For readers outside Australia, a little context.
Pete Evans was once one of Australia’s most popular television personalities — a professional chef and long-time judge on the hugely successful cooking show My Kitchen Rules. He later became a highly controversial figure for challenging conventional thinking on diet, health and, eventually, COVID, and largely disappeared from mainstream television. The verbal violence against him was intense.
Karl Stefanovic’s break with mainstream media is much more recent. For more than 20 years he was one of the best-known faces of Australian breakfast television. In June 2026, his network career ended abruptly following the backlash over an interview he conducted with British activist Tommy Robinson for his independent podcast.
I don’t necessarily share the politics of either man. What interests me is what their conversation represents.
Something seems to be shifting in Australia. Subjects and opinions that became virtually unspeakable are beginning to come back into public conversation. Perhaps we have reached something like the hundredth-monkey point — one of those pivotal moments when enough people have changed their minds, or simply stopped being afraid to speak, that the boundaries of acceptable discussion suddenly begin to move.
This interview may be one small sign of that shift.
Pete Evans recommendation, if we can do nothing else, support regenerative farmers.
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