The Joe Walker Podcast - 2025 Retrospective — A Listener (Zac Gross) Interviews Me

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

In this special end-of-year episode, the tables are turned: I’m the guest, and I’m interviewed by Zac Gross — an Australian macroeconomist and long-time listener of the show. We reflect on what I learned on the podcast in 2025 and what I changed my mind about. We also discuss the behind-the-scenes work of running the show, and my plans for 2026. Sponsors Vanta: helps businesses automate security and compliance needs. For a limited time, get one thousand dollars off Vanta at vanta.com/joe. Use the discount code "JOE". To sponsor a future episode, go to https://josephnoelwalker.com/sponsor/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a special kind of episode. Today, the tables are turned. I'm in the hot seat and I'm going to be interviewed by a listener of the podcast. I'll introduce him in a moment, but just to provide a bit more context, we're continuing a tradition I started in 2023. So I wanted to do an end of year retrospective, reflect on the year, both in terms of the content of the episodes, but also the behind-the-scenes aspects of the podcast itself.

But I didn't have anyone to interview me, no producer, it's a one-man show. So I thought, wouldn't it be fun to, invite my listeners to apply to interview me. It's probably my only original contribution to the field of podcasting, having a listener interview the host. I don't remember seeing that idea anywhere else. But I really enjoyed the experience. It was a nice way of drawing out and synthesizing the lessons from the year. And also a good way to develop empathy for my guests and become a more thoughtful interviewer. So about a month ago in early December, I put out a call on Twitter and through my mailing list, looking for listeners to interview me. Received a bunch of excellent

applications, but the best was Zach Ross, who's interviewing me today. So, Zach, we were talking before we started recording. I think you first found the podcast maybe six or so years ago. Yeah, about that. To introduce you briefly, you're an Australian macroeconomist. You worked at the Reserve Bank of Australia as a lecturer at Oxford, and you're currently an assistant professor at Monash University. So it's the afternoon of the 30th of December. We're doing this in Melbourne. And thank you so much for doing this with me. No worries. Happy to be here. Over to you. Great. Thanks, Joe. Well, at the end of your last interview, you mentioned that you're going to take the podcast to the UK, back to the motherland, for a ease of access to the

intellectual environment that is London and perhaps even closer access to the US. I want to ask you how it went and what's been happening with the podcast location wise. So we never actually moved, which hopefully is evident to people who follow me on Twitter and watch the podcast on YouTube, given the amount of Australian content I've done this year. I did think you must be racking up a lot of frequent fire miles if you were with the amount of Australian content. Yeah. No, so the story is, I mean, we're on the brink of moving.

I'd even got my British passport. We're ready to go. And then we realized that the US was much more attainable. A US visa was much more attainable than I'd been led to believe. The US was frankly always plan A and the UK was plan B. Once we realized that we sort of pivoted, generally I'd much rather live in the US than the UK. And that move has kind of been delayed. So I stayed in Australia because there was a lot I wanted to do in Australia first in

in terms of the Australian content. But I guess I don't feel sufficiently famous that I need to update my audience on my movements. So I was in this weird position where that plan slipped out in the 2023 retrospective, and then I didn't really have another chance to update people. Didn't feel like I needed to, so I'm conscious that about half of my audience probably thinks I'm in the UK right now. I haven't been in the UK except for a short trip in 20. Yeah, I haven't been back since 2023, where it is short trip. Oh, great.

Well, there goes all my questions on fish and chips and the, the London housing market, but we'll see if we can pivot and make this work. So I thought that's a big update on location, maybe the US in the future. Do you have any idea of which coast, which side, which state? Yeah, West Coast. But having learned my lesson with the UK experience, I don't want to release too much before it's, before I've got boots on the ground. Fair enough, fair enough. We'll watch and find out. Okay, well, let's chat a bit about the podcast, behind the scenes. And then we'll dive into some of the more detailed content, so perhaps for those who aren't interested in a two-hour serenade on

Australian state capacity, you won't have to say to the bitter end. So first question, your podcast, you're running a business. Who do you see is your top three competitors in the industry? I try not to think in terms of competitors, and it's a very Zen kind of thing where I try to keep them out of my consciousness, because I think thinking in terms of your competition or people you want to copy or emulate, it can be quite, um, quite toxic, like I want to sort of maintain my independence. I don't even listen to that many podcasts in my personal life. So one way to answer the question might be my competitors, you know, newspapers or

substack or anything else people could be doing to consume intellectual content. Is it a podcast even a competition or is it another app on someone's phone? Yeah, yeah, it might be. I think I think the direct competitors would be. podcasts, but, yeah, we're trying not to think about competition. Fair enough. Well, speaking about the podcasts, Derek Thompson, formerly of the Atlantic, now at Substack, I believe, outlined an interesting theory that basically all media is becoming

television. And that's because, well, for a bit of a behind the scenes, we actually spent much more time on the cameras than the lights here than on the microphones so that you can all see us. And that's a reflection of the fact that all podcasts are moving to video, the pivot to video is happening. How has that affected the business of making a podcast? For me, in two ways, the first and most obvious is just doing video and needing to do video to grow the show. So I started doing video for every episode last year. And I publish

on YouTube, publish video on YouTube, Substack and X, formerly known as Twitter. That has turned out to be kind of mandatory if you're trying to grow a podcast because you have access to the sort of upside of those algorithms on those platforms, the discoverability on a platform like YouTube or X is just qualitatively different to the discoverability through a podcast app like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I mean, I don't remember the last time I have used Apple Podcasts or Spotify to find a new podcast. Usually you just learn about stuff through word of mouth and then subscribe through those apps and you keep listening to your same stable of shows, but you don't use those apps to find new things.

I think the second way in which I've noticed the everything is television thesis apply to my show is doing ads in more creative ways. And I think this will be a theme for podcasts that we'll see intensify over the next few years. It's no longer enough to just do a read where you're kind of reading the script the sponsor's given you and you're just sort of plugging a product. I think ads will get increasingly more creative, much more personalized to the host and the show. and much more seamlessly integrated into the show. And that, I think, has been facilitated and driven by the video medium because there's so much more you can do with the ads when you've got that video dimension.

And one example from my show this year was an employer branding ad for Eucalyptus, which appeared in the Hugh White episode. So I interviewed someone who's a long-time listener of the show who now works at Eucalyptus. And so the ad, instead of me, just, you know, Seeing the praises of working at Eucalyptus, the ad was a mini-interview, like a two-minute interview where I interviewed that person, Jay, about what it was like to work at Eucalyptus and why they chose to work there.

So that's sort of an example. We'll see more and more of that. And I think that's a special case of the Everything is Television phenomenon applied to podcasts. And it even extended to having a live studio audience this year. Do you see more of that as well in the podcast future? Yeah, I think so. And I think we'll start to, I think we'll start to see a lot of innovation around what a podcast is.

So it won't just be a kind of sit-down interview. There'll be other elements blended in. It will become more sort of documentary-esque. So like maybe charts in the background or flashbacks to a previous episode? Exactly, exactly. One thing I've been wanting to do for a while is podcasts aren't always the best medium to explore. very difficult ideas and having someone speak extemporaneously about a topic is like it's a very challenging exercise for them and there's only so much you can do wouldn't it be cool if you

could cut in other explainers or if you were talking to a guest about a very technical topic maybe you could step aside and they could explain it on a whiteboard or something and then you could cut that in that kind of stuff I think we'll start to see the the definition and what a podcast interview is start to blur and change and morph. How much prep do you usually give your interviews? Because obviously, for some of them, I did a medical test on one, which I imagine required some preparation. Though I feel like some of the economists, you know,

you might ask them a question like, what's the effects of this? And I was always told, never differentiate in public as a mass student. And I suspect most economists, unless they've spent their entire life studying, you know, this particular equation, you know, would struggle to, or at least be cautious about doing it on the fly. So is that something, I guess, that you'll look to do more in the future? Wait, what was the question? I guess, how much prep do you give your interviewees?

It's very case by case. Generally none. I'll let them know by email. These are the kind of topics I want to discuss. But I don't send them a list of the questions, partly because I don't finish writing my questions until a few hours before or the night before the interview, but also because I like the spontaneity of it feeling like a real conversation. I don't want them to rehearse their answers. Sometimes I'll send them a more detailed list beforehand if I think they might

need it. Sometimes I'll do some kind of intermediate approach where maybe I just send them the first question or something like that so they can start the interview on a strong foot and go from there. But, yeah, it really varies. Fair enough. Yeah. It seems that every podcast has pivoted towards talking about AI these days. Yeah.

It's the only issue that people want to talk about. But you seem to be an exception with maybe one episode aside. Yeah. You haven't really dived into the AI takeoff, whether it's going to take over the world or destroy it. And I found this particularly odd as you actually mention it in your 2023 is sort of like, oh, yeah, I'll have to get onto this. But you managed to resist the temptation. I actually think that's, you know, personally from my own interest, it's a good thing.

But I was wondering why you chose to stay pure. So in 2023, I said this is an important thing that I wish I did more of. In 2025, it's been pretty under-treated on the podcast. So how do you kind of reconcile that contradiction? The reason is, so the guiding principle of the podcast in terms of guest and topic selection and then question crafting is, can I create as much counterfactual value as possible? And in 2023, I mean, this was when you remember, there was some point at which the New York Times still hadn't written an article about chat GPT or something. And at that point, AI was just super underrated.

And I felt like screaming from the rooftops, like people need to take this more seriously. At this point, I think there's not much, there's not as much counterfactual value I can have by doing anything on it. Also, the preparation from like a technical perspective in terms of trying to get myself up to a basic level of competence around LLMs and whatnot, it's quite daunting. I don't think I want to interview a leader of an AI lab without having done. So that might be three or four weeks prep or something. Also, there's been like a general and dawning skepticism around LLMs and the scaling paradigm is the thing that will deliver artificial general intelligence. And I say this is a complete rank amateur, so people can take this opinion with a grain

of soul. But I, yeah, I've just been a bit skeptical of, I, I always both underrated and overrated, depending on which circle you're operating in. Absolutely. And in the circles you and I probably tend to operate in on Twitter, I think I've been a bit skeptical of some of the hype and that's been reflected in the podcast programming. No, no, I think that's fair enough.

As I said, certainly not my interest, and I'm going to extrapolate that as a single audience member, the rest of the audience feels the same, but I thought it was worth asking because it does seem to be ubiquitous, certainly on many other podcasts. Yeah. I mean, it's still a massive deal, I think, as a technological revolution. Do you use it at all in the production of the podcast? Absolutely. Yeah. For every episode, in various ways. Just for transcripts and research and... Definitely for polishing transcripts. Also for research. Yeah. Yeah. And say I'm preparing for an episode, maybe I'm driving to the gym or driving to get groceries or something. I can be talking to the AI in voice mode about particular concepts I'm trying to learn or... Yeah, I use it in all sorts of ways. Oh, great.

Yeah. Well, it certainly seems to have increased your productivity, even if it hasn't taken over the content mill. Yeah. So a lot of Australian podcasts, obviously, you know, they want to have an international audience, but I feel like they struggle to sort of constantly maintain the balance. Like, I'm going to interview this Australian thought leader, but I've constantly got to, you know, introduce them or talk about what hex is in an aside to keep the international listeners

on board, or at least, you know, clued up to the context. You've leaned very hard on the Australian side of that sort of divide this year. year. I was wondering, was that a deliberate decision, purely financial, because of what's what your interests are? Definitely not a financial decision. Originally it was, we had the election coming up. I was planning to, at some point, leave Australia and move now to the US, and I thought, in a very grandiose way, this could be, the policy series I did could be my sort of parting gift to Australia. Son-song.

Exactly. And I felt uniquely well-placed in terms of my network and just general knowledge about Australia and Australian policy issues to do that. And I guess from there, it's kind of carried on because I think it, I quickly realize this is very underserved. No one's really doing almost, I mean, I can't really think of anyone who's doing those kind of conversations

in Australia. and I should keep serving that niche. I guess the conundrum I'm facing at the moment is do I continue down the Australian public policy path or revert back to the general sort of intellectual path, which obviously has international appeal. And maybe this is kind of a cop-out, but I've sort of decided to do both. Oh, look, it far beat me to criticize, but I think it's definitely reasonable to spend time on the Australian market, you know, like many aspects in life, you know, we might be 15% of the American market, but, you know, we are far less than 15% of local content produced

about that are specific to our region. It does feel to me like, though, it's one of those classic public goods where, you know, if, you know, the ABC was, you know, fulfilling its mandate, this is a sort of content they should produce, you know, sit down long-form, individual views with Australia's best and brightest, and at least to my knowledge, you know, they don't seem to be doing it or neither any universities. Would you be open to any, you know, partnerships with them to sort of help get some either official branding or, you know, more support and sort of make a, make an honest podcast out of you? I've floated with the idea. I think the thing I struggle with is I'm pathologically independent and I don't want to be part of any institution where I feel like

my opinions need to be edited or censored. I'm not sure that's necessarily a massive problem working with an institution like the ABC or a university, but even just the niggling thought of that or the prospect, like the specter of that is enough to kind of turn me off and ruin my mojo. This year, I was like quite lucky to receive some very generous support in the second half of the year from a long-time listener of the show, Bill Manos and his foundation. So that's been incredibly helpful. That's probably the kind of thing that's better suited to my temperament and preferences.

And I guess sort of wrapping up the podcast section, on the quality versus quantity spectrum, you're definitely laying much harder on the former. I guess is there a financial reason for that? Is it purely your interest? Because I could imagine, you know, if you're sort of doing a weekly cadence and you're sort of crawling through every professor who's had a bright idea at some point, that might make it harder to get those superstar guests as opposed to what it is now where I wouldn't say Nobel Prize is compulsory for it to be on the podcast, but certainly quite helpful. Is that got plain to your

thinking about in terms of how many guests to book? Yeah, if I was purely optimizing for profit, I would be publishing a lot more and reducing the quality. But, I mean, temperament. mentally, I'm just, I'm not going to do that. I'll probably be dead in 70 or 80 years. I haven't been put on the earth to create sort of midwit slop. Like, I'm just not going to, not going to do that. Maybe we'll get to life extension in a moment, but you're certainly optimistic. But one thing I will say is I'm not at the kind of frontier where there's a strict

trade-off between quality and quantity yet. I could be publishing so much more at the same or even higher level of quality. My big bottleneck is post-production. So spending one to two weeks on average editing and producing and then marketing the episodes. That's been killing me at the moment. Like that's the main thing I need to solve right now. And solving that requires hiring a talented editor or producer who understand, my taste and the kind of editorial decisions I would make has extreme attention to detail

and then I'm compensating them appropriately to spend the time getting the episode right because I think this year I must have trialled five to ten different editors. I don't think the bottleneck there is necessarily talent. I think it's more funding. Like if I had the money, I could probably get the right person. Scaling a business is hard enough already. So you don't want to be bottlenecked on things like, compliance. And while achieving compliance can help you win bigger deals, enter new markets, and

deepen trust with customers, it can also cost a lot of time and money. By automating up to 90% of work involved in SOC2, ISO-27-01 and more, Vanta gets you compliant quickly. It also saves you money. A recent white paper by the International Data Corporation found that Vanta customers achieve $535,000 per year in benefits, and the platform pays for itself in just three months. A startup I worked at used VANTA, and I found it really reliable. Over 12,000 global companies like Atlassian, Replit and Cursar also use VANTA to manage risk and prove security in real time. My audience can get a special offer of $1,000 off Vantor at VANTA.com slash Joe. That's V-A-N-T-A-com slash J-O-E for $1,000 off.

This is the goal for next year. I should be publishing. Byweekly or weekly. Oh, right. Yeah. And with the right producer or editor, I can do that. Yeah. Yeah.

The three things I need to be spending most of my time on are booking the guests, which is a big task, researching for the interviews, which is the biggest task, and then recording the interviews. And from when I press, stop on the recording. Ideally, I'd outsource as much of that as possible. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense from a comparative advantage point of view.

Yeah. So stretching the definition of the year, little bit. One of your last episodes of 2024 had Nassim Talib. And that went, I would say, somewhat viral, at least viral in my neck of the Twitter woods. Although for not entirely positive reasons, I would say something to do with negative probability. We don't need to go into that here. But I was interested from the business side of you, is that a positive moment for you going viral, even if it's maybe not for the right reasons? I guess so

I mean yeah I guess it's the any publicity is good press thing but I guess there are better and worse forms of going viral for the wrong reasons and if it's going viral because I've said something crazy

that's probably a save it for part three of the bottom that's probably the wrong reason It's going viral because it's sparking a conversation on Twitter about negative probability. Look, I won't lie. It was pretty niche even for my text. It's not the worst scandal of anyone's ever been adjacent to. Fair enough, fair enough.

All right, well, I thought we'd go over the episode numbers. I think you've got the total, is it listeners downloads, minutes listen to? Yep. So this is the one segment where I'll... I'm handing over control back to Joe. That's right, that's right. So this is for each episode, the total downloads across all platforms. So that's audio, substack, Twitter, and YouTube.

So I thought maybe I could just share the top three episodes this year in terms of downloads and views. Sure. Can you, firstly, can you guess what they might be in order? I would assume the number one is Francis Fukuyama. Okay. In terms of the second third, probably Ken Henry, because I know he was popular when he was last on the podcast. And then in terms of the third, look, I think this is where it gets down to the brass tacks of, I guess, which Australian you like the most.

But I would say potentially the Hugh White walk through history as having a fairly universal appeal. So you got one out of three. It's terrible. Which one was I right on? You're right on Hugh White, although not the ranking. Just putting my phone on an airplane. So the third most popular was the Greg Kaplan and Michael Brennan episode on productivity.

Fair enough. The second most popular was Hugh White. And the most popular, which was a dark horse. and actually became the most popular in the last month or so was Barry Marshall. Really? Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

That was a good talk, but obviously outside of the theme for the year. Yeah, yeah. Do you have any sense of what made that one shoot up the leaderboards? Yeah, so it had a second wind on Twitter where Steve Pinker shared it and a bunch of other people wrote fulsome endorsements and shared it. And so that drew a lot more attention to it. So it really can be as much as one or two superstars retweeting you and then it's off to the races.

Sadly, yes. Yeah. So that was one of the, that was probably in the bottom half of episodes in terms of popularity until that happened. Now it's number one. I mean, it obviously does have a kind of international appeal and it's a great story. And, you know, 50% of the human adult population have age. Pilari.

Yeah. There's obviously also a bias towards episodes that have been published a longer time ago. So I think Hugh White might eventually overtake the Barry Marshall one, but at the moment, that's the top three. Oh, great. Yeah. All right. Well, let's dive into the content of the interviews, and maybe around the halfway mark, we'll keep things a bit more lively with a game of overrated or underrated to steal an innovation from Tyler Cowan. Yep.

So, look, a big thing, I would probably say the big theme of the year was trying to explain Australia's exceptionalism. Having listened to 30, maybe probably more than that, hours now, I kind of feel like I've got more questions and answers. I guess the main answers seem to be have a good culture and maybe a side helping of, it's good to have a lot of land. Is that a satisfactory conclusion for you? So what role do you see the large amount of land play? I think in terms of just having the wealth from mining, the wealth from housing, the fact that we're had the ability. to, you know, add that as a production into a factor of production into a production function helps explain a lot of our wealth, especially early on with the agricultural side of things.

Like, obviously, we managed to avoid a commodity curse, which we might not have in a different universe. But certainly the good culture thing stands out as practically the strongest explanatory factor, which in turn just says, what causes good culture. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think, unfortunately, it's a pretty boring explanation, but I think it's some combination of those two things. Obviously, the good culture is upstream of a lot of more interesting proximate causes, like the good economic management and whatnot. But yeah,

as a first approximation, I can't really do better than that. No, no, it's fair enough. It seems like a big question mark itself, which at least you've got plenty more podcasts left to unpack it. There's a famous study in economics that looks at the correlates. between height and performance amongst NBA players. And perhaps surprisingly, at least surprisingly, for a non-expert like myself, they actually find a negative correlation that within the NBA, shorter players tend to have slightly higher performance than tall players. And this is not to say that height is an important basketball.

Obviously, that's not true. But it's an example of what's known as selecting on the regressor. If you only look at a... portion of the sample that's at the top of the field, you might be missing dynamics that filter through the rest of the population. And so one question I had was, are we doing, or has the series of investigations into state capacity suffered from a similar issue? Because we're looking all about Australia. We're looking at the NBA of high state capacity. Is it possible that instead of comparing, say, different prime ministers, different states,

different departments, we might have come up with different answers if we'd looked at, say, the whole OECD and said, what makes Australia so much better than the UK, for example, the US or France? Yeah. No, I think that's a really fair criticism. Peter Bowers and I, in our literature review on Australian state capacity, did a bit of comparative analysis where we looked at Australia against other OECD countries. So I feel like, sort of outside of the podcast, I've thought about that.

But, yeah, yeah, I think it's dangerous to select on their aggressor. I guess, and this is perhaps a bit more speculative, but like, if you were to think about what is the height of state capacity, what is the one thing about Australia that it's so ubiquitous that we have it so deeply, which makes us a fairly well-run country, but it's so ubiquitous that we don't even notice it's there. Do you have any thoughts about what such a sense? think could be. So what is height for Australian state capacity? For me, the kind of dark matter to use a physics metaphor of Australian state capacity is the political culture of faith in the administrative

state and obedience towards impersonal authority. Maybe you could just summarize all that in one word is statism. But I feel like that. So when political scientists look at state capacity, they usually differentiate three different dimensions. It's like extractive capacity, how well can the state extract resources to do what it wants to do? So through things like taxation. Secondly, coordination capacity, which refers to the kind of Weberian bureaucracy. And then finally, compliance capacity and we've got a lot of all of those but the compliance capacity really stands out like there's a population that trusts its government that complies with its government you know better than me from the Victorian lockdown experience but when the government

asks things of the population in Australia people tend to to go along and make things easy Yeah, that would be my, that would be the first thing I would think of. How does that sit with you? I think that makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I was thinking about how would we multidimensionalize state capacity as a concept. And I think when you look at sort of the body of work you've done, there are some aspects that Australia is clearly a world leader at. So one aspect that I think we do well at is sort of big technological.

complicated projects such as single-touch payroll or the whole MyGov system, which I think actually work really well. I've lived in the UK and we do much better than them and all these sorts of big technological projects, the RBA's payment system I would add to that. I guess one area where I think we probably fall down, and this is probably the flip side of that high compliance, is that sometimes we set up a bunch of experts to run public policy and And we sort of don't question them if they start to go off and start making policy errors or start making mistakes.

And so, you know, the examples, you know, I'd say for this is like the planning system. We've devolved planning to a whole bunch of, I guess, architects and urban planners. And I think it took decades for us to wake up to the fact that they were probably stoking a massive housing shortage. You know, I could tell similar stories and some of your guests have about the reserve bank, making mistakes and sort of taking a long time to be corrected. And so I guess obviously it's great to have a compliant population when you want to put them in lockdown, but perhaps they're the severe cost of that when you sort of say, look, the experts

have it right. Don't bother questioning them. And then so even when they make mistakes, it takes a long time to pick up. Yeah, yeah. Nothing else is a good point. So maybe this podcast is part of the sort of antibody to that, you know, because, you know, what you want to do is have experts like Richard Holden, Stephen Hamilton, on, you know, they're, they're very good at shouting out when experts are making the wrong

decision about, I guess, vaccine procurement and giving them a bigger microphone is part of that, trying to ride the balance of that ship, I guess. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So several of your guests, Greg Kaplan and Ken Henry come to mind, seem quite concerned about congestion effects, potentially outweighing the agglomeration effects that big cities provide. I was wondering what your thoughts were on that. Because when I reflect, I used to live in a high-density housing in apartment in South Yarrow, which is sort of the Yimbian-perfect dream world of lots of apartment buildings.

I feel like I actually added very little to congestion because I rode, walked, or maybe caught the train everywhere and suffered very little from congestion in return. So how do you think about that trade-off between agglomeration versus congestion? Yeah, I was always prima-facedly kind of skeptical of that claim. And obviously it's an empirical question, and I'd love to see more research on this. This has been on my kind of long list of things to go deeper on ever since those two interviews you mentioned. The reason I'm primarily facing skeptical is firstly for the reason you mentioned, which is in those kind of higher density environments. You're getting around through walking or cycling or whatever.

Secondly, maybe it would be a congestion effect on net if you held, like, infrastructure equal or something, but you don't have to hold infrastructure equal. You can increase infrastructure as well. And that's easy to do in a dense inner city. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because the economies of scale. So, yeah, I'm, I'm not, I would be surprised if the congestion effects outweigh the agglomeration effects, but I would love to see some empirical research on this.

Are you familiar? Sorry, are you aware of any? Look, I did do a bit of a Google when I was thinking about this question. I wouldn't say I saw a, you know, there was no studies on Australian cities, that's for sure, that sort of suggests that, you know, Sydney is too big for its boots and we need to send everyone out to Port Macquarie. But what literature I did find about the US suggests that there's still, you know, if you scale it roughly to Australia, plenty of room to grow and benefit from those agglomeration

benefits and have some, you know, if you do the urban planning right and you put the houses in the right place, congestion doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem. I guess stepping back, when you're like, you know, if we're talking about Ken Henry and Greg Happlin, probably two of the smartest economists, you know, Australia has produced in quite a while, is it tough to push back when you're like, geez, I don't know, my gut feels this is wrong, but like, in the space of a real-time interview, how do you push back on, you know, some of the smartest people certainly in the room? Yeah, Ken was a bit different because it was a live event and we had sort of time constraints

and a lot of questions you want to get through. And that's one of the shortcomings of the live event format. I think with Greg, it's more just this is an empirical question and I don't have the information. So it's sort of one of those things that you just let go through. through to the keeper and then make a mental note to do some more research on that or something. I will say, though, and I think this is interesting talk about, I think there are potentially other good reasons for the let's densify other cities like Camber or potentially even build new major cities. So one might be, you know, we talk about the benefits of federalism and the

laboratories of democracy. We don't really have, it's kind of a sham version of that here. I mean, really, it's a sort of end of two. Yeah. Just from a kind of hyacian, you know, let people vote with their feet perspective, it would be cool if we had more major cities. And then secondly, following on from that, it would be cool if we had more major cities so that cities could be more specialized.

Yeah. Push back on me. Yeah, no, no. I'll take the opportunity. I guess, I mean, we've done that with Cameron. with no old bite. We've given them half the APS, the Army headquarters, the National Institute of basically everything is, you know, situated in Canberra.

It's in such a bad location, though. Wow. Blame the planners and not the free market economists to put there. Imagine if we had Camber been in a better location. Look, I'm sure you could improve the location of camera. I can't argue with that. But I just feel like, you know, we've given Canvra so much. And it's still what, half a million people?

Like, I mean, I guess it depends on where you want to draw the line of what is a city. But I think if, you know, you're optimistically saying we want, you know, 10 new cities of a million people, which I think Ken Henry sort of mentioned off the cuff at one point, it would be hard to think of a, you know, a place that's got more support with Camberra. And it's still, I would say, it's essentially still a government town, you know, one of the industry town. It's hard to fight against the fact that, you know, people want to live with other people and, you know, it's hard to convince a million people to set up shop somewhere completely new and trust that everyone else will do the same. Yeah.

I think we'd, and again, this is something best answered, not through a podcast conversation, but I think we'd want to be a bit careful about how we interpret the Canber example. So for a long time, the federal bureaucracy was housed in Melbourne, right? And then the size of the Commonwealth bureaucracy relative to the general population has maybe had a point of inflection in the kind of post-war era. So maybe you want to start the clock from there or something. And then if you think about Canberra's population growth from that point, maybe it is actually a success story. Yeah, I mean, we shouldn't be too harsh on camera. A lot of very fine people live there.

Like, given a few more decades, could Canberra hit a million? What's its growth rate? I don't know. It's a good question. If we had a, you know, we could pause the podcast here. We'll consult the ABS tables and find out. Look, there's no doubt that, you know, Canberra now is at least A town and it will always be there and, I guess, continue to grow. I guess one question I have is how much can the government do to change that?

I know the UK, this is coming from all my cut UK questions, but they're trying to do a similar thing with, you know, perhaps an even more extreme problem instead of an end of two. They've got an end of one, which is London. And I think they moved their national statistical agency out to Cardiff. And from talking to British economists, they say everyone was upset by this except for like the half a dozen Welsh statisticians who are like, this is great. I'm moving home and keeping my fantastic job at the Office of National Statistics. So, I don't know, I feel like we're always willing to undersell the benefits of big cities. You know, you want to move to a big city, an even bigger city than Sydney, you know, whether it's the UK or the US. You know, I used to live in London and was fantastic.

Lots of aspects of London life that, you know, are better than what Melbourne and Sydney can offer. even with the UK's low state capacity. And I think, you know, those benefits are really real. And we should, you know, we should be careful before we sort of throw them all away and say, no, no, we're going to sail completely upwind and start something fresh. Obviously, you know, cities can specialize, but you know what? Some of the most specialized industries are in, you know, the biggest cities of the world, the New York's, the London's, the L.A.'s.

I just think, you know, sometimes you've got to trust the people and the people want to move to a big city. Not everyone, but quite a lot of people. And for the record, I'm on your side. I just think it's interesting to entertain the opposing arguments and really stress test the idea. Yeah. Well, look, I don't think Canberra is going to be abolished anytime soon,

so we'll always have that guinea pig out there. So for context for the other audience members, Joe and I first met in 2019 on Twitter, arguing over whether house prices were a bubble or not. Perhaps the most Australian way to meet someone. Just missing the barbecue. That's right. That's right.

But I think in your policy saloon with Peter Chulip, you confess that you'd change your mind, or at least admitted that that 2019 forecast was not right. What else have you changed your mind about this year based on the talks you've done? And I guess if I could maybe focus it down, has it changed how you vote, invest, or live your life any other way? And I should say, so at the start of that conversation with Peter,

I gave it kind of mere culper and expressed my gratitude to him for changing my mind on this. You should be one of the other people on that short list of people who have changed my mind on that point. So the question is, what else have I changed my mind on as a result of episodes done this year? Yeah, okay, let me pull up the list of episodes and look, through them. So, I mean, there's stuff that doesn't neatly fit into the category of what have I changed my mind on, but it's like stuff that was a big update or something new I learned. So, for example, with the Abil-Risvi episode, I didn't realize how much weight our policymakers had placed on slowing the rate of population aging as a rationale for immigration policy.

that was like the main motivation for the 2001 changes. Right. Definitely undersold in terms of it's as a message to the people in terms of the justification. Yeah, absolutely. And I want to do some more on that. I'm planning to do some stuff on immigration early next year. I just, I don't know how much the population aging stuff really matters. It's often framed in these kind of eschatological terms, as if,

you know, there's kind of this impending, like, judgment day where we're not going to be able to support ourselves fiscally. And I just don't know. I think it's one of the great things about demographics is you can accurately forecast them many years in advance. The problem is you can't forecast almost any other aspect of society. So productivity growth. Exactly. Yeah. AI or just, you know, general demand. So, look, you know, I think it's reasonable to be concerned about an aging society and the demands that might place on our health care system and residential system. I think there's evidence, or mathematics to show that migration slows that process down,

but obviously can't reverse it because as people come here, they age themselves. So, yeah, to be honest, it is not clear to me whether that's the best way of optimizing our immigration system. I suspect it's not optimal in a number of ways, but maybe we'll find out more next year. Yeah. Peter Chulab episode was the site of my biggest intellectual update this year. All right. Yeah. Tell me more. So for me, this was like a huge red pill moment. No one else seemed to pick up on it. I mentioned it in my, this was the highlight I pulled out in my kind of eight things I learned

Roundup of the Policy Salon series. But the question I put to Peter was, if we could implement a maximally ambitious deregulatory agenda, so get rid of all of the kinds of planning restrictions he's worried about, how long would it take for supply to accumulate sufficient to bring prices in Sydney and Melbourne down by, say, 30 to 40% relative to the counterfactual? And you can argue whether 30 to 40% should be the goal, but I guess on common measures of affordability, that is what you would. want to aim for to make housing affordable in Australia.

And Peter's answer was 10 to 20 years, and he kind of extrapolated that using his and, is it Trent Saunders rule of thumb around, what is it, like a 1% increase in supply reduces prices by 2.5%? Something like that, right? That was a huge red pill moment for me because I think it showed me that this problem is not going to be solved anytime soon, maybe even within our lifetimes realistically.

And that was on a maximally ambitious deregulatory agenda, which is much more than the National Cabinet's target of 1.2 million homes over five years. And even that we're not going to achieve. That is a very ambitious goal. So that just showed me that the, I think the rhetoric around the, I think YIMBY is good. at the margin, we need more homes. Like, we've got to do this. But a lot of the rhetoric around the Yimbi agenda is this being the kind of solution

or silver bullet to the housing crisis, I think is wrong. And if we actually view this as something we need to solve urgently, saying like maybe you don't want to solve it too urgently, right? Because then you can have financial and normal house prices falling by 20%. You don't want too much negative equity. Well, not falling by 20% again. Yeah, exactly. So you don't want to solve it too quickly.

quickly because you can cause those macroeconomic problems and financial instability. But say you wanted to solve it in under three political terms or something, I don't think you can do that under a YIMBY program. And so that's something I'm trying to write something on this, but I think like all of these questions, like all of the things holding us back economically, things holding back our productivity growth, like housing would probably be the first. cab off the rank, right, have much more urgency in a world in which Australia doesn't have a great power protector. And that sounds like such a crazy kind of longbow. But I think all

these debates are going to become, like the stakes are going to become much higher. And you want to act now when you still have the option because, yeah, geopolitically will be isolated, will be in a region where the great power is not an ally of ours, and you want to have a really strong growing economy. If I could... And so, sorry, and so that means you want to solve these things. Like, we should be aiming to solve things quickly. Yeah, yeah.

And we're not going to solve the housing crisis quickly. No. If I could channel Peter Chilip for a second. Yeah, please. Bear with me while I get up my divining folks. I think he would say, look, if a policy lever is relatively weak, That just means you have to pull it all the more harder. And so to the extent that full yimbieism only gets you, you know, maybe half the problem solved,

well, then you better not dilly dally around half yumbiasm, you better to go full yumbizism and then investigate what other positive fixes might be required on top of that. And the second point, I just add, aside from my channeling of Peter, so the Grattan Institute's actually got a new report out that looks at the costs of housing, and especially in Melbourne where the prices are substantially low. find that it's a lot of projects don't pencil out, like the economics, even with planning approval, often doesn't stack up in a lot of different parts of Melbourne. And so perhaps the companion piece of that full Yimbieism is a real examination of what are the costs going

into our construction sector and how we can bring those down. But I guess that's a podcast for another day. Yeah, yeah. And one of the first questions I asked Greg and Michael in the podcast said with them was just how big of a lever for suppliers construction productivity. Yeah. Because if planning's only going to get us, like removing planning regulations only going to go so far, what other levers do we have? Yeah. Yeah, there weren't too many other big updates. I always learn things through meeting guests and consuming the interview. I mean, in many ways, it's an iterative process of learning. Yeah. Yeah. And I learned things about the guests and the kinds of people who end up in the positions that the guests held or hold.

But, I mean, maybe one, one interesting one with Fukuyama was that it was clear that he just, you know, he's working at Stanford, one of the major, if not the biggest technological revolution of our times is happening right under his nose. And he hadn't given much thought at that point to the implications it has for his work. Yeah. And it just shows, you know, even our, like, our greatest public. intellectuals can be slow to update on things. The ivory tower can be very high and very far up in the sky.

Yeah, I think he's since done a lot more stuff on AI. And maybe I'm being unfair to him because he is just like very skeptical about the concept of AI generally. So if he were here, he might fairly push back on me. But at least that was a kind of thing I learned talking with him. On the topic of transparency, I feel like we got two different takes from Peter Costello and Ken Henry. the reform of the GST because Peter Castillo came out, you know, said, look, you really have to

restrict information. You have to keep everything bottled up, you know, once Cabinet is, you know, ready to be told, we'll tell Cabinet, and then we'll spiral it out from there and really control the flow of information, whereas Ken Henry placed a lot more emphasis on needing long-term legitimacy, coming through transparency and institutional trust, which seem a bit in tension with me. You know, you're a treasurer who just wants to jam things through and sort of orchestrate the whole show. Yeah.

Whereas Kenner Henry seemed to want to value. the buy-in from both the broader population and, I guess, other actors in the government. To what extent do you think these are in conflict, these two views? Probably not much. I think it's a sequencing thing. So you want buy-in from the general public at a kind of conceptual level, in this case around a broad-based consumption tax. And that started as early as the Asprey review, which was tabled in 75. But then obviously we had Keating and Option C at the Tax Summit in 85. And so for two, and a half decades this idea had been socialized with the public. But at a conceptual level,

I think Costello's point is more around a specific tax change proposal. And yeah, I do think you want to probably keep that pretty bottled up until you're ready. Because otherwise you have, you know, what we saw with Turnbull, where before they could even consider that policy, they had to kind of rule it out because it was like to remember the proposed change to the, maybe they were going to thinking about increasing it to 15% or something, and Skoma was for that, and he might have leaked it from Cabinet, and so then they had to rule it out. God. Yeah.

I might be getting the facts wrong, but I think that's what happened. Sounds messy. All right, let's shake things up a bit with a game of overrated or underrated. All right. Credit to Tyler. Yeah, credits of Tyler. Feel free to interpret the context as opposed to the baseline up to you, and we'll otherwise go through them. All right.

Orcas, overrated or underrated? Overrated. Overrated. Why? Probably underrated within, or rightly rated within my circles, but overrated generally. Because I think the critics, including guests I've interviewed this year, like Sam Rogavine and Hugh White, are probably right that the US isn't going to make good on its promise. And like the analysis there is pretty compelling. Yeah.

Fair enough. London, I can only assume overrated, since you did not move there. I think it's now pretty underrated. Yeah, having traveled there, I think it's one of the great cities of the world. No, no, I can't disagree with that. Maybe better to visit than to live. Maybe visit during summer, and then it's perfection. Productivity statistics, overrated or underrated?

Oh. Slightly overrated? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think obviously politicians like to talk about them and, you know, journalists like to talk about them. But especially once you see how the sausage is made, I suspect it's hard to put as much importance on them as a lot of the talking heads do. Yep. The likelihood of a U.S.-China conflict, overrated or underrated.

underrated in the sense that we should be public intellectual should be wiring about this a lot more yeah that seems a reason self-experimentation underrated or overrated underrated I won't uh I won't inquire any further I think you can, you know, the obvious critique is, oh, end of one, but I think there's actually a lot you can learn through self-experimentation.

There are a lot of hypotheses you can generate as well. It certainly helps with the paperwork. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Barry Marshall being a great example. Yeah. The baby bonus, underrated or overrated? Underrated. Why is that?

This is one of the few instances of the developed country increasing its TFR. and fertility declines are one of the great problems of our time. We should be taking much more interest in policies to move the fertility rate. Australia's use of international students as a migration pipeline, underrated or overrated. A bit overrated now. Yep. It's obviously caused a lot of, and you would know this better than me, but a lot of issues at universities around the quality of education.

I think we also have a problem where, I mean, the kind of vision was these people would ultimately put on a path to permanent residency and then citizenship. I think that doesn't happen for a lot of them. And it's kind of just a glorified form of cheap labor. Obviously, that doesn't describe the majority of these migrants. But so that's why I'll say only slightly overrated. Fair enough. What do you think? Look, there's a lot of heterogeneity in terms of... You know, different universities, different courses. I think as a way of filtering out, you know, the best and brightest,

it's still got a lot of value add. And so it's, I guess, as an economist, you always say, well, what's the alternative? I don't think we're going to, you know, take the hundreds of thousands of students we get to every year and cut to zero. I guess the question is, could you do it another way, possibly? but in terms of attracting people who are both smart and willing to fund our universities that at least takes a few boxes

even if it maybe technically breaks the Tinberg rule. I think at the time it was a stroke of policy genius to do it, yeah, but I think it's just it's caused a lot of problems. The thing with immigration policy is you have to manage perceptions as well, not just the reality. Which I think is something that Australia gets a lot of credit for in terms of, well, they don't let illegal immigration, you know, they clamp down to

that through a lot of, you know, legally, immorably dubious methods. Yeah. But that, you know, at least historically has managed to correlate with high support for legal immigration. Yeah. Now, maybe that was just luck, but, you know, a lot of people argue that the former leads to the latter. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. National buying is important, and I think in some ways we were lucky it didn't fall apart at the last election. National buying is how you get more immigration in the future. Yeah. I agree.

Australia's National Cabinet, underrated or overrated? The National Cabinet, obviously referring to the group of the Prime Minister and Premiers. Yes. I think at the moment it's a bit underrated. It's proven to be a really effective

decision-making for him. And it's still in its early days. That's true. Hopefully, plenty more crises to come that will get our best brightest together. The Commonwealth Treasury, underrated or overrated? Commonwealth Treasury.

Well, you could substitute with this with the Treasury View. Yeah. Capital V. Yeah. Hmm. My kind of inner wonk wants to say slightly underrated. Because is that the correct answer for someone who wants to interview more Treasury Secretaries?

Because obviously the Treasury view is not always taken at the Cabinet level. That's true. That's true. Maybe you could have a different ratings for their microeconomics versus their macroeconomics, which I think, was it Terry Moran who loved his macroeconomists and was a little less enthusiastic about microeconomic commonly. So I feel like that. Maybe that's a perfectly respectable view as well. Saying this is a macroeconomist.

Yeah, completely unbiased. The advent of AGI, underrated or overrated. What do you mean? Well, the fact that it's imminently going to appear in the next couple of years and, you know, transform the world. Is that idea going, you know, underrated or overrated as a probability? As a probability overrated. Yeah. Yeah.

Is that because you don't think it will happen or you just don't think it will transform the economy and society, even if it does happen? A little bit of both. So I think I would be surprised if it happened by the end of the decade, very surprised if it happened by the end of the decade, even if it did, I don't think you see a kind of shift to utopia overnight for some of the reasons we've talked about on the podcast in the last couple of years, the sort of bowel-cost disease type arguments, but all of the human, social and institutional constraints. Like there's obviously that for people who don't have any sort of context on this,

there's a distinction between coming up with a new technology and then that technology diffusing through society and us finding ways to harness it economically. Yeah, and I think we're already seeing very slow spread of AI in terms of the labor market and job loss. So I think that's likely to do. I mean, that's what economic history teaches us, right? Yeah, yeah.

Although I guess every revolution, every crisis is different. That's right. Maybe there's something about AI, which helps with the defense. itself and like it's it's noteworthy that self-diffusing technology yeah and and it's noteworthy that i think chat gpte was one of like the fastest growing um internet consumer products in history or whatever and but but yeah i think i think it's still it's still not going to diffuse as as rapidly as some people think life extension underrated or overrated underrated

why is that people people people are way to accept of death. Do you think you'll get that extra 80 years that you've claimed at the top of the episode? Yeah, I mean, hopefully longer. But yeah, I think where it's still too, the idea of trying to extend life and have agency over your death is still like weirdly taboo in normal society. I think it's quite normal in places like San Francisco, but yeah, I think it's underrated.

Fair enough. Nuclear weapons for liberal democracies, such as Australia and Japan, underrated or overrated? Becoming less overrated. So it was a bad idea, but maybe less of a bad idea today. And is that just because of the rise of China and they're using a conventional forces in the region? It's becoming increasingly less credible that America's extended deterrence, the nuclear umbrella, would be a credible deterrent for us, for anyone looking to attack us and think in that world you've got to make really hard choices. Fair enough. The Thuclidity's

trap, underrated or overrated? Thucydides trap is probably overrated. And is that just because Times have changed and we're in a new paradigm. I think there are dynamics and it's pointing at a pattern in history, which is that where a rising power threatens the position of an incumbent power that usually results in war. Obviously, the name Thucydides Trap refers to the Pelopinian War between Athens and Sparta, where Athens was the rising power and Sparta was the incumbent. Yeah, I think as Hugh said in the interview I did with him,

there's just so much contingency involved in these kind of decisions and events that anyone who thinks to deterministically about history and geopolitics is making a mistake. So for the kind of reference group I have in mind, I think it's a bit overrated. And finally, and I kind of don't know how this could be overrated at all, the Australian cabinet handbook. I would say prior to listening to your podcast would have received the lowest possible rating, and I'm guessing you think it should be higher? Massively underrated.

So doing that interview with Glenn and Terry gave me a renewed love for the cabinet system of government. It's beautifully malleable. I think it can adapt well to crises, and I think it's maybe one of the explanatory factors for our high level of state capacity relative to other countries. And the functions of cabinet and the prime minister are not found in the constitution or in legislation, but we've kind of documented them through the cabinet handbook. And it's just so interesting. I mean, the government copps a lot of flack for being inefficient or whatever.

And people always talk about how the government should be learning from the private sector. It's interesting to kind of flip that lens and just look at what can we learn from this institution that's evolved over a century. It's served us through times of crises, through world wars. Surely they have some pretty robust processes and things we could learn. And all of that is documented in like plain English in about 40 to 50 pages available online, Cabin-Hamble. It's just so interesting. Even just like questions like, okay, so if the prime minister's role and functions aren't defined anywhere, what is like, what is the actual institutional source of their power.

Like, it's not just social influence over their colleagues. Like, when push comes to shove, what are the actual levers available to the prime minister to exert their power? And you learn through the cabinet handbook that some of the main levers are the ability to, as in there, in virtue of being chair of the cabinet,

to determine the agenda. Because obviously stuff that doesn't get put on the agenda can't be decided upon. Yeah. And secondly, probably their ability to determine the cabinet committees, because some of those committees at the moment, the parliamentary business committee and the National Security Committee can make decisions without needing cabinet approval. But also by the prime minister can take a kind of divide and conquer approach.

So you can set up these smaller committees. You can kind of work on things in the margins of the committee, come to agreement. And the committee does all that decision making. and then cabinet, the full cabinet is kind of just a clearinghouse for a lot of work that's already been done. So that's like another way the PM can kind of get their way. That's all really interesting stuff and that's what you learn through reading the cabinet handbook. Very underrated. It was interesting in your chat on the cabinet process. I think it was Glenn Davis mentioned that the cabinet system reforms around every prime minister. But I'm guessing

that their power within their party or their ministry also varies and fluctuates over time. So, you know, Anthony Albanesey today is a lot more powerful than he was, say, just after the voice referendum. And that presumably is reflected in, you know, his ability to set that agenda and, you know, rule things in or out. I was wondering, did you talk about that with any, or do you reflect on that with any of your interview subjects about how it fluctuates over time? How it fluctuates not just between prime ministerships, but within prime ministerships. No, it's a good question. We didn't look at that.

But, yeah, that sounds plausible. I'm trying to think through examples from reading cabinet diaries and reading Pat Weller stuff on Malcolm Fraser's prime ministership. I can't think of ways in which prime ministerial power changed over time, but surely it's happened. Yeah. Even just, I mean, it's learning on the, learning on the, it's crazy, isn't it, how there's no, there's no induction, there's no course, you just get thrust into this. So surely even just from the perspective of learning on the job, they, they would, you would think they would gain power.

Well, you'd hope that, I guess, that shadow cabinet at least offers some, some sort of training ground, even if it's obviously devoid of all power and responsibility, at least the process of coming up with decisions and proving policies that you're taking. to the next section offers some insight, but obviously you're still diving in on the deep end once you get sworn in. Yeah, yeah. Francis Fukuyama stated in his chat with you that the most dysfunctional organisations are the ones that don't delegate enough authority.

But then when Richard Holden was citing examples of the many ways that the US is terrible, such as at the DMV or with pot-all repair, they were all examples of institutions where it seemed like the local managers were either out to lunch or at least somewhat corrupt. These two views seem in like direct tension with each other. Is it just the case that we're never going to come up with the theory of state capacity that's universal in nature and we sort of should just, you know, analyze each situation, each country in a different lens? So I don't think they're necessarily in tension because you've only stated half of Fukuyama's principle.

This is straining my memory a little bit. But I think he said something like the most effective organisation. are the ones that delegate decision-making to the extent that you have capable individuals that you can delegate to. So, for example, the Fed or the Reserve Bank of Australia can do a lot of delegation because you have a crazy proportion of PhD economists in the organisation. Maybe if you're the DMV, you can't delegate as much because you don't have teams of PhD economists working in your organisation.

So, I don't think those are intention, but with respect to your general question about can we have a general theory of state capacity? I think probably not as much as we would like. I think there are definitely some general principles that would apply across countries. But yes, so much of it is tied to the culture, the dark matter that we've spoken about and sort of path dependency and historical contingency that I think it's quite high. to, I mean, for example, America's in just a, to go back to that obedience towards government cultural trait that seems to be present in Australia. America's just in a totally different

equilibrium. You can't just transplant Australian institutions and features of state capacity in America and expect them to work. Yeah. I think that's right. Yeah. So if a abundance-pilled US governor was to call you up tomorrow and say, you know, what are the secrets of your high-capacity state of Australia, what would you tell them? Switch to a Westminster system. Break out the constitutional reform immediately. No, it might be something around, let's see, maybe something around evidence-based policymaking.

We do that really well here, whereas like so many of their think tanks or a case of whoever pays the piper determines the tune, There was when Pete Bowers and I were writing that literature review, there's a kind of funny example of a gambling reform debate happening in America and in the policy debate they're citing evidence from the New South Wales or the National Productivity Commission in Australia because they just don't have independent policy organization, as many independent policy organizations they can trust over there. So, yeah, might be something around, yeah, like, setting up more, like, independent institutions that can produce evidence-based policy or something. It's funny. You wouldn't usually think that America lacks for think tanks and policy walks.

It's, I would say, historically, something that Australia lacks. And we've got a few now that are relatively new that I think do really good work. But do they have an equivalent of something like the Productivity Commission? I'm not sure about an in-house research thing. Like there are plenty of PhD economists who do work in the US. The Federal Reserve is full of them. Whether they, churning out those sorts of problems, I guess they've got the GAO, the government accountability organisation.

Yeah. It might be the wrong acronym there. But they produce government reports. I'm not sure if they hold up to Productivity Commission reports. I don't think they get the sort of referrals from my treasurer who says, study X, and I will hopefully implement some version of X, which I think is also important. Yes, you want reports to be written, but, you know, there's people ever churning out ideas, which are varying quality.

You need a, I guess, a culture of treasurer saying if the Productivity Commission says something, I'll listen to them seriously and I won't accept everything, but I'll give them definitely the time of day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's something I think Australia definitely does have, but maybe is part of the reason why we've got that high state capacity. Yeah. It's a good question, though.

I don't know what else you'd do. I mean, it's hard, isn't it? Well, it's tough. I mean, it's very hard to turn a ship on a dime. Yeah. But, you know, there are clearly examples from Australia out there that, you know, other countries I'd like to think would be able to learn from just as, you know, we constantly look at America and learn what to do, what not to do.

But, I mean, the big problem I think they have is just the, the risk aversion in the bureaucracy and the kind of procedural fetish, which is a function in part of the risk aversion, because everyone's trying to protect themselves legally. It's obviously a much more adversarial legal environment. But I don't know how you, I don't know how you change that. I think, was it Terry Moran who wistfully complained about being ruled by economists as in Canberra? I think the only thing worse in being ruled by economists

is being ruled by lawyers so maybe the solution is to hire a few less lawyers and hire a few more economists although you might that's the advice you can't say what they are what they should do although can't vouch for the effects

once you end up getting sued under the US legal system could get a bit hairy there all right well I think that brings us to the end of looking back are there any other aspects of the interviews you wanted to touch on Do you have a favorite or a least unfavorant child you wanted to reminisce upon?

Hard to pick a favourite child. I think I enjoyed all of them. And yet I'm going to ask you to do so. I do feel like some of them didn't get a full Guernsey in the chat because someone like Andrew Lee, you know, answers your question with information completely and then sort of, you know, there's no more, you know, The answer is fully formed and complete, citing Australian Dardy. And you're like, well, that's the answer moving on. Yeah, he's pretty amazing like that.

I particularly enjoyed preparing for the Hugh White episode and trying to read all of those 11 books, which I didn't get to do, but I read a lot. Because there's just no other context in which that would be a responsible use of my time. But I feel like it set me up with a lot of intellectual capital, sadly, to understand the next couple of decades. All right, let's move on to the year ahead. So I think you've already mentioned

your planning to up the tempo of episodes. So hopefully, yeah, if I can solve this bottleneck. Yeah. And what sort of guests, do you have any on the docket already? Or who would your dream guest be for 2026? Someone I've been trying to get for a while is Paul Keating. Because I think we could do a great interview. And he's in his,

early 80s now, so I want to do that as soon as possible. I've got a few kind of on the cards. I probably won't announce them because things can happen. None to the files in the can. Yeah, exactly. But generally I'm going to do the mix of Australian public policy content and then the general intellectual stuff and just see how far I can take that kind of bifurcated approach.

and I'll have like a labelling system where I differentiate those two kinds of content on the podcast, different number, different numbering system or something. So I'm going to keep doing both. But yeah, I won't give too much away about guests booked in, but PJK is definitely someone I've been working out for a while and hopefully I can pull that off in 2026. I'm sure I'd have a lot of strongly held opinions. Absolutely. So I think this chat has been at least quite cathartic for one listener.

Have you ever considered adding like a listener's rant to either the end of the episode or maybe to as a separate drop or even as a substack, I guess? Because I feel like you've probably got a pretty smart audience. Thinking about it in a sample size of one. And, you know, many of these questions came from me, you know, listening on the train and thinking, God, can't believe they said that. Outrageous. If only I had an outlet for my frustrations. Fortunately, you've afforded me one today. But I was wondering, have you given any thought to opening up and maybe, you know, either

you summary, or perhaps even AI summarizing, how listeners react to the episode? Obviously, you don't want to, you know, completely rubbish your guests, but I feel like that would certainly add to the dialogue. I guess we were kind of trying to do that with the policy salons. People can always take to Twitter or the comment section on YouTube. I always got a lot of email, always got a lot of comments on Twitter. So definitely express your questions there if you have any. But no, I haven't thought about creating content around that.

Maybe I should. Would you regularly rant if I had that outlet? Oh, look, on a topic of that I held strongly opinions, I'd dash off an angry voicemail. I guess it goes back to what you want the pod to be. Why do you think I should? What would be a good reason to do that? Look, there's nothing people love more than the sound of their own voice and the sound of their own name. You know, the quarterly essay, for example.

Yeah. Great institution. Great institution in Australia. It has not just an essay, but also responses to the previous months. And I think, you know, look, ranty on Twitter is great fun, but my assumption is, you know, approximately zero. people will ever read, you know, any reply, any quote tweet, either that's the same 10 people reading the same tweets over it again. And I guess if you want to build up a sense of community and, you know, get people to engage, I mean, that's one avenue through which

they could do that. It's good, yeah. I should think about this some more. Yeah. Yeah. I guess the real question is, how much effort is it to, you know, either summarize views or read it together. But if people would have sent in their own voicemails, I guess that's at least done the, you know, you already got the audio clip for you. And whether you put it out on, I guess, the main podcast feed or maybe even sort of have a side feed, I guess you always want to be incentivizing your customers to come back. And if I have to, you know, sit through some science podcast to listen to the hot takes on last week's economics podcast, that would certainly incentivize me to do so. Yeah. It's a really interesting idea. That might be my next original contribution to the field of podcasting.

Fair enough, fair enough. All right, well, thank you for being the subject today. Any final thoughts on the set of the pod before we wrap? No, just thanks so much to everyone for listening to the show. It's just a privilege to be able to do this, to be able to call this my job now. And that's, of course, thanks to the audience. So very grateful.

Thank you. And thank you, especially to you for today, for putting in the work and doing this. It's been a fantastic conversation. No worries. Thanks for having me. And we look forward to next year's content. Great. Done. Thanks, Zach. Thanks. Cheers. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, you can support the show by leaving a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or by subscribing on YouTube. Thanks to this episode's sponsors, you can find them in the episode description.

And thanks to Bill Manos and the Manos Foundation for their generous patronage of the show. If you'd like to become a sponsor or patron, you can go to j-nwpod.com slash sponsor. or email me at joe at jnwpod.com. That's joe at jnwpod.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time, chow.