John Pesutto - The Identity of Victoria's Liberal Party
The Discernable Interviews
John Pesutto - The Identity of Victoria's Liberal Party
34min
John Pesutto is the State Liberal Member for Hawthorn, Liberal Leader of the Victorian Opposition and Shadow Minister for Multicultural Affairs. He lost his seat in 2018 but re-won it in the Nov 2022 state election, before quickly being elected as party leader.
He joined Discernable to answer questions around what the Liberal Party actually stands for, why they made moves against their own MPs Moira Deeming, Renee Heath and Bernie Finn, what they will do about housing affordability, energy availability and equity programs, and ultimately why younger voters should consider voting for the Liberal Party.
JOHN PESUTTO
https://vic.liberal.org.au/team/john-pesutto
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The People's Project: Victoria is Broken
The People's Project
The People's Project: Victoria is Broken
2hr 7min
On tonight’s show with Ken Phillips and Nick Karamouzis from Self Employed Australia:
VICTORIA IS BROKEN
Once again Daniel Andrews is dogged by allegations of corruption in his government. We look at the systemic nature of ‘grey corruption’ that is now widely acknowledged across left and right wing media. We make comparisons with Liberal corruption in other states such as NSW.
NOT ABOVE THE LAW
Self Employed Australia provides a final and detailed summary of the entire NATL campaign, and what transpired in Victorian courts. We reveal outrageous moves by judges to assist the Daniel Andrews government, feeding them arguments in court.
ALBO ATTACKS THE GIG ECONOMY
The Australian Prime Minister seeks to ‘protect’ gig workers by fundamentally changing the notion of a ‘commercial contract’, forcing ’employee’ standards on gig workers. We explore what this really means for anyone self employed, or those who use gig work to top up their ordinary income.
MARXISM IN MELBOURNE
Ken Phillips attended the Marxism 2023 conference in Melbourne, and brings us a full report on what he discovered.
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LINKS
The New Discourses page: https://www.youtube.com/@newdiscourses
The full list of named individuals to be prosecuted under the NATL campaign: https://selfemployedaustralia.com.au/Downloads/NATL/SEA-letter-to-WorkSafe-29Sept20.pdf
The 57 page judgement https://selfemployedaustralia.com.au/Downloads/NATL/Judgment-Supreme-Court-Victoria-ICA-vs-VWA.pdf
Support Discernable at Locals: https://discernable.locals.com/support
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Kos Samaras: The Future of Australian Politics
The Discernable Interviews
Kos Samaras: The Future of Australian Politics
1hr 30min
Kos Samaras has over 25 years of experience in advertising and politics. Between 2005 to 2019 he served as Victorian Labor’s Deputy Campaign Director and is now the Director of Redbridge Group Australia, a social and community research company.
He specialises in combining research and socio-political analysis to illustrate emerging trends within the Australian community. He joined Discernable to discuss why the entire continent is turning red (voting for Labor).
We discussed:
- Kos’ history as Deputy Campaign Director for Daniel Andrews
- Why the Redbridge Group published proprietary data on Twitter for free
- The importance of strong political oppositions
- Lockdowns are political, not scientific
- Why the Liberals are dying
- How Liberals held seats in Sydney
- The winning formula for the Liberal Party
- Why Daniel Andrews is so angry
- Kos’ struggle with depression
- Political infighting
- How the Greens are taking over
- Sydney’s property market hurts Labor in NSW
- Melbourne has poorer migrants and a dispersed Millennial class
- Transgender and minority groups
- Councils that fake surveys and won’t collect your bins
- Empathy for the unvaccinated
- Questions from Twitter
- The Indigenous Voice to Parliament
- Labor will lose the next QLD election
- The new elites
- Who is going to pay for ‘Labor’s debt’?
- What is Stoicism?
- What Kos has learned from surveying people
- Low Information Voters
- What makes a good politician?
- Asking Kos to argue against himself
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Better than QandA: Impossible Conversations with Peter Boghossian
Discernable® News and Editorials
Better than QandA: Impossible Conversations with Peter Boghossian
2hr 32min
Better than QandA is a new format live panel show that appeals to those who want to think deeply about the world today.
Tonight’s topic ‘Impossible Conversations with Peter Boghossian’ explores epistemology: how do you know what you know? After demonstrating multiple games of ‘street epistemology’ we will dive into the ‘Sokal Squared’ ‘Grievance Studies Affair’ where James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian successfully published hoax papers in peer-reviewed academic journals to demonstrate the intellectual corruption of academia.
Panellists:
- Peter Boghossian joins us live, all the way from the USA. Peter is a Founding Faculty member at the University of Austin and the director of National Progress Alliance. His teaching pedigree spans more than 25 years and focuses on the Socratic method, scientific skepticism, and critical thinking. Peter’s dissertation explored increasing the moral reasoning of prison inmates and aiding their resistance to crime. His most recent book is How to Have Impossible Conversations and his writing can be found in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Time Magazine, National Review, and elsewhere. His work is centred on bringing the tools of professional philosophers to a wide variety of contexts to help people think through what seem to be intractable problems.
- Flying in from Perth is Australia’s most controversial comedian: Corey White. Transitioning from criminal lawyer to comedian, Corey has appeared at The Sydney Writers Festival, on Triple M, SBS, and at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. He’s mic dropped on the SAS, police, “journalists”, the legal profession and government approved comedians, with a swag of agenda fluid gags that are rigorously tested, safe and effective for all. Until 2023 he was Australia’s most cancelled comedian for daring to raise impossible conversations.
Support Peter and his non-profit, the National Progress Alliance: https://www.nationalprogressalliance.org
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Better than QandA: The High Performance Life
Discernable® News and Editorials
Better than QandA: The High Performance Life
2hr 5min
On Mondays at 9:35pm you can tune into the ABC and watch their attempt at having an open discussion or at 7:30pm you can watch something better.
Better than QandA is a new format live panel show that appeals to those who want to think deeply about the world today.
Tonight’s show is brought to you by the 20 brave souls in the room who helped seed what we hope becomes a monthly event. Tonight’s topic, ‘The High Performance Life’, leads us to explore the ideas of success, happiness, identity, consistency, achievement and purpose.
From 2:34 we play a game a Street Epistemology
From 26:00 we started the QandA panel:
- ‘How do we determine success?’
- ‘How do I find magic in the mundane?’
- ‘How do I figure out what I should be doing for a job when I’ve spent my whole life doing jobs I’ve hated?’
- ‘How do you consistently perform at an elite level?’
- ‘How do you stay focused?’
- ‘Is it really, and still, a man’s world? Does the trope persist long after genders have been equalised?’
- ‘How do we fight the war on meat, on health and push back against BigFood and BigPharma?’
- ‘Why is veganism and plant-based being co-opted by BigFood?’
- ‘How much does diet contribute to a high performance life?’
- ‘What is one characteristic every leader should possess?’
- ‘What is the role of a strong and functioning family unit in society?’
- ‘What is better – intrinsic or extrinsic motivation?’
- ‘How do you transform abstract ideas into quantifiable outcomes?’
2:03:08 – promotion for our next on Fri 31 Mar 2023
All of Discernable’s town halls, merch, interviews and events: https://linktr.ee/discernableofficial
LATEST NEWS AND EDITORIALS
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Trung Luu: Liberal MP, Police Officer and Boat Refugee
The Discernable Interviews
Trung Luu: Liberal MP, Police Officer and Boat Refugee
1hr 29min
Trung Luu spent 24 years investigating crime scenes as a sworn member of Victoria Police. In 2022 Trung was elected to parliament as the Liberal Party’s first Vietnamese MP in Victoria.
He travelled to Australia by boat as a young refugee and has since built a life and family in the western suburbs of Melbourne. In this sit down we discussed the Liberal Party’s attempted expulsion of Moira Deeming MP, the refugee perspective of other refugees arriving by boat and ‘skipping the queue’, freedom of speech and privacy in Australia and the banning of certain people and subjects.
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Dr Tien Kieu: Labor MP, Theoretical Physicist and Boat Refugee
The Discernable Interviews
Dr Tien Kieu: Labor MP, Theoretical Physicist and Boat Refugee
2hr 7min
Dr Tien Kieu was a Labor MP in the Daniel Andrews government 2018-2022. During that time he continued to publish academic papers as a theoretical physicist.
His story today comes in three parts: refugees, politics and science. For conversation on the politics and ethics of Covid-l9 lockdowns and government support of minorities in general and communism, skip to 20min 42sec. For our discussion on quantum mechanics and theoretical physics skip to 57min 40sec.
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The AI Revolution Finally Arrives: Why ChatGPT and generative AI is a true revolution, not hype.
Discernable® Editorials
The AI Revolution Finally Arrives: Why ChatGPT and generative AI is a true revolution, not hype.
Reading Time: 3 Minutes
Matt Wong
Chief Writer
Consider the major revolutions of history:
- Agricultural revolution 10,000-5,000 BC
- Printing press 1400s
- Industrial revolution 1700s-1900s
- Information revolution 1950s-2000s
- Digital revolution ~1990s-2005
- Mobile revolution ~2005-2020
- AI revolution ~2022+
This layout is time/event based. Another way to think of technological revolutions is systems based. This is why you keep hearing about ‘the fourth industrial revolution’ which looks like this:
No matter how you think of revolutions, they are all ultimately defined by how significantly they change the way humans live.
We have all become de-sensitised to claims of ‘technological breakthrough!’ because they are usually overblown, myopic and have no significant effect on how humans live. Sometimes they never will, sometimes they are simply early. Current example: the Metaverse.
This ‘failure to launch’ is normal and to be expected in the advent of new technology. Tech needs to be birthed, tried and tested in the natural game of ‘survival of the fittest’.
Thus it’s easy to dismiss the latest ‘groudbreaking app’ as just more hype designed to line the pockets of a corporation. It’s probably just a fad that will die in a year’s time right?
Park that cynicism for a moment as you watch this video from Microsoft. Ask yourself whether you are witnessing vaporware, empty hype, or something more:
I believe it’s something more. Let me explain by way of a story:
In 2022 we shrank our staff count (deliberately – to extend our startup’s runway). In the strive to maintain output we attempted to automate or accelerate much of our daily tasks. Nearly all automated tools and assistants were eventually jettisoned because their effort:benefit ratio didn’t make sense.
Except for OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
We have now permanently integrated ChatGPT3.5 into a large number of our workflows, and our day to day looks very different to just 6 months ago. Not only is generative, predictive AI speeding up and enabling content creation with fewer staff, it’s changing the way we create.
But wait, there’s more! We are hearing from housewives, seniors(!) and from nearly every business we consult for…everyone is experiencing the same paradigm shift.
The common refrain is that they now rely on AI to such an extent that they cannot imagine life without it. Kind of like imagining living and working without the internet.
AI is now a contagion.
We are witnessing a technological revolution with generative AI and few are ready to adapt like Millennials are. Fellow travellers born loosely around 1981-1996 will remember what it’s like to learn and grow on both sides of ‘the internet’.
Thanks to fortuitous timing, we Millennials understand the internet both natively and as adopted phenomena.
This is unlike Generation X whose young minds were formed pre-internet but have since adopted it as a tool for life.
Millennials are even more unlike Generation Z (so called ‘Digital Natives’) who were born into a digital era, their brains forming in a world rich with information and instant connection.
I truly appreciate and feel the wonder of broadband internet because dial-up, failed connections and information scarcity is a visceral and lived reality.
But I also share the natural fluency for the digital world that Gen Z has, finding it easy to be an ‘early adopter’ of tech.
That Microsoft ad above is actually just a collection of use-cases that are already happening TODAY. But it seems to be happening in the lives of the ‘early majority’, not just the ‘early adopter’ category.
With smart integrations, we are going to blow right past ‘the chasm’ or ‘the tipping point’.
Why? Because this revolution is PRAGMATIC. It’s practically improving the lives of people and businesses everywhere. The ‘Early Majority’ are in fact…pragmatists. They adopt tech if it makes sense. And large language models make sense to our everyday lives.
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The Scandal of Grace with Bishop Paul Barker
The Discernable Interviews
The Scandal of Grace with Bishop Paul Barker
1hr 47min
What is the core promise of Jesus Christ and Christianity? Rather than settle for common caricatures, we invited Bishop Paul Barker to take us to the very centre of the faith where he explained the scandalous claims it makes.
What is faith? Is it testable? Does it lean on any empiricism and science or is it purely a ‘leap of faith’?
What about social justice – is that the key message of Christianity?
What does ‘believing’ mean? Is it merely mental assent or something more?
Who is Jesus Christ? Does it really matter or is the rest of the Bible helpful without him?
How ‘good’ do you have to be to get into heaven? What about really bad people?
These are the questions that were in my mind approaching this interview, and I found it both surprising and refreshing to hear such a unique exposition of the Christian faith, instead of the strawman we hear in popular culture.
The second half of the discussion centred around cultural relevance, whether the world is devolving its standards, and whether all faiths will remain true to their sacred beliefs and texts or become secularised due to cultural pressure. We explored the failings of the modern church, and the loss of the core message of grace.
At Discernable we continue to explore different perspectives, beliefs, values and opinions by presenting them in their best light possible so you can make up your own mind.
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Dr Jereth Kok - Cancelled by AHPRA for Posting Memes
The Discernable Interviews
Dr Jereth Kok - Cancelled by AHPRA for Posting Memes
1hr 36min
For 4 years Dr Jereth Kok has been suspended from practising medicine for posting memes, satire, and other Christian religious opinions on social media. Many of these posts centred around transgenderism, sexuality and abortion.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) used an emergency mechanism reserved for use on dangerous doctors who represent a risk to ‘the public interest’.
Suspended without trial or hearing has meant 4 years of ‘legal limbo’ for Dr Kok who has been found neither guilty nor innocent by AHPRA. He has since been forced to retrain into an alternative career, so regardless of the eventual tribunal outcome he is unlikely to return to medicine.
AHPRA have disclosed that their investigation began when they received 2 anonymous complaints about Dr Jereth Kok’s social media posts, and that those two complainants have never been his patients.
In this interview we explored the offences alleged by AHPRA, using AHPRA screenshots of Dr Kok’s social media posts. Most of them are inarguably absurd, satire, or vanilla statements and the remaining are expositions of his Christian views.
We went on to discuss the dangerous reality being set by bodies like AHPRA in censoring doctors and homogenising the ideology of the entire industry, resulting in anti-scientific practices that ignores long-established principles of modern medicine.
DR JERETH KOK
https://www.hrla.org.au/jk-day-court
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