Jennifer Rayner (2016) | Generation Less

Jennifer Rayner (2016) | Generation Less

Author: Festival of Dangerous Ideas June 15, 2020 Duration: 31:20

Why are young people worse off than their parents? Why is the gap between older and younger Australians – in terms of work, wealth and wellbeing – growing wider? Is Australia cheating the young?

Jennifer Rayner was born into aspirational Australian suburbia during the Hawke years and came out of age in the long boom of the Howard era. Her lifetime tracks the yawning inequalities that have opened up across the Australian community in the past 30 years. She has worked as a federal political adviser, an international youth ambassador in Indonesia and a private sector consultant. She holds a PhD from the Australian National University.


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 | 06.5 | Tongues | B-Side [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 5:02
Tongues is an explicit, potent musical manifesto, exploring having your voice taken away, in response to Roxane Gay and Kate Manne's discussion. Tongues is written and performed by Tanya Tagaq, a Canadian Inuk improvisat…
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…