A half-hour discussion that Nick Schulz and I held on line, with James Pethokoukis as our guest. We talked about his blog post on economic policy ideas.

We conducted this using a Google+ hangout. I recorded it using Camtasia Studio (I actually messed up the recording and had the wrong focus, so I do not focus on our faces until about 7 minutes in, and even then it is unnecessarily fuzzy.) You can think of this as a very low-cost way to do a long-distance group discussion or talking-heads show or what have you.

Nick and I hope to make this a weekly event. We want to gradually experiment with adding more people as participants and as lurkers when we are live. Think of it as sort of a discussion-around-the-water-cooler with the participants in separate locations.

Future topics might be the changing nature of think tanks (Tevi Troy has written a provocative article), the prospects for a U.S. sovereign debt default (I have a paper coming out in a few weeks as part of a symposium), and David Weinberger’s new book on the Internet, Too Big To Know.

Comments and suggestions welcome. My instinct is that this format can be helpful, but we will need to be creative in how we use it.