Bec first heard Derek Sivers on the Tim Ferriss podcast, and was immediately interested in this countercultural person who sold a multimillion dollar company and then moved to New Zealand to do something completely different. He’s interested in learning and iterating, and he did say he would answer every email — so we decided to test him. He answered right away.

Derek has been a musician, a circus performer, an entrepreneur, and a speaker. He’s a slow thinker, an explorer, a xenophile, and loves a different point of view. In New Zealand, he lives in a house that he designed himself, based off the notion that houses should grow from how people actually live, not from a master plan — so he waits to add walls until he figures out what he needs. That’s just one of his more radical ways of thinking. We were pleased and he was pleased that we asked him questions that he had never been asked before about how to live, about spirituality, parenting, and architecture. This conversation is full of surprises, and we hope you enjoy it.

Links:

Useful Not True

How to Live

For more from Derek, check out his website or follow him on Instagram and Twitter

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

Reframeables’ first ever live recording!

Writer Junot Diaz said: “When the world is burning, spending a little time with one’s people — in our case: book lovers — is no small gift, precisely because the world is burning.” So that’s what we did with our live podcast recording a few weeks ago. We spent time with our people: fellow book lovers and the extraordinary Emma Donoghue, reframing risk and reinvention.

Irish-Canadian Emma Donoghue is the author of sixteen novels and numerous plays, a fixture on the New York Times bestseller list, and the mind behind Room — long-listed for the Booker Prize, adapted by Emma into an Academy Award-nominated screenplay. She’s done it all, and we couldn’t wait to ask her everything. Her latest, The Paris Express, is the book we couldn’t put down.

Links:
The Paris Express
For more from Emma, take a look at her website

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

Having spent a week at the Cannes Film Festival, we are now in withdrawal. Nat’s watching Marvel shows with her guys — and though she loves a good action TV show, she's missing the nuance. Bec is filling the hole with The Pitt — with a beefier Noah Wyle. Which brings us to our guest: Michel Ghanem, better known as TV Scholar. He's French, he's smart, and he does some serious research on the TV that’s out there and worth watching. We talk about how he left academia for television and his column for The Cut, “Appointment Viewing.” When he comes back to Toronto for TIFF we're going to hang out and figure out a follow-up conversation with our new friend — because he’s just that kind of TV expert that we need to talk to again.

Links:

• Appointment Viewing
• The TV Scholar newsletter
• For more from Michel, follow him on Instagram and Twitter

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

We love reading books that express things we actually may have always known in our hearts, but previously didn't have the language for. Dr. Serene Khader’s book Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop was one such book for Nat, and so we brought Serene on Reframeables to talk more about her work and break down the book for an absent Rebecca. We talked about feminism’s changing landscape in North America and beyond, and then we added “sex therapist” to Serene’s résumé as we talked about the orgasm gap and how an understanding of intersectional feminism will make for better sex. We even got into how Serene was inspired by Reframeables and now wants to start a podcast with her sister!

Serene Khader is a writer, political philosopher, and feminist theorist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (2024) and Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (2019), among other works. She is professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center and holds the Jay Newman Chair in Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College.

Links:
Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop
For more from Serene, check out her website and follow her on Twitter

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

When we started this podcast three years ago, we never anticipated that we'd be sitting down to talk with a Canadian Paralympian medal winner — but if anyone can reframe resilience, it's Paralympian Allison Lang. We loved so much about this chat — learning about Allison's sport, sitting volleyball, and how that opened the door for her to move forward from some pretty brutal bullying to become a disability advocate in so many different settings. From brand influencing to speaking about her prosthetic leg in schools, Allison has brought forth an inherently hopeful worldview that reframed a lot of our thinking about resilience.

Born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta and now residing in Montreal, Allison is a content creator, speaker, model, and athlete for Team Canada's sitting volleyball team. She was born missing her left leg and was severely bullied for having a disability, resulting in her struggle with body-image and self confidence. Now, she shares her story of self-love and body acceptance in hopes to help others who may be on a similar journey. She is a passionate advocate for those with disabilities with a goal to connect with her community online in hopes to dismantle ableism and create a more inclusive and accessible world!

Links:
The Anti-Ableist Manifesto by Tiffany Yu
Faux Feminism by Serene Khader
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
For more from Allison, check out her website and follow her on Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

Who couldn’t use a mood boost these days? We’re grateful for good people doing good things to counter all this mess — like Julia Stewart, our next guest in our resilience series. She’s the CEO of Alurx, a wellness company with a cool health app (that you should check out, by the way). Julia and Nat almost missed each other because of the fires that were happening in L.A. — the day that we were supposed to record, she was being evacuated! When we finally were able to connect, we delved into the resilience required as a female business leader in male-dominated environments, the value Julia gains in being a mentor, and her very cool story of having started out as a waitress at IHOP and then, years later, buying the whole company.

We encourage you to join us in making a difference for those affected by the L.A. wildfires by contributing to these reputable and trusted organizations Julia has suggested:
California Fire Foundation
Direct Relief
Wildfire Recovery Fund

Link:
Alurx

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

Nat did the morning drive before the age of podcasts, and a voice that kept her sane on the road for all those years was the CBC's very own Gill Deacon — the next guest in our series where we reframe resilience. With Gill, we discuss resilience from a number of angles: her health challenges over the years with breast cancer and long COVID, and how she used writing to help her reframe along the way. We also talk about her new Substack and podcast projects, and the many ways in which she's come to embrace uncertainty.

Gill Deacon is a veteran journalist, television and radio host, bestselling author, and public speaker. She has hosted many radio programs for CBC Radio as well as television shows for CBC Television and Discovery Channel. From 2013 to 2024, Gill was the host of CBC Radio's Here & Now. Gill has written three non-fiction books, all published by Penguin. Her fourth book will be published by House of Anansi Press in 2025. Gill is a former columnist for Chatelaine and has written many articles for news outlets such as the Globe and Mail and CBC. Her podcast Gill Deacon is Getting Old(ish) debuts in 2025.

Links:
A Love Affair with the Unknown
For more from Gill, follow her on Instagram and Twitter, or check out her website

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

We continue reframing resilience with Dr. Poppy Gibson, a lecturer in education whose key interests involve children’s psychological development and mental health, and wellbeing in education. Nat had actually previously met Poppy when writing for a journal that she edits, and after doing some digging found out some really significant similarities! We talk about how both Nat and Poppy almost died, and Poppy’s children’s book about how to talk about death with kids. All kinds of trauma are navigated here, but somehow we ended up laughing a lot — and briefly crying!

Links:
When They Died by Poppy Gibson & Alfred Russo
For more from Poppy, follow her on Instagram and Twitter

We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.