Benedict Collins is a political journalist working for 1News in the press gallery in Wellington. From his first days as a reporter, he's had a strong interest in covering anything to do with illicit drugs and enforcement.

He's covered punitive drug-testing sanctions applied to beneficiaries, the battle to legalise pill-testing at festivals, the 2020 cannabis referendum, and in 2018, helped expose a meth-testing scandal that had government, landlords and homeowners wasting hundreds of millions of dollars.

Benedict's book on the subject, Mad on Meth: How New Zealand Got Hooked on P was published in 2023. Tune in as controversial writer and podcast host, Damien Grant, interviews a wide selection of interesting and entertaining individuals, authors, business people, politicians and anyone else actually willing to talk to him.

For more interviews visit: https://www.differentmatters.co.nz/

Dr Barbara Oakley is a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Oakland University. She conducts research on learning, cognition, and educational practices, bringing insights from neuroscience and psychology into the classroom. A New York Times bestselling author, she has written and co-authored numerous books, including A Mind for Numbers, Learning How to Learn, Mindshift, and Uncommon Sense Teaching. Her work has been featured in outlets as varied as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 

In her book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend, Barbera with psychology as a frame of reference, Oakley uses cutting-edge images of the working brain to provide startling support for the idea that “evil” people act the way they do mainly as the result of a dysfunction. In fact, some deceitful, manipulative, and even sadistic behavior appears to be programmed genetically—suggesting that some people really are born to be bad.

Tune in as controversial writer and podcast host, Damien Grant, interviews a wide selection of interesting and entertaining individuals, authors, business people, politicians and anyone else actually willing to talk to him.

For more interviews visit: https://www.differentmatters.co.nz/
For the interview video visit: https://www.youtube.com/@DifferentMattersbyDamienGrant 

Musa al-Gharbi is an American sociologist. He is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. 

Al-Gharbi is the author of the 2024 book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, a study of the history and political economy of the knowledge professions from the interwar period through the present, published by Princeton University Press.

Tune in as controversial writer and podcast host, Damien Grant, interviews a wide selection of interesting and entertaining individuals, authors, business people, politicians and anyone else actually willing to talk to him.

Wood left high school early, associating with drugs and violence, committing crimes to maintain his habit. At 18 years old, he went to prison in Paremoremo Prison for murdering his 42 year old drug dealer, after he attempted to sexually assault Wood. Wood was convicted of murder and served 11 years in prison.

Wood's mother passed away three days before the murder. He served part of his sentence in Paremoremo Prison, which he described as "New Zealand’s toughest facility."

Wood completed his undergraduate and master's degrees while imprisoned, and he commenced a PhD, which he completed in 2011. He is the first New Zealander to have achieved both feats. In 2019 he published a biography titled, How to Escape from Prison.

Tune in as controversial writer and podcast host, Damien Grant, interviews a wide selection of interesting and entertaining individuals, authors, business people, politicians and anyone else actually willing to talk to him.

David "Chook" Henwood is one of the country's most decorated and respected police officers, who served for 37 years in South Auckland before retiring in 2007. He held the rank of Detective Sergeant and was awarded a record three silver merit awards during his time as an officer.

Henwood was an early and, for a time, relatively lone voice in proclaiming the innocence of Teina Pora for the 1992 rape and murder of Susan Burdett - whose conviction would, 20 years later, be overturned in one of the country's most high profile cases of a miscarriage of justice.

Tune in as controversial writer and podcast host, Damien Grant, interviews a wide selection of interesting and entertaining individuals, authors, business people, politicians and anyone else actually willing to talk to him.

Jonathan Ayling, Chief Executive of the Free Speech Union (New Zealand) has worked in Wellington for 8 years across roles as a Beehive staffer, senior political advisor, and in the NGO sector.

Tune in as controversial writer and podcast host, Damien Grant, interviews a wide selection of interesting and entertaining individuals, authors, business people, politicians and anyone else actually willing to talk to him.

Dr. Lindsay is an American-born author, mathematician, founder of New Discourses, and self-described professional troublemaker. Known for his sharp wit and thought-provoking insights, he is a leading critic of Critical Race Theory and "Woke" ideology.

His bestselling books, including Cynical Theories and Race Marxism, have sparked global dialogue and been translated into over a dozen languages. Through his podcast, speaking engagements, and media appearances on platforms like The Joe Rogan Experience, Fox News, and NPR, Dr. Lindsay challenges divisive ideologies and invites audiences to think critically and engage meaningfully with today’s cultural issues.

Tune in as controversial writer and podcast host, Damien Grant, interviews a wide selection of interesting and entertaining individuals, authors, business people, politicians and anyone else actually willing to talk to him.

Peter Gregory Boghossian is an American philosopher and college professor. His main focus is bringing the tools of professional philosophers to people in a wide variety of contexts. Peter has a teaching pedigree spanning more than 25 years and 30 thousand students.

Peter's primary research areas are critical thinking and moral reasoning. His doctoral research studies, funded by the State of Oregon and supported by the Oregon Department of Corrections, consisted of using the Socratic method to help prison inmates to increase their critical thinking and moral reasoning abilities and to increase their desistance to criminal behaviour.

Peter has written two books, A Manual for Creating Atheists, and How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide.

Tune in as controversial writer and podcast host, Damien Grant, interviews a wide selection of interesting and entertaining individuals, authors, business people, politicians and anyone else actually willing to talk to him.

For more information, or to get in touch, visit the Different Matters Website.

Nigel Biggar CBE is Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Pusey House, Oxford.

In his recent book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning Nigel Biggar addresses the crucial questions in eight chapters: Was the British Empire driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate? Should we speak of ‘colonialism and slavery’ in the same breath, as if they were identical? Was the Empire essentially racist? How far was it based on the theft of land? Did it involve genocide? Was it driven fundamentally by the motive of economic exploitation? Was undemocratic colonial government necessarily illegitimate? and, was the Empire essentially violent, and its violence pervasively racist and terroristic?

Biggar makes clear that, like any other long-standing state, the British Empire involved elements of injustice, sometimes appalling. On occasions it was culpably incompetent and presided over moments of dreadful tragedy.

Tune in as controversial writer and podcast host, Damien Grant, interviews Professor Nigel Biggar about his book. 

For more information, or to get in touch, visit the Different Matters Website. 

Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014, after 16 years as a commercial litigation partner.

Roger recently published a report titled, Who Makes the Law? Reining in the Supreme Court, in which he warns of a looming constitutional crisis in New Zealand, as the Supreme Court increasingly oversteps its bounds, threatening the balance of power between the courts and Parliament.

Tune in as controversial writer and podcast host, Damien Grant, interviews Roger Partridge about the report, law and some alarming decisions made by the New Zealand’s Supreme Court recently. 

For more information, or to get in touch, visit the Different Matters Website.