“You’re obviously a loser in life and going nowhere. Goodbye.” These were the final words that John Laws ever said to me, delivered in that famous baritone voice, live on his top-rating morning show. It was 1991, and Laws was king of the airwaves. I, on the other hand, was an unemployed 19-year-old who’d recently made the trip from Lismore to Sydney on the XPT. It was the height of Paul Keating’s “recession that we had to have”, and I was desperate to find work.