The Beliefs Series, Richard Fidler

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James Valentine:

Hi, I'm James Valentine, and welcome to Head Room, The Beliefs Series.

I came to this view late, but maybe you've always realized this. Our actions, our responses, our view on the world is shaped by our values and our beliefs about how the world operates.

If you're imbued with a spiritual belief, for example, then you will see God's hand at work everywhere, whomsoever that god may be.

If you believe that people are not to be trusted, well then, that's how you'll act.

I've been in radio for thirty years, I've done thousands of media interviews, and I've never asked anybody what they believe.

So I thought I'd start.

I chose people for this series on a simple premise.

Because of their life and work, I assume they must have beliefs and principles, and insights about life that will be deeply held.

I wanted to know what they were.

Someone like Richard Fidler, host of Conversations on ABC Radio and podcast. Well, I told him why I wanted him.

Richard Fidler:

Why me? Why? Why me? Why you? Why me? I'm just here for collegiality, you know that, don't you?

James Valentine: I knew you didn't really want to do it.

Richard Fidler: I'm terrified.

James Valentine:

I was really curious,I thought, has Richard Fidler learnt an enormous amount from fifteen years of talking to people, of five days a week of researching people, to spend an hour with them, you know what?

Richard must have beliefs and insights into humanity that have come from that.

I've known Richard for years. We've lived kind of parallel lives. In the eighties, when he's in the wildly successful comedy troupe, the Doug Anthony All Stars, I'm playing in Australian rock bands like The Models.

We both detoured into television and then both found our life's work in radio, ABC local radio specifically. He in Brisbane and me in Sydney.

He began Conversations in 2006. It's broadcast daily and it's become one of the best radio and podcast interview shows, broadcast anywhere.

He's also the author of four books of history on topics as diverse as Constantinople, and the sagas of Iceland.

So have all these interviews, all of these stories and lives he's consumed, have they shaped him?

Is there one that stayed with him?

Richard Fidler:

I remember talking to a restaurateur once, quite a famous one, and he'd been on the telly a lot. And he said the most interesting thing, sometimes the most unlikely people say the most interesting things. This wasn't fake modesty, but he said, I honestly conceive of myself as a servant.

And I thought about that a lot and I thought, I think that's why he's a happy man.

I think the people I find, who seemed to have the most contented lives, not happy, happy, isn't quite the same thing, but who are at peace with themselves, the most conceive of themselves as servants. And you know, in radio, in local radio, when we were brought into it, so much of what we were given as a kind of an ideology of radio was about, how do we be of service to listeners? What's in it for the listener? What are we doing for the listeners?

And I think that's good for us in broadcasting. And it's good. It's a good enough ideology for anyone because you never go to bed. I mean, I worked in commercial radio a little while and you go to bed at night going, Oh, why am I doing this? What, what, what good is it?

James Valentine: That's a very nice Audi, but why am I doing this?

Richard Fidler:

Yeah. I don't know if Kyle Sandilands has ever asked himself that question, but, uh, nonetheless, I think it really bothered me. And, the ABC is full of its frustrations as, as we both know, but I never go to bed worrying. What's the point of all this? What do I, what am I doing?

James Valentine:

Like you, you believe that your daily task, your job, your career should be something that's of service and provides personal satisfaction to yourself, not just a means to having the house and having a nice holiday every year.

Richard Fidler: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

I mean, you know, you and I again would be doing probably different things if it was just all about money for us. But you know, that's what some people, some people like that the riches of this world of this world. I'm not being judgy about that. But I think I've always wanted something more than that, if I could afford to have it.

Uh, there've been times when I've had to do jobs, which I don't particularly enjoy at all doing, but I just needed to bring the money in for the family. So yes, that's, that's a very large part of what I see as being part of the, the good life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

James Valentine: Let me say at this point, my intention in this podcast is not to try to find out what are the right beliefs or how you should live your life.

I simply want the people I talk to to tell me what their beliefs are. For Richard, that sense of daily satisfaction and purpose is important, for me too, but neither of us are suggesting that this is some essential truth. It's only right for us. Many others find deep satisfaction and purpose well beyond the job.

We went on to discuss the good life.

What is the good life do you think?

Richard Fidler:

That's always the thing with the good life is to find that balance between how you make time for yourself and what you owe to other people. I see myself, my family being of use to my family as being a large thing. Yeah. They want me to be of use to them as another thing entirely.

Uh, but that's a very large part of, uh, part of my life. Yeah. I got a lot of satisfaction out of that. I'm not saying that's altruistic. It's pleasurable. That's a, it's a, it's the, it's the joy of it for me.

James Valentine: Yeah, yeah. Do you believe in altruism? Or is altruism always, in some ways, self serving.

Richard Fidler: I think when people go down that rabbit hole, there's a little bit again, a little bit of sanctimony behind it.

Like, no, there is no such thing as altruism because if you are a saint of a person and you're giving over so much of your time and yourself, clearly you're getting off on that. Therefore, there is no such thing. We're all ultimately selfish creatures, um, propagators of our own selfish genes and all that.

That's just a boring way to look at the world. I think, yeah,

James Valentine: I think it's just one of those. you know, sophisticated sophistry. Is that what I'm looking for? You know, it's a sophistry. It's a very interesting argument. You know, I like when Bob Goldoff was doing live aid. He said, I don't care why they're here.

Yeah. I don't care why Phil Collins wants to fly back and forth as long as they're doing it.

Let's come back to the original question.

Emphasizing the research. Perhaps most people don't realize this necessarily. I know what you do to be in that position to produce that hour for that hour to be such a riveting conversation.

You spend a lot of time studying. people studying the work that they've done.

Has something come from that? Do you, do you, do you think you've learned something about humanity, about who people are?

Richard Fidler:

Yeah. I pick guests who are at a point in their lives. I think anyway, for those who were giving me their, their personal life stories, I picked them at a point in their lives when they've got some kind of point of reflection and insight when something is sort of settled, when all the various catastrophes have happened.

And. They're not still in the middle of that going, what the hell is going on? And I'm, I'm so distressed. I can't make sense of it. They've arrived at a point of finding out something. And here's another little bit of unlikely guest wisdom. The late manager of INXS. I had him on the show.

James Valentine: Chris Murphy.

Richard Fidler:

Chris Murphy. And he was really hyped up. He was kind of really nervous about being interviewed and he talked about how his dad had died on an ice, I think playing ice hockey, I think it was when he was 14 or 15 and how it completely came right out of the blue. He wasn't ready for it as you wouldn't be at that age, the loss of this big, huge, lovely man in your life, your dad.

He said, I've never gotten over it. And he said, it's funny because people have always said to me, I should get over that. And he said, I don't see why you should ever get over anything. And again, I thought about that a long time and he was right.

The idea we should get over things is really Oprah esque. I think we're always looking for that American thing closure so that we don't remain emotionally incontinent that we move on to the next thing and, and don't create.

Uh, don't, don't ripple the, the, the, the placid waters of, of our own social circles.

James Valentine:

Yeah. It's interesting that isn't because it's not very dissimilar to the emotional attitude that was common in, in my childhood. Which was you were meant to bear up things like closure is a bit the same in a sense. You're not meant to bother anybody else.

With this, with your heavy emotions, the death of the parent, the death of a child, your own failure, or something, you know, you are not meant to bother them with that. 'How's he, how's he doing after his wife died?'

Richard Fidler: 'He's bearing up!', that's right, 'he's bearing up very well, very well'. But at the same time though, I find kind of excessive emotional incontinence hard to be around as well.

It's a bit look at me, look at me sometimes after a while.

James Valentine:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There, there's a balance there. So you've done it twice.

There's the restauranteur who said, to serve, that, that struck you and we never get over things from the very unlikely source of Chris Murphy.

Richard Fidler:

And the other guy was George Calombaris, these people often known for their, let's say for their, uh, their, their, their intensity towards their business. So, so yes, that's, that's, um, that's a surprise. Yeah.

James Valentine: Well, you've learned wisdom comes from unlikely quarters.

Richard Fidler: That's right. There you are. This is the third great lesson. Are we writing this down?

James Valentine:

I know. That's right. Thankfully it's been recorded.

Richard Fidler: A new Talmud thats being created here,

James Valentine: but is that more what it is for you? There's gems of wisdom that come out sideways.

Richard Fidler: Yes. I don't go looking for wisdom. And I mean, sometimes if people want to volunteer a philosophy that they have, that's, that's one and good, but life is so messy and this is probably gonna be a problem with our conversation now.

There's so much mess to life and blurry edges to things. And part of that too is the distortion that's inherent in my radio program, which is to present someone's life story as a satisfying narrative arc. We'd like to hear stories in that form. They're always going to distort the record somewhat because we don't really live that way.

It's just a great way of talking about it in an audio format in radio or in a podcast. You find that, you know, well, there's a beginning, there's a trajectory, this thing happens, more stuff happens. And then you eventually sort of arrive at some point of insight at the end of this process.

But then I'll often find, I'll find that guest five years later and they've got a completely different thing going on. You know, something else completely different and they go, Oh no, no, no, I don't think that anymore. Did I say that? No. Did I say that? Nah. Yeah,

James Valentine:

it is true, isn't it? We see our life in that way as well.

See, if only I hadn't done that, you know, this, this wouldn't have got there, but that's not actually how it goes. Do you think of life as chaotic?

Richard Fidler:

Not chaotic, but messy. So you can move the whole thing forward. That's It's sort of like moving handfuls of spaghetti from one space to another. It's very slippery, very slippery.

And there's tongs and there's a foul trail of something behind it that's going to get a bit rancid as time goes by. It's all a bit messy, but there's, there is some momentum to it, of course. And it does have a shape to it. And sometimes those shapes become more discernible over time.

James Valentine: So when you say who, what's the shape?

What are you describing there?

Richard Fidler: The shape of one's, one's life. The shape of your shape of events. The shape of, of whatever is unfolding in a person's life over time.

James Valentine: Right, right. You see the patterns of your own behavior?

Richard Fidler: Yes, yes, yes. You do. I think, yeah.

James Valentine:

Yeah. Do you think you see human patterns?

This is how we do things, this is the way life is.

Richard Fidler:

Yeah. You do. I get a lot of that from, um, I, I, I married an uncommonly wise woman, Kim, my wife, who. I really don't think I'd be doing my show if I hadn't met Kim because she's, she's one of those old heads.

She, even when I first met her and when we were 20, she had a bit of an old wise head on her shoulders and is capable of seeing quite a lot in people and in quite a forgiving way too.

So she's not judgy and sanctimonious. She knows, you know, we're all made from crooked timber in this world. And, um, and, and I like that so much about her too. And sometimes if we've been through kind of a strange social situation, I'll say, what do you think was going on there? And she'll sort of hit, hit on it in a gentle kind of way.

And I go, yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah.

James Valentine:

And see, there's, there's to me a fundamental belief about life. It's messy. We're all made of crooked timber. You know, it's, there's a randomness to it.

Richard Fidler:

That's right. Yeah. A randomness. Yes. Um, but when we're not powerless over our own futures, we, we do make decisions.

We do move from one place to the next and that's largely an act of will interacting with the environment around us and running against obstacles we can't, we can or can't get over.

James Valentine:

So I'm not hearing that it's the volume of interviews and research that Richard has done. He's heard some kernels of truth and sense along the way that struck home, but life is messy like a pot of spaghetti.

We are not powerless against the randomness of life, but we will strike obstacles that we can't get over. That's what you learn from living any life. But again, that's only Richard's truth. Many won't think that life is a bowl of slippery noodles.

In these conversations, we're going to end up with lots of fundamental divides, I suppose.

I think I will often clash with people who don't think the world is chaotic.

'No, no, it's controlled and there's this and they're in charge and that should have happened and this is the way it should have gone.' You know,

Richard Fidler: Those people are my enemies, James, and I'm not kidding. People who have a very prescriptive idea of human nature like that and of what ought to happen tend to be utopian in their outlook.

And, you know, as Milan Kundera once said, you know, the author of The Unbearable Likenes of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, great Czech fiction author, he said, um, 'from time to time, people have attempted to set up a human utopia and each time They do that. It's become necessary to build a small concentration camp at the site of it.

And over the time, the population of utopia gets smaller and the concentration camp gets larger and larger.'

Yes, people with prescriptive ideologies based on, a fundamentalist idea of human nature are quite dangerous people, I think, if they get anywhere near political power.

James Valentine:

Yeah. How do you, how do you then bridge a divide there? That divide?

Richard Fidler: What do you mean?

James Valentine: Are you able to communicate, talk, be friendly? Is it, do you try to reform them, uh, bring them to your point of view? It often seems to me a bit intractable. It's like, well, no, I think the world is messy and chaotic.

Richard Fidler:

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I, I tend to find if I encounter that kind of didactic sort of person at a party.

And even as I'm saying this, I was thinking, have I ever been that person? I hope not. I really may be in when I was younger. I don't know. Maybe I am now. I don't know. But, um, uh, if I encountered that person, even if it's me, I'll sort of do that thing and say, uh, I'm just going to go and stand over here for a while and move away because it's too boring.

James Valentine:

Does that mean we believe, I'll tell you, we believe, because I think we're, we're drifting the same territory. There are these divides that can't be crossed. If you, if you're coming at things from, if you're looking at the world in two completely different ways and there's, they start from such different points, it's very hard to find common ground.

Richard Fidler: I think sometimes, um, if you're working with such people, they have all these gifts that people like myself don't have.

Gifts for organisation, gifts for making categorical decisions quite quickly. Sometimes you're in a situation where you need people to make categorical decisions quickly, even if they're wrong decisions and to move the thing forward.

You need those people in wartime very often, but ideally they sit as generals underneath a politician who has more of that other kind of temperament that I'm speaking of here, who, uh, sort of gets the messiness and brokenness of people. But, um, every once in a while reads then it needs, realizes they need a kind of a windup toy of a human being to go out and sort this mess out.

Sometimes those people are very good at that sort of thing and can be of great assistance.

James Valentine: Does your history reading tell you that's a common relationship, what you described there, the politician, the general, the wise king and the warrior.

Richard Fidler: Yeah, I think one example of that is the way Franklin D Roosevelt handled, and it does have to be called that, handled General Douglas MacArthur, perhaps the most brilliant general of the entire Second World War, a gift for strategy, an encyclopedic mind.

Uh, never forgot a thing, absorbed the topography of whatever battlescape he was going to send soldiers into. Got famously low casualty levels as a result, helped lead the defeat of the Japanese in double quick time along with Nimitz. And Roosevelt regarded him as one of the most dangerous men in America.

And his staff said, 'what are we going to do with this guy?' Because he was a diva, a total prima donna, with a fantastical view of himself as the only and most important person in the universe.

In some ways, he was like a Trump. But with extreme competence, um, that doesn't get me very far.

James Valentine: What's the difference there?

Yeah. You see the thing?

Richard Fidler: Yes. Extremely capable. It's intensely narcissistic, but not without compassion. I don't think Trump has much compassion in him and that has to be said that. And McArthur, when he was, when he staffed told him this, 'We have quite a dangerous man in our hands here. He could run for the Republican nomination and run against you and maybe even beat you in a presidential election.'

Roosevelt would just say quietly, 'we must learn to use these people'. That was his thing. He knew how to flatter MacArthur. Yeah. He knew how to box him in without MacArthur even realising it. So there are examples of that, like history.

James Valentine:

Richard Fidler is a historian and what I admire so much about his work there is it's so unexpected to me.

For most Australian media types like myself and many others, if we delve into history, we do Australian history. Perhaps the big political movements, perhaps the wars. Perhaps the quaint social customs of the olden days, not Richard.

Richard Fidler:

 I like to write about medieval and renaissance scientists. I've often got their work in my book, and philosophers too.

And the thing I find quite attractive about the way they often see the world, particularly like Johannes Kepler, who deduced the nature of planetary motion. The way they saw the world was, or the universe, was this extraordinarily complex puzzle, infinitely complex puzzle hiding its secrets from operating on a network of invisible correspondences that we can barely perceive.

James Valentine: He's the author of Ghost Empire, A History of Constantinople, The Golden Maze, A Biography of Prague, and Saga Land, with his friend Kari Gislarson, a book on the epic stories of Iceland. It's an impressive range. So, has this study of the world and its past shaped his beliefs?

Richard Fidler:

It definitely has led me to believe that, notwithstanding the last few years being somewhat kind of alarming.

The last six, seven, eight years, ten years in the world, we live in the best possible time of all times in the best possible place. James.

James Valentine: And do you mean Australia?

Richard Fidler: Yeah. I've travelled a lot. I've, I've read history and seen how bad things get and how bad they get for very, very long periods of time.

To live in a time of prosperity and democratic stability with protection for human rights, uh, under rule of law. Where travel is possible, where all sorts of things are possible.

I've got friends who grew up under totalitarian communism who didn't have that.

Who lived in societies where the government of the day was doing its best to exterminate trust between its citizens, because once you have trust between friends, you can have a cabal that might want to overthrow the government.

This is what people live through in China at the moment, and to some degree in Russia.

I'm glad I don't live in those societies. Very, very glad.

So, so, yes, I think it's we live in an unusual moment that because it's been going on for a while in the societies we live in. And there's plenty that's wrong with the society we live in, I'm well aware of that.

I don't think we live in utopia. I don't believe in utopias, but, uh, we can maybe say that the stability, prosperity and peace that we've enjoyed by and large is a normal state of human existence.

And it just isn't. It just is not so much of human history is, of course, war, chaos, disaster, famine, plague, intense cruelty, subjugation, oppression, colonialism, all these things.

We've lived in an unusual time.

James Valentine:

 And I think you and I are of an age where we've been. usually blessed, you know, like it's there. We're pretty, we're, we're, we're post Vietnam. So that, that conflict didn't, didn't strike us. We had a bit of free education there for a while. And you get those very peaceful years of the eighties and nineties through to 9/11.

You know, not bad.

Richard Fidler: Yes and no.

I've mentioned this many times before, but it's, it's kind of a fundamental to my, the way I see the world.

Is that when I came out of high school in the early eighties, I didn't think I'd live to see thirty.

It's forgotten that in the early eighties, after Reagan got elected and Brezhnev was in his decrepitude and then followed by two more decrepit rulers in the Soviet Union.

And the window for a nuclear retaliation just got smaller and smaller. The time between retaliation got smaller and smaller. There were apocalyptic dramas going on TV, like the British series Threads, the British show Threads, which show what would happen in a nuclear exchange. I couldn't see a way out. I couldn't figure out who was going to untie or slash through that Gordian knot.

I couldn't see. A way in which there would not be catastrophic, large scale, massive exchange of nuclear weapons between the US and its allies in the Soviet Union that would render the whole globe uninhabitable. I can remember having conversations in the refectory at ANU when I was a uni student where we were saying, well, so we just become alerted to the idea of the concept of the nuclear winter.

For a while we thought, well, we might escape that in Australia. We might miss out on the worst of that.

Scientists warned us that such would be the dust cloud and stuff that would be thrown up into the atmosphere, there'd be a nuclear winter, all the world's crops would fail, we'd all die of starvation at some point.

So this was the early eighties. This is 1981, 82, 83

James Valentine: And this is a belief you fervently hold at this point.

Richard Fidler: Oh yeah, yeah, sure.

James Valentine: That's it, you know, we're doomed.

Richard Fidler: Yes. Yes. I just couldn't see rationally a way of it.

And then Gorbachev arrived, found a willing partner in Reagan, as it turned out, he surprised us all with that, and undid the tensions of the Cold War.

That's why 1989 was such a joyous year for me. Because it felt, being in Prague during its Velvet Revolution, I thought I was getting my future back.

James Valentine: I've been laughing so much through that, mainly just the contrast between you and I in the same years. You were paying attention. I so wasn't.

Richard's comedy troupe, the Doug Anthony All Stars, was deeply and acerbically political. I was blurting out bluesy sax riffs with rock bands.

I often wonder whether a study of history leads you to see, see that, you know, human beings have behaved in, in, in, in exactly the same way for thousands of years.

Richard Fidler: Yes. Yes. And this is a squishy politician's answer. Yes and no James…

James Valentine: Let me answer that this way.

Richard Fidler:

Um, it's sometimes said about the Romans, the ancient Romans. And I think this is true .

That we can recognise about 90% of ourselves in the ancient Romans. There's plenty of literature of the time of ancient Rome.

We know how people said and thought and did. We know a lot about what they said and thought and did. And we can recognise 90% of ourselves.

Like us, they were interested in their careers. They were interested in attracting, uh, particularly the men honor to themselves. Uh, they protected their families.

They fell in love. They wanted to travel. They liked money. They liked. food. They like all those things that we all, we all like, but the 10% that's different is just like this almost unbridgeable gap.

James Valentine: So your sense of history is to look and go, yes, yes, of course, a lot of our fundamental urges are the same. So we're going to be the same, but that 10% different, it's a bit like that 1% of DNA in the chimp.

It means a lot.

Richard Fidler:

It means a lot. Yeah. Also slavery, their attitudes of slavery. Most of the time we understand Romans thought of their slaves and treated them like kind of like with the way we treat our pets. With affection, indulgence, perhaps.

We'd hear them give slaves, you know, give them a bit of cheeky advice every once in a while and go, 'Oh, well, that's a bit much, but oh, whatever'.

But there's also like, you know, you can have sex with whoever you want as a slave at any time. And of course, there was slaves working legions of them in, in mines in Spain, which would never see the light of day.

James Valentine: Is there a spiritual belief?

Richard Fidler: Oh, yeah, sure. Absolutely.

James Valentine: Are you happy to describe that? What's your, what's your spiritual belief?

Richard Fidler:

It's hard to talk about this because it's, um, it's very easy to wander into something that's vulgar or new agey or something like that.

Strangely enough, over the year, over all this time, if I've ever had a conversation that approaches a discussion along those lines. It's with oddly enough, Nick Cave.

He's recently put out a book with his friend, the journalist Sean O'Hagan, where they talked about things that really matter to Nick right now, things that are concerning him after the death of his two sons, which of course is. Death, absence, presence of those people who die, who still linger as ghosts that might be real or metaphorical, or just entirely within one's own head.

Nick's close reading of the Bible, particularly the New Testament, all that sort of things. And it kind of works as a dialectic because Sean's, I'm pretty sure, is an atheist. And very amusingly at the beginning of it, um, Nick talks about, His song, Breathless, which is really, I think it's a hymn that could be sung in church today.

And Sean was really shocked. He said, 'if I'd have known it was like a sort of a praise God song, I never would have played it at my wedding'. But I thought, I feel like I'm on the same page as Nick with a lot of these things. I'm someone who's always lingering outside of church. Don't much enjoy being inside them.

I went to church a fair bit. In my, um, childhood and teens, not coerced at all, never found it horrible. I don't particularly enjoy a service these days, although having said that, I think Christian Orthodox service is the closest thing I've ever had to a kind of a sublime encounter with, with the Christian liturgy.

I found that in an Orthodox church in Paris. I just wandered into, I thought it was a Thursday evening and I thought they won't be doing anything. And so I walked in and a full on service was taking place with two cantors and the whole liturgy is sung and it was just, oh, it's wonderful.

It was just wonderful. So i'm full of uncertainty about what it is, but um, it's, it's the thing that is sort of…

James Valentine: You know, it's there. There's something there, you're not quite sure. It's not defined and it's not, there's no institution that's defining it for you.

Richard Fidler: It's the thing I've always, it's the reason why I've always had a kind of, um, soft spot for some surrealist poets like there's a, a Czech surrealist poet called Jaroslav Seifert.

And he had this wonderful poem, which I'm going to quote for you now off a page, which I brought with me here. And to have written such a thing in Prague makes perfect sense to me.

He wrote "Key holes are glittering in the sky. And when a cloud covers them, somebody's hand is on the doorknob and the eye, which had hoped to see a mystery gazes in vain.

I wouldn't mind opening that door, except I don't know which, and then I fear What I might find.

I just felt I knew exactly what he was talking about when he wrote that. I feel very comfortable with that.

James Valentine:

That makes sense. I don't think you could spend so much time with the medieval, with the ancient world as Richard does, and be cold to the possibility of something beyond.

I could get him talking on that, but there were no go areas. Is there anything in the modern world that you believe is kind of ghastly, killing us, anything in particular? You were sort of like, Oh, that's it. TikTok is the end of it all.

Richard Fidler: Of course there are.

So much of it, James. Damn, if I'm going to tell you, come on.

If I told you, I'm going to just be like, old man shakes his fist at cloud.

Do you know how, do you know how interested people are in thinking on my sort of mordant reflections of what I don't like? about modernity and modern politics, and what millennials say all the time. No, they're not.

James Valentine: Oh, I was, but I gather we might need a whole other episode.

Richard Fidler, thank you so much. Thank you for being so frank, so open.

Richard Fidler: James, you have been, as Kafka would have said, an axe for the frozen sea inside of me.

James Valentine: Of course, he finished with Kafka. A wonderful discussion and a really perfect first episode. It's that kind of frankness, depth, and openness I hope to achieve here in the Belief Series.

Clare Wright: I'll tell you what I don't believe, having studied history. I don't believe that the value of studying history is so that we won't make the mistakes of the past all over again.

That's often something that's, you know, considered to be the value of a history education or an interest in history. I think that that is rubbish.

We will make mistakes over and over again because we are mere puny humans.

James Valentine: That's Professor Clare Wright.

Future episodes will include discussions with film director, George Miller, writer, artist, Sean Tan, and musician, William Barton.

I hope you'd like this so much you're still listening and I hope you'll go onto the ABC Listen app, press the heart and subscribe.

I'm James Valentine.

This podcast was written and produced by myself with Grant Wolter and Chloe MacKenzie.