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G'day, you mob. Welcome to this episode of The Goss, where I sit down each week and chat with my old man, my dad, about the gossip, the news this week. Most of these stories are down under, though we don't stray away from interesting stories from abroad, around the rest of the globe. So today we try and talk about a whole range of different topics, ranging from Victorian number plates, car number plates that were sold for one million dollars, more than a million bucks.

We talk about a man in the Melbourne CBD stealing $800 necklaces using a fishing rod. We talk about a new genus of extinct marsupial lion that was found in Australia. We also cover the Coronavirus and give you an update on what's going on with that worldwide as well as in Australia. And then we also dive into some rather difficult conversations, some rather difficult topics. But I'm trying not to shy away from those kinds of topics.

So we also talk about identity politics in Australia, things like race and gender, as well as a story that came up on ABC, I think it was on Four Corners, about young children being given hormones to prevent them going through puberty because they identified as non binary. So we try and talk about these topics guys, to one, inform you about these issues, to help you develop your own opinions about these issues as well and hopefully improve your English in the process. So with that aside, guys, smack that kookaburra and let's get going.

All right, Dad, what's going on?

Hey, Pete, good to be back.

Well, welcome to this episode of The Goss.

Another week.

I know we're up to number 10. Boom! A decade.

Number 10? How did that happen. Exactly.

So how's your week been? What have you been up to?

Busy. Yeah, I've been to the doctor for a check-up on the heart. Everything's okay. Yeah. I might need more surgery in a couple of months, but we'll see how that goes.

Yeah, you were telling me about. That's a heart surgery.

Yeah.

Does it not freak you out a little bit?

Well, you know, any surgeries freaky enough when you got to go under a general anaesthetic, there's always a concern of complications. But yeah, yeah, this is not open heart surgery. It's all just done through a catheter. So it should be okay.

I feel like I would like to know if I were getting surgery, how it was going to be done. But at the same time, I think a lot of the time when people describe these surgeries to me... And I don't know what it is, I just have that aversion to blood. And it's so weird. Like I can... I've seen plenty of videos where surgery is happening or, you know, some of those atrocious videos of people getting injured or whatever. And it's kind of like that doesn't disturb me. But when I think about it happening to me, that's when I get sort of freaked out and I've forgotten... Let's find out what is the phobia called for blood phobia. Do you know the word? It's bloody obvious!

Hemophobia.

Nailed it. Hemophobia; people who have a fear of the sight of blood. For me, the sight of blood doesn't freak me out. But the idea of having blood taken

For you.

Yeah. Blood taken freaks me out or getting injections. Yeah. And again, intellectually, it doesn't bother me. I understand this needs to be done and I'll force myself to do it. But going through the process freaks me out. Just getting jabbed. And I remember, as you guys can probably see from my ear here, when I was doing jujitsu, we have things called cauliflower ear where the ear gets bruised effectively by being roughed up. So boxers, rugby players. Judokas, so people who do judo, and do jujitsu practitioners get them from being roughed up.

And if you don't drain it, the liquid in the ear turns to bone; it calcifies. And so you have to try and drain it to avoid it being deformed really badly. Like mine's a little bit deformed, but it's not as bad... Some of them end up looking like golf balls in people's ears. But I had to go to the chemist and ask for like a pack of syringes and some alcohol and do it myself. Or I would have to go to the hospital every single day that I trained and it got worse.

And it was funny because I was using the syringe on myself in the mirror, concentrating on shoving it through the skin and then pulling the blood out of my ear. And that never freaked me out.

Go to get blood out of your arm at a pathologist.

I don't know how it works. Yeah. So the weird thing is, I don't know if it was the fact that I had to concentrate myself on the needle, you know, and there was there was one time where I pushed too hard and the needle went through my ear and out the other side. And it didn't bother me like...

Piercing.

freaked me out a little bit. But I was like...

You don't have the studs ready to..?

It was funny because I was kind of like, you know, this is strange that I can do this every single day for a month. And I don't pass out. I don't faint, but when I have to go and get a vaccine, afterwards, just now out of habit, I have to lie down just because I feel like I don't want to faint. I may not. And it's so weird because I feel like such a wuss. I feel like such a pussy.

Yeah. And part of that is... Obviously, I'm not a psychologist, but part of that is probably psychosomatic. You know, it happened to you once and then you're concerned about it. Therefore, it's going to happen. But the problem with psychosomatic reactions is that they are real and they're not caused by the thing that you think they are. But they're still real.

Kind of like the inverted placebo effect, right?

Yeah.

Where you're afraid of this thing happening. And so because you're afraid of it happening, it happens because you freak yourself out. I know that happens with me with, um, having my blood out. I had to get my blood checked for something at the doctor just recently, not recently, in the last year, Kel came with me and she rang ahead. Great doctor. She was just like, "I'll ring the guy, tell him, you know, Pete's a bit of a wuss. He can't handle it. He's a chicken."

I show up there. And the guy instead of using a needle this time, he had a needle but it wasn't in a syringe. It was on like the little... I guess it's like a tube, a plastic tube. Yeah. And he just did the like the tiniest little "Eee," and it went in, pulled the blood out and I was like, "Is that it? Like, didn't even notice." But yeah, I had to lie down, put my legs up. I'm just like, "Just doing this just in case," like I know I need to get my blood. I have no problem.

"I'll be fine in fifteen minutes. Just leave me alone."

Yeah. What about giving blood? What's it like in Australia in terms of the Red Cross and people giving blood? Is it a cultural thing where we do it more than other places? Because I know quite a few friends who do it a lot.

I don't know the details about that. I used to give blood when I was young, but then I got glandular fever and then, I don't know what it's like now, but then the Red Cross would say, "Well, if you had glandular fever, you can't give blood for ten years."

Ten years? Is that how long it hangs around?

Well, who knows? But yeah, that was what their rules were.

But isn't that worse than tattoos? Like if you get a tattoo, it's like two years.

Yeah. That's because it's an unknown infection.

Well they're worried about hepatitis C and everything, right? With tattoos, but...

Glandular fever is 10 years and so I just sort of got out of the habit and then stopped. But yeah.

So that freaks me out. I could I would love to give blood, but I think I would have to have a general every time.

It sort of defeats the purpose.

Yeah. I'd be more than willing to if I didn't have to be awake during the process and think about it coming out of my arm into the bag. And I have so much respect for people who can do it. One of my best friends, Tristan, who's definitely not going to be listening to this podcast, but Tristan, I respect you, mate. He has done it, I think the other day he announced on Facebook 82 times, and he's 32. So he's... What's that? Four times a year for the last... Since he was probably 18.

You can't give blood, I think, unless you're over 16.

Yeah, but he's done it. I think he's done it since he's been legally of age to give blood. He's done it every single time he's been able to, because I think they make you wait a month or two...

Still a couple of months, I think. I don't know but yeah. Interesting.

Yeah. Anyway, I guess onto the news, anything you want to hit? Shall we start with some funny stuff?

We start with the toilet paper hoarders. Bloody hell. This is. And this is one of these panic buying...

It gives you the shits.

And I won't even excuse the pun. It's panic buyers. You've got to sit there and go... They cause havoc because everybody panics. And the thing is, if you're forced... And it's not panic, if you can see that there is a diminishing amount of toilet paper on the shelves, then you actually are buying just in case. It's the people who go when... The first half a dozen people who's like, "Oh, geez. Toilet paper's is going to run out. So we'll go and hoard that!" Yeah. Yeah. Why toilet paper? Yeah. Why not cans of sardines? Like it's just bizarre that somebody decided a few days ago that toilet paper in Australia was going to be in short supply. And I have no idea...

Ironically it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now it is!

Of course it is. And that and that those panic buys happen every now and then when, you know, some trigger happens and... And I remember years ago there was a... The gas supply; It was a major problem with the gas supply in Victoria. And the gas was off and people went out hoarding bottles of water.

Why? Hoard the gas!

Exactly! Go out and buy bottles of gas, maybe. But hoarding bottles of water because there was a gas shortage and you go, "Don't understand." So yeah, panic-buying. But you know, the stock market did the same thing.

Yeah.

Corona virus comes out in the stock market crashes. The stock market is going up and down, has absolutely zero to do with the economy. All it is, is just people betting on other people's behaviour. Yeah, you're going to bet that people are going to buy, so you sell. You're going to bet that people are going to sell, so you buy. It's crazy.

There must be a term for it where you fear a certain outcome and the action you take to avoid that outcome causes the outcome.

Yeah. I'm sure there is.

There must be a term, because one other example would be traffic jams, right.

Yeah.

Where people slow down where they don't need to, which causes the people behind them to slow down. And so you end up with traffic jams where if everyone had just kept doing the normal speed then...

Yeah. The classic one is on divided roads where there's a car accident on one side and...

And everyone wants to check it out.

There's a traffic jam on the other side of the road where they're... Because there's no effect to the traffic on that side of the road. Everybody wants to slow down... There are, in fact, the first few people slow down and then everybody is slowed down regardless.

So there's some beautiful stuff on traffic jams and, I think, working out that roundabouts are much more effective than... What they called? Four-way intersections, right. Or even lights, because it allows the free flow of people to move around that. But I remember seeing some studies when I was studying biology and there were people working on population movement problems like that. Where you have large groups of whatever it is, moving around things and objects and through roads. And they were using ants to try and solve that problem by putting certain obstructions along paths and then just letting thousands of ants walk around them. And they would find the quickest and easiest route and then just follow that route and they would use that to extrapolate out...

That study was done partially to examine getting people out of large crowds in a hurry. Say you're at the MCG. Hundred thousand people at a football game. And there's an emergency and you have to get people out quickly. They wanted to know how do you deal with bottlenecks of people, because the gates are only so wide. You can only fit so many people through.

And the irony was that in those experiments with ants, that it was found that if you put obstructions in the way, like little bollards and things...

Pylons right?

Pylons in the way, then the people didn't jam up because they suddenly got into these artificial lines and followed the person in front of them rather than just trying to go for the next gap. And so you sped up the movement.

Yeah.

Yeah, you'd have ants on one side of a wall and a tiny little hole and they'd all just jam up and nobody could get through. And then they put an obstacle in front of it and they just sort of zigzag in, you know, that sort of zipper. If the technology goes in. So yeah, it's a bit weird, but...

It's pretty cool. I love seeing those sorts of scientific studies where you might be looking at a certain problem with a certain organism or a certain model or system and then you end up applying it to a completely different one. One beautiful example of that are x-rays, right? They were originally used to probe space in order to take what sort of like... Long time... Long exposure photos effectively of the background noise of space. And then what?

They realised that they could use them to see bones in peoples, you know, when they were taking medical exams to have a look at people's injuries. So that was one of those beautiful ones of crossover where... And this is one of those arguments, right. With funding. You know, "Why should we fund that project? That doesn't seem relevant." And then quite often it ends up being useful but in a completely different area that might save millions or billions of dollars a year, right.

And that is... There's thousands of examples of scientific research where people have tried to answer one question and something comes up halfway along and they go, "Oh, that happened."

So what do you reckon is going to happen with the people freaking out and buying shitloads of shit tickets? Bog roll.

I think this will be one of these ones that just goes away. I can't imagine, given the backlash on social media, I can't imagine that when those shelves get restocked in a few days time, because it's not like this has been going on for weeks and we're actually genuinely out of toilet paper in the country and it's all sitting in a bunch of lunatics cellars...

I love how that's the first concern. It's like we don't want food. We're not worried about, you know, hygiene. But, geez, I want to make sure that if I end up sick, that I can go to the toilet.

I actually went shopping last night and I bought toilet paper, and toilet paper was already on our list. So it was a bit weird going down a shelf, nine o'clock at night in a supermarket when there weren't many people...

"I'm not freaking out! I just want to go to the loo!"

And there wasn't much toilet paper on the shelves. They were pretty barren. So I grabbed a couple of packs. Normally I only buy one. Yeah I know. Normally I only buy one. But so I got forced into the semi panic buying. But yeah, the sort of the look on the person's face at the checkout was, "Oh, you've got sucked in as well, have you?"

Yeah. Was saying to me, "Do you want to go and grab some?" And I said to her, "I don't use it."

Well there was that thing where a split second last night with Joe... Your mother and I were talking about it. We suddenly went, "Shit. Should we go and buy some toilet paper?" Because she said, "Well, it's on the shopping list anyway, so just go shopping now." Which I did. But it's sort of... Well, what do you do?

Just get the kitchen hand towels.

Exactly.

So I actually did enjoy the article that popped up on a Facebook feed this morning about how all this sort of panic about Coronavirus and things being in shortage and stuff was being propagated through the Murdoch press. And the irony of that is that if toilet paper becomes in shortage, then Murdoch's newspapers are actually going to increase in sales, not for their content, but for their second-hand use.

Well, is that what paper used to be like for outdoor dunnies? Didn't you used to use newspapers stapled together and hanging on a hook?

Yeah. Punch a hole through a newspaper and strips of it hanging on a hook. There... That was a bit before my time. But I remember it at a great aunt's place with the outdoor dunny.

Can you explain the history of the outdoor dunny?

The drop toilet?

Tell us about that came about in Australia and became such an Australian thing?

It was basically a toilet seat mounted, enclosed, but mounted over a... Like a 10 gallon can. And this was in a little shed right at the back of the property. And every night the poo man would come in his cart and he would exchange the semi filled can with a fresh one.

What a shit job!

Exactly. And then take it away. And that was before sewerage and particularly in inner suburbs.

Which year? Like roughly around the 1800s?

Even way after that. I can remember them. So up until... there are few places in the 1950s and 60s that still had it.

Good God.

But by then, sewerage had become the norm. The trouble with sewerage was that in many of the suburbs that had them, which were the original suburbs settled in Melbourne, and they were that thing... It wasn't a lot of technology that you had to build, basically build a shed and put a seat over a can and have little door on the back of the shed that could be opened. But there were laneways all behind them. So now when you get into any development now and the back fence on your property is the other side of the back fence on the other property. But there were laneways between them and those laneways were mostly to remove the sewerage.

And they're still around Geelong and Melbourne...

Oh yeah, all the old suburbs have those little cobbled lanes.

Yeah, laneways.

And that's what they did. They had these little horse drawn carts that they'd go up and, you know, the poo men would come and collect it and. Yeah. So that sort of started to disappear. But by the time it had started to disappear and sewerage was by the 1950s and 60s was a common thing that, you know, new developments just went in with sewerage in. But the older places had started to become more lower socio-economic areas. So the people who were living there couldn't afford to put the sewerage on even when the sewerage went, you know, the sewerage trunk line might have gone down the back lane, they dug it up, put a sewerage pipe in and so on.

Then you had to pay someone to attach your house?

You had to connect into it. Yeah. And effectively what you were paying was half the share of the width, the cost of doing the length of your property or the or back of your property and the person on the other side did the other half, but if you could... They'd still put it through. But if you couldn't afford it then they didn't connect you up to it. So it took a bit longer for some of those places to get connected.

And there's one thing I guess you experience it today only at camp sites really, right, where you go to drop dunnies.

Yeah.

That's about the only ones you'll ever see.

And they're now composting. So they don't come and remove that typically. they just let it go for whatever time it is and then bury it.

Jesus.

And move the toilets along.

You wonder what the problems were back then too with like fear of dropping things in the drop-dunny, right? Because here, obviously, nowadays it's your phone, you're freaking out about, you're like, "That goes. I'd pay the cost of the phone again to not have to get it. It's just done."

"What phone?" "Have you seen my phone? I've lost it."

And it must have been so weird back in that time too, because I mean at the very beginning when we had drop-dunnies, you would imagine there wouldn't have been electricity. Not so you would have had to go in, in the dark, with a candle or something.

And I can remember going to my great aunt's place in East Malvern, which is now a very, you know, upper class suburb in Melbourne and going to the toilet in her backyard.

The suburb used to be a shithouse.

It did. Yeah. Well, lots of little shit houses, all in the back lanes.

Oh, we'll stop with the shit jokes.

Well we did start with toilet paper, this is only ever going to go downhill from here.

Well, shit only rolls downhill.

Exactly. Well yeah, you can pump it uphill to go down again, which is how there are pumping stations around Melbourne to move the sewerage because Melbourne so flat.

Really?

The sewerage has to be pumped up again to get down to mostly Werribee or the eastern plant down near Edithvale.

There you go.

Yeah. Sewerage stories. I can tell them all day.

There's so many good expressions, right, related to poo in Australia. And like one of the classic ones you hear today referring to that is 'built like a brick shithouse,' right. So 'built like a brick shithouse' would be the guy's so strong, so big that he's built like...

Yeah. You know, he's basically a cube.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's like a bodybuilder. So yeah. Far out. All right. Moving on.

Moving on.

Yeah. I had a few funny ones to mention here. A Victorian number plates has sold at auction for over a million dollars. Did you see that news?

No, no. What number was it? Was it number one?

Nah, that's worth a lot more than that now, apparently. It was number 26 and it sold for 1.11 million dollars With a $55,000 auctioneers fee on top of that from Shannons Auctions. Yeah, they were expecting it to be $600,000 to $700,000 as 20 years ago it sold for between 70 and 80 grand. And these numberplates, I guess we should sort of give a bit of background, these are the first numberplates that were ever released in the different states. You would have one, two. These were like phone numbers back then as well.

They started with number one. Yeah. Well, a school friend of mine, you know, back in the late 60s and 70s, his mother had number 23 on her car.

Yeah. And his grandfather had number eight.

Jesus.

Number eight.

Well, and nowadays it's just rich old money families, generally right, that have these number plates passed down that they tend to be highly contained within families and passed along. And they're so sought after.

And now none of them will actually be on a car because they just get stolen.

Well, that's what I was wondering...

There's no way anybody would put that on a car.

Well, I've seen a few. You see a few around Melbourne, especially on things like Lamborghinis and Ferraris and Bentleys and stuff where you'll see, you know, 110. But yeah, so this this number plate was repressed as well, 30 years ago, so it's not even the original, but it's a massive piece of history that people are so obsessed with. These number plates were first issued, I think, on motor vehicles in 1911, but they were actually only printed and given out as plates in the 1920s. And yeah, the CEO of Coles and Foster's, although I think Foster's was sold overseas, right? To an American company? But the CEO of Coles, Peter Bartels, owns number one and he knocked back offers for it for a one and a half million dollars, so... But what car would you put it on if you had one?

What car would I put it on? Probably a 1925 T model Ford, which is probably what it went out in the first place.

But I thought I would be on an absolute shitbox of a car, just as a joke, right.

It's one of those episodes isn't it. Just Press delete now.

That's it. Just hit stop. Skip to the next one. But yeah, I can't imagine what car you would get that's worth more than the number plate.

I remember of 15 years ago, 20 years ago seeing a story like this in a newspaper where the number plate GTA-JOE had sold for $100,000. And this had been 20 years ago. And that was in relation to the GTHO Falcons. They were touring cars that, and I think we're talking about a couple of episodes ago, yeah, the touring cars in... They were the Falcon of the Ford back in the 70s. And obviously somebody had got that personalised number plate GTA-JOE to stick on their car.

Yeah.

And they had obviously got rid of the car, but kept the number plate. And people were saying at the time that if they still had the car, they could get 20000 for it. But the number plate is so collectable by every person who has one of those cars restored would want that number plate. And so it went for five times the value of the car that it would have been on.

It seems ridiculous. And I still don't get people who get personalised plates. It just easily screams at me "Bogan", right. I don't know, where you see like SHAZZA5, or something. And not only that, you have to pay hundreds of dollars.

Yeah. It cost you money.

To get a number plate personalised.

I remember seeing a bumper sticker, and unfortunately was before the days of having a camera in your phone so you couldn't just, you know, click and take a photograph of it. But a bumper sticker next to one of those with a little arrow on it and a sign saying, "This just proves what a rich knob I am."

At they've got a sense of humour.

I can't remember what the numbers said. The bumper sticker was better than the number plate.

What would you get if you were going to get a personalised plate on your car? What would it be?

I honestly, I've never thought about it because I think it's just such a bizarre idea that, you know, identifying your car by some... Because of the way number plates are done in Victoria anyway, we're restricted to six digits. And so that makes it difficult to come up with a novel word that is still meaningful cause they've all been done.

You have to use numbers, and...

Yeah, the old school nickname of 'SMISSO,' which is not much of a contraction of Smissen... Yeah, I'm sure that would be taken not by person with our surname, but it must be taken.

But I was trying to find 'AUSENG', But it was taken.

Yeah.

And I was like, "Ugh, I'd totally get that. I would get that if it wasn't taken. But I'm not using numbers."

It'd be a lot cheaper to just get a magnetic sign and stick it on the side of your car.

Very true.

And you can do that for 100 bucks.

Yeah, but it's not tax deductible... Well actually... What am I talking about? They both would be. The next story was a man stealing an $800 necklace using a fishing rod on Little Collins Street from Le Style in Melbourne the other night. Did you hear about that?

No. That one slipped through my trawling of the news.

So police are trying to catch a man who used a fishing rod to steal a Versace necklace off a mannequin through a shop window in Melbourne's CBD. The man spent almost three hours trying to hook the eight hundred dollar costume jewellery off the dummy's neck after breaking a hole in the window of high end fashion boutique 'Le Style' in Little Collins Street. Police said the thief used two different sized rods before eventually reeling in the Medusa medallion necklace just after 2:00 a.m. on Monday.

It's a fake.

Nah nah, $800.

It's fake. Like the real one to be worth thousands. Yeah. Yeah. So he's gone to all that trouble to get an $800 necklace.

It's so funny, though...

What's he going to do with it?

Because the videos there, you can see his face clearly pretty so non... He's so awkward. It's not nonchalant at all. He's just walking around with this fishing rod in the middle of the Melbourne CBD and then he's like sort of half looking around and shoving it through this gap in the glass and then trying to like fish around, using it. It's so awkward.

One assumes he was doing this after hours.

it was 2 am.

2 am.

So he obviously started at 11 pm. But it's just like... It's just so weird.

What are the cops on the beat doing in the CBD? Obviously, they're down at King Street, you know, breaking up fights.

that's it. All right. The next story is that a new genus of Australian lion was discovered in the Queensland Riversleigh World Heritage fossil site. Did you hear about that one?

No, I didn't. But it's not a surprise. Riversleigh is the sort of Mecca of fossils in Australia.

Yeah, it's called... See if I can get this right. "Lekaneleo roskellyae," And it's a new genus. So it's about the size of a domestic cat. Really powerful flesh cutting teeth. But it's a marsupial. These are marsupial lions like Thylacoleo, which are these things that were... Thylacoleo is much larger and...

Thylacoleo was larger kangaroos...

Big kangaroos. I think Thylacoleo, the Australian marsupial lion had the strongest jaw force or bite of any mammal. Yeah. That's ever existed. And it's crazy because they have these carnassial teeth. They have these huge teeth at the sides, right. That are instead of molars, they just have two big teeth that are used like shears, like scissors to slice through meat and these massive claws for thumbs like velociraptors. But the... Big claws where the thumb is and they could stand up on their hind legs and grab like that, you know these huge kangaroos.

But, um, this guy was a little one who roamed the earth 24 million years ago and lived in trees, eating birds, snakes, possums and even animals the size of sheep, which is pretty creepy. But they were saying that they've been dissolving fossil limestone in acid for more than 40 years and they finally discovered and described this one and that... Yeah, it's pretty significant. They died out 35000 years ago, though. Marsupial lions as a group, which is kind of sad. It would be kind of cool to have a pretty large predator in Australia that humans were afraid of.

He'd be the equivalent of lions in Africa, tigers in India, Asia. Mountain lions or cougars in North America. So it's...

I think they would scare the shit out of me much more than a bear or something, though, I think.

Yeah, I've seen plenty of bears in the forest in North America. And, you know, you never particularly concerned as long as you know...

If you can see the bear, you're probably okay. Unless it's running at you.

And they smelled you beforehand. Unless you're doing something stupid. But yeah, cougars would be very different because as the old saying goes, you don't see a cougar coming because they attack from above. They jump out of things onto you.

Did you see that guy who killed one with his bare hands in America last year?

No.

I think he was a young one, a juvenile. And it was obviously, you know, having just left its mother or whatever to try and fend for itself. This guy was just running and suddenly he got attacked by this cougar and ended up having to strangle it to survive. But he did it with his bare hands. Killed the cougar with his bare hands. But yeah, no chance he'd be doing that with an adult.

No. You could try.

The marsupial lines as so cool because they were alive when Aboriginals were in Australia. So the last of them died out 35000 years ago, which overlapped with estimates of Aboriginals, Indigenous Australians getting here within the last sixty thousand years. But imagine that, right? You know, you've only got wooden spears to defend yourself against something like that. Like I always... It blows my mind thinking of the indigenous people who first came to Australia when all the megafauna was here, because we had Megalania, That six metre long goanna, bigger than a crocodile that walked around and hunted people down and things like Thylacoleo and these huge wombats, I think Diprotodon, right. And then the massive kangaroos too.

The worst thing was them sitting on you, so...

Yeah, but the crazy thing I learnt too recently about some of the megafauna is that some indigenous songs and stories warn of megafauna. So they've been... The songs have been passed down for so long that you can trace the references in them to large animals that no longer exist because there was one woman giving a TED talk, talking about how when she was young there were songs or stories telling them that if a big... I can't remember the name of the animal, came around at the night-time, you had to climb up a tree because it couldn't come and get you. And they worked out... Well, they surmised, they think that was diprotodon that they were referring to. Not that it would hunt you down, but it was just a dangerous animal.

It's like elephants and rhinos. They're not going to eat you, but...

They'll mess you up.

They'll mess you up. Exactly.

But what do you think is the reason that a lot of our megafauna went extinct?

Oh, look, who knows? There's... People have said, well, you know, as soon as humans arrived here, then they just hunted them out. But that is probably 20000 years from since humans first arrived. In fact, 30 or 40 thousand years, because some of those megafauna didn't die out until about ten or fifteen thousand years ago. So I think, yes, there would have been hunting of them, but I don't see that as it. I think it just would have been, you know, hesitate to say it, climate change.

I think it's a combination of the two because I definitely think hunting would have done it.

Hunting will have had an effect.

But not the way that people think because there was a study released looking at mammoths. I think in population densities there and a lot of people freak out thinking that, you know, how on earth could indigenous people anyway kill so many mammoths and eat them? And it's like, "You're not thinking about it correctly. They weren't killing the adult mammoths. They were killing the young that run away." And if you're just picking off the small animals that you can eat a lot faster and the population isn't reproducing, it's going to collapse pretty quickly. So that would be my... Sort of where I would hedge my bets.

I think unlike I mean, unlike the moa, which were the giant flightless birds in New Zealand.

Yeah.

Which quite clearly got hunted out by the Maori...

And the large eagles died because those moa disappeared, right, there were huge Eagles in New Zealand that died out as well a thousand years ago.

Yeah. So basically, you know, within 100 years of humans arriving in New Zealand, those very large birds disappeared. And so, and the moas... Because you've got very large, slow and probably aggressive birds that you were going to try and kill anyway for your own safety, but you could eat them.

Do you think... I was watching Q&A last night. Did you watch this week?

No, I didn't watch this week.

Trigger warning. Trigger warning. It was very left of centre and sort of thinking about which point I'm trying to make... But there were two indigenous women on there talking a lot about indigenous issues and the fact that, you know, indigenous management of the land would help with bushfires. But I feel like in today's political-correctness climate, we attribute those sorts of positive attributes of some groups of indigenous people widely to all indigenous people, and we think all indigenous people were, you know, living in a utopia prior to European colonisation.

They all managed the land perfectly. But reality wasn't like that at all, right. A lot of things would have gone extinct and the land would have changed as a result of indigenous people coming here. And there was a lot of conflict and death and fighting and wars and everything like that. Why is it you think that we like to look back on our history and try and turn a lot of grey into black and white? You know, the good guys, the bad guys when it comes to that sort of stuff?

Because grey's boring.

Is it also more nuanced and it's more difficult to..?

That sounds cynical, but I think there's a... We want to recognise... In the case of indigenous people, we want to recognise that they've been here for tens of thousands of years and those tens of thousands of years they seem to have, if we look at certainly the ecological, historical, ecological studies are suggesting that they did seem to manage a lot of areas, not all of them in all parts of Australia, because a lot of them in particularly in southern Australia, were not burning off big tracts of land of things. They were living in areas where they were migratory because they would move away from mountains in the winter and get to the coasts...

Surely there were places where the food sources were different and didn't require that kind of management in order to make sure the food was there.

If you're eating a lot of fish, you don't need to be burning forests, those sort of things.

Well that was what I got from reading this book recently. Watkin Tench. 1788.

Good book.

He didn't mention anything about burning off or anything like that because they were around Sydney harbour, they were eating a lot of fish and whale and other things.

So I think there's that element. But I think there's also... We also have that same, and I hesitate to say this sort of rose coloured glasses opinion, but we have that same sort of reverence for the early pioneers, not necessarily first settlers, but the people who... The early pioneers, European pioneers who moved into other parts of Australia, moved down and they put sheep out there and they created industry and in all those sort of things. Whereas the flipside of that is that they destroyed the land.

Yes.

They at least, if not killed, moved out a lot of indigenous people and so on.

Which put them in conflict with other groups and killed them off.

Exactly. So we have these... We have sort of very narrow views of the good and the bad, because the reality is that most of those people, through most of their lives and most of history are just carrying on their life. They're not heroes and they're not villains. There's no story to tell about that.

I Kind of get irritated a little bit around the talking about convicts as well, because there's so much nuance to it. They came to Australia not by choice.

Yeah.

You know, they came out here, I would imagine most of them on trumped up charges where they'd stolen something very petty.

And there were very political ones. The Irish, a lot of those, were just political refugees effectively.

A large group of people who were sent out here with no real other choice, no other option but to try and survive. And you know, what else would you have done if put in that situation? But at the same time, when you read something like Watkin Tench, you see that a lot of the convicts were pieces of shit. Horrible people...

You put a whole lot of crooks together, and even those that the political ones or the petty criminals, what are you going to do to survive in that environment?

Yeah, it is really sad. And we were watching a doco last night, Lawmakers by the History Channel, which is with Mike Munro, who was, I think, on A Current Affair and 60 Minutes. And he found out throughout his life that his great grandfather or his grandfather had actually changed his surname from Kenneth to Munro, because... I can't remember his first name. But there were two Kenneth Brothers who ended up outlaw bushrangers who murdered and chopped up and burnt a bunch of people. And so his grandfather changed his name. Yeah, well, at the time it was a massive taboo. Anyway, Munro has done this job of going around talking about four of the biggest bushrangers, including Ned Kelly. Ben... What's his name?

Ben Hall.

Ben Hall. Captain Moonlite.

Ned Kelly was never really a bushranger in that sense. He was a criminal and he was forced to live out in the bush because the police were chasing him and trying to capture him. But he wasn't that classic bushranger of holding up stagecoaches with stand and deliver and, you know, stealing people's money and those sort of things.

I wanted to ask you before I guess you get into it too deeply, what do you think of Ned Kelly? Is he a good guy? Is he bad guy? Is he black or white or is it massive amounts of grey? And what do you think of his appreciation or hatred that he gets from the Australian public?

Yeah, again, mostly I think he's become that sort of anti-hero legend. And everything that I know about him, and that's all just what I've read, obviously, some of which is fiction, some of which is historical documentation, that historical documentation is typically written by his enemies. Yeah, the police, the courts, the newspapers who initially were on the police side. Sympathy for Ned Kelly, though, increased quite significantly even during his life. There were lots of people around who were hiding him and...

Helping him, giving him food.

And the sympathy... Even in Melbourne, the sympathy for him, even up until when he was killed...

Executed.

People were on his side. Because I think, though, that the one thing that he had about him is that he wasn't well educated in the traditional sense, but he was fairly articulate and he was willing to speak his mind. And he wrote and he wrote letters.

Or dictated them.

Yeah. Or dictated them. But. and so the... There is a record of his opinion, of his position. And it's quite sympathetic when you look at that, because he was basically saying... He'd he never claimed he wasn't a criminal.

Yeah.

But he was... He claimed that he was forced into being a petty criminal because his mother, she was a single mother by the time he was a young adult.

She was a widow.

Yeah, widow. And he was basically saying, "Look, my mother is being forced off out of her house, off the land. We have no other way of surviving other than by stealing money." So he was robbing banks.

Well I think a big problem, too, is that the police had it in for him and his family because they were... I think they were Irish. They were Catholic. They hated Protestants. They were treated poorly. The mother had some sort of side hustle of selling moonshine, illegal hooch to people.

And one of the policemen, the young policeman who liked to buy the hooch, had a crush on Ned Kelly sister, and came over to the house one night. And this... It's so crazy because you can see when you hear about his story that this is the moment, the pivotal moment where it all went bad and all went south, where he goes over one night harassing Ned's sister and Ned's mother smacks the guy in the back of the head with a shovel and the douchebag goes back to the police and says that Ned shot him.

Yes.

And that starts everything, where the police come out. Ned runs away. And then the... But the problem is that, yeah, initially he is running away and he's on the back foot. But then I think it's... What is it called again? Spring Creek or whatever it is.

Where they were camped.

They were camped there and there were a bunch of police that camped nearby them within a kilometre. And Ned found them and executed three of them. One of them got away. But I think he claimed self-defence the whole time. And in this doco is really interesting because they broke down the wounds and the injuries and where everyone was. And it was very clear that it wasn't self-defence, that these people were shot whilst running, or, you know... I think the one guy who was executed had a massive shotgun hole in his chest. And Ned had always said it was a mercy killing. They effectively showed that wasn't the case.

So it is something where there is a lot of nuance to his story, right. But yeah, what do you think of people who, in Australian culture today, hold Ned Kelly up as this, you know, real evil guy versus this hero? Do you think that's part of the problem we have today where we want it to be black or white?

We want to polarise everything. It's become a part of our sort of socio-political landscape, I think, where we try... Not you and I, but as a culture, we seem to... At least the media scores points and makes money out of polarising things. Yeah, yeah. If you tell the extreme story, then somebody else will tell the alternative story. And the reality is probably going to be 90 per cent in the middle. And so that's what we... We were waiting for the know the 10 second soundbite by a politician who is only ever going to say something controversial if you're going to take 10 seconds of it, because even if it was perfectly reasonable thing to say, it'll be represented out of context.

The stories we get now, and I rant about this all the time, the stories that we get in most of the certainly the Internet based media is just rubbish stories. There are... 50 people on Twitter said this. That's not a news story, what other people's opinion was, what actually happened?

Well, I guess what news outlets are really after, these media outlets, now are after clicks and views...

It's clickbait.

...To expose you to ads.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so they don't really care about the content in terms of quality anymore because that's not what's... That's not what's bringing you to the page. The outrage is.

It's the instantaneous stuff. And so they have to have, you know, clickbait headlines that often have nothing to do with the story in them. I tell this story again, one of those things that happened before I had a mobile phone with a camera in it, I remember years ago at a check out in a supermarket where they always have the horrible women's magazines, not horrible women, but women's magazines that are horrible, and the fact that they call it makes...

It's gossip. All gossip.

And there was two of them which are competing from different publishers, had the same photograph of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban on them. And one of them, the headline was "Nicole and Keith Breaking Up" and the other headline was "Nicole and Keith More in Love Than Ever". And it was the same stock photograph that they had both used. And you just sit there and go, "Well, at least one of them is a lie. In fact, both of them are lies."

How do either of these... Well, how does any of this media, like women's magazines like that, make money these days when stars have Instagram and you can check in?

I don't... To be honest, I don't know. I honestly don't know. And look, those magazines are a relic from a bygone era where we had a much greater differentiation in the home role of men and women, where men went out to work and women were the homemakers, you know, cooking, cleaning, looking after children. So those women's magazines when I was growing up were mostly full of recipes, knitting patterns, cleaning solutions, those sort of housekeeping type things.

Once in the 60s and the 70s, many women and rightly so, stayed working because back in the 50s... My mother is an example. When she got married she lost her job. She didn't get fired, but she just knew that they weren't going to keep her because you couldn't employ a married woman. You could employ a single woman. She worked in a bank. You could employ a single woman. But a married woman? No.

But is that is that like that sort of assumption that up until recently was, you know, pregnant women aren't going to keep working at this place. They're going to take time off so we won't hire them? Was it the same idea of "She's married, so she's probably going to take care of the family and disappear", or..?

No, I think it was just that, you know, it was because, you know, the vast majority of families, the man worked in paid work and the woman worked in unpaid slavery in the home. And so there was this thinking, "Well, if a married woman stays working, she doesn't need to work because her husband is going to keep her and therefore she is taking the job from another man,"

Who would otherwise be supporting their family.

Would otherwise have been supporting his family. So I think that was the mentality up until the 1950s and the early 1960s. And then from there on, many women went to work and so on. So your average woman's magazine got left with nothing to tell. And so they turned into gossip rags. And so... And you know... And that's where paparazzi make their money. And paparazzi didn't make their money out of newspapers. They made their money out of gossip rags, coloured glossy photographs on the front page.

It is funny that there isn't an equivalent for men. I guess, you know, you would hate to paint people with stereotypes, but, you know, they focus these things on women because I guess women are much more interested in relationships and talking about, you know, having conversations about those sorts of things, whereas men are much more vain or interested in cars or... It's weird how we fall along those stereotypes. It is a stereotype and I'm sure plenty women hate those magazines.

There are plenty of magazines that are clearly aimed at a male audience.

Yeah.

Car magazines or fitness magazines that always got bulked up, muscly men on them. And the occasional one that will have a woman who's a fitness instructor or something. But so there are those that are aimed at them, but they're not celebrity gossip stories that are in them. And I don't think that women are any more attracted to celebrity gossip than men are. I think it is simply that relic of these magazines have been going on and they evolved in it. I'm sure if they had never been coming out of the 1950s and before that, if they had never existed... And I don't think any publisher today would say, "I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to start a magazine. I'm going to take a whole lot of photos and tell lies about celebrities! That'll sell!" But it just wouldn't happen because all that shit is on the Internet.

You don't need to go and spend five to eight dollars to buy a colour glossy magazine because that stuff's in your Facebook feed and your Twitter feed and your Instagram constantly. So anyway...

I wanted to run something else past you.

What was the news story that we got to this from?

Well we were talking about...

Was it toilet paper?

We're talking about Q&A and everything. But another thing on there that really irritated me, and I have this sort of issue with a lot of the stuff on ABC these days, it seems to be very... And again, we have we have arguments over using the terminology Left versus Right, but it seems to be very left-focused. So Q&A is a website... A series that you can watch online, but it's effectively question and answer, right. And I used to love it because they would interview interesting... They'd have a variety of different people have different opinions on this show that would talk about controversial issues or news and current affairs. It's a great place, you know, if you're trying to learn English and understand Australian culture and news...

Was. Not a fan of it now.

But why has it taken such a massive swing to the left? And why do they believe that diversity is only related to race, gender, race, religion, but they don't care about diversity of political views or diversity of opinion or... Like, because last night I was watching it and it was, you know, two indigenous people, an Indian Australian guy and one really left wing white Caucasian Australian guy. And they were all left wing, you know, very far left wing. There was no... It was all of them agreeing with one another. So, I mean, there's nothing, you know, there's nothing wrong with listening to them talk about these issues. But there was no balance. So it's very weird.

I think that the show has changed. The host has changed. And obviously, the production has changed in a sense that they're... I don't know whether it's because of the host or the fact that they've got a new host meant, "Oh, we can change the structure of the show," as you say, previously it used to be, "We'll just take a bunch of people," and they were typically... There would be... If there would be two politicians on there.

From both sides, right.

From at least different parties, not necessarily complete opposition all the time. But they would have people with different opinions, different political positions. They would have, you know, some random celebrity or intellectual who was touring the country at the time. Let's have this person on, you know, let's have Richard Dawkins on.

Yeah.

And they didn't spend the entire show talking about evolution and creation.

No, no.

He was talking about racism in Britain, and all sorts of things were coming up just because he's worth listening to.

Yeah.

And so that's what that's what the show used to be. And it was... I thought it was really good. There were occasionally shows where you just went, "Now, this is just getting out of hand," and the fact that's in front of a live audience, it also makes it entertaining. And they're canned questions because obviously they've got a limited number... It's not just put your hand up and shout out a question. They invite people, clearly, to put questions in beforehand, and then the producers will choose which ones get up to talk. But at least you've got people in the audience who can ask questions. It's not just the panel members who are controlling the conversation.

But now it seems to have turned into that, whether it's left wing or whether it's one side of politics or whether it is looking at their version of diversity is to take minorities and so on. I don't... I agree. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. You're having a show that just says,"We're going to dedicate this show to looking at those issues," is fine, but it's not the same show anymore.

Well you're not looking at the issues from different multiple views, right...

They should've just canned the original show and created a different gig because the original one was have different, opposing points of view...

And let people make up their mind.

Let people make up their mind and have an argument and so on. Whereas if that's the show that they wanted to do and there's nothing wrong with that show, if that's what they want to do, they should canned the old Q&A and started up a new show and called it whatever, you know, Minority Views.

It was just it was so frustrating because last night they were talking about domestic violence in Australia and it's now being labelled a crisis. And it is one of those things where in and of itself it is horrific. It's horrifying. But I mean, I was talking to one of my friends who works in domestic violence in Melbourne and he's like, "It's not increasing. It's not a crisis."

It's not as it was ten years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago. In fact it's probably less bad because now it's exposed.

Yeah, 100%. And I think part of the problem is that we need to we need to keep making these monsters, right...

It's to create controversy in the press. It's the media. Blame the media for everything.

But the thing... The issue that I had, I can't remember his name, but the Indian Australian guy seemed to be very far on the left spectrum when talking about domestic violence and very anti-male. And some of the stuff that he was saying was kind of horrifying where I think... Someone had mentioned that this monster had murdered his wife. Ms. Clark and the three children. And he was like, "I object to the word monster. He was a man. He was a man who did this." And it's one of those things where...

it's just postmodern semantics. I don't like it.

That freaks me out. That kind of rhetoric that seems to be getting a lot of airtime these days where we find the group that we want to associate with the perpetrator that did something and we can point at them and blame them for it to feel better about ourselves and sort of offload the problem and say, "This is you guys who have to who have to solve this." But I don't feel like that helps ultimately, especially with domestic violence, because you make enemies out of every other male that would never have done anything like that.

Exactly.

Because it now feels like, "Well do you think I would do that at the drop of a hat?"

And we had this discussion a couple of episodes ago. In the end, the solution for male against female domestic violence is men.

Yeah.

So if you're going to disenfranchise men. Three and a half billion of them. Then you're not going to be able to solve the problem.

Yeah. It's frightening.

So what else are we got?

So Sun Yang was banned for eight years from swimming. Do you want to talk about what happened there with the anti-doping rules that have come through and why he's been banned? Because I don't think they've shown that he has tested positive to steroids yet. But he refused to allow his blood to be tested.

Exactly. And he dodged being tested to the point of, you know, what appears to be criminal behaviour.

Do you want to talk about the backstory there with the... I think there was an Australian swimmer. I'd forgotten his name and a British swimmer...

Mack Horton, I can't remember the British swimmer.

Both swam and came in the second or third.

Mack Horton got beaten just by him. Yeah, I think with the 400 meters.

And they refused to sit on the podium...

And he accepted his medal standing next to the podium and wouldn't stand on the podium with him because he said he's a drug cheat, you know.

So how do they know? Is it basically... Do they have insider information on this stuff or is it mainly that they knew they....

They knew that he dodged it. And there's the stories all over the place and people can read that story if they want to go and find it. It's not hard to find because it was an international incident, you know, when Mack Horton refused to stand on the podium at the world championships. And the other side of it, too, I think, is that Sun Yang is the second most successful swimmer in history in terms of world championship and Olympic medals. And so this is a huge story in terms of, well, if he wasn't a drug cheat, why was he avoiding being tested to that extent?

Yeah. So what would it mean if he would've found out... Were to be found out that he had been cheating and on drugs? What would that mean for the sport?

Well, yeah, swimming's an interesting one because it's sort of been mostly clean for a while. There were periods in the sort of 70s in the 80s where the Eastern Europeans were quite clearly taking irresponsible chemicals to enhance their performance.

Why do countries like Russia care so much about winning the Olympics? Like, who gives a shit?

One of those episodes is it?

Who gives a shit about winning sports? Like as a country, as a nation, I guess.

I think it's... Russia was one. East Germany was clearly the worst. and I think for East Germany, it was all about national pride, because let's face it, East Germany was just effectively a little carve off in the communist era of a previous German Prussian state. And it didn't have anything going for it. Yeah, it was one of the most the tightest communist regimes. And nobody could get in or out of East Germany except on sporting trips.

And so I think that was the way they made their, you know, their national pride was around, you know, our sporting performance. And I use the example all the time of one of my sporting heroes, Raelene Boyle. Hey Raels, if you're listening. She's, I think, the greatest woman sprinter in history and she's never won an Olympic gold medal. Never broke a world record because she was racing against East Germans who were clearly on the juice. And she was by far and away the second best person in the world. But she simply couldn't beat Renate Stecher in the 1972 Olympics. Came second in 100 and 200 to a woman who looked like me, you know. And then there was a period, getting back to swimming, there was a period in the 90s, I think it was, maybe early 2000s, where the Chinese women's team went from nothing to breaking almost every world record in a period of about two years. And these women were huge.

They were bigger and stronger than the Chinese men who weren't doing very well swimming.

Why weren't those groups doing it, though?

Well, even if the men had been on the stuff, they're not going to get a significant improvement out of taking anabolic steroids as the women are. These women had shoulders bigger than mine. And, you know, these huge shoulders, tiny narrow hips. You know, they look like Tarzan.

Well, that's one of the things that China seems to have is an advantage over other countries. This just the sheer size of their population and the amount of people that they can select from in order to have, you know, elite athletes...

Yeah. Yeah. If China decided that they wanted to become the elite sports country in the world, just on sheer numbers, you've got to reckon they would be able to do it. India would be close as well. But India, I think the majority of their population are not in a position to be able to be in those things where as China probably are. So, yeah. So I think there's a history of in Olympic sports of those things. But the Olympic sports is bizarre because, you know, the Chinese women were never going to make any money out of this.

Yeah.

They're not winning prize money by it. They might have been making money back in their home country for winning gold medals and those sorts of things. The East Germans were never... Athletics and swimming and things up until very recently, there was no prize money in it. So you're working to make a living out of it. There was no financial reward other than the rewards that your own government was going to give you.

Wow. They can be pretty lucrative sometimes, I imagine.

They can. Yes.

Including saying, you know, "Hey, we won't persecute you."

And look, there's a lot of the a lot of Russian athletes, for instance, in the military. And they don't do any military service as such, but they are paid and they are in the military and they are there to train. So, you know, that's... And particularly in military related sports, like shooting and things, you know, you almost always you say, "Oh, what's this person?" "Oh, he's a captain in the army."

Yeah.

"Really? What does he do?" "Shoot."

Far out. An update on Covid 19, so Coronavirus.

Don't mention toilet paper. Yes. First, death in Australia, sadly.

That was an elderly Perth man who was 78 years old and had been on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship. But fortunately, his wife didn't... She got it but didn't pass away.

So he actually didn't contract it in Australia. He got diagnosed by the time he got back to Australia.

Although I think in the last few days we've had a few verified human-to-human transmissions, right. The other updates, I guess, is that it's now spread to over 60 countries with over 93,000 infection rate, as in 93,000 people or more. 3200 deaths. Fortunately, though, 51000 people have recovered. And I think the mortality rate now is at 3.4%. There's some of the interesting stuff was that... From watching the Coronavirus ABC, I think Four Corners doco the other night, Iran has a much higher rate of mortality than China or the rest of the world, which is a little bit strange.

Yeah, look, we can hypothesise on why that might be, but it would be purely hypothetical.

Yeah.

Yeah. Look, and it may well be that... Iran's quite a sophisticated technological country. So I think their, you know, medical practices and things will be up to it. But it may well be that just places like China and South Korea have isolated people much more quickly.

Yeah.

It's not the once somebody hits hospital, it's the fact that, you know, most people are isolated...

That shit is terrifying. And that was making me think about, you know, the ethics of a pandemic or epidemic where the disease spreads and the government's trying to control the disease. But what are the limits that should be imposed on human rights? Because the stuff in Wuhan in China is frightening. There was an Australian guy in this documentary living there with his Chinese wife in Wuhan. And he's like, "There are sick people to the left of my house. There are sick people living above me. The hospital in Wuhan across the road."

"And I can't leave my home."

Yeah. Well they were welding doors shut in certain apartment buildings so people couldn't leave the apartment buildings, one woman was up on a balcony crying because her mother was currently dying in her bed in her house, and you're just like, "My God," like, what do you do in a situation like that where so many people are sick and people are dying and you don't want the thing to spread? It's just frightening, because he was like, at any moment they can come to my house, open the door, take my temperature, and if it's elevated, they'll just tear me away, take me to the hospital. And even if I'm not infected, I'm now exposed to all these people who are. But at what point... At what point do you need to impose those kinds of utilitarian practices to make sure that the majority benefit and avoid sickness?

Yeah. Look, it's a bit like... And there's been a whole lot of those sort of movies about the giant pandemics and so on.

Well, the movie, sorry to interrupt you, the movie Pandemic is now trending because everybody's watching it.

But there's a lot of them. and they all have those clichéd things of it happened in one little town in Oklahoma. And all of a sudden the army has surrounded this town with tanks and anybody who leaves a town will be shot. And know we're not quite at that stage, but it seems like there are some examples of it in some places in the world where it is.

But when you think about zombie apocalypses in these movies and you think how frightening that is because of the zombies, you know, you think that first and foremost, the threat is the person who's sick, and, you know, turns into a brain eating monster... But it's crazy the effect that a flu virus can have on the way in which society works, right.

Without zombies or without any sort of, you know... We're just killing people at a percentage that's only 3% mortality... SARS was 10%, right. And so what do you think is going to happen with how society is going to move forward through this if it continues the way it's going, right? Because we've had the stock market crash more than it has since the 2008... What would you call it?

The Global Financial Crisis.

Yeah. And, you know, we have people stockpiling and freaking out on these things.

Don't mention toilet paper!

Where do we go from here? Surely it can only get worse in the short term.

Yeah. You don't know. I mean you could look at it with the rose coloured glasses on and use the toilet paper example of... Yeah, that was a two day panic and everybody went, "No, you're idiots," and it all stopped. But I think there's also going to be that risk that there will be more and more people... There's no way that the man who died in Perth is going to be the last Australian to die of this. But at the same time, around the world, 20,000 people a day die of cancer. In Australia, hundreds of people die of cardiovascular disease. Now they're not... You can't catch those, so there's not a fear of transmission of those diseases.

But people are dying of things all the time. and this is... Yeah, there's always the... And it's the catch 22, I suppose, is that you don't want to be flippant about them. So you, a country, the World Health Organisation, various national health organisations, and so on, don't want to be flippant about it and go, "Oh, it's just another flu virus. A few people will die and it will all be over." Because clearly the best way of reducing the number of people who die is to reduce the number of people who catch it.

But then if you're starting to get the... the world economics are changing. The supermarket runs out of toilet paper. You know, they're too into the spectrum. But yeah, there's a panic that has nothing to do with the disease. And so it's that balance between the two of... Yes, you wanted to run, you know, reduce the transmission of these diseases. But at the same time, you don't want the consequence of that to be so horrific that you might as well just let the disease run its course.

It is pretty crazy. The other the other thing, I guess, in terms of crazy side effects is the massive reduction in pollution in China as a result.

Because nobody's driving vehicles.

Well they've closed down industry, they've closed down transport and everything's come to a standstill. And now all of the nitrogen... Nitrous oxide. NO2 has just massively declined because cars, power plants, factories aren't running like they were. And it's also coincided with the Lunar New Year where businesses are closed. So it's crazy. There was a map of China with pollution mapped out a few months ago and today and it's gone. So ironically, the people in China can probably go outside now and breathe some of the cleanest air that they've probably ever experienced, at least in China.

Next story was... This was a weird one to talk about, too. So I was watching a Four Corners documentary on non-binary children and children having...

"I'm not a boy and I'm not a girl."

Yeah. Children deciding they don't have a gender. And so they were putting children as young as 11 on puberty blocker hormone drugs to stop them from going through puberty for the next five to six years. And it's one of those things that my initial thing is always, "What the hell are people doing!?" Especially when it comes to children of 11 years old. And I wanted to see what you thought about this situation, because you want to think... You know, you people... It's really interesting watching the doco and then seeing the comments below, because it seems like, like with a lot of these other issues, it's polarised.

Ironically Binary.

Yeah. These people either hold up these children as incredibly brave, wise, you know, "Save your children who are challenging what it is that we think gender is and sexes.," and then there are the others that are just like, "This is child abuse. And these people should be put in jail for doing this to their own children. They're getting brainwashed." Obviously, it's probably neither of those things.

And that's where I see it, because I don't think it's either of those, because, frankly, I don't think an eleven year old can be a social change hero. They're not choosing to react or behave or think the way they're thinking in order to change the way the rest of the world thinks about their issue. They are thinking about how they can survive in the world, and that's perfectly reasonable. If you're ambiguous in your gender and at the age of 8, 9, 10, 11, then that must be a really difficult thing for a child to go through when everybody else around them, because they're not going to know anybody else who is in that situation, typically...

Because this isn't even necessarily trans, right, where you're changing from male to female or female to male...

You're just somebody who doesn't really identify as either male or female.

Yeah. Or at least doesn't know currently which one they want to be.

That's right. They're ambiguous. And so they are surrounded by all of their friends and everybody else they know other than the occasional stories in the papers or the odd person, or not odd in a personality sense, but odd as in very unusual, you know, very small numbers of people. Everyone else is going to be male or female. And understand that they are male or female. So it must be a really challenging thing. I think more challenging than somebody who is trying to choose sexual preference because there's gay children, lesbian children will find other gay children and lesbian children. It's not unusual.

But for a child to say, you know, to not be able to identify as a boy or a girl, for their entire life, presumably, I'm sure they don't... And I didn't see the episode, but I'm sure these children have lived like that for their entire life. They have probably had a gender, a genetic based gender enforced upon them by their parents or society as little children and at rebelling against even that. So that in itself is a challenge. So it's an interesting one.

What happened with just accepting feminine men and masculine women, right? Because, and that was sort of the thing that I was kind of grappling with whilst watching this, I'm like, "Why can't you just be a boyish girl or a girlish boy, you know?" And I... It was really heart wrenching to see some of the parents... The problem, the biggest thing for the parents, and they were sort of like, "A Lot of people say this is child abuse. It's not. Not putting our children through this would be child abuse because they would likely commit suicide." And so you're at a point where you're like, "They're suffering if we don't do this and they're likely to suffer mental health problems in the future, if they're not given help now and may commit suicide vs. we give them, you know, hormones, drugs at a very young age that are going to affect their gender and their bodies in the long term but may help save them from psychological problems, distress and everything like that."

And I was just like, "Firstly, I don't envy those parents at all, being in that sort of a situation."

You can't imagine what that's like as a parent. But at what point do you say that something like that is a mental disease or a mental illness? Right. I mean like, I'm sure a lot of people don't want to have that kind of a conversation. But imagine you had a child who identifies as a bodybuilder or a different race or as a paraplegic and has significant distress in not being able to achieve that body. Would you be allowing the person to remove limbs, to paralyse themselves, or to inject themselves with growth hormones? I mean, I don't know if these are exact parallel arguments. My idea is, I guess, when it's a child who is not of an age to drink, to have sex, to drive, but they're at an age where they are allowed to make decisions about their physio-... Like they can't even get a tattoo. And they can make decisions though about... That are long lasting decisions. It seems like it's such an ethical nightmare.

And I think the hormone repression drugs are about just giving them time.

Yeah.

So just trying to, you know, trying to delay puberty, because once puberty has happened, then it's a much more difficult thing to do. Yeah. And so I think that's what it's about.

That's definitely what was across.

Yeah.

They were saying that, I think, once you get off the drugs, it is reversible. At least they believe that if... You can stay on these drugs that just holds puberty off. And after five years, you kind of have to make your decision. What you going to do? And if you keep going, you'll have...

Yeah, it'll have physiological effects into adulthood that, you know, it will be quite negative, I presume. I'm not a doctor, but... It's a really challenging one. I think that whole gender identity thing that is... It's become a hot topic over the last few years and rightly so, because there have always been people in our society who have identified as one gender or another, which is not their gender of birth. And that becomes an easier thing for those people now that it is being discussed and it's open and it's out there because you don't feel alone.

Yeah, like when I was a child. Yeah, I had a couple of gay friends and they knew they were gay, we knew they were gay, by the time they reached puberty. But for them, I'm sure it was a very lonely experience because very few people wanted to identify like that, even though they probably did internally and...

Because of the social repercussions.

But now, I mean, the stigma about being gay or lesbian is just... It's just not there the same way it has been. And that's a very good thing.

It's almost the inverse right now where we, as a society, attribute virtue and wisdom to people who happen to be now of minority groups that doesn't seem to be necessarily warranted, right.

I don't know about that. I would put it as well... For me, anyway, I more respect what they have been through in their life in order to get the position that they are in. And that's true for every person. But some people just have higher hurdles along the way.

Yeah.

And so I think I respect that. Your average heterosexual white male has a pretty easy life in comparison with a lot of other groups of people in Australia. Probably don't have in other parts of the world.

But again, it's not Necessarily by choice. It's by...

And that is that... I'm not saying that there's anything... That those people done anything wrong or they get it easy. But it's more that, you know, you can... A person who reaches their 40s and they're, as I say, a white heterosexual male reaches their 40s and is reasonably successful in life. You go, "All right. That's what we expect." But a lot of other minorities historically, that has not been a very easy thing to do. I think that is more easy now. But for some of the, you know, the... The more and more... Sorry, the less and less frequent or less and less popular populist, I'm trying to think of the word. It's not about popular. It's small groups in the population, really. We're talking about small proportions of 1% of the population, who are now being recognised as being challenged in our society. And respecting and giving them opportunities is a great thing.

But doesn't it get to a point where it's... You keep dividing down into minorities until you get to the individual?

Yes.

And then you're kind of like, "Well, we're all facing challenges that aren't exactly shared across the board, right?"

I think the bigger challenge is that they, and this is potentially going to be a politically insensitive thing to say, but there are bandwagons that people will jump on. And I think the transgender children bandwagon is a classic one of... How many celebrities... Why is it that celebrities are the only people who have transgender children? And how many celebrities saying, "Oh, yeah, my seven year old son identifies as a girl, therefore he's going to be a girl?" Oh, fine. He likes wearing dresses. He's effeminate. That doesn't mean he wants to be a woman when he turns 15 or 20 or whatever. If you're making that decision for a seven year old...

It's like one of those things where you've got two buttons and you've got someone sitting there who moves their hand towards one or the other and you clap every time they go close to one and brandish a gun when they go to the other. So like if you're rewarding someone for making a certain choice it kind of... They're going to keep going that way.

And that's not to say that some of these children aren't intending to be transgender.

That's where it gets to a point with me too. I'm kind of like, why aren't we just teaching people to accept who they are?

Yeah.

Like, what does it matter if you are born in a woman's body? But are more masculine. It seems like the suffering is all psychological, not physical. And so if we can just get you comfortable with who and what you are, the rest of it falls away, right. And so we should be building a society that's much more about... Surgery should be the answer or giving you lots of drugs shouldn't be necessarily the answer that, "Hey, you know, this 10 year old wants to do this, this," "Alright. We'll give them surgery, give them some drugs and sweet. Let's go." It should be more, "You're this. This is how you were made and let's make the most of it."

Right. Yeah. And it's a really challenging thing because there's all sorts of boundaries around it that... And I hesitate to say that others aren't necessarily genuine, but the genuine cases of psychologically conflicted people who are in transitions between genders or are uncertain and so on... That's a well-documented and perfectly reasonable group of people in our society. But there, at the other end of that spectrum, we have 15 year old girls having breast implants because they don't think their breasts are big enough. And yet I'm not equating the two. I think it's the same decision making process where, as parents, you have a child who is unhappy about who they are and what they look like and how they think of themselves and how they perceive that other people perceive them.

And you're allowing them to make choices about medical treatments and surgery that... In the case of the breast implants, you could question whether that was a legitimate thing for anybody to do, let alone a teenage girl, and as I say, I'm not equating that with transgender or gender identity and those sort of things. But it's from a parental point of view I think it's the same sort of thing that we have to start to consider, is how much rights do parents have to allow children to make those decisions or to influence them to make those decisions? I'm, as you said, you're in this country and you can't drink in a hotel, you can't serve in the military, you can't drive a car, you can't vote until you're 18, but you can choose to get tattoos. Breast implants. Yeah, have the hormone therapy to reduce your, you know, the effects of puberty so that you can make a gender choice later on.

And yet it's illegal for you to take steroids.

It's a very grey side of the ethics of medical practice. And it's around trying to keep people happy, which we all want to do. But yeah, a very difficult thing to do.

I don't know how you solve it, but it is weird. And I was the last thing I was going to say is why do you think so many people fetishise this sort of stuff? Where they hold up all of these minorities now as having, you know, wisdom that other people don't and thinking, you know, they're brave, they're so wise, and everything, and you're kind of like they're just... What makes you think that just because they're a minority?

I think they... Well, I think there's there's two sides of that. There's the side of the people who are in the same situation for whom these people who are either telling their own stories or having stories told about them become their heroes by default.

Yeah.

Because, hey, this person is telling my story as well. Then there's the other side of people who are not directly involved, but who, for all the right reasons, potentially, want to have a society where you've been talking about saying, "Well, let's just allow people to be who they want to be." And they will promote these people, as you know, as being the heroes or the standard bearers for particular issues. But then, as you said, there's the flip side of people who just say, "This is just child abuse. You know, parents should be locked up." And I don't think that's terribly helpful either.

Well, it doesn't help the children who are faced with these sorts of issues, right.

And the issue was real.

Yeah.

You know, as we're talking about with your blood problem. Hemophobia. Whether you actually have an illness or not, if you think you do, then the issue is real.

Yeah.

And so those issues need to be dealt with, whether they are dealt with by a parent and a child and their general practitioner, or whether they're dealt with by a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a social worker or a medical ethics committee somewhere, all of those things have to come into it. we have a 20 year debate going on in this country about legalising euthanasia. And that to me is a very personal choice, that where... At the moment many states, not all of them have allowed euthanasia, but the rules are so tight around it.

You have to be on death's door step to actually be able to go through the process of euthanasia.

It's one of those bizarre things that the law is set up with fail safes in them, perfectly reasonably so, but those fail safes make it so difficult that it sort of defeats the purpose.

It seems very weird. And a lot of people, especially it seems like the Christians in Australia are very frightened of what the euthanasia could be used to do. But it's like who is going to be taking, you know, their disabled uncle or disabled son to get euthanized? And who is going to be allowing them to do so? Because that seems to be their worry, right?

Ironically, that argument should be just as viable and justice sensible for me as a devout atheist as it is for a Christian. But there are too many atheists who are saying those things. So I think they are setting up straw men arguments that suit their argument. Their basic argument is, "That's not the way God wants it to be."

"God can't let you commit suicide."

So therefore it won't be. So any other argument will prop up as part of our case. So, yeah, I just I don't think it makes that much sense.

Anyway, Dad. We've gone through a lot of content.

We have.

Thank you so much for coming on.

A very long and winding conversation. That's good.

Hopefully you guys got a lot of shit out of this episode and didn't think it was shit house! Just go and buy toilet paper before it all disappears!

See you!

Send us some! Bye!

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