2,500 years of strategy, 11 books, one afternoon.

Hugh White is Australia's foremost strategic thinker: former senior adviser to Defence Minister Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in Defence, inaugural Director of ASPI, and principal author of the 2000 Defence White Paper. He is now Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University.

Before this conversation, I asked Hugh for the eleven books that most shaped his thinking on strategy, international relations and defence policy. We work through them one by one — what each book argues, what it gets right and wrong, how it shaped his worldview — and use them to tackle the big questions: why great powers start disastrous wars, how international orders collapse, and how Australia and America should respond to the rise of China.

Episode resources

• Hugh's strategy reading short list: https://josephnoelwalker.com/hughwhite/
• Hugh's strategy reading long list: https://josephnoelwalker.com/hugh-whites-strategy-reading-list/
• Hugh's 1993 Tathra note: https://josephnoelwalker.com/hugh-whites-tathra-note/

Sponsors

• Eucalyptus: the Aussie startup providing digital healthcare clinics to help patients around the world take control of their quality of life. Euc is looking to hire ambitious young Aussies and Brits. You can check out their open roles at eucalyptus.health/careers.
• 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.

Peter Costello is the longest-serving Treasurer of Australia (1996–2007).

He led the most complex overhaul of Australia's tax system in the postwar era: introducing the Goods and Services Tax (GST) — a value-added consumption tax — while abolishing a range of indirect taxes (notably wholesale sales tax) and cutting income-tax rates.

I wanted to learn from Peter what it actually takes to achieve a reform at that scale — and why we haven’t managed anything like it since.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• GST implementation war stories;
• lessons on how to get big things done in government;
• why major reform became so much harder after 2000;
• why Peter would sometimes hide revenue estimates even from the prime minister; and
• the baby bonus (introduced in 2004), which led to an uptick in Australia's total fertility rate — making Australia one of the only western countries to increase (albeit temporarily) its TFR since the demographic transition began.

Episode sponsor:

• 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".

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One bacterium causes roughly 1 in 20 cancer cases worldwide. It’s the most cancer-causing pathogen we’ve found—and the main cause of peptic ulcers. Its discovery overturned an ironclad medical dogma that the stomach was sterile.

Despite infecting about half of humanity, Helicobacter pylori wasn't discovered until 1979 and shown to cause gastritis and peptic ulcer disease in the early 1980s. Why did it evade detection for so long—and what finally broke through the consensus?

I went to Perth, Australia—where H. pylori was first discovered—to chat with Barry Marshall, gastroenterologist and co-recipient (with Robin Warren) of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering H. pylori and proving that it causes gastritis and peptic ulcer disease. Marshall famously infected himself with the bacterium to demonstrate causality and later helped develop clinical diagnostics like the urea breath test, which we demo live in the episode.

We discuss:

• the rise and fall of stomach cancer in the West;

• whether Darwin’s dyspepsia and Napoleon's stomach cancer trace to H. pylori;

• the ulcer–cancer paradox;

• Correa’s cascade: what H. pylori eradication reverses—and what it doesn’t;

• the “H. pylori enigmas” (Africa, India, Costa Rica);

• eradication prospects and an oral vaccine timeline;

• how the field missed the discovery;

• how the primitive internet enabled the discovery;

• what the H. pylori discovery teaches us about how knowledge diffuses;

• lessons from manufacturing millions of tests in Perth;

• and much, much more.

Episode sponsors:

• Eucalyptus: the Aussie startup providing digital healthcare clinics to help patients around the world take control of their quality of life. Euc is looking to hire ambitious young Aussies and Brits. You can check out their open roles at eucalyptus.health/careers.
• 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".

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.