Hello, everybody, and welcome to the latest Eukis Itel podcast from the UK in a changing Europe.

I'm Joe Rutter. I'm a senior research fellow here.

And this is the first time I've been let loose to interview anyone on our podcast. I've been on the other side of the microphone.

But I'm absolutely delighted to be joined today by Dmitri Grzabinsky, a former Australian

trade negotiator, founder of Explained Trade, and also a great new book called Why Politicians

lie about trade. And that's what we're going to be talking about

for the next half hour. Dmitri, it's great to have you with us on the Eukis podcast.

You start your book by saying you have to care about trade policy. But do we really? Life's

quite short. Why am I caring about trade policy if I'm just a punter in the street?

Unfortunately, and I very much sympathize with anyone who doesn't want to care about trade policy, most days I am firmly in that camp.

Unfortunately, there are some really big decisions coming down the pipe that our leaders are going

to have to make about how we use the tools of government to address challenges like national

security, climate change, the imbalances in our economy, the inequalities in our economy.

And those are going to be really big decisions that affect our lives,

our livelihoods, and those issues that we care about. And so with the sort of general consensus

about trade that existed over the last decade, decade and a half fading and these issues rising

to more salience and becoming more pressing, we unfortunately are going to have to get a little bit more engaged

if we want to follow along and be active participants in the way our countries are governed.

Okay, that sounds like hard work, but we will be exploring that

and hopefully making it much simpler for people over the course of the next half hour.

So having decided that trade matters, that we have to care about trade policy,

why did you decide it needed a book by you?

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