Late Night Live — Full program podcast · ABC Australia

The US is run by meme lords, and Steven Pinker on common knowledge... and common delusions

·55 min·3 clips

About 7 million people marched against Donald Trump, and he answered with a 19-second jet video dumping shit on them.

The hour opens with politics at its most performative. David Morrow frames the discussion with the October anti-Trump protests, the no kings rallying cry, and Donald Trump’s retaliatory social-media spectacle, using the contrast to ask what a meme actually does once it becomes a political tool instead of a joke. The show does not stay on the surface. It moves into the awkward line between satire, protest, memorial, and vandalism, then follows the idea that online absurdity can both strip away seriousness and give outsiders a way to puncture an overconfident establishment. That tension matters here. Charlie Worzel is brought in as a technology and culture writer for The Atlantic and the host of his podcast Galaxy Brain, someone who can talk about how internet behaviour spreads, why people use mockery to process outrage, and how young people can end up treating political life as something to watch rather than enter. The conversation stays cautious. It keeps circling the risk that the culture of the joke tips into nihilism, especially when one figure dominates public life long enough to make everything feel pre-written. Even so, this is not a complaint in disguise. There is a real sense that online chaos can also work as interruption, a way for funny or countercultural voices to cut through polished authority without pretending the mess has no cost. Then the argument turns again. Steven Pinker comes into view with a different problem, one about common knowledge, which the show explains as not simply what people know but what people know everyone else knows, a distinction that sounds neat until it starts doing real work. The subject becomes social glue. The episode treats that idea as the hidden wiring behind institutions, public signals, and the strange bargains people make when they assume everyone is already following the same script. It lands cleanly enough. A Winnie the Pooh quotation gives the abstract idea a softer ending, while a dry aside about journalists and forbidden material brings the whole programme back to the pleasure and risk of finally seeing what had been kept out of reach. The tone never gets slick. It stays patient, mildly sardonic, and content to let the audience keep up as the questions move from meme warfare to social theory without pretending those are separate worlds. That is the show's appeal. Late Night Live here sounds like a smart late-evening argument about how public life is shaped by what people laugh at, what they assume, and what they refuse to look away from.

As heard by us

Memes, power, and common knowledge are handled with dry clarity.

Late Night Live ties a Trump meme stunt to Steven Pinker’s idea of common knowledge and turns it into a sharp look at how politics moves through irony, spectacle, and shared assumptions.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want politics, internet absurdity, and one idea-rich conversation in one sitting.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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