Big Small Talk

Hello!!! The U.S. midterm elections are a week away (a.k.a nerd Christmas) and boy do we have the segment for you. Hannah walks us through the stakes, the key races, and the all important question: do the Democrats actually stand a chance?  Then Sarah talks about the second-biggest political decision of the year – People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. She explains how the competition started, and h...

Everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager. It’s the phrase taking over the internet, and it raises a pretty uncomfortable question - have we become so obsessed with protecting our peace and setting boundaries that we’ve forgotten how to actually show up for our friends? This week, we’re joined by internationally recognised friendship expert, journalist and autho...

Is Elizabeth Holmes a bad person? Or is she a person who did bad things? We’re back for part two of our series on Elizabeth Holmes – the Silicon Valley darling-turned-fraudster who falsely promised that her company could run lab tests with just a single drop of blood. It’s 2014 and things are looking good for Elizabeth. Her company is valued at $9 billion. Magazines are making he...

Everyone is talking about Elizabeth Holmes. She’s the star of Nathan Fielder’s buzzy documentary, You Can See Everything. Consider this month’s Big Talk your pre-show guide – everything you need to know before you head to the movies.  But hey, even if you have no interest in watching that film (even though it might be the first doco to win Best Picture at the Oscars EV...

Hello hello. Do we have an episode for you this week or what! First up, Hannah talks us through the latest allegations against Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Apparently, Dutch spies hacked his phone and he’s allegedly been receiving some LARGE sums of money from Middle Eastern leaders to influence foreign policy. But this isn’t the only scandal he’s caught up in…...

Ashe is a huge US based singer-songwriter, a collaborator of FINNEAS (Billie Eilish’s brother and creative partner), and now the voice behind 'Stop the Wedding!', the viral song making women everywhere rethink what they should expect from love. And what if expecting more from our life and relationships wasn't cynical, but actually the most romantic and joyous thing we could do? After going t...

Hi everyone. This episode is coming amidst some tragic developing news: independent federal politician, Helen Haines, is in a critical condition after a man purposefully drove into her multiple times outside her office. Hannah shares what we know so far about the attack, and discusses the rise we have seen in threats towards female politicians. Note: since recording, the suspect, Brendan Nugent, h...

Is our obsession with being nice is actually part of the problem? This week on Small Talk, I'm joined by one of Australia's most respected political journalists and authors, Amy Remeikis, to unpack why playing nice might be getting us absolutely nowhere. Amy is the Chief Political Analyst at The Australia Institute, a contributing editor at The New Daily and is known online as Pyjama Politics. Amy...

Hello hello! If you had any doubt before, you can now say for certain that we are living in a dystopian hellhole because the U.S. has announced it will livestream the execution of a prisoner on death row.  Hannah talks about how this announcement, and the recent failed execution of Christa Pike, has sparked universal outrage from all sides of politics. Then, Sarah explains why Olivia Dean is...

We spend years learning about our bodies through trial and error because no one ever really taught us how our hormones work. Model, founder of Selfdom and creator of the bestselling gratitude journals, Dominique Elissa returns to the pod this week to discuss her new journal 'Flow State' and why understanding your hormones has completely changed the way she lives. From the four phases of the menstr...

Prosecutors have reopened an investigation into an alleged rape at Cornell University after public outrage and mounting questions over how the case was handled. Then, the New York Times has decided the best TV shows of the 21st century and naturally, we have thoughts. Back home, the Greens have a new leader, but the result has exposed some pretty major divisions within the party. Plus, has the int...

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles on in studio with us? Consider this Sarah’s pinch-me moment. The girls join us to talk about their new film, Sense and Sensibility, which by the way, is perfect cinema. You’ll know Daisy of course from the cult classic, Normal People, as well as Where the Crawdads Sing, Fresh and Twisters, and Esmé from Hanna, The Doll Factory and Si...

Welcome back to Big Talk! It’s the political scandal so infamous that, 50 years later, we’re still adding “gate” to the end of every controversy. But Watergate didn’t begin with a break-in. In Part One, we’re going back to Richard Nixon’s rise to power, the lies America was told about the Vietnam War, the explosive leak of the Pentagon Papers, and the incr...

Richard Nixon wins re-election in one of the biggest landslides in American history. Less than two years later, he becomes the first and only U.S. president to resign. So, how did it all fall apart? In Part Two, we get into Nixon’s growing paranoia, the creation of CREEP, the increasingly unhinged schemes of the people around him, and the break-in at the Watergate complex that started the un...

AUDIENCE SURVEY LINK HERE!!!! THANK YOU ILY: https://forms.gle/dc9iXh7BEwntMuiW9   On the show this week, OpenAI hacked a Medicare portal months ago, and we’re only just hearing about it now. So… how did that happen? Then, Taylor Swift has released new music. Of course, she’s the biggest pop star in the world, so we HAVE to deep it, but if you’re not in the mood to ps...

This week, Sarah sits down with renowned human rights and media lawyer Jen Robinson, whose career has taken her from Julian Assange’s legal team and the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal to representing Amber Heard. Jen unpacks how defamation laws can be weaponised to silence women, survivors and journalists, and the enormous legal and financial risk that can come with telling your story. We als...

Hey BSTies! On the show this week – anti-abortion activist Dr Joanna Howe and her husband James have come under fire after he said that he doesn’t “do consent”. Then, the girls unpack Lena Dunham’s announcement that she has become a mum via surrogacy. Is it ever okay to pay someone to carry your child? Plus – Labor and One Nation announce migration crackdowns, C...

The beauty industry is worth more than $450 billion globally. So what actually makes us buy one product over another? Sarah sits down with Natassia Nicolao, founder and CEO of Conserving Beauty, to unpack what it really takes to build a beauty brand in an industry obsessed with virality, celebrity launches, dupes and the next “must-have” product. From creating the world’s first d...

This week, Donald Trump is promising every American adult $5,000 if Republicans win the midterms - yes, really. Then, NFL star Aaron Rodgers has opened up about his breakup with actress Shailene Woodley and revealed the wild request she made before they got married, which has somehow only made the internet like her more. We’re also getting into a former Anthropic employee who quit because he...

For the first time in almost three years, your Tuesday episode is running a day late! A perfect storm of sickness, international travel and terrible timing has thrown us slightly off course — so Sarah is jumping into your feeds with a tiny update. The good news: we’ll be back TOMORROW (Wednesday) at 5pm with a VERY big Big Small Talk. And trust us, there is a lot to talk about this wee...

Our friend Chanel Contos is on the podcast, and she’s casually changing Australia again! Chanel is the activist behind Teach Us Consent, the campaign that helped change consent education in Australian schools. Now, she’s coming for our algorithms with Fix Our Feeds - which, huge news, just got the green light from the Australian Government this week. We recorded this chat before that h...

Nationals leader Matt Canavan is blaming the ‘feminisation’ of schools, consent education, and female teachers for the online radicalisation of young men, and Hannah is… not impressed.  She unpacks his controversial comments, why we need to stop blaming women for the actions of men, and the latest push to finally regulate social media algorithms + fix our feeds. Then, Sarah...

At some point, you'll probably face what we on the pod call a Diabolical Quarter -- a time in your life when everything falls apart and you just can't catch a break. Singer-songwriter Gretta Ray knows about these seasons of life all too well. Just 48 hours after moving to London -- ready to take next big leap in her career -- Gretta ended up in hospital and diagnosed with a life-threatening condit...

Guyyssss Olivia Rodrigo threw a festival raising money for women’s health, safety and reproductive rights and THE WORLD IS HEALING.  Sarah kicks off this episode talking all things Daisy Chain Festival – Stevie Nicks’ appearance, the whopping $20 million donation, and the way a 23-year-old pop star is building a legacy that goes way beyond her music. Hannah then breaks down...

There’s a good chance that you’ve heard of Pussy Riot – the punk band from Russia that has made global headlines for speaking out against Vladimir Putin. Maria Alyokhina was just 23 years old when she joined the group and, consequently, became Putin's political prisoner. She was arrested and jailed multiple times for her activism over the years. But in 2022, she hatched a plan. S...