The Weekly Hoon: El Nino, Iran’s D-Day and the author of ‘Why we think what we think’

Kia ora koutou katoa.

Welcome to The Hoon, where co-host Peter Bale and I go around the week's news in geopolitics and Aotearoa's political economy with a whole bunch of experts, academics and politicians, all to understand our worlds better and have some fun.

Hello, audience.

You've just got me today.

Bernard is having a rest and basking with seals in British Columbia.

And I happen to know he's also been given by Lynn a new T-shirt with, I think, presumably a maple leaf and Canadians get your elbows out, which is apparently an ice hockey thing.

And it's all about, you know, don't mess with don't mess with Canada.

So we'll hear more from Bernard next week.

He promised me, at least, he would wear this T-shirt next week.

So you've got me and a slightly changed show again today.

I have to start with a mea culpa.

I made a mistake last week at the end about the Tasmanian devil story.

It was, of course, a Tasmanian tiger, a thylacine, not a Tasmanian devil.

I'm terribly sorry about that.

And as a former correspondent in Australia where I used to do stories about those things, I feel ashamed.

First up on the show, we've got Dr. Catherine Dyer, and I've asked her to go a little bit longer than we sometimes have her for and go quite deep on the implications of this unusually historically large El Nino and how it fits with the dramatic rise in global sea temperatures, particularly in Europe.

Second, we've got our usual check-in with Professor Patman from Otago University, and I've asked him to try to make sense of the new D-Day against Iran and much more in this topsy-turvy world, and a bit more perhaps on why Wellington is so keen to keep its head down despite what's going on with Canada, or perhaps because of what's going on with Canada.

In the second half of the show, we have, as Monty Python might have said, something completely different.

I've invited a friend of mine, an author and polymath, Turi Munzi from Rome, to talk about his new book, Why We Think What We Think.

And I think it'll make you think.

If you like the books of Yuval Noah Hariri, Sapiens and so on, you will love Turi, I suspect.

And because we're keeping to our laser-sharp agenda, here's Dr. Catherine Dyer.