Ideas at the House

Michael Wesley is a Professor of National Security at the Australian National University. He is currently the Director of the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Studies in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the ANU. He also consults extensively for the Australian government. He has a new book being released this year called Restless Continent: Wealth, Rivalry and Asia's New Geopolitics. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Martin Ford is the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm and the author of two books:  The New York Times bestselling Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future and The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future. He has more than 25 years’ experience in the fields of computer design and software development.Marc Lewis, a professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, is a cognitive neuroscientist known for his research on the development of emotions and personality in childhood and adolescence. His current work, based on an integrative review of the neuroscience of addiction, shows that addiction is not a pathological state but rather an unfortunate result of a brain doing what it's supposed to do -- in fact overdoing it: pursuing pleasure and avoiding risk. Accordingly, he argues that to understand addiction we need to stop thinking of it as a disease. Lewis's 2012 book, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, is an account of his addiction to drugs as a young man, with accompanying explanations of the neurobiological processes underlying various drug experiences as well as the process of addiction itself. His new book is called The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dan Ilic is one of Australia’s most prolific comedic voices. Dan has been making television in Australia for ten years. His credits include: Australia’s Funniest Home Videos (Nine), Hungry Beast (ABC), Hamster Wheel (ABC), Can of Worms (Ten) and The Feed (SBS2) as well as being a regular on comedy panel shows and news magazine programs. In 2014 Dan raised more than $50,000 through crowd-funding to make A Rational Fear into a web series. Most recently Dan was Senior producer of Satire for AJ+ English, Al Jazeera’s digital platform for millennials.James Colley is a Young Walkley nominated satirist and creator of The Backburner on SBS Comedy. He works on The Weekly with Charlie Pickering and Gruen and has previously written for A Rational Fear andJunkee. Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt describes James as "utterly unfunny" with humour "of the kind that would make only Lenin laugh”. James Colley notes that Lenin was famously difficult to amuse.Kate McCartney is a writer/director, illustrator, animator and performer. Her work as a comedy performer and writer has featured in Big Bite, Hamish and Andy and The Time Of Our Lives and she also appeared inKath and Kim and Outland. Kate was also a senior writer for Sam Simmons’ Problems, and her other credits include Adam Hills Tonight, Dirty Laundry Live, Spicks and Specks and ABC3’s Little Lunch andYou’re Skitting Me. In February 2015, McCartney and writing partner Kate McLennan’s original concept The Katering Show was released on YouTube. To date, it has attracted more than 4 million views and 60 000 subscribers.James Jericho founded satire news website The Shovel in 2012 after realising no-one else was going to publish his exclusive exposé about the real use for George Brandis’s bookshelf or Tony Abbott’s target to cut Australia’s reputation by 30% by 2020. Now read by hundreds of thousands of Australians every month, and featured weekly on The Sydney Morning Herald, The Shovel has become the must-read masthead in Parliament House. James is The Shovel’s head writer and editor, and is a regular commentator on satire’s place in contemporary Australia. In June 2015 he kick-started a national campaign to find Bill Shorten.Jordan Shanks started Friendlyjordies with a focus on political and social satire. in 2013 and since then it has grown to an audience of more than 100,000 people on Facebook and YouTube. He writes articles for SBS Comedy and a weekly Friendly Jordies podcast that occasionally makes it to the Top Ten Australian podcasts.Rebecca Shaw (aka Brocklesnitch) is a freelance writer, podcaster and creator of the parody Twitter account @notofeminism. She is a columnist for the Kill Your Darlings Journal, one of the team at The Backburner, and has written for SBS, Junkee, and The Guardian. She is in constant competition with Ruby Rose to become Australia's favourite lesbian.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Johann Hari is a British writer and journalist who has written for many of the world’s leading newspapers, including The New York Times, Le Monde, and The Guardian. He was a lead op-ed columnist for The Independent for nine years, and left the newspaper after it was revealed that in some of his interviews, he had used passages that his interviewees had written or said elsewhere, and presented them as if they had been said directly to him. Since then he has written The New York Times best-selling book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Day of the War on Drugs, which has been praised for its insights and for its thorough referencing by everyone from Glenn Greenwald to Elton John to Noam Chomsky to Naomi Klein. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jon Ronson is a Welsh journalist, author and documentary filmmaker whose works include best-seller The Men Who Stare at Goats and The Psychopath Test. He has been described as a gonzo journalist, known for his informal but sceptical, investigations of controversial fringe politics and science. His new book So You've Been Publicly Shamed explores public humiliation in the internet age. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dennis Glover is a professional speech writer, a Fellow of the Per Capita think tank and a political columnist for the Australian Financial Review. He currently writes speeches for Labor members of parliament as well as business and community leaders. He is the author of two non-fiction works Orwell’s Australia and The Art of Great Speeches. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As an investigative journalist, Eric Schlosser continues to explore subjects ignored by the mainstream media and gives a voice to people at the margins of society. He’s followed the harvest with migrant farm workers in California, spent time with meatpacking workers in Texas and Colorado, told the stories of marijuana growers and pornographers and victims of violent crime, gone on duty with the NYPD Bomb Squad, and visited prisons throughout the US. Schlosser’s first book, Fast Food Nation (2001), helped start a revolution in how Americans think about what they eat. His second book, Reefer Madness (2003), looked at America’s thriving underground economy.  Both were The New York Times bestsellers. His most recent book, Command and Control (2013), examines the efforts of the military, since the atomic era began during World War II, to prevent nuclear weapons from being stolen, sabotaged, or detonated by accident.Command and Control was a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book, was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize (History) and also received the Gold Medal Award (Nonfiction) from the 2013 California Book Awards.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For much of the 1990s, Helen Razer could be heard blabbing on the ABC's youth network, Triple J. While the national broadcaster still occasionally permits her to talk in exchange for money, she is now chiefly engaged in the work of writing on social and cultural matters. She works with Crikey, The Saturday Paperand a range of publications who permit her to say terrible things. Her fifth book, A Short History of Stupid,remains a best-seller and was recently shortlisted for the NSW State Library's inaugural Russell Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Damon Gameau is well-known as an Australian film and television actor. In 2014, he directed That Sugar Film, a documentary which examines the place of sugar in our diet. It follows Gameau as he puts himself on a sugar-laden regime consuming food that is normally considered healthy, such as fruit juice and cereals. The documentary will be released in the US in July and has now been followed by That Sugar Book.Jane Martin is Executive Manager of the Obesity Policy Coalition (OPC), based at the Cancer Council Victoria. She advocates for policy and regulatory reform to prevent overweight and obesity, with a focus on food marketing, labelling, and tax and pricing measures. For over twenty-five years, Jane has worked extensively in public health advocacy, firstly in tobacco control then in obesity prevention.Sarah Wilson (Chair) is The New York Times best-selling author and entrepreneur. Her career as a journalist spanned 20 years, across television, radio, magazines, newspapers and online. She is the author of the international best-sellers I Quit Sugar and I Quit Sugar For Life and is director and founder of IQuitSugar.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Berg is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, where he specialises in civil liberties, the political economy of regulation, and media and technology policy. He is a weekly columnist with ABC’s The Drum, and has been published in all major Australian papers, as well as the Wall Street Journal. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.