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Red Hot Australian Christmas is a darkly funny 45 minute radio play set during last year’s devastating bushfire season. It’s the story of Heather, a matriarch trying her best to ignore the fires and host Christmas for her extended family. She stays strong even as the mercury rises and smoke starts to engulf her homestead in Maffra, Gippsland, until a code red is called, and all are forced to evacuate.

The play was written and directed by comedian and author Tegan Higginbotham. The radio play is semi-biographical, and appears in the feed of Paul Verhoeven's Loose Units

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You know that meme of the girl sitting beside the ice cream sign, "this is what its like to listen to podcasts"?

That's me whenever a new episode of Oh No Ross and Carrie drops.

If you've never heard their show, you're in for a treat, there's so many amazing episodes in the archives to explore.

https://ohnopodcast.com

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Podcasts can be incredibly niche affairs, allowing creators to indulge in their obsessions without chasing mass market appeal. Case in point is comedian Tim Ross' latest, House Stories; a short run series on the rarely seen tapestries of the Sydney Opera House.

When I mentioned how niche the subject matter was, Ross laughed and pointed to the recently wildly successful Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher, as evidence that "a great story is a great story, despite what it’s about." - read more at SMH

Tim and I talk about modern art and architecture, the Opera House, his podcast, and the Sirius towers in The Rocks.

..and that f**cking Octopus movie.

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Kara Swisher joins me to talk about her new podcast with the New York Times, Sway.

We also discuss her twenty year career on the tech beat, 500 episodes of Recode Decode, and discovering the big dog, Scott Galloway, for her podcast Pivot.

Along the way we talk about the importance of finding a mentor, doing what you love, Trump and Twitter, and answer the big question of the day, who is more destructive to democracy Rupert Murdoch or Mark Zuckerberg?

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American singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer was part-way through a world tour when COVID-19 shut the world down. As luck would have it, she was in New Zealand when her flights were cancelled.

"I think I won the jackpot on this one very much by accident, but I am really, really lucky, as an American and especially as a parent of a small child," Palmer says.

Palmer has spent her time in New Zealand finishing a podcast she started two years earlier. The podcast, The Art Of Asking Everything, has Palmer interviewing artists and activists, including Tim Minchin, Dan Savage and Tim Flannery. Palmer recorded interviews on tour, tracking down the thinkers she’d always wanted to speak to.

"I used the podcast as an excuse... to just go very very deep with someone I wanted to befriend anyway, and I use it as my excuse to talk to them and cut through all of the small talk and the bullshit," she says.

"I've recorded about 20 episodes of it, and it's just incredibly deep personal conversations with big thinkers. Mostly artists, but also psychologists and climate scientists and all sorts of people who were just great conversationalists."

Recording the episodes so far in advance, Palmer was "afraid that the episodes would get stale and wouldn’t stand up in a COVID world" but she was pleased the conversations are "much deeper than that, so they’re evergreen conversations".

And her fans supporting the project on Patreon have access to "live follow-up chats with all of the guests, to just check in post-COVID. Where are we, where is your work at, how was your lockdown?" she says.

"The painful paradox of the pandemic is that in times of crisis, we are instinctively called to move towards one another and to gather and to rely on our collectivism and our collective effort. And we've been physically unable to do that.

“That's the big one-two punch and the big paradox of this pandemic is that we've been separated and then separated again."

Palmer has been watching the civil unrest, protests and failed response to COVID-19 with horror – a completely predictable horror, but a horror nonetheless.

"It's devastating. I just feel like we are watching the wheels fall off the bus. I wake up every day and I read the news and listen to what's happening and there's ... a part of me that shakes my head and thinks, 'This can't be happening. We live in a constitutional democracy. The President's not allowed to say that.'

"So I am doing what I think most Americans are doing, which is I am not trying to forecast, because I feel that that's probably a waste of energy. Instead Ir'm trying to batten down my emotional hatches and try as best I can to use my platform to get people to register and to actually vote."

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