Sometimes, the best way to start a conversation about a new dad’s mental health is not to ask about mental health at all. It’s to ask: how are you sleeping?

In this episode, Dr Karen Wynter explains why that small question can be a useful way into conversations fathers may otherwise avoid. We talk about the research on poor sleep, distress, depression and suicidal thoughts in the first year of fatherhood — and why there is still no routine mental health check-in designed specifically for new dads.

We also explore father–infant attachment, the role of support and criticism between partners, and why fathers can feel like they are simply “in the room” during appointments that are meant to support the whole family. Karen shares what more father-inclusive care could look like in practice, from small actions by GPs, midwives and maternal and child health nurses through to larger changes in training, services and policy.

We also discuss the Australian Fatherhood Research Consortium, intimate partner violence prevention, what COVID revealed about fathers’ caregiving, and Karen’s advice for families preparing for a second child.

Dr Karen Wynter researches perinatal mental health, fatherhood, family wellbeing and how health services can better include fathers.

If this conversation brings someone to mind — especially a new or expecting dad — send it their way.

Why don’t kids tell their parents what’s really going on?

According to Martin Heppell, it often comes back to something simple: kids don’t talk because adults don’t talk either — about failure, embarrassment, worry, and the times they’ve stuffed up.

Martin is a presenter with The Resilience Project and a dad of four. In this conversation, he unpacks what resilience actually means beyond “toughen up”, how parents can create the conditions for their kids to open up, and why being a safe person is more important than having the perfect answer.

We also get into the reality of adolescence now: social media, body image, comparison, connection, mindfulness, and why this generation isn’t less resilient — they’re growing up in a very different world.

For dads, Martin talks honestly about the pressure of early parenthood, losing touch with mates, looking after your own mental health, and why asking for help is not weakness.

He also shares a personal story about childhood trauma, the importance of an open door at home, and why support matters when life gets heavy.

You’ll leave with practical ways to have better conversations with your kids, your partner, and your mates.

Most of us will care for someone dying, and almost none of us are taught how. Psychologist and researcher Kerrie Noonan wants to change that.

Kerrie coined the framework of "death literacy" — our collective skills, experience, action and knowledge around death and dying — and has spent the last decade researching what actually helps people navigate loss well. In this conversation she explains why death literacy sits in communities, not just individuals, why normalising conversations about death only gets us so far, and what she learned bringing her own mother home to die. She also unpacks the idea of an "emotional will" — a way of passing on memory and meaning that has nothing to do with money — and why grief doesn't move through neat stages, no matter what we've been told.

Kerrie is a psychologist, palliative care bereavement coordinator, and researcher connected to La Trobe University's Public Health Palliative Care Unit and the Death Literacy Institute.

Expect to walk away thinking differently about grief, ritual, and what it actually means to be prepared — not scared — of death.

What is The Odyssey actually about — and why has it survived for nearly 3,000 years?

Christopher Gribbin joins me to explore Homer’s Odyssey, the complicated character of Odysseus, and the world of ancient Greece behind one of the most enduring stories ever told.

We discuss what we can and can’t know about Homer, whether there may be historical truth behind the Trojan War, and why translation changes the way we experience the poem. Christopher also shares his take on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: what the film gets right, what it changes, and why the gods matter so much in Homer’s original.

Along the way, we get into moral ambiguity, homecoming, ancient Greek religion, and the things modern audiences often misunderstand about the civilisation that produced these stories.

Dr. Paul Turke calls himself the world’s first Darwinian paediatrician.

Before medical school, he spent months doing fieldwork on the tiny Micronesian atoll of Ifaluk, studying cooperative childcare and kinship networks. He then became a paediatrician and has spent the last 25 years treating kids by asking why, not just how. He is the author of Bringing Up Baby: An Evolutionary View of Pediatrics.

We get into the grandmother hypothesis and what Paul actually saw in Micronesia that pointed him towards it; why modern mobility, isolation and poor health can weaken the kinship networks humans evolved to rely on; and the uncomfortable truth about “getting all the childcare bugs over with early”.

We also cover co-sleeping and sleep training, a theory linking reduced holding of infants to later sensory issues, teen anxiety, screens, Australia’s social media ban, and why evolutionary explanations for health and behaviour still get pushback inside medicine.

Gautam Raju leads global policy and advocacy at Movember, sitting at the point where men's health research meets government and the algorithm.

We get into why the word "masculinity" can shut a conversation down before it starts, the WhatsApp video that stopped him in his tracks — titled "how to ensure your three-year-old boy is not toxic" — and why two-thirds of young men are watching masculinity influencers regularly.

We also cover Movember's push for mental health checks for new dads, a confronting stat about the health system missing men before suicide, and Gautam's own experience moving through that system as a patient.

This one sits with the discomfort rather than resolving it.

Are dads actually "hard to engage", or have we just been building the wrong kinds of support?

I'm joined by Simon Moore, a Geelong‑based registered nurse, founder of Strong Dads, and creator of The Wholehearted Dad Program. We talk about why he no longer buys the idea that dads are "hard to engage", the four traps he sees modern fathers falling into – provider, lone wolf, control, and competence – and the slow work of rebuilding identity once life includes a tiny human and no sleep. We also get into why three in five new Aussie dads are never asked about their mental health, and what it would take to catch them earlier rather than in crisis.

If you're a dad, a partner, or someone who works with families, this one's part mirror, part map – an honest look at the pressures men are under, and what more wholehearted fatherhood could look like.

Extinction might be the rule in the universe, not the exception.

Charley Lineweaver studied history and English before switching to physics — and ended up on the NASA team whose 1992 discovery of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, the oldest light in the universe, helped earn his PhD supervisor a Nobel Prize. He's now an astrobiologist and cosmologist at the Australian National University. With his student Aditya Chopra, he proposed the Gaian Bottleneck: the idea that most life goes extinct before it learns to regulate its own planet, and that this, not the difficulty of starting life, may explain why the universe looks so empty.

We talk about:

• Why extinction, not emergence, might be the hard part of staying alive on a planet
• His case, built on isolated ecosystems like Australia and Madagascar, that human-like intelligence may never have been an inevitable outcome of evolution
• Why he thinks maths is useless for talking to aliens, and what trying to communicate with dogs, dolphins and plants actually teaches us
• Where he agrees, and where he sharply disagrees, with his hero Carl Sagan on humanity's place in the universe