Gide, humans. Welcome to your refuge from everyday squabbles. This is the place where we can lift our heads and think about things from a more enlightened perspective than we might in the normal everyday course of events. There are certainly no taboos on this show. We can go beyond the echo chambers of social media feeds and simply talk about good arguments and bad arguments.

I am here to sniff out the difference.

A lot of the things we talk about will be wise, a lot will be deeply unwise,

some will be funny, some scientific, some of them ugly.

But all of these conversations, I hope, will make some of us just a little uncomfortable.

Music will make some of us just a little uncomfortable. What a bloody treasure today's guest is.

Tim Flannery is a household name in Australia, probably one of the most popular, beloved, controversial and respected scientists in the country.

He won the most prestigious award that Australia ever offers, the Australian of the Year award.

He was the Australian of the year in 2007, having been named the Australian Humanist of the year in 2005, he is a mammologist.

Mamologist?

What's a person who studies mammals?

Whatever that is.

A paleontologist by training and started out working, looking into the incredible animals

who used to exist in ancient times on this vast continent of ours.

And he's an environmentalist and conservationist and an explorer.

And now a public science figure.

He was the head of the Climate Commission, which the federal government established to provide information on climate change to the public,

that was then abolished by a conservative government run by Tony Abbott,

was one of the first things that the Abbott government did.

So Tim Flannery went on to join a bunch of his other sacked climate fire and emergency commissioners to form an independent body called the Climate Council, which is now funded totally by the community, including myself, I'm a supporter, and they provide independent climate science to the Australian public.

He started out running the Australian Museum. Well, he didn't start out there. That's a pretty big gig to start out with, but that was where he first came to national prominence. And he was a principal research scientist there doing incredible work, like discovering dozens of different species of native kangaroos, saving the bandicoot population on North Head in Sydney. He went to Harvard

University for a year, not as a student, as a professor. He was the chair of Australian studies

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