Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 1990. Sophie Scamps was nineteen, an 800-metre runner who was not confident out of the blocks, on a 4x400 relay team nobody expected to win. One of her teammates did not want to start. So she said she would.

Australia won gold.

Most people know Dr Sophie Scamps as the Member for Mackellar. This hour is about the runner, the emergency doctor, and the daughter of a GP who followed him into the job.

"You have a choice in life. You can either be a spectator yelling from the sideline… or you can put yourself in the race."

This Saturday on Duncan Schieb. beerwithduncan podcast

Full episode: Duncan Schieb. beerwithduncan podcast is on Radio Northern Beaches 88.7 and 90.3, Saturdays at 9:01am.

Ask Alexa or Google: say "Alexa, play Radio Northern Beaches" or "Hey Google, play Radio Northern Beaches."

On your phone: the free Community Radio Plus app, search Radio Northern Beaches.

Online: stream live at rnb.org.au.

Catch up any time: Spotify, YouTube (@abeerwithduncan), or the player at beerwithduncan.com.

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#beerwithDuncan #SophieScamps

You become like a… secular priest. You know, you get to the extraordinary privilege of listening to people talk about their lives."

That is Dr Briony Scott on what a school principal actually carries, and it is the best description of the job I have heard.

She did it for nineteen years, fourteen of them at Wenona, and she was named Principal of the Year and one of the most powerful people in Australian education. She now leads Royal Far West, the hundred-year-old charity getting healthcare to children in rural and remote Australia.

Four things from the hour worth the time of anyone who leads people.

On what leading a community is: conducting an orchestra. You are not there to play the instruments. You are there to get disparate instruments playing together enough to make a tune.

On the thing she thinks is going wrong more broadly: "We are not comfortable with being uncomfortable." Her picture for it is a butterfly cut free of its cocoon by someone trying to help, which then cannot fly, because the wings take their strength from the pushing.

On accountability, and this one is aimed at adults: young people are expected to admit a mistake, apologise and remediate, and most adults no longer do any of the three. She admires teenagers for it.

And on doing work whose results you will never see: "You plant seeds that… in education won't come to fruition in my lifetime. So you have to trust that what you're doing." She is clear there is no glory in the job, and equally clear about where the meaning is, which is in the one-on-one conversations nobody watches.

She also started again in a new sector at a point where everyone expected her to retire, which is its own lesson.

beerwithDuncan doesn't just tell other people's stories. It changes the way you see your own.

Full episode: beerwithduncan.com

#beerwithDuncan #BrionyScott #Leadership #Education #SchoolLeadership #ForPurpose

You may think you know Tracy Hall's story. It has been told as true crime more than once. We are not telling it. The man at the centre of it has had enough of her life, and he is not getting this hour, either.

What is left when you take him out of it turns out to be far more interesting. Twenty-five years building brands for eBay, Virgin, GoDaddy and Afterpay. A father who died three weeks after a leukaemia diagnosis when she was in her twenties, which she says plainly was the hardest thing she has ever been through. A boss who handed her his credit card and told her to go home to her family. And a young woman walking around Sydney on her lunch break, crying, wishing there was a grief room.

Duncan asks what shame was telling her about herself, and what it felt like at two in the morning. She answers all of it.

Then she turns outward, which is where she now spends her life. Everybody is a target. There is a scam for everybody. The thing under attack is not your firewall, it is you. And the crime she most wants parents to understand is the one aimed at their kids, which moves in hours, targets boys more than girls, and is run by organised crime rather than by anyone in a basement.

If your child ever tells you, she has the first words for you: this is not your fault, you have been targeted by a criminal, thank you for telling me.

She brings five songs, from The Cure to The Doors, two of which belong to her dad.

beerwithDuncan doesn't just tell other people's stories. It changes the way you see your own. Listen from Saturday 22 August at beerwithduncan.com

Twenty years ago, Jocelyn Brewer (https://jocelynbrewer.com/digital-nutrition/)was a high school teacher of geography and drama at Sydney Boys High. Her headmaster, Dr Kim Jagger, told her the school was handing laptops to every boy in year nine, that the kids knew what to do with them and the teachers did not, and that somebody should work out what was going on with boys and games.

She has never really stopped pulling that thread. She retrained as a psychologist, studied cyberpsychology, and, in 2013, coined the term Digital Nutrition: not screen time, not detoxes, but the value of what we feed our minds. She is generous about where it started. She calls Dr Jagger the guardian angel of Digital Nutrition, and she is just as honest that the work got personal when she got her own first iPhone at 32 and started waking in the night to check it.

This hour is for anyone who feels the quiet erosion, a bit less present, a bit less patient, a little less themselves, and senses that both banning it and bingeing it are dead ends.

Duncan asks what staying human actually means once you strip the slogan off it, whether she lives her own philosophy on a bad week, and what she would say to a parent whose kid has gone quiet behind a closed door. She gives them three sentences to try. She also gives the teenager listening something better than a lecture.

Jocelyn has kindly offered a 20% off code  for the Tech Use Agreement course 

 https://offers.jocelynbrewer.com/tua-v2-checkout-page

CODE: DUNCAN20

https://jocelynbrewer.com/digital-nutrition/

And she brings five songs, from Rickie Lee Jones to Kula Shaker, with a Hare Krishna story attached to the last one.

beerwithDuncan doesn't just tell other people's stories. It changes the way you see your own

Listen from Saturday 15 August at rnb.org.au  or say 'Alexa, Play Radio Northern Beaches at 9:00 am on Saturday '.

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For more than ten years, Orlanda Bettison stood at a school photocopier printing off
resources for parents, because the book that would teach a child about their own mind was
not on any shelf.

Then came her own postnatal mental health chapter, and one thought she has never forgotten:"I wish I knew this earlier." A teacher with a psychology degree, she had spent her working life around children’s feelings, and nobody had ever taught her how her own mind worked.

In July 2024, she launched a Kickstarter campaign. Eighty-nine strangers backed her past her target in forty days. The My Brain Books series now runs to five titles, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in seven countries, and is used by psychologists, occupational therapists, teachers and parents everywhere,

In this hour, Duncan asks about the house she grew up in and what was allowed to be felt out
loud there, the postnatal chapter in her own words, the Friday afternoons at the photocopier,
the night she pressed the Kickstarter button, and the seeds she hopes the books plant.
beerwithDuncan doesn't just tell other people's stories. It changes the way you see your own.

Listen from 08/08/2026 at rnb.org.au

If this episode raises anything for you: PANDA (Perinatal Anxiety and Depression Australia)
1300 726 306. Lifeline 13 11 14.

Check out the My Brain Book series here:

Orlanda’s Songs:

1. Feel it Still - Portugal. The Man
2. Valerie- Amy Winehouse
3. Electric Feel- MGMT
4. Too Sweet- The Macaroons Project
5. Ok Love you Bye- Olivia Dean

To hear the songs, tune into the radio broadcast at rnb.org.au

This is beerwithDuncan. One hour, one guest, their songs,
and an honest conversation about how a life actually gets built.”

beerwithDuncan is a one-hour conversation, recorded on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, between Duncan and a single guest. The songs, chosen by the guest, carry the hour. They belong to the guest, picked for their own reasons: perhaps the one they walk in on, perhaps the first they ever loved, perhaps the one they still cannot hear without going somewhere, perhaps the one they want the listener to leave humming. The music is the joy running through the whole thing.

The conversation is personal. The hour moves through who the guest is, where they came from, and the good they have made of their life. When there is a hard chapter, we sit in it gently and only as far as the guest wants to go, and then we reach for the light, because the point is always what they carried out of it. When a guest has a whole good life honestly built, the hour lives in the warm, telling moments most interviews skip.

The show is made for a simple, hopeful reason. Somewhere a person is listening, and a stranger says something honest and true, and the room gets a little warmer. They feel less alone, a little braver, and glad to share a world with people like this. Every guest is chosen because their life, honestly told, does that.

Host Duncan is a country-born auctioneer who has called more than 15,000 auctions and raised over $200 million for good causes. He coaches junior footy and cricket on the Northern Beaches, mentors young people, and works in grief support. He does not sit across the table as a neutral interviewer. He is a warm fellow traveller who makes the room safe, asks the small honest question, and knows the hour belongs to the guest and to the person listening.

www.beerwithduncan.com

https://www.instagram.com/beerwithduncan/