This interview is presented by the Department of Genuine Satire.
Valerie Chidiac: You completed a PhD in history, researched settler-colonialism and published two books before shifting from academia to political satire. How would you describe the different impact you have had in those two respective areas?
Giordano Nanni: I would say dramatically different in academia. I was at the very beginning of that journey, and didn’t venture far. I did a PhD and then took a break before being in a research position for about three years. The project that I was working on was one that I devised, and which was to use verbatim theatre to bring back to life the 1881 Coranderrk inquiry. That was a very public-facing project, and it had quite an impact on the people who saw the performance as we staged it. For many years, it was here in Melbourne and then had a national tour. It also led to curriculum materials, so although I only had 3 years in academia, I feel like I did some important work during that time. But nothing really compared to the impact that I’ve experienced since publishing my work on YouTube. Just in terms of the range of people that I’ve been able to reach, the difference is vast. In academia you’re working through conferences, academic journals; a very select and elite part of the population. Even when we did the Coranderrk play, it was generally wealthier, more middle class audiences. I don’t want to stereotype but definitely still small compared to YouTube which has been more useful in terms of disseminating ideas, sparking conversations or just getting people to talk and think about certain things outside of academia. But that doesn’t cast aspersions on academia itself which is also an important avenue for debating and challenging ideas. But for someone like me who is a bit more noisy and a bit more impatient, YouTube was a better forum.
Out of curiosity, would you call yourself a content creator, or is that term a bit fickle and weird?
It sounds so sterile. I never call myself a content creator. There’s something very clinical about it. It’s funny, whenever I’m on a plane and am filling in an immigration card and it says, what’s your occupation? I sometimes put historian, or YouTuber. There’s something about that label that indicates you’re making content for empty vessels that just need to be filled. It feels very like a sausage factory. However, I would be happy to call myself a content (as in happy) creator 🙂
VC: Where did the concept and name ‘the Juice Media’ come from?
GN: It goes back way back to my conversations with my high school friend Benedict Coyne. He’s a human rights lawyer now, up in Brisbane and we used to have a lot of conversations about the state of the world and how to interpret things. We used to have some shorthand terms for certain things and one of them was ‘the juice’ as in the essence of a problem. What is the radical solution or underlying structural explanation? When you squeeze and you get rid of all the pulp, the bits and pieces in the skin and the pips, you’re left with the juice, with what really matters. We didn’t really think about it too much. And you can’t change your name after it sticks.
VC: How does your company run? How many people and what are the roles? And is it true, are you funded by the Greens?
GN: No, we’re not funded by the Greens, that was a joke in one of my videos. We’re funded by our patrons. Most people will know it by now but Patreon is like a microfunding site where you can support creators. The business is very small. Essentially I do the business side of things; managing all the pages, the website. I write, research, direct, edit and publish the videos. But then there are some crucial roles that I don’t do. One of them is obviously the acting, which is that we have our two regular faces of the Honest Government Ads, Ellen Burbidge & Zoë Amanda Wilson. Their voice isn’t their voice in the videos, it’s that of Lucy who is my partner and wife. So it’s a family slash friends thing. We know Ellen and Zoe as friends from before doing the Honest Government Ads, so it’s a group of people who are serious about activism and about the issues of the world that we live in. We have adopted a satirical vehicle which has turned into a business. We do have other people that we work with; a VFX guy, Brent Cataldo, who helps us if I need help on some videos. We also have legal advisors, and volunteer translators who translate our videos around the world. Regarding research, I’ve developed some great networks with experts in their fields like Australia Institute climate scientists, researchers in security, privacy, law reform, or climate and energy technology. It’s not a financial relationship, it’s basically sharing ideas and maximising that brain pool to make the best content that we can.
VC: How important are legal advisers when dabbling in the satire of politics and more specifically, politicians?
GN: It’s quite important because I don’t want to do something silly and say something that is defamatory or that is genuinely wrong. The defence for what we say is the truth, right? So it’s good to document what you’ve said as long as it is part of fair political commentary and it’s not racist or sexist or abusive. That’s not the kind of comedy that we do. So having that legal advice is always good, but we don’t get lawyers to check the script every time we do a video; except during an election because there are many electoral laws that are always coming into play. And because part of what we do is we’re trying to get people involved in the electoral process so we don’t want to seem that we’re flouting and not respecting electoral laws. But it’s a double-edged sword: some laws are incompatible with our Constitution’s implied right to political commentary – so occasionally it’s also important to test the boundaries of what’s allowed; like what happened with our recent “Visit Tasmania” video, which attracted a complaint from the Tasmanian Electoral Commission asking us to take it down. We want to respect electoral laws, we want fair elections, but we also need to be able to freely comment on those elections. So yeah, most of the time we’re just assuming that we have an implied right of political communication and if someone complains about it, we’ll deal with it. But obviously if you’re too careful about stuff, you don’t end up saying anything and there are some things that need to be said.
VC: Hypothetically speaking, how would one get cast in an Honest Government Ad? What is the criteria?
GN: We’ve had a few people who’ve expressed interest. Occasionally people get in touch, but sometimes they’re not in Melbourne where we film. Having some acting skills, or at least being happy to be in front of a camera is key. And also being brave. Not everyone is that comfortable wearing their political opinions on the outside, so what the actors do is not for the faint hearted.
VC: What is your favourite video that you have worked on?
GN: It’s hard to pick one. If I had to pick in terms of the most important one, I’m torn between two. Top one is the Honest Government Ad that we made about preferential voting, which explains how our voting system works. It does a better job than most explanations which get complicated and technical. Obviously those are the best ones to read if you really want to understand it, but a lot of people don’t have that time. Our video has helped a lot of people who are not familiar with electoral politics. Our system is very effective and we are lucky compared to elections in the US, even Canada and the UK where they have the first-past-the-post system which just feels so primitive compared to what we have — not that ours is the best. You can get even better, but ours is so much more nuanced and you can really make your vote count. Our system has been misrepresented in that if you vote one way, you’re helping the other party to win; we debunk these assumptions in that video. And I’ve really noticed a change in people’s understanding of the electoral system since we put that video out six years ago. We refer to the Coalition as the Shit Party, to the Labor Party as the Shit-Lite party, and to the candidates who do take climate action seriously, as Not Shit Candidates. I’ve seen those terms being used more and more on social media. The other episode that I would really like to mention is the “Net Zero” video featuring a very short cameo by Greta Thunberg at the end. It was a hard one to write because you can either be funny or didactic and it’s hard to be both. For some people it might be on the didactic side, but the best that I could do is to really try and explain those key concepts and make it funny at the same time. We break down the concept of cumulative emissions which is the greatest threat with climate change because those emissions keep accumulating in the atmosphere. So the longer we wait to take action, the more damage we’re doing. And unless you can visualise it, it’s very hard for people to understand why delaying climate action is so stupid and and reckless. Even climatologists really struggle with that and so what I love doing is taking complicated things that are hard for people to grasp and making them a little bit easier to understand. I suppose that’s where my academic background comes in handy.
VC: As someone who made rap videos years ago do you mind explaining to our readers what “rap-investigative journalism” entailed?
GN: That’s the previous YouTube series that I worked on with Hugo, who is a UK born rapper who moved to Australia and we met here in Melbourne. I’m not a rapper, so my contribution was the same as what it is now with the Honest Government Ads as a writer and researcher. I did act in that series but essentially it was an investigative news bulletin all delivered through the medium of rap. The character that we created was Robert Foster, a news anchor who would invite people from different departments like the military, politics, the media or it might be a celebrity. We impersonated everyone from Al Gore to Hillary Clinton to Julian Assange. Rap News focused mostly on US politics, and we made this series between 2009-2015 so it really belongs to that pre-Trump era.
VC: You also hosted a podcast and have interviewed the likes of Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Greta Thunberg and also Malcolm Turnbull. Would you say podcasts have become an oversaturated media form, or is it merely in its prime? And what does Youtube or any other social media platform mean to you?
GN: I find podcasts really useful. I actually wish I had time to listen to more of them. But it probably is true that there’s tons of podcasts and the scene is saturated. I do feel like it’s not a big problem that I worry myself about. And sure, it’s become a common response to say “Oh god, you’re not starting another podcast!” kind of thing. But I don’t feel that way: I reckon, if you want to get active and engaged and make the most of using the internet, itself an incredible medium that we’ve only very recently inherited, that’s a good thing. Just as long as you’re not doing it to spread misinformation and bullshit.
VC: As you were talking, I wanted to ask if you might do a video on the HECS-debt situation?
GN: Unless it’s been completely dealt with in the upcoming budget in a few days from now — which I somehow doubt — it’s definitely the kind of topic that we would talk about and who better to really write about this than students. This is exactly where I would love to have input from younger writers because when I started doing this I was in my late twenties, early thirties, and it’s lovely to have people who are actually, going through and experiencing these struggles. Also the fact that fossil fuel companies need to be paying far more in petroleum tax than students HECS, there’s a wild imbalance in who we tax in this country and who is actually doing the heavy lifting. It’s all put on the shoulders of renters and young people and then after that first-home buyers and it’s a bit of a Ponzi scheme. It’s really unsustainable. Your generation is really getting fucked like seriously badly.
VC: What would you say to students looking for a job post-graduation, and should they be interested in joining the Juice Media team?
GN: When I finished university I felt like there was still hope and a fairly clear path for being an academic. I did an arts degree, and then went on to postgrad study in history. I don’t know that I would be brave enough to do that nowadays. So it all depends on what degree you’ve done. I don’t know if we’d have much use for someone who graduated in something like medicine, but definitely if you know someone who has graduated in arts or political science, and they feel that they would like to and if they are someone who likes working in a small but motivated environment where they can potentially reach a lot of people, give us a call.
VC: What are the next goals of the Juice Media? Are you looking to expand your platform or continue building upon what you already produce?
GN: I’d love the idea of expanding and doing all of that, but the reality is that we have two young kids and at the moment we’re really trying to spend more time with them. My children are four and six years old and I’m just very conscious of how important it is for their own growth and development that they have time with their parents as well. So instead of expanding the business, we’ve really been expanding family time as much as possible. Our challenge is to keep things going as they are. I’m not an ambitious person who wants to create a Murdoch media empire, I would just like to keep doing what we’re doing: publish a video every month which we’ve been doing for the last eight years. I was also doing a podcast: I would do a podcast following each Honest Government Ad to interview a guest and get more into depth about a topic – but I stopped that too about a year ago to spend more time with the kids in between videos. I’m planning on picking up the podcast again because I really miss that. For anyone thinking of doing what we’re doing with media, politics and YouTube, it can become all-consuming. You might immerse yourself in the cycle of what’s happening in the world and then neglect your personal relationships. So for anyone in that position, I hope that you also remember the people and things around you that are really important to nurture and cultivate.