NZ showjumper and eventer Dame Catriona Williams broke her neck in a fall from a horse and became tetraplegic. 14 months into her marriage, she told her husband Sam to leave. He stayed, and 23 years on she calls herself lucky, not inspirational.

As a teenager, Brad Iles was a world schools golf champion, and Michael Campbell called him one of the best talents to come out of New Zealand in a long time. Seven years on the professional golf tour, then he booked a flight home and never went back. This is the story of starting again.

Melissa Vranjes is a certified holistic sex and relationship coach, and she joins us to tackle the stuff most couples never figure out how to talk about.

Mike King is one of the most recognisable figures in New Zealand. Comedian, broadcaster, mental health campaigner, former New Zealander of the Year: and he's spent the last few years at the centre of a national conversation about how we look after our young people.

Nathan Fa’avae is one of New Zealand's greatest ever athletes.

7x Adventure Racing World Championships, a decade unbeaten on the biggest races on the planet, and a record-breaking 1,000-mile paddle down the Yukon.

Dave Wood is the first guest ever invited back three times.

A former lifeguard and intensive care paramedic, he turned his own battle with chronic pain into a career as one of the world's leading voices on stress, mindset and human performance — working with elite athletes and some of the country's biggest businesses.

The silent epidemic harming Kiwi kids - and the survivor determined to end it.

For the first 16 years of her life, Gloria Masters endured abuse most New Zealanders would refuse to believe happens here. She survived - and went on to become a teacher, a child psychotherapist and a communications trainer, dedicating her life to breaking the silence around child sexual abuse and giving parents the tools to protect their kids.

⚠️ This episode contains discussion of child sexual abuse and suicide. Please take care listening.

Louis Davis is the biggest content creator in New Zealand - 3.8 million followers, 3.5 billion views in a year, and TikTok Creator of the Year. But the numbers are, in his words, background noise.

Gemma McCaw has played over 250 times for New Zealand and been to three Olympic Games - but this conversation is about who she is when the hockey stops.

In a rare long-form sit-down, Gemma opens up on the reality behind high-performance sport, the grind and the near-misses, and what it took to be okay with herself beyond the medals.

Warm, funny and refreshingly open. This is Gemma, in her own words.

Mark Law passed New Zealand SAS selection at 18 - the youngest ever to do it - and his life since has read like fiction.

We trace the whole arc: a rugged Whangamōmona childhood, the New Zealand and British SAS, private security work in war-torn Angola, and a string of near-death experiences that would have ended most lives, then there's Whakaari White Island. Mark's book, Lucky, You're Tough, is out now.

This episode contains descriptions of the Whakaari/White Island tragedy and other themes that may distress some listeners.

Grant Baker started with nothing - biking to sales meetings and hiding the bike around the corner so clients wouldn't know he couldn't afford a car.

He'd go on to build and sell some of New Zealand's best-known companies: 42 Below vodka (sold to Bacardi for $138M), skincare giant Trilogy, and the automotive empire now known as Turners. Grant shares hard-won lessons on ambition, resilience, giving back, and why you should never die wondering.

Becki Ross was given two to three years to live. Diagnosed at 42 with stage four, incurable bowel cancer, she's a mum of two teenagers, a teacher, and one of those rare people who lights up a room the second she walks in. When we recorded this, Becki had just been told her treatment options had run out - that the cancer was, in her words, "declaring itself," and that her time is now very short.

In one of the most powerful conversations we've ever had, Becki talks about planning her own funeral - the plywood coffin, the celebrant, the plan to climb in herself just to make everyone laugh - and about the parts that aren't funny at all: the fear, the reality of leaving her kids behind, and the perspective that's come with facing it head-on.

Israel Dagg had everything he'd ever chased - a Rugby World Cup, a young family, the life a kid from a Hawke's Bay state house could only dream of. Then he retired, and the question underneath it all hit at once: “if I'm not an All Black, who am I?”

In one of the most open conversations we've had on the show, Israel comes clean on the five years that followed - the addiction, the depression, and the spiral he kept hidden while the world saw a highlight reel.

Justine Smith has been a fixture of New Zealand comedy for more than 30 years - a Seven Days regular and one of the few women who lasted in a room that pushed most others out.

She's also very funny about the rest of the industry it - falling into comedy almost by accident, the terror of her first gig, and three decades of standing in front of a crowd talking about herself for a living.

He's spent nearly 30 years getting the world's biggest stars to open up - but Graham Norton rarely sits on the other side of the mic.

The most famous chat show host on the planet pulls back the curtain on his craft: the psychology of who sits where on that famous sofa, why the guests always outrank him, and the research ritual that's funnier than the show itself.

Scott Goldman is a high-performance psychologist who's spent 30 years inside some of the biggest teams in world sport, including the Golden State Warriors, and works across five professional franchises at once.

His whole philosophy flips how you think about success: you're not your talent, you're your talent times your environment. Get the environment wrong and the most gifted person in the room fails.

Rob Cope has spoken to over 40,000 New Zealand parents about the dangers hiding in their children's online world.

He delivers the talk every parent needs to hear - and pulls no punches about the reality of what kids are accessing online, why good kids in good homes aren't protected, the neuroscience of screen addiction, what the government is getting wrong, practical tools to keep your kids safe.

Rob also has a Wild Dad movement getting fathers off their phones and back into their kids' lives.

Steve Braunias sat through every day of the Polkinghorne trial - the society murder that gripped New Zealand - and wrote the bestselling book on it. He liked the accused. He chatted with him every morning. And he more than entertains the possibility that Phil Polkinghorne is an innocent man.

But this is also the story of one of New Zealand's greatest living writers.

Futurist Frances Valintine (founder of Academy X and Tech Futures Lab) joins the show to map what New Zealand actually looks like in20 years, and it's a sobering picture.

We're one of the fastest-changing populations on earth: ageing fast, with a birth rate well below replacement and a workforce shrinking from four people per retiree toward just two. Her warning is that we're already late to plan for it.

From there the conversation turns to AI and the future of work, where Frances is blunt - every job ahead will have an AI component, and the longer you wait to understand it, the harder it gets.

For 20 years, Darren Shand was the most powerful person in All Blacks rugby that nobody knew about. As Team Manager across four Rugby World Cups - including the back-to-back title wins of 2011 and 2015 - Shand sat above the coaches, managed the operation, and helped build the cultural architecture of the most successful international rugby team in history. He worked alongside Sir Graham Henry, Sir Steve Hansen, Sir Wayne Smith, Richie McCaw, Dan Carter, and some of the greatest players to ever pull on the black jersey.