Episodes

Amy Alkon is an award-winning investigative science writer and the author of Going Menopostal: What You and Your Doctor Need to Know About the Real Science of Menopause and Perimenopause. Based in Detroit but writing for a global audience, she specialises in what she calls science help — doing the deep dive into peer-reviewed research, critically evaluating the evidence, and translating it into language that lets readers make informed decisions about their own health. Amy's core argument is that the gap between what medical science knows about menopause and what most doctors actually provide is shockingly wide. Women in their forties and fifties — often at the peak of their professional careers — experience brain fog, fatigue, and memory problems that the medical system routinely misattributes to stress, ageing, or depression rather than to hormonal changes with well-established physiological mechanisms. The result is that accomplished professionals mistake a solvable medical issue f…

Sönke Ahrens wrote How to Take Smart Notes, the book that introduced Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten method to a global audience of writers, researchers, and knowledge workers. He left academia to work as an independent writer and course creator, focusing on the practical craft of turning reading and thinking into sustained written output. Sönke explains the Zettelkasten as an external thinking space — not a filing system for highlights, but a structured environment where ideas confront each other and generate insight through writing. He draws a clear distinction between the archivist who collects and the writer who processes: a highlight that never gets recontextualised into your own thinking is effectively lost, regardless of how good the capture system is. The conversation moves from Luhmann's analog index cards to a practical digital setup using Obsidian, Readwise, and Zotero. Sönke describes how he keeps his system from becoming overwhelming (show only the last 30 days of unp…

Sue Ellson has worked as an independent consultant since 1994, building a practice around LinkedIn, networking, and low-cost business development. She joined LinkedIn in 2003 and has grown her network to over 26,000 connections and 30,000 followers, all through the policy of connecting with everyone she meets and maintaining those relationships through consistent posting and engagement. Sue explains her Geekster identity — using technology to attract aligned gigs rather than a single career path — and her job for now strategy for maintaining financial security during the transition from employment to independent practice. She argues that the confidence gap is the biggest barrier for professionals considering self-employment, and that a part-time bridge role protects against the psychological spiral that can come from working alone without income certainty. The conversation covers the three networks every professional needs (personal, professional, and community), why word of mouth s…

Laetitia Vitaud returns for her third appearance on Wisepreneurs. Half French, half German, and now back in Paris after years in London and Munich, she writes the Laetitia@Work newsletter on Substack and is one of the clearest voices on the future of work from a European perspective. Laetitia frames the current moment as an age of individuation and networks, where the most important asset for starting a business is not capital but relationships — specifically, the 150 or so people in your Dunbar circle whom you know well enough to stop for a drink if you bumped into them on the street. For professionals over 60 considering independent work, she argues that the network built over decades of career and community life is the startup capital, and that maintaining it deliberately — through birthday messages, direct messages, and genuine check-ins — is the most leveraged form of business development. The conversation covers the multi-stage life (from Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott's The 1…

Laurie Smale left school at 13 to work in a junkyard and at 79 produces his own Magic Minutes YouTube series after learning digital tools from scratch with LinkedIn specialist Sue Ellson. Between the junkyard and YouTube, Laurie graduated from Melbourne University with honours, built a speaking career through the National Speakers Association, and wrote three books. He shares how he overcame a lifelong fear of technology and why baby steps and the right mentor make reinvention possible at any age. Wisepreneurs explores how independent professionals turn accumulated expertise into sustainable practice.

Tomáš Baránek returns to Wisepreneurs for his second appearance. He runs Melvil, a Czech publishing house that publishes only 12 to 20 nonfiction books a year — but each one is chosen with the care of a curator selecting for a specific audience. His readers trust the imprint so completely that many buy every title, and some have asked for a subscription. Tomáš explains how Melvil operates in a country of 10 million people with a deep book culture and 16,000 new titles annually. The strategy is counterintuitive: publish fewer books, translate them to an exceptionally high standard, and build enough trust that readers will wait six months for the Czech edition rather than buying the English original. Melvil licenses from the world's most influential thinkers — Harari, Kahneman, Grann — and recently relaunched Sapiens in Czech after the previous publisher lost the rights. The conversation covers Yuval Harari's Nexus, which Melvil published at the same time as the global launch, and Tom…

Kim Watty is a 66-year-old Emeritus Professor of Accounting who spent 30 years at RMIT, the University of Melbourne, and Deakin University, teaching in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Japan, and rising to Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Business and Law. She formally left academia in 2020 and spent the next few years looking for what she calls 'the more' — the thing she knew she wanted to do next but could not yet name. That thing turned out to be The Main Act, a business she co-founded with her daughter Pru. Their signature programme, Retirement by Design, is an eight-week online course for women aged roughly 45 to 78, built on the Stanford Life Design methodology developed by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. The programme alternates content weeks with integration weeks, includes one-on-one accountability calls, and deliberately keeps cohorts small and Melbourne-based for now. Kim and Pru interview every applicant to ensure alignment with the core mindsets — curiosity, bias to action,…

Filip Drimalka is a Czech digital innovation expert and the author of The Future of No Work. He studied law but never practised, instead spending two decades helping organisations adopt new technologies. On the day ChatGPT launched, he did two things: bought NVIDIA stock and registered the domain futureofnowork.com, because he understood immediately that work was about to change at the structural level. Filip's core concept is symbiosis with AI — not using AI occasionally as a separate tool but integrating it into every step of every process, the way you would use your own memory or judgment. He describes building an AI consultant called Amy that now handles the initial diagnostic conversations his human consultants used to conduct, and how uploading hundreds of pages of client conversations to NotebookLM produced better insights in 15 seconds than a two-hour team workshop. The lesson, he says, is that thinking as we knew it has ended: the skill now is orchestrating AI to do the thin…

Michal Novotný is a Czech physiotherapist who has worked with Rafael Nadal, Maria Sharapova, Orlando Bloom, and Chris Hemsworth. He was one of five ATP physiotherapists on the professional tennis tour, but his philosophy sets him apart from most practitioners in his field: the best physio is not the one who treats injuries but the one who makes sure they never happen. Michal's approach is radically individualised. He categorises patients by somatotype (ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph), by temperament (melancholic Nadal vs sanguinic Djokovic vs phlegmatic Federer), and by age band — what he calls bronze, silver, gold, and diamond periods. The exercise or diet that works for Chris Hemsworth (a mesomorph who gains and loses muscle quickly) will produce no visible result on Michal himself (an ectomorph with a fast metabolism). His book Sport Is Pain, which took 2,500 hours to write and became an immediate Czech bestseller, guides readers through self-assessment before offering any recomm…

Anna Burgess Yang shares her solopreneur workflow for building independent professional practice with lean thinking, automation, and AI. After leaving a FinTech executive career, Anna built a content writing business around Zapier, Airtable, and ChatGPT Pro. She explains why operations is the part of solopreneur practice nobody talks about and how authenticity beats generic AI content. Wisepreneurs explores how independent professionals turn accumulated expertise into sustainable practice.

Krisna Hanks returns to Wisepreneurs for her second appearance. A former professional dancer who spent two decades in Amsterdam and now lives in Tucson, she has moved from executive coaching into metabolic health, working as Director of Employee Wellness Programs for heart surgeon Dr Philip Ovadia. Krisna's core argument is that too much sitting is not the same as too little exercise. You can hit every recommended activity target — 150 minutes of cardio, two strength sessions a week — and still be what researchers call an active couch potato if you sit for back-to-back hours. The mechanism is physiological: prolonged sitting suppresses lipoprotein lipase activity, which is necessary for triglyceride uptake and HDL cholesterol production. In effect, your body behaves as if you have gone to sleep, and the metabolic machinery slows down. The Australian research that sparked this field, led by Neville Owen and Genevieve Healy, found that women fare worse than men on these measures. The …

Tonianne DeMaria cut her teeth as a fashion buyer in New York City, spent a year in a medieval farming town in Germany, and retrained as a public historian before co-authoring Personal Kanban with Jim Benson. The book applies the visual workflow system born on Toyota's factory floor to the messy, invisible work of knowledge professionals — and its central argument is that you cannot improve what you cannot see. Personal Kanban has two rules: visualise your work, and limit your work in progress. Tonianne explains why knowledge workers resist the second rule harder than the first. We carry invisible inventory in our heads, and the cognitive load of too many half-finished projects is what produces burnout, not the volume of work itself. The board makes the invisible visible, and the WIP limit forces choices — which means it also forces important conversations about what actually matters. The conversation covers the emotional dimension of workflow that most productivity systems ignore: …

Peter Compo spent 25 years at DuPont as a chemical engineer and business leader before leaving to write The Emergent Approach to Strategy — a book that argues the word 'strategic' should be struck from business language and that strategy is not a plan but a central rule for busting the one bottleneck standing between you and your aspiration. Peter grew up in a musical family in New York City and sees the same underlying patterns in music, science, and business: all creative endeavours follow the laws of emergence. The future cannot be planned, but it can be shaped. His framework is built on a triad: aspiration (what you want to achieve), bottleneck (what is in the way), and strategy (the central rule that directs all resources toward busting that bottleneck). The influence diagram — a V-shape with the aspiration at the narrow point and all possible actions fanning out to the left — makes visible what most strategy documents obscure: that you cannot do everything, and that without a r…

Gail Greatorex turned 25 years of product safety expertise at the ACCC into a solopreneur consulting practice, helping businesses navigate consumer protection laws, compliance, and product recalls. She explains how self-employment lets her choose projects aligned with her values, including co-founding ClimateWise Associations. The conversation covers the rising challenges of e-commerce safety, the risks posed by button batteries and toppling furniture, and her role in shaping the regulatory standards that protect consumers. Wisepreneurs explores how independent professionals turn accumulated expertise into sustainable practice.

Eliška Šestáková is a Czech academic, note-taking expert, and Zettelkasten practitioner who teaches at the Faculty of Information Technology at Czech Technical University in Prague. She discovered the Zettelkasten method through Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes while struggling to write her PhD dissertation, and it transformed both her academic work and her personal knowledge management. Eliška distinguishes between two uses of notes: professional development (reading, courses, absorbing knowledge that compounds) and project execution (capturing where you left off so you can resume in minutes after weeks away). Her approach to deciding what to read is counterintuitive: she does not start from a reading list but from her current problems and questions. She links potential sources to those questions in her system, and when a problem becomes urgent enough, the sources linked to it become the priority. This ensures motivation because taking notes on the wrong material is what makes …

Leanne Shelton ran a copywriting business in Sydney for nearly a decade before AI began eating her pipeline. When prospects started saying 'why would I pay you when ChatGPT is free,' she did not dig in — she pivoted. She founded Human Edge AI Training to teach professionals how to use AI with the human touch, drawing on every lesson from her copywriting career about what makes writing work. Leanne's core argument is that most people use ChatGPT the way they use Google: shout a demand, accept the output. This produces generic, surface-level content that lacks facts, stories, and brand voice. Her method treats AI as an intern who needs a thorough brief: first train it on your business, your audience, and samples of your writing, then have a conversation. She teaches people to say please and thank you, to ask 'is anything unclear?' before generating, and to treat prompting as iterative dialogue rather than a one-shot command. The conversation covers how she built her copywriting busine…

Cedric Chin runs Commoncog, a publication about accelerating business expertise. Born in Borneo and now based in Singapore, he writes about one question: how do you get good at business, and how do you get good at it faster than the traditional trial-and-error timeline allows? Cedric's framework draws on the science of expertise, particularly the concept of tacit knowledge — the kind of know-how that experts carry in their heads but cannot easily articulate, and that cannot be learned from books or courses alone. The most valuable business skills, he argues, are tacit: recognising patterns in incomplete data, making judgment calls under uncertainty, knowing which customers to walk away from. The problem is that most business education teaches explicit knowledge (frameworks, models, checklists) and leaves people thinking they understand something they have never actually practised. The conversation covers the Cognitive Flexibility Theory approach to learning complex domains — studyin…

Karen Wickre shows experienced professionals how career independence works well beyond conventional retirement age, drawing on senior roles at Google and Twitter and decades of authentic relationship-building across Silicon Valley. She explains why genuine, mutually beneficial connections matter more than transactional networking, and how continuous adaptability sustains an independent career into your 70s. Wisepreneurs explores how independent professionals turn accumulated expertise into sustainable practice.

Danielle Joworski helps women entrepreneurs over 50 build visibility and overcome the compounding barriers of ageism, sexism, and self-doubt. A visibility strategist and fractional COO near Toronto, she explains why confidence is an outcome of courageous action rather than a prerequisite. She covers the rule of one, breaking goals into small steps, and the Rocket Fuel visionary-integrator model for knowing what to delegate. Wisepreneurs explores how women over 50 monetise expertise and build sustainable solopreneur practice.

Jane Hudson built an independent L&D consultancy specialising in regulatory training after leaving corporate employment, and returns to Wisepreneurs 50 episodes after her first appearance. She covers pricing strategies, managing remote teams, finding a defined niche, and balancing client delivery with business development as a solo operator.

Peter Hatherley is the founder of Authored Intelligence, a New Zealand-based AI company that builds custom GPTs designed to remove the prompt barrier for professionals who want AI to write like them, not like a machine. He came to AI through SEO, where he discovered a letter-pattern algorithm in 2012 that launched sites to number one within weeks — and those same sites, untouched since, still rank in the top three. Peter's core distinction is between generative AI (one-prompt-and-done) and interactive AI (a conversation where the machine asks you questions, offers rationale, and collaborates). His products — Semantic Author, Conceptuality, Storyline Author, and the All-in-One Editor — are built on this latter approach. Semantic Author, his most popular, embeds semantic entity optimisation beneath the surface while explaining its reasoning, effectively teaching the user SEO as it writes. Conceptuality functions as a virtual advertising agency, handling copywriting, campaign planning, …

Dr Holly Whelan has a neuroscience PhD, a 20-year marketing career at Unilever, and a frustration that would not go away: marketing stops at awareness and engagement, but real behaviour change goes further. She co-founded Habit Partners with Dr Mark Cobain, taking the HeartAge Tool — which explains your heart disease risk as a biological age — out of Unilever as a spin-out asset. Their niche sits between academic behaviour change science (rigorous but dry) and advertising (engaging but shallow): campaigns and programs that actually shift what people do, not just what they think. Holly's own career is a study in deliberate change. She left the lab because she did not want a research career, joined FMCG marketing when it was the gold standard, then left corporate when she wanted to do the right thing rather than sell more margarine. The conversation covers how to take intellectual property with you when you leave an organisation, why values-driven work makes the risk of going solo bea…

Debbie Jenkins trained as an electronics engineer but talked too much to be a good one, so she became an author and book coach instead. She has written 17 books and published many more, but her recent trilogy gets straight to the point: Stop the Credibility Crisis (the why), Stop Writing Books Nobody Reads (the how), and Stop Selling Books Nobody Buys (what to do with it once it exists). Her central insight is the credibility quadrant: most expertise-based business owners are strong on trust — the qualifications, the testimonials, the case studies — but invisible on desire. Nobody wants what they offer because they all sound the same. Meanwhile the "bro commerce" operators have desire in spades but no trust. The book that fixes this is a short, valuable one written by a real human — not AI — that builds connection and signals credibility at the same time. Debbie grew up in inner-city Birmingham, read every book she could get four library tickets for, and now lives in Spain. The conv…

Natasha Ginnivan researches how aging stereotypes undermine experienced professionals before they even open their mouths, and what the evidence shows about countering them. She explains how stereotypes affect professional identity, why social connections and lifelong learning protect cognitive wellness, and what research from CEPAR at the University of Queensland and Stanford's Distinguished Career Institute supports about aging well in professional life. Wisepreneurs explores how independent professionals turn accumulated expertise into sustainable practice.