Good Weekend Talks

Social media was once harnessed by Barack Obama to spread hope. Now “angertainers” are exploiting our human instinct to seek threat to divide society and to build their own cultural, political and social capital, often based on misinformation and lies.
They create content for platforms that reward stunts, insults and anger – in the process, distorting reality and hijacking any possibility of ...

Bob Brown has spent the past 50 years trying to make people put the planet before profit. The environmental crusader, former senator and medical doctor, and founding member of the Wilderness Society has fought pivotal battles, including campaigns to save the Franklin River and the Swift parrot. He also practises what he preaches: he has lived sustainably for decades in a one-bedroom home.
Today, to celebrate t...

You might know her best from Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell, but over the past 20 years, Christie Whelan Browne has become one of the most in-demand stars of the Australian stage, appearing in Britney Spears: The Cabaret, The Producers, Shane Warne: The Musical and Muriel's Wedding.

But the thing that has kept her in the headlines is no laughing matter – the allegations of sexual harassment she made against her Rocky Horror Sho...

When Fran Lebowitz was growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1950s, she won a school award for being “the Class Wit” – and in her 50-year career as a writer and speaker, she’s repeatedly earned that label. Among her countless famous aphorisms, this zinger: "The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat."

As a writ...

Luke Bateman is perhaps Australia’s most unlikely book critic – a former rugby league star and recovered gambling addict who works as a logger on a remote Queensland property. While hardly your average inner-city literary type, Bateman had always loved reading – especially fantasy books – but living in the bush with only black snakes for company, had no one to talk to about it. So one day in April last year,...

Investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe has made a career out of chasing the kinds of stories that most people would be wise to leave alone. The New Yorker writer is drawn to powerful institutions and the people at their heart – from the Sackler dynasty, whose pharmaceutical company created the opioid painkiller OxyContin, in Empire of Pain, to the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in Say Nothing. His late...

New York food writer, editor and podcaster Laurie Woolever spent the early years of her career assisting two very famous chefs: first Mario Batali, then Anthony Bourdain, for whom she worked for nine years. Woolever was also, for much of this time, an addict – using alcohol, marijuana and sex to get through the ups and downs of work, marriage and motherhood. She writes about all of this in her candid 2025 memoir, Care & F...

Marianne Perkovic spent decades working in the finance sector. In 2006, she was the youngest chief executive of an ASX-listed company and in 2018, as a banking executive, she faced a grilling at a royal commission. This is not the standard path for nailing the best seat at Australian Fashion Week. In fact, becoming executive chair of the Australian Fashion Council in 2023 was meant to be her “fun board” (while giving he...

Stephanie Alexander is a national icon: an internationally renowned cooking guru, best-selling writer and inspirational founder of a nationwide kitchen-garden scheme for schoolkids. She's also the final arbiter of kitchen disputes in homes all over Australia – resolving disagreements about how to store tomatoes and when to take the sponge out of the oven – as the author of Australia's most famous cookbook, The Cook...

Bob Carr has done hard jobs before. He was premier of NSW for 10 years, and later served as foreign minister under Julia Gillard’s government. But when his beloved wife, Helena, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 2023, he faced the hardest job of his life – learning how to live without her. Carr worked through his deep shock and sadness by obsessively walking the Sydney streets he once presided over as premier, often ...

In this episode, we talk to Courtney Barnett, who broke into the musical mainstream a little over a decade ago as an Aussie singer-songwriter with deadpan delivery, with work veering from the witty and rambling to something evoking Margaret Atwood. The Grammy-nominated artist chats to Konrad Marshall from her home in Los Angeles, where she's about to release her fourth album, "Creature of Habit".

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Kathy Lette is a comic writer and pioneering voice in contemporary feminism whose first book, Puberty Blues, was published in 1979. Co-authored with Gabrielle Carey, it catapulted her into the public eye, horrifying her headmistress mother with its graphic depictions of teenage sex and drug taking. She has subsequently written 21 best-selling books and today speaks with The Sydney Morning Herald’s deputy opinion editor, ...

Todd Sampson began his TV career on Gruen, the long-running ABC series about advertising, before transforming himself into a human guinea pig to scrutinise the limits of the human brain and body.
His upcoming show, called Why?, explores the reasons behind why people turn to extreme beliefs and behaviours such as doomsday prepping, base-jumping or alien worship. In this chat, hosted by The Sydney Morning H...

In this episode, we talk to reality TV star, youth worker and mental health advocate Brooke Blurton. Many know her as the first Indigenous and bisexual Bachelorette from the dating-show franchise, but she's also an author, presenter and podcaster. Blurton talks with Konrad Marshall about everything from growing up in Western Australia to life after The Bachelorette and her recent TV collaboration with Tony Armstrong. As well: ...

Martin Luther King III carries one of the most famous names in 20th century history, that of his father, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. The second child and eldest son of Dr King, Mr King was just 10 years old when his father was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Mr King joins Good Weekend senior writer Amanda Hooton for a discussion on what it was like to have the most famou...

Jon Lovett is a former speech writer for Barack Obama, a progressive activist and co-host of a global hit political podcast. Sounds serious, right? Yet, out of the four hosts of the popular Pod Save America, Lovett it is known as the funny one. He's a comedian who appeared on a season of Survivor, wrote...

Tennis star Alex de Minaur will lead the homegrown charge in the Australian Open, which begins on Sunday, off the back of a tough 2025. De Minaur spoke to Konrad Marshall for this episode late last year, during a rare and all-too-brief break between seasons. It was an opportunity to ask the tennis champion at length about everything from his lowest point, which he himself calls his rock bottom, along with how he plans to ...