Simon Waller (00:01.368)
Hello and welcome to the future with friends. Today I’m being joined by a friend of mine. I met over a decade ago, Kath Walters. Kath and I, I don’t even, do you remember when we first met? What’s your memory of our first meeting Kath?

Kath Walters (00:20.928)
My memory, I think I might’ve seen you in the, the thought-led business school kind of immersions, but my memory is actually of us having a coffee and you sort of saying, look, I’ll, I want you to help me with my book. And I was kind of like, bit sort of unsure about what this was all about. So, and then you were sort of saying, I was like, okay. and you were saying.

Eventually you said, in exchange I’ll do, I’ll give you some technology advice. So wasn’t quite sure of the terms of the contract initially.

Simon Waller (00:59.122)
Well, I, yeah. So my memory was that we did, we did do an exchange. It was a contra deal that was done. And at the time, like I remember being a little bit intimidated by you. So, so Kath, you’re a journalist, correct? where did you work when you as journalist? Like it pretty, it’s not like high level journalism. wasn’t just kind of like the local paper.

Kath Walters (01:13.046)
You

Kath Walters (01:24.724)
No, I worked for Fairfax. I worked in a weekly business publication that was called Business Review Weekly or BRW. Now, like many publications, of default, it was a big thing, was started by Robert Godlinson, who was a fabulous journalist who started to bring in the sort of stories of the people behind the companies in Australia and

It was a really fun time. I loved it.

Simon Waller (01:57.11)
Yeah. I just remember like, I don’t know, like there’s something about someone perhaps who’s been a journalist. Like you’re quite like, not a little bit direct, like you want to get to the fact or the story. And I felt at the time I was still kind of playing as a keynote speaker or playing as an author. And then I met you and you’re like, but like, this is someone who actually has and does a job, you know, like, and I do remember we did at the time I was doing some tech coaching stuff.

And we did a contra deal, I think it was actually initially around some public relations work or something like that. But then I think through that, we developed a relationship that led to also my first book, analogosaurus and your advice and stuff on that. But yeah, I reckon it goes back and I think we’re also both working at the hub at the time. Is that right?

Kath Walters (02:48.738)
hub wasn’t it. keep sort of trying to remember, I can’t picture the coffee shop, but I can picture exactly where in the city it was. And I was at the hub at that stage.

Simon Waller (02:57.964)
Yeah. So I started the hub when I first came over here in 2020. So I reckon we might’ve even seen each other around the hub and then ended up in business school. But this is all validating the fact that this is a genuine friendship. We’ve known each other a long time. There’s not a random person I picked up off the street. You are very glad to have you on the Future with Friends.

Kath Walters (03:17.4)
Beautiful. Yes. No. And I’ve just got to say like a lot of that stuff that you, that tech stuff you taught me in that very first in exchange, I still use today all that time.

Simon Waller (03:30.35)
Well, this is a thing that really, I mean, to go, I mean, I imagine for like a lot of my, the people I worked with back then, they, there was a lack of confidence perhaps around technology that made them go, yeah, could actually do with some help here. And then when we reconnected, uh, and we started talking about you coming on the podcast, you blew my mind because apparently it was at last year, you were one of the 3 % or 5 % top users of ChatGPT in the world.

Kath Walters (04:00.256)
It was a, it was a bit of a sobering moment when a chat GPT said, you know, here’s a review of your 2025 use of, and it said, you’re in the top 3 % of users in the world. I’m like, I can believe that. Like I can believe that, but it was also a shock. I’m like, Ooh, something do I need to sort of stop that? Anyway, it was just something I

found the introduction of AI both very confronting and very fascinating. I asked chat, said, well, why do you think I’m in the top 3 %? And it said, because you asked a lot of questions. And so this is true. Like when I get an answer from ChatGBT, I will interrogate that answer a lot.

Simon Waller (04:46.99)
Yeah. so I must admit when I, when you first shared that little factoid with me, was like, Kath, really? And part of it was because I know of your journalistic roots, right? Like, the concern around things like artificial intelligence is the reliability of it and the efficacy of it. And in some ways your use of it like that, and even what you just explained then that when you get served up a response, you…

cannot accept it at face value and you feel a need to deeply interrogate it. And having been on the other side of that, I’m not necessarily an interrogation, that level of inquiry, right? I was like, okay, yeah, that, that is probably the way it makes sense. And in a way that there’s a credibility it gave me like around my, around the usage, because I use ChatGPT probably in a similar way. I struggle to accept face value.

and almost like I want to see the references. want to go to those references. want to read those. I want to get the counterpoint and only then can we arrive at something that feels like, something I can trust. Yeah.

Kath Walters (05:55.328)
Yeah. I often, mean, early on in the process, I would often just ask it to argue with itself because why, you know, why do I need to do the work? just say, well, okay, well now give me the opposite point of view. And so, you know, I would say argue with yourself and it would then provide the other argument. And, and then we’d go from there. I kind of rarely use it to get facts. I was more using it to sort of.

explore perspectives, explore ideas. Yeah, I would, but yeah, early on I clicked through the links. Like the first thing I did was click the links and was like, no such place. So.

Simon Waller (06:42.242)
And so when we, when we kind of, started talking about, you come on the podcast and we’re exploring different topics, you came up with something that I thought was super interesting and exciting because you have recently retired. retired from paid work. Exactly. Right. And I was like, wow. And we talked about this concept of the future of retirement. And I was like, this is such an interesting topic because I’ve had my own views around you having seen.

Kath Walters (06:55.982)
Start some pipework, yes.

Simon Waller (07:10.926)
parents retire, or my dad almost like pretend to retire. then I do think he retired, he retired for the first time when he was in his forties, then found out there was no one else retired his age, got sick of playing golf with like people, you know, 30 years older than him. And then got back and went and got another job, like a board of the business. And the second time around almost like didn’t retire. Like he just still has his little finger in the, like in the fishing business somewhere, but

I was like, this is such a great thing to explore. And then you sent me your first, we talked about it. You sent me a draft of your scenario and I was like, hang on Hath, this is not about the future of retirement. And we’ve now had to pivot. that right?

Kath Walters (07:53.518)
Correct. Because the coming up with the scenario took me into a place that I had to explore. I didn’t, if it was now, I could tell you about now, but we’re talking about the future. Excuse me. And I looked at the future and I thought, and you know, I was doing some prompts that you’d given me and that sort of thing.

And I thought, well, I don’t want that future. I don’t want to write that future because that future is, we lose everything. I didn’t want to go there. I just, and it created a sudden insight for me because I’m writing a novel about the stories we tell. And so I sort of then kind of

I started looking at telling a different story. And again, I was going back to the robot as I was thinking through the ideas. That’s the robot I call the AI. saying, well, what if it wasn’t like that? What if we did something different? What if it didn’t end up that way? What if AI didn’t collapse the world? What if that didn’t work out that way? What would we as human beings have had to have done?

to change that. And I found that much more interesting. And it sparked a of a resurgence in me of both hope and a sense of my sort of duty as a person no longer in paid work to get out in the streets and protest.

Simon Waller (09:23.31)
Mmm.

Simon Waller (09:44.462)
Yeah. So this is so interesting and we’ll talk after we hear your scenario, we’ll talk a little bit more about the process that you went through to write it. But I do think there’s something very interesting about the process in the sense that I think when we had those conversations beforehand, we talked a little bit about like, here’s some prompts and they’re both cognitive prompts, but also prompts you can use with things like a large language model like ChatGPT.

Here’s a set of prompts to take you through and think a little bit deeper about the future. then one of the things I think I’ve shared with you, and I’ve said this to most guests, it’s like, at end of the day, like your scenario is going to be about five minutes, which is about a page and a half or so. And you’re going to find that there’s only one thing you can explore well in that. And part of this process is you working out what’s that one thing. What do you care about so much that when you’re forced into this difficult situation, this is what you would choose.

And as I said, what was super interesting for me is that I got this and I was like, this isn’t actually about retirement at all. The only reference to retirement in it is that you’re retired. And, and what it actually, when we kind of went through that the first time and we realized, this is actually about the future of protest. And that again is such an interesting topic. And so, as much as I’m like, Ooh, I’m so keen to explore the future of retirement with you at some point.

Kath Walters (10:51.118)
Yes.

Simon Waller (11:10.22)
I’m very, very happy we’re doing this version today.

Kath Walters (11:14.07)
that is, I mean, it is retirement because I see my, one of the key jobs of my retirement is to reboot people’s capacity to believe in the power of protest.

Simon Waller (11:26.621)
So we like, let’s, let’s now have a listen to your scenarios. So in a second, I’m going to throw the microphone to you. Well, you’ve actually already got one, so I wanted to throw it. And, um, we’ll throw the microphone to you and I’m going to let you to read your scenario from the start to the finish before we do one last thing. So the other requirement I give you in this is you must choose a point in time. It has to be at least five years in the future and you have chosen five years into the future.

Kath Walters (11:52.234)
Yes, I pushed it out a little bit, now to 2035.

Simon Waller (11:54.212)
did you? Okay. 23.25. Okay, cool. And is there any significance or rationale behind the time frame?

Kath Walters (12:03.15)
I was looking at what I had thought had happened in the interval between my scenario and now, and I thought we needed a little bit more for that to have happened.

Simon Waller (12:12.45)
Yeah. And there’s a tension, isn’t there, between like, you know, if we come too close, we can’t imagine difference. But almost like if we take too far out, it feels maybe even a little bit out of our control. Whereas I feel like with this timeframe is we can see the logic that we can go through and we can see how people would be empowered for that action. So, okay. No more from me, Kath. We’re now going to throw to you. Please tell us about the future of protest.

Kath Walters (12:39.182)
Okay, I’m reading from my iPad. So the future of protest 2035. I was a little nervous about taking off my clothes, but everybody else was naked. I was 18 at the Cotter River in 1976, just outside Canberra. It was hot, even under the shade of the casuarina trees. I wandered with everyone amongst the stalls of the first down to earth con-fest.

We discussed environmentalism, self-expression and community living. We felt full of hope and conviction. We believe we could make the world better just by talking with each other. And we did. There was a long list of victories, but they got lost. They got buried. We got a long way and then we lost heart. So how did we regain it?

So it’s March now 2035 and the streets are ringing again in the rocks in Sydney. I’m standing with my daughter who’s now 42 amongst 500,000 people, climate action. We are not moving until all the world’s governments sign the agreement. As the afternoon light turns the city buildings honey gold, there’s no anger, no panic. We’re singing Into My Arms by Nick Cave.

The melody rising up the canyons of sandstone. It’s not a song about climate. It’s about love. My daughter squeezes my hand. She grew up in a time of severe climate anxiety and so did her generation. They were told to grieve the inevitable. Instead, they’re here singing, dancing, believing in a future worth fighting for. It was the Santos mining fracking travesty that broke our country.

It broke the world. It wasn’t the mining giant Rio Tinto deliberately destroying two 46,000 year old rock shelters in Jucan Gorge in Western Australia to expand their iron ore mine. It wasn’t the Jabiluka mines, uranium tailings, dam leaching across swathes of almond land. Though we wept and we marched, we lost those fights. The world’s governments did not stop. The heat, the fires, the storms and the avalanches.

Kath Walters (15:00.66)
rained down across the earth. It was the destruction of a pristine hot spring deep in remote Northern Territory that left us gasping. A fracking project that contaminated the springs and spread for hundreds of kilometres. All that fossil fuel, gas, the planet could not afford to burn. We marched with a kind of despairing fury that saw us win and the mine closed.

But the change had begun earlier. It began when the artists, movie makers and authors woke up. We had become the enemy of the future, bombarding the world with conspiracy stories and images of burning temperatures, collapsed technology and people responding with cruelty to diminishing resources. We played into the hands of the rich and powerful.

We told their stories of inevitable collapse. Instead of inspiring change, our creative visions destroyed hope and increased a fatalistic despair. And the rich raked in their riches. Before the hot spring died, we had begun to remember our power. Slowly, new books and movies and paintings emerged showing a world protected, a population ignited.

Damage averted and losses reversed. We wrote stories about a future where change became reality. The end of dystopia. Yes, hard won, hard fought, but a new future where the planet thrived. Many of those singing and marching today are grey haired. The protesters from the 70s and the 80s like me are back. We helped tell the stories of successful projects.

saving the Franklin River, winning the right for women to vote and striking for Indigenous stockmen to be paid. We learned the art of defiance the way Bob Brown wrote about it. When we regained hope, we regained agency. In small groups, we learned to organise the food, the toilets, the medical care, the protection from the weather. We can stay here.

Kath Walters (17:22.67)
for as long as it takes. We continue our songs and the police stand at a distance, uncertain. Can you arrest people for singing and dancing on the street? How would it look on the Sydney Morning Herald front page? The sun’s lower from the homes around us, open their windows, lean out and join our song. Babies on their hips, toddlers pointing. I think of 1976.

all that naked hope and conviction at the Cotter River. And I think we were right. It just took 55 years to get here. It took reading, it took learning, it took the creative class to remember they had the power to move people. Beyond these buildings, the sun glints on the harbour and sinks. Candles, phones, we’re all still singing and the city is singing with us.

Simon Waller (18:22.929)
Um, that’s so beautifully written. Obviously it helps when you invite a journalist onto the show. Um, I, I mean, I love the other thing I really love when, uh, when guests come on and especially when I read something like this is the personalness of it. And yours incredibly so, like I think the reference to your own, uh, experience, you know, in protest movements in the seventies.

And, and I think it won it, sets up the whole scenario really beautifully and there’s a beautiful symmetry and symbolism in it. But it also kind of raises questions, which we’ll explore in a little bit about almost like this missing middle. Like almost we were really good at protesting and then we got really bad at it. And now it feels like it’s in this very much a resurgence phase. I said I’ll park that for a second. I just want to talk a little bit before we do.

about the process of writing this and specifically as someone who’s a journalist and as we talked beforehand, you have a desire to have a level of deeper truth in what you do, right? In what you write, you’re going to accept things that face value. How do you take that when you’re talking about a scenario of the future? Like when you do a scenario of the future, we don’t necessarily, there is no fact yet.

Can you talk me through about what the experience was like for you and how you kind of went about it?

Kath Walters (19:52.59)
didn’t do a lot of fact checking. I had to check what the confess was. You know, like I’d, you know, that was a long time ago. I had to go back and check those facts. I had to draw on an incident literally listed in the news yesterday about this fracking project that’s going to sort of, you know, contaminate the water basin and this really remote, beautiful Springs area in Northern Territory.

I thought, wow, that’s a, that’s a heartbreaking story. This little spring that has kind of escaped, it’s escaped the sort of notice of the world, which kind of causes complete destruction of so many things. And then yeah, that, you know, it’s, underneath there is a whole lot of gas we can’t afford just to, burn on this planet. And they want to go and do that fracking process, which is really about getting in the water table in the desert we’re talking about.

Yeah. Craziness. And I just thought, wow, what a great example. Like you would think that the Rio Tinto blowing up the sacred sites was enough. Yeah. You would think really that Jabaluka mine, which was in the eighties and nineties, you know, the, the tailing stamps was enough. But I think there were, there was a big effort, but it’s got to be a huge effort. I think the reason why.

We’re still struggling to come to agreement in terms of global warming, even though it’s like so painfully obvious and everybody wants it, the certain sort of government levels is because of the politics of it. People are not enough people are on the streets. That’s the sort of thing. we, we need the political will. We need people to say, hell yeah.

And, just for people, and we need to say we’re not moving until you move.

Simon Waller (21:55.756)
Yeah, that was definitely one of the lines I picked up in it about that idea of we can stay, what did say you said, the line, we can stay here for as long as it takes. again, as one of the things I highlighted, I wanted to talk to you about it. I, I kind of wondered about the conditions where there, whereby that becomes the truth. So when, when we kind of go through this process, and I think even in one of the conversations we had,

I think initially you painted this kind of ideal of where you think we could get to. And you’re very intent on this. Like I don’t want this to be a dystopian scenario. want this to be something that is filled with hope. And almost there was a, I could sense there was like almost like a bit of a frustration and potentially even a little bit of anger that, you know, and this kind of comes into it, the creative class that keeps pushing this dystopian narrative. Let’s not do that. Let’s actually push something that’s really positive.

And so, but when I asked you to do that, I was like, okay, but talk me through the logic of how, how do we get from here to a point where there is a shift in that consciousness and we get to a point where half a million people are protesting on a street in Sydney. Can you, yeah, talk me through what you had to come to terms with in terms of that, in terms of that logic and that shift.

Kath Walters (23:10.318)
Beautiful.

Kath Walters (23:19.628)
Well, two things. is I, interesting after writing the first scenario, which was kind of a bit gullible and we sort of narrowed it down. a friend of mine said, I’d go to an activist workshop on Sunday. And I’m like, great, I’m coming because I’d just written the scenario and I just realized that if I wanted that scenario to happen, I’d better start getting my sort of skills back up. And I went to that, that.

workshop that was in Castlemaine and it was amazing. It was incredible. thought, wow. For one thing I thought, look at these young people doing it. You know, like they were doing it. They were spending their lives on this. They were sharing the knowledge. They were using a Bob Brown Foundation nonviolent direct action sort of package as it were.

It was so sophisticated compared to really what we were doing when we were wandering around on the Cotter River. Thinking and talking was enough and it was, was so much has changed that people don’t even know. Like people, have to, you have to have been in the 1970s when you walked into a sandwich shop and you got two pieces of tip top white bread with a, a, a, Kraft cheddar sort of pre-sliced thing between it.

You know, the sophisticated version of a sandwich had the lettuce on it. and you know, we, we sort of, we, all of that stuff has changed because of the, you know, the sort of health movement, you know, the thing that we were kind of about healthy eating, all that stuff. Anyway, that all changed. But this reminded me, this little workshop, were 20 people or so there. Reminded me of the seventies where we would have what we called, especially in the feminist movement, we had consciousness raising groups.

And we get together in small groups and we talk about politics on sexism and patriarchy. And, it was a place where people could talk in a sort of an unthreatened kind of environment and say, but you know, I have to go now cause I’ve got to make the dinner. we’d be like, no, maybe you don’t, you know, maybe you don’t need to make the dinner tonight. Maybe you could say you were out of consciousness, raising meeting and you didn’t get time for the dinner. So we sort of, we.

Kath Walters (25:39.284)
educated each other. And this, think, is the story of it. And so when I went to this little meeting, I thought these people are doing this all over the place. I thought fantastic. And one of the things that was mentioned was how we don’t write this. We don’t. The history of protest and its successes is always written out of history.

Simon Waller (26:04.802)
Mm-hmm.

Kath Walters (26:06.062)
You know, we have the vote and Australia was the first place in the world to give women the vote. We have the vote because suffragettes in England, they walked the streets against their sort of husband’s permission. They were arrested. They were put in prison. They went on a hunger strike as a result and they were force fed. I mean, it is, you know, that’s why I can vote.

The thing I reckon I realized is it doesn’t stop. It just doesn’t stop. I think there was a point where we got to like, okay, when do we stop? When do we kind of like think that we’ve done it? And then I just realized recently it doesn’t stop. And I think that middle, those middle years where we lost it, it’s normal. You’ve got little kids and you’re kind of trying to get things secure and like, that’s cool. We can, we, we.

The gray haired people can get out, the students maybe can get out. We had free education, you know, like we had free education. Where did that go? You know, that’s a terrible loss. But we had, you know, young students, had, and the sort of gray haired or the elders of our community, we can do it while you’ve got kids and you you just can’t get on the streets. It’s too busy.

Simon Waller (27:30.742)
Yeah, but I do wonder like, so, so I’m, I’m born a generation after you. So just after you were, pants around naked at the Cotter river in 77, I was born. Right. So in theory though, as you were like moving into those years, said having young kids and this be up, should have been my generation that picked it up. And I actually wonder whether it was my generation that dropped the ball. you know, like.

And I don’t know whether it’s true or not true because I’ve been trying to make sense of it myself. Like I’ve never been to a protest.

Kath Walters (28:02.518)
Such fun!

Simon Waller (28:03.79)
This is what I took out of it like, shit, I’m missing out entirely. This looks like a

Kath Walters (28:08.366)
I’ll tell you that this is the thing I wanted to reanimate or reenergize is we just had a ball. We had a ball. There we were at the Cotter River. We were all running around for some reason. I think the self-expression was the nakedness. I don’t know what that was about. But anyway, we were all sort of trying to do something different, but we were having a great time.

Brown talked about this on a recent interview about his new book, Defiance, which is, can’t wait to read. We were having a great time. We were organising things. It’s an incredible sense of you. When you do some kind of action, you feel this huge sense of hope agency, connection, connecting with these 20 people. I’m like never met before. Beautiful.

Simon Waller (29:00.91)
Um, so yeah, I feel after having read this scenario that I’ve been missing out. It’s the first thing. The kind of thing I picked up around like the way, know, and I tried to understand and did some research myself around that because you referenced like, know, like how, like in the, in the sixties and seventies nudity was actually used for its shock value. It’s like, we will bring attention to this thing because of it. And if we get in the news.

then more people will be aware of the thing that we are protesting about. now it’s kind of like, well, you know, I think there’s like the world naked bike ride, which has now been running for nearly 18 years or 20 years. So one of the things when you look at like the goals of the bike ride, feels like they’ve shifted over time. And even like in the U S it’s been used recently in Portland as almost like an anti-ice thing. But then it’s also been used around kind of climate and transportation and like

But almost at some point, I wonder like whether it’s lost its shock value and it’s now just people who like to get naked out on bikes. Okay. As an example, which is also fun, right? But more the point like, so do you know, like what is it that we have to create shock value? Like, or is that even necessary? Like we can create shock. Like in this case where you talk about half a million people turn up for protest. You know, I remember the images of the,

You know, the pro-Palestinian protests in Sydney and people marching across the Harbor Bridge and just the sheer scale of it is shocking. And I don’t say shocking isn’t shocking bad, like it has that impact, right? It has impact. I kind of go like, what have we got left? Like in a positive sense, like, cause there’s a positiveness to, to, to getting naked, right? Like it’s disarming. It’s like, I’m not hiding anything. I’m not concealing a weapon.

There’s nothing here like where

Kath Walters (30:58.23)
vulnerable here. I’m vulnerable.

Simon Waller (31:01.72)
Presently, I’m vulnerable. But the shock stuff is coming, we’re throwing paint at art in the Louvre and going like, that’s shock, right? If we tried to face this thing, like, what do think we’ve got left? Like what does positive shock and positive, attention look like in the future protest?

Kath Walters (31:19.616)
It looks like singing and dancing. Maybe. mean, this was one of the points that they made in the activism workshop, which is why I put that thing in about us singing it. because the, you know, the mentioned, you’ve got to create a dilemma for the authorities. Like, can we really, like, if we kind of go with our kind of leather jackets and our big signs and our shouting and our things like that, there’s a sort of a.

collective sense from the society that you should put those people in jail. But if we’re a bunch of people out dancing, is the police face a dilemma? Like, what are we doing arresting dancing people or naked people or whatever it is? Do you remember the protest of the grandmothers knitting in, I think, look, this is terrible because I can’t remember whether it was Argentina or Chile.

But there was the disappeared, know, the dictator regime.

Simon Waller (32:25.672)
yeah, with all the people had gone missing, yeah.

Kath Walters (32:28.438)
Disappeared, just gone. And the grandmothers sat on chairs knitting. I mean, it was a brilliant, brilliant stroke of shock because when you come and arrest a bunch of knitting grandmothers, you look like the oppressor you are. So we’d have to keep inventing those things. You know, we just have to keep inventing them. I can’t never tell if Instagram is real or not. Like I just have no idea if I’m looking at AI generated, but if it’s true.

The people in Times Square protesting the what’s going on in America at all sorts of levels are singing. That’s they’re out there singing together. And it’s this just watching it, if it’s true, is a sort of a, even if it’s not true, actually just watching it is kind of like, yeah, that’s, that’s kind of where we need to be. This sense that we.

You know, sort of a part of a bigger thing that where we’re not just kind of going to lie down and get trampled over even at the sort of height of, of that happening in the world right now by, know, yes, the politicians, but also the tech bros. mean, the tech bros are just run and rampant. Run and rampant.

Simon Waller (33:48.558)
Um, well, I picked up on that as well, by the way, around the singing and the dancing and stuff. And what it reminded for me, I think one of the signals that I’ve picked up recently, uh, which is very closely aligned at the ice protests in the U S I think it might’ve been, it started, I think in Portland, uh, was the people dressing up in inflatable suits. And it started with one guy as an inflatable turtle, but there’s now actually a whole not for profit in the U S called operation inflation.

Kath Walters (34:18.093)
Bye.

Simon Waller (34:18.474)
And the idea with operational inflation is you can donate an inflatable suit and there’s someone just rocks up with a truck full of inflatable suits to protest sites and you can just like, so again, it’s that same idea as like, like how threatening am I if I’m a massive inflatable dinosaur? And then to your point about that question about, what do we do? There was actually a video recorded of an ICE agent spraying pepper spray into the air intake valve of someone’s suit.

Kath Walters (34:35.214)
Exactly

Simon Waller (34:48.398)
Which was just like, buddy, it got like say like two and a half or three million views on, on socials and stuff because that was shocking. It was shocking because you would do that to someone where it like, it’s like, there’s this kind of, it’s entirely non-threatening. We are allowed to be here. Like, you know, even in the U S the right to protest is more enshrined in law than it is in Australia. but yeah, so I picked up that as well and I kind of like.

I imagine in this future of yours, there’s a lot of inflatable suits or there’s jugglers and people on like unicycles and there’s actually almost like this very festive experience.

Kath Walters (35:30.336)
Yes. I remember once walking along down kind of, what’s it called? At Canberra Avenue or Northbourne Avenue in Canberra. And I’m sort of walking along with this guy who I later ended up in a commune with Patrick. And he, there was a policeman walking alongside sort of keeping the crowd on a sort of a, yeah. And my friend Patrick turned around and he said, glad you could make it.

you know, like to the policeman, as if he was walking on to the protest with it. And it was just the end of, you know, and the guy couldn’t help smiling, you know, I mean, you know, like it was just this kind of thing where we just didn’t do a violent sort of approach. And I loved like the level of sophistication around consensus and consent and nonviolence in, in the workshop that I attended.

And so I advise everyone to go to one Bob Brown Foundation. it’s just so sophisticated, like so sophisticated now compared to, how we sort of start it. and you’ve got to remember like the, the ads for the Confest was in the classified section of the Canberra Times. mean, you know, no, no, you know, was like down a little square. I had looked it up. It was so fascinating. This is the fact checking stuff.

I was so fascinated to look at like, wow, that’s how we found about it all. Like sort of handouts and they’re always written in this kind of really handwritten writing, you know, what it confessed even mean. I think it was a sort of a, kind of a.

Simon Waller (37:11.576)
Cons- conservation? Conservation festival.

Kath Walters (37:14.67)
could have been or it could have been convention and festival and, it was about a festival. So I wanted to reboot people’s sense that this, like, we’re not going to get there. We’re going to just have fun, always keeping them back. know, like journalism is holding a power to account. So I spend my time and look, I was in the union movement and I, you know, was out there doing, and I protested about Iraq and all of those things, but.

Simon Waller (37:19.244)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kath Walters (37:44.096)
You know, I was very consumed with work and my daughter and everything like that. know, you know, it’s, essentially, know, journalists don’t have any real qualifications. I mean, you can get a communications degree. I didn’t, it’s about journalists are people who record the daily activities journal, and, hold power to account. And we learn it from each other or how to do it, you know, how to, how to not get.

intimidated and, and, know, like people really try to intimidate you, the ring you up and say, if you print that, I’m going to sue this out of Fairfax. And, know, they do that. So we have to sort of, you know, but it needs to be sophisticated. Like if we were going to actually have 500,000 people in the streets of Sydney, we would have to have all of those streets on board.

Simon Waller (38:24.343)
Yeah.

Kath Walters (38:38.538)
feeding, allowing people to go in and sort of have a go to the toilet or have a shower or would have to have rows and rows of, so you have to, to get it to that level, everybody has to have kind of learned some skills around organization.

Simon Waller (38:52.526)
That’s why I took in there. was a level of sophistication around this that is greater than I imagined it would be. Maybe it’s greater than it is right now. But I also feel there’s something like, you know, I love this, that just the premise, we have some pretty experienced protesters here who are now bringing a new generation on board. And there is this kind of melting pot of, of, of kind of the old and the new in a way. but underpinned.

by almost like, you know, the, the, kind of free love vibe or that kind of positive, love vibe of the sixties and seventies. And I feel like that’s almost a bit dismissing. And one thing that definitely came up for me and is like, okay, so you’ve chosen, that we’re protesting about, in like the environment. And I go, of all the things that you see people protesting about that one is I would suggest the least controversial.

Kath Walters (39:50.401)
Yes.

Simon Waller (39:50.856)
Like you don’t get a lot of counter protesters to environmental protests. Right. But let’s talk about some of the other stuff around kind of immigration, anti-immigration type stuff where there’s much more likely to have a sense of conflict. Yeah. Do you feel like this, this plays out in the same way? Or do you think like if that at the moment, again, I, you you kind of talk about things like the, pro-Palestinian rallies and stuff.

Kath Walters (39:55.842)
No.

Simon Waller (40:21.07)
And, and it being largely, um, the, you know, the motivators around that has been, you know, some of the atrocities that have been seen in places like Gaza. How do you dress up an inflatable suits to that? Do you know what mean? Like, is there something that has so much gravitas that is really hard to hold the kind of hold the line on love if that might, you know, you know what I mean?

Kath Walters (40:30.318)
day.

Kath Walters (40:45.986)
Yeah, really good question. I think you do have to sort of strategize for the actual, for the topic. And I think that the pro-Palestinian protests have been very sophisticated in doing that because one thing that they’ve been very, very committed to is making sure they’re peaceful. I mean, they are protesting against war and I know that they get characterised as having

you know, violence or something. They just have it. It’s just not true. you know, there have been violence people sort of protesting against them, but they have been very conscious that if they’re protesting war, they need to project peace. And so I think those are the sort of nuances like

Actions do have to have a strategy and thought behind them. have to, the people, there are people who plan these things and I’ve never really been one of them. I’m a turner up. But, but, but I hope that’ll change. I hope that I will be one of the people who plans them, but because I might be a bit vulnerable to be out turning up on some of them, you know, like I can’t.

I’m not as strong and agile as I once was to sort of.

Simon Waller (42:15.106)
The real question is, can you knit?

Kath Walters (42:17.334)
That’s the good, yeah, as long as I can knit, no I can’t, but I can pretend to knit. Yeah, so you have to strategize appropriate to the topic. And you’re absolutely right. would, and look, don’t think those, those protests are fun in that sense of what we were talking about, but they are, they do create a sense of,

community, collegiality, hope, conviction, a sense that, you you’re just not alone feeling completely disempowered. Yeah. I mean, they are remarkably, you know, galvanizing. They galvanize people’s sense that they are not victims of a world where

technology and sort of brute strength, always win. know, like, get it. We’re really fighting hard at the moment. I get it. but, they work, you know,

Simon Waller (43:28.334)
It has been super interesting when you look at some of the stats around participation in protesting, it has been growing quite, I think it’s something like that 10 % year on year for the last decade. And when you kind of look at some of the reasons behind that. And again, I couldn’t find a lot of data that was specific to Australia, but there’s been some global studies that have been done and we are peak processors in Australia and not even the U.S. It’s actually places around kind of North Africa and the Middle East are actually, and again, it’s like they’re often.

protesting against quite high levels of oppression, et cetera. And that really drives people to the street and to face like high levels of kind of, you know, brutality as a result. So, but even like as a global movement, protesting has grown for the last decade, which I found super interesting. And I think part of that, we go, what are the underlying reasons for it is one thing that came up was, as this data was that, so with younger generations, they have less faith in government, which means that in

countries where voting isn’t compulsory, they’re actually less likely to vote, but more likely to protest. So they don’t necessarily feel that voting is going to change things. Yeah, go, no, but by protesting and involved in that and showing a movement and a solidarity with others, that is actually how they’re more likely to make a shift in government policy or position. Yeah.

Kath Walters (44:40.526)
That’s what I feel like.

Kath Walters (44:56.024)
Yeah. I mean, that’s where I feel like the creatives have sort of played into an incorrect narrative. mean, one of the reasons that people believe that governments are corrupt, and I’m not saying the governments are never corrupt, but one of the reasons people think they’re rotten to the core is because of all the movies around it. Like, yes, okay, we had the, what was his name? Anyway.

We have had incidences of corruption, terrible corruption. But the reality is that, you know, in Australia, in America even, you know, a lot of very dedicated people who are committed to the sort of serving of the public against being paid stupid wages in corporates and blah, blah, they are serving the people.

And I think we have that in Australia. have an incredible number of politicians who walk a horrible line between pissing me off and making someone else happy, know, doing sort of public service. And I think that, you know, we, I’ve had, I remember having a sort of a bit of a standup Barney in my younger days when I was much more sort of insensitive.

with a, with a friend of mine who said she never voted. And I’m like, the women went on the streets and they, you know, they were force fed and thrown in prison for you to vote. out and vote. know, like, we, sort of, we have to use all our mechanisms. I think that idea that it’s pointless voting. It’s a, it’s a neoliberalist, conservatist, you know, the people who vote.

You know, they want to be the peers. They want to be the lords and the ladies. You know, we want to get out there and we want to vote because that’s one thing we can do. And then we can lobby our politicians too. And we can, you know, go in and ask them questions that they have to ask in parliament. And apparently I discovered recently, yeah, still going, still so much to learn, you know, there’s still so much to learn about how the system works and how we.

Kath Walters (47:17.336)
kind of engage with it and, and belief, belief that we can do it and we can change things and we can, and that they do care. They really care. When you get out on the street, they know that there’s 10 people sitting at home for every one of you. And, yeah, I mean,

Simon Waller (47:35.086)
that’s what it is. And again, I’m trying to understand that why is it that, that there is obviously a younger generation or even a general movement. mean, trust in government has fallen and all formal institutions has fallen significantly over the last decade or so. I think some were driven by the pandemic and people questioning the response to that. Some are driven by, you know, social media and the echo chambers. But, but I do think there’s something also to be said for

When I vote, I don’t know who else here feels like I do, but if I go to a protest, I’m fairly comfortable that all these people feel like I do when I look around and there’s a solidarity and a sense of belonging that we’re also craving. Which probably is a nice time. Like you’ve mentioned this a couple of times and I really want to spend some time talking about it. You talked about this shift for the creatives moving away from the dystopian to a utopian narrative. Yes.

So to positive narrative. Okay. And, you know, even in my work, I do a lot of scenario work with clients and stuff like that. And I do lean slightly in the, into the dystopian in those. I feel like it’s almost like there’s lessons to be learned from those stories that are powerful lessons. If you have the time to dissect them and potentially the gap is if you don’t take the time and effort to dissect them, you’re not left with a lesson. You’re just left with a bad feeling, you know, so maybe that’s part of it.

I also wonder about like, you know, we talk about the power of, of, of social media algorithms that have had a tendency to promote content that is more negative than positive. Like, why do you think it is that creatives, like even your own exact, like from your own work, do you feel like what, what has influenced you?

to either be more negative or more positive in the content you create.

Kath Walters (49:34.796)
Well, look, just on the most sort of basic level, news is negative. as a journalist, kind of have to sort of focus on what went wrong. We didn’t, I mean, in BRW, we did get a lot of opportunity to focus on what went right. We wrote about the Fast 100 and we wrote about success a lot. people, know, given the choice between reading something positive and reading something negative,

There’s a very human thing that says we go negative, right? We’re fascinated by the negative stories. And I am not saying that we start writing some, you know, sort of Pollyanna sort of vision of the future. That would be like ignored. That would be totally, I’m looking at what, what would actually be happening? What literally would be happening in the next five to eight years?

for us to be actually turning the future into something that is survivable and thriveable. so it is, I think, recognising. I think the work that’s been done, the stories of technology collapse and what happens to the food supply chains when that happens. John Birmingham, fantastic. You know, his book, The Zero Day.

yeah, Tim, Winton’s book about the sort of like that searing sort of, you know, world in which you have to live underground because too hot to get out. Like all of that stuff, it’s really important, but we’ve sort of done it and we need to, you know, sort of, we need to start saying, so if that is the future, what are the stories that need to happen to, to change that future? And also what are the stories that.

did happen to change it, to change our future. Like when I was, you know, one of the issues we were facing annihilation to when we were out in the seventies, there was the nuclear protest movement. We were under the belief and I don’t think we were far wrong that, know, the sort of the policy was mutual destruction. That was the policy. You fire at me and I fire at you and the world blows up. That was.

Kath Walters (52:00.118)
Like as sophisticated as it got, you know, and we were, that was the end of the world. That was also the end we kind of, and that’s why we have a no nukes in, in Australia. We fought for it. but yeah, so, what we have to do is recognize what has happened to change for us to be here now and what needs to happen for us to be somewhere different in the future. So we do have to sort of listen to the stories of.

sort of successful protest and unsuccessful protest. We were always protesting around Pine Gap because I lived in central Australia for a couple of years and you know, still there. But we did kind of make sure that everybody in Australia knew what’s there. So, know, we sort of we make sure that people knew we had a target sitting in the centre of Australia should a war break out, you know.

They weren’t going to just sit there and say, oh well, but it’s in Australia, so we won’t bomb the American base in Australia. We’ll just kind of leave that because they’re nice Australians, you know? We sort of made those things. what we have to do is start to sort of change, say, okay, yes, that is the future. That is the future we are looking at. Not good. Very bad. What now are the stories we need to tell that gets us to a future that doesn’t look like that?

And you know what, we have all the answers. have all the answers. We just don’t yet have the political will to get there. So I’m talking about how do we sort of show, I reckon that one of the biggest, widest worldwide protest movements is recycling. It is a pointless act. Like it’s a pointless act that everybody in the world recycles their stuff.

Because what you need to do is make a change at the legislative level and make it so that you can’t produce plastics or whatever. Two years, you get it done, it’s over. But in Norway, they recycle 95 % of their waste. And admittedly, they do a fantastic job and they do dispose of it. But largely in Australia, it is a totally pointless act that everybody does. And I reckon that is protest.

Kath Walters (54:22.04)
That is the future of protest. have to understand that it’s pointless, but we’re doing it because we want to tell you that’s what we want. We want it like that. We don’t want this waste kind of piling up in. Yeah.

Simon Waller (54:36.206)
Yeah. There’s so much unpacking just what you said. That last a bit, I’ll just make a comment, I wrote a blog post, maybe it only about a week or so ago. I was talking about like the hierarchy of controls in safety. And I was relating that to how we approach things like strategic thinking and organisations. And what we know from that hierarchy is there’s better and worse interventions. And I’m hearing that in the recycling thing, right? So the lowest form of intervention is when we ask.

the end user or the person to make themselves safer. It’s like, I put the problem on you and the highest type of intervention is where we just remove the source of the safety issue in the first place. And what you’re talking about is yeah, well, we can just literally remove plastic. We wouldn’t have this issue at all. Yeah. I definitely hear that. I want to go back though. So one thing that’s really come up for me in this episode and in your scenario is this is a very true example of what a positive.

story could look like, right? Like you’re talking about the need for it and you are delivering it. And I just, the, how it’s impacted me in this conversation, I feel like I genuinely am missing out because I haven’t been to protests and I haven’t felt like that in the past. There has been a, you know, like when you see the pictures of, uh, what seemed like relatively innocent people being beaten and arrested. You go like, well, is that, could that be me? Am I, I feel like a relatively innocent person.

If the stories that I read was about the community was built and the friendships that I made and the fun that we had, why we were doing something that was really positive. It’s like, yeah, count me in. I’m, you know, I’m for a bit of fun on a Saturday and I believe in the unbluing cause, right? Like the two things can be both true. Um, the other thing which I, I, I made a note about, which I felt was also this shift that we’re seeing, cause I’m trying to understand.

for us to have this outcome, what is going to lead to the half million people or a million people around Australia on the streets? Cause that’s ultimately what’s needed. You know, there’s that three and a half percent kind of rule, which says that any meaningful social movement has to have three and a half percent of the population engaged in it before change happens. so there’s some research done about this. So in Australia, that’s just under a million people. It was about a million people that we need.

Simon Waller (57:01.218)
And, um, then I go like, how do we get to that point? And some of the things we kind of saw, you know, around the social media stuff is that people are actually starting to switch off it. So peak social media, most places in the world was around 2022. And there’s been a relatively like, there’s been about a 10 to 15 % decline in social media use since then. And so I was like, oh, are we moving away? Like, first of all, we see social media has been less social.

Like I’m no longer finding my friends on it. My feeds just filled with kind of AI slop. And I still want the social part of it. What is going to be the thing that feels that whole for me if I’m not getting the updates from my friends and like in that environment. So I wonder like, is all of this leaning towards something where what would it be for protest, either at a small scale, like the, the, the dialogue stuff you talked about earlier or the large scale.

Kath Walters (57:35.127)
Yes.

Simon Waller (57:58.51)
actually being part of our social fabric.

Kath Walters (58:01.678)
So I guess with the recycling example, I want to just sort of say the future of isn’t just on the streets. it’s very, it’s, we did a lot of stuff, you know, we demanded better sandwiches. You know, it’s sort of, we did a lot of different kinds of things. And I didn’t know that statistic about the three, 3%. That’s wonderful to know. If we.

If that means that we need a million people in Australia, that really means we only need 10,000 on the streets. Because for every protest, there’s usually 10 people who won’t turn up.

Simon Waller (58:40.408)
No, no, need a million people active. I’m to help you.

Kath Walters (58:43.438)
All right. So yeah, I mean, think it’s sort of, it’s making it possible for there to be a million people. So maybe it’s not possible to fill the streets with 500,000 people because of the logistical issues. So how do we show a million people? How do we do it? Like, we’ve just got to get our creative minds back on the task, I guess.

So maybe it means that we have to, I think there’s a protest on the 22nd of March that is happening in every city in Australia. So then you have say, maybe you get 500,000 people by spreading it out all over Australia.

Simon Waller (59:30.606)
Yeah, that’s what I think. think that when you look at like that, it’s actually quite doable. Like if you kind of go, like we only need, we actually only need 300,000 in Sydney and 300,000 in Melbourne. know it’s a lot of people, like suddenly, and again, this has been that, you know, when we talk about things like in the U S the rise of things like the no Kings movement, this is the number that they’re aiming for is can we get, we, but we, know that we can’t try to put all those people in one place together as hard. And so with the no Kings movement, I think at the last one, there was something like, I don’t know.

guessing at this, it’s something like there was a thousand different no Kings rallies across the country. So some were just in a small town, right? But some were in a city and maybe in large cities, might have been four or five different separate protests because how do we get to three and a half percent? Now the risk of it is if we see the number as being the outcome, then ultimately the number becomes meaningless. And even the author of this, name, Erica,

What was it? Sorry. There was a research that kind of came up with this fact. name was Erica Chenoweth who did this in 2013. She’s come out and said, like put some caveats on it. It’s not just three and a half percent. It’s three and a half percent sustained and active in a movement. And I think that’s kind of part of this, but yeah, like there are different ways we could think about this. One of the things, mean, weirdly, I know this sounds probably lazy and stuff, but I’m down on the morning to Peninsula.

Like it’s an hour and half backwards and forwards each way to get to the protest. You know, I know there’s a slack to best act in that, but I also kind of go, well, what would it be that one of the protests was literally held on Main Street in Moreington? Beautiful. Yeah.

Kath Walters (01:01:14.614)
Yeah. And sort of, know, then you would see who else in your community is concerned with the issues that you’re concerned about. And it’d like, hi. my God. didn’t realize. Yeah. Great. Good to see you. And there’s this whole other sort of side of it. So I think we have to, I guess what I’m sort of saying is it’s kind of up to us to put the fun and the strategy back into it and to, and to sort of like sort of reboot it.

I don’t know, maybe you, you know, your generation was dragged along to too many process by their boomer parents or something. So you kind of lost, but I think the two key things are that it doesn’t stop. Like we never get to the end thing. We have to kind of keep, holding power to account all the time in various ways. But the other thing is how do do it in a way that is joyful and fun for us? is smart, strategic, that is.

respectful, is, you know, inclusive, all of those things that we’ve learned. You know, I was, I learned about feminism when I went to school without walls at the age of 15. It was a big shock to the system. Um, but you know, even, even with that, when Monica Lewinsky, you know, that whole thing in 98, was in 98. Yeah. And the star report and all that stuff, you know, I, I was not.

My feminism was not sophisticated enough to see what was happening to this young woman. Whereas now we all are kind of, know, the Me Too movement and all that sort of stuff. So these things are always like revolutionizing how we think. We’ve just got to remember how effective they are. know, that, and, you know, I was thinking before about like Me Too was just two words.

In Russia, where people are not allowed to sort of protest, they do something with the Swan Lake Ballet. Like there’s this whole backstory to Swan Lake that they use to indicate protest. In China, they would have blank pieces of paper that indicate in protest. even when, I mean, look at what happened recently and tragically.

Kath Walters (01:03:37.558)
where the people in Iran went out and was shot on the streets. I we are talking about people at a level of guts and sort of, you know, courage that we don’t fortunately face if we stay vigilant. And, know, because Argentina was, you know, a very middle-class, you know, these places get overrun by, look at America, you know.

You can, dictator can come from anywhere and take over. So.

Simon Waller (01:04:11.15)
Yeah, as I said, feel like there, yeah, there’s almost something to be said for like, how do we maintain a sense of this active engagement all the time so that we don’t have to deal with something far more significant some of the time. You know, I like,

Kath Walters (01:04:30.392)
Exactly. Exactly. We’ve, we’ve, it’s lost by inches. It’s lost by inches. And, and, know, they love it when we are feeling that we simply have no power. Power will come from the smallest little group. My friend down on, Mornington, Peninsula in Redhill has a food sharing, started a food sharing group, food sharing school. And people just grow too much stuff in their own garden, bring it along and swap it over. It gives an incredible sense that you are among.

a community of people who share a concern with you and that’s fantastic.

Simon Waller (01:05:07.182)
Yeah, I picked up on that. Like a lot of my work is kind of associated with concepts of community and belonging. do a lot of my kind of paid work is with local government. I, you know, I’m the president of the local basketball club. still on the board of a library corporation. But one of the things I really took out of, I find that in lot of those cases, there’s a frustration, especially with the, the basketball club that community is quite, like it’s not active. I asked trying to get volunteers is really hard.

The people, I don’t know, there’s, people out there that have an alignment in the shared belief around community and belonging, but you don’t get to see it. I do wonder about that as like you show up in this place at this time and you find the other people who are there like you and how reassuring that would feel. I know we’re kind of running out of time. Before we go, was a couple of things I wanted to ask you. The first is, know we’ve called this the, the, the future of protest.

But it feels like that’s not actually what this is about. Like it’s almost more like it’s about the future of agency or the future of response, like participation or something. Whatever that is that thing, like what is it that do you believe for people listening that they should be aspiring to in this? And ultimately what would be the something that they could do to move themselves closer to it?

Is that? Yeah.

Kath Walters (01:06:35.808)
I suppose if I look at my own trajectory, it’s the future, it’s community does it. Community does it. Right. So I went to the school without walls and suddenly found this community of people who just like rocked my world. And, know, like I was a sort of middle-class, private school, you know, young woman and who sort of hit this sort of alternative school and, sort of had my political awakening. that led to a lot of.

You know, subsequent choices in my life. And one of them, I moved into a commune when I was 17 and I kind of feel like I’ve come full circle. now live in a Nightingale housing project. These are buildings built by a not-for-profit developer who prioritise living here. So our apartments are beautiful, livable places.

that mean that there’s a strong sense of community in our apartment building. And it’s all the way down. Like I’m in one building, there are a thousand people down along this section of Brunswick. It’s really about community. when you invite your friends over to sort of reinforce the sense of community amongst your friends, you don’t sort of sit down and do an agenda. You give them food.

You have some music going, know, kind of, you know, like this is meant to be fun. So, um, you know, just thinking more about, and this is making me think, you know, too, you know, like I’m thinking, well, now what can we do at the next, you know, resident group meeting here? That’s fun.

Simon Waller (01:08:13.582)
Infightable Suits.

Kath Walters (01:08:15.648)
Inflatable suits. Let’s see the chair. So to sitting there in an inflatable suit and say, okay, let’s take, we’re getting too serious here. so yeah, it’s like, it is being community all the way through. I went to the Docker River community and worked with the women down there and community was so important. I was in the community arts movement in Melbourne. was, you know, even journalism is a sort of community of, of people trying to, you know, do their thing. I had my business. was all about.

sort of getting people to build their own communities around their books. It’s just like, it’s so important. It’s, it’s everything. gives us a belief in ourselves, in others. It’s really tricky. You know, you can’t get people involved, you know, and people like you always rub against these kind of bizarre opinions and like you have to keep, you know, communities a bit more tricky than staying isolated in your own thing. People are really weird. Some people are super weird.

And you have to sort of like kind of work away around that and sort of like, okay, you don’t, you know, like I hate to talk to you about that, but we’re, we’re talking here about this and we’re going to stay focused on this. So yeah, I think it’s community. build yourself a community. If you’ve got communities that you have just mentioned and have I’ve just thought about, how can we make it more fun to be part of that community when we’re not sort of rallying in like.

for volunteers, were like, can I join the basketball club? Because I heard you had a really great party the other day when you were talking about next year’s agenda.

Simon Waller (01:09:55.682)
Yeah, we have our awards event in about two weeks time. And I think I shall go as a dinosaur, potentially.

Kath Walters (01:10:03.426)
Wonderful. I can feel a protestor being born.

Simon Waller (01:10:08.878)
I think it’s something like that again, I feel like when I’m asking for this advice for others, in some ways I’m asking for this advice for myself. I like, but I know that probably the simple answer is just go to one. Yeah. Like just find, find something that you have a relatively high sense of alignment with. Yeah. And just go to one. And then if you didn’t, like, it’s almost like eating brussel sprouts or something, you know, like if you try it and you don’t like it.

You don’t feel compelled to go to another one. Like, but if you do it and you go, gosh, especially when you have it with a little bit of bacon and a lot of butter and salt, know, brussel sprouts are delightful. And maybe it’s like that, you know, what is it? You might find that, yeah. that’s, that was a pretty.

Kath Walters (01:10:54.186)
And you know what, like there’s so much stuff to do behind the scenes. There’s people painting black arts and there’s, you know, banners and there’s, you know, social media and there’s, everybody you can like, if I can’t get out to certain protests, like that one in Sydney, my daughter was at that. It was very scary. So scary. I would have been, you know, very nervous at that. It was a horrible moment. That was a very, you know, like re-energising moment for me.

when the police sort of surrounded them in the pincer movement, you know, but there’s so much to do behind the scenes.

Simon Waller (01:11:29.608)
Tell me also, lastly, I get so much out of this, these kinds of conversations. I genuinely do. I also kind of am acutely aware that I do get you to do most of the work in terms of, you know, the scenario and doing the research and everything. And I’m always kind of, I hope, and I have enough evidence to suggest that when I ask guests to come on and do this, there’s insights and stuff that they get out of it for themselves.

What was, was there anything that you learned out of this or that you’re going to take away or that’s changed your own perspective about this idea or maybe it’s even just reinforced something that already believed?

Kath Walters (01:12:10.574)
You know, I think it’s changed my life, Simon. Like I sort of feel like I sort of, enforcing myself to think about the future. I sort of suddenly saw a lot more clearly. I saw no path to that future. If I want that future and not the other future, which is not what I want really. I don’t like the way things are going. It’s, it’s pretty.

pretty scary and uncomfortable and you know, it’s, it can be really depressing. So I sort of felt like when I started the whole thing and it went towards that, just thought, you know what? don’t want this. And I’ve never wanted that. And I’ve been fighting against it, you know, for 50 years. So, you know, let it sort of rebooted or re-energized my

my activism and I started a sub stack called the future of protest. you know, I want to sort of, and you know, I’ve written about my political awakening and I’ve written about, you know, my first attempt to write a novel, which was when I came back from central Australia and I was trying to explain what was going on out there was so hard and yeah, so it’s been fantastic for me. Like I’m writing still and I’m writing a novel.

And it’s just fed so much into that, that whole process. it’s, and, and, you know, of course, when I wrote about the school that was on my sub stack, all these people from the school that was said, my God, you know, and so I kind of reconnected with that community and, it’s been great.

Simon Waller (01:13:54.318)
That is, that is awesome. I’m so happy. and, you know, even what you said, there’s something you said earlier on about when you kind of decided that this was the topic and then someone’s invited you to a workshop, you’re going, well, of course I have to go. Like, you know, even that there’s something about the congruence that we need to create for ourselves. If this is, as you said, if this is what I want, well, then I need to act in a way that’s congruent with that.

It means that I need to uplift my skills and I need to be more active. think that’s really beautiful that this is a, this is not like, this is not a preachy thing, right? This is not you just going, Hey, by the way, here’s what everyone else needs to do. It’s like, actually, no, here’s what I need to do as a result of this, which I think is a beautiful, beautiful, outcome from, from you coming on my podcast.

Kath Walters (01:14:44.79)
Really good. So good. I sort of like, wow, okay. I should have thought of that before. yeah. And I have in the past sort of kind of projected what I wanted, but I guess there’s a sense when you retire, it’s like, well, what do I do now? It was great to sort of think, okay, well, what do I do if I want that future? And I think it’s all very integrated. Like part of the protest will be what I write in my book and what it’ll be, I’ll be, you know, if it ever gets done, of course, everybody’s writing a novel they never finished, but.

Nobody cares if I do or don’t. But yeah, mean, it’s all part of that and the sum stack and the,

Simon Waller (01:15:20.3)
Yeah. And I really, I really, what I am excited for out of this, I’ve, I’ve always enjoyed your writing. I really enjoyed this scenario and I really want to see, like what is really triggered for me is how do I lean into that sense of positivity, even my own scenario writing, because I’ve always felt that the slightly negative or slightly dystopian is where the lesson is.

Whereas maybe it’s also not that where the energy is like it might be that the energy is actually enabled by the positive perspective. And I’m not really sure what that means yet. I’ve got a client I’m doing some work with at moment, which will lead to some scenarios like, how do I bring a bit of what Kath is saying into that? So thank you for this.

Kath Walters (01:16:04.43)
Fantastic. Lovely.

Simon Waller (01:16:06.38)
Okay. Well, that’s going to be all we have time for, but it’s been such a delight chatting with you, Kat. I’m so glad that you can come on and be part of the show.

Kath Walters (01:16:15.096)
Fantastic, yeah, I’ve loved it. It’s great to see you again too.

Simon Waller (01:16:18.286)
Yeah, it’s been really good to see you and I hope we get to catch up in real life. Maybe to protest somewhere shortly. All right. And thank you all for tuning in. That’s the end of this episode and we’ll be back with another episode very, soon. Till then.

Kath Walters (01:16:23.736)
Yeah, let’s get a protest going.

Kath Walters (01:16:33.76)
Thanks so much. See ya.

Done.