This is it. We're finally here. The episode where Michelle and Jacky talk about dating. Today we have our friends Julia Lin and Anna Hickling on to talk about dating apps and their experience with these platforms. We also go into a variety of adjacent topics, such as our views on love, relationships, the breadth and limits of "love", and experiences dating in the modern age. Stay tuned in to the end of episode to hear Julia peer pressure Jacky into using dating apps, despite him fervently protesting for the entire episode against them. 

On this episode we have on quite possibly the most interesting person Michelle and Jacky have ever had - Mr. Brennan Hatton. Brennan is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Equal Reality, a virtual reality company that builds and implements virtual reality experiences for organisations with the aim of driving greater empathy, awareness, and inclusion. Outside of Brennan's most recent professional accomplishments, he has had a fascinating career within Silicon Valley, being scouted for and involved in Augmented Reality projects when the technology was still nascient. We discuss with Brennan his early life and how he got into the programming and game design space, his journey to Silicon Valley, his experiences there and reflections on the culture, and his eventual decision to co-found his current organisation. We really only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg of all the interesting stories Brennan has to tell and will definitely have him back on. Below are the links to his organisation's website and his personal website:

http://equalreality.com/

https://life.brennanhatton.com/

For this episode, we chat with our friend Sophie Cameron. Sophie is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland conducting research into the development of moral intuitions and judgements in children. We discuss various topics of interest including definitions of morals and ethics, the motivations behind conducting research in this field, interesting observations from her work, personal implications of investigating moral decision-making, veganism, factors influencing changing to (and sticking with) a vegan diet, and reflections on personal moral frameworks. Plus, we find ourselves in a very bizarre tangent discussing whether Jacky would endorse cannibalism under extreme circumstances. A shorter and concise episode but we will be sure to have Sophie back on in a future episodes to discuss other stimulating philosophical and psychological topics.

On this episode, we speak to Jessica Phan about personal religious experiences. We discuss Jessica's journey to faith all the way from her initial drive to find purpose and meaning in her life, the doubts she held about Christian doctrines, early interactions with people at Church; to a conversation of the way faith currently influences her motivations and the way she lives her life; to how it shapes the view she holds towards living the rest of her life. In this conversation we try to avoid getting too entangled into exploring theological concepts or arguing for the existence or non-existence of god. Rather, the interesting take-away listeners may get from this episode is an insight into the personal, first-person account of a religious experience. This was quite an enjoyable conversation and we believe that Jessica offers a very beautiful vision of what faith can bring to a person's character and influence the trajectory of their lives for the better.

For this episode, we have Scott Parker on the show, perhaps better known by his social media handle Scotty Does. Scotty discusses with us his experience growing up with relatively unbounded freedom, working in kitchens as an adolescent and young adult, his career as a chef and head chef, his eventual transition away from the industry, and his attitude towards living an engaging life. Our usual co-host Michelle is away on her grand adventure holiday so we brought on Hannibal Thai, our guest for our previous episode to serve as a substitute co-host. Seizing on this opportunity, we have a great discussion towards the latter part of this episode regarding our separate views on masculinity and social structures that foster an unhealthy masculine standard, as well as how we each look to manage these social and familial pressures. It was a very enjoyable conversation but definitely a long one. For any listeners that just want to listen to our discussion regarding masculinity, you can skip ahead to around 1:27:32 in the episode. Hope you all enjoy! 

In this episode Michelle and Jacky are joined by our good friend Hannibal Thai - rock climbing superstar, psychology PhD student, and recovering WoW player. We go through and explore Hannibal's early life in Vietnam, his observations regarding the cultural differences between Vietnam and Australia, and learn of the deceit and deception used to fool his parents into allowing (this word is used very loosely) him to swap from a law degree into psychology. We also spend some time delving into his PhD topic on psychosocial factors impacting on dietary choices in our "secret" psychology section at the latter portion of the epsiode. The audio for this episode is pretty quiet for Jacky's voice as we get used to recording and editing the audio so apologies in advance. It was a great to have Han on and to learn more about him and we hope you enjoy the episode!

This is the first episode of our discussion podcast, Conversations with Michelle and Jacky. We aim to spend each episode with an individual from our lives that we find interesting and engaging and have an extended conversation about their personal histories, influential life events, hobbies and interests, core attitudes and beliefs, and future aspirations. These conversations are relatively free flowing and the ultimate point is to help us gain greater insight into these individuals that capture our interest. Our first episode features a back-and-forth between Michelle and Jacky as we use the questions from Story Corps (https://storycorps.org/participate/great-questions/) to learn about each other. We cover topics such as cultural identity as a second generation immigrant, cultural norms around relationships, pivotal positive and negative experiences in our lives, the lessons we derived from those experiences, parental influence, death anxiety, and much more. We tend to go on A LOT of tangents. Please leave some feedback on whatever platform you listen to this on!