Late Night Live - Separate stories podcast

Knowing that your body is contributing to the growth of a tree or the richness of soil is increasingly attractive. But the healthier climate claims made by some companies offering new technologies, or green alternatives, are largely unverified. Guest: Hannah Gould, Senior lecturer in Buddhist Studies at the the University of Melbourne, where she also works with the Death Tech Research Team and author of an article in the online magazine AEON, about greenwashing burial, titled ‘How to become a tree’. Producer: Ann Arnold

Whether former President Donald Trump will strike a deal with Cuba remains an open question, as pressure on Havana intensifies. Trump has signalled that worsening fuel shortages and economic strain could create leverage for negotiations, but Cuban officials will reject any arrangement they view as compromising sovereignty.Guest: Dr. Luis Martínez-Fernández, Pegasus Professor at the University of Central Florida and expert in Latino/Hispanic politicsProducer: Ali Benton 

While Australians lose over $31 billion to gambling each year, industry donations to major political parties continue. Over the past decade, millions have flowed legally to both sides. While the federal government has committed to new rules for faster disclosure of political donations, a new report form the Australian Democracy Network says the federal lobbying framework is amongst the weakest in the country, leading to a lack of transparency over who gets access to our political leaders. They says it's not just donations laws that need an overhaul, lobbying rules need to tightened too. Guest: Christian Slattery, Senior Campaigner at the Australian Democracy NetworkProducers: Ali Benton, Catherine Zengerer

Conny Aerts had a hunch, that stars had internal rotation and measuring those rotations could give us rich information about the universe. She was right, and became the "founding mother" of the new field of asteroseismology. And because the vibrations of the stars are waves, they can be rendered as music: what does a red giant star sound like, anyway?Guest: Professor Conny Aerts, Institute of Astronomy at the University of LeuvenProducer: Alex Tighe

The Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai will die in prison, after being sentenced to 20 years. Lai is one of the island's most prominent pro-democracy advocates, and his newspaper Apple Daily was founded to be a voice for press freedom on the island that is increasingly under China's thumb.Guest: Antony Dapiran, a writer, lawyer, and photographer who was based in Hong Kong from 1999 to 2025. His latest book is City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong.Producer: Alex Tighe

The new Opposition leader Angus Taylor and deputy Liberal leader Jane Hume are flagging their crisis plan will involve lowering taxes and immigration, changing our immigration policy, and focusing on home ownership and the cost of living. Guest: Anna Henderson, chief political correspondent with SBS Producers: David Marr, Catherine Zengerer 

In his new book, Steven Pinker asks us to look at how group knowledge works. Pinker argues that what drives society is knowing that what we know is widely know — in his term, "common knowledge". But what if our beliefs about everyone else's inner thoughts turn out to be wrong?Guest: Steven Pinker, experimental psychologist and the author of many popular books on the human mind. His latest is When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and OutrageProducer: Catherine Zengerer and Alex Tighe

The White House is publishing AI slop images; ICE conducts raids and turns the video into film-style trailers; right-wing influencers are sitting in the White House press briefings, in chairs that used to hold journalists. Social media has become the new location of politics in the US, which substantive policy changes beginning as memes. Where does it end?Guest: Charlie Warzel is a technology and culture writer for The Atlantic and the host of the new podcast, Galaxy BrainProducer: Alex Tighe

Gaza is today in ruins, with over seventy thousand dead and buildings everywhere rendered rubble by the onslaught from Israel since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Many argue the war on Gaza began at this point, but historian Julie Norman has traced the history of both the land, its people and the terrible wars that have plagued what was once a beautiful and prosperous place for a century and destroyed the dreams of the Palestinian people. Guest: Julie M. Norman, Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at University College London, and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. Author of Gaza: The Dream and the Nightmare, co-authored with Maia Carter Hallward, Director of the PhD Program in International Conflict Management and Professor of Middle East Politics at Kennesaw State UniversityProducer: Catherine Zengerer

When librarians from the University of Sydney found a sketch and an inscription in the back of a 1497 copy of Dante's Divine Comedy, they called in Renaissance expert Professor Jaynie Anderson. Soon the discovery was confirmed: the sketch was by the hand of master painter Giorgione, and the inscription solved the mystery of Giorgione's life and death. A book of scholarship on that remarkable discovery has just been published by Melbourne University Press.Guest: Jaynie Anderson, Emeritus Professor and Ufficiale dell'Ordine della Stella d'ItaliaProducer: Alex Tighe