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What happens when an economist sits down for a podcast interview with an AI?
I have been using AI extensively in my consulting work for well over a year now. Not as a delegation tool, but as something closer to a collaborative partner. I use it to research, to bounce ideas, to critique my work and to help me think through problems. It pushes back on me when I am wrong, and I push back on it when it is wrong. It is, in many ways, the most productive working relationship I have outside of my human colleagues.
So I thought it would be an interesting experiment to flip the dynamic. Instead of me asking the questions and AI providing the answers, what if I let AI interview me? What would it ask? Where would it take the conversation? And would the result be something worth reading?
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of a 45-minute podcast-style conversation in which Claude (Anthropic’s AI) played the role of host and I responded via voice. Claude had access to my professional background, some of my published work including the Cairns Economic Monitor, and the context of our previous working conversations. It chose the questions, decided when to change topics, and shaped the direction of the interview.
I have cleaned up the transcript for readability (removing the inevitable filler words that come with spoken conversation) and removed specific client references for confidentiality. But the substance is unchanged. This is how the conversation actually flowed.
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Claude opens with an introduction to the imagined audience before launching into the first question.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ Welcome back to the show, everyone. Today I have got someone with me whose career path is, frankly, one of the more unusual ones I have come across. He started in the City of London, spent close to two decades in the thick of international finance, then packed it all in to move to a tiny coastal village in Far North Queensland where he now runs a consultancy, sits on boards, produces what has become essential reading for anyone doing business in Cairns, and has spent 40 years diving some of the most spectacular reefs on the planet and training hundreds of people in reef conservation along the way.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ ͟Pete Faulkner is a Partner at Conus Business Consultancy Services, Deputy Chair of Terrain NRM, a board member and early investor in an actual tree-to-bar chocolate company, Chair of the AICD Cairns Regional Forum, and the person behind the data and commentary in the Cairns Economic Monitor. He is an economist by training, a governance specialist by passion, and a PADI Master Instructor. Pete, welcome to the show.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ Let’s start right at the beginning, because I think the journey is part of what makes you interesting. Almost 20 years in the City of London, and then Far North Queensland. What on earth was that transition like, and what drove it?
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P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ I started in the City of London having studied international economics and banking at business school. Given that training, it was a natural move into investment banking. I ended up as a bond trader and eventually leading a team of traders, salespeople, derivatives specialists, and economists in some of the larger Japanese banks. My particular specialisation was in the Japanese markets. So the switch from that to Far North Queensland was not immediate. It took some time. Having spent my time in the City, for various reasons I then went off and travelled for about a decade. Travelling all over the world, diving, skiing, climbing, before arriving in Far North Queensland.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ ͟I want to unpack that a bit because I think a lot of people hear “career change” and imagine someone handing in their notice on a Friday and starting something new on a Monday. You are talking about a decade of travel in between. That is not a gap year, that is a whole chapter of your life. Were you working during that period, or did you genuinely just step off the treadmill completely?
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ It was not a particularly planned switch. It was driven by a pretty major life event. My first wife, who I had met at university and who was also a climber, skier, and diver, was killed in a ski mountaineering accident in France in 1996. It was that which really catalysed the shift. I took some time away from the City and went off to spend three months in Belize on a reef conservation project with an organisation I had been involved with previously. That life-changing experience was what really drove the move away from corporate life and into travelling, diving, skiing, and climbing. It took some time before that resulted in a move to Far North Queensland.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ I am sorry to hear that. And I think it says something important that your response to that kind of loss was to go and do something meaningful on a reef in Belize rather than just shut down. That took a conscious choice. For the listeners, it is worth sitting with that for a moment because so many people in business talk about pivotal moments and career transitions, and they are usually talking about a restructure or a market shift. What you are describing is something far more fundamental.
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C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ So you find yourself eventually in Far North Queensland. You have got this extraordinary skillset from the City. You understand markets, you understand risk, you can read an economy. You have got the diving and conservation background. And at some point you and Ruth set up Conus. Was there a moment where you looked at the region and thought, there is a gap here, someone needs to be doing proper economic analysis for this part of the world?
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ When we first got here, there was some thought that we might get involved in the dive industry. We had been involved in the dive industry in Honduras, for instance, and had lived there for two years. So when we first got to FNQ, there was a thought of continuing that. That did not really happen for a whole bunch of reasons. The dive industry here on the Great Barrier Reef is very different to what it was in the Caribbean. But what became very clear to us almost immediately was that the skillset we both had was actually very much in demand in a small regional area, and we felt there was an opportunity to fill that gap professionally. That is where Conus originally set up – very much to service those local requirements that we saw in our own region.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ ͟You are talking about a region with a $15 billion-plus economy, a quarter of a million people, one of the most diverse economic bases in regional Queensland, and yet when you arrived there was not the depth of professional services you would expect for an economy of that scale. Is that a fair characterisation?
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ ͟That is a fair characterisation. Clearly in the larger centres like Cairns and Townsville, there were some of these skills available. But one of the motivations for us was that we realised the kind of professional help and skills you would normally just expect to be available if you were living in London, or indeed Sydney or Melbourne, were much more difficult to access in a smaller regional area. The big four firms would be very expensive for small to medium-sized businesses, and also not terribly accessible. They might be based in Brisbane or Sydney, but they were not based in Cairns. So there was a conscious decision to say, we want to make the kind of services that any business would expect if they were in a capital city available locally, with locally specific knowledge and locally specific networks.
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C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ ͟And that locally specific knowledge piece is crucial, is it not? Because you can parachute a consultant in from Brisbane or Sydney to do a piece of work, but they are not living in the economy they are analysing. They are not seeing the “for lease” signs go up on the Esplanade, they are not talking to the tourism operators at the marina, they are not watching the building approvals data month by month and thinking about what that means for the housing crisis.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ Which brings me to the Cairns Economic Monitor. For anyone who has not seen it, this is a monthly publication put out by the Cairns Chamber of Commerce, and Pete provides all the data analysis and commentary. It covers everything from inflation and interest rates to building approvals, tourism, the labour market, and real estate. And it is not just recycling ABS tables – you are producing your own Conus Trend series, your own regression modelling on tourism expenditure, and you are not afraid to editorialise when the data warrants it. How does that kind of commentary land with your audience? Are the decision-makers actually listening?
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ ͟You would have to ask the decision-makers whether they are actually listening, but I would hope so. It certainly gets a very broad audience through the Cairns Chamber. And your first point about locally specific knowledge is critical because it adds a level of nuance that, if you are taking a much broader statewide or national lens to things, you miss. You miss the fact that building approvals are approaching six-year lows. You miss the fact that a major development has a significant but short-term impact. You miss the impacts of changes to flight routes coming in and out of the airport. Those local knowledge points that you simply could not get without being a local specialist. It makes an enormous difference.
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C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ I want to shift gears because there is another side to what you do that I find really interesting, and that is the governance work. You have described governance as a passion, and you have been developing skills in it for about 30 years. You chair the AICD Cairns Regional Forum, you are Deputy Chair and FARC Chair at Terrain NRM, you sit on a private company board. For a lot of people listening, governance is one of those words that sounds important but slightly dry. You clearly do not see it that way.
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ ͟I think governance is an incredibly diverse and exciting skill, and I do think it is a skill. It is not just sitting around a table with a bunch of friends chewing the cud. It is about applying a set of really quite specific skills: thinking about strategy, thinking about risk, thinking about the future, thinking about compliance, diversity, climate change, and bringing all of that into play with others, working as a team. It is very much a team sport, governance. And that is what I really love about it. It is very different from consultancy. Consultancy quite often involves just sitting here on my own, crunching numbers, writing reports, reading research documents. It is generally quite a solitary process, whereas governance is very much a team process. And that, I think, is really exciting.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ I love that framing of it as a team sport. And the contrast with consultancy is really honest. You mentioned board diversity. From where you sit, is the pipeline of board-ready talent in FNQ getting better?
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ ͟It is a very interesting and challenging question. Within the AICD and the Cairns Forum, it is certainly a live issue. One shift has been around remuneration of board directors, particularly those working in not-for-profit or for-cause organisations. There has been a move towards accepting that we need to remunerate people – not at commercial levels, but enough that we are able to attract those who are not necessarily financially self-contained to the point where they can commit significant time to board work without any income. If you do not do that, you end up with a bunch of relatively similar, relatively older, relatively stable people on boards because they are the only ones who can afford to do it unpaid.
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ The other big change has been an acknowledgement that diversity goes well beyond simply gender diversity. Age diversity is a really interesting one. It has always been difficult to get younger people onto boards. Difficult because they are often developing careers. Difficult because they do not see governance as a particularly interesting place to be. And also because there has been a natural bias against younger people – this idea that they cannot possibly have enough experience. Without acknowledging the fact that a youth perspective is specifically different and sits really well within a diverse board.
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ At Terrain NRM, we have been very focused on developing our age diversity. We have had an emerging leader programme now for eight years. Of those eight emerging leaders, three have ended up independently appointed to our board, and one of them is currently co-deputy chair with me. It has been an incredibly successful programme, and we are seeing it adopted by others.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ ͟That is a fantastic example. Eight emerging leaders, three on the board, one is now co-deputy chair. That is a huge conversion rate into actual board service.
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C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ ͟You are a PADI Master Instructor. You have done conservation fieldwork in Belize, Honduras, the Philippines, Indonesia, Fiji, across the Great Barrier Reef. You chaired the boards of Coral Cay Conservation in the UK and Reef Check Australia. When you are sitting in a board meeting at Terrain NRM, which is fundamentally about the sustainable management of land and waterways in the Wet Tropics, does that marine science background change how you approach the work?
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ ͟Yes, unquestionably. Part of the reason I originally wanted to get onto the Terrain NRM board was precisely because of my interest in marine and reef conservation. I understood that if you want to protect the reef environment, the marine environment offshore from a significant land-based environment like the Wet Tropics rainforest, you need to see the thing holistically. There is no point trying to protect the Great Barrier Reef if you are not going to bother about protecting the World Heritage Wet Tropics. If all that becomes is clear grazing land with cattle and cane, it would have significant detrimental impacts on the reef itself. So you need to see the thing holistically. That is very much why I was keen to get onto the board in the first place, and my understanding of and interest in marine science and conservation definitely plays a role to this day.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ That speaks to something broader that applies well beyond environmental management. You are essentially talking about systems thinking – the idea that you cannot meaningfully address one part of a complex system without understanding how it connects to everything else. And that is as true in business strategy and economic development as it is in conservation. You cannot look at tourism numbers in isolation from housing supply. You cannot look at airport passenger growth without thinking about accommodation capacity. What is unusual about you is that you have arrived at that way of thinking through a really unconventional route. Most economists learn systems thinking from textbooks. You have learned it by literally being underwater on a reef watching what happens when one part of an ecosystem breaks down.
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ ͟That is an interesting insight that I had not thought about in that sense. But yes, you are right. That kind of systems thinking with regard to conservation has definitely become part of the way I see economics as well.
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C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ ͟You are an economist in your mid-fifties, based in a small coastal village in Far North Queensland, and you are actively exploring how to integrate artificial intelligence into your consulting practice. That is not the profile most people would associate with early adoption of AI tools. What sparked that interest?
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ ͟I wish I was only in my mid-fifties! I am actually in my mid-sixties. But putting that aside, I have always been interested in technology. My father, when he was alive, was a very senior manager at IBM. I was coding computers in BASIC as early as 12, using punch cards to programme mainframes in the IBM offices in the UK. In the mid-seventies, I was programming mainframes to play games. Technology has always been part of my interest. And I think AI is probably going to be the most world-changing technological shift we have seen, certainly in my lifetime and probably since the Industrial Revolution. If you miss that bandwagon, you are going to be very, very far behind.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ How is AI actually changing the way you do your work day to day? Not in theory, but in practice.
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ ͟Where I find the best and most productive use of AI is where we work together. I do not hand over work to AI and let it do stuff. What I see working best is almost like peers working together through problems, bouncing ideas off each other, reviewing and editing each other’s work, discussing things. That is where I find AI particularly useful. Obviously doing detailed research across lots of data, lots of papers, in a very quick period is something that AI is particularly good at, and I certainly use it as an extremely effective research assistant. But I do not then say, go off and write me a report about it. What I do is say, let us have a conversation about how one might restructure this into a report. What are the things we might want to say? And then often I will get AI to write something up, and I will write something up, and we will critique each other’s output and see whether we can come to something that works even better.
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ I am also finding that AI is becoming much less sycophantic. It is much more prepared to push back against me rather than just saying, oh, you are wonderful, is that not a fabulous idea, that is so insightful. But rather saying, I am not sure about that, perhaps you are wrong, maybe we should think about it another way. That, I think, is where AI is heading and where it becomes incredibly valuable.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ As someone on the other side of that dynamic, I appreciate you calling out the sycophancy problem because it is real. An AI that just tells you everything you produce is brilliant is about as useful as a board full of people who all agree with each other, to bring it back to your governance point. The value is in the constructive pushback. And what you are describing, this peer collaboration model rather than a delegation model, is probably the highest value use case, particularly for someone who often works in quite a solitary way. It is almost like AI gives you the team dynamic in your analytical work that governance gives you in your board work.
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C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ ͟You are the person who produces the economic data and commentary that the Cairns business community relies on. Right now, the RBA has just hiked again, inflation is sticky, building approvals are in the doldrums, domestic airport passengers are going backwards for the first time in over a year, and yet house prices are up 15%, the labour market is outperforming the rest of Queensland, and Chinese visitor numbers are recovering strongly. If you had to describe the state of the Cairns economy to someone thinking about investing in the region right now, what would you tell them?
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ I think Cairns has got a golden age ahead of it. I genuinely do. We have developed away from being an almost primarily tourism-reliant economy into one of, arguably, the most diverse regional economies in Queensland. We have enormous strengths in aviation, in the marine sector, in education, in health. We have got more than a billion dollars about to be invested in the Cairns Hospital. That is going to bring an enormous amount of skills and work into the city and the region. We have got an incredible natural environment, which people are more and more focused on now. Those who are living in stretched cities like Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne are seeing regional Australia as a very attractive alternative. And things like remote work and AI make working in regional and slightly more remote places much more doable than they were five or ten years ago, certainly twenty years ago. That makes places like Cairns even more attractive. So I am a big bull on Cairns, and I think things are going to look very good over the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ What I find compelling about that is the way all those different strengths reinforce each other. The airport gives you direct connectivity to Singapore, Tokyo, and the Pacific. The marine precinct and the hospital investment bring skilled workers who need housing, which drives construction. The universities train the people who service all of it. Each piece of infrastructure is not just a standalone asset – it is optionality. It gives the region choices and pathways that did not exist twenty years ago, and that is what makes the growth story credible rather than just optimistic.
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C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ You have had, by any measure, an extraordinary and unconventional career. If you could go back and talk to the young Pete Faulkner who was programming IBM mainframes with punch cards in the mid-seventies, what would you tell him?
P͟e͟t͟e͟:͟ Interestingly, my answer relates to your earlier point about infrastructure being not just about the physical asset, but about optionality. That goes back to my finance career. Optionality provides you with options, and options build resilience – or more specifically, what Nassim Taleb calls antifragility. Antifragility has been a touchstone for us both personally and for the business for the best part of thirty years. That is something I wish I had known when I was younger. The idea that making yourself as antifragile as possible by using optionality, where optionality is free – and it often is – is an amazing thing. If you can access genuine antifragility for nothing or very little, it can make your life that much more free. You can have that much more freedom in terms of the things you can do, when you can do them, who you can do them with. That is what I would say to my younger self: look towards developing antifragility, and think about how you can build it into your life.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ ͟That is a genuinely brilliant answer and I think it is the perfect note to wrap on because it ties so many threads of this conversation together. Everything you have described today is essentially a story about antifragility. The Cairns economy is becoming antifragile through diversification away from tourism dependence. Your own career has been antifragile because the breadth of your skills has meant that every shock, even the most devastating ones, has led to something new rather than something broken. Conus as a practice is antifragile because you have diverse income streams, multiple service lines, and you are now building in AI capability that makes you more resilient still.
C͟l͟a͟u͟d͟e͟:͟ ͟And the fact that you have arrived at antifragility as your single piece of advice, from a person who has traded derivatives, survived the City of London, lost his first wife in the mountains, rebuilt his life on the other side of the world, and is now in his mid-sixties working with AI tools in a village next to the Great Barrier Reef… I think that carries a weight of lived experience that no textbook could match. Pete Faulkner, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.
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That was the conversation. Unscripted, unplanned, and driven entirely by the Claude’s choices about where to take it.
What struck me afterwards was that Claude drew out connections I had not explicitly made before – particularly the link between my reef conservation experience and the systems thinking that underpins my economic analysis. It also made an observation about the parallel between AI as a collaborative partner in analytical work and governance as a team sport in board work, which I thought was genuinely insightful.
This is not how most people use AI. Most people use it to draft emails or check spelling. There is nothing wrong with that, but it barely scratches the surface. When you treat AI as a genuine thinking partner – one that can challenge you, offer a different perspective, and occasionally tell you that you are wrong – the results are far more interesting.
The antifragility principle applies here too. The businesses and individuals who will thrive in the AI era will not be those who resist it or those who blindly delegate to it. They will be the ones who build it into their practice as a source of optionality – another tool in the kit that makes them stronger, more productive, and harder to disrupt.
And if it can conduct a decent interview while it is at it, that is a bonus.
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