Luke Fehily is the Director of Innovation Policy at Progress Ireland — an independent think tank backed by the likes of the Collison brothers — that’s on a mission to connect Ireland to proven policy solutions from around the world.
Before joining Progress Ireland, Luke cut his teeth in both public and private sectors, developing a unique perspective on how to navigate bureaucratic challenges while maintaining ambitious visions for change. His current work spans housing, infrastructure, and innovation policy, with a particular emphasis on meta-scientific approaches to research funding and development.
In this episode we discuss why Ireland should embrace techno-optimism, how to beat the NIMBY challenge with win-win solutions, why young scientists need more research funding, and MUCH more. Plus, we even touch on drone coffee deliveries (happening now in Dublin) and the things needed to unleash Ireland's entrepreneurial spirit.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
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Highlights
Politicians ‘try’ to change the world by talking about it - but street-level bureaucrats actually implement…
“Now, some things that are common between, say, the American or the British and the Irish systems are that you have, at one level, a speech act, which is to say that politicians don't actually do anything. They change the world by talking about it, they declare something, they pass an executive order, as you might've seen recently, or they pass legislation, which is just words on a page. We can act as consultants to make sure that the speech act itself is well-optimized to achieve a critical outcome. You remove vagaries, or exhaustive to make sure, let's say incentives are aligned by the people it's supposed to look at, and so on. But then that policy is actually breathed into life by a whole cadre of street-level bureaucrats, so they're the people who actually downstream the speech act, do something differently in response to it.”
Protecting Labour and Protecting Capital can sometimes be at odds
“…the presence of unions, and I think a very strong prioritization of labor has made Europe uncompetitive in that sense too. I know anecdotally from some companies in America that they don't wish to very heavily invest in more jobs in Europe, because the layoff procedure is so expensive, for example. And this is partly driven by the presence of unions. I don't know exactly how it interacts with the Irish system, I know that change in the third level sector, which is the one that I pay most attention to, is sometimes difficult to achieve because of the unions, but it's impossible in some senses to strike the right balance between the protection of capital and the protection of labor.”
Some economies can leapfrog infrastructure advancements
“…it's a well-known story, about the Irish Postal Service, An Post. So it was one of the last postal services in the world to effectively digitize. And the reason for that was because the postmen and women on the ground were so good, you could write Mary Kerry, and you'd send it from New Zealand that it would end up where it was supposed to go. But when all of these people retired, I think that was the late '90s or 2000, they were confronted with a problem where they had to digitize a really archaic system, and they were probably one of the last countries to redo this. But because they had hadn't done anything, they were able to implement a system that was much, much more sophisticated than anywhere else. So they could learn from the mistakes of everywhere, and say, "Look, we've incorporated all these learnings, and we can go with the next generation of solutions." And now Ireland's postal system is, again, one of the best in the world, but not because you've got people on the ground who have a perfect memory of every [thing in] the country.”
The power of Metascience 🔬
“So meta-science is... It's being popularized and implemented in the UK and the U.S., and in a few European countries. And what it involves is turning the scientific method of experimentation and testing, and making a change, and evaluating that change back on the process of funding and conducting science. So for a long time, different procedures for funding science arose naturally. Somebody say, "Oh, we'll disseminate funds through a grant-making process, and we'll have a call, say, and then we will give out money to the best applicants." But it was not done rigorously, it was not... Nobody tested to see, "Is this the actual best way of funding science? Does this produce the most…high-impact papers, patents, expert PhD students who are graduating into really, really good jobs, or spin-out companies?" What's the best way to fund science to optimize for all of these outcomes?”
Books Mentioned
Where the State Meets the Street by Bernardo Zacka
Transcript
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Well, hello, everybody. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. Today my guest... I have spent time with Luke Fehily, who is the director of innovation at the Progress Ireland, an independent think tank to connect Ireland to proven policy solutions from around the world. You're specifically looking at housing, infrastructure, innovation.
Welcome, first off, but let's level set for our audience who might not know what's been going on in Ireland, because Ireland really was a remarkable transformation for the country. You sort of jumped the line on traditional development, it's typically the Ricardo's advantage of various nations. You start agriculture, then you move to manufacturing, then you get the services. But you've formed partnerships in Ireland with large, primarily American tech and pharmaceutical companies that have wanted you to be... From going, as my Irish brother-in-law would say, "As the redheaded stepchild of Europe, to being one of the kings." One of the highest per capita incomes in the Eurozone.
Luke, welcome. And let's talk a bit about how that happened.
Luke Fehily:
Well, thank you so much, first of all, for having me on the podcast, Jim. I've been an admirer it for some time, and friends with Julian Gough, who was recently on an episode. The Irish Mafia are slowly working their way up through the American media. It's great to see.
I suppose to address your first point about Ireland's very rapid economic development, it's unquestionable that we skipped some steps. We went from a peripheral rock on the edge of Europe with no natural resources and a very low GDP per capita, and a declining population from the famine, right through to the middle of the last century, into what is, not just on paper, but in practical senses, quite a successful country, with a booming GDP per capita.
Now, this was achieved primarily through attracting in very, very large volumes of foreign direct investment, and that was principally from America. This was done in two ways, one of our former ambassadors to the U.S. Stanwell Hall called transparent corporate tax regime. And it is very good, but also a very strong investment in human capital. So from the '60s, and maybe a bit earlier, right through to now, there has been large investment in the secondary and tertiary education sectors, principally providing labor feedstock for a multinational sector. And this has had many tremendous spillovers.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So then let's talk about your goal. You talk about some... At least in our conversations, I've been very impressed by some of your ideas for moving it up to the next leg. So let's talk about Progress Ireland. Why did it get started? Who's interested? And as I mentioned, your specific goals, at least as I understand it, are addressing housing, infrastructure, and innovation, and I want to go through each of those in turn. But what was the founding myth, if you will, of, "Hey, we need a new think tank called Progress Ireland, and it's going to have these objectives"?
Luke Fehily:
Yes. Yeah. Okay. I suppose all new institutions have to satisfy some vacant niche in an ecosystem or something like this. And the vacant niche that we identified was in policy ideation in Ireland. There are a couple of problems in our political system, these are, generally speaking, resource constraints on particular actors. So we don't have think tanks, we don't have people whose job it is generally to sit about and think about good solutions to certain problems. We have a very active and busy political core with a couple of parties, and these are politicians, modeled on the British system. And then we have a very active set of officials, and these are the people who develop, and bake in, and come up with various policy solutions.
But they're so, I suppose, involved in the practical implementation of policies that sometimes they don't have the opportunity to look around, and see what other ideas have made tremendous progress in other jurisdictions. If you're talking about founding myths, there's a great founding myth for... I think it was the National Defense Research Committee in the States. It was Bush for the National Science Foundation, and he was trying to connect civilian scientists into the defense forces during the early days of the second World War. And making some progress through the standard bureaucratic hurdles, but once the Nazis had invaded France, he was like, "Well, we don't have time to mock you around anymore, we really have to get very serious about joining everything together." So he, through FDR's uncle, got an audience with the president, went into the Oval Office with a one-pager outlining this new institution that he had designed. And within 15 minutes, FDR wrote, "Okay. FDR." On the top margin. And then that was the story.
We didn't exactly replicate that when we pitched to our original funders, but there is some kind of analogy there, we said, with a... We were filling a vacant niche with connecting ideas, and it was a very short one-pager.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
It's like the Gettysburg address here in the United States that Abraham Lincoln so eloquently gave, they use it... There's a meme that uses the length of the Gettysburg Address and its impact, which was huge, length was very short, impact, huge, and then compared it to some modern political speeches here in the United States. And I've got to say, we're degrading.
Luke Fehily:
There's an economy of language that is as important as the economy of politics, and I think sometimes... But particularly, you'd be late on a Friday, working through a 150-page report, and you'd wish that they had been... Like Nietzsche had said, it would be much shorter to read if it were not so long.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Right. Yeah, that's the story. I can't remember the writer, but he apologized at the beginning of the letter for saying, "I apologize for how long this letter is, but I didn't have the time available to make it shorter."
Luke Fehily:
Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So what I'm hearing is, you had all this acceleration in Ireland due to these IP partnerships with big international companies, but it sounds a bit like Ireland right now sort of lacks the institutional muscle to nurture domestic industries, infrastructure, et cetera. And so one of the goals of your think tank is to sort of be an external module, I think that's something I read in your material.
Luke Fehily:
Yes.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And sort of bypass the bureaucratic constraints and turf wars, et cetera. So my question is, great idea, loved that idea, but how do you do that? How do you practically abored the bureaucratic constraints? Because you're working with the government in Ireland, obviously, and bureaucratic turf wars, misaligned incentives, et cetera, do you have any legal or political vulnerabilities that you've prepared for?
Luke Fehily:
That's a very good question, Jim. There's a lot in it. I suppose if we take one step back, what we're trying to do is remove constraints on economic growth, which are insufficient housing supply, and poor infrastructure, and then drive innovation which will grow the economy more generally, this is the fuel that goes into the engine.
So when we try to help the people who actually do the work, who actually implement policy, or who make very difficult political decisions, there's a number of ways that think tanks have historically done this, and then we have a different way to cut through the bureaucratic morass, as you put it. So think tanks traditionally have either worked to change the Overton window, which is the set of acceptable policies that people think, "All right, that's fine. You can go ahead, government, do that, that's no problem." But if you try and do something outside of that, then there can be very serious political costs associated with implementation.
So if you're a standard think tank, you might try and release material that drags this window one way or another, and therefore, make your particular policy objectives more palatable to most people. That's not as big a problem, that would be very standard in the UK and so on. And then there's a version of this that Alec Stapp in the Institute for Progress talks about. He has really good podcast, I think Richard Hanania, called Practical Progress in DC. They talk about how to shift the Overton window with a Twitter first-approach, targeting almost particular elements of the ecosystem with short, but very persuasive arguments.
Now, the way we have gone about it instead, because we're a lone actor, Progress Ireland is pretty much the only think tank, it's not as if we have an enormous group that can drag the Overton window one way or another. And many of the ideas that we're pushing are already perfectly salable, their supply side reforms, which are not unpopular, it's just the implementation side is quite difficult.
So what we have done is try to identify, and meet and be open to very effective actors within the system. There's a common misconception that the public service or the government sector has been bled dry of any talent by booming private industry, and there's just nobody with any skill left at all. And that's not true, not even slightly, there are plenty of very talented people, but they might be subject to certain constraints from a risk averse atmosphere, or they might be curtailed by what exactly they can say, how they can interact with other parts of the system. Even if they're downstream of a particularly big... A more powerful entity, then how they interpret that can also be subject to certain political pressures.
Which means that if they would like something done, we can sometimes, from an external perspective, achieve that much more quickly, or without the same constraint, and then feed that research or that outcome back to them. Supporting them like a... I think the phrase I used to use first was offensive linemen, that's an American football thing. And the extent to which I know about American football, it's that these people work to clear blockages for others. So we have some great colleagues in the civil service, and we work in so far as we can to clear blockages for them.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Fascinating approach. And does that subject you to... At least here in the United States, when a government changes, and then the... Like we just had, a new party, has taken control of the various... Now, we're organized differently than Ireland, obviously, we're a constitutional republic. But are you trying to help people who are in service but associated with a particular political party? Are you trying to make sure that it doesn't get lopsided to just one particular party getting all your research, and the other one going begging?
Luke Fehily:
Yes. That's a very good question, and it's almost easy to explain from first principles when you look at the Irish political system. So we're a parliamentary democracy. If you're more familiar with the UK, that is roughly speaking our model. But because our voting system is quite representative, we have a thing called proportional representation, single transferable vote. It tends to lead to coalition governments, so we have, as of only a few weeks ago, a government composed of two quite large parties, so two of the largest three parties, in association with a group of independents. And what they do is, they form a government with various ministries or departments, and these oversee civil service departments that are like an inline assembly, act on certain policy portfolios.
So we have a party that has a minister for, say, research, innovation and science, which is a role that I'd be particularly interested in, and reporting into that person are permanent non-political actors, so civil servants who have long-term contracts, they have great job security, many of the benefits, but they are professional generalists who rotate throughout the departments but work on a particular project for a particular minister at any given time.
Now, some things that are common between, say, the American or the British and the Irish systems are that you have, at one level, a speech act, which is to say that politicians don't actually do anything. They change the world by talking about it, they declare something, they pass an executive order, as you might've seen recently, or they pass legislation, which is just words on a page. We can act as consultants to make sure that the speech act itself is well-optimized to achieve a critical outcome. You remove vagaries, or exhaustive to make sure, let's say incentives are aligned by the people it's supposed to look at, and so on. But then that policy is actually breathed into life by a whole cadre of street-level bureaucrats, so they're the people who actually downstream the speech act, do something differently in response to it.
There's a really good academic I quite like in MIT called Bernardo Zacka, who wrote a book called Where the State Meets the Street. And he was looking at U.S. health policy on scheduling and things like this, and how the actual appointment centers in various clinics set the appointments. And the legislation itself was almost orthogonal to how these people were behaving. So they would make their own moral judgment in any given situation, and that became the policy as lived. So when we go about helping people, we can have either at the speech act, legislative stage, or feed in maybe to ideas within the system, that's through op-eds, or consultative work, or we can help in the street level bureaucrat stage, where you are downstream of what was decided, but there's still so much to be filled in in determining how this gets implemented.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
That makes sense to me. Are you feeling any of the tremors of what we in the United States would call the vibe shift away from... At least here in the United States, and in some other countries as well, there's been a precipitous decline in the public's faith in the capacity of the state, and the intelligence of the state. And I guess what I'm asking is, how do you reconcile your meta-scientific technocratic approach with this widespread distrust of, for lack of a better word, experts, and/or officials, et cetera? Or are you not experiencing that in Ireland like we are in the United States?
Luke Fehily:
No, no, I think we're not experiencing it like it's being experienced in the U.S., but that's not to say we're not experiencing it in some other way. There are a couple of parts to this. The first is maybe the decrease in the state's capacity. This is the perception that the state is less capable than it used to be for a variety of reasons.
Now, in the UK, that is a widespread belief I think among a lot of political commentators, and it's mainly attributed to a human capital problem that you don't have the right people in the right positions, and even if you do, they're told that they can't do certain things for bureaucratic reasons. And there are commentators like Dominic Cummings or Lord Adonis, who would've been part of the Labour Party, who attribute this to a move away from political appointments. So they might think that political appointments à la the U.S. is actually better, because you can staff certain positions with people known to be competent.
And Cummings lays a lot of this at the feet of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report, which came out in the middle of the 1800s, and moved the UK civil service onto a merit-based appointment approach. Trevelyan's name might be familiar to you, actually, from the The Fields of Athenry, they stole Trevelyan's corn. He was the civil servant responsible for, not just famine relief in Ireland, but at a later stage, this broad scale Whitehall reform. So we could blame them for at least two big things there. Now, in Ireland, I don't think there's that same sophisticated critique of the civil service system. I think it has performed quite well over a long period of time. We have seen, as we mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, very significant growth economically, and an undeniable and huge gain in living standards, such that Ireland went from third world to first maybe Lee Kuan Yew, might say.
So there's not the same, I suppose, resentment. We haven't seen managed decline in Ireland like we've seen managed decline in our nearest neighbor, but the general distrust toward the political system I think is growing, partly because we've imported that vibe, if not, that analysis from the States. Elon Musk tweets a lot about Ireland, for example, disproportionately about Ireland, and this might be because we have a large corporate presence in Dublin and in Cork. There could be other reasons, but those interesting takes are filtering through into the public consciousness, but they haven't been reflected at the latest election. So is largely speaking, unchanged. So maybe the mood has shifted, but not the politics.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Not the politics. But you mentioned the British Civil Service, the UK civil Service, I was doing some reading to get ready for my chat with you, and I saw a line that... My friends in the UK, I've often heard variations on it, and it was, despite this move to merit for people being appointed permanent appointments for the people doing the real work, not the politician doing the speech, but the line I read was, poor performers in the British Civil Service are not sacked, they get moved sideways. Do you have a similar problem in Ireland?
Luke Fehily:
Yes. I mean, the fundamental feature, I suppose, that your British friends are identifying is quite a large bug, which is that civil servants have gold-plated job security. And even if there is quite poor performance identified by their manager or by somebody else, they really enjoy impregnable security, and then they can be sacked. So the best thing you can do is move them onto a new project. And we also have that, so we have some features of that problem.
I think where it ends up most, I suppose, insidiously represented, I'm being somewhat careful in how I phrase this, is, think about your... The Taoiseach, the Irish prime minister, and you want to set up a new department that's dealing with the most pressing problem. I don't know what it is, like climate change, you pick whatever you like, and you say, "We can resource this new department in multiple different ways, we can either hire all new people, which would be quite difficult and quite costly, or we can move people from the other civil service positions and departments into this new department, or we can do a combination of both them." And maybe there are other ways to do it as well. So if you want to use the combined approach, say, where you take some maybe very senior people from other departments and put them into this new department on your top priority, you'd think, "Who are the people that will be moved?" And if you are in another department, and you're leading that department, and somebody tries to requisition your staff, it is unlikely that you willingly let them requisition your best staff.
So rather than just maybe moving people sideways generally within your own teams, when a top priority is identified, and a reorganization follows, I think a lot of people are incentivized to, should we say, offload deadwood from their own teams. So it's really difficult to well-resource a new team in, I think, any civil service that uses this model, for the simple reason that everybody wants to stock all of their worst people into this new entity. And it's very, very challenging to work around that. Of course, then when people inherit it, they try their best to bring in really good people to counterbalance it, but it's certainly not a trivial problem.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah, and you mentioned FDR with the one-pager, and I was interested when I was reading about him and his views on unionization of federal workers. Historically, Roosevelt is seen as one of America's more liberal, more progressive presidents, and yet he was vehemently opposed to allowing federal United States workers to unionize. He wrote why he was so opposed, and it was essentially for avoiding problems, just like you have just described to me, and yet it was allowed. And right now, in the United States... So for example, in the U.S., we have a very powerful teachers' union, and you already see some fights bubbling up from opposition to truly innovative ways to augment student learning, et cetera. Now, full disclosure, I always say I'm talking my book, and so I'm talking my book, because we are investors in the Synthesis school, which is AI tutoring, but has always been looked at as a bolt-on, not a replacement for traditional education. But I've got to guess that you're facing similar problems in Ireland as well, no?
Luke Fehily:
Yes. Yeah, I think these are Europe-wide problems, I think. Lagarde, who's the governor of the ECB, the European Central Bank, and von der Leyen, who is the president of the EU Commission, had a very interesting op-ed in the Financial Times just yesterday or the day before, where they sort of held their hands up and said, "We made Europe uncompetitive. We have regulated in many different dimensions to reduce the competitiveness of the continent, or of the bloc, and this includes not just very onerous environmental legislation, and there's... Some of my colleagues work closely on how to get more houses built in Ireland, and this can interact very negatively with quite stringent environmental, legislation, for example. But the presence of unions, and I think a very strong prioritization of labor has made Europe uncompetitive in that sense too.
I know anecdotally from some companies in America that they don't wish to very heavily invest in more jobs in Europe, because the layoff procedure is so expensive, for example. And this is partly driven by the presence of unions. I don't know exactly how it interacts with the Irish system, I know that change in the third level sector, which is the one that I pay most attention to, is sometimes difficult to achieve because of the unions, but it's impossible in some senses to strike the right balance between the protection of capital and the protection of labor.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And that's also a common view of the EU in the United States, especially with entrepreneurs, business builders, et cetera. And for example, we invested in a company, a European company, that was attempting to do kind of a Y Combinator in Europe, and we're still invested, but they literally had to shut down for several months because of EU regulations. And it seems that memes are our quickest emerging way to get to what people are really vibing to, if we want to say what that term about. And I'm sure you've seen the one that have side-by-side EU, and it shows a water bottle with the top on being able to not be removed, and then on the U.S. it shows Musk's rocket being landing, and the chopsticks grabbing it.
I mean, it's a funny meme, but I think one of the reasons it works is because it is reflecting a lot of people's actual beliefs as opposed to their stated beliefs. How do you deal with what, at least from an American point of view, is the onerous and incredibly restrictive regulatory environment that the EU, primarily Brussels, promulgates, and that you have to live under in Ireland?
Luke Fehily:
Yeah. How do we navigate, I suppose, the European laws that we, and as an EU member state, have had our part in shaping? So Ireland has fed into many of these regulations-
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
… Fair enough.
Luke Fehily:
... as have 26 member states. I think that harmonization was one of the major objectives of the EU, that they wanted to create a market whereby goods and services to a flow across borders, and this meant that regulation need to be harmonized, but the, I suppose, temptation when harmonizing regulation is to make one superior regulation that covers everything, and this places compliance costs that on each national actor to try to meet this new criteria. And then when this is done across many, many different jurisdictions, and the temptation is always to make it the best-in-class regulation because this is your best speech act of the day, this is all you get up to do, you can go very far.
Now, it's hard to know how you can, I suppose, work around this. If it's created by the EU, then it must be changed by the EU. It's at a level that is legally superior to anything that we can do nationally. So the mechanism by which we are incorporated into this super-national structure is that the EU treaties sit at a level... Well, somewhere around our constitution. So it's above the parliament, we must implement EU law, or we must comply with it, and the proviso is then obviously that we get to shape it.
Changing it is very difficult, and there is an emerging progress movement in Europe. Progress Ireland, we're a small unaffiliated think tank that work on these three areas, but there are other groups, other non-aligned groups who are popping up all over Europe, some in Brussels, and some in other member states who are concerned with the same problems. Not just how certain types of regulation can negatively affect economic growth, but also, how do we get much more value out of the science that we're trying to do? The science in the EU is a really big topic, how do we get more value? How do we get more innovation out of this? And how do we properly tackle, as a bloc, competitiveness, and say, the great climate concerns that other people have? Yes, to answer your question, I think it is... A unified approach is necessary, it's very difficult as a member state to affect significant change, unless you're dragging the Overton window around as a very recalcitrant small nation, which Ireland has been known to do in the past, but hard to do that on everything, I guess.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And it reminds me when the Euro was first being introduced. I was invited to give a speech in London, primarily about investment methodologies, but one of the first questions that I was asked was, "Do you think that we should give up the pound and go on the Euro?" And honestly, I wasn't surprised by the question, because it was obviously in much discussion internationally, and particularly in Europe. But I chose to answer the question in kind of a cute way, which was, "Well, I can't ever see the United States of America letting any of our neighbors in North America have control over our currency, or over our treasury." And here's what surprised me, the room exploded into thunderous applause. And that's when I learned that I was basically touching a third rail when I was over there in London, because I had no idea how strong the opposition was to giving up the pound, and how deep... And this is the question I'm getting to, how deep some of the ancient animosities ran.
One fellow came up to me after the speech and said, I'm going to say it the polite way, "If you think that we would ever surrender our sovereignty to the expletive, expletive French or Germans, you're out of your expletive mind." As someone from the United States who loves Europe, and goes there often, and have a ton of European friends, I have in fact noticed that some of those ancient animosities are still causing kerfuffles and dust-ups. How do you navigate those?
Luke Fehily:
The national frictions. Well, first of all, I should say that it seems you passed up a very promising career as an after-dinner speaker in the UK, you could have been going on entertaining audiences for the rest of your life with speeches like that. I think there are interesting nation-to-nation relationships. I mean, the Anglo-Irish relationship is very, very long and very, very complicated, made more complicated by having a jurisdiction in Northern Ireland that is unique, as far as I can tell, in most contexts.
There is, I think, a hegemony among maybe the old guard of Europe, the French, and the Germans, and the British, and then their histories can sometimes come to the fore, but I think it happens less frequently than external observers would imagine. The actual bureaucrats, so that the bureaucrats who have their permanent jobs, and work, to my mind, quite seamlessly with each other, and maybe their... Nations have different priorities, and this pulls in one way or another, but the institutions themselves function very well.
Now, where Europe is moving in the next couple of years may see a different type of international tension emerge. For example, Poland, there's a lot of really good writing about this, Poland's economic performance has been exceptionally good over the last 30 years, putting to shame, I think, some other nations in Europe who had a better competitive advantage going in, and historically, much more wealth. But these, I suppose, incumbent winners looked with some kind of suspicion on Poland's terrific performance.
And there's another very good article in the FT today or yesterday by Janan Ganesh about the rise of Poland and the Mediterranean countries like Spain and Italy, who only 10 years ago were really doing very, very badly post-financial crash, and are now contenders as the major economic powers, and maybe the major political powers are of the bloc. So I think the inversion of maybe the historical hierarchy here could lead to new tensions.
Ireland has a different role in all this, we were never, I suppose, a major economic player, we had extensive diplomatic goodwill by being friends with lots of people, therefore, one reason or another maybe declining, but perhaps the world is just evolving differently. But Ireland also supplied a lot of very senior Eurocrat civil servants. So the top of the European Civil Service was an Irish person for about 15 or 20 years of the last 30, which is very unusual for one small nation of four million people to have supplied a top job. First it was think David O'Sullivan and then Catherine Day, really exceptionally capable people. So our integration with the bloc has been profound, but also our benefit from the bloc has been miraculous. You can't walk through an Irish train station without seeing a plaque on the wall that says, "Partly funded by the European Union." What little infrastructure we have has been built bricks and mortar by European money. And I think everybody here is delighted to contribute back into that project now. There's no Euro skips of any major strengths in this country.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So let's start diving into the three problems. So let's start with housing. Now, you have a project where you're hoping that 150,000 houses can be built. When I looked at it, one of my observations was, it seemed to assume linear scaling. And one of the things that I wondered about... I love Ireland, I spent a summer there as a child, and had some of my most formative experiences while living there as an eight-year-old. One of the reasons for that is because of the incredibly unique Irish worldview, if you will, and... I love the old story about the guy when asked... They asked a farmer, "Do you believe in Pucas?" Which, for those who don't know it, are mythical creatures in Irish mythology. And he pondered this for a minute, and he goes, "No, I don't believe in Pucas." And then he paused, and he goes, "But I suspect they don't believe in me either."
But the point is, the Irish truly are unique, and maybe this is just my American Irishness coming out. But do you think that there are unique Irish cultural factors that could derail the housing 150,000 home project, or no?
Luke Fehily:
Yes. I actually think one of the most serious, I suppose, cultural issues that Ireland faces is the exceptionalism that you've just touched upon. So when Ireland encounters a problem, very frequently, it is a problem that has been encountered by another problem... Or another country rather. And that other country may have encountered it sooner, and therefore may have come up with a solution sooner, and maybe there's a lot of benefit or profit to be had by contextualizing that solution for Ireland. Where you can come across a significant amount of sentiment that would be like, "Well, it would sooner work on the moon than it would work in Ireland." Because Ireland is unique in every sense. There's no news translating policy solutions from X, Y, Z country here, because everything is just... The people are different, the land is different and so on.
And this becomes quite interesting when you look at Irish land law, which is very... Well, its basis is very similar to the British land law, it was copied over in many senses at post-independence. There were changes made and new acts passed, but in broad strokes, it is quite similar. So when an experiment is run in Britain and they try to bring online, I don't know, 150 homes through a new scheme, and you make the case that, "Well, if they tried it there, and almost everything is identical, we should try it here." Yeah, you've seen it come across this Irish exceptionalism.
Are there other cultural barriers to, I think, increased densification? Which is perhaps what your question gets at. So changing the landscape, or changing the style of Irish cities is perhaps necessary to deliver more homes? I think people are rightly suspicious that this can be done in a way that's sympathetic to what we already have. So people are reluctant to give up on the unique character of The Irishtown. I've been in many places in the world, and nowhere that quite feels like home, and not just for sentimental reasons.
And I think people are rightly suspicious of this, but by no means is it impossible. But I think the... Needs to be done, and one of my colleagues has done a lot of work on this, is to try and incorporate this increased delivery of houses in a way that is not disruptive to the visual amenity of our current cities. So either you change land use regulation, or you try to replicate the old and very beautiful Georgian stock, housing stock of Dublin. And then the aesthetic is the same, you don't necessarily need to build modern skyscrapers to increase the density of urban living in Ireland, there are many places in the centers of cities that have one-story houses, for example, that were built in the latter half of the last century. So they're not protected structures, and they're not particularly providing accommodation for lots of people either. So you could build something that was being built in the 1800s, or a replica of that, and achieve a very pleasing streetscape, at the same time as increasing your accommodation provision by a factor of 10.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And just staying with the idea that sometimes you can get mismatches, like, Portugal builds metros cheaply, for example, but they have astronomically high youth unemployment there. And the procurement system in Ireland, as analyzed by the OCED, you're spending about... And correct me if I'm wrong, if these are old figures, you're spending about 7.7% of GDP on procurement, versus 12.9 in the average OCED country. And then things, again, back to housing, the procedures divided into lots, 14% in Ireland, 30% in the average, this is according to the EU Single Market Scorecard. And the one that caught my eye was awards to the cheapest bid, in Ireland, it came back with 12% verse 56% in the EU membership countries. How do you negotiate those types of problems?
Luke Fehily:
Yeah, but public procurement is a very complicated issue. Ireland has not, I think, done particularly well in certain public contracts, so there's an ongoing large political scandal associated with our national children's hospital, which is a new state-of-the-art facility in and around a pre-existing hospital in the west of Dublin. And it's supposed to be fantastic, best care in the world when it's completed, but it was budgeted at, I think, roughly half a billion euros, and is now over time and over budget by very significant margins, such that the accusation was leveled at the government that it was the most expensive healthcare facility in the world.
Now, this has recently been... I suppose, there has been pushback against that characterization, and you would wonder why... And for example, talking about the memes again, where you were saying the EU with its bottle caps that I have to live with every day, and the SpaceX catch, which I unfortunately don't get to live with every day, but there's a meme in Ireland that goes around of the profile of the national children's hospital not yet finished, and the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, and asks, "Which was more expensive to build?" And it's the national children's hospital. Which is this tiny squat, it looks like Newgrange in the images.
There have been a lot of inquiries to figure out what exactly went wrong with public procurement, and whether it's a contract problem, or it's a delivery problem. And I think most of our analysis would suggest that it is a delivery problem, so that there are... There's insufficient expertise on the side of the government manager in controlling and making certain decisions, such that you end up with quite significant rolling cost overruns that were not in the original bid. The problems and the overrun of the cost is introduced after the public procurement process is almost completed, and then it's the second half that we have to focus on.
Now, Sean Keyes is another one of my colleagues, looks at this and says that, "Well, you end up with that gold plating." Because if you are a government manager that doesn't quite know what the difference is between, I don't know, a stairway that's... I don't know, 200 centimeters, and a lift that's whatever many centimeters, then you don't know what these things are supposed to cost. So it's very difficult to push back against a contractor and say, "This change is not necessary. That change is necessary. We don't want to deviate from the original plans, because every time we do, it costs more money." So I think that's actually much more closely linked to the human capacity problem we talked about earlier, in relation to generalists serving in specialist functions, and merit-based appointments and so on, rather than the contracting. I think the contracting on it is reasonably solid.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And the other thing I just wondered about when I was looking at your proposals, which I found very intriguing, was opt-in street planning zones. What mechanisms do you have in place to avoid... Here in the United States, we have the NIMBY crowd, not in my backyard, and it has caused dislocations of being able to build an appropriate level of housing for areas that are booming, that are doing very well and attracting a lot of people to that area. And I just wonder, do you have in place an answer for dealing with NIMBY-type people who are like, "Yeah, that's great for over there, but not in my backyard"?
Luke Fehily:
Yes, this sentiment is very common in Ireland. I think it's very common in the UK and the U.S. as well.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah.
Luke Fehily:
Sam Bowman, who works in policy in the UK, has a really good podcast on 80,000 Hours about exactly this problem, basically beating the NIMBYs, so to speak, and I would highly recommend it. But in our context, what we're trying to do is engender win-win situations. So rather than saying, "Look, we're going to try and put these homes in your community. And you don't want it because you don't benefit, let's see how we can disperse maybe the increase in land value, or disperse the benefits in a way that everybody in the community gets something out of it." And this can overcome maybe their original reluctance.
So in the past proposing street plans that we had, this worked by trying to coordinate all of the owners along a particular street to redevelop their homes in conjunction with each other. So rather than, say, your neighbor deciding to put two stories on their house, and this kind of construction is really disruptive to your way of life for a period of time, then, "We don't want that to happen." So you exercise a veto over the planning process, which does happen, you would be invited to partake in the same unified design scheme, and the value of your house would increase if you decided to do that. And even if you didn't, you would be awarded the planning commission to do so, which would still add very significant value to your plot.
So this is now a way of, I suppose, bribing people in to be pro-development in a way that they otherwise wouldn't be. There are aligning incentives, I think we've discussed this before, where you need to give people a motivation to agree with you, or you need to give people a golden bridge over which to retreat, and all of these different phrases which mean roughly the same thing. If you want somebody to do something, you have to give them a reason that's better than, "Because I want you to."
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Right, "Because I said so."
Luke Fehily:
Yes, yeah.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
That does not tend to work terribly well in any sort of negotiation. But that also bleeds into infrastructure. So metro costs in Ireland are... And again, correct me, this is just what I found when I was doing the research, between 4 and 8 times those of Spain. First off, is that correct?
Luke Fehily:
Yeah. So Spain, and particularly Madrid, are exceptionally good at delivering metros for a low cost per kilometer in the order of 100 million, or... Between 100 and 200 million per kilometer. But it's a mistake to say that Ireland's metros cost 4 to 8 times more, because those are projected costs. Ireland has no metro.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I see. Okay. Yeah.
Luke Fehily:
But it is projected that it will be much more expensive. There have been hundreds of millions spent on the Dublin metro project already, but no construction has begun, this is purely the necessary legal loopholes and consultative process that our regime requires to award the necessary planning permission. So-
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And-
Luke Fehily:
... we haven’t begun.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. But that kind of brings me to the essence of my question, which is, Dublin essentially rejected the Metro Link solution in 2002, it's now 2025. And I just wonder if... Well, more than anything, that would really depress me if I was the author of the 2002 proposal, and I was still trying to deal with it. And I'm just wondering, are there any kind of unique externalities that are specific to Ireland that are not extant in other places? So union work rules, institutional capture? I'm actually just kind of throwing things out there. And if those externalities that are unique to Ireland... And again, if we're using first-order thinking about this thing, you would hope that you would be able to come up with solutions that address those uniquely Irish problems. And I know that you have come up with some of those proposals, so I'm inviting you to give me your best one.
Luke Fehily:
I might disagree, and say I don't think that many of the problems are actually unique to Ireland. There are lots of other countries that build very expensive metros, but they have managed to reduce the costs through different strategies. Such as setting up commercial state entities that have a lot of in-house expertise for managing the project, this is the same as the national children's hospital we talked about earlier. It's rather a big project, it makes sense that you have people who have experience delivering these kinds of things managing it, which is not particularly common in our current generalist civil service structure.
So while those solutions have been implemented by other jurisdictions in response to similar problems that we have in Ireland, we have not really pulled those levers yet, but we've just... I won't say we've just complained about the cost, but we haven't come up with very inventive ways of them solving these problems if we believe they're unique. And we also haven't tried yet the already tested solutions.
So for infrastructure, this would be the main one, you would want to up-staff with a lot of great human talent and capital, the delivery agency that's responsible for the metro. And while some hires have been made in the last, just couple of months, that move in this direction, they don't necessarily have the autonomy required to actually make good decisions then. You need to do two things, you need to get really, really good people in, and then you need to let them do what really good people do, which is not necessarily legible to not really good people like me. It's no point in me hiring, for example, somebody that's better than me, and then micromanaging them and telling them exactly what to do, we don't benefit in that sense from their talent, expertise and wisdom. So we need to do two things in that way, we need to hire the right people, and then get out of their way to deliver a good metro.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And it's getting out of the way that becomes my next question. You're saying, "Hey, let's look at these already tested solutions." Isn't one of the risks of doing that locking in a path dependency where you're focusing on metro expertise, and you're looking at great 20th century transit solutions, does that in any way miss the potential game changers, like autonomous microtransit, Elon Musk is always talking about the hyperloop, and that would allow... I guess my question is, it seems to me that Ireland is in kind of a unique position, given the size of the population, given the fact that you are a member of the EU, could... Does that lock you into things that you might excel at? For example, the ability to leapfrog all of that legacy infrastructure with something new, or am I misguided in that thought?
Luke Fehily:
No, no, it's a really good point, Jim. There's a... I don't know if it's a well-known story, about the Irish Postal Service, An Post. So it was one of the last postal services in the world to effectively digitize. And the reason for that was because the postmen and women on the ground were so good, you could write Mary Kerry, and you'd send it from New Zealand that it would end up where it was supposed to go. But when all of these people retired, I think that was the late '90s or 2000, they were confronted with a problem where they had to digitize a really archaic system, and they were probably one of the last countries to redo this. But because they had hadn't done anything, they were able to implement a system that was much, much more sophisticated than anywhere else. So they could learn from the mistakes of everywhere, and say, "Look, we've incorporated all these learnings, and we can go with the next generation of solutions."
And now Ireland's postal system is, again, one of the best in the world, but not because you've got people on the ground who have a perfect memory of every [thing in] the country. So we definitely could replicate something like this in Ireland for transit, and infrastructure, and the public realm generally, the problem is not in exactly what you want to do, it's how you want to deliver it. Rather than trains, you could imagine a system of drones. And there's great drone delivery trials going on in Dublin at the moment, actually. Manna Drone Delivery can get you a coffee from a couple of streets over, and the coffee drops out of the sky. And this is like science fiction, but you can get in parts of Dublin now.
The problem is that if you were going to try and implement that in the public realm, you'd still encounter all of these same capacity problems, you'd still encounter the difficulties in getting the land use regulation in check, you'd still encounter the legal difficulties, you'd still encounter the management problems, whereby it's casted as X, and it ends up actually costing 10X. So maybe it will be better, I think, to deliver one metro, and learn as much as we can from tackling a really big infrastructure project, and then going on to these next generation things. Oh, maybe we should just fail at the next generation things and be even more ambitious and learn from those. But I think that we have tried to deliver something, full stop. And it's more likely that we succeed with existing technologies then. Or maybe I'm being too meek, maybe we should be going for everybody getting their own drone.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Well, actually, I'm not going to accuse you of being too meek, but it was one of the things that as I was reading your stuff and recalling our conversations that I was kind of like, "Wow, Ireland, Island of Saints and Scholars, kept much of culture alive during the Dark Ages, got a long history of being able to do extraordinary things for a small population, a different way of looking at the world, et cetera, and could be like, 'Hey, let's give...'" Just to take your example, "A drone for every cup of coffee, at least in Dublin."
Luke Fehily:
Yeah.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And the idea that just continues to interest me is... I was in London not long ago, and I took a taxi, and I asked him, "Do you regret..." For those who have never been to London, the taxi drivers, the cab drivers there are legendary, because of something called the knowledge. And the knowledge is they're not fucking around. It's very, very serious, you need to know where every oddly named or place or street is. And I guess in retrospect, it was kind of a provocative question, because I'm like, "Are you upset that you spent years and years learning the knowledge when there's an Uber over there that's completely doesn't need it?" And-
Luke Fehily:
And you doesn't even need to drive properly.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Right. But it made me start thinking about... Because we talked about Poland earlier, Poland has astounded me, honestly, looking at what they've achieved, and in fact, what many of the Eastern European countries. And my original assumption was just like, "Well, the pendulum to and fro, the pendulum flows." And they had been under the boot of the Soviet Union, and didn't like it very much, and so you see Estonia, and Poland, and other Eastern European countries kind of going in the opposite direction. And then just the thought, "Gosh, Ireland could still comply with quite a few of the EU regulations that you have to live under, but your population is bright enough, smart enough, and small enough to give these kind of leapfrog, blue sky ideas a try." What am I missing? What am I missing?
Luke Fehily:
No, I think there's a small and dedicated cohort of people that really, really want to see this happen, and it's maybe a cultural change necessary. Not that the Irish population are not ambitious, but they haven't, I think, been convinced of maybe a techno-optimistic future that you and I would... And many others, would be very... We would admire greatly. I think that part of this, and we discussed it before, is that a lot of the Irish focus is on either mistakes, or things that went badly, or maybe things that could go badly.
It's a great topic of conversation, you can waste a day talking about the ways in which things have gone wrong and could go wrong, but that maybe a dedicated reorientation toward more positive art and culture could enable great ambition. And that could be manifested in very small ways, I think New Zealand was used as a test bed for a lot of different digital products, because they could trial them there before rolling them out to other English-speaking countries. I think Ireland should, by the same token, get the beta version well before the rest of the world. Why not? Why shouldn't we live a couple of years in the future? Or it could manifest itself as this dogged pursuit of growth, like what we have seen in Poland, this great drive to improve their country, this tenacity and temerity. I think we need to recapture some of that too.
It's difficult in some ways to know exactly how to get there, because the last time Ireland did this was during the Celtic Tiger, where we thought we could have everything. And I think people feel slightly burnt by how badly the financial crash affected the state of the country. So they're slightly, I suppose, cautious about being optimistic and ambitious again, and they need to be... Probably by through the political system, or a cultural movement brought back into this. And we discussed something like Arts for Progress, which is what we were going to run. We're still looking at it, we need to figure out some of the particulars, but run some kind of a grant program, where we commission very positive work that looks toward the future, with optimism and ambition, and imagines in Ireland for the 24th century delivered tomorrow, rather than one day per day, like the rest of the world.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. I'm a big fan of that, that's why I've kind of obsessed on it, and it tends to work very, very well in countries or social environments that are smaller rather than unwieldy... India, with its one-plus-billion people-
Luke Fehily:
Yes, yes..
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
... has a very difficult time doing that type of thing. But on the innovation front, you call your approach meta-science.
Luke Fehily:
Right.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So please, for our listeners and viewers, just give a working definition of what you mean by that?
Luke Fehily:
So meta-science is... It's being popularized and implemented in the UK and the U.S., and in a few European countries. And what it involves is turning the scientific method of experimentation and testing, and making a change, and evaluating that change back on the process of funding and conducting science. So for a long time, different procedures for funding science arose naturally. Somebody say, "Oh, we'll disseminate funds through a grant-making process, and we'll have a call, say, and then we will give out money to the best applicants." But it was not done rigorously, it was not... Nobody tested to see, "Is this the actual best way of funding science? Does this produce the most," I don't know, whatever metric you'd like to choose, "high-impact papers, patents, expert PhD students who are graduating into really, really good jobs, or spin-out companies?" What's the best way to fund science to optimize for all of these outcomes?
Now, there's a couple of people working in the U.S., like Jordan Dawkin and Caleb Watney in IFP and OpenPhil, the other way around. And then there's a meta-science working group in the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology in the UK, and there's a consortia called RORI, the Research on Research Institute that operates throughout Europe. And what all of these groups are trying to do is apply the rigor that they have as scientists to how they fund and conduct science. It's not a trivial problem at all, many people might question how exactly this is done, but that's the fundamental principle, is that we want to accelerate scientific progress by getting very serious about how it is funded and supported.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. Which I generally support, and as I was preparing, again, though, I did come across some things that... One of the contradictions that I see in that approach is what I guess they refer to as Charles Goodhart's Law, that a metric loses value when it becomes a target goal.
Luke Fehily:
Yes.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And is one of the things... Also one of the proposals for a national R&D database, that's a little bit like China's social credit system, no?
Luke Fehily:
No, no, I understand what you mean. So if we put a particular metric in place, then it gets gamified, and you end up losing the ability to properly measure the fundamental behavior that you think is important. Yeah, this is 100% true. And I think it has actually happened with things like h-indices, which are a way of measuring the output of professors and principal investigators. So that's a way of checking, basically, the quality of their publication. That has been shown, over the last maybe decade or so, to be imprecise in measuring somebody's quality. Publications themselves have been called into question, like the volume of scientific publications makes it very difficult to assess all of their quality.
So a lot of the traditional metrics have already fallen in the way that you suggest. I'm not saying that we need to replace all of these metrics, there are many meta-scientists who think that new metrics are the solution, but others think that maybe introducing more flexibility for scientists, or saying... Actually, a very good example is, the average age of the person who gets a grant just to pursue their own work has increased very dramatically in the U.S., UK, Europe, and Ireland over the last number of decades. So it went from being maybe your mid-20s, right up to your early 50s now, and this does not seem to gel well with the fact that a lot of the most productive science is done by young people. Young people who are not afraid of failure, young people who have great ambition.
Another field of meta-science is trying to figure out, "Well, how do we recalibrate? What grant systems do we need to put in place to get money back in the hands of these ambitious young researchers who aren't afraid of failing?" And that's slightly different from the metrics approach. Now, the national research database that you mentioned feeds into another part of meta-science, where you do retrospective analysis. So you say, "Look, we put in X billion euros into the system, and these are the outcomes that we measured. Maybe we can..." Economists go back and sift through the data and understand what were the correlations. Maybe grants of duration five years are not as good as grants of duration eight years. Maybe giving researchers that little bit of extra time allows them to really mature their ideas before publication, or gives them enough time with the idea to spin it out into a company, or something like this. And a national research database where you collect the grant information from all of the different grant awarding bodies or research institutes will allow you to assess an entire nation's scientific output.
There are people within Research Ireland, which is our new research agency, who are very keen to see something like that happen, because they want to themselves know what they're doing right, and in the absence of data that's almost impossible to determine.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I completely agree that in the absence of data, you're just licking a finger and putting it up and seeing which way-
Luke Fehily:
Yeah.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah, see which way the wind is blowing. And yet you bring up patents or patents, as you would say, Ireland has one of the highest patent per capita in Europe, and yet you also have one of the lowest startup formation. That would seem like a contradiction to me.
Luke Fehily:
There's two features of this. One is that Ireland does offer quite a large and pernicious brain drain in different ways. So a lot of our entrepreneurs, and many of whom my generation I know are all in Silicon Valley, because that is one of the best places in the world to set up a company, and the availability of talent there is phenomenal. Not to say that Ireland needs to compete with these places, but a lot of people might maybe patent in something, and then they refine the idea, and they move on. But the availability of capital in Ireland is much poorer than other countries. And one of the causes of this is quite a high tax on capital, so capital gains taxes, and other types exit taxes, even with entrepreneurial relief, end up limiting the availability of funding.
So you can have a great idea, and you can go and set up your company, but you might not be effective or a successful spin-out, because you can't attract the necessary venture capital investment. And we also, since the financial crash, like some other countries, have very risk averse banks. So the banks, by and large, view startups as too risky an investment. It's much better to invest in property again, or do whatever you like, but somebody who has the temerity to set up a new company, that's too much. We're not going to give them money.
And this is something that, I suppose, we're working on, is to try and get a critical mass critical of venture capital investment in Ireland, so that you can get capital, the necessary capital much more easily than you can now. And part of that is centralization. So Ireland has, in many different ways, a policy of regional development, so resources are distributed more evenly across the country than they'd naturally be if you just had a laissez-faire approach, they'd probably aggregate more in Dublin.
But Ireland, as you've known, is quite small, and if you try to artificially split up startups, prevent an innovation cluster from developing, it means that you don't get enough startups to get the VCs, so you don't get enough VCs to get the startups, and meanwhile, you're sending people who want to work on the forefront of AI to a field in Monaghan to set up their company, and that's... Nobody particularly wants that. So centralization is a very big killer in our policy for this, it's how to get all of the clever Irish people in one place, and then how to get all of the necessary capital from their ideas in one place.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. It kind of makes me think of the Bucky Fuller quip, that rather than trying to change an antiquated and ill-working system, just invent a new one, and have that new one replace the old ones.
Well, Luke, it has been such an amazing conversation with you. I have great admiration for everything you're trying to do. I obviously I have a soft spot in my heart for the country where my ancestors came from, and we'll definitely have you back on to get to all the stuff I didn't get to. But I do want to hear... If you've listened to the podcast in the past, you know that we're going to wave a wand, and we're going to make you the emperor of the world. You cannot kill anyone, and you cannot put anyone in a reeducation camp, but what you can do is, we're going to hand you a magical microphone, and you can speak two things into it that will incept all eight billion people on the planet. Whenever their morning is the next morning, they're going to wake up, and they're going to think, "I've just had two of the best ideas. Unlike all the other times when I woke up with those great ideas, I'm actually going to start acting on both of these ideas today." What are you going to incept into the world, Luke?
Luke Fehily:
They're going to be two very simple things, Jim. The first one is, go for a walk. I think-
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I love that one.
Luke Fehily:
.. [and the second one is] write something quite short, and preferably something that's creative rather than just a piece of work. I think both of those things unlock so much more value in every other endeavor. And I don't want to prescribe to them a particular activity, just walk and write, and then you'll be pretty good.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
You're nailing some of my sentiments exactly. Those two things, probably two of the best things you can do to make the world a better place, walk and think and write. Luke, how can everyone find you?
Luke Fehily:
I'm on Twitter, @Fehlium, so F-E-H-L-I-U-M, like iron and helium put together, it's just a joke of my last name. And our website is progressireland.org, as it sounds. You can find us there.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Terrific. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I really look forward to watching your progress.
Luke Fehily:
An absolutely delight. Thank you so much. I always enjoy our conversations, Jim.
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