A Rational Fear

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Welcome to our Budget Reply special of A Rational Fear, it's all the numbers you wanted to know, and many of the numbers you didn't.

Joining us for this weeks podcast is.

Dylan Behan from the Newsfighters podcast.
Gabbi Bolt from The Chaser and TikTok (Yeah The Girls Show)
Lewis Hobba and Dan Ilic (me) as almost always.

We also ask Brynn Obrien from the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility just how responsible the treasurer's budget really is.

(Oh and Julia Zemiro pops in for a chat about being fiscally responsible)

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🎟️ GET A TICKET TO OUR NEWCASTLE SHOW — JUNE 5TH
🎟️ GET A TICKET TO OUR SYDNEY SATIRE SHOW AT JNI — JUNE 24TH 
👕 BUY OUR MERCH HERE

A Rational Fear on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear

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This week's podcast takes you flash points for disaster around the world; India, London, and Clive Palmer's office.

Indian authorities are clamping down on criticism against Prime Minister Modi, banning critical hashtags and throwing people in jail who tweet against the PM's response to COVID19.

So at only a small personal risk to himself, Anuvab Pal unleashes his thoughts on Modi this week's podcast rather than broadcast them on twitter.

Also UK Journalist and host of Course Correction podcast, Nelufar Heydat, uploads her concerns about a new NHS COVID Vaccination Passport App, that will divide the UK into the jabs and jab-nots.

And Dom Knight from satirical comedy outfit The Chaser, brings to light one of Clive Palmer's more recent failings. A proposal for a coal mine less than 10km from the Great Barrier Reef has been rejected by the state government.

We also discuss how A Rational Fear can get some of that $19686 per minute in fossil fuel subsidies. (Spoiler: We can't, please join our Patreon ) — oh and God pops by.

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Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Rational fear contains naughty words like bricks, camera, and gum, and section body, or rational fear recommended listening by immature audience.

Dan Ilic  0:13  
George Christensen shocking announcement that he's leaving politics is eclipsed by the shocking revelation. He's only 42 years old. And in Canada pledges to cut its carbon emissions by 40% before 2030, which is huge if Trudeau and Victorian Government has introduced a new tax on electric vehicles. Tonight we'll teach you how to convert your Tesla to a Model T Ford. It's the 30th of April 2021. And now milkshake brings all the boys to the yard of their own volition. This is a rational fear irrational

Welcome to irrational fear. I'm your host the ADHD enabled dickhead Dan Ilic. This is the podcast that takes the toughest topics and breaks them open like a pink lunchbox filled with USB sticks. Joining us on the podcast tonight he's been writing and performing satire for so long it's too late to change to something more lucrative like fossil fuel extraction from the chaser it's dumb night. Yes, preferably a fossil myself now

Dom Knight  1:17  
but I did try to change careers but I failed. So hello.

Dan Ilic  1:21  
And this is an Afghanistan born British journalist who speaks English Farsi, Hindi and dari. But this is her first time speaking Australian from Doha debaters course correction podcast. It's nella Hidayat.

Unknown Speaker  1:34  
Hello.

Dan Ilic  1:37  
That was a very honourable attempt. And finally his half torso, half legs, but all heart It's Louis Alba.

Lewis Hobba  1:46  
That's right. It's a very strange heart that is really leg shaped at the bottom.

Dan Ilic  1:52  
Coming up a little later on the grind and event pal joins us from Kolkata to shed light on whether Prime Minister Modi is the best Indian Prime Minister of all time, or the greatest Indian Prime Minister of all time. But first a message from our sponsor.

God  2:06  
Hi, I'm God, also known as Yahweh, the Lord Jehovah. And in some circles, Jenny, you may remember me for being the father of Jesus, the guy who was murdered by the mob when the local authorities claimed his safety was the responsibility of the seats. Now I just want to clear a few things up. Your Prime Minister Scott Morrison claimed that I came to him in a vision. And I said quote, Scott, you've got to run for Prime Minister. Well, that's not how I remember it. I remember hearing to him and saying Scott, you've got the runs. And if you don't make it home, you'll have to stop it and the dean McDonald's. I'm glad we could clear that up on the record. And remember, folks love one another. Although I understand that's more of an inner city a dinner party cafe. Greene's thing to do. Oh and buy my book is big, and it's a best seller.

Dan Ilic  3:12  
All right, this week's first fear Clive Palmer's proposal a bit of cold nine near the Great Barrier Reef has been dealt with a blow saying the project is not suitable. The problem is not suitable is Clive Palmer's whole brand dinosaurs on a golf course not suitable replica of a titanic the never sailed not suitable spending $60 million on a spoiler campaign to steal votes from labour not suitable paying people who work in his nickel refinery, not suitable dome in a world where coal is king, aka Queensland. How did Clive Palmer lose out to the environment on this one?

Dom Knight  3:47  
Well, it's a funny thing. I mean, I gave his holiday for the central Queensland mine came because few years ago Clive read about a Danny he read about all the years of objections. He read about the terrible environmental disaster or the ruining of the groundwater. And he just went home with Tim Tams. I've got an idea for a minute and this is where we are today. I was confused because, look, one thing that Queenslanders do not do is object to mines. You know Queensland has approved coal mines, like they're rejecting coming motorists from New South Wales. I love the coal as though with King Wally Lewis or a ship condo at surface like this is their thing. But then I remembered that Clive Palmer ran in the last election he spent was a $40 million or something I think even though $6 million 0.6% of the vote. This is in Queensland, so they've just Labour's just gone not know Clive, we hate you. You're the one man. Look, if Twiggy first proposes a coal mine Gina Rinehart Daryl summers could prefer Richard PC to get it up but Clive is the one guy who is saying no do not because they don't like Carl that is don't like Clive

Dan Ilic  4:52  
urich and Clive is the liability for his own coal mine.

Dom Knight  4:57  
I think so. net niloufar If you know Clive Palmer he's he's kind of like the Australian prototype for Donald Trump. except he's actually a billionaire. He was there for about three years. He turned up in a Rolls Royce. And then eventually we got rid of him big time. Yeah, billionaires in politics, it turns out don't mix. So well.

Nelufar Hedayat  5:15  
No, it's shocking, because the wide and varied history of the UK has proven not to be not true. I mean, look at today's news, right. So today, we've had calls for Boris Johnson, our Prime Minister to be investigated because he didn't like the former Prime Minister's Theresa Mays wallpaper. He's accused of like spending 1000s and 1000s of pounds doing up number 10 with donor money. And you know what, one of the things that I really find true in the UK is we use the word crony to mean corrupt because we just we don't seem to be able to say corrupt. So there's accusations of cronyism, but this sort of idea of like billionaires coming in, it's I mean, I'm gonna say you got that from us. I'm just gonna say

Lewis Hobba  6:00  
the fact that Boris Johnson is gone, you know what I mean, at number 10. And the first thing that I really need to put on this whole place is my personal taste. The idea that his arrogance extends so far that he can go look at this hair. Now imagine the decision I'll make on this wall.

Nelufar Hedayat  6:18  
No one's gonna say that Teresa Mays like got the eye on the interior design world, right. But at the same time, he's absolutely shameless. And because he's been baseer, because I'm sure this feller is and kind of walking up with a Rolls Royce or driving up whatever the Rolls Royce, he gets away with it. There's something about politics in a developed world where if you have a personality, people are like, Oh, he's just like us. He's just like us. It doesn't matter if his ancestors are Turkish royalty, or whatever he must be. And it's that sort of gaudiness with which they kind of approach politics that that that means that they can get away with it. it's astounding.

Dom Knight  6:53  
I love the Boris Johnson story and I love that the Prime Minister the UK during one of the world's worst pandemics has come out. Well, we better decorate for we can do anything else.

Nelufar Hedayat  7:03  
When did you make that decision? Like when 2000 people were dead 20,000 people it's astounding to know that this is something that you know he had time for as well as having a baby. Also, he's

Lewis Hobba  7:12  
such a he's such a like giant teenager that you like, how expensive is it just to buy a Reservoir Dogs poster that you're playing?

Unknown Speaker  7:24  
The first order of business is to tear down these fluid delays and then put up some racing cars.

Dom Knight  7:32  
I love I'm sure Boris and Clive were going everywhere. But I mean, Clive. Yep, see, right. Clive is so ridiculously flamboyant. But at the same time, he is a serious coal miner. He does all this kind of stuff. And this this proposal, the central Queensland mine was an absolute doozy guys. I mean, I had a look at it. And you know how Adani was 160 kilometres from the coast. This is 10 Yeah, 10 kilometres from the barrier. It is on the coastal floodplain, it's an open pit mine. So whenever it rains, the water just gonna wash straight onto the roof. It's extraordinary.

Dan Ilic  8:05  
And I love how I love how the government said no at a state level. But then the central Queensland coal company spokesperson said, I think there's still a pathway forward to get this going.

Nelufar Hedayat  8:18  
Around the world, like here in the United Kingdom, like Australia has quite a reputation of being a vanguard of being at the forefront of like climate action. And like, you know, banning plastic bags and working on all this stuff. And that's kind of Yeah, we don't know there's a billionaire coal man wandering around trying to absolutely decimate the barrier reef like why are we hearing about this? This is insane.

Lewis Hobba  8:40  
Our current prime minister now will just say walked into parliament holding a lump of coal yelling that it wouldn't hurt people like people, these people are

Unknown Speaker  8:51  
holding stuff. I mean, snowballs, climate change.

Dom Knight  8:56  
We found out this week that he likes touching people to heal them in kind of a Christian way. So the two things he likes touching are people who don't want him to in coal. That's what we're dealing with at the moment,

Unknown Speaker  9:06  
are rational fear.

Unknown Speaker  9:08  
By believing someone in social media has its virtues and values, to connect people in ways

Unknown Speaker  9:15  
those weapons can also be used by anyone a rational fear.

Dan Ilic  9:21  
That brings us to the second fear of the week, Australia's biggest doll Blodgett is receiving $19,686 a minute in welfare and that's the fossil fuel industry. Yeah, if you think $19,686 a minute is a lot of money. Well, it is. It's it's kind of more than the Australian government spends on the army. That's more than the Australian government spends on the Air Force. It works out to be about $10 billion a year we could have. We could have 10 more ABCs for that kind of money or at least one ABC that pays Louis Well yeah, finally,

Unknown Speaker  9:52  
someone plays I

Dan Ilic  9:55  
mean, this is this is great like wasn't one of the biggest plays in the local industry, Exxon Mobil They make $30 billion a year over four years and yet they pay zero tax. So fear mongers let me ask you this, how can we this podcast get some of that? $19,686 a minute?

Nelufar Hedayat  10:12  
Well, we can definitely start off by holding these lumps of coal you said.

Unknown Speaker  10:18  
Now,

Dan Ilic  10:19  
maybe I'm gonna put some recruit oil on my face and turn up in oil face, that'll probably get some sweet sweet dollars. Yeah, do we, if

Lewis Hobba  10:27  
we just start digging, like if we just go in the backyard? And like, I reckon they might be called a gang and just like, get like get the dog in there, the dog can mine. How small does the dig have to be before we start getting some of those subsidies?

Nelufar Hedayat  10:38  
Well, the closer to the barrier reef, the more likely we are to actually

Dom Knight  10:44  
just hit out on that we'll just head out on the roof, go out there on a surfboard and just start literally drilling into coral. And money will fall from the sky.

Dan Ilic  10:54  
Now this is actually a generous kind of kind of calculation from the Australia Institute, this $10 billion figure, the IMF did a calculation a few years back that put the cost of health care and the cost of the environment as factors with inside that subsidy. And the number is way bigger. It's like 29 billion US dollars a year in subsidies. It's just mind boggling now. Now you're outside of Australia. On your podcast cause correction. This week, you speak with former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gilad about her time in office and her attempts to bring the emissions trading scheme to Australia. What did you learn about Australia's climate politics? Speaking with her,

Nelufar Hedayat  11:33  
actually, that you guys are no better than any one of us, which is quite nice. Actually. Like I said, I mean, around the world, Australia does have a somewhat forward thinking view of climate action. And I don't know where this comes from, because it's blatantly a lie.

Unknown Speaker  11:48  
Yes, yes. Yeah. Great.

Dan Ilic  11:52  
It's so surprising that you say that because like ever since 1997, the Kyoto Protocol, we have been absolute, malignant assholes when it comes to the international negotiations,

Dom Knight  12:03  
your highest per capita emissions.

Unknown Speaker  12:05  
I mean, Whatsapp group.

Nelufar Hedayat  12:09  
Europe, well, we're not Europeans anymore. Oh, got that. Wow, that just gonna pop that control for later. Now. When we spoke to the Prime Minister, she was very, I think, you know, having lost the election because of her vote because of her carbon tax. It just felt like she had experienced what it's like to be at the forefront of change in that it's awful. Many of the people I've interviewed in my life Malala Yousafzai, Twin Peaks, astronauts, politicians, all types of folks have always kind of had this veneer of like, I'm a Changemaker thing is gonna be great. But on course correction, Judy Gilad just lays it out. And she's a woman. Let's say that let's put that out there. She's a woman so people are less likely to trust her when she says things. So we got into it. We really got into the to the nub of the issue. And yeah, it's a bit disheartening to think that a the messaging is all absolutely shambolic when it comes to climate change, and be that we're gullible enough to fall for it, because we want to believe in the good news, right.

Dan Ilic  13:13  
One of the things you said one of the things you said in that episode, which is really interesting was Julia kind of put the case that maybe the ETS was a hard thing to do. And even though it got torn down, it was still a worthy thing to do. Because it makes whatever comes next. Yeah. And the

Nelufar Hedayat  13:30  
person, she's a good leader, when it came to the climate bill, when it comes to ETS, she absolutely did all the right things, and she knew she was going to get banned for it. I can name I know, I can't, I can't name a single leader in the world except obviously the benevolent the good and the great Narendra Modi, who would do something along those lines of putting the nation putting something that's idealistic above herself.

Dom Knight  13:53  
You say that, but have you heard what our prime minister said this week in joe biden's Climate Summit, because this is impressive. This is impressive thinking it's creative. And I'm very proud of him, he managed to talk about the great carbon emissions that we have the moment all the reductions that we've made, he managed to exclude both the emissions on our exports and on our imports. So Australia's climate emissions look great if you don't count the stuff we dig out of the ground, or the ones that are you know, burnt, making things that what we import, which is every single thing that we have, it's like going to the pub and saying, Well, if you don't include all the BS that I drank, important in my body and the export of vomit at the end of the night, I'm actually sober to drive home.

Dan Ilic  14:41  
No, that's it like if you don't understand that's, like

Unknown Speaker  14:46  
none of the trick.

Dan Ilic  14:47  
None of this is true. None of this is tricky. None of this is hard. It's like it's fake accounting. One of my favourite things that was said though, was by your prime minister now. Boris Johnson, I think get a message for the whole world. When he was talking let me play a bit of that it's vital for all of us to show that this is not all about some expensive politically correct green active bunny hugging or however you want to put it I'm not even with bunny hugging you know what I'm driving at? You know what he's driving at? He's no he's it's not about Bernie hacking.

Nelufar Hedayat  15:24  
reputation of these United Kingdom's is what he's driving out funny hugging Mother of God I really just flattened by that. I mean that man represents my life. Like he is the person that we thought was best fit.

Unknown Speaker  15:43  
This is a rational view.

Dan Ilic  15:46  
This week's third fear international travellers in the UK will be asked to show their COVID vaccination test status with the NHS smartphone app. It's the same app that people book their NHS tests on. For me, it's it's problematic as the NHS app is only available for people in the UK, if they want. If they want international people to use it. They should use an app that everybody else uses like Tinder or something, you know, you got the Vax swipe right away, you go off to your baggage collection. Now what other problems do you see with this NHS passport?

Nelufar Hedayat  16:15  
So first of all, Michael Gove, he's kind of looking after this sort of thing. And we've got Mr. Wahby, who's in charge of the vaccination effort and trying to sort all of this stuff out, they have not come together in a consensus or a unified voice. So we literally don't know what's going on. In fact, the Guardian Today reported that the cop COVID passports that we thought were essential for going into pubs, just for quick payments of mates, or to restaurants is now being annexed and moved away into a different app into a certificate. And then there's going to be a passport, that means that you can go to some European countries, but only if you're wearing a yellow hat and holding a song. Here's my thing with all of this is COVID has shown us like just it's just been an absolute eye opener in terms of the haves and the have nots and how we have in the global north chosen to divide society. It was obviously a big raucous around the world a couple of weeks ago, when it's been proven that most of the vaccine 80% of the vaccines in the world have gone to the global north. And that's why you end up with situations that may or may not be happening in India right now.

Dan Ilic  17:15  
Finally, finally, the term global South makes sense for Australia. It's like yeah, we're now in the global south. We're not getting any vaccine.

Unknown Speaker  17:24  
Welcome to that. Not so, good club.

Nelufar Hedayat  17:26  
One of the main things that I'm concerned about is this holiday home loophole. Right. So if you have a holiday home, you can like bypass all the queues, all the lines, forget the bureaucracy that has to come with this thing not to mention that I could probably just pick up a piece of paper, stick a sticker on it and call it a passport myself. Like there is no thoughts, no foresight, no nothing going into this and it's going to create an absolute storm of it. When it comes to student holiday time

Dom Knight  17:55  
versus dad's been using that as a reason versus dead Ben jaunting off to Spain or something to his holiday house. Yeah,

Nelufar Hedayat  18:01  
it's a Stanley I can't remember his name he Hanley Stanley Stanley is a legend. Not Not Not a good legend. So much of it going on in the UK. But But you know, we have a different lexicon for it in the global north in Europe. We don't call it corruption. We don't call it misplacement of public funds. We don't call it ineptitude. Within the public service. We say it's a Bumble. We say, mommy huggers, we say that it's it's all gonna be all right on the you know, on the night and all this kind of chat. So so I don't what I what I'm really terrified of is that we're going to stumble into another situation where people are going to pay the price for government ever. And that's what's happening here with this

Dan Ilic  18:46  
pen. And mostly it's those people who still have got a Nokia 3310 because you know, the app doesn't work on that. Yeah,

Nelufar Hedayat  18:53  
I know. I you know, I think your Tinder Tinder thing is good shout out. And if Michael Gove cabinet ministers listening right now, I would like you to think about this as a sensible option because your NHS app is actual shite.

Lewis Hobba  19:05  
So you're asking for Michael Gove to get on Tinder. Is that what you're officially putting on the record?

Unknown Speaker  19:11  
He'll do well,

Dan Ilic  19:12  
on next we speak with an event pal from India. But before we get to him, the ABC sports reporter Jared code has a podcast and I was a guest on it. And I promised to run an ad for that show.

Lewis Hobba  19:21  
Speaking of cronyism, that's

Unknown Speaker  19:25  
incredible.

Lewis Hobba  19:29  
This is staggering. No one

Dan Ilic  19:33  
here it is.

Unknown Speaker  19:34  
Hello, Norman here. This is an ad for the get Jerry on podcast, a podcast and interviews comedians, where they come up with fun and silly ways to try and convince Jerry Seinfeld to come on. Unlike me, Jerry can't be bored so it's not going to happen. But it's fun to listen to these idiots try. Whether it's standing in a park with a sign begging a quarantine Daniel suas to go on the pod or pointless Billboard at a Sydney train station. This pod is doing all it can to get Gerry's attention. And I can tell you they are so far off, Jerry is more likely to take a call from me at this stage. So subscribe to the get Jerry on pod now, someone Seinfeld's agent finally responds, asking how many listeners they have, they won't have to lie like they have to all the others. Now back to our rational fear of feeling Gary would have if he knew this podcast existed.

Dan Ilic  20:29  
Now, you may have heard things that go into shit in India, but I'm not talking about the arrival of the British. That was some time ago, India's COVID cases are climbing fast. And they've hit a new global record with over 350,000 new cases per day this week with official numbers saying that around 2000 people a day are dying. But the real numbers are probably much worse. Joining us to agree with the official numbers or face arrest by Prime Minister Modi is the great and EVAP How can I innovate? What's

Anuvab Pal  20:56  
it like where you are? Everything's perfectly fine. Nothing wrong at all. Just a tranquil tranquil day in India. Some people are saying that they watched a new release in the theatres just before we had the lockdown. And that release was King Kong Vs. Godzilla. And a lot of us could identify with what happened to the cities in and, and looking at those cities. People were saying, Yeah, this is a perfectly reasonable place to live. And that's how we're living right now. So So basically, we're in a Hollywood movie set, and it's everything else you hear is an exaggeration. It's made up. Just give me one second, I'm just going to turn down the surveillance camera. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Now we can have a conversation. Yeah, we're all gonna die.

Lewis Hobba  21:56  
so considerate of Modi to give you a volume button on camera. And that's really,

Anuvab Pal  22:01  
it. You know, it's one of those things, we stopped our exports from China. So a lot of our technology isn't working, right. So as I'm just getting past that loophole by being able to turn this down, I can just tell you how bad things were just one quick example, which is, I mean, I leave the news for all the grim, morbid stuff, a petty criminal, a thief in the Central State of Madhya Pradesh, who was an expert thief, he was very good at stealing small things like car hubcaps. Lots of random steel equipment, like he was an expert, decoyed he stole a large shipment of vaccines. And he returned it with a note in Hindi saying, I'm sorry, I didn't know. These were vaccines. So even petty criminals are stepping up to do the job for the Government of India. We're in a condition where basically, I'm turning to my high school group to see if we can help each other and I hate my I read the day before I was telling my wife how the whole a bunch of third treat, you know, scumbag bastard. Now we see each other's lives. So rule is, I guess never dis your high school friends. Because even if you hate them, they'll come through when the government doesn't.

Dom Knight  23:17  
I would like to thank Anna Bob's classmates signing up to the Patreon.

Unknown Speaker  23:20  
Yeah.

Dan Ilic  23:23  
I mean, that would be great. I know. There's a big audience in India and a vibe. So please tweet about this. Now lections are still happening in the in the state of West Bengal with around 17,000 cases per day. Still, how does one responsibly campaign to get elected there?

Anuvab Pal  23:40  
Yeah. So I'm in the city where there's elections today, in central Calcutta. It's one of the phases where Calcutta is the capital of Western goal. Yeah, elections are going on. Now. I was curious to know what why an individual would come out and attend an election rally. In the middle of this right. We're in the middle of 40 degrees heat, and you are a very poor Indian person working on a farm. If you go to listen to an election rally, you're going to lose a day's work. So why would you why who in their right mind would go and listen to political speeches in the middle of this. And then I found out in true Indian fashion, there's bribery involved. So you know, one of the age old things were very good at cricket and bribery. So what they give you is they give you 500 rupees and a packet of biryani, if you go and attend these speeches, and to be honest, I would go for 500 rupees and a packet of brownie and it doesn't even matter which side you're listening to really,

Dan Ilic  24:38  
what is 500 rupees worth in in dollars. How

Anuvab Pal  24:42  
do you get a Coca Cola and I don't know a sandwich of some kind. But the point is, that's how you get crowds you know, and it's something we comedians should learn from. When you know we play to empty houses at the end of COVID you know, some biryani and because you're looking at these pack crowds and the media is like What the hell? Why the hell would you do this? that problem? I have no answer for I mean, you'd have to ask. Or once again, the cameras back on again are fantastic Prime Minister Modi. Every scholarly answer philosophical Hansen, Prime Minister Modi. I could do that in 3434 languages if you'd like.

Dan Ilic  25:22  
I'm speaking of the hat, the very handsome and the render birdie at Facebook has banned the hashtag resign Modi. Why, why? Why can they? Why can they prevent Narendra Modi from having hurt feelings but not prevent genocide in Myanmar?

Anuvab Pal  25:34  
You know, one of the things that Prime Minister Modi has understood about history is that if you constantly Forget it, then you can repeat it. And to everyone, it's new, you know, that's the thing. So, if you hadn't had the Nuremberg trials, then if you ever had something like Nazi Germany, again, people be like, Whoa, what is this? This is amazing. What is this? You know, so But if you don't, if you don't have regret, shame, if you don't ever say I'm sorry, you can keep going. You can keep doing stuff. And there's a new narrative that's, that's coming out from the government, which basically says, forget the past. Let's all worked together, forget the past. Now, the past was about six minutes. So that's a really good way to think about forget the guys lying here, this is dead. Forget

Dan Ilic  26:25  
about the future now that that word help us. And speaking of the past this week, Australia is closing its borders to India. Now the rate of infection per capita in India is because it is so huge, the rate of infection is about the same as Italy and the United States and the UK about 200 per million. It's almost it's almost like there's something different between the people of India and the people of the UK and USA, but I can't put my finger on it. And in fact, do you have any idea why Australia is trading India so

Anuvab Pal  26:55  
differently? It's an age old thing. It's an age old thing. It's been going on for 1000s of years. The Americans are in denial of it. And you know, all know what I'm talking about. It's the big word. It's cricket. Basically, you know what happened? I mean, some show some people that five people that follow cricket in the world, probably know that the Indian cricket team beat everyone in Australia, if they get away, they might do it again. So why not just ban everyone? Other people are saying racism, I don't think it's racism. I really think that's what it is. They just don't want these 11 people to get there again.

Dan Ilic  27:32  
I think I've got a picture of two cricketers flying internally in India. This is them on a domestic flight, David Warner, and Kane Williamson on a flight internally in India. It's like the only people who have got these guys or four people on the podcast. They're dressed head to toe in hazmat kind of suits. They don't even real hazmat suits. They're like dust certs that painters wear and they've got masks on. And that's about it. Like it's not even not even a real, not even a real kind of hazmat suit.

Dom Knight  28:01  
Well, the news have just come through this evening that, in fact, to Australian cricketers have found a way through the blockade or you've got to do you've just got to fly to Doha, do the tests in Doha and then come back from there and oh, and also be white and rich?

Unknown Speaker  28:18  
was very, very well.

Dom Knight  28:19  
I don't know who it is. They haven't been identified, but I suspect that Steve Smith and Dave wanted just sandpapering through the rules.

Lewis Hobba  28:26  
Yeah, the other the other only other alternative is if you get cast in the new Thor film,

Unknown Speaker  28:32  
as well.

Dan Ilic  28:33  
Yeah, at this point, there are so many Hemsworth they could create their own cricket team. I think there is a thing that is 11 and Swiss brothers,

Unknown Speaker  28:40  
then I might watch cricket. I mean,

Nelufar Hedayat  28:44  
we should look into this Australia.

Anuvab Pal  28:48  
I did see somewhere that your prime minister said he wasn't going to give a special claim to Australian cricketers to go back. And, and I think that there's good reason for it. Because, given some of your leading players spend so much time in India, a couple of them are in Bollywood films. They've done their own romantic comedies here. I just recently saw your former captain in a chewing tobacco commercial, I think they'll have a harder time proving their Australian credentials.

Dom Knight  29:14  
I think if you'd seen one of Brett lays a Bollywood movies as I have, you would close the borders permanently. No restraints ever again.

Anuvab Pal  29:22  
Now there you go. Tom probably knows more about Bollywood that I do. I was three minutes of that film. And then I did not watch cricket for six months. So I don't know if you've sat through it. You're a better Indian person than I am. So.

Dom Knight  29:34  
Well, one question I have for you on a verb is about these numbers. And we mentioned that the rate of infection is looks on paper like the West but I talked to my wife is Indian. And she said, Look, no one believes the numbers. Both because they can't possibly catch everyone because there's slums. Things are doing really badly there. But also, people just think the government is changing the numbers. Is that the sense you get on the ground there?

Anuvab Pal  29:58  
Yeah, I mean, look, there's small discrepancy. sees the just the tiny factor of 100 is the lie. So saying one, basically, numbers 100. So if you can work out what that equation is, from the lie to the actual, you'll be fine. And this goes back to an old indian thing that we have. And maybe it has something to do with being in a third world country, maybe something to do with a complex about not being rich enough as a country that people always say, you know, never, never, like, accept blame for anything. Because, you know, we have this phrase in India, where the where the prepositions are messed up, and the phrases it will come on you. It can be inappropriately translated in the West. But what they really mean is, and I don't mean to intrude on anyone's private life here, but what they really mean is, you will be blamed for it all. So you know, if say, India is reporting a million deaths, everyone be like, Oh, my God, look at India million deaths, India. And it's, it's, they teach us this in high school as well, just if you've done something wrong, don't admit it. Otherwise, it's just going to come on.

Dom Knight  31:06  
He said, Prime Minister, Scott Morrison Indian.

Anuvab Pal  31:11  
This The thing with the COVID COVID thing. And we did this at the last wave as well. Basically, if you don't admit, it's going on, it's not happening. And we solve Indian family conflicts that way as well. If we suppress it long enough, one or the other party will die after really resolve the problem, but what's happening is now India has a lot of good data scientists and the want to tell the world the facts, right. They want to you know, they have we have brilliant scientists, we have brilliant civic society, people who studied abroad who want to give people the reality. And what the government is saying is that these are made up numbers to make India look bad. So that's the new thing that's going on. Because it's not a pandemic. It's a fashion show, and you cannot look bad.

Dan Ilic  31:52  
I want to thank you for joining us on irrational fear. And I hope you don't get arrested because of this podcast. Like so many of your country, people have been arrested for tweeting things about Modi on Twitter. So thanks. Thanks so much for joining us on irrational fear.

Anuvab Pal  32:06  
It's my pleasure by the way My name is not about Paul, this never happened. But I wish you guys wherever you are. Good luck.

Dan Ilic  32:15  
That's it for the show tonight. big thank you to Dom night nella had died and Louis harbour and an EVAP How do you guys got anything to plug? Don't you wanna plug anything?

Dom Knight  32:23  
I'm doing absolutely nothing other than this has been wonderful.

Dan Ilic  32:27  
What would you like to plug

Nelufar Hedayat  32:29  
in podcasts out right now across all reputable podcasts? Sure. Which is Spotify, Apple podcasts and Stitcher and all of that. Please listen. It's really good. I'm in it could

Dan Ilic  32:37  
cause correction. It is very good. All check it in the show notes. Louis, you want to plug anything?

Lewis Hobba  32:41  
Oh, you know what, actually, yeah, for the first time in the history of this podcast. I actually have launched a new podcast in the last few weeks. Yeah, it's called simply the jest. It's from our radio show that we do on Triple J. It is though, like most insane stories, that Triple J listers which might not mean much to you know that. They're basically like a bunch of beautiful, psychotic wild grumps. Every week, we give them a topic and anyone in the country can call in and tell their story very quickly. And we hear about 20 and then we pick our favourite one and it is Darius

Dan Ilic  33:18  
Lewis and I have shows coming up in Vega and Newcastle. Stay tuned for that. And we've also got a show coming up in Chippendale sometimes, which just got moved this week, which is fantastic. big thank you to rode mics, the birther Foundation, our wonderful Patreon supporters, Jacob brown on the tepanyaki timeline. The incredible Rupert Degas for his incredible God voice over at the stone at the start of the show. Until next week, there's always something to be scared of. Goodnight

A Rational Fear on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear

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Once a month on A Rational Fear on the podcast feed we present a different kind of show:

Greatest Moral Podcast Of Our Generation is a long form conversation with a climate leader from around the world.

(02:21) Linh Do and Dan Ilic rip into the Leaders Climate Summit from this week in the climate news 

(14:08) This month's Dan Ilic talks with School Strike for Climate Leader: Jean Hinchliffe 

If you enjoy our work please chip in to our Patreon to support the podcast or buy something from our shop: https://www.redbubble.com/people/ARationalFear/shop?asc=u

A Rational Fear on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear

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Thanks to so many of you who made it out to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival on the weekend. We had an absolutely cracker show from start to finish

Feat.

Alice Fraser
Sami Shah
Gabbi Bolt
Lewis Hobba
James Colley
Dan Ilic
+ Simon Holmes à Court

💉 We covered the vaccination rollout.
🥔 Peter Dutton suing people on twitter for defamation.
⭐⭐⭐ Bit Clout and reputation on the blockchain.
🌏 The highjacking of the Climate Change Authority and Turnbull's sacking from the NSW Zero Emissions board.
🤴 Prince Philip's death.
🏄‍♀️ Netflix's new reality series set in Byron Bay: Byron Baes.
🎹 Gabbi Bolt does songs about climate change, incels, and empathy consultants.

It was a great show — I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed performing it.

Cheers

Dan 

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A Rational Fear on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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🎟️ SEE A RATIONAL FEAR AT MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL COMEDY FESTIVAL: https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2021/shows/a-rational-fear

On the podcast this week, we grab an e-meter in both hands and audit the accounts of Scientology in Australia. We rip into the Government missing the vaccination target, and ask ourselves is being a tradie-cum-stripper an essential worker?

Also Gina Rinehart, Australia's most successful climate action delayer and funder of misinformation, has released a joke book (sic). Even though a super from SkyNews Australia said she's the author, it looks like, for all intents and purposes, a collection of memes she stole from my Dad's email account.

Make sure to follow this week's fearmonger panel on social media, and book a ticket to their comedy festival shows.

Kirsty Webeck (Chuck A Sickie)
Craig Quartermaine (Twitter / Facebook)
Kamahl (Twitter)
Lewis Hobba (A Rational Fear)
Dan Ilic (A Rational Fear)

There's only 1 week to go until our comedy festival show, that is, if no tradie-cum-strippers visit Victoria before then.

🎟️ SEE A RATIONAL FEAR AT MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL COMEDY FESTIVAL: https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2021/shows/a-rational-fear

Bertha Announcement  0:00  
This podcast is supported in part by the birth of foundation.

Dan Ilic  0:04  
Good evening Lewis.

Lewis Hobba  0:05  
Hello Daniel. How

Unknown Speaker  0:07  
are you?

Dan Ilic  0:08  
I'm well I'm well and a big Hello to all of our new Patreon supporters Louis Sam. You know how last week Lewis was a record breaking week for our Patreon supporters?

Lewis Hobba  0:18  
Of course I've already bought a Tesla put a new wine cellar in the rental. I've really been dining out

Dan Ilic  0:27  
Well, it's thanks to Dave like this week is even more 14 new Patreon subscribers big thank you to Trey Ryan Christie Osborne Professor Hilary bambrick from the climate council previous fear monger on the show Lisette Salah Vich Eleanor booth Dylan Joel Matt Smith, Joseph bass, Jacqueline Flynn, Jared Van Dijk travelling Gilmore, Megan Villa just signed on just moments before we started the broadcast more expensive from the climate collective. Carrie, who is only signing up for Gabby bolts she insists that you know where she insists we're okay. That Gabby bolt is the real star of the show.

Lewis Hobba  1:00  
That's fair. That's absolutely fair. We'll still take the money. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Dan Ilic  1:04  
Yeah. And speaking of Gabby bolts she's going to be performing at our Melbourne International Comedy Festival show. April 11. We're Amelia weekend a little bit of why we've sold over 100 seats, which means there's still 150 to go because I booked this big book the biggest the festival.

Unknown Speaker  1:21  
No One

Lewis Hobba  1:22  
No One books comedy more than awake out there. Now. That's true. That's true. That's true.

Unknown Speaker  1:27  
Relax.

Dan Ilic  1:28  
Yeah, you know, I have a theory like if we only sell like 150 seats in the 250 seat venue, we can space everyone out and say it's COVID safe.

Lewis Hobba  1:35  
Anything's a sellout in 2021.

Dan Ilic  1:37  
Speaking of sailing out I did a TVC this month you might have seen me on TV. Sorry about that. Sometimes you got to make money. I'm recording my end of a rational view on gadigal land and the Euro nation sovereignty was never stated. We need a treaty. Let's start the show

Unknown Speaker  1:51  
rational fear contains naughty words like bricks,

Unknown Speaker  1:55  
camera, fed COMM

Unknown Speaker  1:58  
And section body. A rational view recommended listening by immature audience.

Dan Ilic  2:04  
Tonight we finally unblocked this sewers but London parliament is full of shifts and Australia has missed its COVID vaccine by 85%. The country has messed up this much since landing on the beta gallipoli's and southeast Queensland comes out of a three day lockdown wild northern New South Wales narrowly avoids an outbreak of blues and roads. It's the second of April 2021 We ain't no fools. This is irrational fear.

Welcome to rational fi. I'm your host former Australian Financial Review senior political operative Dan Ilitch. This is a rational fear that podcast that takes the scariest news stories of the week and unwisely laughed in their face. Let's meet our fear bunkers for tonight. Thanks to Brisbane locked down our first guest can now spend less time doing stand up comedy shows and spend more time with his beloved ride on lawnmower. Zooming in from southeast Queensland. It's Mr. hotspot himself cry quartermaine wangi.

Craig Quatermaine  3:09  
Good evening, everybody. And yeah, don't don't talk about

Dan Ilic  3:15  
Renee, you're right on lawn mode. Here we we need. When you first got a ride on lawn mower, did

Craig Quatermaine  3:21  
you think God I've made it? I did not want it in any way. And I did not want this amount of grass. And there's something that happens when you're in your late 30s. And you look around and I modal that and this is just this free pride. Yeah, I just became obsessed. I became one of those guys. That World War Two barbecuing mowing your lawn. And I've got two of the three of them.

Lewis Hobba  3:44  
Are you part of the Facebook group? The Australian lawn enthusiasts group?

Craig Quatermaine  3:50  
No,

Lewis Hobba  3:51  
no, I'm not. I'm gonna send you this link. I followed them like three years ago for some dumb thing that we were doing on the radio. City. Yeah, I grew up. I grew up in the country. I grew up on a ride on mower. But I don't I don't need it now because I realised that they suck and it's work. So I'm trying to stay far away from that life as possible. But you should get involved with this group. It's passionate. I get

Craig Quatermaine  4:15  
it. I completely feel it absolutely is one of those things. I never, I could never become one of those guys now. It's it's trying to figure out how I can do an entire acre without backtracking.

Dan Ilic  4:28  
It's like, welcome back to the largest loans of Australia podcast. Our next guest has just hit a milestone of 8000 Twitter followers. Was it her charm, her stand up success or maybe it was her constant tweets about the Suez Canal? It's Kirsty women.

Unknown Speaker  4:45  
Hello.

Kirsty Webeck  4:46  
Hey going,

Dan Ilic  4:48  
Kirsty Welcome to the 8000 Club. How does it feel to have 8000 Twitter followers? Oh,

Kirsty Webeck  4:54  
it's an immense amount of stress. I think it would be rivalled only by Craig having to manage that amount

Dan Ilic  5:03  
Finally, it's the man that all young up and coming radio broadcast as a calling the ever given of Triple J. It's loose.

Lewis Hobba  5:11  
That's true. I am I am too big and no one can get rid of me.

Dan Ilic  5:18  
Coming up a little later on, we'll be giving Kemal a call. After years of research, he's finally gotten the answer to why so many people are so unkind and the answer will surprise you. But first, here's a message from our sponsor.

Unknown Speaker  5:30  
The rules of federal parliament are changing from April 1 to 2021. Some behaviour will now be quietly condemned, whether that's accidentally quote, assaulting a silly drunk girl, or just whacking on a desk. The consequences of your actions could now be enforced with serious thinly veiled threats. Like you could lose your portfolio, lower the chances of pre selection, maybe, or possibly even getting a telling off by a state premier. That's why the Prime Minister's Prime Minister for female complaints is introducing knob keeper. knob keeper provides relief for your upstanding member. No keeper supports noms with fully paid leave, so you can spend more time with your family if you still have one before coming back and fulfilling your promise to the Australian people while collecting $200,000 a year. Or your fully paid leave can be used to brief a team of lawyers so you can sue a trusted journalist who never mentioned your name for defamation. But remember, if you're not sure whether that upskirting photo or dick pic is appropriate. Check with Jenny first Julie has a way

Unknown Speaker  6:41  
of clarifying things.

Unknown Speaker  6:42  
Nope. Keep a helping hand for our big swinging decks authorised by irrational fear on behalf of the Australian Government camera.

Dan Ilic  6:50  
First year this week, Australia has missed his targets for vaccination. Now, I'm not saying that they've, you know, injected everyone in their eyeballs. No, the state and federal governments have only vaccinated 600,000 people missing the target set by the pm some months ago, or 4 million, which is basically missing it by 85%, which is huge. The federal government is updated the target to 4 million by the end of April. In order to achieve that they'll need to do the equivalent of 121,000 shots a day. And with music festivals cancelled, there's still even less opportunity to double up with other drugs a fear mongers, how can the government made the hit goal of 4 million doses by the end of April Louis? Well, I

Lewis Hobba  7:30  
mean, first of all, I think anyone who's ever listened to this podcast knows that we were pretty in glass houses when it comes to laughing at someone from the doing 15% of the expected job. I want to be very clear in that as an Australian, I think we can all relate to that achievement. Yeah.

Dan Ilic  7:49  
Do you think this is going to embark? Do you think this is going to big up the government in the eyes of regular Australia? Because

Unknown Speaker  7:55  
like, Oh, you

Dan Ilic  7:56  
know, they're blogging on the blog? Yeah, I totally.

Lewis Hobba  8:00  
I think they'll just be like, why didn't you get to formulate it? They're like, Oh, I might as long weekend. We knocked off pretty early on Thursday. We'll be back Tuesday. But you know, Tuesday's a short week, so really, we're looking at maybe April 12. And I think most people can look at that and go sure I can I back that.

Dan Ilic  8:17  
Kirsty's is a big concern for you not being able to get the shot sooner.

Kirsty Webeck  8:21  
Not necessarily for me, but I think someone should get it.

Unknown Speaker  8:27  
Like give it

Unknown Speaker  8:28  
give it to someone bleeding hearts over here. Give it to someone.

Kirsty Webeck  8:32  
I reckon, though, that what they need to do is train up all of the musicians that are out of work at the moment get them given the jabber out

Lewis Hobba  8:41  
everyone who is supposed to play blues fest retrain them as a as a as a nurse or doctor.

Unknown Speaker  8:46  
Absolutely.

Kirsty Webeck  8:47  
I know. Well, I mean, they could go to medical school for eight years and they'd be right up.

Dan Ilic  8:54  
Craig, you're in the you're in the hot spot of of southeast Queensland. You need three cases. How are you coping?

Craig Quatermaine  9:01  
I couldn't be further away from everyone. So it's pretty good. It's not that bad. Queensland Is This Really? I'm from Western Australia. Queensland has is very, we had aggressive exception. The case of you know, they hear about the stuff Oh, we got to wear a mask. I can hear right. And then that's it. That's as far

as been great. And, but it's just interesting for me, because, yeah, they're still not giving them out. We're trying to lift it. I mean, it's amusing for me. I ran 10k yesterday. I'm in pretty good Nick. But just because I'm indigenous and nearly 40 you get the vaccine before any of you Oh, the fucking it's hilarious. As far as getting up vaccinations, I don't know maybe you got you got to show a certificate or something like the only way you can watch married at first sight is if you get the jab awesome shit like that, but just Yeah Is that like that

Lewis Hobba  10:03  
I actually loved that idea, Craig. I think if you told everyone that it was lip filler, instead of like, this is the Pfizer lip filler and then you just like we just need to test it out on your arm and then once it's Think of it as Botox but for your for your bicep.

Unknown Speaker  10:20  
When you were in politics, a group of male politicians who called themselves the swinging digs sought to block your career aspirations.

Unknown Speaker  10:28  
I believe it was big swinging decks. So there was obviously an overexcited imagination on the part of some I would suggest a rational fear.

Dan Ilic  10:39  
This week second fear ladies look up your tradies because they could have rabies or worse COVID-19 in perhaps the most Australian of COVID-19 stories, a Gold Coast trainee who works part time as a stripper, most recently at a hinge night in Byron Bay has been linked to the Queensland hospital cluster that sparked the lightest lockdown. You know, he's actually updated his routine he now plays performs to Joe caucus hit you can leave your mask on. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I've got two shakes of the head and 111 sympathy nod from

Lewis Hobba  11:14  
Kirsty you have no way of physically keeping us at this podcast and I will walk

Dan Ilic  11:19  
I will walk. It's easy to blame the NBN and Smokeout is easy. I reckon if Kemal wasn't coming on a little bit later, y'all would have walked the mongers. stripper trainees essential workers, Craig.

Craig Quatermaine  11:35  
I think so. I think they're a bit of it's really really because this isn't the thing my mom was supposed to come up and visit. And this guy being like, this is the whole scare that stopped. Because Yeah, mums in a late 60s. She was supposed to come up and because of this case, she didn't make it into Queensland. She's gonna stay out in Victoria. And it's well, not because she skated COVID is because she swore he can't get a lap dance.

You got it. The thing is, you hear the in here stereotypes and you hear all these sort of ridiculous stories. Then you spent one night in the Gold Coast like yeah, this makes sense. It's totally

Dan Ilic  12:17  
The tradie has such this iconic stranglehold on on on Australian culture. Do you think this has done any damage to the icon of the tradie? Kirsty?

Kirsty Webeck  12:27  
No, absolutely not. Like, if anything, the part of the story that I'm most fixated on is that he went to visit his nana, And I'm like, He's a good boy.

Dan Ilic  12:41  
I didn't know that step out of the story.

Kirsty Webeck  12:43  
I think if anything, he's, he's increased. The standing in the community. Definitely, in my opinion.

Unknown Speaker  12:51  
I love him.

Lewis Hobba  12:52  
As with all COVID things, it's always funny until it's not. But it'll be interesting to see what happens with the Byron Bay outbreak because I don't know how much time you spent around there. But trying to get them to wear masks is going to be it's going to be like feeding a toddler vegetables like it is going to be one of the toughest challenges in human history.

Dan Ilic  13:10  
If you told them that wearing a mask was cultural appropriation though they'd probably do

Lewis Hobba  13:16  
if you connected it to an Indian headdress, American headdress rather. That's right. Yeah.

Dan Ilic  13:20  
Everyone in Coachella is wearing masks, man. Everyone's got its traditional Navajo dress.

Craig Quatermaine  13:25  
I believe you're digging the boots into people that have just been robbed Xavier Rudd each pair of pricks. They've been through it.

Lewis Hobba  13:38  
We've only had 20 chances a year for the last 20 years to catch up.

Unknown Speaker  13:45  
To it Robert he resigns from the table ministry for breaching ministerial code and 2018 set 200,000 Rolex watches from a Chinese billionaire he's a parliamentary speech written by a property developer is $38,000 for home internet and says my bag when he incorrectly blamed cyber attack for centerlink going down last

Unknown Speaker  14:02  
year. How does this bloke get more responsibility in your shop

Unknown Speaker  14:05  
when someone does a good job like that

Lewis Hobba  14:07  
they show that they can take on responsibility if they can get things done for Australians

Dan Ilic  14:11  
a rational fear this week's third fear in Scientology news. Now apparently Australia's become a tax haven for this Church of Scientology. It enjoys its tax exempt status in Australia whereas in other countries like the UK, it actually has to pay tax. So the Australian arm of the not for profit church between 2013 and 2019 has made a profit of $65.4 million. Which is insane. The church makes a profit of about 30% more than companies and Australian stock went on the Australian Stock Exchange. When it comes to purchase Goa. It is made $102,000 per church goer whereas the Catholic Church has only made 5600 per head. Now the total assets in Australia from the Church of Scientology totals $326 million. It kind of makes sense. Now with all these celebrities coming here to make these films, I guess fishmonger's, to what extent does this make the Church of Scientology appealing to you, Kirsty? Is this exciting for you?

Kirsty Webeck  15:12  
Yeah, I find that today after I. Allegedly, they will be claiming that they're putting all that money into properties in which they can carry on their religious teachings. And I just want to get inside those properties. But there'll be paralysis. I want to see what's happening in there. Yeah, I want to swim in the infinity pool.

Dan Ilic  15:40  
I don't know if you saw there's a photo of the headquarters in chatswood. in Sydney, it used to be a campus of the University of Technology, Sydney, but now the Church of Scientology is bought, they bought an entire university campus and turn it into their Australian headquarters. It's, it's incredible.

Lewis Hobba  15:58  
I think, like the big difference when you start thinking of the Catholic Church in Scientology, apart from things is, I think, you know, you look at all of the money that the Catholic Church has. And so obviously, there's a lot of bad and let's all just accept that in pocket. But if you're looking for the positives, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of songs, there's a lot of art, you can go and see some sculptures you can pop into, you know, you can go to Rome and wander around and have a look you like, they're ostentatious with their wealth in a way that you can go, I can see where my money's going. Whereas I feel like Scientology missed that trick. I would love to be able to go and see the you know, the modern version of DaVinci. David, where it's just a tiny little statue of Tom Cruise with his dick out like this. There's room out there. I feel like they jumped

Craig Quatermaine  16:47  
on surveillance equipment.

Unknown Speaker  16:51  
That's their art. Yeah,

Craig Quatermaine  16:52  
they don't have any big gold statues. I'm with Jesse though, as far as a Korean. Why not? What is a struggling comedian like myself? Why wouldn't you sign up with sites? I think they take less than most managers. argue with the results.

Kirsty Webeck  17:10  
Let's get them to produce our Comedy Festival shows in 2022. Take it from there. But

Craig Quatermaine  17:24  
as far as religions go, let's be honest, it's not the weirdest one name,

Unknown Speaker  17:28  
the latest one, like

Craig Quatermaine  17:34  
underpants is a dude that rose after three days is like, Well, you could just keep going, in a perspective that all of these religions are like 2000 years old. That's hilarious to me. Anyway. If you're looking for a look at the capital gains in Scientology, fuck it, why not?

Dan Ilic  17:50  
They actually like looking at this article actually structured like how Google and Facebook and apple or offshore their money, they give out loans to the other international arms of the business and then they charge almost like franchise fees and licencing fees back to the other parts of the business. And so you kind of got this aggregate it's like Australia is a place where there's like this storing the wealth of the entire church. Because other tax other tax jurisdictions mean that the tax the money will go to go to tax will go to governments.

Lewis Hobba  18:22  
It's proposing a heist. Alright, let's

Dan Ilic  18:30  
do Hang on a sec. Now. Now this week's Hang on a sec comes from Sky News Australia. Apparently,

Gina Rinehart has launched a joke book. Yeah. I'm gonna play the news story. At any point you at any point you want to chime in just say Hang on a second, I'll stop the tape.

Unknown Speaker  18:49  
They say laughter is the best medicine and mining magnate Gina Rinehart has wants more of it to be shared

Lewis Hobba  18:55  
these little bits of Hang on a second. Yeah, well, what does like before we even get to the insanity of this idea? That introduction makes no sense. She's not a doctor. So to say laughter is the best medicine. Like what why is that even an appropriate introduction for a mining magnate? I'd have thought like, you'd have gone something like every comedians looking for the gold and dug up heaps of it or something you don't I mean, like, I haven't really thought about it, but I wouldn't have gone with medicine.

Craig Quatermaine  19:24  
I love that. exactly the point where you stop that she looks like a witch.

Unknown Speaker  19:28  
Sort of bits of

Kirsty Webeck  19:30  
humour to hopefully bring some smile to faces.

Unknown Speaker  19:33  
She began gathering jokes and stories for friends in hospital. Now they've been put together into a book to bring moments of joy to those who need it. Most people in this book

Craig Quatermaine  19:43  
in jumping on to St. Jude have done the corporate

Unknown Speaker  19:53  
How much does it pay?

Unknown Speaker  19:56  
Ridiculous

Kirsty Webeck  20:03  
Look, I would have been seated. I wouldn't have done a set.

Dan Ilic  20:06  
Craig, you would have been one of the prime candidates to do the corporate as a former person who worked in the mines themselves Surely,

Craig Quatermaine  20:12  
Luke Okay, so I have taken dirty mining money several times. But in my defence when I did feel guilty about making money of digging up my ancestral home, I bought myself a really nice pair of shoe mining gigs and Wi Fi so much. And it's after seeing this video and seeing whose presence and that is basically a junket. And that sky, I'm pretty confident would be the only people reporting on it because they own half of that station. I can't even imagine what the hell DMC got paid just to turn up and do that. And they're just, it's just because you grind their bones to make you bread doesn't mean you know how to make kids laugh

Kirsty Webeck  21:06  
as a man died, but I think they have left us with things that are highly relevant. today.

Unknown Speaker  21:12  
It's a project close to her heart. Dina Reinhardt's Cambodian daughter's design the book cover,

Lewis Hobba  21:18  
hang on a second. Where is this journalist currently because it seems to be like she's in an empty pub. Is that is that the launch?

Craig Quatermaine  21:26  
I think that launch just the journalist and Gina Rinehart and an empty pop Sky News for all the money and everything they have pumped into it. All of their journos in regional state so if that's in Perth, or wherever it is, a lot of images vj so it's just the journalists and their cameras. She's probably filming that herself. Yeah, yeah.

Dan Ilic  21:45  
Yeah, Louis you

Lewis Hobba  21:46  
don't don't try to make me feel sorry for a Sky News journalist.

Unknown Speaker  21:50  
I'm not trying to

Craig Quatermaine  21:54  
sign up for evil pricks

Unknown Speaker  22:00  
the magic of technology connecting speakers and guests. Those from Parliament House the Royal Flying Doctor Service and pest Polly attending virtually to share their favourite journalistic

Dan Ilic  22:10  
so the Royal Flying Doctors, journalists, people in Parliament House and pest Polly, the the the polkadot that

Lewis Hobba  22:21  
like pill company,

Unknown Speaker  22:23  
yeah, what was what?

Unknown Speaker  22:23  
What?

Dan Ilic  22:24  
What's going on over here? Why is this valley logic

Lewis Hobba  22:27  
a joke, but I imagine she's when she just be one of their biggest customers. When you have a lot of pills to clot. You need to constantly be updating your pill collection. It's incredible.

Unknown Speaker  22:37  
And quotes

Unknown Speaker  22:38  
if you want something, said ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.

Unknown Speaker  22:45  
Yeah, guess say laughter is desperate.

Lewis Hobba  22:48  
is Gina plugging this officer? Oh, she's just literally gone on like Wikipedia jokes. She's stolen them she had you wouldn't you'd be failed for this at university?

Dan Ilic  22:56  
No, she absolutely has. And she's like taking names from people's emails and put them in the book. Like, there's one in there saying, with a mum pointing to a girl say, Listen here, little girl, if you got to stop lying, otherwise, you'll become an ABC journalist. Like that's, that's one of the jugs of the book. They like right wing ship posts, put in book form to give Cambodian children some joy.

Lewis Hobba  23:19  
And that that that Jabba the ABCs really gonna bring a smile to the face of someone in hospital

Unknown Speaker  23:25  
in an era of political correctness,

Unknown Speaker  23:28  
keeping warm and enjoying the laughs I mean, who doesn't need a laugh right now? Seriously, Gina

Unknown Speaker  23:33  
is a woman of the world literally. And she's a great friend and I just admire

Lewis Hobba  23:39  
Hang on a second. Where does Bronwyn Bishop think the rest of women?

Dan Ilic  23:45  
Definitely not the world. What? Whatever planet whatever Roman bishops from.

Lewis Hobba  23:52  
I was born in a helicopter flying from Melbourne to jalon. So I was not really off the world. I was up the sky.

Unknown Speaker  23:59  
profits from jokes and joys are going to the Cambodian Children's Fund shine awards, the Royal Flying Doctor Service and country Women's Association. Gabriella palla, Sky News.

Dan Ilic  24:12  
And you can get a copy of that book from somewhere. And that helps all those kids good on them. That's very good.

Lewis Hobba  24:20  
I mean, like, do obviously all the money that goes to the kids, the better but how much do you reckon that money? How much do you think that book will make compared to how quickly she could have just given them the money? It's gonna make like,

Dan Ilic  24:31  
yeah, it's gonna make like 600 bucks. Like that's, that's all it's kind of like, I tried to look for a link to buy the book and you can't get the link anyway. Like, maybe she's trying to sell it, you know, to her workers or something. I don't know.

Lewis Hobba  24:44  
Gina needs the Scientologists to manage this book distribution.

Dan Ilic  24:48  
Do you guys have your own jokes for a genuine heart stroke book? I've written a couple. Knock knock. Who's there? 200 200 Whoa. 200 Korean workers on board. Five Seven phases working 84 hours a week at $16 an hour to build Roy Hill iron ore mine.

Lewis Hobba  25:07  
I feel like you could you could get brevity if you just like funniest joke tax.

Unknown Speaker  25:14  
Rational fear

Unknown Speaker  25:18  
is Kamala coming up next.

Unknown Speaker  25:20  
Yes he is.

Dan Ilic  25:21  
Could you ask him to smile so we can save a lot of people may have thought that that was in terribly bad taste we'll have one. This is a rational fear. Joining us now is a man known to irrational fear diehard fans. He is Kumar Welcome back to irrational fear Kemal

Kamahl  25:35  
Thank you. Glad to be with you.

Dan Ilic  25:38  
Now, last week, during some press for Dancing with the Stars Dara summers lamented that he had Saturday wasn't on TV anymore because of cancelled culture, which meant you couldn't get away with good, clean fun. Then a guy on Twitter john Patterson published a clip from Hey, hey, have yourself being bullied and it went absolutely viral on Twitter. You're huge on Twitter. Now you love Twitter. What did you make of that clip and seeing that old footage again?

Kamahl  26:04  
Well, it doesn't take much imagination to work on it was it was a bully. It was humiliating and degrading. Given that the week after I was paired up at Carnegie Hall to do my second project. It was it was I don't know whether the President intent intended insult. But yeah, you know, it could have been a little kinder, I thought,

Dan Ilic  26:34  
what did you think when you kind of saw this thing going around again?

Kamahl  26:37  
No, I look what what really happened is that when Harry Connick Jr, appeared on the show, and and there was a cartoon with a which came out the next state CHANNEL SEVEN turned up, wanting to know what I thought of escape. And, and they wanted to know if it was great. That's not really a manipulator, who is racist, I am more racist than Hey, Saturday, meaning in the real sense, I was brought up in Malaysia as a Sri Lankan, Malaysian born, Sri Lankan. And we had prejudices and racism of our own. And I mean, they, the whiter you are, the better you are, the faster you are, the worse you are. In fact, my family stopped me from playing cricket because it was the sun would make me a doctor. But we have weird kind of prejudices in Asian countries as well. So the I think, maybe the reason I mean, I'm trying to work out why it was necessary for them, to humiliate me. And I think it was a form of a tall poppy syndrome, because it was my second concert there. And I think I told them that Bob Hope was going to introduce me. And yeah, it was it was trying to their way of dealing with the tall Poppy, and especially a black hole. Perfect.

Dan Ilic  28:03  
Yeah, I I noticed Darrell summers has never performed at Carnegie Hall.

Kamahl  28:07  
Not even once. I don't know. But then, on the contrary, I think he's a he's a very, very talented man. I, you know, I really don't know. Because at the moment, there have been all sorts of negative and positive comments in there where there was a lady with a programme manager of a radio station, said that, you know, why, what the past that I was talking about, because I was being outed. Every time I appeared on the lily pad. I don't know who this person is, but particularly and she's the programme manager. I mean, that that's, that's rubbish I. I had a wonderful time on the big day out. And Sahara Herald was in charge. And my friend did duck pond put me on there year after year for nearly 90 days. So we are getting this weird reaction to this.

Unknown Speaker  29:02  
Yeah,

Dan Ilic  29:03  
I remember watching high as a kid and seeing is a lily pad. I think lily pad was an amazing part of your career.

Kamahl  29:13  
Find out who this lady is. You can't tell me obviously he never attended it. Maybe or maybe he was. You know, I think we I'm getting sort of crazy flames in at the same time. There was one. There was a guy. He said I'm 32 years old. But we did Oh, my mother is still hot about you. wonderful, beautiful. Very funny. Well,

Dan Ilic  29:43  
you should have seen Kirsty WebEx tweets when she found out she was being she was going to be on the show with you Kemal Kirsty, do you have anything to say to

Kamahl  29:53  
you? Ah,

Kirsty Webeck  29:54  
yeah, I'm a huge fan Kemal and when I told my parents I was coming on the panel. Cast with you. They were adamant that I was to tell you that they're massive fans and they've loved every single thing you've ever done.

Kamahl  30:08  
Well, you know, I think I think a bigger head, they have good taste anyway, they're particularly in having a daughter like you. Jim, you know, I really, you know, the thing is, in a way, this has been a, you know, sort of a disguised form of blessing. I mean, I've I haven't had this much reaction, positive 90% percent positive in my 86 years of not 86. Yeah, I'm 86 years old now. But I started doing this 64 years ago. And yeah, it's it's amazing.

Dan Ilic  30:50  
64 years in showbiz and still going that is such stone cow. That's really great.

Kamahl  30:57  
It's a good taste of the Australian audience. Come on,

Lewis Hobba  31:00  
I can I can I ask. Like I because I didn't, I didn't get a chance to watch it. When it was on it was not really in my, not quite my time. But watching watching that clip that I did say today, last week was horrifying. And I could only imagine what it was like for you to see it again. And to think about all of that again. But what did you if you don't mind me asking? Well think about like when Darrel summers apologised. Did that? Because obviously you would have known him for a long time. What did you think of that? No,

Kamahl  31:31  
I mean, I suppose you know, he was the host of this show. I mean, he could have, you know what i what i didn't mind so much. They they, they hit him in the face with a powder with a white powder. But what they disappoint me more than anything else is the fact they didn't bother to make a little bit of a question. That's what I was doing next week in New York. With with the doing a show for the second time. I don't know whether it's a tall poppy syndrome, or what it is that? I don't know. So that's, I'm more interested in that than being hit in the face, really. But I wouldn't have my mind in taking the hit, provided the game, you know, balance that with generous reporting. Sorry,

Craig Quatermaine  32:20  
it's Craig here. I grew up in Canada in the East Kimberley of Western Australia, you were the first brown guy I ever saw on TV as well, just being an Indigenous Australian, it was just nice to see someone different on that show. That was the only thing we could watch because we had one channel. And for you to go through all this right now. I'm really interested to know that are you surprised that people are shocked that there was racism? in those periods where you're on TV? Isn't that reaction that most amusing part?

Kamahl  32:50  
Look, racism or prejudice of any kind, you got to be careful if you ever saw the movie South Pacific, you know, we are not born racist that they you know. But I think we have to be carefully taught, and we believe a lot of things that are untrue. You know, we, we as human beings, we grew up believing the earth was flat. It took us years and 1000s of years to find out it is a sphere. And similarly, there are a lot of things. Let's say, you know, in politics and religion, especially religion, there are 4000, or 404 and a half 1000 religions. But there's only one God and I have my own view of what it is. And at the end of the day, what really matters is truth. To be true to yourself, I mean, even if you have to tell a few fibs, but be true to yourself. Hello.

Lewis Hobba  33:56  
Sorry, we're all just taking a moment to think of ponder your words of wisdom, be honest commodity.

Craig Quatermaine  34:01  
Iconic, this is a huge part of me that still like I feel like it's an impression. I feel like it's not really you. But yeah. It's just such an iconic voice. It's crazy to be talking to you.

Kirsty Webeck  34:13  
I was just thinking about all the people have told lately.

Dan Ilic  34:18  
Come on. Thank you so much for joining us on irrational fear. You've always been a great part of our show from episode one. You.

Kamahl  34:28  
By the way, by the way, what what do you consider a rational fear? What can I be afraid of?

Dan Ilic  34:35  
Well, the rat the name irrational fear stems from the idea that media is making are scared of things all the time and often all the wrong things and irrational fear is a name that implies that there is something you should be scared of the media is not talking about, which is what things we talked about on the show, which is mostly climate change. That's the big thing that we talk about.

Kamahl  34:54  
I mean, I think we should all be afraid of untruth, not the truth

Unknown Speaker  34:59  
disinterment

Kamahl  35:01  
Yeah, misinformation. Yeah. Anyway, thank you for having me on

Dan Ilic  35:05  
Kemal. It's great to be with you. Do you do you have any? Do you have any shows coming up? You want to plug?

Kamahl  35:10  
Yeah, in fact, there's kind of an anniversary. Pull up doing like to those two shows one day apart, and it's it's nice to have retired senior citizens. So I'm looking forward to that. I can't tell you exactly what it is. It's two shows. When is it? Two days apart?

Dan Ilic  35:34  
Excellent. A big thanks to all of our guests for tonight. Craig quartermaine Kirsty werebear. Can Louis harbour Do you guys have anything to play? Craig we get to do any Comedy Festival shows coming up.

Craig Quatermaine  35:45  
Sorry. Yeah, no, that's the only reason I'm here bro. Cuz I got nothing to plug. No, that's not true. Um Yeah, just keep an eye out. I've got a new show called historically accurate. planed, Earth runs and Sydney runs in Melbourne runs and they've just all come unstuck because the COVID about the show is called historically accurate. It's my latest style. I'm very very happy with it. And yeah, it's that the cow it's gonna

Dan Ilic  36:12  
watch. Kirsty way back What did you got to plug you've got a few shows coming up?

Kirsty Webeck  36:16  
I do indeed. So I have a show called Tucker sikhi opening on April 6 in Melbourne for the comedy festival and it's it's 14 shows from the sixth to the 18th and it's on at 6:10pm each night comedy Republic come along. Also follow me on social media I'm really good at it.

Unknown Speaker  36:43  
I remember

Lewis Hobba  36:45  
Craig when you came to tazzy with us for Triple J and did some comedy and your clip that you did was so successful that they basically like did they did they take it down a

Craig Quatermaine  37:00  
million views ABC comedy went under and so did my my video I just I really just got it back.

Kamahl  37:06  
Yeah, yeah, so I blew up. You're kidding me tucked away if I may and inject something slightly sobered. Are you prepared for it Kaffir come out. These are the few words that sustained Nelson Mandela for 27 years in prison. Its support called Invictus goes something like this out of the night that savage made black test pit from pole to pole. I thank whatever gods may be For my on conquerable. So in the fall, lots of circumstances, I have not went not quite allowed. Under the bludgeoning of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath or tears, Looms but the Horror of the shade, and yet the menace of the years finds and shall finally an upgrade. It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments to sprawl. I am the master of my fate. I am the exception, my soul.

Dan Ilic  38:22  
That was amazing. Thank you so much Kemal. Thank you so much, Craig quartermaine Thank you so much. cosi WebEx, thank you so much, Louis. How about we've got shows the Melbourne Comedy Festival April 11. Big thanks to rode mics, the birther foundation Patreon supporters. The discord crew for Jackson ideas that I had it goes Big thanks to Dave bluestein Kate Holdsworth Killian David. Voiceover this week from Bronwyn Morgan Until next week, there's always something to be scared of. And come out. Do you have a catchphrase? You want to end the show on?

Kamahl  38:51  
What was that?

Dan Ilic  38:53  
Why people so I

Kamahl  38:55  
know why so many people are doing. Many people are doing Thank you very much, but Right, right. Until next week, there's always something to be scared of.

Dan Ilic  39:08  
Good night. Thanks, cabal.

Kamahl  39:09  
Thank you.

A Rational Fear on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

🤑 CHIP IN TO OUR PATREON https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear
📨 SUBSCRIBE TO OUR EMAIL LIST: http://www.arationalfear.com/
🎟️ SEE A RATIONAL FEAR AT MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL COMEDY FESTIVAL: https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2021/shows/a-rational-fear

On the podcast this week, we talk about the Prime Minister putting journalists on notice for asking questions, Dark Mofo's Big F Up, and BoJo dumping ScoMo via telegram over Australia's lack of action on climate change.

We're joined by

Amber Schultz (Crikey)
Gen Fricker (Melb. Comedy Festival Show Details)
Lewis Hobba (Melb. Comedy Festival Show Details)
and Dan Ilic (Me) (Melb. Comedy Festival Show Details)

A Rational Fear on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

🤑 CHIP IN TO OUR PATREON https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear
📨 SUBSCRIBE TO OUR EMAIL LIST: http://www.arationalfear.com/
🎟️ SEE A RATIONAL FEAR AT MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL COMEDY FESTIVAL: https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/2021/shows/a-rational-fear

On this week's podcast we hit the UK and Australia's slide into authoritarianism, and ask Steve Keen if Mattias Cormann's appointment to the OECD will mean anything meaningful for climate action globally.

Adam Hills 🎟️ (Shoes Half Full)
Alex Lee (Dragon Friends) 
Dan Ilic (A Rational Fear)
Lewis Hobba (A Rational Fear)
+ Professor Steve Keen. (Patreon)

Big thanks to Naaman Zhou who coined this episode's title and the sketch within.

https://twitter.com/naamanzhou/status/1372357753503502337

——————————————

TRANSCRIPTION BY A COMPUTER:

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
This podcast is supported in part by the birth of foundation. Hello Daniel, how are you?

Dan Ilic  0:06  
I'm well I'm well, I couldn't help but notice before as we come on, Mike, you, you're doing some vaping on the side there. Have you got a vape sponsor? Can you get a vape sponsor for the show? I

Lewis Hobba  0:16  
thought I would get that in just before the cameras started rolling. Yeah, I would say it's my shameful habit. I had no idea that this I was actually walking behind a guy who was smoking today, and I was vaping and he was smoking and he was like five steps in front of me and obviously 10 years behind me, but a few steps in front and he was blowing smoke and it was coming back as always inhaling my vape was inhaling his smoke and I thought, yuck

Dan Ilic  0:46  
Well, it's just one more thing to rag on you about you vapour. It's very exciting. I'm not ragging on our new Patreon supporters, though, because we've got some killer new ones. It's another record another week of seven new Patreon supporters. JOHN Miller, thank you for joining up fright bat became a fright manga Thank you. Oliver Kadett, Chris ebbeling Jason Halladay Brooks Santa Hugh Donaldson, thank you so much for supporting us on Patreon. If you want to support us on Patreon, go to patreon.com forward slash irrational fear. Now we're only a few weeks away from our Melbourne International Comedy Festival show Louis April 11 at the Melbourne Town Hall. I'm really excited about it. I can't wait to get to Melbourne. I can't wait to enjoy the festival.

Lewis Hobba  1:25  
Yeah, me too. I also saw on one of my weekly forays into Twitter that you are begging for guests, which I always which makes you feel very relaxed about the

Dan Ilic  1:36  
situation. No, that's not that's not true. I was after a suggestion for a big climate change name to join the show and I booked one. We've got Simon Holmes accord joining us he's mega brain on energy and climate. He knows all about the juiciest truth bombs about how Australia is missing out on the it's brand new green energy revolution. So he's going to be our interview guests which is fantastic. That's amazing. Yeah, it's awesome. Sami Shah Alice Fraser, James Colley who is the head writer the weekly and grow and transfer you and I and also Gabby bolt is due on a soundstage to for her only Melbourne show she is going to be an absolute mega star Gabby bolt. So you it's going to be one of those shows. You'll go. Oh, you know, I saw Gabby bouldered an irrational fear at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival back in 2021. Before she became an absolutely massive

Lewis Hobba  2:21  
Yeah, plus that we can see if we can get some of that homes are caught money on the Patreon.

Dan Ilic  2:26  
He is a patron subscriber he's a he's a Patreon supporter, so he already does

Lewis Hobba  2:31  
amazing he goes by Patreon.

Dan Ilic  2:33  
probably good. For more go to comedy.com Today you look for a rational fee. I'm recording my end of irrational fear on gadigal land. In the eora nation sovereignty was never said we need a treaty. Let's start the show.

Unknown Speaker  2:44  
A rational fear contains naughty words like bricks cambro

Unknown Speaker  2:51  
gum, and section 40 of

Unknown Speaker  2:53  
our rational fear

Unknown Speaker  2:55  
recommended listening by immature audience.

Dan Ilic  2:58  
Tonight Scott Morrison's response to the march for justice was the worst example of public tone deafness since meatloaf played at the AFL Grand Finals. It was so bad that Jenny asked him to imagine if he was a single dad. And for publicly diminishing his reputation Christian Porter announces plans to sue himself for defamation. And another COVID case confirmed in a Sydney quarantine hotel as usual. Melbourne says that we're doing it months ago. It's the 19th of March 2021. I'm spending my last job paper on lollies This is irrational fear.

Welcome to irrational fear. I'm your host, former Duke of Edinburgh Dan Ilic. And this is the podcast that takes the week's toughest stories and gives them a big hug. Only if they agree to it. Let's meet our fear mongers for the podcast this week. He's taking some time out from his gruelling hotel quarantine regime of looking out the window. It's Australia's favourite will Anderson look alike. It's Adam Hill.

Adam Hills  4:05  
Not the hotel quarantine that had a case this week. Just want to point that out.

Dan Ilic  4:10  
Well, how are you? How have you been spending your time Adam?

Adam Hills  4:14  
I'm writing a children's book. So that's great most of my time. And being that I'm alone in a hotel room you can imagine what's taking up the rest of my time.

Lewis Hobba  4:24  
children's book just like where's Wally, but it's one man alone a hotel's theory.

Dan Ilic  4:29  
There is again

Adam Hills  4:31  
I'm on my third draft and I'm really worried when I handed in the editors are gonna go well, we got really dark all of a sudden.

Lewis Hobba  4:39  
Because I write episodes of play school, and, and every now and again, if things are not going well in your life, you can sometimes read a first draft back. I had to do one there was teaching kids how to like ask for help from a doctor that were ever sick. And I read it back. I literally had Humpty Dumpty falling off a wall and screaming in agony that he's shattered his legs Oh, where was I last night like that is Blake Lewis. Anyway, they ran it traumatised kids

Dan Ilic  5:06  
and she's been busy auditioning for SBS his insight but didn't manage to get the top job what she sabotaged from within it's the feeds Alex Lee.

Alex Lee  5:15  
Hello and yes, I was I was the perfect hosts. How is

Dan Ilic  5:22  
the Fed going, Alex?

Alex Lee  5:23  
Great. Yes, just in case for all of your baffled listeners. We made a comedy series about me trying to audition to be the new host of insight and failing miserably and you can watch an SBS on demand.

Dan Ilic  5:36  
And finally, he's Elaine main. Sorry, he's a lane not main talking machine. It's Louis harbour.

Lewis Hobba  5:42  
That's very straight. Do you know i speaking of being not main I'm also not lame. I put up I put on 10 kilos in the last year. I'm jacked.

Dan Ilic  5:50  
So you've gone from looking like you've come out of Belson to looking like you're signed up for chadwicks. That's not too bad for you.

Unknown Speaker  5:57  
deep knowledge of modelling.

Alex Lee  6:00  
Writing diet Lewis

Unknown Speaker  6:03  
recommends,

Lewis Hobba  6:04  
I probably would have put on 20 kilos if it wasn't for the joule.

Dan Ilic  6:09  
Coming up Maverick economist Professor Steve Cain joins us to talk about Mateus Coleman's appointment to the Secretary General job of the OECD what it means for Australia and climate action. Will we see him use less planes in favour of a chopper. But first, a message from this week's sponsor?

Unknown Speaker  6:26  
Hi, I'm Nick Fuller. As New South Wales Police Commissioner, I love stripping down with others. But gaining consent can be a confusing process. That's why we've developed a new app to help men with important careers feel safe at night. If individuals have developed relations to a point where undergarments could be heading in a southerly direction, it's important to document the consent of each party before the engagement of horizontal proceedings. Simply take out your service New South Wales app and scroll to the sexual consent form. You and your sexual participants simply tick the boxes for the style and duration of sexual intercourse. Also note if applicable, which private high school participants attended. So we assign the most appropriate legal response should we even need to then simply sign on the screen or use a finger on the fingerprint reader. If one of your participants is too drunk to sign, definitely don't coerce them, or just place their finger on the fingerprint reader. They'll never be able to prove otherwise, then and only then can sexual intercourse proceed at a location of your choice. There is currently a 15 person limit per sexual event per household. But this will relax as COVID rules change. Now, this is important. If any participant changes their mind, it won't be automatically updated by the app. But we're assured by the Boston Consulting Group that this will be addressed in a future upgrade. So when emotions are running high, remember now app no wet. This has been a message from the New South Wales Police. Thank you.

Dan Ilic  8:01  
Yes, no after no after that line courtesy of the Guardians name. And so I saw it on Twitter and I had to steal it with consent. Of course, there was his tweet, I'll share it in the show notes. Yes, this week's first fear this crazy consent app. Now the start of the day, the New South Wales Police Commissioner was floating this idea about an app to get a whole bunch of people to jump on this app to engage with swapping consent over an app to kind of quell rising sexual assaults. So it's just something that normal, you know, adults would use to swap consent before during the day. But by lunchtime, he was resoundingly made fun of on social media, and the New South Wales, police commissioner McFaul had to retract the idea saying these on radio,

Unknown Speaker  8:41  
to be honest with you, the app could be the worst idea I have in 2021. But the reality is in five years, perhaps it won't but if you think about dating 10 years ago, this sort of concept of single people swiping left and right was a term that we didn't even know you know,

Dan Ilic  8:57  
Mick Foley might have appointed I didn't had no idea of consent until he actually floated this whole the idea of an F v mongers. Is this a good idea? Alex?

Alex Lee  9:06  
I think that was the one correct thing. He said that it was absolutely the most insane idea he could have thought of like, it's the kind of idea that you you know, you might whisper to your wife as you go to sleep and she goes, Okay, that's enough bedtime or like, something you put on the subreddit of shower ideas, but to be the New South Wales Police Commissioner, and to put it out there in the public is so crazy. And it was just, you know, after what has been a really awful few weeks, you know, for women in Australia just to display that level of ignorance about how consent works, how sex works, what the actual issue is, like, it really like bordered on not being funny, despite the many ways that it is hilarious that he said that out loud to people

Dan Ilic  10:00  
I just like the constant like, backpedalling he did over the last two, like lunchtime hours on radio. I really enjoyed that. Adam, what do you think?

Adam Hills  10:09  
I mean, okay, apart from the bass, like there's two ways to approach this the realistic way in the funny way. And the realistic way is, I think, if someone can force you to have sex, then they can force you to consent on an app. If someone's if someone's able to force you to do one thing, they can force you to do another thing. So that takes away the idea of the app being effective in the first place. But secondly, he also said this might be the dumbest idea I have in 2021 as if he's leaving it open for something dumber to happen.

Do you know what I mean? He's like, I don't want to call it yet. Because there's a whole bunch of months left in this year. This could go anyway,

Alex Lee  10:49  
he's gonna come back next month and say, Okay, that was stupid. It was stupid to suggest an app for sexual consent. It's a robot Okay guys, sex robot and you tell the robot at all times whether you want to have sex or not. Okay, that's it. That's the good idea.

Lewis Hobba  11:06  
It does make you want to sit in with a full a brainstorm session like Alright guys, it's the boys in blue blue sky thinking let's do this thing. What are we getting called? on thinking hansy crush? Who's that? Who's up there?

Dan Ilic  11:19  
I've done some research on iOS there's nothing like it but Google Playstore is a bit more of a wild west. Let me show you a couple weeks and have a look at some of those reviews. Yes to sex is an app he says check out these reviews out of rubbish I couldn't get past the first page not even select my gender and it is on friendly web keep asking for locations thumbs down

Lewis Hobba  11:41  
you like the bedroom I'm in the bedroom Yeah.

Dan Ilic  11:48  
Person yes just six yes five stars Rakesh Yes, he

Lewis Hobba  11:52  
was six that's a fun doing it.

Alex Lee  11:56  
Very looking forward to now I downloaded this app to be getting some sex. Yeah, I've maybe it's like a way for bots. Like there's so many sex bots out there. Maybe yes to six is like a dating site for bots.

Lewis Hobba  12:11  
And select which images in this square have. You know what I'm talking about?

Dan Ilic  12:16  
There's even one code only? Yes is yes. And this one actually uses smart contracts. It uses Ethereum blockchain. So anyone with an aetherium account or aetherium will be able to verify how horny all the other people are all around the world at once. Unfortunately,

Alex Lee  12:29  
anyone with an Ethereum account, has never had sex and never will.

Unknown Speaker  12:37  
What's your response to the call fleece speech

Unknown Speaker  12:39  
last night

Unknown Speaker  12:40  
I would like to start impeaching has to be given I've got to go in a couple of minutes because I have an international call that I have to attend to irrational fear.

Dan Ilic  12:52  
This week second fear one of the things people in the UK are known for is their stiff upper lip, you know their grin and bear it attitude. But that is drastically changing. British MPs have voted in favour of a bill that increases police houses for cracking down on power protests that are annoying. Yeah, it's a 307 page bill, which must have been very annoying to read. Other things. It says it's going to do incredible fines for damaging statues, like for three months to 10 years in jail. For instance, police will have the power to tell one person protest to stop shouting and could impose noise limits and have start and finish times for protests as well. It's basically ushering in a whole new era of authoritarianism. You know, when I think of annoying, loud mouth leaders that don't come anymore, more annoying than Boris Johnson, which is ironic. Adam, you live in the UK? How are you taking this?

Adam Hills  13:46  
This is something I've been following for a while. So when COVID hit, you know, the government brought in a whole bunch of rules, including, you know, how many people could gather publicly, there can't be any more than 30 people, all that kind of stuff. And remember at the time, I think labour, the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn was in opposition and said, Yeah, okay, let's have a time limit on this. let's let's let's not have a law that could go forever, that stops people protesting, and then 12 months down the track, it's kind of come to fruition, but the idea that it's not just if it's annoying, if you inconvenience anyone, if you put someone you know, if you affect someone's ability to go about their business, that's the whole point of a protest. If you're not being annoying in a protest, you're throwing a fate.

Dan Ilic  14:32  
And some of those extinction rebellion protests for 2019 felt really festive, you know, it felt like they were they were like, you know, it was parade it was Carnival with a existential attitude. Really, it was

Adam Hills  14:45  
part of a bigger thing that and this, this happens, you know, this is the thing that happens in times of a pandemic, in times of a crisis, government introduced laws and a lot of those laws aren't lifted at the end of it. Right. And I think we've talked about this on the last leg in London. We've got to our slogan, why Make sure they don't keep the shady shit.

Dan Ilic  15:02  
Have you seen a lot of examples of where sunset clauses haven't been put in place for loans like

Adam Hills  15:07  
this? I mean, there's just little sneaky things like even the fact that, you know, Melbourne went into Melbourne had a five day lockdown, what, three, four weeks ago. They've come out of lockdown, but they're still not allowing international arrivals. Which is why, you know, I know this because I tried to get into Melbourne, and I've got a quarantine in Sydney, because there are no international flights coming into Melbourne at the moment. And it's just a little sneaky. It's not an infringement on people's human rights. But it's just a little sneaky. There's a similar thing going on in China that I read today where the Chinese government has said they will only accept foreign arrivals if they've been vaccinated with the Chinese vaccine.

Dan Ilic  15:42  
Right? Wow. Well, that's pretty good. I mean, you can get that pretty easily. They just, they knocked off the Pfizer vaccine. So it's cheaper, it's easier to get you just get on Alibaba.

Lewis Hobba  15:55  
The the I remember when the extinction rebellion protests were happening in the UK, though. That's one thing. I think we actually talked about it on the show, that chief of the Met, came out and complained about a tactic that extinction, extinction rebellion protesters were using when they were getting picked up by the cops. And he made a request that they stopped doing it. And it was that they were going floppy. anytime they grabbed them, they were going there was the head of the man and his name was says Steven something. And essentially, there was a press release saying so Steven has asked you to stop being fluffy. And it was one of the all time great press releases.

Alex Lee  16:36  
That's a great tactic. My son does that. Like all his limbs tend to liquid if you try and put him in his highchair. I'm gonna ban it. I'm gonna tell him it's against the law now,

Dan Ilic  16:47  
but in a court of law is going slumping annoying. Is it annoying enough to get 10 years in jail?

Lewis Hobba  16:53  
I think that there is a box for that on the consent app. If it doesn't work out.

Dan Ilic  16:58  
Adam, this is pretty interesting. Like, from your perspective, how is all this playing with the current protest at the moment for this poor woman who was abducted by a police officer? Like how how what's the sentiment, like in the UK about these laws being passed? Well, I

Adam Hills  17:13  
mean, you know, a lot of a lot of this. A lot of this has happened since I've been back in Australia. But I mean, it's, there's a word that's thrown around a lot. And it's one of those ones. It's almost become a marketing advertising term. But I think it still stands it's optics. It's the optics, when a woman is kidnapped and murdered, on the way home walking home in the middle of London, and then a peaceful vigil is held, and the optics are police kneeling on the backs of women who are holding a peaceful vigil about a woman who was murdered by a police officer, you can see how that looks terrible. And I think it's not just in Britain, if you know everything that's going on in Australia this week, with Scott Morrison's dealing with with, you know, claims of rape of sexual harassment and all that kind of stuff. It's it's, it's kind of worldwide. I mean, wasn't it? wasn't his his response to say that we didn't, there are protests happening and we're not shooting anyone. And aren't we great?

Dan Ilic  18:08  
Yeah, that that's the next thing I want to talk about is isn't that that was such a crazy thing that happened earlier this week. As Monday is 1000s of people and myself included, marched across cities around Australia, all about gendered violence and inequality. Scott Morrison decided to use very loose words in question time noting that the protesters were lucky they lived in Australia because protests in other countries nearby were met with bullets. Talk about kind of lowest common denominator, fear mongers should should women feel grateful that tempt the authorities would piglets, shirting women, Alex?

Alex Lee  18:43  
It seems like they weren't given that courtesy in the UK in their protests, basically. But no, I mean, it was, it's just sitting low, like you said, the very lowest bar for your government that you are not shooting protesters and then asking for credit for it. And the reason it is that is because he's not doing anything else, like he offered to go and to, for the women to come into his office and meet with him the organisers of the March, and they said, No, like, the very least you can do is come out and see all the women on the street and see what we're asking for. And he wouldn't even do that. And so, you know, all he can give him the only thing he could think of to give his government credit for and the way they've handled this is that they're not shooting people. And you know, that government can mobilise very quickly like I This isn't funny at all, but I you know, I read how after the the sexual assault of Brittany Higgins, the government very quickly moved forward, the date of the cleaning of the of the office that took place in so they so there's evidence of that that they it was due for a clean on Monday, they moved it to a Sunday. Like they can act very quickly if they need to, and if this is the only thing they can do to address this issue that, you know, hundreds of 1000s of women are asking for. It's it's, it's more than depressing.

Dan Ilic  20:08  
And and when you when you when you said optics before, kind of remind me of that moment, Alex, you just mentioned how he invited the protest organisers into Parliament House. It's almost like he hasn't read any news about the kind of safe space that Parliament House has been for women over the last

Unknown Speaker  20:26  
few years. It's like people want to be.

Dan Ilic  20:28  
Yeah, exactly. Very strange. Louis, has this been the kind of friendly banter you've been doing on drive on Triple J?

Lewis Hobba  20:35  
Yeah. Right. That was flume. Anyway, feel unsafe, give us a call. Blake, like, you know, obviously, we do a very dumb and silly show on Triple J. And so you know, we keep it pretty dumb and silly. But there are days obviously, where it's very hard to do that you guys would all know that you've all worked in jobs where you get paid to be dumb and silly. And there are days and there are weeks when that feels like you are going counter to the issue or that you are your silliness is I don't know, the wrong noise to be making and this week, it did feel like that to be honest, it was a it was a really it was a really difficult week and to say their response, do you just like oh, that's fine, I'll be silly they're gonna pay attention and then they don't like hire out man like this is it's just it's very, very bleak to say that response and just to say not no movement whatsoever from the people who need to be listening.

Alex Lee  21:33  
Yeah, I do think it's so I did get a bit of perverse pleasure in reading the tweets from men who went to the march but just wanted to make sure that everyone knew that there were there was a lot of like, just here at the march just in case anyone wanted to know a man at the march and there are a lot of women coming up to me saying thank you for being at the March the march so just keep that in mind everyone.

Lewis Hobba  21:57  
I really saw quite a lot of people who like mosques in the stories and then the masks off when their photo went on the grid. You can see the whole

Alex Lee  22:11  
they should have sought match at the match which is just like a flashing sign that said I'm one of the good ones

Dan Ilic  22:19  
Well, I don't know if you heard the full clip of Scott Morrison question time he said much worse and I'm very surprised the media didn't pick it up.

Unknown Speaker  22:25  
The Prime Minister as

Unknown Speaker  22:27  
it is good and right mr. speaker that so many able to gather here in this way whether in our capital or elsewhere, to do so peacefully to express their concerns and their very genuine and real frustration

Unknown Speaker  22:42  
This is a vibrant liberal democracy Mr. Speaker not far from here. Such marches even now are being met with bullets not here in this country

Unknown Speaker  22:51  
members on both sides

Dan Ilic  22:52  
now these women or people if we can call them that and I'm asked my team and we can are lucky they went crushed by tanks Mr. Speaker, we have tanks we can do all those fine Phillies marching today. And I'm pretty sure I can say that should count themselves fortunate. We don't send them to offshore detention. Mr. Speaker, we've got plenty of women there shorts against international law, but it's fun. I was quite happy to meet these women in my office in Parliament House, just them with me surrounded by men with guns. There's no safer space. Mr. Speaker, the member for Kingston is warm. I've had empathy training. I could if they wanted me to give them a massage, Mr. Speaker, calm them down, listen to their concerns. And I would have told them like I'm telling you, we all know when it comes to holding an investigation of a member of the National cabinet that Samantha for the states, Mr. Speaker and I would have been quite happy to explain that to those hysterical girls organising them after that today. And I'm definitely sure that's fine to say I've got hysterical girls of my own Mr. Speaker. Just shocking can't believe he said that kind of a labour.

Adam Hills  24:05  
It's hard to believe that that his original statement came from someone who came from marketing slogan I'm not as bad as Pol Pot isn't.

Dan Ilic  24:21  
next guest is one of our favourites on irrational fear. He's a maverick economist to tells it like it is I assume because I'm not smart enough to know what he's actually talking about. It's Professor Steve Cain stave Welcome to irrational fear. irrational mode after

Steve Keen  24:34  
we're one of those experiencing for the last few months reading economics.

Dan Ilic  24:38  
I bet I bet Now look, as an economist of regard, you kind of get into these incredible places like the OECD. So I wanted to pick your brain about the Mathias cormann appointment. You know,

Lewis Hobba  24:49  
can I use my prop in really quickly before you get stuck into ICD and just say that I don't know what the day is.

Dan Ilic  24:57  
Yeah, so embarrassing, but

Lewis Hobba  24:59  
I just want to just Want to put that out there?

Alex Lee  25:01  
You know how you find it really hard to focus on talks for long periods of time Louis removed that check. And pretend I made a joke about OCD. Okay.

Dan Ilic  25:19  
I enjoyed it. Oh, yeah. So let's go back. Let's go back to the bare bones here. What is the OSI OECD and and how is Mateus as Commons appointment? significant?

Steve Keen  25:37  
Yeah. So the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development was once called the rich man's club had about 20 nations and it mainly America and and Europe. And now it has about 3738 nations. And it's lastly there was quite a progressive Mexican leader, Angel guaira. And he was quite in favour of non orthodox thinking on economics, particularly after the OECD completely fluffed it back in 2007. When in their economic report for to the middle in June 2007. Their chief economist said what a fantastic year 2008 was going to be, which is gonna have an economic recession, it was going to be a book. So after that Angel established what's called the new snake, which stands for new approaches to economic challenges. And that led a lot of progressive thought into the OECD, which is how I managed to get past the past the guards at the gate. And, and, and now, Angel had been there for three terms, 15 years, which is extremely unusual. So they needed a new replacement. And nobody on the planet thought that anybody from Australia had a chance because if any part of the planet is burning, it's burning it up. It's Australia and climate change have become a major focus of the OECD in the last seven the last half, half dozen years. And lo and behold blow was down with with a Saharan wind. Matthias Korman wins the ballot, which was quite remarkable, a tribute to Australia's capacity to play the numbers game. And now a man who's in the playing numbers is leading us in something which is deadly serious, which is the amount of carbon dioxide and other pollutants we're putting into the biosphere. And we've been putting up modly many, many environmental organisations will concern that the OECD is lead on climate change resumed go massively into reverse under corpsman, and now we're gonna find out one way or the other.

Dan Ilic  27:39  
Now, do you? What's your instinct on this? Do you think corpsman is going to be a good faith actor in the US and push the OECD on climate action? And therefore push Australia to be more progressive on climate action? Or do you think his words are meaningless? And he's just going to play the same game that he's always played?

Steve Keen  27:57  
categorically? I'd say yes to that question. Sorry. Yeah, I think he's gonna he's gonna stuff the place up. But if you read his statement about it, he talked about how we needed to go guaranteed normal growth, with safeguards for human rights and environmental concerns. And so everything is the environments in the background, forget about that, you know, let's get the growth going first, and the environment could take care of itself, which it will do, it will take care of us as well. So I'm, I'm thinking will push us five badly backwards, and we'll be there. We'll go from leading on the issue to being reactive. So I'm putting me down as a sceptic of him, not climate change.

Dan Ilic  28:40  
And the OECD, you know, it has this big mandate to promote policies that had some sort of economic and social well being for people all around the world. How powerful are they in terms of shaping what goes into agreements, like what we'll say caught in a few months time? Well, that's

Steve Keen  28:56  
the only organisation which has the status of a nation when it goes to the mediflow. cope and so on. So there's, you know, there'll be 40 countries plus the OECD. So it has really

Dan Ilic  29:06  
it's got like a nation status.

Steve Keen  29:09  
Yeah. It's so it gets a seat on the board, which is unusual for an international organisation only they've got to take a backseat and do it in the backroom. The OECD is both in the back room and the front. But frankly, speaking, of course, it's the major countries that carry the the weight of the whole thing so America dominates Germany second, and and China and Russia bringing up the rear. But it does make a difference. If you have an organisation which was enabling non orthodox thought, critical thought about climate change and economics to be heard. And suddenly you've got a guy who's reading from a copy of Samuelson then I think it's a major step backwards.

Dan Ilic  29:48  
And you actually you've been presenting recently to the OECD and you had a very strange moment where the Australian permanent ambassador to the OECD as soon As you came on the conference calls to talk, decided to take his camera offline. Despite him actually being part of the conversation, he turned his thing turns

Steve Keen  30:09  
himself off when I was turned on. Yeah, that was not promising. I was talking about what's called modern monetary theory.

Dan Ilic  30:17  
I can only guess that he he either either didn't care for you to say or to he really enjoyed what you had to say so much that he had to he needed a bit of privacy. What do you think? It was?

Steve Keen  30:29  
The Tobin situation angle I haven't heard before and I'm not gonna go anywhere near it. He's, he was quite, he was invited to be discussing to Stephanie Kelton presenting arguments about what's called modern monetary theory that says the state doesn't need to borrow money from the public doesn't need to text to spend, it's got its own capacity to create money. And that's how it finances itself, and so good on him for being a discussant. But if you look at the comments on YouTube, what people had to say there about his comments where I've been pretty spot on, basically, he just trashed everything. Stephanie had to say because he fairly obviously hadn't listened to what she was saying in the first place. He's He's, he's a conventionally he has a PhD in economics. He wrote his he lectured at the A Anu. So he's got all the mainstream credentials that I have been attacking for the last 20 years of books like debunking economics, and I think he is going to basically say, to, to call it to calm and, you know, let's let's get it back on the straight and narrow. Let's go back to the good sound economics. Well, good sound economics got us into the stink in the first place. So I'm not hopeful about where the OC is going to find itself. And I think it's not quite as bad as appointing Donald Trump before a pandemic. But I think it has similarities.

Dan Ilic  31:48  
Well, I, I'm pretty the way you kind of frame it, I get very kind of despond because he always say for a lot of people is this black box that is so powerful. And yet, you know, there's little we can do about it, when it comes to getting the right people in there to affect the right kind of change. I wonder, like, who are our allies in the OECD in that regard, like who are the who are the champions of climate action in that, in that, in that organisation that we should be kind of following

Steve Keen  32:16  
on doubleview group called Naik, which stands for new approaches to economic challenges. That's the that's the progressive element inside the OECD. And then you've got every every country, which is a member, and there are 37 countries, every country has an ambassador, so called. And the ambassadors funnily enough, once they're appointed, they act under the auspices of the OECD, rather than their own countries, so they can't be recalled by their own country, they have to be removed by the OECD itself, there are about half a dozen to a dozen, I think the Irish rep for one is very good, the Mexican rep, there's some people who are supporters of the critical attitude towards what we're doing to the environment. But like most of these organisations, they're very much driven from the top down. And people are very loath to step outside the consensus. So if you get somebody at the top like Coleman, who proves to be somebody who will carry you know, a lump of coal into the, into the proceedings and, and talk about good economic girly men. Then we can see the OECD go quite substantially backwards, all white and say, I've got a feeling the climate might decide to intervene and say, you might not take me seriously, but I do.

Dan Ilic  33:29  
Yeah, that is the worst situation we could possibly hope. Do you guys have any questions for Steve, before we wrap up?

Alex Lee  33:36  
I mean, I guess I always think that our Well, you know, Mathias common he was, you know, he is toeing the party line. But this is the point where he's not part of the government anymore. He's acting off his own steam. So like, what is the justification? Do you think for this kind of black rat? fuckery? Like, what's he getting from this? Like? That's what I always want to know, with people like that, like, what's in what's in it for you to destroy the planet like? Yeah, is it just a Cush? Is it just a cushy job for him? Or do you think that there's something else going on?

Steve Keen  34:14  
Well, it's certainly a cushy job as part of it. I mean, he he is a green mentioned international character, I think was he's Belgian by birth. He speaks about four or five languages. He was in Europe until his early 20s. So he's in that sense, he's an international persona, and that's a strong thing in his favour. Probably a major factor why I think that they put forward anybody else like, Who's that bloke used to be Attorney General Christians, somebody I don't think he would have gone down all that well. But Coleman certainly has a an establishment that says he'd be laughing with you here with me. I think it's a it's a major status thing for himself, relocates him back in Europe. It's all sorts of massive positives of music. First small slide. When it comes to what he's doing, I think most of these people are genuinely sincere. They really believe they're doing the right thing by the by the current climate in what they're doing. And I know economists like William Nordhaus. So I think we'll actually, I hope to see tried for eco side at some stage, given what he's done about climate, but he genuinely believes he's doing good for the climate. Now, Coleman will probably think of imposing economic discipline, and standard rule of law is all that's necessary, and he's doing the right thing. It'll be quite sure he's doing the right thing. So so they actually believe that you know that there's sincerity? I don't question it. But the funny thing is, I had a school teacher once who gave me a great insight of sincerity, we were having a class discussion about some politician fighting like crazy amongst ourselves school, the school days, and one kid pipe gun, or at least he's sincere. And the hospitals here and our teacher who normally just let us run, Riot chirped up and said, Don't override sincerity. The most sincere person you'll ever meet in your life will be the maniac chasing you down the road with an X tronic.

Unknown Speaker  36:09  
A very big x

Steve Keen  36:11  
is the biggest x humanity's never seen

Adam Hills  36:14  
if Alex's question is, what's, what's in it for Mathias cormann? My question is what's in it for the Australian Government?

Steve Keen  36:20  
That's huge. And I think that's a really important question. Because Australia's been on the nose internationally, it's actually been called out by a couple of international organisations for how badly it's behaved on climate change. And this is a way that the country which is deservedly criticised as the greatest legged on the planet now has a voice at the head of the table. So I've got a feeling that's a major reason why he was in there. And that's why I'm particularly we got to the position, mate, you, you keep us from being under attack.

Dan Ilic  36:50  
Man, just for a period here, I was really excited about how Australia was the pariah internationally, but like to see that we've now got some cover because of Coleman actually hurts me a little bit. I, I worked at the 2015 cop and I did a show every night about the winners and losers of the cop negotiations in Paris. And Australia was always number one, two or three of world actors at the Yeah, in the negotiations. And so I was one of those things where it's like, well, maybe 2021 maybe this next cop coming will be a little different. And there'll be enough international pressure to turn us into a good actor, but fuck now it seems that that's gonna be harder than ever.

Lewis Hobba  37:32  
You know, they say about cost in a cab.

Unknown Speaker  37:39  
They made

Dan Ilic  37:42  
Thank you, Professor Steve Cain. Really great to have you big thanks to all of our guests. Adam hills, Alex Lee Lewis haba and we got anything to plug Adam you got to plug anything?

Adam Hills  37:51  
Yeah, go on Melbourne International Comedy Festival coming up and some shows in Canberra in Sydney.

Alex Lee  37:56  
Alex Lee got some the plug. And my Dungeons and Dragons podcast. Dragon friends is also doing comedy festival but it's sold out. So who cares?

Lewis Hobba  38:06  
For dragon friends is your beautiful water bottles. Would you like to tell everyone about that?

Alex Lee  38:10  
Dragon friends, that's freedom a good home and I completely distanced myself from that.

Dan Ilic  38:15  
Oh, yes, I saw those water bottles on Twitter and I kind of mentioned them on this show. Louis, you got anything to float?

Lewis Hobba  38:22  
Yes, Dan, a rational fear the live show on the 11th of April at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Dan Ilic  38:29  
And you've listeners of this show. If you use the code podcast, you get a big discount which is great. Steve Cain, you want to plug your Patreon?

Steve Keen  38:37  
Yeah, Patreon on patreon.com slash Prof. Steve came to me gasbag about the idiocy of mainstream economics. I'm giving away free software at the end of the month by the way package called Ravel. So have a look at that and see what you think.

Dan Ilic  38:52  
Not a concern tab. That's an unusual choice. Big thanks to rod Mike's the birth of foundation our Patreon supporters please join us on Patreon so we can keep making this show big thank you to killing David David bluestein, Kate Holdsworth, Rupert Degas and Jacob round on the tepanyaki timeline. Don't forget to come to our Melbourne Comedy Festival shows Until next week, there's always something to be scared of good night.

A Rational Fear on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear

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Once a month on A Rational Fear on the podcast feed we present a different kind of show:

Greatest Moral Podcast Of Our Generation is a long form conversation with a climate leader from around the world.

This month Dan Ilic talks with Ketan Joshi is one of Australia's great thinkers on energy, climate change, politics and technology. This is a great wide ranging chat about all those topics.

📝 Bitcoin is a mouth hungry for fossil fuels

🐦 Ketan's most underrated tweet from 2020

📗 Ketan's book: Windfall

Links mentioned in the climate news:

📺 Salla — The Coldest Town in Findland's bid video for the 2034 Olympics: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-bid-salla/salla-coldest-town-in-finland-to-bid-for-2032-summer-games-idUSKBN29V2I8

📺 Brisbane Bid Video for 2038 Winter Olympic Games: https://youtu.be/He0vdIqn_1Y

TRANSCRIPTION FROM A ROBOT:

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
This podcast is supported in part by the birth of foundation.

Dan Ilic  0:04  
Hello, Lynn.

Linh Do  0:05  
Hey Dan. Longtime no chat.

Dan Ilic  0:06  
I know I know we took a summer break a siesta over summer, but now we are back.

Linh Do  0:11  
We are back. 2021 still feels like 2022 not gonna lie still working from home

Dan Ilic  0:17  
not 2022 but 2020 as well, is that what you meant by two?

Linh Do  0:22  
We actually still in 2021, I had clearly been very optimistic, projecting myself into the future.

Dan Ilic  0:27  
Now for those who are new around here. This is the greatest moral podcast of our generation. It's a monthly long form chat with leaders on climate action from around the world. It appears right here on the irrational fear feed and this week. I'm very excited about this conversation. Lin you haven't heard or you haven't heard it yet, but I can't wait for you to hear it. It is with mega energy climate nerd technology brain katan Joshi, and he is like my favourite person about climate and the environment and technology on Twitter. Do you follow him?

Linh Do  0:58  
I do follow him. And I recommend people ask me the question of Oh, how should I engage on climate? I'm always like, so this this guy. This is like how do you follow him? Sometimes he tweets about Norway because he lives there now. But like 90% of the type of climate and like good stuff,

Dan Ilic  1:14  
that Firstly, I guess we should get the climate news out of the way I'm recording my end of the greatest moral podcast of our generation on gadigal land and the eora nation what whose land are you on?

Linh Do  1:23  
Lynn wonderland of the well wandering people of the Kulin nation,

Dan Ilic  1:26  
sovereignty was never ceded. We need a treaty. Let's stop the shop.

Unknown Speaker  1:29  
Despite global warming. irrational fear is adding a little more hot air with long form discussions with climate leaders. Good.

Unknown Speaker  1:42  
This is called Don't be afraid the heat waves and drove greatest mass extinction. We're facing a manmade disaster, podcast, climate criminals.

Unknown Speaker  1:57  
ration

Unknown Speaker  1:59  
all of this with the global warming and a lot of it's a hoax book, right, a small

Unknown Speaker  2:03  
podcast about generation for short, all right,

Dan Ilic  2:08  
let's get stuck into the climate news. So the last couple of months, I guess there's been a hell of a lot of it. Let's just do some highlights recently, I reckon. Despite everything, the federal government, you know, supporting gas supporting fossil fuels, it looks like they can't even do that properly. I don't know if you've seen this piece by Reuters is a great scathing opinion piece, basically saying Australia's energy policy is in such disarray. While they are trying to support fossil fuels and completely negging on renewables, they haven't even managed to support fossil fuels enough to keep Exxon from closing their oil refinery in altona. In Melbourne 2020. There were non oil refineries in Australia, but now there's only two for the whole country.

Linh Do  2:51  
COVID really did impact clearly a whole bunch of different sectors. And it's so funny, right? Because we definitely say the Australian Government is one of the biggest supporters of fossil fuels all around the world, to the point where the European Parliament is about to vote on something soon to punish polluters, I a people like Australia, it's, you know, we're being punished for internationally, but back home, still not doing a good job. And

Dan Ilic  3:11  
that's incredible. And you know, who's next after the EU, apparently, Japan is going to import is going to be doing some climate tariffs work as well. But of course, it is a bit more of a tension there because Japan is a much bigger trading partner with Australia than than the EU is But still, to have the EU, implement tariffs and then Japan implement tariffs. And Kerry is now talking about implementing tariffs from the United States. So all of our biggest trading partners are going to be punishing us for not acting on climate.

Linh Do  3:40  
We're so wedged in that we're not even quite in a corner anymore. And we're not even really in the picture in the game, you've essentially got the four biggest economies in the world saying, Hey, we're gonna do stuff on climate businesses that operate here, we're going to respond, what are you doing Australia?

Dan Ilic  3:53  
You may remember Around this time, last year, there was going to be talk about a gas powered recovery from COVID. And things like that. Well, let me tell you, the a mo the organisation that basically is the industry body for running the energy in Australia ran a workshop with a whole bunch of stakeholders floating how a gas powered by gas, lead recovery is going to work. And it turns out that half of the stakeholders described it as completely not useful. Which is extraordinary to see. So you know, this, it's so interesting to see how the government has come through and said, We want to do this gas powered recovery. But the industry's like, Nah, that's really shit idea. We're not gonna do any of that.

Linh Do  4:36  
Well, when your normal friends aren't even willing to back You're right. I recommend you can't keep calling them your friends anymore. And we definitely are saying it's the biggest owners of fossil fuel. So like a GL and whatnot, some of the finance, like none of them want to touch any of these projects.

Dan Ilic  4:50  
Yeah, it's really interesting, like two thirds of the participants in the AMA said that they would prefer to do make Australia a hydrogen superpower and that's pretty exciting, too. Know, the industry is like more buoyant about climate action than the government is.

Linh Do  5:06  
Yep. The Australian Federal Government has more than one pickle to deal with at the moment. Hey, so maybe they are slowly going to be so wedged in that they're gonna have to start responding. Was

Dan Ilic  5:14  
that a pun Lin? were you telling you, it took me about a certain kind of pickles is a small one. Excellent. Last month at the National Press Club, the pm actually stated a preference for a movement to 2050 target. insiders next week, Catherine Murphy said that she totally believes that scomo would love a net zero by 2050 target. But and he would totally sign the liberals up if it weren't for the National Party. Apparently Canada enjoys a holding him back. And it's so strange to see like if the liberals and the coalition take those people away from from their party and they do sign up to a net zero 50 target then that would almost be more progressive on climate than labour. It's so it's kind of it's this strange games like labour does want to show their cards and be aggressive on climate because they'll get attacked by the coalition. But the coalition deep down I've only got like three or four troublemakers that are holding the rest of the party ransom.

Linh Do  6:06  
Again, you think that as Prime Minister of Australia, you might be able to do something on climate but it's clear that this like coalition that they've got going on is it's still a coalition. Each house feels like strange bedfellows at this moment in time.

Dan Ilic  6:18  
I don't know if you saw this story, and New Zealand's chief environment advisor has said that we need to up the ticket prices for New Zealand flights to prevent tourists from coming to New Zealand.

Linh Do  6:28  
When he first saw the headlines, I couldn't tell if it was some sort of nimbyism and some sort of luck. We've like sorted out COVID no one come here. But then I read the details. I was like, ah, interesting. It's actually a really good step, I think and it helps embed some of the learnings that we've had over COVID. Right. The Travelling is a privilege, not a right. And if it's a privilege, how do we actually pay for it when most of the world never get to fly anywhere?

Dan Ilic  6:50  
I mean, it's pretty interesting that they have this chief environment and advice for a New Zealand the cool quote is controversial though it may be I'm in favour of putting off some people from coming to New Zealand. I just don't believe the idea that the number of international visitors to New Zealand can grow and grow and grow without limits. I just don't believe that it's credible. All right. So if a higher price for the privilege of flying to New Zealand, put some people off good.

Linh Do  7:12  
I reckon that makes sense. Because you know, what if travel is now all about experiences, and all of that sort of stuff, the more rare and precious you can make something like the more people want to be instagramming about it. So if there's not a million Instagram photos from New Zealand, but only a couple of 100,000 they just gonna get far more traction. I'm all for this idea.

Dan Ilic  7:30  
And Lin Brisbane might have some stiff competition for the 32 Olympic Summer Games.

Linh Do  7:35  
That's right. And I'm pretty keen to head to Finland, not just for Santa Claus, but also the coldest town in Finland. A pretty cold country is keen to harness the 2032 not Winter Olympics, but Summer Olympics because you know, climate change is heating the world up.

Dan Ilic  7:48  
Here's a little taste of there being video.

Unknown Speaker  7:54  
Coming soon,

Unknown Speaker  7:55  
what a great video. I

Dan Ilic  7:56  
mean, they did show volleyball beach volleyball being played in the snow, do you think there'll be ready in time to get rid of that snow for the 2032 Olympics?

Linh Do  8:04  
pretty optimistic. What's the difference between snow and sad, you know, small little particles, I can say if we don't tackle climate action, Finland, they're going to be the hearts of the next Olympics.

Dan Ilic  8:14  
You know, it's really interesting, rational fear we made a sketch, like 2014 remember when Sochi hairy

Linh Do  8:21  
head of the time

Dan Ilic  8:23  
derivative in Sochi held the Winter Olympics and they ran out of snow in Russia. Like import they like would stockpiling snow for four weeks before and then they would try to make snow but they couldn't get enough snow. Anyway, so are we at irrational fear. We made a video for Queensland holding the 2038 nuclear winter games.

Linh Do  8:46  
You're basically your profit. The International Olympic commission should bring you on board as a staff member they should do away with their voting system and just have to predict where it will the Olympics will be held in the future.

Dan Ilic  8:58  
You don't want to do I'm going to fly in the video sketch to the end of the interview with Qatar joshy. So you'll you'll hear it in the podcast but also I'll add the link in the show notes so you can watch it later. Right now though, I'm gonna play you my conversation with Qatar Joshi.

Unknown Speaker  9:11  
You're listening to the greatest moral podcast about generation.

Dan Ilic  9:17  
Our next guest on the greatest moral podcast of our generation is one of the most gifted science communicators that we have in Australian media. crotons writing is funny, sad, and it cuts through with clarity. He doesn't mince words, and he never misses his targets, of which there are many. And I hope we get to talk about all of his targets on this podcast. It could turn joshy Hello, Tom, thanks for joining us on the greatest moral podcast of our generation.

Ketan Joshi  9:41  
Hi, it's good to be here. Yes, we will just list all of my enemies

Dan Ilic  9:46  
one by one. Let's start off with we started off with

Ketan Joshi  9:51  
That's a hard one. If you want to talk about what I've been reading about over the past few days show

Dan Ilic  9:56  
Yeah. What have you been reading about?

Ketan Joshi  9:58  
Um, I've been reading about Bitcoin.

Dan Ilic  10:02  
I'm so glad I'm so glad you brought this up because I want to ask you questions about NF T's and how artists are going to ultimately destroy the Earth.

Ketan Joshi  10:13  
Okay, so do you want for your listeners? Do you want like a rundown of what the basics of this whole thing?

Dan Ilic  10:18  
Yes plays. This is one of the one of the topics I wanted to pick your brain about. Because let me just let me just kind of flag with you. I have been dabbling in NF T's I've been trying to buy artwork from Australian comedians. And I've lost about 200 bucks plugging money into Ethereum wallets, and then trying to get a theory and wallets to connect with platforms to buy NF T's and it just hasn't worked. But I've been thinking about, as, I don't know, if you realise this kitten, but when you've got a podcast about climate change, it's not incredibly profitable. So I've been trying to figure out ways to take the sketches we do an irrational fear and monetize them with ease. At the same time fully realising the irony, the irony that I could be making things worse for the planet. So please enlighten me as to what the hell is going on with NF T's and intellectual property and how that intersects with climate change.

Ketan Joshi  11:15  
Yeah, okay. So there's a lot of like, this is actually a little bit like climate change in that there's people trying to explain it through through analogies and metaphors, I'm going to try and avoid that because you know, it get you kind of, you just end up swimming around in like, you know, mixed metaphors. And it's very confusing and scary, basically, the way I've always understood, so I so just a bit of background, I used to work at the CSI role, specifically in the data science part of the business called Data 61. So we did, we actually did a bit of stuff on blockchain technology, and its various uses. And it's described as a distributed ledger, which is basically imagine you've got an Excel spreadsheet on your computer. Imagine that that spreadsheet replicates across 1000 100,000 computers at the same time. So if you put the word pou into a cell in your Excel spreadsheet, that would who appears in 100,000, other copies instantaneously, right?

Dan Ilic  12:11  
Oh, so it's just like Twitter, great.

Ketan Joshi  12:14  
That is distributed ledger. So it is, it is a pretty fancy way of doing especially and because copy of it is replicated across so many things, then if one person makes a change to it, then it's sort of copied across. So with that means there's a high level of trust in this, there's no single authority that you sort of have to rely on. Now, Bitcoin sort of operates on similar technology, right? You have this distributed ledger, but what you do is they've taken that technology and tried to make a currency out of it, that means you have to have something, some challenge to get value from this currency, you can't just kind of randomly distribute imaginary tokens of currency. So what they came up with is, well, what we'll do is create a process that is incredibly hard. And by making it so difficult, what happens is it takes some amount of work to acquire one of these coins, a Bitcoin, and it's called proof of work. That's the name of it. That's the name of the technology. And the best way I've seen it described is, imagine if keeping your car idling 24 seven, solved, the imaginary Sudoku is that you can exchange for heroin.

Dan Ilic  13:29  
So you said you were gonna get into metaphors. But that is a very accurate metaphor, I enjoy that.

Ketan Joshi  13:35  
It is my one loud metaphor. And I'm gonna spend it on that one on that tweet, because it was fantastic. So basically, to win a Bitcoin, you have to generate as many random numbers as you possibly can, it takes a lot of computational power. And that amount of computational power increases, because you need to actually have a balance between who is winning this currency who's winning these tokens, and the amount of computational power that's in the system, which means the system actually adapts as you get more and more computational power, which means basically, bring it all together, it takes more and more energy to get the next coin. Yeah. And so what you end up with is the situation in, you know, all of this sort of technology aside, you end up with this reality of you have these vast, vast quantities of server farms, sitting there just like buzzing with noise and hate just spinning out as many random nodes as they possibly can to get as much of this currency as they can. So it's called mining, they call it Bitcoin mining. And so when you see things like Bitcoin consumes as much energy as this particular country, it's because it does, like it takes that much literal, physical electrical power to run these computers to generate these transactions. Every time new coins are discovered. It takes even more How to get to the next point, right? A bit more. Yes, yeah. And so all of these dynamics, I'm simplifying, because I'm simplifying all of these dynamics very, very heavily. But the basic consequence is that by design, proof of work, and Bitcoin requires a lot of energy. So if you want to change that, if you want to change it from requiring a huge amount of energy to requiring not much energy to change the design, and actually there are people working on this, right. So there are different ways you can prove, you could introduce difficulty without having the difficulty being that you just consume ludicrous quantities of energy, right? You can have other forms of difficulty, right? There's different types of these things called proof of stake, for instance. So how many bitcoins that someone already have in their virtual wallet or something like that, right? reading into these, there's actually some hope, essentially, that you can have these things, not consuming world melting amounts of energy.

Dan Ilic  15:55  
So what you're saying is that we could possibly fund this podcast by selling bits of it, and also not destroy the Earth at the same time.

Ketan Joshi  16:04  
Yeah, so so it just that brings it back to what you were describing earlier, which has been described as like crypto art or non fungible tokens or NF T's very inaccessible names, basically, it's generating the serial number of a unique piece of work. So it can be a tweet, or it can be a piece of art or whatever. And that serial number is stored on a blockchain right, which means it's, it's on that spreadsheet that's replicating across a trillion billion different computers, which means when as soon as you generate it, you put you put the serial number you put this tweet is owned by Tom joshy, he paid 100 bucks for it. It's this sort of very highly trustable system, right? Which is, which is pretty good, right? Like this is something that is obviously a lot of value to artists is to have a more discreet, like almost like copyrightable sense of ownership for the art that they create,

Dan Ilic  16:55  
to deal in the digital space where you create something and it goes up and you hope it goes viral. But there's no monetary gain from anything. Speaking as someone who has gone viral so many times if I had one cent for every time I've gone viral, absolutely be able to buy a new car. But

Ketan Joshi  17:13  
yeah, I mean, this is what people have been trying to do with like, you know, when you see a viral tweet on Twitter, and below it, someone's written like, you know, here's my SoundCloud or whatever, like, please send me some cash. Like they'll put the code off the link there and say, can you please just help fund my you know, getting through university?

Dan Ilic  17:30  
Whatever Katon? I don't know, if you realise you are. You're just outlining my business plan. So that's exactly what we do on irrational fear. We will we will go viral. Usually, this is this is no, this is no secret to irrational fear listeners. But we will create a sketch put it up on Twitter and I will write who made this. And then right underneath it, I made this subscribe to the podcast.

Ketan Joshi  17:57  
So this is a real source of frustration. And like Bitcoin, it raises this fundamental question. And it's not it's not limited to Bitcoin, it's actually something that the whole energy and climate world is facing. right at this moment, which is basically is this worth it, is what we're doing worth it. So is the value that you get from copywriting. And paying for a piece of art worth the X number of kilowatt hours that was required to process this transaction. And crypto operates on a slightly different system to Bitcoin. It has the same fundamental sort of proof of work system, but it's slightly more efficient. Because you're not playing this random number game. It's actually it's actually going through this process where a whole bunch of different transactions get bundled, bundled together, it's still relatively high consuming, right, like it's still a relative decent amount of energy. And I was just looking at this one chart this morning from this website called Digi economist, and they look at the power consumption for the thing that runs crypto on NF T's which is called aetherium. Yeah, and it's it's still pretty high, you know, it's not quite as high as Bitcoin. But, you know, like that, there is still sort of some options for bringing that down. Yeah. But fundamentally, there is still this really, like almost really hard to solve problem underneath at all, which is that it requires a lot of energy. And of course, the problem with consuming a lot of energy is that we live in a fossil fuel world, predominantly fossil fueled world. Yeah. And to consume a lot of energy. You just have to consume a lot of fossil fuels.

Dan Ilic  19:32  
Yeah, I've seen so many, countless numbers of vice documentaries about warehouses in China and, and orders crammed with AMD RISC chips that are all like mining Bitcoin. And there's like dude with their shirts off like plugging like plugging cables here and there. And then and then there's on the other side in rich countries like Iceland. You see these, these stories about Bitcoin factories that are built in Iceland in real Cold air is to use the natural cooling of the of the environment to to mine Bitcoin and using geothermal technology to kind of power these, these Bitcoin mining factories, but it's such a, it's it's such a headache like you're just like, you know, you, you think one thing is going to save the planet but ended up just completely destroying it.

Ketan Joshi  20:23  
This is this is why this is why I kind of got sucked into it a bit because there's actually nothing really like it. There's nothing where the ratio between how much energy it consumes. And to be honest, it doesn't really seem to have clear societal benefits, right?

Dan Ilic  20:40  
Yeah, you've got all these or you got all these like blockchain edge Lords who were talking about how Oh, you know, we're only at 00 point 3% of what we've explored with blockchain. I think it's gonna have exponential growth. I'm like, well, that's so much more energy

Ketan Joshi  20:56  
efficient thing. Good.

Dan Ilic  20:58  
Yeah, it doesn't seem seem good.

Ketan Joshi  20:59  
Yeah. Well, it's actually worth mentioning the the renewable versus fossil energy thing, because something you hear a lot is basically, that Bitcoin miners will hunt out the cheapest and most surplus energy, right. So, of course, you know, renewable energy has gotten a lot cheaper over the past decade, wind and solar in particular. But what we're actually seeing is that there isn't surplus wind and solar, wind and solar being deployed and very carefully managed ways around the world, such that they do what they're meant to do, which is displace fossil fuels, instead of just sort of feeling this like rising addition of Bitcoin mining demand, and then leaving the fossil fuel system as it is like, that's not a good thing. That's not a good outcome. Yeah. And so what they're actually drawn to is hydro, in particular. And in China, what you find is that there are hydro assets that aren't particularly well interconnected into other parts of China, which means they have potential output, if so, reservoirs that are sort of like full Yeah, that they could never, they could never really set that could that is way more than local demand, right? So the logic of Bitcoin miners as well, we kind of just, you know, we like, flow into those into those bits of surplus and consume that. So, you know, it's like, it's not really changing the situation at all. And it's not quite how that manifests in the real world. Yeah, because what is happening is that every part of the renewable energy world that is like stranded or surplus, what we're finding is that we actually need to connect it up to the world to start displacing fossil fuels. I mean, China is a particularly great example of where there's a lot of coal happening. So those renewable assets need to be going towards displacing fossil fuels. So if they're stranded, that's not a good thing. And to lock them into being stranded by saying, we'll give you a revenue stream, from your surplus from from mining Bitcoin is basically diverting that action to link it all together, to start pushing down on fossil fuels. Yeah, that's not a good thing. And then, on top of that, this is whole push within the Bitcoin mining community to actually specifically use fossil fuels so actively and consciously seek out fossil fuel mining operations, so so oil and gas, and to say, well, you guys, through the process of extracting oil and gas from the ground, you get this thing where methane leaks from these sites, right. So what they do is either they just let it let me think seep into the atmosphere, which is extremely bad. Or they burn it off, which is slightly less bad. This is all in the process of extracting fossil fuels, which eventually get burned. What is the logic in actively seeking out fossil fuels in that case, so So what they're saying is like, well, because all of this waste product, all of this waste me, young, these mining sites will either be released or burned, we may as well just burn that burn that waste to mine Bitcoin. So fine, you can see these videos, and it's not a secret, you know, they're very sort of open about it. You see these videos of like these shipping containers at oil and gas fields. And they'll just slowly pan the camera around from like, you know, this sort of classic like oil drilling thing, you know, they've got like the big weight on one end. Yeah. And they'll pan they'll pan around from that oil drilling thing to this shipping container that's buzzing, you know, like, like, it's full of Hornets. And it's full of like LED lights. And it's a little seven farm that's mining Bitcoin, because they're taking the gas, but they're still burning gas. And, yeah, when you burn gas it creates it creates greenhouse gas emissions. So the net impact of what they're doing is, it's either nothing or it's worse because when you look at the websites of these companies, they're like, Look, we're actually doing this to help the optics of the fossil fuel industry, the venting and flaring problem of methane at these sites has been under has been the subject of criticism for a long time. In you know, Biden's administration, the US is like we have to crack down on all these like waste methane issues at these sites. So the Bitcoin miners come in and they're like, don't worry about the waste. Just burn you can just burn the fossil fuel to mine Bitcoin and it's actually an environmental benefit.

Dan Ilic  25:27  
Has anyone? Is anyone seriously trading off that though? Is anyone seriously putting that in a press release saying that, you know, hey, you know, where the where the do Gooding oil company that's flaring off our methane to mine Bitcoin?

Ketan Joshi  25:40  
Yeah, it's not just the companies that are sort of, you know, offering this as a pathway but like the, like these massive giants like Ecuador. So, you know, Ecuador being the state owned oil company here in Norway, where I live. They, they have been investing in this because they're like, we're actually we're actually solving the problem.

Dan Ilic  26:04  
I never thought I never thought I'd say this, but I can next year I will heading out to election i can i can just say Scott Morrison saying we're going to have a Bitcoin led recovery. A blockchain lead recovery.

Ketan Joshi  26:15  
Oh my god. Yeah. So I mean, actually, you know, they're actually awesome. I saw a tweet yesterday like another another Norwegian oil and gas company announced their intention to sort of invest in Bitcoin not not specifically using methane to generate it, but to just did they taking the cash that they have, and just investing in Bitcoin, with some weird promises about using stranded renewable energy assets, but no clarity on what they mean. Yeah. And someone you know, someone tweeted at like all the Australian oil and gas companies like Woodside HCl and origin being like, Hey, guys, why aren't you doing? This is a great idea. So so to bring it all together? Yeah, basically, what I've been been finding out is that, first of all, it contains a lot of energy. I think people sort of know this, like they've seen it in articles, you know, they've read about all the comparisons. That's a little mystery. But with Bitcoin mining, in particular, there seems to be this like energy pushing them towards fossil fuels. And it's because what they are drawn towards is not zero emissions power, they are drawn towards cheap stranded power. And oil and gas mining operations actually fit that bill really nicely. Demand for fossil fuels is going to decrease very significantly. And so if these Bitcoin miners step up and say, well, don't worry about all the, you know, people not wanting your fossil fuels, will take them, the price of those fossil fuels will drop very significantly due to due to the fall in demand. And they will probably be there to be like, well, don't worry about your coal mine, your gas mine, your oil extraction thing, we'll just take that energy that you're extracting, and use it to mine Bitcoin. And they can kind of say, Well, you know, they'll sort of like frame it in this like tortured logic of, we're actually doing an environmental benefit. But really, they're monetizing the this sort of side this like waste stream from the fossil fuel industry. So anyway, I've written a sort of very long post about this, because I think it's actually a very nice summary of a relatively important debate that we're all having, which is like, how do we manage energy? You know, do we live in like a high energy world, low energy world who gets it? How do we connect up renewable energy? How do we figure out what to do with fossil fuel companies? Like do we congratulate them if they're doing something that sounds vaguely like it's environmentally beneficial? Or do we remain critical of them? All these questions are really big and important. I'll publish that pace. Probably later this week. I'm not sure when this podcast will go out. But if anyone wants to read three to 4000 word, rant for me about this. I don't know why you would want to, then yeah, it'll be published soon, we'll be able to buy it an open seat on IO as a nifty question. Yeah, I mean, the crypto art thing as well is is an interesting cultural comparison, because Bitcoin is just full of libertarians. Yeah. You know, plenty of whom are not particularly influential types are right. Yes. Yeah. And so well, yeah. And also, you know, also not particularly open minded towards, like collective climate action and like government regulation, fossil fuel companies and things like that. But then, like, the art community is very, very different. You know, like, it's really, of course, it's a lot of environmentally conscious people, people who you would sort of think are a lot more into like climate action and environmental justice and things like that. And of course, you see a very different reaction. Now you see a lot of backlash from with In the arts community against the sort of like, I guess, the excesses of this, but then there's also a lot of people who are like, well, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because if we can really bring the energy consumption down, the concept is really sound and really beneficial for a lot of people who would like to get paid for the stuff that they're doing. So there is some work, you know, to try and rescue I guess, to try and cleave it away from the Bitcoin libertarian world and into this like, basically like a useful technological tool to help artists get paid.

Dan Ilic  30:33  
I think that's where that's where I am right now, as I create, I like thinking like, you know, how, how do we use this to get paid, but how do we also not not destroy the Earth at the same time? I think it's really interesting that you kind of mentioned that, that the oil industry, the fossil fuel industry, are using Bitcoin as a delay tactic, considering they are the kings of delay tactics and your your book in your book windfall. It's just, it's just like 400 pages of delay tactics. I think I think that some, I think one of the one of the things I love about your writing patterns, is just how clear it is, and how often you return back to first principles all the time, I really appreciate that. Like, I think you whenever you talk about coal, you kind of talk about it, how it's just the sunlight trapped in a rock, or you're always talking about climate change, about how the government is slowly trying to kill its citizens. And one of my favourite motifs is an idea how you, you kind of return to again and again and again about how it's just a handful of powerful individuals that are responsible for the position that we're in. And one of the things one of the, my, my favourite senators in the book is about house when you're articulating Australia's last decade of climate action, and he said it was squashed into the boot of a callous few lately protecting their own manufactured realities. It's such a when you when you kind of write like that. And when you return back to first principles, the obfuscation kind of floats away. And you're kind of left with this bare naked truth as to kind of the position we're in and the absurdity that the Australian Government is in is in, in particular, where what have you learned by moving to Oslo? And looking back at Australia?

Ketan Joshi  32:17  
Yeah, this is this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, because what is happening this year is this global environment, this like sort of global climate meeting in November called cop 26. Conference of Parties, it was meant to be the it's the sort of the five year check in. And it was meant to be last year 2020, obviously, delayed due to COVID-19. It may not even happen this year, if if the vaccination stuff goes slowly. So that means that the whole world kind of stands up in their podiums and says, Well, this is where we're at with climate change. And so that means Australia also stands up and says, this is where we're at, we're checking in, it's been five years, six years since the Paris Agreement started. And that means the sort of trapped world that every country has been living in, you know, looking at their own climate politics.

Dan Ilic  33:16  
What are you trying to say every country has their own version of the camera bubble?

Ketan Joshi  33:20  
Is that what you're trying to say? Yeah, basically, essentially, yeah, this is something else that's actually become very clear is that as I have existed Australia's timezone, it's actually pretty tough to get people to think about different countries, when they're when they're really sort of into their own in their own particular area. I mean, maybe I think maybe America might be the worst offender of this, because they sort of, there's a lot of things that happen in there that they treat is like the first time that it's

Unknown Speaker  33:46  
like, no, no.

Ketan Joshi  33:48  
Many of these things have happened elsewhere.

Dan Ilic  33:50  
Yeah. And the matrix is early in the metric systems, the big one there, I think.

Ketan Joshi  33:54  
Yeah, absolutely. But what what Australia is going to is finding out this year and what we'll what we're only at the very start of, and will become more intense as the year goes on, is that a lot of things have become saturated, and because they're saturated, people get people lose their sensitivity to how bad and horrific The situation is. So to give you an example, in the UK, in the past few weeks, this coal mine that was proposed is called Cumbria. And it's like this. On the scale of UK is coal mines. It's it's relatively big, right? Because coal mining in the UK has declined over the over the past century, to almost nothing. There's a couple of really small ones. And of course, coal fired power generation in the UK has also declined to almost nothing. It is functionally no longer really playing a role on the grid in the UK. This coal mine has been proposed. It's an underground coal mine. I was looking at the discourse around it, and it's Intense right like this, the local council, the UK Government, climate activists, investors, the debate on this one Coal Mine is just like this really, really launched focus. And I was looking at it and I was like, hmm, Gee, I wonder how that coal mine compares to like Australia's current, like list of planned coal mines, so nonoperational coal mines in Australia, but the ones that are sort of at various stages of like, you know, getting towards operation, and I put it onto this chart, which is basically looking at the number of mega tonnes of output of coal per year from each coal mine,

Dan Ilic  35:39  
will I need to get it? Well, I need to get a skew bag for the rest of the Senate.

Ketan Joshi  35:45  
Well, I'll try not to describe it too vividly. But basically, it's like this tiny little red dot and like Australia's planned coal mines, several orders of magnitude greater. I found that really stunning, right? Because it's not like the level of outrage and emotion within Australia's leadership within political circles is is equivalently larger than the level of outrage at this one tiny planned coal mine in the UK? And of course, like, the reason is obvious, right? Is because that plant coal mine in the UK is new. It's like a new unfamiliar thing for UK people to go, Oh, my God, a coal mine. Are you kidding me? Like, why? Why are we building a coal mine? That's bonkers. Like we, you know, we're holding, we're hosting cop 26 at the end of the year, and you're building a damn coal mine. And then, you know, you look at Australia. You know, just to give one single example, though, is this amazing? This is amazing court case being brought against the Australian Federal Government, on the grounds that expanding a coal mine, expanding a planned coal mine. And just the expansion of this coal mine dwarfs the magnitude of this coal mine in the UK. And, and like, that got some attention that this court case being brought by a group of teenagers, but it didn't get anywhere near the magnitude of attention that the Cumbria Coal Mine is getting in the UK, and its saturation, right? Like, it's just like this, you know, it's not like people don't care. It's just that if they were to care by the same order of magnitude, then they wouldn't be able to function as human beings, right? Like the like, you just you would be so overwhelmed by how much you should care about, about like the production line of new coal in Australia. Yeah. And the other thing that's worth noting is that this production line of new coal extraction in Australia, is globally very, very significant. There was this report last year from the International Energy Agency that looked at the coal production in different countries. And they're like, Look, there's a few countries in the world that are just going to be the engine of new coal production in coming years. And Australia is one of them. There's other countries like Indonesia, actually, Germany is up there, as well, because Germany really seems to be big on coal mining is a couple of others. I can't quite recall from the report, but Australia is basically a key player. Right? And oh, and sorry, of course, China, it but China uses a lot of the coal that it produces, right? It's not a big net exporter. Australia is one of the countries that actually supplies it to elsewhere in the world. So that is really the sort of the key thing that I felt looking back on Australia, because it's this barrage, this daily barrage over new things, that because it obviously becomes extremely difficult to maintain outrage about because it's just so proportional II, massive in Australia, and compared to other countries where, like the UK, for instance, where the horrific stuff still happens, but it happens more frequently, which means which lets you have the emotional capacity to go, oh my god, and you call mine and talk about this. Whereas in Australia, you get this phenomenon where like with coal mining, for instance, you kind of have to concentrate all of your feelings onto one symbolic example, like the Carmichael coal Adani, coal mine, Donnie.

Unknown Speaker  39:13  
Yeah, yeah.

Ketan Joshi  39:14  
Yeah, it's like the only way you can emotionally manage because if you were to spread it equally across all the coal mines planned in Australia, you would never have the you would melt into a puddle. The brain capacity. Yes. Yeah.

Dan Ilic  39:27  
It's one of those things like to communicate it you need just like a very simple emoji and the stopper Danny thing really symbolises that and even though stop Danny's actually stopped everything happening in the Galilee basin. That's kind of that's kind of in the Galilee basin is filled with hundreds of cold coal companies all vying for the coal underneath underneath the Galilee basin. Yeah, Ben Adani is the easiest Danny's like this Dinis, like the signpost that we all rally behind and even when they change the name to bribe us, we still you stop it down because I don't know, I

Ketan Joshi  40:00  
just use the all of the wrong things that are done in the past. I treat them as a completely new company. So that's basically why I write the way I do in a sense, because I, because I always want to. I want to try and describe things in a slightly different or literal way. We often rely on shorthand to talk about this topic, because of course, like it's just a, it's just a weird new complex sciency, you know, economic like, Techno political thing. Yeah. So if sometimes you just sort of read describe what you're talking about in a slightly different way, then it just resets that emotional exhaustion,

Dan Ilic  40:43  
it almost makes it sound, you know, climate action, and going carbon neutral sound completely achievable as well. Like, I think one of the one of the things you constantly mentioned in your book is, is like you re, you return to again, and again, is saying that no, even if one molecule of co2 equivalent is stays in the ground, that's great. You know, like, when you when you put it down, when you put it as my noodle is that you like, Oh, yeah, shit, yeah, that's what this is all about. It's about keeping the stuff in the ground,

Ketan Joshi  41:12  
that sort of links it back to renewable energy in my own advocacy of renewable energy, because we can confirm that, you know, grids are finite. Like, if you if you have 100, people demanding electricity, and then you know, 50 of those people get it from wind and solar, whereas they otherwise would have got it from coal and gas, then that's an emissions reduction, we can confirm that this, oddly enough, was actually almost controversial last decade, like this is something you know, wind and solar were kind of treated as like a sideshow of like, Oh, you know, they're there. But they're generating so randomly that we don't really know they're there, whether they're reducing emissions a lot. It's kind

Dan Ilic  41:50  
of strange. Like, I feel like there's a couple of conversations happening at different levels of government in Australia with that is still the case, like in federal government, you have a whole bunch of right wing conservatives who who kind of have that same, it's still that same dialogue, that same conversation, whereas a lot of other conservatives are kind of kind of on the renewables train at a state level. And you kind of see the shift in mode in conversation, the main, if you will, that renewables aren't reliable is kind of disappearing.

Ketan Joshi  42:23  
Yeah, I split it in the book, I split it into three sort of categories, right. One is price. One is like grid security or reliability, and the other is emissions. And so it's just been this three pronged fight to prove that, like, renewables can perform those three functions. And so, in each of those three, the balance of discourse has been in exactly the wrong direction. Like you had this, like, you, I'm sure, you know, your listeners will recognise this is like whole decade of like, renewables are too expensive, that no one can afford them. And of course, what we what we're discovering now is that the majority of price falls and electricity prices in Australia, I'd usually to renewables

Dan Ilic  43:03  
renewable energy. Yeah,

Ketan Joshi  43:05  
won't last forever, of course, but it's actually it's pretty damn good that that's happening. The next thing has been grid reliability. You know, South Australia had its blackout. And then suddenly, everyone was like, Oh, see, you know, wind and solar cause blackouts. And now we're realising that strong to this one.

Dan Ilic  43:20  
This was really fascinating. In your book, you spent a lot of time dissecting the 2016 blackout in South Australia, why did you just disband? Why did you decide to spend so many pages dissecting? What was it five seconds of grid problems in Australia?

Ketan Joshi  43:37  
My long suffering editor actually convinced me to pare that down the book actually would have been substantially longer.

Dan Ilic  43:46  
And I say, as a reader, I really enjoyed it. It might have been my favourite part of the book.

Ketan Joshi  43:51  
Yeah, because because it was the it's actually my favourite. No, sorry. It's my second favourite part of that. But my favourite part is the community and issue pot, which maybe we can come to later. Yeah, the mismatch between reality and discourse that was the greatest, I think it has had the most noticeable impacts on the way energy policy happens in Australia. So back then back in, like sort of 2016 2017 the narrative was like, if you build more wind and solar, it's gonna cause blackouts. I promise you it's going to cause blackouts. What was happening is that a lot of wind and solar was being built because it was incentivized under the renewable energy target, and blackouts, grid stress were increasing, because climate change is happening and heat waves are becoming more intense and longer. bushfires are impacting parts of electricity infrastructure like transmission lines. And that means there's more more stress on the grid. And coal, coal and gas fired power stations are getting older and less, they're becoming more susceptible rather to moments of great stress. So all these moments were like heat waves That just blatantly worsened or intensified by climate change, causing calling gas plants to basically shut down or power lines to get wrecked. Those were all blamed on wind and solar, because they were like, well, CCC hypothesis has been proved, like we told you that the presence of wind and solar would cause all these problems. This has actually changed somewhat since then, what we're going to see now is over the next few years in Australia, it's going to shift away from a narrative about renewables and towards the closure of coal and gas fired power stations, right? It will initially be mostly about coal, because there's this phenomenon that is about to happen in Australia's grades where coal simply loses its profit, profitability, wind and solar are so cheap, as a fundamental of the way they operate in that you don't have to extract the fuel that they use, you get it from the atmosphere and space, then coal simply can't compete. Because it's more expensive, you need to dig a hole out of the ground and transport it. This is without a carbon tax, without any, you know, without any form of carbon pricing essentially, in Australia at all. So this, this is something that's going to accelerate. And what is going to happen is that these companies that operate these, these, these power stations will say, this is really bad. All of our coal fired power stations are going to blip offline, and it's going to cause chaos, there's going to be blackouts, there's going to be price rises, because renewables, wind and solar will not be able to pick up the slack. So it's sort of an extension of that of that debate from like, sort of the mid 2015 onwards, that wind and solar can't provide reliable power, but it's going to be it's not going to be used as a reason to attack wind and solar. It's going to be used as a justification for keeping coal plants running longer.

Dan Ilic  46:55  
And that means for subsidies. Yeah, yeah.

Ketan Joshi  46:59  
Yeah, this is my prediction. I think that this is the way it's going to go over the next like one or two years. And you're already sort of starting to see some signs of it like is in what we what we know, for absolute Sure, is that Australia will not align to ambitious, strong climate targets, unless it's shut down shuts down its coal fired power plants before they're set to retire. Because every coal plant has it has a date on it, that it's like it that it retires. And you can put those dates into a spreadsheet and say, if they run to that day, what are the emissions? And then you can say what emissions Do we need to be under to align with climate targets. And of course, letting those coal plants run to the end date means we blow past our carbon, we emit way more than we should, if you were to sort of assign a 1.5 degree global target to Australia. So there's just no there's absolutely no escaping that math. And think back to last year, where a coal fired power station in New South Wales called Adel a relatively big one is usually close in 2022. For very, very close, right, like this is this is right around the corner. The reaction from the government was initially, we have to keep this open. We need to extend its lifespan for another five years. That did not go down particularly well, because the even the owners were like, I don't think we can do that. It was just the quantity of government money that would have been required. It was it was beyond the pale even for that. So then they said, Look, what we think is that the the owner of that coal fired power station should be forced to sell it to someone who will agree to keep it open. And Australia's government like toyed around with that idea for a while it didn't work. And the latest that we saw was Scott Morrison and Angus Taylor standing up in front of the cameras and saying, Listen up energy market, you have been very naughty. This coal plant is due to shut down very soon. And we feel that the replacement capacity hasn't been put in place. So we so we are threatening to build a 1000 megawatt gas fired power station as a punishment. Because you've been so naughty, and you haven't built you haven't replaced the capacity of this coal fired power station, that we're going to build another fossil fuel power station to replace it as punishment. So you can so what the reason is, is because

Dan Ilic  49:27  
the gas the gas powered recovery is blackmail to keep the coal industry going. Is that what you're saying?

Ketan Joshi  49:34  
Ah, look, it's confusing. I can't quite follow your logic if the gas fired recovery. But essentially, essentially, the The reason I bring this up is it's actually a really nice example of how big the absolute key debates This is really extremely central to Australia's entire climate issue is shutting down coal fired power stations before For them in to retire. When a coal plant when a coal plant reaches its retirement date, the government can't even handle it shutting down on its minister.

Dan Ilic  50:11  
It sounds it sounds like the government is so sick, like absolutely sick. Like it's that they've got an illness.

Ketan Joshi  50:19  
Yeah. So so this is what I this is kind of links back to what I mean when I say like saturation, right? Because such a such a bad situation of like, they can't even handle the absolute baseline basic starting point of this issue, to control emissions to where they need to be controlled to that. You look at the way it's covered stuff like this. And people it's like, almost like people just don't want to and when I say people start I mean, I mean, you know, I guess like the bulk of like coverage in like News Corp and like large media outlets, you know, they sort of almost can't deal with how bad the situation is. They sort of like cover it like, yeah, I guess Hey, let's go up and suggested 1000 megawatt gas fired power station, environmental groups criticised it. Yeah. Next one, let's move on. Yeah. And it's like, if you can imagine the, I guess, like trying sort of related back to COVID-19. And the tone of like, emergency not not just from Australian citizens, but from media outlets to you know, the sort of really, those this air of like, this is an actual emergency and it needs to be treated as such. You know, bad decisions were criticised as, as such, you know, that, like it didn't really matter, that people would be seen as being too biassed in favour of saving lives from the impacts of COVID-19. They did it anyway, because they felt is journalists, you know, it was their sort of duty to serve the public interest and criticise bad policy decisions on the grounds of protecting the lives of people vulnerable to the impacts of this disease. The very same logic of like, well, the government ought to be criticised on the grounds that they're allowing the emissions of the substance which causes harm to human life doesn't really come into play. And it's frustrating. Another good example is actually, the next biggest sector of Australia's emissions is transport. Australia, you know, it's just a lot of cars, a lot of big cars, not as much public transport as they could be in big cities, not as much active transport like walking and cycling as they could be in the big cities. And consequently, Australia has very high transport emissions, even relative to the population. The upside is that decarbonizing transport is just as much is just as feasible as power, right? Like we have the technology, you know, bicycle hills, like ebikes, public transports, electric vehicles, electric buses, all these sorts of things, long distance transport as well. There's a lot of different options available. Australia could start now very easily on decarbonizing transport, and a few months ago, this long awaited plan came out from Australia's government and it was just this huge struggle they just like, we're not gonna bother, like we're just going to electric vehicles will probably eventually get cheaper, right? That's that's completely in arguable and they're sort of looking at that they're sort of holding that and going, Hey, look, you know, electric vehicles are gonna get cheaper. So why is everyone panicking. And of course, the reason that we're panicking is that you need to put some force into the system. Yeah, make it go quicker

Dan Ilic  53:35  
to make go quick, because we're running out of time. And I really enjoyed, I really enjoyed that kind of attitude that I saw on Twitter from a lot of conservatives like see, we don't need to help the sector, the sector is going to sort itself out. And then, of course, two years ago, when there was an election going on, you had mykhailiuk cash, gay trainees are gonna lose their use and lose their weekends if labour has its way. It's such a peculiar fact up argument, that it just makes my head hurt so bad. It's incredibly frustrating to see that some states treasurer's, like in South Australia and New South Wales, are even considering putting a tax on on a vase. Like why would you want to put an economic disincentive to buy an Eevee at this juncture,

Ketan Joshi  54:24  
this is a very sort of salient problem to me, because, you know, I live in Oslo, in Norway and Noy has, you know, easily leads the world and the deployment of electric vehicles, but it's actually really interesting when you dig into the policy mechanisms that we use, right? So it's this really fine balance between at the very start, you have relatively strong incentives for abs, but you actually need to need to go through this process is Evie start filtering into the fleet of private vehicles in a country, you actually then need to kind of flick it the other way around a little bit and start to rebalance. The level of like taxation, so things like, there was this great interview with the head of the Norwegian electric vehicle Association where she talks about the fact that of course, every single thing that people do has some impact on society. So even using a private vehicle, even if it's electric, you know, that has, you need to use a road. To do that there's infrastructure that must be maintained, you pay a toll when use certain road tires emit particulates, that sort of thing. But there's also benefits relative to a combustion engine vehicle, of course, there's no air pollution in the greenhouse gas emissions is quieter, there's less air pollution, all that sort of stuff. So you need to then have this balancing act of like, don't let ABS be entirely excluded, because there are some impacts from usage of a private vehicle or, you know, most of the activities, of course, that humanity that like people do in cities as well. And what has happened in those states in Australia, is they've just mucked up the order quite badly. So they've started, they've started with the strict, like, you know, they started with a disincentive. And then they're like, we'll get to the we'll get to the step one, after we've done Step six, like so. And it's like, no, that's gonna Of course, that decreases the deployment of electric vehicles. I interviewed the head of the Norwegian Navy Association about this. And they're like, you just kind of see like the look on their face. It's like squinting at you like, they're like, why are you doing this in precisely the wrong order?

Unknown Speaker  56:36  
That's crazy.

Dan Ilic  56:37  
So you are a prolific tweeter. And your tweets are some of the most enjoyable tweets, particularly around energy and environment. Probably, I would say the best Twitter person to follow if you want if you're into environment stuff. One of my favourite tweets was you publishing a story from the Australian and it was like a bad a KPMG report. And he said consequences of mining now considered major threat to mining says, say miners, and for me, that was probably the most underrated tweet of 2020 and should have should have got far more tweets than the 43 retweets I got. I don't know when you hit 20. Do you think? Do you think this is definitely gonna be a 43? Or this is definitely gonna hit 500? Like what what was going through your mind when you hit tweet when you hit tweet on that one?

Ketan Joshi  57:22  
I never, I can never tell the my often my crappiest tweets send out the most popular and my best ones end up the least appreciated.

Dan Ilic  57:30  
And one of my I think I kind of made a connection today is like there was some data pulled together by KPMG, which made me think about today's big energy news story about the federal government spending $9 million on consultants to work out how best to subsidise the gas industry. And those consultants weren't KPMG. And clearly, Boston Consulting Group is happy to come up with different kinds of information for the game. Yeah,

Ketan Joshi  57:58  
it's actually I intend to write about this one right about this one, too, because it's a really, really fascinating story. And it's great work from the Australia Institute for for, you know, having that scoop and sort of getting those documents that tell them, my writing is split into two halves at the moment. One is one is, you know, sort of renewables focus, like grid energy technology stuff. And the other half is actually critique fossil fuel industry critique. And also like in general sort of climate plan critique, because what we're seeing a lot of is, is not just fossil fuel companies, but many other companies, is sensing the change in the wind and going, Oh, okay, well, we need to come up with a climate plan. What do we do? You know, like, do we, we need to reduce our emissions from a company, you know, whatever the company is, and you've got this whole spectrum of like, really, really good ones, where people are very, you know, very consciously recognise that their environmental footprint. Actually a good example of a good one is Google, surprisingly enough, I fully expected them to go for, you know, greenwashing crappy plans, but they've got a fantastic plan where they, where they match, they actually turn their data centres into demand matching for renewables. So it actually helps ease the integration of renewable energy. So bad one, isn't actually there was a really good article last year, I can't find it, because I needed to write my thing. But it examined Boston Consulting group's own net zero plan. And what they, and they have this, you know, with every one of these netzero plans, what happens is you get this really sort of like, flashy media thing, where it's like, Look, you know, here's another one. Here's another company, you know, showing that they're sort of caring about climate change. And often these are actually really good signals, these netzero plans, so they do hit they do do some good in that everyone's kind of watching this happen, and they're going like, Oh, fantastic, you know, now we now we need to do it. But then the next step after everyone kind of agrees that we all need to do this is to dig into the details of that plan and say, well, actually you need to improve this particular thing. Boston Consulting Group did this really interesting thing. And then zero plan where they don't really change the number of flights that they consultants take very much. They kind of just fill it in with offsets, right. So this is either like planting trees, or having a technology that sucks carbon carbon from the air. Those are the kind of the two types of offsets, they call them natural technological offsets. There's a lot of controversy around both with with the tree stuff, obviously, you need to actually have something that removes carbon permanently. Obviously, we got it from the ground, we've got it from deep underground. And if you kind of just have it on the surface, in a tree or in the soil, very unstable, re released back into the hemisphere. There's also some controversy around you know, there's a lot of projects that are sort of sold is like, we're building this we're planting this tree specifically because you paid us to do it. But of course, that tree may have been planted anyway. So it's not additional, there's no additionality is the word. Carbon removal has a lot more hope going for it. But it's it's a long way off. And then often the promise of carbon removal just get to us. As like, you know, we'll just continue burning fossil fuels, because we recommend like 2049, someone will just have this amazing technology that will just suck all the carbon out that we've spent 29 years releasing, it's like

Dan Ilic  1:01:09  
the same, the same, the same kind of false promise of carbon capture storage, just like Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we've got these two, we've got these two plants, and we think they're working, but we're not quite sure, but they don't really work. But we'll just say we've got them. So it means we don't have to do anything for another 15 years.

Ketan Joshi  1:01:23  
Yeah, and I often often produce these charts with like, here's how much they've released. And here's how much they've captured. And it's just like a ridiculous. visible, we've got to like squint at your laptop or phone. So So BCG offset their flights, you know, show instead of saying we're gonna figure out a way to fly less, they just said they just call it in with trees, and they will just continue, will largely continue doing what we're doing. But it will just have we're just commentaries and it's like, okay, that's actually that's actually not a particularly great thing to do. Because it's not reducing the amount of carbon that's being added to the atmosphere, the planting of trees is probably a good thing. And it certainly helps. But then you can't have that as the thing that you're relying on, you actually need to reduce your emissions as well. Yeah. So bcj were on my radar last year. And then there are a lot of companies that work is enabling for the fossil fuel industry without actually being specifically digging up fossil fuels themselves. Of course, the other category is like public relations, like marketing, advertising, things like

Dan Ilic  1:02:23  
that, I was gonna say Can Can could could be CJ possibly lower their carbon emissions by not working for the Australian Government and working out how to burn more fossil fuels.

Ketan Joshi  1:02:34  
You know, it's not captured in their annual report, like you won't see, here's a list of our clients. You know, here's Exxon Mobil, here's the Australian Government, blah, blah, blah, you won't see that sort of stuff. And there's a lot of actually really good groups. There's one in Australia called calms declare, there's another one as well. I've completely forgotten the name. But basically what they

Dan Ilic  1:02:51  
thought of another one called a podcast declare as well.

Ketan Joshi  1:02:55  
Oh, yeah, yeah, I've seen I've seen that Twitter account. Yeah, it's good. I mean, like this is basically, this is really important stuff. Because I think to some degree, we underestimate the impact of particularly advertising. You know, like consultancies, obviously, play a pretty big role in this sort of stuff. Like you can see the impact there. With BCG in the Australian Government, their marketing and advertising is going to become a much much bigger thing as decarbonisation moves from like grid stuff, like, you know, huge wind and solar farms out in rural areas, and into our homes. So like cars, you know, the type of stovetop that you have decisions that you make around like, where you put your money, you know, like which super which super funds, you put your money and that sort of thing. All of this is actually becoming way more individual. And so marketing and Mass Communication are going to be really, really big things this decade, the I was just tweeting this morning about the gas industry, they they really don't want people building new homes without connections to the gas network. The more people choose not to connect their new home to gas, the less value their infrastructure has, and it's freaking them out. Because you know, induction cooktops work amazingly well. You don't fill your home with fossil fuel protected like you don't know burning a fossil fuel inside your damn heart.

Dan Ilic  1:04:12  
You're not putting me in your house where you live.

Ketan Joshi  1:04:16  
There's an interesting side issue right equity of course, like I've been a lifelong renter,

Dan Ilic  1:04:22  
you and I are similar in similar positions where like it'd be all well and good to be able to do renovations to place we live to have an induction stove top to have electricity beaming from our rooms to our homes and doing all these ones and having a having a Tesla in the driveway. First of all, I've got to get a driveway. And yeah, so like to do all these things when you're when you actually don't have the power to do any of that yourself. If you're not a homeowner, that's a very different game to play. As a consumer myself, I try to make choices that are that thoughtful like a carbon offset my car even though I even though I'm totally aware of the nature of carbon offset, it still makes me feel good.

Ketan Joshi  1:05:10  
No, it's certainly something that you should do. I mean, like, as long as they're, as long as they're like high quality, you know, as long as they're verified, and that you are in a situation where you can't afford to purchase an electric car, or, you know, you live in a certain spot where you can't live your life without, like, it's not feasible for you to walk or catch, you know, use a bicycle or catch public transport. And in Australia, of course, there are many, many, many instances of where that's the case for most people, then I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with deciding to try and do some other action it doesn't need doesn't even have to be an offset, you know, you can like funds like a community solar organisation, or you know, you can you can purchase greenhouse electricity, like, there's a bunch of different things that you can do, that don't have to be a one for one emissions cancelling thing that really helped a lot. This is actually a really important point because the debate between individual action and like systemic regulatory action on climate change really rebounds between these two things, and people just get caught up in this rebounds, right where they just like getting buffeted around like, Oh, my God, I feel bad for not doing too much in my life that I don't know I don't feel bad at all. Because it's the corporation's you know, that should be doing it. Oh, no, I feel bad again, Oh, my God. Like, don't let yourself be emotionally battered around by this by this constantly shifting focus, right? Because

Dan Ilic  1:06:28  
as you say, as you say, you should feel good for doing something good, you should feel good because you didn't put molecules in the air. So that's that's exactly

Ketan Joshi  1:06:35  
right. So so the actually, the gas industry is a really good example of this. Because there's a dimension, right, there's a spectrum, where we actually get more room to make the to make emissions, lower emissions decisions in life, because of regulation, right. So the example I often use is, I live here in Oslo, I cycle my kid to childcare. But I only do that because somebody fought to get bike lanes in Seoul. And this is actually a really recent phenomenon. And Oslo suddenly, in the past few years, that bike lanes have become ubiquitous in the city. And if they weren't there, I would not be doing this, it freaks me out, I would probably be driving a car. And if I didn't have the option to drive an electric car, I'd probably be driving a fossil fuel car. Because I need to get my kids to childcare. And so it's the I've made a decision. Like I could still drive a fossil fuel car if I wanted to. But the reason that I've made the decision, this lifestyle change is because somebody fought in Oslo's council to get this like option available to me, with the gas industry as well, they are looking at marketing and advertising campaigns to get people to have gas in their homes, because it will impact regulation, because they want like a body of people out there who will stand up and say, I like my steak when it's cooked by fossil fuels. And I don't like my steak when it's cooked by electricity from those wimpy wind farms and like they need that their to be able to say, Well, I want this state government to introduce a policy where they're not going to allow the banning of gas connections, for instance, and this is happening in the US, entire states are creating these things called ban bands, which is basically Yeah, this is wild. So they're banning the banning of gas connections. That's such

Dan Ilic  1:08:24  
an American thing. That's such a magazine.

Ketan Joshi  1:08:26  
Yeah, similar thing is actually happening with plastics. So there are pre emptive bands of plastic bag bans, where they say you're not allowed to stop people from using plastic bags. single use single use plastic bags, because that's too much of a of a, you know, it's impinging on the freedom of whatever it really you know, of course, it's there to produce the to, to protect the petrochemical industry producing the raw materials for those plastic bags, right. But it's a growing trend, and they need and they need widespread public support. Because these are all really local issues. Now, particularly with gas network stuff, they're going to be really local issues. So they need people to be like having warm feelings towards their warm feelings towards gas and gas connections. And you can tell I've obviously been doing a lot of reading and writing about about the gas industry. But it feels kind of relevant, you know, because Australia's doing its whole gas fired recovery thing.

Dan Ilic  1:09:26  
About a year ago to get the gas industry we're putting together events with influences to make people feel good about gas. So they had these wellness influences doing yoga and meditating next to a gas fired fireplace where they were breathing in me shade and particulate matter. In the sake of wellness to kind of sell gas to a whole bunch of you paid Evans types.

Ketan Joshi  1:09:51  
They cited some studies where they said that looking at a flame creates psychological wellness and therefore You shouldn't be putting gas in your home. I'll give you another example, that some, you know, it's sort of within COVID, because it's sort of relevant. Last year in America, this council in California was looking to implement a ban on new gas connections, and the gas lobby in this area, threatened to bus in protesters, and sent a message saying, if you go ahead with this, what we will do is busing protesters to protest your your attempts to ban gas connections. And that that is going to spread COVID-19 in your in so they specifically used

Dan Ilic  1:10:43  
weaponized COVID-19

Ketan Joshi  1:10:44  
respiratory disease as a threat to force people to have the option of having another respiratory illness from having gas burning inside your home with inadequate ventilation. So, like, you can tell why I've been so obsessed with this particular like, you know, phenomenon around the world, because the gas industry starting to get pretty dirty about this stuff, right? Like they're getting really, they doing like, do you remember sort of like the old coal PR stuff from like, the 2010s? You know, where they would do like ads, you know, with a lump of coal spinning in like, you know, bright light and that sort of stuff? Yeah, yeah, they would, they would do all these, like, you know, filthy astroturf things and get like, you know, dodgy operators to come in and do PR. So like, all that sort of coal stuff from the 2010s to get the gas industry starting to kind of do a bit of, that's a really significant thing, I think we can actually prepare ourselves a bit for it, by knowing how all of these things are gonna go and kind of knowing how they operate. And that's why I write about that stuff so much, because I want to be like, Look, we know, we can actually predict very reliably what's gonna happen here. And so watch out for it and don't fall prey to the, to the lines of reasoning that they'll they'll be using.

Dan Ilic  1:12:05  
Yeah, we actually made a parody on irrational fear of the little black rock, I think was gonna call it was called magical Black Rock is saying, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let me play that parody for you. Now, hang on, here we go.

Unknown Speaker  1:12:21  
This can provide endless kinds of environmental destruction. It'll create carbon emissions, respiratory disease, and more waterfront land than ever before, delivering more than 50 million people the motivation to move from their countries to ours, it creates jobs for 1000s of machines, built by people all over the world. due to falling demand. It's the cheapest it's been in over a decade, but consequences of using it will still look expensive. Because if we use it as fast as we can, our world will look just like this little black rock. Whatever is good for humanity. This shit is the opposite.

Dan Ilic  1:13:02  
A guy that was that was 25th. September 7 2015. Yeah,

Ketan Joshi  1:13:07  
Yeah, Yeah, I will. I'm certain we'll get a you know, long, slow focus on gas bottles, you know? Yeah, I know the well, the wellness, the influences stuff is the is the modern version of that of that little black rock.

Dan Ilic  1:13:23  
I think it's gonna be the steak. It's gonna be cooking the steak, that'll that'll be the one that gets

Ketan Joshi  1:13:27  
this. There's actually a few. There's a few partnerships that the gas industry does with I think it's like, some cooking shows in Australia. Is it Mastership? Like I remember which ones, but they do like, they get like, you know, the chef's from those shows to be like, Oh, no, I always cook with fossil fuels.

Dan Ilic  1:13:44  
It makes sense. Master chefs, Master chefs set up is all guest stars, I've noticed and lasted over them. So it's one of those things where it's like, Wow, look at that. Look at that naan bread being like, completely blown out on that guest. It's really incredible. I should really let you go. Because you know, you're a busy man with the world to save. And I'm not. But I do have questions from a couple of my Patreon supporters. Susan from Patreon asks, What are your thoughts about the most likely power sources for the aviation industry over the next 50 years?

Ketan Joshi  1:14:16  
Yeah, this is actually one of the this is really one of the toughest areas to sort of talk and think about with with climate action, because it's another one of those areas where you have to think about the potential of technology not not like what what it currently is. Because there's just no alternative to jet fuel. Forget for transporting people across oceans, across land, obviously, you can, people can travel along the grounds in a high speed train or a car or whatever. But across oceans ships can't really do it. The electric ships really, actually progressing a little faster than I thought there's a few really great electric ferries here in Norway. actually do surprisingly large distances already. But you know, it takes a lot of resources and materials to make the batteries for those things

Dan Ilic  1:15:07  
I saw mask mask was going to stop building fossil fuel powered ships in 19 2030, I think

Ketan Joshi  1:15:14  
there's some good stuff going on. And actually around this hydrogen, hydrogen is produced from a bunch of different you can make hydrogen from budget for things, but you can make it from electricity, which you can generate from renewables. And when you burn hydrogen advance cleanly, it just produces water. So it's actually a pretty, pretty good option, but you just need to develop the technology to to make engines that run hydrogen. And it's an option for planes as well. But the challenge for both batteries and hydrogen is basically energy storage for planes is that they post pretty heavy and they're both hydrogen is volatile. And so you need to have, you need to have the technology to store it in a plane safely. Batteries are far heavier. So you need to have the balance between the weight of the plane and the weight of the battery,

Dan Ilic  1:15:59  
what we can do is to charge their phones before going on a plane and then plug it into the plane. And then passengers can use their energy

Ketan Joshi  1:16:08  
may not last very long. Yeah. I mean, I guess it really just makes sense that, um, transporting people through the air requires a pretty wild amount of energy. What is more likely to be the best pathway for aviation is keep going, we'll let technology keep developing it, but cut off the excess of usage. And so a lot of that is actually business travel, a huge, huge proportion of total flights around the world. I think it's like 30 to 40%, I can't quite remember the exact number I need to check it is from business travel.

Dan Ilic  1:16:39  
I was really grateful. Two weeks ago, I had to do a presentation in Canberra. And I was quite thankful I didn't have to go. And I could do it over zoom to seven important people in Canberra. And I could just do it from my bedroom where I am right now. And I was like, Well, you know, the only thing I've got to do is put on a tie. And I'm ready to go. And, you know, I think we've all been in COVID times that, that telecommuting and you know, stuff like video conferencing can replace a lot of that unnecessary travel.

Ketan Joshi  1:17:05  
Absolutely. And the other problem, of course, is is frequent flying. So it's people who people who fly way more than you and I would ever fly. And that is also a pretty large proportion. And the problem here is course is that airlines understand that this is a very large proportion of their revenues, people who fly when they don't really need to, or really, you know, like not this isn't, you know, stuff when they're going on holidays and stuff. So this kind of overlaps with the business thing of like, you know, a crazy melting group when I haven't have a meeting and they just fly their people, you know, from New York to Los Angeles to have that meeting.

Dan Ilic  1:17:35  
Yeah, maybe instead of having a gold and platinum, they should have like, brown level, you know, you've got it should gold to brown. Yeah, yeah,

Ketan Joshi  1:17:44  
this is actually this is actually a sort of proposal is to have like an incentive programme for infrequent dragonflies are very nice to get rid of marketing incentives for flying essentially, which which will cut off a very large amount of demand. And of course, that would be a politically fraught thing down the line. The airlines would not be a very happy with this approach, particularly Not now.

Dan Ilic  1:18:08  
One of our discord, community members adds rights. You read a lot about technology replacing coal plants with wind and solar and phasing out IC engines in favour of electric this leads to two questions. will this happen quickly enough? And even if they get replaced with renewables slash electric inside of 15 years? Is it enough? Or do we need larger systemic changes? I don't think it's, I don't think it's a quick question.

Ketan Joshi  1:18:37  
Quick, I'll give you a quick answer, though. I mean, you need systemic changes to reach that rate of change, there's no doubt about it, you need to have systems in place that intervening in what may have previously been thought of as like relatively free markets. So what actually goes links back very nicely to the coal closure thing, because the owner of a coal plant won't shut it down early, unless you force them to. And to get that 15 year time frame, that's actually going to be a really, really tough systemic deep change to make. So the other side of it, of course, is that simple replacement isn't sufficient, you actually need to push down on the demand side of the equation to so that's I mentioned active transport and public transport for, it's actually a really nice example of where you need to reduce the demand for the usage of vehicles. So people own a car, but they don't use it as much as they normally would. That is also climate when right. So this is actually a really tricky thing to sort of wrap your head around because we often conflate machines existing and the use of machines. China, for instance, is actually building a fair few new coal fired power stations, but they're using them less than less. So obviously, it's not, you shouldn't be building new coal fired power stations, that's extremely bad. But keep in mind that they also use them less and less because competition from renewables is

Dan Ilic  1:19:54  
increasing. peeping Neil on the discord also writes, what does he think about direct Technical intervention to reduce co2. And he says, technology solution trees won't cut it, he says. So yeah, the idea of reducing co2 with the technological device, how far away is that,

Ketan Joshi  1:20:14  
on the scale that we need to this, you've got to, you've got to sort of split it out into two categories. One is getting rid of everything that's already been emitted. And the other is dealing with stuff that we're about to or that we, that we think we almost certainly will emit. So so so of course, if you ask a company like shell, they'll be like, yeah, we're not going to decarbonize very quickly, there's still a lot of admitting that we're going to do. But if you ask, if you look at if you look at ambitious climate plan, there actually is still some emissions that are gonna happen. So you know, I don't know, like a rescue helicopter, filled with jet fuel that you need to save someone from hanging off a cliff, she'll have some carbon emissions that you want to you want to remove. So and then, of course, this is historical emissions. And there's a lot you know, what are we up to last year, you know, 36 Giga tonnes in that in that single year of carbon dioxide. So not not all greenhouse gases just come with oxide. We currently last year, we removed 0.04 ish. Maybe missing a decimal point there. But you get to the proportions.

Dan Ilic  1:21:18  
It's like, I don't know why I'm laughing like it's one of those things where it's like, I shouldn't be laughing. I should be being very angry. But it's a sad laugh. Yeah, I think that's what irrational fear does.

Ketan Joshi  1:21:30  
What, what, what I think is actually a really important argument in favour of carbon removal is is actually a justice question. So the burden should be on those who have done the most emitting over the past century. And that's North America. That's Europe, and Australia, Oceania, some degree, all of these sort of three chunks of the world that have done a lot of historical emissions. So not the yearly amount. But if you look at the atmosphere as a stock, it's like a bucket of stuff who's contributed the most of that bucket of existing stuff that's in the atmosphere? That I think that's important. I think that's a justice question. And so shouldn't be led by fossil fuel companies, though,

Dan Ilic  1:22:05  
do you think it'll get to a point where, you know, 50 years down the track, the global community will be saying, well, historically, when the rich countries need to start mopping up their historical emissions, and really paying for it, this kind of exporting mass exporting of co2 equivalent from countries like Australia, which we build out riches on, is suddenly going to be the biggest Achilles heel that we have politically in the in the, in the world.

Ketan Joshi  1:22:31  
Yeah, the problem, the problem there is that Australia actually doesn't have particularly good carbon storage opportunities, somewhere like Norway has actually has really good carbon stored opportunities just for sequestering underground. There's a lot of sort of existing, like oil science offshore here in Norway. And so they're sort of trying to get ahead of the curve and and offer it as a, you know, business to say, well pay us and we'll and we'll, you know, we'll take your ship full of capture carbon and store it on the ground. And there's two sides that one is the one is the bad side, which is that fossil fuel companies may use that activity as justification for more emissions. And there's the good side, which is that we actually need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, because for the same reason that we don't emit, in that we need to reduce the stock of this substance in the atmosphere that that traps heat on Earth. So you've got to maintain both in your head at the same time, same time. Yeah, in that something good is going to be misused. It's going to be used as a delay tactic to keep the fossil fuels burning. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Dan Ilic  1:23:34  
It's a Tom, thank you so much. Look, I it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. I've been a fan of yours for ages. And it's really, really great to get all nerdy with you. I think about two years ago, I went on a bit of a journey to try and learn as much as I can about this space. From my very small kind of comedy point of view. And it's in your one of the first book people that people turned me on to and haven't regretted following you on Twitter, and

Ketan Joshi  1:24:02  
I love your work. I of course, I've been really enjoying the particularly like the, of course, like the fossil fuel industry, when you skewer them through through that comedy work. It's really fantastic. And it just, it just fills me with not a lot of things when it's dry these days, and sort of the dark humour of that is just fantastic to me, and makes me feel really happy. So thank you for that.

Dan Ilic  1:24:23  
Well, thank you. Well, without people like you, doing the hard work and writing the great work that you do, then I've got nothing to read to make jokes about. So thank you.

Unknown Speaker  1:24:35  
GM, the greatest moral podcast of our generation. Welcome to Brisbane.

Unknown Speaker  1:24:40  
capital is seven Queensland and bid city of the 2038 nuclear winter games thanks to industrial growth at all costs. Queensland is live life to the extreme and there's nothing more extreme than our weather. But every Cyclone has a silver lining last year Brady Denise From Ian, chalky Philippa good true Tiffany Melinda Shiro Rochelle and Dave Neely made space for new stadiums and sporting facilities and now we're ready for re rebuilding again. With the southward spread of Deva southeast Queensland now has the lowest rate of denki fever in all of southeast Queensland. But don't worry if you do catch it some of the best funded doctors in Australia just over the border in New South Wales, thanks to rising sea levels. in Brisbane, everyone shares waterfront views with some of the most ancient and deadly locals around it's now even easier to take a boat to the Great Barrier Reef Memorial oilfield it's just been refurbished and moved into the habit of speaking of water, the water wars of 2025 are a thing of the past. We now have a roster. Clean water will be available to farmers Mondays and Tuesdays coal seam gas miners Wednesdays and Thursdays residents on Fridays and theme parks on Saturdays Sundays and public holidays. But going wild can work up an appetite grabber by two weeks, literally just a bite. Queensland supermarkets now have round the clock military God ensuring the orderly distribution of rations and thanks to the Queensland government's banana buyback scheme, the cost of bananas is no longer than others. You know what they say? Queensland beautiful one day of the year otherwise by the Campbell Newman reeducation facility

A Rational Fear on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear

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Fearmongers this week:

Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki 📚 (Dr. Karl's Little Book of Climate Change Science)
Naomi Higgins 📺 (Why Are You Like This)
Michael Hing 🎟️(MICF show: Kill-Hing in the Name Of)
Lewis Hobba 🎟️(MICF show: A Rational Fear)
Dan Ilic 🎟️(MICF show: A Rational Fear)

A Rational Fear on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

🤑 CHIP IN TO OUR PATREON https://www.patreon.com/ARationalFear
📨 SUBSCRIBE TO OUR EMAIL LIST: http://www.arationalfear.com/

True to form, A Rational Fear, takes a look at week's scariest news. Catastrophic ecosystem collapse, Gerry Harvey's JobKeeper bonus, sexual assault allegations in Canberra, and Schapelle Corby on Dancing With The Stars have all been loaded into the ARF canon and ready to be shot into space.

Fearmongers this week:
Amy Remeikis
Prof. Lesely Hughes (Climate Council)
Adam Zwar
Lewis Hobba
and me, Dan Ilic

Dan Ilic  0:00  
Hi this is just a little content warning that this episode of irrational fear will cover issues of sexual assault.

Unknown Speaker  0:06  
This podcast is supported in part by the birth of foundation

Dan Ilic  0:10  
Hello Lewis. Hello Daniel. How are you? I'm well I Well, I want to be a big thank you to new and returning Patreon supporters we have our Patreon supporters have gone away and have come back, which is really exciting news for everyone.

Unknown Speaker  0:23  
I can understand the first part The second part is a real mystery.

Dan Ilic  0:27  
No, I know. A big thank you to Gus MC, no Danny rate and pate Lola, who have all joined up in Patreon this week. big thank you to everyone. How are you, Louis? You okay? Oh, I'm alright. And I mean, it's been a bit of a week. It's been a bit of a week. That's why we're here. Well, we'll kick off. I'm recording my end of irrational feet on the land of the firewall. sovereignty was never seated. We need a treaty. Let's start the show.

Unknown Speaker  0:52  
A rational fear contains no to words like bricks cambro COMM And section 40 of our rational view recommended listening by immature audience.

Dan Ilic  1:05  
Tonight, Attorney General Christian Porter has heard rumours that he's taking a short leave of absence but doesn't know any specifics and CHANNEL SEVEN costs repel Coby in Dancing with the Stars because March operate was unavailable and the UN chief demands Australia ends its deadly addiction to coal by 2030. In response, Scott Morrison broke into the UN chiefs house and stole his VHS recorder and sold it for a lump of the good stuff. It's the fifth of March 2021. And no journalist has ever asked me about this podcast. This is irrational fear.

Hello, welcome to rational fear. I'm your host, former Duke of Essex. Danielle it's irrational fear is the podcast that holds your hand for the scariest forest of news. And we're doing it this week. So let's meet our fear mongers for tonight. She spends her days wading through the rubble of trouble from the camera bubble. It's Amy ruminococcus.

Unknown Speaker  2:10  
That's a very nice way of putting it I wade through the piles of shit. That's my job.

Unknown Speaker  2:15  
That's what I do.

Dan Ilic  2:15  
Amy, how are your rage levels as of today for this one?

Unknown Speaker  2:20  
Oh, I am incandescent with rage. I don't think I'd screen burn it all down so often in my life, and that was this Monday. So you know, it's been going great.

Dan Ilic  2:31  
And he's one of Australia's most prolific comedy creators. He quit journalism for the stability of comedy. It's Adams wha Hello, Adam. And he regrets about leaving journalism after a week like this.

Unknown Speaker  2:41  
It was a wise decision wasn't it? Yeah, I I'm exhausted and I'm not even involved in any way. So I kind of mentioned how you feel me? Um, yeah, full on.

Lewis Hobba  2:54  
It's lucky you got out Adam, you would have been joining the mob of media bullies.

Unknown Speaker  3:01  
do realise I was the lightweight among journalists. I used to write show business journals.

Unknown Speaker  3:05  
That is one of the nastiest pits to be in show business journalism. I wouldn't I wouldn't want to come across you. alley Yeah, I've

Dan Ilic  3:15  
been on the I've been on the nasty end of a paid afford clip on a current affair where he he said Daniel, which I've never heard of him.

Unknown Speaker  3:24  
On Twitter. I don't think we've had any interactions. And then just one day I discovered I was blocked on Twitter and I was like, can you even eat? Are you bored?

Dan Ilic  3:32  
And our final fearmonger is considering becoming a celebrant, I've already booked him to officiate my funeral. It's Lewis haba,

Lewis Hobba  3:38  
allaudin. I tell you that I actually did drunkenly consider becoming a celebrant?

Dan Ilic  3:43  
Well, I think you should I mean, you're told you're handsome. You're good with a voice.

Lewis Hobba  3:47  
Thank you. I mean, I don't think that any of those are relevant qualifications to sell celebrando wedding, but um, because I get I'm sure you guys get this as well. If you talk into a microphone professionally, you get asked to emcee every wedding. Like I've emceed more weddings and I've attended. And occasionally people do pay me to DJ so I could add celebrate, then I could literally be the whole wedding.

Dan Ilic  4:10  
Coming up ecosystems all around Australia and the Antarctic are suffering huge levels of decline, and are on the brink of collapse. joining us to discuss which ecosystem is likely to be last and where you should be building your eco doom. bunker is climate counsellor, Leslie Hughes. But first a message from our sponsor. It's the Harvey

Unknown Speaker  4:29  
Norman swimming in money sale. There's so much money with drowning in profits up 116% sales up by $462 million. As a bonus, we're keeping job keeper that's right $22 million from the government to help struggling businesses during the pandemic The only thing we're struggling to deal with find space to bottle this excess $22 million tax free interest free no cashback the savings are huge. And Harvey Norman, if you're me it's the Harvey Norman Swimming in money sale. All cash just got a

Dan Ilic  5:07  
bit of long tail out in that one. This works Firstly, the Attorney General Christian Porter claims he is innocent of any allegations of sexual assault in 1988. He was adamant that the allegations that he himself hadn't seen were completely false. It was an extraordinary press conference this week, Porter claimed that no one put to him the allegations ever. I think what he meant to say was I hadn't seen or heard anyone putting the allegations to me because the Attorney General you had a radio a mouse or pick up a phone from the hundreds of journalists trying to put the allegations to him, then maybe he would have he also had the gall to suggest that the media were trying to quote ruin his life, forgetting that someone's life was literally ruined. Worst of all consequences for Porter is that it would he would have to step down for politics and go to work in a law firm for four times the money that he's on. Now. It's a bit like Schrodinger is Korea inside his a box, and you're not quite sure whether the career is alive or dead. And the only way to find out is if you open the box, but No way. No one wanted to open that box, not even a series of successive prime ministers. The job is very important to him. After all, the twice divorced Porter only has his job. It's not like he can quit to spend more time with his families because they don't want to be near him. It was a very, very strange press conference, indeed, fear mongers what were your strangest moments from this remarkable presser? Amy, let's start with you.

Unknown Speaker  6:31  
I mean, it does have to be said straight up. But he does absolutely deny it even happened at all that there was any sort of consensual relationship between him and the complainant. And he just says it doesn't it hasn't happened at all. And I have to put that out there for legal reasons, because this is a live legal issue. He has already said that he is trolling through social media and news stories and like for defamation, so he denies everything. The most extraordinary part of the press conference for me apart from some random memory of a bowl of prawns that he mentioned, he remembered from the 1988 night period in question from the complainant was that he basically said that he would be if this was independently investigated, or there was an independent inquiry, he would be the first person in history to have to disprove something that never happened. And to me, that was extraordinary, because that's the basis of every not guilty or denial plea that's ever been made. You're just you're saying it doesn't happen. That's that's part of it. If you saying it doesn't happen, then you you are asked to explain your side of the story. It's not unique. And then when he went on to say that the basically the rule of law would collapse, if he was asked to, to go through some sort of other inquiry. Because you know, anyone could make any sort of allegation and it would immediately ruin a MPs Korea, which again, is not true. You have independent inquiries all the time in the sports world, in churches, in schools, in businesses, it's not an either or situation.

Dan Ilic  8:19  
Deadline deadline. If you say when he said if he stepped down, it would be the end of the rule of law. That was quite a quite a very strange line. Like I think we all remember when the pope retired, Catholicism disappeared. I think it's the same sort of thing. Same sort of logic He's going for there.

Lewis Hobba  8:37  
It is what it sort of had this like vision that if a man is ever actually or a politician has ever actually convicted of a sex crime, the next day, it's the Thunderdome.

Unknown Speaker  8:47  
True, yes. But like that. The the other point, though, is that we're not even talking convictions. This is not going into a criminal court. It can't. The complainant has passed away, they passed away before they made an official complaint, they withdrew it before their death. There was never any formal interview process. The police literally cannot investigate this, there is no way that they can. So this is never going to a criminal court. The only way you have to test whether he is fit to sit in the ministry is an independent inquiry, which has to be called by the Prime Minister. And he's not even being asked to to do resign. He's just basically being asked to maybe step aside while this inquiry is carried out, which is something that happens all the time. It's just It's extraordinary that we've now reached these peaks of just it's going to burn down democracy and the rule of law. If we look into this any further and the fact that the government is just picking up that line and running with it and the Prime Minister is pretending to be a passive bystander. He's like, Oh, well, you know, the police have had this I there's nothing I can do and people believe it. is extraordinary to me.

Dan Ilic  10:01  
It's such it's such a passing of the buck again of all kinds of responsibility like this is exactly the scomo playbook. It's like, it's not my problem. It's somebody else's problem. It's not our problem. It's not our fault. It's not my responsibility is just continually passing the buck 730s Laura tinkle made a point that back in the olden days that some people had shame and that politicians would resign that over the slightest smell of impropriety. I think one of the one of the ones that sticks out in my mind was Peter reef, like having a massive scan around Peter rates telecard card, which is his telecom card that he gave to his son that his son racked up 40 or $50,000, with a phone calls on I don't even know how you could do that. And that almost brought down the government, but like nowadays, politicians are just sticking around, they're sticking to their guns, and tough in and out yet until they pass through. What do you think is what do you think's driving this trend

Unknown Speaker  10:56  
going back to you know, like, you know, times when people just resigned over almost nothing, there was a resignation because someone took a Paddington Bear toy into Australia without declaring it and paying tax. There was a resignation because an MP brought, you know, he imported a colour television and he put down that it was a black and white television. So we didn't pay the proper amount of tax on that. And he resigned over that. Like, it's just we've gone from that to a point where we have had sports rights. And we've had, you know, questions over Angus Taylor's involvement in like, you know, certain other projects, then we've had bullying allegations during the Liberal Party leadership skills like the many many Liberal Party leadership skills spills. Then we've had the handling of the Brittany Higgins allegations and now we have a rape allegation. And we've still got a prime minister saying I don't hold a hose or an acquire inquiry. It's just insane to me.

Dan Ilic  11:55  
I think I don't hold a hose is going to be the meme of his tenure. That will be the symbol of his entire Prime Ministership. Adam, what do you think about that

Unknown Speaker  12:05  
idea? Yeah, I agree. I remember there was a time when people resigned. I think they probably started a lot. They stopped resigning around 27 to 2018. I remember. I think so. Barnaby Joyce, he left the legendary Liberal Party National Party in 2018. I think that was the last resignation. I can remember really, the Al Franken who was the Senator, I remember it was 2017 that he was removed. There was a accusation that he forced a woman to kiss him. And then he he demanded an investigation into himself and I think seven other women came forward. And so he resigned. Right now you've got Andrew Cuomo, he's not going anywhere on three women have come out accusing him of sexual harassment. Trudeau three times just photographed in blackface. Attorney General of Virginia, Mark herring, blackface again. All those people that are holding firm and I think it's, you know, we can blame Trump, but I think it actually goes back to Boris Johnson when he there was a you know, a number of scandals that he was involved in that just didn't touch the sides with him. It's something about those guys that just they just huge hide. Don't care what you think. Kind of love, love the fight. You know, Boris Johnson had multiple affairs. He doesn't admit to how many children he's got.

Dan Ilic  13:28  
That's a great start. That is that is I don't hold a penis mate. That is

Unknown Speaker  13:34  
totally fine. Yeah,

Dan Ilic  13:35  
it's obfuscation right there. There was an article in nine papers today that said scomo praised Porter's gutsy performance is scomo the world's most powerful drama teacher Adams. Well, yeah, he

Unknown Speaker  13:48  
like he takes the acting really seriously because it you know, as we know, the child actor and the Vic said back in the day, and

Dan Ilic  13:55  
do people know this that he was a child actor in a Vicks vapour drops ad when in the 70s and 80s? I didn't know that. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  14:04  
yeah. We're struggling to find out which ad it actually is. It's kind of hard because you know, he's got a kind of a fat ball kid in any of the kids with hair and how do you kind of pick out scomo? There's a, I can see the tricks of the trade that he's using, you know, when he was talking about the Jenny thing the other day, and he was saying that when Jenny had talked about it with Jenny, and you know, Jenny said, think about it if it was one of your daughters. He thought he was in a Ken Loach film that when he was doing that, he was really searching for the meaning and he was like, really loading those pauses, you know, you've got to be a lovey to know like, shit, he knows and he when he's standing behind people talking, you know, they've discussed the talking points beforehand. Yeah. And it's almost as though his lips are moving like he's kind of and he's kind of getting a little bit impatient with that. They're not delivering the lines. Was he would have, and you know, he kind of he kind of does he, you know, in his smoky, horrible way he he's a, he's a strong performer, whether you like him or not he kind of just he, he holds up, he keeps holding up despite the evidence being against him.

Lewis Hobba  15:19  
I hit that before that performance, I think that he does with the pauses, is very reminiscent of a genuinely ANGRY DAD when you're a child. Like, I think when you're getting told off by a dad, and you can, and he yells at you, and then there's a silence that grabs you as a as like, everyone remembers that being yelled and like that. But the problem is that he started to double up on the same performance. So there was there was this one where he did that was like, come on, you know this. And then there was the exact thing from a year ago where he does the same performance. But the point of this point A year ago was that he's yelling at journalists, because like, this problem is all over the place. Women are getting raped, and we're not listening to them. And you're like, Ah, you're these performances are really now clashing.

Dan Ilic  16:06  
Yeah, yeah, it's not that's not the tone we need for this particular point of view right now.

Unknown Speaker  16:11  
You get out of the text and you get another take if you don't get it right. Well, I ended up

Lewis Hobba  16:17  
doing we've got that one.

Dan Ilic  16:19  
Scott's always got another dose up to get to show he can always try it out again. There. That's it. Yeah. Amy, I want to ask you this. I don't know if you're across this. But I saw that Porter could possibly have his fate decided for him by the EEC, by the time the next election rolls around, because because of a whole demographic shift from Wi Fi to Victoria, the IEC is planning on abolishing Potter's seat of peace. Do you? Is this the most Is this the most humane way to put Porter down?

Unknown Speaker  16:46  
I don't know about that. It is a very live issue for why politics at the moment whether you know Porter's seat will exist. And it's going to be very interesting from a purely political viewpoint of how much political capital he still has in the wha branches because usually when this sort of stuff happens is the heavyweights get to move into somebody else's safe seats and that person ends up resigning. So you see those battles happen, you know, kind of everywhere I'm in labour went through one in Victoria, when Melbourne had a whole bunch of you know, re selections in terms of where the boundaries were going. And that sort of thing. There was a lot of shuffling around and who got to go where cray

Dan Ilic  17:27  
cray Kelly Hughes is looking pretty attractive.

Unknown Speaker  17:34  
I think you'll probably stay in who there was some talk at the time that you might want Julie Bishop's old seat and that he was making a move for that even back then because it's a much, much safer seat than his is. But it really is going to depend on how the next couple of weeks, months, like play out. And when you're talking about Morrison's performance, and I refuse to call him scomo because that is a nickname he gave himself. It is a marketing day. You cannot allow the man to just create like the man, the myth, the legend with a nickname he gave himself. So we need to like you know, move on from the scomo talk. But he performs mostly for the televisions and those pauses for the grabs. He just wants the TVs to have a neat cut of him saying he's very profound statement, cut one, cut two, boom, that's all anybody hears from the prime minister and everyone moves on. Because I think if we remember about politics, one of the key rules is that you don't want people thinking about politics because if you think about politics, you'll begin to pay attention to what the government's doing and if you're doing that you will probably vote them out. He doesn't want you thinking about it. He wants you just ignoring it. going oh, that's just a Canberra Parliament bubble thing. Move on. How about them Sharky,

Unknown Speaker  18:59  
what I was talking about with the pauses was the was the in the in the my daughter's thing. He was trying to tap into an emotional place there to show us that he was human. And in doing so just look worse than normal. I thought I thought that I thought he was actually trying to go a little bit too far. And being a child actors when I was little child actors. They don't develop into proper actors that they retain. It's like, really two dimensional kind of truth that they search for. It's and it's on the nose.

Lewis Hobba  19:30  
I imagined. If we ever go back and find that big sad, it'll just be some kid coughing desperately at a young Skomer going. I don't know how to explain

Unknown Speaker  19:44  
that's a metaphor, the Queensland Government. I mean, that's a metaphor, the cranium, that's a matter that I'll rise with other premiers and Chief Ministers. That's really a question to the premium. That's a matter of I'm happy to take up with the other premiers and Chief Ministers a rational fear.

Dan Ilic  19:56  
Let's move on to our second fear this week, as mentioned at the top of the show, There's a new wildcard entry for Dancing with the Stars chapelco rb, which makes me ask the question have TV producers run out of genuine Australian stars now, fear mongers. We're going to call Chappelle a star here. Who else should be given a crack at Dancing with the Stars? I've got a small list. I'm Ned Kelly. George Pell. My Brian brown still alive. Maybe we could get him on Dancing with the Stars.

Lewis Hobba  20:25  
I like I like Chappelle on Dancing with the Stars. But I think it should be kind of like a 90s. Right. Like she should just throw down three pills. And then the episode goes for 12 hours. We just say how long she can shuffle.

Dan Ilic  20:38  
This is really sad for not ignited graduates. I've always thought I thought not a graduates graduating not and now now have to go and commit some extremely drastic crimes of essays so they can get cast on the show.

Unknown Speaker  20:49  
Like, let's remember though, Pauline Hanson was a star on this show, after she had, you know, got out of jail after she was, you know, wrongly convicted or expunged or whatever, they ended up staying there. And before she was back in politics, we ran out of stars a very, very long time ago. I mean, I just, I think we went through, we went through whoever was in neighbours and home in a way that wasn't a hands worth and then I think maybe they dug up some like, you know, people from Better Homes and Gardens. Then they went through some like, you know, I don't know the block contestants. And then they were like, oh, who else who's coming out of jail now Pauline Hanson?

Lewis Hobba  21:29  
Yeah, but the reality TV pipeline now is this kind of like an Etch A Sketch, where you try to walk out of maps and you accidentally walk onto the block. And then when you leave and all of a sudden you're on X Factor, and you

Unknown Speaker  21:43  
are in Paradise and then you're stuck in that island and you find yourself into Viber and then you just go like, you know, putting out a raft somewhere and it's I'm a celebrity Get me out of here and it's never ending Dante circle, like reality TV.

Unknown Speaker  21:57  
What about the lie the cost of insiders? Phil curry on dancing and dancing stars definitely. Pay to watch that. Actually. I would pay me

Dan Ilic  22:08  
a remake us on Dancing with the Stars. There you go.

Unknown Speaker  22:10  
Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I would, you know, probably dropped some really unfortunate swear word and then just get voted off and then just go straight into my next reality TV show.

Unknown Speaker  22:22  
And you're dancing with your mobile phones. You're watching him at all times.

Unknown Speaker  22:25  
Yeah, yeah, I

Unknown Speaker  22:25  
am. I'm just like, do you see what the fuck they've done?

Dan Ilic  22:31  
Adam, you're an executive producer of many TV shows. Is this some? Is it appealing to you to cast Chappelle in something?

Unknown Speaker  22:38  
Do you know what i like? I saw si s Australia. Oh, and I watched that with interest has done a channel seven show. I think I've watched the last you know, decade. And I really liked it and Chapelle I was very sceptical of when she came on but she was so lovely. She's a very sensitive, nice person. And that's how she came across anyway. And she won me over I was actually a little bit moved when she got voted out. I mean, she was terrible as if she shouldn't be anywhere near near, you know, she shouldn't be running 10 kilometres with a backpack on and no

Unknown Speaker  23:16  
one should.

Unknown Speaker  23:18  
And she, she, she was she was okay. So she's not gonna be any good at dancing. She'll be fobbed off in the first week. But you know, she'll be swayed about it and, and and take some money. I definitely think it was a brother did it.

Unknown Speaker  23:36  
They seize writable view.

Dan Ilic  23:39  
Turning now to activate close to this podcast heart, the end of the world. A groundbreaking report has just been released to COVID-19 ecosystems around Australia, our major threat of collapse that is deteriorated so badly. They're unlikely to recover a bit like my older brother's hairline. It's never coming back. And I feel like I'm missing. One of the authors of the report and longtime friend of the show is Professor Leslie Hughes. Leslie joins us now. Thank you, Professor Hughes for joining us. Hi, Dan.

Unknown Speaker  24:07  
Great to be here.

Dan Ilic  24:08  
So 19 ecosystems doesn't sound like a lot. But when you see it mapped out across the continent, the way that the report has it, it feels like the whole of Australia is it is in peril is an imminent collapse period.

Unknown Speaker  24:21  
Well, in some cases, yes. The the ecosystems as you can see on the map in the paper go from right at the northern tip, right down through the continent, right from east to west, and then down to Antarctica. They're spread out all over the place. Some of them are ecosystems that are really well known, like the Great Barrier Reef and others will be ones that most people haven't heard of, but they're all in trouble.

Dan Ilic  24:47  
The ones that people haven't heard of, do they need some kind of PR campaign? Is that something that we can help out with?

Unknown Speaker  24:53  
Yes, I guess, I guess so. I mean, some of them aren't quite as spectacular as the Great Barrier Reef for Or the Murray Darling Basin, but they're all in trouble. They all have species that are disappearing, they all provide services to to our health and well being. In some cases, they've been in trouble for a very long time. Whereas in other cases, the the evidence of decline has been quite rapid and quite recent,

Dan Ilic  25:19  
were the ones that the evidence of decline has been rapid, like, what are the ones that have kind of, you know, fallen over pretty quickly?

Unknown Speaker  25:26  
Well, we've, we've seen things for coming back to the Great Barrier Reef, you know, in the last five years, we've had three major bleaching events from from underwater heat waves. And that's resulted in about 50%, of loss of all of the corals on the Great Barrier Reef, if you think about a reef system, you can see it from space, it's more than 2000 kilometres long, and we've lost half the corals. That's a pretty major event. And it's actually happened, you know, in geological time, very, very rapidly. And then a couple of years ago, for example, just over the space of a couple of days, we had massive fish gills in the menindee Lakes, as a result of, of drought and heat and loss of water, with millions of fish dying in the space of two or three days. So some of these things can happen really, really fast.

Dan Ilic  26:17  
What does this kind of collapse mean for Australia's ability to feed itself to kind of, you know, provide agriculture for itself and as an agriculture nation?

Unknown Speaker  26:28  
Well, indeed, to the ecosystems that we mentioned in the reporter, the Murray Darling waterways, and the Murray Darling sort of what we call riparian vegetation, which is the vegetation around the river. Over the last few decades, there's been a massive decline in rainfall. And on top of that, of course, we're removing lots of that water for irrigation and for urban uses. And those two things together, together with you know, runoff of nutrients and sediment from from agricultural fertilisers are really destroying those ecosystems. And the Murray Darling Basin is where we produce a third of our food. So when when you've got those ecosystems that are so intricately intertwined with our life support system in in, in the form of our food security, there's there's some really serious things going on.

Dan Ilic  27:23  
And it sounds sounds dire. Like it sounds like there's nowhere to go.

Lewis Hobba  27:27  
Is there any positive to look at it? Can we eat the fish from them and in the lake? So can we take the bleached coral and use it to decorate Byron Bay? airbnbs?

Unknown Speaker  27:36  
Well, yeah, you can't eat bleached coral. And I guess you'd have to get to the fish pretty fast before they poisoned us. So there's always some creative things that you could do with that destroyed ecosystems, but it would be better to do something positive to to stop and then reverses decline.

Dan Ilic  27:55  
Is there an ecosystem that's thriving right now? Is there a place in Australia this like, hell yeah, this

Unknown Speaker  27:59  
is great.

Unknown Speaker  28:02  
You know, I can't think of one

Lewis Hobba  28:05  
goddamnit Leslie.

Unknown Speaker  28:08  
I'm sorry. I mean, if you think back to the black summer bushfires, for example, the amount of area burned in those fires, is about three times the size of Tasmania is about 20% of our eucalypt forests, but that summer, so you know, that's just the East Coast and a bit of Western Australia.

Dan Ilic  28:26  
I was just saying, I'm in jervis Bay right now. And we've been driving up and down the south coast. And it's a hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kilometres. It is just recovering forests. And it's so stark to drive through these places that you're I remember seeing on the news a year ago, thinking wow, like this is just this is just so epic, the amount of bush land it was burned over that summer, and it's only kind of recovering now. And I'm just thinking about all the wildlife that has gone missing, particularly over that strange, dark period.

Unknown Speaker  29:00  
Yes, one of my colleagues at the University of Sydney estimated that around about 3 billion vertebrate animals that's birds, mammals and reptiles probably directly perished in the fires and of course, many more would have died of starvation and predation afterwards. So but look, the eucalypt forests that you've been driving through are recovering, they'll they'll You know, they're fairly well adapted to to fires, but they're really different thing about that summer's bushfires is that we had massive fires go through rain forests, the Gondwana rain forests that the don't burn, usually. We had some a few years ago in the Tasmanian World Heritage Area that killed trees that were 1000 years old. So what we're seeing with with climate change, increasing the severity and intensity and frequency of these fires, is places burning that have never burned in the last 1000 years.

Dan Ilic  29:57  
With with this word that you've just kind of realised It's a big job to kind of kind of categorise every kind of ecosystem in Australia and put it kind of put it through the that that filter. How did this this job kind of come about? How did this piece of work get built?

Unknown Speaker  30:16  
Well, there was a workshop down in Canberra at the Academy of Sciences in 2018. That brought a number of us together to talk about what we called ecological surprises. And a number of people spoke at that conference, including myself. And when the people at the conference got together afterwards, we sort of sat around and thought, Well, look, we really should write something up. So that that this, what's been talked about at the conference can be on paper and disseminated beyond these walls. And so really, for the last couple of years, that paper has been put together, more and more people came on board who are expert in particular ecosystems. It's been a massive job, there's a massive amount of data and references in this paper. But finally, to all of our great relief, it was published last week.

Lewis Hobba  31:04  
I mean, given that there's, you know, 19 ecosystems, we've got the Great Barrier Reef in there, one of the most famous in Australia and the world, we still can't get anyone to do anything about that. The most famous one that we know generates billions of dollars of tourism, there's still nothing they can do about that, let alone the other 18, when you get together with your group have made these discoveries, what's the mood?

Unknown Speaker  31:32  
It's a good question. I think anybody that works, both in environmental conservation and climate change, and I work in both of those areas, kind of gets pretty used to being depressed about it, or and most of the time, you know, you get you do get you do have to get hardened to it, which doesn't mean that you give up and stop going. But nothing much surprises you anymore, you know, we sort of expect the worst. And on occasion, when we get a small victory, we celebrate that. But generally, they are small and fleeting victories against a backdrop of really extraordinary loss. But I mean, the alternative is to just crawl under your donor and ignore it and hope that it all goes away or gets better. And really, that's not really an option for most of us.

Dan Ilic  32:22  
I'm glad it's not an option for you lately. That's

Lewis Hobba  32:25  
great. A lot of

Dan Ilic  32:29  
you last time we hung out was in Paris at the climate talks. You are a representative on the Intergovernmental Panel for climate change. We're heading into cop 26 in Glasgow, first of all, what is what is cop 26 gonna look like in this kind of pandemic situation that we've got? Is it gonna be face to face?

Unknown Speaker  32:52  
Look, we don't know. I mean, I guess with the vaccine rollout, especially in places like the UK, which is seems to be going pretty well, I think we would hope that it would be at least partially face to face. Of course, the Glasgow meeting was supposed to happen last year and didn't happen at all. So there's another year down the track and emissions keep going up. I think one of the really major things that will be different about this year, whether it's in person or not, is the fact that Joe Biden's administration has put climate change front and centre. So that's given an enormous boost of hope, going forward. And I think that the atmosphere in Glasgow this year, will be very different to what it might have been last year under the Trump administration. So whether it's in person or not, that's a really important difference.

Dan Ilic  33:44  
And I don't want to kind of put you on the spot here. But what do you think Australia is going to take to Glasgow, do you think Australia is going to be a better actor than it has been at previous conferences of parties?

Unknown Speaker  34:00  
Well, look, you've just been talking earlier in the podcast about this government's ability to just sort of soldier on unchanged regardless of extraordinary scandal, the government's attitude to climate changes is also an extraordinary scandal. But they've proved thus far to be able to sort of tough out all sorts of things. So my prediction would be is we'll go to Glasgow with no further level of ambition, then we took to Paris despite all evidence that that is not enough. I'd love to be surprised by that.

Dan Ilic  34:39  
Like even with Europe in the UK standard, think about financial penalties for in tariffs on count on high carbon countries. Do you think that'll change what we take to Glasgow at all?

Unknown Speaker  34:52  
Well, it might do in fact, I think that's probably the only thing that will turn this government around to being a better player in this space. You know, if places like the EU, and the US start to impose carbon tariffs on countries like Australia who are not pulling their weight, then we will have to change because we are so reliant for our economy on on our trade. So, you know, it's sad that we should be dragged kicking and screaming to that position when Australia has so much to learn from renewables and green manufacturing,

Lewis Hobba  35:30  
it does seem like Australia has two options. One, that option, the smart one to Jenny starts to care. And

Dan Ilic  35:41  
it's the battle for Jenny,

Unknown Speaker  35:42  
you know, we should put it to Scott that his his kids and grandkids are going to live hopefully into the next century. And if we, if we carry on the way we're going with three degrees or more of temperature increase, that is pretty much an uninhabitable world that those kids and grandkids are going to be inheriting. So if he really does care about his kids, if anybody cares about their kids and future generations, they should be absolutely as passionate about climate action as I am.

Dan Ilic  36:15  
And Leslie, as part of this big bit of work that you've released this week, you've kind of put together a bit of a scheme called the three A's a way that people can kind of do their kind of get involved with their own action in meaningful ways. What are the three eyes?

Unknown Speaker  36:33  
Yeah, we wanted to put forward a sort of a framework of hope going forward, we didn't just want to catalogue the problems, and so many of these sorts of papers do. So the first day is awareness, you know, and that's what we've been doing with is raising awareness about the true extent of the trouble with Australian ecosystems are in. The second is anticipation. If you can anticipate future decline, hopefully, you can get in and do something about it before it happens. And the third eye, of course, is action. And what we do in the paper is for each of those ecosystems, we outline a series of management actions that if implemented, would help halt and possibly in some cases, reverse the decline. Of course, most of those are local actions that address things like habitat clearing and over allocation of freshwater and that sort of thing. But on top of all of that, is the global action that we need on climate change.

Dan Ilic  37:31  
If I was not a generous person, I'd asked you why. There wasn't a fourth a Angus Taylor, why wasn't that on the list?

Unknown Speaker  37:39  
Well, Angus Taylor gets the prize for the most Orwellian named ministry, you know, the Minister of emissions reduction that is wanting us to put in new coal fired power stations, you know, it does beg a belief

Lewis Hobba  37:53  
he's absences. The fourth is is kind of a whole it's a it's an A Paul.

Unknown Speaker  37:59  
Very good.

Dan Ilic  38:01  
That's it for rational A big thank you to all of our guests, Professor Leslie Hughes

Unknown Speaker  38:05  
Adams. Well,

Dan Ilic  38:06  
Amy remake of St. Louis harbour, have

Unknown Speaker  38:07  
you got anything to plug?

Dan Ilic  38:08  
Amy, do you wanna plug anything? No,

Unknown Speaker  38:11  
just speak to your MPs just be loud and angry and not at me and social media. Like just take it to the people who represent you. It's the only way you're going to get action.

Dan Ilic  38:22  
atoms. Why do you want to plug anything?

Unknown Speaker  38:24  
Nothing to plug then? Which is a relief, isn't it?

Dan Ilic  38:28  
It's very good, Louis. How about what are you plugging?

Lewis Hobba  38:31  
Nothing, Dan. on the radio show, you can listen if you like, but

Dan Ilic  38:35  
yeah, no big deal. Leslie Hughes, what do you have anything to plug?

Unknown Speaker  38:39  
I'd like to plug the climate Council, which is working very hard. And they're now in our eighth year to inform the Australian public about climate change.

Dan Ilic  38:48  
And for the kids who are listening to this, ask your parents about what the climate Council is and how it was formed. It was this incredible story over a two week period where where one government department got shut down and the cabinet and the climate council came together with a whole bunch of public donations. And it was absolutely remarkable, very inspiring stuff. Amy, on a personal note, thank you for your hard work this week. It's been so fun watching you on Twitter, and heartening to see you at the coalface of such a very difficult story and helping all of us on twitter in particular channel outrage as to what was going on. So thank you. Oh,

Unknown Speaker  39:28  
thank you for listening.

Dan Ilic  39:29  
Big thanks to red marks the birth of foundation our Patreon supporters Jacob round on the tepanyaki timeline Rupa degasser He's incredible voice Kelly and David Payton all the discord crew. Until next week, there's always something to be scared of good night.

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