A probe into Gideon Haigh's worldview, someone I've anticipated interviewing ever since this podcast began.

Some highlights from the podcast.

• On cricket: “Cricket marches backwards into the future — always haunted by its past.”
• On Warne: “He had perfect superficiality and the gift of putting everyone at ease.”
• On journalism: “Legacy media has become mindlessly negative. If they can’t own it, they destroy it.”
• On new media: “It’s amazingly empowering to write something and press publish — no intermediaries, no gatekeepers.”
• On India: “India has become the gravitational centre of world cricket — a nation full of gods, and some of them play cricket.”
• On memory: “Memory is a slippery thing — journalists are constantly trying to pin it down, trusting it when it suits us, interrogating it when it doesn’t.”

Gideon is a veteran journalist, author and the most eclectic cricket writer alive today. He has prolific output. He’s published more than 50 books and thousands of articles scoping a gamut of topics. Work, bureaucracy, the office, Australian crime, banks, business, scandals, cricket, cricket history, cricket politics, media, journalism, biography, memoir, and too many more to rattle off.

Check out the video of this one (Spotify or Youtube). The decor is a very on the nose projection for Gideon's aforementioned interests. Lining opposite walls are two imposing floor to ceiling bookshelves eyeing each down for Gideons attention. Behind him a shrine to cricket and across from him a shrine to the rest.

Gideon is also the co-host, alongside Peter Lalor, the wonderful Substack and podcast - Cricket Et Al.

If you like Cricket than you’ll love Cricket Et Al.

... a few quotes from Gideon in the interview to leave you with.

• "I've always thought journalism was a great vehicle for curiosity"
• “Contemporaneous documentation — that which was created at the time — is the closest thing we have to truth.”
• “Part of the romance of archives is finding them — going to see the thing that no one else has looked at.”
• “We are too easily satisfied with low-hanging fruit. I believe strongly in delayed gratification.”
• “An inquest is like a lightning flash — it illuminates everything in its surroundings for a moment before vanishing.”
• “If the record spoke for itself, it wouldn’t need interpretation.”
• “A good historian has humility. They know they can’t tell the whole thing, but they do their best.”
• “It’s not imagination that’s rare, it’s perseverance.”
• “I’m interested in delighting readers, not just informing them.”
• “The minute I stop getting better, I’ll stop doing it.”
• “Journalism should be a vehicle for curiosity, not defensiveness.”
• “I’ve always thought the best journalism comes from knowing who really pulls the strings.”
• “The site, the Substack — it’s a hungry beast. It requires constant replenishment.”
• “I’m not just writing to be read. I’m writing to find out what I think.”
• “I dislike the term ‘non-fiction’ — defining something by what it’s not.”
• “Legacy media is in long-term decline. They can’t own new ideas — so they’d rather destroy them.”
• “The barriers to entry have never been lower. The barriers to making a living have never been higher.”
• “Cricket is a game that marches backward into the future — every feat echoes those that came before.”
• “Test cricket is romantic love; T20 is carnal love.”

I've anticipated this interview for 6 years.

Robyn Davidson has lived one of the most mythologised lives in Australian memory.

She famously and unintentionally burst onto the scene with Tracks in 1988, which was a 2,700km camel trek across the Simpson desert. She'd never intended to write a book or document anything of it's kind from the journey, but was desperate for some money to gather supplies for the impending trip. She figured $1000 would do, and serendipitously met the National Geographic photographer who put her on the map whilst cleaning windows as a part time gig in Alice Springs.

He said that if she wrote to National Geographic telling them about the journey, then she might get what she needed.

They paid her $4,000 which Robyn comments 'was a fortune', and from there, the rest is history.

Robyn has since lived between India, London and Australia but travelled most elsewhere on the map. She was with Salman Rushdie while he wrote the 'Satanic Verses', has published a series of books and articles documenting the lives of nomads, lived an 'aristocratic life' with her partner Narendra Singh Bhati in the high Himalayas and most recently published an autobiography titled 'Unfinished Woman'. Robyn say's to me that 'memoir is the slipperiest genre'.

I have waited 6 years to do this interview with Robyn. She has a dream guest of mine since before the podcast began. We recorded earlier this year in rural Victoria.

The interview is Robyn's life. What led up to tracks, and what happened after.

Robyn reflects on her lifelong resistance to labels. Not a “writer,” not a “traveller,” not a “feminist icon,” but simply, as she says, “a person.” We speak about memoir, the slipperiness of memory “in retrospect, memory is imagination”.

She speaks candidly about solitude, beauty, and depression, her family, fame, about the distortion of the famous photographs “Rick made me look like a Vogue model, that wasn’t me”, and her uneasy relationship with literary celebrity in London alongside Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and more.

In this podcast you can expect the following discussion.

The Performed Self & Identity

• “Whenever you use the first-person pronoun, you are necessarily creating a character.”

The Narrative Fallacy

• “We invent neat, linear, emotionally satisfying stories to explain what happened… but the world is messy, chaotic and driven by chance.”

Freedom, Nomadism & Refusal to Be Fixed

• Freedom and movement — literal and intellectual — define her resistance to labels like “travel writer” or “author.”

Chance, Fate & Serendipity

• “On the tiniest turning point you can head off in a billion directions.”

Depression, Nihilism & Meaning

• “It’s a terrible pain that hovers somewhere between the physical body and the mental body.”
• “To learn how to deal with a profoundly nihilistic view and to counter that view — that’s been the most formative moment of my life.”

Beauty, Objectification & Subjecthood

• “If that journey was about anything, it was about being the subject of my own life, not an object.”

Feminism, Rebellion & the 1968 Generation

• The spirit of the late-’60s counterculture — radical freedom, equality, and experimentation — shaped her worldview.

Authenticity vs. Fame

• “What I was interested in was knowledge and whether people were genuine or

“I deserved whatever the opposite of a Pulitzer is.”

Phil Elwood is the author of All the Worst Humans, a confessional memoir from the dubious world of public relations.

As a PR operative. He helped Qatar win the 2022 World Cup. He spun the release of the Lockerbie bomber into a “positive headline.” Had the Gaddafi family, the Assad regime and plenty more among his clients.

Phil speaks with humility and incredible clarity about what he learned from that world. The moral grey zones, the craft behind the spin, and how media manipulation really works in practice.

It’s a rare, honest window into an industry that prefers the shadows.

• How propaganda and PR actually get executed behind closed doors
• The mechanics of “first ink,” astroturfing, and reputation laundering
• The moral compromises behind Qatar’s 2022 World Cup bid
• Sportswashing, Liv Golf, and the new global game of influence
• Whether the media is more easily manipulated than ever?
• Whether AI and independent creators can break the old PR machinery

00:00 — Who is Phil Elwood?
04:57 — Lockerbie bomber: how he manufactured “positive press” for Libya.
11:14 — “Opposite of a Pulitzer” treating the news like a solvable game.
12:30 — What a PR operative really does; “infect a newsroom.”
18:28 — First Ink masterclass: Antigua vs USA
27:44 — Qatar 2022: going negative on the US bid
40:15 — Is Sportswashing PR? Is it all bad?
49:57 — “Buy the printing press”: oligarch media ownership.
55:01 — News collapse, AI replacing reporters, and why that’s dangerous.
57:21 — Andrew Callaghan. Do gatekeepers still matter?
01:05:53 — “Digital fentanyl”; treat content as a public-health issue.
01:10:27 — Rebranding Zuckerberg; persona as PR product.
01:22:44 — Bots: PR firms pitching bot farms
01:34:30 — Practical playbook & media-literacy plus a nice close.