Some thoughts on reading a profile of yourself in your hometown paper

The Sydney Morning Herald ran a profile of me this weekend, written by Michael Koziol, and I want to talk about it — partly because it’s a strange and wonderful thing to (metaphorically) open the paper you grew up reading and find your own mug plastered on it, and partly because Michael managed to articulate the Platypus Economics origin story better than I have in two months of trying.

Also, the headline calls me Steve Irwin reincarnated as an economist, and honestly? I’ll be dining out on that for the rest of my life.

Yes it’s AI. Here’s the tell: I would never get that close to a croc. As for alligators? Weak sauce.

Crikey!

The piece starts out describing my first attempts at talking directly to the public:

Okay, maybe I’m lying a little bit here. I do give a 💩. Deeply. I want to impress you, my subscribers. But, not with the performative smartness of the ivory tower: I want to earn your trust with honesty, directness, and analytic insight.

Platypus Economics is a passion project: I want to teach the world economics. To do that, I’ve had to learn a different way of being an economist, so that I can reach folks where they are. (It’s rarely a university seminar room.)

It’s not just radio, television is also “going the way of the horse and buggy” as it contends with the streaming revolution. And Michael captured the part of this story that genuinely keeps me up at night: the liars, spivs, and (ahem) purveyors of misinformation figured this out years before the rest of us.

If you’ve ever wondered what I sound like on the phone, that’s it.

And there’s a big idea that animates Platypus Economics: The answer to bad actors winning the information war isn’t to simply complain, but to show up and compete.

The profile also touches on something I don’t talk about much: the version of this story where the 2024 election goes the other way, and Platypus Economics never exists.

I won’t pretend I’d have been sad about that timeline. But since we’re living in this one, the question that…