Green Fix
Welcome to the Green Fix, the climate & sustainability podcast for Australian corporations and their ESG practitioners. We explore the top challenges and opportunities in the industry, how they are impacting your business and your work, so that you can keep your sanity.
Green Fix
S2 E1: What if comedy could save the planet? with Dan Ilic, A Rational Fear Podcast
Comedy might just be our most powerful tool in the fight against climate inaction. When data and spreadsheets fail to move hearts and minds, laughter creates an opening for truth to slip through defenses and take root.
Award-winning podcaster and media strategist Dan Ilic joins The Green Fix to share his remarkable journey from viral video creator to climate activist extraordinaire. Long before digital content could "go viral" with the tap of a share button, Dan was pioneering comedic climate communication, demonstrating how humor can distill complex information into "memetic versions of truth" that stick with audiences in ways data never could.
The conversation takes us behind the scenes of his most audacious stunt – crowdfunding billboards in Times Square that publicly shamed the Australian government's climate policies during COP26. What began as a modest $12,000 campaign for a single billboard in Glasgow snowballed into a six-figure international media sensation that ultimately pressured then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison to attend the climate summit he'd planned to skip. "If I could do one thing, making Scott Morrison go to COP was the one thing I could do for the movement," Dan reflects.
For sustainability leaders navigating corporate environments, Dan offers refreshingly practical advice: show your actual emissions reduction work rather than relying on consultants or generic ESG messaging. "Find meaningful and tangible ways to do great work, reduce actual emissions, and then talk about it authentically," he urges, suggesting companies could even introduce their own "carbon tax" by charging polluting clients differently or offering incentives for climate action.
Ready to infuse your sustainability communication with humor that cuts through the noise? Listen now to discover how comedy might be the secret weapon we've been overlooking in the climate fight.
You can find Dan's work at:
A Rational Fear
Not A Real Media Company
Instagram
Your Hosts:
Dan Leverington
Loreto Gutierrez
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I don't know if you've ever seen a spreadsheet. It's pretty fucking boring. Comedy does something really special it has the ability to refine information. The reason why you laugh, the reason why a joke is so good, is because a joke is based in truth and it's refined down to a mimetic version of that idea. You can whittle away all the excess to get the point across in a very rapid vector. It also threatens an audience in a way that makes them feel at ease. Comedy surprises an audience and then tickles apart in people's brain. That can make them come at an issue from a different angle, whereas a spreadsheet doesn't have the same ability to do that.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Green Fix, the climate and sustainability podcast for Australian corporations and their ESG practitioners. We explore the top challenges and opportunities in the industry and how it impacts your business and your work, so that you can keep your sanity. I'm your host, loretta Gutierrez.
Speaker 2:And I'm your host, dan Leverington. Today, we have the great fortune of being joined by Dan Illich, media strategist, climate activist, comedian and award-winning podcaster. Dan's career is enmeshed with the modernization of media. His career so far has included working with NBC, the ABC, sbs and Network 10, covering the Winter Olympics to satirical news and everything in between to satirical news and everything in between. He has also served as creative director for GetUp and overhauled digital video for Fairfax. As the founder of Not A Real Media Company, he has created the multi-award winning podcast Irrational Fear and viral campaigns for the Climate Council, and there's already a good chance. You have witnessed him in full flight as a corporate event emcee.
Speaker 3:With deep expertise in geopolitics, technology, climate and media, Dan is uniquely positioned to wade into the turbulent waters of corporate sustainability and kick off season two of the Green Fix with our very first explicit content warning for an episode. Dan Illich, welcome to the Green Fix.
Speaker 1:Wow, that is such an elder, millennial resume you've read out there. That is wonderful. Thank you so much. It is great to be with you, which is what we used to say in old media, but now we say what scabidity riz. You know it's great to be here. Thanks for having a chat.
Speaker 3:We are delighted to have you on the podcast, Dan. Do you want to give us an overview of how you first got into the climate movement?
Speaker 1:First and foremost, I started up my career as a comedian, making comedy stuff with my friends at uni and then made my way through television and then got to a point around 2007 when I was on the Ronnie John's Half Hour and it was a parody of the when the Bloody Hell Are you campaign, which was for young people, was like a really big deal, like a big tourism campaign for Australia. It starred Lara Bingle and a whole bunch of other Australians. The catch cry was where the bloody hell are you? And it was. People thought that was cheeky and irreverent and hilarious and everyone was like this ad is the best ad in the world. Now it should come of no surprise to you that Scott Morrison made that ad and it got banned in every English speaking market around the world. It got banned in the US, it got banned in the UK, it got banned in Singapore. It got banned in Canada, not for the use of the word bloody, but because in Canada you're not allowed to show an ad with unbranded beer, and it had a shot of a glass of beer being poured that had no brand on it and it was like well, you can't have unbranded beer on an ad. Having the word bloody in the ad ended up being a massive fail for the Australian government because it turned out you can't advertise to people in other countries who are trying to come to your country. That's the only place you can advertise and it got banned in the English speaking market around the world.
Speaker 1:And I was so sick and tired of hearing what a success this ad was. When it wasn't, the media press were like no, this ad is not a success. And then Scott Morrison and then Fran Bailey, the tourism minister, on the radio and TV saying this is the biggest ad in the world, blah, blah, everyone's talking about our bloody ad. I was like, oh well, I'm going to make an ad that everyone will see. So I got my mates together and I made a where the fucking hell are you? Ad and it was very funny. He kind of made satirical pokes about Australia, like we had a dingo being eaten, we had free accommodation for refugees in Villawood Detention Centre, we had abuse of human rights and it was look, it might not sound very funny but it was very funny.
Speaker 2:It was great and also quite timely because it was just after the Cronulla riots.
Speaker 1:That's right. It was just after the Cronulla riots and it ended with a wog being beaten up on the beach and I can say that because I'm Lebanese. So yeah, it was very funny and this ad got seen by tons of people. I put it up on YouTube. Youtube was brand new. It got like 40,000 views in a day and then after a week it got 1.4 million views, and this is really big in 2007. These days, you can fart in a bottle and it gets 1.7 million. This is like groundbreaking stuff For young people.
Speaker 1:How videos went viral back in 2007 is you made a video, turned it into a Windows Media Player file and an MPEG and an MOV and you would send three different videos to 200 people in your email list and you hoped that one of your uncles also had a big email list and they would forward that video to their favorite 200 people. That was the term. That's how viral happened. That was what viral happened. Now we're less in a viral state these days. It's more of a publishing state forced by algorithms. That was the true virality of that and I was like 26 at the time and I was like, aha, this is amazing. This is really powerful stuff and people started to get really upset by it, including the tourism minister at the time, who sent me a cease and desist letter and they said you need to take this video off your website Because I had it on a website back then too. And they said, yes, this video used exactly the same music as our ad and your copywriting fringing on our music. And I sent them an email, a lovely letter, back, saying thank you, slater and Gordon. Unfortunately, the music is not the same. I gave your song my friend, leonardo, and said can you make me a song that sounds almost exactly the same? Basically, the only similarity between my version of the song and your version of the song is the word nah, because their song went nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. And I said I've done a do version, a la version, a whistle version and a crazy frog remix version. I have taken the offending version down and so, yeah, that was like a big aha moment for me. I was like, wow, digital media has the power to reach so much more than traditional media. Now, this might not sound revolutionary in 2025, but in 2006, this was a really big deal. Traditional media didn't know what digital media was Back then you would try to get people who are on digital media to watch your TV show. But now you make a TV show, so it goes on digital media.
Speaker 1:The whole profit model for Sky News Australia is to make outrageous content and clickbait for Americans, and that's why Sky News Australia has millions of hits with all of their Donald Trump content. Because they're not making it for the 40,000 people that have Sky. They're making it for the potential millions of people that watch it on YouTube. And then 60 minutes is the same 60 minutes. Australia effectively makes a very profitable YouTube channel and they like they're the number one news brand on YouTube in Australia. They've got millions of hits. They're massive 60 minutes. Australia is basically YouTube, which is amazing. So, and it's Australia is basically YouTube, which is amazing. So. But in 2007, no one knew that.
Speaker 1:And then I had a meeting with Nick Moraitis from GetUp at the time and he's like, hey, we saw that video. That was really cool. You should come and do stuff for us. And I'm like I don't know who you guys are, forget it. Like, what's this GetUp thing? Dirty, dirty lefties. I was unsure about this group and then Ronnie John's kind of wrapped up and I kind of reached back out to them and I was like, hey, yeah, let's, let's make something.
Speaker 1:So the first thing I ended up making was this video about David Hicks, the Australian who was locked in Guantanamo Bay. And I made it because I happened to catch a plane with Major Michael Murray, who was his lawyer at the time, and he was sitting on the opposite side of the aisle to me flying back from LA. I'd just been to Cuba, coincidentally on a holiday, and he was flying back to do some media and work on David Hicks' case and I was like I recognize you, you're Major Murray. He's like, yes, I am I. And I was like I recognize you, you're Major Murray. He's like, yes, I am, I make comedy videos. He's like, well, you should make something for us. So I made this like David Hicks Cribs video, like MTV a parody of Cribs with David Hicks. It was awful, very funny and it raised a ton of money for Get Up and campaigning, which is amazing.
Speaker 1:And then I kind of moved on to environment stuff with them. So a friend of mine, sarah, she was an actress and she had auditioned for the latest government campaign for Howard's pollution reduction scheme. It was John Howard's piecemeal attempt at lowering emissions. Basically, the story was was, when it's sunny, hang up your clothes and if you're making a cup of tea, only make a cup of tea with half a kettle water. Don't. Don't make a cup of tea with a full kettle of water. Don't make a cup of tea with a full kettle of water, because that will make more emissions. And it was basically that.
Speaker 1:And she was so pissed off that she didn't get the job. She forwarded me the script. She's like hey, I didn't get this job. I was really good, do you want the script? And I was like, yeah, I do want it, that's great.
Speaker 1:And I said to GetUp we can start making this video before it comes out. And so Brett Solomon at the time was running GetUp is a very smart man when it comes to digital campaigning. He was like, yeah, let's go make it anyway. So we started making this video based on the script that got leaked to me and then, once the government campaign came out, I could match the graphics and stuff and the tone of it. They're all fucking same clinking, clinking music and soft focus. It's boring. So I managed to easily do a parody of that and it was so funny. It was great.
Speaker 1:That was called Climate Cleverer and the campaign was Climate Clever and we were very clever. We raised from GetUp like $150,000 from the membership and then we could run that during the AFL grand final and during Meet the Press every week after that. So Meet the Press was this show that had journalists and politicians on commercial television and you could buy TV spots. Politicians don't go on commercial television anymore. That was the first foray. I was like right, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:And then I kept my eye on the story as it went and then got to a point in Hungary-based where I noticed that the dialogue in media discourse was really disjointed around climate. It's so funny as a kid thinking about climate like I would have been 22, 21, thinking about these targets for 2025 and thinking they were so far off in the distance. And here we are now In the media discourse. During Hungry Beast, I noticed there was a lot of people talking about climate action who are on panels like news panels and Q&A, and they would preface everything they would say by I'm not a climate scientist but and that really annoyed me, I would hear that so often It'd be just like I'm not a climate scientist but I'm like, well, why the fuck aren't media people getting climate scientists on the shows? And it just was like people saying that were like like David Williamson, like playwright was saying it, like boomer playwrights were being asked for their opinion on climate change, anyway.
Speaker 1:So I kind of found all the climate scientists in Australia and made them do a rap video called I'm a fucking climate scientist, and it was like this big, noisy kind of rap video that went viral around like climate circles. It is my favorite thing I've ever made for a long, long time and I spent weeks on it because I was basically interviewing climate scientists and trying to distill a whole stack of information into a very sweary and funny rap video and we flew around Australia filming it. It was great. So that was kind of the early days of my climate awareness and from that climate scientist video onwards I've always leant more into learning more about climate. For me as a comedian and a communicator and a media person, that was a space that I needed to play in.
Speaker 2:So, given your background in comedy and the journey that you've taken through the climate movement, what? Is it from a psychology perspective when it comes to satirical work that really seems to engage people on a level that spreadsheets and data and 45-minute lectures just misses.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you've ever seen a spreadsheet. It's pretty fucking boring. Comedy does something really special it has the ability to refine information. The reason why you laugh, the reason why a joke is so good, is because a joke is based in truth and it's refined down to a mimetic version of that idea. You can whittle away all the excess to get the point across in a very rapid vector. It also threatens an audience in a way that makes them feel at ease. Comedy surprises an audience and then tickles a part in people's brain that can make them come at an issue from a different angle, whereas a spreadsheet doesn't have the same ability to do that. A lot of research has been done on this, from a woman in Washington. Her name is Professor Katie Borum. She's written many books about how comedians are great truth-tellers and satire is a great way to push through information that would otherwise not be able to be consumed in any other way.
Speaker 1:For a long time, people used to talk about how Jon Stewart's Daily Show was like the main way people got their information online. The main way people got their information full stop, because it was a comedy show about the news. And now TikTok and Instagram and places like that, those shows do so well still today, all those late night shows that have all the comedians on in America. They get millions and millions and millions of views online, like you're Seth Meyers and you're John Oliver's and you're John Stewart's, and it's a way to give information but also a delighted audience at the same time. Whereas they may not have enjoyed that content the same way, had they read it in a Guardian article, you know, and just by the very fact of it being wrapped in the Guardian turns people off. It's like I've got to read a.
Speaker 2:Guardian article.
Speaker 1:Of course, that's for some people. Some people like me are a subscriber and really value their journalists.
Speaker 3:And one thing that you've said in the past, Dan, is that the best outcome of comedy is catharsis. Why do you think that's the case?
Speaker 1:Well, I used to really believe comedy can really change people's minds, but now I've kind of set a different bar. I used to really think that if you could pair a fact and a joke, you could create something called an info bomb and that would explode in the audience's mind and they might change their attitude on a particular piece. I still think that has some relevance and I still think, particularly people coming to an issue brand new like if people haven't already made up their minds and this is the first time they're coming to an issue or coming to an identity comedy is the best vector. Like Zohan in New York City. He had so much content, so many comedians were making content about him and how much they loved him.
Speaker 1:Automatically you've kind of got this great progressive figure who's dominating the digital space and if you see all these comedians say what a great bloke Zohan is and his policies are and how this is going to be great for New York, and then you see some rich guy on CNN go, here's a communist. You've probably already made up your mind because you've already seen the vertical video. That's very helpful in terms of conveying information to audiences who haven't already made up their mind and for audiences who have made up their mind. All you can do is let them know of the other point of view.
Speaker 1:For audiences, particularly around climate so divided already like there's been so much misinformation for decades about it People are already in their camps. It can provide catharsis for folks who are trying to bring about change in their own, who are trying to move the needle in a small way. One of the things I did I'm sure we'll talk about, but the whole billboard thing in 2021, I heard from so many people at COP who were there on the ground in Glasgow saying thank you for doing this, because it gives us something we can point to as Australians on the ground and say look, it's not us, it's our government that are fuckheads, and it's a real thrill to fire other activists in that space to get the message across and also to keep their work going. So what satire can do ultimately is tell the people in power that not everyone agrees with them, and it can also provide consensus to the audience who do agree.
Speaker 2:And we are definitely going to speak about the Times Square billboards, going to speak about the Times Square billboards, but I really want to dig into how your expectations or your measurements have changed of how you're creating impact. I'd love to know do you, from a personal perspective, measure the way that you're shifting public opinion or inspiring action within climate and the sustainability space?
Speaker 1:Well, now I'm looking for vehicles to do it at scale right. Media has become so atomized that getting big ideas across is so hard. In a bit of media Like, you can't make one video and go. That's it. I've done it. I've solved climate change. You need tons and tons of material over long periods of time. You need steady, long engagement from trusted voices over long periods of time. You need a constant machine to drive that. During elections it's easy. We created something called it's Not a Race after COP26, co-opted Scott Morrison's name for the vaccine rollout and turned it into a campaign vehicle to get rid of Scott Morrison. That was a real interesting experiment. We got tons of crowdfunding money, tons of big donors tipping in so we could push Scott Morrison out and push his coal prop aside and we could make way for a conversation about Greens candidates and climate independence to come into parliament.
Speaker 1:It was a big digital campaign that we got that. We spent $600,000 of donors money to try and do was great, um, and we. We were very successful, not only with our paid reach, but also our organic reach. We'd make memes and videos and content and just constantly pushing out new spins on the same story, having having three or four key messages messages and recycling those messages in multiple different ways, in multiple different ways, in multiple different memes.
Speaker 1:Because in the end, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you've retouched on the same story before. The same story, repackaged differently, is really important, and that is where the game changed. You know, this year this election just passed we kind of scaled it up again. We had much less money with much less liquidity assurance, and we had a much smaller team. But with a tiny team and putting the money in the right spot, we got like 52 million views across all of our content, which was astounding, which was great. And and we got rid of peter dunnan, which is great.
Speaker 1:Here's one of the cardboard cutouts which we we got made up to put on top of liberal core flutes. Yeah, we got rid of him. That was Peter Dunnan in a MAGA hat, for those who don't have the video and we plastered them all around Dixon, all around red-blue electorates that might go red, all around teal seats that might either retain teal or really closely go to liberal votes. So we did a massive campaign in real life with that too, which was really fun, really really funny stuff, and it was great. It was a great campaign and now the game's going to change again, right?
Speaker 1:So both the coalition and Labor have teamed up to change the way registered third parties like it's Not a Race can operate in elections and change the way we get money. So we can no longer get like a $200,000 grant from, or $200,000 donation from, someone. We have to find donors who can give a maximum amount of $50,000 each, and so we have to find many, many more donors to funnel our money back into our campaigns. But for the Liberal and Labour Party, they've got one designated legal entity that is allowed to collect all their money and then give it to them.
Speaker 3:For our listeners. Do you want to explain a little bit the changes and how you've been impacted?
Speaker 1:Essentially, as a significant third party for the AEC, we can raise money and then campaign against. It's not a race case, we're a negative campaign. So our main game is to make fun of climate vandals, which is what we did with the Liberal Party pretty much at. Peter Dunn Basically ran crowdfunding campaign, which we raised about $100,000 from small donors, which is great, and then we raised like maybe $400,000, $500,000 from big donors and that money comes in, you know, usually $100,000 chunks. But now the rules have been changed and it's in order to make people like me or organizations like it's Not a Race more difficult to campaign, so we can no longer get hundreds of thousands of dollars being funneled into. It's Not a Race that we can spend on meta-advertising. We can only get small donations in smaller chunks, which makes it infinitely harder to be effective in the digital algorithmic space. So we can now rethink what that looks like. Throw out our model and we can raise as much money as we want between now and July 1st, but without the threat of an election coming.
Speaker 1:It's a little hard to raise money. It's a little hard to go to rich green people and go hey, why don't you give us $150,000? Just to let us sit. We'll just let it sit there, you know, until the election. That's not going to happen. We need to think about new ways to build trusted voices, trusted progressive voices who can constantly communicate the message to digital audiences, and I think that's going to be the next strategy. I'm working on a couple of things at the moment along those lines, but that'll be the next thing for me. We're trying to figure out how to operate at scale, with lots of different voices being able to do whatever they do. Do what they do so well, you know, call bullshit, do proper journalism, do satire around climate and other issues and find ways to communicate to audiences regularly.
Speaker 2:And then, come election time, they will be effective, trusted voices in digital space. You could teach them how to be a politician, but I think it's rapidly becoming if you're not a digital native, whether in politics or corporate. The inauthenticity that comes off of people trying to learn on the go how to do this is insane. It is repellent.
Speaker 1:Totally. I mean, you know Pokemon Go to the polls is a great example. You know, no one needs that. No one needs that at all. I agree, this is Zohan's second bite of a big race as well. He's seasoned. You know he's done a campaign before he's built his team and this time he was ready.
Speaker 1:It just goes to show second time runners are very potent forces. Alex Dyson almost picked up Wanan Very close 7,000 votes in it, and I mean he gave everything. But of course the liberals were very threatened with Wanan and so they put everything behind Dan Tehan as well. It's very interesting to say yeah, digital natives are. If you're a young person, you've got great ideas. This is a great time to strike. The electorate is younger than ever before and you'll have your community behind you.
Speaker 2:The interesting thing with his candidacy this time was that in January, I think, he was polling at two or 3%, so in five months he's gone from two to three percent to winning the whole thing and not effectively ending a political dynasty in the Cuomos, the digital strategy behind it was really clever.
Speaker 1:I'm not a New York voter, but I was getting a lot of Sohan clips. There was a mayor in my neck of the woods, jesse Fitzpatrick, who ran for basically two years on Instagram before becoming mayor. He's got a quota of two and a bit in the council elections and just for two years on Instagram before becoming mayor, I think he got a quota of two and a bit in the council elections and just for two years on Instagram, he was posting vertical videos about our local electorate around here, the Windsor-Caribbean Shire, and he was talking about the pool being closed and blah blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:And he was really digital literate, very engaging online, spent a lot of time talking to local businesses getting his face out there, but his digital video game was bang on and it was consistent.
Speaker 1:It was lo-fi, it was funny and engaging. He was not afraid to make himself look like a goose. He tried to get into the old Mittagong pool and it was in his swimmers and a deflatable, and then spent some time explaining why the pool was shut down and then he would do these visually engaging little tricks with his marketing. It was great. It was fantastic and he had the most recognition out of every candidate in our little shire just because he was very good at vertical video and that's where everybody is and no one's watching TV. And everybody else who runs for the council isn't a 33-year-old white guy.
Speaker 1:They're a bit older and aren't as versed in vertical video. It was amazing to see him absolutely go from nothing to becoming mayor in such a short space of time.
Speaker 2:So what do you think? Both environmental advocacy groups and then also corporates themselves what kind of lessons should they be taking away from landscape that is shifting pretty rapidly underneath?
Speaker 1:them. Well, I think you know stuff that we've been talking about. I'd hate for BP to take up vertical video in a really authentic way. I think the lessons are fairly universal First of all, having great policy and then telling that story over and over again in a variety of different ways in cheap and entertaining formats.
Speaker 1:Be funny. Don't be afraid to be funny Like people. People being funny is the most authentic thing you can do. And if you've got budget to be funny, give me a call Dot com, send me an email, you know, if you've got 20 grand, 50 grand, 100 grand, we can make that funny. Don't be afraid to use humor. Don't be afraid to jump into vertical video. Don't be afraid to be cheap and lo-fi. Don't be afraid to tell your story in an engaging way and burn and turn, because content half-life is so cheap these days it's no use being precious over a 30 second spot anymore, because you will run it unless you've got lots of media behind it. It's going to run once and then two minutes later, no one's going to look at it.
Speaker 1:If you can make stuff cheap and fun and set a calendar where you're constantly making good stuff communicating your policy, then that's the way to go. No-transcript message across. You can find great progressive voices to share your message to those audiences who are excited to hear it. Irrational Fear, for instance, is my podcast. We have like 15,000 listeners a week, which is not huge, but it is very popular. I was in a shop on the weekend and a woman came up to me and said when are you starting the podcast again, because we had a bit burnt out from the election. The answer is we're starting this week. So get off my back listeners.
Speaker 1:And we've had some great partnerships over the years. Bertha Foundation supported us for a couple of years but then Australian Ethical supported us for a year, which is amazing. And when you listen to other great media brands, particularly in the environment space, like Renew Economy, energy Insiders and Fully Charged, those podcasts have huge listeners and they've always got brands attached to them and I always like to listen out for who's sponsoring these podcasts. These folks doing great work, particularly Renew Economy. Renew Economy's work is so good. Giles Parkinson and Michael and those folks over there are deep in the weeds in energy policy and supporting them is, I think, is really crucial because they do good, honest journalism around the renewable rollout and that's so important.
Speaker 1:There's tons of folks out there doing great progressive media work. At the moment there's a new media criticism show called Lamestream, which is a great podcast hosted by Oz Faruqi and Scott Mitchell. Pundus Politics have a podcast and they've got a huge audience. Also, toilet Paper USA for Australia has a huge podcast and a huge audience. Serious Danger they also have a huge audience as well. And then you've got folks like Hannah Ferguson who are a bit more broad, but they've got such a deep, engaged audience at Cheek Media. Big Talk Small Talk is so popular it's worth jumping in there and sponsoring them, and there's a ton of great voices out there who could easily do with a hundred grand a year in sponsorship to make their work sustainable. If you've got a marketing spend and you're going to spend a hundred grand on a TVC, I think you're honestly wasting your time. Just spend it on a podcast who will hear that message for a whole year, who will be engaged in the issue, and you'll win a whole bunch of new fans.
Speaker 1:My point is find the irrational fears, the cheap medias, the pundits, politics, the folks you engage with and invest in them because they're on the ground doing good stuff Like Irrational Fear, for instance, is ostensibly a comedy show about the news, but really we always hold space for climate and we tend to get deep in the weeds in climate. Sometimes it started off as a way to backdoor climate into broad kind of conversations around comedy and news. It was basically we're going to use this vector of comedy and news to talk about the climate Because at the time when we started it in 2012, no one else was. Now we've been doing it for years, so take your marketing budget and spread it around a bit.
Speaker 2:I think the past six months have been really interesting because at the start of the year was Trump's taken over the world and no company can talk about sustainability, Otherwise they're going to get cancelled, and very quickly it became obvious that actually there are a lot of consumers who were actually looking for brands who were standing up for the values that they believed in and, if you want to put it in P&L sense, there's a huge commercial opportunity to be seen as the brand that is giving people a vehicle to spend their money in a way that they feel good about doing. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I want to go back 13 years because you've brought up irrational fear.
Speaker 2:What was going on in 2012.? It was a big year for climate change in Australia. The Climate Change Authority was established, as was the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. The carbon pricing mechanism came into effect 1st of July. The Australia Institute's 2012 Climate of the Nation report found that 81% of Australians were very concerned or fairly concerned about a more polluted planet and 71% of Australians were very concerned or fairly concerned about more extreme weather events like floods and cyclones. No one seemed to be worried about Tony Abbott coming over the horizon and, most importantly, 2012 also saw the premiere of Irrational Fear. What was the catalyst for starting the podcast in 2012?
Speaker 1:I'd been in media for a little bit of my career and I realised that there really wasn't a place to talk about climate, and my plan was I'm going to start this podcast, put it on in a pub in Sydney, hack out the pub, make it really popular and then try and get it on television. We started it with FBI radio in Sydney. They had a band room at the King's Cross Hotel and it was great. We streamed it live from the King's Cross Hotel. So we had a panel of great comedians and we were always talking about stuff in the news, but also climate change, and you'd see this room start off with like 80 90 people and then, gradually, over the course of the night, like 150 people would come because they would hear we were broadcasting in sydney and then they would drive to the pub and come and watch the show. So that was, you know, really, really fun.
Speaker 1:Those early days of irrational fear were loud and loose and really fun, and there was like no daily show or no SNL. There was no tyrannical comedy show on Australian TV in 2012. And then, a few years later, there was like 3,000 of them. So it was like really annoying, but it was. It was kind of this moment where we're like, fuck, this is so much fun. We felt like we were very much the underdogs talking about all this stuff on stage and we were just young people back in 2012. Now I'm an old man so it's different. But we would always kind of book these shows and always have a place for comedians to have a stronger opinion about the world and also try and find new voices to plug into that and try to give folks a leg up into comedy as well.
Speaker 1:It served a lot of different masters and we did that. It was great. We did that once a month at FBI for ages and then gradually the show got bigger and bigger. We were selling out like the opera house and then we had like a great meeting with Foxtel for like, which seemed really really close Like. We went back for like several meetings. They all came to the opera house show. They loved it, and then we went back for another meeting and then kind of fell over at the last minute and then I moved to America and I kind of disappeared for six years from Australia, and then I came back.
Speaker 1:It was this real moment where I felt like we were doing something naughty and loud and fun and also giving a place for climate to have a conversation, and at the time, you mentioned all the good things that happened about climate. At that point, dan 2013, tony Abbott did come to power and in those dying days of irrational fear before I moved to America, he disbanded the Climate Change Commission. He got rid of the carbon tax, the carbon pollution reduction scheme. He instigated a green army where people would work for the Donald and Go Plant trees. He did a whole bunch of stuff other than reduce emissions. That's when the Climate Change Authority got disbanded and then all the people that worked there created the Climate Council from the ashes, and Australians got behind that and funded the Climate Council, and they still need money today to keep their work going. It's a really good example of what you were saying before how there's this appetite for people to show leadership and when people aren't showing leadership, people have to step in. Anyone who does show leadership on the issue is not rewarded, but is supported in a way. And so I came to America 2015 through to 2018, worked for Al Jazeera, worked for Fusion, worked for a bunch of other places, got to Rational Fear for those few years, to rational fear for those few years, and then came back in 2019 and flew to Kuala Lumpur as part of an Obama Foundation fellowship program called Obama.
Speaker 1:I'm an Obama leader. I sound wanky, I'm an Obama leader. Okay, whatever. I met Barack Obama. He called me a leader. Whatever, what are you going to do about it? Shut up, who cares? It's not a big deal. And so far flew to kuala lumpur and that was a week of corporate leadership training and there was an extraordinary trainer there called ye tong singapore dude, very smart, and he stepped a group of us through facets of power and different kinds of power that we all have and kind of broke down nine, ten different kinds of power and made us do this exercise. That helped us realize we have a lot more agency and a lot more power than we give ourselves credit for. We only think of power as one thing, but here's another kind of power.
Speaker 1:That was a bit of an aha moment for me On the way to Kuala Lumpur. I was looking out of the window and 2019 December was pretty awful in Australia because we had the black summer bushfires and for eight hours I was looking outside the plane just looking at smoke right across Australia. Usually you can see the desert and stuff like that when you fly to Singapore from Sydney, but there was just smoke everywhere. It was so wild and it made me feel so sad about the state of climate in Australia that we're still kind of dealing with this in a less than satisfactory way. And Scott Morris was in power and holding up coal in parliament saying not to be scared of it, when that's the main thing we should be scared of, and just radical cognitive dissonance.
Speaker 1:I came back and made a commitment to get Irrational Fear going again, and so we got it going again and COVID hit Gratefully. We were supported by Bertha during those years. We had four Best Comedy Podcast Awards in a year, which was amazing, and we just kept churning out the podcast and became a real powerful platform again, this time not in a pub, but much like how podcasts are recorded these days. Thanks to COVID, we was all over Zoom and we could get anyone we wanted. So we spoke to tons of great people and really built our audience and really used the rational fear to rattle the cage of Australian media and politics again around climate. And it culminated in 2021 when, leading up to COP, scott Morrison was saying that no no no, there's no need for me to go to COP.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to go to COP. And COP is one of those funny things, right, like, sometimes there's a big COP, sometimes there's a small COP. You generally have three smaller COPs, then you have a big COP cop. Sometimes there's a small cop, you generally have three smaller cops, then you have a big cop. And this was a big cop. This was a big conference of parties, a big climate talks, the first big one after the Paris talks, which I was in. I went to Paris in 2015. And then these were 2021. So six years later, this was the next big cop. And, incidentally, the next big cop is cop 31, which is going to be potentially in Adelaideide.
Speaker 1:Uh, cop 26, scott morrison was saying he wasn't going to go to cop because of covet and a bunch of other things, and I was like mate, you're the fucking prime minister, every leader in the world is going to cop and you're not going to cop. So I thought, fuck this, I'm going to use my power. What power do I have? I've got a email list of 5 000 people. I've got, uh, 15 20 000 listeners. I've got to buy a bill. 5,000 people. I've got 15,000, 20,000 listeners. I've got to buy a billboard in Glasgow making fun of the Australian government climate record and it's a small billboard. It was like $12,000 worth of billboard just by the side of a road in Glasgow. I could put three bits of artwork on it, no-transcript. The first bit of artwork I had was Australia cuddle a koala before you make them extinct. It was just a parody of a tourism ad. Audacious made. It was beautiful, very funny, funny, you know. Funny, sad, not funny, haha, but you know, whatever. Hey, you know, choose your definition of funny listener. And then the other one was Australia net zero by 2300. And I had a burning kangaroo on it and I thought that was so funny because it was like everyone at that COP was aiming for a net zero by 2030. And I thought it'd be so funny if Australia had a typo with their billboard. It was like net zero by 2300. That's really funny. It's hilarious. In my mind, great energy brain and climate brain, katan Joshi reached out and he said did you know? I actually did projections of when Australia would become net zero and in my projections I had 2,299. And I was like that is so funny, that is so funny. So not only was it a typo, it was absolutely accurate too. So I'm a stickler. It was really fantastic. A really great billboard, ernie Kiguruk, excellent.
Speaker 1:And then the third billboard I threw out to the crowd. I was like if you would like, if you'd love to give me $4,000, you could have your own billboard, because that way it was split up. I would pay the $12,000 up front and then I would hopefully raise $12,000 in the crowd. But if you wanted to pay $4,000, you got one of the three, one of the three billboards, and I said you could put any message up there, you you want. And everybody who gave me money had their names like in tiny little letters around the billboard. You couldn't quite read it, but it was good. It was a smallish billboard.
Speaker 1:Come September, about a month out from COP, come September I hit go on the crowdfunder and at this point Scott Morrison wasn't going to go to cop and I'd go at six o'clock in the morning. By eight o'clock I'd raised $12,000. It was so stupid. I was sitting in my cramped, moldy Bondi apartment going. I hope someone fucking pays for this because I've just lost $12,000. And I was so relieved like, two hours later, thousand dollars. And I was so relieved like two hours later, um, not only had I'd raised more than twelve thousand dollars, but someone had bought the um, the individual billboard, um, that they wanted to have, and it was a famous person who I can't name, and um and uh. So it was very, very funny and the problem was, two days later I had had $40,000. And then two days after that, I had $80,000.
Speaker 1:By the end of the following week, I had like a hundred and something thousand dollars in this bank, in this Indiegogo, and I'm like, well, holy shit, I learned three things. I'm going to need more billboards, I'm going to need bigger billboards and Australians really have an appetite for this. Australians really want climate action. And so the person who bought that billboard for their own message, they DM me on Twitter and they're like so I bought your billboard. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, what message do you want? He's like, well, is there like a stat or something? Like you know, sorry, we fucked up, sorry, our government's fucking useless X number of people want climate action in Australia. And I said, yeah, there is, yeah, there's this great ACF stat. At the time it was like 65% of Australians want climate action. I think now it's a lot more Globally. It's a lot more like 80% of the world wants better climate action from our leaders, which we're not getting from our leaders, which we're not getting. And I was like, yeah, I can put that in. He's like, yeah, great thanks. So I put that together, and little did he know that that $4,000 would then extrapolate into a lot more billboards.
Speaker 1:Not only did I buy that billboard by the road in Glasgow, I bought giant billboards that were on the highway on the way to the convention center in Glasgow, and then I ended up having some money left over and I decided to buy the biggest billboard in times square. It normally runs for a hundred thousand dollars an hour, but I got just 10 minutes of it, and so I bought it for 10 minutes. Uh, and I got my friend, andreas friend Andreas to take our artwork, animate it in a beautiful way, because you could put these giant MPEGs on it. And then I got more comedians to write more billboards and I put more billboards together for this particular space, including the Chaser. The Chaser did a great one. They did like Colophile Dundee and it was like a picture of Scott Morrison holding some coal, which was really funny.
Speaker 1:I did a New York Comic Con parody. It was like New York ColaCon, featuring special guest Matt Canavan, and it was like coal cosplay winner of the year, matt Canavan, which is a joke. No one in New York City would get right now, I'm just kidding. One thing that really annoyed me around the time it was COVID was happening and Scott Morrison said we're going to have a gas-led recovery and his answer to fixing COVID was building a gas pipeline. I don't know if anyone can remember this. There was a national COVID task force and the national COVID task force was chaired by many people who are in the fossil fuel industry. So to solve a respiratory disease, we built gas infrastructure. Does anyone remember this? This is what happened. It was called the COVID-19 Task Force. This is what happened. Right, absolutely mental. So I did an ad for a new game called the Australian Government Against Humanity and it flopped down two different cards and it was like solve the COVID crisis by building a gas pipeline.
Speaker 1:Sean Marsh now works for Climate 200. He's a designer there. He made an ad that people were saying, oh, this billboard's going all around Glasgow and it was like Australia we're rich in wind, sun and climate denial and it had smoke-covered opera house sales. But it wasn't. It was just a mock-up of an ad, so people thought it was in Glasgow.
Speaker 1:I reached out to him and said, hey, I know your mock-up's going around. Can we run it in Times Square? He said yeah, so he made us one to fit the billboard and I got it animated. And many of your listeners will know Rolly Williams, who is on Climate Town, he saw it and he took his camera down there and he did me a big solid and shot the most beautiful footage of this fucking billboard. And I did a campaign where I set up a Facebook group and, well, set up a Facebook event and invited every New Yorker I knew to go to it but then went on to the Aussies in New York pages and tried to get as many Australians down to do it and there was lots of Australians who work in like Broadway down there.
Speaker 1:They all went down. It was so amazing. There was this one guy. One guy had his phone up and he was taking a photo of it. He was taking a video going oh my God, look at this. Dear Australians, our governments are fuckheads. Most of Australians want climate action. This is the funniest billboard I've ever seen, and I saw that and I sent it to the big donor. Extraordinary moment, russell Crowe sent screenshots of a text he sent to Jake Tapper. This is before the billboard was live and he's like hey, jake, have you seen this video? That's happening in New York? And Jake sent him it back because I made a campaign video saying if you're in New York, go see it.
Speaker 1:Blah, blah, blah, chip in, we need a bit more money. And Jake said, no, I hadn't seen it. Thanks, Russell Crowe. So Russell had basically did my media in New York for me by texting Jake Tapper. Jake Tapper sent a crew down, recorded it and then the day after got me on the program to talk about it and it was the best media hit of my life. It was fantastic. Like sure, I did the project leading up to it, but nothing beats talking to Jake Tapper. It was fantastic, it was so good. And then, as soon as that billboard went live in Times Square at 9.45, am and we were flicking through webcams on YouTube to try and find a view
Speaker 3:of it.
Speaker 1:And we got a view of it. It was amazing. My fiance at the time, my now wife and I thought it was the funniest thing in the world. We're sitting in our crappy little apartment watching this video go live. It was really phenomenal.
Speaker 1:And then later that day, scott Morrison held a press conference and someone asked him why he wasn't going to go to COP and he said no, no, no, we are going to go to COP. We were always going to go to COP. It was something we were always going to do and I was like, mate, if I could do one thing making Scott Morrison go to COP that was the one thing I could do for the movement. And they succeeded and it was truly amazing.
Speaker 1:The best thing to come out of that was pictures of Scott Morrison standing by himself looking at his phone while all the other leaders were hanging out, and I heard from so many people in Glasgow thanking me for that, because it was when you're in the, when you're in, when you're in climate activism and you're Australian. You, you are a pariah of the world stage, because Australia is the third largest exporter of fossil fuels and we have the largest scope for emissions, right up there with Saudi Arabia and Russia. It was just one of those magic moments where I was like well, maybe this could be a moment that might change something.
Speaker 1:And it was great, it was really fun. This is a really fun, fun moment where I could exercise my power, and if I hadn't gone to that Obama conference and met Yong T, I don't think I would have done that. I just kept going back to what power do I have, what are the resources at hand and how can I use them most?
Speaker 2:effectively. It's a real-time through line from your early days in comedy starting Irrational Fear becoming an Obama leader. The billboard Important role that I see you as playing is you've actually built communities through comedy. You've done that from FBI radio live shows. The live shows are enormous, right, like you said Sydney Opera House all over Australia.
Speaker 1:We just booked Adelaide venue for November 2026. We've got 800 seats to sell for Adelaide for our cop shows.
Speaker 2:And you'll do it right, because I think the work that you do. Going back to that word that Loretta used catharsis it gives people a vehicle to have impact that they otherwise wouldn't be able to have on their own.
Speaker 1:Look, that is so true. Keep in mind 2021. When that billboard stunt happened, it was like day 100 of lockdown and we were all powerless. I think people wanted to do something and by giving me money I could then do something stupid. We had a whole bunch of money left over. We had like 30 grand left over and we gave it a whole bunch to the Wangan Jabaloo tribe and a bunch of other folks like Seed Mob and people like that as well.
Speaker 1:So we did actual, tangible good stuff with the money left over as well, which made me feel good.
Speaker 3:One thing we want to talk about is, if you think about our listeners, they're typically leaders in sustainability. If you think about their perspective and how they are exploring communication avenues, what are some non-traditional communication strategies that you would recommend for them who are looking to authentically engage with their audiences without giving their executives a heart attack?
Speaker 1:It's very, very hard, and I feel for people who work in those situations where they've got to, where they're accountable to the ESG spreadsheet and they're accountable to either getting to net zero or getting to real zero, as some great companies are doing now, which is fantastic, but they've also got a commitment to shareholders and their boss.
Speaker 1:I reckon finding meaningful and tangible ways to do great work, reduce actual emissions and then talk about it authentically is the best thing you can do. Share the work that you're doing. Show your work. People who work in your organizations think you are there to check a box for governance, so why not show how many tons of emissions that you've abated within your organization or you've gotten rid of, or you're deep into systems and you can find ways that you are doing real emissions reduction work within your organization and make that something that people can be proud of. You know planting a flag in the ground and helping everyone run towards that flag that's the job of a leader. And by showing the work that you do, by reducing emissions in your organization and how you did, how you got real world emissions reduction, that's.
Speaker 1:That might not sound heroic but it truly is and and and make it lo-fi and interesting. You know, if you interesting If you're just writing a LinkedIn post about the challenges of offsetting this or that, talk about that. Or reducing emissions in this system or that, talk about that. If you see something exciting that other organizations are doing, saying well, this could be good for us, talk about that. Here's what you don't do.
Speaker 1:I was emceeing this is a great advert for me. I was emceeing something for a big enterprise software company and what they did was their sustainability person brought on stage a consultant from a big five consultancy to talk about ESG. That's nothing, that's crazy. Echo chamber fucking bullshit. Right, your company is bringing on a big five consultancy to talk about why ESG is important. That is the world's biggest fucking cop-out I'd ever seen. Okay, so that was one thing. There was a giant cop-out, right, it's an all-hands staff meeting and you're talking about ESG, you're talking about sustainability, you're talking about emissions, but you're not talking about it. Deloitte is talking about it, Great, and the Deloitte person was fantastic and engaging, but your person had nothing about what you were doing. So that was the first crazy moment.
Speaker 1:And then the next moment in that conference, straight after the person got up to tell everyone about a new cloud-based product that they were launching and they'd already had five customers sign on to this great cloud-based product. And the five customers were New South Coal, Yan Coal, it was Santos. It was like the biggest polluters in the world. You just went from your sustainability credentials to showing how your clients are actively exporting scope for emissions around the world and how this product is going to help them accelerate that Well done. It made me so furious, right, it made me so furious.
Speaker 1:That they did that not only in that order, but like the sheer hypocrisy of it was just outrageous and I thought if you are a software company like this, you have power to do stuff in meaningful ways. If you do truly have the best cloud-based enterprise software, you can charge your own carbon tax. You absolutely can, Like you can charge these companies extra until they deal with their emissions. It's absolutely possible.
Speaker 1:You actually have the power to change the way your clients do work by maybe not charging them more, but offering them a discount, offering them a carrot, an incentive to do better in their emissions, and that's a leadership piece that I don't think folks in corporate land have really thought about. They haven't thought about the client aspect? Right, they haven't thought about well, my client is a big polluter. We can either boycott them and get other clients, but we're in an industry that is big polluting. Why don't we think about how we can give discounts for folks who are doing better in emissions abatement or emissions reduction than not? You actually have power as a corporation and you can use it really well.
Speaker 1:That is like big scary thinking. Okay, for chief sustainability officers. You're going to go to your CEO and say I reckon we should charge this person more, this organization more, because they're a big polluter. Your CEO is going to flip out, of course not, but that's a leadership piece, right? If one company does it, then another company might do it, and then you can then build out new norms and put pressure where the government can't, and you can also. You can take the pressure off it too by labeling everything an experiment, right.
Speaker 3:Well, what a great way to end the podcast. We're going to go through a round of three rapid fire questions. Of course, we recommend everyone goes and listens to Rational Fear. Do you have any other recommendation for our listeners, whether it's a podcast, a book or a film?
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, there's a bunch of climate podcasts. I love Outrage and optimism always gets me excited. I also love listening to David Roberts Vault's podcast. He is a journalist out of Washington state and he is deep in the energy game and always gets super interesting people on to talk about all kinds of developments in energy. Super, super interesting. Dude, great podcast. And I love Energy Insiders. It's something I've mentioned before.
Speaker 1:It's so weird that I'm a comedian and I listen to all these fucking podcasts. They're in my top echelon of climate-y podcasts and when it comes to the leadership space, like Outrage and Optimism, they really fill me with hope about the big leadership plays that are being done around the world and that gets me excited about every cop and hearing the wins and fails. And you get to hear some great wins, like the last COP. The great win that came out of it was the recovery fund for loss and damages. That was a really great start and that's going to be. That's going to only get bigger because we're spending so much money on dealing with climate anxiety and climate issues. So, yeah, those are. Those little wins are really good with climate anxiety and climate issues. So yeah, those little wins are really good and Outrage and Autism has them. So yeah, I love that podcast.
Speaker 2:We give all of our guests a magic wand at the end of each episode, and so, as we give you your magic wand, what is one thing that you would like to see changed in the world in the next five years?
Speaker 1:That crypto disappears forever. Crypto disappears forever. Blockchain gets put in the shredder. Yeah, that would be amazing. That'd be great. I mean such a useless technology other than for speculation. It's just its own casino and it goes up and down and that's the only thing it does, and it is of no use to anyone and all it does is suck the power out of energy systems which could be used better elsewhere. So, yes, if I had a magic wand, that would be the case. My second magic wand would be that the Australian government would be a bit braver when it comes to fossil fuel extraction in Australia and cease all new coal and gas production.
Speaker 3:Love it. Do you want to take us out by sharing one piece of positive climate news that you've heard recently?
Speaker 1:What I'm kind of excited about is electrification of everything, even though this Labor government has just done a whole bunch of fossil fuel projects. But they're also deeply committed to batteries in homes, which is so exciting, and they're also deeply committed to the renewable energy rollout that's going to happen now and that's really exciting. After decades of liberal shenanigans tearing up renewable energy projects, we've got a real opportunity in Australia and we are leaders in Australia when it comes to building out renewables to complete the energy transition. That is so exciting to me and we should all be getting free energy. It's crazy that we don't. It's ridiculous Like I'm so excited to get rid of this gas connection on this house. That's my next thing.
Speaker 1:My own personal project is getting a heat pump water heater in and removing gas entirely from our house and then getting a battery and then getting an. Ev. So step by step. You know I'm excited about that.
Speaker 3:Dan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We invite everyone to come and listen to your podcast, rational Fear. We're excited to hear that you're back on the recording schedule after a very exhausting election cycle, so congratulations on that and thanks again for joining us.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much and thank you for everyone listening despite this daycare lurgy.
Speaker 3:Is there anything else that we might have missed? If you are in ESG land and you want to have a really fun event, hire a rational for you to come and do a live show with comedians and your CEO and we will rip you to shreds and have a really fun time. This was Green Fix with your hosts Loretta Gutierrez and Dan Levington. We hope you enjoyed the episode. You can send us your questions or tell us who you'd like us to interview next. At info at greenfixpodcastcom, you can get your Green Fix every two weeks on Apple Podcasts, spotify, youtube and Pocket Casts.
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