Hello, welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kiss.

And this is the show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing

about.

At trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts.

We ask the experts.

Our fantastic expert guest this week is an Australian economist, the CEO of lateral economics,

and a self-styled general pontificator.

Nicholas Grown, welcome to Tregonacci. Hi Constantine, hi friends. It's great to have you here. Listen, for those people who don't know you, just give us a little overview of who you are, what's been your journey through life. How are you where you are?

Okay, so let me just say that my brother, well my father was quite a prominent economist in Australia and my brother

and I had two, both of us had an ambition not to become economists and we both failed, not just me.

But it's an important part of my story because I knew,

I got an intuition about economics long before I studied economics

and I found, I went and worked for our

industry minister a guy called Senator John Button in the 1980s worked on car

industry policy and I found to my dismay that economics was being used not as a method of thinking

but as a badge of tribal identity.

If you were trained as an economist, you knew what you thought. of

a tribal identity. If you were trained as an economist, you knew what you thought before you checked out the subject.

And I've, I've realized now that the company that I started many years later which I called

lateral economics I actually have given a paper called lateral economics

a brand or a method and I think it's a method and it's the way I go about things which is to stay away from pre-cooked

conclusions whether they're in my discipline in any other discipline or in politics or anywhere else.

...