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This week's guest is Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, who alongside her husband Karim Amer, directed the new Netflix documentary THE GREAT HACK which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It's out now, and the Guardian has already given it five stars.

The documentary uncovers the dark world of data exploitation online. It follows the personal stories of some key players on different sides of the explosive Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data scandal. Carole Cadwalladr from the Guardian who has spend years investigating, Brittany Kaiser who went from interning on the Barack Obama campaign to working on the Cambridge Analytica Trump campaign. It's informative, entertaining with some pretty scary revelations. Even if you know a bit about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it's fascinating to see the people behind it, and their individual motivations. 

Data has surpassed oil as the world’s most valuable asset. People and companies everywhere are in a battle for control of our most intimate personal details. THE GREAT HACK forces us to question the origin of the information we consume daily. What do we give up when we click the yes box on the T&Cs on social media apps? It is available to watch now on Netflix, I recommend a viewing.

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While I am on a very short podcast hiatus, I hope you don't mind that I will be re-posting some of my favourite episodes from over the three years. (I'm back with a bang in August!) This episode was a popular one, with Lucy Sheridan: the world’s first and only Comparison Coach.

Lucy is an author and life coach who specialises in her helping her clients get over the ~compare and despair~ that can be heightened via social media (*cough* Instagram)

She has a new book coming out called the Comparison Cure, and it is out in December 2019 so get pre-ordering. it's packed full of tips, examples and exercises to help you take back control of who you are and what you want, this empowering book is the necessary antidote we all need to the toxic comparison culture we're living in.

The Times’ calls Lucy “one of the UK’s most successful coaches”, she was also recently listed in the Sunday Times Style in an article called “Meet The New Wellbeing Coaches”, and she’s been featured on Oprah’s ‘Life Class’ series multiple times.

In this episode Lucy and I discuss what our own personal comparison triggers are, what to do when *you’re* the trigger for someone else’s comparison, online mental health, and setting your own personal and professional boundaries. I’m proud to be sharing this very honest episode on comparison, and I hope you enjoy it!

You can find Lucy Sheridan here proofcoaching.com or on Instagram @lucysheridan <3

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While I am on a very short podcast hiatus, I hope you don't mind that I will be re-posting some of my favourite episodes from over the three years. Here is my episode with the brilliant Will Young. We all know Will from this Pop Idol success back in the noughties -- I was a fan then and I am now too -- but now for a different reason: his new podcast with his friend Chris Sweeney called HOMO SAPIENS. They describe it as “two gay guys talking to people we think are interesting” and were heavily inspired by BBC’s Woman’s Hour. Each weekly episode tackles a diverse mix of LGBTQ+ subjects He’s been nominated for an Olivier Award and was also nominated for the Guardian Pride Power List 2017.

Subscribe to Homo Sapiens on iTunes or Acast. Hope you enjoy this episode!

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My guest today is the incredible Elizabeth Gilbert, one of my biggest inspirations​ of all time​. I turn to her work whenever feeling a bit lost. She is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, Big Magic and The Signature of All Things (plus many others). Big Magic is the book I recommen​d​ to anyone struggling with a creative project. It is really practical, fun and helps creatives understand how to work alongside fear.

Elizabeth's NEW book is already a #1 bestseller and is called City Of Girls, a delicious novel of glamour, sex, and adventure, about a young woman discovering that you don’t have to be a good girl to be a good person. We discuss all sorts: the weather forecast in our minds; how being a relaxed women (not a strong women) is a radical move; why we should check in which people more often; how creativity changes everything (and us) and how to break the habit of negative self talk. Hope you enjoy this one :)

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Dame Stephanie Shirley ​is tech pioneer, entrepreneur and philanthropist. She also goes by the name "Steve" which she used to sign business letters to potential clients when they were not responding to her.​ If you haven't already, go and watch her Ted Talk it is funny and moving and super interesting to hear what it was like being a woman in tech during the 60s.

In 1939 ​Steve arrived in ​B​ritain unaccompanied​, a​s child refugee during the war, and​ when she was 29​ she started what became her multimillion-pound IT software consultancy, from which she made a £150m fortune - on her dining room table with £6 in 1962​. ​

She retired in 1993 to concentrate on philanthropic work, since then she has given away at least £65 million via her charity Shirley Foundation. She continues to give to a range of causes including autism research, a cause she was drawn to through her late son Giles who had autism.​ Her Damehood in the Millennium honours was for services to IT.​

She was awarded the Order of Companions of Honour in the Queen's Birthday Honours in June 2017.

Aged 85 she remains married to her first husband Derek.

In this episode, we talk about her brilliant memoir Let It Go. In this episode we talk about workplace misogyny, making money, resilience, giving back, and why it's importance to keep learning.

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*Please go to charitywateruk.org/emma*

My guest today is Scott Harrison, founder of Charity Water, and New York Times Bestselling Author of Thirst.

Really excited for you to hear Scott's story behind setting up this incredible charity that has now raised more than 360 million dollars, provided over 9.5 million people with clean, safe drinking water.and funded over 35,000 water projects in 27 countries.

Scott set up Charity Water in 2006, having seen the effects of dirty water firsthand. The organisation set out on a big mission, to bring clean water to every person living without it, and an even bigger vision - to reinvent charity with an innovative 100% model and radical transparency, proving every single water project funded.

And I'm SUPER excited to also share that I am doing a Charity Water fundraiser for my 30th birthday. I am 30 this week!

so if you enjoy this podcast, I'm asking you for a small gift for my birthday, to go to charity water...it would absolutely amazing if you could do this one small thing and donate to my fundraiser. You can give anything.

Go to charitywateruk.org/emma

Why am I asking you to do this?​  Over 600 million people in the world are still living without clean water. Every day, about thousands of children die from diseases caused by unsafe water. It's not okay. But we can all do something to help.

What I love about charity: water, is that 100% of the money will be used to build clean water projects, and when they’re complete, they will send us photos and GPS ​link so we can see the exact community we helped and the water points they build.

Just a reminder that it's charitywateruk.org/emma

Hope you enjoy listening to this episode and thank you so much in advance!!!

​

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Dustin Lance Black is my guest today! Lance has been named as one of the 50 most powerful LGBTQ+ people in America for the last decade. He is an Academy Award® winning filmmaker, writer, and social activist. He won the Oscar and two WGA Awards for his screenplay MILK, the biopic of activist Harvey Milk starring Sean Penn. He was also a founding board member of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which successfully led the federal cases for marriage equality in California and Virginia. Lance's memoir MAMA’S BOY is out now, an absolutely incredible book, about

growing up in a conservative Mormon household outside San Antonio, Texas. The book is about his relationship with his mother, Anne, who sadly contracted polio when she was two years old and endured many surgeries throughout her life. Lance came out to his mother at twenty-one, and Mama's Boy explores what it took to remain a family despite such division of belief. Mama's Boy is the story of building bridges, of family, foundations, turmoil, tragedy, elation, and love. It is a story needed now more than ever. There is so much more I could say about Lance, but most of all, he was so lovely, and warm and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting him and going to his home in London to record. <3

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My guest today is Jessica Pan, author of Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously. This is an incredibly funny and frank book all about how Jess decided to drastically change her life for a whole year. An introvert by nature, she decides to live like an extrovert for a year with the help of some experts and mentors along the way. She embraces some horrors. She takes on a series of challenges: improv, a solo holiday, public speaking and talking to strangers on the tube. Jess reports back, and it's laugh out loud, but also rather inspiring.

We talk about getting out of our comfort zones, how talking to strangers actually makes us happier, how at a certain age we lose friends and how to make new ones and much more. Hope you enjoy this one!

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Poorna Bell is award-winning journalist of 15 years and a digital expert having worked as UK Exec Editor and Global Lifestyle Head for Huffington Post. She currently writes for Grazia, The iPaper, The Guardian, Red magazine, and Stylist. She was recently named one of Balance magazine’s top 100 wellness personalities, a Stylist magazine Rising Star, a judge for the Mind Media Awards and British Book Awards, plus so much more.

Her debut non-fiction book Chase The Rainbow (Simon & Schuster) came out last year; a moving memoir about how Poorna's life was affected —but not defined—by the suicide of her husband Rob. Ariana Huffington said about the book: ‘Chase the Rainbow is a game-changing book. Poorna Bell’s moving account of the pressures on modern men could be a life-saver." Poorna's second book In Search Of Silence is out now, all about her deeply personal journey which asks us all to define what 'happiness' truly means to each of us. In this episode we discuss the inspiration behind this second memoir, her wariness of self-help books, and what she's learned along the way.

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Philippa Perry is an author, psychotherapist, factual presenter for radio and television and someone I've been a fan of ever since I read her book called How to Stay Sane back in 2012. After volunteering with the Samaritans, Philippa trained as a psychotherapist and worked in the mental health field for several years before writing her graphic novel, Couch Fiction which lays bare the process of psychotherapy, published in 2010. 

Philippa is also an agony aunt for Red Magazine and contributes to The Guardian. She has presented several documentaries including The Truth about Children Who Lie for BBC Radio 4, Being Bipolar for Channel 4 and How To Be A Surrealist with Philippa Perry for BBC Four.

Her most recent book, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did), was a number one Sunday Times bestseller - a book all about what really matters and what behaviour it is important to avoid - the vital dos and don'ts of parenting.

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