Give It A Nudge

In this episode of Give It a Nudge, Steve Grace sits down with world-renowned live speed painter Matteo Charles for one of the most unique episodes yet. While chatting through his journey, Matteo paints a live portrait of Steve right in the studio.

From an old-school signwriter and Sydney club DJ to collapsing with severe ulcerative colitis, Matteo opens up about spending five years in and out of hospitals and surviving a near-fatal heart attack during an iron transfusion. He shares how picking up a sketchbook in a hospital bed sparked his philosophy that "Art Heals," leading him to bet on himself, develop his signature rapid live painting style, and turn a life-altering illness into a global career.

Today, Matteo performs around the world, creating high-energy portraits in under ten minutes to music, sometimes completely upside down. He talks about performing at the Playboy Mansion for the Grammy Awards afterparty, opening for Tony Robbins and Kevin Hart, painting for Bruce Lee's family in Hong Kong, and staying grounded while working in rooms with billionaires and A-list celebrities.

Watch the episode to see Steve's live reaction to the final portrait reveal.

Episode Highlights

• 00:00:00 Painting live in the studio and Steve's reaction to being painted
• 00:03:19 The diagnosis: Surviving ulcerative colitis and hospital battles
• 00:10:45 How art became medicine: Finding purpose in the darkest moments
• 00:21:06 Developing the speed-painting craft on an old garage door
• 00:23:09 The breakthrough: From Sir Michael Parkinson to the Playboy Mansion Grammys afterparty
• 00:32:42 Studio secrets: Why Matteo avoids painting teeth and the mechanics of upside-down art
• 00:43:33 Betting on yourself, tuning out the noise, and navigating elite rooms
• 00:45:54 The final portrait reveal and Steve's speechless reaction

In this episode of Give It A Nudge, host Steve Grace sits down with human behaviour scientist, performance expert, and author Dr. Jemma King to explore what it truly takes to thrive under extreme pressure and adapt in a rapidly changing world.

Dr. King breaks down her remarkable journey of leaning into discomfort and backing herself, taking her from managing a mafia-frequented nightclub in 1990s Moscow during perestroika to conducting research and teaching emotional regulation to Australia's elite Special Forces.

Together, Steve and Dr. King unpack the science of stress and explain how reframing anxiety as excitement can turn cortisol into fuel for peak performance. They dive into the mechanics of brain health and recovery, revealing how deep sleep physically sweeps out toxic proteins and why short-sleeper genes exist.

Finally, they cover actionable biohacks like strategic napping, humming, and sauna protocols, while discussing why emotional intelligence and human connection will be the ultimate differentiators for future leaders in the age of AI.

We’re keeping the momentum going for our new launch with another epic episode!

Steve is joined by the delightfully outspoken Lauren Dunn for an in-depth, wild ride through reality TV, viral fame, and life post-MAFS.

Trace Lauren’s story from the moment producers spent years sliding into her DMs, to sitting in front of an Endemol Shine panel, and using the show as a radical "line in the sand" to finally break free from a toxic six-year relationship.

She breaks down the harsh realities of filming - from strict drink limits and isolation to navigating fake personas, wedding day strippers, and an unopened mountain hotel honeymoon designed to make couples turn on each other.

Lauren reflects candidly on the brutal aftermath of reality TV: returning home with no clients, no income, and an Instagram account locked by the network, before turning her chaotic life around to build a thriving brand. She shares her rules on brand deals, turning down massive payouts for gambling ads, helping small female-led businesses, and transforming her personal trials into powerful advocacy for women across Australia.

Another incredible episode to kick off our new season launch!

In this episode, Steve sits down with author, social entrepreneur, and global environmental leader Natalie Kyriacou OAM.

Natalie reflects on her journey from begging for unpaid volunteer roles and cleaning animal enclosures at the RSPCA to founding organisations and advising on global policy.

Following the international release of her book Nature’s Last Dance, she breaks down the intersection of environmental policy, corporate accountability, and why true impact must supersede financial return. Steve and Natalie explore the future of environmental storytelling, global conservation, and why humour and hope remain our most powerful tools for driving systemic change.

Watch the full episode now!

In this episode of Give It A Nudge, Steve sits down with David Pysden, Co-Founder of Chiron Global Tech, the company behind a revolutionary full-body protective armor system called the Chiron X1.

David shares the seven-year journey of bringing the X1 to life, including five grueling years of research, development, and testing with Tier 1 Special Forces, military units, and law enforcement. Inspired by a co-founder training with elite forces in Bangkok, the suit solves a massive training flaw, instead of slowing down strikes or avoiding vital areas like the head and throat, operators can train at full speed with real weapons strikes.

David walks Steve through the incredible engineering behind the patented head and neck protection, which distributes concussive forces down into the chest cavity, allowing a user to take a full-force blow from a baseball bat or rifle butt to the head without injury. They discuss how a defense composite expert with a background in designing stunt and movie armor helped optimize the carbon fiber plate structure, balancing absolute mobility with total protection.

From being invited onto classified military black sites to testing the gear against point-blank shotgun blasts, this episode gives you a look inside the future of protective defense tech.

Timestamps

• 00:00:00 Shotguns and bats: Testing the extreme limits of the Chiron X1 armor
• 00:00:58 Intro and the relief of talking about a physical product instead of software
• 00:01:36 The five-year R&D journey and linking product branding back to Achilles
• 00:02:42 Gaps in traditional protective gear and training with real weapons in Bangkok
• 00:03:54 Eliminating bad muscle memory by allowing full-force head and throat strikes
• 00:04:12 The patented head and neck protection distributing concussive forces away from the spine
• 00:05:34 How a movie stunt armor designer helped optimize fluid plate movement
• 00:06:34 Redesigning the chest plate so law enforcement can draw pistols smoothly
• 00:07:25 The multi-layer material breakdown including Kevlar, elastomeric foam, and cooling tech
• 00:08:21 Carbon fiber strength-to-weight ratios and Formula One crash cage comparisons
• 00:09:17 Point-blank shotgun testing and shooting at the suit with training munitions
• 00:11:01 Weight distribution and moving freely enough to do a cartwheel in 14.5 kilos of gear
• 00:11:42 Pitching the U.S. Army Rangers and landing an paratrooper instructor to jump in the suit
• 00:12:10 Meeting a Vodafone executive at lunch and jumping into a massive market gap
• 00:13:09 Raising $2.5M to mass produce low-cost injection-molded training and riot control versions
• 00:14:32 Reducing officer panic, de-escalating threats, and lowering litigation risks in riots
• 00:16:08 Testing with the UK National Tactical Response Group during real prison riot training
• 00:18:10 Getting peppered with non-lethal rounds without a single bruise or cut skin
• 00:19:20 Using a 30x manufacturing capacity boost to target 400,000 U.S. corrections officers
• 00:21:19 Getting invited to test armor on classified, top-secret Special Forces bases
• 00:22:14 Navigating the fundraising roller coaster and building an optimal customer feedback loop
• 00:24:30 Flying on an empty plane during Covid to run an East Coast U.S. roadshow
• 00:25:51 Geopolitical tailwinds driving the global need for next-gen protective equipment

#ChironX1 #MilitaryTechnology #BodyArmor #DefenseTechnology #SpecialForces #LawEnforcement #MilitaryTraining #TacticalGear #Innovation #DefenseIndustry #GiveItANudge #Podcast

We’ve got a fantastic episode of Give It A Nudge today as Steve sits down with Brittany, the founder of Nevam. Brittany has had an incredible trajectory over the last two years, moving from a comfortable corporate consulting career to launching a highly scalable customer experience platform.

Brittany shares her journey of leaving Deloitte while on maternity leave to pursue a vision she had been treading on for a decade. She opens up about the realities of corporate life, noting that becoming a partner often just makes you a baby partner all over again, and contrasts that with the un-fast-trackable lessons of the founder journey. Steve and Brittany discuss the massive validation of pitching at a Propeller event and walking away with 72 direct warm referrals to Chief Marketing Officers at major enterprises.

The conversation gets highly entertaining as Brittany shares her unconventional personal operating systems. She explains why she programed a male-voiced AI to give her confidence boosts in the morning, how she runs a strict, post-it note family strategy session on New Year’s Eve for her three and six-year-old kids, and why there is a non-negotiable bottle of Fireball in her house for parenting emergencies. They also tackle the mental side of being a founder, navigating loneliness, and what happens when winning a major innovation award doesn't change your daily reality of needing to get back to work.

Timestamps

• 00:00:00 Intro and the Malcolm Gladwell inspiration behind naming Nevam
• 00:01:43 Digital transformation and the frustration of corporate consulting at Deloitte
• 00:05:21 Turning mirror boards and screen grabs into an automated tech platform
• 00:09:33 Google mapping Deloitte and entering a massive corporate ecosystem
• 00:12:18 The myth of making it and the reality of the baby partner concept
• 00:13:23 Tinkering with a startup idea on maternity leave and budgeting a one-year runway
• 00:14:54 Moving from the Stride program to Techstars and closing an investment round
• 00:17:21 Scoring 72 direct enterprise referrals through the Propeller community
• 00:21:05 Building custom crawlers and automating live journey maps for marketers
• 00:25:54 The isolation of leadership and preserving a small circle of transparency
• 00:29:46 Using Claude for goal tracking and programing a male AI voice for confidence boosts
• 00:33:30 Switching off your brain by watching reality TV and learning Swedish on Duolingo
• 00:38:34 Why Nevam targets messy global enterprises instead of simple websites
• 00:42:07 The future of customer experience tracking and moving past reactive metrics
• 00:45:30 Winning an innovation award and realizing you still have to go make money
• 00:47:19 Steve's daily phone notes ritual for keeping a positive mindset
• 00:49:51 Running corporate style strategy sessions for toddlers on New Year’s Eve
• 00:51:52 Banning Fireball from the office and keeping a stash for tough parenting days

We’ve got a great episode of Give It A Nudge today as Steve sits down with Nima Kermani, the founder of Kermani Capital. Nima’s business has seen exponential growth over the last year, but the road to building a $7 million property portfolio wasn't exactly a straight line.

Nima shares the story of how getting fired from his last job was the final push he needed to go all-in on his own business. We dive into his history as a hyper-productive paperboy at age 13, and the brutal life lesson he learned at 17 when he lost $10,000, his entire life savings at the time, to an online scam.

The conversation also touches on the patterns in Nima's career, including the time he tried to work two full-time finance jobs simultaneously, his brief stint as a model, and the terrifying transition from being a solo operator to hiring his first staff members. To wrap things up, Nima puts Steve in the hot seat to talk about the hardest lessons he’s learned about ego and leadership.

Timestamps

• 00:00:00 Intro and the exponential growth of Kermani Capital
• 00:01:14 Getting fired and why Nima finally decided to give it a shot
• 00:05:24 The wealthy parents banter and the guarantor loan shortcut
• 00:07:15 The 13-year-old paperboy hustle and losing his savings to a scam
• 00:14:53 The secret to landing jobs: Applying for 1,000 positions at a time
• 00:16:46 The pattern of getting fired and working two jobs at once
• 00:18:54 Addressing the rumors: Nima’s history in modeling
• 00:23:18 The fear of the first hire and the reality of founder responsibility
• 00:27:02 Future plans for Kermani Capital and launching a property fund
• 00:30:35 Renting by the room: Solving the housing shortage while boosting yield
• 00:32:29 Steve's hardest lesson: Dealing with internal turmoil and ego

Steve sits down with Rowan McNamee, co-founder of Mary Technology, the legal AI startup that just closed a $7M funding round led by OIF Ventures to completely disrupt how litigation teams handle evidence.

Rowan’s journey started where all great business ideas do: pitching his mate on the way home from a bucks party. As a former family lawyer, Rowan intimately understood the absolute misery of taking hours of handwritten notes and spending weeks manually digging through thousands of case documents. So, he helped build a solution to eliminate the "fact chaos." Mary Technology is a Fact Management System (FMS) that can ingest thousands of pages of complex, unstructured legal documents and spit out a fully organized, actionable fact record in just 10 to 20 minutes.

We dive into the origin of the company's unique name (yes, it’s named after his actual Aunt Mary), and how they hit 10x ARR growth in 2025 with over 2,000 lawyers globally—including heavyweights like Shine Lawyers and Maurice Blackburn—now using the platform. Rowan also opens up about the "delusional optimism" it takes to get an AI startup off the ground, opening their new San Francisco office, and launching a self-serve model so small-to-mid-sized firms can get the exact same fact management power as the global giants.

Hit play and get the inside scoop on one of Australia’s fastest-growing legal tech startups.

What We Cover:

• 00:00:00 Intro and the elevator pitch for Mary Technology
• 00:02:50 Founding the company and pitching the idea at a bucks party
• 00:03:32 Why they named a highly advanced AI after his Aunt Mary
• 00:07:24 The original product idea and the misery of manual legal work
• 00:11:49 Eliminating "fact chaos" and turning weeks of document review into 20 minutes
• 00:13:42 Raising $7M with OIF Ventures, launching in SF, and scaling the team
• 00:21:50 Navigating the exploded Legal Tech market and standing out
• 00:23:56 Co-founder dynamics and the heavy weight of founder responsibility
• 00:30:19 How the platform handles everything from foreign languages to GIFs
• 00:35:00 The 59% time-saving pitch and their new self-serve model for smaller firms
• 00:37:45 Team offsites, guest speakers, and getting way too competitive at lawn bowls

In this episode of Give It A Nudge, Steve sits down with Dain Walker, CEO of the branding agency Rivyl. Dain has built a global agency from the ground up, and brings a very direct, no-nonsense approach to building businesses and brands.

Dain shares his journey, starting with his childhood in and out of foster care, and explains how a mentor's "rubber band" analogy helped him reframe those early challenges as a foundation for his resilience.

We also get into the difficult realities of running an agency. Dain opens up about a cash flow crisis in early 2024 that brought his company within days of missing payroll. He walks Steve through the "ego death" required to take full ownership of the situation, and his contrarian strategy to expand and spend more while competitors were shrinking.

With Steve and the team currently in the middle of a 90-day content sprint, they spend some time diving into practical content strategy. Dain breaks down his 3-Circle Framework to help founders find a genuinely interesting niche, explaining why creating content just to "get leads" is a losing battle.

They also discuss the impact of AI on content creation, why raw human experience is becoming more valuable, and Dain’s subtle "sneaky love" approach to team leadership.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Dain’s origin story

04:18 - Hustling Pokémon cards at age 7 & lessons from foster care

08:41 - The "Rubber Band" mindset: Reframing childhood trauma into resilience

14:28 - Navigating a cash flow crisis and the reality of founder ego

18:46 - The contrarian playbook: Expanding when the market is shrinking

29:33 - The 90-Day Content sprint: Moving past the "get leads" mentality

36:47 - The 3-Circle Framework: Finding a content niche that actually works

44:21 - How AI is making genuine human connection the ultimate premium

51:15 - "Sneaky Love": Dain’s approach to nudging his team toward their potential

58:41 - The float pod vision and writing a business book in 3 weeks

Links:

Connect with Dain Walker → https://www.linkedin.com/in/dainwalker/

Rivyl → https://www.rivyl.com/

Agency Podcast → https://www.youtube.com/@agencypodcast/

Connect with Steve → https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevegrace/

The Nudge Group → https://thenudgegroup.com/

Give It A Nudge Podcast → https://www.youtube.com/@giveitanudge/

The Trouble With People → https://thetroublewithpeople.substack.com/

In this episode of Give It A Nudge, Steve sits down with Richard Stevens, the CEO of Zyft. With a rich background in scaling tech businesses, Richard is leading the charge in the ever-changing retail landscape, with AI coming in strong and shaping the way brands and shoppers interact.

We take a proper deep dive into Richard’s career, exploring his journey from falling into product management before it was even a recognized field to holding key leadership roles at prominent comparison sites like iSelect and LocalAgentFinder. He unpacks the challenging transition from a hands-on product builder to a CEO, explaining how he learned to let go of the day-to-day execution to focus on scaling a vision. Richard also shares how taking a five-month family road trip across Australia helped him reset before stepping into Zyft with a clear perspective.

The conversation centers on how Zyft is helping empower both consumers and retailers to make informed decisions, whether it’s purchasing smarter or promoting products more effectively. Richard explains the mechanics of Zyft’s browser extension and app, which act as a silent shopping assistant scanning over 140 million products across 50,000 Australian retailers. By completely removing the friction of manual comparison, he highlights how consumers feel empowered all year to find the best prices and save a few extra pennies.

Steve and Richard also discuss where Zyft is heading next and how the rapid pace of technological adoption is transforming the industry. They touch on how major retailers are using Zyft's predictive search data to navigate high-pressure sales events like Black Friday, and how platforms are dealing with global disruptors like Temu. Richard provides a glimpse into the future of automated, AI-driven personal shopping, explaining why maintaining a ruthless focus on genuine user value is the ultimate key to surviving retail disruption.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro and Richard’s journey from the Mornington Peninsula

01:17 - The elevator pitch for Zyft and its AI-based shopping tool

03:43 - The shift in consumer habits and shopping for value in-store vs. online

05:11 - A deep dive into Richard’s product management background and iSelect

09:23 - Transitioning from a product builder to a CEO and learning to let go

12:18 - Traveling Australia with family and resetting before joining Zyft

15:03 - How the Zyft extension and app seamlessly find the best deals

20:11 - The business model and working with over 1,000 retailers

23:39 - Using predictive consumer search data to forecast retail trends

25:11 - Navigating the Black Friday rush and cost-of-living pressures

30:27 - Dealing with global disruptors like Temu and exact product matching

35:42 - The future of AI shopping and automated digital personal shoppers

Links:

Connect with Richard Stevens → https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardfstevens/

Zyft → https://zyft.com/

Connect with Steve → https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevegrace/

The Nudge Group → https://thenudgegroup.com/

Give It A Nudge Podcast → https://www.youtube.com/@giveitanudge/

The Trouble With People → https://thetroublewithpeople.substack.com/