Human, Apparently

Most people who start over will tell you the same thing. The hard part isn't learning the new thing. It's grieving the old one. The version of yourself you were already good at, the one people recognised, the one that made sense. That person doesn't come with you.

Sabine Kvenberg came to America from Hamburg with four suitcases, a theatre career behind her, and a dream she couldn't fully articulate yet, in a language that wasn't hers. She'd spent decades as a professional actress and director on international musical theatre stages. Then she started again, and built everything from scratch.

She's the author of Gumption, a keynote speaker, and the founder of Impact Communication Coaching. She's known as The Storytelling Dame, because the story always comes first.

In this episode, Sabine talks about what starting over actually costs a person, what it feels like to lose your voice in a new language and have to find it again, what the stage taught her about presence, and the bold move she almost didn't make.

If you've ever left something behind to build something new, this conversation is for you.

Connect with Sabine:

Website: sabinekvenberg.com

Most of us have a complicated relationship with our own voice. We've been taught to be pleasant, to be composed, to ask permission before we make a point. And somewhere along the way, a lot of people stop making sound altogether, unless they're sure it will sound good.

Heather Schmid spent twenty-five years learning to make beautiful sound. She's a classically trained opera singer, an international recording artist, and a GRAMMY voting member. Then she became far more interested in useful sound.

Her practice, Vibrational Voice, is breath, humming, and sustained tone. No singing ability, no equipment, and sounding good is not the point. The distinction that makes it hers: in a sound bath, someone else strikes the bowl and you receive it. In Vibrational Voice, the person making the sound is also the person receiving the vibration.

In this episode, Heather talks about why we turned the human voice into a performance when it was a biological behaviour first, what she hears in people who've spent decades being composed and agreeable, where the science ends and the sacred begins, and her most provocative conclusion after twenty-five years of being listened to, that the human voice may matter most when nobody is listening.

She also takes us through a three-minute practice, live on air.

Connect with Heather:

Website: vibrationaljourneys.com

Film: Voice of the Earth, available at vibrationaljourneys.gumroad.com/l/VoiceoftheEarth

Tai Chi keeps showing up in the research with benefits for balance, physical function, stress regulation, and healthy ageing. And the usual explanation is that it's gentle exercise, so of course it helps. Except that explanation has never quite fit.

Richard Leirer has spent decades with that puzzle. He's a Tai Chi and Qigong practitioner with fifty four years of experience, a founding Vice President of the National Qigong Association, and the creator of Tai Chi programs for surgery rehabilitation at the Cleveland Clinic. His new book, The Living Expression of Li, explores what Tai Chi might actually be doing to the body, through mechanisms like mechanotransduction, connective tissue signalling, bioelectrical communication, and the movement of lymph and interstitial fluid.

In this episode, Richard talks about where the established physiology ends and the emerging hypotheses begin, what it was like bringing Tai Chi into a hospital, and the bigger question underneath his work: does how we move matter biologically, not just how much?

He's careful about what the evidence shows. That's part of why this conversation is worth your time.

Connect with Richard:

Website: https://richardleirer.org/

Book: The Living Expression of Li, available on Amazon

There are things people carry for years without telling anyone. Not because they're ashamed exactly, but because saying them out loud would make them real, and once they're real, you have to do something about them.

Ronni Robinson carried something like that for thirty years. She was a binge eater for three decades. She made promises to be good tomorrow after every binge, meant them, and the cycle kept going anyway. Eighteen years ago, something shifted. She stopped, not through a diet or food elimination, but by finding another way. She trained as a Certified Eating Disorder Recovery Coach and now runs Recover with Ronni, helping people with binge eating and compulsive overeating reclaim their lives.

She's also a three-time Ironman, a mom, and the author of Out of the Pantry, a memoir about her disordered eating and recovery.

In this episode, Ronni talks about what those thirty years felt like from the inside, why the promises never held, what the actual turning point was, and what recovery feels like once food stops running the show. We also get into why this disorder hides so well in middle-aged women, and something unexpected, what endurance sport gave her that food used to.

If you've ever been stuck in a cycle you couldn't break, this conversation is for you.

Connect with Ronni:

Website: ronnirobinson.com

Most of us are trying to be healthier. And most of us are doing it by buying something. A supplement. A skincare routine. A detox kit. A superfood powder. Some of it helps. Some of it doesn't. And the honest truth is, most of us can't tell the difference, because the information we're given is designed to be hard to sort through.

Britney Shayo has spent years trying to sort through it anyway. She's a health and wellness enthusiast with a particular interest in nutrition, everyday products, and environmental exposures, and she brings the perspective of a curious consumer rather than an expert with something to sell.

Her central idea is simple, and in the wellness space it's almost contrarian. Healthier living doesn't always have to mean buying more.

In this episode, Britney talks about why it's so hard to tell whether a health claim deserves your trust, how wellness marketing shapes the choices we make without us noticing, and what it actually takes to ask better questions about the products we use every day without becoming afraid of everything.

If you've ever wondered whether the thing you were told to buy is actually doing anything, this conversation is for you.

Connect with Britney:

Podmatch Profile: https://podmatch.com/guestdetail/1791925467253109259fd6d67

There's a particular kind of frustration that comes from knowing something useful and being unable to get anyone to use it. Not because the evidence isn't there, but because the system isn't built to receive it. The clinic is too busy. The doctor has fifteen minutes. The patient is overwhelmed.

Stuart Berkowitz spent years as a math researcher before starting seven companies. Now he's built a free tool that uses Bayesian causal models to ask a specific question for each disease: if you combined the best evidence-based treatments, how much could you actually reduce its harm? He says he's tested it against more than a hundred thousand anonymised medical records.

This is not an episode about longevity protocols, and it's not a validation of the claims. It's a conversation about the gap between a good idea and a real patient, because that gap is where most good ideas die.

In this episode, Stuart talks about why doctors can't do this themselves, what it's like to build something this ambitious outside the medical system, what he's seen in the people who've actually used it, and what still needs to be proven before a clinician would trust it with a patient.

If you've ever wondered why good evidence doesn't always reach the person who needs it, this conversation is for you.

Connect with Stuart:

Website: longevityresearch.ca

What if a machine could detect your stress, anxiety, or depression before you felt a thing? And what if it was right?

Aamir Malik has spent almost three decades building instruments that do exactly that. He's a Professor of Neuroengineering at Brno University of Technology, where he heads the Cognitive and Neural Engineering group. He came to the brain the long way round — electrical engineering, then nuclear engineering, then information and communication, and a doctorate in mechatronics. He came to the brain as an engineer, not a clinician, and that outsider perspective shaped everything that followed.

After years of catching problems early, he started asking a different question. Why wait for the breakdown at all? His answer became Fix the Floor, a book built on an engineer's idea: health stands on five pillars — habits, connection, sleep, movement, and food — and like any connected system, it breaks at its weakest link, not its average.

In this episode, Aamir talks about what it means that we need machines to tell us something is wrong, why the pillar that's failing is almost never the one you're working on, and how a fifty-minute self-assessment at your own kitchen table can show you where to actually start.

Aamir is clear that he's not a doctor and the book doesn't replace one. What it offers is measurement.

If you've been doing everything right and still feel flat, this conversation is for you.

Connect with Aamir:

Website: fixthefloor.life

Book: Fix the Floor

Most of us spend years chasing something. A result. A title. A version of ourselves we think we're supposed to become. And every so often, someone gets close enough to see it clearly, and it turns out the thing they were chasing was never going to give them what they were actually after.

Daniel Sterling grew up in Aspen in its early, wild years. Risk became his default. He raced alpine skis at a national level, worked in television news, and spent years trying to write and direct feature films. He kept moving toward something. By his own account, he kept coming up short of being great, and the falling short hollowed him out.

Then he cratered mid-life, met a mentor who changed how he saw himself, and started the slow work of living an examined life. That work became his first book, Hungry, a memoir about the pursuit of meaning and what it actually cost him to find it. Now he writes about something else, raising boys into whole men, and finding the balance between the masculine and the feminine.

In this episode, Daniel talks about what it actually costs to chase greatness, why falling short of his highest version of success turned out to be a gift, what self-study looks like in practice, and what he's learned about raising boys from having lived the version of ambition he's now trying to help them avoid.

If you've ever wondered whether the thing driving you is also the thing keeping you from being whole, this conversation is for you.

Connect with Daniel:

Substack: Shared Space

Marriage brings two people together, but what happens when their families, cultures, and expectations start pulling them apart?

Pesa Shayo is an author and co-founder of Live Your Best Marriage, where he helps cross-cultural Christian couples navigate in-law pressure, loyalty conflicts, and cultural differences.

In this episode of Human, Apparently, we explore why outside influences can create so much tension in relationships, what happens when someone feels their spouse keeps choosing family over their marriage, and how couples can set boundaries without abandoning the people they love.

Drawing from his own cross-cultural marriage and his work with other couples, Pesa introduces the idea of building a “United Front”: learning to face challenges together instead of allowing those challenges to turn partners against each other.

Connect with Pesa:

Website: https://liveyourbestmarriage.com/

What happens when a young person is struggling but doesn't know how to explain what they're feeling?

Dr. Danice Rinderknecht is a board-certified family medicine physician with more than 30 years of clinical experience. After decades of caring for patients, she turned to an unexpected way of exploring teen mental health: storytelling.

In this episode of Human, Apparently, we discuss anxiety, depression, and trauma in young people, the warning signs parents and educators sometimes miss, and why starting conversations about mental health can be so difficult.

We also explore her young adult fantasy novel, The Spark: Light Begins Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and how fiction might help teenagers recognize and express emotions they struggle to put into words.

Book: The Spark: Light Begins Between a Rock and a Hard Place — available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and at any independent bookstore.