Jennifer Byrne Presents

The Simpsons (animation)
Garfield (cartoon)
Oblomov – Ivan Goncharov
The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard (plays) – Anton Chekhov
The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things (painting) – Hieronymus Bosch
“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street” (short story) – Herman Melville
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
“Nearer My Couch to Thee” (essay) – Thomas R. Pynchon

top ↑

JENNIFER BYRNE: Hi. Jennifer Byrne here. Moving through the sin cycle, though it would be in appropriate to be too excited about it because tonight's sin is sloth, the quiet and reluctant achiever of sins. Also the last to get on the board. The original sin - it's interesting, this - it was sadness, a sort of spiritual idleness, and it was only around the 17th century that it got rebadged as sloth, though the punishment of being thrown into a pit of snakes remained the same. Too harsh maybe? Well, we'll be discussing this with... if I may introduce my four very different guests, starting with the human torpedo - statesman, memoirist, blogger and Pilates obsessive - the high-achieving and perfectly sculpted Bob Carr. By his side, Hannah Gadsby - comedian, art lover, TV presenter. And don't let that productivity fool you. This is a woman who likes a good lie-down now and then. She claims she actually works in bed. Sure you do, Hannah. Gary Shteyngart is a New Yorker who makes the best, funniest and definitely most star-studded videos to promo his books, including Super Sad True Love Story, which, in fact, we featured on this show when it was published a couple of years back. and his current memoir Little Failure in which he appears, absolutely unforgettably, with James Franco in matching fluffy pink dressing gowns. And it was fabulous, Gary. And finally, the Venerable Robina Courtin, a woman who has already had several lives before becoming one of Australia's leading Buddhist teachers, who will, I'm sure, bring us some wisdom on the subject of sloth. So won't you please welcome them all?

(Applause)

JENNIFER BYRNE: Now... ..this is the fourth sin we've discussed. A couple of the others, we've started with Homer in the case of wrath. We started with The Iliad. Um, The Odyssey we started with pride. But with this, I thought we'd start with another Homer. We'd start with Homer Simpson.

(Chuckling)

JENNIFER BYRNE: Because I think, is there any better modern summation of the nature of sloth than his observation - 'What is the point going out? You just wind up back here again.'

(Laughter)

JENNIFER BYRNE: Recognisable, Hannah?

HANNAH GADSBY: Yeah. I wouldn't say he's necessarily a sloth, though, because he has passion. He's very passionate about food. And one of the things about sloth is that you don't really care. And you can't say that about Homer. He gets excited about food.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Would you define him... Define the sin through a negative. It's what you don't do is sloth.

HANNAH GADSBY: Yeah, pretty much. You're just empty inside. Um, I think in his case his slothfulness is the by-product of his greed.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Ah! So he's guilty of another sin?

HANNAH GADSBY: Yean.

JENNIFER BYRNE: That happens.

HANNAH GADSBY: Yeah, it does.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Bob, is this familiar to you, the whole notion of Homer Simpson? I could mention Garfield the cat, another lazy character.

BOB CARR: No, I think I've seen Homer Simpson once but wasn't driven to set my clock and go back and see it another time.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Because, I mean, I would like to bring forward one... ..because I think, again, the particularity of sloth, is there is one pillar, one literary pillar, one titan, which is the book Oblomov, which was written in the 1850s by a Russian. Would you agree he is the epitome of sloth?

GARY SHTEYNGART: Yeah, Oblomov is a wonderful book by a fella named Ivan Goncharov. It's fun to say that name.

(Chuckling)

GARY SHTEYNGART: And Oblomov spends most of the book on his sofa. Sometimes he punches his manservant, Zakhar. But he basically doesn't move very much. And he complains when his servant says, you know, 'You have to go out and woo a woman, you have to go and be productive.' There's even a Russian word, 'oblomovshchina', which means 'the stage of being Oblomov'. And when people describe all the problems of Russia, they will say it's oblomovshchina - the fact that people don't move much from their sofa.

BOB CARR: Yeah, I, um... I think it's got to be considered seriously as one response to a view that every action ends up with unintended consequences. And people can assume that all social engineering, for example, ends up failing. And one response to this is simply to devote your life to doing nothing. But... reading the book, you do want to take him by the lapels of his Oriental dressing gown, with its egg stains and soup stains...

JENNIFER BYRNE: That's right.

BOB CARR: ..and shake him into doing something, going out and jogging along the Neva or...

JENNIFER BYRNE: Yeah.

BOB CARR: ..reading one of those books cover to cover that have been open for a month and have faded.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Because he does absolutely nothing.

BOB CARR: Nothing.

JENNIFER BYRNE: But he doesn't even get out of bed till...

BOB CARR: Yeah.

JENNIFER BYRNE: ..150 pages.

BOB CARR: And the expression that reverberates is that 'on the edge of his bed, he poked his toes towards his slipper...'

ROBINA COURTIN: That's right!

BOB CARR: '..and then withdrew it, thinking better of it.'

(Laughter)

ROBINA COURTIN: I found that it was a most ridiculous book. I thought he was a ridiculous fellow. I though he was a character... some kind of fantasy idea of a person. I just... I wasn't... I was bored reading about him. And I wasn't so sure he was authentic. I mean, I don't know who this author is, but it seems to me he had some idea of what a slothful... Did he have a political kind of agenda there? Was there something behind there? It seemed to me he was making some point.

JENNIFER BYRNE: We defer to the Russian amongst us, even though you are actually now a New Yorker.

GARY SHTEYNGART: Yeah, er...

JENNIFER BYRNE: I mean, it was meant to be a political comment at the time.

GARY SHTEYNGART: Anything that any Russian wrote in the 19th century was meant to be political - 'Tsar bad...'

ROBINA COURTIN: So, what was he trying to show, the author?

GARY SHTEYNGART: The indolence of the, sort of, upper class, the aristocracy of...

ROBINA COURTIN: OK, see, that brings the point to me, then - it's a rather clich�d view of what sloth is, or laziness. The implication is if you're rich and don't need to work, you'll sit around contemplating your navel or putting your toe towards a slipper, and then the working classes aren't lazy and aren't slothful because they're forced to have to work day and night. I think that's rather clich�d - it's more nuanced than that. I mean, the...

JENNIFER BYRNE: Except that was true. That DID happen in the 1800s.

ROBINA COURTIN: Maybe it did. But maybe that's not necessarily the real definition of what laziness is. It seems to me, if I look at the Buddhist literature, which is... it's different from the Catholic one... Well, no, the Catholic one is a bit insightful to me, that this laziness was avoiding what you should do. So being busy... doing what you shouldn't... ..being busy and avoiding what you should do, which looks like you're being busy, actually is a form of laziness. So engaging in what you should do, which, of course, they meant spiritual practice... The Buddhist literature is similar. The first kind of laziness is 'can't be bothered'. Maybe that's...

JENNIFER BYRNE: Mmm.

ROBINA COURTIN: The second kind, though, is 'I'm too busy, I'll do it later', which is called procrastination.

JENNIFER BYRNE: And that's a particular sin, is it, or the beginning of one?

ROBINA COURTIN: It's the one that... avoiding doing what you need to do - the thing that you can't be bothered doing.

BOB CARR: I think the funniest part of the book is the section that deals with his family background.

ROBINA COURTIN: Yes.

BOB CARR: And his sloth, his pathological laziness, becomes clear. This is how he grew up. It's a big household, a gentry household...

ROBINA COURTIN: Yes.

BOB CARR: ..where people did nothing. People did absolutely nothing. They slept off the labour of the dinner and thinking of reasons not to exert the slightest effort. For example, remember they received a letter - it was very unusual for them to receive a letter - so they handled it and they discussed whose handwriting it might be and they put it away for a year... and brought themselves to open it because it might have required some effort, some response.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Procrastination, as you said.

ROBINA COURTIN: That's a procrastination. And maybe for me, reading Oblomov, the biggest sin is just utter self-centredness, utter... utter self-centredness.

JENNIFER BYRNE: I would challenge you thinking that it's a clich�, because I think around the 1800s, I mean, Flaubert, Proust, all those guys were writing about decadent aristos and middle... you know, the upper middle class lazing around doing nothing.

BOB CARR: And Chekhov went on to write four plays about the inability of the gentry to do anything to fix up their languishing estates. That's what it was all about. Every one of the great plays by Chekhov is about gentry that can't make the household work because they're inherently lazy, they've got this inherited laziness. By the way, the Communists must have loved Oblomov. It must have been required reading after 1917.

GARY SHTEYNGART: Oh, Russia was so oblomovian in the 20th century. It was a thing to behold! Er, just every relative I knew was asleep in his office from 9:00 to 4:00 with a slight break for vodka. Er, women worked hard. You know, women were building the streets and the crumbling mansions and everything. And the men were sort of these... ..you know, these dreamers, if you will. And that's how I became slothful, is just learning from my ancestors.

JENNIFER BYRNE: But in the heritage of Russia, is Oblomov seen as a fascinating hero or, in fact, a reproach - an example of what you shouldn't be?

GARY SHTEYNGART: Well, both. To the new go-getter Muscovites, who are, you know, busy cutting up slices of oil and gas, yes, that's very reproachable... reprehensible. But to most of the working population, oh, to be an Oblomov, I think, is still pretty cool.

ROBINA COURTIN: I can't believe it. Wow.

JENNIFER BYRNE: I'd like to go back, because, you know, you were talking about in Buddhism, um, it's... the origin was of not attending to your faith. The actual origin of sloth, I think, is really interesting. Because it used to be, when it started, it was in the 4th century, it was known as the noonday demon. And it was these monks in the desert in Egypt and because they weren't attending to their prayers, THAT was the sin, of not being, you know, sufficiently spiritually alert. But that became sadness or melancholia. And I think that's a really interesting link, that sloth and melancholia, or sadness, should be linked.

HANNAH GADSBY: It was one of the humours - there's the four humours, and I forget which one the other three are, but they're much more humorous than melancholia.

(Laughter)

JENNIFER BYRNE: Bile, I know, is in there. Blood.

HANNAH GADSBY: Something like that. You had to have a balance of all of them. So you need parts of all of them in order to, you know, operate with balance. But if you overcompensate with one, and that's melancholia, you're just depressed, basically. And I just think it's a little bit uncaring of Christianity to just go... 'Just do it. Just snap out of it.' You know, perhaps there's something missing for a reason and you get sad. I think it's early... it's depression was what they pinpointed. And, like, you know what - just swim in some snakes.

(Laughter)

HANNAH GADSBY: It's not very caring, is it?

JENNIFER BYRNE: It's not very caring.

HANNAH GADSBY: And snakes are a per... Like, that's not a punishment for the slothful. To avoid being bitten by snakes you just be very still.

(Laughter)

JENNIFER BYRNE: The idea of melancholy as, sort of, an origin of sloth, does that... does that ring true to you?

HANNAH GADSBY: Er, yeah. You see it pop up a lot in art. It's either... The, um, representation of sloth is either just someone lounging on a chair... Um, Hieronymus Bosch did a great one in his Seven Deadly Sins. ..or something that's slow, like a snail. And I don't... I think that's unfair on the snails. They're practically backpacking and that. You know, they're taking their house with them. You know, they're not... they're just slow. Like, I always think there's this misconception that, you know, you're slothful because you're slow. But, um, I think when you're slow you're just picking your battles.

JENNIFER BYRNE: But then along comes the complete redefinition, where it becomes what we now think of it, which is, kind of, laziness...

ROBINA COURTIN: Laziness, yeah.

JENNIFER BYRNE: ..which happens in about the 17th century. And look, Bob, I don't want to sound cynical, but that is also just in time for the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, and the notion that a non-working widget is no point at all. Does it seem suggestive to you?

BOB CARR: Yeah, I think that is... that's a valid point. It's been remarked on that the peasant class was able to get away with a lot of idle time, a lot of idle time. With the industrial era, another ethic, and you've got the view that there was the deserving poor but idle people... idle people were not to be tolerated. So I think it is part of the rigour of the industrial age, that shift in view.

HANNAH GADSBY: That would... that would go to serve that, um, you know, over-busy people get sad. You know, the pace is too much for some constitutions to cope with. I know it's too much for me, you know, just this having to work constantly and justify sitting. You have to be busy all the time. It's like, you know, if you don't have time to think then you might... you know, it's a form of procrastination.

ROBINA COURTIN: Also, speaking psychologically, which is really the basis of the Buddhist one, is that we're avoiding what's going on inside here. We'll do anything but deal with what's inside here, which, of course, informs what you do out there. So we'll just run around looking like we're incredibly busy, putting it off, unable to bear what's going on inside yourself. This is why I'm thinking it's more nuanced than just lots of activity of no activity, is that it has to have some ethical basis. You can be really busy doing lots of... you know, working really hard designing guns so you can go out and kill people. I mean, who cares...

BOB CARR: But what about monastic life? How do you explain that in these terms?

ROBINA COURTIN: Oh, absolutely. The Buddhist psychological approach, in the Buddhist model of the mind, the... obv... we need to learn to see what's going on inside here because obviously - it's hardly rocket science and Buddha doesn't own this idea - that what goes on inside here informs what you do with your body and speech. And clearly it needs to be for the good of the world, for yourself and the others, and it's got to be ethically based. So if you know what's going on inside here, then that informs what you do with your body and speech, then it's useful. You mightn't be so busy, but then what you do is useful because it leaves something useful... it's useful.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Useful to whom?

ROBINA COURTIN: It's beneficial to others.

BOB CARR: Is meditation hard work?

ROBINA COURTIN: Oh, enormously hard work.

BOB CARR: It's a very tough discipline, very tough discipline.

ROBINA COURTIN: So you could have a person sitting there all day doing their meditation - not just some self-centred activity but an activity of honing your own mind, disciplining it. It needs immense rigour and discipline to focus your mind so that you can... ..so you can transform it, basically, and then become a better human being.

JENNIFER BYRNE: But isn't that... isn't that fairly self-absorbed, you could argue?

ROBINA COURTIN: If that's the reason you're doing it, just to become more self-absorbed. Well, you can't be more self-absorbed than Mr Oblomov, could you, and it's useless, anyway. The reason behind this is so you end up being useful to others.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Just before Oblo... Ob-LO-mov...

GARY SHTEYNGART: Ob-LOM-ov!

JENNIFER BYRNE: Ob-LOM-ov. (Chuckles) ..was published, only about five short years, there was a book by Melville - Mr 'Moby Dick' Melville - called Bartleby, The Scrivener, this scrivener who went to work on Wall Street and he did some good work for a while and then he stopped working. And he would always say, 'I would prefer not to.' 'Would you like to go and do some job?' 'I would prefer not to.' That was his answer to everything. In the end he got sacked, and in the end he died. That's the story.

ROBINA COURTIN: Right.

JENNIFER BYRNE: But...

HANNAH GADSBY: Spoiler alert!

JENNIFER BYRNE: It's only a short story.

ROBINA COURTIN: So what's the point?

JENNIFER BYRNE: The point is... the point is that people say that this was the first literary example of extreme sloth. And it was about protest. So THAT's what I want to ask about. Is sloth, in fact, a form of protest? Of being... Whether you're sitting on Wall Street, over-busy there, or whether you're out cutting down trees or whether you're on a computer, is sloth some kind of strike?

BOB CARR: Well, it must have been in the old Soviet Union. You know, the workers saw that they were stuck in a system that exploited them grotesquely. If they weren't party leadership, they didn't have decent rations. And one response to a system that was ripping them off was to... was to, you know, sell on the black market anything they could steal out of the factory and to do no work whatsoever themselves. That's...

GARY SHTEYNGART: The old joke was, 'You pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.'

BOB CARR: Yeah, yeah.

(Laughter)

BOB CARR: So it could be argued it's a rational response.

GARY SHTEYNGART: Oh, very rational, I think.

BOB CARR: Why should they exert themselves, given that the party leadership was exploiting the system?

HANNAH GADSBY: Sometimes when you're feeling that there's an element of being trapped in a situation, whether it be political or whatever, um, and your response is sloth, that can affect you spiritually. And so then it becomes a lot denser in that way, in that it will make you sad because, you know, that's pretty much what it goes back to. Sort of, like, maybe it's not so conscious in some levels, the sloth, you're just, like, 'Oh, there's not a lot of point' because you're hitting your head against a wall, and so you become...

JENNIFER BYRNE: I think it's an expression of... of 'Get me away from all this'.

HANNAH GADSBY: Yeah, yeah. You're damaged on some level. So, on the Christian sense, where it's, you know, you're supposed, basically, to be thinking about God and you're thinking about everything else, that's sloth. Like, or you think about nothing - you don't care. But, you know, in a state of depression, that's essentially what you do. You are empty. You're not... You're not even sad, you're empty. Like, you just can't get off the couch, you're not... There's no humour. You know, just nothing gives you joy. And that's not necessarily a protest - it's almost a defence.

BOB CARR: It is one answer to Hamlet's question - 'To be or not to be? To take up arms against a Sea of troubles and... blah-blah-blah... ..end them.' The slothful person, pre-eminently our mate Oblomov, opts just to stay on the couch all day. If you consider that all social action ends up being useless, counterproductive, that everything ends in paradox or defeat, I suppose you could argue that's one response

JENNIFER BYRNE: Do you really believe that?

BOB CARR: No, no, no. I don't believe it. I can't live that way, and I'd feel like slapping his face or shaking him around to get him started, but you can understand... there's a philosophic grandeur about someone who says, 'It is all useless. I'm not even going to attempt it. I'll just lie on the couch until a stroke takes me out.'

JENNIFER BYRNE: Exactly. And that's a protest.

GARY SHTEYNGART: A friend of Oblomov says to him, 'Dude, Oblomov, you know, you should be reading more books - that's what it's all about.' And Oblomov says, 'These books, they're just for the self-glorification of the author. And that's a kind of... So he's saying he wants to take himself out of that and he doesn't have anything to glorify about himself so he's just going to live the rest of his life and then die. At the end of each... In his family, this genteel family in the countryside, they end each day by crossing themselves and saying, 'Well, that's another day over with, thank God!'

(Laughter)

GARY SHTEYNGART: You know, and that's a beautiful kind of mantra. You know, they survived another day and now another day begins and then...

ROBINA COURTIN: It's practical psychology. It...

HANNAH GADSBY: Self-care. Like, it, you know, perpetuates something. Like, if you're happy and balanced on the inside, then that expression will help, like, just in your own life. Like, he's not happy, this guy...

ROBINA COURTIN: Clearly.

HANNAH GADSBY: ..Oblomov. Had a go. Swallowed the word, but...

(Laughter)

BOB CARR: No-one would opt to live like that, surely. I mean, it's repellent to me. But I can see the logic of it.

JENNIFER BYRNE: You would no more go to bed and lie there than fly to the moon!

BOB CARR: It'd drive me insane. But I'd rather be in a life of pointless activism and busy-ness. It just seems to give you a chance at having a shot at doing something,

ROBINA COURTIN: No, it's true. Good point.

BOB CARR: ..pulling something off. I can just see the logic of his radical view of the universe. Nothing works, everything fails, everything's counterproductive. It's a correct reading of the situation in Russia, of course, so why not stay in bed?

HANNAH GADSBY: I feel a bit like it now.

(Laughter)

JENNIFER BYRNE: Not at this minute!

HANNAH GADSBY: No, not in the show. Just generally in this country.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Really? I want to give you fresh meat in the literary front in terms of sloth. Um, Ignatius J. Reilly, the lead character in A Confederacy Of Dunces. I'm not saying he's slothful, but he was someone who never wanted to leave the place of his birth. And he was pretty damn shambling, wasn't he?

GARY SHTEYNGART: Yeah. Big fella.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Would you put him into the sloth category?

GARY SHTEYNGART: The story is basically him living with his mom, um, and then he meets a woman... There's a love interest in Oblomov as well, so the love interest always exists in these books. The large fella in bed has to be aroused by something. And so it's him... I know that, yes. The lifting of the eyes is appropriate at that point.

(Jennifer chortles)

GARY SHTEYNGART: And so he tries to get out of bed and then things don't happen, I think. I can't remember how the book ends.

JENNIFER BYRNE: He's just this big, shambolic bear of a man who just thinks that everybody is far too active, far too busy, and, um... and does very little, does extremely little. Because it's quite hard in literature to find creatures that don't do anything.

HANNAH GADSBY: You need action. You need some kind of narrative drive. I... I... like, you talk to me at the end of the day, not interesting, what I've done, what I've achieved in action. Thought a lot but, you know...

ROBINA COURTIN: What do you mean, Hannah?

HANNAH GADSBY: Well, just action-wise. Like, if you're going to drive a narrative, I'm not going to drive a narrative.

GARY SHTEYNGART: There's no arc to your day.

HANNAH GADSBY: No, there's no arc to my day. So that's why slothful people don't make great central characters.

JENNIFER BYRNE: So do you feel that...

HANNAH GADSBY: I don't feel... I don't need to have action. I'm living a life. But as far as literature's concerned, you need someone who's doing shit. I'm not doing shit.

GARY SHTEYNGART: It's so nice you can say 'shit' here.

(All laugh)

GARY SHTEYNGART: Holy shit.

JENNIFER BYRNE: These small civil liberties are granted to you here.

GARY SHTEYNGART: This is how a civilisation is made. Not a shitty civilisation either - a fine one!

JENNIFER BYRNE: So, does your quietness and slowness but activity within get mistaken as sloth?

HANNAH GADSBY: Yes.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Do you feel defensive about it?

HANNAH GADSBY: Oh, not defensive. I love my lifestyle.

(Gary chuckles)

HANNAH GADSBY: You know, I... I get lots done. But I don't get HEAPS done.

(Jennifer chuckles)

HANNAH GADSBY: You know, I'm not constantly busy. I pick my battles.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Thomas Pynchon, in an essay on sloth... He actually wrote an essay Nearer My Couch To Thee, which I like.

(Gary chuckles)

JENNIFER BYRNE: And he said that... he described writers specifically as 'mavens of sloth'. 'The ones who are... 'They're the expert witnesses at the sloth hearings. They're the head of the sloth task forces.' Is it, do you think, and especially writerly sin?

GARY SHTEYNGART: The thing is that really good writing, you do it for three hours a day and it's diminishing returns after that. So, truly to write requires three hours a day. So, you know, I wake up at 11:00. Breakfast is brought in. That's until 12:00. Then the writing day begins until 3:00. And that's it. And then what... you know, then we all get together for a light... Well, first there's psychoanalysis until 5:00...

(Laughter)

GARY SHTEYNGART: ..then we all have dinner at a Viennese cafe on Park Ave until 7:00. Then drinking until 12:00. And then what's called 'the crying hour', which is when writers realise that publishing is dead and we're all going to be homeless soon enough. And then 11 more hours of sleep, koala-like, and then the cycle begins again at 11:00 with breakfast, and then the three-hour work. But it's not because I'm lazy!

JENNIFER BYRNE: You are such a liar!

GARY SHTEYNGART: It's all true. Just follow my Tweet feed.

HANNAH GADSBY: There's something to be said about creativity flowing in the stiller states. Like, I do a lot of my best thinking just before I go to sleep and just after I've woken up. But if you just jump out of bed and just get busy, you lose that...

JENNIFER BYRNE: So you really meant it? You DO do some of your best work in bed?

HANNAH GADSBY: You know, I don't... Yeah, I do. I do sort of sit there and let my brain be active in its own time. I mean, I have that... You know, I'm privileged enough to be able to do that. I'm not, you know... But I'm saying that it's actually a really key part of my creativity.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Not to be mistaken with sloth.

HANNAH GADSBY: Well, I... you know, I have passion, you know, so I don't think I'm guilty of sloth. I have passion about inactivity, though, so...

(Gary laughs)

BOB CARR: My best work as a premier was done leaping out of bed, not having time to arrange my thoughts, and picking up the phone to morning radio stations, newsrooms, and shaping the political agenda of the day. The less thought I gave it...

HANNAH GADSBY: That's comforting.

(Laughter)

BOB CARR: ..the better it went. And, inspired by the ruminations of my sleeping state, great ideas came to the fore. I'd only have to hear a burst of the 5:30am news to decide how I'd reshape things...

ROBINA COURTIN: My goodness.

BOB CARR: ..and would appear on the 6am or the 6:30am news.

HANNAH GADSBY: It's a very different thing, though, that, you know...

BOB CARR: It was creative. It was like your stuff. It was being entertaining...

HANNAH GADSBY: I'm not ruling the world.

BOB CARR: ..putting suggestions out there...

HANNAH GADSBY: I'm just making jokes!

BOB CARR: ..making decisions and telling some jokes.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Here's a proposition for you - that we're all talking like sloth isn't such a bad thing really. You know, it takes many forms and... Or can be redefined, as you are, Robina. But my proposition is that because it is the only sin of omission on the list... All of the others are sins of commission - too much lust, too much anger, so forth. Because it's the sin of omission, if sloth gets in your spirit, then basically it's like the cruise missile of the sins - all the others go but, in fact, everything goes. It can blow up everything and leave emptiness in its wake.

HANNAH GADSBY: Cluster bomb. Um, I don't think sloth is necessarily a sin. It's not a state to aspire to but I think that if it happens it's symptomatic. It's not... You know, it's symptomatic of something else, whether it be sadness, despair, these sorts of things. I think that, like, becomes a form of, you know, whether it be public protest or internal protest, you know, if you feel despondency.

JENNIFER BYRNE: And so one should, rather than judging and condemning...

HANNAH GADSBY: Just look after yourself.

JENNIFER BYRNE: ..be a little kinder.

HANNAH GADSBY: Just look after yourself, right? Self-care is what it goes into. I think there's a lot of... People like to condemn other people, I think. That's... that's not the problem.

GARY SHTEYNGART: I think lust is OK in small quantities.

(Laughter)

HANNAH GADSBY: Yeah.

JENNIFER BYRNE: But that's a sin of commission, even in small quantities.

GARY SHTEYNGART: Or emission, yes.

(Laughter)

ROBINA COURTIN: I mean, it's just despondency and sadness and hopelessness, isn't it? That's what... It's the worst one. I mean, you're worthless and what you do is worthless, which is the exact opposite... reality, I think, is opposite. Every single being has some worth. I'm trying to be sentimental or holy here. Every single one of us has enormous worth and potential, so to have... OK, in this particular way we're talking here, the Buddhists use... The first level of laziness is 'can't be bothered, too much effort'. The second one is 'too busy, I'll put it off'. But the third one is the worst. It's the one that says 'I'm not capable, I'm can't do it'. And that, I think, informs all the rest.

BOB CARR: In the end, life is meaningful...

ROBINA COURTIN: That's right.

BOB CARR: ..only when we make a contribution.

ROBINA COURTIN: Exactly.

BOB CARR: You've got to contribute. And as meaningless as the whole thing looks from time to time, the one answer is 'What can I contribute today to my family, to my neighbourhood, to the world? What can my contribution be?'

ROBINA COURTIN: Even to the dog next door.

BOB CARR: I really think I could give some good therapy to Oblomov. I think I could appear...

ROBINA COURTIN: But I would put it this way. I think the Oblomov in... our own Oblomov... I've got to start moving MY Oblomov. Forget Mr Oblomov. That's his problem. But every one of us has to see we've got potential. Every one of us can see that we can be of use to the world, even if it's just the dog next door.

JENNIFER BYRNE: A most intriguing sin, this one. It's actually a harder sin to pin down because we live with it. Um, but it's all in the definition and all in the way we think of it.

GARY SHTEYNGART: Yeah, it's a tough one. Get me back here for greed. Ooh!

(Laughter)

GARY SHTEYNGART: I'm so angry!

JENNIFER BYRNE: We've done greed.

GARY SHTEYNGART: I guess that's anger. Oh, you've done it. Never mind.

JENNIFER BYRNE: That is our show for tonight. It was great to have... and I hope that you will join me in giving a big thank you to tonight's guests - to Bob, to Hannah, to Gary and to Robina.

(Applause)

JENNIFER BYRNE: Now, next week we tackle envy. Its colour is...

HANNAH GADSBY: Ohhh!

JENNIFER BYRNE: Yeah.

HANNAH GADSBY: I wanted to do that one. That was a little joke I did there about envy.

(Jennifer blows raspberry)

GARY SHTEYNGART: Oh! I get it now. (Laughs) I am so slow!

(Bob chuckles)

JENNIFER BYRNE: Moving on - it's colour is green... Of course it's green. Its associated animal is the dog. and the punishment in Hell is to be put in freezing water. So until then, take care, be thankful for what you've got. That was my envy joke, but yours was better.

HANNAH GADSBY: Sorry.

JENNIFER BYRNE: Thank you so much for your company. Lovely to have you. Goodnight.

(Applause)

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Bob Carr – Bob Carr is the longest continuously serving Premier in New South Wales history. He served as Leader of the Opposition from 1988 until his election as Premier in March 1995. He was re-elected in 1999 and again in March 2003 securing an historic third four-year term. He retired from politics in 2005 after more than 10 years as Premier. As Premier he introduced the world’s first carbon trading scheme and curbed the clearing of native vegetation as anti-greenhouse measures. He was a member of the International Task Force on Climate Change convened by Tony Blair, and was made a life member of the Wilderness Society in 2003. He has also received the World Conservation Union International Parks Merit Award for creating 350 new national parks. Bob Carr has received the Fulbright Distinguished Fellow Award Scholarship. He has served as Honorary Scholar of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue. He is the author of Thoughtlines (2002), What Australia Means to Me (2003), and My Reading Life (2008). In March 2012 he was designated by Prime Minister Julia Gillard as Australia’s Foreign Minister. He was elected to the Australian Senate to fill a casual Senate vacancy and sworn in to the Senate and Cabinet on March 13, 2012. He announced his resignation from the Senate on 23 October 2013. He published his memoirs Diary of a Foreign Minister in 2014.

Hannah Gadsby – Hannah is an award-winning Australian comedian who thinks quickly and moves slowly. She is sardonic, laconic and, after numerous bone crunching accidents, bionic. Her droll delivery, delightful wordplay and heart-breakingly funny, self-deprecating observations have delighted audiences all over the world.
From 2011 to 2013 you could see her every Wednesday night on ABC TV’s acclaimed Adam Hills Tonight.
Desperate to make use of her art history degree, Hannah has written and presented three specials for ABC TV’s Artscape and takes every opportunity to present her incredibly popular comedic art lectures at festivals around the world alongside her stand-up comedy shows.

Gary Shteyngart – Gary was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. He is the author of the novels Super Sad True Love Story, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was selected as one of the best books of the year by more than forty news journals and magazines around the world; Absurdistan, which was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine; and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Travel + Leisure, Esquire, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications and has been translated into twenty-six languages. Shteyngart lives in New York City and upstate New York.

Robina Courtin – Ordained since the late 1970s, Venerable Robina Courtin has worked full time since then for Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche's FPMT (Federation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition). Over the years she has served as editorial director of Wisdom Publications, editor of Mandala magazine, executive director of Liberation Prison Project, and as a touring teacher of Buddhism. Her life and work with prisoners have been featured in the documentary films Chasing Buddha and the ABC-TV Compass program, Key to Freedom.

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