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G'day you mob, and welcome to this episode of The Goss, where I sit down each week and chat with my old man, we have a bit of a chinwag, a bit of a yarn about all the news and current affairs happening in Australia this week. And, you know, sometimes worldwide as well. So don't forget, guys, "The Goss" is short for the word "gossip." What's the goss? What's the gossip? What's the news? Remember that, okay. What's the goss? What's the goss?

So today's a pretty good episode. It's a bit of a ripper. It's a great one. It's long, but it is in depth. We cover heaps and heaps and heaps of different interesting topics that have been in the news, including the Holden brand of cars in Australia being retired. We talk about rat curators at the Sydney Museum of Hyde Park Barracks. We talk about the AFL; should it be named AFLM and AFLW for the men and women's leagues? We talk about Australia's oldest horse. The richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, donating $15 billion to fight climate change. We talk about Germany quitting coal and what Australia should be doing.

And we also talk about the shoe farce that's been going on with Nike, having created a shoe that people are wearing now and smashing records for races like the marathon, the five kilometre race, 10 kilometre race, a whole bunch of these things like that. So it's a really good episode, guys. Don't forget, if you want the full episode, you want to listen to the entire thing, make sure to sign up for the premium podcast or the academy membership when you go to AussieEnglish.com.au and you will get instant access to all of The Goss episodes, the transcripts, the downloads and their entire length, right.

They're not 20 to 30 minutes long, that's just the first portion. They're actually much longer and they're a great way of learning about news and current affairs, learning about how to discuss these, and most importantly, developing your own opinion about these topics so that you can talk about them in English. With that guys, thanks for joining me again. Without any further ado, smack the kookaburra on the rump and let's get going.

All righty. Dad, what's going on? Welcome to this episode of The Goss.

Hey, Pete, good to be here again.

I know we're smashing through these episodes. I think people are liking them. They're responding well.

Well, that's good.

Listening to them on the way to work.

Always happy to hear feedback, particularly positive. But if you've got any criticism, give it to us.

That's it. Give us the treatment. So how's your week been? Let me open my drink.

Yeah, busy. I've been looking after the granddaughter for a couple of days and again tomorrow, so... And I was teaching last night and the course that I'm running on landscape photography looks like it's going ahead, so I spent most of today getting that prepared.

So what are you going to do for that in terms of organisation?

It's just, I mean I've run it before, so it's more just going through what I did before and looking at what I wanted to change and just rewriting notes and things.

They always tend to be the easiest courses to make, right? The ones you redo.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There's about a 10% difference between what I did last time and what I want to do now.

I remember there were always stories of people at university, the lecturers or the professors who spent years developing a course, and then when they, you know, if they got fired or something, the next person to be like, "Can you give me your notes?"

And they'd be like, "No, you can screw yourself. There's no chance." Yeah. Exactly.

Particularly back in the days when everything was handwritten. And now that everything's online, it stays online. So, you know, while the copyright is actually owned by the university, the intellectual property is owned by the individual, so they can re-use it themselves anywhere they go, but they don't have the right to delete it and take it down. Whereas previously, if everything was handwritten notes and overheads that you put on the old overhead projectors, you'd take them with you and they're gone.

Yeah, I think actually I might have heard that story from mum, where she left Deakin, and she was just like, "There's no chance you're keeping my notes," you know, "Screw you guys."

And they rang her up the day before something was about to start and say, "Can we just get some advice here?" And she said, "Yeah, $200 an hour." But funnily enough, they didn't pay.

So anything interesting in the week's news that you want to talk about first? I've got a shitload a different things here.

Yeah. Look, I think the big news for the week is the Holden brand finally closing down in Australia. The General Motors Holden is the Australian branch of General Motors, the worldwide motor company. It's been around for a long time. In fact, the company has been around since the 1850s. It was a saddlery company that started up in Adelaide...

It's older than Ford, isn't it?

And it... look, it took on, I think, early 1900s, they started manufacturing cars to overseas designs, not Australian designs. And the first major contract I think they got was making T-model Fords, so... But then they sort of kept manufacturing vehicles and so on and then making parts for vehicles. But then in the 1940s, that was a decision made by the company to build an Australian designed car, not just build, you know, compiling overseas cars.

What's the history with that? Because I know I've covered on the podcast before that we created the ute, right?

Yeah.

In Australia, I believe there may have been a sort of contemporary... I think a few years afterwards there was a sort of equivalent in the US. I'm not sure if they were directly influenced by Australia, but I know that we... The story goes that some guy wanted to take his family to church on the weekend and his pigs to market during the week during the week and he needed a car with a tray on it.

The first model of Holden that was created in 1948, 49. Very soon after they made a ute version, which is, you know, for Americans is the equivalent of a pickup truck.

Yeah.

So with the tray back and the slang term "ute" is from "utility vehicle." So it's for use of like work related stuff.

Exactly.

Tradies tend to have them.

Tradie utes, yeah.

There's lot's of bogans.

There's a bit of jargon for you.

Yeah. Tradie utes. They're still all over the place. I'm sort of surprised because Ford and Holden were the primary makers of those cars, right, the utes at least, and that was a big thing in Australia, the cultural rivalry between Ford and Holden, you tended to be one of the other, right? I remember growing up and being a massive Holden fan. I don't know why.

You had to pick red or blue. That was it. I sort of grew up being a bit of a Ford fan, but ironically, the first car I bought was a Holden when I was a kid. But it was more the... There was a "which sort of car do you prefer?" part of it. But then there was an also "which brand of car you're going to follow in motor racing?" Because touring car motor racing has always been big in Australia and obviously the major manufacturers of touring cars were Holden and Ford and so they dominated touring cars for 50 years in Australia.

So there's the V8 Supercars now that race at places like, um, Phillip Island and Bathurst, right?

Yeah.

So what's happening now with those races? Are they still continuing, but they're open to every car model?

They've always been a model, you know, because for a while BMW came in, Nissan came in. I think Mercedes have run some vehicles in the past, but the big V8 class, there were really only two models of cars that were in them and that was the Holdens and the Fords. Ford stopped manufacturing in Australia about four or five years ago. Yeah, they still do some manufacturing, but it's mostly, again, compiling overseas cars. We don't build Australian models of cars anymore. And so, funnily enough, the Fords that have been in those racing are Ford Mustangs imported from America.

Well, that was the weird thing, I guess. Now, driving around, you see those things everywhere. They're a dime a dozen, right? Yeah. Every man and his dog has a Ford Mustang now, which is one of those things, where when I first started seeing them, I was like, "Fuck, that's a nice car." But now that you see them everywhere, they're like rats. You're just like, well, they've lost their appeal because everyone's got one.

And look, they're a great car, if you like big V8 monster cars.

Yeah.

But not very practical in terms of efficiency.

Not great for fuel economy. No.

They got a five litre V8 engine.

Something like that.

Yeah.

That's crazy. So what do you think's going to happen? And I was that was my first story, the Holden one and that was funny. I think I posted on Facebook the meme of "football, meat pies, kangaroos and position available."

Yes, exactly.

Because there used to be that song...

Holden cars.

What was it was up from the 70s of the 80s?

70s, yeah.

And it was football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars. And that's all about Australia and Australian culture, right?

Exactly.

So does it feel like you kind of... Do you feel a little disappointed that that's happened? You know, do you think that Australia's lost something now that both Ford and Holden, which were a big part of car culture in Australia, have moved operations overseas? Or do you think that was sort of inevitable with just how cheap cars can be produced now in places like Thailand China and everything? Or at least the parts.

Yeah. Look, I'm sad in a way that part of my childhood, teenage years and young adulthood have... Not that I was a huge motor racing fan, but I used to enjoy that rivalry of... Yeah, because, you know, when you're at least a kid at school, everybody was either a Holden or Ford.

We were the same. 100%.

And so that will still stay there. Ford will still be there. Who knows... Holden will become Chevrolet. They will simply import American Chevrolets into Australia and they will race them. So it will still be a General Motors versus Ford, but it won't have the same sort of parochial component to it where these were Australian made cars and the origins of that, what is now the V8 Supercars was touring cars, touring cars as in cars that you could walk into a lot and buy.

And originally back in the 1960s, there were quite heavy restrictions on the racing teams as to how much they could modify the cars because they were supposed to be like the car that your average Joe could walk into a car dealer and buy. Obviously, they tricked them up with safety and those sort of things and took a lot of things out to make them lighter and so on. But the engine and the chassis and the body were basically a touring car.

Now, that's not the case anymore. Because you look at the modern V8 Supercars and yes, they might have the same base engine in them as the one that you would pick up off the street. But there's a lot of souping up that gets done to them in the physical structure and the motor and so on. But it's still the same essence. And so we're losing that. But we're not looking at Australian cars being driven around a racetrack anymore by Australian drivers.

Now they're all going to be yank-tanks.

Yeah.

The nickname for American cars that come over, yank-tanks.

Yeah, the big American cars. The yank-tanks. Yeah.

Well, I've seen some of those around, sorry to interrupt, some one of those massive ones with like six wheels that are like the American equivalent of a ute, which is not what we would think of as a... A sedan with a utility thing on the back. A tray.

They call them Duelies.

These things are insane. Massive.

Duel wheels on the back, but they're mostly...

It's ridiculous.

It's ridiculous in terms of having them as a standard vehicle to drive around. But most of the people who are driving those are actually towing big horse floats or caravans and those sort of things where they need the capacity to handle a fair amount of weight sitting on the back wheels. And they've got restrictions on them, so yeah, you need to have that strengthened axle and the double wheels and so on. But if you see them just driving around the streets, they are a bit ridiculous.

Because you just see them parked at the shopping centre and you're just like, "Fuck this is a tank!"

It takes up one and a half car parks.

It's like when we first started getting Hummers imported to Australia and you're like, "Who's buying these and for what reason?"

Well, Hummers are a really weird one because they were originally designed to be desert the military vehicles. Yeah. And so size didn't matter because you made your own tracks and. Yeah, I've been into four wheel driving for a long time and people are, "Oh yeah. You go buy a Hummer. They're the best four wheel drives around." I said, "It doesn't matter how good they are, you cannot drive them on a normal four-wheel drive track. Yeah.

Because the wheel base is. Just wider. It just doesn't fit." So, you know, your average Toyota and Nissan and Mitsubishi and so on all has basically the same wheelbase. So certainly in width. And so you can drive along in each other's ruts. And often on some of the Alpine tracks, the ruts are a foot deep. And so, you know, if you're driving something that's, you know, it's 30 centimetres wider, you've got one wheel in a rut and one wheel sitting up on the edge. So it's...

They're seven feet wide or something. So they're over two meters wide, right. They're like a foot wider than a normal car.

About 35 centimetres wider than the average four wheel drive, so...

But they are ridiculous. I was following some guy on YouTube when I was looking into cars and buying cars and he bought his dream car, which was a hummer. And in in the US, it's just insane the prices that cars get to. Like, they dip down to. So he ended up buying a Hummer, his dream car and guys like 20 something years old and he could literally drive over other cars. So as like a joke, a stunt, when he bought that thing, fully kitted out and everything for off-roading, he went to his mate's car lot where they had trashed cars and just drove over the top of two other cars like windscreen and just crushed them. And you're just like, "It's insane that someone can own effectively a monster truck."

Exactly. I know they're totally impractical.

But what was I going to say? I was looking up train history in Australia. So I can't remember how I got onto that. But I think it was an expression episode that I'm going to do in the future. And I was talking about train... An expression to do with "train of thought" or something like that. And I thought I'll do Australian trains. And I didn't realise how messed up our system is.

With the different track widths.

Yeah. So apparently, I mean, you probably know better than me, but, when the colonies were first all competing with one another and we weren't a unified country before Federation of Australia into a single country in 1901, they... All the colonies were using different width tracks, or at least several wits spread across "standard," "broad," and then there was one in between or something like that.

And then there was narrow gauge as well.

Yeah. And so every time you went between borders, you had to switch across. So apparently between New South Wales and Victoria, and this is where we have, I think it's Achuca and Albury?

Wodonga and Albury, Yeah.

Wodonga, Albury, yeah, they have the two train stations that are massive.

And I remember the first time I caught the train to Sydney when I was... I don't know, it's probably 14 or 15 years old.

You had to change over?

And yeah, you got to... You left Melbourne at seven or eight o'clock at night. Took about four hours, five hours to get to Albury. And then at about midnight, the train would pull into Aubrey's station and you'd get off, grab your bags, walk across the platform, get onto another train, and it would go again. Because the... Albury was the end of the Victorian line and the start of the New South Wales line.

I think we had in Victoria, we had broad train, it was wider, and Sydney had thinner ones.

Standard rail, they called it.

the irony is that allegedly, and I've heard this several times, I haven't actually checked the details, but the width of the train track was the width of a single car - Single horse cart with wheels on it, so that when they were originally laying tracks for trains, they were using existing tracks, trails that carts were going along, not main roads, but taking... You know, effectively a little walking trail that people would use with their horse and cart. And so because the...

It was so a particular width, then that was what the width of the tracks were to lay them down in the middle. Now the English standard was the standard width, the Scottish one was the wider one. So the joke is that Clydesdale horses came from Scotland and they've got a fatter arse, so there was a wider track for the house to go down.

It was just so interesting because it was really eye-opening that a big part of it, of pushing these train tracks and these train railways into Australia was opening up the interior of Australia because for 100 years, even though we'd been the European settlers who'd been in Australia around the coastline, they hadn't really pushed into the interior and they had no way of transporting stuff out. So a big reason for the trains in the first place, I think was getting wool and wheat.

Yes.

Off the farms. And then they finally started finding obviously gold in the eighteen hundreds. And then after that, I think they found, especially in one place that was on the border of South Australia and New South Wales, they found a shitload of silver, zinc and I think copper.

Broken Hill.

Broken Hill. Yeah. And the interesting thing was that South Australia had gone almost to Broken Hill and New South... Like many years before, and New South Wales was trying to come to the side to get there as well. And I think for some reason, South Australia wasn't legally allowed. Like the government said they're not going to Broken Hill.

So a private company opened a 50 kilometre stretch of railway between the two and did so much trade that they're actually the only railway company in Australian history. And it was a private company to make a profit. And they killed it. Yeah, because of all the transfers and all the silver that was going out.

Interestingly, the railways, as you've said, it was originally around getting agricultural products out of rural areas, down to ports mostly. And before that, before the railways went through, most of the New South Wales and Victorian farmers used to do it by horse to the rivers.

Yeah.

And then they would have big paddle steamers going down the Murray River.

Yeah.

The irony now is that you can't flight a paper boat down the Darling River. You can drive down most of the Darling River because it's dry. Where as the Murray still hangs in there. And we still have paddle steamers. They're no longer used commercially, but they are there for tourism.

Well, you and mum went on a trip once.

Yeah. Yeah. Mum's 40th birthday. And then your grandfather's 75th, I think. We...

So those are some of the original paddle steamers that have just been..?

Some of they are. The one that we went on that does the overnight trips has been recently made. In fact it was made for the TV series "All Rivers Run" but it was featured on it and it was fairly new then and it became famous because of that. "All Rivers Run" is a TV series, TV mini series that was run in the 1980s.

What's the name of that girl that's in it? The actress that's been in Sea Change and...

Sigrid Thornton. Around the corner from you.

Yeah. North Melbourne. That was weird. I remember walking up to her one day and just being like, "I loved you and sea change. Thank you." You know, "it's just brilliant. I loved your acting." And I was like, "What? She's just walking her dogs in North Melbourne?"

But the interesting thing that I remember reading up on about the Murray River steam boats was that the railways were originally making a race to the Murray River because they wanted to cut them off and steal all the trade from them, because all of the farms were bringing the trade there to go on the Murray or the Darling Rivers to go through Victoria and New South Wales out to South Australia and then into the port. I'm not sure what the name of it is in South...

Goolwa.

is it? Yeah. Where they would get to the boats and go out. But if, if the trains got there they could take them to places like Sydney and Melbourne really quickly, get them on boats much faster than a paddle steamer, and then... And so they were doing a lot of things like price gouging and dropping the prices a heap and they killed the industry of the steamboats within a few years.

There's only a few years. So yeah, there's a lot of those sort of weird things that went on.

But the funny thing to building infrastructure in South Australia, they originally tried, or they thought, that the trains weren't going to be something that would last at the ports and bringing goods in and they thought it would be horses. And so I think they still have the original train that gets pulled by horses down to the port there for a portion of the rail road and they'll take you on it as a tourist.

But with the cars you were talking about, how there was sort of a, I guess you would have called it a... What's the evolutionary term? An arms race, right. Between the different companies trying to make the cars better and better and better. And they sort of had to cut them off for the, you know, all those modifications. There was a thing in the news this week about the guy who ran, I think he broke the five kilometre record by like a minute using Nike's new shoes, which are have an elastic mid-sole foam and integrated carbon plate.

I know this is the guy who broke the world. Yeah, he's done two hours for the marathon. Yeah, I think he's...

Actually you may not have been the same guy, but I think the same shoes were used.

And they're effectively they're just putting a spring in it.

Yeah, well, they've designed the shoes in order to return as much energy to the runner as possible with every step.

So a spring.

Yeah exactly.

that's all a spring is. Yeah. It's just returning momentum.

But it's interesting because I was like my initial thought was, you know, "Fuck these guys, you know, just smashing these records by using technology." And then I'm like, "Well if it's a shoe, you know, the average person can probably afford to buy even the most expensive shoe to compete in racing. So if it's available to everyone, should they be able to use it?" And I was reading an article that was comparing it to some of these other sports, like swimming, where we had a big issue, I think probably around the 2000s, the Olympics here, right. So Australia with the swimming suits that... They were doing crazy things with that, right. They took 20 minutes to put on these special skintight suits. They did special... Like had nanotechnology...

and micro channels in them that would allow the water to flow over them and reduce the friction.

Yes, that was one of those things that was kind of like mind boggling because you think why would adding all these little bumps on the surface improve it? But it's like holds the water close to it. And the friction's reduced and the water goes over the top really quickly like a golf ball, right? Yeah, but that was a big issue at the time. And I think the sport decided they...

They just banned them.

And the problem there, though, they were saying was that those suits were very expensive. Thousands of dollars.

individuals couldn't afford them. It was just the companies that were giving them to Olympic swimmers to be able to wear. Yeah. Yeah. Your average person competing in a local swim meet down in Geelong isn't going to be able to go and buy a $2000, $3000 suit that you can wear a few times and they fall apart.

Yeah, exactly. And then the next thing was cycling, you know. So we have swimming where they've changed it and they just said, you know, we're not going to use this stuff. We have this running now where people are like, "Oh, all these records are getting smashed, which, you know, might be a good thing. But at the same time, it's because of technology, more so than people, you know, using their attributes." I guess, you know, they're using their attributes, but they're sort of getting a boost. But cycling is apparently ridiculous in terms of the amount of money that gets poured into the technology so they were saying something here like the road bike for the team G.B., Great Britain costs like $130,000.

Yes.

So one hundred thirty eight thousand dollars. That's seven of my cars!

200,000 Australian dollars. And they carbon fibre and titanium. Yeah. In order to make them strong. Yeah. To flex less and really light. And you know that technology is ridiculous. But yeah I remember when... I was never, you know, racing bikes but I had friends who were into cycling and they bought, you know, what was at the time considered to be an Olympic class racing bike. Yeah. It cost probably three times as much as your average bike that you would walk into a bike store and buy, but it weighed about the same amount of money. The technology then was in how smooth the gearing worked and those sort of things. But yeah, now it's just gone crazy.

Well, the funny thing was looking at the cycling staff they were talking about and I didn't write his name down, but one of the athletes who was sort of experimenting with positions on the bike, I think in like the early 90s and he made his own bike. Not so much using different materials, but changed where the handlebars were. He had them closer to him originally, where his body was bent right over the top so that his head was parallel with the, you know, the oncoming air. And he slashed all his records and then they banned that position because it had an effect of changing it. And yet they've allowed technology to keep being a big thing. So what do you think of that? That's sort of... How much should we allow technology to interfere with sports or improve sports?

Well, look, if it's available to everybody, then I don't think it's an issue.

Steroids.

We're taking drugs... Drugs is a different story.

But they're cheap!

You can afford, then they are $100. The drugs are a different story.

But if we're talking about technology and equipment, then, and look, the cycling one, you've got to assume that anybody who's riding in the Tour de France or riding in the Olympics, they're all sponsored. They don't have to buy their own gear. So everybody effectively has access to that gear if you're riding at that level. Whether somebody who rides in the local cycling race in Melbourne has got access to that probably doesn't matter.

The question comes when somebody turns up with one of those bikes and everybody else goes, "Nah," and that's when it becomes difficult. But yeah, tennis is a good example. Golf is a good example where the technology in the rackets and the clubs and the balls, not so much tennis balls, but golf balls, golf clubs and tennis rackets has changed hugely in the last 20, 30, 40, 50 years.

And I think I was watching Margaret Court and Rod Laver and they were using wooden rackets.

That's what I grew up with and I grew up with a Rod Laver signature racket,.

And you used to have little things that you had to put them in framed frames to keep them straight.

Yeah, because they would warp in the heat and the humidity. So you had a frame around them to keep them straight and people were hitting the ball nowhere near as hard or nowhere near as fast as fast and no way to have topspin and those sort of things with smaller wooden rackets in comparison with the carbon fibre rackets that are available today.

How did that change happen? Sorry to interrupt you, but did that happen all of a sudden with one player using a carbon fibre racket or something?

It actually the first player, the first major player, I think, that that used a different style of racket was Jemmy Connors in the early 1970s. He had a steel frame racket and everybody else was still using wooden rackets and the wood technology had changed a little bit. But there's only so much you can do when you're building a wooden frame. And he used a steel frame which was more flexible and it was strung differently. Yeah.

And so a few people then started switching to that and then aluminium rackets came in and then that turned into carbon fibre and blah blah blah. So all of those things did sort of evolve after that. But yeah, I played with one of the rackets that Jemmy Connors used for a while, so I, as a ordinary shitkicker player down at a club player, I could go into a sports store and buy the same racket that was being played by a guy who won Wimbledon, the Australian Open, the US Open.

So that technology is just immediately available and...

You know, it's available when they can smash those rackets on the ground. You don't see any cyclists raging up and just grabbing their bike and smashing it over their leg.

Exactly right.

So how would you say that steroids and technology differ then? Why is that a different argument?

It's a different argument because there are physiological side effects of taking performance enhancing drugs.

But if someone agrees to take those risks upon themselves, I mean, I can understand that from an individual basis of like, okay, well, now, you know, if you're using technology, it's not affecting you physiologically. And so obviously the choice is a little easier. But if you decide, "I want to inject myself," I guess the problem there is that everyone's going to have to do that to keep up.

And look, it also comes to that... I don't think that's a free will choice. And yeah, we could have the argument about does anybody have free will? But there's effectively a free will choice if you're the first person or the second person who decides to do it. And if the only way that you can compete on the same playing field is to take drugs that, you know are going to adversely affect you immediately in the short term and in the long term...

Is that the case? Is that necessarily the case with all of them?

Well...

I mean, depends on what you mean by drugs.

If you're talking steroids, yes. Yeah. If you're taking anabolic steroids, there are so many adverse side effects to both men and women that you'd be crazy to take them.

I think it depends on what you mean, though, because there are different extremes. I was considering taking anabolic steroids when I was competing in jujitsu. I was... I never got close to actually doing it, but I could see the appeal because you would take them, not because you wanted to be bigger or stronger necessarily, although obviously if that was a side effect, you'd be happy with that. But because you wanted to be repairing your body quicker from training so that you could keep training. So it wasn't the same as, say, bodybuilding where it depends on you pumping as much in as possible to get huge, that would be beyond normal.

The part that you were manipulating or taking advantage of was the fact that you can spend more time training really, really hard and recover faster so that you have an advantage over other people who might not be able to train as often or recover as quickly. So that was the only time I was ever considering doing it because I never had an interest in being massive. But when I fell in love with jujitsu, I really wanted to replace it. I got sick of being fricking tired and sore and wanted to get back on the mat. But I mean, I'm not a scientist in terms of medical biology and the effects of steroids, but I would imagine that the small doses they used there for recovery is a different story from people who use them excessively.

But as a there's a whole lot of grey in the middle. Yeah, it depends on how dark the grey is. And I again, I'm not a medical physiologist that can tell you or a pharmacist that will tell you what the... What dose of a particular anabolic steroid you can take without a side effect. I suspect the dose is very close to zero. Yeah, because the side effects basically you're, in a male, you're replacing or adding to the testosterone. Now, you're not using testosterone, but you're actually...

It's having the same effect broadly. In women, it's doing the same thing. But in the case of women, they have such a low amount of testosterone in the first place that anything that they take is going to have a significant effect. In the case of a man, you've obviously got typically higher levels of testosterone. So you don't need to take more anabolic steroids to have any sort of effect. But, you know, there are plenty of cases of seriously good, you know, world record holder in the women's hundred meters. Flo Jo, she died at the age of 37 of a heart attack.

Yeah, there's a lot of them. Well, look at bodybuilders, that's a whole heap of them. In strong men there's an Icelandic guy I think who died of a ruptured aorta at 42 and you just like that's like unheard of.

Exactly. And so. Yeah, and they're taking extremes. Yes. And they're pushing their body to extremes as well.

I feel worried about the mountain from Game of Thrones, who's the Icelandic giant. You see him originally and he was this thin, obviously tall basketball player who decided to get into bodybuilding. And he is definitely on the juice.

He's a monster.

I worry about... Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens with him in his time, right.

What else was I going to say in terms of that? But a big problem, too, is that it's not necessarily drugs. What about things like blood doping?

Performance enhancing behaviours as well. Yeah. So, look, there are...

Do you want to explain what blood doping is?

Blood doping is basically taking blood out, highly oxygenated blood out and then putting it back into your body so that you're actually going to get a better ability to carry oxygen.

More red blood cells.

So you got a better ability to carry to carry oxygen.

And this is what... What's the name of the guy who came out got shamed? The American used to do it. So what's his name? The American cyclist who came out and admitted to it?

You've got me.

Yeah. He's massive. He's massive. Yeah. He came out and blew a lid off it all. Lance Armstrong.

Lance Armstrong.

He was on other stuff as well.

Possibly. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think he came out and was like, yeah. And I think the screwed up thing of that, aside from, you know, "Oh, yeah, I was doing drugs, you know, or doing blood doping in order to get an advantage," was that he's like, "Anyone at the top is doing it because they will have to now."

The reality is that he was more evil than that. Yeah. And yeah, you could say what he was doing was cheating. Yeah. And that's an individual choice. And he got caught. But there's two sides of it. The evil one is that he spent his entire career denying it and deriding everybody else for doing it.

That was the evil aspect.

And yeah, it turns out that if you want to ride on his team, you had to be on the stuff. So he was forcing other people to do things that he was denying doing himself, but actually doing. And so it became that, you know, how do you do it? And look at that. That whole professional cycling thing just became ridiculous at that time where there was there was one Tour de France that a few years later, nine out of the top 10 places were found subsequently to have it. And the one who wasn't was an Australian.

And it was probably that he just wasn't caught.

Well, he still says he has never taken, he actually won the Tour de France legitimately.

It's crazy, though, because to that stage, he must be so like so much of a biological freak compared to other human beings that he might as well be taking drugs. Right. At least in comparatively. Yeah. Did you see the documentary called Icarus?

No.

You should watch that. That's an American guy who after the Lance Armstrong case came out, he was like, right, well, I'm going to do a documentary on myself doing what Lance Armstrong did in terms of taking steroids and doing blood doping and racing in races where it was okay to do that, or at least it was like an open... You know, I think he came in saying, I'm taking these drugs. I want to see where I got. And he's like, "It's fucked. I still came 14th." Like he's like, "It's not like I didn't have to train." It's crazy.

You can't just go, oh, pump another litre of blood into me and all of a sudden I'm going to win the Tour de France. That wasn't the issue. But when we got elite athletes doing those things, then in order to get... it's 1%, 2%.

Yeah. Well it's the cherry on the cake, and that's what I was thinking when I... The only time that I ever consider doing anything like that with jujitsu and taking steroids in order to train more, I was really thinking in order for me to ever justify this, because also, by the way, in jujitsu, most of the guys at the top are on it because it's not... there's no blood testing, there's no piss testing. There's none of that in the sport, so... and have a look at some of them. But what was my point?

My point was that my body wasn't at the top of what it could be. My training routine wasn't at the top of what it could be. My diet wasn't on point. So it was just a total waste of time to even consider doing it until all the other ducks were lined. Exactly. And the only way to really squeeze any more toothpaste out of the tube is to jump on the steroids to really do it.

Well, that's what I do amounts to, because if you're looking at your average Joe in a sport, a power sport that you're taking, say, anabolic steroids is going to be useful in... Your average athlete, you know, B-grade sprinter down a local athletics club who goes on the stuff, he's going to probably improve his hundred meters time by two or three tenths of a second. Yeah.

So he's going to go running from 11 and a half seconds to eleven point two seconds for 100 meters. He's not going to suddenly become an Olympic athlete because he's not doing the training and the diet and everything else, to actually make use of, you know, what those drugs are capable of doing. It's the guys who are actually at that limit already who get a huge advantage out of it because they're actually doing all that work already. So that's where it becomes weird. I just think it's. The argument about, "Well, everybody's doing it before it's okay," to me sucks.

It's one of these things where necessarily think anyone thinks it's okay. I think it's they might think it's justified.

Yeah. Yeah. On an individual basis, you can understand why people do it in order to compete.

And what the hell do you do when you end on Lance Armstrong's team, and he says to stay here you'll get paid, you know, make millions of dollars.

All you have to do is a ride along in the pack and make sure I win. Yeah. That's it.

Yeah, exactly. But everyone's doing it, by the way. Yeah. You better do it as well, right.

But yeah, I think from an individual point of view, I'm not, criticising an individual for making that choice. I think, though, on the other hand, it's very difficult for a sporting body, an organisation, to say... to give up and say we will allow it because every beat is going to do it anyway. Yeah, and mostly not because of the cheating part, because you can in the end, if everything's equal, everything's equal. But it's more that the physiological side effects, the fact that you're actually... You're condoning people who are making critical decisions about their health and their life expectancy in order to compete in your sport. And I don't think any sporting body should be able to do that.

What do you think then of weight cutting for sports like boxing, any of the fighting sports?

But that's...

because people die doing that. And that's one of those things that seems like you are pushing. Everyone has to do it if they want to compete, right. There's no getting around.

Unfortunately, you can't get around that because they're not doing anything in terms of taking drugs. Well you could get around it in terms of, you could get them and say, "You need to do some sort of a hydration test to show that you aren't." "I'm, you know, normally a hundred and fifty kilos, but I've starved myself two days before and now I've dropped it."

The key to it is the way it should be as they're walking into the room. Yeah, exactly. And because anybody who is dehydrated themselves to the point of exhaustion simply couldn't fight. Yeah, but what happens with these guys is that they starve themselves, dehydrate themselves for 48 hours before a weigh in. They'll lose three or four or five kilos before a weigh in. All of which will go straight back on and more in 24 hours before the final one.

The dumb thing is...

that's why they do it 24 hours beforehand.

They're usually at the same weight anyway. And so it's like all you've done is artificially dropped...

Both competitors have dropped their weight by five kilos to make the limit and they've bumped it up again.

Significantly weaker for the actual fight because they're probably not going to fight at the level they would if they hadn't had to starve or dehydrate themselves so close to when they actually had to fight.

If you had if you weighed them in, as they step into the ring, then it wouldn't be a problem because they dropped... They'd feint of exhaustion in the first two minutes of a boxing match if they'd lost that weight by dehydration or starvation.

So that's yeah, that's one of those big issues that I have with the fighting sports is the, you know, seeing a lot of people going through that. And just how... It just seemed dumb to me. That was one of the reasons that I don't think I ever did, I mean, I had to do weigh-ins for jujitsu, but it was never that, I probably never got to a level where it was that much of an issue and it was that important. You would just fight above a class.

It's a funny one, because boxing in particular has such narrow ranges of weight classes. Yeah. Yeah. There are two, three kilo weight classes. I can't fathom how anybody who weighs two kilos less or more is going to be significantly advantaged or disadvantaged, fighting someone.

Could just be a mental thing as well. Right, like a placebo effect when you just have the confidence. And that was the thing with these shoes going back to the racing. A big thing, too, that the article was talking about was the effect that it's going to have on people's psychology, because if they see one guy running with those shoes, it's going to get in their head. And he was saying, the writer, the author, he or she, was saying that everything is going to end up wearing them now, whether or not they do help, because it's just a, "Well, you know, at least I've got them in case."

Well, you know, talking about earlier on that I went out and bought a Jimmy Connors tennis racket when I was sort of 18 years old.

And suddenly I was in Wimbledon!

And suddenly I probably wasn't hitting the ball any better than I was with the previous wooden racket, which, by the way, was a wooden racket that Bjorn Borg used to use, so... And then before that, it was the wooden racket that Rod Laver used to use.

Your bank account felt it.

My bank account felt it, but it didn't find it a huge amount. But, yeah, I don't think people are going to suddenly become super heroes by going out and buying a better golf club or a tennis racket, if you're average B-grade tennis player like I was.

I guess keeping in the line of sports, there was an article having a whinge about the AFL for men being called the AFL M and the AFL for women being called the AFL W.

And ironically, they're both run by the AFL. A sort of super body that runs both.

What do you think's going on there? Is it just feminists or political correctness just going nuts?

I don't think there are any feminists who are saying that it should be the AFL M. I think it was somebody in the AFL... Look, it was a bit of a storm in a teacup because yeah, from what I and I didn't read every report on it. But from what I understand, somebody... The chief football operations person in the AFL was asked a question on radio as to whether or not they there was a possibility that that might happen. And he said, yes, there's a possibility we might look into it.

And all of a sudden the reports as typically happens and sports media and there's no... Follow me on Facebook if you want to rant every second day about the morons in sports media who... No your average, this is the break for the rant, you want to cut this. Your average sports media article now runs something like fill in a name, fill in something they did wrong.

And then have a hundred random people's tweets. And the story is the public goes wild over, Fred. Doing something in some sport. That's not journalism. Go and learn something about the sport. Commentate on the sport, the performance, how I went, how they played, what happened. I don't care what your average person thinks about. And that's what this story was.

I feel like it's a non issue.

Ranting, and I'm going, "Why would this happen?" And to defend the guy, he basically said, "Yeah, might. Might we might look into it."

But I didn't see the point. What other sports do we... We don't call it, you know, women's tennis and male tennis officially.

Tennis. Yeah. And there are two different competitions.

Yes. Yeah.

There's a men's competition and a women's where they're separate. The only time they come together is at the majors, at the Wimbledon, the Australian Open, the US Open and the French Open. And they're actually not run by the WTA or the ATP, the two professional associations that run men and women's tennis.

They're private events. So, yeah, it's all a bit weird when you look at that. Look, my humble opinion, humility not being something of which I'm frequently accused, in my humble opinion, is that it doesn't make a difference. It will never be called the AFL M.

Yeah, it's just too clunky to, right. It's a poor acronym.

Ultimately it's the AFL and there's a men's competition and a women's competition.

Exactly. So yeah, I saw that was like, "What's the point?"

It's one of that... I haven't seen any women complaining about it. And thankfully, because women fought for two or three decades to be able to play Australian football at a national level in this country, and if the only thing they've got to complain about now is whether they have a W after the name or not, and it wasn't women in the sport who were complaining.

First world problems.

Australia had its oldest ever horse die this week, 50 years old.

I know.

I had no idea. This was a horse called Calypso. So was born in 1969. You know, almost 20 years before I was. It was a young quarter horse bought from a riding school in the 1970s by the Maciek family. Yeah. And so it lived for 50 years, which was the equivalent of 150 years in human years. Yeah. How crazy is that?

Yeah. The average... Yeah. If the horse reaches 30 they've done well.

It's still pretty crazy for a horse to get to 30. Yeah. You think of dogs and they get to like what? 12, 14? Cats can get to 20.

Bigger animals tend to live longer. Yeah. Traditionally, but like elephants live same life as humans.

Whales live longer.

Whales even longer. Yeah, but then we have anomalies like cockatoos that will live 80 years.

Yes. For anyone watching, don't by a cockatoo as a pet, unless you wanted to go to a funeral.

Unless you're 10.

They can live 200 years old, which is pretty crazy. You know, imagine going out and seeing a cockatoo that was alive at the end of the First World War, you know, out in Australia. You would never even think that that thing's been around that long, right? What you reckon it is about cockatoos, and galahs, I think too. Parrots, that has them living so long.

Who knows? Some aspect of physiology, I suspect. Yeah. No idea what it is.

Guess there is no selection against it.

No.

Just keep pumping out babies.

The only selection that would be against it is if you are not reproductive in that time, if you got three quarters of your life being non reproductive. But then these birds live in flocks so they will be helping look after chicks and those sort of things.

The other thing you wanted to talk about was Paul Parker apparently being fired from the RFS. And so for background here, guys, he was the guy in the video...

You've got to run the tape.

Not now, but not now. I should probably insert it. But yeah, he effectively is in a video where he's in a...

This was during a literally the heat of the biggest bushfires that were going on a few weeks ago.

Yeah. So he was a firefighter. Drove the vehicle up to a cameraman and said, "Are you from the media? Tell the prime minister to go and get fucked from Nelligen. We really enjoy doing this shit, dickhead!" And then drove off. So he was effectively making the point... And this was in the wake of Scomo saying quote, "Volunteer firefighters want to be there and don't need to be paid," right. They shouldn't be compensated because they enjoy it.

Don't get me started.

I know. Exactly. So anyway, apparently he got fired. I was, I mean, assuming that's true, because there seem to be mixed reports. The RFS said that he wasn't fired.

He was put on leave for illness. Stress and exhaustion.

Do you think someone in that position who's representing the RFS should be speaking like that, though, about the prime minister, let alone the swearing?

He's not representing the RFS. He just happens to be in and RFS truck and wearing an RFS uniform at the time. Yeah, he's not a spokesperson. It's not like they interviewed him as a representative of the RFS, this was an individual who was doing his job, who is actually protesting about what a politician had said. And a stupid thing that the politician had said.

For sure.

But I can see the other argument. Sorry to interrupt, but I can see the argument that the RFS are going, "You're doing RFS duties at the time, whether you are a spokesperson or noi it reflects badly on us." The irony is I reckon if you did a poll of Australians, most people would say that it reflects worse on the RFS for firing him than it does on him for doing it. Yeah.

The other little side story to that is that apparently the pub that he goes to in his little town Nelligen, or whatever it is. Apparently they've got a tab now for him that's got over $500 in it. People keep donating and saying, hey, give Paul a beer for me. People are even sending money to, transferring money to the pub and sending it to them and saying, buy a beer for me.

Jesus. It's one of those funny things, right? The Australian spirit.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, and there was a lot... Celebrities are always going to run this up because, you know, if they're Australian, they like to be Australian, but they like to pump up being Australian too. But we've had 2 effectively celebrity events in raising money for the fire appeals over the last couple of weeks. There was a cricket match with a whole lot of ex and a few current cricketers playing in a celebrity match that raised nearly 10 million dollars. And then there was a concert last weekend. Yeah, same thing. Raised nearly $10 million. And there's a lot of celebrities that you saw being interviewed at that time. Yeah, that's a bit selective. They're always going to choose the ones that the good news stories about even celebrities who are not Australian, who came to Australia, K.D. Lang flew to Australia to sing two songs at a concert.

So I think we had the guitarist from Queen as well.

Well, Queen were there. But they're in Australia already though. Doing their concerts. The irony is it was their stage that they used...

Oh, really?

They put a concert off that night. Yeah. They changed their schedule to allow that concert to happen and then played another concert later. Yeah. So yeah... So people like K.D. Lang came out and sang and they they're asking her "Why?" afterwards. And she just said, "There's something about Australia."

There seems to be a lot of American famous... Is it Paul de Franco. I think I saw him on the Aussie Ark Instagram and he spent a week at Aussie Ark. I think it's a place in Tasmania that takes care of Tassie devils and other animals down there, like a small zoo.

And he volunteered for a week, you know, and just hung out down there. So what do you think it is about Australia that is attracting so much sort of attention from celebrities? Why do we have such a sort of place in their heart?

Well, I think we're... Talking about American or North American, Canadian and America, US celebrities mostly. I think there's two parts to it. One is that Australia is probably overrepresented with singers and actors and so on who have made it in North America. And so a lot of these celebrities are American celebrities have got friends who are Australians.

So Hugh Jackman. Nicole Kidman.

Yeah, Keith Urban, Russell Crowe. Yeah, it goes on and on. Now, arguably, some of those are not Australian. They are New Zealanders, but they grew up in Australia. They identify as Australian.

We claim Russell as ours.

Yes, exactly. And Keith Urban, he's a New Zealander, but he married an Australian who ironically wasn't born in Australia. Yeah. So I think there's that element to it. But I think the other thing, too, and one of the things that Katie Lange said and a couple of others said it as well, is that there just seems to be this sort of Aussie spirit thing, the mateship and never say die and we'll always look after each other, which we grow up with and just think it's normal. And, you know, apparently it's not so. But it's hard to reflect on that when you're in it. Yeah. When you're inside the bubble, you can't look from the outside to see why people think find that.

Where do you think that originates? Because at least for me, I can sort of see it going back as far as the first and second world war with the Anzacs. I mean, I'm sure it's a bit earlier than that. But where those, you know, we had thousands, if not tens of thousands of young men go and fight a war that wasn't directly impacting them and lay down their lives, especially if you guys looking to Gallipoli, I think Normandy Beach as well.

Did we have a whole lot of people die there? Yeah, well, Gallipoli in the First World War and Normandy in the second. And, you know, it wasn't directly affecting us, but we still did our bit. I guess we felt maybe compelled because of the colonialism and the Commonwealth and everything.

And I think the part of that, sort of mateship part of that, too, I think, the First World War in particular is something that we have, certainly, I grew up a few decades after it. You nearly a century after it. Yeah, but I think there was an element of that that because we had Australians and New Zealanders going to cross the other side of the world to fight a war that they weren't directly involved in. They were being supervised, managed and ordered by the British military hierarchy. And so they stuck together...

And this is why they became the Anzacs.

And the whole Anzac spirit.

Australian New Zealand Land Corps. That whole spirit of the Anzac came from not just fighting and doing those sort of things, but the mateship thing of looking after each other because the bastards, the generals, the British generals who were sitting in London weren't taking much notice of the Australians, the New Zealanders, or the Canadians or the Indians. They were basically cannon fodder for a lot of them.

And for an example there, go see Gallipoli, the film, to understand. What was it? 7000 people in a day that just got mowed down by machine guns, line after line?

And they were just gun fodder. Yeah.

Just delay them. Distract them. Yeah. Give your lives.

While we go up there and fail. So I think there's that element to it. And look, that also, just as a sort of sideline, that was also meant that this is sort of bizarre brotherly sisterly relationship with Australia and New Zealand as 2 close countries ,obviously closely, geographically, closely culturally, we will, as Australians, we will fight tooth and nail in every competition we ever have with New Zealand, and they will do the same with us.

And they'll pretty much beat us.

At least there aren't many sports! Yes, but it's like that sort of big brother, little brother thing when they're in the backyard playing cricket or whatever, you want to kill each other. But if a kid next door jumps the fence, you'll be mates and you'll be out off against them.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Exactly. So it's that sort of weird relationship that we have.

Yeah, it is interesting. And it is one thing culturally that we just grew up taking for granted. I don't know if there are other examples. I'm sure there are other examples of that around the world. But personally, I guess I don't know too much about... I don't know what Americans, the Canadians feel of one another and the same with Britain, Scotland and Ireland and Wales, they are all much more competitive as opposed to, you know, a very close.

They seem to have... Although they have so much in common, they don't tend to like each other. What else have I got here? Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, and richest man in the world, even after his incredibly expensive divorce...

I think he gave away half his...

Billions of dollars. He set aside a $15 billion to fight climate change. Isn't that incredible? And I wanted to, I guess, bring this up, to talk to you about what you think...

8% of his wealth.

Yeah. What to... The average person doesn't donate that kind of money.

No, your average person who earns $100000 a year, isn't giving away $8000. The average person who earns $100000 a year probably doesn't have $100000 in their bank account. If they got 50 thousand dollars in a bank account, they're not going to give away $4000. You might give away 50 or 100. And think they've done a good job.

And Jeff Bezos probably doesn't have a bank account with $15 billion in it either.

No, that's true. And the argument is always, after you've made your first billion, does anything else matter because you couldn't possibly spend it? but even so, it's the no win gesture, you know, in a sense. It's a great gesture in terms of saying well... As a political gesture as much as anything else, because realistically that sort of money is going to be highly valuable because he's putting in it research. It's not about marketing...

I guess it's you're in a position to make such a massive difference at an individual level, at least on your individual basis, and not have that that, you know, there's not going to be a negative effect on you. You're not going to feel, when you have that amount of money, you're not going to feel that you've given up.

And that's unfortuntely the negative that he's been copping as well. What does it matter if he gives away $15 billion if he's worth...

Or how much does he need to give away though? Does he need to resign? It's one of those things I get conflicted because I see there are quite a lot of, I think, friends that I have on Facebook that tend to be more lefty socialist, anti capitalism and wealth. They said they tend to be very adamant about how much they hate the rich. I'm... I guess, more on the libertarian side of it.

To some extent, where I'm kind of like rich people don't tend to just get the money. They tend to have done something or be helping... Like, obviously, Jeff Bezos has probably tens of thousands of employees, people he's given jobs to. He's created a service. People are willingly giving their money across to that service. And that's how he's gotten rich.

What, though, what... Do you think your... The amount of responsibility you have to the rest of the world increases, though, the more wealthy you get?

Oh, I think so. And if you look at Bill and Melinda Gates as a good example. I don't know what proportion of their wealth they put it into the foundation, but it is significant. I would be very surprised if it wasn't more than 8 per cent.. Yeah, and Bill Gates says, he just says that I've got more money than I know what to do with. I've got more money than anybody knows what to do with. So I know what I'm going to do with it. I'm going to try and solve some of the world's problems. Yeah, they've put hundreds of billions of dollars in the last couple of decades into trying to solve AIDS in Africa

and malaria.

And malaria and those sort of things where that's, you know, malaria is the biggest killer in the world. Yeah, by a long way. And yet he's just looked at then said, I can fix this. I can't fix it tomorrow. But if I put money into it now, it'll be fixed by the time I'm dead. And that's something where I think people who have that sort of money, I think they do have a... An imperative, I think, to look after the rest of the world, because let's face it. And these are two good examples. Bill Gates came up with a good idea and that was microcomputers. And a bunch of other people ran with it. Apple ran with it.

IBM ran with it in everything else. And he just said, "Yeah, other people are better at building machinery than I am. I'm just going to build software." And that's how he made his money. He didn't contribute anything after that to the world. It just happens that Microsoft became the biggest software manufacturer in the world because they were very good at doing what they did and they were very good at doing that from a point of view of the technology, but also a point of view of the business. And they went after business and they predicted where that business was going to be. Jeff Bezos came up with one idea and that was online shopping.

Well, it was even less than that, right? It was selling second-hand books online from my garage.

Exactly. And that changed the world. You could argue that that changed the world more significantly than Microsoft or Apple or anything else. Then all of a sudden, we were... And it was an inevitable thing. But the first person who thinks of it is always the genius.

Well do you find it ironic, too, though, that you will have people like these unnamed people on my Facebook page or... Not page, my private Facebook, who tend to whinge a lot about these billionaires, but they'll be using Microsoft in order to get on Amazon to buy their books at probably a tenth the price of would have cost for them previously. If those things hadn't been in place to get from the bookstore down the road.

Yeah, look, there's an element there, I think of people who and you can... I'm probably further on the lefty socialist side of politics than you are, but I sit there and let it go. Frankly, I don't hold it against anybody who has made money. What I hold it against them is how they operate when they've made that money. If you... And it's like a Bezos individually is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The company that he runs is worth a trillion dollars, probably in total. You know that if you were to sell it.

Not that anybody could buy it, but if you were to sell it, I reckon a trillion dollars would be the starting point. Even if it's for half a trillion dollars, it doesn't matter. But when you look at that and you say, "Well, what's this company doing? It's not what the person is doing, it's what's the company doing?" And I'm not going to speak about Amazon or any of the others in particular. But what are companies doing if they're deliberately dodging paying tax in the country that they were started in by moving everything overseas...

Well, that gets me. That's such a difficult one, because, I mean, I understand the frustration, but at the same time, it's... They're abusing the rules. I mean, it's screwed up, they're playing a game with rules.

There's nothing illegal. But I think there's a moral judgement that I will make on people and companies that eventually says that... And I know why they do it. You know, it's not it's not simply we just want to keep making more money...

but you want to keep growing. You want to keep hiring up people. You want to keep spending and investment, all of the other thing.

But ultimately, it's about shareholders. As these companies are public companies, they are owned by the public, not generically, but they are owned by hundreds of millions of people around the world who've got a small amount of shares and then other bigger companies who've got bigger trenches, tranches of shares in them. But when it comes down to that, are you responsible for making money for your shareholders? And they would always say yes, or are you responsible for how you behave in the world community? Is that the...

Yeah, the one step that you going to take? And there are certainly companies that we don't even hear of that that take the second one of those as being the most important. That if you're a billion dollar company and you're making $100 million profit a year and you can pay a dividend to your shareholders and you can increase that dividend slightly every year. Can you afford to pay tax? Yes. Why should you say, well, if we move ourselves offshore and pay no tax in the country that we're in, we're suddenly going to make $200 million a year, pay our shareholders double the dividend that they were getting. Does that make you a better corporate citizen in our world?

It's just one of those negative aspects of capitalism where you're in it for yourself. To some degree first. And so if the rules say that you can set it up that way... Like when was the last time you met anyone in Australia who paid more tax to the government than they needed to, to the ATO and just said, "You know this, you have to pay ten grand, take twelve." Because...

But most people do in a different way. Most people donate money to charity. And that's a form of taxation.

Yeah. For sure.

And voluntary tax.

So that that I don't... I have nothing wrong, you know, no negative opinion of at all. And I would prefer that they get themselves into a position where maybe they can do that. Like in Jeff Bezos's case, I'd rather that he's giving this money to directly fight climate change than giving it to the American government, or to the Australian government.

Exactly. Yeah, who, quite frankly, is corrupt.

And I guess once you get that big, though, too, it's almost like it doesn't really make a difference. Right. If you've got hundreds of millions of shareholders and you're putting a lot of money into climate change and fighting that, that is effectively helping the shareholders in as well as everyone else anyway.

Exactly. In the grand scheme of things, if the four or five biggest companies in the world now do those sort of things and they are you know, it's got Bezos doing that. We've got Microsoft doing those things. Apple do all sorts of things. You know, those big companies are doing a lot along the side, but at the same time, they're making money out of exploiting the loopholes.

What else have we got here? Some of the last stories, I guess, to finish up were that Germany is quitting coal without losing any jobs. So apparently they are...

Long term planning. Who'd have thought of that in a government?

Well, they got rid of the black... I don't know. It's one of those things where I think they would've kept doing it if it was affordable. But I think the fact that they closed black and coal because it was becoming too expensive to do more so than that was a good thing for the climate, at least my basic understanding of it is. And now they're getting rid of all the brown coal mines, which are dirtier than the black coal ones, but I think easier to get too easy to mine, by 2038. But yeah, apparently they're doing it in a way using long term planning in order to save the jobs, at least.

And that's one of the criticisms I make of governments who keep saying, "Oh, we can't afford to do this." Yeah, you can't afford not to. Yeah. In the long term. But the problem is that we have politicians now are no longer employed by us to run the country, the state, the local council or whatever they're doing, they're employed by their parties to get re-elected. And so that's the only thing they ultimately care about. They might get into politics with all the right ideas of saying, yeah, "I want to make this a better country or a better state."

But in the end, the only thing that matters to them is getting re-elected. That's why we don't have these longer term planning things. I'll use an example, and the Victorian state government have been doing some great things recently, but a few years ago we closed down a coal burning electricity production in the Latrobe Valley. We closed it down, effectively fired everybody. The government must have known for three years before that that they were going to close it down.

What they should have done three years before closing it down is announce a 10 year closing program, retrain those people, build up an industry in the area during the three years before you're actually going to shut it down, and so you would actually increase the number of people employed because coal mines, the way they are now, don't employ a lot of people.

Automated machinery doing the things, automatic driving cars.

Exactly. And yeah, when you when you talk about producing electricity by burning coal, the actual plant that's producing it doesn't employ a lot of people. But overall, there's a lot of people who get affected as soon as you fire a few hundred people in a town of 20000. Then there's a lot of side effects to that. Whereas if what they've done is said, yeah, "This is a billion dollar job to shut this plant down, let's spend that billion dollars over a 10 year period instead of in one or two years and do it in a planned way that is going to have...

We could have, in fact, said we're going to build a recycling industry in the Latrobe Valley because Australia's recycling sucks," because we just seem to ship everything to China. Yeah, China said "We're sick of taking your shit, keep it." And perfectly reasonably so because we weren't paying them enough and they got enough of their own. And so we could have built a recycling plant in the Latrobe Valley that would have been up and running by say 2025. And so we closed something down in 2015 or 16.

But if we'd known about it and... Which the government must have known, you don't just make "Oh, we're going to close this thing tomorrow," and they're the sort of decisions that Germany is choosing to make. They're not saying we're going to shut down coal mines today. They're saying we're going to shut down coal mines within the next 20 years and we're going to do it at a job neutral. In effect, it will be an increase in the number of jobs, because soon as you move into different industries, particularly in, say, renewable energy.

Renewable energy is mostly at the moment about R&D; Research and development. And you're trying to... You're employing people to do things. You're training people that will end up being able to have transferable skills.

So I think that's the sort of thing that we've got to do as a country is... We can whine or we like about saying coal's bad, gas is bad, oil is bad.

Unless you're exporting it and making heaps of cash.

Or unless you're an Indian coal mining company that is no longer able to do business in India. Because the irony is that India have said we're no longer going to dig up coal in our country. We have a coal miner who comes to Australia, wants billions of dollars here. Effectively grants by saying, "I want you to build a railway line, I want free water, I want all of this stuff in order to build an industry," that's in the end going to hire a few hundred people as permanent jobs. Yes, to set it up, there'll be a few short term jobs.

But if the government can tax it.

And the government can tax it, but really? Where's he going to ship it to? Because India at the same time Germany announced this, India announced the same thing.

Well China, I guess. Right. We're hoping China is burning coal, which they're probably not going to very long. And Australia's economy is tied by think like 30% or 40%. 30% to 40% of our economy is just exporting iron ore and coal and everything to China. Yeah. And so if they suddenly tomorrow just say, "You know what, we're getting it elsewhere,"

"Getting it elsewhere or we're just going to stop."

Australia goes into instant recession, right.

So it's not even an environmental thing. It's an economic thing of, "Do you make a decision that is going to set you back economically over the next 20 years?" Where are you going to take a short term loss, not necessarily losing money, but losing profit for the long term gain. And at the same time, it's going to be environmentally friendly because let's face it, this current government doesn't give a monkey's about the environment.

They will only listen if they look at the numbers. But even then, they don't look at the numbers if they disagree with them. There was a study that came out, and I should have sent it to you, but I've lost it by now, but came out a few weeks ago, at least the report for it did, of the cost of various forms of energy production. By far and away the most expensive one is nuclear, which is why it's not going to be the solution in Australia.

Why is that the most expensive one?

I think it's just that it takes a huge amount of money to create nuclear electricity plants. Yeah, yeah. And that and the risks to them are huge. So there's an enormous amount of money that goes into risk management, which it should in any industry. But the second most expensive is coal.

And when you start to look at that, you know, it makes no sense for us to keep burning coal. It's just cheap and easy for us to dig it up. And so it makes no sense when we can create renewable energy cheaper in the long run, not cheaper when you want to do the R&D in Sydney infrastructure up, but in the long run, it's cheaper to to run.

Well, it's inevitable, right? Yeah. I guess though it is one of that you have those two forces of it's going to run out eventually. So we just keep riding it for as long as possible or it's going to run out eventually. Do we try and get off the train as soon as we..? get off this cash cow as soon as possible and just switch back onto the next thing?

And we've got these clowns in parliament who keep running about things like, you know, run around and say, "Well, you know, we can't use solar electricity because the sun is not at all day. What happens at night?" Battery storage.

But I understand the argument there. It is difficult in terms of the infrastructure that we currently have set up requires a constant load of electricity. And I mean...

You know how we maintain that load now?

It needs to be so. Well, we use coal, in order to to maintain.

We do. But do you know how we maintain the peak? It's through hydro. Yeah. So we're effectively using stored energy in the form of water. Yeah, yeah. And so the... We turn all of the hydro systems on in the morning and in the evening in Victoria to run peak electricity. Yeah. Tops up...

Because you can't you got to suddenly fire up and have a coal power station. It takes a week to actually fire it up. And whereas water you just open the tap and it's turning the turbines. So we do that but then we use the excess that we're producing in coal or that we're doing by wind or solar and where ever else and we actually pump the water back up the hill.

Yeah.

During the middle of the day so that we can run it down again and then the middle of the night so we can do the same thing again.

I've no issues with that, I think...

We can do that very easily here.

There isn't... Because I quite often hear from people the argument of we just need to go with solar. Solar will solve everything. And it's... I think it is one of those things where at least at the moment, everything has a place. Obviously, we don't want to rely on coal for too long or at least much longer. But at the moment it has its place where we do kind of rely on it.

We need it for the next few decades whilst we transition towards, you know, I think it's like investing in one thing versus spreading it around and having your eggs in many different baskets, right. And it's going to be the same thing with wind and solar. It's not going to be just that we have wind and solar and we're sweet. We're going to have to have long term batteries. We're going to have to look at nuclear power, like thorium nuclear, which is safer and hopefully easier to use. And then hydro and other energy sources, too.

Yeah, I think the big challenge we have is that we have spent 50 or 60 years mostly just running round in circles with solar. Yeah, if we had put a dedicated effort 50 years ago in, and I use the example of John F. Kennedy in 1962 would come out and said by the end of this decade, "I'm going to have America run on solar electricity," rather than saying, "By the end of this decade, I'm going to have a man on the moon." They would have done it. Yeah, and they would have done it probably cheaper than the space race in the 60s. So we've got to be able to do that, put that effort in, because you look at what has happened now with electric cars.

Electric cars are a joke in a sense of they're not saving any coal or other carbon-based electricity if you still have to charge your electric car with coal-based electricity.

You're one step removed from the coal.

Right. That's right.

You pat yourself on the back...

You know, you're not burning gas or fuel.

I didn't kill him, the gun killed him!

That's right. But that technology is now getting so good. The battery storage and the capability of using solar electricity is that cars are going to be made out of solar panels within the next ten years and they will be, during the day, you just parked car outside and it'll be constantly storing electricity in a battery that's going to be efficient enough to store enough for you to travel a few hundred kilometres. And if you travelling during the day, it will just never run out.

That will happen. But that's just one example... This, and well, this is a holding pattern for the next time, I'll check it up. There's a story that came out today about a young Australian entrepreneur who has just said he will put in millions of dollars worth of technology into some of the fire affected locations to have them up and running again with solar and battery power that will enable everything from a household through to an entire town to run. And he said he'd do that in three months and he's already got four or five of them installed in a week.

I think that's one of the biggest things we can have to move towards, probably worldwide, is just having energy decentralised.

Local energy.

Yeah, 100%, where your house does most of the work itself. You got wind, you've got solar, you've got whatever. Geothermal, hydro.

I don't need the government to do it for me.

Yeah. And batteries. And then you just, you know, you have access to the grid or something if you need it.

And we're doing that already. There's Australia, I think has the highest number of houses, proportion of houses with solar energy being run into the grid in the world. And that's still nowhere near enough. I mean, our house, we have solar panels on the roof. We're running that into the grid, which gets a reduction in our electricity cost. It works out at about a 10 to 20% reduction over a year because obviously in summer we're producing more electricity than we are in winter.

Yeah, it works out at about 10 to 20%, but that's purely because of the way we have sort of loaded that onto an existing architecture. Whereas if we build that architecture in the first place to do that, and a lot of places are doing that now. There's a lot of large buildings now. There was a hospital recently, I can't remember what it was, but there's a hospital recently built in Australia that is energy neutral because they built the entire place with solar panels everywhere. Yeah. And they're producing enough electricity to run a large hospital, which is a fairly electricity intensive thing.

You know what I think we need to do? We need to work out a way of turning the sunlight and the energy into water that's moved into the desert so that camels can drink the water and they can turn that water into fat.

And then we can have it stored there in the camel until winter. And then we just take it from the camels.

Hydro-camels alert.

We'll burn the camels afterwards. Right. Then we solve the camel problem and the energy problem at the same time.

I think that be a short term solution. An interesting one. Look, you obviously got your tongue firmly planted in your cheek, but they are the sort of things that we're getting people now who think about. Yeah. You said look at West... Cars have come from. And even though I sort of keep pooh poohing the whole electric cars idea, but I'm not pooh poohing them in a sense of saying that they're bad. But in saying that we're not quite there yet. But the technology has improved so much by doing that.

Yeah. Yes.

Your book.

This is the Blue Economy. So I'll hold that up for you guys by a guy called, I believe, gone to Gunter Pauli. Yeah. So I think he's Dutch. 100... What is it, "10 years, 100 innovations, a hundred million jobs." So this was all about not being a green economy, but a blue one where you try and recycle as much as possible.

A circular economy.

Yeah. And so it was really cool. I remember reading about that and him talking about trying to find waste and turn that back into money. So I think one of the key examples was taking coffee grinds, growing mushrooms out of them and then selling the mushrooms as food.

Or, you know, there were there were 100 different examples that he had of doing things like that, like taking recycled paper or whatever and then turning it into something else. And so it's one of those sorts of things where you need to work out, well, what's currently waste and how do we make money from it and put that back into the system?

Look, Sweden, I believe now has got a huge proportion of their electricity has been used by burning waste.

That's one of those difficult ones. It's like you're burning plastics.

It's better than burying it.

Well, in the short term.

It means that you don't need to dig up new material in order to burn.

Yeah, I just I would worry about the pollution, I guess. You know, it's kind of one of those things where it's like...

Yeah, but if they're burning sort of non-polluting things, I don't know what they... The majority of our garbage is still producing methane as an example.

Well it's going to be interesting to see the technologies that are produced in the next few years that are pulling these gases out of the atmosphere because you can imagine it's effectively just carbon, right. Like methane, carbon dioxide. It's oxygen and carbon and hydrogen.

We have the technology. It's 400 billion, 400 million years old. It's called...

Bacteria?

Trees.

Well, Australia's sort of limited, right? We can put some up, but we do live in those places and we keep burning them down. That's it.

The last story that I had that I wanted to touch on, which was a cool one that I found today, was that the Sydney Museum in Hyde Park Barracks... So the Hyde Park barracks is what? A convict barracks from..?

It was a barracks of an army barracks.

An army barracks. But they were convicts there, right? Or is it a convict museum today?

I think it's a conflict museum now. Originally, it was just was an army barracks.

And... But they found I think, you know... They've got a new thing opening tomorrow, a new exhibition opening tomorrow, which is all about what the rats that had infested the Hyde Park Barracks had stored up under the floorboards in terms of the archaeological items that they'd saved. So they ended up making all these nests and stuff under the floorboards of the Hyde Park Barracks.

And they have, in the 70s, they discovered this and pulled all of this material out. And for 160 years, it's been sitting there untouched, effectively, besides rats. And they got 80,000 archaeological artefacts out. So things like... What did they get? Scraps of fabric, food, personal treasures, all that stuff. So it was a really cool story of them having all of this, you know, archaeological... These artefacts and everything.

Rodent archeology.

Yeah. That have been stuffed up. It look beautiful. The different bits of fabric and notes and little bits and pieces that these rats had stuffed into their nests. So that's opening in Sydney tomorrow.

Go check it out!

Anyway, probably long enough. I think we smashed out an hour and 20 minutes.

We have we've gone... We've done well.

Thanks for joining us, guys. We'll see you next time.

Thanks, everyone.

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