Human Cogs Podcast

You might think you know Shaynna Blaze as the vivacious and talented interior designer from TV shows The Block , Selling Houses Australia , Celebrity Apprentice or Country Home Rescue . What you may not know is that Shaynna is also a passionate advocate for women and a social justice campaigner for tackling domestic violence.  In this conversation, Shaynna shares some of the challenges she faced i...

The word trauma is everywhere, but what does trauma really mean and can we heal and recover from the impact of assault, neglect, coercive control, parentification, bullying, loss, sexual violence, war, accidents or destructive acts of nature? In this episode, I speak with Dr Ahona Guha , a forensic and clinical psychologist, who is also a survivor of complex trauma herself, as well as the author o...

How many people do you know who live with hidden conditions? You might be surprised to learn that an estimated 30 per cent of the Australian population live with neurodiverse conditions including ADHD and autism. In fact, new data has revealed the number of prescriptions issued for ADHD has more than doubled over the last decade in Australia, with an increasing number of adults - particularly wome...

As a very little child, Mariam Issa dreamt of traveling to faraway places. What she did not dream is that she would need to flee the horror of Somalia’s civil war on an overcrowded boat to Kenya. Nor did she dream of the violence and bombings she witnessed, or of her beautiful close-knit family being torn apart and displaced to far-flung foreign countries.  One of those countries was Australia, wh...

How are you feeling right now? Are you wired? Are you tired? Did you sleep ok last night or are you tossing and turning til dawn? What about your relationship with your body? Are you fasting? Stressed? Eating meat? Riding sugar highs? Suffering energy lows? And what role are hormones playing in your life day to day?  In this episode we do a full-sweep health check with Michele Chevally Hedge -  a...

If your heart had a voice, have you ever wondered what it would say? Dr Michelle Woolhouse is an author, podcaster and holistic and integrative GP with decades of experience working in the fields of anxiety, stress and burnout. We first spoke to Michelle in 2020, around the time she hit a wall within herself, which catalysed her decision to step off the high-stress career treadmill she’d been on,...

Award-winning documentary maker and author Pete Dickson is no stranger to life’s curved balls. Childhood illness and a fast-track to an AFL career truncated due to a life-threatening condition were the early harbingers, but the tragic loss of his beloved brother Robert - Australian football identity, reality TV star and filmmaker - and his two young nephews in an accident one ordinary day threw hi...

It was the philosopher, Holocaust survivor and author of 'Man's Search for Meaning' Victor Frankl who said: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” The idea links to Epictetus’ Dichotomy of Control, that being that there are multiple things within our sphere of influence we do have the ability to change, but there is also so much of our human expe...

Warning: This episode talks about suicide and mental health. Did you know that suicide is the #1 killer of Aussie men under the age of 45? Every day in Australia, 7 men and 2 women take their lives, and each year across this country, there are 65 thousand attempts of suicide. That’s one every 28 seconds. These are shocking statistics that media personality Gus Worland knows all too well. When he d...

How are you feeling as the end of 2022 looms? It's been a big couple of years, hasn't it? Pandemic life has worn us all down a little, anxiety and burnout are widespread and trying to find balance again can be a real challenge for adults, and for kids.  So in this episode we sat down with Dr Lexi Frydenberg , a pediatrician and educator, Co-Host of the Kids Health Info Podcast and Mum of three who...

Experts say effective communication isn’t just about what you say: it is 50% speaking and 50% listening. Think about your interactions today. No doubt you will have countless exchanges with loved ones, colleagues, clients and strangers, but how many times are you actually tuned in and listening deeply to what they say, and what they don’t say? And how many times will you feel truly listened to?  O...

“I am so acutely aware that little girls born like me don’t sit in rooms with billionaires and don’t help run tech companies. So with the incredible privileges that I have, I don’t know that I can justify doing anything else but trying to make sure that other people have access to those same things." Meet Aubrey Blanche - an absolute powerhouse and world leader in workplace culture, inclusion and...

When you think about your life, is there a moment that comes to mind which you know changed you indelibly? Fergus Watts says that moment happened when he was 15 years old, and the legendary AFL footballer and Reach founder Jim Stynes changed his life by unlocking the vulnerability hiding underneath his masculine bravado to finally give him permission to talk about “real stuff”.  That encounter 21...

Have you ever wondered how you can use your remaining days on this planet better? In this episode we explore this question with Dr Amantha Imber, plus unpack stacks of other fascinating, perplexing, super-curly conundrums like: How do high achievers find balance? What does work look like in a post-pandemic world? Can you stop perfectionism? Would you survive “the airport test”? Why are you a peopl...

During the dark days of the pandemic not everyone was baking sourdough. Many women were locked in their homes with people they feared, and psychological, physical, financial and fatal abuse played out behind closed doors with domestic violence continuing to devastate too many lives. Tarang Chawla is a writer, speaker, anti-violence campaigner and mental health advocate, whose beloved 23-year-old s...

Did you know that you spend most of your waking life working – a jaw-dropping 90,000 hours for the average person.  Work dominates our days. It can be the thing that gets you up in the morning, or the thing that keeps you awake at night.  What about you? Has the pandemic changed your relationship with work? Are you at a career crossroads, feeling tired, unmotivated, a tad lost in your work life? A...

Have you ever set yourself a crazy big hairy audacious goal, and found yourself against the odds somehow achieving it? Women climb invisible mountains every day. But Laura Youngson's eureka moment came on a volcanic ash pitch, 5,714 metres above sea level, on Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro in June 2017. Youngson, an ambitious entrepreneur, gender activist and Co-Founder of global non-profit Equal Pl...

Sushi Das is an award-winning British Australian journalist of more than 25 years, spending much of her career at The Age, where she held a series of senior reporting and editing positions.
 She is the winner of two Melbourne Press Club Quill Awards including Best Columnist (2005) and currently works as a freelance columnist and as a researcher for RMIT ABC Fact Check. A brilliant writer and story...

What happens when, aged 30, you understand you’re transgender? This was the question that confronted Dr Yves Rees, an award-winning author, historian and regular contributor to ABC Radio and The Conversation, whose life was upended by gender transition in 2018. Then known as a woman called Anne, Yves was forced to grapple with the knowledge that they were not, in fact, a woman at all.  In this epi...

Many of us hear the word menopause and may think it’s not meaningful or relevant in our own life – regardless of our gender, career path or life stage. As an accomplished business executive who travelled the world working in often male-dominated industries, Melissa MacGowan was once probably the same. Until the symptoms of undiagnosed peri-menopause wreaked havoc in her own life. Melissa is now a...

Adam Schwab is a former corporate lawyer, company founder, angel investor and the co-founder of Luxury Escapes, a global travel company. He has also written for Crikey and SmartCompany since 2005 and is the author of Pigs at the Trough: Lessons from Australia’s Decade of Corporate Greed .  From being a self-described glorified filer at a top-tier law firm, to great accomplishments as an entreprene...

George McEncroe is a tech entrepreneur, writer, standup comedian, educator, and force of nature. The single mother of four hates orthodoxies, has a roll up your sleeves ‘can do’ mantra, and has spent her life giving everything a crack to dial up the carpe diem in her every day so she doesn’t die wondering. In this episode, we hear about  some of the formative experiences that have shaped the adult...

Jocelyn Brewer has, in her words, a job of the future. A psychologist and ex-teacher who helps individuals and organisations be well connected and mentally fit, she has been working with adolescents, families and adults for a decade, and understands the complexity of busy modern life, the increasing role of technology in our work and how healthy digital and screen habits need to be consciously sha...

On an ordinary day in August 2018, Craig Hopper woke up living the dream, got ready for the day, kissed his three kids goodbye and went off to work. Meanwhile, his wife dropped their youngest at school and set off as a fit 46-year-old on her regular morning run.  What happened next changed their lives forever. Craig’s wife suffered a massive heart attack and was found by a passing cyclist unrespon...

Rachael Neumann is an uber impressive high flyer who has experienced countless successes around the globe in the ever-changing and complex worlds of venture capital investment and business. But business wasn’t the focus of our fabulous and high-octane chat.  Instead of deep diving into her latest hot startup deal, Rachael shared some of the formative experiences that have shaped the inner narrativ...