Mikey Robins was bet $50,000 he wouldn’t make it past 50. It was a good bet

Fitz: You pop up on all the commercial TV stations, lots of ABC stuff, particularly with Good News Week, and more radio with Triple M and Vega for a good stint. Squires once said to me that when it comes to wit, you were “the fastest gun in the West”. Is there anyone you’ve worked with, whom you care to offer a similar accolade?

MR: Paul McDermott, who I worked with on triple j, was the best improviser I’ve ever come across. He was what I call “a hand grenade guy”. If a bit of improv might not be quite working, Paul would throw himself on the hand grenade to save everyone else, and dig deep to make it work, even if it costs him a little bit of ego. And I would also cite the late Rebecca Wilson, who I worked with on Vega. She had absolutely no filter. She would just say stuff that was so great to work with. And I would say to management, “Don’t make Rebecca come to the planning meetings. Just turn the mic on and let it go!”

Fitz: Squires is not alone in the industry in regarding you as a great wit. How is it that you don’t have a gig right now?

MR: Because, let’s be honest, now that we are in the age of national networking, there’s about seven or eight of those jobs in the whole country going to get the attention of generally young age brackets, and as you say, I’m over 60. I’m not complaining. I had a bloody good run, made a lot of friends along the way, and had a ball.

Fitz: So now, and this sounds strangely familiar, you’re raiding history for great stories, and have a book coming out called Idiots, Follies and Misadventures. What is the guts of it? And I trust I’m not mentioned under “idiots”.

MR: Well, my last book was about bad behaviour throughout history and as I was writing that, I kept coming across other stories that didn’t quite fit, about colossal idiots, shocking follies and terrible misadventures. The big-game changer for prehistoric man was controlling fire, but looking back I think the most amazing thing is that we actually managed to make it out of the cave without spearing ourselves in the foot. My take on history is that while the technology and the costumes have changed, the human impulses are the same.

Fitz: Go on . . .

MR: Well, in terms of stupidity, the truth is that we will believe anything from someone we know and trust, or something that makes us feel better about ourselves – and we will take both over actual scientific fact – and this was as much of a problem in the third and 16th century as it is now. And I’ll give you an example of the parallels. During the Great Plague of London in the mid-1600s, one of the prescribed preventative measures was to walk around with a jar of your own flatulence to sniff from when you were in company. The idea was that stench around you would prevent you getting the plague, and rich people would buy the most stinky of goats to put in their parlour.

Fitz: Go on with you!

MR: It’s true. And I was writing the book during COVID, and we had people who ended up in the hospital because they took fish-tank bleach to ward off the virus! There are so many examples of these parallels. Yes, right now, the net is responsible for the surge of a lot of stupid conspiracy theories. But let’s not forget that within 30 years of the Gutenberg Press being invented in the mid-1400s – the great breakthrough in disseminating information – it was being used to spread false conspiracy theories, sometimes with tragic results. In Italy, after a child had died in mysterious circumstances, a pamphlet went out blaming the local Jewish community and ended up in a pogrom. And here’s the thing, this same crackpot theory is still being espoused in right-wing chat rooms today! It’s like the David Bowie lyric, “we’re always crashing in the same car”.

Fitz: Other examples?

MR: The whole “flat Earth” thing. We were taught that Columbus was the only European who thought the earth was round, when actually, by the time of Columbus, the elite had known it for centuries, from Socrates to Plato to St Augustine. But Columbus actually thought the Earth was shaped like a woman’s boob as she lies flat on her back, with the nipple being the Arctic, closest to God.

Fitz: Really? I am loving these stories, but can only hope they are true.

MR: They are. Columbus writes of it in his third journal. He was worse at maths than I was, and believed in two weeks he could have got to Japan. To his dying day, he believed he had got to India. But because of American exceptionalism, they wanted to make it appear that Columbus was defying all the current beliefs by continuing to sail west without falling off the edge of the Earth and this writer Washington Irving wrote a fictional biography of Columbus, quoting an early medieval writer who believed the Earth was flat. And then in Victorian England, the flat-Earth thing takes off. It then gets transported to America and in the last survey I saw, you’ve got about 9 per cent of Americans who think the Earth is flat!

Fitz: I am guessing that in terms of folly, America was fertile ground?

MR: My favourite is the one on Lincoln’s bodyguard, John Frederick Parker, who went with him to the theatre that night. There had already been many assassination attempts on the president, and they included a confederate surgeon getting infected clothing from prison camps making them into elegant shirts that he mailed to Lincoln with the thought that he might get smallpox. On the theatre night, Parker was supposed to be seated at the entrance to the booth where Lincoln was shot. The play Our American Cousin was getting a lot of laughs, which Parker can hear. So that piques his interest, and he leaves his spot to get a better view of the play. He then decides he doesn’t like the play, so goes to the tavern next door. There’s a good chance he and the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, actually crossed paths that night, going from, and to, the theatre! And so Lincoln was shot, unprotected.

Fitz: Staggering. Australian stories?

MR: I love the one on the American-born politician, King O’Malley, who was one of the prime movers in having our capital city, Canberra, placed where it was. I was always taught at school that it was put there because it was halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. But another factor, pushed by O’Malley, was that cold climates create greater intellects – which, when you think of it, is a really European and imperialistic way of looking at the world. He wanted to call Canberra “Shakespeare Town”.

Fitz: Generally, I thought O’Malley highly regarded?

MR: Well, he might fit into another chapter called I Should Have Done Better, which focuses on how the ability to be clever in one area does not guarantee you’re going to be clever in another area. Isaac Newton lost a fortune in the South Sea bubble. Similarly, Mark Twain was an absolute financial idiot, and originally came on his famous tour to Australia to raise money to pay back taxes.

Fitz: I can’t wait to read it. What’s your next project?

MR: Well, I’m doing a podcast with a guy called Paul Wilson who is a real historian. And we’ve actually been getting people in to talk about their hero and their howler from history. And so, this afternoon, we’ve got Matt Preston coming in to talk about Zheng Yi Sao, the Chinese pirate from the start of the 19th century. Blackbeard, at his height, had four ships and 200 pirates. She had 1400 ships and between 60,000 and 80,000 pirates. And when she surrendered to the Qing dynasty – after she had taken on the Portuguese empire and the British East India Company – she was allowed to keep all her wealth, retired to Macau where she opened a tea room /gambling house/ brothel, and they reckon that, to this day, some of the nefarious activities on Macau probably come in a direct line from her activities.

Fitz: That is a brilliant story. I will race you to write a book on it!

Quote of the Week

“If even half of it is true, then he’s toast.” - Donald Trump’s former attorney-general Bill Barr on his ex-boss’s indictment.

Joke of the week

Maud: “Knock-knock.” Johnny: “Who’s there?”

Maud: “Sam and Janet.” Johnny: “Sam and Janet who?”

Maud [In a wafty, sing-song voice]: “Sam and Janet evening, you will meet a stranger.”

Twitter: @Peter_Fitz