The You Project

So many people spend so much time talking about starting, while never really truly starting. And when I say starting, I mean properly starting. As in, diving into the project or process fully committed to do the work (and not to stop), no matter what. So many ideas, plans, intentions and conversations about things that never actually get done. Always going to do it, but not now. Soon. One day. The mystical magical day that never comes. This chat with Tiff is about why we avoid starting, why we avoid commitment, why we avoid doing the actual consistent work, and what we might do in order to get out of that holding pattern and become the person who both starts and finishes. Enjoy.

Our favourite geek is back at TYP, and along with Tiff we dive into AI, digital interactivity, audiobooks (including fiction) that you can ask questions as you read, cyber security and surveillance, automotive technology and safety, consumer electronics and why many electric cars could be the end of you, if you find yourself off the road and in a body of water. If you are familiar with these episodes, you won’t be surprised when I tell you there are some mildly (?) inappropriate conversational detours taken along the way. I blame Patrick. Of course I do. Enjoy.

Not unlike most episodes with Bobby and Tiff, this one meandered away from the core topic and back, but much of the conversation was exploring what I call ‘The Awareness Pyramid’ - a kind of summary of what I’ve been working on for the last six and a half years in my PhD. Enjoy.

Dr. Ezekiel "Zeke" Emanuel is one of the world's most respected physician-philosophers. He's an oncologist, bioethicist, health policy expert, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His work sits at the intersection of medicine, ethics, public policy, and healthcare reform. Zeke has a MD from Harvard Medical School and a PhD in political philosophy from Harvard University. He also earned an MSc in biochemistry from University of Oxford and a BA in chemistry from Amherst College. It was great to sit down with one of the most respected researchers and academics in the world. I really enjoyed my time with the Doc, and while we agreed on nearly everything, we did diverge on one or two things but of course we did; we’re two humans. Enjoy!

This was an interesting and somewhat different conversation with Dr Bill Sullivan - one where we explored the idea of going back to school (in some form) in our ‘more experienced’ years. Chatting with someone who is a world recognised researcher, scientist, author and educator (and still crushing it in his sixties), it was a great opportunity to discuss a topic that more and more people are choosing to explore and engage in. Like the bloke writing this. Enjoy.

It’s never a boring chat with David Gillespie and this time we talk about the research, the challenges and a potential cure for Motor Neurone Disease (MND), also known in the US as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). As always, David talks to us about a potential chemical culprit, a molecule known as 4-HNE. You might need your thinking cap firmly in place for this one.

This time Patrick and I talk about AI biasing certain moral perspectives and certain cultures. We discussed the pros and cons of e-bikes, why you might need to get a new cable to charge your phone, BYD trying to pull a shifty on its customers, a 20-year study focusing on decreasing the risk of dementia, a bunch of other geeky stuff, and a liberal smattering of conversational bullsh*t. Of course. Enjoy.

Lucas Aoun is a naturopath, researcher, educator and one of Australia’s most respected and popular biohackers. This was one of my favourite conversations this year. Personally, I learned a lot. There’s too much in it for me to do justice to the conversation by providing an incomplete snapshot, but I’ll just say, if you’re interested in outside the box thinking, alternative treatments and therapies, and zero bullsh*t or bro science, take a listen. Enjoy.

Dr. Cam slid by TYP Central to share the love, the knowledge and the fun (as he does), and along with Tiff, this time we discussed how general medicine, health care, disease treatment, pharmaceuticals, integrative medicine, and treating the human body as one system - not fifty - might evolve over the next decade. It’s a bit scary and a bit exciting. Enjoy.

Is artificial intelligence making us less intelligent, or could it help us become better thinkers? Are we outsourcing our brain to a machine? What happens when we start sharing our cognitive workload with AI? Is there a healthy way to use and interact with it? Is it possible that it’s a tool that could help us become more efficient and effective at what we do, while upgrading our capacity to think, create, solve, and understand? Perhaps it’s neither good or bad, perhaps the positive or negative impact it has in our life, is all about how we use it and the power we give it?

What’s the deal with mentors? What’s their role? Who needs one? How do we find someone who’s a good fit? Can you be one? Perhaps ‘being’ a mentor has as many benefits, as ‘having’ a mentor? Apart from mentors, Bobby, Tiff and I also explored learning styles, optimising your energy, how to retain information and lots more. Enjoy.

Well, this conversation got real deep, real fast. It might not be for everyone, but I know it will resonate with some. The brief synopsis is that Tiff and I spoke about the very human challenge of navigating complex, painful, emotional and unfamiliar situations, especially when it comes to supporting loved ones. We also chatted about knowledge, perception, belief and faith. And lastly, we spoke about the struggle many of us have to acknowledge our own flaws, own up to our mistakes and biases, recognise our need to be right and ‘win’, and finally, our willingness to unlearn and let go.

Amazingly, the title of this podcast is not a metaphor. Rhys Thomas literally held his own heart in his hands. I don’t want to spoil the story because it’s so great, but the snapshot is that Rhys is a former professional rugby player and international representative who has had a crazy, fascinating, and inspiring life, full of peaks and troughs, breakdowns and breakthroughs, agony and ecstasy, and 11 weeks ago he received a new heart. I loved every second of this conversation with Rhys (and his new heart). Enjoy. @realrhysthomas

I often bang on about self-awareness (because it’s super important) on this show, but how do we develop it, how do we benefit from it, and how do we operationalise it in day-to-day life? This is a teaching/coaching session where I unpack, what I consider to be, some practical and powerful questions that can supercharge our self-awareness, in a relatively short period of time. Enjoy.

Well, if that title doesn’t get you salivating, there’s something wrong with you (wink). This podcast started with Patrick giving us the history and evolution of tai chi that none of us knew we needed. Seriously, it was a pretty interesting chat and opened up into a discussion around the benefits of slow controlled movements in an era when the exercise conversation often focuses on explosive, dynamic, high-performance and complicated movements. Oh, we also spoke about tech stuff (for those of you not captivated by the tai chi chat). Enjoy.

On this episode of TYP, Bobby and I talk about compassion fatigue, homelessness, performance threshold, who to help and when, being responsible for the effort but not the outcome, and we also had an interesting chat about Bobby‘s often-unrecognised disability and some of the challenges of navigating life with a traumatic brain injury, Tourette’s syndrome, PTSD, and a mind that won’t be quiet. Enjoy. theselfhelpantidote.com

It might not sound like a fun episode, but it was. Gillespo and I explore the reason why cancer rates among young people are on the climb, the impact that high sugar and low nutrition food can have on things like cognitive function and certain neurological conditions, finding healthy sauces that don't contain seed oils (good luck), the difference in lifespan over the last two hundred years, and lots more. Oh yeah, we also test Tiff's real-time research skills and let's just say that she had a mixed bag of results (lol). Enjoy.

This could go well or not, but you don’t know if you don’t have a go, so I’ve decided to do a teaching series (of sorts) where, once a week or so, I will drop a solo ep. into the TYP mix. Not so much an inspiration or entertainment offering, as it is a sharing of science, coaching and let’s be honest, me thinking out loud about stuff that fascinates me and drives me to understand more about the human experience. Enjoy.

What is happiness anyway? Is my version of happiness the same as yours? Can we consciously create it, or is it an unintentional byproduct of doing certain things and being a certain way? Can it be a permanent state, or is it transient? Is it a single thing or is it a combination of things? Is happiness a good goal? Is it about what’s happening around me, in my external world, or is it about what’s happening within me, in my internal world? Is it about the intersection of both worlds? Will two people in the same state necessarily use the same label? I loved this conversation, it’s a topic that fascinates me, as it’s something that virtually everybody strives for. But is happiness about getting more and doing more, or is it about letting go and striving less? Or something else? Enjoy.

Dr. Sam Casey (PhD.) and I were having a fine chat on this episode about trauma informed therapy, overcoming stagnation, the challenges of parenting (for both parent and child) and then somehow, we fell into a version of a coaching session with Dr. Sam - all about how she can get more bang for her buck in the gym. Yes, two very divergent topics indeed. She stepped into the Client role and I put on my Exercise Science hat and we went on a quest to produce better results with her workouts. This was fun. Enjoy.

When people ask me what I do for a job, I often say “I help people change”, which I know is a very broad and vague answer, but it’s also pretty true. People ask me “change what?” and I say everything from choices, actions, behaviours, outcomes, career, lifestyle, mindset, health and even, identity. But how helpful am I, how effective am I as a coach, speaker and writer, and behind the razzle-dazzle of personal development and motivational hyperbole, what is our actual capacity for lasting transformation? This was a fun chat with Bobby and Tiff. Enjoy.

Gillespo is back and this time we talk about the alarming rise of violence and other crimes in a culture where people seem to have less impulse control than ever before. Enjoy.

Dr. Bill Sullivan is back at TYP and this was a fascinating conversation about brand-new research suggesting that there is another component to depression, other than just brain chemistry. Knowing that about a third of people suffering with depression don’t respond positively to SSRI’s and the like, for some people, this new scientific insight and awareness might be life changing. This is definitely an episode where I learned as much as you will. Enjoy.

The Tai Chi-loving, rural-living, tech-obsessed, fifty-year-old-man-child-geek is back, supported by the host-with-the-most (issues), and the strangely muscular, inspirational and let's be honest, periodically (often?) hangry, Tiff. I won't go into specifics but we took yet another deep dive into a broad range of fascinating topics and issues. As we do. Enjoy.

Our favourite neurological surgeon - turned regenerative (not degenerative) medicine specialist - Dr Jeff Gross - is back at TYP and we go deep on GLP-1s (specifically, Retatrutide), anti-ageing, recognising pseudo science, the hysteria and damage caused by the Covid years, the origin story of Jeff’s medical career and his subsequent shift away from traditional medicine, putting down the medical ‘Kool Aid’, the rise and evolution of anti-ageing and we talk about his personal health regime and protocol. Which by the way, is fascinating and extensive. Enjoy. 

It dawned on me that three years down the track, I still didn’t really understand how David Gillespie ‘works’. I’ve known him for years but we’ve never actually met in person, and so I’ve never really chatted with him ‘about’ him - so to speak. Turns out, he’s fascinating. This was a very different conversation to our typical episodes, but it’s honestly one of my favourites. Maybe top three all time. Enjoy.

I actually loved this conversation with Tiff. It started out with about ten minutes of silliness (albeit scientifically insightful), but then we had a fascinating chat about emotional regulation, self-awareness, understanding the feelings that drive our choices and behaviours, and we finished off with a deep but valuable discussion about navigating grief.

In this episode Dr Lillian Nejad and I [and Tiff] took a deep dive into the idea of reading people and whether or not it's an actual skill that can be trained, developed and mastered, or whether it's just a social construct, and a story that we tell ourselves about some perceived social and psychological superpower. Along the way we talk about micro expressions, body language, understanding emotions, context, circumstances, environment and a few more scientific-sounding things like theory of mind, metacognition, meta-perception, nonverbal communication, impression formation, social perception, social intelligence and situational awareness. I think this is a conversation and a topic that is broadly relevant and potentially helpful for many of us. Enjoy.

I was recently on the Performance Intelligence podcast with the fabulous Andrew May, so this episode is not so much on original TYP, but rather a co-share - a conversation I had with Andrew a week or two back. To be honest, there may be some repetition from previous podcasts you’ve heard from me (can’t really remember), but it’s always interesting being the interviewee not the interviewer. Enjoy. andrewmay.com

Hearing is the physiological process of detecting sound. It’s passive. If your ears work and sound waves reach them, you hear. Listening on the other hand, is the cognitive and psychological process of paying attention to, interpreting, understanding, evaluating, and responding to what you hear. It’s active and intentional. In this episode, Bobby, Tiff and myself talk about the science of being a good listener. I love this chat because it’s relevant and helpful for all of us, and a superpower for those of us wanting to excel in communication. Enjoy.

I loved this conversation with highly renowned American psychologist, Professor Barry Schwartz. I still have to pinch myself sometimes with the quality of guests that join me for a chat, brilliant people from all over the world. As per the title, we chatted about the gap between wisdom and intelligence - knowing things and how effectively we use that knowledge. We talk about the decisions that we make, big and small, and also the decisions that we don't make, that we could and should. We talk about all the places that echo chambers dominate and thrive in Religion, Science, social groups, politics, sport, etc. - and the impact those echo chambers can have on a life. This was much more of a free flowing conversation than anything resembling an interview, and I really enjoyed my time with the Prof.

Patrick’s back for another chat on TYP and as always, we had fun. This time we talk about the increasing number of people using AI to make themselves look younger, more muscular and in general, more aesthetically pleasing (in their mind anyway). We chat about people falling in love with AI, which of course - and not surprisingly - ended in a discussion around sex bots. Yuck. We spoke about the idea of transhumanism - people becoming a fusion of biology and technology - and the potential consequences of this pursuit. Scientists using wool as a material to heal bones, growing stem cells in space, LED lighting and cellular energy production, silence being eliminated from modern life, the advancement of humanoid robots being used in China for street management (whatever that means), Air New Zealand using humanoid robots as travel companions.. and lots more. Enjoy.

The title is an expression that came out of David Gillespie‘s mouth mid conversation. For him, an unretrievable faux pas and for me, near the very top of my all-time funny moments on a podcast. We covered quite a range of topics in this chat, but maybe the most interesting is David’s claim that the science does not support salt’s bad reputation. In fact, quite the opposite. Enjoy.

Of course I’m fascinated with communication, it’s literally my job. Becoming an effective, if not elite communicator, has been a lifelong goal. Clearly, I’m not there yet. In this fun conversation, Bobby and I share a few stories, unpack some of the science around effective communication and share our personal thoughts about what does and doesn’t work. Enjoy.

Tiff, Scott and myself sit down to discuss the ins-and-outs (pun intended), of new relationships. This is very much a conversation (focused mostly on their relatively new status) and is in no way, intended to be any kind of relationship advice or coaching. In fact, you might learn what not to do. LOL. Enjoy.

The very handsome, clever, charismatic and charming Dr. Cam is back at TYP Central, and this time we talk about how to live, not just longer, but how to live well - for longer. Fit, strong, healthy, functional, and full of energy. We discuss the eight factors that we believe move the needle the most in the health span equation. Enjoy.

Among many other things, Chris Rhyss Edwards and I discuss the real-world reality of living our best life, self-optimisation, self-awareness, understand how 'we' work (individually), identifying weakness and flaws, and building an existence based around who and how we want to be, and what we want to achieve. **Chris Rhyss is an Australian army veteran, acclaimed author, and innovative researcher dedicated to sparking transformative dialogue and pioneering technological solutions. With a rich background that spans a decade of military service, influential writing, and breakthrough achievements in health-tech, Chris explores the dynamic intersection of human resilience, emerging technologies, mental health, and societal progress - aiming, hoping, and praying to drive impactful change at every step.

My weird little brother from another mother (Bobby) is back at TYP Central and this time, we talk about the things that AI can’t do and probably won’t be able to do in the future. In a time where there is so much uncertainty and fear about the role technology will play in the future and the impact it will have on humanity, do we really need to hit the panic button or will we be okay?

You know those movies that leave you feeling a bit sad, a bit inspired, a bit emotionally exhausted and a bit hopeful? Well, this podcast with the inspiring Katrina Umback is one of those movies. Well, a podcast equivalent, anyway. I could tell you more but I don’t want to ruin it for any of you. It’s definitely one of my favourite conversations this year. Enjoy.

The always fabulous and fascinating Dr Bill Sullivan is back at TYP Central and this time we speak about the world of scientific research, reason and funding, who makes great science communicators and why, fake science and conspiracy theories, Dr. Bill’s biggest discoveries as a researcher, a dangerous parasite that currently finds a biological home in 30 to 50% of the global population (what!!), and lots more. Enjoy. Or panic. Lol.

Dr Sam Casey is back at TYP Central and even as a non-parent I found this conversation fascinating for a bunch of reasons. We talk about the multitude of challenges in parenting and the impact that our own habits, patterns, actions, rituals, communication and personal weirdness can have on our kids, even without us knowing or trying.

Patrick's back at TYP and this time we talk about removing micro plastics from our water, why our Smart Watch might be contributing to our anxiety, the use of Al in psychiatry, the pros and cons of charging your electric car, the VR experiment where scientists change people's brain by giving them virtual wings, brain stimulating contact lenses that reduce depression, and lots more. Enjoy.

The fabulous Bobby is back at TYP dropping a few bombs, sharing the knowledge and sharing the love. This time we continue the conversation trying to understand the human experience, how others work and perhaps more importantly, how we work.

Some old dude (Socrates) told the world a coupla thousand years ago (400ish BC) that "the begging of wisdom is to know thyself", so it's clear that the whole - trying to figure out who the-fuck we are, and why the-fuck we are the way we are - is not a new human endeavour. This time on TYP, the very brilliant, charming and accomplished Professor Beau Lotto and the mildly-competent me, continue the exploration. Beau is an American neuroscientist, author, entrepreneur and keynote speaker best known for his work on perception, uncertainty, creativity and human behaviour. He's a visiting scholar at New York University and the founder of the Lab of Misfits, a creative studio exploring the intersection of neuroscience, art, technology and innovation. Lotto's research focuses on how the brain interprets reality - particularly the idea that we don't passively "see" the world as it is, but actively construct perception based on past experience, context, assumptions and survival needs. evolvable.me

Eggs sure have taken a beating over the years (see what I did there?). This is a fun one with Gillespo (the nutritional kill joy) where we unpack the BS surrounding the 'healthy' heart tick, the more current 'health star rating system', and lots more.Enjoy.

It’s been a rough week on Planet Harps, as I’m sure it has (is) for many of you. This might be a self-indulgent download or it might be a different TYP conversation that helps a few of you.

On this episode of The You Project, we explore one of the most misunderstood human emotions: fear. In a culture obsessed with "fearlessness," we often treat fear like a flaw, weakness or personal failure. But what if fear isn't the enemy at all? What if it's actually an important and protective part of the intelligence of being human?

This time around, Tiff has a humble brag about her double bodyweight deadlift, Bobby unpacks the firsthand experience of living with Tourette's, we talk about the aversion some women still have to strength training and why, we discuss where we each sit on the introvert-extrovert scale, I talk about my one-off panic attack, the challenge of training with an ageing body gets a mention and the idea of keeping our brain in shape - if not, improving - over fifty, and lots more.

Many cults don't look like cults, and many cult members would never consider themselves to be members. Most people think cults happen somewhere else... to other people. But cult-like dynamics can emerge almost anywhere humans gather around identity, certainty, emotion and power. In this episode, I explore the psychology of cults, coercive control groups and modern tribalism - from religion and politics to wellness culture, online communities and self-help movements. Why do intelligent people get pulled into unhealthy systems? How does manipulation happen gradually? And why are humans so vulnerable to certainty, belonging and charismatic leadership?

Dr. Sam is back and this time we chat about the impact of parents arguing in front of their kids, whether boredom is necessarily a bad thing, thoughts about toddlers and screens, the idea that the risk of tech-addiction is 'dose dependent', why letting kids experience a degree of risk, discomfort and uncertainty to build confidence, resilience and adaptability is okay, psychological safety vs. psychological flexibility and lots more. **Dr Sam Casey is a Registered Play Therapist, Accredited Mental Health Social Worker, has a PhD in Psychology and has spent over twenty years working with children and families. She's also the founder of the Play Prescription® Method.