It was the poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou who once said ‘there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you’. Stories are what help us make sense of the world around us and of ourselves, of great tragedies and fates and fortunes, of buried histories and mysteries, of the untold secrets and human essence of things. Journalist Corrie Perkin was born with stories in her blood. Her father, Graham Perkin - the famed journalist and editor of The Age newspaper - was a...

Being a young person in your 20s is a complicated and challenging time. Whether you’re living through this decade of your life now, or you’re a parent to a twenty something, you likely already know that the 20s are the most uncertain decade of life. In this episode, we talk to the always compassionate and wise Dr Meg Jay, a developmental clinical psychologist, who is on faculty at the University of Virginia and maintains a private practice in Charlottesville where she specializes in...

Grace Tame is a name that needs little introduction, but that doesn’t mean you know Grace - or indeed her story - on her own terms.  Catapulted into the spotlight as 'Australian of the Year' in 2021, Grace stepped squarely into the public eye and became a powerful catalyst for a tidal wave of conversation, action and policy change for survivor-victims of sexual abuse across Australia.  Finally, this was a chance for Grace Tame to find - and use - her voice, after years of shadows and...

Over the Summer I spent countless hours deep in the pages of a remarkable book called Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. The book is written by the very entertaining scholar, researcher and poet Cat Bohannon, and it's making very big waves across the world right now. The book is an epic story and sweeping scientific exploration that starts with mammals 200 million years ago and moves forward through time, to fundamentally challenge the real origin of our...

When you google Catherine Mahoney, the first thing it says is Andrew John’s ex-wife. But as I know nothing about the NRL or his career as one of Australia’s biggest sports stars, this isn’t what led me to invite Cath to join us on Human Cogs. Cath is an ex-publicist, writer, podcaster, talented creative, and had me rollicking on the floor with laughter when we first met two years ago. Her warm, funny and relatable 2022 memoir Currently Between Husbands tells the story of her marriage and...

How are you going with the state of the world right now? Wars and violence continue to rage, hate and abuse fill social media feeds, and an escalation of ideological conflict is causing uncertainty and division in our politics, in our communities and at our dinner tables. It can make you lose a little faith in the world ... wonder if humanity will be ok, whether we can actually save ourselves from ourselves. Until you remember that there are stories of hope and love and life and survival...

“Affairs are a little like childbirth. Someone is always having one somewhere, usually right under the nose of a spouse because nobody knows everything that happens inside a marriage, not even the people in it.”  Award-winning author and journalist Kate Legge has chronicled social and political affairs and other people’s stories since the 1980s. But Kate’s latest book - an unflinchingly honest and raw memoir called 'Infidelity and Other Affairs' - explores her own story and the tumult that...

We’re all familiar with the idea of mindfulness and leadership and most of us would have some preconceived ideas about what each of these terms mean. So what happens when the two constructs collide at the deepest level? And what does mindful leadership mean for the leader, the team, the organisation and the bottom line? Michael Bunting is a keynote speaker, best-selling author, researcher, facilitator and co-founder of the Awakened Mind app. As the co-founder of global consultancy, The...

Over recent weeks we’ve all watched and listened to the debate over 'The Voice to Parliament' play out in the media, at dinner tables and in the public sphere. Conversations have caught fire and it seems that a lot of confusion has got in the way of the facts.  This is partly because right-wing hardliners have deliberately launched misinformation and disinformation to seed fear, cloud issues and inflame political debate. But also because many people are saying they don’t really know what...

A quick google search shows that almost 8 hundred million people have searched for the term resilience and close to 5 hundred million have searched for the term grief. However, far less frequently, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, have the two concepts collided. Dr Lucy Hone is a best-selling author, speaker and award-winning academic researcher with a gift for translating complex science into practical tools. Regarded as a thought leader in the field of resilience psychology, tragic...

Kerri Sackville is a writer and columnist for Sunday Life magazine in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. She’s also the author of five books, including her most recent, The Secret Life of You – How a Bit of Alone Time Can Change your Life, Relationships, and Maybe the World!  Now, those listeners who know me well, know that even though I’m endlessly curious, I am not a voracious reader of books, and although I own thousands of books I’m more of a skim reader than a cover-to-cover...

Ange Harbinson is an entrepreneur, tech and innovation trailblazer, digital strategist, and lover of all things data! In 2019, when she was still the Managing Director of Thirst Creative, a marketing, design and digital agency she co-founded with her husband, Ange saw a gap in the market for online resources to support people going through separation and divorce, and she cofounded The Separation Guide.  The Separation Guide is a divorce technology platform designed to make separation and...

In this episode of Human Cogs, Sabina speaks with not one, but two guests to better understand the devastating effects that drug use has on the children of drug users, and the cycle of abuse that can repeat if no action is taken. Prue Mahar shares her story of what unfolded after her sister left behind two youngchildren following a drug overdose. In addition to Prue’s lived experience and insights, I am also joined by the quietly unstoppable Jane Rowe, founder and CEO of the Mirabel...

Jeremy Macvean is a marketing and communications expert who has held senior roles at Clemengers, Young & Rubicam and Austereo among others before deciding he wanted to use his comms expertise and insights for good not evil. This realisation led Jeremy to share his marketing and digital nous with the Royal Women’s Hospital, Peter McCallum Cancer Centre and The Movember Foundation… and in 2019 Jeremy co-founded The Fatherhood, a Dad-focused media platform to shine the light on the...

What do you think are the most important ingredients for a young person to learn and thrive? While we’ve hopefully come a long way since reading, writing and arithmetic topped the list, we wonder how many of you would say that connection, empathy and a sense of agency matter most when it comes to educating young people to step out into the world and be their best selves.  In this conversation we meet the extraordinary Lael Stone - a Parenting Educator, Speaker for The Resilience Project and...

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 in her early years as a single mum with a 4 and 5 year old after leaving her first marriage, how she...

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 of new book: Reclaim - understanding complex trauma and those who abuse. Dr Ahona helps us unpack...

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 women - being diagnosed with the condition later in life.In this conversation we meet the...

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, where Mariam arrived 25 years ago with four young children in tow, and pregnant with her fifth....

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 regular presenter and writer with Mama Mia, Huffington Post and Body&Soul, Nutritional...

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, and to embark on a deep journey of self-discovery and to get underneath the anxiety that had...

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 his life into a spin of grief, heart-break, holding on and trying to keep it together when his...

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 experience that sits well outside the realm of our influence, no matter our desires or hopes or...

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 devastatingly lost his closest friend and mentor to suicide, he decided something had to change.Gus...