Life Uncut - Live Show Diaries - Michael Hing

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

Hey Lifers Today's episode is from our chat with the wonderful Michael Hing at one of our live shows! This episode is such a laugh! Hingers is a character. We chat about: -having two Chinese doctors as parents and wanting to work in comedy  -being a finalist for cleo bachelor of the year -using 'culture' in comedy -microaggressions and racism being a Chinese guy working in radio -working out what's worth speaking out about and what's not   If you have an question please send it on it to life uncut podcast on Instagram hereJoin us on tiktok Or join the facebook group here Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! xxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm producer Keisha and this is our third installment of bringing you some of the wonderful conversations that Britt and Laura had with our great guests at each of our live shows across the country. We got to fly around to seven different cities across Australia and we were joined by some of the best people that I could ever have imagined joining us on stage. And so we wanted to bring some of those conversations to you while we were taking a bit of a summer break. Today's episode is with the hilarious Michael Hing. Now, Michael Hing, you might know him as Hingers because he was on Triple J. He's also on The Project. He does a bunch of comedy and a bunch

of other podcasts. He's a very, very busy man. And he's also an absolute laugh and a half. In this chat, he shared two actually. I was going to say the most outrageous, accidentally unfiltered, but he decided to share both because why not? They were both equally as outrageous as each other, which I love for him. He also spoke about having two Chinese doctors as parents and wanting to work in comedy because it's a little bit of a contrast to the narrative of being, you know, successful to want to work in the arts. They spoke about being a finalist for Clio Bachelor of The Year and Using Culture in Comedy. He also spoke about some deeper things, but of course, he's a comedian, so that was still hilarious, which I don't know how he managed to do.

He spoke about things like microaggressions and some racism that he's experienced being an Australian Chinese guy who worked in media, as well as speaking about what he finds worthy of speaking out against and how a lot of people who experience microaggressions can feel quite exasperated from the experience. So it was a really great chat. There's so many laughs in this one, but there's also some really impactful lessons. So I hope you love it. Let's get into the chat that Britt and Laura had with Michael Hing at one of our live shows. We have our very last guest for this evening. Now he is a comedian. He was also a radio host. He has a podcast and he is a host on the project. You guys probably know him from being the drive show on Triple J as well.

We have Michael Hing joining us. Hing is... Get on in here. Hey, everyone. With the red wine. Oh, yeah, I brought some wine. I think this is... I don't know if this is your rider or something,

but I've stolen someone's wine. It's Sandfish's rider. Yeah, right. Come on. Take the hot seat. He's welcome. You look amazing. What does your top say?

It says the black eye patch. It's from a Japanese shirt maker that I can't afford to buy things from, so I asked them for sponsored content and haven't done the post. Anyway, look, it's fine. Swipe up, swipe up. We'll put links in the show notes.

Now, Michael, we start every podcast episode the same way. You might not know because I don't know if you've listened to many episodes of Life Uncut. This might all come as a surprise to you tonight. Sure. But we start every interview the same way. And that is with your accidentally unfiltered story. Oh, sure. Well, I have some options.

Go with the worst ones. My life is humiliating. um do you want to hear about oh do you want to hear about dick pics or yes do you want to hear the option about there's also an sti story so i don't know what you prefer do you guys want a dick pic no no okay we have time for four hours we can do both okay well the the the dick pic story is very very from a very long time ago and i was dating someone uh we she was in a different part of the country and I was having dinner with my parents because um I lived with them and she we were like kind of just texting I was like I gotta go have dinner and she was like oh

before you go get dinner I'll have dinner um can I show you something and I was like what and then she sent me sort of a I guess a an amorous photo and guys I'm a virgin anyway I um and i was like oh thanks like because you got to be polite you know thank you please that it was not your response there is michael there's nothing worse than getting a reply to a sexy photo that is thank you well what are you supposed to say i'm gonna have i can't be like oh because i'm gonna go have dinner with mom like i can't what am i gonna do no you can you can compartmentalize the horniness yeah that one in the microphone sorry if you missed that laura said at least send the squirting emoji. Anyway, thanks for the soup, mum. Anyway, so we're getting bogged down

in the details. She sends me this photo. I say, I'm very grateful for that, but I have to go get dinner. Oh, thank you. I'm grateful. Yeah, and then she says to me, I've, she says to, I got this quite, I don't, not, it was a nice text, but it was like quite forceful. It said, I've shown you what you're missing out on. I want you to show me what I'm missing out on, right? So the implication there is very clear so i go and have dinner and then after dinner i say mom dad excuse me i've got some homework to do or whatever and i go homework how old are you i was probably like 19 or 20 oh okay i was sorry i wasn't i wasn't like 15 to be clear i was i was i was at uni and i went back upstairs and then i'd never done this before but you know how when you don't want

your parents to come in your room you like jam a chair under the door because you're like what i'm about to do is going to be so humiliating that i don't want anyone to ever see this so then i like i'd never i'd never taken a dick pic before so i wasn't sure like what angle to take it from what lighting well yeah no no just not just that because like because obviously it's like i could take it from the from like my perspective but i was like i don't think she would have ever seen a dick from that angle before so maybe i've got to try and do it from her perspective like it's a front-on selfie but then it's like just a weird like oh god yeah it's a bit full-on so you're like oh god so then i'm like getting lamps and shit in to try and do like

i'm like i don't know just just 0.05 camera make it better i don't know like and they took me i was like 20 minutes trying to sort out the lighting and stuff and felt quite self-conscious and during that time obviously you know blood flow is an interesting thing and you know i i lose the erection and you can't you can't say you can't be like hey what are you missing out on and then you send her a photo of your soft dick you know what i mean because that's it's horrifying so so without not knowing what to do and again being quite young i was like oh i'll just look on the internet I put into Google

I was like I'll just have a look what dick pics are available but I don't know if you guys have ever googled for dick pics before but most of the penises to send my dick to somebody most of the penises available on Google they're sort of white and my penis

it matches my face do you know what I mean it's the same design team that's worked on both of these items so now I'm like half an hour after dinner and I'm googling Asian dick pics and that's I don't want to embarrass anyone who might have done this but like if you google

most of the dick pics coming out of Asia a lot of them are censored so now I'm googling uncensored Asian dick pics and I'm like I find one that I think looks a bit like mine I think and I'm like oh so then here okay here's the fuck here's how obviously i'm the villain in this story but this is how

fucking crazy my brain is i like found the photo i then sent it to my i emailed it to myself opened it on my phone kind of like cropped it in the phone in the photos app then screenshotted it right so the metadata would be the same like do you know what i mean i'm trying to smart man in case asio is looking at my dick pics or whatever i i send this to her and i'm like here you go and then obviously like we've been together for like three years at this point and she just texts me back being like that's not your dick you've been together

three years you left that out of course she knows your dick and I was like oh well yeah so I was like oh here's what happened I tried to use the lighting and I'd never done this before and I lost the blah blah blah anyway

we obviously didn't make it um so where did the sti come into it yeah no i need to hear the other one now sorry settle in this is a separate one okay so this is uh again a long time ago this is an x-ray data and to be clear in these stories i think this is obvious but i'm not i'm the object of mocker in these stories you know i mean i don't want to be we got it one of these people no one's confused don't worry yeah okay cool so i this is this is again quite a while ago when i just started doing comedy i just started doing stand-up and i was like traveling around the country a lot touring it was like living my dream but my my girlfriend at the time she was um working full-time back where we lived in sydney and so she was like pretty unfulfilled by the relationship

which i think is like very understandable so i came back from like a three-month tour and she was like i can't do this anymore it's been three months while you've been away it's been really hard i think we should break up and i was like hey i understand like you know what i mean fair enough. So, we split up. Two and a half weeks later, I am going to the bathroom and I notice what I would broadly describe as some symptoms in like the danger zone. And I'm like, oh, this isn't good, right? Because I'm a bit of a germaphobe as well, right? Now, I'm like, I should go get this checked out. So, I don't know if you're like me, I've got two doctors. i've got the doctor i go to when everything's fine

and then i've got the shameful doctor i go to when i'm like i need help you know like there's one doctor i go to like oh i need asthma puffers this doctor's like i need a test you know what i mean so i go into a place in sydney called king's cross which is like kind of a i guess like what was previously quite a sleazy area and there's a sexual health clinic there that's like they do very good work it's very anonymous they just give you a number it's like it's like totally it's very safe and very like very helpful i went in there and i'm in the waiting room with my number waiting to my like a fucking deli number getting way to be called into the doctor's office and the doctor and and the the person comes out and they're calling the person

before me and when you've ever been to a sexual health clinic in the waiting room everyone's so tense like no one's in there being like i'm gonna fucking nail this test you know me like you know yeah so I'm there and I realize what's happened I'm like oh shit like I think I've because I'm like I know I haven't you know messed around so that's what's happened what oh sorry what I didn't mention was the night we broke up we also had crazy you know what I mean like just one night one night only set you know I mean kind of goodbye sex right so I was like I know I haven't messed around so if I've if I have got something does that mean she's cheated on me while I've been away which I guess I would understand but then we're back and then it's

you know is that is that what's happened is that how I've got this thing and I'm at my mind begins to swirl I'm like I think my girlfriend cheated on me so then the doctor comes out and she goes oh you know number 18 or whatever and I go into her thing and she goes what seems to be the problem and I just haven't told it talked to anyone about this so I break down in tears I'm like I think my girlfriend cheated on me and she was like oh we mostly do pathology here so I so then she goes all right give us a look and so it was like these three marks that kind of went through down the center of my i guess like you know danger zone right and we can say penis here yeah yeah well it was it was above the penis right and so she gets me to she there's three

these three like welts i'm like what the fuck is this right so she gets me to undo my pants and like when you're at the doctor and you said i undid my fly and you know and these like went down to my jeans and i pull down the the jeans and i remember this i pulled out my underwear but i i pull it down beneath my knees but like so i'm like i'm showing you my dick but i'm like covering my ankles just in case she goes and she goes what's this is i'm like it's this and she goes i've never seen anything like that before like what do you mean don't tell me this tell me this is just a i don't know tell me it's a panadol can fix it and then she's like getting the like the the fucking magnifying glass thing they get and everything and she's got another

they shine the light on and i'm like oh god and then she's like oh and i'm like what she and she grabs the sort of flaps of my jeans and she pulls them up like that and she goes oh i i think those marks are from the buttons on your jeans and i was like what and she was like oh yeah i don't think you've got an sci i think i think your jeans are just too tight and i was like oh i like i i have had sex before um like i i am at risk i'm dying for you but i mean i guess that's the best possible outcome best possible outcome I mean yeah I just I just in the loneliness of the two and a half weeks I may have eaten a couple of large pizzas just for you know just for me or whatever and um and your genes okay all right well Michael you're I fucking love that you're um

both of your parents are doctors yes but obviously you can't ask mum about that you know what I mean yeah yeah so you didn't want to go to mum talk about the flaccid penis and maybe the No, both your parents are doctors. How did they feel when you decided to go into the creative arts, acting, stand-up comedy? Gosh, well, not only are they two doctors, they're also Chinese, which, you know, is a relevant factor in this specific instance. At the time, though, I did a bait-and-switch.

So this is for if anyone is, like, my parents are, like, concerned about me, you know, going into a career in the arts, do what I did. so I knew I wanted to do comedy but the other thing I was doing at the time was playing a lot I was playing a video game a lot called Starcraft because again virgin and I

was thinking about so there's this thing called eSports you wouldn't know because you all fuck but there's a thing called eSports which is like video game competitions and they do it a lot in Korea and I was thinking about going to Korea to play video games professionally so I led with that and I said mum dad I'm thinking about going to Korea

moving to Seoul to play video games professionally And they're like, no, you can't do that. That's not a career. And I was like, okay, don't worry. I've got a backup. Stand-up comedy. And so they've been pretty happy with it. I think parents are just fine, right?

If they love you and you love them and they know you can pay rent and feed yourself, they're mostly fine. They're happy. I mean, we spoke about some of your accolades very briefly. But something, and a really amazing accolade that I think most people may not know of, is that in 2015, you were actually a finalist for Clio Bachelor of the Year. Okay, scattered applause, mostly. Some confused faces. Yeah, so I got nominated.

If you don't remember, Clio was sort of a magazine that used to do sort of, they used to find one hot guy every year. But before that, they had an elimination process where they'd find other guys to compete with him. And I don't know how, but I got on their shortlist for some reason, and I felt very flattered.

I thought it was quite funny that I was going to be on Clio Bachelor of the Year. And they said, oh, you've got to come to this photo shoot. and I was like, I'll go to a photo shoot, that sounds like fun, I've never done a proper photo shoot before and they said wear a white t-shirt

and some jeans I was like, I can do that, and then when I turned up, they were like, I was like, why did you want us all to wear a white t-shirt, and I was like, oh, because it's magic mic themed and we're going to get you to strip and I was like, well no you should have told me that before I and I was like

what do you mean, why a white t-shirt, she goes, oh well if you don't want a strip we'll just make it a wet t-shirt and I was like oh maybe that'll be a bit better because my body's whatever and she I was like can I do the wet t-shirt instead of the stripping and she goes okay so she got me to stand like and you gotta there's like when you turn up to these shoots there's like 25 the only way I can describe them is like hot media girls you know what I mean like women who have studied media at uni and they they're kind of they don't want to go into like I guess like hard journalism but they they want to use their degree right and so these people are like living their best lives and they're all so attractive and fashionable and they've all got

clipboards and they all they're all like rating you out of 10 and you feel very emasculated at that time and they got me to stand up against a wall in a kiddie pool and then one of the women had a bucket filled with water and she just threw a bucket of water at me you know like you might see someone washing an elephant at a zoo, right? Just throw a bucket of water at me and then they like, are like taking it and she's like,

and the photographer's like, yes, more of that. So did you win? Yeah, I did not. I think I lost to Larry Emder's son, I think. Oh, he's pretty hot. Okay, well, whatever. But so are you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Michael, you you actually use a lot of politics in your comedy as you can tell from the three stories i've told tonight believe it or not no but i feel like i mean politics and comedy independently can be quite polarizing when you put them together very polarizing what made you want to use will be so political when with your stand-up routines um so it's like in stand-up and i also like i work on the project and i used to work at sbs on a show called the feed and you just kind of like, if you're reading a lot of the news, I think it's difficult to not have opinions on it, right? You become informed about things, and then you suddenly start to feel passionately about

things. And then stand-up, I think, is best when it's like a real relationship between you and the audience. And so I think if you genuinely feel something, you want to talk about it, the trick is, can you turn it from, like, just having an opinion into something funny? And I find that really interesting. I find that really fun to play with. But I think the real reason I do it is that when you're doing stand-up it's just you alone on stage right and when you walk on stage people immediately start to have judgments about who you are what you look like what you might think is funny you know it's just subconscious but they immediately have those judgments and when I started doing comedy there weren't a lot of people who look like me doing stand-up comedy

in Sydney in Australia and so I would come on stage and people would immediately see like a Chinese guy with glasses and they'd want me to like acknowledge that or mention it or do jokes about that and a lot of the people who did jokes about that you know back in the day were like they're like doing funny accents and they're pretending to be their mum and it's very like ethnic comedy stuff which wasn't really my vibe so I started acknowledging the fact that I was Chinese by talking about the racism that I'd experienced in Australia which is a thing that I found interesting and like kind of funny as well and like weird and we'll talk about that and really that kind of then became like i guess a career of sorts but it really just came down to

that one thing of like walking on stage and the audience wanting you to acknowledge the fact that you're chinese as though i didn't know or something you know but i mean one of the reasons why i was so looking forward to having this conversation with you on stage and i remember the moment i was sitting in my car and i was looking through tiktok and one of your tiktoks came on and like I've loved the conversations that we've had on the project, but it was this very specific TikTok that you were having a conversation with your co-host, Hobba, around the racism that you have experienced in your workplace

when you're working at Triple J and how that permeated so much of your career, but how there was this expectation that you would just deal with it in silence and not make a big deal about it because it makes other people uncomfortable. Can you talk us through a little bit around what that part of your life was like

or what that period of your life was like? Yeah, so just to, as a bit of an audience poll, I mean, I won't be offended, but has anyone here ever listened to Triple J? Okay, cool, cool, cool, yeah. Yeah, a couple of freaks in here. So Triple J is like a, it's an Australia-wide radio station that's run by the ADC. And the only way you can get in contact with the radio host is through a thing called the Triple J text line, 0-4-3-9-7-5-7-triple-5. And we're always asking for your opinion, right? are always like hey you know um are you going to this concert tell us what it was like over

three nine seven five seven triple five you know or like hey what have you like you know what are you up to this weekend over three like text us in you know but what it means is that anyone can just message you any time of the day because the abc can't afford to have like an army of producers for every show we're reading all those texts all the time so you might think like when i text into a radio station who what who sees it it's the posts who see it because they're the ones who have got to call you back to put you on air or read out the text or whatever and so when i started at Triple J I remember the like within a month of me starting there doing like the drive show which is what I did COVID was starting to kind of kick off and being a Chinese guy whose name is Hing

some people had some really strong opinions on like I guess what I'd done obviously you started COVID I started COVID obviously you know me like ground zero yeah and so like I would I would be like hey it's like Hobber and Hing blah blah blah are and people were like you're a fucking chinese spy in the communist part like it was just like and people are in these very bad places they're very stressed and so they're just taking out on you right and i remember being and i was getting called all kinds of horrible slurs and so i went to my boss and i said hey do you think we could put a filter on the text line so that like racial slurs don't come through to us when we're reading the text line and they were like well don't we

want kind of have to have a to have a raw kind of like unfiltered version of what the Australian public think and I'm like I understand what you're saying but like you're a white guy in your 40s you know you don't know what it's like to come in and just be told you're not human or you're a traitor to this country or you're a spy we can't trust you you've started a global pandemic like it's a different experience and i found that as i talked more and more to people at the abc about it because the abc is a very wide organization and especially at the upper echelons in management you really had to like stop them and slow them down and be like hey like i know you can't possibly understand what it's like to have this experience but i need you to know that this is meaningful to

me like there was a uh another um presenter on the show on triple j at the time called emily Wadu who's of African descent and she got all kinds of horrible stuff and when she went to the bosses she had the exact same thing happen you know where they were like ah we don't know we kind of wanted to keep it raw and unfiltered you know and what it took was all of us going to them and and being like this is hurting us a lot and this is actually making us worse at our jobs because every time someone calls me a gook or someone tells me to go back to where I'm fucking from it takes me two and a half three minutes to recover from that while I'm thinking about that and I'm not in, I'm not, my mind's not at, you know, a game, right? And I said to them, I have to

assume you don't know what it's like, because if, because what they said to us, they're like, oh, you think because we're white, we can't understand what this is like. I was like, I think, I have to, I have to assume you think that, because if you could know what it was like, and you still did nothing, that would make you a pretty careless person, a pretty callous person who doesn't care about the well-being of their employees you've got a bunch of asking you here to fix it um and so after a while they decided to put in a um a filter on the text line so now if you text in racial slurs to triple j they won't get through but what's nice what's really great is that racists are creative oh my god gooks with zeros you can spell you know what i mean i love that you're

still trying to make jokes about but I am genuinely really sorry that you went through that I would have always said Australia is not a racist country I used to be that person that and I feel now quite embarrassed that I ever said that but I think there was a level of ignorance I was blanket Australia's not a racist country and then I started to have more in-depth conversations with my friends with people of colour my sister married a wonderful Indian man and when I started to have these conversations i realized that there are genuinely people that do not think they are racist or do not think they're making racist comments but they are making micro racism micro racist comments and micro aggressions um and these are things that i didn't even know existed

can you talk to us a little bit about micro racism and micro aggression and what that looks like for people that might not actually know because you i imagine experience it on on the regular so um is is most is mostly white people here tonight we actually can't really see because the lights are so bright so like i i guess when we talk about like is australia a racist country you need to think about like what does the word racism mean to you so for some of us when we think of racist we think of like new nazi skinheads with swastika tattoos you know making violent threats and that's obviously racist but then it's like when we get all the way down to like are you just treating someone differently in a bad way because of their ethnicity or their

nationality or their race you know and you know it doesn't just have to be you know the classic asian stuff of like oh you can't drive or you know it can also be like stuff like i was told my entire life that i was great at maths you know i'm like fine but like my teacher's like you should do four unit maths you should do four unit maths i'm like i'm like i'm okay like it's the glasses it's like it's like glasses it's like you know what i mean so like but then so like i think that's a version of it i think there's like also this thing that happens where like when you're starting a new job for me certainly and i wonder if other asian people or other people of color feel this as well when you start a new job you're just waiting for the first time that someone in

the office or at the shop or wherever decides they are comfortable enough with you to make a racist joke and what's fun about that is they don't mean it in a mean way it's a joke between friends but it's what it does is it takes the control totally out of your life because you haven't said okay it's cool because obviously friends say fuck shit to each other all the time and it's fine but what's weird about this is like when your boss decides you're now close enough for them to say that or you know and they don't mean it in like a hey you're not a human being or whatever way but it's still just like you're like oh okay well that's what i am to you that's the most interesting thing to me is the thing i have no control over and i think that's the the thing

that has really been the biggest effect in my life on that front michael how do you manage those experiences because i mean when you work in the world of media and you're being told by the big bosses like it's not that bad you know we want an open text line or they're trying to tell you to push down your experiences when you kind of are in a world like the media world there's so few jobs and everyone is fighting for those positions and then you're also fighting for those positions as someone who is a minority within the Australian media landscape how do you then decide what you feel comfortable to speak up against knowing that you're going to come up against backlash and knowing that you're going to have people in powerful positions

being like, shh, don't make it uncomfortable for everyone. Yeah, I mean, like, it's interesting. I think I also feel the other way, which is, like, sometimes I don't want to talk about it because I'm like, it doesn't feel like a huge thing compared to the stuff other people go through. Like, I see the hate that, like, women who worked at the station got, like, the misogyny, or Indigenous people who worked at the station,

the stuff they got as well. So it's like, you kind of, on one hand, you kind of feel like, I don't want to bring it up because I don't want to be pretending like like you almost feel like you don't want to be competing against other people or whatever which isn't true obviously we're all we're all moving together but that's certainly something in the back of my head the big thing for me was I like you can see when I was just trying to make jokes before it's like that's what my natural reaction is I want people in the audience to have a good time I want people listening to the show to have a good time so I'm trying to keep things light and bright and then

when you're like oh by the way I got a death threat from a white supremacist on the weekend lol it's like doesn't hit the same yeah it's like it's like hey shut up and play flume you know what i mean like it's you know like and i and i get it if you're just like driving to work or driving home from work and you hear us being like hey it's time for a serious chat about this man who wants to like you know who's threatening violence and they're like hey i just i didn't come here for this you know so i think choosing for me and i don't know if this is right or wrong but it's like choosing the moments and and flagging the point so that you know flagging it so that because i trust that most of the people who listen to our show for example they listen

to their show because they liked the show and they liked us as people and so i liked flagging and saying like hey today we're going to be talking about something a little more serious and letting people opt into it because i also know that like it can be quite triggering for other people to listen to like stories about racism and stuff and so like um trying to choose those moments but the thing is like you also don't want to be like known as the guy who like fucking like goes out and then complains about white australia like you don't want to be that guy you want to be a friendly cool guy who's hanging out especially when you're a comedian because you're like i want to be the funny guy i'm the funny guy i want to talk about you know

but in that i mean when it comes back to comedy where did that come from like this want to make people laugh this want to create comedy that is i know we i know we said that it's laced with politics but at the end of the day is there or was this something that you lent into when you were younger as like this is my superpower so well i wouldn't call it my bank account wouldn't call it a superpower but um i think that um so i grew up in a place called the sutherland shire which if you don't know is like a pretty conservative part of sydney it's where the Kurnala riots happened um did someone cheer that oh my goodness in Canberra of all places um and so like I grew up as like one of not many Chinese kids in my year right and so it was obviously a

thing that affected me because my my I remember like like like even from a young age my teachers would like we would have like a um like an international food day you had to bring food from your heritage and my my family are from like like they're Chinese but like generations back they're from Walgett which is like a country town use of Wales so I brought in Lamington because I thought that was and then and my teacher was like this will not do and she went across to Coles and like and she thought again she thought she was trying to do a nice thing she like went bought like microwave spring rolls and was like Michael this is what this is what people want right and I think what she was trying to do is explain she was trying to use the opportunity to teach the class

hey like chinese food is nice i think she was trying to do a nice thing but obviously the message i got from that was like you're not australian you're chinese right and i think like moments like that from my childhood made me have to have a thing that was more interesting than being chinese about myself you know and i wasn't good at sport and you know all the other things that i wasn't smart enough so it was like i can be the funny kid and so like with all comedians it basically comes back to childhood trauma and a defense mechanism so you have wrapped up triple j you're still in the project what do you see in your future what do you see in the next five years do you want to do stand-up till the day you die yeah i love it i love doing

stand-up i mean i i can't imagine anyone here has ever seen me do stand-up comedy but um it's the most fun it's the thing that brings me the most joy i love it so much i would i will do it for free in like rooms to four people i will i will do it i will tour nationally i don't care i'll do it forever um but in australia because the comedy scene's so fucking crazy you can like you can't really just do stand-up you've got to have like a tv show or like a radio gig or whatever so we left triple j and we started a podcast which is very exciting it's called it's called silver bullet it's um oh one person that's cool it was the same person that cheered for the cronella riot it's a pro-racism podcast so it's a podcast where we we like my radio partner

lewis and i we trial wellness trends so we'll whatever it is we'll give it a crack um with vagina steamings yes penis steamings yeah well we um grace tain made us do hot yoga um we went and tried to get botox we've done um tom cardi you might know from tiktok made us do eat like the the diet of dwayne the rock johnson for a week what about the um anal sunning perineum that's season two that's coming i would love to do okay i want to i want to see that one although we are coming into summer so perfect time yeah yeah yeah um so there's that and then also doing the project and i want to um i don't know i want to just like daily radio you guys would know what it's like daily radio your mind just is like racing all the time i just want to take some time to make

something cool you know i want to i want to write something or i don't know travel or i don't know I've got time to live my life. I got married, which is kind of fun. Well, you did. And you were in like Vogue wedding magazine or something? Yeah, it's fucking crazy. What an upgrade from Cleo Bachelor of View. Yeah, take that, Cleo, if you're not going to give me Bachelor.

I'm in Vogue now. Yeah, fuck you, Cleo. Michael, I know that these conversations are really hard and I know you wanted to come out and just be a comedian, which you did do, but we're really grateful that you have had these conversations because Laura and I, a big part of what we want to do is always bring the laughs and make people laugh but we also want to educate people and help people

and um racism is a really big one and a really important one so I'm super grateful that oh no thank you for having me yeah and also I mean coming from someone who does spend so much of their time being funny I think it's so powerful to hear you speak about it and like I said when I listen to the TikTok that you put together and the way in which throughout your career in media people have been like oh it's not that bad like just you know just take it it's part and parcel of the job i don't think that unless you've ever experienced yourself which for us we never have that you could ever comprehend what that would be like and we have experienced a very different version of online trolling and like the relentlessness of it it it wears you down so

much and it's so hard to explain to people what that feels like yeah totally but then like there's also like really great things as well like you know you get to come to camber and do a fun show Like, it's nice, you know? It's not, I mean, it's not, doesn't make the racism okay, obviously. No. But, you know, you get to stay in a nice hotel and drink some wine.

It's kind of fun. Michael, you're a fucking legend. Thank you so much for coming and joining us. Thank you. We're so grateful. Thank you, guys. Michael Hing, everyone. Hingers is just such a character.

He's such a laugh. I hope you found that episode really interesting and loved that conversation with him. Guess what, guys? Next week, we're back. We're back to normal programming. We have an incredible guest joining us next week. I don't know if I'm allowed to say it in these recordings,

so I'm not going to just in case. But if I am allowed to, I'll come back and, like, re-edit it in or something like that. So I hope you've enjoyed some of our live laughs from some of our live shows. We've had Hingers, we had Elodie Pullen, we had flex mommy you can go back and listen to those if you missed them earlier in the year so we'll be back in your ears next week i can't wait i can't wait to catch up with you and see how you

been see how brit and laura have been how they've been spending their summers i'm sure that we're going to have many many many updates but in the meantime you know the drill tell your mom tell your dad tell your dog tell your friends and share the love because we love love