structure of institutions around our democracy reflects that DNA, and QA reflects that DNA because what does QA do? It separates the governed who are in the audience from the those who govern. And so what would it be like to invent or to develop a TV program that came from the world of representation by lottery? Not hard to imagine. Take QA, throw away the panel, make the audience representative, stick them in the big brother house. Don't have to do that, but you get them to deliberate on subject, and then you make a documentary about who thought what, who changed their mind, why did they change their mind, who persuaded, so on. Were they was it a feelings thing? Was it a reason thing? Who did they know that meant that they thought, oh, I get it, I see why you're saying that. We could do that.

SPEAKER_02 2:16:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:01

But you have to invest. The ABC's got enough money to run a program like that. The BBC's certainly got enough money to run a program like that. But everyone's optimizing around their little horizon, not looking for a a bigger story. You still in touch with Rory Stewart?

SPEAKER_02 2:16:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:19

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 2:16:20

Because he's now one of the most powerful media voices in the world. He is. You know, my admiration for the man, but yes, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:27

But but he's he and I have talked about me being on his show, and he fears that the people running the show won't be impressed enough with my profile, and so someone else will get on the show. That's terrible. Well, that's that's the way our system works. And and Rory would like I think Rory would like to have me on the show.

SPEAKER_02 2:16:46

But Yeah, like that's the whole point of having like, in my opinion, at least, with this new media. Exactly. But you can have a podcast which costs nothing, but get the types of eyeballs that entire news station.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:57

Yeah, but this is uh but but his operation is a big commercial operation. I'm good on it.

SPEAKER_02 2:17:02

It's terrific or goal hanger, you know, the the pr the production company for all those various podcasts. But like I think at least. Yeah, and there are guys out there who do this really well, like Joe Rogan. Now he's a reflection of his own interests. So he's rising comedians or his rising archery guys and so forth. But if Joe was super interested in radical politics, you know, he wouldn't think.

SPEAKER_00 2:17:21

Well, I don't call this radical politics, but compared politics or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 2:17:26

Anything that's not the standards can be classified as that. But I think like one of the one of the one of the marvelous things about this new media is that for show creator, they have the opportunity to curate the entire show at the scale that these other organizations had to perform without the vested interests. Yeah. Because there's no investing here.

SPEAKER_00 2:17:47

No, but talking about well, well now Joe Rogan has got big vested interests. I mean, that's worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

SPEAKER_02 2:17:54

So Yeah, but I and I don't know the man, obviously. Yeah. I I actually think the there's a big narrative about him which isn't necessarily true. But I'm not criticizing him. No, but like what what are his vested interests? He heads ads.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:07

Like his well, he wants his Yeah, I know. But if you have me on your show and not Jay uh RFK Jr. or someone that someone's heard of, it's a little bit of a dip in your ratings.

SPEAKER_02 2:18:19

The point is is that you can survive that long. Of course he can survive that. That's right. Like it's the cost of bringing on someone with a lower is much less than it meant.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:31

No, but there are, you know, I I mean I must have got two or three emails this week with people who want to come on my podcast. Nice. And my podcast is not, you know, there's a few thousand people who who consume it. So just think of what's heading in Joe Rogan's direction. A fire hydrant of stuff. So how am I going to get through that?

SPEAKER_02 2:18:55

I'm not suggesting that you would try and get on there. No, no, no, no. I agree to activate voices.

SPEAKER_00 2:19:06

I agree. And I'm not making a c comment against either Joe or Rory, who I think of as a friend and who's been, you know, generous to me. There are there are realities about the world, there are uh layers of considerations. And you know, if Rory said we have to have him on, I don't think that's would be too much of a problem. Uh he would like to have me on, I think, and other people wouldn't, and that's reasonable too. And they'd probably have say the same sort of thing to Rory, saying, I want this sort of person on, and Rory might say no. So that's all entirely legitimate. Um All I'm saying is that I mean it is a general it is a general problem, I think we have culturally, that it's so much more lucrative, it's so much better for cliques to have people who have profile. And and you can see a problem there. There is there is a chicken and egg problem there.

SPEAKER_02 2:20:03

I I see that 100%. If if you look at the top ten uh ratings for all the interview shows across any country, like it's kind of especially in the English speaking world, yeah. There's a huge overlap of guests around the same time.

SPEAKER_00 2:20:17

Yeah, and we've all heard of the guests. And so if I'm going through if I'm going through Rory's program, The Leading, I'll probably I'm likely to click on the person I recognize. That's just a fact.

SPEAKER_02 2:20:32

Yeah, but the I I don't I don't know even if that is like a problem, you know, that once you get a big show, you sort of start to gamify the metrics and think about okay, if I get on this guest and I ask them this series of questions, it's gonna pop. I'm gonna have 20 nice shorts for me to spread throughout the internet. Yeah, yeah. You know, like I could have just come on here and and said to you, all right, Peter Dutton, why didn't he win? You know, you can blow the Away and we'll get a response and it'll be like, we clip this up and then the that's right. Another video is why Peter Dutton lost. That's right. All of a sudden it's gonna get a bunch of clips. Yeah, but it's not interesting to me. I doubt it's interesting to you. It's not, you know, then like and then those examples are just you know run run infinite. And that's our culture. What's optimistic about is that with this sort of new media, with those so low barriers to entry, and the fact that you can now enter a playground that has conceivably billions of English-speaking people around the world who can consume this thing, that there is a chance that you find that niche who is as well feeling the same as you and me.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:40

Like they want this type of stuff. Yeah, I think that's true.

SPEAKER_02 2:21:43

I think that's true. I I I don't know if I have a point behind any of that at all, but it's just it does give me a great sense of optimism in the face of maybe the, you know, some of the negative things we've identified about the culture.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:54

Yeah, I agree. There's not much point. I had a little I had something in my newsletter where I commented on this really quite sad piece by a millennial who said thought she'd come up with a really great line about how rough their millennials' lives are, and she said, We're not after handouts, we're after hope. And I thought, well, I don't know who gives you hope. I mean, that's hard. But I said, I don't have any hope particularly, I do have faith. And by faith I mean that you plug away, you think what you're doing is worthwhile. If that's the case, then in a sense it is worthwhile and you will succeed to some extent, or maybe you will not succeed at all, but I have faith that even if I don't succeed at all, that there have been, I know already, and I've spoken to this as we've been speaking, there are already valuable things for me in having done all this stuff. Because I've thought about stuff in in a way that goes deeper and in a way that is active. It's not just, oh, I might be able to get an article published in some academic journal. It is that I'm engaging with the world in a full-throated way as a human being who has feelings and has and is offering a way of thinking that he thinks is valuable and he thinks should be in the marketplace. That's worth doing. And will it lead to something? Let's hope it does. What what uh uh you know, it's not like going out there and making money where you can just say that you failed and then it wasn't worth it. Right, right. Uh it's part of life to to think about stuff, discuss d d d discuss stuff, and so on.

SPEAKER_02 2:23:44

It might be a little bit sappy, tell me if it is or not. But there's an idea.

SPEAKER_00 2:23:48

Well, let's do some sap.

SPEAKER_02 2:23:49

The idea that I really like by Carl Jung, this idea of you know individuation, like what it is to fully become yourself. And the and it's interesting because it ties into a lot of the other ideas that he is a super original thinker and put together.

SPEAKER_00 2:24:04

And who's this person? Carl Jung. Carl Gustav. Oh, Carl Jung, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's original, right?

SPEAKER_02 2:24:10

Yeah. But the you know, sort of the the top of his of his whole worldview is that we're all trying to in individuate, yeah. Just become our full selves, realise our full potential. But it's nice because the whole point of it is that you you will never ever reach it. Like it's always just the peak is just over the clouds and yeah, things open up. Things open up as you go. And therefore, like to individuate is actually impossible. But the journey along it as close as you can get to it. That's kind of a life well lived. Yes. And you know, the journey, the things you're doing along the way, is up to our own agency and our own interests and that how we feel about responsibility and what family duties we want to take on and so forth. It like leaves all those questions in our own hands to deal with. It's not told by some moral system, one of the monotheistic ones, actually, how you should live your life, rather, just make sure that it's a journey to a very anyway.

SPEAKER_00 2:25:08

Well, I would say that there's also an ideas version of that, and that that is if you have clarified your ideas, if you've pondered things deeply and you've come to some new way to look at things, then vistas open up. So I start thinking of these two ways to uh represent the people, and that leads me to have an idea about that leads me to have an idea about how to design a TV program. Um so it goes on and on, and things you just get to you get to re-see the world, you get to see the world in new forms, which you find you've discover something that that you didn't know before. So I think that's good. Learning stuff is very pleasurable.

SPEAKER_02 2:25:57

Uh amen. So I I've tried to be uh as exhaustive as possible for your worldview, but naturally we've probably only scratched the surface. But at least on the middle. So that's what worldviews are like. At least on like the the big core things you're thinking about right now, which would you agree it's it's been addressed? Yes. Because then we've we've gone very long. And there's a couple more questions I'd love to ask you. So we'll see how quickly we can maybe get through them. You're okay? Yeah. All right, fantastic. Well, pokeys. So, you know, I knew just anecdotally how bad they were, but I only just moved back to this country having been away for you know almost a decade. And so was really struck in the face by like this is this is this is so grim. Like it it it it's it's a negative public good. It should it has no right to be in public spaces. Yeah. Um and some of the statistics were crazy. Australia has roughly 18% of the world's poking machines, despite having 0.3% of the world's population. And Australia is the world's biggest gambling losers per capita.

SPEAKER_00 2:26:57

That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_02 2:26:58

By a by a big margin. Waging and losing around $25 billion each year. So it's washing cash.

SPEAKER_00 2:27:05

If I'm that makes it $1,000 a person.

SPEAKER_02 2:27:08

Which is nuts. Yeah. And I don't know what the stats are, but let's assume it's like less than 20% are actually using them. Yeah. Anyway, so um Yeah, that's right, which makes it five thousand dollars for per person who's using it. I see where they're fun, they hit every dopamine sensor, they're habitual, so forth. But I wonder, like I was trying to think what's actually a relevant question here, but do you think if it they were primarily used by elites, they would have already been banned?

SPEAKER_00 2:27:35

Quite yeah, yeah, they're they're instruments of extraction. I'll I'll tell you a story. When I was in Singapore about twelve years ago, something like that, I had an afternoon w to kill and I was wandering around Singapore. Uh well, I was actually underneath that that that that silly boat, you know, with the three with the three towers that are the garden towers. Yeah, well, there are three towers and there's a massive long boat stuck over the anyway. At the bottom of one of those towers. At the bottom of one of those towers was a casino. And I thought, oh, okay, I'll go and go into the casino and just sort of look around. I wasn't really uh I find uh betting in such places pretty boring. But you know, it's just an interesting thing to look around, see what's happening. And um so I went to go in and they said, excuse me, sir, you can't go in. And they said, Do you have your passport on you? And I said, No, I don't. And then they said, All right, well, if you don't have your passport on you proving that you're a foreigner, you have to pay us $100 Singapore dollars, which is a hundred American dollars roughly. And I thought, well, there you go. They're happy to set up they're happy to be predators against foreigners. They don't want to be predators against their own population. That I like that. Uh you have to prove that you're a foreigner, and then they'll say if you're stupid enough to come in and have your money taken off you, be my guest.

SPEAKER_02 2:29:01

In some sense, we kind of do that as well. You go to Crown Down the Road or Star in Sydney. Yeah. It's uh like just eye test, 80% foreign tourists.

SPEAKER_00 2:29:11

Fine, and that's fine. That's fine. I don't have a problem with that. They can look after themselves. But um, but but we but there's lots of you know, these these profit maximizing outfits are gonna try and get money from wherever they can, and they destroy lives. So it's uh there's there's I don't know whether you know of a guy called Matthew Crawford, who is quite a he's sort of recently taken to Substack. He wrote a terrific book called The World Beyond Your Head, and it's about addiction, our addiction to social media, but he goes into detail about gambling and some of these other things. You know, it's just horrific. It's anyway, what it is is it's it's predation. It's now it's consensual predation, that's true, and that's better than non-consensual predation. But it's predation, and again, most Australians object to it. Most Australians want quite a lot stronger regulation of it. And but the interests, the gambling interests have managed to buy off the politicians. But if you had a citizen assembly on this, it would confirm and it might you might get a swing. So you you start with the raw score of how many Australians are against. I don't know the answer to that, but it's more than a majority. And then over time, as people learn about it, they may well um you may well get a larger swing.

SPEAKER_02 2:30:37

It would be a great battleground for the Third Assembly.

SPEAKER_00 2:30:41

Yes, yes, indeed. And I think the teals want it, all the all the independents I know want it. I'm not sure I don't know what Bob Cater thinks. But uh, you know, Andrew Wilkie, all kinds of independents want it. And uh so far the money in power has managed to keep it as a playground for for money to frolic and to enrich itself off the foibles of problem gamblers. There are also people for whom inexplicably it's a form of entertainment, and that's fine. But there's plenty of problem gambling amongst that's also a leading indicator of a lot of other sort of things. That's right.

SPEAKER_02 2:31:27

I I I I think um and this may be Rory Sutherland's idea, but I love his idea about pubs. Is it his idea? Who knows? An idea that pubs should be tax-free because they're in Oh, that's Rory Sutherland.

SPEAKER_00 2:31:39

Is that Rory Sutherland?

SPEAKER_02 2:31:41

Because they are in fact a sort of public good. Yeah. You know, you and I go into a pub right now, even though we might not interact with anyone, increases the vibe for everyone else in the pub. You know, more people there, more chatter, more feeling of connection and humanity and so forth. And then take it one step further, like pokies have no business at your local pub where you jump in for lunch and drop a hundred into the pokies, buy a steak and chips and have a beer and then and then and then leave. It would create so many more conceivable uses in a competitive market for this space. Like, pubs don't have to just be a place where you go to watch the dogs, go to bat ponies, or go to eat a steak and chips. You know, you can open up the trivia nights, open up family nights, you know, get really creative with it. Like, what why couldn't a a pub have Thursday night movie? You know, like things like that. And if you remove the pokies from it, it immediately changes the environment and the type of people that are gonna be there. And then if it's tax-free, way more people are gonna be going because the competition of the pubs is like their costs are gonna go down straight away. They'll be able to have more staff there, they'll be able to be more creative with the activities that they're gonna create and so forth. Um, anyway.

SPEAKER_00 2:32:50

Well, I mean, I would be if I wanted to forego revenue or spend money, I've already told you that I'd want to target that. So I would do something like fund what I call with the program I Wish I'd Asked and these social connection programs. And maybe some of them could be run from pubs, you know, but uh you know, it's a yeah, it's a nice, it's a good thought starter to say that. But I think you kind of want the capacity for a community to develop ideas about what it wants and to govern that and steer that. And that's it's easy to say forgive us some tax. It's anyone who says forgive us some tax, they should also be asked to tell us where they who they want to tax more, because that's a harder it's harder to answer that question.

SPEAKER_02 2:33:39

So you want the you want both.

SPEAKER_00 2:33:41

Well, you want to keep them honest, don't you? I mean, I can think of lots of ways that it'd be nice to have I mean, I got the the Taz the the Victorian government had too much money for one stage, and I got a letter from the Victorian government saying that because I hadn't had a parking had hadn't had a speeding ticket in three years, they were going to send me fifty Well, it was just completely absurd. It's got nothing. It's just totally nuts, okay? But I mean it's felt good. It was, you know, so I could run around. So someone had come up with that idea. And someone had said, would it be good? Well, we should reward people for having a good record.

SPEAKER_02 2:34:18

It's kind of dehumanizing too. It's like that's not the reason you've decided to Well, that's possible too.

SPEAKER_00 2:34:24

That's possible too. But anyway, what I'm saying is that we need to try to develop capacities for communities to enrich themselves. And by enrich, I don't mean economically, particularly, although that will happen too. But there are this is this is one of the things that's not functioning very well, particularly in disadvantaged communities. And you can find ways in which people gain confidence in each other and end up having a great time and being constructive. And at the moment we are these communities are so full of rent extraction that they're demoralized. I mean, there's nothing more demoralizing than going to the pokies because you're too bored and you can't think of anything else to do, and then you come home, you spend far more than you said you would, and you feel like shit. That's that that sounds horrible. Yeah, exactly. Well, there's a lot of that going on.

SPEAKER_02 2:35:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:35:20

That's super sad.

SPEAKER_02 2:35:21

All right, look, I I've decided to forego some of these other questions because they will they we're all gonna be going well past 8 p.m. But uh hopefully there is an opportunity sometime in the future to speak with you again. Sounds good. What I wanted to do with this interview was I would try to make them all as evergreen as possible. Nothing in the news, nothing, but like some type of of hook where you can latch onto and say, like, this is an interesting world for you of this person. Here are some ideas about who they are. Like, for instance, we haven't spoken about much your family, where you're from, what your education was like, etc. Yeah. Which is maybe details that could be filled in at a later point. But anyway, would you agree? Because otherwise we've just got fun questions to finish on. No, no, that's good. That's good. Across the spectrum of your career, are you more optimistic now than you've ever been? Because of these LLMs, you know, because of the radical change that you've got to do.

SPEAKER_00 2:36:11

No, no, no. No, no, no. I was naively optim No, I I'm not more optimistic. I'm fairly pessimistic, but that's not that's very different to hopefulness is the thing that matters, or faithfulness is what matters, not optimism or pessimism.

SPEAKER_02 2:36:27

And you're faithful.

SPEAKER_00 2:36:28

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And well well they asked a guy called Mark um Herbert Marcuse, a Marxist scholar. I'm not a fan of his work, but they asked him, they said, You're very cheerful and yet you're so pessimistic. And he said, Yes, that's true. I'm a cheerful pessimist. So So I'm a cheerful pessimist. My father had a saying which was that uh an optimist is just a pessimist without the facts. And he was a he was a sunny kind of character who participated in a great generation building from the ground zero, the scorched earth of of World War II into the you know, into a great modern society.

SPEAKER_02 2:37:10

And both of his sons became academics of one strike.

SPEAKER_00 2:37:14

My brother and I both tried very hard not to be economists and we both failed.

SPEAKER_02 2:37:19

Well, at least uh your own boy has only partially sat footage.

SPEAKER_00 2:37:22

Well, there was a brief period when my daughter was looking like becoming an economist, which I was thinking was at some stage I might have to break the glass and and and call an emergency, but she seems to have seen uh she seems to have found her way to more constructive activities. That's right.

SPEAKER_02 2:37:40

If you were to witness, not participate in just watch a conversation between any two people in history, dead or alive, no language barriers.

SPEAKER_00 2:37:47

Oh God, this is so hard. I don't know. But wouldn't it be interesting? Some somebody from the ancient world, I think maybe Aristotle. I can't think of anyone in the modern world that I want to talk to. Um Scott Morrison? Not Scott Morrison, not Scott Morrison, but Aristotle, some great figure. I mean, another one is Shakespeare. I mean, how that guy came up with what he came up with is I mean, wow. Um so there's a couple of people on the dance card. And then, you know, maybe the other person should be, you know, maybe not Ben Along, but I've heard of Ben Along, you know, an indigenous person, somebody haven't you? Ben Along Point? You the Sydney Opera House is built on Ben Along Point. He's the guy geographically I see what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's the guy who the first fleeters captured. He's an indigenous person. They captured him because they wanted to get someone who they could teach a little bit of English, and then he would be there. He would he would he would kind of be an ambassador between the whites and the between the Europeans and the indigenous people. And it was it's an extraordinary story. Anyway, he was uh an odd sort of character, very charismatic and kind of a bit of a show pony, and they took him to Europe and dressed him up in European clothes. It's an extraordinary story. In the end, he's a kind of broken person in some ways, but I don't have a strong sense of him. You know, there are remarkable indigenous people, and imagine I mean, Barack, William Barack, is that his name is it was a reserve, and there were five reserves, and again, these facts mightn't be exactly right, but there were five reserves, and this was a reserve in which a par a Protestant pastor, a Scottish, I guess he's Presbyterian pastor, was on the border, and he helped this community build this extraordinary um farm. God, the name is so close to the tip of my tongue. And these two great indigenous leaders, Simon Wonger, and then he died, and William Barack led their people and tried to and they and and and Barack walked from Hillsville Sanctuary into Melbourne, and such a moving story, and he would talk to the governor, and the people at the top of the tree were really quite sympathetic and trying to do stuff, and the middle managers killed everything that ever started and stole their money, and it was it's it's just a horrific story. And I don't know whether anyone saw this, any white people saw this when he would present the governor with a little dot painting, you know, this is sort of before dot paintings were a thing in out of Papania. Um and then when he died, they found lots of these paintings that he'd been doing the whole time. And oh, it's just an amazing attempt to reach out. He would say to everyone, we've got to dress in Western clothes because then they'll respect us more and all this stuff. And um, all this possibility, pissed up against the wall, no one go to shit.

SPEAKER_02 2:41:07

Um yeah, it'd be great to in better logs. But it would take a long time Aristotle.

SPEAKER_00 2:41:12

Yeah, yeah, yeah, very much so. That would be very cool. That would be very cool.

SPEAKER_02 2:41:16

And uh finally, Nick, I've asked this question every guest what is the role that serendipity has played in your life?

SPEAKER_00 2:41:22

Well, I suppose, yeah, well, you know, meeting your wife if she if it's a success, which it is, so there you are. Getting a great wife and kids, serendipity. Um, you know, your life goes on and amazing things happen and you kind of make stuff out. I I knew this question, I knew you asked this question, I should have a better answer, shouldn't I? It's not a very good illustration of serendipity that I haven't at least worked out something to say.

SPEAKER_02 2:41:48

Well at least were the circumstances under which you met your wife. Were they very serendipitous?

SPEAKER_00 2:41:54

No, they weren't. It doesn't fit the question. I mean, I just think that life is just a one connection after another, and you make you make a lot of this serendipity, and that and it's one of the things that I think a lot I mean, I don't know whether you want to call this serendipity, but I think the only education I got was doing history. I mean, I've done lots of other things, studied lots of other things at uni, and I wouldn't call that an education. And the thing about history was that I ran into a a whole discourse at the time which was teaching people that you couldn't understand somebody unless you made the effort to understand them on their terms. You get a hold of a bunch of words and say, well, they didn't express themselves very well, but they're sort of trying to mean this, that you have to make that journey, and that can be a long and a rewarding one. And also you want you're not likely to make that journey if you're not sympathetic to them. That's one of the reasons I'm sympathetic to Pauline Hansen and all these people. I draw the line at Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump. I can't be because I think they're psychopaths. I don't think they're worthwhile. But but even there, uh They still had a set of experiences that drew. Well, and if you want to understand them, you you you have to try and understand what are they thinking? What what what is their perspective? What is their perspective? And so that and that's uh that is a if you really believe that and you really inhabit that, you really get a payoff from that constantly. I got a payoff from that when I did economics, before I trained in any economics. I did economics for John Button, and he was industry minister in the 80s. And what what was my what was my magic what was my superpower? One, my father was an economist, so I got the hang of economic thinking, but I listened to people. So I would go and listen to people running car factories, and I'd get them to tell me their story, and all the free traders would say, Well, they're just telling you that they they need protection and they're just trying to mislead you. I said, Look, I'll make that decision up later on. I just want to know what it's like from their point of view. And it was doing that that enabled me to that they were the ones who were talking about economies of scale, not the fucking economists who were using models in which there weren't any economies of scale. So that's a serendipitous thing. That but it's a kind of it's a created serendipity. It's it's a serendipity comes from humility. I don't want to put myself so it would be a little ludicrous to present to you you myself to you as this paragon of humility. That's that's not quite the way it works. That's what's at that's how you've come across. But but but but the but the the the ladder of humility, the the the I don't understand this, I'm not here to give this person a lecture. I'm here to hear what they think, and then to listen for bits that I might not understand and draw them out a bit more. That might be the sort of thing you're thinking about as someone who interviews lots of people. To shut I mean, one of the things I've noticed in this conversation is that when I'm trying to say something, you've been completely silent. That's great. That's great. Because that's what you want. When you're hearing someone not quite get an idea out, then shut up because you'll get something. And then once they've said something, you might say, Oh, you you're thinking this, or I was talking to this person. Don't say, Oh, you mean that. So these are things we pick up, and they may so so I've turned this into a little homily about making your own serendipity. That's not a bad answer, is it? Love that. That's and that's 100% true.

SPEAKER_02 2:45:46

Because serendipity doesn't just have to be exactly the interaction in the real world, it can also be a discovery in a concept.

SPEAKER_00 2:45:53

A prepared mind. You know, the the discovery comes to the prepared mind, or as a famous chess player said, I'm not sure who it was, and someone said you've been so lucky in your career, and he says, Yes, my experience is that the better I play, the more luck I have.

SPEAKER_02 2:46:08

Great place to leave it on. Good.

SPEAKER_00 2:46:09

Okay. We're gonna thanks, Ryan.