A message from Stephen Fry

A message from Stephen Fry

Author: Festival of Dangerous Ideas February 24, 2026 Duration: 1:48

Heading into its 13th festival, FODI exists thanks to supporters who don't flinch at difficult topics. Brave minds. Bold hearts. Dangerous conversations. We've built a reputation for dragging the world's sharpest provocateurs and thought leaders to Sydney IRL.

From 21–23 August 2026, FODI returns. Our Opening Night event with Salman Rushdie will ignite a jam-packed weekend, where global thought leaders, trail-blazing artists and fearless experts converge upon some of Sydney's most iconic venues.

But a festival with global reach doesn't come cheap. To keep tickets accessible and to stay fiercely independent, FODI relies on people like you.

Big ideas don't fund themselves. Donate to help us lock in extraordinary speakers and artists for this year's program at festivalofdangerousideas.com.au.


For more than a decade, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas has curated a space where provocative thinking isn't just welcomed, it's the entire point. This podcast is a direct line to that stage, offering an archive of talks that deliberately unsettle comfortable opinions and interrogate the stubborn problems we often agree to ignore. Each episode captures a live conversation from Australia's original disruptive ideas festival, presenting arguments that can be exhilarating, uncomfortable, and vitally important. You’ll hear from a compelling roster of festival alumni-including leading experts, intellectual troublemakers, and visionary authors-who share perspectives that conventional discourse frequently sidelines. The discussions here aren't theoretical exercises; they grapple with the pressing and difficult issues shaping our society and culture right now. Tuning in means granting yourself access to a decade-long tradition of intellectual courage, where the core assumption is that some truths are only reached by first entertaining a dangerous idea. It’s a chance to listen as boundaries are pushed, not for shock value, but for clarity. The result is a consistently challenging and refreshing audio experience that complicates simple narratives and expands what feels possible to talk about.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Festival of Dangerous Ideas
Podcast Episodes
FODI: The In-Between | 05.5 | Semi-Autonomous | B-Side [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 5:13
A text-generating AI that has been trained with FODI transcripts speaks in conversation with a deepfake AI about violence, conspiracy theories and what it means to be human. Our FODI-trained AI was created using Max Wool…
FODI: The In-Between | 04.5 | The Dancer | B-Side [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 2:49
Recording art for a post-human world, a machine attempts to describe a human dance. The piece responds to Eleanor Gordon-Smith and Slavoj Žižek's discussion, the power of words to create reality, and the experience of em…
FODI: The In-Between | 03.5 | Within Salt | B-Side [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 5:11
During Sydney's most recent lockdown, sound artist Alexandra Spence submerged a 15 minute-long piece of cassette tape in seawater. The cassette tape contained a field recording of waves, and a recording of Alex's voice o…
FODI: The In-Between | 02.5 | Anthropocene | B-Side [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 5:28
We hear the recorded sound of the invisible electromagnetic landscape that humans created unintentionally, allowing us to tune in to what our environment has to endure. Against a backdrop, we hear the voices of anonymous…
FODI: The In-Between | 01.5 | Light Shines | B-Side [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 4:56
Sydney-based writer Tasnim Hossain records her written take on the meandering histories of Enlightenment discussed by Joya Chatterji and Stephen Fry, and the experimental sounds of the first known recordings of the human…