What I’m listening to: I’ve been listening to quite a few podcasts. Bundyville is about people on the far-right hidden in America who are all about liberty. It’s a frightening exploration of them. In one part of it they basically are in breach of a particular law and everyone presumed they’d lose the case, but they spoke to Americans at a different level and the jury let them go. I think it lets you understand things like Donald Trump a lot better to see those communities. But I also listen to things like The Little Dum Dum Club, it’s a couple of comedians, Tommy Dassalo and Karl Chandler, and they interview different comedians. That’s more about the enjoyment of the chat really.

What I’m reading: Ezra Klein's book Why We're Polarized. It’s about why our society is becoming really polarised, why we are getting into those silos. It points out for instance if we look at the polling with Trump everyone acts as if it’s this really different circumstance, but if you actually look it’s pretty similar to what’s happened the last three or four elections. It’s very well researched. I’ve been reading a few political biographies for a project I’m on. I had a little look at Malcolm Turnbull’s one [A Bigger Picture] and Julia Gillard’s [My Story]. The one I actually want to look at because I think he’s a very funny character is Christopher Pyne’s [The Insider], that’s next on the list. He’s got quite a turn of phrase.

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The best part of iso was: I got to spend a lot more time at home with the family, I’ve got three teenagers. The weirdest thing we probably did was we all painted the house together. The kids worked for seven days straight painting. They did get into it, although they did say at the end of it we’ll never do that again. It was a weird bonding experience. It was a shared pain.

You don’t need lockdowns for environmental change: I actually worry that people are going to start equating reducing emissions to being locked up in the house. And that’s not what anybody’s asking for. Using renewable energy you can still travel and run your air conditioner and all that. We’ve got lots of solutions to the problem of high emissions if we get heaps more action from business and government. People in the UK have a third of the carbon footprint that Australians do because they’ve changed where their energy comes from. And it’s been done by a conservative government, it’s not a left-right issue. We need to make massive changes, but it’s not necessarily about living a spartan lifestyle, it’s about changing the way we do things. Craig Reucassel hosts Fight for Planet A: Our Climate Challenge on the ABC and iview.